#Do not forget that the Jewish people and the Palestinian people we’re neighbors and lived in Palestine together for hundreds of years

[carrionbeast]

nobody who has responded to my post is anyone who I am talking about. But it is good to remind people to be aware of the language and rhetoric being used.

[j-saying]

masterpost (2/2):

@batrogers

#Important#antisemitism#the context of Israel matters#history#people can behave badly for good reasons#it doesn't make their behaviour RIGHT#but it does mean you have to account for those reasons#when you're judging how to move forward#Israel/Palestine#recent history#I have a bachelors degree#that included this region and time period#which is why I'm so fucking impatient with the discourse on this site#it's all so short-sighted

@bicycles-bees-bisexuals

#antisemitism#this is not discourse it is basic facts#there is so much nuance in everything and people just ignore it for black and white comparisons

@myalchod

#antisemitism#if your i/p activism fails to account for this then what the fuck is it even worth?#you do no one any favours with regurgitating ahistorical claims#this is not said to excuse anything#it’s said because it needs to be acknowledged

@ladypolaris

#fucking thank you!#people love to conveniently forget that jews in the diaspora aren’t guaranteed safety in their home countries#that’s literally the entire reason israel exists#this is not discourse it is basic facts#antisemitism

@chocolatepot

#I really think a major part of goyish leftist westerners' inability to comprehend that shit's complicated#comes from the idea that generational trauma is something that only happens to good people we all agree are oppressed#and many of them don't even quite think there's real antisemitism at all in the world#(based on an argument the night before I wrote these tags)#so instead of going 'wowee that sounds like a harsh thing to deal with. I can see how it would warp people into hyperaggressive defense'#'maybe we should include this in our discussions to show we understand that it's a factor'#they accuse you of defending/minimizing Israel's actions or trying to distract from them#I'm sorry but if you're neither Jewish nor Palestinian you are in fact the privileged person who needs to listen at least briefly#gobsmacked that so many people who normally have a decent understanding of privilege don't grasp this#israel/palestine#antisemitism

@novafigura

#this.#i/p#antisemitism#also. there is no question that the state of israel’s founding created a backlash in the region.#but the antisemitism itself is old and has very deep roots.#(hence such a *terrifying* backlash in otherwise totally uninvolved countries.)#we live in a post-creation of the state of Israel world. that means a lot of things; this post is one of them.

@azriellaveraon

#fun fact! i personally know a few jews who fled to america from iran#went to synagogue with some jewish ethiopian refugees too#these events happened withing my lifetime!#im only 27!

@zahari097

#our history goes back over 3500 years with concrete archaeological historical and genetic proof that we all came from the levant#in fact the amount of evidence you have to ignore or flat out deny in order to pretend we all came from poland or w/e is staggering#claiming that we “made up” all of these artifacts and historical records in order to get a tiny piece of land is also insane#but of course those greedy (((zionists))) would craft intricate lies to get their grubby little hands on some land!!#it's arabs who are cosplaying indigeneity when they're literally the colonizers

@hmsharmony

#stop applying a western lens challenge#actually learn our history before trying to invalidate our fears#(or maybe just yknow listen to us and trust we know what we’re saying like you rightly would with any other historically oppressed group)#issues: antisemitism

@jacensolodjo

#israel#it's as if you forget the whole never again thing and why the jews might need somewhere to flee to#after 2000+ years of being murdered and driven from places for being jews#Am I Queue-ing Myself Jaina?

@likethecities

#I feel the need to remind people that#like it or not#a major Jewish and Israeli presence in the ME is not going to change#they cannot be inflicting violence and destruction on their neighbors constantly#but any long term goal for peace that does not include a Jewish nation is not one they can survive in#and if they can’t survive they will keep fighting

@jewish-sideblog

#Mass migration is *always* about push factors not pull factors.#virtually no one voluntarily leaves their country of birth because they want to live in a different country.#you have to leave behind your home and your friends and your family and your language and everything that you hold dear#people don’t do that unless they’re at risk of losing everything or unless they’ve already lost everything

Oh my god, once again reminding people that Jews in the SWANA region being scared of being murdered if Israel is dismantled are not comparable to white Americans and Canadians being scared of indigenous sovereignty. The entire world, and that includes Muslim countries, has a very very long history of violently expelling and brutally murdering its Jewish communities; Israel itself has many, many refugees and descendents of refugees from other countries in Asia and Africa, countries that do not want those people back.

The comparison to white North Americans is absurd, cruel, and ahistorical; the claim that Jewish people lived in happiness and peace and safety in SWANA countries before Israel's founding is a complete fabrication and blatant victim blaming. Many of the countries surrounding Israel and throughout the SWANA region have Jewish populations that can literally be counted on one hand and that isn't because people just abandoned their homes and friends and communities to move to Israel for funsies, it's because many of them were brutally murdered or expelled from their homes, with the rest fleeing out of fear for when they would be next.

I am saying this as a Native person who is 100% in favor of indigenous sovereignty in my home country and who is fully against the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government. If you cannot acknowledge how antisemitism is still very much alive and an active danger to Jewish people all across the world and how many people fled to Israel specifically to escape violence, then you really cannot have any sort of meaningful conversation about Israel.

[nataliesnews]

A school in Palestine

Your children went safely to school. You often drive them there and back. You never had a problem to find a school or to get a permit to buy one. This is how Israel deals with Palestinian children who try to get a basic education. Very, very rarely do Palestinians get permission to build anything Starting with a pen for animals, a toilet or an addition to a building. As for a building it …forget it. And how cares where they go? They do not walk on roads or through the desert…imagine in summer. Often the schooling of the girls is cut short because parents say is it dangerous for girls alone in the desert. We are the people of the book……but better to keep them uneducated as one settlers said….They were created to be our servants”         This Pastoral Palestinian Community Built a School of Its Own. Now Israel Wants to Demolish It

Before the schoolhouse was built, children had to walk seven kilometers each way to get an education. Will the dream be destroyed by bulldozers?

The schoolhouse in Ras a-Tin.Credit: Alex Levac

Gideon Levy

Alex Levac

Published at 15:00

It’s exactly 12 noon. A little boy bursts out of the teachers’ room holding a heavy iron bell and rings it. The chime of redemption? Not quite. Immediately afterward the doors of the five classrooms open and dozens of boys and girls spill out of them. Schoolbags on their backs, most of them wearing corona masks, they walk in a line down the slope of the verdant valley to their homes – in tents. One “privileged” boy has a ride waiting for him: a mule that’s tied up nearby. He’s from one of the neighboring pastoral communities.

Since the start of the school year in September, the lives of these Palestinian children from the village of Ras a-Tin, east of Ramallah in the West Bank, have been transformed beyond recognition. Until then they had to walk more than seven kilometers each morning to school in the closest village, Mughayir, and then take the same route home – about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) back and forth in the heat and the cold, in the wind and the rain, and sometimes also in the face of settlers’ attacks along the way. So in late August the community decided to act: It would build its own school.

With the aid of the Palestinian Education Ministry and GVC, an Italian-based European Commission aid organization, the miracle occurred. Residents built a simple brick structure of six rooms – five classrooms and a teachers’ room – covered with a tin roof, situated on a gravel mound. This was the primary school of the village of Ras a-Tin.

Open gallery view

The schoolhouse in Ras a-Tin.Credit: Alex Levac

It’s a very touching sight. The simplicity of the white building; the small, Spartan classrooms that contain only a few children’s work tables, chairs and a whiteboard; the sparkling eyes of the teachers, the enthusiasm of the pupils; the principal who came here after administering a similar institution in another shepherds’ community. Previously most of the children were frequently absent from school, or dropped out altogether, because of the ordeal of the daily trek, but now the attendance rate is high.

This week pupils in the new school learned about equations with an unknown variable.

The real unknown, however, is whether and when the dream will be shattered and the school demolished. The fear is that this heartwarming vision will be a short-lived one, because the occupation authorities won’t let it last. Israel’s Civil Administration, which administers the West Bank, has already issued the demolition orders; the bulldozers are on the way.

First, personnel of the Civil Administration tried to prevent the building’s construction, then they began to confiscate equipment and furniture. Now they are preventing the town from hooking up the teachers’ bathroom to some sort of plumbing infrastructure, in a locale that’s not even connected to the main water or power grids. Inspectors from the Civil Administration show up regularly to make sure no one has connected the plumbing in the meantime so as to make it possible to flush the toilets in the teachers’ bathroom. That’s how far this evil has gone.

Open gallery view

A classroom in Ras A-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

An Occupation Vacation

Israeli Students in State-funded Scholarship Program     Guard Illegal West Bank Outposts

This Bedouin Poet Began Writing at 46. Her Feminist     Work Is Now Celebrated Globally

An expert opinion written on behalf of the Israeli human rights NGO Bimkon – Planners for Planning Rights by architect Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, which was submitted to the court last month states that the school has tremendous importance vis-a-vis the lives of these pupils.

“For some of them, it is their only possibility to participate in the education system, as it is close to their home,” he wrote. “The school makes it possible for all the children in the community to exercise their basic right – the right to education: for those who never attended school, for those who have dropped out, and also for those who previously had to make their way to a distant school across difficult terrain and who were frequently absent. Demolition of the school will deprive these children” of this opportunity.

According to Cohen-Lifshitz’s document – which will also be submitted to the Supreme Court, following a district court ruling that the school’s demolition can go ahead – in numerous other cases in the West Bank, ways have been found to avoid demolition of a school that has been built without a permit, and special directives to that effect have actually been issued by the military government, citing “regulations authorizing the establishment and exemption from permit for an educational structure.”

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But such exemptions, of course, apply solely to Jewish settlements, not to the other residents of the region. Cohen-Lifshitz emphasizes that the land on which the Ras a-Tin elementary school was built is privately owned and that the Palestinian owner gave the go-ahead for the structure’s construction. In addition, under the Mandatory-era regulations that apply in this area, a school may be built on agricultural lands, even though there is of course no chance they would ever receive a building permit from Israeli authorities in Area C of the West Bank (under exclusive Israeli control).

Cohen-Lifshitz went on to describe what the typical school day would look like should the children be required to return to attending their former school in Mughayir. . “Here we should try to imagine little girls and boys, in the first grade, who need to leave home at 6 A.M. to reach school on time for their first class. These children end their school day at 1 P.M., but will arrive home only at 4 P.M. Their school day thus lasts 10 hours, only half of which is devoted to learning,” the document says, he wrote on behalf of Bimkom.

In the period of the coronavirus pandemic, this predicament is even more acute, as online learning is virtually nonexistent in a community lacking electric power, not to mention computers and internet.

About 300 people, around half of them children or adolescents, live in Ras a-Tin, where their parents make a living raising sheep and growing wheat and other feed grains for them. It is situated next to the Kokhav Hashahar settlement’s rock quarry, itself a gross violation of international law, which forbids occupying forces to mine natural resources in an area under their control. Kokhav Hashahar is located on the ridge opposite.

We are perched above the Jordan Valley. On the surrounding hills settler outposts and mobile homes sprout up like poison mushrooms after the rain. The Israeli residents’ aim is identical to that of the Civil Administration: to strangle and force out the pastoral Palestinian communities in the vicinity and shunt them to the Jericho region – in a reprise of their expulsion in the early 1970s from their previous habitation in the South Hebron Hills.

Open gallery view

 A maths class in Ras a-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

Israel does not recognize its existence, but the community of Ras a-Tin is relatively well kept, consisting of a group of family tents spread across the hills above a valley where wheat fields bloom after the first rains of autumn. The grain is stored in nearby caves that function as natural granaries. But Israel is out to destroy this way of life.

