#don’t even get me started on none of them speaking on Palestine | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aspiringwarriorlibrarian · 1 year ago

Note

Hello,

Ive been following you for years and I love your blog. In all my years on this website I have never posted, sent an ask or a message, commented or interacted with anyone on this website in any way. However seeing your recent posts about Palestine made me feel like I had to say something.

Just because you support the “weaker” side, it doesn’t make you immune to lies and propaganda.

Please educate yourself before you spread misinformation and/or misleading info.

I am a citizen of Israel. This conflict started when Hamas brutally murdered hundreds of innocent civilians, including elderly and children. They kidnapped over a hundred more. They are known for being a terrorist organisation whose stated goal is to murder jews.

I am terrified. My people are forever scarred. I and everyone I know have lost loved ones in this war. And the fact that people like you in these terrible times choose to focus solely on the suffering of the Palestinians, ignoring and justifying our suffering, speaks volumes.

The bombings you speak of, are a retaliation for the slaughter of October 7th. Israel warns citizens in advance, in order to prevent as many casualties as possible. But we cant just ignore the murder, kidnapping, rape and harm to our people like you do. We have no choice but to defend ourselves.

We have no interest nor desire to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. If we did, we would have already done so. Instead we financially support Palestine, despite the fact they use this money not to better their lives, but to instead attack our civilians.

Beware of misinformation like the accusations against Israel for bombing the hospital in Gaza. That is a straight up lie that was proven false, and the Hamas spread it along with lies about how many people got hurt, in order to convince people like you that they are justified. And its working.

Before you accuse others, maybe check your own biases and think to yourself why a Palestinian life is worth something to you and an Israeli one isn’t.

Can you even imagine what it feels like to go online after such a tragedy for a little relief, only to see people like you calling for my death?

And yes, that is what you’re doing by supporting and encouraging the actions of Hamas. An organisation that cares more about killing innocent civilians like me than protecting its own people.

I hope that if you can’t take the time to properly understand this complicated situation, you will at least stop talking about something that you clearly don’t understand.

You know, I put all of this in a private post initially. I've been largely focused on spreading charity posts, actual concrete things that can be done to save the innocent people caught in the crossfire. But clearly, my message has been mixed, so I'll define it right here.

This is just something that seeps into my bones and I had to say it somewhere: the sheer refusal by both sides to admit what they're doing. Oh, we thought that music festival was soldiers....wait no we didn't, it was random Gazan civilians who did it instead, not us, hurt them instead. Oh we are going to wage all out war....no those innocent civilian casaulties weren't us, it was them! (No, the cause of the explosion has not been independently proven. It has, however, been proven that Israel shelled the place three days earlier as a "warning" then called ordering an evacuation shortly before.) Put down an evacuation order so short and so sudden the UN protests that civilians can't possibly get out in time, then bomb one of the convoys. Tell your countrymen the evacuation order was fake so you get more human shields. More rockets! More airstrikes! More "accidents" to the tune of hundreds of civilians dead, and you never have to carry the burden or the blame for any of it. Shoot from far enough away, target enough civilians, makes it easy, makes it fun. The glory of war with none of the guilt and none of the risk! Ain't that a wonderful thing. Ain't that a fucking joke.

I grieve for the innocent Israeli citizens slaughtered because Hamas cowards wanted to kill the defenseless. I grieve for the people in Gaza getting slaughtered because neither side cares if they live or die. The difference between the two is not that one life is worth more than the others. That is morally repugnant and fundamentally absurd. The difference is that Israel is getting aid from many nations, while other nations only give aid to Hamas, not the people of Gaza. They need humanitarian aid, they need someone to speak for them and beg for restraint, which is why I'm primarily reblogging posts that call for humanitarian aid to them and for a ceasefire so they can, at the very least, have the evacuation time they should have been allowed. It is not because their lives are worth more, but because to far too many, their lives are worth less.

I understand your pain and fear, and I am deeply sorry for your loss. I too find those rooting for Hamas or declaring that the victims deserved it for being settlers repugnant. But the people of Gaza did not do this, and if it's a choice between them living and Hamas dying, I will choose their lives every time. I will always choose life. And I refuse to apologize for that. Violence like this is a cycle, revenge and revenge and revenge again because you cannot kill an idea with bombs, only keep destroying until nothing is left to fight over. You cannot stop a cycle by continuing to spin.

#israel palestine conflict

30 notes · View notes

demobsblog · 9 months ago

Note

So what are your thoughts now that CR has donated to Gaza?

Hi! I’ve haven’t been active on this account for a min lol

That they did it to get fans to stop boycotting them, they haven’t made a statement about Palestine since then and it was very weird how they were blocking people on both accounts speaking about Palestine but until fans boycotted, and started to speak louder against them for their silence they literally said “We hear you.” when they donated. I truly don’t think it was out of the kindness of their hearts, they noticed fans were pissed and decided to do something unlike D20 who’s made multiple public statements about Palestine and still finding new ways to show support to Palestine. And Matt video was so oddly timed considering he used his chronic pain and depression as an excuse for why he can’t make a statement about “the war in Palestine.” as he says. And lied about taking a social media break when he’s been active on social media— His chronic pain stops him from making some damn tweets and researching but doesn’t stop him from traveling !! ?? None of them except Liam has made a public statement (which wasn’t much but still something I guess?) And I think it’s weird that Sam liked this Critical Role Cooking for Gaza post when they donated but now it’s no where in his likes.

I also think it’s weird how his mom praised them for donating like they weren’t blocking fans for even saying the name Palestine on their page? Some people literally just said Free Palestine and they were blocked for months and then they unblocked them including me after their donation? + Laura Bailey blocks people for speaking about Palestine on instagram ? So again I don’t believe that donation was out of the kindness of their hearts

but that’s what I think about all that , disagree or agree if you want I truly don’t care. Anyway support D20 They’re doing an auction and the profit goes to Gaza support :))

#critical role #boycott critical role #critical role supports genocide #free palestine #marisha ray #mighty nien #ashley johnson #free gaza #laura bailey #liam o'brien #sam regiel #travis willingham #bell hells #critical role matthew mercer #support gaza

11 notes · View notes

zendyval · 7 months ago

Note

I get the message behind blocking celebrities who haven’t spoken out. I think it’s an attempt to start hurting their pockets by limiting their exposure. However, I do think people need to engage in a bit more critical thinking on who they block and why. Gigi Hadid, in my opinion, deserves no hate. She’s been talking about Palestine from the beginning, and like you said, the Israeli government literally went after her. I can’t imagine how scary that is, especially with her being Palestinian and having a daughter to protect. They’re going after the wrong people.

I do have mixed feelings about Z, though. She has somehow become the face of this, and it’s probably due to her popularity. Zendaya has posted about Gaza before this most current war. But she hasn’t talked about it since then. Correct me if I’m wrong. It may be her anxiety or she may not feel like it’s her place. She seems to only talk about issues in regards to black people. I think she could carry a lot of weight by just reposting someone’s story, but she doesn’t. Do I think that means people should block her? That’s up to the individual. But I don’t think she’s the kind of person who is just ignoring these things for the sake of keeping her “wealth.”

I think there’s just a desperation in the air. Horrible things are happening, and people just want to blame any and everyone who doesn’t seem to be helping or at least speaking out. Some of it’s fair criticism, others seem to be critically online takes about people they know nothing about.

I want to be clear I'm not against anyone who is supporting Palestine and raising funds and awareness and trying to help. I think most of the intentions are good and kudos to people doing the work.

Also none of this is about me defending Z. I do understand why even though I think she's fairly clearly not a Zionist or anything, people want her to speak because she is a celebrity who does have more money and resources than honestly many people are calling out. While I think people are extremely misguided about how much money many celebs have in many cases which was on display in terms of thinking celebs pay for their tickets and gowns to the gala, Z is a rare case of someone who could afford to do that.

I just watched a tiktok from someone with organizing experience and I agreed with a lot of what they said. Also mixed with thoughts from a few other tiktoks I agreed with. What is happening is now we are getting tiktoks and tweets solely with block lists, with no reasons why and no other information on Palestine, and what is happening is in trying to decenter celebrities, you are just winding up centering them.

Then to the organizers point, if you issue a block list of 300 celebrities, who has time to sit there and block 300 celebrities. If you want to focus on celebs that it should be a more centered approach of one a day and you give a clear reasons why and what the response you are hoping to achieve is. So if the person does wind up saying something, what are you trying to get them to do? Because I think what it happening with some is that sitting there blocking 300 celebs makes people feel like they are doing something? But most people don't have the time to do that and/or you could be doing something else with that time.

Also to the organizers point is you have to figure out what your response is going be if the celebrity does speak up or then starts fundraising. Because what also happens is they pressure a person--let's use Hank Green or Lizzo, since those were two real examples. They speak up and maybe start raising money and you don't need to thank them or give them applause or even unblock them, but it sort of then comes a continued purity response of well you spoke up too late and It's not genuine and people just mocking them in the comments. But isn't the focus supposed to be raising awareness and money? And also if X influencer and celeb over here sees the negative response that Hank Green got when they spoke up, then they are likely not going to subject themselves to the same. I think to this organizers point, lot of it is behavioral psychology.

Plus like to that point, if a celeb is shamed to speak and does, okay...but sometimes people do show up late to the party and people have been fighting for Palestine for decades. This is not something that just started in October, so haven't most people in that sense showed up late to the party?

Then it also, like with Gigi, becomes a slippery slope of people who are pro Palestine and have done things but its still not good enough for some people who just want to hold moral superiority.

Or it becomes a "has so and so celeb said anything yet" because people also want to feel validated if they can keep stanning their celeb.

None of this is support celebrities and poor celebrities, boo hoo. But I think we wind up on this slippery slope of performative activism and we have been through this before.

0 notes

waitingforeddyneddy · 1 year ago

Note

You responded to none of my points because you have 0 counter argument. Privileged white people literally ARENT educated because they are privileged. It’s taken THIS war for most of them to find any interest in educating themselves. Once again, you implying he’s a Zionist is dangerous and weird.

And once again - people are being blacklisted in Hollywood which why most of your faves aren’t saying anything.

I am angry because this is fucking slacktivism and you’re using this genocide to fuel your j’te for a celebrity who hasn’t even said anything regarding the topic.

Interestingly enough you want simone to work with Tarantino who is a huge fucking Zionist.

You’re not a kathony weirdo? Am I wrong - you don’t like charithra, you don’t like Nicola, you don’t like JB. Ou sème to j’te everyone for 0 reason, which is your right. But you didn’t even respond to the fact that Nicola is the only one outspoken about free Palestine. Once again, simone isn’t said shit either and many people she’s worked with are likely Zionists.

People are not going to speak against their bosses. Get off your ass and actually go to the streets to protest.

Listen here pathetic asshole

JB and NC stans are not welcomed on my blog

The first I cannot stand, and no matter how much you try to twist the narrative he was celebrating the show with his zionists friends and he did go to Israel posting a photo dump on instagram 🤡

The second I cannot stand either, no amount of pro Palestine post on instagram is going to make me forget her going to national TV to cry about diversity or having promo over the leading lady of s2 while Simone had to do interviews on zoom. Or the fact that she took every possibilities to talk about polin saying how better their season is going to be. Or her liking tweets about Rege being a diva knowing full well how poc are villanized at the first opportunity.

