oh shit - i was time travelling and accidentally killed an ancient italian. doesn’t matter tho everyone was killing each other, when in Reme do as the Remans
While most of the arguments attacking the legitimacy of palestinian gfms and the people who verify them seem to boil down to the plain racism and the discomfort with having to think of palestinians as anything other than faceless statistics on your phone or tv screens instead of real living people who want to talk to us, there is a strain of of it that i find more aggravating than anything else.
[image i.d.: senatortedcruz, 6d ago: Friends I will be honest I don't think real life Gazans are taking time out of their day to make brand new tumblr blogs then send asks to big bloggers asking for money.]
This makes my blood boil for a couple of reasons:
FIRSTLY, there is the assumption that palestinians were somehow never on the internet before. The smear campaign against shahed began literally after some users found it impossible to believe that she was a real person who loves photography and to talk to me about her art and how important it was to her. This was IN SPITE of me linking her Instagram that has existed long before October 7th 2023 and has over 6k followers specifically there for her art, which they would have found easily if they had cared to actually read my posts about her.
This is nothing new, because it has always been the general assumption from users in the imperial core that you don't think we from the global south can exist on the internet and see all the shit you say and have opinions about it– but it never stops being shocking to me how thoroughly you are ready to pretend we aren't real people every time. We are directly seeing the results of that wilful ignorance manifest itself cruelly against palestinians in their time of need today.
And then SECONDLY comes the fact that they aren't entirely wrong– reaching out to us on the internet in the middle of a genocide IS insanely hard. There are constant network outages due to the incessant bombing, people have lost their homes and livelihoods, they have lost so much of their friends and families, they are sick and injured, they are struggling just to find any food or any clean water. A lot of people either lost their cellphones while fleeing violence or probably had to sell them and pick cutting themselves off from the world and each other over starving. They are experiencing atrocities beyond our comprehension. A lot of people have given up, especially in the face of the apathy they see from the rest of the world to what they are going through. But that doesn't mean everyone has and that they aren't reaching out to us anyway, often at great cost to themselves, because it is a matter of survival.
Shahed has told me that she has had to struggle a lot to reach out to us. Finding places where there is internet connection is very hard, and she often has to risk going by active combat zones to get a good enough reception to talk to me and others here she has befriended. The danger is even more so at night, and she has told me about how afraid she is at those times because of the presence of iof quadcopters in the area. Sometimes she is able to come by internet connection at night from someone with some solar cells nearby her tent now that running electricity has become so hard to come by in gaza, but she has to pay a high fee to get it from them, dipping into the meagre funds her family has saved for food and water instead.
Every single message that reaches us from gaza comes with a sacrifice we can't even begin to understand.
The cost she has to pay both literally and in terms of the dangers to her life to reach out to us are extremely high, but she still does it all because she is the sole provider for her family of seventeen right now– especially her little siblings Rafif and Masa, who are suffering from severe hepatitis right now and urgently need to get out of gaza so that they can seek treatment in egypt; and her months old nephew who was born just weeks before the genocide began and has no access to baby food or diapers right now.
It GALLS me to see people try to call her a liar for being able to have an internet connection at ALL when i know just how hard she had to fight to get it.
Just because YOU are unable to imagine yourself in that situation when you are in your comfortable homes with an easily available connection, DOESN'T mean there aren't people who are willing to fight to be heard and get the help they deserve. And of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the struggle that comes with crowdfunding when you are in gaza.
Your “cynicism” comes from a place of privilege and doesn't help anyone. You are only insulting all the palestinians who work so hard every day to reach out to us, all so some truly heartless people can call them bots or scams for being able to reach out to anyone at all.
WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. SHAHED HAS TO REACH 80K WITHIN THIS WEEK TO EVACUATE HER WHOLE FAMILY.
WE HAVE ONLY JUST CRACKED 68K/80K, AND THERE IS STILL A LONG WAY TO GO.
Have you ever experienced seeing your dream broken in front of your eyes and not being able to do … Shahed Muhammad needs your support for H
Please donate to and share Shahed's fundraiser as widely as possible. Take it to your whatsapp groups, to your discord servers, your instagram stories. Repost her story and her photography, repost the link to the raffle at @journalsforpalestine wherever you have reach because there is only so much i can do with the deadline looming so close to us.
This CANNOT wait. You've gotten her this far, let's get her through this last stretch too.
It is not lost on me that the people accusing shahed of being a scammer reacted like that with a screenshot of the post where i specifically talked about shahed as a photographer and what she had personally lost to the zionist occupation in gaza.
