I think the essence of what drives me crazy about current Enlightened Online Leftist Discourse Regarding My Life Personally And Whether This Time Killing Me Is Morally Correct (as in, commentary about the latest episode in i/p violence) is this:
I want a free Palestine.
I don't personally know a lot of people that don't! They might bristle at the tagline, because it's co-opted by people who do in fact want them dead, but as soon as I lay out why it's in literally everyone's best interest, how a non-free Palestine is horrific both to the people of Israel and to the people of Palestine, how pragmatically ridiculous the occupation of the west bank and the siege upon Gaza are (and I am a very pragmatic person), they get it. And I don't mean I debate people online about it - this, too, is a ridiculous concept - I mean having, time and time again, the deradicalization conversation with my friends, and colleagues, and my family. Obviously not only now - I've always been a very principled and argumentative Jew, ever since I became an adult - and I've been alive for, I don't know, a dozen flashpoints and operations and wars at this point, and I don't stop being argumentative and loud in peacetime either, but especially now.
But that's not what "from the river to the sea" means.
When you, gentle soul from across the sea, echo this slogan, you are either:
By apathy or will, ignoring that the sentiment cheers for the mass expulsion and killing of Jews. Indeed, any non-Muslim present from the river to the sea. This doesn't even begin to cover how even Muslim arabs still will not be safe under Hamas rule - and trust me, I don't care if a Hamas apologist told you different. A victory for Hamas (And we're ignoring the fact they do not have the military capacity for it - I hope you are aware of the privilege inherent to not understanding military conflicts) means exactly that. No "rule by the people". No socialistic, Palestinian utopia to be had, which is a fantasy I'm seeing alluded to a lot recently. Just an extension of the horrific power structure in Lebanon and Syria, where Hezbollah - friends and allies to Hamas - have been playing a tango for decades of both refusing to participate in actual government and betterment of civilian lives, while still draining their resources and controlling them with no real contest. "From the river to the sea" is not a sentiment for freedom fighting - it's a sentiment for a final solution to the people living here who are either Jewish, or for some Very Strange And Weird Reason would rather not submit to Hamas rule. You know - Israeli Arabs, secular and Muslim and Christian, Druze, Circassians, Bahai, take your pick. Their suffering, and my suffering - you know, a person who made the strategic error of being born in Israel while Jewish, which is inherently problematic and not okay of me - don't matter to you. Just the fantasy of an easy, morally correct cleanse of the land.
Are well aware of all of the above! You just don't care. You either smugly chuckle that I, and anybody else who will die, deserve it - or that it's an acceptable loss for the aforementioned fantasy. "Decolonization is an inherently violent process", you'll say to me, chillingly, before implying I have a summer home in Brooklyn I can just retreat to when things get tough. Israel is basically Rhodesia, a very popular blog here mentioned flippantly, so what's the issue with all of those lily-white Jews fucking off back home before the righteous freedom fighters strike them down? Well. This might be the part I urge you to open a book, or even Wikipedia or any god damn thing that will explain to you these upsetting, dense things you clearly struggle with.
It's easy for me to discount islamophobes. Like, very easy. It's very easy for me to discount insane evangelistics who "advocate for me" simply because I'm a pawn in their religious rapture. It's easy for me to fight against Israeli and Jewish fascists - I have been long before this news item came across your feed, as did the insinuations that some civilian deaths are okay, actually.
It's easy for me for me to see promotions for BDS, and donations to non-political aid in Gaza. It's easy for me to see the sentiment that hey! Palestinians deserve safe, healthy lives. That they have deserved an independent state, and were unfairly denied one, for decades. It's easy for me to see people saying "You know, the Israeli government is shit, actually, and their actions endanger and promote to the misery of innocents". Because that's right! I wouldn't be voting and protesting and donating for all of these sentiments otherwise!
