#muslims might kill you for being gay but Jewish people might be MEAN to you because of it actually 🤓

[radykalny-feminizm]

Muslims, Jews and Christians all have the same god btw, same base book too. An Orthodox Jew will shame gay people as fast as the other two will.

“The book of Vayikra is traditionally regarded as classifying sexual intercourse between males as a to'eivah (something abhorred or detested) that can be subject to capital punishment by the current Sanhedrin under halakha (Jewish law)”

Most of the religions are homophobic, but there is only one religion in the name of which homosexuality is punished with death nowadays. And guess what, it isn't Judaism.

[ayin-me-yesh]

There are Jews in Ukraine. Yes, Jews besides Zelensky.

(There should actually be a LOT of Jews in Ukraine. There would be today if it weren't for the pogroms where Jewish people and other vulnerable groups in what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland were targeted with mass violence by mostly Russian and Ukrainian antisemites. Or if the Holocaust, in which Eastern European fascists and white supremacists collaborated with German Nazis to round up and kill their Jewish, Romani, and other marginalized neighbours, hadn't happened. Nonetheless, there are still Jews today in Ukraine. Despite it all.)

There are also Muslims in Ukraine. And Romani people. And many, many other vulnerable, marginalized Ukrainians.

These Ukrainians are also caught in a war zone.

Ukrainians who decide to join Nazi organisations to fight the Russians, at bare minimum, are willing to throw those neighbours under the bus for their own perceived benefit. It doesn't really matter if they're ideologically committed to Nazism anymore than it mattered if Nazi collaborators were.

If that seems unfair, you may be getting caught up in ethnonationalist propaganda.

Again, Ukrainian Jews are also Ukrainians. Romani Ukrainian are Ukrainians. They are also being shelled. Their neighbours are joining organisations emblazoned with symbols of their genocide. For what? To protect THEM? Their fellow countrymen?

What the hell kind of "free Ukraine" will they build with their Nazi imagery and Nazi slogans? What kind of "free Ukraine" would the Ukrainian government build arm and arm with Nazis?

Maybe Zelensky feels safe because he thinks they mean those other Jews this time. The Chasidic Jews. Or the socialist Jews. Or the gay and trans Jews. Or the Russian Jewish immigrants. Or the Jews who haven't bought into reactionary nationalism so hard that they're willing to applaud Nazis if it might help ensure their borders.

Maybe he feels safe because he thinks they mean other minorities entirely. The Muslim Ukrainians. The Romani Ukrainians. The Black Ukrainians.

Maybe he's right. Maybe the Ukraine he'll build hand in hand with Nazis will be a Ukraine where he is free to stand proud on top of the bones of "those people" just as the pogromists and the Czarists and the Nazi collaborators would have once stood on his bones.

People like him can go fuck themselves. Ukrainian (and Russian and all other) Nazis can go fuck themselves.

No one deserves to live in a war zone, and no one deserves their neighbours and their government in that war zone parading symbols of their deaths in the names of exclusionary nationalism.

[shivology]

RE my last repost ... the reason why white liberals tend to romanticize islam and judaism comes down to two things methinks

a. STILL not seeing muslim and jewish communities as human beings. making sweeping assumptions about a group of people is always stupid even if these sweeping assumptions are "positive". like, we are human beings lol. sometimes we are shitty! respecting someone's inherent personhood doesn't mean they're always good people. and it's still dehumanizing, it's just dehumanizingly making you feel like you're doing something lol. it also allows shitty muslims and shitty jewish people to get away with shitty things. overcorrecting because you don't want to seem like a bigot is fucking... stupid, lmao. motherfuckers will say shit like "omg u guys we can't ask muslims to not hate gay people, its disrespectful to them :/" like, what, are we so stupid and barbaric that we cannot possibly be asked to adhere to your Regular People moral code? do you think you have to hold my hand into not hatecriming a dude? boo fucking hooooo. also no offense (full offense) if someone believes their religion allows them to oppress other people, like, if THIS is what they take away from their holy text, then maybe... they are simply just a shitty person? they are a shitty person who also shouldn't live in fear of some fucking white supremacist cunt yanking their hijab off their head like???

