Tumgik
#african americans in the us military
tomorrowusa · 30 days
Text
youtube
The Donald "Dozy Donny" Trump trial has been pushing other items out of the news. But it is not the only news story making history in New York.
Zeita Merchant just became the first woman of color to reach the rank of admiral in the US Coast Guard.
Her promotion ceremony took place at the NYC theater which hosts the play Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton happens to be the father of the Coast Guard.
Adm. Merchant decided to join the Coast Guard at the last minute. It turned out to be a good choice and she became a career officer, rising through the ranks to admiral.
By coincidence, I visited Alexander Hamilton after the solar eclipse earlier this month. He probably would have been pleased by this connection to him in the 21st century.
Tumblr media
12 notes · View notes
aeolianblues · 11 days
Text
I'm trying not to block people. But there's only so many times I can go 'give people the benefit of the doubt' and then click their blog and what's literally the third or fourth post on their blogs? They talk about middle eastern people like savages who can't control their violent urges. And of course, more than half of them are Americans. After posing for 20 years, the masks that temporarily went up when anti-war activists criticised the American war in the Middle East are slipping, some of you never really believed brown people to be your equals did you? Get the fuck off my blog.
7 notes · View notes
bijoumikhawal · 2 months
Text
"Biden is the best choice and he's actually really empathetic and reasonable but also you can't wait for a candidate that won't do genocide and war crimes because to become a presidential candidate you have to be willing to do that" see what you fundamentally don't understand is I'm not waiting for a candidate that won't do war crimes, because I know that. I cannot morally stomach this system, it's a joke to claim its democratic, and AMERICA DELENDA EST. this country is a plague on this Earth
#cipher talk#It's baffling because okay so you know how fucked up this is but you're behaving in a way that clearly indicates you want that this shambli#Disgusting empire to cling to life until after you're dead because it'd make /you/ uncomfortable and inconvenienced#To live through its destruction (the wealthier classes and more privileged experience lesser material changes in state collapse so long as#They aren't too highly ranked/involved in politics. A Sri Lankan wrote an article specifically addressing Americans about this)#It's so dehumanizing! People's blood is so cheap to you! You've just accepted its inevitable that genocide will happen!#Because of how the US operates! You can see no other future! It hardly matters to you!#You say this like the death of Palestinians of Yemenis of Syrians is someone else's dropped ice cream cone#You understand why people hate this country and you understand we deserve it but it just. Hardly matters to you#It feels like madness to watch this. It's disgusting#I keep thinking- it'd be so easy for you to justify my people being killed if violence broke out and it was in your favor#It's unlikely because. Well. America loves 'the church of the martyrs'#But you'd do it if that was favorable. You wouldn't think twice. You might feel a twinge in your heart but that's all#Because we aren't people to you!#We aren't all that important! Not important enough for you do anything more than 'well let's vote a blue in and do some protests'#What's a protest worth if you perpetuate the system and can't see a way out and don't try for a way out?#That's killing a man then putting flowers on his casket. It's /perverse/.#You get used to the idea that Africans die that West Asians die and that's just the way of the world. My g-d do you understand anything??#I watch necrosis take hold my parts of my culture and I watch every good person I know be ground to dust under a military regime#I talk to my friend who got drafted and is trans and may never come out because if they do they can get arrested as a 'prostitute'#I watch the wild hope for the future I was introduced to over radio at 9 years old wither#I watch people risk it anyway because just past the fence they can see they know there are people there#I watch my neighbor to the south crumble and weep because our hands are bloody and it's in part because we bloodied them for the west#And you just think that's how things are.#Fascist white death cult mindset
8 notes · View notes
sleepysera · 2 months
Text
"Time and again, since the War of Independence, African Americans have placed themselves in harm's way to fight for liberty and justice, even though they were frequently denied these rights. African Americans, believing deeply in the nation's founding principles, sought to demonstrate their worthiness to have full rights as U.S. citizens."
-Lonnie G. Bunch III, Fighting for Freedom (2017)
3 notes · View notes
lightdancer1 · 3 months
Text
The Double V Campaign is more famous but it had a WW1 antecedent:
The First and Second World Wars lit a timebomb under segregation and under the United States as a whole. They were processes that drastically accelerated the modernization of the United States, by shaking older systems out of a complacency that lasted not least because no major outside forces brushed against them. Both wars, unlike their modern successors, were also fought with drafts and accordingly larger numbers of people from society as a whole served....and that meant that in the segregation-era United States Black soldiers fought for the right to shoot white Europeans while Dixiecrats balked in turn at realizing that men with rifles in their hands were unlikely to accept as 'meekly' as they had the brutal discrimination they were subject to elsewhere.
