Magneto was right @shofarsogood - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
Magneto was right
@shofarsogood
🧑🏻🏫🌈📝📖🦹🏻🧶🪬🧿✡️🕎♿🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ He/him, they/them, or ey/em, 31, Jewish, genderqueer, bisexual, and engaged to the hottest lady imaginable (junebug93). Our tentative marriage date is summer, 2027. Currently getting my master's degree. I post about comics, social justice, bugs, animals, whatever strikes my fancy. On a personal quest to follow every jumblr blog. Header by @jewishsideblog. Profile picture from X-Men '97.
Free Palestine from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Give them democracy.
Woman Life Freedom. Free Iran!
Free Ukraine! Russia is a terrorist state.
Free Kurdistan!
Free Sudan!
Free Tibet!
Romani people are still oppressed.
ICE are murderers, and the US immigration system needs to be dismantled entirely.
Trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are non-binary.
Intersex people deserve to be respected and given proper medical care. And intersex issues need to be discussed in their own context without connecting them to trans people.
Sex work is real work. We need to protect the people who choose to go into sex work while protecting the victims of trafficking. The only way to protect people who want to leave sex work is to protect people who want to be in sex work.
Vaccines are good and should be mandatory with rare, medical exemptions.
People know themselves best and can define their identities best. Don't tell people how they should call themselves. If someone isn't causing active harm, they're fine. Just let people live and stop worrying about he/him lesbians or whatever. Let people choose their own pronouns.
All human beings are equally valuable. All human beings deserve human rights. Yes, even those people.
I think too many queers, especially white queers, have not internalized the fact that they are not, and will never be, “one of the good ones”.
You may be a “temporarily useful” one, a token, the reason harm comes to others like you; but you will never truly be “one of the good ones” to them.
You are as much every sex worker, every addict, every unhoused person in their eyes, as you are queer. Your rights and your liberation only extend as far as those you leave behind, much like how Black folks learn that no amount of money can save them from a cop that wants them dead.
You cannot sacrifice your way out of oppression, and your liberation is tied to that of those you see as “lesser” than yourself, so you better fucking start caring and listening to them.
Erika Diamond
Asheville, North Carolina
40% (quilt)
2022
Reflective vinyl fabric, batting, lined with “Super Snuggle Pride Pronouns Flannel Fabric” from JOANN(tm)
“The quilt lining signals the single most lifesaving factor in a gender-diverse child’s well-being: a parent using a child’s preferred pronouns.
-Erika Diamond
Artist Erika Diamond uses the quilt form to highlight the specific challenges faced by queer youth today. Her quilt, made out of mirrored vinyl, alters the Virginia quilt square block to resemble the outline of a basic house. The artwork’s title, 40%(quilt), references the disproportionate amount of queer youth who are unhoused in Virginia.
Through this literally reflective quilt, Diamond asks us to reconsider the challenges and barriers queer youth face today, giving visibility to a group that is often overlooked.
(Photos taken by /u/Complex-Royal9210 at the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC, in June 2024. I am not Complex-Royal, but have their permission to share their photos here.)
The Center for Craft was of course affected by Helene. I'm not finding a lot of photos, but what I do see is pretty damn bad. They're doing a fundraiser at their website, here:
https://www.centerforcraft.org/grants-and-fellowships/craft-futures-fund
It actually kinda pisses me off that every time there’s an adaptation of some classic work coming out, there are takes like “maybe we should not judge the adaptation compared to the original”… I think if the creator doesn’t want their work to be compared and judged on comparison, they can make literally any other type of piece. I’m not arguing for a word for word adaptation - I think those are impossible, first of all, and just not fun to strive for. But slapping a recognisable title, names and plots into your work, and then turning around and asking people not to compare your work to the original is simply absurd lol
A sick wizard castle with a nondescript van painted on the side. A gothy pin-up girl with the portrait of a random trucker tattooed on her thigh. A bathroom-themed beach vacation. A beautiful brightly coloured cupcake that tastes like soap.
Jesus with a portrait of my grandma on his wall. A scimitar-wielding fantasy protagonist reading about the adventures of sixth-grader Kelsey. A National Park with a framed print of somebody’s living room.