b. inherent misunderstanding of power dynamics and how they function in society. muslims and jewish people in europe and the us/canada are a religious minority and often though not always are racialized -> ie they're an oppressed group. people have used religion to oppress minorities since like ever since they created the concept of religion lol. this is neither new nor special. but as it so happens, antisemitism and islamophobia is deeply rooted in western society in a way that affects the lives of jewish ppl and muslims every day. However! in muslim majority countries, for example, muslims are the oppressor. in ways identical to how christians are the oppressor in the west lol. like, in egypt, for example, like 15% of the population is christian. every one else is Presumed to be muslim. (egyptian jews are SO badly persecuted that they have to say they're muslim or christian on their ID because they might actually get fucking hatecrimed OR KILLED for being jewish !! and if you say you're atheist you may literally get fucking killed lol 🤩) and you'll find this shit in nearly every muslim majority country just as you find it in fuckass islamphobic racist america! does this mean ALL muslims are antisemitic bigoted pieces of shit? No but SOME sure fucking are! it just so happens, that in this specific region, the people who are in power, the people who have the resources and social power to oppress others, are muslim. it is so insanely eurocentric to think that muslims are always uwu victims uwu. and you know what's fucking funny? christian minorities in the SWANA region are nothing like, i don't know, catholics in france. diaspora muslims are nothing like the fucking taliban. you don't tend to see verses about christian supremacy in SWANA christians, just as you don't tend to see bigoted verses repeated by diaspora muslims. religion tends to manifest in peaceful "wholesome" ways when you're disenfranchised as a survival tactic because you gotta be on your best behavior baby you can't oppress people here! you cannot afford to alienate (looks at scrambled writing on hand) women or gay people. people have and will use religion as a tool and weapon to be relevant and stay in power but context is fucking keyyyyyy

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

See here's the funny thing you keep putting words in my mouth which is even funnier every time you post. Which is the only reason I'm even still interacting with you.

1. I did not say nor assess that all Muslims are barbaric. I did however state that many Muslims abide by the rules of their religious text. Specifically the Quran and Hadith both of which are very adamant about executing Jews.

2. I did define zionism. According to most people who are Jewish who are not indoctrinated into leftist ideologies. Which is that Israel has the right to self-determination. And that it has a right to exist. Neither of which I see an issue with.

3. You say I can't define self-defense but I'm pretty sure retaliation against killing 1700 people and trying to take out the terrorist cell that did so qualifies as self-defense. Maybe not to you but 99% of sane human beings on Earth would probably agree to that.

4. I say Neo Nazi because you literally ascribe to that level of rhetoric. It isn't me jumping the gun, it's me pointing out that you have a warped view of what the word Zionism actually means. What's more you think that Zionism is a bad thing when I listed the understood definition in number two. And if you view it as a bad thing the question then becomes something different entirely.

In short it's not a lack of things to call you. Because I don't use the term Nazi or Neo-Nazi loosely. The way that you describe Israel is the exact same way neo-nazis and Nazis did and do still to this day. Which is that they are propagandizing the whole world and they are crazy puppet Masters destroying everything. Which while you might not have said out right you have very much inferred that is what you believe. Because the last time we talked you basically made out like Hamas did not put out their own propaganda. And I can literally go back to the posts when I said that and you never addressed it because of course you didn't.

Because again you are dishonest. If I call you a Neo-Nazi it's because you are acting like a Neo-Nazi. Because your definition of Zionism very much aligns with the Nazi rhetoric version of it. Which is something we ran across last time we talked where I defined things and then you claimed that I didn't because you didn't read you didn't care you're only existence here relies on your ability to just outright lie and misrepresent what I'm saying. Which doesn't shock me. Three bans later an account hopping because you sound like a lunatic. Color me shocked.

