#i could have been doing more for years to try and spread awareness for palestine and i never did and i wish i could go back and change that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

viv-hollande · 5 months

Text

Ok, so this is a post that I should have made sooner. I've been somewhat out of the loop with regards to current events and the state of discourse on this website courtesy of a pretty serious depressive episode from which I am only just now recovering. As I have emerged from this state I have been pushed towards a conclusion about this website and the state of discussion around the ongoing Israel-Gaza War that I had thus far avoided due in part to my barely possessing the energy to keep myself alive and due in part to my denial that the conclusion could be true. But that denial can no longer hold.

It has become openly apparent that the pro-Palestinian camp on this website has become popularly infused with a degree of blatant, aggressive antisemitism that I, in my naivety thought impossible in the days just after October 7. I am trying to avoid turning this into a mea culpa because that would be unproductive and feel self-serving, but I do feel an obligation to admit that I disregarded prescient warnings from Jewish users whose warnings I dismissed as over-blowing a problem that I felt was real, but more limited in scope than they made out.

I'm neither an idiot nor am I ignorant. I am well aware of the long history of antisemitism in leftist politics and in the Palestinian Liberation movement. Back at the beginning of this crisis I was prepared to see the occasional instance of antisemites using the inevitable, overwhelming Israeli retaliation as an excuse to air their hateful politics. I was prepared to see both the well-meaning but ignorant and the malicious alike sharing tweets from antisemitic pro-Palestine accounts, spreading and normalizing low-grade, subtle antisemitism. Make no mistake, this should have been condemned. Antisemitism, like all bigotries, has no 'safe' level. There is no background level of antisemitism that society should just accept as normal. But I was more focused on the inevitable cacophony of suffering that Israel would almost certainly begin meting out, and so I failed to act.

The fatal blow to my denial was the increasing prevalence of the use of quotation marks around the word "Israel" and "Israeli". The first few times I saw this, I didn't really understand what it meant. Still laboring under the belief that antisemitism was a manageable problem on the left, I was certain that most of the users on this site, well-intentioned, goodhearted, critically thinking people that they were, would have recognized and called out even disguised antisemitism before it took over a good 20-40% of all posts about the conflict. I was a damn naive fool. For those, like past me, who have not cottoned on to the meaning of the quotation marks, they have become a way to express the denial of the legitimacy or even existence of, individually or all together, the State of Israel, the Israeli people, or the right of either Jews or Israelis to identify as Israelis.

CONGRATULATIONS TUMBLR! You have successfully revived from depths of 4chan neo-Nazi boards the (((fucking echoes))).

Are you serious? Are you fuckers for real? This, right here, encapsulates the pitch-black absurdity of this whole situation and why I remained in denial for so long. Never, in a million years, would I imagine that the proudly pro-Social Justice, anti-fascist, 100% Certified SAFE-SPACE(tm) website would end up using the same language as the goddamn Nazis on 4chan. I thought this website was smarter than that. But noooo, it turns out that I was a damn naive fool.

This was where the post was originally going to end. I say my piece, hope to change a few minds, and commit myself to actually fighting antisemitism instead of sitting back and dismissing the problem. But I figure, while I'm here and while I still have the driving forces of anger and guilt pushing me along, I may as well put pen to paper and spew forth my other thoughts on the ongoing crisis. I am thus compiling a much longer post detailing my thoughts on some aspects of the current situation. [EDITED ~1:25 AM GMT, 5 Dec 2023: add link to finished post] That post will definitely be long, probably be angry, possibly wrong on some aspect of fact, and will absolutely be pretentious, preachy, self-righteous and hubristic to a positively Hellenistic degree. Brief, non-comprehensive summary so you can decide whether or not get mad at me ahead of time;

Israel does apartheid, or near enough for government work.

Israel is definitely conducting a campaign of forced displacement, possibly amounting to ethnic cleansing, but I remain unconvinced of the claim of genocide.

Hamas may or may not be a anti-colonialist revolutionary group, but it definitely is an antisemitic terrorist organization with genocidal aspirations and actively supporting them is morally indefensible. Yes, this includes the Al-Qassam Brigades.

Anti-colonial and other revolutionary movements do in fact have fundamental moral obligations and suffering oppression does not give you carte blanche to do terrorism, even when an oppressor attempts to render peaceful opposition impossible. There is a middle ground between peaceful marching and 850+ dead civilians; aim for that.

The left is just as prone to unhinged conspiracism as the right.

Verify your sources, for fuck's sake.

Use nuance. It won't kill you.

There's more, but it's a little difficult to summarize an unfinished post. If you want to argue with any of these points, go ahead, just keep in mind that a longer, more comprehensive post is in the works that might have the answer to your argument/complaint/insult/intellectual disagreement. If that post isn't up by midnight GMT on Friday, assume I forgot about it and argue away. In conclusion, antisemitism is bad, apartheid is also bad, Tumblr is a hellsite (derogatory), "From the river to the sea" is, in fact, antisemitic, seriously, stop saying it, take Jews seriously when they warn you about antisemitism instead of writing them off like a damn naive fool, and last but not least, free Palestine.

#antisemitism #israel gaza war #israel #palestine #fuck hamas #politics #leftism #free palestine #israel palestine conflict #misinformation #here goes nothing #kicking the hornet's nest

339 notes · View notes

dionysusprteam · 1 month

Text

Prediction: Eurovision is gonna be a disaster this year, not just from people boycotting (me included), but because it’s gonna be held in Malmö, and if you know anything about Malmö you know Israel preforming there will not go down well. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they have to cancel or delay the show (fingers crossed).

In all seriousness, as a Swedish person, it makes me nauseous to think that we’re giving a platform to Israel so they can continue spreading their disgusting hateful agenda. The double standard is so insane, Russia is banned from competing two seconds after invading Ukraine (which was good, they should be banned) but Israel is actively committing genocide and that’s just fine?

I’m never watching Eurovision again, it used to make me really happy but the truth is that it has always been problematic. I’ve been against Israel participating for many years now because of what they’ve continuously done to innocent Palestinians, but I can’t just turn a blind eye anymore. In reality I probably should have stopped watching Eurovision a long time ago but I really didn’t know any better, I wasn’t aware of all the strange and bad things that Eurovision has done/endorsed because I was a kid for most of it.

I’ve linked two videos I think are good that explore how Eurovision has been problematic in the past as well as currently (one is more in depth than the other).

If I’ve said something offensive or insensitive please let me know (unless its from a pro-Israel perspective), if anyone has any resources or recommendations on where I could learn more about what is happening in Palestine and/or how I could help (like books and/or charities) I’d really appreciate it! I try my best to educate myself and I always want to know more so I’d love any kind of help or direction if it’s something you feel like doing.

youtube

#eurovision #Eurovision 2024 #Israel #Palestine #free palestine #free gaza #Youtube

38 notes · View notes

missvioletvillainess · 1 month

Text

🇵🇸 Can we talk about the fact that I keep getting asked out by hot dykes at Pro-Palestine protests and it's so affirming and wholesome?? 🇵🇸

Because there's no queer liberation without the liberation of Palestinians. Because there's no freedom from oppression until Palestinians are free from Israeli occupation and if you're actively involved in that, I know you're a safe space. If I see you can create an ounce of discomfort in your life and disrupt it to one small degree to try and create comfort for those less privileged, I know you're someone I can trust.

I need to know you care about making change. I need to know you care not in an abstract, intangible way, but in a very real, disrupting your work schedule, cutting off friends, risking opportunities, put-your-ass-on-the-line, kind of way. If you care about change,you have to be actively involved, talking about it is not enough, it's never enough. It's easy to be woke and speak out about social issues until you actually have to be inconvenienced, unsafe or economically disadvantaged for doing so. Then it's hard. Thats why so many people agree with these political views but so few actually take out the time to get involved. Trust me, I know exactly how hard it is. I did it when I had no job, no home, no visa; I did it when I was triggered, when I was unsafe, when I was overworked and overwhelmed. I have been doing it since the bombing started, and I do it consistently every week.

Personally, I don't think I could be with a partner who isn't involved in activism to some degree. It's been a part of my life for years, and I've only been more radicalised as time goes on. I'm attending 2-3 Pro-Palestine events every week, I can't date you if you have a 🇵🇸 in your bio and that's the full extent of your contribution to the cause. Thank you, but no thank you, I'm going to move on. Palestine isn't the latest war or invasion or conflict, it isn't a sad tragic story for people to donate to out of sympathy, it is a systematic ethnic cleansing and a televised genocide. I don't have capacity to deal with someone who is lukewarm about this.

More importantly, I don't have capacity to to deal with someone who talks about social issues but isn't prepared to disrupt their lives to even a small, inconsequential degree to fight for a cause they believe in. You doesn't have to just support Palestine, you could be supporting Ukraine, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Congo. You could be supporting ethnic minorities in your community, you could be supporting refugees, abuse survivors, homeless people, trans people, anyone at all, but if you don't show up and get involved in the cause you believe in, if you don't put in the work, if you don't put in the effort; if you can't attend protests, demonstrations, teach ins, seminars, charity events; if you're not fundraising, boycotting, spreading awareness; if you can't give something of yourself to the community you want to support, I really don't know if I can be romantically involved with you.

That's why I think people at the protests have such a strong tight knit community, and that's why some people actually find safety and security in the people they meet and that's why they might want to pursue something romantic with the people they feel comfortable exploring with. It's hard showing up when you're overwhelmed and you're going to be late to work the next day. It's hard showing up when you have to miss your iftars, your hang outs, your social gatherings. It's hard showing up when you're broke and stressed, and it's hard showing up when you're late on assignments and meetings with your supervisor. It's hard as fuck, honestly. But if I see you're doing that, I know I can trust you to a certain degree, at least. I know you have your priorities straight, I know where your morals are aligned, I know where you're going to put your energy, and I want to be part of that.

