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creepingsharia · 5 years ago

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A Month of Islam in America: March 2020

While much of the civilized world was put on lockdown, the Wuhan coronavirus did not slow down the jihad in America in March.

This month’s report is brought to you by, and because of, America's Early Apologists for Islam. Just a sampling of what we found.

Click any link below for more details and a link to the original source.

Jihad in America:

Minnesota: Pakistani Doctor in U.S. on H1B Visa Arrested for Attempting to Join ISIS

Muhammad Masood, 28, charging him with attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Masood, who was a licensed medical doctor in Pakistan, was formerly employed as a Research Coordinator for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, under an H-1B Visa.

California: Muslim Confesses to 2017 ‘Allahu Akbar’ Shooting Rampage; Killed 3 Men Because They Were White

“I just found some white men to kill,“ said Kori Ali Muhammad in his confession to police.

Missouri: Muslim Convert Sentenced to 19 Years for Plotting ISIS Attacks in Kansas City

Hester, aka “Mohammed Junaid Al Amreeki,” said he wanted a “global jihad.”

Long Island: Muslim Woman Gets 13 Years for Providing Material Support to Islamic State

Zoobia Shahnaz provided more than $150,000 to ISIS and attempted to leave the U.S. to join ISIS.

Arizona: Muslim Sentenced to 67 Months for Witness Tampering, Lying to FBI in Garland Jihad Investigation

Abdul Khabir Wahid committed the offenses during FBI investigation of ISIS-related attack on Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas.

DC: Dept of Defense Arabic Linguist Arrested, Gave Names and Photos of Informants and Techniques to Hezbollah

Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, formerly of Rochester, Minnesota, was charged today in the District of Columbia with transmitting highly sensitive classified national defense information to a foreign national with apparent connections to Hizballah, a foreign terrorist organization that has been so designated by the Secretary of State.

California: Mother of San Bernardino Jihadi - Who Killed 14 - Agrees to Plead Guilty to Destroying Evidence Related to Her Son’s 2015 Terrorist Attack

Plea agreement will allow her to serve no more than 18 months of a 20-year sentence.

Rafia Sultana Shareef, a.k.a. Rafia Farook, 66, the mother of Syed Rizwan Farook, the male shooter in 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack, has agreed to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge of intending to impede a federal criminal investigation by shredding a map her son generated in connection with the attack. She has agreed to plead guilty to a one-count information charging her with alteration, destruction, and mutilation of records.

California: Man intentionally drove SUV onto sidewalk striking 4 teens in Burlingame

Omeed Adibi was booked on charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and driving under the influence.

Texas: Federal court affirms conviction of jihad recruiter behind Islamic terror attack on Texas free speech event

Erick Jamal Hendricks was accused of trying to recruit people to conduct terrorist attacks in the name of the Islamic State group. A jury convicted Hendricks in 2018 on charges of conspiracy and attempt to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.

A federal appeals court in Ohio has affirmed the convictions of a North Carolina man in a terrorism case.

More Jihad in America:

Brooklyn, New York: Man Arrested For Making Violent Threats Against Jews and Blacks

‘Jew fucking guy…I told him I wanna another holocaust killing 60 million jews…The era of whites (jews) and negros are long gone’

NYPD announced the arrest of ALLAMBERGEN KUDAYBERGENOV, a/k/a “Allambergen Kuday Bergenov,” charged with one count of making interstate threats, one count of using false immigration documents, and one count of aggravated identity theft.

New York Muslim Brotherhood Activist: "If I am infected [with coronavirus], I will go to the Egyptian consulate here” (VIDEO)

Illinois: Preaching the Islamic Conquest of the World... in Suburban Chicago

Arizona: ‘Clearest example of a jihadi recidivist in U.S.’ who died waging jihad in Texas had been bailed out of jail by Democrat candidate and CAIR-AZ founder (and she is running for elected office)

Government Failure to Stop Jihad:

OIG Report: FBI missed chances to stop U.S. terrorists

Pentagon did not do enough to vet foreign military students, DoD intel official tells Congress

Targeting “Violent Extremism” Means Targeting Nothing – Targeting Nothing Means Losing the War

Legal Jihad in America:

Missouri: Somali Refugee Teen Brutally Assaults Neighbor, But Walks Free After Muslim Prosecutor Drops Charges

Michigan: Judge Dismisses Another Charge in Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Case

Previous monthly reports here.

Immigration Jihad also known as Hijra:

Texas: Bangladeshi Pleads Guilty, Smuggled Illegal Alien Muslims to the United States

Afghan Refugees Still Arriving in U.S. Despite Coronavirus Lockdown on Americans

Rape Jihad & Islamic Slavery in America - courtesy of Mass Immigration:

New Jersey: Muslim Woman Gets Less Than 6 Years Prison for Enslaving Sri Lankan Girl for More Than 9 Years!

Mosques - the incubators of jihad in America:

New Jersey: Paterson passes Muslim-proposed law allowing Islamic call to prayer (5 times a day, everyday)

Election Jihad in America:

California: Grandson of Islamic Terrorist Wins Democratic Primary Election

Illinois: Daughter of Muslim serving 168 years for Libyan-funded terror plots in U.S. running for Congress

Pakistani/Islamic Lobby took over Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign sabotaging his aspirations

North Carolina: First Muslim woman elected to Durham County commission - unopposed

USA: 92% of New Muslim Candidates Won’t Express Support for Constitution

Jihad in Education:

American universities receive billions in undocumented funds from Arab regimes in violation of federal law

Fraud for Jihad:

Missouri: Another Doctor Indicted in Oxycodone, Medicare Fraud Scheme

Please share this and other posts on your social media sites.

Previous monthly reports here.

#Legal #Islam #Jihad #Sharia #Muslim #Mosque #Immigration #News #Politics #Terror #Education #monthly #History

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my-lady-knight · 4 years ago

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Favorite Reads of 2020

I take back everything I said last year about how 2019 was a comparatively bad reading year for me. 2020 was even worse. I only read 48 books, I could barely focus on reading even when I did find a book I liked, and, just like last year, I ended up with fewer favorites than usual. Starting in August I’ve been having trouble reading any written media that isn’t TOG fic. And some of my eagerly awaited releases by favorite authors ended up being disappointments (Deeplight by Frances Hardinge and Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee).

2020—the year that keeps on giving.

I sincerely hope 2021 will be a better year in all respects, including my reading habits, but, as with everything else, who knows.

Regardless, here’s my list of favorite reads of 2020, in chronological order of when I read them:

Network Effect by Martha Wells

I’d read the first four Murderbot Diaries novellas when they first came out and enjoyed them, but I didn’t fall head-over-heels in love with them. Maybe because they were novellas, and too short to get fully invested? Possibly. As it turns out, Network Effect is the novel-length fifth entry in the Murderbot Diaries that turned me into full-on squeeing fan—SecUnit, aka Murderbot, continues to be its delightfully acerbic, antisocial self, SPOILER makes another appearance and oh how I’d missed this character, the supporting cast is fun and endearing, and the novel-length story means there’s time and space for the brand-new corporate espionage/colonization/alien civilization murder mystery to unfold and spread its wings. (Sounds like a Sanctuary Moon plot tbh). SecUnit is possibly my favorite non-human fictional character atm, and I am now fully on-board for every and any new story in the series.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

When I first heard about this book and read the words “time travel romance”, I immediately went, “Nope, not gonna read.” I don’t like reading time travel stories, and honestly, I was imagining it to be something like The Time Traveler’s Wife, which granted I haven’t read but also sounds like it’d be the opposite of my cup of tea.

And then I went to a reading where Amal and Max took turns reading chapters – letters written by Red and Blue, enemy agents who repeatedly taunt and thwart the other’s plans to ensure their side is the one to win the time war and who can’t resist smugly outlining just how they’re staying one step ahead of the other – and the prose was witty and gorgeous and clever and intricate, and Red and Blue were snarky and arrogant and talented and fun. I had to read it. And I ended up loving it, this enemies-to-lovers story that is a meld of fantasy and science fiction such that they’re indistinguishable from the other, where the past is as equally fantastical and alien and imaginary as the future, where Red and Blue’s power play transforms into something different and scarier and more intimate than either of them imagined.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers has done it again, writing a gentle, hopeful story about humans working together out of a share a love and fascination for scientific exploration and wonder for all the possibilities the entirety of space can hold. With the advent of both space travel and technology that alters human physiology to allow them to survive otherwise inhospitable environments, a team of four astronauts and scientists have embarked on a mission to ecologically survey four distant planets and the life forms that inhabit them, from the microscopic to the multicellular—not to conquer, but to record and to learn and to share the gathered knowledge with the rest of Earth. In the meantime, lightyears away, Earth is going through decades without them, and the four of them must also contend with a planet that may have forgotten their existence—or that’s abandoned the entire space and scientific exploration program.

Reading Becky Chambers is the literary equivalent of sitting down with a warm mug of my favorite tea on a bad day – I always feel better at the end and like I can imagine a future where humanity does all the wonderful things we’re capable of doing.

A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker

I started reading this book right as NYC was gearing up to go into lockdown, which should have made this a terrible choice to continue reading since part of the premise is that a combo of multiple stochastic terror attacks and a brand-new, deadly plague upend the world as everyone knows it by causing the U.S. to pass laws that keep people physically apart in public for their own safety and make concerts, theatre, and any other kind of artistic gathering obsolete.

But that’s largely just the set-up, and the real story is that of Luce Cannon, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who played the last major concert in the before times who twenty years later performs in illegal underground concerts, and Rosemary, a younger music-lover who’s only lived in the after-times, and who’s taken a new job scouting out talent to add to the premier virtual entertainment company’s roster of simulated concerts.

It’s a love letter to live music and what it feels like to connect and build community via music in unusual and strange and scary times, the energy involved in making music for yourself, for an audience, exploring the world around you, imagining and advocating for a better tomorrow, and embracing the fear, the possibility, and the power of change, both good and bad. This was the book I needed to read at the beginning of the pandemic, and I’m thankful I ended up doing so.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 edited by John Joseph Adams and Carmen Maria Machado

When I end up loving half of the stories in an anthology and greatly enjoying all but two of the rest, that’s the equivalent of a literary blue moon for me. My favorites included the following;

"Pitcher Plant" by Adam-Troy Castro

"Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women" by Theodore McCombs

"Variations on a Theme from Turandot" by Ada Hoffmann

"Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good" by LaShawn M. Wanak

"The Kite Maker" by Brenda Peynado

"The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" by P. Djèlí Clark

"Dead Air" by Nino Cipri

"Skinned" by Lesley Nneka Arimah

"Godmeat" by Martin Cahill

"On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog" by Adam R. Shannon

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

No one is more surprised than me that Harrow is on this list, given that I am one of approximately three people in the universe who did not unequivocally love Gideon the Ninth.

And yet the sequel worked for me.

Maybe because this time I already knew and was used to the way the world and the Houses worked, and I knew to not take anything I read for granted because I could be guaranteed to have the rug pulled out from under me without even realizing. Maybe Harrow’s countdown/amnesia mystery worked better for me than Gideon’s locked room mystery. Maybe the cast of characters was more manageable and fewer of them were getting murdered left and right before I got a chance to get used to them (and some of them even came back!) Maybe it’s that Harrow blew open the potential and possibilities Gideon hinted at and capitalized on just how fucking weird and mind-blowing the whole premise is in a way that felt incredibly and viscerally satisfying.

Also SPOILER happens three-quarters of the way through. That was pretty fucking awesome.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

P. Djélí Clark is a master of melding history and fantasy in ways that are in turn imaginative and clever (his fantastical alternate-history, early 20th-century Egyptian novel A Master of Djinn is one of the books I’m most looking forward to in 2021), while also using fantasy to be frank and incisive about the history of American antiblack racism (as in the above linked story in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019). Ring Shout combines the late-nineteenth and early 20th-century history of the rise and normalization of the KKK with Lovecraftian supernatural horror, in which the release of The Birth of a Nation summoned literal monsters (called Ku Kluxes) that became part of the KKK’s ranks. Maryse Boudreaux is a Black woman who’s part of a grassroots organization hunting both the monsters and the human members in order to keep the Klan at bay. However, there’s soon to be another summoning ritual atop Stone Mountain that will unleash even more Ku Kluxes into the world, and Maryse and her friends are running out of time to prevent it from happening.