And while they are not the first to try and discredit Shahed, i have noticed so far that a lot of it has come from people who have “free palestine” in their bios and palestine flags in their headers- like it's an aesthetic rather than an actual movement towards decolonization we must commit ourselves to. Because the people making these accusations thoughtlessly don’t have to commit themselves to anything- no matter what happens, they’ll get to keep living their privileged lives unchallenged.
It seems to me that the user base from the imperial core is only comfortable talking about atrocities happening to people in gaza when they are faceless victims they personally do not have to know or interact with, but not when they are real people with rich internal lives- with families, friends, hopes and dreams, and as artists who deserve to be uplifted and seen.
They are unable to confront the personhood of the people who their empire is actively killing today, and the enormity of everything the victims have lost and it all reads like a violent reaction to their own discomfort with having to hear about it at all- the claws come out and suddenly everyone is a liar and a fraud who is out to steal the measly $5 they were never even forced to donate. "Eat the rich" website my ass you people cant even be trusted to not report and try to get accounts of people deleted when they are just asking for help.
I will not let you discredit and insult shahed and her family like that.
I have known shahed for a month or so now and we talk on most days, when she is able to get a good internet connection. It has been spotty recently because of the incessant bombing, and because she got displaced after the massacres last week from where she and her family had been encamped at khan younis.
She has talked to me about her little sisters Rafif and Masa a lot. Rafif, thirteen years old, likes to read and write stories, winning prizes for it at a sector level, while Masa, who Shahed has described as a nine year old diamond, loves to draw.
They are both currently very ill with severe hepatitis from the unclean water in gaza.
Shahed told me that in the days before she and her family had gotten displaced, she had been recommended by the doctor who had been treating the kids to give them sweets, so that they can keep their strength up with the sugar.
So shahed decided to make them cake. With the scarcity of food and water in gaza right now, alongside the lack of basic amenities available in a kitchen, it had taken Shahed days of hunting to scrounge up all the ingredients she needed to make a cake. She often ran into dangers just trying to gather ingredients for them, as many areas in khan younis were turned into active combat zones. Oftentimes she escaped from death by just a hair.
Consulting her friend who is a chef, she was finally able to make it using a clay oven and give it to her sisters.
She has told me that despite how tired and sick she herself was, and all the dangers she had been through, it was all worth it when she saw her sisters’ faces light up when they got first taste of the cake she had painstakingly made for them.
This was around the same time she was able to collect the whole $40,000 USD for her sisters’ evacuation so that they can seek proper treatment for their illnesses in egypt.
It was also one day before they were forced to flee from their camp at khan younis due to the constant bombing by the IOF.
Both online and offline, Shahed has been fighting for her sisters’ safety at great cost to herself, despite all the obstacles in her path.
Right now, she has registered her sisters for evacuation at the hala agency for when the border opens so they can get to safety. But due to the lack of funds for it, she will not be able to join them when they leave and will have to stay behind with the rest of her family.
In her own words:
"This is my family and I will always fight for them. I know that when I am afraid, I will be able to survive if I know that they will be by my side. We will be together. I can't imagine an instant where we are apart.
I will be too lonely, and I will collapse without them. Who else will give me the motivation and strength to fight? they are everything, my family is like my soul. I can't imagine for a moment that we are not with each other.”
Her sisters are her strength, and without Shahed i can't imagine there will be people in Egypt who will fight for those little girls as fiercely as she does. The safety Masa and Rafif want to escape to CANNOT exist without Shahed, and she has told me how heartbroken they are too at the idea of being forced to leave Shahed and the rest of the family behind.
TIME IS RUNNING OUT. TO EVACUATE THE WHOLE FAMILY OF 17, SHAHED WILL NEED TO GATHER 80K WITHIN THE NEXT WEEK.
THEY ARE CURRENTLY ONLY AT 54.6k/80k
PLEASE SUPPORT SHAHED AND KEEP HER FAMILY FROM BEING TORN APART.
With regional tensions being escalated by the zionist occupation in gaza, we don't know when they might get a chance to evacuate again. The people who have been hellbent on discrediting palestinians and discouraging people from donating to them by targeting shahed recently have been beyond cruel, and we CANNOT allow them to hinder Shahed from saving herself and her family.
Have you ever experienced seeing your dream broken in front of your eyes and not being able to do … Shahed Muhammad needs your support for H
Her gfm has been verified and appears #224 on hussein and nairuz's list of vetted fundraisers.
We need to get them to this goal one way or the other but i can't do it on my own. So PLEASE repost her gofundme in your whatsapp groups, in your discord servers.
Share her story, repost her photography anywhere you have reach, share the link to the raffle being conducted for her @journalsforpalestine wherever you can this CANNOT WAIT.
