Not to be outdone by Israel’s theft of the homes of Palestinians expelled in the 1948 Nakba, the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council is stealing the very name “Nakba” itself.
Tonight, a friend suggested that I Google “Nakba.com” to see what happened. When I did, the address redirected to “Jimena.org.” This site is a hasbara effort dedicated to countering the Palestinian Nakba claim. It’s a bit more sophisticated than that. The site claims to advance Mizrahi and Sephardi culture and traditions. It has a website that’s quite slick and looks quite authentic in terms of its connections to Mizrahi heritage.
But the site’s mission statement makes its propaganda angle apparent:
In the early 20th century, under the heavy weight of Anti-Jewish governments and policy, nearly one million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa had their property confiscated, basic human rights stripped, and were systematically persecuted and victimized. Ultimately these Jews were forced to flee their homes and surrender their nationalities, becoming the “Forgotten Refugees” of the Middle East and North Africa. UN Resolution 242 asserted that Jews fleeing Arab countries were ‘bona fide’ refugees, yet the international community, the media and North American educational systems have continuously ignored their plight and their losses.
Revisionist history of the Middle East conveniently excludes the fact that over half of Israel’s Jewish population live there not because European atrocities during World War II, but because of Anti-Jewish Arab governments who dispossessed and displaced their native Jewish populations following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Adopted narratives of the Arab-Israeli conflict fail to address the fact that Israel was the largest refugee camp in the Middle East, providing safe haven to some 650,000 dispossessed Middle Eastern and North African Jewish refugees whose ancestors had a continuous presence in the region for over 3,000 years.
Here especially is the money quote:
As the only organization in North America focused on educating and advocating on behalf of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the Israeli government has requested that JIMENA continue to play a key leadership role in international initiatives to advance this issue.
…We have led a number of effective Jewish refugee advocacy training seminars, educating students and adults on how to incorporate the issue of Jewish refugees into a broader discussion of how the Middle East has developed.
Clearly, Jimena is a creature of both domestic Israel Lobby (the JCRC) and the Israeli government itself. It is part of a long-term strategic effort to undercut any Palestinian claim of a Right of Return or reparations with a countering claim that similar damages are due the Jews from Arab lands. The hope appears to be that the two claims will cancel each other out and the Palestinians will be left with nothing.
In truth, if the Arab Jews do have a legitimate claim to either physically return to their former homes or to claim restitution, then the Palestinian refugees have the same right. In this sense, the hasbara apparatus is undermining its ultimate goal: to discredit any Palestinian claim to return to their homeland.
After a bit of sleuthing, the truth about Jimena became even clearer. First, the site is registered to the San Francisco JCRC. The site administrator is a former JCRC staffer, Yitzhak Santis, who now works for the Israel Lobby hasbara outfit, Standwithus. Santis uses a JCRC e mail address and Jimena’s address is the same as that of the JCRC. The listed phone number for Jimena’s registration is the JCRC’s own. In other words, Jimena is essentially as astroturf organization created by the JCRC in order to advance an anti-Palestinian agenda.
The current director, Sarah Levin, lived in Israel for some time and lists as one of her passions, “Israel advocacy.” The advisory board includes Charles Jacob, the founder of one of the nation’s leading Islamophobia outfits, the David Project. It also includes the CEO of the liberal-Zionist New Israel Fund, Rabbi Brian Lurie. I guess they have to cover all their ideological bases.
The odd aspect of this case is that the neither the JCRC nor Jimena own the Nakba domain. That honor is reserved for one, Howard Hoffman, a businessman and domain broker from Palo Alto. He owns Nakba.com and Nakba.org and nearly 5,000 other domain names according to Domaintools.com. But not (yet) Nakba.net. What he’s done has a name: political domain squatting or cyber-squatting. If Hoffman did this for financial gain, he would be breaking the law. I don’t know whether the JCRC is paying him for the pleasure of redirecting traffic to Jimena.org.
But Hoffman is engaging in a form of anti-Palestine lawfare by denying the domain to someone with an intent to use it to educate the public about the Nakba.
Returning to the JCRC, perhaps it’s fairer to say it isn’t stealing “Nakba” but only borrowing it from another pro-Israel businessman who stole it. He’s making a tidy profit from it doubtless (that’s his business after all), just as modern Israel has profited from its expulsion of nearly 1-million Palestinians.