Maryse is a fantastic character, as are her two friends—brash, unapologetic Sadie and WWI veteran, weapons expert Chef—her mentor and leader of the Ring Shout group Nana Jean, and all the other members of the group who work and fight together as a team and a family. Maryse’s past and the journey she goes on in the book to uncover the truth and stop the summoning is harrowing and heart-stopping, the supernatural elements are both horrific in and of themselves while also undergirding the real-life horror of the KKK and the hatred they engender. It’s smart, it’s fun, it’s eye-opening, and it’s also being turned into a TV show starring KiKi Layne. It’s really, really good.

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

“Stick to the brief.” This is the maxim given to Dietz and all the other soldiers who join the war against Mars, where soldiers are broken down into light to travel to and from their assigned battlefields instantaneously. Only Dietz isn’t experiencing the jumps like everyone else – Dietz, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, has become unstuck in time and is experiencing all the battles in the mission briefs out of chronological order, to the point that Dietz starts to build a picture of a war and a reality that’s been sold to Dietz and everyone else on Earth as pure fiction.

I’ve always appreciated Kameron Hurley’s stories, but this is the first book where she fully succeeded at writing the book she set out to write—it’s fast-paced science fiction thriller in the form of a loaded gun that takes brutal aim at late-stage capitalism, modern military warfare and the dehumanization of everyone involved on all sides, the greed of ungovernable governing corporations, nationalistic and military propaganda, the mythology of citizenship and inalienable rights, and it’s viscerally bloody and violent without being grotesque in the way all of Kameron Hurley’s books are. Especially important for me, I loved that Dietz went through the entire book not being gendered in any way, shape, or form (those last five pages didn’t exist, what are you talking about), and I love in general that Kameron Hurley is committed to writing non-male characters who aren’t less violent or fucked-up or morally superior to men just because they’re not men.

Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

Middle grade is a hard sell for me these days, as are books in verse, and I wouldn’t have known this book existed if it weren’t for the Ignyte Award nomination list earlier this year. As it turns out, this book, the story of Jude, a pre-teen girl who wants to be an actress who leaves Syria and the encroaching civil war with her mom to go live in the U.S. with her uncle and his white wife and their daughter while her dad and older brother stay behind, is full of beauty, curiosity, humor, confusion, grief, pain, and joy, and the poetic prose is both lyrical, nuanced, and perfectly fitted to Jude’s voice. I devoured this book in one day, which is the quickest amount of time it took me to read any book this year, including novellas.

Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khorram

The first book Darius the Great Is Not Okay was one of my favorite books in 2018, and I’m ecstatic that the sequel is equally as amazing.

It’s been approximately half a year since Darius went to Iran, met his maternal grandparents in person for the first time, and found his best friend in Sohrab, and in that time he’s come out as gay, joined the soccer team, got an internship at his favorite tea shop, and started dating for the first time. Darius is also working through some things though—when and if he wants to have sex with his boyfriend, his grandfather’s worsening illness, his dad’s recent depressive episode, his emotionally distant paternal grandmothers on his coming for an extended stay, the fact that he’s getting to know and growing closer with one of his teammates who’s best friends with Darius’s years-long bully, and a bunch else.

Darius the Great Deserves Better has the same tender and vulnerable emotional intimacy as the first book, more conversations over tea, new instances involving the mortifying ordeal of being a cis guy with a penis, even more Star Trek metaphors, and so much growth for Darius as he works through a lot of hard situations and feelings, and strengthens his relationships with all of the people in his life he loves and cares about. I can’t think of any other book that’s like these two books, and I love and treasure them dearly.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

I had zero awareness of this book until a bunch of SFF authors started praising it on Twitter a couple months before the release date, and I was intrigued enough to get a copy from the library. I loved this book. I happened to be reading it right at the time of the presidential election, and it phenomenally served the purpose of desperately-needed distraction from the agony of waiting out the ballot counts.

It’s book about the power behind borders, citizenship, exploitation, and imperialism, set in a late-late-stage capitalist future, in which a prodigy invented the means to access and travel to slightly divergent parallel universes to grab resources and data – but only if the other universe’s version of “you” isn’t there. It’s the story of a woman named Cara – poor, brown, born in the wastelands outside the shelter, security, and citizenship privileges of Wiley City – who’s comfortably employed to travel to all the parallel worlds no one else can visit, because all her counterparts in those worlds are dead from one of the myriad ways Cara herself could have died growing up. It’s the story of Cara traversing the muddied boundaries between her old life and her new one, the similarities and differences between her own life and that of her counterparts, as well as the figures of power who defined and shaped her and her counterparts’ existences, and solving a mystery involving the unexplained deaths of several of her counterparts and the man who invented multiverse technology.

It’s a story of the permeability of selfhood and self-determination, and complexity of power dynamics of all kinds – interpersonal, familial, collegial, intimate – and the interplay between violence and stability and identity, and how one can be both powerful and powerless in the same dynamic. It’s a story with literary sensibilities that is unequivocally science fiction, written with laser-precise prose that flays Cara open and puts her back together again.

I worry this description makes this book sound dry and removed when reading this book made me feel like I was coming alive every time I delved back into it. This is a book I cannot wait to reread again to experience the brilliance and skill and thoughtfulness and emotion of Micaiah Johnson’s writing. I have no clue what, if anything, she’s writing next, but I have a new favorite author.

Honorable Mentions

Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer

With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Stormsong by C. L. Polk

The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (I feel bad putting it here and not in the first list – it is undeniably a modern classic and a brilliantly crafted book! But I had zero interest in any of the Italy chapters, and I found the way he finally figured out how to access fairy magic by essentially making himself mad to be both disappointing and narratively unsatisfying.)

War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

For my yearly stats on books written by POC authors, in 2020 I read a total of 24 books (one of which was co-authored by a white author), which is fewer than last year (30). However, because I also read fewer books this year overall, this is the first year ever that I achieved exactly 50-50 parity between books written by POC and white authors. I honestly wasn’t expecting this to happen, as I stopped paying deliberate attention somewhere around April or May. Looking over my Goodreads, the month of September ended up doing a lot of heavy lifting, since that’s when I read several books by POC authors in a row for the Ignyte Award nomination period. But also, it does look like the five or so years of purposefully aiming for 50-50 parity have materially affected my reading habits, by which I mean even when I’m not keeping my year’s count in mind, I’m still more likely to pick up a book by a POC author than I was five years ago when I had never kept track at all. My goal for next year is to once again achieve 50-50 parity and to not backslide.

#long post #book recommendations #book recs #favorite books of 2020

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multiverseforger · 4 years ago

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Edit

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Marc Spector is a Jewish-American rabbi's wayward son. As an adult, Spector had been a heavyweight boxer before becoming a U.S. Marine serving in Force Recon, afterward, he left the Marines to become a mercenary occasionally doing work for the CIA. As a mercenary he befriends the French pilot Jean-Paul DuChamp, whom he affectionately calls "Frenchie". While working for the African mercenary Raoul Bushman in Egypt, the group stumbles upon an archaeological��dig whose crew includes Dr. Peter Alraune and his daughter Marlene Alraune. The dig had uncovered an ancient temple where artifacts included a statue of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Intent on looting the dig, Bushman kills Dr. Alraune. In response to Alraune's murder, Spector challenges Bushman to personal combat and is defeated by Bushman and left to die in the sub-zero temperatures of the desert night. The Egyptians who worship the ancient gods find Spector and carry him to their temple. Helpless before the statue of Khonshu, Spector's heart stops. Khonshu appears to him in a vision, offering Spector a second chance at life if he becomes the god's avatar on Earth. Spector awakens, wraps himself in the silver shroud that covers Khonshu's statue, and again confronts Bushman. He defeats Bushman and returns to America with Marlene, Frenchie, and the statue of Khonshu. Deciding to become a crimefighter, Spector creates a silver cloaked costume, based on the silver shroud, and becomes Moon Knight aka "The Fist of Khonshu".[24]

After his return to the United States, Spector invests the money that he had accumulated as a mercenary and develops a small fortune. To distance himself from his mercenary past, he creates the identity of millionaire entrepreneur Steven Grant, using this identity to purchase a spacious estate. To remain in contact with the street and criminal element, he also creates the identity of taxicab driver Jake Lockley and has acquired civilian allies such as Bertrand Crawley, Gena Landers, and her sons.[25]

In the character's first appearance, the criminal organization the Committee supplies Marc Spector with the name Moon Knight, his costume and weapons (using silver) to hunt down Jack Russell. In Los Angeles, Moon Knight captures the Werewolf for the Committee, but then frees him and halts the Committee's plans, fighting Russell again.[26] He battles Conquer Lord,[27] teams up with Spider-Man to fight Cyclone,[28] and fights Lupinar,[29] and his brother Randall, the Hatchet-Man.[30]

His origin of being "created by The Committee" is explained as a ruse set up by Frenchie so Marc can shut the Committee down.[31] He then encounters the Midnight Man[32] and returns to Chicago to prevent the poisoning of its water supply by a group called the Werewolves,[33] encounters Morpheus[34] and teams with Daredevil to fight the Jester.[35] It is around this time that he first encounters Stained Glass Scarlet.[36] Later, he battled the Werewolf once again,[37] battled Bora, and met the X-Men, the Fantastic Four,[38] and Doctor Strange.[39]

Volume 2: Fist of Khonshu (1985)Edit

Spector abandons his Moon Knight, Grant, and Lockley identities after the effects of Russell's bite (lunar cycle-based strength)[40] fade away, and functions as an independently wealthy man opening art galleries around the world, with the help of art historian Spence. Spector's estranged relationship with Marlene ends when she finally leaves him for her ex-husband when he becomes Moon Knight again.

The cult of Khonshu telepathically summons Spector to Egypt and supplies him with a new arsenal of moon-themed projectile weaponry, originally designed by a time-traveling Hawkeye in ancient Egypt. Khonshu himself appears to Spector and enters his body, giving him the same lunar abilities he previously had.[41]

As the agent of Khonshu, he aids the West Coast Avengers, but at the cost of alienating Frenchie and further distancing Marlene.[42] He time travels to 2940 BC to rescue the Avengers, where he learns of his weapons' design by Hawkeye.[43] He officially joins the West Coast Avengers[44] and enters a relationship with Tigra for the remainder of his tenure on the team.

While investigating the Phantom Rider with Daimon Hellstrom, Moon Knight and the Avengers are attacked by soldiers working for Khonshu's rival, Seth, who is invading Asgard. Khonshu abandons Moon Knight to battle Seth after explaining it was his wish to join the team, not Spector's. Moon Knight resigns from the team,[45] and reunites with Marlene and Frenchie,[volume & issue needed] only to die and be resurrected by Khonshu once more.[volume & issue needed]

Marc Spector: Moon Knight (1989–1994)Edit

This volume introduces Moon Knight's teenage sidekick Jeff Wilde, also known as "Midnight", the son of Midnight Man, a member of Moon Knight's rogues gallery. At this time, Moon Knight first encounters the Black Cat.[46] Midnight is turned into a cyborg by the Secret Empire, then is seemingly killed in a battle with Moon Knight, Spider-Man, Darkhawk, the Punisher, Nova and Night Thrasher.[47]

Teaming up with the Punisher, Moon Knight defeated ULTIMATUM,[48] and during the "Acts of Vengeance", fought Killer Shrike, Coachwhip, and the second Ringer.[49] He then encountered Silver Sable and her allies Sandman and Paladin.[50] As Marc Spector, he was tried for murder in Bosqueverde, South America.[51] Moon Knight teamed up with the Punisher again, as well as Spider-Man against the Secret Empire.[52]

While fighting with his brother Randal Spector over who is destined to carry the mantle of Moon Knight, Marc discovers Khonshu is not the god of vengeance but the god of justice.[53]

Moon Knight eventually upgrades his armor to adamantium armor rather than his original Kevlar costume.[54] This upgrade is critical since Moon Knight needs the armor to hold his body together after being infected by the then-possessed Hobgoblin. The disease is revealed to be the villain known as Demogoblin trying to possess him.[55] With the help of Doctor Strange and Mister Fantastic, the Demogoblin parasite is removed. Moon Knight seemingly severs his ties to the Avengers by burning his membership ID card after being brought in by Thor to answer charges in regard to his illegal actions against Doctor Doom.[56] By the end of the series, Moon Knight is killed violently, sacrificing himself to save his loved ones from a computerized villain called Seth and his "Zero Hour" program.[57]

Resurrection Wars and High StrangersEdit

Moon Knight was resurrected in two separate limited series in 1998 and 1999.

