I need to say this to somebody: I, as a queer person, now feel safer seeing an Israeli flag than the Pride flag these days despite the fact that I'm not Jewish. I am an ally of Jewish people, and have come to understand people flying the Pride flag might reject me for that. Why is it like this? How did it get to this point? Why am I doubtful of the flag that's supposed to signal safety and acceptance to me? And if I feel like this... how much more awful must it be for queer Jewish people?
I really understand where you're coming from, and it really shouldn't be like this. When flags of terrorist groups and regimes that kill queer people are flown alongside pride flags, something has gone terribly, badly wrong. And the only thing these bizarrely disparate groups have in common is violent hatred of Jews and accepting Nazi esque propaganda as gospel truth. I don't frequent leftist or queer spaces at all anymore, because I cannot pretend I don't see the hypocrisy.
My love and solidarity with all queers who are as sickened by this as I am ❤️
“I don’t like this song because I can’t relate to it” skill issue. I’m mad at my husband I love my girlfriend I’m a lone cowboy I’m growing old I’m growing up I’m depressed I love my friends I’m perpetually horny I’m drunk at the club I love my husband again
yeah gotta be honest every time i think about how the dome of the rock was literally built on top of the holiest site to judaism and that jews are actually literally banned from going there i wonder how the jewish people haven’t set the world on fire with justifiable rage
and not only that but the people whose religious structure now sits on top of the temple mount have historically fear mongered about jews supposedly plotting to take over the site and used these misinformation campaigns to justify violence against jews — the hebron massacre for example — and yet the jewish community is expected to not be pissed about any of this
also i should be used to this by now but i think it’s wild how every fucking time i make a post like this validating jewish pain i IMMEDIATELY lose followers. some of y’all just plain disgust me.
Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.
Also, what prompted the Second Intifada (on paper), was that a Jewish politician went to visit the Temple Mount after the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf illegally excavated and dumped over 10 dump-trucks' worth of priceless artifacts within the Temple Mount.
And they slaughtered thousands of our civilians for it.
“A new sense may actually be dawning that only a mass movement against Israeli apartheid (similar to South Africa’s) will work.”
Fuck this article, but the headline spot on.
A Jewish man merely visiting the holiest place in the entire Jewish religion, that Jews aren't allowed to go near to "respect" the religion that built over it, and that alone prompted slaughtering thousands of our civilians.
20 years after the fact, what attacks did Israel face?
And people try to, "Well... both sides" it.
"Wellllll, a Jewish politician visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque made Muslims scared that they'd make changes to it, so you can understand why--"
a) Like when they "made changes" to our holiest site in the world by destroying and dumping tens of tonnes of our holiest artifacts??
b) A Jew visiting a Mosque shouldn't prompt slaughtering thousands of Jews.
I shouldn't have to say that.
And don't, "Well, apartheid--" me:
This was just after the Camp David Summit.
Just after the Israeli government agreed to all of Yassir Araf's demands for Palestinian statehood and then some: All of Gaza, 96% of the West Bank, East Jerusalem as the capitol, plus full monetary reparations for those displaced in 1948 War that they started.
And Arafat responded by not just rejecting statehood, but his Waqf by vandalizing and destroying ten dump-trucks worth of the holiest Jewish artifacts from the holiest Jewish place in the world.
And Jews were (and are) expected to be completely fine with it.
"They destroyed literally tonnes of our holiest artifacts, but we visited their mosque, so it's really all the same."
"They stabbed, shot, and blew up thousands of our civilians across a bloody summer, but one of our guys visited their mosque, so tit-for-tat."
Fuck that.
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If you disagree with me about any of this, that's fine.
I don't care.
I just wanted to draw attention to that one extra detail.
It's also important to point out that this act of vandalism destroyed historical evidence of our history in Israel.
See, the Waqf's illegal excavation of the Temple Mount has a part two: The Temple Mount Sifting Project. We know where all the rubble was dumped, and this organization, with the help of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, has spent decades sifting through it for all the priceless archeological treasures.
But one of the most important elements of an archeological find, perhaps the most important element, is the context. Not only where it was found, but how deep. What was above it? What was it above?
