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cyanidedrinkers · 5 months

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Forgive me father for i have sinned.

A PriceGraves religious guilt fanfic. Tw: Religious guilt, Religious Trauma, Mentions of homophobia, accidental self-harm, Graves has a mental breakdown- Graves loved his Shadow's, They were like family to him and because they were his family he did everything in his power to make them comfortable. One of the major ways he does this is by taking the time to research their religions and adjusting accordingly. During Ramadan Graves tracks who's fasting and makes sure to have the night crew make food for those breaking fast. He keeps Kosher meals on hand at all times and special orders MRE'S for those in the field so they still get fed and don't have to go against their religion. All around base there are rooms for those who need to pray through out the day. He special orders uniforms for those who cant wear what is provided due to their religion, and assigns special roles for those who refuse to handle a gun but still wish to serve. All he asks is that he is informed ahead of time when someone needs to fast, take off for holidays, or pray so he can provide the support they need. If the company ever gets deployed around Saudi Arabia Graves asks around to see who would like to make their journey to the Kaaba. There's a small church area on the base for those to go to throughout the day and designated times for people to go attend service. He even provides custom helmets for those who decide to wear Hijabs or Kippah's and takes feed back on how to make them comfier.

Growing up in the south Graves was raised Catholic, His mother and father were very prominent at the church and so was little Phillip. He went to lent, ash Wednesday, attended church every Sunday, participated in dinner every Wednesday, learned old Latin so he can read the older versions of the bible, went to Catholic schools, he even prayed at every meal and before bed. His religion was sacred to him, It was an important part of his life growing up and so he strives to make others comfortable too. His love for his god tends to backfire though. After his betrayal of the 141 and Los Vaqueros he spent a whole week locked in his room praying and begging for forgiveness. His cross clutched so tightly in his hands that it left bruises and made that spot tender to the touch. Shadow's had stationed themselves outside the door to make sure he was safe but the cries coming from his room were those of pain and terror as he begged for forgiveness and to wash away his sin from his unholy body. It took nearly 3 months for him to get back to normal and when he did he got the worse news possible. "Due to the nature of this mission I'll be assigning 141 to help you. It'll be easier for them to stay on your base so clear out some space." Laswell stated firmly. Less then 24 hours ago Graves was hit with this news, He was scared to say the least. The 141...Staying with the shadows? How would he break it to his boys-, And girls, That the people who killed their teammates, lovers, and friends would be staying with them for god knows how long. Graves ran a hand over his face, His eyes threatening to close and his knees sore from sitting down all day from doing the paperwork for the 141's arrival. What he really wanted was to crack a beer open and watch the afternoon PT be done, He loved watching the new trainees get too cocky with their superior then bicker and moan as they were made to run laps. It brought him back to days were things were easy and he didn't have to worry about anything other then what their NCO was going to do to them. Pushing himself up and out of his chair with a loud groan Graves collected his things and set out to break the news to his shadows. The sun was just setting over the horizon as he took his first step out into the real world. The air smelled like a mixture of sweat, heat, dirt, and....rain? With a quick glance up at the clouds and a curse under his breath Graves made his way to the mess hall. "That stupid weather man said it wouldn't rain for another two days" He whined under his breath as he kicked a rock Infront of him, Repeating this action intel he eventually lost it. "Smells like damn rain to me, The clouds are white as snow but i just know it by the smell" His mumbling and grumbling to himself continued till he made it inside, It caught the eye of some shadows as he passed by them but they shrugged it off as him being hangry or a meeting gone wrong.

Once inside Graves was greeted by the waves and smiling faces of his Shadows, Some ran up to him and started asking how he was and if he was busy today because he didn't make his rounds like he normally does. Graves just smiled and made small talk intel everyone sat down. It was fairly easy to get everyone's attention when he needed it.

He stood and cleared his throat, Graves had prepared to yell over all the noise but the sound of silence washed over the mess hall as he stood and nothing but clattering forks could he heard as the attention was on him.

"Well that was easier than i remember-" He smiles to himself, He's still got it.

"It is with uttermost disappoint that i inform you that the 141 will be staying with us-" Groans and yelling cut him off. His shadows like small children sometimes, They whined and one person let out a very loud "NOOOOOO" which was met by laughter and agreement.

"I know we haven't been the best of friends with them but i expect you all to treat them with respect and to NOT, I repeat, NOT disrespect them in anyway OR steal their stuff." Graves hisses out, He aims that last part at a Shadow not to far away from him who's known for stealing things from people she dislikes.

This gets a unsatisfied groan from her but understanding nods from everyone else, And with that Graves grabs himself some dinner and goes back to his quarters for the night.

Once his meal is done and he finally shuts down his laptop Graves changes into a simple T-shirt and sweats. He removes the cross necklace from around his neck, takes off his socks and gets on his knees at the foot of his bed. His hands, Grasping the cross that lays so perfectly across his hands, and closes his eyes as he bows his head.