Learn more

This section needs expansion.

Minor appearancesEdit

In 1998, Spector uses his Ka to help a critically injured Black Panther through the Kingdom of the Dead.[58]

In 2001 and 2002, Moon Knight joins the "Marvel Knights" non-team to capture the Punisher.[59] After making a brief appearance in the "Avengers Disassembled" story-arc, he makes a minor return in the 2005 Marvel Team-Up miniseries, fighting alongside Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the Punisher. He later appears in issue #2 of the Great Lakes Avengers mini-series where Doorman offered to recruit him in the GLA, but he immediately rejects the offer.[60]

Moon Knight Volume 3 (2006–2009)Edit

This volume opens with Marc Spector's early retirement which comes after a brutal battle with Bushman. Although his body is broken after a tremendous fall and both knees shattered, Moon Knight finally defeats his nemesis Bushman by carving off his face with a crescent moon dart. Spector is then haunted by a spiritual apparition of Khonshu, who chose a faceless Bushman as his ethereal representation. Marc Spector's background is updated, so he fought in the Gulf War and that his time as a mercenary was during the 1990s. It is also revealed that Frenchie is homosexual and in love with Marc Spector; which is why he stuck around for so long.

The new Secret Committee then hires The Profile, an amoral character who can analyze a persona past and future habits with a glance, to help them entrap Moon Knight. He escapes after the plan collapses because they authorized a mugging of Frenchie too soon. Profile then becomes a reluctant source of information for Spector himself, even giving him advice on rekindling his relationship with Marlene.

Moon Knight eventually gets drawn into the Superhero Registration Act as he investigates a string of murders perpetrated by Midnight, his former sidekick. Other Marvel heroes take notice of his violent return to vigilantism. Spider-Man attempts to contact Moon Knight but is rebuked.[61] Captain America pays him a visit to deliver a warning and they quarrel.[62] The Punisher and Moon Knight have a lengthy conversation about the nature of their vigilantism and their shared past.[63] Moon Knight is forced into a final confrontation with his cybernetically enhanced former sidekick Midnight, seemingly killing him for good.[34]

Iron Man also investigates Moon Knight's activities by placing him under close surveillance. Finding his mental condition unstable, Iron Man decides that arresting Moon Knight under the Registration Act might make his mental instability worse. Moon Knight begrudgingly applies for registration after much prodding from Khonshu, not wanting the law to keep him from his work. The new law requires him to submit to a psychiatric exam. The psychiatrist controlling the exam, along with the government and Tony Stark, has no intention of granting Marc Spector approval for registration. After speaking with Spector's repressed alter egos Jake Lockley and Steven Grant, the psychiatrist begins the process of officially turning him down, suggesting possible future imprisonment. Subconsciously Spector breaks the doctor's will by speaking in the voice of Khonshu and pointing out the doctor's own antisocial tendencies, as told to him earlier by the Profile. The psychiatrist not only approves his application but bows to worship him as well. However, later on, Marc meets the Profile with their dialogue suggesting that the personalities above were just an act to be approved for registration.[35]

Moon Knight shows little regard for his newly licensed superhero status or any passion to the people around him, further alienating himself. His former nemesis Black Spectre returns. Carson Knowles, recently released from prison, attempts to frame his murders on Moon Knight. He steals some Stark nanotechnology and plans to unleash it on the city. Moon Knight pushes Knowles off a building apparently to his death. Tony Stark, as the head of the Initiative, revokes his superhero registration, but buries the fact that Spectre had stolen Stark Tech.[64]

The Thunderbolts, led by Norman Osborn, are now on the hunt for Moon Knight. Tony Stark and second-in-command Maria Hill argue with former Avengers government liaison Raymond Sikorsky, now a representative of the Commission on Superhuman Activities, who desperately wants for Moon Knight to be apprehended with extreme prejudice.[65] Marc Spector himself busts up a drug deal while wearing an entirely black costume while going through an internal monologue about how crime-fighting is much easier without the burden of his reputation and "costume recognition."[66]

Several weeks later, after barely surviving an altercation with the Thunderbolts, Spector pleads for Khonshu's forgiveness for turning his back on him and for the god's renewed assistance. Khonshu appears and informs Spector he doesn't need him anymore, as he now has other worshipers. Spector returns to his Moon Knight costume to aid Frenchie DuChamp in gaining revenge on the Whyos gang for attacking his restaurant and injuring Frenchie's lover Rob, only to find the Whyos' attack was designed to draw Spector into another conflict with the Thunderbolts when he is ambushed by Venom.[67] After a brief fight Moon Knight is captured, but escapes when S.H.I.E.L.D. shows up. Frenchie agrees to help Spector, and Ray joins the reformed team as well. Bullseye is released to kill Moon Knight, as Spector prepares to go out with a bang.[68]

Moon Knight is next seen battling Bullseye on the streets of NYC. He eventually leads Bullseye to a bunker/warehouse where he has planted several explosives. Bullseye narrowly escapes as Moon Knight ignites the explosives. Later that day two press conferences are held: one by Norman Osborn to announce the Thunderbolts' success and Moon Knight's death and the other held by Tony Stark who denounces the methods used by the Thunderbolts. At the end of the issue, it is revealed that Moon Knight has faked his death, escapes from the warehouse through a secret passage in the floor, and is hiding in Mexico. It is also revealed that the Marc Spector persona has "died" and that Jake Lockley is now in control.[69]

Now living as Lockley, the Moon Knight escaped to Mexico.[70] Laying low to avoid attracting the attention of the Registration Act any further, Lockley gets roped into a mission involving criminal cartels, two boisterous sibling luchador assassins, and a murderous Toltec avatar. During this stint in Mexico, Moon Knight learns he was being shadowed by The Punisher from the moment he crossed the border. Frank Castle's reasoning was that he knew Moon Knight would find himself somehow involved with the very cartel Frank had been pursuing; however, the Toltec god's avatar made quick work of the cartel.[71]

Eventually, the super-hero Civil War ended with Norman Osborn as director of H.A.M.M.E.R. and with him replacing S.H.I.E.L.D.. Lockley knows that Osborn had been behind the group of Thunderbolts sent to kill him and that a deranged psychotic was not fit to run the U.S.A.'s national security agencies, so using some spoils from the Cartel, Moon Knight decided it was time for a comeback.

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eldunea · 5 years ago

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buckle up, kids, let me tell you a bit of history.

[TW: Mentions of racism + racial violence, politics, murder and body horror.]

there is an urban legend in the united states about a native american man who tried to assassinate andrew jackson—the man responsible for the trail of tears, who built his political career on taking indigenous lives. the story goes that while andrew jackson was giving a speech, he threw a dagger at him from his vantage point, perched on top of a tree; the dagger just barely missed, nicking jackson’s ear and embedding itself in the stage wall behind him. suddenly, all eyes were on him, a dark-skinned man dressed in european clothes—including the eyes of the guard. some say he had yellow eyes with catlike slits for pupils. others say he had a tail, and that when he opened his mouth they saw glistening fangs. in any case, it was time for him to make his escape.

according to the story, he let out a yowl like a cat. he then leaped out of the tree and hit the ground running despite being shot two times. he sprinted down the city road, pursued by men shooting at him on horseback, but he managed to outrun them all, not even slowing his pace as the holes in his back continued to bleed. finally he ran into a residential area, leaped the fence into a backyard, and disappeared into the woods. dogs were sent to track him, and spurred by his scent they did so with an unusual ferocity—but they lost the trail in an open clearing.

the dagger remained with the u.s. government, where it was inspected by officials. they assumed that the hilt was made of some sort of bone, and the blade was made of iron. they also assumed that the creature carved into the hilt was a being from native mythology. but there were several things wrong with this picture: for one thing, the carving was too intricate and detailed to have been done by human hands. for another, the feathers that dangled from the hilt were not identified as the feathers of any known bird species. moreover, no native american identified the dagger as one of theirs, nor could they identify the creature or the feathers as belonging to their mythology. lastly, soon enough, the government realized that the blackness coating the outside of the bone was not paint at all. rather, the bone itself was black on the outside and white on the inside (which had allowed the carving to look so striking)—a feature not found in the bone of any species on earth.

the dagger also showed a downright magical stubbornness to never remain with one person for longer than a day. anyone whose hands it passed into would find it lost the next morning, and if they took it back, it would display the same result. mysteriously, no matter how far away it was moved, it always seemed to be trying to get closer to the white house—where andrew jackson lived. and when jackson’s second term was up, the dagger immediately switched course, doggedly pursuing him to his new home.

those who were still loyal to him panicked. they insisted that some sort of “indian curse” was trying to kill their beloved former president. they tracked down the dagger’s location, seized it, locked it in a lead box, sailed out as far as they could go and dumped it in the ocean. and there it lay, allowing itself to become lost and forgotten, ready for the day when it could once again emerge and fulfill its purpose.

earthlings say that america’s seventh president fell victim to lead poisoning from the two bullets that remained embedded in them. but a more apocryphal addition to the legend of the man and his dagger suggests a different end. they say that jackson did not succumb to poisoning symptoms, but met a more grisly fate. instead of peacefully asleep in his bed, they say he was found there on june 8, 1845 with a stab wound in his chest, his face twisted into a scream of agony and fear—after decades of being moved from place to place, the dagger had finally found its mark. chillingly, however, the tale does not stop there: it also adds the detail that his body looked desiccated, dried out, as though the very life essence had been sucked from him. his hands, which reached out for a help that would never come, looked leathery and tough like the hands of the pharaohs laid to rest in egyptian tombs.

here is where the story ends. and here is where my story begins.

the dagger’s magical properties, for its part, had long since been passed off as an idle myth. several decades after it had disposed of the ex-president, it allowed itself to resurface in a collection of indigenous artifacts. those who rediscovered it faced the same problem as those who had initially attempted to pry into its mysteries. if this belonged to a native american nation, then why could no actual native people identify its imagery or its craftsmanship? what sort of animal had bones that were black without and white within, and what sort of bird had originally carried the feathers in its hilt? however, the ignorant americans paid these issues no mind. they classified it as “native american; unknown origin,” when they stuck it in a museum.

for decades more, the dagger did nothing. its purpose had been fulfilled, so all it had to do was wait for its master to show up and recollect it. silently, tamely, it sat there behind the glass, the dried blood of the fallen president long since wiped off its blade. it sent out messages that it knew its original owner would be able to pick up on; humans who looked at it often got the feeling that it was calling to them. it became the most popular item in the exhibit due to the supernatural experience that one received just by looking at it—until one evening in 1945, when the object began to beep.

the security guards alerted the curator, who was just about to go home for the night. curiously, he took the dagger from its encasing and stole into a back room. once there, he tugged at it and figured there must be some way to open it, as the beeping was probably created by something inside. he thought he would have a struggle, but surprisingly, as soon as he pulled on the blade it came out into his hand.

attached to the knife blade was a panel of intricate circuitry in need of repair. and attached to that panel was a vial of a bright blue-white liquid—the drained quintessence of president andrew jackson.

the curator gave it to one of his scientist friends, who immediately recognized the technology for what it was: the invention of a civilization advanced beyond human comprehension. the scientist, who was well aware of all the myths surrounding the dagger, felt as though everything had been made clear. the feathers and bone hilt must have come from extraterrestrial species. the carving must depict either a real species somewhere on a distant planet or a creature from an alien mythos. the dagger’s repeated pursuit of its target must be the result of some sort of artificial intelligence. and the “native” man with catlike eyes who had thrown the dagger, then managed to outrun horses and avoid dogs even after being shot twice--he was obviously an alien in disguise.