And all of that context was permanently, irrevocably destroyed. If a 3000 year old shard is found, we have to ask: has it been there for three thousand years? Or could it have spent two thousand years elsewhere before being moved?
If the Temple Mount hadn't been desecrated, we'd find that shard in a layer of debris that would prove how long it had been there. But as is, we can't be totally certain. We can't prove it.
I've volunteered with the sifting project twice. The first time, I found a piece of Herodian tile--that is, the specific type of tile that he used in all his major building projects, which we also see at Masada.
I held in my hands corroboration of the contemporary account of Herod renovating the Temple and adding the retaining walls and plaza that are still standing today, the structure the Dome of the Rock was built on.
But that evidence, and every other piece of evidence the project finds, has, and always will have, an asterisk.
A bit of room for doubt that will always be there, because the religious authority descended from the conquerors of the land deliberately destroyed the evidence of the cultural history that predated their presence.
And yet, somehow, we are the real imperialist colonizers, and our presence is the real desecration.
you solve the mystery of what to have for dinner one night and you think "hell yeah case closed forever" WRONG there is a dinner mystery the next night too
That's funny, I don't see you criticizing Russia the same way. I don't see you criticizing China the same way. Afghanistan. Syria. Yemen. Iraq. Iran. Turkmenistan. North Korea. The list goes on
Did you miss when Russian immigrants were being harassed? Have you not seen all the racism against the Chinese online? Do you not remember how Islamophobic people were during the Afghan war?
"Have you missed russian immigrants being harassed?"
That's interesting as I'm russian myself, dumbass, tell me more about how we, russians, are firebombed at protests, blocked from student campuses, called baby killers, vermin, how russian neighborhoods are filled with people screaming for our blood, how random russians are blocked from cafes and stopped in the streets and harassed over Putin's war simply because they're russian.
Ну давай. Расскажи мне, русскому человеку, о притеснениях русских иммигрантов. Может ещё заведешь мне путинскую шарманку, про то, как русскоязычных везде притесняют и обижают, а? Ну так, если совсем мозгов нет. А судя по тебе мозгов реально нет и вряд ли когда-то были
Пиздуй в свою Пластелину и освобождай от выдуманного геноцида, а не сиди в тумбе и рассказывай русским, как их везде якобы ненавидят. Борец за свободу хренов
Indeed. Where are all the articles about the Russian Tearoom getting its windows smashed and patrons called genocidal pedophiles?
Where are all the articles about Orthodox Churches in financial crisis because they can't afford the security measures they need to not get killed for congregating?
Where are the stories about people being beaten in the streets for the crime of speaking Russian in public places?
How many Russian restaurants have had to close in the past three years due to constant harassment, vandalism, and threats? Because I can think of five kosher restaurants that closed off the top of my head, and if I did some research I bet I'd find way more. How many times has someone tried to blow up a Russian daycare? Has anyone ever shot up a Russian holiday party? Raped a teenage girl for being Russian? Tried to poison their employer's family for being Russian? Been caught on tape saying they'd let their Russian patients die? I could go on and on and on but I know the answer.
And here's the thing: when Russians or Chinese people, or Arabs do face racist bullshit because of their governments? Progressives almost universally condemn that shit. No one on the left is out here saying that beating up random Asians is a justified response to the bullshit (up to and including actual genocide) being pulled by the CCP.
Wonder how long it'll be before the public looks back on this era and claims they always spoke out about antisemitism.
I'm so sick of this era. Can we get to the part where everybody retcons their own behavior? It'll still suck but at least they'll make public statements about how antisemitism is bad again and I'll have some sense of faith restored.
The answer for a lot of them if they were honest would be “I made a post saying antisemitism is bad in between posts about Israelis being bloodthirsty childkillers, and then went on a tirade about ‘zionists’ finding it when jews started reblogging, but I was sure to balance it out by saying I love my good Jew antizionist comrades”
the obsessive, religious fervor at work here also reduces Palestinians themselves to mere objects, Christlike martyrs with Israelis cast as the devils, the crucifiers. it’s effectively entrenching this belief into every social justice movement, and more than simply normalizing, it is uplifting and canonizing antisemitic ideology as righteous and sacrosanct. it’s nothing new, but it is dangerous, and there are thousands of years of evidence to show why.