The abuse here is long-standing. Iyad Hadad, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, shows us some documents and testimonies that he took from the residents of Ras a-Tin back in 2009, when the campaign to expel them began. The mukhtar, or headman, of the community is Ahmad Ahadishan Kaabana, and we’re sitting with him now on a gravelly area in front of the new school, which is neither a yard nor a playground.

“Free Palestine” declares a sign in childish handwriting pinned to the door of a classroom. Unlike other schools in the Palestinian Authority, they’re afraid to fly the Palestinian flag here. It is evident in only one classroom, on the floor in a corner, leaning against the wall, folded and ashamed. Maybe also frightened.

“We don’t dare hang up even a drawing of a tree here, so you want us to hoist a flag?” says the principal, Nura Azhari, who lives in Ramallah. Before coming here, she ran a school in another shepherds community, near Beit Liqya, west of Ramallah. There, too, a demolition order hangs over the school.

There are 22 “challenged” schools like this across the West Bank at present, under threat of being torn down at any time. Mapping carried out by Bimkom for 260 routes that run between 130 communities like Ras a-Tin in Area C and the schools their children attend, shows that accessibility is poor and difficult. For more than 80 communities, the route to school is longer than two kilometers; for 48, it’s longer than five kilometers, which often must be traveled on foot.

Ras a-Tin residents haven’t felt secure for even one day since moving here in 1971, Kaabana tells us. “They have us in their sights, they don’t leave us alone.”

Several times they have been moved from one place to another, and sometimes they are forced to leave their homes temporarily to allow training exercises by the Israel Defense Forces. They are not permitted to dig wells; they must bring containers of water at high cost. No one even dreams of being hooked up to the water and power grids.

Open gallery view

 The school principal, Nura Azhari.Credit: Alex Levac

When the children attended the school in Mughayir, they were sometimes bused by the PA, but no more than two or three times a week. The situation became more acute during the past two years because of attacks on the children by members of the settler outposts. So the community decided to build its own school, close to home. The revolutionary idea was implemented quickly, because the PA promised to help if land could be made available – and that was contributed to the community by its Palestinian owner. Afterward the mukhtar heard about GVC, an NGO that helps build schools in disadvantaged areas around the world, and the dream of the school materialized.

Construction began on August 20. Eleven days later, on August 31, Civil Administration forces showed up and confiscated construction equipment, bricks, rods and cement. The next day they returned with an order: “Final order for cessation of work, and demolition,” issued by the “subcommittee for construction supervision of the Supreme Planning Council.” The work continued, however, and skeleton of the structure was in place by September 3.

Open gallery view

 School children in Ras A-Tin. Credit: Alex Levac

Civil Administration personnel returned and confiscated the tin sheets that were intended for the roof. They also took the opportunity to make off with four pallets of bricks, 30 chairs and 12 tables. The community’s race against time reached a peak of intensity – three days later, on September 6, the school year was supposed to start.

At first, the pupils sat on the floor surrounded by gray, unplastered walls and no roof over their heads. On September 10, the Israeli forces returned and expropriated more tin sheets, which were already serving as a roof in place of those previously impounded. The forces also took 12 more tables that the PA had provided. In the following days, empty olive oil containers were used as tables.

The Civil Administration hasn’t actually confiscated anything since, but on three occasions teachers and pupils arrived in the morning to find all the furniture from the school strewn on the ground outside. The perpetrators might have been settlers, perhaps the Civil Administration: In Ras a-Tin, people believe there is total identification of the latter with the former, and collaboration between them all.

Administration personnel returned on September 20, this time only to photograph the site. They also came back last week, to do more photography and to check that the toilets were not connected to the water supply. Each such visit of course gives rise to more fear and dread among teachers and pupils alike.

A spokesperson for the unit of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories issued the following response to a series of questions from Haaretz this week: “A petition concerning the allegations [of the residents] was received in our office. The response to the petition will be made to the court, as usual. We emphasize that the Civil Administration’s supervisory unit carries out activities of enforcement against offenses relating to planning and building, this as part of its duty to preserve public order and the rule of law. The enforcement activities, like the confiscations of equipment carried out in the place mentioned, are executed in accordance with its powers and procedures, and also subject to orders of priorities and operational considerations.”

During the period of the coronavirus epidemic, pupils only are at school for four hours a day. The classes are coed and mixed: First, second and third grades are in one classroom, and the same holds for the upper grades too. All told, there are 50 pupils, 30 girls and 20 boys, six teachers, a secretary and the principal. Now it’s girls, who previously hardly attended school because of the distance and the dangers involved in going, who constitute the majority.

Principal Azhari says that with all the fears and anxiety caused by the demolition order, the changes from the period before the school existed have been dramatic. Parents tell her proudly that their children suddenly know a little English. And math. And literature. And suddenly they want to learn. As for the teachers, the principal says, they can’t wait for each new day to dawn so they can come to the school.

[garudabluffs]

Map of Concentration Camps in Italy

List of Italian concentration camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italian_concentration_camps

How evil happens

Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered?

READ MORE https://aeon.co/essays/is-neuroscience-getting-closer-to-explaining-evil-behaviour?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=af34be6cf1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_08_08_01_46&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-af34be6cf1-70417325

It wasn’t just hate. Fascism offered robust social welfare

“The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem.”

READ MORE https://aeon.co/ideas/fascism-was-a-right-wing-anti-capitalist-movement?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=db840944ed-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_08_08_03_52&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-db840944ed-70417325

These are human shields, in the strong and specific sense, and it is Israel that has a history of using them.   OpEdNews Op Eds 8/3/2

Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy By Jim Kavanagh                                       "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much""-- Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness" [h/t William A. Cook]

The Israeli-American (Let's never forget this is a team effort!) slaughter in Gaza is so horrifying that I've been at a loss to find the words to comment on it without letting anger get the better of me. The media coverage of what's happening, dominated by the ridiculous notion that Israel is "defending" itself, is so grotesquely mendacious, hypocritical, and racist (imbued with colonialist ethno-supremacism) that it is hard to know where to begin critiquing it--without, again, becoming enraged.   - Advertisement - For the moment, I'll focus on one particular, insistent meme, constantly being promoted by Israel and its apologists, namely that Hamas is using civilians as "human shields." The idea is that for Hamas to place any kind of military personnel anywhere in or near a civilian neighborhood constitutes using all the civilians in that neighborhood as "human shields." Furthermore, it makes of that neighborhood a legitimate "military" target for devastating Israeli attack, absolves Israel from any culpability for the scores of resulting dead, blown-apart civilians including children, and places all moral and legal responsibility for those victims on the Palestinian resistance fighters who dared appear anywhere near civilians.   So, for example, the personal homes of Palestinian political and military leaders, construed as "command and control centers," are legitimate military targets. If a Hamas functionary lives with his family of five children in an apartment building of 8 stories with 4 apartments per floor, it is perfectly legitimate to bomb that building and kill all 32 families--"human shields," after all--in  order to destroy that "command and control center."                 - Advertisement -                 This "human shields" argument is what allows Israeli officials, as Noura Erakat points out, to "openly admit that they are deliberately and systematically bombing the family homes of suspected militants," killing whole families. It suggests an ethic that supposedly justifies an Israeli offensive which produces 75-80% civilian causalities , 33% of which are children, among the Palestinian population (and somehow renders insignificant the contrasting fact that almost 100% of Israeli casualties from Palestinian resistance operations are military). To hear it in the American media, poor, anguished Israel actually becomes the victim of all these "telegenically dead," deliberately sacrificed, Palestinian "human shields."   American political "leaders" and media pundits universally endorse this pretense of an ethic, or at the least, let it pass unchallenged.   Of course, anyone with an ounce of intellectual or moral honesty would have to accept that such an ethic was universally applicable: Kill by that ethic, die by that ethic.               - Advertisement - As Amira Hass points out, "the [Israeli] Defense Ministry is in the heart of Tel Aviv, as is the army's main "war room." [These are real "command and control centers"] And"the military training base at Glilot [is] near the big mall" And the Shin Bet headquarters [is] in Jerusalem, on the edge of a residential neighborhood." If Israel's claimed ethic were anything other than the flimsiest excuse for its presumed ethno-supremacist license to kill, Israel and its supporters would have to accept that Hamas has at least as much right to fire its crude rockets in the general direction of the Israeli Ministry of Defense as Israel does to blow up homes, schools, and hospitals with its precision weapons--civilian casualties be damned. By Israeli logic and ethic, are not the Israeli civilians near these military facilities "human shields"? When they get killed, should we not sympathize with the anguished Hamas rocketeers who were forced to kill the civilians that Israel cleverly placed in dangerous neighborhoods?   [Actually, unless one is comfortable with colonialism, it's arguable that Hamas has every right  to its attacks, and it's inarguable that Israel has no right to theirs.]   We all know, of course, that there is no intellectual or moral consistency here, only the ethic of ethno-supremacist, colonialist "exceptionalism." Can you imagine the moral outrage and gnashing of teeth on the part of the oh-so-tough-minded American political and media personalities who accept the Israeli "human shields" argument if anyone tried to apply it to hundreds of dead Jewish children? If this were the scene, day after day, for Israeli Jews:   The father is saying: 'Wake up -- I brought you a toy.' (Image by مخ��لفون mo5talfoon)   PermissionDetailsDMCA But we need to take a step back to see how Israel is deliberately and dishonestly confusing a specific definition of "human shields" with a more general notion of something like "collateral damage" in a way that tries to justify the viciousness of its current massacre in Gaza.   As Brad Parker, of Defence for Children International Palestine, points out: the use of civilians as human shields is prohibited under international law and involves forcing civilians to directly assist in military operations or using them to shield a military object or troops from attack. The rhetoric continually voiced by Israeli officials regarding "human shields" amounts to nothing more than generalisations that fall short of the precise calculation required by international humanitarian law when determining whether something is actually a military object. Israel is using the "human shield" argument in a way that dilutes is specific meaning in international law, and turns it into another catchall bugaboo, used to hinder careful thought and justify the unjustifiable. Israel finds "human shields" everywhere there are civilians in the way the U.S. government now finds "weapons of mass destruction" anywhere there's "an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce."   It's particularly brazen for Israel to be raising and confusing the "human shields" issue because it is Israel itself which has repeatedly used the specific, prohibited tactic of using children as "human shields" to protect its military forces. According to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, along with the torture, solitary confinement, and threats of sexual assault toward detained children, Israel is guilty of the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants." The report, issued last year, cites14 cases in 3 years.     We're not talking here about some vague notion of endangering children by allowing them to live in a dangerous town. Nor are the accusations limited to namby-pamby UN Committee that  no red-blooded American/Zionist would pay any attention to.  We're talking about specific practices, identified and denounced by the High Court of Justice in Israel, "like the 'neighbor procedure,' whereby neighbors of wanted Palestinians are forced to go into the wanted man's house ahead of troops, in case it is booby-trapped." Here's a picture, from The Guardian in 2007, of Sameh Amira, 24, who--along with his15-year-old cousin Amid, and an 11-year-old girl, Jihan Dadush--was forced to act as a human shield to search homes in Nablus during a search for bomb-making labs. They were forced them to enter apartments ahead of the soldiers, and to search the houses, emptying cabinets and cupboards, in order to protect the most-moral IDF boys from getting hurt. And here's a picture of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy lashed to the front of an Israeli armored vehicle to prevent stone throwers from" What? Damaging the clearcoat? These are human shields, in the strong and specific sense, and it is Israel that has a history of using them.   And, according to a report in Mondoweiss, there is evidence that Israel is using these explicit human shield tactics in the present conflict.  One resident of Khuza, Ayman Abu Toaimah, reports that: "As Israeli invading troops advanced to the village they besieged it and used residents as human shields." Another, Abu Saleem, 56, says: "Israelis claim that Hamas is using us as human shields-- how? This is a lie, we do not see fighters in the streets. It's them, the Israelis who used us as human shields in Khuza'a and Shuja'iyeh. They turned our houses into military posts, terrified residents in the houses." And a third, Abu Ali Qudail, said: "When the ICRC told us that ambulances are waiting us at the entrance of the village from the western side, about 1,000 people rushed to leave their homes, some of which were used as a hideout for Israeli forces."   Here's a good rule of thumb: Every nasty tactic that Israel accuses the Palestinians of using is one that they are actually the masters of. It's called projection, and you'll be understanding the world a lot better if you consider that most of the accusations Israel (as well the United States) makes against its enemies are projections of its own faults and crimes. Do you think for a second that, if there were one piece of evidence as clearly dispositive of Hamas's use of human shields as the pictures above, you would not have seen it all over the news every day?   Corollary question: With all the constant chatter about "human shields," why does none of this factual evidence about Israel's use of the human shield tactic ever enter into the media discourse?   Because American politics and media are in complete collaboration with the colonial savagery that is Zionism, and they do not want to disturb the American public's acquiescence to that. This is a stance that must be refused, with contempt. As Congress approves unanimously and Obama supplies the weapons, no American can think s/he stands in a neutral space, shielded from the nasty effects of the decision s/he is making--whether by resting silently complicit or by speaking up in protest.  

