#TWO (2) WHOLE JEWISH CHILDREN MESSAGED ME FROM OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE WORLD LAST NIGHT TO TELL ME ABOUT THEIR ANTISEMITIC TEACHERS

[edenfenixblogs]

Buckle up folks, this is gonna be a long one, with a lot of re-blogged additions. Mostly because there can only be 30 images in a post at a time. And I have, uh, way more than that. This was part of an experiment I did with @thatmuslimlady-deactivated20240 (who I am devastated about being deactivated, by the way. Truly I cannot even find the words tbh. She is a bright light, and I hope she's doing well.)

I know she deactivated her old blog because all the i/p stuff and the antisemitism and islamophobia was getting to her. Seeing as how none of those things has slowed down even a little bit, I wouldn't be surprised if she's gone again for the same reason.

However, our friendship and that history is exactly why I reached out to her via DM about doing this. Here was our convo:

And it's true, B''H! She received a lot of support, visibly, from Jews as well as other people! Which brings me incredible joy. I am not surprised that she received support, as she is a lovely person. I am not surprised that Jews stood up and did what was right to defend her. Despite what people seem to think about Jews and how we think we feel about both Muslims and Palestine, I know we are not crazed beasts looking for Muslims to harm in the name of Israel (or whatever the bigots seem to think motivates us for hateful purpose).

I am (happily) surprised that there was not any hatred and (very happily) surprised that no Jewish people (or those speaking on behalf of Jewish people) said anything negative at all. Not because I expected any kind of horrid thing to take place specifically. It's just that I don't hold Jew to a different standard than any other group. I get people of all kinds being hateful to me all the time. There's a lot of Jewish pain at the heart of this conflict, and I wouldn't be shocked (saddened, but not shocked) to learn that some of us have allowed our pain to morph into hatred. And I'm not saying that Jews don't ever do Islamophobic things all the time! I'm sure many Muslims and Arabs on this site have encountered bigoted and unkind Jewish people in their comments. I've called out some of those people! So I'm not trying to cast Jewish people as perfect angels who do no wrong ever, is all I'm saying. But I was very happy for my friend that she didn't experience this, even when posting to #Israel and #I/P and #Palestine, as that seems to be where a lot of hate is festering right now. I reblogged her post and planned to link to it, but I can't find the reblog on my dash. IDK where it went. Luckily, I do have the replies to her post saved. (I've tried to redact names wherever possible for obvious reasons, but have kept profile pix as those are not usually unique to specific users)

In the below post I'd like you to notice, a week after we both originally posted early January 15th, her note count was 332. Aside from reblogging and liking each other's posts, neither of us did anything to promote or drive engagement with our posts. My note count at the time of making this post is 104 Notes. This is not an inherently good or bad thing. It just means more interactions with her than with m than me. And that would have been terrible if it included anything bigoted. But it didn't, for which i am very grateful. (Also, note: many of the photographed users identify as Jewish in their usernames.

Her interactions looked like this:

and this

This is all fantastic. People coming forward to defend human kindness and to make the correct and uncomplicated assertion that being bigoted is always wrong. People coming forward to say loudly and proudly that they will police their own communities for bigotry and to ensure that it will not be tolerated. People coming forward offer support and an ear to listen and a shoulder to cry on. Truly the best that we humans can be to one another.

This was...very much not my experience.

Don't get me wrong! I did get some love, and for that I am eternally grateful. This isn't the oppression Olympics and we are just two people--neither of us are speaking for all Jews or all Muslims. But almost immediately, my end of things got...complicated.

So complicated, in fact, that I wasn't able to post that night like I planned. I looked into my notes and was instantly overwhelmed.

And before I explain why, I just want to be explicitly clear: THIS DOES NOT MEAN I WANT MY FELLOW JEWS TO STOP SHARING MY POSTS OR WRITING TO ME WITH THEIR CONCERNS OR TO BE SILENT ABOUT THEIR PAIN WITH ME OR ANYONE ELSE!!!!

I simply wish to highlight the overwhelming nature of Jewish pain at this moment in our culture.

I always intended for this post to be included in my #The Antisemitism Experiment tag. I didn't expect it to be a whole new aspect of the experiment itself. But it's absolutely become one.

It wasn't just that I received a tremendous amount of hate (which I did). It wasn't just that it was violent and actively threatening (which it was). It was more than that.