You really don’t want to start a conversation about CC cause I can guarantee you will leave my blog crying

Polins trying to act like the moral police make me fucking laugh. No need to hide you troll. And go fuck yourself

Also the fact that you insist privileged people don’t have an education and live with their heads in the sand is psycho behaviour 🤡

#simone ashley #nicola coughlan #jonathan bailey #asks #fellow travelers

1 note · View note

subbyfoxelf · 2 years ago

Text

[movie review] injustice (2021)

i watched all the cutscenes from the video game in preparation for this, and my biggest problem with it was that even if lois died (and even if clark was responsible for it), i just can’t see him going off the deep end like this. but in the video game all of that happened in the past. the movie is all about him getting to that point, and that’s actually drastically worse because the whole time it’s happening i’m just not even slightly buying it.

you just can’t turn clark into a dictator without him being a completely different person. the things that make him him could only be changed by a drastically different nature or a drastically different nurture, and this movie doesn’t suggest either of these. it just completely uncritically buys in to joker’s “one bad day” theory from the killing joke, and there’s nothing else to it.

there are actually a few things i like about this. dick and damian’s relationship is great, and has a lot of carry over of what i liked about their relationship in some of the batman movies from the previous run. i especially loved dick calling damian “little brother.” i’m also honestly super impressed that that did strike a chord with me considering that nightwing’s ghost being called “deadwing” made me giggle inappropriately every time he appeared.

i also liked how everybody picking a side was handled in the movie quite a bit better than in the game. the people who fall in with superman are never wholly complicit with his bullshit, and the one who comes the closest to being is diana (and frankly she’s almost as out of character as clark at times), and even she is genuinely horrified when confronted with unmistakable evidence that he’s gone off the deep end. also catwoman doesn’t side with clark to keep an eye on him and try to protect bats or whatever the fuck was happening in the game to set up bats being all butthurt about it and refusing to forgive her. that was dumb.

speaking of selina, the bit where clark sent her to check on bruce after dick died was extremely good. and although i already talked about how much i appreciate this movie’s take on dick and damian’s relationship, i also really appreciate it making it obvious how fucking important dick is to bruce. seeing him literally crying over him was… a lot. and selina does such a good job of comforting him, telling him not to be batman, to just let himself be a mess just for one night. that was exceptionally good.

i was also impressed that the u.s. is portrayed fairly accurately in this, with them freaking out the second superman seems to be challenging their authority and saying the quiet part out loud when they say, “superman’s bringing down governments. fine when it’s in our interest, a mighty big problem when it’s not.” they also jump right to siccing the cops on superman’s father. so, yeah. some points there.

unfortunately there’s also some serious bullshit here given that the u.s. government isn’t literally the first one supes goes after when he decides to start unilaterally taking down governments. plus there’s some tone deaf “both sides”y shit about israel’s occupation of palestine, and a throwaway reference to north korea’s nuclear program being disarmed but no mention whatsoever of any other country’s nuclear program like, oh, i don’t know, just throwing one out at random, the fucking united states. i mean, it’s not like they’re the only country in the world that has engaged in acts of nuclear war and–wait, hold on, i’m getting new information… huh. well, hey, they probably don’t blatantly bully other countries using their nuclear arsenal as a cudgel to uh… what’s that? … all the time?

huh. well, that’s awkward.

and yeah, given that supes is obviously the bad guy here, none of that would be a huge issue except for the fact that the movie isn’t really shy about what it thinks is right and what it thinks is wrong, and it doesn’t seem to be terribly upset about either of these throwaway details? and for that matter, no one ever actually articulates a counterpoint to superman’s bullshit? no one ever says, hey clark, funny thing is, when you prevent people from using violence to resist, you allow the everyday violence that oppresses them to continue unabated just because it doesn’t bother you. no one says anything other than, basically “nuh-uh.”

okay, there is one pretty good scene where mister terrific kicks clark’s ass rhetorically while simultaneously kicking his ass at chess. but even that doesn’t actually articulate a positive ideology to contrast with supes’. it just boils down to a slippery slope argument.

but that still isn’t the biggest reason why i didn’t like this. it just circles back around to the fact that they never, at any point, sell me on superman doing any of this. i was just constantly mentally shaking my head and saying “nope.” you didn’t make it believable, guys. a switch doesn’t just go off in your head and make you a totally different person because something really bad happens to you. and the whole story just falls apart if you don’t believe that. c-rank

#injustice #injustice dc #dc comics #batman #catwoman #robin #robin dick grayson #robin damian #damian wayne #dick grayson #superman #wonder woman #dc universe original movies #movies #reviews #movie review

1 note · View note

itonje · 4 years ago

Text

people of color in arthurian legend masterpost

hi! some people said it would be cool if i did this, and this is something i find interesting so. yeah! are you interested in king arthur and the knights of the round table? do you like to read about characters of color, especially in older lit? well, i hope this can be a good resource for people to get into stuff like that, especially poc/ethnic minorities who might feel uncomfortable or lonely getting into older media like arthuriana. this post is friendly to both those who prefer medieval lit and those who prefer modern stuff!

disclaimers: i am not a medievalist nor a race theorist! very much not so. i am just a 17 year old asian creature on the internet who wants to have an easy-to-reference post, if i’m not comprehensive enough please inform me. i’m going to stay closely to the matter of britain, as well, not all medieval european literature as a. this is what i’m more familiar with and b. there’s so much content and information and context to go along with it that it would really be impossible to put it all into one tumblr post. (however there’s always going to be overlap!) also, please do not treat me or any other person of color/ethnic minority as a singular all-knowing authority on anything! we’re all trying to have fun here and being made into an information machine on things, especially what is and isn’t offensive isn’t fun. with that out of the way, let’s get into it! (under cut for length!)

part i: some historical context (tw for racism and antisemitism discussion)

fair warning, i’m going to start off with some discussions of more heavier history before we talk about more fun stuff. while pre colonial racism was far more different than how it is today, there still...was racism. and it’s important to understand the social mien around nonwhite people in europe at the time these works were written.

to understand how marginalized ethnicities were written in medieval european literature, you have to understand the fact that religion, specifically catholicism, was a very important part of medieval european life. already, catholicism has violent tenets (ie, conversion as an inherent part of the church, as well as many antisemitic theologies and beliefs), but this violence worsened when an event known as the crusades happened.

the crusades were a series of religious wars started by the catholic church to ‘reclaim’ the holy land from islamic rule and to aid the byzantine empire. while i won’t go into the full history of the crusades, (some basic info here and here and here) its important to understand that they had strengthened the european view of the ’pagan’ (ie: not european christian) world as an ‘other’, a threat to christiandom that needed to be conquered and converted, for the spiritual benefit of both the convertee and the converter. these ideas of ethnoreligious superiority and conversion would permeate into the literature of the time written by european christians.

even today, the crusades are very much associated with white supremacy and modern islamophobic sentiment, with words such as ‘deus vult’ as a dogwhistle, and worship of and willingness to emulate the violence the crusaders used against the inhabitants of the holy land in tradcath spaces, so this isn’t stuff that’s all dead and in the past. crusader propaganda and the ignorance on the violence of the catholic church and the crusaders on muslim and jewish populations (as well as nonwhite christians ofc) is very harmful. arthuriana itself has a lot of links to white supremacy too-thanks to @/to-many-towered-camelot for this informative post. none of this stuff exists in a bubble.

here’s a book on catholic antisemitism, here’s a book on orientalism, here’s a book about racism in history that touches on the crusades. (to any catholic, i highly reccommend you read the first.)

with that out of the way, we can talk about the various not european groups that typically show up in arthurian literature and some historical background irt to that. the terms ‘moor’ and ‘saracen’ will typically pop up. both terms are exonyms and are very, very broad, eventually used as both a general term for muslims and as a general term for african and (western + central) asian people. they’re very vague, but when you encounter them the typical understanding you’re supposed to take away is ‘(western asian/african) foreigner’ and typically muslim/not christian as well. t

generally, african and asian lands will typically be referred to as pagan or ‘eastern/foreign’ lands, with little regard for understanding the actual religions of that area. they will also typically refer to saracens as pagans although islam is not a pagan religion. this is just a bit of a disclaimer. the term saracen itself is considered to be rather offensive-thank you to @/lesbianlanval for sending me a paper on this subject.

while i typically refer to the content on this post as having to pertain to african and asian people (ie, not european) european jewish arthurian traditions are included on this post too. but, i know more about poc and they’ll feature more prominently in this post because of that, lol.

part ii: so, are there any medieval texts involving characters of color?

i’m glad you asked! of course there are! to be clear, european medieval authors were very much aware that people of color and african + asian nations existed, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. even the vita merlini mentions sri lanka and a set of islands that might (?) be the philippines!! for the sake of brevity though, on this list i’m not going to list every single one of these small and frequent references, so i’m just going to focus on texts that primarily (or notably) feature characters of color.

first of all, it’s important to know was the influence of cultures of color and marginalized ethnicities that helped shape arthurian legend. the cultural exchange between europe and the islamic world during the crusades, as well as the long history of arab presence in southern europe, led to the influence of arabic love poetry and concepts of love on european literature, helping to form what we consider the archetypal romance. there are also arthurian traditions in hebrew, and yiddish too, adding new cultural ideas and introducing new story elements to their literature-all of these are just as crucial to the matter of britain as any other traditions!

when it comes to nonwhite presence in the works themselves, many knights of color in arthurian legend tend to be characters that, after defeated by a knight of arthur’s court join the court themselves. though some are side characters, there are others with their own romances and stories devoted to them! many of them are portrayed as capable + good as, if not better than their counterparts. (this, however, usually only comes through conversion to christianity if the knight is not christian...yeah.) though groups of color as a general monolith created by european christians tended to be orientalized in literature (see: mystical and strange ~eastern~ lands), many individual knights were written to be seen by their medieval audience as positive heroes. i’m going to try to stick to mostly individual character portrayals such as these.

with that all said though, these characters can still be taken as offensive (i would consider most to be) in their writing, so take everything with a grain of salt here. i will also include links to as many english translations of texts as i can, as well as note which ones i think are beginner friendly to those on the fence about medieval literature!

he shows up in too many texts so let’s make this into two bullet notes and start with one of, if not the most ubiquitous knight of color of the round table (at least in medieval lit),-palamedes! palamedes/palomides is a ‘’saracen knight’’ who (typically) hails from babylon or palestine and shows up in a good amount of texts. his first appearance is in the prose tristan, and he plays a major role there as a knight who fights with tristan for the hand of iseult-while he uh. loses, him and tristan later become companions + friends with a rivalry, and palamedes later goes off to hunt the questing beast, a re-occurring trend in his story.

palamedes even got his own romance named after him (which was very popular!) and details the adventures of the fathers of the knights of the round table, pre arthur, as well as later parts of the story detailing the adventures of their sons. it was included in rustichello da pisa’s compilation of arthurian romances, which i unfortunately have not seen floating around online (or...anywhere), so i can’t attest to the quality of it or anything. he appears in le morte darthur as well, slaying the questing beast but only after his conversion to christianity (...yeah.) in the texts in which he appears, palamedes is considered to be one of the top knights of the round table, alongside tristan and lancelot, fully living up to chivalric and courtly ideals and then some. i love him dearly and i’ve read the prose tristan five times just for him. (also the prose tristan in general is good, please give it a try, especially if you’re a romance fan.)

speaking of le morte d’arthur, an egyptian knight named priamus shows up in the lucius v arthur episode on lucius’ side first, later joining arthur’s after some interactions with gawaine. palamedes has brothers here as well-safir and segwarides. safir was relatively popular, and shows up in many medieval texts, mostly alongside his older brother. i wouldn’t recommend reading le morte of all things for the characters of color though-if you really want to see what it’s all about, just skip to the parts they’re mentioned with ctrl + f, haha.

the romance of moriaen is a 12th century dutch romance from the lancelot compilation, named for its main character morien. morien, who is a black moor, is the son of sir aglovale, the brother of perceval. whilst gawaine and lancelot are searching for said perceval, they encounter morien, who is in turn searching for aglovale as he had abandoned morien’s mother way back when. i wholeheartedly recommend this text for people who might feel uncomfy with medieval lit. though the translation i’ve linked can be a bit tricky, the story is short, sweet, and easy to follow, and morien and his relationships (esp with gariet, gawaine’s brother) are all wonderful.

king artus (original hebrew text here) is a northern italian jewish arthurian text written in hebrew- it retells a bit of the typical conception of arthur story, as well as some parts from the death of arthur as well. i really can’t recommend this text enough-it’s quite short, with an easy-to-read english translation, going over episodes that are pretty familiar to any average reader while adding a lot of fun details and it’s VERY interesting to me from a cultural standpoint. i find the way how they adapt the holy grail (one of the most archetypal christian motifs ever) in particular pretty amazing. this is also a very beginner friendly text!

