Vanessa, excellent article. The tendency to take a tiny fringe and turn it into a defining feature of Israeli society is clearly unfair. No country of nearly ten million people should be judged by the actions of a few hundred radicals, especially when the state itself confronts and arrests them. If anything worries me more about Israel’s internal balance, it’s the growing political influence of the ultra-Orthodox parties, not a fringe handful of extremists. That debate, at least, is a real and open issue inside Israeli society — unlike the distorted narrative so often pushed from the outside.
and if we are blanketing everyone with accusations- You are a vile antisemite who has purposely crawled onto a site dedicated to Jewish life to spread your racism and hatred. You attack Jewish people for their religion and for their right to defend themselves against terrorism — terrorism carried out by those who deliberately embed themselves among their own civilian population (their own children!), knowing full well the response it will bring, and then shamelessly use that suffering as a shield. You have no place here. Your bigotry is transparent, your arguments are as worthless as you are. GFY
Blanket accusations like that aren’t arguments. Exactly which “entire cities” are being blown up? And by whom? Israel is responding to organizations that openly call for its destruction and have fired thousands of rockets at civilian areas for years. When regimes and groups backed by Iran call Israel the “Little Satan” and the United States the “Great Satan,” and openly vow annihilation, pretending this conflict started in a vacuum isn’t serious analysis. It’s just rhetoric from a troll.
Absolutely right Vanessa, many journalists seem to opt for the path of least resistance and consequently reinforce a pre-existing narrative. Omitting essential historical context simplifies the situation but conceals a hidden agenda.
The many journalists , many who are now Muslim or who have worked for Al Jazeera, like the six of so journalists writing about the ME in the Washington Post, know that if they do not blame Israel for everything, they will be fired by their bosses. In the West, Jews are to blame for anything within their countries, and Israel for everything in the world. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Christian bSudanese have been slaughtered by Muslim Sudanese, and there is total silence in the media.
Vanessa, I very much appreciate your writing and analyses, but I found the present essay to be somewhat below par. It's tainted by your partial acceptance of some of the propaganda that has defined the issues in terms that handicap Israel from the starting gate.
Your arguments about the practice of selecting fringe social phenomena to represent Israeli society as a whole are entirely valid. But you missed the opportunity to inform readers of the extent to which the entire narrative of the "wild hilltop youth" has been grotesquely exaggerated and dishonestly framed to make a mountain out of a mole hill.
The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) maintains an online database of incidents involving settler violence. The NGO Regavim managed to obtain the spreadsheet that feeds into the UN database. The data was carefully analyzed by Gadi Taub in an essential essay that was published in Tablet (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/settler-violence-myth). Here is a closer look at the "data": Of the 8,332 incidents of settler violence in that period, 2,047 of those incidents involve settlers as VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE. More gems:
'OCHA counts any Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount, no matter how peaceful, as “settler violence.” It also classifies as settler violence clashes between Israeli security forces and rioting Muslims on the Mount, even when no Israeli civilians are involved. Also listed as violence are “tourists visiting archaeological sites, infrastructure work carried out legally by the State of Israel itself, traffic accidents,” and other common activities that in no way can be categorized as “settler” related or “violent.” ... “After filtering out thousands of irrelevant cases,” the report says, “only 833 incidents remain over a seven-and-a-half-year period—a mere 10 percent of the original list.”
So much for the myth of settler violence. As for the "disputed territories," I would argue that it's also time to discard that terminology and stop shooting ourselves in the foot. The meticulous legal arguments and analyses that have been provided by Eugene Kontorovich and Natasha Hausdorff should convince everyone apart from the ICC judges that no one has a more valid right to live in Judea and Samaria than the Jews. We need to get off our back foot in this discussion as well. Our enemies have invested their resources in framing the conversation to be about "occupation" and "illegal settlements" and "stolen land." We will never persuade them to abandon their narrative, but we do have the freedom to begin treating their propaganda with the contempt it deserves.
Too many Jews in the US are totally ignorant of the facts on the ground in Israel. Outside of the US, many more Jews know the situation as they have strong personnel connections to Israel. Many American Jews depend on the grotesque propaganda churned out by TV channels, print media, and social media.
