Latest Posts by bunnie-the-pooh - Page 2
This isn't the first time. Last year, the IDF would leave behind explosives disguised to look like toys (they did this in Lebanon as well)
"nothing is real atoms never touch each other youve never touched anything in your life" ok. well when i pet my dog he is soft and when he licks my hand it is wet and that is far more real to me than whatevers going on at an atomic level
🍉Data sources under the cut🍉
Please consider spending time to learn more about Afro-Palestinian experiences and living under occupation while Black and Palestinian, along with Afro-Palestinian resistance efforts throughout the years. Here are some valuable articles and resources:
Articles:
In the heart of the Old City, generations of Afro-Palestinians persevere in the face of occupation by Mousa Qous
Putting the pieces together: Fragments of oral history in exile by Samah Fadil
‘Afro-Palestinians’ forge a unique identity in Israel by Isma'il Kushkush
The Africans of Jerusalem by Mousa Qous
The History Of Afro-Palestinians, Past And Present by Fayida Jailler
African-Palestinian community’s deep roots in liberation struggle by Electronic Intifada
Remembering Fatima Bernawi: Historic Palestinian fighter and liberated prisoner (1939-2022) on Samidoun
Fatima Barnawi, founder of Palestinian Women's Police and veteran prisoner, dies at 83 by Middle East Eye
On Fatima Bernawi, Women's Struggle, and Black-Palestinian Solidarity by Elom Tettey-Tamaklo
Afro Palestine: the African Diaspora in Palestine (not an article but a quick video summary of Afro-Palestinian history)
Note: highly recommend checking out Mousa Qous, the founder of the African Community Society, for his writings above all!
African Community Society of Jerusalem:
Their website— organization centered around the Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem.
General info about the group
ACS's instagram to learn more about Afro-Palestinian history.
Here is a write-up about the African Community Society, their impact within Palestinian society, and Afro-Palestinian history in Jerusalem specifically. Highly recommend taking the time to read this if you can.
Please take the time to watch this Documentary by Stephen Graham about former Israeli prisoner Ali Jiddah where he takes the viewer on a tour throughout Jerusalem and describes the unique struggles the Afro-Palestinian community face. He is quite a friendly guy and very funny:
Does anyone have a link to an old Aizawa x reader a fic? It was about a reader with a wyvern quirk who has to take care of Aizawa for a week after he gets hit with a quirk that turns him into a child. The reader’s quirk makes them have an obsessions with gold. Pls help :(
While we are on the subject - financial abuse is not always just physically taking money away or not having a savings account or escape stash. For a lot of people it is the other spouse sabotaging your credit score, constantly overspending, and you being unable to trust that joint household bills and loans are paid. Did you know that once you add an authorized user to your bank account it’s nearly impossible to remove them without their permission? Did you know that your spouse, who likely knows your birthday and SSN, can often gain access and reset passwords for any online accounts and create new ones?
Financial abuse will ruin your life and there’s really nothing except significant time that fixes it. If you are in a situation where you think this might happen to you you should freeze your credit with all three major agencies. You can find info on how to do this at USA.gov/credit-freeze
This is not something that only happens to tradwives. You are not exempt because you are independent or competent.
“Safe zone” was always a lie. I hope this is clear to everyone. “Evacuate to the safe zone” always meant “consolidate for slaughter” and that is exactly what is happening now
Genocide experts warn that India is about to genocide the Shompen people
Who are the Shompen?
The Shompen are an indigenous culture that lives in the Great Nicobar Island, which is nowadays owned by India. The Shompen and their ancestors are believed to have been living in this island for around 10,000 years. Like other tribes in the nearby islands, the Shompen are isolated from the rest of the world, as they chose to be left alone, with the exception of a few members who occasionally take part in exchanges with foreigners and go on quarantine before returning to their tribe. There are between 100 and 400 Shompen people, who are hunter-gatherers and nomadic agricultors and rely on their island's rainforest for survival.
Why is there risk of genocide?
India has announced a huge construction mega-project that will completely change the Great Nicobar Island to turn it into "the Hong Kong of India".