And while I'm not of the faith and haven't been for a number of years I do truly mean this. I hope that you make yourself right with God one day. Because it very much seems like not only have you not the amount of active hatred you have in your heart towards a certain group of people is frankly depressing. I do not subscribe to this everyone I hate is a Nazi b*******. If I'm putting a label upon you it is because you are exhibiting traits very clearly of that label. Because it is actually sad to me that you think literally everything that a specific country says is all 100% propaganda and that the existence of that country is 100% propaganda. Meanwhile ignoring the propaganda that comes out of literally every other country.

So this suggestion that I am calling Muslims barbaric is stupid. It is a factual statement that under Islam a lot of the world has generally suffered. Yes, other faiths have had similar issues. But it bothers me the people like yourself tend to turn a blind eye towards atrocities committed by Islam which is why I assumed you were a leftist. Because it is normally Neo progressives that go out of their way to whitewash history in regards to what several different types of groups of people have done to other groups of people. I mean let's look shall we. In Gaza a region that is primarily made up of Muslims you can get a 10-year prison sentence for being gay. Several Middle Eastern countries have a trend of throwing gay people off of buildings for sport. Castrating women's genitalia so that they cannot enjoy sex. Stoning women to death for blasphemy reasons. And the list of actual humanitarian atrocities continues.

Is that me saying that most or all Muslims are bad or barbaric? Absolutely not. Because it's not most and it's not all it is a large chunk of however. And note here how I said Muslims not Arabs. Because Islam is extremely far from a religion of peace. Yes there are very very moderate versions of it that exist that are not awful. And there are progressive Muslims who would like to see certain parts of their faith go the way of the Old testament as it were.

Yet somehow people keep sliding into the comments of these posts and reblogging as if I'm saying that all Muslims are bad. I'm sorry but pointing out objective fact is not calling all of an entire group of anyone evil or bad. Intention also matters though. And my intention has never at any point been to smear all of Islam or all Muslims. However you and your anarchist buddies have taken the bad faith argument that I am condemning all of them. When I have not said such.

However, I have pointed at the fact that is a statistical truth according to several metrics that the Jewish population and most of the Middle Eastern countries in the area who are predominantly Muslim have either plummeted to nothing or almost nothing. And we know for a fact that it is because of Jewish people fleeing those areas due to threat to their lives or those countries purging the Jews that lived there.

That having been the case, it makes sense very much so that if Israel was to just be dissolved that a repeat of what happened in all of those countries would then happen again. Because at least as far as gazing citizens are concerned they have been indoctrinated by Hamas for years, to Martyr themselves to murder Jews. And many such individuals have come forth saying as such. And yet you believe that this is just some fight against Israel as a country rather than what it actually is which is a radical sect of Islam trying to get rid of Jews.

Which again, I honestly can't tell whether you're far left or far right because you identity politics protect the hell out of Islam and hand wave away all of their atrocities while saying that Israel needs to be removed from the face of the earth. Because while you certainly did not say that verbatim that was definitely the implication. And you can say that I am putting words in your mouth but the implication is very clear. You're certainly not hiding how you feel about the matter. Because the last time we talked to you very much said something along the lines of Israel shouldn't exist.

At which point in time we had a very similar conversation to this and you did not listen. A instance in which one of the people who I respected despite being an anarchist called me a right-wing warhawk who hated Muslims. Which is why I cannot tell what side of the political spectrum you're on all I know is that you are a radical sect of that spectrum. Because you have the same functional reaction Neo progressives have when it comes to criticism. Which is that of everyone I hate is my enemy in every way and every member of any of them are bad. I have not even endorsed the idea of sending money or weapons to Israel at all in any post that I've made. I have just stated fact as to The Purge from Middle Eastern countries and the fact that they are retaliating against a force that wants to kill more of them which is in fact self-defense. What's more Hamas had to more than half the numbers of supposedly dead because they've been propagandizing as much as or more than Israel. Hamas has been bombing the country for literally years. one of the leaders of Hamas actually several who are now some of the richest people on Earth because the aid that was supposed to be going to the people who live in Gaza ended up just in the hands of Hamas.