You have to give the bad guys credit for figuring out the best places to invest their efforts. Once they wormed their way into teaching positions at the most prestigious journalism schools and took over, they were able to seed the next generation of activist "journalists" on TV, print, and social media. The project of creating a false narrative about Israel and the Jews took decades to push through, but, today, young Jewish graduates of our Ivy League schools have learned to appreciate the noble goals of Hamas and Mamdani.
Did you actually read that article, or know anything about the author, Haviv Rettig Gur? I understand the impulse to defend against the usually lazy and unjust narrative, but his career and writing isn't at all what I'd call leaning into that narrative.
If its only a few hundred individuals as you say then the IDF or Shin Bet should be able to easily take them down. The Shin Bet pretty much neutralized a far more dangerous and numerous Islamic Jihad. Is Netanyahu afraid to do it because of votes? These few hundred are apparently pretty good fighters. Why aren't they in the military? Are they Haredi draft dodgers?
When the extremists hold effective control of the government - and they do in Israel - the country has an extremism problem. The minister in charge of the police is on the side of people committing crimes and preventing any enforcement of laws against them. I can easily imagine a future government (במהרה בימינו) reversing the situation, and then the country would at least have much less of an extremism problem.
I think the problem we are seeing is that this fringe group of "a couple hundred" is overly representative in the Israeli government, and that government is catering to them in the form of a lack of enforcement against their terrorism. That in turn is misrepresenting the extremist behavior as increasingly mainstream, and exacerbating Israel's bad image on an international stage.
I find this perspective refreshing. Since Israel is the world's substitutionary scapegoat its "crimes" are examined by its supporters as well as its foes. Yes, we decry settler violence to demonstrate that we are reasonable people capable of criticizing Israel.
Imagine that the world's press - or even the Canadian press - focused as much on First Nations communities in Canada that lack potable water as they do on the "West Bank". Would that define Canada in the eyes of the world?
When you write about Israel extremism problem, I was certain that you are referring to the woke, regressive, Leftist useful idiots in Israel but reading further, I understand that you are writing about the hilltop bandits that illegally retaliate against the "Palestinian" terrorists in Judea and Samaria.
If you read the following report, It might slightly clarify the unjustified delinquent behavior of some of the young Jewish civilians of Judea and Samaria:
Did we not forget the Oslo agreement which divided up Judaea and Samaria. According to the world Area C is occupied/disputed territory. I would take a look at the organization Regavim to understand how much of the mislabeling of Jewish terrorism and how it is reported.
There are no illegal Jewish communities. Enough with that language.
Frankly I'm sick of Zionist Jews feeling the constant need to explain Israel's case as if we owe the world an explanation for our existence and every action of every Israeli. Is any other country placed under such a microscope? Let the rest of the nations of the world clean up their own filthy houses and mind their own damn business about every aspect of Israeli society. They should stop channeling their own citizens attentions and anger away from their own internal problems, disfunctions and truly evil behavior onto Israelis who they lie about so they can feel morally superior when in reality they are morally bankrupt. The muslim countries and Europe have an inferiority complex and for good reason.
Stop referring to Judea and Samaria as the West Bank — that is Jordan's name for the territory, imposed during its occupation of the land, a period during which Palestinians were barred from owning any of it. The people living there are not settlers — they are Chalutzim, pioneers. And these are not settlements — they are Yishuvim, communities where families live, work, and build their lives.
Diaspora Jews who fly to Israel and spend their time eating and drinking in Tel Aviv are tourists. They are not experiencing Israel — they are experiencing a Mediterranean city. The soul of Israel, the Israel being built with the same love of land and people that drove the Chalutzim after 1948, is in Judea and Samaria. That is where Jewish history lives and breathes. That is where families are planting roots in the same hills their ancestors walked. Every Jew who cares about the future of the Jewish people owes it to themselves to see it with their own eyes — not through the lens of media that can't even bring itself to use the right words for the land.