Nowadays, the island has 8,500 inhabitants, and over 95% of its surface is made up of national parks, protected forests and tribal reserve areas. Much of the island is covered by the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, described by UNESCO as covering “unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems. It is home to very rich ecosystems, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, among others. In terms of fauna, there are over 1800 species, some of which are endemic to this area. It has one of the best-preserved tropical rain forests in the world.”
The Indian project aims to destroy this natural environment to create an international shipping terminal with the capacity to handle 14.2 million TEUs (unit of cargo capacity), an international airport that will handle a peak hour traffic of 4,000 passengers and that will be used as a joint civilian-military airport under the control of the Indian Navy, a gas and solar power plant, a military base, an industrial park, and townships aimed at bringing in tourism, including commercial, industrial and residential zones as well as other tourism-related activities.
This project means the destruction of the island's pristine rainforests, as it involves cutting down over 852,000 trees and endangers the local fauna such as leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds. The erosion resulting from deforestation will be huge in this highly-seismic area. Experts also warn about the effects that this project will have on local flora and fauna as a result of pollution from the terminal project, coastal surface runoff, ballasts from ships, physical collisions with ships, coastal construction, oil spills, etc.
The indigenous people are not only affected because their environment and food source will be destroyed. On top of this, the demographic change will be a catastrophe for them. After the creation of this project, the Great Nicobar Island -which now has 8,500 inhabitants- will receive a population of 650,000 settlers. Remember that the Shompen and Nicobarese people who live on this island are isolated, which means they do not have an immune system that can resist outsider illnesses. Academics believe they could die of disease if they come in contact with outsiders (think of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas after Christopher Columbus and the way that common European illnesses were lethal for indigenous Americans with no immunization against them).
And on top of all of this, the project might destroy the environment and the indigenous people just to turn out to be useless and sooner or later be abandoned. The naturalist Uday Mondal explains that “after all the destruction, the financial viability of the project remains questionable as all the construction material will have to be shipped to this remote island and it will have to compete with already well-established ports.” However, this project is important to India because they want to use the island as a military and commercial post to stop China's expansion in the region, since the Nicobar islands are located on one of the world's busiest sea routes.
Last year, 70 former government officials and ambassadors wrote to the Indian president saying the project would “virtually destroy the unique ecology of this island and the habitat of vulnerable tribal groups”. India's response has been to say that the indigenous tribes will be relocated "if needed", but that doesn't solve the problem. As a spokesperson for human rights group Survival International said: “The Shompen are nomadic and have clearly defined territories. Four of their semi-permanent settlements are set to be directly devastated by the project, along with their southern hunting and foraging territories. The Shompen will undoubtedly try to move away from the area destroyed, but there will be little space for them to go. To avoid a genocide, this deadly mega-project must be scrapped.”
On 7 February 2024, 39 scholars from 13 countries published an open letter to the Indian president warning that “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”
How to help
The NGO Survival International has launched this campaign:
From this site, you just need to add your name and email and you will send an email to India's Tribal Affairs Minister and to the companies currently vying to build the first stage of the project.
Share it with your friends and acquittances and on social media.
Sources:
India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe, 7 Feb 2024. The Guardian.
‘It will destroy them’: Indian mega-development could cause ‘genocide’ and ‘ecocide’, says charity, 8 Feb 2024. Geographical.
Genocide experts call on India's government to scrap the Great Nicobar mega-project, Feb 2024. Survival International.
The container terminal that could sink the Great Nicobar Island, 20 July 2022. Mongabay.
[Maps] Environmental path cleared for Great Nicobar mega project, 10 Oct 2022. Mongabay.
Palestine Donation Links Masterpost
This is a masterpost of places to throw your money at to support Palestine. I'm gonna try and keep this updated as much as I can.
*** Please note, donating does not mean you should stop boosting Palestinian voices. Spreading awareness is JUST AS IMPORTANT as sending money since misinformation is one of the Zionist movement's most dangerous tools. ***
(Last Updated: 21-05-2022)
Palestine Children's Relief Fund
In addition, follow the PCRF on twitter (@/thePCRF) as they regularly post about opportunities to donate to support Palestine.