[ask-the-crimson-king]

((This was FAR too big for an ask, put a read more cut where you see fit))

Ok, so the accusing anon mentioned it was the Progress Flag they saw and the way they worded their explanation kinda went in a few directions, which I'll try to sort through:

"Nazi and Nazbol [Nazi-Bolshevik] Groups": Yes, that is a thing that exists, but on a smaller scale online and not nearly as prominent in the living world as other supremacist ideologies. Yes, there are people who actually looked at the darkest days of both German and Soviet History and decided "This could work well together", but they are dunked-on HARD by both pro-fascists and pro-communists by their very nature. Do not ask me how neo-Nazis and Tankies got together in such an unholy union or what they stand for because none of it makes sense to my Bachelor's education degree with social science emphasis OR my regrettable experience from both groups in my soon-to-be 29 years of life

"Eth Nat [Ethnic Nationalist] desires": Yes, those unfortunately exist around the world. Racism and ethnic cleansing isn't a solely White practice, but it's definitely been done by Whites throughout US history and its affects (and believers) still exist to this very day. Only non-White supremacist American group I can recall is the very loose online Hotep community (remember the "We were kings" memes?) that's legitimately Black supremacist and also incredibly anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic---so taking a rainbow flag wouldn't be their work || [Don't forget the ethno-nationalist cleansing of Armenians that is still happening right now, and the settler-colonialism happening with the Palestinians.]

"Representing clear racial politics": Well, I guess if you loosely define Black Lives Matter and its main message of "stop profiling us as criminals and even if we are criminals, treat us humanely as you do White criminals", then it would count as "racial/identity politics". So would the "Stop Asian Hate" movement in response to COVID fearmongering, but if we're really defining any political movement (for good or for ill) as "racial" if it affects a given race, then practically everything is racial politics---by nature of people of different races experiencing things, even within the same country or social class

___ [I think they were trying to say Nazi and Nazi-adjacent groups were seeing the flag as depicting "clear racial politics". I have seen fascists use this talking point, but against non-white minorities. Never for them.] ___

"Protected by a strong border": That definitely is a policy point put forward by ethnic nationalists, pro-fascists, etc. and groups have tried to parrot or "steal" progressive groups' rhetoric to then apply to border security (remember that map of America made into a cartoon woman, gripping her skirt as a hand from the South reaches up, all with the caption "My borders, my choice"?). As for how black and brown are "stronger" colors than pink and white, that's entirely a cultural bias in associating light or warm colors with femininity or "weakness"---which is why Hitler rotated the original Hindu swastika 45 degrees to resemble an X rather than a cross and painted it black rather than the usual pink or light purple, as well as why the upside-down pink triangle was used to mark LGBT+ citizens

"The fact that four in rotation makes a swastika": I mean, if you were to completely disfigure any 4 stripes in such a way, it could resemble an X or a cross, but the swastika itself has 4 more "legs" that stick out from the base. But with how much the human mind needs to warp any given lines into a new symbol, you may as well just slap the graven image itself on the thing and be forthright with it

[And they do! Homofascists/4Chan or generally right-wing trolls in the past have, indeed, simply slapped it on the standard 6-color pride flag.

More info on fascism/it's supporters/how it gains traction under the cut.]

As for whether so-called progressive people do parrot fascist rhetoric and support fascist policy? That is also unfortunately true. Don't ask me how I know this or how this even could happen, but there were a few Trans Fascists I came across and I found two of their flags: one being just the swastika slapped onto the Trans Pride flag, the other being the Lesbian Labrys in the place of the axe in the fasces symbol (that ancient Roman symbol of a magistrate's power over life and death, the origin of the term "fascist/fascism") on the Trans Pride Flag

___ [People who try to be progressive but fall into the pit-falls of Nazi or fascist ideology are why we have NazBols. It's why we see groups trying to "take the land back" and basically create woke ethno-states for marginalized people. I am not saying this referring to indigenous peoples who are fighting to keep their land (which I do indeed support), I have also heard weird Tankie-esque stuff about Black people feeling so much safer away from whites, and other people of color who may feel the same. Thus creating a separatist divide and creating "woke" ethno-states -- "It's for the good of the minorities so they can feel safer!" Or we could talk about and tackle the systemic problems leading to people feeling this way? How about that instead? "But it'll never work!" It won't if you never try.

Don't fall for Black separatism, kids. You are not only feeding into the interests of white supremacists, but you're also becoming a reactionary in the process. Just because you are white, it does not mean you are an inherent threat to your nonwhite comrades. Diversity is strength. Remember that.] ___

My own hot take? We should remember that at the very core of Nazi ideology---no matter how many self-proclaimed LGBT+ individuals also proclaim to be Nazis, no matter how many non-Whites or women march beside them, no matter how many Nazis claim otherwise---is Nazism is straight White male supremacy and those undoubtedly deluded into being their "allies" are simply a means to gaining government office democratically

But once that purpose is served, they too will be slaughtered. Anyone PoC, LGBT, non-Christian or otherwise not fitting the mold of "the Supreme Master RaceTM" who is utterly duped into supporting their agenda (and cause them to succeed) would merely buy themselves a stay of execution at the cost of their neighbors' lives---before their blood also becomes the oil on the gears and their bodies also become the coal in the furnaces of the fascist war-machine

Populism, the Nazis' preferred tactic and a pillar of fascist ideology, is dependent upon democratic majority. It would be incredibly stupid (though these ARE Nazis and fascists we're talking about, so the bar is well beneath the floor as it is) to instantly demonize everyone who doesn't fit their tight mold the moment they set foot on the streets. They will deny being homophobic. They will deny being racist. They will pay lip-service to feminists. They will force a smile on their faces and hold back their gag reflex in the company of "lesser beings" just long enough to get some votes

Hitler did not seize power overnight. Hitler did not seize power, period. Hitler was elected by the desperate, the foolish and the ambitious in equal measures. The Nazi Party did not run door-to-door to viciously murder every Jew the second Hitler was inaugurated. Every Jew was not immediately sent to the death camps. The Jews were not Hitler's only victims. The Jews were not even Hitler's first victims, though the Jewish casualty count is the still highest that we can confirm

In order to both remove the "undesirables" from Germany and to control the German populace, Hitler and the Nazis went down a very long list. Every potential political opponent, every ethnicity, every possible demographic and label besides "Aryan Nazi supporter" was scheduled to be systematically demonized, discriminated, disappeared and destroyed when it was most convenient for the Nazi Party to do so

When it was ultimately the Jewish people's turn, the removal of their humanity was a long and gradual process of public indoctrination and supported legislation that lasted several years. Once the Jews were stripped of rights and thought of as nothing more than vermin by the German masses, the Nazis simply played their willing role as exterminators. Whether the Germans thought it would go so far or would go so bloodily is an afterthought that came far too late

Remember well the words of regretful Hitler supporter and Holocaust survivor, Martin Niemoller:

"First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me."

To all those who those who look upon their far-right reactionary movement and think "They will always stand by me and the power I give them will never be used against me": You could not be any more wrong, yet you already believe their lies

----

[Good and informative post for those not already familiar with any of these terms, which is why I put the cut where I did. I also added a bit of my own commentary here and there to try and provide examples along with an explanation of the terms I was using.]

[josiebelladonna]

corollary to the screenshot of the tweet of the news article point: another alternative is showing video footage from a hospital or a photograph of a young child, dirty, caked in blood, and living in horrific conditions, and more often than not without a trigger warning of any kind despite it being very upsetting to even think about (coming from the same crowd that harped on us all for YEARS to be mindful of that)

also:

piece of art with a hebrew prayer inscribed on it from the 13th century, or photograph of a synagogue in edinburgh at dawn so the stained glass windows are bright and colorful and absolutely beautiful

100 notes

photograph of bedouin ranchers in the 1930s and even though the bedouins were primarily north african, it’s inexplicably tagged “palestine”

1025 notes

a very cool-looking and elaborate menorah from 1912 that would be a metal artist’s wet dream

70 notes

someone saying “surround yourself with ‘palestinian music and literature’” (when such a thing either doesn’t exist, it’s israeli, or it’s going to be christian because christianity was there way before islam)

5620 notes

an ashkenazi jewish guitarist just being himself

10 notes

people seeming to forget that he’s ashkenazi jewish and are demanding why he’s not saying anything about palestine (when he has, a few times no less)

200 notes (and counting)

photograph of the gigantic annual pride parade in tel aviv, everyone is smiling and holding hands and having a good time

17 notes

a member of the lgbtq community saying something pro-palestinian that’s got a dogwhistle within and even a gentile like myself can see it’s antisemitic from a mile away

20178 notes

“zionism as we know it today is just a way of saying that the jews deserve a place to call home and they should coexist peacefully with their neighbors.”

20 notes (all jewish)

“zionism is evil!!! and here’s an out-of-context quote from a rabbi confirming it!!1!”

52908 notes

“i’m jewish and a zionist but i want the palestinians to have it well, too. and in fact, most of us do. and, people, and!”

40 notes (39 jews, 1 ally that would be me)

(sincerely wish i was making this up, this was an actual post i found yesterday) ”if talking about israel means we’re antisemitic, then we should start calling zionists nazis”

a whopping 1098 notes

POV: You are Jewish on tumblr

Pro-Palestinian quote but it has a dogwhistle for Jewish genocide woven into it

18790 notes

News article about a synagogue in Germany being bombed

38 notes (all from Jews)

Post with actual charities and resources that may help Palestinians

5473 notes

News article about a Jewish woman in France being stabbed in her apartment

47 notes (all from Jews)

I’m Jewish and my life has been a living hell since Oct 7. I’ve had dozens of death threats calling me a zionist. They won’t listen to me no matter how many times I say I’m not and it’s really clear this word is just being used as an excuse to harass Jews and get away with it.

51 notes (all from Jews)

Straight up blood libel reblogged by a fandom blogger you follow who has never shown any interest in political injustices of any kind until now

21455 notes

Screenshot of a tweet of a news article about something happening in Palestine but most of the actual news is cut out and most of the post is someone’s angry all caps rant and in the end you’re left slightly confused about what is actually happening. But boy howdy you’d better be fucking mad about it immediately or else.

27655 notes

Hey Free Palestine and all hell yeah but don’t be antisemitic while you do it. Here’s a quick guide on things to look out for from your peers that they might not even realize they’re doing.