immediately he contacted the united states government, which took lotor’s dagger into its possession. everything the government did to test the blade confirmed the scientist’s theory. but what the government was most intrigued by was the quintessence sample; they easily deduced that the quintessence powered the blade, and they wanted to see if it could have any application for humans. they soon discovered its miraculously energy efficient properties: simple machines could run on just a few drops for years on end with no decline in functioning. when NASA was created, its scientists were thrilled to hear the government secret that they had found a miracle substance that far surpassed the capabilities of fossil fuels: this was just what they needed to power their proposed rocket ships, just what they needed to get ahead of the russians. naturally, it wasn’t long before russian spies found out about this secret. the galaxy garrison was founded and started developing quintessence-based weapons and technology, and the russians made their own equivalent soon after. the race was on.

this is the story, my friends, of how lotor sincline attempted to assassinate andrew jackson—which then launched humanity into the space age.

he was indeed the man who perched in that tree and threw the dagger—if he walked around dark-skinned in the united states, most people mistook him for native, black or latino. galra instinct had driven him to climb that tree to get a better view. he already loathed the man in front of him, but hearing the way jackson spoke about native americans pushed him to the brink—it reminded lotor of how his father spoke about his own people, the moon elves, and it didn’t help that he felt that moon elves and native americans had a lot in common. violently triggered, struggling to even think or act with the force of his lived experience and his blood memory coursing through him, he took the concealed “smart dagger” from under his sleeve and snarled, “kill president andrew jackson.” once commanded, the blade would not miss its mark—nor would it rest until its objective was fulfilled.

there was only a one in a million chance of the blade malfunctioning.

somehow, jackson still lived.

in the end, though, lotor’s weapon gave him the death it thought he deserved. when it finally found him in his home, it not only stabbed him, it drained him of quintessence—it had been running low on battery and needed a brand new dose of energy, and the quintessence in jackson’s body would power it for the next 7,000 years. with the new energy, it then consumed him with visions of its master’s intensely traumatic life. moon elvish smart daggers take on their master’s feelings and even their memories, and lotor had bonded with his strongly enough that it was aware of the many traumas he had suffered. as andrew jackson felt the sensations of lotor’s life wrack his body and watched the scenes of the alien’s ordeals flash by, he learned what it was to experience the sort of oppression that he had inflicted on the native americans--and he experienced ten thousand years of it within the span of a mere thirty seconds. the shock of it killed him before the blood loss did.

fast forward to the mid-1900s. the american government kept many secrets from its people. the existence of extraterrestrial life was one of them. the existence of quintessence was not—but they certainly lied about their method for harvesting it. for a time, they were satisfied in taking it from animals—there was a farm outside washington d.c. that raised livestock specifically for quintessence draining. but they soon realized that the quality of the energy drained from the livestock was not as good as the quality of the quintessence within the blade itself. once more recalling the story about how andrew jackson had been found dead and seemingly “drained,” they quickly deduced that the purest source of quintessence available to them was from human beings.

and so it was. the american government got their quintessence fix from people sentenced to the death penalty. capital criminals were told they would get the noose or the electric chair, but instead, they were violently stabbed to death so that the life energy could be drained from them. the united states would never have invented the level of technology depicted in the voltron series if not for the discovery of jackson’s quintessence inside lotor’s dagger; humanity’s incredible progress was thus forged in the blood of the guilty. NASA had no idea that any of this was happening, that the technology they used was being powered by murder--but the galaxy garrison, whose scientists had come to the conclusion that human quintessence was superior to that of animals, did.

spacefaring aliens across the universe have had mixed reactions to this, especially because it’s a common cultural practice for them when they encounter non-spacefaring races to leave no trace of their presence. some of them praise lotor for indirectly getting revenge on an oppressor, and point to how the decades-later result of that helped the human species attain greater technological advancement; these people also tend to be pro-contact. the opposite side points to the fact that the humans harvested criminals for their quintessence, and say that lotor should have been more careful with the use of advanced technology on a “primitive” planet. these people are among the sort who believe that leaving behind even the most seemingly inconsequential of materials can change the course of another species’ history. either way, after being separated from his weapon, lotor figured it was time to go get it back.

when the paladins returned to earth during the events of my canon divergent season 7, lotor told galaxy garrison officials that they had something that belonged to him. he asked to be shown to area 51, where his dagger was giving off the last of its weak calls to be found by him—many of its systems including its system of communication had malfunctioned and were slowly breaking down, which had caused the beeping back in 1945. he was easily able to track it; he took it out of its box, smiling down at it gently. pressing the flat part of the blade to his cheek, he was granted a vision telling him that the item had completed its mission.

“well done,” he murmured. “welcome back, old friend.”

#word of god™. || tian speaks #politics*#racism*#body horror*#death*#murder*#alma te anul; the history of self. || HEADCANON

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heygutlcssa · 2 years ago

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DARKS’ RESEARCH, RESOURCES, & HISTORICAL CONTEXT

VIDEO SOURCES

West Side Story (1961)

RACE – THE POWER OF AN ILLUSION How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Created

TEXT RESOURCES

Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York

Brooklyn Rumble

My Climb to the Top of the Bottom

The Shook-up Generation

FICTIONAL TEXTS

West Side Story - Irving Shulman ( take it with a grain of salt. I dislike most of this adaptation for its unfeeling nature and missing the point of the story.)

The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton

The Warriors - Sol Yurick

HEALTHCARE

Changes in childbirth in the United States: 1750–1950

Eugenics and Unethical Clinical Trials on Puerto Rican Women

Medicare and Medicaid Act (1965)

The Past Victim, the Future Abuser

Childhood abuse, household dysfunction, and the risk of attempted suicide throughout the life span: findings from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study

Victims' barriers to discussing domestic violence in clinical consultations: a qualitative enquiry

Violence and substance use among female partners of men in treatment for intimate-partner violence

The occurrence of female-to-male partner violence among male intimate partner violence offenders mandated to treatment: a brief research report

IF THEY GROW UP: EXPLORING THE NEIGHBORHOOD CONTEXT OF ADOLESCENT AND YOUNG ADULT SURVIVAL EXPECTATIONS

Health and Urban Development

WOMEN’S RIGHTS/ HISTORY

Women in the 1950s

NEW YORK HISTORY

Hoovervilles in Central Park

The Battle of San Juan Hill: West Side Story and the Demolition.

Remembering the Ramifications of Robert Moses's Lincoln Square Renewal Project

Lincoln Square Renewal Project (New York, 1955-1969) A case of culture vs. community.

Robert Moses and the Demolition of San Juan Hill

How Lincoln Center Was Built (It Wasn’t Pretty)

The Exploding Metropolis: The Enduring Slums

Business: Tenements (1934)

The Many Lives of San Juan Hill

Uncovering the Stories of San Juan Hill

The Alien Registration Act of 1940

Becoming "Nuyorican": The History of Puerto Rican Migration to NYC

West Side Story: The Murder That Shocked New York

New Yorkers Without a Voice: A Tragedy of Urban Renewal

SOCIAL/CULTURAL

My Very Personal Taste of Racism Abroad

Why West Side Story Leaves Out African Americans

Youth gangs, Self-expression, and Conversations About Interracial Tension in Postwar New York City, 1945-65

Demolition of the Lower Hill District, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 1956

Sorry, But the Irish Were Always ‘White’ (and So Were Italians, Jews and So On)

During World War II, the U.S. Saw Italian-Americans as a Threat to Homeland Security

Proclamation 2527 and the Internment of Italian Americans

THE ITALIAN 'INTERNMENT' Restrictions Placed on Italian Aliens

Why America Targeted Italian-Americans During World War II

The Italian Internment

Brief Overview of the World War II Enemy Alien Control Program

Secrecy and Injustice: Exposing WWII Italian Internment Camps

The “Privileged Dago”?: Race, Citizenship and Siciliansin the Jim Crow Gulf South, 1870-1924

Linciati: Lynchings of Italians in America

Race and Multiracial Americans in the U.S. Census

White immigrants weren’t always considered white — and acceptable

Afro-Latinos: Shaping the American story

The 1930s: When Irish Catholics Changed America

In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks

Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States

When Irish immigrants were America’s most feared terrorist group

W.E.B. Du Bois, Felix von Luschan, and Racial Reform at the Fin de Siècle

What is Afro-Latin America?

We Weren’t Always White: Race and Ethnicity in Italian/American Literature

Cardella: The Black Italians

Racialization works differently here in Puerto Rico, do not bring your U.S.-centric ideas about race here!’

MISC

Teenage Tragedy Songs

The History Of Banned Rock 'n' Roll

The Birth of Rock and Roll

“Oh Daddio!” How Blackboard Jungle Changed Rock & Roll

A (Brief) History of Music Censorship in America

Nat King Cole Assaulted Onstage By White Supremacists In 1956

José Torres Obituary

Torres' legacy Extends Beyond the Ropes

Sports Sovereignty and Puerto Rico

Lost in design: The absence (mostly) of cultural heritage in Puerto Rican fashion design

PUERTO RICAN WOMEN'S DRESS, 1895-1920: AN ACCULTURATION PROCESS

The Federal Government and Metropolitan Problems

Chapter 11 - Gay and Lesbian Literary Culture in the 1950s

#resources

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afrofuturism-112 · 2 years ago

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Blog #5

Blog Assignment #5

Adam Robinson

The Music of Afrofuturism

My Blog post #1 makes a quick mention concerning music in Afrofuturism. This is when Lil Nas X did his music video for “Montero.” This area of media must be given further light. So, this post will present several bodies of work containing, in the area of music, that all center on Afrofuturism.

Now my first introduction to this type of music was through the artist George Clinton & P Funk in the presentation “Mothership.” Not Only did the artist arrive on an actual alien craft in the live performance, but there was reference to the mothership coming. The music and the lyrics centered on a science fiction vibe and captivated the audience.

Next, Sun Ra can be thrown into the mix. He presents two different types of musical elements within this genre. First, he presents the idea of Utopianism in “Space is the Place,” where he is presented in a video as an Egyptian God who traveled to a planet where he could bring a colony of black people to live and thrive and have peace. The idea of utopia for the people of the African diaspora digs in perfectly to Afrofuturism, and so does the next concept he performs which has some similarities. Sun Ra performs here with his arkestra, or his orchestra but with a spelling change to emphasize the word “ark” in it. In this performance he provides musical escape. Escape from any worries or burdens that might be placed on black people, and even an escape from this planet if needs be. It is almost a futuristic escape and can make someone feel like he could even go back through the sands of time and liberate those entangled in the chains of slavery.

Really quickly, escape does not always have to be presented in a science fiction point of view. In this scene from 12 Years a Slave, the main character who was wrongfully enslaved in the U.S. even though he is a free man, finds escape in the music created by those who grew up enslaved.

These artists, and others like Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis and Alice Coltrane, inspired continuing generations to pick up where they left off. The group Outkast, heavily influenced by George Clinton, provide a sound to Afrofuturistic music that speaks to utopia, dystopia, escape, alternate reality, and so much more. Now they are worthy of mention because they inspired Janelle Monae. Not only does she have several songs with this genre of music, but they are coupled with music videos sharing the same concepts. Not only that, but she also has a short film that goes even deeper into everything related to Afrofuturism in “Dirty Computer.”

There are so many worthy mentions for this amazing genre in music. Here are a few more links to some great examples of music and Afrofuturism.

“Rockit”- Herbie Hancock.

“Bitches Brew”- Miles Davis, the Picasso of Jazz.

“World Galaxy”- Alice Coltrane.

“Journey in Satchidananda”- Alice Coltrane.

“Tightrope”- Janelle Monae

“Many Moons”- Janelle Monae (This is Also a short film)

2017 Grammy Performance- Beyonce

Lemonade Album- Beyonce (Especially “All Night”)

“Alright”- Kendrick Lamar

Black Panther Album-Especially “All the Stars”-Sza and Kendrick Lamar

“Insh’Allah: Music of Lion’s Blood”- Heather Alexander

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jo-the-poetic-rock · 4 years ago

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Thank you for this @thesassysausage. As a Coptic Egyptian whose family has literally been confronted about our ancestors having been aliens or the recent trend of trying to prove the ancient Egyptians were Black Africans, this topic makes me fume. Sometimes it feels like the world just refuses to acknowledge we exist. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and bringing some light to this topic.

As for the whitewashing, I want to bring to attention the fact that as a Copt living in America, I still have to identify as "white" on legal papers, including the official U.S. census. Not just North Africans-- the entire Middle East, too. Legally identifying as "white" obviously disregards our actual heritage and culture, but it also keeps us from reaping certain minority benefits like scholarships (which has definitely come to our attention as I apply for college) or being considered when it comes to filling a diversity quota. They're ignoring us on purpose. We're only "white" when they want us to be, and when it doesn't benefit them, they have no problem discriminating against North Africans/Middle Easterners as people of color.

