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Opinion
It's the Bad Ideas—Not the Old Age, Stupid!
Don't count birthdays. Follow the money.
Jun 06, 2025
Sometimes a little procrastination can be a good thing. A recent case in point was this year’s California Democratic Party’s convention decision to postpone consideration of a resolution calling for a mandatory retirement age for state and local officials. By not acting on the measure the party has, at least for the moment, spared itself a diversion from the real question of just what message it wants to convey – regardless of the age of the messenger.
The resolution was offered by Eric Kingsbury, a member of a heavily tech-funded slate that succeeded in moving the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee dramatically to the right in the last election. Kingsbury was quick to state that this was “decidedly not about Nancy Pelosi. If every elected leader in this country were like Nancy Pelosi [the 85-year old San Francisco Representative who is a fellow Committee member] we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.” And yet SF Democratic Committee Chair Nancy Tung suggested a specific age cap of 70: “That’s the general thought. Though we are thinking that an exploration by the state party is the way to go. But 70 is an age that other jurisdictions have adopted for judges and the like.”
This all, of course, is a predictable reaction to Joe Biden’s inept debate performance widely believed to have cost the Democrats the White House. It is also something of what we might call a “best seller-list solution,” in this case a follow-up to the success of “Original Sin,” the account of the Biden decline in his White House years that immediately hit the top of the New York Times non-fiction list. This book comes close on the heels of “Abundance,” the best-seller pro-growth manifesto also touted by centrist members as the cure for what ails the Democrats. .
Perhaps the quickest refutation of the age-limit solution is Senator Bernie Sanders, currently traveling about the country conducting (often in the company of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) the largest anti-Trump Administration rallies to be found anywhere, while also sponsoring the (unfortunately unsuccessful) U.S. Senate resolutions to block weapons shipments for Israel’s use in further devastating Gaza. Sanders is 83, a year older than Joe Biden. Would we really want to silence the principal challenger to the Trump agenda in the currently trendy cause of fighting gerontocracy? Well, actually the people behind the convention resolution just might.
What is the new leadership of the San Francisco Democratic Party all about? As they say, just follow the money. In winning control of the Central Committee, the SF Democrats for Change slate raised over $2.2 million, more than tripling the amount raised in support of the Labor and Working Families slate of incumbent members and allies.
The source of that overwhelming financial edge was predominantly high tech capital. Backers included billionaire Chris Larsen of Ripple cryptocurrency, once estimated to be the fifth richest person in the world, now down to #407; Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman; and Zack Rosen, CEO of the venture-backed software company Pantheon. But the group’s most prominent and infamous supporter is self described “centimillionaire” Garry Tan, CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator (I’ll leave you to do your own research on the exact meaning of that), and also an early employee of Palantir Technologies, the data analysis and technology firm that has received over $113 million in federal funding from the Trump administration for the implementation of the executive order for federal government cross-agency data sharing.
Tan, who is estimated to have spent something like $400,000 on SF politics in the past few years, achieved his moment of maximum fame with a wee hours X post directed at a majority of the then members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors: “Fuck Chan Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a label and motherfucking crew … And if you are down with Peskin Preston Walton Melgar Ronen Safai Chan as a crew fuck you too … Die slow motherfuckers.” When someone responded suggesting that he was drunk when he posted what was apparently a reference to a Tupac Shakur song, Tan responded, “You are right and motherfuck our enemies.” (The posts were subsequently deleted.) Tan describes himself as a “moderate.”
While all of the big bucks backers of SF Democrats for Change may not be as crude as Tan, one trait we can be certain that they do share is disinterest in any campaign to radically shift the status quo in America. Do they share their proteges’ interest in a political age cap? Who knows, but it’s nothing that’s going to make them start asking for their money back. Whereas, if they were to hear that the recipients of their campaign funding were calling for an end to the corporate domination of politics, we can be pretty sure they’d let us know what they thought about that.