318 notes

Don’t listen to the (((zionists))) trying to tell you that (thing that has been used as an antisemitic dogwhistle) is an antisemitic dogwhistle!!! They’re just trying to distract you from Palestinian liberation because they’re evil. In fact, don’t listen to anyone telling you anything you’re doing is antisemitic ever, actually

50641 notes

[dani-qrt]

As Israel Celebrates Dream of Independence, Many See Nightmare Taking Shape

JERUSALEM — When Israel declared its independence in 1948, President Harry Truman rushed to recognize it. He took just 11 minutes, and Israelis, about to go to war to defend their infant state, were euphoric.

Seventy years to the day — and nearly as long since Israel declared the holy city of Jerusalem its “eternal capital” — the United States will formally open its embassy on a hilltop here two miles south of the Western Wall.

The embassy’s move from Tel Aviv and President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — reversing decades of American foreign policy — comes at a moment so fraught with both pride and peril that Israelis seem not to know what to feel.

Israelis find it hard to rejoice when they find themselves doing some of the same things they did back in 1948: listening for civil-defense sirens, readying bomb shelters and calling in reinforcements to confront threats to the north, south and east.

An escalating shadow war with Iran has broken into the open, pitting Israel against its most powerful adversary in the region. A mass protest in Gaza has spurred thousands of Palestinians, encouraged by Hamas, to try to cross into Israel, whose snipers have killed scores and wounded thousands of them. The bloodshed has brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back onto the international agenda after years as an afterthought.

Now, in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, Israeli border police and troops are bracing for expressions of pent-up frustration, impatience and rage — at the United States for seeming to dispense with any pretense at balance; at Israel for its continuing occupation; at the Palestinian Authority for its weakness and corruption; and at the peace process itself, for inspiring hopes that have again and again proved false.

“If you look at it from the outside, you’d see one of the most dramatic success stories of the 20th century,” said the historian Tom Segev, author of a new biography of Israel’s founding prime minister, “David Ben-Gurion: A State at All Costs.”

With Israel so strong and its Jewish population larger than ever, Mr. Segev said, “It’s really the realization of Ben-Gurion’s dream. But at the same time, the future is very bleak, and some of the problems he left us remain unresolved.”

It is hard for Israeli Jews to feel entirely at ease when they remain so estranged from one another and the nearly two million Arab citizens at home, and from millions of people next door: A lasting settlement with the Palestinians seems as elusive as it has been in more than a generation.

However besieged many Israelis may feel, objectively Israel has never been more powerful, in almost any sense of the word.

Its military routinely obliterates opposing forces with fighter jets, antimissile batteries and newfangled tunnel-destroying tools. Its spies whisk warehouses’ worth of secrets out from under its enemies’ noses. Its high-tech start-ups routinely sell for billions, its economy is the envy of the Middle East, its television shows thrive on Netflix. On Saturday, its entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest — a chicken-dancing feminist named Netta Barzilai — overcame a boycott attempt by Israel’s detractors to win by popular acclaim.

Warming relations with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states are even buoying hopes that Israel could begin to expand its tiny circle of friends in the region.

Monday’s move of the American mission to a fortified former consulate along the seam between East and West Jerusalem, from a beachfront bastion in Tel Aviv, is freighted with symbolism in manifold ways.

But the relocation of the chief American outpost from liberal Tel Aviv, a blue dot on the red political map of Israel, to a capital city that has largely replaced its secular Israeli population with a more religious one, neatly mirrors what is happening to support for Israel in the United States.

Ben-Gurion was prime minister for 13 years, all told. Benjamin Netanyahu will surpass that record in mid-2019 if he holds on to office. That is far from assured: He faces possible indictment in a web of domestic corruption scandals, and criminal charges could cause his governing coalition to collapse.

President Trump has gone further than perhaps any of his predecessors to support Israel and its right-wing leader, and no American president has done more to bestow gifts on an Israeli leader than he has.

From recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, to withholding money from the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees — an agency Mr. Netanyahu would like to see eliminated altogether — to pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement last week, Mr. Trump has showered Mr. Netanyahu with political prizes.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and a senior adviser on the Middle East, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are among the high-ranking representatives sent by the administration to attend Monday’s opening ceremony. Israel said all 86 countries with diplomatic missions in the country were invited to the event, and 33 confirmed attendance.

To Palestinians, the official unveiling of the embassy is just the most concrete and latest in a cavalcade of provocations from Washington and the Israeli government.

“It’s might makes right,” said Hind Khoury, a former diplomat for the Palestine Liberation Organization who now heads a sustainable development nonprofit based in Bethlehem. Not only are Palestinians now expected to forget about Jerusalem, she said, but also the losses of their homes in 1948 and again in the fighting of 1967.

“Accept Israel’s presence and dominance,” she said. “Accept home demolitions and expulsions and dispossession.

“Accept the uprooting of our olive trees, the violence of settlers,” she continued, picking up steam. “Accept settlements. Accept Israel’s control of all the Jordan Valley, and using it for its economic benefit. Accept that Israel didn’t live up to any of its commitments. Accept the siege of Gaza. Accept that East Jerusalem doesn’t belong to us anymore. Accept the racist legislation that Israel passes; that we’re prisoners in our land: I can’t get a visa because we’re ‘all terrorists.’ Accept the use of ‘anti-Semitism’ to fight anybody who wants to support Palestinian rights.”

“These are things we have to accept, or we’ll just get more hell,” she said, before adding: “Maybe I speak more like a mother and grandmother, but it’s so sinful to give such a legacy to the next generation.”

For Israeli Jews, a different set of grievances is being assuaged and activated by Monday’s embassy opening and all it stirs up.

The American-Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi, whose new book “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor” is being published on Tuesday, sees the embassy move as a “rare moment of compensation” for what he called “the campaign to deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem” — one expressed in votes of Unesco, or in the speeches of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, when he invokes the Christian and Muslim attachment to Jerusalem but pointedly omits any Jewish one.

“There’s this deep resentment among Israelis about the war against our history and our rootedness in this city,” Mr. Halevi said.

Still, noting that his book “about reconciliation with my Palestinian neighbors is coming out at one of the worst moments in the tortured history of our relationship,” Mr. Halevi said he wished the embassy move could be accompanied by some kind of “affirmation by both Israel and the United States of the Palestinian presence in the city we share.”

“I don’t think we should be laying out blueprints,” he said. “We’re far from that. But there should be a clear stating of our recognition that we’re not alone in Jerusalem. This would be an apt moment for a generous Israeli statement.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s advocacy against the Iran deal during the Obama administration did much to sour Jewish Democrats on the Israeli leader. His abandonment of a painstakingly negotiated deal to give Reform and Conservative Jews a bigger stake in Jewish life in Israel, and approval of a measure granting the Orthodox chief rabbinate’s monopoly over conversions to Judaism in Israel, drove a wedge between liberal American Jews and Israeli religious leaders.

Other policies, like efforts to deport African migrants, and a continuing legislative attack by Mr. Netanyahu’s political allies on democratic institutions like Israel’s Supreme Court, have only added to many liberal Americans’ discomfort with Israel.

In effect, as the Trump administration gives physical expression to its affection for Israel, a rift appears to be widening between the world’s two main centers of Jewish life.

The immediate threats to Israeli security could of course fizzle. The rift between American and Israeli Jews could heal with a new administration in either place, if not before. Even the risk posed by the embassy move could prove no more dampening to the celebration, in retrospect, than the smashing of a glass at a Jewish wedding.

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Middle East peace process “is most decidedly not dead,” despite the embassy move, telling “Fox News Sunday” that the United States still hopes to be able to “achieve a successful outcome” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr. Segev, the biographer, said he had learned in his research that Ben-Gurion had never cared much for Jerusalem, and had refrained from trying to take the city in 1948 in part because he knew it would be difficult to guard its Old City from extremists.

In that sense, Mr. Segev said, little seems to have changed.

“That’s what Jerusalem is all about,” he said. “That’s why it’s been a problem the last 3,000 years. And it may be a problem for the next 3,000 years.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Israel, Pride and Anxiety Greet U.S. Embassy’s Jerusalem Debut. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post As Israel Celebrates Dream of Independence, Many See Nightmare Taking Shape appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2jWi2Ua via Online News

[newestbalance]

As Israel Celebrates Dream of Independence, Many See Nightmare Taking Shape

JERUSALEM — When Israel declared its independence in 1948, President Harry Truman rushed to recognize it. He took just 11 minutes, and Israelis, about to go to war to defend their infant state, were euphoric.

Seventy years to the day — and nearly as long since Israel declared the holy city of Jerusalem its “eternal capital” — the United States will formally open its embassy on a hilltop here two miles south of the Western Wall.

The embassy’s move from Tel Aviv and President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — reversing decades of American foreign policy — comes at a moment so fraught with both pride and peril that Israelis seem not to know what to feel.

Israelis find it hard to rejoice when they find themselves doing some of the same things they did back in 1948: listening for civil-defense sirens, readying bomb shelters and calling in reinforcements to confront threats to the north, south and east.

An escalating shadow war with Iran has broken into the open, pitting Israel against its most powerful adversary in the region. A mass protest in Gaza has spurred thousands of Palestinians, encouraged by Hamas, to try to cross into Israel, whose snipers have killed scores and wounded thousands of them. The bloodshed has brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back onto the international agenda after years as an afterthought.

Now, in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, Israeli border police and troops are bracing for expressions of pent-up frustration, impatience and rage — at the United States for seeming to dispense with any pretense at balance; at Israel for its continuing occupation; at the Palestinian Authority for its weakness and corruption; and at the peace process itself, for inspiring hopes that have again and again proved false.

“If you look at it from the outside, you’d see one of the most dramatic success stories of the 20th century,” said the historian Tom Segev, author of a new biography of Israel’s founding prime minister, “David Ben-Gurion: A State at All Costs.”

With Israel so strong and its Jewish population larger than ever, Mr. Segev said, “It’s really the realization of Ben-Gurion’s dream. But at the same time, the future is very bleak, and some of the problems he left us remain unresolved.”

It is hard for Israeli Jews to feel entirely at ease when they remain so estranged from one another and the nearly two million Arab citizens at home, and from millions of people next door: A lasting settlement with the Palestinians seems as elusive as it has been in more than a generation.

However besieged many Israelis may feel, objectively Israel has never been more powerful, in almost any sense of the word.

Its military routinely obliterates opposing forces with fighter jets, antimissile batteries and newfangled tunnel-destroying tools. Its spies whisk warehouses’ worth of secrets out from under its enemies’ noses. Its high-tech start-ups routinely sell for billions, its economy is the envy of the Middle East, its television shows thrive on Netflix. On Saturday, its entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest — a chicken-dancing feminist named Netta Barzilai — overcame a boycott attempt by Israel’s detractors to win by popular acclaim.

Warming relations with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states are even buoying hopes that Israel could begin to expand its tiny circle of friends in the region.

Monday’s move of the American mission to a fortified former consulate along the seam between East and West Jerusalem, from a beachfront bastion in Tel Aviv, is freighted with symbolism in manifold ways.

But the relocation of the chief American outpost from liberal Tel Aviv, a blue dot on the red political map of Israel, to a capital city that has largely replaced its secular Israeli population with a more religious one, neatly mirrors what is happening to support for Israel in the United States.

Ben-Gurion was prime minister for 13 years, all told. Benjamin Netanyahu will surpass that record in mid-2019 if he holds on to office. That is far from assured: He faces possible indictment in a web of domestic corruption scandals, and criminal charges could cause his governing coalition to collapse.

President Trump has gone further than perhaps any of his predecessors to support Israel and its right-wing leader, and no American president has done more to bestow gifts on an Israeli leader than he has.

From recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, to withholding money from the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees — an agency Mr. Netanyahu would like to see eliminated altogether — to pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement last week, Mr. Trump has showered Mr. Netanyahu with political prizes.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and a senior adviser on the Middle East, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are among the high-ranking representatives sent by the administration to attend Monday’s opening ceremony. Israel said all 86 countries with diplomatic missions in the country were invited to the event, and 33 confirmed attendance.