Lets go to protests together, lets make banners together, lets attend fundraisers and political teach in sessions, let's have a date at an occupied space (actually did that last week) Lets romanticise the activism we do, because it's fucking powerful and we should celebrate it.

The sexiest thing a sapphic can do is be an activist, fucking fight me.

If you're not Pro Palestine, please unfollow. Or let me know, so I can block you. Kthanksbye.

🇵🇸 Dykes for Palestine

43 notes · View notes

magicalgirlagency · 1 month

Note

Why do you always gotta say "or the internet will die forever" and stuff? Ain't that doomer behavior?

Well yes, but actually no.

It's just that I'm trying to get people to wake up and spread the word much, much faster; I mean, the USA wants to ban TikTok because a vocal group of people is using it to raise pro-Palestine awareness, this is just the beginning.

Oh, and before anyone says "Just use VPNs!", the US is also pushing another law to criminalize VPN usage where you could end up in jail for 20 years, as well as pay a $1million fine for your release, so it's useless to dance around the restrictions.

They blab about how much they cherish freedom of speech, but are actively attempting to silence others in the same breath and even willing to violate its own amendment to get even more minorities murdered.

This wouldn't be a problem if a crushing majority of the internet weren't US-based/centralized; even if you aren't from the United States, this draconian bill WILL majorly and totally affect you in one way or another.

And I would like to take this opportunity to tell everyone that I will NOT answer any more asks until I see more people reblogging the previous post. If you guys can interact with me, than you certainly can reblog/share the post informing of KOSA's threat (however, I did have programmed a post for March 22nd, because while I am scared for this blog's survival, I also wanna know if the crisis has been adverted).

So, I won't say it again: If you guys don't spread the word, this blog, as well as other blogs within this platform, and many other social networks, websites of informative/educational nature (LGBTQ+ subjects, pro-Palestine, abortion/reproductive healthcare, etc.) and even fandom-related spaces...

...WILL DIE.

EDIT: It's sweet that you guys are reblogging this ask of mine, but shouldn't you be reblogging THIS LINK DOWN HERE INSTEAD?

#magical girl #stop kosa #i'm being serious.#i've already had a suicidal episode because of this shit; i'm afraid of going through it again.

34 notes · View notes

phantomram-b00 · 3 months

Text

Okay so I’m joining solitary of the strike curtesy to Bisan from 21st to 28th for Palestine as they are actively in need of our help, i advice all to do the same. But I see an alerting thing that I need to address rn. To spread awareness and to make sure my mutuals/followers don’t fall victim into this.

So there even donation scams going around this app, such as:

I’ve saw two more of these, one of me was posing as a Palestinian Mother with two kids whilst the other claimed to need money for their lungs. Now I wish I had these screenshots to prove my claims but at the time I wasn’t sure if I was going crazy or was the only one having this gut feeling. But today, I realize this has been an alarming thing. This just happen to me, and I’m finding out, this is how they’ll get you:

Typically, they’re use your AMA to ask for donation, whether it on their animal, children, etc that require their donation usually by PayPal. Another is that, they’ll randomly follow you and immediately use the AMA to try to get you to either donate to them or signal boost their donation. Usually their story will be a copy paste as it more than just one. This situation is truly worse than p*rnbots. And frankly it absolutely disgusting.

If you want more proof other than the proof I just showed above, go search on Donation Scam and you’ll see many of these scammers. Here are one I can provide as there more than one incident where this happen:

Now to try to prevent this from happening I will link also a blog that goes in depth on how to prevent something like this from happen to you ghost pals or your mutuals or followers so they don’t fall victim into this:

What can I tell you, my mutuals and followers is that, please report them and block them is this does happen to you.

“But what if they’re being truthful”

I wish I can tell you, but the sad truth, it can be tricky because it the internet, as much as it a place to connect, it can also be a place to deceive you. So the best advice as I can tell you is be on your P’s and Q’s. Because years ago I was scammed and hacked for trusting a source I thought was factual. So I don’t want that to happen to you Ghostly Pals. And for my mutuals/friends, please be careful. 🩶 but I do have an advice, save their photo and run it by a photo finder I personally use TinEye and see if the image have been posted anyway, but if you have another you prefer even better:

Originally I was gonna make a post about boundary regarding the AMA but now that I see this have been a new scam running rampant on tumblr, I can’t keep my mouth shut about this and I need to let this be known. But I will still say, please only use my AMA for asking questions or telling me things whether it’s Good omens related or whatever. Please don’t use it to ask for donations like what these scammers are doing. I hope this doesn’t make me sound like an asshole but I just want to be safe. Until then please spread this around, make this known. Please.

I will like to thank the people whom I’ve linked as if it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have known that this was an ongoing problem so I advice you look at the links and listen to them as your speading awareness.

#donation scam #scams #scammers #cat scam #please spread #spreading awareness #psa #important #important psa #spread awareness #scam #please listen #this is important #beware #please dont ignore this

14 notes · View notes

anamericangirl · 1 month

Note

Hi there, I was wondering if you maybe have some advice?

I have a friend on here who posts a fairly small amount about the israel/palestine stuff, but it's all very pro-palestine, and she didn't used to post about politics a lot before the war started. She's still pretty chill though, and seems like she has her head on reasonably straight, but has just been taken in by the genocide talk, and humanitarian crisis things.

So I was wondering if you had any advice on what I could do to try and talk to her, and maybe help her look at things more critically? Or even some posts on here that have a more measured look on the war. I don't post about politics a lot ever since a bunch of people cut me off for being pro-life, but this has really been weighing on me lately.

I think it's great you want to approach your friend and help her to look at things more critically. With the way information is consumed these days it's extremely easy to just automatically share whatever you see and assume it's correct and that seems to be the habit she's fallen into.

Typically, what I try to do with someone I know personally when I notice that they are falling into that pattern and just spreading information they saw on the internet and just uncritically accepted it is really just to try to ask them questions in a non-hostile manner. Not from a confrontational mindset, but a curious one.

Like in this instance I would probably approach her just asking her why she supports Palestine and just base my next questions on whatever her response is.

If she claims Israel is committing genocide some follow up questions you could ask are:

"Why do you believe Israel is committing genocide?"

"What do you consider to be genocide?"

"Are you aware the Palestine population has been steadily increasing over the last several years? Wouldn't that make the idea that they're committing genocide a little less credible?"

"Do you think Hamas is trying to commit genocide at all or do you think it's just Israel?"

Whatever she says about Israel you can acknowledge it and say you understand her perspective but I think asking for her opinions on some the things Hamas does that she just might not be aware of would be helpful. Like, for example:

"Do you feel like Hamas was justified in their attack on Israeli civilians on October 7? Why or why not?"

"How do you feel about the fact that Hamas uses their own citizens, including children, as human shields?" This is something they've admitted to.

"How do you feel about the fact that Hamas lied about Israel, saying they had blown up a hospital and killed 500 people when in reality Israel hadn't done anything and Hamas' own rocket hit a parking lot and no on was killed?" We know this to be a fact because we have it on video.

"How do you feel about the fact that Hamas is run by billionaires with plenty of funds and instead of using that money to feed and house their citizens they just use it to to keep firing rockets at Israel?"

"How do you feel about Hamas stealing the aid meant for civilians?"

By just asking her questions it will help expose her to how much she doesn't know about this situation. And she might not like that and might get a little defensive, but it will at least show her there's a lot she doesn't know and she doesn't have a well rounded perspective on this issue.

Ask her if she's ever looked at this issue from the other side or listened to anyone who isn't pro-palestine. Has she given both sides a fair look before picking a side or is she just reposting whatever is coming across her path without question?

You can offer to show her some posts from the other side that you found helpful and resourceful or things that at least cast doubt on all the claims of genocide.

That is at least how I tend to go about things and find it to be a better tactic than just challenging everything they say. I hope this was at least somewhat helpful but if you have any more questions feel free to ask :)

#anon #answered

9 notes · View notes

p3rson27 · 2 months

Note

You retards keep calling Israel an ethnostate despite the fact that literally 21% of the population is Arab. Druze, Bedouins, Christians, and various other nationalities all live there as well, and everyone has equal rights under the law. The person who started calling Israel an ethnostate was Richard Spencer btw so good job getting your lie of a talking point from a literal Neo-Nazi 👍 Then again, you shitstains are all Nazis so I guess it's understandable.

I know this doesn't deserve an answer but I have to laugh for so many reasons.

Arguing the minutiae of the definition of ethnostate when ethnostate and ethnocracy have been used interchangeably to describe Israel by many historians since approximately the 90s. Problem is tumblr isn't the place for fully historically accurate semantics of language. Also, I'm not going to background check every historian who's ever opened their mouth in the past 30 years. Sorry!

I'm a silly little shitpost blog. I make silly little shitposts. Sure, sometimes I get political, but if you're not having a good time, you can just leave. I've never made an original post in support of Palestine, just reblogs, but I do my due diligence with stuff like this.

Specifically I get paid to do my due diligence. I work as a community organizer in my hometown, advocating for the common people, spreading accessible education on justice and equity and working to create an ethically minded community across my town, then to my state, then to my nation, and then to the world. The situation in Palestine is something we talk about and learn about constantly, so I can say with confidence that you are worried about all the wrong things, and the atrocities being done disproportionately to innocent civilians should be the thing that makes you mad. Not some random guy who touched a post you disagree with.

It's my job to deal with this kind of thing. Every single day. As much as being angwy on tumblr can do for you, action is different than advocacy and awareness. If you really wanted to make a difference, try harder.

Lastly, and the reason this is so funny to me, I'm literally fucking jewish bestie. I'm a black, goth, genderqueer jew. Nazis hate me for existing. When my uncle survived a concentration camp, he was part of a collective of people who said "Never again. Not for anyone" and we take that shit seriously. Not for anyone. You can't throw the word nazi around just because someone hurt your feelings.

There is no hope for people like you. People who see the public and blatant bullshit Israel is doing and think that it's the Palestinians who are in the wrong. Listen to this Jew, and the voices of countless others. Nothing that the Palestinian people have done or could do will ever make what that have suffered justifiable.

