Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Although it’s really the second day since I arrived in Amsterdam, I didn’t do much yesterday because I was exhausted. So today, Monday, really counts as Day 1.
And oy, did I sleep last night! After chatting with my host and a few people connected with my visit, I took at nap at about 1 p.m., but was restive and woke up without much sleep at about 6 p.m. But then the serious sleeping began. I crashed at 7 p.m., woke up 5 hours later, at midnight, checked my email (there’s a seven-hour time difference from Chicago), and then went back to sleep, waking up totally refreshed at 5 a.m. I got at least ten hours of deep sleep, something unknown to me!
It was too early to make noise or disturb my hosts, so I crept downstairs—two flights of the steepest stairs I’ve ever seen in a house, for Dutch houses are high and narrow. There I found a copy of yesterday’s New York Times, a local map, and a note that there was Balinese food in the fridge from the nearby restaurant (rated one of the best Indonesian places in the city). What could be a better breakfast than Indonesian beef, green beans, other veggies, and chicken atop a bed of rice and heated in the microwave. I read the NYT as I dined, noticing that Bret Stephens’s column on the U.S.’s poor treatment of Israel was on the front page of the paper edition—something you wouldn’t find in the U.S. (column archived here).
While I finished my food and perused the Times, a wonderful event occurred: a beautiful fluffy and shiny black CAT wandered into the kitchen. In less than a minute we had made friends, and in 2 minutes he was on his back, allowing me to give him belly rubs. (I have a way with cats.) I later found out his name is Toom. Here he is:
As you see above, Toom soon jumped up on the sink and looked expectantly at the faucet. Could it be, I thought, that he wanted a drink? I turned on the faucet lightly, and Toom went to town. First he stuck his paw under the flow until it was wet, and then licked his paw.
Here is a video:
But then Toom put his back under the faucet, too, and then licked the water off his back! Granted, he did use his mouth to drink from the faucet, too, but preferred licking water off his back and paw.
The Back Lick:
After 90 minutes my host came downstairs, taught me how to make coffee with the machine, and we had a cup and chatted for an hour or so until she went to work. (I’m staying with a married couple, but the husband is on a work trip for a few days.)
Here’s Toom with a post-lick blep:
After breakfast I had a leisurely walk around the area (I’m staying in a lovely part of town, a half hour walk from the Museum District). My host had also having furnished me with a tram/bus/train pass, but I needed a morning constitutional.
I walked to the Museum area, hoping to get into the Van Gogh Museum, one of my favorite museums in the world. (I love the later van Goghs.)’d been told that you have to reserve tickets in advance, which I didn’t have to do the last two times I visited here, and, sure enough, when I showed up everyone had reserved tickets. I asked the guard how long I had to reserve in advance, and he replied “About two weeks.” Oy! But he added that if I went online right at 5 p.m., I may be able to get tickets for tomorrow. I’m not sure I’ll do that as there are things to see in Amsterdam that I haven’t seen twice before. (My first talk isn’t until Thursday.)
Once again the day was lovely: tee-shirt weather. You know you’re in Amsterdam because there are bicycles everywhere:
The obligatory bike-mirror selfie:
My best guess is that the denizen of Amsterdam below is a Western Jackdaw (Corvus monedula), but readers can help out.
This is the smallest car I’ve ever seen, and there are plenty of these in Amsterdam, as parking is quite difficult. It can hold two people in the one seat if you’re squashed up together.
I think it is a LuQi electric mini-car, which runs about 10,000 Euros. It may be made in China but I don’t have enough information.
You can fit them into a space only a few yards wide:
The interior. You better be friendly if you have a passenger.
While looking around the Museum Quarter, I found “The Best Hot Dogs in Town.” I can’t vouch for that, but I’m sure that a good Chicago dog, dragged through the garden, is way better.
Finally, I took the tram to the Central Station (it’s nearly a straight shot from where I live, with an intermediate stop at the museums, to fulfill a long-time craving: Dutch friets with thick mayonnaise. This, along with raw herring, is one of the two great street snacks of Amsterdam. I was last here a while back, but I remembered the location of a good friets stand near the station, and, sure enough, dead reckoning brought me to my goal:
That was lunch. And you needn’t tell me that it’s not the healthiest of foods, as I already know. I have tried the raw herring, but couldn’t abide the malodorous fish, and I’m not a piscivore anyway.