To Palestinians, the official unveiling of the embassy is just the most concrete and latest in a cavalcade of provocations from Washington and the Israeli government.

“It’s might makes right,” said Hind Khoury, a former diplomat for the Palestine Liberation Organization who now heads a sustainable development nonprofit based in Bethlehem. Not only are Palestinians now expected to forget about Jerusalem, she said, but also the losses of their homes in 1948 and again in the fighting of 1967.

“Accept Israel’s presence and dominance,” she said. “Accept home demolitions and expulsions and dispossession.

“Accept the uprooting of our olive trees, the violence of settlers,” she continued, picking up steam. “Accept settlements. Accept Israel’s control of all the Jordan Valley, and using it for its economic benefit. Accept that Israel didn’t live up to any of its commitments. Accept the siege of Gaza. Accept that East Jerusalem doesn’t belong to us anymore. Accept the racist legislation that Israel passes; that we’re prisoners in our land: I can’t get a visa because we’re ‘all terrorists.’ Accept the use of ‘anti-Semitism’ to fight anybody who wants to support Palestinian rights.”

“These are things we have to accept, or we’ll just get more hell,” she said, before adding: “Maybe I speak more like a mother and grandmother, but it’s so sinful to give such a legacy to the next generation.”

For Israeli Jews, a different set of grievances is being assuaged and activated by Monday’s embassy opening and all it stirs up.

The American-Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi, whose new book “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor” is being published on Tuesday, sees the embassy move as a “rare moment of compensation” for what he called “the campaign to deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem” — one expressed in votes of Unesco, or in the speeches of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, when he invokes the Christian and Muslim attachment to Jerusalem but pointedly omits any Jewish one.

“There’s this deep resentment among Israelis about the war against our history and our rootedness in this city,” Mr. Halevi said.

Still, noting that his book “about reconciliation with my Palestinian neighbors is coming out at one of the worst moments in the tortured history of our relationship,” Mr. Halevi said he wished the embassy move could be accompanied by some kind of “affirmation by both Israel and the United States of the Palestinian presence in the city we share.”

“I don’t think we should be laying out blueprints,” he said. “We’re far from that. But there should be a clear stating of our recognition that we’re not alone in Jerusalem. This would be an apt moment for a generous Israeli statement.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s advocacy against the Iran deal during the Obama administration did much to sour Jewish Democrats on the Israeli leader. His abandonment of a painstakingly negotiated deal to give Reform and Conservative Jews a bigger stake in Jewish life in Israel, and approval of a measure granting the Orthodox chief rabbinate’s monopoly over conversions to Judaism in Israel, drove a wedge between liberal American Jews and Israeli religious leaders.

Other policies, like efforts to deport African migrants, and a continuing legislative attack by Mr. Netanyahu’s political allies on democratic institutions like Israel’s Supreme Court, have only added to many liberal Americans’ discomfort with Israel.

In effect, as the Trump administration gives physical expression to its affection for Israel, a rift appears to be widening between the world’s two main centers of Jewish life.

The immediate threats to Israeli security could of course fizzle. The rift between American and Israeli Jews could heal with a new administration in either place, if not before. Even the risk posed by the embassy move could prove no more dampening to the celebration, in retrospect, than the smashing of a glass at a Jewish wedding.

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Middle East peace process “is most decidedly not dead,” despite the embassy move, telling “Fox News Sunday” that the United States still hopes to be able to “achieve a successful outcome” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr. Segev, the biographer, said he had learned in his research that Ben-Gurion had never cared much for Jerusalem, and had refrained from trying to take the city in 1948 in part because he knew it would be difficult to guard its Old City from extremists.

In that sense, Mr. Segev said, little seems to have changed.

“That’s what Jerusalem is all about,” he said. “That’s why it’s been a problem the last 3,000 years. And it may be a problem for the next 3,000 years.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Israel, Pride and Anxiety Greet U.S. Embassy’s Jerusalem Debut. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post As Israel Celebrates Dream of Independence, Many See Nightmare Taking Shape appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2jWi2Ua via Everyday News

[cleopatrarps]

As Israel Celebrates Dream of Independence, Many See Nightmare Taking Shape

JERUSALEM — When Israel declared its independence in 1948, President Harry Truman rushed to recognize it. He took just 11 minutes, and Israelis, about to go to war to defend their infant state, were euphoric.

Seventy years to the day — and nearly as long since Israel declared the holy city of Jerusalem its “eternal capital” — the United States will formally open its embassy on a hilltop here two miles south of the Western Wall.

The embassy’s move from Tel Aviv and President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — reversing decades of American foreign policy — comes at a moment so fraught with both pride and peril that Israelis seem not to know what to feel.

Israelis find it hard to rejoice when they find themselves doing some of the same things they did back in 1948: listening for civil-defense sirens, readying bomb shelters and calling in reinforcements to confront threats to the north, south and east.

An escalating shadow war with Iran has broken into the open, pitting Israel against its most powerful adversary in the region. A mass protest in Gaza has spurred thousands of Palestinians, encouraged by Hamas, to try to cross into Israel, whose snipers have killed scores and wounded thousands of them. The bloodshed has brought the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back onto the international agenda after years as an afterthought.

Now, in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, Israeli border police and troops are bracing for expressions of pent-up frustration, impatience and rage — at the United States for seeming to dispense with any pretense at balance; at Israel for its continuing occupation; at the Palestinian Authority for its weakness and corruption; and at the peace process itself, for inspiring hopes that have again and again proved false.

“If you look at it from the outside, you’d see one of the most dramatic success stories of the 20th century,” said the historian Tom Segev, author of a new biography of Israel’s founding prime minister, “David Ben-Gurion: A State at All Costs.”

With Israel so strong and its Jewish population larger than ever, Mr. Segev said, “It’s really the realization of Ben-Gurion’s dream. But at the same time, the future is very bleak, and some of the problems he left us remain unresolved.”

It is hard for Israeli Jews to feel entirely at ease when they remain so estranged from one another and the nearly two million Arab citizens at home, and from millions of people next door: A lasting settlement with the Palestinians seems as elusive as it has been in more than a generation.

However besieged many Israelis may feel, objectively Israel has never been more powerful, in almost any sense of the word.

Its military routinely obliterates opposing forces with fighter jets, antimissile batteries and newfangled tunnel-destroying tools. Its spies whisk warehouses’ worth of secrets out from under its enemies’ noses. Its high-tech start-ups routinely sell for billions, its economy is the envy of the Middle East, its television shows thrive on Netflix. On Saturday, its entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest — a chicken-dancing feminist named Netta Barzilai — overcame a boycott attempt by Israel’s detractors to win by popular acclaim.

Warming relations with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states are even buoying hopes that Israel could begin to expand its tiny circle of friends in the region.

Monday’s move of the American mission to a fortified former consulate along the seam between East and West Jerusalem, from a beachfront bastion in Tel Aviv, is freighted with symbolism in manifold ways.

But the relocation of the chief American outpost from liberal Tel Aviv, a blue dot on the red political map of Israel, to a capital city that has largely replaced its secular Israeli population with a more religious one, neatly mirrors what is happening to support for Israel in the United States.

Ben-Gurion was prime minister for 13 years, all told. Benjamin Netanyahu will surpass that record in mid-2019 if he holds on to office. That is far from assured: He faces possible indictment in a web of domestic corruption scandals, and criminal charges could cause his governing coalition to collapse.

President Trump has gone further than perhaps any of his predecessors to support Israel and its right-wing leader, and no American president has done more to bestow gifts on an Israeli leader than he has.

From recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, to withholding money from the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees — an agency Mr. Netanyahu would like to see eliminated altogether — to pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement last week, Mr. Trump has showered Mr. Netanyahu with political prizes.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and a senior adviser on the Middle East, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are among the high-ranking representatives sent by the administration to attend Monday’s opening ceremony. Israel said all 86 countries with diplomatic missions in the country were invited to the event, and 33 confirmed attendance.

To Palestinians, the official unveiling of the embassy is just the most concrete and latest in a cavalcade of provocations from Washington and the Israeli government.

“It’s might makes right,” said Hind Khoury, a former diplomat for the Palestine Liberation Organization who now heads a sustainable development nonprofit based in Bethlehem. Not only are Palestinians now expected to forget about Jerusalem, she said, but also the losses of their homes in 1948 and again in the fighting of 1967.

“Accept Israel’s presence and dominance,” she said. “Accept home demolitions and expulsions and dispossession.

“Accept the uprooting of our olive trees, the violence of settlers,” she continued, picking up steam. “Accept settlements. Accept Israel’s control of all the Jordan Valley, and using it for its economic benefit. Accept that Israel didn’t live up to any of its commitments. Accept the siege of Gaza. Accept that East Jerusalem doesn’t belong to us anymore. Accept the racist legislation that Israel passes; that we’re prisoners in our land: I can’t get a visa because we’re ‘all terrorists.’ Accept the use of ‘anti-Semitism’ to fight anybody who wants to support Palestinian rights.”

“These are things we have to accept, or we’ll just get more hell,” she said, before adding: “Maybe I speak more like a mother and grandmother, but it’s so sinful to give such a legacy to the next generation.”

For Israeli Jews, a different set of grievances is being assuaged and activated by Monday’s embassy opening and all it stirs up.

The American-Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi, whose new book “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor” is being published on Tuesday, sees the embassy move as a “rare moment of compensation” for what he called “the campaign to deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem” — one expressed in votes of Unesco, or in the speeches of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, when he invokes the Christian and Muslim attachment to Jerusalem but pointedly omits any Jewish one.

“There’s this deep resentment among Israelis about the war against our history and our rootedness in this city,” Mr. Halevi said.

Still, noting that his book “about reconciliation with my Palestinian neighbors is coming out at one of the worst moments in the tortured history of our relationship,” Mr. Halevi said he wished the embassy move could be accompanied by some kind of “affirmation by both Israel and the United States of the Palestinian presence in the city we share.”

“I don’t think we should be laying out blueprints,” he said. “We’re far from that. But there should be a clear stating of our recognition that we’re not alone in Jerusalem. This would be an apt moment for a generous Israeli statement.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s advocacy against the Iran deal during the Obama administration did much to sour Jewish Democrats on the Israeli leader. His abandonment of a painstakingly negotiated deal to give Reform and Conservative Jews a bigger stake in Jewish life in Israel, and approval of a measure granting the Orthodox chief rabbinate’s monopoly over conversions to Judaism in Israel, drove a wedge between liberal American Jews and Israeli religious leaders.

Other policies, like efforts to deport African migrants, and a continuing legislative attack by Mr. Netanyahu’s political allies on democratic institutions like Israel’s Supreme Court, have only added to many liberal Americans’ discomfort with Israel.

In effect, as the Trump administration gives physical expression to its affection for Israel, a rift appears to be widening between the world’s two main centers of Jewish life.

The immediate threats to Israeli security could of course fizzle. The rift between American and Israeli Jews could heal with a new administration in either place, if not before. Even the risk posed by the embassy move could prove no more dampening to the celebration, in retrospect, than the smashing of a glass at a Jewish wedding.

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Middle East peace process “is most decidedly not dead,” despite the embassy move, telling “Fox News Sunday” that the United States still hopes to be able to “achieve a successful outcome” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr. Segev, the biographer, said he had learned in his research that Ben-Gurion had never cared much for Jerusalem, and had refrained from trying to take the city in 1948 in part because he knew it would be difficult to guard its Old City from extremists.

In that sense, Mr. Segev said, little seems to have changed.