One could definitely argue that this is because society as a whole just isn't sure where to fit us in since we usually are of lighter skin, but that argument is weak in my opinion. There are boxes for Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Latinx, etc. They can make one for North Africa and the Middle East easily. We are not white, and we are not Black. Copts are North African and we are a minority.

#egypt #egyptians #ancient civilizations #history #whitewashing #coptic #copt

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thedummymen-blog · 6 years ago

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DIALOGUES AT THE PORT OF THE UNBOUGHT: Part 1 By the DummyMen

“The Ethiopians are black, the Egyptians thieves, the North Africans cruel, the Damascans liars, and of these four peoples it is the Black who will soonest lose the imprint of the stamp which marks his nature.”

MZ(Dumdum): Part of the general unease of black Africans who come across the discourse of afropessimism, outside, of course, its coming on the heels of two distinct formulations in the 1980s and 1990s that go under the same name and thus may confuse the listener as to which afropessimism one is being confronted with (and this polysemic history of the term with regards to both inside and outside the continent I think is an underexplored theme) is where and how to situate oneself in regards to its locus of enunciation - the U.S-, its articulation of blackness, and its argument that blackness is in a symbiotic relationship with slavery, a symbiosis consummated in and as social death.

One way to broach this unease, or even attempt to abate it, is through the thematic of the black forced to leave and the African left behind. This approach that perhaps privileges an idea of a splitting of a once-whole unit, whether filial or affilial, is not unrelated to the popular rendition of a western modernity that goes on to stipulate the parameters of the properly political, philosophical, social, cultural, scientific and economic. The Atlantic basin, or the New World, thus offers us the proper subject of the political -in whatever guise- against which the rest of the globe now must stand in contention. In this scenario then, the black slave becomes the ultimate degraded non-subject whilst black Africa is geographically lumped in with the rest of the colonized world, and historically locked firmly within the 18th and 19th centuries along with (anti)colonialism’s concomitant articulations of conflict, oppression, and most importantly of course, liberation.

But our African reader still has questions. How then is she to think of the slave relation in Mauritania between the Haratin and the al-beydan? What of the pressures exerted by the Egyptian and Ottoman forces, or at various periods the Hijaz, on the bilad al-Sudan (literally ‘’the land of the blacks’’ from Arabic which in turn was translated into English by British and American mappers as ‘’Negroland’’ and ‘’Nigritia’’ respectively) via a racialized permanent servile status of its inhabitants? Wherever one looks one is faced with provincially customary distinctions made between, say a Fur and a Fartit in Western Sudan, a Jilec and a Jareer in Somalia or a Habesha and a Barya in Ethiopia. These convoluted local histories themselves are then entangled within a wider orbit of a slaving, slave-trading or slave-holding (or all of the above and more) paradigm that boasts of a much older and long-standing appetite for African slaves in the Indian Ocean basin. If we take seriously the assertion by Frank Wilderson and others that slavery and blackness become imbricated at some point in the 7th century A.D. and follow Bernard Siegel’s thesis that “slavery must be considered in its relationships to the entire social structure’’, then the black African today is left with an unenviable task with regards to the ethics involved in making methodological and political sense of the aforementioned ‘’convolutions’’ and ‘’entanglements’’. But then again, when was the black African ever not in an unenviable position?

AJ(Yumyum): Exactly! The position is unenviable no matter what side of the Atlantic or Indian Oceans, Red or Mediterranean Seas one is on. And here, between all sides of the East & West and North & South divide there is an ontological sameness, a shared ontological misfortune, that often gets ignored. And those distinctions in Africa proper between a Fur and a Fartit or a Habesha and a Barya are unthought and unquestioned sociopolitical positions that have seemed to somehow come from the heavens. But you, as is Wilderson, are making the point that this has not always been the case. And this relational matrix in the hinterland and coastal regions is ignored because I think it is deeply painful to draw these sorts of conclusions that something is happening on the inside of our psyches and on the inside of our romanticized and prefixed places of species origin.

Now let me attempt to bring these twin universes (Africa and the Americas) of existence together. On the African continent you have, as Tsenay Serequeberhan points out, “the inherited and taken for granted self conception of African “liberation” as the guise and mask of neocolonialism”. And similarly in the US context Saidiya Hartman, when speaking to the legal emancipation of the slave, asks the question: “Suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not liberating the flesh or redeeming one’s suffering but rather of intensifying it?” By connecting and thinking about these two historical happenings together we learn that liberation and emancipation as legal events do the work of intensifying the suffering of the afflicted in quotidian and lessly spectacular ways in the everyday. Hereby binding tighter and hiding more cleverly the unattended corrosive open flesh wounds derived from the cultural unconscious in the form of the stereotype beneath the ego structure of the slave’s psyche. That is to say that if we do not do the heavy lifting now and think about how we have been negotiating captivity and about how the ruses of liberation and emancipation have been originary to our political, social, cultural and economic delusions, then the tragicomedy, our existence in the invertible, will be on play ad infinitum.

The truth is that, as David Marriott reminds us, “Fanon [in ‘Black Skin White Masks’] makes it difficult for us to avoid facing the fact that the ego just is where the stereotype returns - but the stereotype is just the real occupying the ego” and this trojan horse is “the enemy attacking the ego from within”. This means that the stereotype that seeks to disfigure the ego returns to itself as the psychic force that has been sent from without to terminate it. And this is all unconscious. One’s alienation of one’s self from certain aspects of one’s self is a mystifying and fetishizing practice that enables one to save themselves from themselves(??). We can call this objective vertigo a tragicomedy. You introduced me to this text by way of this quote taken from a larger one you first threw my way. And damn! It was a vibe I damn near couldn’t handle.

Nevertheless, the ruse of liberation beyond the imposition of structural adjustment programs, unfair trade treaties and the like is that “just as Christianity and civilization once [were used to serve] the purposes of conquest and empire, [new code words like] "good-governance," "global stability," "development," "economic growth," "international cooperation," "food aid," "cultural exchange programs," "human rights," "rule of law," etc.[...are the way] the West now perpetuates its hegemony.” In light of this the Sisyphean like failures of post-colonial Africa we can see the same unconscious Fanon identified in ‘Wretched of the Earth’ is still operative. Hence, “at the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was not seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a sweet, kind hearted mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free rein to its malevolent instincts. The colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune.” This unconscious line of thinking has been calibrated in very predictable and unethical ways as of late - spurring the growth in literature focused on pointing out the good that the colonial project in Africa brought to its inhabitants; even being bold to the point of recommending that these colonial arrangements be reduplicated.* Here the indelible legacies “of [irreparable] separation - and [eternally persisting] continuities” are the issues, that up to this point, “African philosophy has failed to take up”. The psychological effects (and affects) of the “the slave trade and colonialism” cannot be ignored by the Black-African. It is now more pertinent for us to look to this. For the “lingering doubt of the very possibility of self-government” is becoming ever more pronounced. And this entails for a inward look inside ourselves by ourselves and for ourselves as we simultaneously excavate (as best we can) the outside from within ourselves.

I’m not sure if you remember the Africa-Compton map that Kendrick Lamar put on display during his 2016 Grammy performance, but it captured, to the great dismay and disapproval of Afropolitans everywhere (one can recall the flurry of op-eds and blog posts that came to the defense of the particularity of the ethnic and national identities of Africans. And the feverish way in which Lamar’s presumed ‘hotepery’ and penchant for race essentialism was rigorously denounced), the shared ontological sameness between the ‘beneficiaries’ of legal-politico ‘non-events’ of liberation and emancipation by way of unveiling the cartographic reality of international Blackness. The political and cultural conditions that made Fanon write that “colonialism, little troubled by nuances, has always claimed that the “nigger” was a savage, not an Angolan or a Nigerian, but a “nigger” are still in place. Still, Lamar’s Africa-Compton map in one fell swoop illustrated, as Sylvia Wynter put it, the “connections and correlations between the contemporary state of Africa and the United States’ Black jobless inner cities and their correlated prison system.” If the Americas are the Slave Estate proper then Africa is the den of slaves. I mean even aspiring African politicos with neoliberal proclivities such as Berhanu Nega (leader of the Ethiopian opposition group, Ginbot 7) understand this to a certain extent when he says: “whether you are called Abebe or Jimmy if you know how this country [(America)] works as you should, then, you must know that you are all ‘niggers’ in their eyes.”

#africa #postcolonialism #afropessimism #black diaspora

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iathings · 4 years ago

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Fcuk the Puppet Master, Trump, and Aliens Have you heard the latest insanity from Trump supporters? Multiple credible news sources are reporting that the former head of the Israeli space agency is claiming that Aliens exist and are working with the U.S government on secret experiments that will benefit them and humanity. They quote the man as saying the following. “Trump was on the verge of revealing that aliens exist but the aliens in the Galactic Federation said wait and let humanity calm down first. They don’t want to start mass hysteria. They want to make humanity sane and understanding first.” If I were one of these aliens, I’d be chuckling to myself every time I think about this directive because I know that a safe level of white sanity will take another one thousand years to achieve unless they don’t see white people staying in power. If aliens are in communication with humans, I don’t see how any human, especially Trump could continue to spread hate and division throughout society. Surely, he would gain an appreciation, love and desire to preserve all human life and abandon his white supremacist ideals. These aliens that Trump is in communication with are clearly not ethical but how can this be? The truth is that the whole story is a deception crafted by the Puppet Masters. They see how Trump has helped them so far so now that his power is ending the Puppet Masters are jumping on the QAnon bandwagon to help him maintain power over the millions of white supremacists who still believe in him. I do not believe in most conspiracies, only the ones that support my understanding of humanity. What I do understand is that different races of people have different psychological characteristics. White people are power hungry and self-righteous, Asians are meticulous and resourceful, and Afrakans are apathetic and lack perception. The Puppet Master belongs to a sub-race but due to adversity and his strong will to survive he has developed enhanced ingenuity. It was the Puppet Master that developed the mystery-god concept using Egyptian mythology. His concept was then co-opted by the wider white race and used as a tool of conquest and to bolster his self-righteousness. The Puppet Master was angry at first but eventually he grew to understand how he could use white supremacy to work in his favor. Today, he maintains an uneasy alliance between himself and the white supremacists because he knows that all white supremacists desire is power, money, and an exclusive paradise to rest in the after death (heaven). Fcuk the puppet master, trump, and aliens. The puppet master loves to play the victim when he wants to get support from Black people but we see how he treats Afrakan refugees in Israel. He beats and imprisons them, he steals their internal organs to sustain himself, and he secretly injects Afrakan women with contraceptives so they cannot reproduce. Trump loves to spew lies about doing more for Black people than any other president in history. He says he has provided the most jobs and freed the most Black prisoners but he still fails to do the one thing that Black people have been asking for the most, which is to address systemic police brutality. If this one thing could be eliminated, Black people could go about achieving the American Dream by building their own business communities again just like Black Wallstreet. Fcuk aliens for siding with the oppressor class instead of the Saner people of Earth. Their initiatives are flawed because they align with a linear understanding of the Universe. We see it in all the concepts that science fiction has been able to create so far. That is; Life was created by chance and is now on a quest to understand the Universe. How is it that you aliens are far more advanced than humans but you still need human help? It doesn’t make sense so take your secret experiments and get lost. Oh, and take the white supremacists with you. #Aliens #Trump #PuppetMaster

Integral Dohgon

#alien my ass

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xtruss · 4 years ago

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Bibi’s Figital Warriors Take on Arabia: How Israel Won Over the Gulf States

Israel has been using a web of social media accounts to produce a more favorable image among Arabs in the Gulf. With the UAE agreement, it seems these efforts are bearing fruit.

— 972 Magazine | August 14, 2020 | Dr. Norman Gary Finkelstein | By Katie Wachsberger

A man takes a selfie in front of the Tel Aviv Municipality on Rabin Square, which was lit up with the flag of United Arab Emirates after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, on August 13, 2020. (Oren Ziv)

In 2009, Netanyahu hired a group of young, ex-soldiers from the IDF’s communications unit including his eldest son, Yair — to lead the administration’s efforts in creating a strong social media presence. Equipped with an elite unit of tech-savvy digital warriors, the Israeli government was ready to take on the Arab blogosphere and begin producing a more favorable image of Israel

Even Netanyahu himself began posting in Arabic between 2011 and 2012.