Now it’s time to rest a bit, work on my talk, and read the book I brought: Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.
For some reason my flight to Amsterdam, though nothing out of the ordinary for a west—>east across-Pond flight, was exhausting. Perhaps it was the Person of Size next to me in the middle seat, who tended to ooze over the armrests (I was in the aisle seat) preventing me from sleeping after dinner and two movies: Past Lives (quite good) and the documentary “Being Mary Tyler Moore” (surprisingly good). But my attempt to get three hours of sleep was a dismal failure, doomed by encroaching avoirdupois.
But Amsterdam is lovely, and I’ve never been here at this time of year. It’s sunny and warm (78°F, 26°C) with blue skies and sun. A generous local humanist and skeptic is putting me up for the week, and I’m on a quiet, leafy street near the Museum District. Here’s the view from my bedroom):
Right now I’ll try to recover my energy and; have a look around; I’m told there’s a good Balinese restaurant nearby.
Oh, and Happy Mother’s Day; there’s a Google Doodle; click to see where it goes.
Today’s Masih: The Iranian Morality Police are at it again, but the tee-shirt wearing girl was saved from their clutches.
So called Morality Police in Iran violently assaulted a teenager for not wearing a hijab in the city of Borujerd, Iran.
The citizen who filmed this incident told me that a hijab police officer attempted to brutally arrest the teenage girl for wearing a T-shirt. However, because… pic.twitter.com/gLd77cERpt
Here’s an eight-minute Real Time bit in which Bill Maher goes after the media for blowing up the campus protests out of proportion. To counteract this trend, Maher proposes five rules for proper journalistic coverage of the news.
One such rule is that the media should stay away from quoting the “angriest people on social media with too much time on their hands.” Tell me about it!
At the end of the bit, Maher answers the question, “What do we do if he wins?” (The “he” is obvious.)
I’ll be off for O’Hare soon, but heres a photo of Irises I took on my way home. I don’t know when you’ll hear from me again, but before that I’ll have had a belly full of french fries with mayo or peanut sauce.
In the meantime, feel free to discuss politics or whatever you want. I’ll throw out some starter questions, but you can ignore them. I would, however, like to know the readers’ opinions. Three of the four questions are about the war, as that’s been much on my mind.
a.) What the deuce is Biden up to with Israel? He does know that the IDF considers Rafah important in getting rid of Hamas, right? So why is he trying to prevent a serious military operation there? Does he want Hamas to win and maintain power?
b.) The UN has revised the death toll of Gazan civilians, reducing it considerably and halving the number of women and children killed). Given that, and given the fact that the new ratio of civilians killed to Hamas fighters killed is a bit more than 1:1; AND given that that ratio is lower than any similar ratio in modern warfare (the U.S. is a grim 3:1 in its Middle East conflicts and other fights go up from them, AND, given that these deaths can be imputed largely to Hamas, who encourages Gazans to die for propaganda purposes and uses them as human shields, AND that Israel takes steps to reduce the civilian death toll, including warning civilians of strikes and providing humanitarian aid, then why is the death toll of Gazans considered way too high for this war? So high, in fact, that mostly the whole world hates Israel, falsely accusing it of genocide because of the number of civilian deaths. Is there supposed to “death equity”, so that for every civilian killed and Israeli should die as well? This truly baffles me.
c.) Why is Israel so prominent among conflicts given that in other places, like Yemen and Syria, far more people have died and there is much more starvation? Why don’t we hear more about Syria, where the forces of Bashar al-Assad have killed an estimated 300,000 people, mostly Muslims? This isn’t mere “whataboutery,” for the conflict there is ongoing, serious, and has killed more than ten times the civilians that have died in the war between Israel and Hamas.
d.) Is Donald Trump ever going to be convicted of anything? Will he win this fall’s election, whether or not he’s found guilty? Why do so many Americans vote for a person whose mental illness is palpable, and on display every day?
I will check from O’Hare, and I’m hoping for a plethora of comments. Say whatever you want.
This article, from Claire Berlinski‘s Substack site was written by her as well as by John Oxley, and paints a picture of Biden as a doddering old fool with no clear take on foreign policy. Biden, they say, has waffled so much on his Israel policy, including his decision to stop most military weapons sold to Israel, that he’ll lose the vote of both Muslims and Jews—a hard thing to do. It also includes ten summaries of and links to other articles, all criticizing Biden and all worth reading. It’s a valuable piece, and those of you who are so certain that Biden will win should read the whole thing. (Claire abhors Trump, by the way; like me, she just wants the Left on a sane foundation.)
