From the Background @windyren - Tumblr Blog

sassycolortheorist101-blog

some fucking resources for all ur writing fuckin needs

* body language masterlist

* a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

* a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

* 550 words to say instead of fuckin said

* 638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again

* some more body language help

(hope this helps some ppl)

kinavu

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.