The result, in a smaller scale because US involvement in WW1 was much shorter than in WW2, was the prototype of the Double V campaign and like its WW2 counterpart it reaped a greater backhanded success, as where Pershing was very insistent that an AEF form and be led by US soldiers, he was perfectly happy to send USCT forces to fight under French command in a display of both racism and the kind of horse-trading that went on in the real world behind the propaganda of the various sides.
The ironies would not be lost on people then even if for a variety of reasons they have otherwise been forgotten.
0 notes
stephobrien · 3 months
Text
Is your pro-Palestine activism hurting innocent people? Here's how to avoid that.
Note: If you prefer plain text, you can read the plain text version here.
Over the last few days, I’ve had conversations with several Jewish people who told me how hurt and scared they are right now.
To my great regret, some of that pain came from a poorly-thought-out post of mine, which – while not ill-intentioned – WAS hurtful.
And a lot of it came from cruelty they’d experienced at the hands of people who claim to be advocating for Palestine, but are using the very real plight of innocent Palestinians to harm equally innocent Jewish people.
Y’all, we need to do better. (Yes, “we” definitely includes me; this is in no small part a “learn from my fail” post, and also a “making amends” post. Some of these are mistakes I’ve made in the past.)
So if you’re an advocate for Palestine who wants to make sure that your defense of one group of vulnerable people doesn’t harm another, here are some important things to do or keep in mind:
Ask yourself if you’re applying a standard to one group that you aren’t applying to another.
Would you want all white Americans or Canadians to be expelled from America or Canada?
Do you want all Jewish people to be expelled from Israel, as opposed to finding a way to live alongside Palestinian Arabs in peace?
If the answer to those two questions is different, ask yourself WHY.
Do you want to be held responsible for the actions of your nation’s army or government? No? Then don’t hold innocent Jewish people, or Israelis in general (whether Jewish or otherwise), responsible for the actions of the Israeli army and government.
On that subject, be wary of condemning all Israeli people for the actions of the IDF. Large-scale tactical decisions are made by the top brass. Service is compulsory, and very few can reasonably get out of service.
Blaming all Israelis for the military’s actions is like blaming all Vietnam vets for the horrors in Vietnam. They’re not calling the shots. They aren’t Nazis running concentration camps. They are carrying out military operations that SHOULD be criticized.
And do not compare them or ANY JEWISH PERSON to Nazis in general. It is Jewish cultural trauma and not outsiders’ to use against them.
Don’t infuse legitimate criticism with antisemitism.
By all means, spread the word about the crimes committed by the Israeli army and government, and the complicity of their allies. Criticize the people responsible for committing and enabling atrocities.
But if you imply that they’re committing those crimes because they’re Jewish, or because Jewish people have special privileges, then you’re straying into antisemitic territory.
Criticize the crime, not the group. If you believe that collective punishment is wrong, don’t do it yourself.
And do your best to use words that apply directly to the situation, rather than the historical terms for situations with similar features. For example, use “segregation,” “oppression,” or “subjugation,” not “Holocaust” or “Jim Crow.” These other historical events are not the cultural property of Jews OR Palestinians, but also have their own nuances and struggles and historical contexts.
Also, blaming other world events on Jewish people or making Jewish people associated with them (for instance, some people falsely blame Jewish people for the African slave trade) is a key feature of how antisemitism functions.
Please, by all means, be specific and detailed in your critiques. But keep them focused on the current political actors – not other peoples’ or nations’ political or cultural histories and traumas.
Be prepared to accept criticism.
You probably already know that society is infused with a wide array of bigotries, and that people growing up in that environment tend to absorb those beliefs without even realizing it. Antisemitism is no exception.
What that means is, there’s a very real chance that you will screw up, and get called out on it, as I so recently did.
If that happens, please be willing to learn and adapt. If you can educate yourself about the suffering and needs of Palestinians, you can do the same for Jewish people.
Understand that the people you hurt aren’t obligated to baby you. Give them room to be angry.
After I made a post that inadvertently hurt people, some were nice about it, and others weren’t. Some outright insulted my morals and intelligence.
And I had to accept that I’d earned that from them.
I’d hurt them, and they weren’t obligated to be more careful with my feelings than I had been with theirs.
They weren’t obligated to forgive me, trust me, or stop being mad at me right away.
I’ll admit, there were moments when I got defensive. I shouldn’t have. And I encourage you to try not to, if you screw up and hurt people.
I know that’s hard, but it’s important. Getting defensive only tells people you care more about doubling down on your mistake than you do about healing the hurt it caused.
Instead, acknowledge that they have a right to be angry, apologize for the way you hurt them, and try to make amends, while understanding that they don’t owe you trust or forgiveness.
Be aware that some antisemites are using legitimate complaints to “Trojan horse” antisemitism into leftist spaces.
This is a really easy stumbling block to trip over, because most people probably don’t look at every post a creator makes before sharing the one they’re looking at right now.
I recently shared a video that called out some of the Likud and IDF’s atrocities and hypocrisy, and that also noted that many Jewish people are wonderful members of their communities.