Claire, by the way, is the daughter of evolution opponent David Berlinski, but seems to have a whole lot more common sense.
Clicking on the headline may get you one free read, but you also may wish to subscribe, as I enjoy Berlinski’s prose—and ideas. (The articles are written by Berlinski and other people.) Try clicking on the headline:
I’ll quote a lot of her short article, and be sure to read the Bret Stephens article mentioned in the first sentence (it’s archived here).
I just saw this column by Bret Stephens, who echoes my sentiments almost verbatim. I hadn’t seen that when we recorded this last night, and obviously, he hadn’t listened to this podcast.1 But he wrote more or less exactly what I’ve said here.
All of this is disastrous for Biden, and thus disastrous for us all.
I figured until this that he was basically a savvy politician who understood why the American electorate put him in power quite well. Normalcy. Not extremism. But I was wrong. He’s in a bubble. He doesn’t understand how much of his support comes from people like me.
People like me—and I suspect the majority of Americans, even still—loathe the far right. They also loathe the far left and the Islamists. People like me have for years rejected the argument that Biden is dangerously in the sway of the Islamists and the far left on the grounds that it’s absurd to say so. Befuddled though he may be, Biden is clearly an old-fashioned center-leftist, firmly in the postwar American tradition. He’s not going to do anything grotesquely offensive in office. Trump, meanwhile, is literally—not just metaphorically or hyperbolically—insane, a Clusterfuck B personality disorder on cloven hooves. It really is an open question whether the American republic would survive another term under his aegis.
I still maintain this—passionately. For all his deficits, and there are so many, there’s no option but Joe Biden. The prospect of a second Trump presidency is too terrible to consider.
But until recently, I had allowed myself not to consider it. I believed, in some primitive, unjustifiable way, that it just couldn’t happen. That Americans will somehow come to their senses before Election Day.
I no longer think so. What this tells me is that Biden is so out of touch that he’s confused the campus of Columbia with mainstream American opinion. It’s an unforced and terrible error. It tells me the people around him—including his cabinet—are giving him awful advice. Neither he nor his advisors have properly understood how many Americans want to vomit when they see those spoiled, pampered, Hamas-loving campus imbeciles demanding “humanitarian aid”—for themselves. So they don’t get peckish during their sleepover parties with their little chums.
It’s not just the greasy-pole climbers like Elise Stefanik who feel this way. There’s a broad American center that cannot stand what we’ve recently seen emerging from these institutions. They will instinctively and immediately understand that Biden has decided to pander to them at the expense of our ally, and they will understand that in doing so, he has made us weaker. They may not be able to admit or articulate to themselves what causes them to stay home on Election Day. But it will be this—this, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan, our timidity in arming Ukraine, our misbegotten efforts to coax Iran back into a nuclear deal it clearly does not want. This—and Biden’s infernal mumbling, stuttering, and slurring. This—and the massive, coordinated information war that Russia and China will mount on Trump’s behalf. (There will be a hell of an October Surprise. I promise.) This, and the failure of our judiciary to swiftly put Trump behind bars— not for paying off a porn star, but for attempting a coup. All of this, together, is enough to win Trump reelection.
I have no idea how Biden made this decision, or why. How could he fail to appreciate that it’s the political kiss of death to be lauded by Ilhan Omar? Her words will be on GOP attack ads from now until Election Day.
In capitulating to his party’s loons and cranks, Biden has breathed life into a GOP argument that until now was easy to dismiss—viz., that the crackpots are secretly running his administration.
This is a disastrous headline for Joe Biden:
(The headline below is from a WBMA, an ABC news site in Birmingham, Alabama).
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., speaks at a rally outside an Amazon facility on Staten Island in New York, Sunday, April 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Here’s a new tweet by AOC, echoing the misguided claim that invading Rafah is a “red line”. What she doesn’t say it that crossing that line would make both Israel and the world safer. In other words, AOC (and Biden) simply want Hamas to persist as the rulers of Gaza.
Biden has not “lost his mind.” He is upholding the word of the US.
There are 1.3 million people in Rafah. You do not need to slaughter them to go after Hamas.