wolfram von eschenbach’s parzival (link to volume 1 and volume 2-this translation rhymes!) is a medieval high german romance from the early 13th century, based off de troyes’ le conte du graal while greatly expanding on the original story. it concerns parzival and his quest for the grail (with a rather unique take on it-he fails at first!), and also takes like one million detours to talk about gawaine as all arthurian lit does. the prominent character of color here is a noble mixed race knight called feirefiz, parzival’s half brother by his father, who after dueling with parzival, and figures out their familial connection, joins him on his grail quest. he eventually converts to christianity (..yeah.) to see the grail and all ends happily for him. however, this text is notable to me as it contains two named women of color-belacane, feirefiz’s black african mother, and secundilla, feirefiz’s indian wife. though unfortunately, both are pretty screwed over by the text and their respective husbands. though parzival is maybe my favorite medieval text i’ve read so far i don’t necessarily know if i’d recommend this one, because it is long, and can be confusing at times. however, i do think that when it comes to the portrayal of people of color, while quite poor by today’s standards, von eschenbach was trying his best?-of course, in reason for. a 13th century medival german christian but he treats them with respect and all these characters are actually characters. if you’re really interested in grail stories (and are aware of the more uncomfortably christian aspects of the grail story), and you like gawaine and perceval, i’d say go for it.

in the turk and sir gawain, an english poem from the early 16th century, gawaine and the titular turkish man play a game of tennis ball. i’m shitting you not. this text is pretty short, funnily absurd, and with most of the hallmarks of a typical quest (various challenges culminating in some castle being freed), so it’s an easier read. it’s unclear to me, but at the end of the story the turkish man turns into sir gromer, a noble knight, who may or may not be white which uh. consider my ‘....yeah’ typical at this point, but i don’t personally read it that way for my own sanity. also he throws the sultan (??) of the isle of man (????) into a cauldron for not being a christian so when it comes to respectful representation of poc this one doesn’t make it, but it does make this list.

the revenge of ragisel, or at least the version i’ve read (the eng translation of the dutch version from the lancelot compilation), die wrake van ragisel, starts off being about the mysterious murder of a knight, but eventually, as most stories do, becomes a varying series of adventures about gawaine and co. one of gawaine’s friends (see: a knight who he combated with for a hot sec and then became friends and allies with, as you do) is a black knight named maurus! he’s not really an mc, but he features prominently and he’s pretty entertaining, as all the characters in this are. i also recommend this highly, i was laughing the whole time reading it! it’s not too long and pretty wild, you’ll have a good romp. this is a good starter text for anyone in general!

i’ve not read the roman van walewein, which, as it says on the tin, is a 12th century dutch romance concerning some deeds of gawaine (if only gawaine was a canon poc, i wouldn’t need to make this list because he’s so popular...). i’m putting it on the list for in this, gawaine goes to the far eastern land of endi (india) and romances a princess named ysabele. i can’t speak to ysabele’s character or the respectfulness of her kingdom or representation, but i know she’s a major character and her story ends pretty well, so that’s encouraging. women of color, especially fleshed out woc, are pretty rare in arthurian lit. i’ve also heard the story itself is pretty wild, and includes a fox, which sounds pretty exciting to me!

now the next two things i’m going to mention aren’t really? texts that feature characters of color or jewish characters, but are rather more notable for being translations of existing texts into certain languages. wigalois is a german 13th century romances featuring the titular character (the son of, you guessed it, gawaine!) and his deeds. the second, jaufre, is the only arthurian romance written in occitan, and is a quite long work about the adventures of the knight jaufre, based on the knight griflet. what’s notable about these two works is that wigalois has a yiddish translation, and jaufre has a tagalog translation. wigalois’ yiddish translation in particular changed the original german text into something more fitting of the arthurian romance format as well as adding elements to make it more appealing for a jewish audience. the tagalog translation of jaufre on the other hand was not medieval, only coming about in 1900, but the philippines has had a long history of romantic tradition and verse writing, so i’m curious to see if it too adds or changes elements when it comes to the arthurian story, but i can’t find a lot on the tagalog version of jaufre unfortunately-i hope i can eventually!

this list of texts is also non-exhaustive! i’m just listing a couple of notoriety, and some to start with.

part iii: papers and academic analysis

so here’s just a dump of various papers i’ve read and collected on topics such as these-this is an inexhaustive and non-comprehensive list! if you have any papers you think are good and would like to be added here, shoot me an ask. i’ll try to include a link when i can, but if it’s unavailable to you just message me. * starred are the ones i really think people, especially white people, should at least try to read.

Swank, Kris. ‘Black in Camelot: Race and Ethnicity in Arthurian Legend’ *

Harrill, Claire. ‘Saracens and racial Otherness in Middle English * Romance’

Keita, Maghan. ‘Saracens and Black Knights’

Hoffman, Donald L. ‘Assimilating Saracens: The Aliens in Malory's ‘Morte Darthur’

Goodrich, Peter H. ‘Saracens and Islamic Alterity in Malory's ‘Le Morte Darthur’

Schultz, Annie. ‘Forbidden Love: The Arabic Influence on the Courtly Love Poetry of Medieval Europe’ *

Hardman, Philipa. ‘Dear Enemies: the Motif of the Converted Saracen and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’

Knowles, Annie. ‘Encounters of the Arabian Kind: Cultural Exchange and Identity the Tristans of Medieval France, England, and Spain’ *

Hermes, Nizar F. ‘King Arthur in the Lands of the Saracens’ *

Ayed, Wajih. ‘Somatic Figurations of the Saracen in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’

Herde, Christopher M. ‘A new fantasy of crusade: Sarras in the vulgate cycle.’ *

Rovang, Paul R. ‘Hebraizing Arthurian Romance: The Originality of ‘Melech Artus.’’

Rajabzdeh, Shokoofeh. ‘The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure’ *

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. ‘To the Well: Malory's Sir Palomides on Ideals of Chivalric Reputation, Male Friendship, Romantic Love, Religious Conversion—and Loyalty.’ *

Lumbley, Coral. ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Race’ *

Oehme, Annegret. ‘Adapting Arthur. The Transformations and Adaptations of Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois’ *

Hendrix, Erik. ‘An Unlikely Hero: The Romance of Moriaen and Racial Discursivity in the Middle Ages’ *

Darrup, Cathy C. ‘Gender, Skin Color, and the Power of Place in the Medieval Dutch Romance of Moriaen’ *

Armstrong, Dorsey. ‘Postcolonial Palomides: Malory's Saracen Knight and the Unmaking of Arthurian Community’ (note this is the only one i can’t access in its entirety)

part iv: supplemental material

here’s some other stuff i find useful to getting to know knights of color in arthurian legend, especially if papers/academic stuff/medieval literature is daunting! i’d really recommend you go through all of these if you can’t go through anything else-most are quick reads.

a magazine article on knights of color here, and this article about the yiddish translation of wigalois.

this video about characters of color in arthurian legend!

the performance of the translation of arabic in Libro del Caballero Zifar, and how it pertains to the matter of britain

a post by yours truly about women of color in parzival

this info sheet about palamedes, and this info sheet about ysabele-thanks to @/pendraegon and @/reynier for letting me use these!

this page on palamedes as well

this post with various resources on race and ethnicity in arthuriana-another thank you to @/reynier!

part v: how about modern day stories and adaptations?

there’s a lot of em out there! i’m not as familiar with modern stuff, but i will try to recommend medias i know where characters of color (including racebends!) are prominent. since i haven’t read/watched all (or truly most) of these, i can’t really speak on the quality of the representation though, so that’s your warning.

first of all, when it comes to the victorian arthurian revival, i know that william morris really liked palamedes! (don’t we all.) he features frequently in morris’ arthurian poetry, (in this beautiful book, he primarily features in ‘sir galahad, a christmas mystery’ and ‘king arthur’s tomb’. he has his own poem by morris here.)

and some other poems about palamedes, which i’d all recommend.

for movies, i know a knight in camelot (1998) stars whoopi goldberg as an original character, the green knight (2021) will star dev patel as gawaine.

some shows include camelot high, bbc merlin, disney’s once upon a time, and netflix’s cursed, all featuring both original characters of color and people of color cast as known arthurian figures.

for any music people, in ‘high noon over camelot’, an album by the mechanisms, mordred is played by ashes o’reilley, who in turn is performed by frank voss, and arthur is played by marius von raum who is perfomed by kofi young.

i’ve also heard the pendragon and the squire’s tales have palamedes as a relevant character if you’re looking for novels, as well as legendborn and the forgotten knight: a chinese warrior in king arthur’s court starring original protagonists of color!

part vi: going on from here

so, you’ve read some medieval lit, read some papers, watched some shows, and done all that. what now? well, there’s still so much out there!

if you have fanfiction, analysis, metaposts, fun content etc etc about arthurian poc, feel free to plug your content on this post! i’d be happy to boost it.

in general, if you’re a person of color or a jewish person and you’re into arthurian legend, feel free to promote your blog on this post as well! i would love to know more people active on arthurian tumblr who are nonwhite.

this is really just me asking for extra content, especially content made by poc, but that’s okay! arthurian legend is a living, breathing set of canons and i would love love love to see more fresh diversity within them right alongside the older stuff.

a very gracious thank you to the tumblr users whom i linked posts to on here, and thanks to y’all for saying you want to see this! i hope this post helped people learn some new things!

#finny.txt #arthuriana #arthurian legend #matter of britain #medieval romance #arthurian literature #arthurian mythology #<- :/#but necessary #also ITS DONE ITS DONE ITS FINALLY DONE #PLEASEREBLOG THIS WRHSFSHDFDHSFSDF #2K PLUS WORDS..

297 notes · View notes

amelmajrii · 3 years ago

Note

People are weird and are just trying to drag on arguments, ignore them. I am Muslim and from the middle east and I have tried to seperate my opinions all the players and their lack of awareness on Palestine. I like some players, don't like others but in the end I don't see any of them as people who are important in the fight for justice. They are footballers. People expect too much and then get angry when people are not the perfect image they created. None of them are perfect. Fandoms in general need to stop relying so much on the supposed perfectness of people they don't know and enjoy their game and do their own activism for themselves. It is like they expect them to be perfect little activists so that they can reduce their white guilt by saying they are stanning a perfect activist.

Hi. I’m like you. To be honest, I used to expect a lot especially from those who post and repost about every single issue on their social media. As a Muslim fan, the silence on palestine made me really angry , disappointed and made me question who I like but more importantly it made me change how I see these people. The silence was terrible but then I was like why am I expecting anything from ? Who are they and why should it all be on them? We all have a responsibility in talking about issues and nowadays, it has become so easy to just hit that repost button that you don’t really know how a person really feels and how much they mean it away from social media.

I feel like many fans have this perception of the celebrity to be perfect and should do things the way they like. They have an idea in their head that they forget that these people will at some disappoint them and may have disappoint other people. It’s really just the white guilt and at some point, they start fetishizing these people it makes me sick. I know that football players with their huge following have the power to educate a lot of others but we also should stop relying on them as our source of education. There are so many voices to listen to, so many activists talking about blm, Asian hate or even Palestine. Why do we ignore them and care only when a celebrity speak?

#answered asks

2 notes · View notes

freezingbeach · 4 years ago

Text

Mashrou’ Leila lead singer Hamed Sinno’s Tribute to Sarah Hegazy

I’m sorry this is taking a minute, but I haven’t been able to articulate my thoughts about Sara’s death. To be honest, my thoughts are constantly interrupted by stabs of resurfacing trauma. I suspect this is the same reason I haven’t been able to write a song in years, but that’s irrelevant. I realize a lot of people are waiting for me to say something, but what can I say now that I haven’t been saying for years? Why should my opinion matter anyway?

