Hasnain says:

“For Üngör, a former student articulated the question at the heart of the debate in an email she sent him early in the war: “Do you only study genocide or do you also want to prevent it?”

It’s a dilemma many scholars of mass violence have been grappling with. Herf, the retired historian, said that for those studying the Holocaust there was a “moral impulse – and that was to see that it never happened again”. He cited fears of Iran and a second, nuclear Holocaust.

Hirsch, the scholar of memory, believes that naming genocide implicates a response.

“Genocide prevention is a responsibility,” she said, citing Philip Gourevitch’s well known book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. The book’s title implicitly calls out those watching as a genocide unfolds.

“Now, we’re watching on our iPhones, and still people are holding back.””

Hasnain says:

a few weeks ago Amnesty International became Hamas for truthfully reporting it’s a genocide. Then earlier this week, HRW. Now Doctors Without Borders.

The tide is turning. The hasbara defenses have gotten more desperate. I hope states listen.

“In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to implement provisional measures to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. Despite this, no action has been taken to address these measures. MSF’s first-hand observations align with those of an increasing number of legal experts and organizations, concluding that ethnic cleansing and genocide are taking place in Gaza. MSF calls on States, particularly Israel’s closest allies, to end their unconditional support for Israel and fulfill their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza. States must leverage their influence to alleviate the suffering of the population and enable a massive scale-up of humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip. “

Hasnain says:

“To work in DC now is to understand that the genocide in Palestine is not a mistake. The people actually in charge are doing this. Your job is a farce. Your work means nothing. The very top echelons are shredding everything you stood for. You will never afford a house in Washington. If you have a catastrophic health emergency, even you will need to turn to GoFundMe, and every day when you open your phone you see children mangled alive with weapons that you know legally should not be delivered.”

Hasnain says:

This one caught me off guard. I’ve been complaining about media bias for quite a while, including studies done by these folks. But even then I wouldn’t have imagined something this blatant because what. At least folks were slightly more subtle with their bias before.

“A survey of a year’s worth of Palestine-Israel coverage by four Sunday morning news shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Face the Nation, and CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash—reveals a startling statistic: With the exception of one interview, the Sunday shows covered and debated the so-called “Israel-Hamas war” for 12 months without speaking to a single Palestinian or Palestinian American.”

Hasnain says:

What does one even say at this point, if soldiers and commanders from the “most moral army in the world” are admitting to this. This was the least horrifying example.

“While Palestinians are officially prohibited from entering, the reality is more severe than a simple exclusion zone. "It's military whitewashing," explains a senior officer in Division 252, who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza. "The division commander designated this area as a 'kill zone.' Anyone who enters is shot."

A recently discharged Division 252 officer describes the arbitrary nature of this boundary: "For the division, the kill zone extends as far as a sniper can see." But the issue goes beyond geography. "We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists," he says. "The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200."”

Hasnain says:

TIL the government only had 2(!) people assigned to Palestine, of which one resigned.

“Far from diplomacy, Casey now works at a local bank, where he watches from afar and his criticisms extend beyond a single administration. He sees a systemic failure in US policy towards Palestinians – a complete absence of a coherent strategy that in turn hurts Israelis too and remains viscerally personal.

“I remember two children killed in a ramming attack at a bus stop in Jerusalem who were the same age as my kids,” Casey said. “You see the effect the conflict has on people in Israel as well. Israelis deserve better, not just Palestinians.”

His ultimate assessment?

“We don’t have a policy on Palestine. We just do what the Israelis want us to do.”

Hasnain says:

“All of what we described in this post is why Leaving Traditions are a cherished part of Google's security culture and something we believe is valuable to share with the industry. They enable us to:

Discover and fix critical vulnerabilities, making Google more secure
Demonstrate the importance of multi-factor authentication as a key defense, ensuring that getting hold of a password isn't enough to compromise an account
Have some fun with coworkers leaving Google, and give them a lasting memento of their time at Google”

Hasnain says:

As always with one of Charity’s posts, I found myself nodding along. There’s so much gold in the founder mode discussions, but it was unfortunately buried under so much hubris. She does a great job extracting the useful information in this piece.

“There is actually no shame in this! He is right: being a CEO is fucking hard. It does not come naturally. Nobody is born good at it. It takes a lot of hard work and pain and suffering to become someone who is good at running a company. I was CEO of Honeycomb for 3.5 years, and it almost killed me. I never got good at it. I have immense respect for the people who do it well.

But this attitude he has, where the buck stops literally everywhere but him — is one I find so fucking repellent. Ethics aside, I also feel like it constitutes a material risk to any company when the CEO is so lacking in humility and self-awareness. (I can leave room for the possibility that he is actually humble as fuck and he just…chose not to share those reflections with us in this talk. 🤷)”

Hasnain says:

The words I have to say about Assad are extremely impolite and vulgar because what else can one say about a maniac who deserves only the worst fates imaginable?

“"One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate" of the number of bodies buried at the site, said Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force. "It's a very, very extremely almost unfairly conservative estimate."
Moustafa said that he is sure there are more mass graves than the five sites, and that along with Syrians victims included U.S. and British citizens and other foreigners

Hasnain says:

“The survey from Emerson College Polling found 68 percent of all respondents found the actions of the person who shot and killed Thompson unacceptable.

But a startling 24 percent of those aged 18-29 found it “somewhat acceptable,” and 17 percent of that group found it completely acceptable.”