"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Please, Allow these next few days to go well. Allow sin and hatred to not come in-between our mission and deliver my children back to me safely. Give me strength to push through and give strength to those who will have to see the faces of those who killed their loves, friends, and brothers in arms. Allow nothing but peace between the two companies lord. Amen"

Graves stays there for a few more seconds before standing up and setting his necklace at the bedside table. As he gets into bed and drifts into sleep he can't help but have that same gruff voice pop up in his head, Those calloused hands, the smell of cigars, it all swarms his mind intel he finally falls asleep....

That was part one :) if ya'll liked it let me know and I'll probably continue it- I had to do a lot of research so i apologize if everything isn't correct- I'm Agnostic, Former Christian, and don't know very much but I'm trying.

#cod #cod mw2 #call of duty #phillip graves #phillip graves mention #captain john price #john price #captain price #pricegraves #price x graves #gravesprice #religious trauma #religious guilt #story???

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longwindedbore · 1 year

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What fresh (Catholic) Hell has the oblivious or brain-dead (Protestant) Evangelical leadership cabal delivered themselves and the rest of us into?

I ask as an ex-Catholic - are you punch-drunk fools aware that you have engineered the take over of the Supreme Court by Opus Dei, a secretive world-wide Catholic organization?

Apparently you thought you were using the Catholic Church to increase YOUR political power.

Maybe you Evangelicals should re-evaluate who used who.

YOUR local pro-White Evangelical Patriarchy State GOP politicians are bankrupt and facing being swept from office in a tidal wave backlash that has already begun.

Trump GAVE Opus Dei a majority on SCOTUS potentially for decades. While you and Faux News watched.

It’s one thing to co-opt the “Catholic issue” of abortion to use it for the White Christian Nationalist & Patriarchal code language “secret” goal of “overturning Affirmative Action and getting women and minorities out of the White man’s workplace.” That’s political. Ugly. But political.

But doesn’t it defeat all your plans to hand the supreme court over judges indebted - in all senses of the word - to Opus Dei, an organization that reports directly to, and only to, the Pope in Rome?

As an ex-Catholic I see that we now have six very very alt-right to fanatical lunatic fringe of Catholicism Supreme Court Justices: Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. It terrifies me. But you’re OK with it?

These aren’t the Biden or Pelosi Catholics who will be excommunicated for fulfilling their oaths to the Public.

Three of the Catholic SCROTUS were nominated by your Evangelical “New Cyrus”, Trump. Then shoved through by McConnell and the GOP Senators elected by Evangelicals.

Opus Dei is a secular Catholic organization of economic elites operating worldwide.

Organized like SPECTRE (meeting in Rome) in the Bond movie of the same name.

Was used as the NAME of the sinister organization in “The DaVinci Code”.

Opus Dei has its origin and philosophy in the Spanish Fascist regime of Francisco Franco. Heir to the inquisition and Armada.

Currently the Pope is liberal and ecumenical. So unlikely to exploit SCOTUS other than try to persuade.

But the papal pendulum can swing in a heart beat followed by a puff of white smoke.

Also, the ‘explosive growth of new evangelical churches in Latin America’ you crow about results from ‘poaching’ members from the Catholic Church. The current Pope is, after all, South American. So not an admirer of Evangelicals.

What we’re you thinking? Assuming you thought.

Opus Dei doesn’t publish a list of members but influential secular Catholics, like Leonard Leo of the Heritage Foundation, have been instrumental in the nominations of five of the six current Judges. As well as many in lower benches.

[Opus Dei doesn’t publish a list of members for the same reasons that are typically expressed by the KKK and the marching virgins of the Patriotic Front.]

Trumped effed us all on this one by handing over control of the Court - at best - to a fringe group of devotees. Or - at worst - to an international theocratic cabal.

Maybe he did so because, like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, the Vatican City micro-county does not have an extradition treaty with the US?

In any event nothing good has ever come from the far far far right of the Catholic spectrum. Devotees who are, still today, big fans of hair shirts, daily attendance at mass, self-flagellation, and sleeping on wood boards.

Hoping all you Evangelicals know the properly tonal response to “Dóminus vobíscum”

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mariacallous · 3 months

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The Group of Seven (G-7) leaders are expected to ratchet up economic and political pressure on Russia when they convene at a summit in Italy later this week, with plans to roll out new loans to Ukraine from frozen Russian assets. They also plan to condemn Moscow’s growing ties to North Korea as well as China’s indirect support of the Russian war machine.

The plans for the upcoming summit, described by current and former officials familiar with draft G-7 communiques circulating among diplomats, are being pushed by embattled Western leaders eager to lock in foreign-policy wins in the face of major election hurdles at home. A G-7 leaders’ summit in 2025 could be drastically different and a lot more fractured depending on how elections go in the United States, United Kingdom, and now France—particularly if former U.S. President Donald Trump beats incumbent President Joe Biden in the U.S. elections in November.

“This is the last time this group will meet in this configuration with these leaders. I think that’s pretty clear,” said Josh Lipsky, a former advisor at the International Monetary Fund and now senior director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. “It all conveys a sense of urgency and the stakes around this G-7.”