@Richard
Just a small thing- ultimately it’s over a million Palestinians over a twenty year period.
I know you know this. I just think it’s important to mention whenever the “initial” Nakba comes up.
It depends on how you count:-)
A great number of the Palestinians expelled during the Naksa (1967) were people who’d already been expelled during the Nakba. I don’t have the exact numbers in mind, anyway there are no exact numbers, but the different organizations generally agree on around 300.000 expelled in 1967 (or Palestinians being abroad prevented from returning home) and of those I think around 100.000 are second time refugees.
(I’m too lazy to look for the numbers but they are available on the net)
Sephardic Jews are not refugees although they are descendants of expelled Jews from Spain. Palestinians personally displaced number only about 25,000 today, all others are their descendants who were never expelled or displaced from anywhere. Israel to them would be as alien as Spain would be to Sepharadic Jews.
@ Gaby: You have expounded a lie. That is unacceptable. Historically, at least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled ( not “displaced”). If you use lies like this in future you nay be moderated or banned.
Actually, Israel would be as close to home for Palestinian refugees as it would’ve been to Yehuda Halevi in medieval Spain.
A lie? I said that about 25,000 Palestinians that were personally displaced are alive today. At least that was the consensus in 2012 in the US Senate when it discussed the Kirk Amendment. And it makes sense since 1948 is 68 years ago already. Most of those that were personally displaced or expelled simply died. It’s called the law of nature: people age and die. And the Senate, and the Amendment, referred to them as “displaced” not “expelled”. The rest of the so called refugees today are just descendants, expelled from nowhere. Can you imagine a Syrian refugee who made it to Berlin last summer, giving birth to a boy in Berlin today, and having been born and raised in Germany all his life in 70 years you refer to him a Syrian refugee? Absurd!! But somehow, Palestinians were made into perpetual refugees.
@ Gaby: First, you don’t get to define who is eligible for Return. Nor does Mark Kirk, nor does the U.S. Senate. That’s like saying the Fox can decide who’s allowed in the chicken coop.
And I’ll tell you something about the law of nature: if the world hates you eventually you will die. That apparently is the role you seek for Israel.
As for who is a refugee. Let’s change the terms & say imagine a Holocaust survivor who gives birth to a child. Can the child call her/himself a child of survivors? Of course he can. Just as the child of someone driven into exile is a descendant of someone against whom a profound & historic crime was committed. As Israel expelled the 1-million, it must make amends not just to the few original expelees, but to their direct descendants. If Israel didn’t want to have to deal with this mess it shouldn’t have expelled them. As it did, it now reaps the whirlwind.
As for what is “absurd.” That would be you.
I guess black people can call themselves sons of slaves too, but yes, calling yourself son of holocaust survivor today, or son of Palestinian refugee or grandchild of displaced Apache Indian is absurd. There is a statute of limitations to past wrongs and the one on Palestinian refugees has long expired. Or do you suggest that whites should also “make amends” to the blacks? People need to learn to move on with their lives, the problem is that the world doesn’t let the Palestinians move on with theirs, calling them refugees forever and giving them the illusion that they will be back to Haifa!! Imagine if the Jews kept the survivors in Aushwitz for 70 years telling them to hold on to their keys that they soon will go back to their shtetl in Poland…
@ Gaby:
They certainly can because they are. You make the typical condescending, even racist assumption that you can determine for ethnic groups who’ve suffered hate & racism what they may call themselves or how they may see themselves. You may not tell the descendant of a slave who sees him or herself as part of a tradition that invovles suffering a great injustice, that they are “absurd.” The very notion is beyond offensive.
Spoken like a true colonialist and perpetrator of suffering. Of course there is a statute of limitations. Better yet, let’s redefine the injustice as not a crime to begin with. Then you don’t need to bother with any limitations.
The difference between Israel (which you represent despite all your denials) and the U.S. is that you deny the suffering you inflict while many Americans acknowledge it. Of course slaves and their direct descendants deserve acknowledgement of their servitude. They deserve a national apology, possibly even financial reparations. You ignore the fact that the U.S. did precisely this for Japanese-Americans who were interned during WWII.