UNRWA
United Palestinian Appeal
Palestinian Youth Movement
Islamic Relief USA
Help Fund Life Changing Surgeries in Palestine
Scholarship for Palestinian Medics
Direct Appeal To Alaqsa Attacks: Al Makassed Hospital
Educate the Women of Palestine
Urgent Relief for Al-Aqsa
BDS Movement
Decolonize Palestine (Patreon)
*** If you have any additional recognized and trustworthy places to donate, please either reply or send me an ask or DM and I will update this list! ***
In addition, Palestinians (both in Palestine and diaspora) can feel free to leave your paypals / ko-fi's / cashapps / venmo.... whichever you want in the replies.
on my worst mental health days, when I need to keep up but can’t stand the dread of scrolling, I look to Let’sTalkPalestine’s Instagram channel for news updates. Today I read something that really fucked with me. It said that even if there was a ceasefire called tomorrow, and aid allowed in and etc. that it would take Gaza until 2092 for its economy to return to 2022 levels. 70 years of potential progress, stolen from them in 4 months. And you just know that even when that happens (because Palestine WILL recover and WILL be rebuilt after Israel’s settler colony fails) the world will see that they’re still years behind the West for reasons completely out of their control and power and use it as justification to be even more racist and demeaning. And y’know how I know that? Because they already do it to the rest of the Middle East.
the US is directly bombing syria, iraq (x, x, x, x) and yemen simultaneously tonight (very early hours of 03.02.24) while, of course, continuing to proudly fund israel’s ongoing genocide in ghazzah. they’re saying that this is the only the beginning of their operations in iraq and syria. meanwhile, israel is increasingly targeting rafah, having just martyred 11 palestinians there in one airstrike alone. as a reminder, rafah is essentially the southern most area in ghazzah and is where israel told palestinians to flee to, calling it a ‘safe zone’. this is all happening the same day israel announced it is preparing for a ground invasion in rafah. allah reham kare
spotted this sticker outside my apartment building and I think it illustrates an important point about the moment we’re in.
on a surface level this is something that a lot of people who consider themselves antizionist would agree with. but take 10 seconds to google the url at the bottom and you’ll see that this is a sticker for a neo-Nazi group.
“We serve one nation” is a reference to the dual loyalty trope, the idea that Jews can never be loyal to America because they are first and foremost loyal to Israel.
There are a lot of hate groups taking advantage of the moment we’re in. It’s easy to replace “Jew” with “Zionist” and get a lot more people to agree with them. Do not fall for it.
One day each of you is going to suffer the greatest loss you could have ever imagined and you are going to be angry and irrational and start praying to god again and the person you love most is going to die and you are going to think “I wish it was me instead” every second of every day for the rest of your life and your going to leave your childhood home for the last time and it is going to eat you up inside that you can’t go back to being 6 years old and you are going to become even more angry and even more irrational and people are going to ask you why it’s such a big deal and why won’t you just get over it already and that is when you will finally truly understand what Palestine is going through right now and why your silence is making us so angry and why we are always asking for you to just pay attention and listen to us and know that it is our loved ones and our childhood homes that are be taken from us while everyone tells us it’s not that big of a deal
quick psa!🇵🇸
no thanks has been approved and added to the apple appstore. basically you scan a barcode and it tells you if the product is from a company that’s either part of the bds list or supporting isreal. highly recommend u check it out!! ^_^
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/no-thanks-app/id6476206516
There's one charity that I haven't seen shared here personally, and that's Care for Gaza.
They're shared a lot on twitter as a reputable on-the-ground relief source. You can donate to their gofundme to help their efforts here.
PLEASE WATCH AND REBLOG - DON'T JUST LIKE - THANK YOU
BISAN IS AFRAID THIS MAY BE HER LAST VIDEO. THE OCCUPATION IS PLANNING TO INVADE NASSER HOSPITAL IN KHAN YUNIS, THE LAST FUNCTIONING HOSPITAL IN THE GAZA STRIP.
SHE WANTS PEOPLE TO SHARE THIS. PLEASE, PLEASE REBLOG.
Hey you know how I said I was going to make a workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies? I actually did that.
HERE IS THE VERSION WITH LOTS OF SWEARING AT THE USELESS, SHITTY SITUATION YOU’RE IN.
HERE IS THE VERSION WITH A FAIR AMOUNT OF BLACK HUMOR BUT NO CURSEWORDS.