I was later informed that, while that video in particular seemed reasonable, the creator behind it is frequently antisemitic.
I deleted the post, and blocked the creator. I encourage you to do the same if it’s brought to your attention that you’ve been ‘Trojan horse’d.
EDIT: Important note about antisemitism in leftist spaces:
While it's true that some blatant antisemites are using seemingly reasonable posts to get their foot in the door of leftist spaces, it's also true that a lot of antisemitism already exists inside those spaces.
This antisemitism is often dressed up in progressive-sounding language, but nonetheless singles Jewish people and places out in ways that aren't applied equally to other groups, or that label Jewish people in ways that portray them as acceptable targets.
If you want to see some specific examples, so you can have a better idea of what to keep an eye out for, I suggest reading this excellent reblog of this post.
Fact-check your doubts about antisemitism.
Depending on which parts of the internet you look at, you’ve probably seen people accused of antisemitism because they complained about the Likud and/or IDF’s actions. So you might be primed to be wary, or feel unsure of how to tell what counts as real antisemitism.
But that doesn’t mean antisemitism isn’t a very real, widespread, and harmful problem. And it doesn’t mean many or even most Jewish people are lying to you or being overly sensitive.
So if someone says something is antisemitic, and you aren’t sure, I encourage you to:
A. Look up the action or thing in question, including its history. Is there an antisemitic history or connotation you aren’t aware of? For best results, include “antisemitic” in your search query, in quotes.
B. Understand that some things, while not inherently antisemitic, have been used by antisemites often enough that Jewish people are understandably wary of them. Schrodinger’s antisemitism, if you will.
C. Ask Jewish people WHO HAVE OFFERED TO HELP EDUCATE YOU. Emphasis on WHO HAVE OFFERED. Random Jewish people aren’t obligated to give you their time and emotional energy, or to educate you – especially on subjects that are scary or painful for them.
@edenfenixblogs has kindly offered her inbox to those who are genuinely trying to learn and do better, and I’ve found her to be very kind, patient, reasonable, and fair-minded.
Understand that this is URGENTLY NEEDED.
In one of my conversations with a Jewish person who’d called me out, they said this was the most productive conversation they’d had with a person with a Palestinian flag in their profile.
THIS IS NOT OKAY.
I didn’t do anything special. All I did was listen, apologize for my mistakes, and learn.
Yes, it feels good to be acknowledged. But I feel like I’ve been praised for peeing IN the toilet, instead of beside it.
Apologizing, learning, and making amends after you hurt people shouldn’t be “the most reasonable thing I’ve heard from a person with a Palestinian flag pfp.”
It should be BASIC DECENCY.
And the fact that it’s apparently so uncommon should tell you how much unnecessary stress and fear Jewish people have been living with because of people who consider themselves defenders of human rights.
By all means, be angry at the Likud, the IDF, and the politicians, reporters, and specific media outlets who choose to enable and cover up for them.
But direct that anger toward the people who deserve it and are in a position to do something about it, not random people who simply happen to be Jewish, or who don’t want millions of people to be turned into refugees when less violent methods of achieving freedom and rights for Palestinians are available.
Stop peeing beside the toilet, people.
3K notes · View notes
jccheapalier · 1 year
Video
youtube
Untold History: Muhammad Ali’s Political Conversion
1 note · View note
wilwheaton · 9 months
Quote
Frederick Douglass, who was born into Southern slavery, described the South as “a little nation by itself, having its own language, its own rules, regulations, and customs.” Fewer than 2000 families — six-tenths of one percent of the Southern population — owned more than 50 enslaved people and ruled the oligarchy that we call the Confederacy with an iron fist. The 75 percent of white people in the South during that era who did not own any enslaved persons generally lived in deep poverty. Women had no rights, queer people were routinely tortured and murdered, education for both enslaved Africans and poor whites was generally outlawed, religious attendance was often mandated, and hunger and disease stalked all but those in the families of the two thousand morbidly rich planter dynasties. Modern-day Red states are doing their best to recreate that old Confederacy, right down to state Senator Kathy Chism’s new effort to return the Confederate battle flag to Mississippi's state flag. Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence have both emphasized their presidential pledges to restore the names of murderous Civil War traitors to American military bases, celebrating their armed defense of the “values” of the Old South. Today’s version of yesteryear’s plantation owners are called CEOs, hedge and vulture fund managers, and the morbidly rich. They use the power of political bribery given them by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — with Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking Citizens United vote on behalf of his sugar daddy Harlan Crow — to lord over their Red states, regardless of the will of those states’ citizens.
Why are red state 'welfare queen' oligarchs allowed to mooch off of blue states?