What nobless oblige. The equanimity of the colonizer.
You have just created the most embarrassing and offensive historical analogy made in many a year: you’ve likened Holocaust survivors to Palestinian refugees. You’ve also opened Israel to a claim of genocide in its treatment of the Palestinian refugess. I know you didn’t intend this. But that’s where your analogy has taken you. It’s one Palestinian activists would love to see you make. So I’d like you to own your analogy, embarrassing as it is for your argument.
Just as the Nazis put Jews in the extermination camps and were responsible for reparations to them for their suffering, so Israel is responsible for creating Palestinian refugees and must resettle them inside Israel if they wish to return. BTW, there were Jewish survivors who returned to their home countries and resettled there. This was a right denied all Palestinian expellees. They were stripped not only of their land, but of their right to return. They were deemed infiltrators though they were no less Israeli than the Jews who settled in Palestine after surviving the Holocaust.
Gaby, I am sure you oppose the Spanish law that gives the descendants of expelled Jews Spanish citizenship?
150.000 Israeli Ashkenazi Jews have received European passports (I am sure you oppose this too), and the Spanish law is a rare chance for Mizrahi Jews to obtain such an insurance policy.
The many Spanish muslims that were expelled in the same period (converts mostly, not colonists from N-Africa) were offered no such deal from the Spanish governmen, by the way. What do you th9ink about that?
I don’t see the link between your hasbara and my comment.
Anyway, International Law (which wasn’t around in 1492) is clear on the topic: Palestinian refugees AND their descendants do have the Right of Return (cf resolution 194 and resolution 3236 of November22 1974).
And why not mention that the Jewish community in Safed that hasbara claim to be around from the creation of Earth were largely expelled Sephardic Jews who were allowed to settle in Safed by the Ottomans (it goes for Hebron too).
And why not mention that Spain has voted the Right of Return of Sephardic Jews recently (but not the Right of Return of expelled Muslims) !!
You are making things up. Resolutions 194 & 2326 you mention, are not “International Law” they are merely advisory, not compulsory, not binding, having as much weight as me recommending you eat pizza for dinner tonight. And they say nothing about descendants.
@ Gaby: You are now subject to the Hasbara Comment Limit. It’s reserved for the designated official hasbarati assigned to “cover” this blog. Especially when they attempt to monopolize the comment threads. No more than 3 comments from you in any 24 hr period. Do not abuse this rule.
As for UN Security Council resolutions, they are indeed binding on member states. The notion that such a resolution means no more to you than ordering a pizza is indicative of Israel’s general disrespect for international norms & laws.
Yes Elizabeth, i seriously doubt any Jew has moved back to Spain but anyhow I do oppose any Jew moving back to Europe. Europe is anti-semitic, and Jews should live in the Jewish State. It is getting crowded in Israel but there is still plenty of space to live in the West Bank. As to the Muslims not getting Spanish passports, it’s a big difference, Muslims came to Spain as conquerors of the peninsula back in the 8th century. Expelled muslims who had no right to be there in the first place should not get passports to return.
@Gaby: If you wish to encourage Jews to live in the West Bank you won’t do it here. I do not permit commenters to flout international law here. You do it again & you’ll be moderated.
Further, Jews have applied for & been granted Spanish citizenship. Isn’t it ironic that you condemn Muslims who allegedly conquered Spain, but refuse to condemn the hundreds of thousands of non-indigenous Jews who invaded & conquered Palestine.
Resolutions 194 and 3236 are General Assembly resolutions. Only Security Council resolutions are binding on UN member states. This is not a commentary on the content of these two resolutions, merely a statement of fact, so please don’t kill the messenger, ok?
@hasbara:
Per the Zionist and Jewish definition of what a refugee is, all Palestinians in the Palestinian diaspora are fundamentally refugees– and what’s more, each generation inherits the status of “refugee” as well.
If the Jewish and Zionist movement can claim that Jews are “refugees” by virtue of living outside the so-called “Jewish state” then all 10 million + Palestinians in their diaspora are most certainly refugees.
I believe the Israeli claim is that if Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees from Arab countries (around 700,000 I believe in Israel – millions of descendants obviously + a few hundred thousand in the rest of the world (US, France, UK, etc.), around a million originally all told) – then the Arab countries could absorb the Arab refugees from mandatory Palestine.