I'm not religious in any christian way but the thought of Biblical Jesus having a whole gallery wall of pictures of every single grandma with a jesus on her wall is cute.
The next time someone tells you that America’s history is all just forcing scared little kids to go to war just to go kill brown people overseas because the people up top were bored I want you to remember that a major part of the reason that the military is so thorough in their investigation of you when you enlist isn’t just because technology advanced but also because there were droves of young boys going to great lengths to lie about their ages and falsify their birth certificates to get in because even at their age they were aware of what was happening and decided it was worth the trouble
There are stories galore of fourteen and fifteen year old boys lying like dogs to get in there and fight for freedom and democracy. It was kind of a problem. Also, they really, really don't like having white supremacists in the military. My learned my brother was in a prison gang when they did my background check. They took my horror at the revelation as enough proof I didn't know and wasn't a plant. I guess it's kind of hard to vomit and cry on command for that type of person.
This has also been a thing since the very beginning. A lot of the last veterans of the American Revolution and Civil War were young boys who lied about their ages.
Not to mention the other lies people were driven to tell to enlist. Women, too, were pretty commonly disguising themselves as men just to enter combat roles. And the ones we know about are only the ones that got found out. We’ll never know how many more there actually were.
Everything I learn about Jewish history opens up at least a dozen more things I never knew.
This one just about kneecapped me, though.
For context: I'm researching a list of every pogrom and massacre and anti-Jewish riot in the past 200 years.
It's already just annual mass murders peppered with, "At the time, this country had limited Jews to only 6 years of school, and school exams were purposely held on Shabbat, and also they were just getting beat up in the streets all the time?"
And yet, one bullet point still managed to jump out and sucker-punch me a lil bit.
Those examples I just gave were ALL from Syria.
Now, first of all: In 1947, Syria had a 2,500-year-old Jewish community.
Aleppo. Tragic images of wounded children and bombed houses come to mind. After over 6 years of a brutal Syrian civil war, it is hard to ima
This painting of Moses parting the Red Sea is from the Dura-Europos synagogue in Syria that was in use about 1,800 years ago.
Then the United Nations voted to create Israel and Palestine. And Aleppo rioted against its own Jews.
Rioters killed at least 75 Jews; set ten synagogues, five Jewish schools, a Jewish orphanage, a Jewish youth club, several Jewish shops, and 150 Jewish homes ablaze, destroying them. Thousands of Jews illegally fled Syria, including half of those living in Aleppo.
The Aleppo Codex, also called the Crown of Aleppo, disappeared for a decade. It was the earliest known Hebrew manuscript comprising the full text of the Torah. And, as the Israel Museum puts it, it was also "the most authoritative, accurate, and sacred source document, both for the biblical text and for its vocalization, cantillation and Masorah (literally, 'transmission' of the Bible, the oral and written tradition by which the Holy Scriptures have been preserved and passed on from generation to generation).... It was probably the manuscript used by Maimonides when he set down the exact rules for writing scrolls of the Torah."
When it resurfaced, 40% of its pages were missing.
But that's nothing.
You see, Arab Palestine was plagued by a godawful fascist the Brits had installed as a leader in 1921 -- before anyone knew what a Nazi war criminal was, much less that this guy would become one.
His name was Amin al-Husseini. And instead of having Palestine declare independence alongside Israel in 1948, he got all the surrounding countries to invade en masse and try to destroy it. To reclaim the land for the Arab world. Including Syria.
Syria was not a hard sell. It was voluntarily harboring a major Nazi war criminal: SS captain Alois Brunner, who rounded up and deported the Jews of occupied Austria, Greece, Macedonia, France, and Slovakia.
The fugitive found a safe haven among Arab nationalists and then went on to share torture methods that last to this day
In fact, Syria was SO on board with al-Husseini's plan that it ALSO introduced a whole bunch of new laws for Syrian Jews!
It stripped them of Syrian citizenship. It shut down Jewish schools. They couldn't have driver's licenses. Or passports. Or buy real estate.