These accounts work together, retweeting one another’s posts, sharing information and followers, and engaging extensively with people throughout the region. They post discussions and polls, videos that directly address the people of the region, and references to Arab culture and Islam. They portray Israel as a progressive, tolerant, resourceful, and peaceful nation. Over the past several years they have come to focus more on technological advancement in realms that interest the Arab world, such as in agritech and medicine.

There is also a significant focus on women’s rights and gender representation in the Israeli government and military, creating an image that marginalizes the violence of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. — Dr. Norman Gary Finkelstein

On August 13, Israel and the United Arab Emirates signed a historic deal to normalize relations between the two countries. Under the agreement, which was brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump, Israel will suspend its annexation of parts of the West Bank. On Twitter, Trump called the agreement a “HUGE breakthrough,” and a “historic peace agreement between our two GREAT friends.”

The peace deal is the culmination of years of warming ties between Israel and the Gulf (or Khaleej in Arabic) countries, buttressed by a demonstrable shift in Arab public opinion. While the deal immediately came under attack for disregarding Palestinians’ aspirations for self-determination, it was also welcomed enthusiastically by many social media influencers from around the GCC.

Over the past decade, as the rise of Iran’s regional influence has been countered by the growing power of the Gulf states, Israel has been using a web of Arabic-speaking social media accounts to spread pro-Israel propaganda in order to win over the hearts and minds of Khaleejis and neutralize the perceived threat of the Islamic Republic. Now, with a peace deal on the horizon, it seems those efforts have borne fruit.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has historically played a significant role in Israel’s relations with the Khaleej. Initiated in the 1990s following the Oslo Accords, annulled in the early 2000s during the Second Intifada (partly as a result of mass popular protests in some Khaleeji countries), recalled in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, and covertly re-established throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Netanyahu’s government has recently been successful in warming ties with the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council — specifically the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and to a lesser extent, Oman and Qatar.

Already in the late 2000s, the Israeli government began utilizing social media to spread hasbara, its national propaganda efforts. Since 2008, for example, Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry has been promoting short “informational” videos on YouTube. Two years later, it established virtual Egyptian and Jordanian embassies on Twitter, “dedicated to strengthening diplomatic relations, economic growth and friendship” between Israel and the two nations. These accounts focus exclusively on social, cultural, technological, and economic content, steering clear of sensitive political issues such as Palestinian rights, which are known to foster discontent among the Jordanian and Egyptian populations.

Similar tactics and social media tools have since been adopted by internal security entities, attempting to influence the Palestinian population’s negative perception of military occupation to one of partnership and closeness.

In the years following his return to the premiership in 2009, Netanyahu hired a group of young, ex-soldiers from the IDF’s communications unit, “Dover Tzahal” — including his eldest son, Yair — to lead the administration’s efforts in creating a strong social media presence. Equipped with an elite unit of tech-savvy digital warriors, the Israeli government was ready to take on the Arab blogosphere and begin producing a more favorable image of Israel.

Following the Arab Spring, the Israeli government established several more Arabic-language accounts — such as “Israel in Arabic” on Twitter and “Israel Speaks Arabic” on Facebook, which has nearly two million followers from the region — reaching beyond Israel’s formal allies. Officials such as IDF Spokesperson Avichay Adraee, the prime minister’s Arabic media spokesperson Ofir Gendleman, and even Netanyahu himself, began posting in Arabic between 2011 and 2012.

The seemingly benign facade of Israel’s cultural, technological, and social achievements can be intriguing for some Arabic-speaking social media users, many of whom have had little to no insight into the nature of Israeli society.

President Donald Trump, joined by White House senior staff members, delivers a statement announcing the agreement of full normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Joyce N. Boghosian/White House)

“Sometimes it’s just about curiosity,” explained Kareem Abdulaziz, a Lebanese consultant born and raised in the UAE who has been following Netanyahu’s Arabic account on Twitter for several years. “My whole life I’ve heard these shadowy explanations of what Israel has done to the Arabs, how Israel is the devil, why we should never talk to Israelis. The whole topic is so taboo that suddenly the opportunity to peak into the black box is impossible to resist.”

Another popular tool is the portrayal of Arabic culture in different Israeli contexts, seeking to foster familiarity and the appearance of sympathy and interest among Israelis toward Arabic music, language, and art. This also includes the manipulation of the Mizrahi narrative, erasing the establishment’s history of oppressing Jews who arrived to Israel from Middle Eastern and Muslim countries due to their Arabic identity and culture, while focusing exclusively on the fraternity and shared experiences of Mizrahi Jews and Arabs in the region.

“They think that I will be more sympathetic to Israel if I see that many Israelis are actually from an Arab background or from Islamic countries,” explained Mansour Benani, a student at Penn State originally from Rabat who follows several official Israeli Arabic accounts on Twitter. “But the truth is this can actually fuel antisemitic tendencies toward Jewish communities that have remained [in Arab and Muslim countries]. We have several such communities in Morocco who often try to disassociate themselves from Zionism.”

By demonstrating the Zionist sentiments of Jews who remained in these countries — which Benani claims is commonly believed among Moroccan residents to be the reason for their discrimination in Muslim countries following the 1967 war — these accounts further alienate Arab audiences. “They are saying, there is no difference between Judaism and Israel, and that even Jews from the Middle East have typically supported Israel. It justifies disdain for the Jews, which often originates from the rejection of Israel’s violent treatment of Palestinians.”

As Israel tightens its control over Palestinians in the occupied territories, and as Arab leaders’ strategic interests increasingly marginalize the occupation’s significance, some of these social media accounts have increasingly adopted overtly political messaging. This increasingly aggressive discourse attacks the Palestinians’ handling of the conflict, claims they have repeatedly rejected any peace initiative offered by Israel, portrays resistance as illegitimate terrorism, and exaggerates Palestinian ties with Iran and Qatar. This more recent addition to the accounts’ repertoire — specifically as it pertains to the portrayal of Iran as a malicious regional influencer — signifies shifting attention toward the Gulf.

As such, the government established the “Israel in the Khaleej” account in 2013. The Khaleeji social and cultural environment has been immensely impacted by social media’s facilitation of exposure to global communities, discourse, and trends, all of which led to the account’s rapid growth. Israel in the Khaleej is deemed by Israeli officials one of the MFA’s most successful social media outreach campaigns, and was branded a “virtual embassy” in 2018. “We can see more and more of our followers who credit our content with having changed their perceptions and attitudes towards Israel,” claims the account’s founder, Yonatan Gonen.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presents files on Iran’s nuclear program in a press conference at the Kirya government headquarters in Tel Aviv, on April 30, 2018. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in engagement on all of Israel’s official Arabic accounts’ with the Gulf. The Israeli government’s Twitter and YouTube channels have published videos of Gulf citizens speaking favorably about Israel, news of visits by GCC nationals, official Khaleeji statements regarding normalization of relations (which are often neglected in mainstream Gulf media), and messages from Israeli citizens to different Gulf states.

The political posts also often touch on shared strategic concerns or interests, specifically as they pertain to Khaleeji foreign policy, such as combating Iran’s nuclear advancements and curbing the spread of Islamic extremism (often equated with Palestinian resistance movements). They also highlight Netanyahu’s access to and cooperation with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, which is attractive to many Gulfies who favor Trump’s aggressive policies regarding Iran.

While the perceived Iranian threat was the catalyst and leading cause of Israel’s diplomatic ambitions in the Gulf, it is not the only uniting factor. In 2011, the Arab Spring brought Israel and the Gulf countries closer, as uprisings demonstrated the power of popular sentiments and their ability to topple authoritarian regimes.

The protests were equally threatening to Israel’s government — primarily interested in maintaining the status quo in which regional threats are neutralized — and to the Gulf regimes, which found the prospects of mass political movements to be both directly and indirectly threatening. The shared perceived threat of Islamist movements developing out of popular resistance is utilized by these official accounts to portray Palestinian national aspirations as dangerous, corrupt, and radical.

As such, posts often attack radical Islamic ideology, drawing a distinction between so-called “good Arabs” and “bad Arabs,” the former referring to compliant and productive citizens, while the latter to supporters of Islamist movements or “terror” organizations (including Palestinian militant groups).

In one Tweet, for example, Israel’s army spokesperson Adraee asks followers how they would want to be remembered: as “respected and successful” like Egyptian football star Mohammed Salah and Syrian sports journalist Mustafa Agha, or “as the cowardly terrorist Ahmad Jarrar,” who was accused of killing an Israeli settler and was shot dead by the Israeli army. These statements echo a common discourse heard in the UAE and Saudi Arabic, which expresses caution regarding radical Islamist trends.

Additionally, these accounts criticize Palestinian resistance, demonize efforts to fight against the occupation, and play into authoritarian regimes’ fear of popular movements that challenge the political status quo or support radical ideological currents. Using hashtags such as “Hamas is your Nakba” and “Not Awda (return) but Fawda (chaos),” official Israeli accounts portray uprisings and protests as violent and goaded by Hamas or supported by Iran.

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020, in the East Room of the White House to unveil details of the Trump administration’s Middle East plan. (Shealah Craighead/White House)

In the late 2010s, prominent international Jewish organizations aligned with Netanyahu’s pro-occupation policies also jumped on the bandwagon. The American Jewish Committee’s Arabic Twitter account, created less than a year ago, now enjoys nearly 60,000 followers. Generally less political in their messaging than the Israeli accounts, the popularity of these organizations in many Arab countries demonstrates a growing interest in Judaism. It also highlights their role as a bridge for Arab nations interested in developing ties with Israel. The AJC, for example, has been a significant facilitator of relations between the UAE and Israel, using its alleged political neutrality as to connect UAE officials with Zionist communities that support the current Israeli administration in the West and in Israel.

Alongside official accounts, individual supporters of Israel’s pro-occupation policies who post in Arabic have also amassed significant following on Twitter. Edy Cohen, an academic specializing in the Arab world and former advisor to the Prime Minister’s Office, has a significant media presence with over 260,000 followers on Twitter. Cohen has become an extremely popular source of information about Israeli politics, and his persona has become a topic of criticism and debate among Arabic social media users region-wide.

Guy Maayan, a Likud member and journalist with the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation who regulalry posts in Arabic on his Twitter account, is especially vocal on Palestinian issues. He features Palestinians who reject the prospects of living under Palestinian sovereignty, while defending the Israeli government’s policies in the occupied territories. Mordechai Kedar, a right-wing academic and commentator, uses his account almost exclusively for engaging with the Palestinian issue, often claiming that popular support for Palestinian rights is an emotional trend that lacks logic and reason.

These independent accounts cooperate with official Israeli social media posts by retweeting and spreading explicitly political content. Many of them reach out to Khaleeji audiences, emphasizing issues that unite Israeli and Gulf political interests. There has also been an increase in posts about alleged animosity that Palestinians harbor toward the Khaleej, claiming that Palestinians have been irresponsible and ungrateful, manipulating the region (and especially the Gulf) through their claims of being victims of occupation. Such statements are often reposted enthusiastically by the Israeli accounts mentioned above.

Accordingly, there has been a steady increase of pro-Israel accounts in the GCC, particularly in Saudi Arabia, which simultaneously praise Israeli achievements and policies while condemning Palestinian efforts to resist the occupation. The arguments used by pro-Zionist Arabic social media accounts to justify their dwindling support for Palestine include Israel’s success in technological advancements and combatting terror, the corrupt and impotent nature of Palestinian resistance, and the Palestinians’ failure to accept previous peace agreements.

These classic hasbara arguments demonstrate the effectiveness of Israel’s outreach campaigns in the region and their success in adapting these tactics to the Arabic-speaking target audience. Such accounts, especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, use hashtags such as “Palestine is not my problem” or “yes to normalization,” and have run various campaigns over recent months that rally anti-Palestinian sentiments among Gulf citizens. This is done by showing Palestinians living in luxury or highlighting ordinary aspects of Palestinian life in an attempt to discredit claims of oppression and injustice.