The article in the FP was written by the incredible Israeli journalist, history teacher, podcast host, and free press ME analyst, Haviv Rettig Gur. Listen to any of Haviv’s podcast episodes (ask Haviv anything), his interviews with Hugh Hewitt and all his articles in the fp to see what an outstanding thinker and protector of his country and the Jewish people he is. These violent fringe are extremists, what they’re doing is terrorism. They’re also extremely violent against IDF soldiers. I think Haviv is right on here, the government isn’t stopping the violence, that reflects on Israel as a whole. You can’t condemn and fight against Islamist terrorism, while turning a blind eye to Israeli terrorism, even if it’s coming from the extreme fringe in low numbers. Regardless of the history or who the land should belong to, violence is morally unacceptable in this case. Israel is better than this.
Reprint of my comment on the disgusting article on TFP-
Today is Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day the Jewish people pause to mourn six million murdered simply for existing. The day the world is supposed to reflect on where hatred of Jews, left unchecked and fed by useful propaganda, ultimately leads
The Free Press chose today to publish a sensationalized piece framing Israel — a nation currently fighting for its survival on multiple fronts while still counting its October 7 dead — as a society defined by extremism and predatory violence against Palestinians. Whatever Haviv Rettig Gur's intentions, the editorial decision to run this today is indefensible. It is not brave contrarianism. It is not "complexity." It is reckless.
Here is what actually happens when pieces like this get published. The author and editors picture a thoughtful reader weighing nuance. What they get instead is the full ecosystem of people who blame Israel — and Jews broadly — for every conflict, every death, and every grievance in the Middle East, now armed with a new citation from a publication that is supposed to be serious. Every antisemite with a Twitter account, every campus agitator, every Iran-funded propaganda outlet will clip this article and use it. The author just became a useful idiot for movements that don't share his nuance, don't read his caveats, and don't care about his qualifications. They just needed the headline.
This piece reveals its bias before the argument even begins — starting with the name. The author, like much of the Western press, uncritically uses "the West Bank" — a term that did not exist before 1948. It was coined by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan after its army invaded the territory during Israel's War of Independence. Jordan occupied and subsequently annexed the area in 1950, naming it "West Bank" to distinguish it from its own "East Bank" — an annexation widely considered illegal even by the Arab League. The proper name — Judea and Samaria — predates Jordan by millennia and was even used by the United Nations in its own 1947 Partition Plan. Calling it the "West Bank" doesn't make the author neutral. It makes him a passive adopter of Jordanian colonial nomenclature.
He identifies the "Hilltop Youth" — the violent fringe responsible for settler attacks — as young people, many from troubled homes, numbering in the several hundred. He even acknowledges the IDF took down six outposts by force in response to their violence, demonstrating that the Israeli state actively opposes these actors. So by the author's own account, we are talking about a few hundred disaffected youth, not a systemic national policy of terror.
Apply that logic consistently. When a few hundred gang members commit crimes in New York City, we do not write essays titled "New York Has a Crime Problem" implying the entire city is morally compromised. We identify the criminals, note law enforcement's response, and move on. The author refuses to extend Israel that same basic analytical courtesy — and then uses it to construct an inflamed national indictment. The double standard becomes even more glaring when you consider what is entirely absent from this article. There is no equivalent piece titled "Palestinian Society Has an Extremism Problem" — despite the Palestinian Authority's Pay-to-Slay program, which is not a fringe phenomenon but official, budgeted government policy.
In Judea and Samaria right now, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are actively rebuilding the same terror infrastructure that made October 7 possible. The IDF's ongoing operations in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams exist precisely because these areas are being used to plan and launch attacks. Dismissing this to write a profile of a few hundred troubled Israeli teenagers is not nuance — it is a deliberate inversion of proportionality.
Congratulations, Haviv. This piece will certainly earn you more appearances on the BBCs, CNNs, and Al Jazeeras of the media world — the same outlets that have spent years sanitizing Palestinian terror while holding Israel to standards applied to no other nation on earth. You've written exactly what they need. I've read your work for years, but after this — published on Yom HaShoah of all days — I no longer pay attention to you.
Vanessa, excellent article. The tendency to take a tiny fringe and turn it into a defining feature of Israeli society is clearly unfair. No country of nearly ten million people should be judged by the actions of a few hundred radicals, especially when the state itself confronts and arrests them. If anything worries me more about Israel’s internal balance, it’s the growing political influence of the ultra-Orthodox parties, not a fringe handful of extremists. That debate, at least, is a real and open issue inside Israeli society — unlike the distorted narrative so often pushed from the outside.