Reread that sentence again. No more yelling about semantics. No more crying about definitions. This is where we are. There is no discussion until you agree with this one point. The rest of the conversation must be built up from there, otherwise you are not on the side of justice and equity.

#truely what are you even doing here #I'm confident you won't read any of that #but thanks for taking my mind off my anxiety for a second i guess #if you want to pick on someone #maybe don't trying yelling about politics to the person who's job includes fighting politicians

0 notes

revolutionarysuicide · 4 months

Note

Hello. I'm the op who posed that 'idf was the nakba terrorist?' question to tamarrud. I know you mean well and you are probably very frustrated with the situation as a whole, but I would appreciate it very much if people already in the know don't shame my little provocative action for the sake of spreading the truth to those who don't in fact know yet. As you may be aware, we are still working with the issue of the media branding the resistance as terrorists and consequently giving IOF the full grace of pardon. I intended to attempt a little snowball show so that it may reach more people and hopefully end the war/genocide earlier. Honestly, I didn't much expect tamarrud to answer, much less answer so thoroughly. If you still have the desire to spit in my face for not doing enough, be my guest. I suppose some therapeutic outbursts is called for considering the death toll hasn't stopped, but that still doesn't mean I wouldn't judge you, as you judge me.

No you don't need to reply to this. But you can do whatever. This isn't even an ask, this is half because I'm communicating primarily through asks because for some reason my messaging in tumblr is now simply nonexistent and I can't comment on posts either.

I'm sorry. I got upset and I know logically it's not appropriate. I know people are still being killed. I just wish people would blare this information in ads and big screens in the west so the zionists can finally be shut down and the IOF could be persecuted after 75+ years of freedom from the law and the murders. will. end.

If I could hack the news where I got this info from to big ads in big cities, I would DO IT. Can anyone else do it? It's on Middle East Eye, I got it from there...

a. i wasn't personally attacking you, i was just expressing surprise that people didn't know. also a lot of people who didn't know reblogged that post, my surprise was directed just as much at them as it was at the anon.

b. honestly i think it's fine to be annoyed at people still not knowing basic facts about the nakba and the origin of israel, when the palestine liberation movement, headed by palestinians, has been trying desperately to get the world to understand their plight for over 75 years now. the information is readily available, just because it's not being spoonfed to you by the mainstream media doesn't mean there aren't tons of books and articles and resources out there, available for free online and possibly at your local libraries and bookstores too. it's not a huge ask for people who claim to be in solidarity with a colonised people to learn the basic facts about the history of their colonisation.

This isn't even an ask, this is half because I'm communicating primarily through asks because for some reason my messaging in tumblr is now simply nonexistent and I can't comment on posts either.

that sounds like you've been shadowbanned, it happened to me a while ago too. basically it's a measure that's supposed to only be applied to bots but for some reason it gets applied to human users too (functional webbed site). luckily one of the few areas where staff actually do do their job is lifting shadowbans, i got mine lifted by contacting @/humans. you may need to get a non-shadowbanned friend to tag them for you as your account won't appear in people's notifications while shadowbanned. or you can message them on a sideblog, sideblogs will still work if your main blog is shadowbanned.

#asks

1 note · View note

dectech · 6 months

Text

reposting this because OP turned off reblogs but i feel this is too important not to share

I have been noodling over posting this for several days but I think it's important for some people to hear.

At a March on Saturday, at a pro Palestine march, my group and I were targeted by by nazis. Not targeted for violence, but targeted for recruitment. They weren't wearing swastikas, they weren't spewing blatant antisemitic hate speech. They seemed like two normal dudes. They marched with us, talked about how awful everything in Palestine was, how we wished world leaders would grow a pair and hold Israel responsible for fucking war crimes, how existing in the world right now was hard. They were empathetic, they were kind, they seemed like genuine good dudes.

Until we passed a synagogue where people were handing our water to marchers. They had signs defending Palestine on their table. But the tone of the conversation changed. These two seemingly normal dudes started talking about how "performative" the gesture felt, that Jewish people should be doing more. That they needed to PROVE it. They started talking about "Zionist" propaganda in the US, about how it was deeply entrenched in capitalism. Things that, on the surface, seemed reasonable but it set off alarm bells in my head.

When I was a kid, I remember getting the speech of "don't repeat anything your uncle or cousin so and so says and don't argue with them. Try to avoid them but if you can't be polite." Because those uncles and cousins said a lot of hateful things about anyone who wasn't like them, but their favorite targets were black people and Jewish people. I would find out as an adult it was because many of those uncles and cousins were in the Klan. When I studied hate symbols for a class in college, I found my self looking at images I'd seen on arms and necks and hands my whole life, because I live in an area of the US where the KKK is still around. And standing in that crowd, listening to these guys talk, i had the most horrible realization I've had in a long time.

We were being fished by Nazis. We were a group of able body, white American leftists. At a march in support of stopping the murder and genocide of Palestinians, these motherfuckers were out here, trying to find people they could get to hate Jewish folks. I wasn't the only one in my group who clocked it, and when we called them on it, the masks came off. They called us a bunch of "Jew loving bitches" before they moved on.

But we're marched with these guys for a couple hours, talked with them, laughed with them, brought them into our circle. For a moment we forgot we also weren't immune to propaganda, we weren't immune to people who make hate sound reasonable and that people like that never start out saying the quiet part out loud, they lean on your anger and your sense of helplessness to move you where they want you. If the last eight years has taught us anything, it's that fascists know how to adjust to the times, to work with what they got, to recruit. They know how to radicalize people, how to weaponize anger and helplessness. And I'm sitting here, every day, seeing posts that sound exactly like these guys did and it worries me.

I know I'm talking to the No Reading Comprehension Website, but I'm begging you guys to develop some now.

You are not immune to propaganda. We are all angry, as we fucking should be. We are watching an entire culture, thousands of lives, whole bloodlines, being wiped out in real time, and for many of us our nations are at best, wringing their hands, and at worst, shipping them weapons, all to protect capitalist greed. It's monstrous, it's disgusting. But look, REALLY LOOK, at the things you are tweeting, sharing, look at the language and how it's used. Take the time to educate yourself about how hate groups use social justice causes and civil unrest to recruit, research the posts your spreading, check your sources. If you are out protesting, be situationally aware, and do not be afraid to clock and call out Nazis. Listen to Jewish people, listen to their concerns, educate yourself on what Zionism and antisemitism actually are and how they can be weaponized. It doesn't feel as good as rage, it doesn't feel as good as having a group you can functionally rail against in a way we can't against a nation a world away, but it's a skill that's going to help you and a lot of other people in the long run.

0 notes

hatari-translations · 4 years

Photo

This interview with Klemens and Anna Hildur (director of A Song Called Hate) appeared in Fréttablaðið the other day. Translation below.

"Really this is a documentarian's dream, working so closely with the subject," says filmmaker Anna Hildur Hildibrandsdóttir. She produces and directs the documentary A Song Called Hate, which will premiere at RIFF later this month. The film is about Hatari's participation in the Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv in Israel in 2019, with Anna Hildur and her camera crew following the Hatari group to Israel and Palestine.

Klemens Hannigan, one of the members of Hatari, says the idea of a documentary in connection with Hatari's Eurovision participation came about early in the process. "When we decided to go ahead and participate in this contest and as we were shaping the performance and the message we wanted to convey, we already had the idea of documenting this process somehow ourselves," Klemens explains.

He says originally, though, the idea was to create a staged documentary, or 'mockumentary'. "As Hatari we want to stage everything, but then it dawns on us, when Anna has been brought in and starts to propose that this should just be a documentary, that the subject was both so fascinating and so important that a mockumentary wouldn't have done it justice," says Klemens.

Anna, who recently entered the film industry after over twenty years in the music business, proposed the idea of the film to her collaborators in Britain and began to look for a director for the project, which she was only planning to produce. "I contacted Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who directed 20000 Days on Earth with Nick Cave, and I told them I needed people like them for this project. Then I searched and searched for a director until they told me I'd just have to step in and do it myself, which I did," says Anna. "They promised to help and are executive producing the film."

Hatari vulnerable

Hatari's Eurovision participation was shrouded in mystery and neither the Icelandic audience nor the international one could predict what was coming.

Anna and Klemens say that in the film the audience gets to experience the contest and everything that came with it in a different way. The members of Hatari appear vulnerable and out of character. "There was a lot of vulnerability in being the subjects of a documentary, for us, because up until this point we had never opened up as Klemens, Matthías, Einar or the others, but it was much harder to maintain that silence and stage every moment during the contest," says Klemens.

"It was really important to catch them vulnerable and out of character, and it was a very close collaboration. We were out there with them for 18 days and it was a really unique time," says Anna. "I was very conscious that I had to stay a bit outside it all and keep my head screwed on straight, because it was a lot of work and no day was the same," she adds.

The message as the primary objective

Klemens says there was a lot of pressure on Hatari during the contest as well as in preparation for it. They were part of the Eurovision-bubble, as he calls it, part of the RÚV team and the subjects of the documentary, but their primary objective was to spread their message and take a stand against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Before Hatari's participation in Eurovision last year, opinions were divided on Iceland's participation. According to a poll by the Zenter research group for Fréttablaðið in May last year, a quarter of the population wanted to boycott the contest to support Palestinians.

"The reason we participated in this contest was that Iceland was going to participate, there would be some participant going to Tel Aviv on Iceland's behalf, and we felt that given that was happening, that participant should try their best to raise awareness of the horrific situation going on there. We wanted to show our stance in action," says Klemens.

"I thought it was very interesting to make a documentary about how they did, and it was not at all clear what would happen on this journey, there were so many unknown variables the whole time," Anna says.

"We hadn't planned anything one hundred percent but we had certain ideas about how we could support Palestinians and raise awareness of the occupation. It was always like we were jumping off a cliff because we never knew what would happen next," says Klemens. "All we knew was that the further we got, the more attention we would get and the more people would hear our message."

