Since when is it wrong...

There is no art work with this blog because when I tried to do an AI drawing of pro-Palestinian protest signs being in a bonfire, I received this message. "Sorry! Our AI moderator thinks this prompt is probably against our community standards." I tried several other requests. None worked. It wouldn't even give me the numbers I asked for. I don't know if it were deliberate or not. I've never had the problem before.

 Here's the blog anyway.

The New Yorker had a story by Alistair Kitchen. He was denied entry to the U.S. because he wrote an article about the pro-Palestinian demonstrations earlier when he was on the Columbia University Campus. What is really frightening, he had cleaned his phone. They had to know before he was detained and were watching for him. They held him for 12 hours before sending him back to Australia.

He is not alone. There are more and more cases of actions against people, including citizens and those legally in the U.S. who speak up for Palestine. 

The last time I looked the U.S. Bill of Rights included Freedom of Speech.

I want to know what is wrong with speaking out for a people who have been forced from their homes. Their schools and hospitals have been destroyed. They are being starved and when they seek food, many are shot. 

Genocide is the word that describes what is being done. And people are being punished for being anti-genocide, which strikes me as being punished because you don't approve of killing women and babies.

Sure, I know the excuse is that some of them supported Hamas which attacked Israel, and Israel has a right to protect itself. I say BS because the Palestinians have a right to protect themselves too as does every country who is attacked by another. Not every country that is attacked commits genocide as Israel is doing.

Supposedly being anti-genocide in this case is being anti-Semitic. Hmmmm...the Palestinians are a Semitic people too. That argument doesn't wash.

Trump has defended people who chanted "The Jews will not replace us" in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 as being good. That sounds pretty anti-Semitic to me. Perhaps, using that standard, Trump should be deported.

My mind is still boggles that Netanyahu, who was labeled a war criminal by the International Criminal Court in November 2024 for using starvation as a warfare method among other crimes, should nominate Trump for the International Peace Prize. I hope the court will throw out the nomination because of whence it came. I imagine at the meeting to decide who gets the prize the laughing at the hypocrisy combined with disbelief.

Students at various universities have been punished for speaking out against genocide. I would suspect, although I have not researched it that those universities have military contracts. One of the goals of those students have been for those universities to divest in this type of contract. Maybe the universities don't want students to have moral values, if one considers mass killings of a people immoral. Or maybe they want to raise a new generation of mass murderers? 

Whatever, the punishments for expressing an opinion in a country that says it has freedom of speech is not living up to what it claims.