It was that instantly--and I mean within moments of posting--my pain was removed from me entirely and became something else. I stopped being human. I became a theoretical subject or an object of hate.

Note: I am not obscuring usernames in this small section, because you can literally see the usernames in the notes of this post anyway.

You see, the first notification that i saw on this post after I posted it was this. Like...Immediately. Like this person was waiting to attack a sad Jew. (And no, please don't send hate to this person, please. I never want anyone spreading hate, especially not in my name. This person is not the point anyway. The behavior is the point.)

TW: SUICIDE BAIT/DEATH THREAT

I screenshot this by reflex. I don't know why. I felt the need to document it. It felt horrible enough that it had to be remembered I guess. But at the same time, I kept thinking to myself "Ugh. I don't want this on my phone. Why am I keeping this horrible memory?"

Over the next week, @arabian-knight sent several more nasty messages to me, which I ignored. @dougielombax attempted to de-escalate on my behalf, which was kind. And I watched for a week a @arabian-knight and @dougielombax engaged in a debate about whether or not I and all Jews deserved to experience antisemitism and hatred and death threats entirely without my involvement. I wasn't relevant because I wasn't real, at least not to @arabian-knight. He was shadowboxing someone who did not exist and who was not a part of the conversation at all. But he also didn't seem to see me, the actual human being who he dragged into the boxing ring and just fucking wailed on repeatedly. He also sent me some kind of horrible message in my inbox. It might have included a death threat or suicide bait--or it might have just been the garden variety "You deserve this." I cannot recall. Because after seeing his initial messages, I decided not to engage anymore until the day I decided to compare my post to @thatmuslimlady-deactivated20240's the following week.

After messaging her as shown in my last screenshot of our convo, I went to my inbox to screenshot @arabian-knight's message to find it gone. As were all the comments he made on my post--at least to me. Because he blocked me. I never engaged with him at all. But he came into my space and harrassed me then he blocked me.

I was instantly so glad I took that first screenshot. IDK if his messages still show up in the notes of this post. It felt like the strangest, most invasive gaslighting. I spent a week ignoring constant horrific attacks on my person and on my culture and the moment I went to speak about it, the rest of the evidence vanished. I was so gutted, I decided not to do the post. It wasn't going to serve the purpose I thought it would serve and I didn't know how to move forward. I re-directed my energy elsewhere.

I suppose I expected a bit of that. The being hated and gaslit and threatened and dehumanized. It'd already been happening for a while.

But what caught me off guard was the horrible solidarity with fellow Jews. The things we have all gone through. The way the internet at large has ghettoized us in the digital age. The way we are all so isolated from one another and from our non-Jewish communities that surround us. We've become nothing and no one to anyone but each other and, only if we're lucky, a few very kind Beloved Goyim who have kept our hope alive. Non-Jews who are very much the exception in The Jewish Experience, not the rule.

So I started looking through my notes more. And checked my (sorry) often neglected inbox. And when that all got overwhelming, I would go to watch a show I like or a YouTuber I like and find that they were spouting irresponsible rhetoric. Or I'd go to Facebook and see my IRL Jewish friends feeling openly miserable and everyone ignoring them. I'd go to text a friend about something unrelated or to see if they wanted to hang out or just share a funny thing from my day and ask about theirs all to be met with the same exact response: Nothing. Silence. It became very apparent that the vast majority of people I know have blocked or muted me despite never even bringing up Palestine with them specifically. A couple people respond to me vaguely and occasionally as long a it is the most surface-level possible subject matter. A "Hey! How are you doing?" was mostly unanswered and absolutely never reciprocated.

I'd go for a walk outside and see reminders about the war or overhear people talking about all Israelis being evil or how 10/7 was somehow justified "because Israel" (as if anything could ever justify such horror).

It is fucking inescapable. And I have wanted to scream at anyone who has suggested that I "step away" for "my mental health." There is no away. Every form of escapist media I enjoyed most is now filled with people who can't distinguish between Jew sand Zionists and Nazis. They're filled with people who are A-OK with ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion of Jews, so long as those Jews are Israeli (and so long as those same people don't have to answer the question of "OK, so were are these millions of Jews gonna go? What's your proposal here? How will they bee kept safe?"). I can't be with people I can't enjoy modern media, because its become so stressful wondering whether or not the people who make that media actually want me dead.