"For the documentarian, what mattered most was that they'd stay in the contest as long as possible, and we knew the stunt wasn't going to have any real impact unless they made it to the grand final," says Anna.

Important to use the airtime

They say that the collaboration went well and that the making of the film went smoothly. "There was basically no tension between us. We always got to know as much as possible about what would happen next, but it was frequently very exciting and even stressful. For instance, the electrified atmosphere in the green room after the final when the Palestine banners had been shown, the camera crew didn't know that ahead of time," says Anna.

Asked whether the stunt had been planned ahead of time, Klemens says it wasn't. "There were a lot of ideas going on. Whether we should get expelled from the contest, or just be completely silent on stage, say nothing at all, and then we had the banners under our clothes. When we saw we weren't getting any points from the juries and were not about to win, we realized that these would be the only seconds we'd have on camera, and we had to use that airtime."

The members of Hatari have spoken about the importance of using their agenda-setting powers and giving a voice to those who lack it; Hatari interviewed many Israeli and Palestinian activists and artists while creating the film and during the contest. Many of the connections they formed are still going strong, perhaps especially their relationship with Palestinian musician Bashar Murad.

"He was our connection to Palestinian culture and the suffering that they've been through and is still ongoing today," says Klemens. "Our collaboration with him and other Palestinians was a huge part of passing on our message," he adds.

"The art of taking a stand is the theme of the movie, as well as seeing the role of art in a social context. It can be controversial to participate and not boycott, but the dialogue between people is important. I wonder if cultural and academic boycott is truly effective in the fight for change," Anna says, adding that the journey to Israel and Palestine and the creation of the film will without a doubt be among the most memorable in her life. "I think the whole group that went there shares a life experience that we'll always keep with us, and the message will live on in the film," she says.

"We communicated the message primarily through the provocative act and our collaboration with Bashar and other artists, but now the documentary will follow up, give the act an ongoing life," says Klemens.

A Song Called Hate will premiere at the international film festival RIFF on Friday September 25th in Bíó Paradís. It will then become available on the website riff.is, as the festival is in an unusual format this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

#hatari #a song called hate #interview #translation

60 notes · View notes

sustainabilitysarah · 4 years

Text

Progress in Food Production Illustration

In 1968, when I was and impressionable six years old horrified by what the television was showing about the Vietnam War, listening to the Beatles sing 'All you need is love', my parents bought a book called "The Population Bomb" by scientist Paul Ehrlich. It suggested that we were running out of resources because our population was growing too fast and we were consuming our earth's life support system faster than it could

regenerate. Two years later, on the first Earth Day, I began my activism, rounding up the neighborhood kids and staging a clean up of the polluted stream behind our apartment that ran into the Hudson River.

A year later my Beatle idol George Harrison held a "Concert for Bangladesh" to raise awareness of the suffering there. Like many kids worried about the "starving kids in Bangladesh" I asked in school why things were getting so bad. Like most school children around the world, we were told how the population bomb supposedly worked, how it ticked. The idea went back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus who argued in 1798 that "population increases geometrically, while food supplies increase only

arithmetically". This has been the prevailing wisdom for over 2 centuries and is often illustrated by the following graph:http://www.biology.iupui.edu/biocourses/N100/images/ageomgrowth.gif

http://occ.crescentschool.org/geography/human/unitvagricultural/malthusgr aph.jpg

Looks neat, right -- so mathematically precise and inevitable. The problem is that it is wrong. I felt it as a kid. It bothered me throughout middle school and high school and on in to college. The reverend's now famous "Malthusian" predictions of doom and gloom came from a man who never studied biology... we now realize that he was a religious zealot and bigot who made up theories to try and stoke anti- immigration fever, arguing that undesirable poor people were basically breeding like rats. The problem in his logic is easy to spot when you use Nexus thinking: FOOD IS A POPULATION. Food comes from living creatures who have populations. They expand GEOMETRICALLY. If you let them. If you encourage them. It doesn't matter if we are talking about Brewer's yeast or earthworms or oak trees or apple trees or chickens or ears of corn or cattle or cocoa covered ants... whatever you eat comes from living organisms that are programmed to reproduce as fast as they can... that WANT to reproduce... geometrically. Just like us. So... population increases geometrically, whether it is us or our food. Starving kids in Bangladesh or Ethiopia simply shouldn't happen, and, I will insist to you, WOULDN'T, if we allowed the organism we eat to do their thing.

The key to keeping food production in line with food consumption, I have been arguing, is to use the "food-waste-to-fuel-and-fertilizer-and-food" or FW2F3 formula wherein every molecule of nitrogen, phosphorous, pottasium and carbon and micronutrients found in our wastes in our burgeoning cities is transformed immediately, in situ, back into food through the magical transduction of anaerobic and aerobic biodigestion and urban vertical farming and micro-livestock.

Using these simple techologies to close the loops in the food/energy/water nexus, the curves on those graphs should continue to go up in lock step, until we reach the limits set by sunlight. And then we will have to figure out safe, harmless ways to grow not just ourselves and our "economy" but our ecology, and eventually help grow new planets. But even that... the promise of space stations and terraforming planets, isn't out of the question. After all, the one thing that doesn't seem to ever be in any danger of NOT expanding... is the universe."

Today’s lecture is about “Progress in food production: a new wave of ancient practices and post-modern technologies that use less water and less energy, produce less waste and can even produce more energy.”

And I believe, to paraphrase Deuteronomy 12:3, we have to start by “tearing down the altars and smashing the sacred pillars” that were erected by wrong headed Malthusians who used a gross misunderstanding of biology and a total lack of nexus and systems thinking to scare us into what I call “induced paralysis for profit”. The idea comes from what is called in economics classes “The Scarcity Model: the fundamental economic assumption of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants in a world of limited resources, which states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs”.

When the scarcity model is used to create fear, to create an atmosphere of doom and gloom, to predict the inevitable arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine, and Death), political economists and political ecologists suggest that it is much easier for elite groups to manipulate the masses. They control the machinery of conquest and war, and they use the specter of famine to gain their power.

Food production sits at the heart of the nexus – every animal on this planet (and doubtless the vast majority of beings in our universe) finds food to be the fundamental. It is priority number one, for unless you are a being of pure light you need the food that grows with light to survive. And if you spread misinformation that famine is imminent, that starvation is just around the corner, you can mobilize armies.

However, looked at from a FEW Nexus perspective, this fear of famine we

have been living with since Biblical times (the four horsemen are part of the Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ to John of Patmos, at 6:1-8 in the New Testament written during the Roman occupation of Palestine) is a peculiar Middle Eastern and North European phenomenon it turns out, coming from civilizations in regions of the world where water stresses constrained food production. People in well-watered tropical regions rarely felt threatened by food scarcity and in fact were described by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins as living in a state of perpetual abundance. He postulated that hunter- gatherers were, in fact “the original affluent society” at a symposium entitled "Man the Hunter" in 1966 and this idea has been tested and found true for most peoples around the world where water was not a limiting factor. It explains why hunting and gathering and subsistence farming persist to this day, and why so many people resisted being brought into modern civilization or adopting modern agriculture methods. In fact the work of historian Anthropologist Eric Wolf, such as “Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century” and Yale professor James Scott in books such as “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” teach us that there have been enough failures due to the form of agriculture that emerged from the conquering civilizations that the conquered were willing to sacrifice their lives to revolt against them. Somehow, it seems, those certain schemes to improve yields were social and ecological disasters that should have been rejected by civilizations but instead were used to confirm the Reverend Malthus’ scientifically unfounded hypothesis – a classic but often neglected example of what is known as confirmation bias – which wiki defines as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative

possibilities”. When it comes to food production, the alternative possibility, which is persuasively argued in Richard Manning’s book “Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization” is that monocropping annual vegetation and basing civilization on grain agriculture, on the use of plants in the family Poaceae/Graminae, that is the grasses – wheat, rice, corn, barely, oats and sugar – yes, sugar is a grass – is, to caricature the 45th president of the world’s most powerful agriculture and military empire, “ a disaster”.

History records that agriculture and famine are the Jekyll and Hyde of the long and often militarized march of civilization. The one came because of the other, says Manning. Most of us were taught the opposite weren’t we? Taught that human life, as the 17th century imperial philosopher Thomas Hobbes decried in his book Leviathan, was “nasty, brutish and short” We were told that humans lived in a state of semi-starvation UNTIL they discovered agriculture. We were told that agriculture saved our species from hunger and misery, gave us the surpluses that enabled our climb to civilization. Sounds good, turns out not to be true.

Even Harvard’s Spencer Wells, a friend of mine who is the geneticist who leads the National Geographic Genographic project writes in his book “Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization” that when humans shifted from hunting and gathering in that original affluent society to grain agriculture the average height of men dropped from about 5 foot 7 to 5 foot 2 and women’s pelvic girdles narrowed to the point where death in childbirth increased in frequency.

These were clear signs of malnutrition recorded in the fossils. Agriculture was to blame... floodplain agriculture dependent on disturbance species that grow like weeds after a disaster because they are weeds. And they end up causing disasters thereafter because they evolved to live in disaster environments, places where floods and fires ravage the countryside on a regular basis. In effect they DEPEND on disasters for their own reproductive survival. It is as though once we hitched our caboose to the weeds and became weed eaters, we started living for them and not the other way around.

Michael Pollan talks about this in his wonderful book that reframes our relationship to addictive plants called “The Botany of Desire”.

He points out that you could look at us as the slaves of addictive plants that evolved to control us through their effect on our brains so that we would help them reproduce. This idea, which British Scientist Richard Dawkin’s calls “The Extended Phenotype” in the battle of Selfish Genes, isn’t really new.