Last time you claimed you believe Hamas was in the wrong but you really didn't care much to elaborate leading me to understandably believe you don't actually condemn what they did. Specifically because of who died. So if I didn't know any better I have three fundamental potentialities for who you are as a person. 1) You are a far leftist who is protecting and whitewashing the history of Islam because it is your duty to do so as a anarchist knee of aggressive. 2) you are a far right Neo-Nazi who believes conspiracy theories about Jewish people and about Israel. 3) you are Middle Eastern or Islamic and therefore have a vested interest in seeing Israel wiped from the map.

The last option which is one that I didn't list prior or even number is that you're just a lunatic. And having a person confirmed to me that you've been banned three times mean that you've committed TOS offenses enough to have gotten banned. Which if I didn't know any better I would probably say it's from violent rhetoric. I have said my piece, so feel free to insert whatever you want to but I'm not going to respond to you a third time. In all honesty you are dishonest and you have misrepresented me more than enough. The only names that I have called you are ones that I believed fit given their actual definitions not whatever you want them to mean. Because unlike you I don't use the loosest definition of a word or some cult-like understanding of a word to label people. Again, I hope one day you find God and make yourself right with him. And that's not me telling you to screw off. That is me honestly hoping you find a way to better yourself. Because it's pretty clear to me you are not doing well.

Just so we’re clear: taking a neutral position in a genocide is taking the side of genocide.

Just so we're clear

The only people attempting a genocide is Hamas. If Israel wanted Gaza "genocided" they could quite literally glass it over night. It and all the people there would be gone over night.

So kindly stop sucking down propaganda like you suck dick. No one's gonna give you a trophy.

[butch-bakugo]

Thats it, im talking about the perisexist aka intersexphobic side of terfs that needs to be addressed more often.

Like terfs fucking hate drag and call anyone, trans or cis, male or female, participating in it "sexual perverts" for wanting to expose children to it but claim you'll die a thousand deaths for gnc women? Bs. Drag is just gender nonconformity on fuckin steroids and it's not inherently sexual. Like why is a woman in a suit only ok to you if she walks around stateing that she is a woman but not ok if she dosent? Like yall are so trigger happy, you shoot at cis butch lesbians with short blue hair who arent actively talking about womanhood and vaginas and accuse her of being an evil tranny whose either a traitor to her fellow woman or a "tim" trying to identify as woman and making a mockery of gnc women.

Yall are so caught up on fuckin genitalia that you dont see the numerous poc cultures, non-christian religions, gnc people and intersex people you drown in your wake who were never aginest feminism but are too "trans-similar" for you to chill tf out. Ive had people tell me im "obviously a non-passing trans woman" just because im intersex with a beard.

Every single time ive addressed intersex people who can not, no matter how much you try, be sorted into male or female, ive been told we dont matter. Intersex people DO MATTER. Your not helping anyone but perisex, hormonally stable cis white women. Hormonally intersex afabs arnt gonna fucking want you, your telling them they dont matter. Physically intersex people raised as women arnt gonna want you, your telling them they dont fucking matter. Hyperandrogonious cis women dont want shit to do with you because your already accusing her of "clearly being a trans woman" because she can naturally grow a beard. The only femininity and women who benefit from terf shit are cis white gc perisex women.

Im not gonna throw away my native culture's gender variance for some white terf just because most white cultures are patriarchal. Im not gonna throw out my genderfluid religious practices for some catholic raised "anti-theist" terf who is one sentence away from saying islamophobic and anti-Semitic slurs just because she believes all muslims and jewish people are sexist and follow the sexist portions of their holy text.

I mean fuck, ive seen terfs advocate for hormonally intersex women to TAKE ESTROGEN so they look less "male" and act less "male". Ive seen them advocate for intersex (mostly afab) babies with intersex genitalia to go through Fgm, a thing they VEHEMENTLY hate just so shes more "female" and can fit their boxes better. Ive seen them say that testosterone makes you inherently violent and angry without dareing to see the actual fucking medical evidence that thats entirely untrue. Ive seen them adovocate for putting 10 year old sons of female rape victims out of shelters because "hes a man at that point" and "other women's safety comes first".... Over a hypothetical and soon to be hypothermic 10 year old boy. Some of them fully and shamelessly base their ideology around genuinely killing all men and male fetuses like... Fuck dude. I think you might need some therapy. Like i get feeling that way, im a victim of many men in my life and if i could choose a world where i can only interact with everyone but cis men, id choose it but im not advocating for the complete genocide of an entire group of people.