It's not easy for me to see people, who I honestly held in high regard and saw having well thought out opinions on important matters, inadvertently echo the sentiment that my death is acceptable. That a terrorist organization, who rule over their own territory with fear and violence, are righteous freedom fighters, vox populi, only out to establish a free state. Like hey, their manifesto said otherwise, so it must be all there is - right? That Jews are just hysterical, they can easily live elsewhere - ever since that nasty holocaust business everything's fine abroad. Besides, it was just so long ago who even cares stop talking about it. Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Ayatollahs in Iran, the fucking Islamic Jihad - are not interested in freedom. They aren't, and echoing their slogan tells me you are either ignoring that, or support them anyway. If antisemitic rhetoric, half truths and lies by omission work on you today, they would have in any period of time. I'm sorry this makes you uncomfortable. I'm not, not really.
So finally:
Know what your fucking words mean. Have a cursory glance at the history of the MENA and why it's so fucked, one that doesn't boil down to "The Jews, with American help, rolled into where they don't belong". This isn't even a joke. I've seen this braindead, history-revising sentiment repeated so many times, both online and in actual textbooks, that I feel I'm going insane. So many well-meaning people handwringing and assuring each other that repeating genocidal slogans is fine, that calling the i/p conflict "a simple problem" (which means it has a simple solution, right? Just kill the Jews.) is a well-adjusted and intellectual take. That "only the Zionists should die! The rest will be fine :)" I dare you to say that and also give me a correct definition of what Zionism is. Why I, a Jew that advocates for Palestinian statehood and rights and safety and always have, won't also face the wall in your little fantasy.
Freedom to Palestine. Peace in the middle east, fucking yesterday.
A curse and a plague on those who don't want either of those, and just want to cheer on the death of "the other side".
A curse and a plague upon you, when you tell me, smugly, from somewhere safe and far away, "from the river to the sea".
@bithcy I'm so glad you understand I mean well, bless your heart.
I'm telling you this is a slogan that calls for my death. Mine, personally. It calls for the death of my family. It calls for the death of my brothers and sisters and cousins of any ethnicity you like, so long as we happen to live here (and remember, most of the time just from making the crazy mistake of being born here). It is chanted by a terrorist organization that would have no qualms over shooting me dead or worse, and have tried to do so on numerous occasions since I was born. An experience you, and you will allow me this assumption, did not have. I would be a trophy to them, a cause for celebration (with chanting of the same slogan, of course!). It is chanted by people abroad, of any political affiliation you like, who make light of my death, and of Jewish suffering, since they were told it's fine and that Jews are hysterical and it's just the filthy Zionists who should be worried.
If Jews, Israeli and in the diaspora, telling you that this is a call to kill them and their families, cushioned as it might be, is not enough for you - I don't know what to tell you further. It tells me for certain you would ignore other dogwhistles, and ignore the people they actually threaten, so long as you feel safe enough doing it.
And I hope you question it, I really really do, but I think right now it feels safe to not question it. I think it feels fine and righteous to ignore me. I'm sure you feel fine with that.
Idk if it's true or not, but someone who speaks Arab did point out that the full translation in English is not actually "Palestine will be Free" but "Palestine will be Arab."
Ya it's a call for genocide of anyone but the arab colonizers who took over the region.
I don't expect the congresswoman to admit that, not only is she a vile human being filled with hate but she's also a politician and they have trouble with the truth at the best of times.
Itās really not the best idea to share these things without context. Especially when white people sit here and try to use these things as evidence that black people and our movements are harmful. They said the same thing about marches on Selma and the like.
So for context, the āla riotsā or more properly termed the La uprising was a result of the absolutely brutal and horrific beating and torture of Rodney King at the hands of LA PD and the subsequent acquittal of all the officers involved. So when you say ādifferent decade, same shitā the āsame shitā is the horrific systemic racism that leads to the death and torture of black people and the absolution of white racists and dismissal by white Americans which in turn spurns justified outrage.
Itās also important to note that the brunt of the damage occurred in Korea town because a few days after the brutality showed to Rodney King, a Korean shop owner shot a 14 year old black girl in the head because he falsely accused her of shop lifting. The shop owner was given a criminally light sentence which also sparked outrage.
The reason that there were black shop owners affected by these things is that in tandem with the shooting, gentrification saw Asian and Latino people overtaking black neighborhoods and displacing the local black communities in Los Angeles. So while these attacks were focused on members of the Korean community in Los Angeles, there were black shops that got caught in the crossfire.
