Voting for the Cage: How Fundamentalism Married Politics, Made Dissent a Sin, and Persuaded Citizens to Surrender Their Own Freedom

Democracy does not always die with soldiers at the doors of parliament. Sometimes it reports for duty on election day. The polls open on schedule. Ballots are counted honestly. The winner raises a sacred book, invokes an ancestral civilization, promises to protect the family, and begins deciding which families count. No voter writes “oppress me” on a ballot. The authoritarian vote is written in the future tense and addressed to somebody else. Silence them. Remove her choice. Keep him out. Close their school. Ban their book. Cancel their citizenship. Let the police decide which protest is patriotic, let the government determine which religion is authentic, which body is legitimate, which marriage is real, which history may be taught, and which citizen must forever prove a loyalty the majority receives at birth. People vote for a locked door because they are told they will keep the key.

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When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?

We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”

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Were there Terrorists on the Altalena?

Before former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, he said something like this:  “There will be no peace in the Middle East until Palestine does to its terrorists what we have done to ours.”

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Helen Thomas is Betrayed by her Bigotry

89-year old Helen Thomas put her silver pen in her mouth and choked her career to death by claiming, on camera, that the Jews should get out of Palestine and go back to Poland and Germany.

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War Crimes for Israel and Hamas

Are Israel and Hamas guilty of War Crimes?

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Palestinian Video Surveilling of Israelis

Can the battle for land and minds ever be won is Israel and Palestine?

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