Nadim Nashif, the executive director of 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, explained that the rise of Israel’s Arabic social media presence seeks to show the high quality of life in Israel and the opportunities that await the Arab world once relations are completely normalized. “This phenomenon goes to show that relations with the Arab world are becoming stronger and that interest in the Palestinian cause is decreasing,” explained Nashif.

Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal seen upon his arrival at the Muqata’a Compound during an official visit to the West Bank city of Ramallah on March 4, 2014. (Issam Rimawi/Flash90)

Indeed, this anti-Palestinian rhetoric is gradually taking hold in popular discourse outside of social media, with more Khaleejis posting uninhibitedly about their support for Israel as well as their wariness of the conflict with the Palestinians. Known popularly as “Arab Zionists,” they are gaining more legitimacy to speak freely about their pro-Israel views.

These voices are not exempt from internal criticism, and in some countries support for engaging with Israel still leads to ostracization (as is the case in Kuwait, for example). But in countries where official engagement with Israel is becoming increasingly visible, such as in the UAE, popular discourse is following suit.

“This is not only because of the fact that people here maintain a herd mentality, supporting what the government supports,” explained a social entrepreneur from Dubai who asked to remain anonymous given the critical nature of his statements regarding Emirati social norms, which could hurt his reputation among colleagues and peers. “It’s also because this has become an accepted way of speaking among Emiratis. Supporting Israel is no longer considered strange, it has become something you hear from time to time.” Indeed, as the interviewee suggested, the increased popularity of pro-Israel discourse can be traced to tendencies among citizens to adopt their government’s stances, as well as the official decision to remove education about the Palestinian issue from school curricula. Social media allows these sentiments to spread and become normalized.

Additionally, the Qatar embargo (enforced by the Saudi, UAE, Bahrain, Egyptian bloc in 2017 as a rejection of Qatari support for Islamic movements) has influenced the decline of pro-Palestine awareness and discourse, as Al-Jazeera (currently blocked in the UAE and Saudi Arabic) used to present the harsh reality of the Israeli occupation in a way that is no longer widely available to Khaleejis.

As such, few prominent Emirati intellectuals who vocally reject normalization with Israel are often subjected to criticism by other UAE nationals, facing resistance when advocating for a solution to the Palestinian issue before the establishment of diplomatic ties.

Expressing resistance to normalization is becoming increasingly dangerous in countries like the UAE, where the government may detain or even torture citizens who criticize authorities. Since the agreement was announced on Thursday, UAE authorities have made it clear that rejecting the government’s new policy on Israel will bring trouble to objectors. The Gulf nations have restrictions on residents’ ability to critique political entities and decisions, which has allowed pro-Israel discourse among Khaleejis to grow with little scrutiny.

As a result, Palestinian social media users are posting more frequently about Khaleeji relations with Israel, condemning their neighbors for abandoning the cause. “This normalization between Netanyahu and the Gulf has been attempted for years, and one of the methods used is incitement against Palestinians and fueling of tensions between Palestinians and Gulfies,” explained Sulaiman Khatib, a Palestinian social activist and co-founder of Combatants for Peace, an anti-occupation organization founded by ex- Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian armed fighters. “They definitely use Gulf voices to play up this conflict. However, I do trust the people of the Gulf that they will stand, as they have historically, with Palestine at the end of the day.”

Thousands of Israeli and Palestinian protesters take part in a demonstration in Rabin Square against the government’s annexation plan, Tel Aviv, June 6, 2020. (Oren Ziv)

As the pro-occupation camp achieves success in fostering popular support for normalization with Israel, Israeli voices that reject the status quo and struggle to end the occupation have been slow to catch up in the struggle for influence over the Arab blogosphere, and have yet to establish a presence in Khaleeji discourse on both official and popular levels. Peace organizations and people-to-people initiatives in Israel have translated few of their materials to Arabic, let alone created an active presence in Arabic conventional media or social media.

“Khaleeji nationals have no idea that there are Israelis and Palestinians working together,” asserted Aisha al-Ghamdi, a Riyadh-based advocate for Saudi women’s rights. “People are convinced that showing interest in Israel inherently requires them to abandon the Palestinian cause, or to look down on Palestinians. This is the case on the web, it is very black and white.”

“The Israeli left has focused its outreach in the U.S. and Europe for several reasons,” explains Achiya Schatz, former director of communications at Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organization of veteran IDF soldiers working to expose the everyday reality of the occupation. “The Palestinians are doing advocacy work in the Arab world, they know the playing field much better than us, and can make their own strategic decisions about what is needed to influence public opinion there. Secondly, the lack of diplomatic ties has made such a task challenging and seemingly irrelevant. Thirdly, the authoritarian nature of the Gulf regimes create obvious challenges for us, a camp that focuses on the importance of human rights.”

It is true that public sentiment and policies in Europe and the U.S. have historically had the most significant influence on the conflict in terms of foreign intervention. However, the incentive of commercial and political cooperation with the GCC is becoming increasingly desirable for Israeli leadership. Netanyahu’s administration has been adamantly striving toward partnership with Khaleeji nations, and has now proven that the realization of these ties is not conditional on a peace agreement with the Palestinians. These nations’ diplomatic decisions have an increasingly significant effect on the conflict’s development, and will continue to play a role determining the nature of any future agreement with the Palestinians, as the normalization of ties becomes a reality.

Meanwhile, the anti-occupation camp is beginning to understand that in order to convince Khaleejis that ties with Israel should not come at the expense of Palestinian rights, it will have to start speaking directly to them. In June, three former Israeli diplomats published an article in The National, expressing their appreciation for Emirati Ambassador to the U.S., Youssef Al Otaiba, after he penned an article in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth, warning that annexation will “be a serious setback for relations with the Arab world.”

Similarly, a new Twitter account, “A New Voice from Israel,” recently published a short video featuring former members of Knesset speaking in Arabic and rejecting annexation and occupation. This video received widespread attention from young Khaleeji social media users, many of whom expressed surprise at the fact that some Israelis are more interested in realizing the establishment of a Palestinian state than Arab leaders. “It is unfortunate to find Arab voices denouncing normalization under the pretext of cooperation, while we see Israeli voices inside Israel who refuse to annex the West Bank and stand against Zionist racism and promote the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” tweeted Talal Alkhanfar from Kuwait.

These initiatives are not only young, they are at a disadvantage because they lack the support of official institutions in Israel and the GCC. Yet they engage the silent majority of young Khaleejis who are interested in the potential benefits of relations with Israel and Israelis while remaining adamantly opposed to the violation of Palestinians’ basic human rights. If fostered and expanded, such efforts have the potential to engage many voices in the Gulf looking to move forward and create a truly interconnected region that offers opportunities to all of its residents.

— Katie Wachsberger is a research associate at the Forum for Regional Thinking specializing in the GCC, with a focus on Israel-Gulf relations and reform-oriented discourse in Oman, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. She works as a consultant with private sector entities and NGOs looking to explore larger GCC networks through engaging with the Palestinian issue, and leads various regional environmental initiatives. Katie has an MA from Ben Gurion University about social contract reform among Omani intellectuals.

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harrelltut · 6 years ago

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creepingsharia · 4 years ago

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A Month of Islam in America: August 2020

The jihad continues.

Vote wisely. And get involved in the election to prevent massive voting fraud here.

Click any link below for more details and a link to the original source (which is most often the DOJ/FBI website).

Jihad in America:

Texas: Muslim on FBI Ten Most Wanted List for ‘Honor Killing’ Two Daughters is Caught; Son and Brother Arrested for Harboring Fugutive

Texas: Family members arrested for hiding fugitive Muslim who (honor) killed his two daughters (for dating non-Muslims)

Minnesota: Muslim Woman Who Tried to Join al Qaeda and Burn Down St. Catherine Univ Pleads Guilty

Hawaii: Man who proclaimed allegiance to ISIS charged for threats to kill teachers and students, bomb police

California: Former Sacramento prison counselor arraigned, lied to FBI about fighting with jihadi group in Syria

New York: Muslim convert gets 15 years for material support of Pakistani jihad group (LeT)

North Carolina: Man who wanted to join Islamic State (ISIS), use girlfriend’s “Buddy Pass” to aid jihad, gets 5 year sentence

Massachusetts: Egyptian immigrant who stole classified national defense documents gets just 18 months prison

Wisconsin: Muslim Woman Sentenced to 90 Months for Attempting to Provide Material Support to ISIS

Utah: Muslim arrested for providing support to Islamic State (ISIS) - complains about jail’s coronavirus testing

Muslim cleric extradited from Jamaica to NYC, held without bail for ‘trying to recruit NYPD cop’ to ISIS

New York: Man Who Disseminated ISIS Propaganda and Bomb-Making Instructions to Incite Jihad in New York City Pleads Guilty

Islamic - Black Lives Matter - Antifa-related Jihad in America

New York: Bosnian illegal immigrant’s ambush of cops during BLM riot, while shouting “allah akbar,” was Islamic jihad attack (VIDEOS)

Florida: St. Pete protester caught with Molotov cocktail, loaded gun, charged with terrorist activity

Maine: Muslim caught driving stolen car, spits on cops (possibly trying to spread coronavirus)

Previous monthly reports here.

Immigration Jihad also known as Hijra:

Refugee admissions to the US resumed on July 31st

Another Muslim enclave in U.S.: Little Egypt - Astoria, Queens, New York (VIDEO)

Houston, Atlanta, Brooklyn, NYC, Michigan - Muslims in US celebrate el EID slaughtering animals, not social distancing (VIDEOS)

West Virginia: Illegal alien from Kuwait pleads guilty to dealing cocaine near WVU

Latin America too: Guyana elects Muslim as president, a first in South America

Rape Jihad:

Virginia: Rape suspect of “Middle Eastern descent” released from jail over covid concerns, KILLS accuser

Fraud for Jihad:

DC: Feds Dismantle 3 Islamic Terror Financing Cyber Campaigns

New Jersey: Owner of Car Dealership Admits Engaging in Large-Scale Fraud

DC: Two Muslims in U.S. Charged with Moving U.S. Currency to Iran

Mosque Jihad:

Boston Mosque Preaches Jihad with Weapons Not Established in America Because of “the weakness of the Muslims”

Michigan: Mega-mosque with 60-foot dome breaks ground in residential neighborhood home to Chaldean Christians (who fled Islamic tyranny)

Government collusion with and failure to prevent jihad:

Virginia: Another judge releases another jihadi - convicted and sentence to life - over coronavirus

Boston: Federal Judge Releases Muslim Ten Years Early Despite Guilty Plea in ISIS Plot to Behead Anti-Jihad Blogger!

Mass: US appeals court overturns death sentence for Muslim terrorist who killed 3 and injured 260+ at Boston Marathon

Canada: Muslim who joined ISIS in Syria arrested, then released on bail in Calgary

Joe Biden’s Jihad:

Democratic convention featured second imam - this one called for release of convicted cop-killer, defended al-Qaeda medic

Democratic National Convention hosts imam from Islamic extremist institution

Fact Check: The Travel Ban Is Neither a ‘Muslim Ban,’ Nor Unconstitutional [and it should be expanded]

Video: The Muslim (Brotherhood) operatives behind Joe Biden’s presidential campaign

Straight up Sharia in America

Paypal Bans Author of ‘Muslim Mafia’ After He Calls BLM Domestic Terrorists

U.S. Navy grants Muslim sailor special Islamic sharia grooming accommodation

Wins or at least set backs for sharia?

New Jersey: Judge Orders New Election for Paterson Council Seat After Mail-in Voter Fraud Charges

New York: Palestinian immigrant convicted of funding terror-linked Muslim charities deported to Rwanda

Previous monthly reports here.

Please share this and other posts on your social media sites.

#Islam #Muslim #Sharia #Jihad #Terror #Legal #Law #Immigration #Mosque #News #Politics #Media #monthly #Fraud #Finance #Crime

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corkcitylibraries · 7 years ago

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It Seems Like Nothing Changes

Paul Cussen

March 1918

This blog post contains images that some readers may find upsetting

Terence MacSwiney is imprisoned again and serves time in Belfast, Dundalk and Lincoln prisons.