So instead of A->B, and B->A, Keep A in A, and B in B – however providing full rights (e.g. full citizenship which is not bestowed on UNRWA refugees (which include descendants) in Arab countries) and perhaps support in the form of land grants and housing.
@ lepxii: I’ve never heard such a bullshit claim, nor have you, unless it came from David Horowitz.
But wasn’t this Nakba day created by Palestinians in order to erase and “steal” the joy of the Israelis Independence day to begin with?
@gaby: No, YOU created Nakba Day by expelling 1 million of your fellow citizens. Palestinians didn’t do that.
I was born and raised in South America, not an Israeli, never held a weapon, and never been anywhere near the Israeli Army so why would you gratuitously accuse me of expelling Palestinians? If you have any decency, you would apologize. Regardless, if by the word “fellow” you mean friend, then certainly the Palestinians were neither “fellow” of the Jews and certainly not “citizens” of the Jewish state as they and the Jews were waging a war way before 1948. Nakba Day, is an invention of the PLO and Yasser Arafat, timed on purpose to fall on Israeli Independence Day celebrations in order to “steal” and rob the Jews of their celebration. So back to my previous point: it is not the Jews stealing nakba, but it is the Palestinians in the first place using nakba to steal Isreali Independence Day.
@Gaby: You are a pro Israel apologist. Hardly matters where you were born. Your goal & purpose here is to advocate for Israel’s worst excesses. No apology to you is called for.
Palestinians living in Israel before 1948, if not expelled, became citizens just as Jews did. So they ate indeed fellow inhabitants, later citizens. The Palestinians by & large did not wage war in 1948. There was no Palestinian army, nor a Palestinian equivalent of the Palmach. Palestinians were by & large civilian victims. Do you know any Israeli history or did you read it on a Barron’s Kosher for Passover chocolate wrapper?
No Palestinian needed to invent Nakba. That was done for them by Ben Gurion & the Palmach.
BTW, Eitan Bronstein notes that the first known use of the term was not by the PLO or Arafat, but by the Palmach in a warning to Haifa Arabs to stop resistance in 1948. Jewish fighters warned them in Arabic there would be a “Nakba” if they didn’t surrender. So I’m afraid you’ve failed again. Better go back to Hasbara Central for retraining.
Hey, you solved the problem then, if the Palmach used it first then Nakba always belonged to the Jews!!!
@Gaby: Your stupidity and inanity is boundless.
@hasbara:
Yawn.
Like the typical hasbarat, you try and turn facts and reality on their heads.
You people are so pathetic. It’s actually nauseating.
Two points:
1. How do get google to refer to another website, i.e. how did arrange that “nakba” would direct to their site???
2. If the ultimate aim is to create groundwork for washing away Palestinian claims, then the group would have to recognize the principle of restitution with respect to Palestinians. This implied recognition might have some counter-hasbara value, that is, should the site start to mention such a strategy as cancelling out claims.
@David: Domain names are purchased on a first come, first served basis. Since the term “Nakba” isn’t trademarked (and even if it was), Howard Hoffman was free to purchase nakba.com and nakba.org because they were available for registration. Domain name registrars, absent a court order, will not investigate prior to selling a domain name, if the person buying it deserves or is entitled to it. Once you purchase a domain name, you can do whatever you like with it. It’s not Google that does this but whatever hosting company you are using. As such, it’s not difficult, and perfectly legal, to have nakba.com point to Jimena’s web site. For example, whoever wants to can right now purchase richardsilverstein.co and point it anywhere they like or use it to build whatever web site they like, and, absent copyright infringement or defamation, there isn’t much anyone could do about it. Again, this has less than nothing to do with Google.
Well Pea is Holocaust a trademark and an earning mean for some? Obviously it is because if you write to your browser holocaust.com you find yourself redirected to http://www.wiesenthal.com. Sadly Palestinians were not clever enough or enough obscene to register it and create pages with their own propaganda. If they had done it, it is 100 percent certain that you and yours would have been screaming loudly. But the Palestinians and their millions of supporters did not, some people have still manners and a sense of what is right and what is not.
genocide.com written into a browser causes a jump to http://www.facebook.com/genocidecom. Strange isn’t it?
