This has been going for a couple of months now and the choice of images has always been suspect to say the least. From your typical orientalist tropes to efforts as bad as this 👇

bsky.app/profile/jere...

It seems the pro-Israel consensus among Democrats is well and truly dead at this point. Dem primary voters prefer candidates who refuse to travel to Israel (by net +45%) and back a bill to end military aid to Israel (by net +61%). www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/202...

Happy to share the story with you if you're interested.

A 'human rights law' academic, believe it or not.

The organizers know. The guy's employer's know too. More to follow.

We shouldn't have to think about who is monitoring and reporting on us to state actors when we are doing academic work, but this is the unacceptable reality. This behaviour needs to be called out whenever and wherever it's observed. 7/7

In the next session I presented a paper with 'Israel's weapons of genocide' in the title, so I had to then think about what might happen if this guy came to it and decided he needed to report me or yell at me or whatever. 6/7

I have no idea what the person was planning to do if ChatGPT told him that any of the speakers were 'anti-Israel' but this also points to the dangers of self-reinforcing AI tools when used as a means to label and harass people. 5/7

As someone who has been subject to harassment by Israeli propagandists, I find this behaviour to be offensive, inappropriate, and dangerous. It's also extremely clumsy to do this 'investigation' of colleagues in such a visible way. 4/7

Worst of all, the person seemed most obsessed with colleagues with Muslim names, going through the programme and entering them one by one. 3/7

The request was always 'who is x and are they anti-Israel?'. This was a panel on international criminal law in which there were some mentions of Gaza but it certainly wasn't central to the discussion. 2/7

The other key thing that seems to have gone missing in much of the commentary is that Iran's attempt to get a nuclear weapon was not so that it could fire it at Israel or the US, but to deter attacks by those states. Israel claiming 'pre-emption' makes zero rational sense here.

Taiwanese drama/comedy on Netflix:

Born for the Spotlight
Wave Makers
I Am Married But...

They are making some cracking stuff over there at the moment.

The vilest and yet most honest articulation of US Empire possible. We are governed by insane people.