The way they talk about trans people smells all to familiar to any group thats gone through genocide and governmental oppression. Its similar to gay people, disabled people, women, poc, non-christians, everyone can see abit of the bigotry in their argument they see in their own oppressors and that should be a real big flashing sign that maybe terfism... Isnt the way to go. When i explain to people that radical feminism can be trans inclusive and its simply and active and deeper form of feminism, i get laughed at by both sides but its true. Tirfs do exist and they include trans and intersex and nonbinary people of all kinds and yes, that includes amabs and many progressives today would fall under that label. But heres the thing, modern day and previous forms of feminism in america have always benefited white cishet women. Susan b fucking anthony supported slavery and did not advocate for black women to be able to vote. Anti-gender variance ignores many poc cultures rich and accepting histories of transgenderism, nonbinarism and intersexuality. So many "pinnicles of feminism" that terfs hold up were racist or homophobic or anti-Semitic. Trans, nonbinary and intersex people are just white cis feminism's shiny new chew toy and they will get bored and pick a new target maybe 10 years from now. Probably disabled people.

I understand the anger many terfs carry but sympathy isnt needed here. Many of them actively ignore actual fact and relative understanding towards anything that questions their veiws and they are HAPPY to uplift racists and anti-semites and homophobes(See jk rowling) as long as their anti-trans messages are still singing. Someone who partners with the enemy to hurt others despite the enemy also supporting the things they supposedly advocate againest has no loyalty or shame. They are happy as long as they have a platform. Terfs would go on fox fucking news watching tucker carlson chuckle under his breath at their feminism and "pro-same sex attraction" ideology as long as they get that soundbite of a feminist not supporting trans pple to make all feminists, trans people and gay pple look fucking stupid.

Jk rowling isnt your fucking friend. Shes a mirror held up to YOUR community. One ive heard echos of sedmients made from outside it being ignored. Your litterally femcels. Ive seen terfs get upset at the ableism and racism within their own community thats upheld by white neurotypical women get utterly ignored. I have so many screenshots of white terfs saying the n word its not even funny yet when a tranny like me shows you evidence of the underlying racism in anti-trans/nonbinary rhetoric, you claim that theirs poc terfs. Ive seen white terfs call me a teepee n****r because i said native american people respected all genders and werent inherently patriarchal. Ive seen white terfs advocate for full on ETHNIC FUCKING CLEANSING of certain poc cultures because they had some patriarchal portions. BRUH. If your scrambling to find some crumb in your community to excuse its actions and cover up the evil everyone already pointed out, you should do some introspection into what your supporting.

Terfs dont even see the humanity in trans people or intersex people. Quoting a jewish youtuber talking about oppression he faced after trump endorsed the nazis in south carolina and said that jewish people and nazis should come to a compromise "when one side will never be happy unless their opposition is completely erraticated, there is no compromise. They simply wont stop until they are all dead or 'rehabilitated'. There is no conversation, there is only the eradication of the victims or the offending group.". Terfs are advocating for trans genocide and detranstion of those who remain. They shrink our numbers to deny us humanity and when they arnt celebrating the high trans suicide statistic, they are minimising it. They are no different from holocaust deniers, they just dont have as much support and the more of their own stances they are willing to let go of to take advantage of their shared opinions with alt-right and fascist platforms, the more their feminist and gay rights mask slip off to reveal the racist, antisemitic and hate filled rot underneath.

[totallyparisfernsby]

The Declaration of Independence was written on the idea that the government should be responsible for taking care of citizens or give them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (remember that old thing? The thing that started this mess of a country?), which is based off the saying "life, liberty and property," but Thomas Jefferson decided to change it to the "pursuit of happiness" because owning property wasn't quite as big of a deal when you were a white colonist in the early colonization of Northish America.