That the party needs to find a way to recapture the hearts and minds of the working class has become a truism in Democratic circles. And that doing so will require advocating clawing back some of the wealth and power that the nation’s corporate elite have amassed in recent years is obvious to anyone who takes the time to think it through. But you ain’t going to keep the support of the people whose cash put SF Democrats for Change in power by talking that kind of talk.
This is a scenario we can expect to see repeated in every state over the next couple of years. Age limits! Deregulation! Strong defense! Cut bureaucracy! Patriotism! Less political correctness! It’ll all be rolled out as party “moderates” try to achieve the impossible status of being both the party of the working class and the party of billionaire and centimillionaire financiers. Beware!Keep ReadingShow Less
RFK Jr.’s Deadly War on Science
Kennedy is not a doctor or a scientist, but he got the job as America’s top public health officer. Now he’s making the wrong choices for all of us.
Jun 06, 2025
During an NBC interview on November 6, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was cleaning up his lifelong anti-vaccination act as he lobbied to become Health and Human Services secretary in the Trump administration.
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” he said. “People ought to have choice…”
Kennedy is not a doctor or a scientist, but he got the job as America’s top public health officer. Now he’s making the wrong choices for all of us.
What Happened
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) report to Kennedy. As with flu shots, the agencies have approved and recommended Covid-19 vaccines as they have been adjusted annually to deal with the evolving virus.
On May 20, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced a new obstacle to FDA approval of any Covid-19 vaccine. For healthy Americans under 65, it must be subjected to large scale and time-consuming clinical trials. That data will replace the prior requirement of evidence showing only an immune response, which was the basis for approving the initial “Project Warp Speed” vaccines and all subsequent boosters.
Makary and Prasad asserted that they’re merely requiring “gold-standard data on persons at low risk.” But by not requiring such randomized, placebo-controlled trials for the elderly and other high-risk groups, they’re conceding that the vaccine prevents infection.
Even trying to follow the new requirement poses problems. It’s unethical to perform a clinical study that would give some people a worthless placebo instead of a vaccine, according to Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the University of Pennsylvania:
[W]e have a vaccine that works, given that we know that SARS-CoV2 continues to circulate and cause hospitalizations and death, and there’s no group that has no risk.
What Should Have Happened
Every year, the Advisory Committee on Immunizaton Practices to the CDC—a nonpartisan group of medical and scientific experts—considers the latest studies, data, and possible side effects of both old and new vaccines. It develops recommendations that the CDC’s director can accept, modify, or reject.
The transparent process culminates in a schedule that pediatricians throughout the country use to decide the safest and most effective ages at which to vaccinate children. Insurance companies use the CDC schedule to determine the vaccines they will cover.
Kennedy didn’t wait for the Advisory Committee. Three days after the FDA’s announcement of its new approval requirement, Kennedy posted a video on X, with Commissioner Makary at his side:
I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that as of today the Covid-19 vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule.
The blowback from the medical community was immediate. Every week in the United States, Covid-19 still kills 300 people and hundreds more are hospitalized. It’s the fourth leading cause of death overall and in the top 10 among children. And a new strain surging in Asia has now arrived here.
On May 30, the CDC walked back Kennedy’s proclamation with an update: For children between six months and 17 years old, the CDC now recommends “shared decision-making” between the physician and the patient or patient and guardian in determining whether to get the vaccine.
Healthy adults are still off the CDC’s list. And for pregnant women—all of whom are at greater risk of Covid-19 complications—the CDC’s positions are internally contradictory. Its new schedule no longer recommends that they get vaccinated. But the CDC continues to recommend the vaccine to anyone with “underlying conditions”—one of which is pregnancy. Meanwhile newborns who depend on their vaccinated mothers for immunity have the same likelihood of hospitalization and death from Covid-19 as someone who is 70 years old.
What Happens When Republicans Fear Trump More Than Endangering Public Health
Exhaustive studies have demonstrated that the vaccine is effective across all age groups. According to data published by the National Institutes of Health—another agency that Kennedy supervises—it has prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved millions of lives.
During Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked Kennedy to acknowledge that the Covid-19 vaccine had saved millions of people.