In 1872, when Samuel Butler published his utopian fiction “Erewhon” the major premise of the people who fled Europe to live on the island of Erewhon in the hopes of creating a better civilization was that they would not allow themselves to submit to the control of their addictions or any system that makes us into its own slave. On the island they refuse to use technology like cars and steam engines and typewriters and telegraph or any machines. It isn’t that they don’t know about these things – in fact they have an entire museum where they keep them safely on display in glass cases. They tell visitors, “in your civilization machines don’t serve you, you serve them. You go to work in the morning and waste your days slavishly building more machines and oiling them and fixing them and keeping them running. It is like the bee that is the servant of the flower... flowers can’t move to reproduce themselves, so they addict the bee with beauty and nectar and perfumes and the busy bee spends its whole life toiling just to help make more flowers”. The phenotype of the bee is being controlled by the genes of the flower, not the bee. This is the concept of the extended phenotype, which finds its purest expression in parasitology.

So there are some who believe that the crops we turned to in our modern agricultural systems are acting more like Parasites that food stuffs, and that when we think we are serving food in the “restaurant service” sense , we literally are serving food – i.e. we now serve THEM, as servants.

This makes sense from the perspectives of evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology.

Whether it was drought in arid desert regions or winter freezing water into ice, the limits to plant growth and reproduction, and hence to animal fecundity were set by the availability of water. In the Middle East, certainly, it was not energy that was missing from the Nexus. Sunshine has always been abundant in those latitudes to provide energy for food production.

In the European countries the harsh winters did indeed constrain plant productivity and famines could result in winter if care wasn’t taken to take the enormous fecundity of the spring, summer and fall and store the harvest surplus for the fallow period. But Hunter Gatherers North and South, in the cold regions or the hot ones, originally depended on agroforestry, on tree crops, on perennials, not annuals. And they depended on the animals that depended on forests – on forest boars and jungle fowl and woodland ungulates – all the ancestors of our modern pigs and chicken and cows. In the north the forest leaf fall in the fall built up incredible rich soils during the winter ready for an explosion of food in the spring and summer which created enough surplus for the mammals we ate to survive the winter. In the south the forests retained the water that fell sporadically and created their own microclimates through transpiration. They forests created environments so rich in the cornucopia of foodstuffs that our mythology now recalls as “The Garden of Eden”.

And if you want some mythological proof of the disaster or agriculture, just look at the curse we were to endure after eating the tree of knowledge and getting kicked out of the garden, “To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat from it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground”. So eating bread isn’t salvation, eating bread is the CURSE. No wonder so many hunters and gatherers said, “shoot, I’m going back into the forest, no way I’m doing hard time through painful toil to eat when I can pick fruits and vegetables and trap

animals.” And the fossil evidence of malnutrition affecting the pelvic bones of women, noted by Spencer Wells in Pandora’s Seed, is corroborated in the curse in Genesis when God says, “To the woman he said, "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

We can even comment on what this reveals about the emergence of patriarchal rule due to the shift to grain agriculture. My experience with hunter-gatherer populations is that the women are usually the ones who

understood the sheer abundance of biodiversity that nature offered to put into the cooking pot. I experienced it when I was living with Melayu and Dyak tribes in the rainforests of Borneo and was taken into the forest by the medicine woman who was cooking our meal and her grandson who climbed the trees to get the foods. She was called the “witch doctor” and as she laid out the huge variety of foods we collected to put in the cooking pot I had images of the witches’ cauldron with its “eyes of newt, frogs legs, bats wings” – all things that would have provided great inexpensive abundant protein but which today are shamefully associated with evil and

witchcraft. After all, women were BURNED at the stake for understanding and promoting biodiversity in diet by the European patriarchy, and children punished or mocked for thinking they could go into the forest as kids do and come back munching on lizards and grubs. Agriculture can be blamed not only for this tremendous patriarchal violence and loss of biodiversity as we simplified the landscape to a handful of weedy grasses, but for what James Scott calls the “dummification” of humanity. At one time, as I experienced among the hunters and gatherers of Borneo, harvesting food was an educational adventure that made women and children experts who rivaled the best Ph.D. botanists and naturalists who Harvard sent out. With agriculture we turned brilliant self-sufficient peasants into outdoor factory workers and, of course, quite literally when you are talking about the first 400 years of agriculture in the European colonized Americas, slaves. The violence inherent in agriculture rears its ugly head everywhere.

And it could be said that Genesis itself records the clearest indication that grain agriculture is the scourge of mankind, the source of its original sin of violence in The story of Cain and Abel. This chapter of the Bible is the clearest indictment of wheat agriculture one could imagine, and nobody seems to comment on it. Abel is a pastoralist who tends a flock of animals who wander about like ungulate hunter gatherers, eating what God has given them. His brother Cain is... a wheat farmer, somehow stupidly living out God’s curse to scratch a living in the hot sun through toil amidst the thistles and thorns that always accompany weed agriculture. Abel brings a lamb meat sacrifice to the altar of God, along with diverse fruits and vegetables he has gathered, and God is pleased.

Cain then comes with a bunch of wheat and the Bible says, “but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard. So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell. Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen?7"If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it."...

To me this is a clear indication that the ancients saw wheat offerings as a kind of sin, the sin of an addiction, an addiction which Cain could not

master. In his anger he turns around and kills his gentle carnivorous animal slaughtering brother.

Think about it for a moment... it is enough to make Vegans go mad: The vegetarian is the killer, the slaughterer of baby goats is the gentle one.

Could it be that this ancient myths were there to warn us that wheat is a weed, that grains are drugs, that we haven’t been growing food all along, but addictive substances that will end up mastering us through the Botany of Desire?

So, to get back to Reverend Malthus, who in my opinion must not have spent an awful lot of time delving into the hermeneutic interpretation of the books he preached in his fiery diatribes against the poor and the immigrants, it is clear to me that the entire Matlhusian premise is based on a fabrication of the weed eaters, who most likely did observe that if they kept planting grains and consuming starches and sugars their own sickly but ever increasing population would outstrip the fecundity of the land and so human populations would increase geometrically while their drug-food agriculture would only increase arithmetically if at all.

But if Abel had been Abel, we might have returned to the garden a long long time ago, where food is a self-increasing population grown in permacultural symbiosis into perpetuity. The good news is, that the world as we know it IS coming to an end. And what is ending isn’t the good life, but the bad life we inherited from our dummified forebears. We can begin again. Permacultural Food Production shows us how.

1 note · View note

ramrodd · 4 years

Video

youtube

Who Wrote Hebrews? (With Dr. David Alan Black)

COMMENTARY:

Theophilus wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews. His signniture is Hebrews 13.:24

Greet all your leaders and all the saints. Those from Italy send you greetings. (https://biblehub.com/hebrews/13-24.htm).

This is in the format of a standard issue, by the numbrers Roman signals message. In the modern military bureaucracy I served in as a combat leader,, we continue to employ this method. It's not foolproof but it is a whole lot easier to use than passing around scrolls of vellum inscribed with hieroglyphics. This is the Roman MI5/MI6 talking to the rest of the clandestine Roman Christian cabal inside the Preaetorian Guards. The first sentence is what would head a military signal: Distribution and has the same purpose, this pattern of distribution, that Don Romsfeld's "Snow Flakes" and Trump's tweets, except that it security status was need to knon and the Distribution list probably contained within a modern spy network cell system: nor more than X number of people had a common source which evaporated upon reading. True MISSION: Impossible stuff, Le Carre and all the rest. That is WHY these 4 gospels exist: It's a military field manual for Christianity in the same way the Torah is a military field manual for social engineering. Trotsky said that trying to transform a culture is like trying to resurrect a cemetary. Well, Genesis, Exodus, and Numbes as the application of the social theory and Deuteronomy as the initial case study of the transformed culture.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are a case study in the recruitment, training and tuning of what amounts to a Green Beret "A" Team created to set a permanent transformation process in motion leading to humanity going boldy where there is no humanity at the moment, starting with the Moon. Apollo 11 is a direct result, epistemologically, of the relationship between the Cross and

John 15:1313Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. https://biblehub.com/john/15-13.htm

So, this is part of the internal communication of the Italian Cohort (AKA: The Centruion Cabal) that created the Holy Roman Church Hebrews is the manifesto for moving forward that the Italian Cohort distilled from all the data they had been compiling in Quelle to try and understand just what the fuck Resurrection was all about. The Romans didn't destroy Jerusalem: Judaism devoured itself. It learned the wrong lesson from Maccabbees and a millenium and a half of Karma from being bad neighbors since David collected 100 foreskins as a dowry came to a head in 70. 3 or four years after Hebrews was written.

The 13 epistles of Paul are, indeed, the 5th gospel and it would serve Christians for all Abrahamic traditions to accept that as, well, gospel. It is clear that Paul has at least read the current version of what has become The Gospel Accrording to Mark by the time he writes Galatians because of his use of εὐαγγελίου, which I propose is the Roman military signals protocol for STATUS. in

Galatians 2:5 οἷς οὐδὲ πρὸς ὥραν εἴξαμεν τῇ ὑποταγῇ, ἵνα ἡ ἀλήθεια τοῦ εὐαγγελίου διαμείνῃ πρὸς ὑμᾶς. https://biblehub.com/text/galatians/2-5.htm

Paul is extending the narrative of the Mishnah on what Jews consider a common messianic trajectory but turns out to be The Way. Because of Hillel, Judaism can rightly claim credit for the basic ethical basis of Christianity: That which is hateful to you do not to others. The problem with Hillel, as he reflects the soul of patience, is the introversion of Judaism, generally, The Golden Rule,

Matthew 12:7 In everything, then, do to others as you would have them do to you. For this is the essence of the Law and the Prophets https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-12.htm

"For this is the essence of the Law and the Prophets" is a recapitulation of Hillel's observation that "Everything else is commentary".

Christianity is Judaism transformed by the KISS principle. Judasim and Islam make the same mistake as the 18th Amendment: it is a tyranny of folly to legislate against human nature.