Itās also important to know that almost all of the people injured and left dead were black people at the hands of a fiercely and swiftly militarized police force.
The aftermath of the LA uprising saw 2 of the officers brought up on federal charges of civil rights violations and found them guilty while the other 2 were again acquitted.
11,000 people, most of whom were black, were arrested and saw harsher punishment than the officers who beat Rodney king and the shop owner who fatally shot a 15 year old girl.
So the increasing burden of systemic racism, extreme poverty, displacement, and finally the public brutality shown to black people with absolutely no chance at justice reached a boiling point which resulted in the 1992 LA uprising.
So rather than hyper focusing on the unfortunate fact that some black business owners get caught in the cross fire as a way to pretend that you care about the material damages done to black people, how about we focus on the conditions that continue to result in these kinds of tragedies in the first place by addressing institutional white supremacy and its resulting cyclical poverty and oppression.
You cannot use one black manās outage as a political weapon while ignoring the rest because that truth does not suit your racist agenda
So how does what you said make it ok that his business was burned down? How does that make it acceptable? How does it make it not a terrible, awful thing for those guys to have done to him?
Surprising no-one, afronerdism reblogged herself to complain about āwhite peopleā ātrying to goad [her] into arguingā, because theyāre clearly all ābad faithā āracistsā.
Even though she literally came onto this post to argue, canāt tell the race of the people disagreeing, and, oh yes, has me blocked even though Iām a black guy.
In short, sheās playing the victim because her fragile little ego canāt let her followers see anyone who criticizes her, even if sheās doing it to defend her stupid, stupid, racist apologia.
If she was really secure, sheād just ignore the critics. And in her attempts to sympathy bait, sheās accidentally directing some of her followers to the notes. Whoops.
PS: I like how she complains about people āhyperfocusingā on the damage to the black guy, as if her problem is that theyāre focusing too much, and not that theyāre focusing at all. Class, you may recognize that little trick from feminist discourse on āhyper-sexualizationā, which is totally different from complaining about sexy female characters.
when someone is completely fucking wrong about your blorbo but you don't want to argue about what basically boils down to opinions about shit that doesn't matter so you just sit there like
The most embarrassing spn takes are the ones that not only donāt accurately describe the character but it just makes you wonder how this even works with your shipping.
So by this logicā¦.why would you ship Destiel let alone even like Castiel? You know who threatened to throw Dean back in hell? Broke Samās wall just to distract him? This character actively used Deanās trauma against him all the time and you think itās cute to ship him with Dean. How does that even work?! Heās betrayed the brothers multiple, gone behind their backs and used Sam as leverage against Dean. Tell me why this is suddenly acceptable.
Now on to Sam. How exactly is he classicist? This is the one tripping me up. I donāt know where youāre getting that. Heās never once looked down on anyone for their class and why would he? Heās a Stanford student that only could go on a full ride because of his scores. He lived in and out of hotels his whole life. What are you talking about? Are we using words again we donāt know because this isnāt being applied right.
Which makes their use of the word hypocrisy quite ironic here. Fictional accounts of Sam using Deanās trauma against him makes Sam the worst, Castiel ACTUALLY doing that on multiple occasions is totes true love. You see why spn fandom takes can be the stupidest shit youāve ever seen?
They ultimately just proved they donāt really have an issue with Sam. They had to INVENT one to justify it while they dismiss this very behavior from Cas.
I feel like that whole thing was less about actually saying Kirk deserved it, and more about trying to make a ) the right look less like victims, and/or b) making an almost certainly left-wing shooter seem less bad.
Remember Charlottesville? People got mad at Trump because they were told he didn't disavow the Nazis (he did, explicitly), but somehow it's okay for countless left-wingers to water-carry for a terrorist assassin.
Again.
Of course, plenty of left-wingers were disgusted with that behavior, including you.
I'm not Jewish but watching people on the left not only unironically but casually repeat the kind of shit that the OG Nazis were saying in the 30s and then disregard me when I tell them that (with receipts) is scary AF. Somewhere down the line, the ideas and language of social justice got swerved in a very bad way so that antisemitism would still be "ok."
