No sane American would DARE come out in support of lynching, right? Especially if that lynching is specifically in the context of murdering someone of a hated ethnic group. That would be simply beyond the pale, wouldn’t it?
You might hope so… but that’s exactly what some of the virtue-signalling Hollywood types found themselves accused of doing with those red pins they wore to the Oscars.
Wearing a red pin advocating for a ceasefire in #Gaza, actor Mark Ruffalo said "It’s starting. We’re late. We’re late. The Palestinian protest shut down the Oscars tonight. Humanity wins," #Oscars2024 pic.twitter.com/HeFZV4Vv7s
— Sir Chilliebean (@Chilliebeanz) March 11, 2024
Humanity wins, eh?
What a regrettable choice of words that turned out to be.
Gee, I can't wait for the next Mark Ruffalo movie as you have to be such a humanitarian to wear that red pin! How about the rest of you? #NeverAgainIsNow @LoganLevkoff @elkwood66 pic.twitter.com/RVrTws3Rou
— Adam Plotkin (@AdamPlotkin) March 12, 2024
Most celebrities wearing red pins don’t know that the image of red hands is associated with one horrific event imprinted on the minds of
Israelis and Palestinians.The 2000 Ramallah lynching of Israelis.
This symbolism isn’t a coincidence. pic.twitter.com/N8JGWpAkc6
— Israel ישראל 🇮🇱 (@Israel) March 11, 2024
In October of 2000, two IDF reservists took a wrong turn and wound up at a Palestinian checkpoint. They were taken into custody at a particularly turbulent moment in the news cycle and a crowd of more than 100 people administered the same brutal kind of ‘mob justice’ that we saw on a larger scale this past October.
JPost memorialized key moments in the event this way, 20 years later:
The IDF reservists were murdered by the crowd via beatings and stabbings, with one Italian news outlet later capturing the infamous photo Aziz Salha raising his blood-soaked hands to the cheering crowd. The reservists’ bodies were then thrown out the window, mutilated and set on fire. The bodies were then dragged to Al-Manara Square in the city center. PA security forces, aware of the seriousness, attempted to confiscate film showing the events.
Video of the lynching caused widespread shock in Israel, and led to extensive military retaliation against PA targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including Israeli Air Force Apache helicopters the police station where the incident took place, the headquarters of the Fatah-aligned Tanzim and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades terrorist organizations, and the Voice of Palestine radio station among others.
The red hands are an allusion to a specific photo taken during the Ramallah lynching of 2000.
A contributor for the Times of Israel describes the moment he — as a freshman — first heard about the lynching, describing what he read:
Two Israelis, Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhich, had made a very wrong turn, and would never turn back. They were swallowed by a lynch mob whole, who beat them, stabbed them, gouged their eyes out, and disemboweled them as they lay on the floor of the Ramallah police station.
And when one of the Israeli men’s phones rang and rang and rang – his wife, worried that she hadn’t heard from him – his killer picked up the phone and said “your husband is dead.” https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-the-red-hands-on-the-ceasefire-pins-mean-to-many-of-us-who-love-israel/
As the writer himself said that context and the inhumanity of the butchers in that mob is almost too much to stomach. But then he saw the photo and it got worse.
But it was the photograph that ran alongside the text that left me screaming, screaming, screaming out of my mind, a keening wail from across ten time-zones, as I stared at the picture of one of the men who did this to them, who squeezed their lives from their bodies with such brutal inhumanity, and who then stood by the open window and waved to the cheering crowd below.
His hands, like two bloody flags waving from the window, his hands like something from the darkest recesses of the mind that drags us to that place where humanity shambles off to die. His hands, those two hands with five fingers each, just like mine, just like yours, covered in the blood of another man… a Jew. A Jew like me.
So when I see the Artists for Ceasefire pins with the red hand on it – that’s what I think about. I can’t NOT think about it. — TimesOfIsrael
When Ruffalo and the others at the Oscars wore those pins to support one cause and shame anyone who did not share his views — did it occur to him to wonder whether there was a broader context he was missing?
Or did they blindly wear a pin supporting the lynching of Jews because someone told him the guys with the red pins were the good guys? Considering one of the most heinous villains in the 20th century — if not history altogether — is best remembered for his wholesale slaughter of Jews, he might want to change his tune on this… in a hurry.
Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.
Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.
This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.