In 1949, it seized Jewish bank accounts. The following year, it banned them from working in agriculture too.
They had to be inside by 10 pm. They couldn't work in public service, in public institutions or in banks. People who worked in the government/military were forbidden from buying anything in Jewish shops.
And Jews were very much forbidden to leave Syria.
They could travel for business or health... if they received permission from the Mukhabarat (secret police), left family members behind to essentially serve as hostages, and left a deposit of $6,000 with the government.
Many people managed to flee the country anyway.
If your kids managed to flee, the Mukhabarat would torture you, and possibly imprison you for several years. Some people died from torture long before it got to that point.
The 5,000 Jews left in the country couldn’t get out,
even with passports, and needed written permission just to travel from city to
city.
There were repeated instances of Jews getting caught escaping the country and being not only murdered, but dismembered.
(In 1958, when Egypt and Syria briefly joined forces, the curfew became even worse. Now it was at 7 pm. And the Mukhabarat would arrest and torture any Jews who didn't make it home.)
You might wonder why Syria kept them there if it hated them so much. The answer is twofold.
First, along with the rest of the Arab League, it had invaded Israel in an attempt to reclaim the land for the Arab world, and failed. It didn't want its Jews to go strengthen Israel.
And second: for a while, it was more profitable to keep them there and exploit them.
In 1953, and again in 1958, Syria temporarily allowed Jews to emigrate.
But only as long as they handed over all their property to the Syrian government first.
(See?)
All of this mirrored not only what other Arab countries were doing, but much of what the Nazis had done in the 1930s. They stripped Jews of their citizenship, their businesses, their jobs, their bank accounts, and forced them to leave their money and property for the Nazi government if they managed to flee.
In 1964, Jews were prohibited from going further than 3 km (less than 2 miles) from their homes without getting special permits from the Mukhabarat.
In 1973, Jews were forbidden to own radios or telephones, or to maintain postal contact with outside world.
Plus, there was constant intense violence against them.
One Syrian Jew described going to the funeral for a neighbor who had been shot, point-blank, by a random Arab man who just knocked on his door and immediately killed him. (And also described having been aggressively questioned by secret police at that same funeral.)
There were many, many murders of Jews which went unremarked and uninvestigated.
The history of Jews in the majority-Kurdish city of Qamishli in northeast Syria is less ancient than in other Kurdish regions across the Mid
But what got me was one last twist.
When Jews died, their property was confiscated by the Syrian government. If their heirs could afford to lease their homes from the government, they were allowed to.
If they couldn't, the property was handed over to the Palestinian refugees in Syria.
So just to summarize:
The Syrian government, along with every other surrounding country (plus Iraq) invaded Israel to reclaim the land for the Arab world. It failed.
It took revenge on the Syrian Jews, who by definition weren't in Israel.
The Syrian government targeted a Jewish population that had been there for at least 2,500 years.
There was widespread, extremely violent antisemitism. Intense restrictions on who could buy from Jewish shops. On what jobs Jews could have.
Jews were demonized. Deliberately forced into poverty and out of their family homes. They were isolated from the world. They were killed for everything from leaving the country to answering the door.
And once they left their homes, left the country, or were killed, it gave their homes to Palestinian refugees.
There were as many as 35,000 Jews in Syria and Lebanon in 1928 - almost entirely in Syria. The population dropped rapidly when the persecution started: by 1957 there were 5,400. In 1989, only 4,000 were left: 90% had fled. Today, there are somewhere between 4 and 100, depending on whose guess you go with.
Syria has successfully ethnically cleansed over 99% of its Jews.
But here's the thing about that plot twist.
At most, 75,000 of the Palestinian refugees went to Syria. The numbers are impossible to fully track; there's great research about how many people left, but not so much on where they each ended up. It could have been significantly lower.
In fact - setting aside, for the moment, the fact that at least four other countries had invaded with it, and at least - hang on, let me count -
at least 10 other countries Acting Like This who hadn't even been involved in the 1948 war -
Basically, Syria started a war to yeet the Jews that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And then it turned around and yeeted and attacked its own Jews, confiscated their homes, and gave those to Palestinians.