Paul is very rigorous to only use the Torah as the basis for his explication of the lements of Christianity embedded in the Torah. The Jesus Followers didn't know that The Way was supposed to go to Rome because Jesus never told them because I don't think Jesus, Himself, understood how it was going to work out, except that He needed to validate the God Hypothesis through a kama-kazi intervention. The wager He had with Satan was that He could take Christianity viral with Ted Talks, intellectual engagement. and a traveling medicine show like Cat Stevens and avoid all that messy drama and inconvenience of the cross.

Until the Resurrection, Christianty, as an ethical social system, was totally an inside baseball agenda for the Romans. As Luke points out in Acts 24:22, the Roman military intelligence system in Palestine had a pretty clear picture of the anthropology of Palestine the Resurrection, which the existence of Quelle demonstrates. and Festus and Eelix inherited from Pilate (although Felix doesn't seem to me aware of Quelle nor whatever connection there is between Cornelius and Theophilus. As far as I can tell, the first Emperor who became aware of the Centurion Christian Cabal since Tiberius was Constantine, with the possible exception of Claudius. The fact is, it isn't entirely clear to me if an Prefect of the Praetorian Guard was aware of Quelle after Marcus Opellius Macrinus.committed suicide. The Centruion Cabal was spread throughout the Roman legions and they probably concealed their worship by combining elements of Caesar Worship with the fellowship of Mithra,

The fact that Hebrews exists reveals the larger Jesus conspiracy inside the core of the Roman empire. The Gospel of Mark is an abstract of Quelle as an intelligence archive of the activities of Jesus. Whereever the historic present shows up in the Greek, that is raw intelligence from the Roman spy networks, an eyewitness account. A lot of the narrative of The Gospel According to Mark comes from the debriefing Cornelius conducts with Peter described in Acts 10. Acts 10:34 - 43 is the core doctrine of the Christian ethic Cornelius transmits to Rome and, as Gary Habermas points out, this doctrine forms the basis of the Apostle's Creed and appears immediately as a result of Pentacost. As you know, this baptism of the spirit happens 4 times in Acts and is consistent with the numerology of the Bible that the Holy Spirit employs throughout scripture, beginning with Genesis, the word itself.

In addition to transforming Judaism with the KISS principle, Jesus is promoting the Holy Spirit as a an element of the ontology of The One as described in Revelation 4:2. A part of my personal commission is to promote the Holy Spirit as a capitalist tool. The Holy Spirit is a divine resource for dominion over the universe, stewardship in society and the fellowship of community. He has always exeisted, but nobody was paying any constructive attention to Him until Jesus came along and made it the only unforgivable sin to deny He's there.

I've had a relationship with the Holy Spirit since I was killed in 1954 and a working relationship with him since I abandoned a military career when Jesus said to me: "I have other plans for you than a military career. Follow me and in the fullness of time. you'll end up revealing the author of the Gospel According to Mark and some other stuff having to do with high performing systems in a Free Enterprise economic ecology of American and British constitutional capitalism".

And here I am, today.

The 4 gospels describe the creation of the tools of cultural transformation and Acts is the case study of the transformation process once it's set into motion. Jesus is a test-tube baby who must die and go to seed like a Dandelion. Unlike the Dandelion, Jesus is born-again while the Green Beret "A" Team He has been training becomes the seeds of the Sower and the rushing wind of the Spirit of God blows them all over the world.

Mark 14:72 and John 11:35 are both the result of the actions of the Holy Spirit. Josephus describes a similar action of the Holy Spirit in the life of Herod Agrippa with the appearance of the 2nd owl in his life before he is eaten by worms.

I had a similar experience in Vietnam and Jesus offered a way out. And here I am, today. Why 4 Gospels? Because the Holy Ghost wants you to discover that Cornelius is the author of The Gospel According to Mark and that there is a line of ethical transfer from the Cross to Nicea that runs straight as a laser through Hebrews and the XP on the shield of the Milvian Bridge by way of the Christian Amideh: the 4 Gospels, Acts and the 13 Epistles of Paul are fulfilled by the 19th element of the meditation, Hebrews,

In the numerology of the Bible, 7 base numerology is the organizing principle of the Mythos, when humanity first began to record its existence after cave drawings and before capitalism and pyramids , the 8 base numerology of Egypt the organizing principle of the Ethos, lwhen humanity began to record its existence with symbols and the 9 base numerology of Melcizedek is the organizing principle of the Logos, when humanity began to develop a God's Eye view of the universe. 19 is the Alpha and Omega of the mind of The One and Sura 74:30 is the clearest portrait of the mind of The One in literature.

In the Beginning was the Word, but, before the Word was, Number IS.

The reason why there are 4 gospels is to describe the qualitative difference between literature and history. Narrative proceeds beyond the horizon while history recedes as debris from the here and now. As Father James points out, the narratives of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church have proceeded in parallel for one thousand years because of the Holy Spirit. The history of the Church, especially the Christian apologetics defending Solo Scriptura, reflects the post-modern deconstruction of academic historical methodogy employed more or less universally in PhD programs and is Marxist in aspect. The problem Christian apologetics has with dealing with critics like Richard Carrier and Ahmed Deedat is that you are all using variations on Dialectical Materialism, which is a very acute instrument, indeed. The Jesus Seminar is an extreme example of its analytical nature, but Thomas Jefferson was trying to do something similar by cutting out all references to God in the Bible: he was trying to get at natural law or what I call process theology, my profession.

The 4 gospels are material debris from the life of the Living God and Son of Man as recorded by people who smelled His farts. The number 4 refers to the material world, as in "Mind" and "Matter". The Gospels are what Ayn Rand would call "Man Made" in that they exist on paper and contain the Metaphysical evidence of "Mind" in operation. The reason why there are 4 Gospels is because that was how the Holy Spirit guided the narrative and the mundane numerology, the literal chpater and verse numberin added a millenium after they became canon is even more magical. The Holy Spirit fairly drips out of the narrative of the Gospels and Acts. but the history can't catch it because it's magic. Magic conveys in literature: it's, at best, a conjecture in Marxist historical analysis: vote a red bead, yeah, a black bead, nay, and the opinion of scholarship in pink and grey, in between.

It makes sense that Paul's gospel is the 5th Gospel. The number 5 has to do with man qua human, archetecture and the interior line, which has a military aspect to it. .Paul presents the strutures of Shammai, the Law of Moses as harsh reality, but with the embedded aspects of Christianity extrapolated and transformed for the military audience of the Praetorian Guard. Along with the Quelle archive in Palestine, the case studies of Jesus in the Gospels, the history of the Dandelion seeds of Pentacost in Acts and the Septuagent, the result is the finding of Hebrews that launched Acts 10:34 - 43 2000 years into the future.

The Epistles of Paul have the same relationship to Hebrews that the Federalist Papers have with the US Constitution: they represent the state of the art in social engineering at the time, but the resulting dynamics have characteristics totally unanticipated in the original intent. The 19th Amendment is just one example. And, the fact is, arriving at the 19th Amendment was the original intent of the Framers in the same way the US Constitution is the original intent of the Epistles to the Romans.

Like George Smiley in La Carre's MI6, Theophilus took all this data in and, digested it and arrived at Hebrews. The important loop he closes is with Melchizedek, the Maji in Matthew and the 7 Etruscan kings from which emerges the fushion of the democratic socialism of Athens with the SPQR and the subordinate republican socialism of Sparta in the Preaetorian Guards.

Here's the thing to understand about Marx and the limits of Dialectical Materialism. Marx wanted to remove all the contradictions in society he believed money and the profit motive created, so he devised a methodology for slicing the ideal away from matter. The problem is that the contradictions he proposes to eliminate are actually paradox and the dynamics required to sustain the paradox is what keeps society resilient and progressive. Supply Side economics is an example of a paradox being devolved to dilemma and a system based on a false choice devised that denies the synergies that make it socially valuabe, if not metaphysically necessary.

Paradox does not convey, historically, only the effects.

In constrast, paradox is the leading edge of narrative, which is what Father James points out to you in comparing the Coptic narrative to the Eastern Orthodox narrative. Hebrews captures the paradox contained in the Holy of Holies like the scolls in the Arc of the Covenant and delivers it, in the fullness of time, to mankind as the final gift of the Magi.

0 notes

romancatholicreflections · 7 years

Text

3rd September >> Sunday Homilies and Reflections for Roman Catholics on the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A.

22nd Sun Ordinary time -Year A

Gospel Text: Matthew 16:21-27

vs.21 Jesus began to make it clear to his disciples that he was destined to go to Jerusalem and suffer grievously at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day. vs.22 Then, taking him aside, Peter started to remonstrate with him. “Heaven preserve you, Lord;” he said “this must not happen to you.” vs.23 But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle in my path, because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s.” vs.24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. vs.25 For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. vs.26 What, then, will a man gain if he wins the whole world and ruins his life? Or what has a man to offer in exchange for his life? vs.27 For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and, when he does, he will reward each one according to his behaviour.”

*******************************************************************

We have four sets of homily notes to choose from. Please scroll down the page for the desired one.

Michel DeVerteuil : A Trinidadian Holy Ghost Priest, Specialist in Lectio Divina Thomas O’Loughlin: Professor of Historical Theology, University of Wales. Lampeter. John Littleton: Director of the Priory Institute Distant Learning, Tallaght Donal Neary SJ: Editor of The Sacred Heart Messenger

****************************************

Michel DeVerteuil Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels- Year A www.columba.ie

General Comments

In meditating on this passage, we need to make some choices – guided, as always in lectio divina by feelings, not reason. For example, we can focus on the disciples, and Peter in particular, so that the passage speaks to us about our relationship with Jesus or with someone who has been Jesus to us. We then celebrate the times when we have been brought to see how our way of thinking was “human” and not according to God’s plan.

I am proposing another approach however – to focus on Jesus, seeing him as our exemplar, the one in whose destiny we his followers are called to share. This is the approach of Hebrews 12:2 ? we “keep our eyes fixed on Jesus” as the one who “leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection.”