The G-7 summit also comes against the backdrop of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as well as strategic competition between the West and its rivals in Russia and China to curry favor and influence in the so-called global south. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has invited the leaders of at least a dozen non-G-7 countries to the upcoming summit, including Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates.

The Biden administration’s top priority for the upcoming summit, which Biden himself is set to attend, is finalizing an agreement to provide around $50 billion in new loans to Ukraine using profits from Russian assets that have been frozen in the Western-dominated international financial system. The proposal has received widespread support in theory among countries opposed to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but it still faces a thicket of complex legal and financial hurdles.

Western countries froze around $280 billion in Russian financial assets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the bulk of which is parked in Belgium, France, and Germany. EU officials have resisted efforts to seize the assets directly, fearing the precedent such a move would set for international markets, but they opened the door to allocating interest generated by these assets to Ukraine. The Biden administration’s plan calls for G-7 countries to issue Ukraine a $50 billion loan, seen as a critical lifeline for the country’s battered wartime economy, which would be paid back over the years by the interest from the frozen Russian assets. Those assets could generate around $2.7 billion to $3.7 billion a year in interest. Biden administration officials are still working to hash out the final details of the plan ahead of the summit.

Alongside this, the G-7 countries—the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—are also expected to issue new statements condemning Russia’s deepening military ties with North Korea and send new warnings to Chinese banks to stop helping Moscow evade Western sanctions lest they face new sanctions themselves, the current and former officials said. The United States has so far avoided sanctioning major Chinese financial institutions, possibly fearing the impact on global financial markets, but Washington could choose to target smaller Chinese banks helping Russia skirt Western sanctions as a calculated response and opening warning shot.

“Our concern is that China is increasingly the factory of the Russian war machine,” Daleep Singh, the White House deputy national security advisor for international economics, said during an event at the Center for a New American Security. “You can call it the ‘arsenal of autocracy’ when you consider [that] Russia’s military ambitions threaten obviously the existence of Ukraine, but [also] increasingly European security, NATO, and trans-Atlantic security.”

The Biden administration’s push for major deliverables at the upcoming G-7 summit fits into a wider strategy the administration has taken to advance its foreign-policy agenda in more informal and ad hoc groupings of partners and allies as traditional multilateral institutions—such as the United Nations—are stuck in diplomatic gridlock. The administration has advanced its Indo-Pacific strategy through the Quad—a new partnership among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—and security partnerships through the AUKUS arrangement with Australia and the United Kingdom.

While the Biden administration hopes to focus the G-7 summit on rallying more international support for Ukraine, it is also grappling with the ongoing crisis in the Middle East centered on Israel’s war against Hamas. Ongoing U.S. support for Israel in the war as the civilian death toll in Gaza mounts has opened Washington up to widespread criticism and accusations of hypocrisy, particularly from countries in the global south.

Countries including Colombia, Mexico, and Nicaragua have filed to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice over vehement opposition from Israel and the United States. Colombia, Bolivia, and Belize have severed diplomatic ties with Israel, and Brazil has withdrawn its ambassador. Russian state propaganda outlets have seized on the narrative of Western double standards about civilian casualties in Ukraine versus Gaza, and many analysts assess that the conflict in Gaza is aiding the Kremlin’s messaging to the global south on Western hypocrisy.

“The Ukraine war awakened us in the West to the fact that there’s work to do in the global south, but at least then we were on the side of the global majority,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali Italian think tank and former special advisor to the EU’s foreign-policy chief.

“Now with Israel-Gaza, we just basically are in a shrinking minority,” she added. “We’re in a far, far more complicated spot than we were a year ago vis-à-vis the global south … and there’s now this total lack of credibility that the West has to deal with.”

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menalez · 1 year

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Here is a critique: Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism’s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where’s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.

But the rest is feminist silence. You haven’t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them—“provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,” in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can’t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor’s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.

You didn’t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention—stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world—except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.

You didn’t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, “defending my honor, family, and dignity,” who cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment’s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations—an accusation leading to his sister’s barbaric punishment—as a way of covering up their crime.

Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities “among educated and liberal families.” In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times “to cleanse the family honor,” and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her “immoral behavior,” had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. “The whore is dead,” the family announced.

As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women’s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women’s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to “lose their voice” in the face of women’s oppression.

The first variety—radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers’s term)—starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: “The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.”

Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence—and specifically, male violence against women. “Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,” according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches “The Sexuality of Terrorism” at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists’ view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists’ “discomfort” with the Afghanistan bombing was “deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.”

If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable—“Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,” as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. “Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,” wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. “They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.”

Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn’t have Joan Crawford in mind), that’s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as “renunciation,” “resistance to injustice,” and “reconciliation.” The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. “I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ‘He started it!’ and throwing rocks,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “I keep looking for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, ‘Boys! Boys!’ ”

Gender feminism’s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naiveté hasn’t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: “The key reason behind women’s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.” Even female elected officials are on board. “The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,” urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. “If we’d had women at Camp David,” he said in July 2000, “we’d have an agreement.”

Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women’s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of “meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.” “Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,” Ensler wrote proudly of the summit’s concluding proclamation—despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. “[B]uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,” Ensler cooed. “Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.”

Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.

Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: “When you’re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.” Now it’s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons’ efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.

The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn’t an authentic, indigenous—and therefore appropriate—expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.

The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against “global hegemony.” He was mesmerized by this new form of “political spirituality” that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the “transfiguration of the world.” Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband’s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women’s basic rights, when a struggle against “the planetary system” was at hand?

Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism—not to mention with women’s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.

The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress “gender complementarity” rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.

Attacking from the religious front, a number of “Islamic feminists” are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur’an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur’an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity’s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.

What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world—and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam—in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite—Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.

At the same time, though, the issue of women’s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur’an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment—the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women’s equality—except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there’s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.

To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel’s “masculinist military culture”—Israel being white and Western—though she would never dream of pointing out the “masculinist military culture” of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the “degradation” of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of “the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,” as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a “device for ranking the ‘other’ men as inferior or as ‘uncivilized,’ ” according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called “white men saving brown women from brown men.”

Spivak’s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. “When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,” Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. “Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,” she says. “What is driving Islamist men is globalization.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating “agency” against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. “Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,” Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. “Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,” she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won’t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn’t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? “I don’t know,” Cooke answers, “I’m interested in discourse.” The irony couldn’t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the “Other” endorse that Other’s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda—subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.

The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing “group rights for minority cultures” over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a “barely tolerable institution.” Some women, she went so far as to declare, “might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.”

But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women’s Day—“Afghanistan Is Everywhere”—was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don’t women in the West parade around in bikinis? “It’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,” columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

As Nelson’s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn’t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of “women’s human rights,” meaning not simply women’s civil and political rights but “economic rights” and “socioeconomic justice.” Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state “as an emancipatory institution,” in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are “unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members” and seeped in “nationalist ideologies” as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations “depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,” writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.

Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the “gender perspective” in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: “Gender Perspectives on Landmines” and “Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement’s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women’s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to “take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women” and to eliminate “stereotyped roles” to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty’s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, “the personal is international.” The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother’s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur’an in accordance with “committee guidelines.”

Confusing “women’s participation” with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women’s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections “to leapfrog women to power.” Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.

That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn’t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?

Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.

The truth is that the free institutions—an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections—that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things—and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.

There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women’s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country’s top priority. There has been a “seismic gender shift on matters of war,” according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there’s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.

Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase “America the Horrible,” went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war “was worth it.” Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.

As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand—that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.

my god this dude wrote the world’s worst thesis and sent it to the worst candidate possible (a muslim-born woman from the middle east that regularly talks about the issues feminists apparently never talk about)

#btw ive gotten several of these anti-feminist rant messages and eventually i will probably get bored of u and block u jsyk #i know these are all dumb copy pastas from reddit probably but i get enough msgs as is #anonymous #long post

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xtruss · 1 year

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Chinese Senior Diplomat Calls To Resist Cold War Mentality At BRICS Security Meetings

— Global Times Staff Reporters | July 25, 2023

Photo: BRICS. VCG

Cyber security as well as other threats in traditional and non-traditional security fields have taken the spotlight at the ongoing meetings of BRICS countries in Johannesburg, South Africa, as analysts said that amid growing global uncertainties, more developing countries are seeking to improve solidarity to jointly tackle challenges to their development under the auspices of the BRICS mechanism.

While attending the 13th Meeting of BRICS National Security Advisers and High Representatives on National Security in Johannesburg, South Africa on Tuesday, senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi said that after more than 10 years of development, the BRICS has become an important platform for emerging market countries and developing countries to unite and self-development.

Under the new situation, we must grasp the future development direction of the BRICS countries, further strengthen political mutual trust and strategic coordination, continue to provide international public goods that meet the requirements of the times, and strive to translate the BRICS spirit of openness, inclusiveness, and win-win cooperation into practical actions, and polish the "golden brand" of BRICS cooperation, Wang said.

To deal with the current global security challenges and solve the security dilemma, Wang also called for countries to resist unilateralism, hegemony and oppose "decoupling" and "double standards" and oppose Cold War mentality and zero-sum game.

Analysts said that the ongoing meetings for security advisors and senior diplomats from BRICS countries and "Friends of BRICS" underscored the security concerns of developing countries and new emerging economies over the destructive activities, "color revolutions" and cyber attacks plotted by some countries who have posed great threats to the stable development of developing countries and global peace.

Aside from expressing their concerns over traditional and non-traditional security fields, BRICS countries and developing countries are seeking to improve solidarity to jointly tackle development challenges under the BRICS mechanism, which will also be part of the build-up to the 15th BRICS Summit in South Africa to be held from August 22 to 24, they noted.

On Monday, a meeting, which was held under the theme of "Cyber security is increasingly becoming a challenge for developing countries," is also being attended by Minister in the Presidency of South Africa Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, Chief Adviser of the Presidency of Brazil Celso Luiz Nunes Amorim, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval of India and representatives of Belarus, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Burundi, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Cuba and other countries.