You're murdering children and blowing upp entire cities. You are all guilty. You are all worse than Stalin
and if we are blanketing everyone with accusations- You are a vile antisemite who has purposely crawled onto a site dedicated to Jewish life to spread your racism and hatred. You attack Jewish people for their religion and for their right to defend themselves against terrorism — terrorism carried out by those who deliberately embed themselves among their own civilian population (their own children!), knowing full well the response it will bring, and then shamelessly use that suffering as a shield. You have no place here. Your bigotry is transparent, your arguments are as worthless as you are. GFY
Blanket accusations like that aren’t arguments. Exactly which “entire cities” are being blown up? And by whom? Israel is responding to organizations that openly call for its destruction and have fired thousands of rockets at civilian areas for years. When regimes and groups backed by Iran call Israel the “Little Satan” and the United States the “Great Satan,” and openly vow annihilation, pretending this conflict started in a vacuum isn’t serious analysis. It’s just rhetoric from a troll.
Grow up, bigot.
Absolutely right Vanessa, many journalists seem to opt for the path of least resistance and consequently reinforce a pre-existing narrative. Omitting essential historical context simplifies the situation but conceals a hidden agenda.
The many journalists , many who are now Muslim or who have worked for Al Jazeera, like the six of so journalists writing about the ME in the Washington Post, know that if they do not blame Israel for everything, they will be fired by their bosses. In the West, Jews are to blame for anything within their countries, and Israel for everything in the world. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Christian bSudanese have been slaughtered by Muslim Sudanese, and there is total silence in the media.
Vanessa, I very much appreciate your writing and analyses, but I found the present essay to be somewhat below par. It's tainted by your partial acceptance of some of the propaganda that has defined the issues in terms that handicap Israel from the starting gate.
Your arguments about the practice of selecting fringe social phenomena to represent Israeli society as a whole are entirely valid. But you missed the opportunity to inform readers of the extent to which the entire narrative of the "wild hilltop youth" has been grotesquely exaggerated and dishonestly framed to make a mountain out of a mole hill.
The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) maintains an online database of incidents involving settler violence. The NGO Regavim managed to obtain the spreadsheet that feeds into the UN database. The data was carefully analyzed by Gadi Taub in an essential essay that was published in Tablet (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/settler-violence-myth). Here is a closer look at the "data": Of the 8,332 incidents of settler violence in that period, 2,047 of those incidents involve settlers as VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE. More gems:
'OCHA counts any Jewish pilgrimage to the Temple Mount, no matter how peaceful, as “settler violence.” It also classifies as settler violence clashes between Israeli security forces and rioting Muslims on the Mount, even when no Israeli civilians are involved. Also listed as violence are “tourists visiting archaeological sites, infrastructure work carried out legally by the State of Israel itself, traffic accidents,” and other common activities that in no way can be categorized as “settler” related or “violent.” ... “After filtering out thousands of irrelevant cases,” the report says, “only 833 incidents remain over a seven-and-a-half-year period—a mere 10 percent of the original list.”
So much for the myth of settler violence. As for the "disputed territories," I would argue that it's also time to discard that terminology and stop shooting ourselves in the foot. The meticulous legal arguments and analyses that have been provided by Eugene Kontorovich and Natasha Hausdorff should convince everyone apart from the ICC judges that no one has a more valid right to live in Judea and Samaria than the Jews. We need to get off our back foot in this discussion as well. Our enemies have invested their resources in framing the conversation to be about "occupation" and "illegal settlements" and "stolen land." We will never persuade them to abandon their narrative, but we do have the freedom to begin treating their propaganda with the contempt it deserves.
Too many Jews in the US are totally ignorant of the facts on the ground in Israel. Outside of the US, many more Jews know the situation as they have strong personnel connections to Israel. Many American Jews depend on the grotesque propaganda churned out by TV channels, print media, and social media.