This was actually completely obvious when you realize modern social justice isn't about lifting up the needy, bit tearing down "The Oppressor" and encouraging cruelty manipulation and ostracization against those deemed as part of "the oppressor", along with the absolute insane and blatantly untrue rhetoric that Free Speech and Gun Ownership were things used only by "The Oppressor" as tools to "Oppress."
All of which i cannot possibly overstate should've been massive red flags for anyone who paid attention to how the Nazis came to power.
i think one of the worst things the left wing internet ever did was push the idea that oppression is basically a virtue, and being oppressed is a sign of your morality. it has made it likeā¦impossible for some of you to hold the idea that most people are privileged in some ways and oppressed in others. AND a lot of you seem to have it in your mind that terrible people cannot be oppressed, and that oppressed people cannot do terrible things, which is a dangerous rhetoric to hold imo.
Also the practice of making Oppressed and Oppressor a part of group identity, rather than a matter of circumstances.
In this mind set nothing bad that happens to anyone whose 'group' is labelled 'Oppressor' is ever as bad as that which happens to those whose 'group' is labelled as'Oppressed '.
In the same way. Nothing bad done by anyone whose 'group' is labelled 'Oppressed' is ever as bad as that done by those whose 'group' is labelled as 'Oppressor '.
All that gets us is dehumanization and more injustice.
āWhat if she gets brain damage or something?ā
āOh shit! Is that like a real thing?ā
āNo, itās not, he made it up. Mike doesnāt know what the hell he is talking about.ā
25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name āTank Manā. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.
Itās actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred.
The picture above, famously referred to as āThe Tank Manā was actually taken on June 5, the day after the massacre.
(Which honestly makes him the one of the bravest person, to go back and stand up to a regime after such a terrible event transpired)
So what happened?
Iām gonna give the TL;DR version:
April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.
Many people, includingĀ workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.
Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.
Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesnāt have time to deal with these sorts of ādemandsā and grievances.
Keep in mind, the people wanted not the end of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.
Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this dayā¦
June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.
June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.
June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.
Content Warning for video: blood
āTell the worldā¦ā
I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event.
Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.
Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesnāt even acknowledge the event as a āmassacreā. And they weaves these cover stories of ācounter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the governmentā. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)
The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing.
Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.
After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
And those who remember the incident in China?
ā¦ā¦ā¦ā¦well, you tell me.
Please at least REMEMBER this tragedy. Untold innocent lives were lost, and a nation has been fed a lie for almost three decades now from their oppressive af regime.
Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and letās just say children have a really interesting way of interpreting information.
I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.
The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, āJust be glad your father isnāt in China, now.ā
And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.
It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I donāt even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you donāt say, that you canāt express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didnāt fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.
To this day I donāt remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my fatherās name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.
And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.
Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. Iām ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.
And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didnāt happen it was such a relief.
When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didnāt know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I canāt even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.
Dad and I talked about Tiananmen Square a few times through the years, broadly, politically, and at times with sheer rage on dadās part. I donāt even know what I wanted to say, but just fuck this fucking regime.
I was In Hong Kong when Tiananamen Square Massacre happened. Hong Kong was still a British colony then and had full freedom of press, and its reporters were there recording live footage while trying to stay as long as possible when tanks rolled in and shots were fired, when students lay in blood and their fellow students piled the injured bodies on those wooden plank carts to get them to the hospitals, while asking the Hong Kongers who were there to support the movement to please remember that night and spread the story of the massacre far and wide, because they already knew they would be silenced, if not imprisoned or murdered.
That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.
Hong Kongers were mostly Chinese, just south of the border with people traveling back and forth. It also shared a language, and so HKers could follow the whole movement and hear news that western media had little access to without the distorting effect of translations. And they followed very closely, because by then, Hong Kong was already scheduled to be returned to China in 8 years time. How the Chinese government dealt with the movement would be a sign of how itād treat dissent, how itād treat people whoāre used to the idea and practice of freedom.