Biden stated the US red line was Rafah. It would make us weaker & the world less safe to let Bibi, or anyone, cross it. https://t.co/EKaGyYnyDH
Well, I’m off this evening traveling on cat Sabbath to Amsterdam, as it’s Saturday, May 11, 2024, and Eat What You Want Day. This video tells you what I want to eat today:
The United Nations General Assembly on Friday overwhelmingly adopted a resolution declaring that Palestinians qualify for full-member status at the United Nations, a highly symbolic move that reflects growing global solidarity with Palestinians and is a rebuke to Israel and the United States.
The resolution was approved by a vote of 143 to 9 with 25 nations abstaining. The Assembly broke into a big applause after the vote. The United States voted no.
The resolution was prepared by the United Arab Emirates, the current chair of the U.N. Arab Group. The 193-member General Assembly took on the issue of Palestinian membership after the United States in April vetoed a resolution before the Security Council to recognize full membership for a Palestinian state. The majority of Council members supported the move, but the United States said recognition of Palestinian statehood should be achieved through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
The U.S. is right. This is one of the stupidest moves the UN has made yet, and that’s saying a lot. But wait! There’s more!
“The U.S. is resigned to having another bad day at the U.N.,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization. But he added that the resolution “gives the Palestinians a boost without creating a breakdown over whether they are or are not now U.N. members.”
The U.N. charter stipulates that the General Assembly can only grant full membership to a nation-state after the approval of the Security Council. Examples of that include the creation of the states of Israel and South Sudan. The resolution adopted on Friday explicitly states that the Palestinian issue is an exception and will not set precedent, language that was added during negotiations on the text when some countries expressed concern that Taiwan and Kosovo might follow a similar path to pursue statehood, diplomats said.
Sorry, but why is Palestine an exception and Taiwan is not? At any rate, this is symbolic (though of course will incite more people against Israel) because the Security Council has to approve full statehood, and the U.S. won’t let that happen, despite Biden’s current waffling and weaseling. Besides, neither Israel nor Palestine want a state. Try again in another 40 years or so.
This is far from the first reversal, political or personal, for Loury, 75, one of the most celebrated and reviled Black intellectuals of the past half-century. While public debate has too often devolved into lobbing grenades from entrenched positions, Loury’s tumultuous life, his swings from the right to the left and back again, his remarkable, barrier-busting successes and his considerable frailties and failures, have taught him to always recognize that he could be wrong and to keep an open mind, no matter how vehement his opinions. He outlines this ragged road to wisdom in his remarkably candid memoir, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”
He was a star Ph.D. graduate in economics from M.I.T. and the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard. He was a darling of the neoconservative movement and was tapped to be deputy secretary of education during the Reagan administration.
But that was before he was charged with assaulting his ex-mistress. Before he was arrested for drug possession. Before he was exposed as both a serial philanderer and a crack addict. He’d left two daughters from his first marriage back in Chicago; he barely acknowledged a son born to a former girlfriend, until the son was fully grown.
A 1995 New Yorker profile described Loury’s first public downfall thus: “Loury was emerging as exactly the kind of person he had warned Black America to avoid: a violent, irresponsible, drug-using womanizer who put his own pleasure above the demands of his career and the needs of his family.”
In recounting all that’s happened since, “Late Admissions” does something that is rare in fiction but almost unheard-of in memoir: It presents both an unlikable and an unreliable narrator.
In an unusual introduction, Loury explains that he hopes to build trust with the reader by exposing his obfuscations and prevarications, warding off anything terrible a reader might say about him by saying it all, himself, first. One title he considered for the book, he told me, was “The Enemy Within.”
He goes into the controversy that’s arisen about the Death of George Floyd, which I’ve written about and now watched the movie saying Floyd wasn’t murdered and read the counter-narrative arguing that Floyd was indeed murdered (see here). I have to say that I’m coming down on the latter side, but haven’t had time to review the very long rebuttal and write something. This may be as far as I get. You can find the book, which comes out on May 14, here.
*Like many of us, Andrew Sullivan is peeved that Trump keeps delaying his trials, forestalling whatever day of reckoning is to come. The title of his piece this week,”Getting away with it, yet again“, tells the tale.
I really don’t want to be a Debbie Downer yet again, but it seems pretty clear to me at this point that the legal resistance to Donald Trump’s deep corruption, pathological recklessness, managerial incompetence, and outrageous attempts to steal an election and then prevent a peaceful transfer of power … have, well, failed.