“That’s what Jerusalem is all about,” he said. “That’s why it’s been a problem the last 3,000 years. And it may be a problem for the next 3,000 years.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Israel, Pride and Anxiety Greet U.S. Embassy’s Jerusalem Debut. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The post As Israel Celebrates Dream of Independence, Many See Nightmare Taking Shape appeared first on World The News.

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[psotu19]

People's State of the Union Address Tuesday January 30th, 2018 Light Club Lamp Shop Burlington, Vermont

People’s State of the Union Address

Tuesday January 30th, 2018

Light Club Lamp Shop

Burlington, Vermont

  Share a story about an experience that gave you insight into the state of our union

Share a story about a time that you felt a sense of belonging, or the opposite, to this nation or your community

Share a story of an experience that gave you hope in the past year

  Hi everyone! Honestly, I’m so happy to be here with everybody today on such an important day. [1:56] My name is Devin Alejandro-Wilder. I’ve lived in Burlington for the past six years and attended at a local liberal arts college for four of those six years. I’m a working artist and I was born queer & disabled and i live in an independent co-op in the Old North End with seven other friends, two kitchens and 3 cats. In this past year, I was fortunate enough that my little sister raised the $5,000 needed to get myself a hearing aid, and it’s been extraordinarily helpful. Let me tell you, hearing footsteps and secrets and whispers has been something that I’ve never been able to experience before. [2:47] While the prosthetic that I use has a lot of faults, my friends certainly don’t, because they always help me keep track of it. It’s really small and black, and it’s meant to be invisible I guess, like myself… But, my buddies see me take it off, and they see me put it on, and turn up the volume and turn down the volume, and they never forget. They repeat questions, sentences, jokes, and punchlines and I don’t have to fake laughter so much anymore. I didn’t used to tell people that I had a disability because I firmly believe that we are told that we’re not supposed to tell people this. We’re just supposed to ‘pass’ and ‘make it work’. But when I did get my prosthetic, there was no more hiding what was going on, because people could see it pretty clearly. Even though it’s small and meant to be invisible, there’s nothing invisible about a piece of robotic technology attached to your my skull (especially when you have weird hair like mine). So, I just want to thank them, constantly, for their patience and understanding and seeming infinite kindness, because while I have employers who look at me differently for my disability, my friends don’t and that gives me hope every single day. Thank you [4:09]

  [4:32] Hi, I’m Max Engle-Strike. I moved to Burlington in May at age 29 to become a brewer, because Vermont beer is so good. I moved from across the country, which gave me a unique perspective on seeing anti-trump sentiment on all sides of the country. It also gave me an insight into the state of our union, which is that it is extremely scattered, and shattered, and torn and divided, in that not even people who are against Trump can agree on how to be against Trump. The story I want to share is about my brother, with whom I am extremely close but we disagree often, to the extent that we were talking about policies in the United States vs the Russia probe as it came down to letting Jeff Sessions being in place or getting expelled. He was in favor of making sure the Russian investigation was completed, those responsible are punished, and that Trump is held accountable for soliciting, confusing Facebook ads. I was extremely disturbed by the policies that the attorney general was putting in place, bringing back mandatory minimums, recriminalizing marijuana, bringing back racist and divisive rhetoric in a way that hasn’t been seen in decades (for good reason) [6:00]and it really scared me that to him, it’s more important to take down a figurehead than to remember that these policies are affecting thousands of Americans every day. So, in wondering how to proceed in the next three years, let’s not miss the forest for the trees: let’s not focus on just the figurehead, let’s focus on the community and each other [6:25] Sorry, Benny, but I’m not with you on this one. That’s my story.

  [6:47] My name is Jane, I’m a graduate student here in Burlington. I’ve been here for six years (I moved here from Boston) and I’m 23 years old. I think that, back in 2016, when everything changed in a really big way, I became very disheartened and sort of felt unempowered about being involved in politics. It wasn’t until really this year that I started looking for pieces of hope and wisdom in my local community, and recognizing that there’s tremendous potential for us to organize in really small ways. Really, the personal is political, the local is global, and so by us meeting here today and actually having these conversations, we are setting an example for people all over the country to do the same thing. [7:45] So, while the conversations that you have with your neighbors or in your classrooms or with your friends and family may feel insignificant, they are part of a greater dialogue, and we really do have the potential to change things. Thank you all for being here.

  I’m Hallie Berksengold. I’ve been in Burlington for almost nine years now. [8:28] I’m originally from the New York City area, and it’s actually kind of become a little joke in my identity about how I’m a Vermonter in a group of New Yorkers and a New Yorker in a group of Vermonters, and that dichotomy almost rules how I look at things and approach the world a lot of the time. So, I’ve been up here for a long time (oh, by the way, I’m 26). I grew up in a—I wouldn’t call it a super religious, but relatively, comparatively observant—Jewish household. I was raised not quite as religious as a lot of other New York Jews that I knew (and I know a lot), but we followed every major holiday, and every somewhat-major holiday. When I moved up to Vermont, I initially didn’t find any Jewish communities that really resonated with me, and I tapered off that a bit. [9:58] It’s been interesting because for a long time, that tapering off was kind of accidental, but then it became very intentional as I became way more disillusioned with Israeli politics over the coming years. Looking back on this now, it seemed really silly that I ever really thought this way, but I did, up until about a year ago, felt like I was literally the only Jewish person who was upset about how Palestinians and African Jews were being treated. None of my original Jewish circles that I had grown up with really either seemed to care or seemed to want to confront the hypocrisy between “healing the world”—"Tikkun olam"—and social justice, and yet there was this very glaring problem in our midst. I came across an organization (totally by accident) and this happened a little bit after the election in 2016, and it was totally by accident because by that point I had sworn off of any Jewish spaces, but this was one was one where young adult Jews primarily were coming together to oppose Israeli occupation. And I was floored; I was like “Wow, there’s a whole group of Jews specifically who do this!”. I was definitely really vocal about my opinions up here, because I felt this need to prove to other people who are predominantly not Jewish up here that, “Hey, guess what? Not all Jews support this”. So I went down to New York last year and went to a training and then, pretty shortly after that, we did a major action in D.C. against the American-Israel public affairs committee by shutting down and blockading the front and side doors. I did take appropriate time off work because this hit me in a rather personal way. I remember just locking down with other people and looking out at the giant crowd of all different kinds of people and feeling wildly at peace in that moment, whatever happened later. Thank you. [13:07]

  [13:14] My name is Ali, my pronouns are ‘they’ and ‘them’. I’m here from San Francisco—I’m on tour for a show—it’s my second night in Burlington, thanks for welcoming me. I live in San Francisco’s oldest housing cooperative. It was founded in 1957 by a group of beatniks, and we just celebrated our 60th anniversary. I grew up in a very conservative family, predominantly Trump supporters. I’ve been a community organizer and activist for 10+ years, ranging from "lets do nice sweet fundraisers” to really militant direct action, so quite a range there. My story is about the first prompt in the State of the Union: I’d been going to and showing up for racial justice meetings starting in September 2016. In San Francisco, the core organizing group fluctuated between like 10, 15 people, sometimes 20. The Bay Area chapter is a lot bigger, but the San Francisco one was just starting. I like to call Trump “Mussolini Kardashian” because I feel like that’s the best way to describe our fascist reality star, and in the meeting after Mussolini Kardashian was elected, we had like 100+ people there. People were there in this visceral state of panic almost, and it actually really pissed me off. I was so happy to see so many people and see people mobilized. We went around and did this big check-in, and people were so utterly panicked, and the reason it bothered me was this: Under President Obama, there were almost 2 million people deported. The U.S. was at war with eight different countries. The Dakota Access Pipeline all progressed under Obama. Michael Brown was killed under Obama. Kalief Browder hung himself under Obama. All of these things were happening in that era. There’s a way in which Trump’s particular brand of being heinous and viscious and brutal is so in-your-face, but then I look at George W. Bush and I look at the invasion of Iraq, and I look at Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act, and I look at this historical amnesia that makes Trump into this exceptionalized boogey man, when the history of our country is genocide, theft, and slavery. There’s this aspect of the contemporary zeitgeist of panic around his behavior as if it’s different from the rest of America’s history, and I look at this too with some of the campaigns that target and attack the Confederate flag, and I’m like “what about the U.S. flag?!” Like, if we need a symbol of heinous, viscous, barbaric actions, that flag really wins the cake. So there’s this aspect for me of certain types and kinds of panic, and the reality star aspect of it for me is important because it’s this flashy, showy, outlandish in-your-face version, but the quiet and subtle aspects of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy has been going on and will continue to go on. I feel like there’s a fireworks to the current thing that really is blinding us, in a way, from the history of it all. Thanks. [16:53]

  My name is Laurie. I am 56 years old, and I was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont. I’m a Burlington, Vermont native. Well, I’ve got kind of mixed feelings about Donald Trump and his actions. Even during his campaign, I always felt that he’s gonna be contradicting, he’s gonna do a lot of firing, and hiring, and the one’s he’s hiring are not staying in, as far as the Senate is concerned. I’m afraid for our country. What I understand is that he’s got so much money, but he ain’t got no brains to use it, so that’s my perspective. I didn’t want him to be our president. I actually wanted Bernie Sanders to be our president. I figured he was more down to earth with us, and he was the better choice. Anyway, I just really was upset when Donald Trump was elected, and I still to this very day wonder, “why did all these people elect him?” My sense of hope in my community is that we can get Trump out, and get somebody else in who knows how to run the country a lot better than it is right now.

  [18:56] My name is Chai Gang. I was born during a depression, and we had people sleeping on our floor every night, and nobody ever said the word homeless. They said, “I can’t find a job". “Homeless" was not a word yet. When I heard Trump talking about how he’s going to get everybody a job, and people voted for him for that reason, I have no respect for those people. I wouldn’t want a man running my country the way he runs this country because he promised me a job. When I was in the Occupy movement, I met a woman who had her mother living with her, and her mother babysat while she went to work. The mother was kicked out of the apartment because she wasn’t on the lease, and the woman lost her job because she didn’t have a babysitter anymore. I met another woman who had her grandfather living with her, and he was in a wheelchair, and he was kicked out because he wasn’t on the lease. So he was homeless. Well, in the old days, no landlord would kick anybody out if the rent was paid and if the place was being taken care of decently. So I’m disgusted and angry, and I feel Trump is supposed to be President, because it’s time for a change, and the change is going to be horrible. What can we hope for? I want to say ‘except that we die’… I don’t want to be here anymore, for what’s coming. And yet, when I think of dying, somebody has to fight. Somebody has to go against what’s coming, so maybe I’m one of them. [21:32]

  My name is David. I lived in Burlington and the Williston area for 56 years. I’m 56 years old now. 29 years ago, I started a career as a taxi driver, which I had for 25 years. I was pretty lucky because I did a lot of runs in Burlington, a lot of runs around Vermont, runs into Canada and all over the U.S. It used to be pretty mild conversations about “Yeah, things are going okay, my job is okay" and the longer I continued, the more I saw old problems just kinda got shoved under the rug, and the people that voted for Trump, there’s a lot of these issues that happened before Trump. Trump is just kind of a beacon of what had been going wrong for a very long time. About four years ago, I lost my house, and I lost my job, and so I ended up being homeless. Luckily, about four years ago, and I moved into a housing complex here for seniors and people with disabilities, both learning and other forms. I’ve learned in where I live that all our differences are making us stronger, and I think all this pressure from the top is finally getting to the point where we’re all starting to organize. More in the last year, we’re all starting to understand that we don’t want this anymore. Let’s go back to caring about each other, getting rid of the power and the money. Let us—the residents and the folks with jobs that are merely making a living—let us take over and head in the right direction. Thank you. [24:10]