Security Concerns Under Spotlight

During the Tuesday meeting, Wang, member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and also director of the Office of the CPC Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, said that the "Global South" is a collection of emerging market countries and developing countries, reflecting our collective rise on the international stage. Countries in the "Global South" face the important mission of resisting the external intervention and maintaining political security and regime security.

Wang Yi said that unity is strength, action is direction, and openness is motivation. China is willing to work with BRICS partners to support each other's efforts to maintain national security and stability, and to carry out more practical cooperation in dealing with international security challenges, so that the world can hear more BRICS voices and witness a greater role of the BRICS.

Senior officials on security from BRICS countries also exchanged in-depth views on issues such as current security challenges, anti-terrorism and cyber security, food and water security, and energy security, and reached broad consensus, according to a release from Chinese Foreign Ministry.

The issue of cyber security has been discussed at length at the ongoing BRICS meeting as some Western countries have intensified using the internet to conduct destructive activities in other countries, including inciting domestic riots, fooling the public or organizing cyber attacks on governmental departments, which have posed threats to developing countries' stability and development, Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The meeting on security, together with other meetings in various fields, will lay the groundwork for the leaders' summit in August, as the BRICS mechanism is a cooperative mechanism beyond economic and security fields, and whether it is regarding traditional or non-traditional fields, it would safeguard development and cooperation in other areas, Song said.

This year's BRICS summit will focus on improving cooperation between BRICS members and African countries in technology, economy and other fields, and security would also be the basis for cooperation, said Song.

South Africa has invited the heads of state of all African countries to the summit, which is themed as "BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development, and Inclusive Multilateralism." The summit is anticipated to discuss how BRICS countries can better work with African countries, media reported.

Security is the core concern for the financial cooperation of BRICS countries and other developing countries. This is also why BRICS countries are studying the potential use of alternative currencies to the US dollar, analysts said.

For the past months, many media, especially those from the West and the US, have reported that BRICS countries are seeking to shift from the dollar in mutual trade to avoid becoming "victim" to sanctions. For example, in April, Bloomberg reported that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called on BRICS countries to come up with an alternative to the dollar in foreign trade.

South Africa, the BRICS chair, has put the stability of the global financial system as a priority for the BRICS meetings, as BRICS countries and developing countries have been put in an unfavorable position that would be affected by global financial hegemony, Wang Lei, director of the Center for BRICS Cooperation Studies at Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times.

However, de-dollarization is not the core mission of BRICS countries and what they want is to make the global financial system fairer and more inclusive, and to better reflect the major changes that have happened in the global governing system, Wang Lei said.

Against the backdrop of the continuous Russia-Ukraine conflict and drastic global changes unseen in a century, developing countries are seeking to inject more stable and secure impetus to the world and to promote the international governing system to be more inclusive and better reflect their interests. However, the US and some Western media have smeared their efforts, analysts said.

What BRICS countries are working toward is not to compete with the US for its hegemony, but to build a multipolar world in which each country's concerns on security, economy and developments can be respected by others - this may also be the reason for the US and West's increasing worries of the growing influence and attractiveness of BRICS, Song said.

#BRICS #South Africa 🇿🇦#Cold War Mentality #Decoupling #Double Standards #Cyber Security #Global South #China 🇨🇳#Mutually Accelerated Growth #Sustainable Development #Multilateralism #Bloomberg #Brazil 🇧🇷#President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva #Global Times #Alternative Currencies #US Dollar 🇺🇸

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jordanianroyals · 10 months

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11 November 2023: King Abdullah II warned that the region will spiral into a major conflict whose price innocent people from both sides will pay, and whose repercussions will affect the whole world if the ugly war on Gaza does not stop. In an address to the joint Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit on Gaza hosted by the Saudi Arabia in Riyadh and attended by Crown Prince Hussein, King Abdullah said Jordan will continue to undertake its duty in dispatching humanitarian aid to the Palestinians through any means available. His Majesty called for building on the United Nations General Assembly’s decision on Gaza, which was the result of joint Arab action, to be the first step to work collectively to build a political alliance to first stop the war and the displacement immediately, and to launch a serious peace process in the Middle East, without allowing its hindrance under any circumstances. Following is the full text of His Majesty’s speech:

“In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Prayers and peace be upon our Prophet Mohammad, Your Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Your Highnesses, Excellencies, distinguished guests, Peace, God’s mercy and blessings be upon you. I would like to thank my brother, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for hosting this Arab-Islamic summit in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We convene today for Gaza and its people, as they continue to face death and destruction in an ugly war that must stop immediately, or our region will spiral into a major conflict whose price innocent people from both sides will pay, and whose repercussions will affect the whole world. This injustice did not begin a month ago. It is a continuation of over seven decades dominated by a fortress mentality of separation walls and violations against holy sites and rights, the majority of whose victims are innocent civilians. It is the same mentality that seeks to turn Gaza into an unliveable place. It targets mosques, churches, and hospitals; it kills doctors, paramedics, and relief workers; even children, the elderly, and women. And I ask today, did the world have to wait for this painful humanitarian tragedy and the terrible destruction to unfold in order to realise that just peace, which fulfils the legitimate rights of the Palestinians on the basis of the two-state solution, is the only way to reach stability and end the killing and violence which have continued for decades? My brothers, The injustice inflicted on our Palestinian brothers and sisters reflects the international community’s failure to grant them justice and guarantee their rights to dignity, self-determination, and the establishment of their independent state on the 4 June 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital. We cannot be silent over the catastrophic situation in the Gaza Strip, which suffocates life and prevents the delivery of medicines. Humanitarian corridors must be kept safe and sustainable. And banning the delivery of food, medicine, water, and electricity to Gazans is not acceptable. It is a war crime that the world must condemn. Jordan will continue to undertake its duty in dispatching humanitarian aid to the Palestinians through any means available. My brothers, The United Nations General Assembly’s decision on Gaza was a victory for humanitarian values and for the right to life and peace. It was a worldwide rejection of the war, and a result of joint Arab action. This decision must be our first step to work collectively to build a political alliance to first stop the war and the displacement immediately, and to launch a serious peace process in the Middle East, without allowing its hindrance under any circumstances. The alternative would be further extremism, hatred, and tragedies. The values of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and our shared humanity do not accept the killing of civilians nor the brutality that has been evident to the entire world over the past weeks of killing and destruction. We cannot allow for our just and legitimate cause to be turned into a source of fomenting conflict between religions. And we say to the entire world and to all believers in peace and human dignity—regardless of their religion, ethnicity, or language—that the world will pay the price of failure to resolve the Palestinian issue and address the root causes of the problem. Thank you all, and peace, God’s mercy and blessings be upon you.” The Jordanian delegation to the summit included Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, Director of the Office of His Majesty Jafar Hassan, and Jordan’s Permanent Representative at the Arab League Amjad Adaileh.

#King Abdullah II #crown prince hussein

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omegawhiskers · 11 months

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Why I started watching WWE again

The earliest memory I have of professional wrestling is The Undertaker/Yokozuna feud. This fond memory was the catalyst to moulding my enjoyment to this form of entertainment.

Years later I began watching WWE/WWF on a full-time basis because it was aired weekend mornings. The Stone Cole Steve Austin/Vince McMahon feud hooked me. As a child, it was an awesome to see an authority type figure getting their ass kicked. Both McMahon and Austin produced classics moments in wrestling history. I bought PPV’s on VHS such as St Valentine’s Day Massacre. I must of watched that tape a couple of times a day over the next few weeks.

WWE became a part of my life. I made it my business to watch Raw and Smackdown every week; I even watched Velocity and Sunday Night Heat. I couldn't get enough! I tried to get my hands on stuff from independents and in 2004 I did some pro wrestling training. But if WWE was such an important part of my life then why did I stop watching it?

2017 wasn’t the worst year in WWE. The Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens feud was fantastic, The Hardyz returned, Kurt Angle was inducted into the Hall of Fame, The Shield reunited, and Samoa Joe made his debut. Despite all of this, a babyface Roman Reigns just couldn’t get over and Jinder Mahal was WWE Champion. I’m not even going to go into the House of Horrors match, but it was something. But it’s OK to have bad moments. They can teach you to never repeat those mistakes again…or can they?

2018 was worse. Some moments left a bad taste in my mouth such as Dean Ambrose turning heel on his fellow Shield member, Seth Rollins. This was the same night that Roman announced that he had leukemia. What the fuck was Vince thinking? The storyline was uglier than a dog’s dinner. Dean would leave the company less than a year later. WWE also went into a controversial deal with Saudi Arabia. The Saudi PPV saw Shane McMahon win WWE World Cup tournament becoming the ‘’Best in the World’’. This is the same PPV where Shawn Michaels came out of retirement for an awful tag team bout. The worst part to 2018 was on December 17, when Vince McMahon came to the ring followed by Stephanie McMahon, HHH and Shane. Stephanie would go on to say ‘’We haven’t been doing a good for you lately.’’ She would rattle on about not listening to us, the fans. We were told that we were now the authority. This was such a surreal moment.

Months prior we got the first All In PPV that would eventually lead to the formation of All Elite Wrestling. The All In card was stacked and displayed some incredible matches that left me wanting more. I started to binge watch BTE on YouTube as well as a history The Bullet Club. I began to attend Irish wrestling shows from Over The Top Wrestling. The first shows I went to featured Will Ospreay, Gunther and Pac. Seeing new talent and the interesting ways they told stories was refreshing. Witnessing smaller promotions putting on better shows compared to a billion-dollar company creating mediocre content was shocking to me.

