Man shot at pro-Israel rally in Newtonville; suspect arrested at scene

I'm happy to engage with you on all of these many ahistorical points you've brought up once I'm back at a keyboard. But I'd love to draw attention to this moved goalpost that's so typical in conversations about this issue. I was replying to the insinuation that using the primary historical names for a region, rather than one invented in the 60s by colonizing outsiders, makes you some kind of bad person or possessing some kind of nefarious political objective. You've responded by ranting about DNA tests and European Christians. Do you acknowledge you have to have internalized 20th century political propaganda by only considering the name "the West Bank" to be valid?

First of all, nobody "worship[ped] Mjolnir"; Mjölnir is the hammer of the god Thor, who himself was worshipped by many of the pre-Christian Norse as a defender of mankind. The famous hammer pendant only became popularized in Scandinavia during Christianization as a counterpoint reaction to the symbol of the cross, ironically.

Second, I don't think most people would dispute that SOME of the people called (or calling themselves) Palestinians are descendants of the Canaanite people who once were or included Jews. Many, if not most, however, are not. During Mark Twain's mid-1800s journey to the Holy Land documented in The Innocents Abroad, most of the region was sparsely populated by a mix of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. When the Zionist movement in the late 19th and early 20th century led to increasing Jewish diasporic return to the land, external Arab and Muslim immigration to the region increased as well. Some of this was political, as Arab nations have always feared Jewish self-governance in the region and encouraged Arab migration to counter this. Other immigration was simply economic, as Jewish presence in Eretz Israel led to land reclamation from Ottoman-era malarial swamps and a dramatic improvement to the quality of life and prospects in the area. While identifying as Palestinian (and pan-Arab before that identity was invented by Cairo-born Yasser Arafat in the mid-20th century), many people from Gaza trace their recent ancestry to North Africa for example, including people whose surnames are things like Al-Masri (The Egyptian). Some prominent Palestinian tribes have a well-documented historical immigration, like Husam Zomlot's family (Palestinian ambassador to the UK and formerly the US) who descended from the Al-Zamlat tribe, which immigrated to Jordan from Najran in the Hijaz region of Saudi Arabia.

In many genetic studies, Jews tend to cluster with the descendants of other Levantines/Canaanites like the descendants of the Phoenicians, specifically Lebanese Christians and Druze. Muslim populations in the Levant tend to have a lot of Arabian ancestry, mainly reflecting migration and the unfortunately common practice of near-total genocide when conquering new areas. Here is one example of an ancestry chart that shows Palestinians clustering strongly with Arabian populations. Meanwhile, Ashkenazi (erroneously called "European") and Sephardic Jews cluster well with the Lebanese Christians and Druze, while Lebanese Muslims tend to be more similar to Syrians, and then Syrians are more similar to Arabs:

(Source study - most of the authors are Lebanese and/or from Harvard)

Not that any particular genetic study is gospel (no pun intended), and I loathe using Nazi-style race science to try to justify whose blood is more connected to the soil. For instance, do "white" partial descendants of Native Americans deserve any right to self-governance on their former homelands? European settlers made a bunch of them march away in the Trail of Tears; does that mean if their descendants want to come back and live where they once did, the descendants of the European settlers who displaced them have a right to violently resist them?

Wow.

"A person cannot lawfully act in self-defense unless he or she has exhausted all other reasonable alternatives before resorting to force. A person may use physical force in self-defense only if he (she) could not get out of the situation in some other way that was available and reasonable at the time. The Commonwealth may prove the defendant did not act in self-defense by proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant resorted to force without
using avenues of escape that were reasonably available and which would not have exposed the defendant to further danger."

If you are just being punched and your first response is to pull out a gun and gut shot someone, you did not in any way attempt exhaust all reasonable alternatives.

The law is very clear, and the state Supreme Court has upheld this expectation when outside of your household. It actually applies to a certain extent when in your household as well.

You may not like it, but the law is the law. Move 30 miles North to Florida if you want to stand your ground

...on earth does the First Amendment have to do with the duty to retreat, counselor?