Hmmmm….
Genocide.com’s owner is hidden behind a privacy service. Whoever owns it has redirected it to Facebook. I doubt Facebook is the actual owner or had anything to do with the redirection. Why is this strange?
@Simohurta: I’m guessing that the Wiesenthal Center registered Holocaust.com in order to prevent Nazis or Holocaust deniers from registering it and then using it for nefarious purposes. As such, I’m pretty sure they did the right thing.
You wrote “…it is 100 percent certain that you and yours would have been screaming loudly.” What’s your point? I wasn’t editorializing in my response to David. Just stating the legal and technical facts. If Palestinians had managed to register Holocaust.com then so be it. I for one would certainly not be “screaming loudly” so there goes your “100 percent certainty.” Anyhow, I didn’t comment to get into a pissing match over hypothetical nonsense. Someone asked a question and I answered.
Well Pea I suppose that if PLO, Hamas or Hizbollah register domains like JerusalemDay.com or different tender Jewish and Zionist “symbols” and link them to their own propaganda sites, USA, Israel and the world’s Jewish organizations would instantly create procedures to deny that and make it illegal. But “amusingly” when Jewish organizations steal the Palestinians’ history, traditions and foods it is seen as legal because the “domains” were not registered. Well jerusalemday.com and shekel.tv are for sale and so are plenty of others. It would be interesting to see what are the limits of Israeli Jewish humor to tolerate such cultural hijacking. Jerusalemday.com could be filled with these absurd videos where thousands of drunken Jews wrapped in their flags shout death to Arabs, pictures of gratifies, burned churches etc racist historical material in the same styles Jewish organizations “marketize” holocaust.
I did not know that “the world’s Jewish organizations” had the power to “instantly create procedures” as you described – and that they haven’t to date because no anti-Zionists have yet to register JerusalemDay.com or shekel.tv or whatever. It’s a wonder anything that offends the all-powerful Jewish organizations is allowed to exist on the Internet or anywhere for that matter. The bottom line is that if a domain name exists, then you can register it. For instance, davidbengurion.org is available. Go ahead and register it and do whatever you like with it. Same with goldameir.net or thekotel.info or westernwall.co or bris.tv or beithamikdash.co. All of those are available and there are no legal barriers preventing anyone from registering these domain names and doing whatever they like with them. Your implications have a whiff of sulphur about them.
@ pea:
You’ve made SimoHurtta’s point w/o realizing it. No one has bought those domains because no one on the Palestinian side is devious enough to think that such a project is worthwhile. But someone on the pro-Israel side has. And it’s not just the pro Israel equivalent of SimoHurtta. Not a lone individual, but the JCRC of one of America’s more important Jewish communities. That is what’s important here. What you’re raising is a beside-the-point smokescreen to conceal the offensiveness of the JCRC’s behavior.
The fact that you deny this fact is a further indication of your moral obtuseness & blindness to the suffering inflicted by Israel.
@SimoHurtta implied that the Jewish community had the power to change long established Internet protocol whenever it wanted to. I never defended the morality of cybersquatting. I in fact believe that what Jimena did is actually kind of childish and that cybersquatting is one of the lowest ways of making money on the Internet, right there next to selling viagra pills and spamming. But nobody asked because y’all assumed that I was defending the practice as opposed to merely letting you know that it’s not illegal.
@pea: That is an incorrect interpretation of the law. There is an anti cybersquatting law that forbids squatting for profit. Hoffman doesn’t own 5,000 domains for charitable purposes. He owns them to earn a profit. So there’s a chance a law’s being broken.
But frankly it’s not the law that interests me most, but rather the attempt to to exploit the Internet as part of the war against Palestine, of which Hoffman, the JCRC, the Lobby & Jimena are part. They are stealing Palestinian history. It’s disgusting & you defend it.
Again, I wasn’t defending anything. At all. As far as your legal analysis, there is no “anti cybersquatting law” that applies here. In the US there is the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) of 1999. It’s an expansion of the Lanham (Trademark) Act and provides protection to individuals and trademark owners. It requires bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. I can’t speak to all of Hoffman’s domain names, but “Nakba” isn’t a Trademark. While Hoffman is indeed a cyber squatter, this kind of cybersquatting isn’t illegal. That’s just a fact, not a defense.