2K notes · View notes
bfpnola · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media
ID 1: Screenshot of a post by @/key48return on Instagram. Background is of a globe with pinpoints of the israeli flag all over North and South America. Title reads in all caps, “israel is involved in oppression all over the world not just in Palestine…” A yellow arrow points right underneath the title. End ID
Tumblr media
ID 2: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:
THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE - 1994
ISRAEL EXPORTED SUBSTANTIAL WEAPONS AND ARMS TO THE HUTU MILITIAS WHO MASSACRED OVER 1 MILLION TUTSI CIVILIANS IN RWANDA ACROSS THE DURATION OF 100 DAYS.
WEAPONS USED IN THE GENOCIDE INCLUDED ISRAELI-MADE 5.56MM BULLETS, RIFLES AND GRENADES. THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE IS RECOGNISED AS THE WORST GENOCIDE IN MODERN HISTORY. ISRAEL HAS REPEATEDLY ATTEMPTED TO CONCEAL THEIR ARMS EXPORTS TO RWANDA BEFORE AND DURING THE GENOCIDE, FEARING PROSECUTION.”
Black and white photos below are shown of various Rwandan children in graveyards or in makeshift tents just trying to get by. End ID.
Tumblr media
ID 3: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:
APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA 1948 - 1994
ISRAEL WAS A STAUNCH ALLY TO THE SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID REGIME, PROVIDING ANTI-RIOT VEHICLES AND ARMS TO USE AGAINST THE NATIVE BLACK POPULATION, ASSISTING THE REGIME IN CREATING NUCLEAR BOMBS AND ISRAEL ALSO OPPOSED THE GLOBAL EMBARGO AND BOYCOTT OF APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA.
FOR DECADES, THE ZIONIST FEDERATION IN SOUTH AFRICA HONOURED MEN SUCH AS PERCY YUTAR, WHO PROSECUTED NELSON MANDELA FOR SABOTAGE AND CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE STATE IN 1963 AND SENT HIM TO JAIL FOR LIFE. (FOR WHICH HE SERVED 27 YEARS)”
Black and white photos below showcase a Black man being held in a chokehold by a white man, two Black people on their knees and hands up trying not to get shot, and a sign that reads in english and afrikaans “white area.” End ID.
Tumblr media
ID 4: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:
MAYAN GENOCIDE 1960 - 1996
THROUGHOUT THE GUATEMALAN CIVIL WAR FROM 1960-1996, OVER 200,000+ INDIGENOUS MAYANS WERE MURDERED BY STATE FORCES, AND OVER ONE MILLION MORE DISPLACED, IN WHAT IS REFERRED TO TODAY AS THE MAYAN GENOCIDE.
THE GUATEMALAN STATE FORCES RESPONSIBLE WERE ARMED AND TRAINED BY ISRAEL. WHEN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SUSPENDED MILITARY FUNDING TO THE GUATEMALAN STATE FORCES IN 1977 IN THE MIDST OF THE MAYAN GENOCIDE, ISRAEL GAVE THEM OVER $38 BILLION WORTH OF ARMS TO FILL THE GAP. THE 'GALIL' ASAULT RIFLE, AN ISRAELI-MADE WEAPON, WAS STANDARD ISSUE FOR THE GUATEMALAN ARMY BY 1980, WITH THE STATE OWNED SMALL-ARMS PRODUCTION FACILITY IN ALTA VERAPAZ PRODUCING ITS AMMUNITION UNDER ISRAELI ARMS LICENCES.”
Below are multiple in-color photos of Mayan families mourning, one photo in particular which shows indigenous Mayans carrying a seemingly endless line of coffins off into the distance. End ID.
Tumblr media
ID 5: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:
SREBRENICA - 1995
ALSO KNOWN AS THE SREBRENICA GENOCIDE. IN 1995 OVER 8,000+ BOSNIAN MUSLIMS WERE MASSACRED BY SERBIAN ARMY FORCES ARMED AND TRAINED BY ISRAEL. SERBIAN FORCES ETHNICALLY CLEANSED OVER 250,000+ MUSLIMS IN TOTAL ACROSS CROATIA AND BOSNIA.
TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHERS WERE WOUNDED, STARVED, WOMEN WERE MASS RAPED AND MANY WERE INCARCERATED IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. MANY OF THOSE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GENOCIDE FLED TO ISRAEL, WHERE THEY WERE GRANTED ISRAELI CITIZENSHIP IN ORDER TO AVOID ARREST AND PROSECUTION FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.”
Once again, the in-color photos below show various peoples mourning. Two of the photos specifically show people reaching their hands out over extremely long lists of just names of people who have died. End ID.
Tumblr media
ID 6: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:
TRAINING U.S. POLICE
SINCE 1990, HUNDREDS OF AMERICAN POLICE OFFICERS, INCLUDING AGENTS FROM THE FBI, CIA AND IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (ICE), HAVE EITHER BEEN SENT TO ISRAEL THROUGH POLICE TRAINING EXCHANGES, OR ATTENDED SUMMITS WITHIN THE U.S. THAT WERE SPONSORED BY ISRAELI LOBBY ORGANISATIONS.