Appointing us - the fans - as the authority figure was a great rib by WWE as they continued to sling crap in our faces as 2019 saw The Undertaker battling Goldberg in another Saudi show that resulted embarrassing bout. You can visibly see the disappointed on Taker's face post-match. Kurt Angle would have his retirement match against Baron Corbin. Angle is on my mount Rushmore, so for his career to lead to anti-climax was a disgrace. Seth Rollins was on a babyface run and I was enjoying it, until the infamous Hell in the Cell match with The Fiend. This match should have been a decent bout, but the arena was casted in ugly red light and the finish came in form a DQ. During a live reaction broadcast WWE were putting out at the time, X-Pac said ‘’You may not ask me back for one of these but how do you get DQ’d in a Hell in a fricking Cell match.’’ I often ask myself this. Things would get worse when Kofi Kingston was squashed in seven seconds against Brock Lesner. Kofi’s six-month title reign came to an abrupt and miserable end and so did my love for WWE. At this point I felt cheated and insulted. How can I continue to watch a product that simply didn't care?

At the tail end of 2019, AEW was launched. The new promotion featured new faces, different styles of wrestling and an opportunity for talent to thrive. I gravitated towards this. I periodically watched WWE clips, but it was clear Vince was out of touch. Talent were also fired during the pandemic. It was as if Vince didn't care anymore. Remembers Erik Rowen’s spider? On top of all this, Vince's scandal was aired across the internet. During this insane time, Vinny had the balls to appear on Smackdown just to wave his ego around.

So, what's changed?

I watched night 1 of WrestleMania and I was impressed. The highlight was Rhea Ripley vs. Charlotte Flair. I liked what I saw with the Bloodline storyline. It was great to see Cody Rhodes, and a heel Dominik Mysterio intrigued me. I kept up with things and noticed consistent story telling. With Vince gone, it felt like everything was moving in a cohesive way. Yes, Vince gave us years of entertainment, but he also held on for too long and it was clear it was causing damage.

I decided to tune back into WWE full time and write about my viewing experience. If you’ve read my past posts, then you know that I still have issues with WWE, but I’ve never seen a promotion do anything perfect. I think WWE do a much better job with their women’s division and keeping storylines simple and clear, but they lack on match quality with many silly finishes. They play things safe, but that's okay. For now I'm enjoying the ride. And that's good enough.

#wwe smackdown #wwe raw #vince mcmahon #the undertaker #aew #rhea ripley #charlotte flair #dominik mysterio #brock lesnar #kurt angle #baron corbin #kevin owens #chris jericho #roh

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bootycallofcthulhu · 1 year

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I remember awhile back I was flying back from Saudi Arabia and its like a 13 hour flight. Having watched everything I felt like watching on the flight over, and being kinda burnt out on the switch games i brought i was like "yeah solitaire sounds like a good time."

This was in the Winter of 2019 on an international flight right before everything immediately went to shit because of COVID, but if I remember it was also the height of flu season. All i know is I had spent the last few days surrounded by people and was just excited to go home so my wife and I could be alone with our cats.

So I open the game up on my fun little economy class in flight seat, order a soda and water and attempt to remember how to play this game.

Now, I have played enough solitaire in grade school to know that under normal circumstances, I would stop playing after 30 minutes to an hour, but seeing as I had not played in at least seven years, I kept going after that because I was finally getting the hang of it. Another hour passes, and the guy next to me has to tap on my shoulder so the flight attendants can get my attention. This is the last point that I was able to recognize the passage of time.

Something was off. Like a possessed demon, I could not stop playing solitaire. And even worse, I still didn't know how to play. I don't think I won once. I would keep playing, realize I fucked up, restart, rinse, and repeat. And whats wilder is at some point I did remember how to play, but for the life of me I couldn't bring myself to follow what my brain said was correct.

Instead, I was listening to what the cards told me to do.

At some point during this flight, the cards started talking to me. Not just the ones with faces. Each card started talking, and each one had a name. Gregory would tell me to place him under Savannah, Jack would comment on Ivan's hair, so on so forth. The cards directed me and I would follow. This went on the entire flight. I was hallucinations while playing solitaire for nearly 13 consecutive hours and did not stop until we began landing.

And i did not win a single game.

Turns out I had gotten incredibly sick during the flight with a fever and wasnt able to make into work for nearly 2 weeks, but did not realize it at the time because the cards were my friends. Who would have guessed it was because I was incredibly sick? Not me, the cards had no reason for me to suspect that.

So anyways i still dont know if it was covid or the flu.

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graybby · 5 months

Text

Awkward encounter

Lando Norris X Russell!reader

The F1 drivers twitch streamer sister series !

Part 1 / Part 2 here 1196 words

sorry for the wait guys <3

As much as Y/N would post on social media and perform to her twitch audience, she would be lying if she said that walking around the bustling crowds of F1 fans at the Aussie grand prix wasn’t terrifying her to her core. She was never one for big crowds - one of the reasons her older brother had only recently managed to convince her to attend his races this year with a lot of guilt tripping. Y/N didn’t help herself though, trying to conceal her identity constantly around her brother's fans when in his company had been grating on her over the years - especially with his rise in fame since joining Mercedes. She began finding it impossible to relax when in public with George, making her a partial recluse - much to her brother's disappointment. George understood why she wanted to hide her relation to him, but the wedge it started making between the two as she grew a larger fanbase irked him - he could tell it was bothering her too as her anxieties grew with it. Y/N loved her job streaming but sometimes doubted herself on whether it was the right choice for her - she found being in the public domain a constant surveillance, her every step taken outside her home found being criticised online. Imagining how much more intense the gaze on her would be if they knew the truth of her identity sent a chill down her spine.