Featuring Helpful Sections such as:
Death Certificates – What you need, why you need them, and how to get them
Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone
What the Everloving Fuck is Probate
Some Simple Dos and Don’ts
Shitty Mad Libs – Templates for writing Obituaries and Memorials
How to plan a non-religious death party
So you suddenly have to become some sort of hacker or some shit
This is an eighteen page book that you can print out, download, share, and give away; it is meant to be used to collect information about funeral planning and account management after a death OR you can use it BEFORE you die and give people information so they’re not stuck playing Nancy Fucking Drew while trying to keep seventeen cousins who crawled out of the woodwork from gutting each other in front of the fucking casket as they argue about who’s inheriting grandma’s favorite dentures.
It’s not exactly cheerful and it’s full of things that are probably going to feel really fucking raw if you’re processing a fresh death.
I’m sorry! I love you! Death is shitty! I’m trying to laugh about it a little and I hope you can laugh a little too because otherwise we’re all just going to cry together.
Good luck!
(in memory of my weirdo mother and her weirdo siblings who all died too fucking young and left me holding this flaming bag of dogshit)
hrrrggghhhh......philosophy of art......praxis.........the idea that a certain level of complexity or a certain kind of technical skill is what qualifies something as art is bullshit.............so you have to think that way about your own art too you have to be consistent.........you have to choose how you refer to your art thoughtfully to reflect this or it will never sink into your brain..............save me jacob geller video essay "Who's Afraid of Modern Art" ............
The Sea Organ is an experimental musical instrument that is located in Zadar, Croatia. Beneath the white marble steps, a series of tubes create a system that could be described as a large piano. When the waves or the wind flow through the holes, they interact with the organ to create random harmonic sounds. (Source)
You can listen to the sounds that the Sea Organ produces here.
FAMOUS AUTHORS
Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.
The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.
Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.
Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.
Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.
Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.
Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.
Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.
The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.
Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.
Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.
Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.
Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.
Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.
TEXTBOOKS
Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.
Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.
KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.
Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.
Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.
MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.
Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.
Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.
Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.
eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.
MATH AND SCIENCE
FullBooks.com: This site has “thousands of full-text free books,” including a large amount of scientific essays and books.
Free online textbooks, lecture notes, tutorials and videos on mathematics: NYU links to several free resources for math students.
Online Mathematics Texts: Here you can find online textbooks likeElementary Linear Algebra and Complex Variables.
Science and Engineering Books for free download: These books range in topics from nanotechnology to compressible flow.
FreeScience.info: Find over 1800 math, engineering and science books here.
Free Tech Books: Computer programmers and computer science enthusiasts can find helpful books here.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
byGosh: Find free illustrated children’s books and stories here.
Munseys: Munseys has nearly 2,000 children’s titles, plus books about religion, biographies and more.
International Children’s Digital Library: Find award-winning books and search by categories like age group, make believe books, true books or picture books.
Lookybook: Access children’s picture books here.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
Bored.com: Bored.com has music ebooks, cooking ebooks, and over 150 philosophy titles and over 1,000 religion titles.
Ideology.us: Here you’ll find works by Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, David Hume and others.
Free Books on Yoga, Religion and Philosophy: Recent uploads to this site include Practical Lessons in Yoga and Philosophy of Dreams.
The Sociology of Religion: Read this book by Max Weber, here.
Religion eBooks: Read books about the Bible, Christian books, and more.
PLAYS
ReadBookOnline.net: Here you can read plays by Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and others.
Plays: Read Pygmalion, Uncle Vanya or The Playboy of the Western World here.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT has made available all of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.
Plays Online: This site catalogs “all the plays [they] know about that are available in full text versions online for free.”
ProPlay: This site has children’s plays, comedies, dramas and musicals.
MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE
Public Bookshelf: Find romance novels, mysteries and more.
The Internet Book Database of Fiction: This forum features fantasy and graphic novels, anime, J.K. Rowling and more.
Free Online Novels: Here you can find Christian novels, fantasy and graphic novels, adventure books, horror books and more.
Foxglove: This British site has free novels, satire and short stories.
Baen Free Library: Find books by Scott Gier, Keith Laumer and others.
The Road to Romance: This website has books by Patricia Cornwell and other romance novelists.