The passage is in two sections: – verses 21 to 23, a narrative; – verses 24 to 27, a collection of sayings. I am proposing that we experience both sections as a unit, with the teachings flowing spontaneously from the narrative. This is always the teaching method of the bible – truth flowing from experience.

We capture the power of the passage by situating it historically, remembering that the incident it relates came at a very significant moment in the life of Jesus. It is one all human beings pass through – a moment of truth. Up till then Jesus had been ministering in Galilee in the North of Palestine, far from Jerusalem in the South. He had met with great success at first: “he went round the whole of Galilee… his fame spread throughout Syria… large crowds followed him” (Matthew 4:23-25; cf. 7:18; 9:15).

Opposition to him had grown, however, mainly from scribes (e.g. 9:11) and Pharisees (e.g. 12:1, 24). At this point in his life then, Jesus decided that the time had come for him to confront these opposing forces at the seat of their power, Jerusalem, home of the scribes and Pharisees (15:1). It was a decision which would have tragic consequences, but the passage shows that he accepted them fully (verses 21-23), basing himself on his understanding of every person’s life journey.

The passage then invites us to celebrate similar “moments of truth” we have lived through, when we chose a course of action which we knew would cause hurt to people we loved and admired, and would bring us rejection and pain. We celebrate the great men and women who have inspired us by the way they entered courageously into their moments of truth – our saints, “personal” or “canonized”. We can also read it as the story of the Church (or of a group within it, like a religious order) taking a decision to be more radical in its following of Jesus.

The passage is also a call to conversion in that it makes us more aware that we – as individuals and as communities – do not respond like Jesus. We pray that the spirit of Jesus will continue to live in our church, our families and the world.

Our meditation will enable us to recognise the different characters in the narrative. Who are “the elders, chief priests and scribes” – the “experts” we must confront? Who is the “Peter” – a dear respected friend, and yet we must find the courage to say to him, “Get behind me”?

Through meditation on verses 21-23, the sayings in verses 24 to 27 will no longer be abstract theories, but lessons about life which we have experienced concretely. We will be aware of the things we would have “lost” if we had tried to “save” them, of wonderful things we “found” because we took the risk of losing them. We will feel convinced that there is nothing we would “exchange” for the blessings which came to us as a result of our choices. We will naturally pray for those who are facing moments of truth at present, with compassion since we know the pain involved, and also with confidence, since we are aware that Jesus is living his story in them.

Prayer Reflection

Lord, we thank you for the times when you allowed us to experience the peace that Jesus bequeathed to us, times when, like him, we had to make a difficult decision we knew would not be pleasing to family and friends: – get married to someone from a different race or social class; – give up a well paid job and take one that offered little security but gave us satisfaction – teacher, artist, community leader; – enter the religious life; – join a radical movement; – bring up a child in a way others considered unconventional; – make a new beginning in a foreign country,

Which way?

We made it clear to them that you had destined us to go to this Jerusalem, and that we knew we would have to suffer grievously at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and to be rejected, perhaps disowned and treated as dead, but we were confident that in time we would be raised up. Close friends, members of our family and of our church community, took us aside and started to remonstrate with us, invoking your name, saying, “Heaven preserve you, this must not happen to you.” But you gave us the grace to turn and say to them, “Get behind me Satan, you are an obstacle in my path; the way you think is logical in your eyes, but it is not what I know to be God’s will for me.” We understood then that to be followers of Jesus we must walk in his footsteps by renouncing ourselves and taking up our cross. We are truly grateful now that we stuck by our decision. What would we have gained if we had won the whole world and lost the deep joy we have experienced? Is there anything that life could have offered us which we would exchange for the satisfaction we have had? How true it is that the most precious things in life are those which we end up losing if we try to save them: – friendships, – peace of mind, – a clear conscience, – a sense of achievement. We discover them as life-giving only if we take the risk of losing them. We thank you for teaching us that in life it is not important to please human beings, no matter how experienced or how holy they are. We are accountable only to our conscience, knowing that the Son of Man is coming in the glory of the Father with his angels and will reward us according to our behaviour.

Lord, forgive us that in our Church communities, parishes and religious orders we encourage submissiveness and conformity, and even invoke your name in doing so. Remind us that you want true followers of Jesus to emerge among us, men and women who are free, who once they know that they are destined to go to Jerusalem, will not be afraid of suffering grievously at the hands of elders and chief priests and scribes, and even to be put to death, knowing they will rise again on the third day; who are not afraid to take risks, knowing that this is the only way to find their lives; who will exchange nothing, even all the possessions in the world, for finding their true selves; who will fear only the Son of Man coming in the glory of his Father, surrounded by his angels, to reward all according to their behaviour.

Jesus always kept his destiny in mind while making decisions.

Lord, we thank you that your Church in many parts of the world has chosen to identify more closely with Jesus by adopting the cause of oppressed groups – ethnic minorities, – women, – people with gender issues, – religious groups considered marginal. Its leaders have often suffered grievously at the hands of elders, chief priests and scribes, some within the Church itself, others from the world of academia, business or the professions. How true it is, Lord, that if the Church is preoccupied with saving itself, it ends up losing its true identity; it will live only if it remembers that the Son of Man is coming in the glory of his Father, and he will judge his Church not on large numbers, big buildings, or prestige in society, but according to its behaviour.

*********************************************************

Thomas O’Loughlin Liturgical Resources for the Year of Matthew www.columba.ie

Introduction to the Celebration

In today’s gospel we hear the call of Jesus to become his followers. This is no easy invitation: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ We enter into the cross of Jesus, and begin our following of him, when we are baptised. It is at that moment that we become members of this body that can gather at the Lord’s table, and it is the grace of baptism that sustains us on the difficult road of following the Lord of life, and goodness, and truth. So now let us recall the fact that we are a baptised people, and ask God to bless us and strengthen us to continue following his Son.

Homily Notes

Aspects of discipleship

1. Think about these statements: Christianity is about discipleship. Christianity is about community. Christianity is about doing the heavenly Father’s will. When we relate these statements to one another, we start to glimpse that Christianity is not a ‘well-designed consumer product’.

2. Discipleship. This is never easy because we like to imagine that we know the best way to our own happiness without any guides. This is even more problematic for us because we are left in no doubt that following is a matter of the cross. ‘From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.’

We do look forward to new life, but is not something that just happens or to which there is an.easy road. ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it,and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’

3. Community. Community is problem for us as we are convinced that others get in our way and limit our choices. Most contemporary visions of a happy ‘society’are based on the notion that everyone will be happy if there is as little restraint on their activities as possible and the only limit is that We should not get in the way of others doing’their thing’. At the same time, we are people who crave companionship, crave acceptance, and fear being alone. A,pretty mixed up situation.

But Christianity is built on the notion of being gathered from being scattered and lost individuals into a community. We talk about the importance of caring for one another; loving self, indeed, but to the extent that we love others; acting as sisters and brothers in the family of the Father, and gathering each week as a community not because we as ‘individuals’ like the idea, but because this is the will of the group.

Being disciples also involves community, for we are part of a group around our teacher and we become his body by working together.

4. The heavenly Father’s will. This also is hard for us because while our society is very good at noting the affective side of religion (it gives people a sense of ‘where they are’) and the individual choice aspect of religion (‘this religion suits me’) we have problems with the notion that there are demands to act with justice, to bear witness to the truth, to oppose wickedness. This is where religion ‘pinches.’

5. All these ideas come together in what we say about the formal act of becoming disciples: baptism.

• Baptism is about following Jesus by joining him in death and resurrection. • Baptism is about joining the community and declaring that we wish to belong to it. • Baptism is about becoming daughters and sons of the Father and praying that his ‘will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’

Are we ready now to declare that we wish to renew our baptismal promises?

****************************************************************

John Litteton Journeying through the Year of Matthew www.Columba.ie

Gospel Reflection

When Jesus told his disciples that he was going to Jerusalem and would suffer grievously there, and be put to death and then rise again, they must have been confused and distressed. Peter had been appointed the rock on which Jesus would build his Church. Now he was hearing that Jesus was going to be put to death.

Impetuous as ever, Peter remonstrated with Jesus, saying that this could not be true. Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God — Peter had acknowledged this earlier and Christ had confirmed it, pointing out that it was God who had inspired this knowledge in Peter. So how could the Son of God be about to suffer and die? The faith that had led to Peter’s insights about Jesus being the Messiah had now deserted him.

In turn, Jesus’ response to Peter’s hostile reaction to his future suffering was stern, unlike his warm words when Peter had affirmed his belief that Jesus was the Son of God. He castigated Peter: ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle in my path, because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s’ (Mt 16:23).

Jesus then described the essential condition of being one of his followers, and this condition would apply to Peter, the first pope, just as much as to the humblest disciple: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mt 16:24).

For the disciples, this teaching must have seemed incomprehensible. Even today, many people resist the idea of having to embrace suffering. Yet dealing with suffering is at the root of the Christian life. The willingness to appreciate the transformative value of suffering is a pre-requisite for authentic Christian living.

Recognising the disciples’ incomprehension, Jesus sought to make them understand. He told them that, in order to gain eternal life, they must lose this life —their attachment to the things of this world. Nothing matters more than pleasing God.

Jesus posed a crucial rhetorical question: ‘What, then, will a man gain if he wins the whole world and ruins his life? Or what has a man to offer in exchange for his life?’ (Mt 16:26). What, Jesus asked, is more important than saving the soul?

If we lose our soul, what joy will the pleasures of this world bring us? None. On the contrary, they will haunt us throughout eternity as the cause of our downfall. Jesus reminds us, as he reminded his first disciples, about this possibility: ‘For the Son of man is going to come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and, when he does, he will reward each one according to his behaviour’ (Mt 16:27).

In summary, then, the reality of Christian living is that we are challenged to be fully prepared to suffer for the kingdom of heaven. We need to be clear in our minds and hearts about the central importance of saving souls. That is our greatest task while living in this world.

