Brianna Wu, woman who did not know what the word pogrom meant until early to mid 2024, seems to have caused uproar on Twitter today after confusing Aramaic and Hebrew
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I didn't know what pogrom meant and couldn't tell you the difference between Aramaic and Hebrew. However, I have access to the internet so I could find out before publicly talking about them.
I never knew 'I'm sorry, I don't know' would be a radical phrase!
When it was pointed out to her that Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic are all part of the same language-family and that Arabic was probably quite common in the Levant prior to the Muslim conquests she literally just started replying to people with the word "no". Brilliant argument all around.
It is not really clear to me what her point would be even if she was somehow correct on the original post. What does it matter what language was spoken in 500 AD? A very odd sophistic nonsense.
She has managed to be consistently wrong about basic history in the region. She’s also been consistently wrong about the contents of the Tanakh, which is a bit weird to do when you’re ostensibly going to bat on behalf of Jewish people.
It's a weird time to pick because you'd think the period of Roman rule would emphasize that the Arab conquest was just another in the relatively common changing of hands of territory between empires and not some unique evil calamity
Its because they consider Romans to be “western”, and they loooooooooove the Roman Empire.
It is the same reason they blame the Jews for crucifixion of Jesus Christ, when obviously it were Roman cops that arrested him and it was the Roman state that executed him.
Guy who supports the Russian Empire stripping rights from Jews and restricting them to the Pale of Settlement because they speak Yiddish, a German language not indigenous to the region.
She cld just use AI to generate tweets, wld be improvement over her made-up history. Facts do not matter & only get in her way. What matters is that she come down on side of genocide & apartheid & accumulate more followers, period. She’s a one-person total indictment of social media.
I think she’s just posting bait for engagement money over there, she’s always had an “I just love to push peoples’ buttons” personality and I think the lowest hanging fruit right now is to cosplay as a zionist but do it so badly that both sides yell at her
If the language spoken in a region thousands of years ago implies ownership today then France belongs to the irish and mongolia belongs to the hungarians. Ridiculous argument
I suspect she was probably trying to make the argument that Arabs are not native to the Levant (which is false). The Edomites and Nabateans were Arab peoples who were native to parts of the Levant (although in fairness, the Edomites spoke the Edomite language, which is an extinct Semitic language)
Brianna Wu is unsubtly claiming that christofascists like her are native to the Levant, and how it's the Arabs who stole the land from white people, kickstarted the "Great Replacement", and prevented the "Rapture".
It always leads straight back to white supremacist conspiracy nonsense.
It’s like the easiest Wikipedia search, like anyone who does Hebrew or Arabic as a first, second or ceremonial language has recognised similarities and figured “oh right they’re Semitic languages”
Doesn't modern Hebrew use a lot of Arabic loan words to make up for certain concepts not existing in the clerical language it was reconstructed from, too?
Wait... does she really think Arabs don't predate Muslims... when the race is older than the Islamic religion?
It really is a level of brainrot unforeseen to man.
The entire logic of Islamaphobes point of the Crusades being justified is because of Arabs converting from Roman Christianity to Islam.
There are letters present in Hebrew script that in modern Hebrew make the same sound as other letters (e.g., khaf and khet), but are pretty clearly meant to make slightly different sounds (khā’ and ḥā’) at some point.
They're really clearly related languages that likely used to be closer (and the distinction between them was probably a lot less given that mass communication has shrunken regional dialects down to nothing)
Good advice for most of us really, but I fear Brianna would come away thinking something ridiculous like anyone who makes fun of her should be subject to trial by bear.
yeah it's a language that had Jewish dialects but it's really hard to call it a "Jewish language" unless we want to go that way with Arabic and Persian and Spanish and English, even
You ever see a claim so wrong it makes you question things you’ve known for decades?
Wu conflating BC and CE so flagrantly was one for me. “I’m like, 99.9% sure the Assyrian Empire ended like, over a thousand years before the events she’s referencing, but I’ll double check.”
God, she's so dumb and out of her league with this stuff. That map depicts a period more than a thousand years before the rise of Islam, and "Arabu" is still right there!
She had another thread a while back where she was trying to "explain" the backstory from Biblical times, and it was a totally incoherent mashup of the Biblical account with the findings of modern scholarship that made it very clear that she hadn't read either.
Anyway, as several other people have pointed out, the actual answer to the question in her first screenshot is "Greek" if she means shortly before the Arab conquests and "Aramaic" if she's referring to an earlier period.
Hebrew was never really a lingua franca in antiquity, although it became a sort of one among Jews much later. In the period depicted in the maps it would have been one of several closely related national languages in the region.