Get Free Ebooks: This site’s largest collection includes fiction books.
John T. Cullen: Read short stories from John T. Cullen here.
SF and Fantasy Books Online: Books here include Arabian Nights,Aesop’s Fables and more.
Free Novels Online and Free Online Cyber-Books: This list contains mostly fantasy books.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Project Laurens Jz Coster: Find Dutch literature here.
ATHENA Textes Francais: Search by author’s name, French books, or books written by other authors but translated into French.
Liber Liber: Download Italian books here. Browse by author, title, or subject.
Biblioteca romaneasca: Find Romanian books on this site.
Bibliolteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: Look up authors to find a catalog of their available works on this Spanish site.
KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.
Proyecto Cervantes: Texas A&M’s Proyecto Cervantes has cataloged Cervantes’ work online.
Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum: Access many Latin texts here.
Project Runeberg: Find Scandinavian literature online here.
Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.
Biblioteca Valenciana: Register to use this database of Catalan and Valencian books.
Ketab Farsi: Access literature and publications in Farsi from this site.
Afghanistan Digital Library: Powered by NYU, the Afghanistan Digital Library has works published between 1870 and 1930.
CELT: CELT stands for “the Corpus of Electronic Texts” features important historical literature and documents.
Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This easy-to-use database of German language texts lets you search by genres and author.
HISTORY AND CULTURE
LibriVox: LibriVox has a good selection of historical fiction.
The Perseus Project: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.
Access Genealogy: Find literature about Native American history, the Scotch-Irish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, and more.
Free History Books: This collection features U.S. history books, including works by Paul Jennings, Sarah Morgan Dawson, Josiah Quincy and others.
Most Popular History Books: Free titles include Seven Days and Seven Nights by Alexander Szegedy and Autobiography of a Female Slave by Martha G. Browne.
RARE BOOKS
Questia: Questia has 5,000 books available for free, including rare books and classics.
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.
Chest of Books: This site has a wide range of free books, including gardening and cooking books, home improvement books, craft and hobby books, art books and more.
Free e-Books: Find titles related to beauty and fashion, games, health, drama and more.
2020ok: Categories here include art, graphic design, performing arts, ethnic and national, careers, business and a lot more.
Free Art Books: Find artist books and art books in PDF format here.
Free Web design books: OnlineComputerBooks.com directs you to free web design books.
Free Music Books: Find sheet music, lyrics and books about music here.
Free Fashion Books: Costume and fashion books are linked to the Google Books page.
MYSTERY
MysteryNet: Read free short mystery stories on this site.
TopMystery.com: Read books by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and other mystery writers here.
Mystery Books: Read books by Sue Grafton and others.
POETRY
The Literature Network: This site features forums, a copy of The King James Bible, and over 3,000 short stories and poems.
Poetry: This list includes “The Raven,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”
Poem Hunter: Find free poems, lyrics and quotations on this site.
Famous Poetry Online: Read limericks, love poetry, and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Lord Byron and others.
Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, fromThe Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.
QuotesandPoem.com: Read poems by Maya Angelou, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and more.
CompleteClassics.com: Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Lord Tennyson are all featured here.
PinkPoem.com: On this site, you can download free poetry ebooks.
MISC
Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.
World eBook Library: This monstrous collection includes classics, encyclopedias, children’s books and a lot more.
DailyLit: DailyLit has everything from Moby Dick to the recent phenomenon, Skinny Bitch.
A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.
Free Online Novels: These novels are fully online and range from romance to religious fiction to historical fiction.
ManyBooks.net: Download mysteries and other books for your iPhone or eBook reader here.
Authorama: Books here are pulled from Google Books and more. You’ll find history books, novels and more.
Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.
Have you heard that the IDF used to be a terrorist group that was recognized by the US and the UN? And apparently the same terrorist group that carried out the Nakba? Basically meaning THE terrorists?...Because BOY, it sure would have helped learning that little detail earlier!
Oh yeah, the Irgun? Haganah? Lehi? All of these literal terrorist gangs made up what we know today as the IDF. Before that, they carried out terrorist attacks against the British as well as commit massacres against Palestinians such as the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948.