“I don’t think anybody can say that,” Kennedy replied.
Now, as with many Trump policies, the cost of a Covid-19 vaccine will hit hardest those adults who can least afford it. But when they don’t get vaccinated, the public at large will bear the consequences.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, expressed concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. But he overcame those reservations, perhaps because Republican primary challengers on the right were already telling Louisiana voters in the upcoming election that Cassidy was insufficiently loyal to Trump. After voting to convict Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection, the Louisiana Republican Party’s executive committee censured him.
Cassidy said that he voted to confirm Kennedy only after “intense conversations” that included Kennedy’s promise to “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations without changes.”
Until Kennedy broke that promise, the decision to get a Covid-19 vaccine was an individual choice. To promote public health, the vaccine’s presence on the CDC’s guidance schedule assured that it would be free to those who wanted it.
Now, as with many Trump policies, the cost of a Covid-19 vaccine will hit hardest those adults who can least afford it. But when they don’t get vaccinated, the public at large will bear the consequences: More Americans will be hospitalized with Covid-19 and more will die.
Blame Kennedy, of course, but he is who he always has been. Trump and Senate Republicans—especially Sen. Cassidy—knew it when they gave him the job that is killing us.
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Israeli Lies and Western Complicity: How Deceit Became a Weapon of War
The people of Gaza are not only being starved, bombed, and murdered. They are being erased from global consciousness by a wall of deception.
Jun 06, 2025
Throughout its long history of ethnic cleansing and occupation, Israel has remained consistent in its tactics: lie, deny, and distort the truth—often with the backing, or at least the indulgence, of Western powers. Lying has become an Israeli art form, refined over decades, practiced with impunity, and amplified by a complicit global media that not only tolerates but actively legitimizes these falsehoods.
The latest massacre at the food distribution in Gaza offers yet another stark and sickening reminder of this pattern. At dawn on Sunday, June 1st, more than 30 Palestinians were murdered while waiting for food aid in Rafah. As usual, Israel swiftly denied responsibility, claiming its army was unaware of any shooting near the American-led distribution center. But eyewitnesses, survivors, humanitarian organizations, and hospitals told a contradictory story.
Israel is not only getting away with war crimes—it’s getting away with lying about them.
Israel’s denial was immediately echoed—and defended by American officials. The U.S. ambassador—better described as Israel’s emissary within the State Department—dismissed reports of the massacre as “fake news.” This grotesque inversion of truth is a familiar maneuver, reminiscent of the Flour Massacre on February 29, 2024, when Israeli forces opened fire on civilians collecting flour, killing 112 and injuring over 760.
Again, Israel denied responsibility, claiming the deaths resulted from “stampedes” and civilians being run over by aid trucks. Yet even after the United Nations and media outlets like Al Jazeera challenged the Israeli disinformation and presented video footage clearly showing Israeli forces firing on unarmed civilians, no accountability followed.
In Gaza, it is not just food aid sites have become death traps. Ambulances are targets. First responders, doctors, and even their children have become “legitimate” military objectives.
Last week, Israel targeted the home of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, killing nine of her ten children—Yahya (12), Eve (9), Rival (5), Sadeen (3), Rakan (10), Ruslan (7), Jibran (8), Luqman (2), and Sedar, not yet one year old. Her husband, Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, succumbed to his injuries days later. Their tenth child, 11-year-old Adma, sustained a critical head injury and is unlikely to survive due to Gaza’s medical blockade.
Israel’s standard, callous response followed, explaining that its aircraft had struck “a number of suspects” in Khan Younis.
In March, the Israeli army murdered eight medics, six civil defense workers, and a United Nations employee—then buried them in the sand. The military later blamed the “suspicious behavior” of an ambulance for the attack. When confronted with video evidence disproving the claim, the army reverted to its usual script: “a mistake,” “a wrong decision,” “disciplinary action taken.” Fifteen lives erased with a bureaucratic shrug.