You can kind of see this as compensation. Maybe. If you squint real hard, tilt your head 39 degrees to the right, and see the presence of Jews as the sole actual problem here.
This is why the social media version of this history is such a successful mindfuck.
It's so far off from the truth, and leaves out such an incredible amount of what happened, that it's almost impossible to counter.
People confidently claim that the Zionists invaded in 1948; that the Zionists attacked in 1948; or that Britain gave Jews the land as some kind of pity gift for the Holocaust.
Nobody has any idea that Britain watched every other country on earth agree that the Jews were about to get killed off if someone didn't take in Jewish refugees - someone else, not any of them - and then turned around and effectively banned Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939. That it even made boats full of Holocaust refugees turn around and go back to Europe. That sometimes, it just unloaded them and put everyone in its own detention camps.
That if it had followed the League of Nations Mandate for this little chunk of former Ottoman Empire land, and encouraged Jewish immigration, it could have taken in all the 6,000,000 Jews who were instead slaughtered.
Yes, fine, that would have quadrupled the population of the entire country, caused immediate food rationing and massive refugee camps, and terminally pissed off Amin al-Husseini, but it would also have saved six million lives.
Nobody knows, somehow, that Palestine was supposed to be, mandated to be, a place where both Arabs and Jews lived in equality and shared in governing. Or that (if you prefer a two-state solution) it was supposed to be partitioned into Israel and Palestine in 1947. After al-Husseini attacked enough people that Britain gave up on the Mandate.
Nobody knows or wants to believe that no, there wasn't a good fucking reason for all these countries to invade. That THIS was where colonialism and imperialism came in.
When 1,300 years of empire ends, and people who have been marginalized under it get rights, there is an inevitable backlash.
The backlash uncoiled for thirty years while the people in power fought to keep all of the power they'd had. And then, like a whip, it snapped.
UNPOPULAR OPINION: A lot of "mental health issues" disappear when bills are paid, rent is secure, and the fridge is full. Peace is expensive. And pretending money doesn't affect mental health is privilege.
first of all the whole "that would kill a shit ton of people, especially disabled people and those with a high level of reliance on social systems in place" thing but also like. okay let's say somehow you manage to literally and/or metaphorically raze the current social system and economic structure and all of hierarchy and everything. that's not a clean slate bro
like first of all, are you going to do this only within the borders of the united states that i assume you agree are artificial impositions on human movement and culture and existence? because if so, then there's your critique right there: plenty of countries are proof that being against a hegemonic system doesn't mean you aren't affected by it. even the soviet union (yimakh shemo) was beholden to global capitalism. and if you say you are going to try to cut All Of The (contiguous???) United States out of the global system, then that means you have to be even stricter than fucking north korea in terms of enforcing the borders, which i'd hope you'd see the issue with given what was just established at the top of this paragraph!
but even if that was fixed—somehow you have a way to completely inoculate the united states from outside forces without restricting human rights or cutting off those global supply chains that are necessary for keeping disabled people and others alive—you still don't have a clean slate because people inside your (porous?) borders are alive and have memories of what life was like before. they still have their subconscious and latent biases, even those who are aware of them and are actively working on them are still affected by them. what do you do about that? you can't just wave a magic wand and erase racism or hierarchical thinking or individualism or [insert other thing here, im not listing all of it lmfao]
but let's say you can. everybody, upon seeing such a radical change in their lives, is now completely open to a new way of thinking. who gets to decide what that new way of thinking will be? you? you personally will be the one with all the power and it will be up to you (or maybe you and some buddies, or even a whole stadium of people, or you do a direct democracy and it's up to everybody) to decide what the new system will be; what do you do when somebody inevitably disagrees? what if they want to do something they think will make the future of the united states better, but you want to do something different that you think will make the future of the united states better? what happens when someone holding more power (social, institutional, physical, intellectual, whatever) than another has a different opinion than someone else? what if the two disagreeing people have the same amount of power? how will you make sure that this manage of mediating differences is unaffected by life and experiences from Before™? what if somebody is exhibiting behaviors from Before™? who gets to decide if somebody's doing that or not? how do you/they react?