All of their terrorist acts are well documented and can verrrry easily be found if you look them up. For instance, the Lehi's focus was literally assassinations of British officials and the Irgun was in fact regularly described as a terrorist organisation in US media outlets, and they were all also described as "terrorist organisations" in official British and UN documents that detail their terrorist activities.
To add, the leaders of these terrorist groups later became Israel's prime ministers (David Ben-Gurion, Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir).
If you're interested in learning more about this, The Institute for Palestine Studies has recently published The Roots of Zionist Terrorism, a paper that includes more info and a rundown of these gangs' most infamous terrorist acts committed against Palestinians starting the years leading up to the Nakba.
https://twitter.com/isabelunraveled
I think it needs to become common knowledge that "inability to read social cues" can show up as overcompensating.
You don't know how much misbehaviour is allowed, so you become the perfect child who never tests rules.
You don't know if someone is irritated with you, so you'll be extra generous and self-effacing.
You don't know how much is expected of you at work so you'll kill yourself in a minimum-wage job and not notice that nobody else is working like this.
"Hardworking and quiet" should be as much of an autism red flag as "ignores rules and doesn't know when to stop talking". Or why don't we just start using words to communicate so i can stop tracking everybody's eyebrow twitches, that would be great.
Israel blows up Gaza's "Palace of Justice" compound which housed the Palestinian Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the Court of First Instance & the Magistrate. 100,000s of vital case documents are gone. Deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure is a War Crime!
Israel's soldiers took victory images inside the Palestinian Supreme Court before blowing it up into pieces. This proves the facility constituted ZERO danger to the Israeli military & no militants were hiding inside it at the time it was destroyed. Again, a war crime!
Habibi (2011) dir. Susan Youssef
Habibi, a story of forbidden love, is a fiction feature set in Gaza. Two students in the West Bank are forced to return home to Gaza, where their love defies tradition. To reach his lover, Qays grafittis poetry across town. Habibi is a modern re-telling of the famous ancient Sufi parable Majnun Layla. The full Arabic title is ‘Habibi Rasak Kharban,’ which translates as “Darling, something’s wrong with your head.” — from the Palestine Film Institute
i know the nyt regularly edits and rewrites headlines post-publication but it's kind of wild that the basically one (1) good op-ed i've seen them publish in ages that was getting really widely shared was renamed from "Why Must Palestinians Audition For Your Empathy?" to much more vague and defanged "The Palestine Double Standard." like. come on.
anyways.
(link to the archived page with the original headline)
The task of the Palestinian is to be palatable or to be condemned. The task of the Palestinian, we’ve seen in the past two weeks, is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it. To earn it.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched Palestinian activists, lawyers, professors get baited and interrupted on air, if not silenced altogether. They are being made to sing for the supper of airtime and fair coverage. They are begging reporters to do the most basic tasks of their job. At the same time, Palestinians fleeing from bombs have been misidentified. Even when under attack, they must be costumed as another people to elicit humanity. Even in death, they cannot rest — Palestinians are being buried in mass graves or in old graves dug up to make room, and still there is not enough space.
If that weren’t enough, Palestinian slaughter is too often presented ahistorically, untethered to reality: It is not attributed to real steel and missiles, to occupation, to policy. To earn compassion for their dead, Palestinians must first prove their innocence. The real problem with condemnation is the quiet, sly tenor of the questions that accompany it: Palestinians are presumed violent — and deserving of violence — until proved otherwise. Their deaths are presumed defensible until proved otherwise. What is the word of a Palestinian against a machinery that investigates itself, that absolves itself of accused crimes? What is it against a government whose representatives have referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and “wild beasts”? When a well-suited man can say brazenly and unflinchingly that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people?
It is, of course, a remarkably effective strategy. A slaughter isn’t a slaughter if those being slaughtered are at fault, if they’ve been quietly and effectively dehumanized — in the media, through policy — for years. If nobody is a civilian, nobody can be a victim.
…
Take it from a writer: There is nothing like the tedium of trying to come up with analogies. There is something humiliating in trying to earn solidarity. I keep seeing infographics desperately trying to appeal to American audiences. Imagine most of the population of Manhattan being told to evacuate in 24 hours. Imagine the president of [ ] going on NBC and saying all [ ] people are [ ].Look! Here’s a strip on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. That’s Gaza. It is about the same size as Philadelphia. Or multiply the entire population of Las Vegas by three.