For meditation If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. (Mt 16:24)

****************************************

Fr Donal Neary, S.J Gospel Reflections for the Year of Matthew www.messenger.ie

The third day

We meet deep human concerns and feelings in the gospel today. Peter is shocked to the core that Jesus would die; so shocked that he always later seemed to forget that Jesus promised that he would rise on the third day. Jesus talks very seriously about the cost of following him, like the cost of following any commitment in life.

Jesus invites us to live at the deepest level of ourselves. In the area of life where we live and love, laugh and cry, worry and enjoy, hurt and forgive. In all these very personal sides of life, Jesus dwells, since he says that he makes his home in us.

We can call it a sort of “third day’ hope. Nothing except love, which is eternal, was final for Jesus. For all the worst things of life there was a third day. The day on which hope would be fuller than any despair, and when life would be more lasting than death. Jesus was like that – when people met him, they remembered him and remembered how he touched the fears and anxieties of their lives with a deep hope.

We are “third day” people, knowing that the love and life of God, promised at our baptism, will always be in the air around us, filling us with the breath of God, and breathing fragrance all around us like the best of flowers. Later they would be raised from final despair and hopelessness at his resurrection. But it took time!

Breathing in and out receive the peace of God.On the in-breath, let the word ‘peace’ echo within you.Lord, may I never lose faith in you.

1 note · View note

aaminahwrites · 6 years

Text

15 QUESTIONS WITH: FAISAL HUSSAIN

Faisal Hussain has always been a creative at heart and his love for helping others allows him to use his creativity to spread love and positivity. His landscape paintings bring a sense of peace to his audience while his charity pieces bring a feel of compassion and a cry for help. Following is our ‘question by e-mail’ about his art and charity work, and a little bit about his background.

Aaminah: How did you get into art?

Faisal: Art was a hobby initially since childhood, I loved illustration, reading, and learning from childhood. I participated in community creative and youth events and gained 50 hours’ experience in graffiti spraying with a local graffiti artist. I took GCSE and A-level ‘Art and Design’ and eventually became Freelance in first year of A-levels in 2012. I decided to take my art work into the community at various charity events and I focus a lot on marketing my art on social media platforms. I am co-owner of the Freedomline clothing brand @_freedomline_

A: Tell me about the style of your art, where it started from and how it evolved.

F: Illustration and landscape impressionism are my main areas of focus. I loved painting sceneries with watercolour, acrylic paints and oils and portraying reality through graphite, chalk, spray cans, and various other materials to create texture in my work.

A: Who is your audience?

F: My audience is mainly the youth, but it’s targeted at anyone who inspires to grow through art.

A: Tell me about your background. Where did you grow up, what was your childhood like and how was school life?

F: I grew up in the Millfield area of Peterborough which was deprived of government funding; the City Centre where I was born was known for having a working-class population. Due to my granddad’s effort of coming over into the UK as one of the first Pakistani workers, my family became established in Peterborough. As immigrant families like ourselves started saving more, we moved out the central ward due to the lack of services, criminal activity, school-catchment area problems.

Primary school was a pretty awesome time; it gave me the scope to fairly learn the fundamentals of many subjects. Secondary school was a journey of personal growth, I managed to find myself personally, mentally and socially.

A: What is your favourite piece of artwork you’ve done?

F: My Palestine A-level final exam piece. It showed me how much pressure I could put on myself and my creativity to paint a large acrylic art piece.

A: What are you trying to communicate with your art?

F: That it is a therapeutic medium, and that you can still make a living through art. You can still work in other areas and still be an artist.

A: Which creative medium would you love to pursue but haven’t yet?

F: Digital design, which I will in a few months’ time.

A: How was the Radical Love Exhibition at the Crypt Gallery?

F: It was a heartfelt gallery, words cannot express the emotions, feelings and realities of how the art portrayed female refugee struggles and third world narratives of love.

A: What’s your biggest fear?

F: Dying knowing I couldn’t achieve everything that I could have potentially achieved in life; personally, spiritually and creatively.

A: How do you work?

F: I use my experience and skill set from in academia, volunteering, work and creativity, and try to apply and improvise it in every situation I’m in. I like to learn from every situation that I’m in, whether I’m successful or not in the task.

A: What other artists have been inspirational to you?

F: Muhammad Ali (Aerosol Arabic), Banksy, Claudio Monet, Van Gogh and Andy Warhol.

A: Tell me about the projects you’ve done with the BBC.

F: My recent project was to do with working with the BBC 5 Radio Live project on immigration, communities, Brexit and the city of Peterborough. Working withtwo well-known artists PositiveArtsUK and Tizer enabled me to refresh and develop my creative skill set. We aimed to work with other community members to portray our views and experiences of Britain on the wall mural, on BBC East and BBC 5 Live Radio.

A: Tell me about your previous charity projects.

F: I have mentored ‘troubled youths’ in a voluntary capacity within a school environment and the local youth club to help them achieve goals and proactive within society. I have also had my own youth hour on the local radio station as a host for Salaam Radio in the summer of 2016. I have been involved in various charities such as Children of Adam and Islamic Relief by fundraising through radio shows, social media management and street collections.

I have also managed to help feed 5000 meals to the needy in Peterborough throughout 2015. I have worked with the Student Schooling Association (SSA) within the university to campaign for January exams and the Campus Awareness programme, and organised events specifically for the students such as the culture festival and the Eid festival. I have been volunteering for Peace Child International by participating in a drama project, and participated in a community graffiti project to paint a mural on a local underpass in 2010.

A: Are there any charity projects you’re currently working on?

F: I am still currently volunteering with the charity Children of Adam in Peterborough. I’m looking forward to participating with them on the radio programmes in Ramadan, feeding the local homeless and participating in their national and international projects.

A: Tell me about ‘Official KNOW.’ How did it start and what direction is it heading in?

F: Founded in 2012, KNOW is a trusted community education platform for people who love to learn. We believe that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn. Harnessing the power of the sharing economy, KNOW brings together students, experts, teachers, leaders and scientists from around the world to bring you bitesize, digestible knowledge delivered in a modern, engaging way and to the point of understanding.

Knowledge is not ‘one-size fits all’. We all have different interests, different ways of understanding, and different attention spans. We all have such different backgrounds, experience and expertise. Our strength lies in our diversity as a community. We can learn something from everyone.

Whether you want to learn about history, politics, health, science or nature, KNOW connects you with those that are in the know - and allows you to become one of them. We’ve just released our new website www.kn-ow.com, so look out for more info!

You can find Faisal on Instagram @art.by.faisal and be sure to visit his event page on Facebook at Facebook.com/ArtByFaisal to stay updated with his work.

#long interview #artist #calligraphy #art #young british artists

0 notes

gender-and-immigration-blog · 6 years

Text

Interview with Riana Baba

Riana Baba is one of the original four co-founders of NYU’s campus IRC group. I was fortunate enough to sit down and talk with Riana about why she cares so deeply about the refugee crisis and her goals for the group.

Riana is deeply connected to the topic at hand as her immediate interest stems from her multinational identity and family ties to several aspects of the crisis. Both of Riana’s parents are immigrants themselves as her dad is from Lebanon, her mom from Palestine. To her upset, she has never been able to visit Palestine due to the state conditions. Though she’s moved around a lot throughout her childhood, she has always considered Lebanon her home. She recalls “ever since I was a kid, I remember seeing Syrian refugees on the street” and every time she returns it gets worse and worse. Thus, making this issue incredibly salient in her life: as she claims it’s hard to deny the issue when you’re confronted with it face to face on a regular basis. For her, the issue is undeniable and so deeply apparent the degree of assistance needed but explains that part of the challenge she—and the campus IRC group—faces is communicating that to people who haven’t seen the crisis first hand.

Riana understands the fortune her family has had to ‘escape’ the crises and is beyond grateful for the opportunities she’s had as a result. “Now,” she explains “I want people in the same position to be able to have that [the same opportunities] and I can’t do that. I don’t have the resources to do that.” Regardless, she has gone above and beyond to contribute what she can to aid refugees.

Through the campus IRC group and other individual efforts, Riana tries to maximize her impact on aiding the crisis. The campus IRC’s main goal is to raise awareness. Riana believes educating people on the issue and trying to relay its related emotionality is most important to spread a sense of urgency in aid. Riana says they “need people to be intensely motivated to do something” yet “it’s getting worse every day and no one’s angry about it.” Unfortunately, Riana notices people only seem to care when it is at the peak of political media attention. Thus, during the ‘off-season,’ it’s challenging to building momentum. Riana also gets frustrated that the campus group can become stagnant during these periods as the group devotes too much time to discussion-based meetings rather than direct impact.

Despite this frustration, Riana feels she is making a direct impact through her work with the IRC’s refugee youth tutoring called Saturday Learning Series. Every Saturday, Riana dedicates time to two refugee students she has been paired: one 17 and one 19-year-old boy. Not only is this time essential to aiding in academic transitions, but also provides the students a community, social experiences, essential relationships to their growth and development as normal, teenage kids. Riana beautifully said, “we want them to be excellent, not to just exist”. Riana unabashedly admits she is no help to her students in any mathematics sense but emphasizes her personal relationship to them instead. To Riana, it’s about connecting with her students and giving them the confidence they need to succeed here by giving them back their agency rather than solely a victim of the system.

Even though Riana has gone above and beyond to dedicate her time, resources, relationships to aiding the refugee crisis she stills feels like it’s not enough: “I wish we could do more. I feel like I have such a minimal impact and I want to figure out a way to make it bigger.” To her, she sees the greatest goal moving forward is building empathy: “if I can make a way for people to understand how bad it is over there, it would change everything.” Riana says generating the content reel is a great step towards promoting empathy and thus action among individuals. We thank Riana for work and look forward to seeing where she takes us next.

#blogposts #interview #refugee crisis #immigration #migrant women

0 notes