  My name is Jen. I’ am a resident of Burlington for three and a half years. I’m a teacher, a community organizer and an artist, and.. I was the one who said that you wouldn’t not have a story, so I have an opening, we’ll see how it goes: So in 2008, when Obama was elected—it was right after the Bush years, which doesn’t seem quite as terrible anymore—I was at Nectar’s when the election results came in, and I was part of a crowd of hundreds and hundreds of people that literally took to the streets and flocked all over Burlington and celebrated this huge victory. It was the first and maybe the only time I’ve ever been that excited about a presidential election. That being said, shortly after that we went right back to the politics and it was kind of a similar but different national thing was happening in D.C., and a friend of mine was doing a local one, and it was this whole idea that we get hope from people, not from presidents. I was really happy to participate in this visual art event. So when I saw that this was happening, I got really excited because something that I always believe very strongly is that we are the power and we can make change. We are living in—I wouldn’t say an unprecedented time, because it’s happened before (before I was around, I think)—but how I’ve seen it affect my friends and my community in ways that I wasn’t expecting. But particularly, I remember—so, I teach college at CCV and up until this semester my classes have always been on Tuesdays—we were talking about the election, talking about it the whole semester, and so, we talked about it all day, told people “If you’re eligible to vote, go vote”, and I felt like we had covered all the bases about who was eligible and everything. So we left and I felt really, really confident that I was going to come into class the next day and I had already planned out how we would talk about what it meant to have our first female president. So I went out with my friends that night, I went down to Nectar’s and we watched, and we went to the OP and we watched, and then we came here, and I sat right there with my friend. As it was close to midnight, and it became clearer and clearer that things weren’t going in the direction that we thought they were going to go, we started losing words, we started having tears, and we started getting fearful. So, when I decided to do this event, we were brainstorming where to do it, and I thought, “let me call Lee, and see if the Lamp Shop is open”, and he said “Yes!”. For me personally, how really hard it is to have this event with people talking about what’s going on, in the same exact place where I felt like I personally got this initial wound, it’s really important, and to be here with people tonight is super helpful. So, thanks for coming and for listening.

  [28:01] Alright, I got one for ya. My name is Luc Arseneau. The first thing about me I guess I tell everybody seems to be—I don’t know how people aren’t bored of it now—I had chronic night terrors since I was a little kid: sleep paralysis, all that shit, for years. I was told to draw them in order to get them to go out, and eventually I did, and eventually I got good at drawing, and then eventually went away. Now I’m a lucid dreamer, and I take those same drawings and I put them up in stories so I can put out something that isn’t taxing on me. So, there you go, there’s a lot of things out there. So, that being said, I got something that I think might be the third one, was it ‘hope’? Yeah, I’ve got ‘hope’ for ya. You can be the judge or whether or not it is, but I’ll leave that up to you. It was the summertime, it must’ve been two years ago maybe, and I was walking across the blue bridge. You know, you might not know but it’s called the blue bridge by anybody who walks across it, it’s railroad tracks. I was going down there, and I live now at the place I was crashing at then, so I had this big backpack, it was my grandfather’s, and I’d used duct taped on the strap on the side to keep it from falling off. So I go down, and I noticed one thing about the bridge was that somebody shot out the streetlights above it again, so I can’t see anything other than, you know, this one lone light, ‘cause the other ones are broken. So I go up to the edge of the bridge and I think I hear a sound, but I don’t stop, because I’m counting the next wooden beam that it takes to get across. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there, so I count them. One, two, three, four, five… and I go across. I hear a sound behind me but I still don’t turn, because I don’t want to break my pace. In the middle of the bridge, I decide to stop, because I hear footsteps. I turn around, and I see a tall figure walking towards me. So I turn forward and go. One thing I didn’t mention is, having night terrors (not that anybody would know) makes you very paranoid, for no logical reason, so you insert logic into it. So I figured, “oh, it’s just a guy going by”. My hand still goes into my pocket, to where my knife is, just there. I hear “hey, boy! Hey man! Hey yo! Slow down, hey hey!” Well, I keep going, and I hear “hey man! Yo yo yo! Stop stop stop!” So I said, “Hey, what dyou want?“ 'cause I’m an idiot. ‘Cause I’m curious. Being curious makes you an idiot. I’m full of idiocy (not as much as our President though, I’ll say that. I’m not curious about what happens there). So I turn around and I say, “Hey man, what dyou want?” and he says “Yo, yo, d’you got a light, man?” I make it clear that my hand’s in my pocket, jingling around the loose change that’s in there and say, “Yeah if all you want is a light”. I realized that for some reason, at that point, I had said something that was very important. I didn’t know why, but I had said something that changed the air. He stops, and he says, “Well yeah, you know”. I realize from the shadow of the light shining past him at me that he’s got his hand in his pocket too. So I said “Yeah, well, yeah, alright I’ve got a light” and I take out some matches, and I give them to him. Then I started talking with him. He was a kid, probably 19 or 18, had a Four Loko, flat brim hat, and we just start to talk. As we start getting into talking, one of the things I notice is that he’s as drunk as I am, he wasn’t certain, he was just trying to light his cigarette. As we’re getting into this conversation I realize he’s not that bad of a guy, and I was like, “I gotta tell you man, I had my hand on my knife in my pocket, ‘cause I thought you were gonna try and mug me” and he’s like, “Yo dude! I didn’t know who you were, I had my hand on my knife too!” And I was like, “Shit, well hey, d’you want some rum?“ ‘Cause it’s 3 in the morning, it’s dark, we’re alone on a bridge, of course I’m gonna, well, you know, who cares… And he goes “No, I’ve got my Four Loko!” and I was like “Oh I’m not touchin’ that”. So we sit down, and we get to talking for about 3 hours, and I learned about his life. He was from Somalia. He got shipped off somewhere else. He was a child soldier for about a year, and then he got free somehow (I don’t know, it was broken English). But one thing he told me, I remember, was talking about how, if you were caught with a beer in his hometown, they cut off one of your hands. I said “Fuck, I’ve heard stories about that, but I never knew…”, and he says “Well, now you know”. So I was like, “Well how nice is it to be in harmony, now, to be in peace?” and he said “What’s harmony, what’s peace?”. And I was like “you know, peace”. I tried to explain to him whats harmony is, and I realized, fuck. That’s the same thing as me asking him, “if all you want’s a light”: yeah, that’s what he asked for. But the thing that we’re not certain about is whether or not we say what we mean, and whether or not somebody understands what we mean when we say it. And that’s all I have to say. [34:08]

  [Lee] As an American, I feel like there is enormous potential with the people that I share nationality with to take this country over. Living in Vermont, living in this little tiny city in this little tiny state has enormous influence to take this fucking country over, and the first thing we have to do is take over our city and start leading by this example. By being an example city, people look at Burlington, Vermont already, with 40,000 people, to lead. Because people like Bernie, and people like things that are happening here. Even though people are like “Oh fuck, they’re building a mall, oh fuck, they’re doing this”, it’s still a really fucking awesome city with a small population. Given the size of the population, we have the ability to take it over and rule this small city, to give an example to the state. People look to the State of Vermont for an example, and we can lead the world if we just take it over. I think Bernie should become the governor, and we should just be like— he has so much popularity, he could get sweeping agendas done. Vermont’s a little green splitting wedge pointing its way at Washington, D.C., and I totally believe that the revolution starts in this city, now. [35:36]

  [37:20] [Chai Gang] The two fantasies I have are: A hundred people marching down Church Street, and one fantasy is that they’re holding signs that say how they were evicted, or how somebody they knew was evicted; the other fantasy is everybody playing music and singing ‘What’s Going On?’, the Marvin Gaye song. Everything I try to get going never happens, so I’m putting this out there and hoping somebody will make it happen.

  Friendship and strength for us all [David]

  [38:20] Reset, ready… hope? Yeah, there’s hope, totally. Hope. [Jen]

  Vehemence, precognition, adverse, and doubting doubts [Luc]

  Invincible, in the sense that we break social, economic, racial, physical barriers, 'cause these are things that hold us together, instead of things that keep us apart. So I really hope that this movement breaks generations and bodies and spirits. I think there’s a lot more that we have in common than in difference, so, that’s cool. [Devin] [39:33]

  Confusion and kinship [Max]

  [40:24] [Phinn] Your story kind of resonated a little more, 'cause I do a lot of photography in my spare time, and it often leads me into very desolate places where I’m completely alone and not expecting to see other people. So basically, there’s this abandoned Cold War era radar base in eastern Vermont. It’s on the top of a mountain, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and it’s a place that I go to kind of be alone, ‘cause there’s no one around, and there’s no one up there, ever. A few months ago, I decided to go up there in the winter time. As I was walking up, I spotted someone ahead of me on the trail up. You know, I was a little hesitant, seeing this guy walking in front of me, but I just kept walking. I was walking significantly faster than him, so I eventually caught up. As I got closer, I could see he was holding onto something in front of him that looked like a gun, and so I got a little bit.. hesitant. As I got closer, I realized it definitely was a gun: he was walking with a gun on a hip and a rifle slung across his chest. So I was a little scared to be walking in the middle of the woods with no cell service past someone with a gun. I had no idea why he would also be up here, you know, out in the middle of nowhere. But, as I got closer—and I had a knife too on my chest and I had a knife on my side—I kind of just slid my hand down along my side as I walked past him, because I was just not sure what was gonna happen. As I walked past, I kind of turned and said “Hello”. He said it back, and then he asked me what I was doing up there. I explained I was taking pictures and he was like, “Oh, well I’m just going target shooting”. We began to talk, and I learned that his name was George and he had grown up in the area, and he was simply this guy going out for a hike, but I had had this heightened sense of urgency of there being any kind of issue with this person, because of an uncertainty of people. Something that I generally hadn’t been feeling, but it was because of the state of the environment that we were in. And now with the state of our country, there’s a little more uncertainty of other people, something I really haven’t felt before and hadn’t felt in Vermont especially, as a generally safe place, somewhere I’ve never really felt unsafe. But it was this moment of second-guessing this person, who also was just out there exploring this place. So I think that was something that really resonated with me, this kind of uncertainty. [43:22]

  [Phinn] Hope is a good one. It’s very wonderful to see everyone from a range of ages and occupations. The wide range is just very good to see. I really appreciate not seeing just a really select group of people talking.

  [Jane] Apprehension, and excitement. And gratitude!

  [Hallie] Improvisation, and connections, and empathy.

  [Ali] Pessimism, cynicism, and optimism.

  [Laurie] I am hopeful and I’m positive (or at least I try to stay positive!)

  [Chai] I’m happy to be here.

[the-record-columns]

August 16, 2017: Columns

Such long days, such a short year...

              John Cashion

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

(Editor’s note: The Record’s longtime co-worker and friend, John F. Cashion died on Aug. 14, 2016. What follows are remarks made by Record Publisher Ken Welborn at John’s memorial service, which was held at The Record Park on Friday, Aug.19, 2016.)

 I spent a good part of the day Sunday and Monday of this week on the phone trying to get in touch with friends and acquaintances to let them know that we had lost a man who was truly a one of a kind friend and co-worker, John Cashion.

Some of these folks had known John for many years, others not so long, but all had a story to tell. I said several times on those days that each phone call was like having a short memorial service for John — most all of them knew this day was coming, all were sad, but to a person they quickly perked up and told me of some way John had made them thankful to have known him. Even in death, John’s uncanny ability to make whatever circumstance he was involved in better, shined through.

At about 2 a.m., on this past Sunday, August 14th  (2016), John Cashion died.

He had been in declining health for a number of years, and had many previous brushes with death, but always managed to turn it around and bounce back amazingly well. In the past year when his health issues were clearly taking a heavier toll, folks would remark that he just didn’t look well. I would usually brush them off by reminding them we had buried John six times already, and that he just wouldn’t stay down.