This is demoralizing work, to have to speak constantly in the vernacular of tragedies and atrocities, to say: Look, look. Remember?That other suffering that was eventually deemed unacceptable? Let me hold it up to this one. Let me show you proportion. Let me earn your outrage. Absent that, let me earn your memory. Please.
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Here’s another thing I know as a writer and psychologist: It matters where you start a narrative. In addiction work, you call this playing the tape. Diasporically or not, being Palestinian is the quintessential disrupter: It messes with a curated, modified tape. We exist, and our existence presents an existential affront. As long as we exist, we challenge several falsehoods, not the least of which is that, for some, we never existed at all. That decades ago, a country was born in the delicious, glittering expanse of nothingness — a birthright, something due. Our very existence challenges a formidable, militarized narrative.
But the days of the Palestine exception are numbered. Palestine is increasingly becoming the litmus test for true liberatory practice.
In the meantime, Palestinians continue to be cast paradoxically — both terror and invisible, both people who never existed and people who cannot return.
Imagine being such a pest, such an obstacle. Or: Imagine being so powerful.
i've said this before but i suppose it bears repeating and clarification. it is arabs and palestinians who have suffered the most under islamist rule. we (middle easterners, revolutionaries, religious minorities, gender and sexual minorities) as people, understand what hamas represents better than israelis do, better than anyone does. we understand what the entire spectrum from political islam to outright jihadist extremism does. we understand dictatorship. we understand theocracy. we understand fascism.
the repression israel has created is so absolute, has destroyed civil, diplomatic, intellectual and peaceful avenues so absolutely, that it leaves no avenues for anyone to condemn hamas anymore. even the representative of hamas's ideological and political opponents, the PLO (which oversees the West Bank), is openly frustrated at the request to condemn hamas. and it's not because he sympathizes with them. he has absolutely no political, personal, ideological or economic reason to.
israel has bombed gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, each and every time with the declared intention of targeting hamas and instead murdering civilians en masse. everyone familiar with israel understands that 'hamas' is meaningless, that israel has no real interest in defeating them (and that defeating militant resistance to an occupation with military force is not possible), that they went so far as to fund them as their choice of preferred enemy. when palestinians hear 'hamas' they correctly understand that israel intends to kill everyone. it is, to use the lingua franca of this period, a dogwhistle. on october 7th, israelis were horrified to see this dogwhistle suddenly become an actual whistle, but nothing else changed except for the intensity and savagery of their attacks on gaza. instead, the more they say hamas, the more they murder civilians en masse, just as they always have. everyone in gaza has said "this is not new, just worse." they have always understood that they are the target. no amount of condemning hamas, being a good palestinian, a good civilian, or even a newborn will change that.
this includes all of hamas's ideological opponents and so-called victims as well. peace activists, intellectuals, palestinian christians, and queer palestinians alike are not condemning hamas right now. they can't because they are busy fighting for their lives and homes against the israeli occupation. if you understood the personal toll this takes on them, if you understood how deeply their trauma runs, you would understand just how evil the israeli narrative on hamas is for all palestinians.
if you want a plurality of palestinian opinion, get rid of the israeli apartheid state. if you want tolerance, get rid of the israeli apartheid state. if you want israelis to be safe in their homes from the threat of hamas militants, get rid of the israeli apartheid state.
the truth is, there is a base and deeply evil racism at the core of asking to condemn hamas, especially by those who would never condemn israel or the violence it requires to maintain itself. it presumes that they have the right to ask for a condemnation of child murder, without ever giving an apology for child murder or the promise to stop murdering children. ghassan kanafani once called this "a conversation between the sword and the neck."
it is absurdity in full display, a macabre delight in impunity disguised as moral superiority. more than treating every palestinian as a terrorist in interrogation, more than its dehumanization and islamophobia, it is at its core asking "do you agree our children are more important than yours?"
and lest you forget, Israel's current minister of national security has already said it directly. as he famously once told arab-israeli reporter mohammad magadli, “Sorry Mohammad, my right to life precedes yours, that is the reality.”
in many ways, that's far more honest than asking "do you condemn hamas?"