When Israel murdered seven humanitarian workers from the World Central Kitchen in April 2024, the Biden administration initially expressed outrage. Twenty-four hours later, that outrage was mollified by Israeli firsters in Washington. White House spokesperson John Kirby reversed course, claiming there was no evidence of deliberate targeting—absolving Israel in the same breath that had condemned it. A mass killing became a footnote.
This is nothing new.
In October 2023, nearly 500 civilians were killed in a blast at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. Israel immediately blamed a misfired Palestinian rocket. Just hours after landing in Tel Aviv, President Joe Biden publicly parroted the Israeli narrative—despite overwhelming eyewitness accounts, growing evidence, and skepticism from independent observers.
And then there is the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist gunned down in 2022. Israel initially claimed she was killed by Palestinian crossfire and released a video that was quickly discredited. Yet Western media gave more airtime to Israeli claims than to eyewitness testimony. Months later, under the weight of irrefutable evidence, Israel admitted responsibility—calling it, once again, a “mistake.”
The soldier who murdered a “lesser” U.S. citizen, like other killers of journalists, never faced justice. In fact he was promoted to Captain and went on killing with impunity—until reports emerged of his death during a battle in Jenin.
Just like the murdered children of Gaza, truth itself has become another collateral damage in Israel's war of disinformation. And those tasked with defending it—the media and democratic institutions—have too often served instead as marketers and conveyors of Israeli lies and propaganda.
The people of Gaza are not only being starved, bombed, and murdered. They are being erased from global consciousness by a wall of deception. And until the world begins to value Palestinian lives as much as it values Israeli (proven false) narratives, the Israeli theater of blood and deceit will continue.
Israel is not only getting away with war crimes—it’s getting away with lying about them. The impunity is not only military; it is moral, political, and informational. Israel has long mastered the art of the lie, dating back to the creation of political Zionism. The West, and its managed media, has normalized these falsehoods—just as it has normalized the starvation and siege of Gaza.
Israel lies with impunity because the world—especially the United States and much of the West—not only permits it, but promotes it. Western governments and media have built an echo chamber where Israeli narratives always take precedence—not due to credibility, but to avoid the reckoning that truth would demand. In choosing falsehood over fact, they evade moral accountability and sidestep the need to reconcile their professed values with the genocide they enable.
This is no longer just about Israeli lies. It’s about a global system complicit in sustaining Israel’s habitual lies and systematic deceit to cover up a starvation and a livestreamed genocide.
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Palestine And Its Metaphors
Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Jun 06, 2025
Metaphors kill. Not with bullets or bombs, but with confusion. They blur what demands clarity. They sentimentalize what should horrify. They distract.
Susan Sontag wrote that the most honest way to understand illness is to strip it of metaphor. To stop saying cancer is an invasion, or tuberculosis is romantic, or AIDS is punishment. Disease is not a morality play. It is a condition of the body. What burdens the sick is not just the illness itself, but the stories society tells about it.
So too with nations. So too with Palestine.
Palestine is not just a land or a people. It has been made into a metaphor. For resistance. For loss. For stubbornness. For martyrdom. For chaos. For terrorism. For hope. For grief. It is everything except what it is: a place where people live, suffer, starve, and die.
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced.
Turning Palestine into a symbol allows the powerful to avoid the facts. You don’t need to look at checkpoints if you’re talking about “conflict.” You don’t have to name apartheid if you’re debating “disputed territories.” You don’t have to say stolen if you say contested. You don’t have to say killed if you say clash. Metaphor is how power talks about violence without taking responsibility for it.
Palestine becomes intolerable not because of what Palestinians do, but because of what they represent: an open wound that refuses to close, a people who will not disappear. This is why their story must be constantly reframed, misnamed, wrapped in euphemism and myth. Their existence disrupts the fantasy that liberal democracies are just, that settler states are stable, that history is over. And so, the metaphor persists. It buries reality. It protects the liar.