THE KNEE-TO-NECK 'RESTRAINT' THAT DEREK CHAUVIN MURDERED GEORGE FLOYD WITH, IS OFTEN USED BY ISRAELI POLICE AND SOLIDERS AGAINST PALESTINIANS.
BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
Photos below are in-color and show various B.L.M. protests. End ID.
Tumblr media
ID 7: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:
ARMING INDIA'S VIOLENCE IN KASHMIR
INDIA IS ISRAEL'S LARGEST ARMS CLIENT, MAKING UP OVER 45% OF ISRAEL'S ARMS SALES. BUYING ISRAELI AMMUNITION AND AIR-TO-GROUND MISSILES, ON THE PREMISE THEY HAVE BEEN 'BATTLE-TESTED' ON PALESTINIANS IN GAZA. ISRAEL PROVIDES INDIA WITH THE ARMS INDIA USES TO MILITARILY OCCUPY KASHMIR AND BRUTALISE KASHMIRI'S.
SINCE 1989, OVER 100,000+ KASHMIRIS HAVE BEEN KILLED BY INDIAN FORCES. WITH OVER 7,200+ KASHMIRIS BEING MURDERED IN INDIAN POLICE CUSTODY, OVER 110,000+ KASHMIRI CHILDREN HAVE BEEN ORPHANED, AND MORE THAN 11,000+ KASHMIRI WOMEN HAVE BEEN RAPED BY INDIAN OCCUPATION FORCES. IN ADDITION, OVER 7,000+ UNNAMED MASS GRAVES HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED WITH THOUSANDS OF VICTIMS.”
The photos below show israel and india’s leaders shaking hands and various armed indian soldiers stopping Kashmiris for unnecessary checks. End ID.
Tumblr media
ID 8: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:
PINOCHET COUP - CHILE 1973
CIA BACKED DICTATOR, AUGUSTO PINOCHET TOOK OVER CHILE ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1973. OVERTHROWING ITS DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT, SALVADOR ALLENDE. THE NEXT DAY HIS FORCES BEGAN KIDNAPPING ANYONE THEY SUSPECTED OF BEING LEFT WING AND PLACED THEM IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS.
PINOCHET'S SECRET POLICE, DINA (DIRECCION DE INTELIGENCIA NACIONAL) RAN THOSE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND TORTURE CENTRES, AND THEY FREQUENTLY ABDUCTED, 'DISAPPEARED' AND EXECUTED CHILEAN CIVILIANS. ISRAEL TRAINED DINA AND WAS ALSO ONE OF PINOCHET'S MAIN ARMS SUPPLIERS.”
Black and white photos below showcase various scenes of armed DINA officers, with one photo in particular showing them in a tank over bodies on the ground, presumably dead. End ID.
Tumblr media
ID 9: In all caps, “ISRAEL'S INVOLVED IN:
ETHNICALLY CLEANSING ARMENIANS - ONGOING
ISRAEL HAS BEEN FUNDING AND ARMING AZERBAIJAN'S MILITARY SINCE 1988, ARMS WHICH HAVE BEEN USED TO KILL ARMENIAN CIVILIANS THROUGHOUT AZERBAIJAN'S ONGOING ETHNIC CLEANSING OF ARTSAKH. THE ISRAELI REGIME SUPPLIES AZERBAIJAN WITH OVER 70% OF ITS MILITARY ARSENAL.
IN ADDITION TO PROVIDING THE ARMS TO KILL ARMENIANS, ISRAEL ALSO REFUSES TO RECOGNISE THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, COMMITTED BY THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE (TURKEY) FROM 1914-1923, WHO SYSTEMATICALLY MURDERED OVER 1.5 MILLION ARMENIAN CIVILIANS.”
Photos below show israel and azerbaijan’s leaders shaking hands, azerbaijan’s soldiers menacingly standing in front of someone wrapped in an Armenian flag, and Armenians mourning over a shrine with their flags all around them. End ID.
Tumblr media
ID 10: In all caps, “THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM IS CONNECTED TO STRUGGLES ALL AROUND THE WORLD.
BECAUSE OPPRESSORS LIKE ISRAEL ARE NOT ONLY UPHOLDING OPPRESSION AGAINST ONE POPULATION, ITS ALWAYS INTERCONNECTED TO OPPRESSING MANY MORE.
FREE PALESTINE.” No photos at the bottom of this slide. End ID.
1K notes · View notes
txttletale · 1 year
Note
h… how is any of that racist
assuming that you mean my posts about the 5e monster manual entry for orcs and how insanely racist it is--by happy coincidence i have a bunch of sources about this strewn haphazardly across my browser so i'm happy to answer this.
