Thomas Wictor

Back when I was trying to be an author, my fake publicists opened a Twitter account for me. The publishing industry is full of stories about authors selling a million copies of their books by using social media. I’d looked at Twitter before July of 2013—that’s when I hired the fake publicists—and decided it wasn’t for me. When I started debunking Pallywood in June of 2014, I began using Twitter myself. Now I tweet daily, but there’s one thing I won’t tolerate anymore: memes.

If you don’t know what a meme is, here’s one.

I like it because it’s clever. That’s not the type of meme I’m talking about.

Here’s what I get every day.

I receive dozens of anti-Israel memes, and they’re all fabricated. Every single one.

[This quote] originated with the pro-Hamas American group Islamic Association for Palestine in an Oct. 13, 2001 press release, which claimed its source as Israeli radio Kol Yisrael:

According [to] the Israeli Hebrew radio, Col Yisrael Wednesday, Peres warned Sharon that refusing to heed incessant American requests for a cease-fire with the Palestinians would endanger Israeli interests and turn the US against us. At this point, a furious Sharon reportedly turned toward Peres, saying “ . . . I want to tell you something clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.”…

Elsewhere in the press release, the quote was repeated, albeit slightly altered to: “we control America.”

CAMERA received confirmation from Kol Yisrael political correspondent Yoni Ben-Menachem, who reports on Cabinet meetings, that he never made such a broadcast and that Sharon never made such a statement.

You can debunk them a million times, but it makes no difference. The creatures posting these memes use them to communicate with each other. They’re part of a courtship ritual.

The way Twitter works, you have “timelines” that show everything you post. Today I had to go onto the Nazi Matthew L. Kees’s timeline to try and locate a death threat he made against me.

Earlier Kees had posted this.

The original Nazis wanted to relocate the Jews to Madagascar. Matthew L. Kees chose the Ukraine because it’s notorious for Jew-hate. The family of the actress Mila Kunis had to leave the Ukraine due to Jew-hate.

Another Twitter user wrote that her grandfather had also fled the Ukraine to escape the persecution of Jews.

“So you can go back to where you came from!” Kees replied.

“Come and get me,” the woman said.

“Come get me too,” a man wrote.

“Where do you live?” Kees asked. “I’ll send limos for you.”

“Come and get me too, Matthew,” I tweeted. “But come in person. Please.”

That’s when he tweeted, “You I wanna kill. So no, I’ll save you for the trunk. Will leave more room.”

Matthew L. Kees is unaware that I witnessed a murder when I was three years old. I was sitting in the back seat of a car at night as a man leaned into the driver’s window, talking to the murderer. The murderer grabbed the man by the back of the head and shoved an icepick into his left eye. It happened completely without warning. The man screamed and struggled so violently that the murderer was yanked all over the car seat, the leather squeaking and the coins in his pockets jingling. While the man pounded on the glass with his hands, right in front of my face, the murderer grunted with the effort of holding on. Then the man abruptly went silent and collapsed. The murderer put the dead man in the trunk, drove us to an open field, took out the body, soaked it in gasoline, and set it on fire.

Twitter is full of tough-talking buffoons who would have to be institutionalized if they spent even a second inside my head. I’m not afraid of Matthew L. Kees or Peter Stahl or the Islamic State or anybody else. We all die. In very real ways, I died a long time ago. As my brother Tim calls it, this is an afterlife.

But it’s important to not give in to the likes of Matthew L. Kees and the former humans who send him memes. That’s why I’ll defend myself by any means necessary.

Also, I decided today that I’ll just block the memers without engaging them. They serve no purpose on this earth except to spread lies and reinforce their shared pathologies. Spending half an hour on Matthew L. Kees’s Twitter timeline was like living the asylum scene in Midnight Express.

But that allows me to end by talking about one of my heroes. If you’ve seen Midnight Express, you know the Turkish head prison guard Hamidou is evil personified. He’s disgusting.

He was played by the American actor Paul L. Smith, who was from Massachusetts. Smith’s first acting job was in the movie Exodus (1960), filmed in part in Israel. In 1967 Smith returned to Israel to fight in the Six-Day War as a Mahal or “volunteer from outside the land.”

A massive man who was cast mostly as villains, Smith had bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and psychology from Brandeis University and a master’s degree in motivational psychology from Harvard. After all that, he also attended Florida State University, where he studied acting, and then he went on to do theater in New York. A chance meeting with Otto Preminger set the course of the rest of his life. Smith had a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and was a bouncer and bodyguard before becoming a full-time actor and producer.

In 2006 he moved to Israel and became a citizen, taking the name Adam Eden. He died in Ra’anana on April 25, 2012, at the age of seventy-five.

Doesn’t his story totally make your day? It’s so surreal, hilarious, and humbling.

Good for you, Paul! I would’ve liked to have known you.