We must refuse to speak in code, refuse to let metaphor do the work of silence. Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Palestine resists. That much is true. But once you say it like that—without detail, without names, without time or place—it becomes a slogan. And slogans consume clarity. The world loves the idea of resistance more than the reality. It loves the photo of the boy with the slingshot. It loves the keffiyeh, the flag, the tear gas. It loves the spectacle of defiance. What it does not love is the cost.
It does not love a broken spine from a checkpoint beating. It does not love a family digging their daughter from rubble. It does not love the dull terror of drones. That kind of resistance is not romantic. It’s not metaphor. It’s not poster-ready.
Palestine is trapped in a paradox. Its resistance is admired as long as it stays symbolic—noble suffering, poetic dignity, children throwing rocks at tanks. But when resistance becomes material—when it demands rights, when it takes up arms, when it names its oppressor—it is immediately recast. Now it is extremism. Now it is terrorism. Now the metaphor turns toxic. This is the trap of metaphor: It flatters, and it criminalizes, depending on what power needs.
The powerful don’t fear Palestine because of its military strength. They fear the idea of it. The persistence of it. The fact that something so small, so wounded, so systematically crushed still refuses to submit. Palestine is proof that domination is never total. That’s what makes it dangerous.
And so, the metaphor must be managed. Contained. You can wear the keffiyeh but not name the Occupation. You can say “Free Palestine” on Instagram but not mention Gaza. You can quote Darwish but not talk about bulldozed olive groves. You can mourn the dead but not accuse the killers. In this way, metaphor becomes a leash. It lets you gesture toward justice without ever touching it.
But Palestine doesn’t need symbols. It needs liberation. Not metaphors, no myths needed, only land, water, safety, and return from exile. These are not poetic demands. They are concrete, measurable, and deliberately denied. To really see Palestinian resistance, you must stop calling it resistance. Call it what it is: survival under siege. Organizing under surveillance. Memory under erasure. It’s not metaphor. It’s real life.
Once you frame a people as pathology, you don’t need to justify what you do to them. You only need to call it medicine. And when treatment fails to sterilize the threat, the language escalates. Now the body must be purged. Now the neighborhood is a target. The entire population becomes suspect.
They say Hamas “hides among the population.” But what does that mean in a fenced in strip of land 40 kilometers long, where there is no army base, no safe zone, no separation between life and resistance? The phrase is not a statement of fact—it is a metaphor. And like most metaphors in war, it serves a purpose: to erase the line between fighter and civilian, to turn every man, woman, and child into a potential target. If you can’t see your enemy, then everyone becomes your enemy. The home is now a military site. The hospital, a command center. The school, a shield. “Among the population” doesn’t describe a tactic, it justifies indiscriminate killing. It is how the language of war collapses into the logic of extermination.
But what if the patient isn’t sick? What if the disease is the system choking him? What if the diagnosis is projection? There is no vaccine for settler colonialism. No cure for apartheid—except dismantling it. But if Palestine is spoken of like a disease, its survival will always be framed as a threat.
Power never calls itself by name. It prefers neutral terms. Clinical. Procedural. Empty terms. Palestinians aren’t starved—they face a humanitarian crisis. Their homes aren’t stolen—they’re part of a property dispute. They’re not imprisoned—they’re under security lockdown. Their lives aren’t ended—they’re neutralized. This is not just bad language. It’s policy disguised as grammar.
Words like conflict, clash, cycle of violence—these are metaphors of balance. They suggest symmetry, as if this is a fair fight, as if both sides are equally armed, equally culpable, equally free. But this is not a clash. It is not a cycle. It is a colonizer and the colonized. An occupier and the occupied. The difference is moral. The difference is material. The metaphor erases both.
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored.
Sontag wrote that when people described cancer as an “invasion,” they were borrowing the language of war to make sense of something terrifying. But when the war is real, and the invasion is actual, language flips. War becomes operation. Invasion becomes security measure. You speak of it like infrastructure. This is how you sanitize occupation.
The wall isn’t a scar across the land—it’s a barrier fence. Settlements aren’t illegal—they’re new neighborhoods. Checkpoints aren’t instruments of control—they’re points of coordination. And Gaza isn’t under siege—it’s self-governed, as if a prison becomes free the moment the guards move outside its walls. Metaphor in this context does not reveal. It anesthetizes.