Anyone who's read the Bible knows that in Deuteronomy Chapter 1, verse 1-49 the Palestinian city of Canaan still existed and God told the Jewish people to go and live among the people but DO NOT attack them "or I will not go with you". They scouted to attack anyway. The Canaanites beat them back 1/?
-"like a swarm of bees". The Jewish people returned to the desert, embarrassed, where they then complained to God, "why did you not help us?" And He told them "I said that I wouldn't go with you if you attacked them!" And punished them by keeping them in the desert for 'a long time'.
I am very sure she's not wanting to discuss sourcing parts of the Torah based on presence of Aramaic loan words which could indicate a northern Israel writer
I think it is just her childhood trauma showing up
for with all people if you argue enough it becomes nonsense and often assertions and basic negation / saying no, like a toddler or elderly senior citizen
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I sympathize but one does not have to do this nonsense she willingly engages in
Great offense here because while Late Antiquity may not be remotely relevant to contemporary politics unless you're a massive weirdo it IS super interesting just in general
What's even better is that she implies that continuous Arab presence for 14+ centuries is not native to the region. I'm Bulgarian, and we arrived in the Balkans around the same time in the 7th century as Arabs in the Levant. Apparently, we aren't native either.
It's not really a unique thing to her but this seems to be a result of people not really getting that indigeneity is more than anything else influenced by one's relationship to the presence of a nascent or intrusive colonial structure. Very little to do with simply "who was here first".
Settler and native is a relationship between two strata and if one, ie the former, is done away with then necessarily the other will be transformed into something else as well.
i read a screengrab of that tweet and have been giggling about the idea of brianna wu forgetting the years she spent in college calling a professor who crossed her in some way a slur i didn’t know existed until 9/11. (you know. THAT one)
canvassing for trent lott-ass creep
Oh dear... I guess they're both semitic languages so uh... they have that in common??? I absolutely cannot speak nor type in either I'm just some old french hick (unlike Wu I don't pretend to be some wise thought leader lol).
Ms Fartlow making a career out of Seth Rogen and everyone else tweeting the fart emoji at her four years ago made it harder to forget because she periodically blows up saying something free parking-ish and reminds everyone
Remembering when she did that history thread on Israel that used the Old Testament as its only real source and she referred to supernatural events as objective historical facts.
Literally something that almost anyone who regularly attends Jewish services or knows anything about Jewish prayers knows. Not, like, an easy mix-up. God, these people are intellectual wafers.
She got in a huff about how we need to install tungsten rods on the moon so we can "drop" them on our enemies. She had a multi day meltdown about how far behind we were against or adversaries.
It was an even dumber version of Rods From God, which I didn't think was possible.
I'm assuming this is from reading Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but how do you get that worked up about space weapons without managing to actually learn any facts about space?
Nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is very bright. But it is important to recognise your limitations - considerably less of a barrier now we can look up *anything* on the internet. Yet still... here we are...
I tried to explain to her that we, the USA, are pretty good at building weapons and that kinetic energy weapons dropped from space don't really offer any advantages to us, the USA, when we already have the ability to lob a Trident missile with a nuke.
I spent a short time in one of the last places where Aramaic is the local spoken language and it was TRIPPY. It sounded like Arabic in a morphological sense... but somehow I couldn't understand a word. My head was spinning.
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Were nazi propagandists quite this bad at their job?
I never knew 'I'm sorry, I don't know' would be a radical phrase!
It is the same reason they blame the Jews for crucifixion of Jesus Christ, when obviously it were Roman cops that arrested him and it was the Roman state that executed him.
It always leads straight back to white supremacist conspiracy nonsense.
It really is a level of brainrot unforeseen to man.
The entire logic of Islamaphobes point of the Crusades being justified is because of Arabs converting from Roman Christianity to Islam.
Shit. I’d named him “Yogi” and everything.
It's a perfect fit for zionists: weaponized ignorance.
Wu conflating BC and CE so flagrantly was one for me. “I’m like, 99.9% sure the Assyrian Empire ended like, over a thousand years before the events she’s referencing, but I’ll double check.”
-aint seen a lolcow this big since ought 9
for with all people if you argue enough it becomes nonsense and often assertions and basic negation / saying no, like a toddler or elderly senior citizen
====
I sympathize but one does not have to do this nonsense she willingly engages in
did she forget 9/11?
canvassing for trent lott-ass creep
God, the way she talks down to people, despite inhabiting levels of debilitating stupidity unknown outside of asylums and TBI doctors, is incredible
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It was an even dumber version of Rods From God, which I didn't think was possible.
I'm not sure I got through to her.