Thomas, my man, was calling out the British government for not giving people the basic things they needed to survive or not leaving them enough money to survive. He was saying, guys, this isn't right. the government should be making sure that we're first, not their money (or whatever colonists were upset with Britain about that particular Thursday afternoon). He was pointing out that the government needed to put their people first, making sure they had what they needed, and giving them the chance to pursue happiness, which included religion and a chance to leave if they were unhappy (guns in this case).

Flash forward to today. Millenials can't pursue happiness when they're working two to three minimum wage eight hour a day jobs to make ends meet. They can't buy property, and they're just struggling to get by. Gen Zers in school can't pursue happiness while constantly fearing for their lives of getting shot. Immigrants can't pursue happiness when they can barely get their hands on a green card, let alone a citizenship. Black people? They can't pursue happiness when any second they can be shot by people who are supposed to protect them and have seen it happen to people they know, even if they aren't doing anything wrong. Trans people? Their rights are barely protected. Gay people? Barely got the right to marry. They're still getting killed by biggots, along with the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. Anyone who isn't a Christian are constantly looked down on even though this country was built on the idea that people should be free to worship what and who they want. Muslims are scoffed at in the streets and always are labelled as terrorists, along with anyone with skin that's too dark. Even Jewish people are getting shot in their place of worship. Women don't have full control over their lives. They're still being raped in the streets, and a life changing decision is based on crusty old white men and a lucky catch with a pregnancy test and being in the right state. People who have minds are sort of scared of climate change and our damage to the earth. Remember people without perfect immune systems, by which I mean literally everyone? Not everyone can afford to go to the doctor/hospital and are literally dying. There are countless more of us who are stuck in this country, constantly being told that we'll never make it and constantly hiding just so we don't have a disadvantage. This American Dream? It's only benefiting the ones who got in and made it hard to get it to anyone they don't like.

Who knows whether or not the founding fathers would look down on us giving black people full rights. They're dead and we can't ask them yet. They wrote that the government should keep it's people safe and give them what they need to survive. Our government needs to step up, not literally put our lives at risk. The pursuit of happiness includes being able to work a minimum wage job and care for your family, even without a degree. It also means college that everyone should have access to, not just people with money or who want to sell their souls. This should be a government of people, literally why it was created, not companies. That means it gives us the space to live our lives, not work for a corporation as a faceless blur with a printed name tag.

Right now, it's like people don't even realize what a disadvantage they're at. And, there's too many things that need changing for just me to fix and too many people who'd assassinate me for trying to make a change in this fuc*ed country. (Also, I really want to move to literal hell on earth but can you blame me? After this nightmare, that might be fun) This is a democracy, which means that it's our government, which means that the majority of the population that's going to be alive in twenty years shouldn't have to take the fall of the mistakes this misguided people who are too close minded to consider anything else. It's our government, or supposed to be. So maybe we shouldn't be wasting our time complying. After all, deep down, you guys are all mortal, and you shouldn't have to give your life to this group of people who literally could raise a family on a high school education, think depression is a fad, and other people's lives are just casualties in their story. Let's not make it about [insert generic white name from sixty years ago]'s Guide to Color Coding, Sexuality Coding, Gender Coding, and Perfecting Your DIY Government. It's our story, the people's.

[the-gay-cryptid]

On Religion

As some of you know, I attend a catholic school and have done so since I was the tender, gullible, impressionable age of 5. I was also, of course, raised catholic. Which, for those of you spared the experience, should know means “I grew up catholic but hated it and I’m still not comfortable outright saying I’m not anymore because I feel guilty.”

I don’t often talk about religion here, but I’ve been rereading The Poison Wood Bible for school (fantastic book by the way, easily one of my favorites I’ve ever read) and it’s really stirs up my emotions surrounding my own religious upbringing, so here we go.

Until I was in the fifth grade, I had no idea religions outside of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim existed. I was also taught that Muslims were savage, oppressive, violent people and the all Muslims wanted to kill everyone who wasn’t Muslim. So. Just to give you perspective. I was also led to believe that Jewish people weren’t as bad, but they were just misguided and stuck in the past.