@ David: It isn’t a matter of what Google does. Hoffman, as owner of the domain, directs it to the Jimena.org site.
“In the early 20th century, under the heavy weight of Anti-Jewish governments and policy, nearly one million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa had their property confiscated, basic human rights stripped, and were systematically persecuted and victimized.”
Early twentieth century? These guys are trying to suggest that whatever happened to the Jews in Arab lands had nothing to do with the foundation of Israel and the real “Nakba”.
And even if they would have the chronology right that other lie remains viz. that the exodus of Jews from Arab lands was exclusively a matter of the “push” from those lands rather than the “pull” of Israel. One gets tired of summoning the same witnesses: eg Naemi Giladi, Ellen Shohat, Wilbur Crane Eveland, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht etc. for Iraq or Professor Pinto for Morocco. As far as the latter country is concerned I understand that Jews are doing very well there (testimony of Job Cohen, who visited the country in his then capacity as mayor of Amsterdam) and that there is an open invitation for Jews to return there.
It is SO obvious when reading all the comments here that the arguments are emotional, almost fallacious
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion#Modern_theories
This begins with the by your editorial decision, Richard, (and it is your prerogative) to define antisemitism very narrowly, almost impossibly so, while calling any type of generalization about Muslims or Palestinians as “Islamaphobic”. Just look at this thread, with the sweeping generalizations about Jews, Jewish organizations, and Israelis. This directs the tone of the discussion. So who cares of somebody spoofs a web address? The internet if full of content, some good and some junk.
I would challenge you to imagine any reasonable man in the street looking at some of the comments and not concluding that they are racist and bigoted. Of course the people saying them would deny that they are anti-semites or bigots, since the hostility against the Jews and Israelis are earned, and that they have nothing personally against Jews, just against what “they” or their organizations do.
Next, it continues with the dismissal or discounting of claims about Jewish refugees or Israeli suffering as somehow their deserved treats, while Palestinians are held wholly blameless for their suffering at the hands of the evil bloodthirsty Jews who invaded their land. I imagine that you’ll even consider the last rhetorical sentence racist.
Finally, the cherry picking of facts to to support a totally one-sided argument, while summarily dismissing others, shows a strong cognitive bias. Yes, “hasbarists” are also making excuses, except that their claims are routinely dismissed as such. Any and all entities that happen to support Israeli claims are described at hasbarah directed by the Israeli government and the world Zionists, and therefore obviously wrong.
Richard, I know that I do not own what it means to support Israel or be a Zionist, which you state you are. However, you certainly must be aware that the editorial decisions that you make here provoke all kinds of people to come out of the woodwork including those are just plain bigots who deny the right of Israel to exist. Is this really the kind of dialogue you want?
I know I disgust you, and you feel that I am repulsive, etc. You already got that out of system, so you don’t need to say it again.
@ Yehuda: You’ve committed a cardinal error of hasbarists here: you’ve levelled vague charges, not specified what they are, not offered proof that they are what you claim. We don’t live by such generalities here. Be clear, be specific and support your claims with evidence. What you’ve offered is a meaningless hodge-podge.
This claim is false on its face. I think what you meant to say is that I call any negative generalization about Muslims or Palestinians as Islamophobic. That’s generally true. But I also condemn similar characterizations of Jews or Israelis as anti-Semitic. There are scores if not hundreds of comments I’ve blocked, deleted or banned which consist of such rhetoric. At times, I’ve even explicitly criticized commenters here for such attitudes. You must’ve missed that. I wonder why?
Again, that is a lie. I have never said Arab Jews didn’t suffer anti-Semitism. I have never said that no Jews fled Arab lands due to anti-Semitism. What I have done is raise legitimate & skeptical evidence concerning claims of mass anti-Semitism and expulsions. I’ve supported that skepticism with historical resources and scholars who reject many of the Israeli claims as Islamophobic or motivated by Zionist impulses.
I find such terms offensive. Don’t use them again even as a form of snark.
You bet. I don’t permit bigots here: not bigots of the right or bigots of the left. I’ve disciplined people on both sides. Your problem is that your ox has been gored but you deny that your ox gored the Palestinians as well.
Stop whining and stop the mock self-pity. It isn’t flattering.