It allows liberal democracies to wash their hands with language. You don’t need to condemn apartheid if you can call it a complex situation. You don’t have to intervene in ethnic cleansing if you can label it a tragic escalation. You don’t have to listen to the grieving if you describe their pain as incitement. This is not metaphor as poetry. It is metaphor as smokescreen.
The media uses it. Diplomats use it. NGOs use it. Even well-meaning activists get trapped in it, calling for dialogue, for both sides to come together, for peaceful resolution, without ever naming the violence that blocks peace at every turn. But clarity is not extremism and precision is not incitement. To describe things as they are is not radical—it is necessary. There is no symmetry between the boot and the neck. And any language that suggests otherwise is complicity with the boot.
Palestine is not a wound in the Western psyche. It is a mirror of that psyche. And what it reflects is unbearable. The reason the world can’t look at Palestine directly is not because it is too foreign, but because it is too familiar. It shows the West everything it claims to have outgrown: apartheid, racial hierarchy, empire, extermination. Not in the past tense, but right now. Daily. Live-streamed.
Palestine is where the myth of Western moral authority collapses on itself. It’s easy to denounce the crimes of the past: slavery, fascism, genocide, so long as they stay in museums or textbooks. But Palestine breaks the frame. It puts the vocabulary of historical evil in the present tense. It makes Holocaust-committed Europe complicit in a same kind of ethnic cleansing. It makes the U.S., champion of “rules-based order,” the primary funder of impunity. It makes liberalism look like a mask, not a principle.
This is what makes Palestine dangerous—not its resistance, but its clarity.
Palestine exposes the real function of international law: who gets to break it, and who must obey. It exposes journalism’s quiet racism: who gets names and childhood photos, and who becomes “a number.” It exposes the limits of identity politics: how many doors are slammed shut when the oppressed are inconvenient. The metaphor of Palestine-as-problem allows Western institutions to avoid seeing the problem in themselves.
To look clearly at Palestine is to confront questions most people would rather leave buried. What does it mean that the state born from the ashes of the Holocaust has become a jailer? What does it mean that human rights groups whisper what Palestinians scream? What does it mean that the most surveilled, bombed, and besieged population on Earth is asked to behave peacefully, while their occupier is praised for restraint?
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced. Because if you face it directly—without metaphor, without euphemism—you must admit that the world is not post-colonial. That we live in a global system where some lives are sacred, and others are collateral. Where entire populations can be punished for existing. Where the worst crime is not violence but remembering.
Palestine remembers.
The time for symbols is over. Palestine is not a metaphor. It is not the universal struggle. It is not the world’s conscience. It is not an allegory for Brown resistance, or the dream of return, or the poetry of loss. It is not an Instagram aesthetic. It is not a stand-in for every injustice on Earth. It is a place, with borders and people, a colonial regime, a military occupation, a blockade and a death toll. It is a place where a child drinks from a bomb-cracked pipe. Where a mother sleeps in a school because her house is dust. Where a man counts the names of his dead before checking if his leg is still attached.
To speak of Palestine clearly, we must break the habit of metaphor. We must stop treating it as a narrative arc, a tragedy to be admired from a safe distance. It is not art. It is not history. It is the present, and it is now, as we ourselves live and breathe. We must reject the language of soft avoidance: Say occupation, not “conflict.” Say apartheid, not “dispute.” Say siege, not “border closure.” Say massacre, not “escalation.” Say starvation not “hunger.” Say Palestinian, not “Hamas.”
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored. This is not metaphor. This is what justice looks like; anything less is a performance.
Sontag understood that metaphor, in the wrong hands, becomes a weapon. It doesn’t soften violence—it smuggles it in. It doesn’t reveal truth—it repackages it in palatable form. She wrote against metaphor to rescue the ill from stigma. We must resist metaphor to stop the disappearance of Palestine.
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