What they saw was deadly. Ugly. It broke the hearts of millions of Hong Kongers who trusted that The Chinese Government had left its Great Leap Forward, its Cultural Revolution days behind. Those who could leave, left. Everyday the airport was filled with families about to be torn apart, who decided to trade the life they had in one of the richest, most vibrant and freest city at the time with the unknown, just so their own children would have the freedom to speak their minds, to have a higher education and not to be seen as the enemy of the state because higher education always led to independent thinking, to questioning, to asking for a better government as those university students in Beijing in the spring and summer of 1989 did.
The heartbreak and fear was almost palpable in its intensity. Most HKers were refugees from China or 1st generation of them. Unlike the HK youths now protesting who are more generations removed, they felt much more connected to the people in China. They still saw themselves as Chinese, like those students in Beijing. They mourned. They cried and cried and cried. They wore black or white everyday like it was the death of their closest relatives. TV stations played these Tiananmen Square clips all day. I can still play many of them out of my memory, can still recite what the students and government officials said (for example, they didnāt use tear gas because they only had three), the songs played ā I know every word of Chinaās national anthem for that reason; the students were singing it. They were patriotic. They demanded reforms because they wanted their country to do better. 8964 was and still is, etched in my psyche. It is just one of the long list of atrocities this government has done against its people, but this one, I was close enough to feel it.
China censored the June 4th Massacre quickly and thoroughly ā if you believe China has censored queer material, for example, Iād say this ā the extent of that censorship is not even close to what a true China censorship does. A true Chinese censorship is you canāt find the info, or a hint of that info anywhere. You canāt talk about it in a roundabout away. You canāt change some elements of time/place/person and pretend itās fictional. It would literally ban the numbers 8,9,6,4 from search results, even though the searcher may really be just be interested in the numbers themselves. Whoever speaks of it may be sent to the police station for a ādiscussionā; their family would be sent, if the speaker is outside China; the speaker may be arrested, and may never be seen again.
The western worlds pretended to be enraged about the massacre for a while and soon forgot about it, kept its diplomatic relations with China and did business with its government as usual. UK returned Hong Kong to China as scheduled, on July 1st, 1997. The city has been the only place that insisted on the mourning the victims and had done so insistently, consistently for 30 years, holding a yearly candlelight vigil in Victoria Park until this year, when because of the protests, the Chinese government decided to not even pretend to honour the international treaty they signed that promised HK its freedom until 2047 anymore. They shut the vigil down in the name of the pandemic (there were <10 cases/day then). Still, some people risked being arrested to go to Victoria park and lit their candles.
The Chinese government fears HKers for this reason. They are outside their iron curtain / firewall but have always been close enough geographically, culturally and ethnically to know and more so, to care. And thereās nothing more a government like Chinaās fear than people who insist on remembering the truth. With the National Security Law in place in Hong Kong now, probably the yearly vigils canāt continue. To understand how insane that law is, by writing this reblog, by saying things that make you dislike the Chinese government, Iām already in violation of its Article 38. It doesnāt matter Iām writing it in a foreign country. It doesnāt matter Iām a foreign citizen. That law includes everyone on Earth.
Yes, that includes you. And you. And you. And you. They can arrest you for trying to overthrow the Chinese government if you pass the borders of Hong Kong.
Please help remember 8964 Tiananmen Square Massacre. That summer day, Beijing citizens asked Hong Kongers to please remember this event for them because they knew they wouldnāt be able to afford to remember it themselves. Now that Hong Kongers canāt afford to remember it anymore, Iām hoping that everyone who reads this to please remember it, for the students who perished only because they wanted their government to be better, for the Tank Man who, on his way home with his groceries, decided to stand in front of a tank all by himself because it was the right thing to do.
Someone drew a picture of Tank Manās perspective. Not of being seen from above with the tanks so small, but of someone looking up at the tanks looming over him as malicious giants. I wish I had tagged it.
As we Americans celebrate and appreciate this day of our freedom, let us remember how good we have it compared to our cousins in humanity who suffer under tyranny. And let us resolve to never allow our government to become our ruler rather than our servant.
Most cop thing I've ever read. what the fuck are you talking about. The posts you're looking for might be on this website but we won't show them to you???