Many are quick to point out mental illness, and her depression, but pathologizing mental illness does nothing to explain why some of us are afflicted and others are not. Mental illness does not exist in a void. It is a product of structural violence. The power of heteropatriarchal capitalism is the way it inhabits the body. We are born into trauma, and we carry it with us wherever we go. “Minorities” show higher death rates in every kind of “natural” death. We have higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, respiratory failure, cancer, anything. You name it. That is what trauma does to the body. That is what hate does to the body. The thought that someone can leave a society that keeps trying to kill them, and still carry that society inside them, still be moved to taking their own lives, chills me to the bone, as I reflect on my own exile, and the exile of the people I love. We spend the first part of our lives demanding air in our homelands, and then we leave to countries where we are promised air, only to find out we were robbed of lungs. Continuing to not address the structural inequality that produces this much suffering is a crime. We might not actively be contributing to it, but we actively benefit from it. That too is murder.

I have nothing to say that we don’t all already know. My opinion as always doesn’t matter. What is this ridiculous thirst for commentary from “celebrities?” Why do you need me to say anything for you to get angry? Why do you need performative politics to validate your subjectivity? Am I allowed to grieve for a minute before I’m skewered for not responding “fast enough.”

I was once deluded enough in my optimism that I honestly believed music could change the world. I honestly believed that if people saw that I, a faggot, loved, and cried, and suffered, and laughed, and danced, and fought for Palestine, and fought masculinity, and fought racism, and fought capitalism, and fought and fought and fought and fought and fought I honestly thought they’d understand that I was human. That we were human. I got away with it for long enough that I started to believe my own optimism, and so did others, and they suffered for it. Her blood is on my hands as much as it is on yours. It should have been me in that prison cell. I apologize if I gave anyone hope that they’ll one day see us as human. The truth is, they’ve always known we’re human. That’s why they pretend to be doing god’s bidding when they kill us.

I don’t know what to make of the amount of hate I’ve seen over the last two days. We are a society that thinks it can speak for god. We are a society that thinks it can correct gods creations. We are a society that murders the innocent and spits on their graves before they’re even buried. None of this is gods will. None of this is religion. This is a society of murderers using god to justify their bigotry. What is this god you believe in who creates anything or anyone less than perfect? What is this god who condones this kind of hatred? What is this god you believe in who needs you, a repugnant loathsome maggot, to correct god’s work?

To my young lgbtq+ following, you are god’s creation, as much as anyone else is. You are perfect. You are beautiful. You are loved. You deserve better. To everyone else, I leave you with Sara’s last words:

السما احلى من الأرض، وأنا عاوزه السما مش الأرض The sky is sweeter than the earth, and I need the sky not the earth.

Hamed Sinno

For context: Sarah Hegazy waved a rainbow flag at Mahrou’ Leila’s concert in 2017, which then led to her arrest by Egyptian authorities, and a 3 month-long imprisonment during which she was verbally and physically tortured. After a long struggle in exile, she took her life on June 15th.

#hamed sinno #sarah hegazy #i can't stop crying about this #ask to tag

53 notes · View notes

ruminativerabbi · 4 years ago

Text

Israelis and Emiratis

This week’s surprise announcement that the United Arab Emirates and Israel have decided to establish full diplomatic relations, including the cultural and commercial ties that such relations traditionally bring in their wake, caught me completely off guard—and everybody else in the world too apparently except for the players directly involved. Who saw that coming? And yet, now that I’ve had time to think about it a bit, I see this not only as something that was probably inevitable, at least eventually, but as a move that has the potential to alter the political reality in the Middle East in a way that could possibly actually lead to a peaceful resolution of one of the most traditionally intractable face-offs on the planet, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

It’s hard even to know where to start in assessing the potential impact of the agreement, but probably most important of all is that it makes it crystal clear that the Sunni Arab world is not going to refuse to make common cause with the one country in the region, Israel, that can and does stand up to Iran in its relentless effort to extend its malign, imperialist influence into Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen merely because the Palestinians don’t wish them to. The Gulf States feel vulnerable because that’s precisely what they are—and the UAE decision to recognize Israel is simply their way to make themselves feel less vulnerable and more in control of their own destiny. Nor is it at all likely that this is the sole deal of its kind in the offing: most of the experts I’ve read this last week seem to agree that it is now only a matter of time before Oman, Bahrein, Kuwait, and even Saudi Arabia follow suit and establish formal relationship with Israel. (Morocco and Sudan won’t be far behind.) It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic shift than the one constituted by this week’s agreement. It really is a whole new world out there.

The message the UAE-Israel deal sends out directly to the Palestinians is key. For decades, the Palestinian leadership has presumed the right to turn down whatever is offered to them—and there have been so many offers over the years that it’s hard even for experts to keep them all straight—not because of any specific detail included or not included, but merely because entering into a peace arrangement with Israel would obviously require the Palestinians to agree to live in peace with their neighbors, something they have never been able to bring themselves to do.

I have returned to this theme many times in this space. Well over 100 nations have already recognized the non-existent nation of Palestine, so it’s not like the Palestinians have to worry if their state will be internationally recognized. Indeed, the Palestinians could easily proclaim their independence tomorrow, like the Israelis did in 1948, and then get on with the business of nation-building. Yes, they’d have to work through various issues with the Israelis, including some thorny ones regarding a future Jewish presence in the new Palestinian state, but once all that was successfully done the Palestinians would still have to bring themselves to live in peace with the Israelis next door. And that is what they appear unwilling or unable to bring themselves to do.

The UAE-Israel speaks directly to that set of issues.

First, it makes it clear that the Palestinians do not have a veto over other nations’ decisions to act in their own best interests. They had an inkling of that sentiment in 1979 when Sadat came to Jerusalem and Egypt established diplomatic relations with Israel, and then again in 1994 when Jordan followed suit. But 1994 was quite some time ago and things have changed considerably in the Near East since then. The Palestinians are eager to describe the UAE decision as a stab in their collective back. But a more realistic appraisal would be that the decision simply constitutes an instance of a nation declining to pass up a chance to prosper through a judicious alliance merely because of a different people’s intransigency.

Second, it makes it clear that the threat posed by the Iranians to the neighboring states of the Middle East is serious and real…and not only in Western eyes but in the eyes of the players on the ground in the region. In other words, this week’s agreement signals that the nations who see themselves as future victims of Iranian expansionism are not going to sacrifice their nations on the altar of somebody else’s national aspirations…and particularly not when those aspirations could be brought to fruition easily and effectively in a matter of days or weeks if there were any real desire to live in peace and to prosper not as a nation of perennial victims, but as a free, independent, autonomous player in the forum of nations.

Third, the Palestinians have always acted as though time were on their side, as though all they had to do was wait long enough and Israel would just go away and their problems would be solved. The UAE deal signals that the opposite is actually the case, that time is specifically not on their side, and that the time has clearly come to act if they want to resolve their conflict with Israel effectively and fairly. The Palestinian story is a tragic one that began with their leaders’ failure to seize the moment in 1948 and establish the “other” state that the Partition Plan for British Palestine was supposed to create. That was already seventy-two years ago, however, and yet they remain mired in tactical decisions that failed them in the 1940s and are still failing them. Clearly, at least some of the Arab world is tired of waiting for the Palestinians to act in their own best interests.

And, finally, the UAE-Israel agreement makes it clear that the oft-insisted-upon fantasy that Israeli cannot live in peace with any Arab nation until it caves into the demands of the Palestinians, no matter how radical or unimaginable, is simply not true. It probably wasn’t ever really true. But now it’s clearer than ever that the moment for the Palestinians to move forward as an independent state is upon them…if they have the courage to seize the day and make the requisite compromises any deal will inevitably entail.

What the Palestinians have to learn, the Europeans also need to take to heart. The endless EU-based rhetoric based on the assumption that the key to Israeli-Arab relations is resolving the Palestinian conflict needs to be set aside and replaced with words reflective of a new reality. If the member states of the EU want to contribute to peace in the Middle East, in fact, they need to press the Palestinians to realize that their problems are being dwarfed in the region by the hegemonic aggression of the world’s two largest non-Arab Muslim states, Iran and Turkey. And that the smaller states in the region see that aggression not only as irritating or destabilizing, but as an existential threat. Since peoples who are facing existential threats generally do what it take to address those threats regardless of what bystanders think appropriate or reasonable, the time has clearly come to press the Palestinians to negotiate a just peace and then to move ahead from there into the future.

Suddenly, all sorts of dreams I’ve had for years are becoming slightly more possible. Could Lebanon ever live in peace with Israel? Not with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah pulling the strings, but what if Lebanon suddenly found the wherewithal to become free of foreign influence? What then? Would a seriously isolated Iran be willing to renegotiate the so-called Iran Deal of 2015 and agree actually to turn away from the possibility of becoming a nuclear power? Could the people of Syria ever seize the real reigns of power in their country, get rid of the Iranians camped out on their territory, and establish the kind of close ties with Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel that should have long ago made that specific part of the Near East into the economic powerhouse it could and should be? The irony, of course, is that these developments—pie-in-the-sky though they may sound now—these developments would only bring prosperity and autonomy to the Palestinians too, who would then be part of a thriving economic region.

In the meantime, exciting things are happening. The Israeli and UAE foreign ministers have had their first phone call and are apparently going to meet in person soon. Embassies are going to be opened, ambassadors appointed. Omer Adam, the Israeli singer, was invited personally by the royal family of the UAE to perform in Abu Dhabi. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin formally invited the Emirati crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to visit Israel. It is expected that it is only a matter of time, possibly only weeks, before direct flights begin between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi.

Americans should be proud of the role our government played in this enormous break-through. But the lion’s share of the credit goes to the Emiratis themselves who found the courage to act in their own best interests. That their move could conceivably lead the Palestinians to abandon their traditional intransigency and negotiate a just and real peace deal with Israel—that really would be the icing on the cake. Whether that will happen, none can say. But it was a pretty good week for the Middle East, and particularly for Israel and for the UAE, and for that we should all be grateful.

#Israeli #Abu Dhabi #United Arab Emirates

1 note · View note

smokeybrand · 3 years ago

Text

Don’t Call Me Shirley

A guy i know replied to a Facebook post I made with something pretty superficial and aggressively nationalist on the post i made about how the government bribes people with socialism in order to throw themselves into war. He believes that Vets deserve all of that stuff because they defended our country but the common man doesn't for reasons? Buddy, have i got news for you! Buckle up because I woke up this morning and, like US International Policy, I chose violence.

Every war that the US has fought after WWII, was in defense of its interests not the country. Those two things are not the same. No country since the fall of Hitler has ever directly threatened the sovereignty of the US. Maybe Russia but we haven't technically gone to war with them and our beef is basically just a dick measuring contest over who can have te most influence (Spoiler warning: It's us because we have the most guns and the most money and act like f*cking D-Bo to the world at large) so what have you been defending? Freedom? Democracy? When has that sh*t ever worked? Every war we have ever fought to stave of the entrenchment of Communism or install a democratic leader, has ended in failure. The Korean War gave us the Ils. You ever see Iran before the US installed their first puppet dictator? Don't get me started on how spectacularly we failed in Vietnam. I'm not even going to touch the shambles we left basically any country to our immediate South. Motherf*ckers are real aggressive about that border. Probably because they want to keep out the couple decades worth of displaced Brown people from getting in here, after we kept failing at coups for the last three or four generations. What about the two Iraq Wars? Surely those were fought to defend our way of life. They killed a couple thousand of us that one time. Surely these last twenty f*cking years of imperialist aggression were more than just the US trying to steal sovereignty away from a country because of oil? Surely all these f*cking lives lost were definitely given in service to freeing the shackled people of... Whatever sandy and Brown country we were supposed to be liberating, and not to line the pockets of profiteering billionaires right? Well, i got news for you kid...

