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Guys, I have so many good episodes for Podcast Friday (particularly about things other than Palestine!), but it turns out that Friday is the worst day for me to do these write-ups because that's when my procrastination bites me in the ass and I feel more urge to do my actual work rather than this, so I have a large backlog that's becoming more irrelevant as time passes. But today I'm less super-panicked about it, so here's the episode I'm currently listening to as I post, because it's pretty good.

The Dig - The German Question w/ Emily Dische-Becker

As you may know if you're following Israel/Palestine politics a little too much, Germany has turned fighting anti-semitism as a state religion but even that has been converted to Zionism along the way (with Germany providing about 30% of Israel's weapons during their current massacre on Gaza, compared to the US providing all but 1% of the rest). Denvir brought in a German anti-Zionist intellectual to discuss this question, and man it is wild. From a marked increase in Jews getting in legal trouble for criticizing Israel, recent German converts to Judaism becoming state-sponsored rabbis so they can tell who's a Good Jew and and a Bad Jew, to the anti-Deutsche movement (i.e. how some antifa white men have become staunch supporters of U.S. imperialism), to the AfD's multilayered instrumentalisation of anti-semitism, to Germans converting to Judaism already in 1948 because they thought it would give them a social advantage (!), to the leftist-Israeli and Palestinian diasporas living side by side in Berlin, to artistic censorship of other minorities, to fabricated anti-semitic mobs, to expecting Arabs migrants to identify with Nazis rather than the victims of the Holocaust, there's a lot mental backflips going on there. Dische-Becker has razor-sharp wit and lands many punches, enough that the usually cool Denvir cracks up in reaction to some the batshit crazy stuff that she reports on. Both highly entertaining and disgusting.

BJP expells Jaswant Singh over praise of Jinnah

"Thirty years of my political life with the BJP and (being expelled) on this note … saddened me and on the ground for writing a book, that saddened me even more, immensely more," a visibly upset Singh, a founding member of the party, told reporters.

These guys are dangerous nutters... The article also mentioned that LK Advani also had to temporarily step down from BJP leadership for calling Jinnah "secular" in the past.

Jinnah was long opposed to a split India and only surrendered to the Pakistan option after decades of Muslims not getting a fair voice in the Congress/independence movement, which was frankly a Hindu nationalist movement more than an all-inclusive independence movement.