Despite this, the guilt of never being there in person to support her brother made her feel awful, eventually agreeing to Georges persistent begging to join him for a couple of the races on the 2024 calendar (as long as he helped conceal her identity). This left her to hide away inside the Mercedes hospitality out of view of any nearby cameras wrapped in a hoodie and sunglasses, anyone who asked about her was met with the reply that she was just a family friend who had never seen a race and wanted to finally enjoy one. The only people that actually knew her true identity being Toto and Lewis, George knew he could trust the two of them with this information.

Out of sheer stupidity Y/N believed the hoodie and sunglasses combo that she wore in Saudi Arabia would continue to work in the blistering Australian heat. To her dismay she found herself sticking to the inside of her jumper, having to peel the fabric away from her skin as she made her way out of the bathroom that she had attempted to find some solace in by spending five minutes splashing cold water into her face. Unfortunately the bathroom was located a long way out from the Mercedes area, the more steps she took out the bathroom she could feel herself growing faint still being overwhelmed by the heat. Finding a close by wall to lean against as she tried to regain her composure as her body grew tired all to quick, Y/N found herself tearing haphazardly at the her hoodie to gain some relief - glasses clattering to the floor as the fabric passed over her head falling beside them to her feet. Her legs screaming out as she slid down the wall crouching into a ball in her fatigued state.

I’m so fucking stupid why did I think this could work today - annoying fucking sun.

Mentally cursing the weather and her own brain Y/N failed to notice the man approaching her - face full of concern for the young girl in front of him face pale and sickly.

“Y/N?”

She looks up - You’ve gotta be kidding me.

“Y/N what the fuck are you doing on the floor - you look like shit, what happened?”

“oh thanks prince charming, can you help me up I need to get back to George - I can’t be seen out here” she asks, eyes pleading.

“I didn’t mean- yeah-no-sure, of course here”

“Thanks Lando” Y/N breathes out shakily as she takes his outstretched hand.

This is utterly embarrassing

“I'm sorry this is how we’re meeting” Y/N remarks as he bends down to grab the items she had dropped onto the floor.

“I’m just glad I was the one to find you, what happened?”

“I think I overheated, I was wearing my hoodie- I know ‘silly’ but I just wanted to be as incognito as possible. It's frustrating”.

Lando gives her a sympathetic look as she answers him - not daring to look anywhere but the floor. “Hey I understand, but that could have been dangerous like you nearly passed out over there love '' Lando says as they make it closer to the Mercedes hospitality. Noticing the lack of response, he finds her still staring at her feet. He sighs and gently moves to face her, tilting her head up, hand cupping her chin softly.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I was lecturing you or anything, but it was scary to find you like that - I’m just worried” Y/N gulps staring back into his eyes as she nods at his words. “No I’m sorry, I was stupid - you don’t need to worry but thank you really Lando” Y/N mustered up the courage to speak, feeling so small under his gaze, his hand still cupping her jaw.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing Norris?” George growls pulling Y/N behind him in a split second, not liking the image in front of him of the fellow driver’s hands on his younger sister.

“Hey I was just helping her mate '' Lando tries to defend himself.

“Didn’t fucking look like it” George snaps back at him. Y/N stumbles back at the sharpness of his voice, pulling her arm out of his grip. “George calm down please, he's only helping me for god's sake, I nearly passed out- he found me!” she retaliated back at him pleading for him to listen and understand.

“I don’t care Y/N, it didn’t look like that when I saw the two of you - he's done his ‘job’ he can leave now” George refuted arms crossed in front of himself, still glaring down at Lando who appeared as shocked as Y/N at this outburst.

Defensively putting his hands up, Lando sighed and turned to walk away - giving Y/N one last apologetic look which she shared mirrored before turning his back and leaving.

“What the hell was that Y/N? George demands as Y/N’s gaze drops back to the floor.

“I could ask you the same thing” He only huffs in response before she starts again. “He really was helping me - I collapsed by the bathroom’s, he found me and walked me back - you should thank him for saving your sister, not shout at him!” her voice raising, fed up with his childish behaviour.

“He had his hands on you, I don't want to see him near you again”

Y/N turns on her heel and charges past him into the hospitality, refusing to keep up such conversation with George, taking deep breaths to compose herself as she pulls out her phone with shaky hands.

Way to ruin a moment bro

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thanks for reading <3

taglist: @bicchaan @lauralarsen @drunkinthemiddleoftheday @ssararuffoni @cherry-piee @eviethetheatrefreak @2pagenumb

#lando norris #lando norris x y/n #f1 fanfic #f1 fic #f1 x reader #george russel x reader #lando x reader #lando norris x reader

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