We "won" the original Iraq war because the Saudis told us to stop pursuing the fleeing Saddam, another one of out installed puppet dictators that went rogue. We didn't win, we stopped. Like in Vietnam. That wasn't and embarrassing retreat, we stopped. You see, Hussein was setting Saudi oil wells on fire as he fled, so the Saudis demanded we protect their bottom line instead of actually finishing the job. The war had it's effect, though. Hussein ceased aggression on Saudi Arabia, mostly, and went back to terrorizing everyone else in the region. Keep in mind that the people there, the one's Hussein was torturing and murdering and raping and whatever else, remember that it was the US who put him in power. They can't forget. They have all those scars as reminders. That's going to play into what comes next. The second Iraq war, the one that has lasted a bit more than half my life, was another grab at that oil by the US, with a sprinkling of personal presidential revenge, coated in the the saccharine sweet of US Nationalism and fear-mongering of the "other", in order for the American people to swallow it all. And swallow it they did. And, f*cking two decades later, we are all still choking on it.

My older brother fought in the same war that his oldest kid can now fight in. That's f*cking dumb and objectively terrifying. F*cking why? Iraq didn't even have anything to do with 9/11. Nothing. Bush II lied to get us in there. That's been proven. Al-Qaeda didn't move in there until after we destabilized it. The Taliban, another problem we f*cking created for ourselves, were based in Afghanistan. We ran through there and, in less than a month, brought that whole organization to it's knees. Then we bailed at the behest of Bush II, leaving those motherf*ckers to evolve into ISIS. We did that. We made that. That's on us because we didn't cut the head off the snake. We went in there and ignored the aftercare after beating the sh*t out of that Afghan ass. How could ISIS not be a thing? Both times, actually. Bin-Laden wasn't in Iraq, he was in Palestine. The whole goddamn time! Hell, not one of the hijackers who started this sh*t were from Iraq. But there were Saudis on that motherf*cker, though.

The Military Industrial Complex of the United States is f*cking absurd, man. There are more guns than there are people here. The international community looks at us like we're an infant with a loaded revolver. No one is coming over here to invade us. No one is shooting missiles off at us. No one is going to press us because we'd destroy everything with our many, many, nuckes, before we let our zealous, nationalistic, ego be pressed. Sure, motherf*ckers well posture and flex but to a point but they know we'll push the f*ck out of that button because we're 'Murrica! Guns and NASCAR and McDonalds and Racism, Hooraw! We spend an average of six hundred, fifty, trillion, yearly, on "defense." China spends the second most and they only spend half. The second strongest military force in the world, spends half as much we do. No one is f*cking with us so why are we f*cking with everyone else? Seriously, and without hubris, ask yourself why?

Why do we keep sewing strife throughout the world? None of the countries we ever liberate, stay liberated, if we actually liberate them at all and don't just f*cking stop. We never stay long enough to install stable rulers, just decimate it and quit it. All this sh*t does is breed US resentment and gives rise to anti-American terrorist groups so why the f*ck do we keep doing it? The answer is simple: Money. War is profitable to a select few, more profitable than even the oil we all seem to covet. That sh*t goes back to the inception of this country. The DuPonts and the Rothchilds played both sides of the American Revolution and got dummy rich off of it. It's why Louisianians speak French. That region was basically a gift to France after the war. The US has been exporting what can only be described as terror and imperialism, ever since.

So, no, you're not defending our country. No, you're not defending our rights. No, you are not justified to go overseas and kill a bunch of brown kids because some assholes in Washington wanted to line their pockets with blood money. You are not fighting to keep America safe or spread freedom or whatever the line is for Democracy. The patriotism you espouse as reason enough to fight a war on foreign soil, is and has been a lie for decades. You are murdering and terrorizing innocent people, in a sovereign foreign country, for the financial benefit of billionaires who probably have skin in both sides of the conflict. They will actually fly to space before bettering this country. And when you come back with the blood of innocent people on your hands, remember that the devastating alcohol addiction you developed to cope with the constant stress of being part of a terrorist outfit, will dog you for the rest of your life because the VA is so grossly underfunded that the socialist help you think only people who have seen conflict deserve, is going to be topical at best. Remember that as you limp around the house you bought with your GI bill because shrapnel in your leg from the IED that killed the rest of your squad right before your eyes, couldn't be removed in time because the VA didn't have enough volunteer doctors to make that surgery happen. Be sure to keep the Camaro you bought at discount under 120 or you might lose that, too, just like you lost the love of your life after being away for so long perpetuating a conflict that has done little to safeguard the homeland.

Remember that, if these socialist programs were available to everyone, that the quality would increase considerably because the funding behind them would multiply dramatically. Remember that, with these programs accessible to everyone, the GDP would increase substantially over time, probably less than the twenty years of this god awful f*cking war, partly satiating the capitalist greed to make money by any means necessary so, maybe, your f*cking kids won't have to be state sanctioned mercenaries. Remember that, if these programs were open to everyone, the collective intelligence of the populace could increase and we'd have the understanding in order to question this sh*t so we don't have to nuke everyone in the world for scuffing our proverbial Puma. But, you know, thank you for your service, regardless. Sorry for the chronic nightmares.

0 notes

humansofhds · 3 years ago

Text

Sarah Sturm, MTS ’20

“We don’t have to have all the answers. We don’t have to agree on everything. But even as we wrestle with our imperfect understanding and try to learn more about other people’s perspectives, we can still come together to act to bring about a more just and peaceful future without having to have perfect understanding first.”

Sarah Sturm, MTS ’20, works as the program coordinator for partnerships at Telos, a nonprofit that builds communities of American peacemakers and equips them to help reconcile global conflicts.

Pursuing the Deeper Questions

My decision to attend HDS goes back to my upbringing and who I was growing up. My dad is German; my mom is American. While I spent most of my childhood in the US, we also spent significant amounts of time in Germany with my dad’s family. I always had an innate curiosity about why the two halves of my family were so different: my American grandparents are Missouri Synod Lutherans, Kansas farm kids at heart, and my dad’s parents were much more shaped by the cultures of East Germany and post-World War II communism. I wanted to try to figure out why the two halves of my family worked the way they did.

When I went to college, I told myself I was going to study economics, but I ended up studying political science and eventually became an accidental religious studies major because the religious studies department was asking the questions I wanted to ask: Why do people think and act the way they do, and how does that play out in the political sphere and in community relationships? Even after graduation, I didn’t think I was going to stay on the religious studies track: I wanted to pursue international relations, but I still held deep questions about what motivates people to act in certain ways. I became increasingly curious about how religion and political affiliation play out in the public sphere, so I began looking for graduate programs that combined religion and global politics.

At first I thought I wanted to leave the US to study, so I applied to only international schools other than HDS. When I was accepted to HDS, I still had doubts about whether divinity school was right for me, but my dad talked me into going to the admitted students’ day just to check it out. I’m so glad I did—I wouldn’t have attended HDS if I hadn’t gone to admitted students’ day to meet current students and professors.

At that time, the Religion, Conflict, Peace Initiative (RCPI) was just getting started, and I had the chance to speak with Professor Diane Moore about her vision for the program. RCPI was asking exactly the kinds of questions I wanted to explore—partly personally, partly out of academic and professional interest. I knew that if I were to study religion, I wanted to do it in a place where people were asking critical questions and bringing who they are wholeheartedly to it. And I sensed that the people at HDS were doing just that.

Orienting Towards Collective Liberation

My first semester at HDS, I enrolled in Diane Moore’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace class and began participating in RCPI events. I’ve always been interested in international politics, and as an American, I feel a responsibility for addressing the US’s role in global conflict. I was drawn to RCPI’s approach because it’s not about taking sides—instead, it stresses having a more capacious understanding of the human beings behind the conflict, and even why “conflict” is a problematic word to use. The initiative focuses on how to think and speak more critically, but in a way that is still oriented towards the impact for people on the ground.

Diane Moore’s class led me to participate in a RCPI January term course, “Learning in Context: Narratives of Displacement and Belonging,” where I travelled to Israel and the West Bank with a group of graduate students and got to know activists working on the ground. The trip left me with a deep sense of implication as an American and a desire to learn more about Israel-Palestine in an integrated way, taking not just an academic approach or an activist approach but a combination of the two.

To continue my learning, I applied for RCPI’s internship experience program as a means of moving beyond what I could learn on the page and hearing from folks on the ground who are affected directly. For my internship, I spent three months in Jerusalem working in international development, getting to know Israeli and Palestinian activists and community members. Through engaging with these activists and hearing their stories, I came back convicted that the place that I could potentially have the most impact was working in the US with fellow Americans on the role that we play in Israel-Palestine in enabling occupation to continue.

Systems of violence harm everyone who’s a part of them. RCPI has helped me figure out how I fit into these systems, where I want to make my intervention, and how I can approach my work as an aspiring peacemaker. We all have a role to play in collectively transforming the systems of violence within our communities into systems of justice and peace. This has been a central tenet for me to hold onto—that I do all of this work not only from a place of guilt or implication, but from a place of seeking mutual flourishing and recognizing that my work is oriented towards collective liberation.

Holding Space for Tricky Conversations

Around the time that I had started thinking that where I wanted to make my intervention was with American communities, I reached out to Greg Khalil, an RCPI fellow and president of the Telos Group. Telos’s mission is to form communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference and equip them to help address seemingly intractable conflict at home and abroad. Through RCPI, I was able to do an internship with Telos while I was still a student at HDS, and once I graduated, that then turned into a part-time job and has now become a full-time job.

Telos’s main focus has been Israel-Palestine, and they work primarily with American evangelicals. As Americans, we’re implicated in Palestinian occupation. There’s a way to respond to this implication that comes from a place of guilt and shame, and there’s a way to respond to it in a way that views it as an opportunity to become peacemakers and take an active role. It’s not a question of if we’re involved, but how we’re involved. Telos means end goal, and our telos is mutual flourishing—which means that Palestinians and Israelis experience freedom, dignity, and security in equal measure.

As program coordinator for partnerships at Telos, I work primarily with our Telos Tables Program. This program is a vehicle for engaging folks who go on our Israel-Palestine trips after they return, helping them build communities where they can continue learning and then participate in collective action. So often, we might care deeply about something and want to enact change, but we don’t always know how. The Telos Tables Program helps people come together across lines of difference and actively address issues they care about to try to promote a just peace.

These kinds of conversations are really tricky to have. I don’t have them perfectly. Part of the reason I’m so committed to doing this kind of work and supporting people in having messy conversations is that other people have done that for me. My first trip to Jerusalem through RCPI was an incredibly transformative experience. I learned a lot, and I didn’t know what to do with it all. I knew I needed to keep processing it, and the RCPI community was so supportive in holding space for that continued work. It can be so easy to fall back into previously held assumptions and binaries when you don’t have a community to hold you accountable, and my peers at HDS provided that community for me. Because I’ve experienced firsthand the importance of these conversations and spaces, I want to help people figure out what these communities can look like for them after they return from their own transformative experiences.

I believe there needs to be space for people to work through some of their assumptions and challenges, and I’m grateful to get to be a part of providing that space. We don’t have to have all the answers. We don’t have to agree on everything. But even as we wrestle with our imperfect understanding and try to learn more about other people’s perspectives, we can still come together to act to bring about a more just and peaceful future without having to have perfect understanding first.

Imperfect understanding doesn’t have to be a barrier to taking action. We’re no longer allowed to say, “Well, I don’t know enough. I can’t get engaged.” We recognize that we’re involved one way or another, whether we want to be or not. Through my work with Telos, I hope to help people to react to this joyous implication, to lean into having tough conversations with their friends and families, to get active in their own communities, and to form community partnerships in the process. Without the support of a community that’s actively oriented towards peacemaking, it can be really intimidating to try to get involved on your own.

Paying It Forward

One of the things I loved about my HDS experience was having a supportive and engaged community. In my coursework and through RCPI, I got to spend time with folks who were actively working to apply what we were learn academically in the classroom to contexts that are larger than academics or the theoretical study of religion.

This is why I will defend going to divinity school. None of what we study is just theory. It has to be put into practice. Being at HDS prompted me to ask myself: How can I embed this in the work that I do, in the essays I write, in the conversations I have, in the organizations I engage with? Where can I find ways to align what I study academically with the action I want to take in the world as a more engaged human? What does this mean not just for me as an academic, but what does this mean for me as a scholarly practitioner? As an activist?