You have to give the bad guys credit for figuring out the best places to invest their efforts. Once they wormed their way into teaching positions at the most prestigious journalism schools and took over, they were able to seed the next generation of activist "journalists" on TV, print, and social media. The project of creating a false narrative about Israel and the Jews took decades to push through, but, today, young Jewish graduates of our Ivy League schools have learned to appreciate the noble goals of Hamas and Mamdani.
Did you actually read that article, or know anything about the author, Haviv Rettig Gur? I understand the impulse to defend against the usually lazy and unjust narrative, but his career and writing isn't at all what I'd call leaning into that narrative.
If its only a few hundred individuals as you say then the IDF or Shin Bet should be able to easily take them down. The Shin Bet pretty much neutralized a far more dangerous and numerous Islamic Jihad. Is Netanyahu afraid to do it because of votes? These few hundred are apparently pretty good fighters. Why aren't they in the military? Are they Haredi draft dodgers?
Lots to think about. I appreciate your analysis and how you write about this perspective.
When the extremists hold effective control of the government - and they do in Israel - the country has an extremism problem. The minister in charge of the police is on the side of people committing crimes and preventing any enforcement of laws against them. I can easily imagine a future government (במהרה בימינו) reversing the situation, and then the country would at least have much less of an extremism problem.
I think the problem we are seeing is that this fringe group of "a couple hundred" is overly representative in the Israeli government, and that government is catering to them in the form of a lack of enforcement against their terrorism. That in turn is misrepresenting the extremist behavior as increasingly mainstream, and exacerbating Israel's bad image on an international stage.
I find this perspective refreshing. Since Israel is the world's substitutionary scapegoat its "crimes" are examined by its supporters as well as its foes. Yes, we decry settler violence to demonstrate that we are reasonable people capable of criticizing Israel.
Imagine that the world's press - or even the Canadian press - focused as much on First Nations communities in Canada that lack potable water as they do on the "West Bank". Would that define Canada in the eyes of the world?
When you write about Israel extremism problem, I was certain that you are referring to the woke, regressive, Leftist useful idiots in Israel but reading further, I understand that you are writing about the hilltop bandits that illegally retaliate against the "Palestinian" terrorists in Judea and Samaria.
If you read the following report, It might slightly clarify the unjustified delinquent behavior of some of the young Jewish civilians of Judea and Samaria:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-palestinian-authority-terror-regime/
Excellent calling out of Free Press' mainsteaming false tropes. Shame on the corporate sellout!
Did we not forget the Oslo agreement which divided up Judaea and Samaria. According to the world Area C is occupied/disputed territory. I would take a look at the organization Regavim to understand how much of the mislabeling of Jewish terrorism and how it is reported.
There are no illegal Jewish communities. Enough with that language.
Frankly I'm sick of Zionist Jews feeling the constant need to explain Israel's case as if we owe the world an explanation for our existence and every action of every Israeli. Is any other country placed under such a microscope? Let the rest of the nations of the world clean up their own filthy houses and mind their own damn business about every aspect of Israeli society. They should stop channeling their own citizens attentions and anger away from their own internal problems, disfunctions and truly evil behavior onto Israelis who they lie about so they can feel morally superior when in reality they are morally bankrupt. The muslim countries and Europe have an inferiority complex and for good reason.
...................................................................................................................................................................................
"In fact, the reality points in the opposite direction. The Israel Defense Forces has dismantled illegal Israeli outposts".
"Words matter. Definitions matter."
Stop referring to Judea and Samaria as the West Bank — that is Jordan's name for the territory, imposed during its occupation of the land, a period during which Palestinians were barred from owning any of it. The people living there are not settlers — they are Chalutzim, pioneers. And these are not settlements — they are Yishuvim, communities where families live, work, and build their lives.
Diaspora Jews who fly to Israel and spend their time eating and drinking in Tel Aviv are tourists. They are not experiencing Israel — they are experiencing a Mediterranean city. The soul of Israel, the Israel being built with the same love of land and people that drove the Chalutzim after 1948, is in Judea and Samaria. That is where Jewish history lives and breathes. That is where families are planting roots in the same hills their ancestors walked. Every Jew who cares about the future of the Jewish people owes it to themselves to see it with their own eyes — not through the lens of media that can't even bring itself to use the right words for the land.