Tumblr media
so we will start with this. the words 'tribe' and 'chief' are deeply, deeply racialised. they have been used throughout colonial (and well into modern and present-day!) history to describe groups of indigenous peoples across the world—with implications of 'primitive' people and societies within the Western myth of linear societal progress. europeans have nations and kings--africans and native americans have tribes and chiefs. the 'tribe' is not a neutral concept--it is a concept that was constructed by europeans in positions of global military domination over a century to justify a narrative about the linear progress of civilization to justify domination [1][2]. of course, it's not just the use of the words 'tribe' or 'chief' but their deployment here in the context of what is obviously supposed to be a 'primitive' method of of government--the 'orcish tribe' is inherently violence, a 'savage' society entirely built on "bloodlust" and "fear"
regis stella puts it much better than i could in this account of an early 20th-century travel memoir in Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject
Tumblr media
while we're on this point i figure i'll add all the other language around 'savagery', 'inherent bloodlust' and so on in the monster manual here to further illustrate my point: it's all quite rote and repeats itself a lot.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
now, wait, waiiiit, wait a second. wait a moment. hold up what was that last thing
Tumblr media
oh thats not good. having to explain why this is racist feels a little like having to explain why its bad to hit people with hammers but i'll do it anyway: the comparison of real-life 'tribes' of people to insects, vermin, and pestilences is a very real element of genocidal rhetoric--from the holocaust [3] to the rwandan genocide [4]. what is the implied correct societal responose to a tribe that is 'like a plague?'
Tumblr media
finally, this is the part that made me say "holy fucking shit this is in the 5th edition monster manual?" because it is pure undiluted gygaxian eugenics shit. first of all, the narrative of the ever-swelling horde, the indigenous or Asian people as an undiffernetiated mass of amorphous Other, is an old one and one that's been used to devalue the lives of people of colour and justify violence against 'the horde'. but the part that's absolutely jaw-dropping is the use of the tropes of reproductive racism--the narrative of Black and indigenous hyperfecundity is also an established racist trope, one which was instrumental in the forced sterilisation of Black and Native women in the USA [5] and now manifests itself in the "great replacement" demographic anxieties of modern racism [6] -- think of White Genocide conspiracy theories and the 14 Words. and of course that is to say nothing of the fact that is made very clear and reiterated (and mechanicised in the form of the Half-Orc player race!) that WotC wants to be very clear about how much orcs "readily crossbreed with other races". this is miscegenation anxiety, plain and simple--somethign else stella talks about.
Tumblr media
so yeah! hopefully nobody will ever ask me this fucking question again! (this is just across two fucking pages of the monster manual by the way don’t get me started on the shit that’s in the other books! god forbid i even think about campaign modules!!)
3K notes · View notes
hotvintagepoll · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Propaganda
Marpessa Dawn (Black Orpheus)—She's like. fairy tale princess etheral pretty. truly eurydice realness. AND she's a singer AND she's a dancer. she used to be a governess/nightclub dancer, which isn't hot per say i just thought it was an interesting job combination. If you want to hear her sing just look up the Black Orpheus soundtrack
Irene Papas (Tribute to a Bad Man, Electra, Zorba the Greek)—"From the opening shot of Michael Cacoyannis's Electra, as the proud, implacable face emerges from encroaching shadows, it becomes impossible to imagine anyone else as Euripides's heroine. Erect, immutably dignified, dark eyes burning fiercely beneath heavy black brows, Irene Papas visibly embodies the sublimity of classical Greece, tragic yet serene." -Philip Kemp (film critic) Also she's a a badass.
This is round 4 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.
[additional propaganda submitted under the cut.]
Marpessa Dawn:
Tumblr media
Marpessa Dawn was an filipina/african american who became well known as an actress, singer and dancer in France. She is most famous for her role in 'Black Orpheus' in which she played Eurydice. It's difficult to find a picture where she and her husband, the actor Eric Vander, aren't kissing or hugging or laughing together, they are incredibly cute (and hot).
Tumblr media
basically everyone and their mother will agree that marpessa dawn was one of THEE og vintage black women working in cinema (even if it was mostly in french cinema! the cross language barrier slay). mostly did her work in french cinema, and her smile in black orpheus is literally like the sun breaking over the sea
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Irene Papas:
Tumblr media
An amazing actress and singer, some may say a literal Greek goddess. Fought against military dictatorship in her home country and had an affair with Marlon Brando.