I’m so grateful to my classmates at HDS who have asked these questions with me, who have offered up space to hold me through my own processing work, and who have been teachers for me as much as my professors. And I’m also grateful for the activists on the ground—the Israelis and Palestinians I work with. I feel incredibly fortunate to get to do this work because I feel deeply implicated in it, and I know that all of the learning I have done has come from the work of folks who are often doing this from a place of necessity, who are on the ground experiencing oppression and violence.

Now, I feel a deep sense of responsibility to act on what I have learned thanks to the time and energy others have given me and to pay it forward—to hold space for other people where I can and to work towards collective liberation.

Interview by Sarah Fleming; photos courtesy of Sarah Sturm

#Harvard #Harvard Divinity School #activism #conflict resolution #peacemaking #global peacemaking #collective liberation #large

0 notes

hanzi83 · 6 years ago

Text

YOU WANNA SEE THE MOST IRRATIONAL BLOG EVER..

You know what maybe I should do what you guys do, most of you and start leaning centrist and to the right, even you pretend ass bitch liberals who pretend to be anti Trump are categorized in this because speaking out against Israel or calling out systemic evil hasn’t gotten anywhere, and even my people in my life have made deals with the devil so they can partake in systemic orgies while pretending to be male feminists, or try to be woke. Maybe I should start making deals with the devil too then; maybe I should be Pro Israel, pro racism, pro misogyny and actually be out in the open with it. Watch how fast these bitch ass media outlets will then start paying attention because you refuse to pay attention when I have reached out numerous times, and you can’t because powerful people locally who take orders from the Zionists have controlled my growth and once were socially conscious type but now suck up to the inner white supremacy so you can have your wrestling, sports, comedy, hip hop connection etc so maybe I should cheer on when white supremacy rises or some shit. Watch out how much you bitch ass shit fucks start paying attention then. I would rather die than ever make peace with any of you or ever break bread with any of you.

Maybe I should sell my fucking soul and become a Pro Israel person and actually be treated like I am a good guy and maybe then you fuck tards who pretend to be a part of resistance will pay attention and suddenly need to stop me, while you sit back and take that Zionist dick from Stern behind the scenes and he rams his fucking tiny cock in your mouths and the semen stains the back of your fucking bootlicking subservient mouth.

I will never be happy until your bitch ass bootlicking cunts kill me. Maybe I should attack the Me Too movement and blow the cover that this is probably all staged and scripted and you all are fucking each other behind the scenes and now it is just the men in charge allowed to now get traction and they are probably all long gone and dead, and their fucking clones are around to deal with the mess while all of you think you got some justice when everything you cheer for is fucking symbolism and it doesn’t mean shit in the end. And anyone in the wrestling business or covers it has a problem, you are no better, you are supporting a white supremacist company like the WWE who supports Trump, you can pretend to be outraged by Saudi Arabia etc but you still take that Vince McMahon dick in your mouth. In my opinion he runs everything, even the independent circuit you cling onto as something about being anti WWE, and you are still supporting them. The evil never runs out, it is just designed as something else.

I would rather die than ever serve that evil. Fuck everyone who does, but maybe I need to if it means getting traction since you fucking woke people are so woke about everything and anything but never once call out the real evil of the system and just pick on the characters that prop up in mainstream. A lot of my people support fucking evil systemic shit, and pretend they are good people. They sacrificed me so they can get all the orgies, perks, access they want and none of them have the fucking balls to say anything about it because it would mean they have to be subservient to me for hooking it up because I was the asshole who took all the fucking harassment and lumps from being prostituted on the Stern Show.

The funny thing is these people pretended they fucking cared about my status and cared about me progressing when it was all about them, it has become clear when they invite me out but still show me some disrespect while dick riding me and telling me I am a fucking legend while simultaneously shitting on me with your bitch ass subtle ways, and just because I didn’t compromise my sexuality like you guys did because you guys wanted to be down, and you were forced into marriages, which don’t even mean shit because most of you fuck other girls and guys on the fucking side. Nothing has any meaning, it is all pretentious. I feel sorry for all of your fucking kids who have to grow up and realize what kind of evil people run the world and what their parents had to do to survive.

Don’t worry once I post this, they will all try to root for my death, which is the point. I want you all to kill me. So if I say I support white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia etc, then will you pay attention and call me out and then put a fucking bullet in my head, since none of you fucking assholes care about my mental health and pretend to preach about mental health awareness, while the faces of mental health on the surface are the biggest fucking cowards because they won’t ever fucking tell you why this happens and how it is designed and they think they are really doing something about it. You aren’t doing shit. You are doing less than me, and I do fucking nothing for a living and I sit here every fucking day and wish for my demise so I never have to see anyone ever again.

I am waiting for the shit heads on Reddit to post this and not even see the point of this irrational anger. “HANZI IS LEANING RIGHT THESE DAYS, HE IS GOING EXTREME AND HE MIGHT KILL SOMEONE” Yeah a guy with no fucking weapons or no desire to hurt anyone is going to do something, what fucking shit heads. Maybe if I say I am going right, maybe they will support me, because everyone else behind the scenes is rooting for Trump. If they wanted him out they would have had him out, but most of these fucking celebrities that are going after him are going after him because Trump fucked some chicks they used to like. Someone inside showbiz told me that and I know you will say he isn’t credible, but none of these people are really against Trump because they support white supremacy beneath the surface, even the ones who seem to be the most staunch liberals.

None of these women actually care about the Me Too movement; I wonder what excuse they will come up with when it is Stern’s turn. They will pretend Stern forced them to keep quiet, but had no problem going to his Hamptons parties and the females that still hype him up are going to look stupid and that is why no one will ever take your fucking movements seriously because you still make deals with the devil because you love those access journalism, and systemic orgies that you pretend you don’t do because you are trying to convince people you made it because of your talent, when the talent is only 4th down the list of what you need to make it. It is because you have to fuck someone to get in position, and then later you can claim you were raped. MAYBE THIS WILL GET TRACTION BECAUSE I JUST SHIT ON THE PRECIOUS ME TOO MOVEMEMNT, YET YOU WILL FUCKING ALIGN YOURSELVES AND DEFEND PEOPLE WHO HAVE DONE WAY WORSE. Any female who claims to be about this movement and you are still cool with Howard Stern, you have no fucking credibility, you have less credibility than I fucking do. That is why no one is going to believe shit.

Maybe I should start waving an Israeli flag and shit on Palestine like everyone of you “GOOD OLD LIBERALS” You call out Trump because it is easy to fucking do, you won’t ever admit that your bitch ass support for Hilary or any other corporate democrat is still supporting white supremacy but you just want to seem half woke You just call out the bare minimum of what is really corrupt and that is why it makes you look good to kind of call out Trump but you will find out that these good socially conscious types are also in the same fucking bed with all of these guys. At least Kanye had the balls to admit it, the rest of you just pretend and it will help you with not having to pay taxes, but still pretend that you are these staunch liberals, especially all of you fucking comedians and Hollywood type, who were busy laughing at the Whack Pack, instead of calling out Stern, maybe someone like me wouldn’t have bought into him being a good person since respectable people gave him props and associated with him. How the fuck is Jimmy Kimmel is bastion of liberalism when he has partook in shit with Howard Stern to mock the mentally disabled on his show and say its all in good fun and then gets on television like the pretentious twat he is and cries his little eyes out because a fucking lion died. Fuck you, you are probably a fucking Trump supporter too, but this is just for show.

Howard Stern runs his dick through all of you mother fuckers and you will keep pretending he is irrelevant which is why you are all afraid to call him out and you will then pretend to act shocked when something about him is revealed and I will be there to call you all out for the lying sacks of shit you are. If people in my life want to do business with filth and evil just so they can pimp out people they know to be down with those then fuck you too. I don’t want to be associated with any of you mother fuckers. All of you in this world have compromised your fucking sexuality to make it, remember it is never because of your talent, the talent doesn’t mean shit, and you can keep pretending because you all have pretend journalist write think pieces and act like their opinions are not biased at all and then anyone who says anything remotely related to a conspiracy, you lump them in with Alex Jones because deep down all of you support Alex Jones, otherwise he wouldn’t have never caught traction, you did that on purpose to make it seem like there was someone speaking some sort of truth and now you use it to spew vile hatred on conspiracy theorists. I rather be a conspiracy theorist then ever be a part of any of your fucking clubs. They are all filth. I wish every fucking day someone would fucking murder me, because I am not going to do it on my own, I will remain here for as long they allow me. One day they will have to kill me, especially if I am trolling and telling you I am going to hype up white supremacy and support Israel, then one of you SJW’s will have to fucking kill me and you will be cheered on for it. Come on and do it. I have nothing to live for, no one wants me and I don’t want them. I just want to die as soon as fucking possible.

If you are stupid enough to think I am actually a white supremacist, maybe I should just pretend to be one and support all the wrong things since you all actually do support the wrong things behind the fucking scenes. Look at the irrational anger you fucking no good shit heads. Discuss this amongst your shitty little private groups and dissect it while you laugh it off but when you are alone you are crying because I hurt your little bitch ass feelings. Just like you have no respect for me, for my erratic behavior and irrational attitude to piss people off, I have no respect for any of you. I have no respect for anything you say or you do because it is all limited and none of you have the real power and the ones that do will do whatever it takes to maintain it.

None of you will even say anything until the day I am dead so then you can pretend you gave a fuck about mentally ill people, but allowed a sea of targeted harassment to come my way and make me feel like utter shit. You will probably frame me for something and fuck me over. I wish you would just be men and just fucking kill me. I have no desire to be here and as long as I am breathing I will be online causing shit and calling people out even if it means I get more blacklisted. What is the point, you already gave all my friends and connections to other people in my life, so why would you even need me, you have the better version of me that you can pretend to like.

I wish all of you who take pleasure in my misery and my behavior that this shit happens to everyone you fucking love and you have to deal with this. I hope you are haunted at night and can’t sleep because you shook hands with the devil and had to compromise your sexuality and beliefs to make it anywhere in this world and I will be in my fucking parents basement where it has been designed to happen, so bitch ass tricks can get ahead of me and make their lane and did it solely because I didn’t want to sell my soul, so you did it behind my back and joined up with evil shit heads. Now you get to pretend you are a good person. None of you are. You are all fucking evil and I wish the worst shit to happen to every single one of you for even fucking with me.

You allow sexual predators online to make waves as personalities and then pretend you are against it but you will never fucking admit that you support this kind of behavior and let it go on. That is why you let Woody Allen parade around, and you let Bill Cosby, or R Kelly makes waves and when their careers were done, then you decided to call them out for it because it became easy and convenient for you. None of you actually care and this women empowerment in 30 years will be exposed when some of these women are exposed as doing something fucked up and then pretending they could do it because they are women and they are allowed to get away with it.

DO YOU LIKE THAT IRRATIONAL ANGER? DO YOU TAKE PLEASURE OR DID IT PISS YOU THE FUCK OFF. I HOPE IT DID BECAUSE NOW YOU KNOW EXACTLY HOW THE FUCK I FEEL EVERY FUCKING DAY WHILE YOU MOTHER FUCKERS HAVE PROFITED OFF ME, WHILE I HAVE TO CONSTANT INCREASE MY MEDICATION BECAUSE NONE OF YOU HAVE THE BALLS TO BE HONEST ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE FUCKING DONE TO FUCK ME OVER. I WISH YOU ALL NOTHING BUT THE WORST AND I HOPE WHEN YOU DIE YOUR SOULS ALL ROT IN HELL. FUCK YOU ALL FOR ALLOWING THIS TO KEEP HAPPENING AND I WILL SIT HERE AND WAIT UNTIL SOMEONE FUCKING COMES AND MURDERS ME. I Won’t do it myself, I am a peaceful person who is trolling you all right now with some irrational fucking anger to prove a point but it will go over all your fucking heads because you will somehow pretend not to understand irony or say I am shit at explaining it. Fuck you all.