The article in the FP was written by the incredible Israeli journalist, history teacher, podcast host, and free press ME analyst, Haviv Rettig Gur. Listen to any of Haviv’s podcast episodes (ask Haviv anything), his interviews with Hugh Hewitt and all his articles in the fp to see what an outstanding thinker and protector of his country and the Jewish people he is. These violent fringe are extremists, what they’re doing is terrorism. They’re also extremely violent against IDF soldiers. I think Haviv is right on here, the government isn’t stopping the violence, that reflects on Israel as a whole. You can’t condemn and fight against Islamist terrorism, while turning a blind eye to Israeli terrorism, even if it’s coming from the extreme fringe in low numbers. Regardless of the history or who the land should belong to, violence is morally unacceptable in this case. Israel is better than this.
Am Yisrael Chai🇮🇱🇮🇱🇮🇱
Reprint of my comment on the disgusting article on TFP-
Today is Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day the Jewish people pause to mourn six million murdered simply for existing. The day the world is supposed to reflect on where hatred of Jews, left unchecked and fed by useful propaganda, ultimately leads
The Free Press chose today to publish a sensationalized piece framing Israel — a nation currently fighting for its survival on multiple fronts while still counting its October 7 dead — as a society defined by extremism and predatory violence against Palestinians. Whatever Haviv Rettig Gur's intentions, the editorial decision to run this today is indefensible. It is not brave contrarianism. It is not "complexity." It is reckless.
Here is what actually happens when pieces like this get published. The author and editors picture a thoughtful reader weighing nuance. What they get instead is the full ecosystem of people who blame Israel — and Jews broadly — for every conflict, every death, and every grievance in the Middle East, now armed with a new citation from a publication that is supposed to be serious. Every antisemite with a Twitter account, every campus agitator, every Iran-funded propaganda outlet will clip this article and use it. The author just became a useful idiot for movements that don't share his nuance, don't read his caveats, and don't care about his qualifications. They just needed the headline.
This piece reveals its bias before the argument even begins — starting with the name. The author, like much of the Western press, uncritically uses "the West Bank" — a term that did not exist before 1948. It was coined by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan after its army invaded the territory during Israel's War of Independence. Jordan occupied and subsequently annexed the area in 1950, naming it "West Bank" to distinguish it from its own "East Bank" — an annexation widely considered illegal even by the Arab League. The proper name — Judea and Samaria — predates Jordan by millennia and was even used by the United Nations in its own 1947 Partition Plan. Calling it the "West Bank" doesn't make the author neutral. It makes him a passive adopter of Jordanian colonial nomenclature.
He identifies the "Hilltop Youth" — the violent fringe responsible for settler attacks — as young people, many from troubled homes, numbering in the several hundred. He even acknowledges the IDF took down six outposts by force in response to their violence, demonstrating that the Israeli state actively opposes these actors. So by the author's own account, we are talking about a few hundred disaffected youth, not a systemic national policy of terror.
Apply that logic consistently. When a few hundred gang members commit crimes in New York City, we do not write essays titled "New York Has a Crime Problem" implying the entire city is morally compromised. We identify the criminals, note law enforcement's response, and move on. The author refuses to extend Israel that same basic analytical courtesy — and then uses it to construct an inflamed national indictment. The double standard becomes even more glaring when you consider what is entirely absent from this article. There is no equivalent piece titled "Palestinian Society Has an Extremism Problem" — despite the Palestinian Authority's Pay-to-Slay program, which is not a fringe phenomenon but official, budgeted government policy.
In Judea and Samaria right now, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are actively rebuilding the same terror infrastructure that made October 7 possible. The IDF's ongoing operations in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams exist precisely because these areas are being used to plan and launch attacks. Dismissing this to write a profile of a few hundred troubled Israeli teenagers is not nuance — it is a deliberate inversion of proportionality.
Congratulations, Haviv. This piece will certainly earn you more appearances on the BBCs, CNNs, and Al Jazeeras of the media world — the same outlets that have spent years sanitizing Palestinian terror while holding Israel to standards applied to no other nation on earth. You've written exactly what they need. I've read your work for years, but after this — published on Yom HaShoah of all days — I no longer pay attention to you.