Tumblr media
She literally played Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world in Greek mythology, what more could you want
Tumblr media
308 notes · View notes
reportwire · 2 years
Text
Nine Army Bases Honoring Confederate Leaders Could Soon Have New Names | Smart News
Nine Army Bases Honoring Confederate Leaders Could Soon Have New Names | Smart News
Black soldiers during World War II Bureau of Global Public Affairs photo archive under public domain United States Army bases have historically been named for white men. But as the military continues to grapple with its racist history, which came under more intense scrutiny after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, the country’s defense department is taking a look inward and proposing new…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
Text
Tumblr media
Israel, pound for pound, is the best investment the US has ever made. Israel is the purest expression of Western power, combining militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, counterinsurgency, occupation, racism, instilling ideological defeat, huge profitable war-making and hi-tech development into a manticore of destruction, death, and mayhem. From Israel’s victory in the 1948-1949 war, US planners saw the country as a regional military power that could contain Arab military and political ambitions. Amidst France’s imperial sunset in the Arab region, the country aligned with Israel – trying to deliver a blow to Nasserist Egypt through the 1956 Tripartite Aggression with Britain and Israel, and armoring Zionism for its successful 1967 war against radical Arab nationalism in the frontline states. Green-lit by the US, the war left the Syrian Ba’athist fusion of Arab nationalism and Marxist-Leninism in shambles and slammed the Nasserist national development project. Israel also became a useful assassin, eliminating Arab radical luminaries from Mehdi Ben Barka to Ghassan Kanafani. From 1970 onwards, US military aid into Israel turned the country into a unique asset: an offshore arms factory; a regional irritant to Arab peace, stability, and popular regional development; a destructive gyro of world-wide counterinsurgency; a black hole drawing in regional surpluses and devoting them to endless defensive and offensive armament, away from social-popular welfare spending and non-military development. Uniquely, the US allowed Israel to keep the military aid partially within the country, slowly and steadily building up a massive military industrial capacity. Meanwhile, US-based capital inflows accelerated, taking advantage of Israel’s highly educated workforce in the defense sector, resting upon super-exploiting the Palestinian colonial underclass in other sectors. In return, Israel armed reactionary forces world-wide: from Argentina to Brazil to Chile, helping evade Congressional restrictions on arms shipments to the Nicaraguan Contras and advanced armaments to the South African apartheid regime. On a world scale, Israel has protected the political architecture of global capitalism. And its US domestic adjunct, the Anti-Defamation League, presaged wider Zionist capitalist investment in repression by carrying out wide-ranging spying on anti-racist, anti-Zionist, Arab-American and anti-apartheid movements.
360 notes · View notes
zvaigzdelasas · 2 months
Text
The junta’s announcement follows a visit by US officials this week which was led by assistant secretary of state for African affairs Molly Phee and included Gen Michael Langley, commander of the US Africa command. Col Amadou Abdramane said on Niger television on Saturday that the US delegation did not follow diplomatic protocol, and that Niger was not informed about the composition of the delegation, the date of its arrival or the agenda.
He added that the discussions were around the current military transition in Niger, military cooperation between the two countries and Niger’s choice of partners in the fight against militants linked to al-Qaida and Islamic State.[...]
“Niger regrets the intention of the American delegation to deny the sovereign Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and types of partnerships capable of truly helping them fight against terrorism,” Abdramane said.
“Also, the government of Niger forcefully denounces the condescending attitude accompanied by the threat of retaliation from the head of the American delegation towards the Nigerien government and people.”
Abdramane stopped short of saying US forces should leave. But he alleged their status and presence was illegal and violated constitutional and democratic rules because, he claimed, it was unilaterally imposed in 2012.
He said Niger was not aware of the number of US civilian and military personnel on its soil or the amount of equipment deployed and, according to the agreement, the US military had no obligation to respond to any request for help against militants.
“In light of all the above, the government of Niger, revokes with immediate effect the agreement concerning the status of United States military personnel and civilian employees of the American department of defence on the territory of the Republic of Niger,” Abdramane said.[...]
In October, Washington officially designated the military takeover as a coup, which triggered US laws restricting the military support and aid that it can provide to Niger. But in December, Phee said the US was willing to restore aid and security ties if Niger met certain conditions.
16 Mar 24
160 notes · View notes
rotzaprachim · 7 months
Text
essential reading.
Opinion - There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. - by Peter Beinart
 And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?
"In 1988, bombs exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged to prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future. Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”
Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope.
There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented, helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious? There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.
ADVERTISEMENT
Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline — which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use force only against military installations and industrial sites — because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American universities had at least partially divested from companies doing business in South Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain.
Tumblr media
In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.
The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.
As Jewish Israelis bury their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.
Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never step foot in it.
Tumblr media
Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948. Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last weekend.
Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north. The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”
But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.
It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.
And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which represents more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.
Tumblr media
The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.
Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.
The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.
That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.
The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.
Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”
Tumblr media
Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.
The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.
After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”
As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.
Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Tumblr media
Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”
Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.
Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.
Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.
From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?
Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.