Again anything I said in here is just my opinion backed up with no facts. It is still fuck you though

#Hanzi 2018 Illuminati Harassment Irrational Anger Trolling Hatred Sellouts Pretentious liberals assholes Howard Stern Show Associates Mental #Illness assholes Hollywood Media Shit heads

1 note · View note

mishpacha · 7 years ago

Link

This article is the story of Nadia Avraham, a trans Israeli Mizrahi woman who was born in Iraq and fled the country to escape antisemitism. Nadia paved the way for Israeli transgender people and her story is well-worth a read. As this is a premium Haaretz article, I will be posting the entire thing below.

It was the period of the War of Attrition, which followed hard on the heels of the '67 Six-Day War. Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, in Ramat Gan, was fully occupied, and the beds of the wounded spilled out into the corridors. Lying among the soldiers, on a bed at the end of a corridor, was a civilian, an alien in the military landscape, alive and hooked up to tubes, but completely covered by a blanket. The soldiers wondered who he was. Why doesn’t the man lying in the corner have any visitors, they asked the nurses. The odd figure became the main topic of conversation in the surgical ward, but the nurses refused to lift the veil of secrecy concealing his identity and the circumstances of his hospitalization.

Two weeks went by, and still no one came to visit. While soldiers continued to arrive steadily, the odd figure from the corridor left the hospital – the fourth person to undergo sex reassignment surgery in Israel.

That person is Nadia Avraham, who will celebrate her 85th birthday next month. “But I look good, still a bit sexy,” she says with a wink and a heavy Iraqi accent.

Avraham lives in the Hatikva neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, in a very small apartment. The bedroom also serves as the living room, and she shares her bed with a cat. On the walls are photographs from the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s – all showing a beautiful woman with big eyes and heavy makeup.

I recorded Nadia for the Hebrew version of “Israel Story,” a documentary podcast broadcast on Army Radio and online, of which I am one of the creators. (An English version is heard on a variety of NPR stations in the U.S., as well as on the website of Tablet magazine.)

Nadia opened all our meetings by saying, “It’s impossible to tell a whole life in a hour or two” – and then sat down on the edge of the bed, straightened up and, despite the constraints of time, started to tell her story.

She has blond hair, bright eyes, a piercing gaze and a singular style of speech that mixes words in Arabic with Hebrew, and in which one particular phrase is prominent: “Maybe yes, maybe no, only God knows.” That’s the essence of her complex worldview, rife with contradictions and an array of identities. Nadia is a “both one and the other” woman.

In one of our meetings, a moment before I turned on the recording device, she went over to the wardrobe and pulled out an old shoebox. In it were dozens of photos, some from a very different era, when she was still Naji, the son of an affluent Jewish family in Baghdad.

When Nadia remembers Naji, the boy she was, she speaks in the first person, but uses the masculine form of speech, adjusting the Hebrew to her biography. She talks about a boy from a large family, with an older sister followed by five brothers. Naji, the middle son, was very close to his mother.

When Naji was 5, a member of his close family started abusing him sexually. “I was afraid, I suffered, I was confused, I didn’t know what it was,” Nadia relates.

Naji did not tell anyone about what he was undergoing, and his psyche remained wounded. He fell ill, became withdrawn, and missed school. This went on for several years, and while his classmates advanced to primary school, he stayed behind, not learning how to read or write. He became a frightened boy, lacking self-confidence. According to Nadia, his worried parents took him to experts of different kinds and to psychiatrists across Iraq, but none of them understood what the child was going through – he refused to talk about it. “The secret stayed imprisoned within me,” Nadia says, “and life at home became unbearable.”

When he was 12, Naji ran away from home. He didn’t have a well thought-out plan, just took a bit of money and headed for the train station. He dreamed only of escaping to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, and starting life over. But shortly after he disappeared, one of his older brothers went to look for him and found the dreamy boy with a backpack at the entrance to the train station. He brought him home in angry and frightening silence. But Naji’s dream of leaving came true a few months later: His parents decided to smuggle him and his older sister far off, to pre-state Palestine.

A truck pulled up in the middle of the night, and Naji and his sister got into it, joining some 50 other people already crammed inside. The truck sped off toward its secret destination.

It wasn’t an orderly aliyah. Iraqi law prohibited Jews from leaving the country, but an escape route was created through neighboring Iran. Naji and his sister lived there with hundreds of Jewish migrants in crowded, dire conditions, slept in tents and made do with the minimal food that was distributed to them – bread with onion and tinned milk.

After a month in the Tehran camp, they were transported to Israel. Naji was happy to have the chance to turn over a new leaf. He was 14, his sister was 30. It took them time to adjust to their new life. They wandered from place to place, from Binyamina to Jerusalem and Rishon Letzion, before finally settling in Tel Aviv. They lived in a small home in the Hatikva neighborhood, which they purchased with money their mother sent.

Some months later, the rest of the family arrived in Israel. Naji, who had always been a mama’s boy, was thrilled to be back together with her. Within months of their reunion, however, his mother fell ill with cancer and died. Without her protection, Naji once more felt vulnerable and alone. Even today, when Nadia talks about her mother, she is visibly consumed with longing. She speaks of the loss as a kind of a “Sliding Doors” moment, and wonders whether her life would have been different if her mother had remained by her side.

After their mother’s death, Naji’s older brother, the same one who had forced him to return home from the train station in Baghdad, started to torment him. The house was no longer safe for Naji. “When I worked, he would take my money, or he would try to teach me to do bad things,” Nadia recalls. “He demanded that I distribute the drugs he sold, made me go to the homes of criminals. Once I tried to run away, but the police brought me back, because of my young age.”

At 16, Naji reported for a pre-induction army screening, thinking that perhaps the military would open the door to a better future.

“I tried, I wanted to go to the army,” Nadia explains. “When the day came, I entered a room filled with doctors and senior officers, and I asked, ‘When do I start serving in the Israel Defense Forces?’ But an officer said, ‘Go home, we don’t take people like you in the army.’ Maybe he meant that I had a feminine body,” she says. “I was as thin as a cue stick, and maybe they didn’t like my body. Maybe they didn’t like my behavior.”

As she tells the story of the event at the recruitment center, Nadia raises her voice and emphasizes the words, remembering the lean boy she was, and laughs. But between the lines and beyond the rolling laughter lurks the disappointment of a boy, somewhat different from other boys, facing a battery of officers, representatives of the establishment, alone. “To this day, I don’t know why they decided not to draft me,” she says.

The rejection by the IDF eliminated another possible route to an easier life as part of Israeli society, and heightened Naji’s distress. Once more he felt he had to escape – this time, for good. “At the age of 16 I ran away from home again,” Nadia relates. “I didn’t have anywhere to go. I lived on the street, slept on benches on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. To satisfy my hunger, I would look for pieces of bread that someone might have thrown into the garbage. And it was hot, a hamsin.”

Victor Victoria

Life on the street was hard, aggravated by a feeling of loneliness, fraught with danger, a battle to survive – and it was a life that set Naji up for exploitation.

Nadia: “I prayed to God that someone would come and take me. Let him do whatever he wants, only let me go inside to wash up and maybe eat something, in his home or in a hotel, the main thing was to get through the night.”

Naji spent a few months living a homeless life on a bench on Rothschild Boulevard. Still, alongside the tremendous difficulties, he began to experience a thrilling sense of freedom. A new world was revealed to him.

“There was a place on Rothschild Boulevard where all the homosexuals used to gather. In the morning I sat on a bench without anything to eat or drink, and in the evening, when the gays arrived, I would forget about food and forget myself – all I wanted was to look at them. One was named Merry-Man, another Poldina, and another Aunt Fanny, and they were from every ethnic group: Persians, Iraqis, Poles. They laughed and talked, and I was envious of them for having such a beautiful life and being able to live with their families, while for me it was hard, living on the street and sleeping on benches.”

On those Tel Aviv nights, Naji felt that he belonged for the first time in his life. “I met a gay guy who wandered around the parks, and he called me Nadia, he was the first to give me that name. I hooked up with him and he took me to his family in Or Yehuda.” From then on, Naji’s name was Nadia. The friend who gave him the name was Victor, who afterward became Victoria.

Victor lived with an elderly, childless Romanian couple who had informally adopted him and afterward did the same with Nadia. It was they who rescued him from the street. Nadia lived with them for eight years. “They were lovely, good people,” she says. “My life with them was the happiest I’d known, much more than with my family, whom I’d rid myself of.”

During those years, Nadia worked in a laundry, running a dry-cleaning machine that needed quite a bit of manual assistance. In the morning, she awoke happily to another day of work; in the evening she went out with her gay companions on the streets of Tel Aviv.

“In that period,” Nadia recalls, “Victoria and I met a dancer named Miko. He suggested that we go to Belgium, buy a wig and a dress, work as women and make a bundle of money. I don’t know whether I believed him or not, but I did it. I quit my job, got severance pay and went to Belgium with Victoria. We started to work as cross-dressers. At night I would dress up as a woman, and during the day I was a regular guy.”

Still not knowing how to read or write, but with acute street smarts, Nadia worked in Europe and met people from all classes of society. “I didn’t really know what to do with the money,” she notes. “For 15 years I lived in Europe, going from city to city, without knowing any languages other than Hebrew and Arabic. Trying to go deal with people who spoke Flemish, French, English, Turkish and Ladino. But I learned and I matured. I didn’t learn perfectly, but I started to get along. I would call to people, ‘Hello, come here, do you want to make love?’”

I try to ask Nadia about the hardships of night life, the world of clubs, the striptease acts and the prostitution, about the violence and exploitation that her life must have entailed. But she rebuffs the question even before I finish asking it. “There, I felt free and strong,” she asserts.

As we speak, it occurs to me that “freedom” is a relative term – elusive, era-dependent, biography-dependent, gender-dependent. The freedom she had in Europe was juxtaposed with her history, her past, the vulnerability, the secret and the rough life she had endured at home.

But as the years passed, Nadia’s attitude toward freedom and the “glamorous life” in Europe changed. After 15 years, she relates, “I felt that I couldn’t go on like that. I’d already started to become older, you could say, and I decided to return to Israel. I wanted to leave that way of life completely. I didn’t want it. I was revolted or despairing.”

The Surgery

Back in Israel, Nadia tried to start over. She found a job washing dishes in a Tel Aviv restaurant, but the regular hours and the minimum-wage work under a tough boss-woman was not for her. “The proprietress really tormented me,” she recalls, “until one day I took off the apron, threw it in her face and told her, ‘The salary I get from you in a month, I can earn alone in an hour.’”

She stalked out, and in the meantime moved in with Carol, a friend she’d known since the days on the boulevard bench. “I lived with him at the corner of Dizengoff and Ben-Gurion Avenue, on the top floor. One day, as we were talking, he suddenly says to me, ‘Nadia, if you want to have a sex-change operation, now’s the time. There’s an American doctor here, now.’”

Sex-reassignment surgery was almost unknown in Israel at the time, but it wasn’t a new concept to Nadia: “In the years when I worked in Europe, I met lady-men and also transvestites of all kinds.” Some of them had the surgery. She felt that this was what she had to do. Not hesitating for a moment, she met with the physician. As soon as he saw her, she says proudly, he agreed to operate. He explained the cost, told her about the process itself, the recovery period, and sent her for diagnosis by a psychiatrist, who also gave his immediate approval. A week later, she was in Sheba Medical Center among the wounded soldiers.

After the physical transformation, Nadia had to cope with the official, bureaucratic changes, including her gender classification in her ID card and passport. Unlike today, no orderly procedure for all this existed in early-1970s Israel. The Interior Ministry, flummoxed, sent her to the Health Ministry, which ruled that a person who wished to change his gender officially records had to go before a medical committee.

“I came to the committee, lay on the bed, opened my legs. I was examined by about 12 doctors, and they all said, ‘You are a woman in every respect, except that you can’t have children.’ I understood, and said, ‘Children there will definitely never be.’ I went back to the Interior Ministry and they immediately changed my ID and passport from ‘male’ to ‘female.’”

With her brand new passport, which bore the photograph of a woman, Nadia flew to Europe once more, this time to Berlin. “I was supposed to work next to a hotel, go up with each client, agree with him on a price of 30 or 50 marks, and then sleep with him And I wasn’t used to that kind of work. When I worked in the clubs, I would lure them with drinks, and I knew how to get more and more money from them without giving anything in return.”