I can't keep from wondering if the people who are speaking out about Palestine (but not saying a word about bringing the hostages home or the bombs constantly fired into Israel or the sky high levels of antisemitism) are staying quiet about every single pressing possible issue that affects ANY Jew ANYWHERE in the world are doing so because they have actually decided to care about Palestine (which is good; they should) and are just a little single-focused due to the truly horrible scale of the tragedy--or because they actually think that (at best) Jewish suffering is unimportant right now or (at worst) deserved and necessary. There's no real way for me to know. The only way that people can actually signal that they care about me as a friend or me as a friend or Jews ass a people is for them to actually say and do something to prove that. And it's frankly fucking terrifying that I can count on one hand the number of non-Jewish friends in my actual real life who have done a single thing to risk letting anyone know that they (gasp!) are friends with a Jew on purpose! And that they (double gasp!) care about how that Jew feels. I can think of exactly two (2) people (plus my sister, who is not Jewish). Two. You know who you are, and I love you. The rest of my support system is people I've never met IRL, because they are the only ones who talk to me anymore. (And I could not be more grateful for you. You have no idea).

I can't step away for my mental health, I can only stop talking for your convenience. And if talking is all I have left, you won't take that from me too.

I've been reading Agatha Christie and Terry Pratchett books like I breathe oxygen, because they're dead and if they were antisemitic, I don't have to know. It won't affect my present or inadvertently harm other Jews for me to enjoy their work.

So, as I perused the internet in the vain hope of escapism, I saw the other Jew like me. The ones who are invisible in the real world now and who are ghettoized digitally.

And you know what I did? I SCREENSHOT EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE OF SOCIETAL FAILURE.

I noted every single time I've seen a Jew cry out in loneliness and every single time someone wished death upon us or refused to listen to us or minimized our suffering or tried to steal and invert our tragedy, deny our history, and otherwise abuse and neglect us. AND I'M GONNA SHARE THEM.

Not all on this post, but in other reblogs of this post. And because I'm not a monster, I will actually put all but the first picture/row of pictures under a read more going forward.

But this post stays long. And it stays inconvenient to scroll past, because maybe--JUST MAYBE--someone will see this wall of text enough times to actually read it and internalize it and change how they behave. Or maybe I'll just make some antisemites annoyed, and I'm personally fine with either. I'd prefer the former, but won't be mad at the latter.

And once I do post the pictures, I can FINALLY delete the hate off my photo library. Hopefully it'll run out. Hopefully you'll all stop being hateful toward us. You're all in control of how long this lasts, not me. Stop giving me and other Jews horrible experiences to share, and you'll stop having to see this wall. But it's gonna be awhile. Because you've done a lot of harm to a lot of people, and now I'm their megaphone as well as my own. Oh. And this is how many notifications I've gotten since I've started typing, I'm really hoping that none of it adds more info to screenshot:

And these are the folders devoted to all the times in which people have isolated Jews from their communities and threatened their safety.

And here's the folder of Goyische support which I also plan to share. There aren't as many photos in that one:

And in case you are one of the people who are determined to misinterpret this post:

I AM NOT A ZIONIST.

I AM PRO-PALESTINE.

THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT PALESTINE. NEITHER THIS POST NOR THE USER WHO WROTE IT DENY INJUSTICE FACING PALESTINIANS OR THE SUFFERING THEY ARE ENDURING.

THIS POST IS ONLY TAGGED PALESTINE, BECAUSE IT ADDRESSES THE ORIGINAL ISSUE OF JEWS BEING DRIVEN OUT OF PRO-PALESTINE ACTIVISM BY A COMBINATION OF ANTISEMITISM AND ERASURE.

SUBSEQUENT REBLOGS OF THIS POST WILL NOT BE REBLOGGED WITH THE PALESTINE TAG, BECAUSE THIS POST IS SPECIFICALLY ABOUT JEWS AND JEWISH SUFFERING ONLY.

Friends and allies: Reblog as much as you want. Keep sharing your stories. You are not alone in your pain. Future reblogs of this post will either be queued or scheduled. (I'll never share personal identifying info without explicit approval from you or unless it was made available widely already.)

I am experiencing a lot of antisemitism due to the ongoing conflict and I would like it to stop, please.