By “failed” I don’t mean, of course, that Trump will definitely not be convicted in his current trial, or that the other cases — from the January 6 insurrection to the classified documents to the Georgia pressure campaign — won’t proceed at some point. I mean something more salient: none of this is likely to happen or seriously dent Trump’s popularity before the looming election this November. His antagonists had four years to prosecute and delegitimize him, and it wasn’t enough time. (Bill Maher chiefly blames Merrick Garland for preternatural dithering — “Attorney General Barney Fife.”)
Judge Cannon has now indefinitely postponed the Florida trial for Trump’s grotesque and dumb mishandling of classified documents. It looks fishy to me, but her pre-trial shenanigans do not appear outside her judicial prerogatives. If the DOJ had wanted to prosecute Trump in this complicated case — involving national security, executive privilege, the limits of discovery with classified information — they might have begun a little sooner than last year.
The Georgia case just got upended by Fani Willis’ hubris, as her romantic relationship with one of her prosecutors gave Trump’s lawyers a chance to delay the trial by asking the Georgia Appeals Court to rule on whether Willis should be disqualified. The federal January 6 case is suspended mid-air as SCOTUS ruminates on the question of presidential immunity.
Which leaves us with one case likely to be decided before the November election: the current, patently political prosecution of Trump for alleged violations of federal campaign law in concealing hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Technically, it seems pretty clear to me that Trump is guilty as sin, and may even be convicted by a New York City jury. Michael Cohen, after all, went to jail for the same crime. But the case itself is a stretch by Alvin Bragg, straining to elevate state financial misdemeanors into multiple federal felonies. Worse, the coverage this week is likely, if it has any political impact, to help Trump in his framing of the prosecution as personal persecution.
. . . So did Trump wear a condom? Boxer shorts? Was the fucking fully consensual? Yes, some of this was necessary because Trump, absurdly, is still denying he ever met the broad alone. But icky is icky, and humiliating people with the details of sexual encounters, even if they are scummy people like Trump, tends to backfire. And it’s hard to see how he politically loses from this trial. If the jury hangs, Trump wins. If he is convicted, he has an obvious appeal option, especially given the racy irrelevance of some of the testimony allowed by the judge this week. If he’s acquitted, we’ll never hear the last of it.
. . . it seems unlikely to me that an electorate that breezed past “grab ‘em by the pussy” is going to stop short at a federal financial fiddle. A recent poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe that the Stormy case is irrelevant to Trump’s fitness for the presidency — up a bit from 39 percent last summer. The slippage seems to come mainly from one demo:
[A]mong independents who lean Republican, the share calling those charges not relevant to Trump’s fitness has climbed from 57 percent to 73 percent, and the share of true independents saying the same has risen from 29 percent to 45.
Oy, gewalt! Whether Trump is a philanderer is not the issue, but whether he was involved in covering up financial dealings, which speaks to his honesty. Granted, its not a capital crime, but it does seem to me “relevant to his fitness” as President.
To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends. It’s a positive thing, what you’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like battle, but like tending the warm fire of community. You have real power when you’re doing it, and with enough people, you can oust someone very powerful.
The easy criticism of a cancellation is: You went after someone who agrees with you on almost everything except some tiny differences? Some small infraction? It seems bizarre. But that’s the point. The bad among us are more dangerous to the group. Mormons don’t excommunicate a random drag performer. They excommunicate a bad Mormon.
I watched all the presidential debates in 2016 with some family members who are conservatives. After Hillary lost, I couldn’t stomach going over there for a few months. I was too upset, and I couldn’t handle seeing them happy. But that’s not a cancellation. I had no power over these family members, or sway in their community. I couldn’t make them apologize for being happy that Trump won.
A cancellation isn’t about finding a conservative and yelling at them. It’s about finding the betrayer in your midst. They look and talk like you. They blend in perfectly. But they’re not like you.
The author I canceled existed in my community. She went to the parties I went to and showed up at the same events as me. The goal was to slice her carefully out, and I was thrilled to do my part. By showing where I stood, I felt closer to my friends. But also, in some ways, doing what I did is the price of admission to the club. To ignore the drumbeat was to suggest that I didn’t care. I definitely did care.
I saw later that the event was canceled altogether after I withdrew. Her book tour didn’t work so well. The book didn’t sell so well. I never saw her at another party, and I never heard from her again—and I was fine with that.