From mid-March, following a series of hunger strikes, Irish Volunteer prisoners won an ameliorated prison regime for many Defence Of the Realm Act convicts. It was available to those whose offences were not criminal per se. Between mid-March and the end of 1918 the General Prisons Board (GPB) examined the cases of approximately 870 convicts, affording ameliorations to around 590 of these. These ‘political’ prisoners were, for the most part, held separately at Dundalk and Belfast prisons.

Robert Gibbings is invalided out of the army in March 1918 with the rank of captain. He had obtained a commission with the Royal Munster Fusiliers and served in the Gallipoli campaign where he had been wounded in the throat in 1915.

The Telemachus episode of James Joyce's Ulysses is published (in serialised form) in the American journal The Little Review.

The closing text of the Report of the Proceedings of the Irish Convention is drafted by Lord MacDonnell with the statement: "If the Report of the Grand Committee be dealt with in the way indicated the Convention will be in an advantageous position to review the whole situation; and to afford to the Ulster delegates a further opportunity of suggesting additions to, or modifications in, the scheme which the interests of Ulster may seem to them to call for. If any additions are deemed desirable, it seems to me dictated they might advantageously follow the line indicated in my proposals for a Provisional Grand Committee. I would add that such a Grand Committee ought not at the outset to be created on the basis of a permanent arrangement, but as an arrangement to be called into operation ad hoc. My expectations are that it will rarely or never be needed. My hope is that Ulster will find in a United Parliament for Ireland a body scrupulously ready to respond to every reasonable demand of Ulster.”

The Ludendorff Offensive scuppers the Convention. The 16th (Irish) Division and the 36th (Ulster) Division were almost completely wiped out in the expected great German Spring Offensive towards Amiens in March 1918. One third of the total personnel are killed—over 6,400 in the 16th and over 6,100 in the 36th.

March 1 – German submarine U-19 sinks HMS Calgarian off Rathlin Island

2 March – SS Kenmare is torpedoed with 29 lives lost. Most of the crew are from Cork

In Skibbereen, County Cork, Ernest Blythe is arrested for non-compliance with a military rule directing him to reside in Ulster

3 March – Peter O'Sullevan, horseracing commentator, is born in Newcastle, Co. Down (died 2015 in England)

The Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russia's involvement in the war.

March 6 – Tributes are paid in the British House of Commons to John Redmond who died in London.

The Finnish Army Corps of Aviation is founded as a forerunner of the Finnish Air Force. The blue swastika is adopted as its symbol as a tribute to the Swedish explorer and aviator Eric von Rosen, who donated the first plane having painted the Viking symbol on the plane as his personal lucky insignia.

The first pilotless drone, the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane developed by Elmer Sperry and Peter Cooper Hewitt, is test-flown in Long Island, New York.

March 7 – Finland forms an alliance with Germany.

March 8 – Battle of Tell 'Asur launched by units of the British Army's Egyptian Expeditionary Force against Ottoman defences from the Mediterranean Sea, across the Judaean Mountains to the edge of the Jordan Valley.

March 11 – Company cook Albert Gitchell reports to the infirmary at Camp Funston, Fort Riley, Kansas complaining of a "bad cold". Immediately behind him came Corporal Lee W Drake with a similar complaint. By noon, Camp Surgeon Edward R Schreiner had over 100 sick men on his hands, all apparently suffering the same symptoms. Within five weeks 1,127 men are infected and 46 dead. It is the beginning of the flu pandemic which wipes out 2.5%-5% of the world’s population.

March 12 – Moscow becomes the capital of Soviet Russia.

March 14 – Faith, the first concrete ship to cross the Atlantic is launched, in San Francisco, California.

March 17 – 'Cork Sinn Féin Pamphlets No.2: The Bishop of Limerick and the British Constitution' is published.

‘Cork Sinn Féin Pamphlets No.1: Most Rev. Dr. Coholan's tribute to the Young Men' was published (including a speech by the Bishop of Cork at Cork Catholic Young Men's Society advising every young man to join a Sinn Féin club at once)

Patrick Anderson is born to Nellie and Charles D. Anderson in Queenstown

March 18 – A crowd estimated at 300 men and women gather at Cork Railway Station and attacked women travelling on the train to Queenstown. The American sailors and their money are blamed for so many women being charged with 'committing acts contrary to public decency on any street' and ‘vagrancy’.

March 19 – USS Terry assists Manley (Destroyer No. 74) with casualties after that destroyer is damaged by an accidental depth charge explosion.

March 21–July 18 –Spring Offensive by the German Army along the Western Front fails to make a breakthrough despite large losses on each side, including nearly 20,000 British Army dead on the first day.

Private Frederick William Oakley from Thomas Davis St. in Blackpool is killed in action.

March 22 – Second Lieutenant William Butler, son of William and Mary Butler, Spring Place, Gardiner’s Hill dies aged 20.

March 23 – The giant German cannon, the 'Paris Gun' (Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz), begins to shell Paris from 71 miles away. Manufactured by Krupps, it had a 118-foot-long barrel, which could fire a shell 25 miles into the air. It is the Saturday before Palm Sunday and Quai de Seine is hit at 07:20, Gare d’Est at 07:40, at 08:05 Rue de Chateau-Landon and at 08:17 Rue Charles-Cinq is hit from a gun site at Crépy-en-Laonnaise, 70 miles away.

In London at the Wood Green Empire, Chung Ling Soo (William Ellsworth Robinson, U.S.-born magician) dies after a trick where he is supposed to "catch" two separate bullets goes wrong one of them perforates his lung. He dies the following morning in a hospital.

March 25 –The Belarusian People's Republic declares independence.

Dr. Karl Muck, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is arrested under the Alien Enemies Act and imprisoned for the duration of the war.

Second Lieutenant Walter Tull, who played for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town, the first black infantry officer in the British army, dies in action (b.1888)

French composer Claude Debussy dies of colorectal cancer in Paris.

March 26 – Dr. Marie Stopes publishes her influential book Married Love in the U.K.

March 27 – First Battle of Amman launched by units of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First Transjordan attack on Amman, ends with their withdrawal on 31 March back to the Jordan Valley.

March 29 – Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart is born in Kingfisher Oklahoma (d.1992)

March 30 –Bolshevik and Armenian Revolutionary Federation forces suppress a Muslim revolt in Baku, Azerbaijan. It is estimated that between 12,000 and 30,000 people are killed in Baku over three days.

#historytoblame #corkcitylibraries #irishhistory #worldhistory

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2whatcom-blog · 6 years ago

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The Idea of Race Is a Lie

The plague of racism has, in some ways, been rising in the previous couple of years. Whether or not one appears to be like at Hungary, Germany, Myanmar, India or Brazil, racists have gotten extra seen and getting elected to public workplace. Then there have been the horrors of the slaughters in New Zealand and Sri Lanka. In america, the president has denounced Mexicans as drug sellers and rapists, described some poor nations as, "shithole countries," and did not reject an endorsement from a former chief of the Ku Klux Klan. He even went as far as to name not less than some neo-Nazis, "very fine people." One is perhaps forgiven for pondering that what his marketing campaign slogan actually meant was "Make America White Again." Hate crimes within the U.S. rose in 2017 for the third consecutive 12 months, and they're rising in Canada too--up 47 % within the latter in 2017, primarily focusing on Muslims but additionally attacking Jews and other people of shade. In combating this improve in racism, there are two main features to think about. The primary is that the very thought of "race" is a lie: because the American Society of Human Genetics, the biggest skilled group of scientists within the subject, defined in an essay: "The science of genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories"; and it "challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct. This is validated by many decades of research." In different phrases, "race itself is a social construct," with no organic foundation. In 2014, greater than 130 main inhabitants geneticists condemned the concept genetic variations account for the financial, political, social and behavioral range all over the world. In actual fact, stated a 2018 article in Scientific American, there's a "broad scientific consensus that when it comes to genes there is just as much diversity within racial and ethnic groups as there is across them." And the Human Genome Undertaking has confirmed that the genomes discovered across the globe are 99.9 per cent an identical in each individual. Therefore, the very thought of various "races" is nonsense. A second downside, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff has proven, is that merely utilizing the phrase "race," even when criticizing racism, truly reinforces the false perception that human beings belong to basically totally different teams. That is as a result of the extra a phrase is used, the extra that sure mind circuits are activated and the stronger that metaphor turns into. The usage of colours to explain ethnic teams additionally helps racism. That is why it's not acceptable anymore to seek advice from Asians as "yellow," to Latin People as "brown," or to Native People as "red." Nevertheless, many individuals, together with teachers and journalists, nonetheless use "black" to explain folks of primarily latest African origin. After all, there are minor variations between numerous ethnic teams: behavioral, bodily, linguistic and so forth, and most of these variations are attributable to one's tradition and experiences. As Einstein noticed, "the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment" that folks expertise throughout improvement, by the construction of the society through which they develop up, "by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior." In actual fact, the concept all of humanity will be divided into 4 or 5 (or nonetheless many) racial teams is comparatively new. Historic Greeks, for instance, by no means considered themselves as "white." As Tim Whitmarsh famous in Aeon in 2018, "Greeks simply didn't think of the world as starkly divided along racial lines into black and white: that's a strange aberration of the modern, Western world, a product of many different historical forces, but in particular the transatlantic slave trade and the cruder aspects of 19th-century racial theory." The reality is that Greek legends painting themselves and their heroes as multiethnic in origin. The Egyptian Danaus turned king of Argos, and his daughter, Hypermestra, was an ancestor of the best of all Greek heroes, Herakles (Hercules). Perseus, who slew the Gorgon Medusa, married an Ethiopian girl, Andromeda, and their kids established probably the most highly effective of all of the Bronze Age Greek kingdoms, Mycenae. One other instance of this nonracial perspective is discovered within the Histories of Herodotus, who, within the fifth century B.C., wrote that the aim of his e book was to, "preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks" . The so-called Father of Historical past" also said that Ethiopians "are reputed to be the tallest and most stunning of all peoples." This portrait of Africans isn't distinctive. Historian Peter Farb notes in his 1978 e book Humankind that "Greek artwork, literature, and mythology usually portrayed dark-skinned folks with respect." And then there are the remains found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in southwest England of the individual known as "Cheddar Man." DNA from his skeleton, dated to around 7,100 B.C., suggests that he had blue eyes, dark curly hair and "darkish to black" pores and skin pigmentation. Cheddar Man shares a genetic profile with a number of different people present in Spain, Hungary and Luxembourg. Cheddar Man's forebears seemingly originated within the Center East. Later, the ancestors of the individuals who constructed Stonehenge traveled west throughout the Mediterranean from Asia Minor, bringing farming with them and reaching Britain about 4,000 B.C. The reality is that we're all one human household that had its origins in Africa. Amazingly, analysis by statistician Joseph Chang at Yale discovered that the newest frequent ancestor of everybody alive at present lived simply 3,600 years in the past. In different phrases, in case you may hint your ancestry again lower than 150 generations, you'd discover not less than one one that is the daddy or mom of us all. And the additional again in time one appears to be like, the extra frequent ancestors we'd discover. Chang concludes: "Our findings recommend a outstanding proposition: irrespective of the languages we converse or the colour of our pores and skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted large sloths within the forests of North and South America, and who labored to construct the Nice Pyramid of Khufu." The burden of proof lies, subsequently, with those that cling to the notion that there are things like "races." They must first present a scientific definition, primarily based on vital variations in human genomes, of what "race" means; and second, clearly reveal that there are sufficient of those variations between totally different ethnic teams to justify dividing folks into separate "races." That is an unimaginable job. Within the last evaluation, it's our experiences and our tradition, not our DNA, that account for many of our variations. So, whereas ethnicity is actual, and there are certainly minor variations between ethnic teams, there isn't a such factor as "race"--only racism. And the results of racism--from the slave commerce to the European genocide of First Nations within the "New World" to Nazi Germany to at present's refugees--are horrific. Even Ronald Reagan understood that, "if immediately there was a menace to this world from another species, from one other planet," the consequence would be this: "We might overlook all of the little native variations that we now have between our international locations, and we'd discover out as soon as and for all that we actually are all human beings right here on this Earth collectively." We face actual existential threats, and we should not look forward to an alien invasion earlier than we focus much less on our minor variations and extra on what all of us have in frequent. Read the full article

#2what.com #cheddar #differences #ethnic #group's #minor #racial #racism

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