In short order, however, Nadia returned to Tel Aviv – this time to stay. She worked in a nightclub on the seaside promenade. “Every client whom I could tell had plenty of money, I turned into my regular client. If I were to count the number of men I met in my life, it would be the length of a bridge from here to New York,” she says with resounding laughter. “All the rich guys, all the men who have inferiority feelings and are ashamed with their wives, they all came to me at whatever price I wanted.”

Eventually Nadia made enough money to buy an apartment in the upscale Bavli neighborhood in Tel Aviv’s Old North – a place she could call home, and which afforded her quiet and security.

One evening, a friend told her that she’d met a boy of 14 who’d run away from home and was sleeping in the street. Nadia felt that life had destined her to meet with this boy, whom she herself had been, sleeping on benches and hungry for bread. She asked her friend to bring the boy to her. Immediately she made a place for the boy, whose name she asks not to share, in her home and in her heart. Nadia, who had survived alone her whole life, raised him like a son.

At the age of 18, the youth was drafted into the air force. After his service he married and fathered children. Nadia remained by his side throughout, but the boy who matured into a man was unable to bear the difficult memories of his earlier life, and died suddenly and tragically. Nadia was shattered. It was the first time she had allowed herself to truly get close to someone, to create a family of her own.

“It was terribly hard for me,” she says now. “I couldn’t function anymore. He was the most precious thing in the world for me. No siblings and no family and no one else – only him.”

Nadia invited the widow and her two small children to move in with her. They lived together as a kind of family for 18 years, until the relations between them grew too complex and Nadia again felt that she had to leave home in order to preserve her freedom: “I really didn’t want to return to the kind of life I had lived with my family [growing up], to deal with difficult relationships, so I picked myself up and went, and left them the house, with no misgivings.”

The family of the adoptive son continued to live in Nadia’s spacious home in the Bavli neighborhood, while Nadia, who hadn’t been in touch with her own siblings and their families for years, returned to Hatikva. She moved into a one-room apartment that her father, who had since passed away, had left her in the family compound. She now lives in proximity to her brothers (her sister is no longer alive), but has no contact with them, she says. Time hasn’t dulled the pain. Nadia is unforgiving, but also unafraid, of them or of anyone.

“With all the suffering I went through, God always loved me and always looked after me, maybe he pitied me, I don’t know,” she says.

Donating a Torah

I’m in Nadia’s small room. We’re listening to the radio, to the very program we recorded in which Nadia is the star and tells her story in her voice. Occasionally she confirms what’s being broadcast, saying, “It’s all true, on my father’s grave.”

Photographs of Nadia in her youth peer out at us from the walls. She looks at them and says to me with a half-smile, “Old age will grab everyone in the end, there’s no one who won’t die.” Contemplating her death, she says with a wink that she deserves to be buried in Tel Aviv’s historical Trumpeldor cemetery, next to all of Israel’s founding fathers. But what’s truly important to her is to donate a Torah scroll in her name to the neighborhood synagogue. Nadia answers to no one but God and herself.

Now, at 85, Nadia has come full circle with her past, with the memories that well up and with the freedom she craved – and, finally, achieved: “I had it very good, and I loved my life. From the time I ran away from home and until I got to the cross-dressing and afterward the operation, and beyond, I was always happy in my life. I wanted and I chose and that’s the most beautiful and the best thing in life. I did what my heart demanded and what it wanted. That’s all. There’s nothing more beautiful than that. Live free in life and you have it good.”

#Nadia Avraham #Jewish #Israeli #Mizrahi #LGBTQ #trans #haaretz

12 notes · View notes

angrybell · 7 years ago

Text

Where does the word “Palestine” come from? I know you didn’t ask...

But I feel compelled to do this because apparently I have nothing better to do. Don’t tell Mrs. Angrybell, she will find something.

So it starts with @halalbarbiee and @baconcourse supporting the following statements (screen shot only, they seem to have locked this one or deleted or whatever because Tumblr won’t let me reblog it):

The origin of the word Palestine is actually a Hebrew word. The modern word Palestine is a gift to us from the Roman Empire. When they had finally subdued the Jews in what was then called Provincial Iudea (Province of Judea), the Romans decided that they were going to try and erase the Jews from existence. So they picked the name of the greatest enemy in Jewish history. Who was this enemy? They are now, in English, called Phillistines. So where did the Romans get this word? Well, probably from the Greeks, since the Romans did that quite a lot. But where did Herodotus, the Greek writer where we find the earliest mention get the word?

Well that’s where it gets interesting. Who were these Philistines greatest enemy? That would be the Jews. What did they call them? They called them the Pelésheth. The Hebrew writing for the word is:

As an aside, the words Palestine, Palestina, Palastia, and Palash all have something in common. They all have the sound of “p” to start them off. Hebrew has that sound. Arabic does not. If the Arabs were actually from “Palestine”, they would have retained it. There is a modern movement to create a “p” sound in the Arabic language, but it is a recent event as the New York Times recounts. The claim that “Falasteen” is the proper pronunciation flies in the face of all evidence. Falasteen is the word that the Arabs use because they had no other way of saying. Interestingly, the Israelis tend to use that pronunciation themselves these days because they are dealing with an Arabic speaking people.

So is the Hebrew word Pelésheth a transliteration of what the “Philistines” called themselves? Most likely, no. Why? Because the word Pelésheth has a Hebrew root. That root word is Pelésh. The word in Hebrew is here:

After all this, we get to to the question of what does Pelésh translate to? The word palash, means “rolling” or “migratory”. And this fits with what we know about these people.

We have earlier writings which identify the people living in the strip that you are claiming was Philistia. The Egyptians identified them as one of the Sea Peoples who invaded the Levant. They called the the “Prst”. Why do I call them part of the Sea Peoples? Because archaeological discoveries have pretty much established that whether you call them Phillistines or Prst, they did not originate from the region and were, in fact, invaders who had come from the region we now call Greece. The archaeological record is pretty substantial at this point that the people there were clearly Mycenaean. Based on this, they arrived in the region sometime around the 13th Century BCE (late Bronze Age).

Now, this enemy of the Jewish people had not existed in centuries. The latest that these people, existed is sometime in the 7th Century BCE, almost two centuries before Herodotus starts using the word to describe the region. What happened then? Well, that is when Nebuchadnezzar came in with the Babylonian army and destroyed the First Temple. Wanting to make sure that he had uncontested control over the region, he also went through and destroyed the Land of the Philistines.

How do we know that?

Well, in recent years, there have been new archaeological finds that have helped increase our knowledge about the region you are referring to as Philistia/Palestine. Here is a link to a PDF of an article written on the subject. ).

One of the things you should realize is that this region was not a united region. In fact, when Nebuchadnezzar came to put down the challenge to his authority, he was not dealing with a unified state. He was dealing with several entities that I will call city-states (that term may be scholarly inaccurate). He was not putting down a rebellion by the king of the Philistines. He was putting down a rebellion by the king of Ashkelon.

That means that there was no unified “Philistia”. The most the archeology supports for the extent of Ashkelon’s reach was the city itself and two small villages near the walls. Ahskelon, in a quick review of the literature, seems to be the most studied of the five city-states identified as Philistines.

An interesting thing though, there is no evidence as to what they themselves called themselves. The name comes from the culture and the people who survived: the Jews.

Now remember how I mentioned that the Romans got the word from the Greeks? The Greeks used the word. But they did not always use it to mean the same thing. Sometimes, they meant it to refer to a region. Sometimes they meant it to refer to a people. Often times, the two did not correspond. In fact there is evidence that the use of the name “Palestine” by Herodotus and other Greeks was not meant to denote the land of the Philistines. They also used it as a pun. He was using it to refer to what Jews call Eretz Yisrael.

How do we know this? Well Herodotus, who apparently travelled to the region, recounts how the men there were circumcised. Guess which people in that region practice circumcision? The Jews. Guess which people did not practice circumcision? Pretty much everyone else who was not Jewish or Egyptian.

Herodotus writes in The History

“The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine acknowledge that they learned the custom from the Egyptians, and the Syrians of the valleys of the Thermodon and the Parthenius, as well as their neighbors the Macrones, say that they learned it lately from the Colchians. These are the only nations that circumcise, and it is seen that they do just as the Egyptians”

Who are the Syrians of Palestine? Well, they’re not Philistines. They’re not Falastines. They’re Jews, who around this time would have been known as Judahites because they were part of the Province of Judah in the Persian Empire which had conquered the region.. How do we know this? Well, the last time the Phillistines were mentioned prior to this was when

What other evidence do we have that Herodotus meant Palaistine to mean Eretz Yisrael? Well, he never calls it the Land of the Philistines for one. For another, we need to look at the meaning of the Yisrael or we would say it in English in modern times, Israel. Israel means “wrestling with G-d” or “wrestler with G-d”. What was the word Herodotus would have used for wrestling? The word is “palaistês”. Wow, that’s really close to the what Herodotus named the region in his writing, Palaistinê.

So is it more likely that Herodotus translated the name for the region for the people who lost in the conflict between the Jews and the Philistines. Or is it more probable that he named the region in his works after the hero who wrestled a god (i.e. Jacob) and spawned the people who still inhabited the land?

If we look at other texts left to us by the Greeks, we find that other writers were using the same word, Palaistinê, to describe the region, not the nation. Aristotle wrote about the Dead Sea and places it in Palaistinê. A few centuries later, Josephus, who chronicled the First Roman Jewish War, also uses the word Palaistinê to describe the region where the Province of Judea was. There were clearly no “Philistines” there then, only the Jews and other groups that existed. None of them were Phillistines.

So lets see, are you going to believe that a Jewish man captured and enslaved by the Romans is going to call his home country by the name of his people’s enemy? Or is it more likely that he chose to use the Greek word because it meant Israel.

Basically, the rest of your argument that there was a mythical kingdom/country/state of Palestine is bogus. Effectively, the term “Palestine” until the 1960s, was akin to when Americans refer to a collection of states as “The South” or “The Midwest”, or when British speak of “The Midlands”. Both refer to regions of territory where there may be political districts, but which do not identify either a sovereign state, a national grouping, or an ethnicity.

Now, when you give a timeline for your fictitious nation of “Palestine”, you are doing violence to history because you are substituting a modern fantasy for historical evidence.

If you want to try and argue that “Philistines” were native cannanites, you’re going to be sorely mistaken. As noted earlier, the evidence shows that they were probably from the Sea Peoples. Again, how do we know this? Well, we know from the pottery that they left behind. The pottery is generally described as being Myceanean. The alaphabet used by these Sea Peoples have been identified as Myceanean Greek, Linear B.

Then lets consider what the Bible tells us. Even though the Bible has problems as a resource, it is one of the few contemporary texts to a) survive the era and b) have a description of the Philistines. Take the description of Goliath. In 1 Samuel 17, the Bible states

So that would mean Goliath looked like his armor would be similiar to

In case you didn’t know, that’s a Greek hoplite. Warriors from the region of Eretz Yisrael did not wear the type of armor Goliath is reported to have worn. Arabs certainly never did.

What happened to the Philistines? They disappeared. Their society and culture did not survive the destruction of Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign. Some scholars believe that some of the surviving Philisitines were taken to Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar went home, along with the Jews he took with him. The Jewish people survived Babylonian captivity and reclaimed their land. The Philistines did not.

Their region ceased to exist. New people came in to fill the void left by the Babylonians. Ashkelon was never a part of the Hasmonean or Herodian Jewish kingdoms of Israel. However, under the Romans and Greeks, it was made part of Syria.

Going back to where this started, when Emperor Hadrian (May G-d grind his bones) attempted to destroy the Jewish link to Eretz Yisrael, he inadvertently renamed Judah, Syria Palaestina... Syria The Land of Wrestler with G-d.... Syria Israel.

TL/DR version: Palestine means Israel.

#there_was_no_Palestine

45 notes · View notes