Nellie’s gloating about cancellation disappeared when she fell in love with someone with whom she had political disagreements (Bari Weiss, whose hiring at the NYT Bowles had argued against), and she goes on to discuss the topic of cancellation in general.
*MIT and Penn, two schools involved in those disastrous Congressional hearings, with the President of Penn losing her job, have both had their encampments cleared.
Police on Friday cleared pro-Palestinian encampments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, the latest efforts by colleges across the country to rein in escalating protests.
. . .On MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus, police arrested 10 graduate and undergraduate students, the school said Friday. None resisted, and the students were taken off campus by MIT police officers to be booked, a spokeswoman said.
“The escalation of the last few days, involving outside threats from individuals and groups from both sides, has been a tipping point,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said. “It was not heading in a direction anyone could call peaceful. And the cost and disruption for the community overall made the situation increasingly untenable.”
MIT said police also arrested several protesters on Thursday after they marched to a campus building and blocked a garage.
. . . In Philadelphia, Penn said police arrested about 33 protesters who were cited for “defiant trespass” after repeated warnings. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said a day earlier that it was “past time” for the school to disband the encampment on Penn’s College Green, which had grown in recent days.
Videos posted to social media by news outlets showed helmeted officers, with riot shields and zip ties, detaining people after Penn’s public-safety department warned protesters to leave.
And Harvard’s in for trouble, too:
At Harvard, a spokesman Friday said administrative referrals to place encampment protesters on involuntary leave continue to move ahead.
“The encampment favors the voices of a few over the rights of many who have experienced disruption in how they learn and work at a critical time of the semester,” said Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president.
Garber at a meeting late Wednesday offered protesters a chance to meet with university officials to address their questions about the university’s endowment, but only if they first voluntarily ended the encampment, the Harvard spokesman said. Garber also reiterated that Harvard wouldn’t use its endowment as a political tool.
The school said protesters declined by deciding to continue the encampment.
So far quite a few of these things have been taken down, including ours, and there have been, as far as I know, no injuries. Only two cowardly schools—Brown and Northwestern—have bargained with the encampers, and that’s to their shame. 2,000 protesters have been arrested. Harvard’s tactic of allowing a “questions meeting but only after disbanding the site seems reasonable, but even that won’t work. And so the Schmarvard protesters will go the way of the others.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has yet another reason to hate Kulka:
A: What are you looking for?
Hili: I left something there but Kulka probably ate it.
In Polish:
Ja: Czego tam szukasz?
Hili: Zostawiłam tu coś, ale chyba Kulka to zjadła.
I can’t remember where I found this, but it was somewhere on Facebook:
From Jesus of the Day. I guess they take the money out of your estate:
From Cate: Stickers found on the north side of Chicago. The one on the left is particularly good:
From Masih; quotidian life in Iran. Note that there’s now a ten-year sentence for Iranians sending a video to Masih!
To my sisters in America and other Western countries, who don’t know how it feels living under Islamic laws! Watch this. A group of police officers stopped this woman’s car in Iran and said, ‘We won’t let you move until you cover your hair. Yes! this is happening in… pic.twitter.com/XsE1kBfk5i
From Scott, who notes, “I’ve never cared in the slightest about the Eurovision contest. But I think I’ll tune in this time to support Eden Golan, the 20-year-old Israeli who’s now in notoriously antisemitic Malmö, Sweden to perform, surrounded by a convoy of a hundred police cars and helicopters trying to stop the crowds from pulling another 1972 Munich Olympics.”
20 years-old Israeli singer, Eden Golan, was dancing with Finish singer Käärijä today, the video got thousands of hateful comments to the point that the Finish singer had to apologize for being seen with this Israeli girl.
Here’s Golan being booed at her dress rehearsal. It’s simply because she’s Israeli. Morons. But she stuck it out as she’s a stalwart Israeli:
The demonstration that keeps Golan in her hotel!
Eden Golan, our fellow artist, cannot leave her hotel room in fear for her life because she is Jewish. This is 2024. I call on every artist to join me in condemning publicly this despicable act of hate. This is a time for choosing. Your silence is complicit. @Eurovision… pic.twitter.com/Qi2lrAtGIv
Why I vote for Eden Golan👇🏽 A young girl needs protection to take part in Eurovision. This is the situation that the press should take offence at, instead of stepping out of its role to be a political vehicle that turns a blind eye to the origin of the current conflict in the… pic.twitter.com/uVskZHnX52