290 notes · View notes
funkopersonal · 1 day
Text
Im quite literally so done with this shit. i keep on going back and forth between hiding all the i/p related tags, but then I realize that its seeped EVERYWHERE. It's in the motherhood tag, and jewish history tag, and everything else. I can't fucking escape it. I opened tiktok yesterday to see one of my favorite characters (iron man) weaponized to support the one group that wants to see me dead, the user saying that iron man would support palestine, and be an antizionist because he "spoke out against the public" and he wasn't like the sheep. It frustrates me to no end this horrible cycle of fucking misinformation that exists.
As a Gen Z, I simply do not understand how its reached this point? I can't even write all my feelings and information about how shitty this is in a single sitting because 1) it'd be too long and 2) my joints wont let me write that long. But how did it reach this point?
How did it reach the point where jewish/isreali stores are fucking marked to notify the public. Their windows are being broken and the stores are being robbed. How did it reach the point where jewish students on some campuses are told to stay home? how they're harassed out of specific areas, and campuses have been made unsafe? How did it reach the point that people literally have written "I ♡ Houthis & Hamas" and "no mercy for Jews."? How did it reach the point that there are nazi symbols, and hanging deadmans, and communist symbols being drawn on college campuses? How is it possible that students are calling for the end of jewish student unions and hillel international on campus? that'd be like calling for the end of the fucking muslim student organization, or disbanding an african-american affinity group. Which would never be acceptable, but apparently its fine when its jews.
I'm sick and tired of all the horrible conditions of palestenian cities being blamed on israel. Palestine is its own country. They had their own government until they elected Hamas to lead them. Hamas, who diverted all their funds to the military. Hamas, who uses hospitals and public spaces as their bases. Hamas, who built miitary tunnels under cities so that when they're invaded, the cities will collapse on itself. Hamas, who steals all humanitarian aid from its citizens. Hamas, who controls palestenian media and teaches hatred to its children. Hamas, who wants their citizens to become martyrs for their country, to die for their goal. Hamas, whose number one goal is to eradicate all jews. Hamas, who denies the existence of the holocaust. Hamas, who enlists children as soldiers and suicide bombers. Hamas, who has has never expressed an interest in a 2 state solution.
Is this the organization you consider freedom fighters? because i dont think they should ever, in any context, be called that. Hamas is nothing but terrorists.
Yes, the deaths and treatment of palestenian citizens is horrible. but no, this is not a genocide. Israel is trying to rid them of Hamas, because quite literally, no country should ever be forced to live in "harmony" with a terrorist group. Especially one who denies their existence and actively wants to kill them all. Israel has been letting palestenians get jobs in the country, has let palestine use their resources and water, all for years. They've let hamas continously bomb them, they've gotten used to a life of bomb shelters in every residence. Hamas has done nothing but crippled their country's own economy and society.
None of the surrounding coutnries want to let in palestenians, or live with palestenians. Egypt wants to annex Gaza, and Jordan wants the West Bank. In fact, they did own that land for a part of history! Yet Israel has let palestenians govern themselves for years, even when Hamas originally came into power, they didn't interfere. Not until they were provoked.
Yes, Israel has flaws. But welcome to the fucking real world, princess. Every country has flaws. Even America, you dipshits. This is not a little fandom for you to play sides on. its not some fictional world that has a black and white solution. Yes theres going to be deaths, just like in any other WAR. But you really can't call for the destruction of a country on the basis that they're trying to make sure they're allowed to stay a country? Because guess what honey bunchkins? "from the river to the sea" really doesn't mean what you think it does. It just means that you want to kill all jews, or at best, forcefully remove them and scatter them around the middle east. (to countries that have killed them in swaths in the past. To countries that have emprisoned jews for helping others escape. To countries that avidly hate jews and want them dead). I don't understand how that would mean peace in any way shape or form?
Not only that, but half of "protestors" and "activists" for palestine, haven't even done basic research. They dont know what river or sea theyre talking about. They dont know that "palestine" was not a palestenian state in 1948, but it was instead a BRITISH MANDATE, that was NOT fully occupied by palestenians. In fact, "palestenians" weren't a thing. Palestenians are just muslims and arabs from countries like syria, who lived alongside jews and christians in the same land (which was largely uninhabited for the most part). Yeah, you heard me right.
Honestly my thoughts on this issue are so scattered its so hard to make a solid points when I can just keep on going forever.
Fact is, Israel deserves to be a country. No one should be supporting Hamas. Everyone should be supporting the eradication of Hamas (and I mean Hamas not palestenian citizens). I don't get how these are debated, and seriously don't understand how citizens of america are so quick to support a terrorist group, to resort to antisemitism.
Im so done with this all. I cant believe we have to tell you gentiles that stoning a 13-year old kid for being jewish is horrible. That throwing a brick through an israeli-owned cafe in New York is horrible. That students not being able to be on campuses because of their religion or ethnicity is horrible.
This has to end.
Do your research, or don't speak (and terrorist-controlled propoganda channels don't count).
81 notes · View notes