When I say, again and again, it's a fandom cult, this is what the fuck I mean.
It quite literally fills in the 'religion/community/hierarchy' for a bunch of people hungry for structure and meaning but traumatized/certain they're 'too smart for organized religion' and they fall right into the hands of terrorist grifters.
And in a bunch of rapidly-secularizing countries who still have a shitload of baggage from the Catholic Church they'd rather not face (Hi Ireland, Hi Spain) and offloading it onto Jews is easier, and they're lazy losers so their activist wings can go do more Jew baiting shit instead of actually confronting their own fucky governments.
I don't think I'm quite the religious-studies scholar to do this, but I would love to see a serious study of this kind of speech specifically from a religious-studies perspective. Because this is fascinating to me in a "the more things change, the more they stay the same" kind of way.
My guess is that this lady has been carefully taught, in post-WWII Europe that the racialized antisemitism of the 19th and 20th centuries is Bad, and Wrong, and anyway Jews Are White now (which is very much code for "Whoops, we went a bit too far on the antisemitism between 1933 and 1945, so we'll give Jews a little bit of Whiteness, as a treat, to make up for that little oopsie"), so you can't be racist against Jews by definition.
But cultural Christianity, and especially cultural Catholicism, is a helluva drug. In trying so hard to be progressive, she's actually looped all the way around to the kind of medieval antisemitism from which we derive the idea that Jews have horns/tails/cloven feet. And I'm sure she doesn't even realize that.
And, as others have noted, the look of spiritual awe in her eyes at the memory of a mere glimpse of Gaza -- the Promised Land, if you will -- really seals the deal that this has become a religious substitute. You really do have to wonder what she'd think if she ever actually did manage to set foot in the Promised Land of Gaza, with all of her intense, earnest, spiritualized White Saviorism so prominently on display.
In such an instance, I would hope that the first person she meets is not a Hamas soldier, but some ordinary shmoe who tells her the equivalent of "Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot! She has been setting a light to our beacon, which, I've just remembered, is Grail-shaped."
As my friend Julian puts it, only half winkingly: "God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation."
This has been driving me insane because this quote is so incredibly Jewish but every time I saw it was completely divorced from Judaism in the version applying it to 'transsexual'.
The original concept that humans complete the act of creation by making bread from wheat is from the Talmud! And the specific "wheat but not bread, grapes but not wine" phrasing is from Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel but it is missing "clay but not bricks".
And among trans Jews the sentiment was already popular before I ever started seeing this specific phrasing so I knew, knew, knew a Jew and likely a trans Jew was involved.
As it happens, Ortberg's friend Julian is Jewish and they have strongly negative feelings about the way the quote has been removed from the context of their life as someone trans and Jewish. They used to have a thread up on xwitter about it but have since made their account private and only have a very terse FAQ online from which you can glean the treatment they likely received when being more open about their Jewishness, relationship to transness, and the interaction of both.
This sounds like a shitpost but people should be allowed to be horny. As in, sexuality is just part of life for most people and there’s no reason for consensual sexual behavior to be punished. A celebrity getting “caught” at a sex club shouldn’t be a scandal. No one should be fired for having a fetlife profile outside of work. Nudes getting leaked shouldn’t be career-ending. Denying and hiding (consensual) sexual interests doesn’t make anyone more professional, it just makes everyone more repressed. And sterilizing ourselves to be better work drones isn’t productive, it’s just creepy. I’d rather my surgeon get absolutely railed on camera and come to work in a good mood, frankly.
also this goes without saying but is also true of ppl who do sex work for used to do sex work. an accountant’s boss finding out that they used to do sex work shouldn’t be a career ender. a restaurant worker shouldn’t be fired bc they have an OnlyFans.
“Criticizing Israel isn’t antisemitic” yeah well lying about the largest group of Jews in the world and making an entire personality out of wanting them to die isn’t criticism
Just so everyone knows what’s going on, a lot of Jewish queer folks no longer feel safe going to Pride.
This isn’t about Israel or Palestine, this is about Pride and celebrating that. Banning Jewish Pride flags is antisemitic. The Star of David is the symbol of the Jewish religion.
We feel unwelcome in our own community and no one seems to notice. Please share this so people can understand.
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