John was a diabetic for over 50 years and that complicated everything else, and clearly, health issues were a dominant factor, but, for the most part, he stoically toughed it out. Never have I seen a man with such faith in the medical profession. Even with all he had against him, he never lost faith that somewhere there was another doctor or another pill that would help. To that end I was amazed at the medicines he kept up with, and, for that matter, how he functioned so well after taking them. I would kid him that Secretariat would have never left the gate of the Kentucky Derby after taking John’s daily medications.

I met John Cashion over 40 years ago when I worked in advertising for his uncle Paul Cashion at WWWC Radio. Then, 3WC was a Top 40 station, and Paul had asked John to come on board as the station manager. I was very impressed with his sales training and willingness to impart that to others, but most of all, his ability to work through the personnel problems he was handed at the time with an attitude that wasn’t judgmental, but nonetheless managed to get across the “shape up or ship out” facts of life. Through the years after the radio station, John was in one activity or another, but for the past 20 or so, he worked with me, first at Thursday Magazine and then for The Record.

But he was not just part of my work, he was part of my life, the life of my wives, and clearly the lives of my children; who regarded him as another wonderful uncle. He was as thoughtful as anyone could be, never forgetting a birthday, anniversary or anything else for that matter. When The Record’s offices burned in 2004, I made the remark that an old book my father had given me was one of the few things I had from him, and really regretted losing it. In no time there was a copy of that very book on my chair at work with a note, “Hope this helps.”

When he felt good enough to come to work, he was always the company man. He sold advertising, collected, gave us story ideas, even made it a point to scout out new locations for our newspaper boxes. His desk was near the front of the office and he was usually the first person our visitors would see and speak to, and he always made them welcome. In the past few years, as his health continued to deteriorate he still came to work whenever possible. I used to say he could sell more advertising by accident than most could on purpose.

I have been acquainted with his son, Matt, and his, mother Georgia (Puddin’ to most), for many years. Matt is a college professor in Wisconsin, is an often published author, and John was proud of him beyond words. Often I was present when Matt would call and John’s smile would light up the room as he always started his conversation with, “Well, hello young son.” I have to note that John Cashion was the only known Cashion Republican in captivity, and, it is a measure of Matt’s love for his dad that he, a flaming liberal, took John to the polls to vote in March of this year knowing he was going to vote for Donald Trump. Georgia Erwin is not your average ex-wife either. Many times John has told me of the uncounted kindnesses she had shown him though the years, long after they weren’t married, saying she “…pulled me out of the ditch” many times. When Matt and Georgia came together to visit last year, John laughed and told me “…they must think I’m going to die.” Well, he did, but in true John Cashion form, he put it off to the very last minute.

John was computer literate long before I ever sat down in front of one, as noted by his very early e-mail address, Mybudjohn@aol.com. He wrote his own obituary every day with his cheerful way and kind treatment of others. Among the things I am most thankful for today is my long and storied friendship with John — he was my bud John, too.

                                             John Fred Cashion

                              October 9, 1940 – August 14, 2016

                                              Rest in Peace

Ye of little faith…  Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith

By LAURA WELBORN

As I continue my search for how to be more mindful with the definition of “Mindfulness” is a way of paying attention on purpose, in the present moment – non judgmentally.  My quest is how to bring peace to my life, and the biggest difference between peace and stress is attitude. 

It’s all about how you look at a situation and what you decide to do with it.  It’s remembering that there are no certainties in life—we don’t know exactly what the future will bring.  So your best strategy for living is to make the best and most positive use of the present moment, even when it disappoints you!   Start by reminding yourself…

“Master your focus—where your attention goes.  Value what you give your energy to. 

Do things for the right reasons, even when things don’t work out as planned.  Your “why” must be bigger than the disappointments and challenges you face. 

Most people end up cheating on themselves and others, simply because they pay more attention to what they’re missing, rather than what they have.  Meditate on this, so you don’t fall back into old, tired patterns.  This one gets the best of even the best of us.  Toxic habits and behaviors always try to sneak back in when we’re doing better.  Stay focused.

Not everyone has the same heart as you. Forgive them, not because they absolutely deserve forgiveness, but because you absolutely deserve peace of mind.  Free yourself of the burden of being an eternal victim.

If somebody is working on themselves and changing for the better, it’s unnecessary to keep bringing up their past.  People can change and grow.  Take this to heart, and show yourself the same courtesy too. 

Calmness is a human superpower.  The ability to not overreact or take things personally keeps your mind clear and your heart at peace.  It’s never too late to change your attitude about something you can’t change.  Just decide to make the best of it. 

Mental strength is incredibly important.  Take care of your mind and the way you speak to yourself.  Don’t let negative self-talk weaken you.  Talk like you are blessed.  Walk like you are blessed.  Think like you are blessed. Work like you are blessed.  And you will be, one way or another.

Everything gets a bit uncomfortable when it’s time to change (or when it’s time to recalibrate your expectations).  That’s just a part of the growth process.  Things will get better.  Be patient, and remind yourself that you will never have to force anything that’s truly meant to be.  Just do your best, then adopt a “whatever happens, happens” mindset.  Don’t try to force things — let go and allow the right blessings to flow.

The wrong choices can bring us to the right places.  The biggest failures often carry the best lessons.  When you fail to get what you want, consider that it just might be a blessing in disguise.” (Marc and Angel Hack Life blog)

And if you have the courage to admit that you’re a little scared, the ability to smile even as you cry, the nerve to ask for help when you need it, and the wisdom to take it when it’s offered, then you have everything you need at this moment.

Laura Welborn, Certified Mediator and Licensed Clinical Addiction Specialist. Contact her laurawelborn1@gmail.com

 The World is Blind Concerning Israel

By EARL COX

Special to The Record

How can the entire world seemingly ignore the realities of the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors — including the very real threats to Israel’s existence from radical Islam? Is it just blindness or something much deeper? World leaders apparently have not learned lessons from history. Obvious evils are going unchecked and most will not acknowledge the contamination of anti-Semitism in their own minds.

 The United Nations and the European Union make up a large segment of this blind and biased camp pressuring the Jewish people and the State of Israel to give away their battle-won lands to Arabs for virtually nothing but trouble in return. One important historical lesson is that appeasement never eliminates hatred and animosity. Many world leaders are completely ignoring the obvious - that the Palestinian Arabs are undeserving of an independent state being grossly unprepared to operate, manage and properly govern.

 Many have drawn attention lately to the eerie parallels between today’s situation in the Middle East and the appeasement of German dictator Adolf Hitler by English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain before World War II. Chamberlain refused to acknowledge that Hitler was a cruel demagogue bent on subduing and controlling all of Europe. He did not believe what Hitler wrote in his book, Mein Kampf, about how he planned to conquer Europe. Instead, Chamberlain considered Hitler to be a good man with whom he could negotiate peace and cultivate good relations so Hitler proceeded to mercilessly bomb England almost into submission, besides murdering 6 million Jews and several million other Europeans. Clearly, appeasement did not bring peace. It simply encouraged more violence and bloodshed.

 Nonetheless, the UN, EU and others are ignoring important history lessons. In like manner to Chamberlain, they are turning deaf ears to the long-time and oft-repeated inflammatory declarations of Israel’s neighboring Palestinians and other Arabs, whose clear goal is the annihilation of the Jewish state of Israel. They are deliberately dismissing the historical truth that the Arabs have inflicted five wars on Israel with the unmistakable intent of destroying her. And one questions whether they are taking seriously the repeated threats from Iran’s leadership “to wipe Israel off the face of the map.” They want to think, like Chamberlain, that they can appease hateful Muslims into becoming kind and peaceful friends. But didn’t Hitler prove otherwise?

 Back to pressure from the Palestinians for the granting of their own state: Hamas is a terrorist entity and the Palestinian Authority government is a corrupt and non-viable farce. The Palestinian economy is in shambles. The Palestinians’ opportunity for independence and democracy in Gaza has been nothing short of a catastrophe, and this now “Jew-free” territory is nothing more than a base for terrorism. Moreover, don’t forget all the promises the PA government has made in more than five peace agreements which they have made no efforts to fulfill.

 How can the UN, EU and others continue to blindly ignore the blatant incompetence, corruption and violence of the Palestinians? On what basis do they conclude that this chaotic and destructive population deserves its own independent state — especially on land that does not rightfully belong to it? It’s a kind of mass insanity!

 The American philosopher George Santayana (1863-1953) once said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The lessons of history are supposed to help us avoid repeating those failures and tragedies in the future. However, world leaders today are drawing the wrong conclusions from the past. Their attitudes and actions are causing great concern for Israel, as well as for the entire free world as the danger does not stop with the existential threat to Israel.

 Radical Arab Muslim leaders have clearly declared that their objective is to control and subjugate the whole world. Yet, it seems that the “wisdom” of the West today is to not take seriously the worldwide threats of the radical Muslim world. Most international leaders do not want to admit that any serious threat even exists and in their blindness they seem to have no concerns about allowing the state of Israel to become a “sacrificial lamb” should a policy of appeasement fail once again.

An Angry River, A Big Fish and A Few Friends

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

I never will forget a three day fly fishing trip I made a few years ago in Western North Carolina.  I had been invited to explore the newly mapped Western NC Fly Fishing Trail. I was concerned about the timing of the trip for a few reasons:  it was a very cold April, it had been raining for about a week, and I was sure the water would be high and fast. However, when I called to confirm I was assured things would be okay.

So I booked the camera crew and off we went. We had a nice large cabin with a rocked fireplace overlooking the Tuckasegee River, and the view could not have been better.

We were getting settled in when our fishing guide, Alex Bell, showed up to make sure we had everything we needed. Alex is a highly respected and well known fly fishing guide who spends much of his time in the mountain streams and offers guide service year round. He also manages to make his way to warmer waters for a bit of salt water fishing, which naturally provides more fishing tales.  Alex knew the best places to go and he made sure we had a good time.

There were also a few writers who joined the adventure, which as you might imagine made for colorful social gatherings. It was during these evening get-togethers that we sat around and told stories of our various adventures. It was no surprise that the fellow who had written the book with the most pages also had bragging rights for the largest catch of the day. It should also be noted that we were fishing catch and release and when he caught the BIG one he was around the bend by himself. We, of course, did not doubt him. Why should we? He was a fisherman, after all.

Some of my best memories of the trip were being in the middle of the cold, surging waters of the Tuckasegee River with a camera crew, doing all we could to not fall in while talking to fellow fishermen on camera. This was not as easy task. I remember approaching Doc Lawrence, a travel writer and producer from Atlanta who had just cast his line.

"Doc," I asked, "are you available for a quick conversation?"

He said sure, so there we stood in the middle of a somewhat angry river, having a conversation on camera, both of us hoping upon hope that we would maintain our footing. We did and we soon became fast friends.

The next day we went over to the Cherokee portion of the trail to fish in some of their waters. While the water had calmed a bit, it was still aggressive. Victor, our cameraman, loves outdoor adventure and was more fit than the rest of us, was setting up his shot in the water near the bank. I was talking with Alex and the next think I knew I heard a big splash and a few Spanish words. When I turned, I saw that Victor had fallen down. The cold mountain water was filling his waders but he was holding the camera safely in the air. We quickly rescued Victor and the camera, but I think it took the rest of that day and the next for him to thaw out.

That was a great trip, even in the cold. To this day I remember with fondness my first visit to the Western North Carolina Fly Fishing Trail.

It’s funny what we recall in life. I enjoy fishing but it’s not the fish I remember.

 Carl White is the executive producer and host of the award winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In the Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its seventh year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte viewing market on WJZY Fox 46 Sunday mornings at 10:00am. For more on the show visit  www.lifeinthecarolinas.com, You can email Carl White at Carl@lifeinthecarolinas.com.  

Copyright 2016 Carl White / Carl White’s Life In The Carolinas