Shahed needs these funds as soon as possible. Her entire family is at stake and we can't fail her now.
I was getting suspicions but now I'm very 100% sure that most of this website's userbase hates Palestinians and not passively. I'm now fully 100% comprehending that the vast majority of this website's userbase passes by any mention of Palestinians and seethes to their core and the only reason little of it came out was because you thought there might be social repercussions for attacking Palestinians in our time of need. All it took was an easily debunkable false accusation to get people to attack people undergoing genocide as well as a genocide survivor, and now he's been stopped from doing the work he has spent months doing. I will not allow this experience to go undocumented or forgotten. Those who partook in the harassment know what they've done and the unspeakable repurcussions of it. I expected this honestly, because that is exactly what happened to BLM and other Black rights activists since 2014; a cycle of unbelievable praise before horrendous abuse and harassment once they stopped being deified. I also saw the way people treated Moataz Azaiza after he evacuated Ghazzah, and expected the same to happen to Ahmed, who also survived unspeakable things for months in an accelerated genocide, and got harassed and attacked by the THOUSANDS on tumblr after this harassment campaign was put out. I will not forgive any one involved, especially not for what they've done to Ahmed.
Here's a collection of links to posts about the issue in the past couple of days, in chronological order I think. And under the cut will be screenshots of the initial post that I saw that brought this to my attention.
[Post 1] [Post 2] [Post 3] [Post 4] [Post 5]
[Post 6] [Post 7] [Post 8] [Post 9] [Post 10]
[Post 11] [Post 12] Edit: forgot one [Post 13].
These links are absolutely non-exhaustive and there's more shit these people have said that I don't have the patience to go collect and link here.
Honorable mention for white victim-playing after leading a hate-campaign against Palestinians surviving genocide:
If you have ever benefitted from my or another Palestinian blogger's posts, especially but not limited to my and nabulsi's vetted fundraiser list, reblog this post. The baseless accusations got thousands of notes, and the damage will not be undone if this doesn't reach the people who got misinformed.
Eid Mubarak to all those celebrating, may we witness the liberation of palestine, sudan, congo and other oppressed nations before next Eid inshallah ❤️❤️❤️
so matt's absolutely giving scorched earth orders behind the scenes right. Not only are publically visible transfems dropping like flies, but every third person who musters up the audacity to comment negatively on Staff or Matt about this vanishes fucking instantly
someone reblog this version for posterity. If the only copy is on my blog, that vanishes with me. I honestly doubt i'll get smote but better safe than sorry yeah? I'll be fine, but if I'm not, I'm making sure the crime scene is as damning as it gets.
First of all, the archive link for this post:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240613035708/https://www.tumblr.com/problemnyatic/753122508917587968/someone-reblog-this-version-for-posterity-if-the
With that out of the way..
If I don't get nuked, by the way, my intent is to keep talking about this. The idea is to put staff in a damning position. If I disappear, if the people in my tags saying they have no plans to delete disappear, then y'all know exactly what happened and why. If I don't, then I'm still here, making sure y'all keep hearing the news about who they've nuked this time.
This shit has gone on long enough. It's fucking pride month, and Staff has been scorching and salting the earth on transfems here more strongly than ever. Vetted Palestinian blogs are vanishing in complete silence. People of color are on worse egg shells than ever. We have to stand together.
I could not be more gravely serious when I say make this a PR nightmare for them. Get journalists looking at this case. Make the story inescapable. Tumblr is erasing all the trans women. Tumblr is erasing dissent. Tumblr is sliding into full draconian lockdown and is using sheer administrative force to try to take control of the narrative.
I like in Les mis fanfics when the back room of the cafe Musain has ANOTHER back room which is used exclusively for fucking. Who designed this building
I don't fuck w nerds, the moment I can smell lore correction coming I'm like "Oh Neptune" and I gotta call my mom and ask her to pick me up
If I'm like "I really liked the scene where Gandalf learns the truth about the Ring in the first movie" and someone's like "Oh you mean when he was in Minas Tirith, originally known as Minas Anor when it was first built in the Third Age?" I am pulling the nearest fire alarm
Them: Pelargir prospered further under the reign of the the Ship-kings, and Tarannon Falastur, 12th king of Gondor, built a home there, though Berúthiel, his wife, didn't care for it
Me, sweating: D. Did you know that. That Viggo Mortensen really broke his toe. In that one scene
[Throws smoke bomb down on the floor] [When the smoke clears I am still in the room with you but lying facedown, possibly dead but more likely unconscious. There is a visible dent in the nearest door.]
2087
dededos
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled
turnnoffyourmind
ellievsbear