Around seventh grade, I began to suspect I was gay. Thankfully I’d become somewhat desensitized to that good old catholic guilt by having it beat into my very being since before I comprehended object permanence. But I didn’t want God to hate me, so I decided I had a crush on this boy. He was nice to me and we liked the same shows and he had a smart ass sort of attitude towards the less mature boys that I appreciated. So obviously since I enjoyed this boy’s company I must’ve liked him.

But I was still curious about my sexuality in relation to my religion. So I took every opportunity to ask about it in “religion” class. Despite the name, we only talked about The One True Religion. I got different answers depending on which teacher I asked.

Senora Baskin, our Spanish teacher who spoke shitty Spanish and was obsessed with Mexican culture and said it saved her from getting an abortion, told me that the pope said being gay wasn’t a sin, just being in a gay relationship. So I could be gay, but I could never date, get married, or even kiss a girl.

Mrs. Shaver said that gays go to hell. She also told a kid whose dog had died that all dogs go to hell because animals don’t have souls. She also told me I’d go to hell for listening to music with cuss words in it. Imagine that: a class of kids going through their edgy phase, listening to MCR and other punk bands of varying quality being told they were going to hell. I didn’t much value Mrs. Shaver’s opinions anyway.

Mr. Miller sort of stuttered a moment, then told me that he wasn’t actually allowed to talk about that. That’s when I learned catholic schools usually don’t talk about the shit the church is against. We don’t get to debate gay marriage, abortions, or the death penalty. We are not supposed to think critically or form our own opinions, because the opinions of a higher organization should replace our own feelings.

I eventually asked my mom. She told me about a gay couple she was friends with. They were married, but not in the eyes of the church. So any time they had sex, they had to go to confession and apologize for sex outside of wedlock. I didn’t like that solution either.

In eighth grade i sort of just shrugged and said “well. Guess I’m gay then.” I made an effort to bring it up in class more. Gay rights, not being gay. I’d never tell anyone, that would be horrible! I did come out to a few of my close friends, mainly because i realized I really wanted to kiss my best friend.

Freshman year, my religion problem amped itself up. The rhetoric was all the same. I was hearing the same lessons over and over and over again. I’d heard the same things since I was five, just in increasingly complex terms. I finally admitted my serious issues with my religion. My mom told me I didn’t have to be Catholic. I could be Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Jewish, even Muslim. I just couldn’t be polytheistic or Mormon. I decided that it wasn’t worth fighting about and didn’t bother telling her I wasn’t sure I believed in an anything. The only thing that would hurt her more than me not being christian, would be me being an atheist.

Religion had been important to her when she was little. She’d been bullied mercilessly, abused by her older brother, had a rocky relationship with her step father. On church retreats, she found camaraderie and comfort. It’s where she met her best friend. They’re still friends, and seeing them together they might as well still be stupid teenagers who don’t need anything but each other.

Sophomore year, I came out to my whole family as gay. It was good. I also met the best religion teacher ever: Mrs. Khouzam. She is, to this day, one of my favorite teachers I’ve ever had. There was Mrs. Rae, who lent me more mature books and encouraged my love of writing, and Mrs. Fava, who taught me that I was allowed to have any opinion I wanted, but it had to be backed by facts rather than a person’s skin or the opinions of my parents. Mrs. Khouzam loved God unconditionally. And she loved us.

She was the Mother Mary incarnate, and I loved her with my whole heart. She reminded me of the paintings of women who cradled ragged men like their children. She just exudes mother. Because of her, I began to love my religion again.

Then junior year that was ruined.

Mrs. Langomez was a short, stout woman from the Philippines who spoke too softly and disregarded our opinions with a quiet reminder of Jesus. We wrote journal reflections in her class, and I’d long since abandoned giving the vague “I love Jesus” shit for opinion questions on my work. I told her out right that I had serious issues with Catholicism and that I was gay. She only wrote on my paper that she glad my family accepted me.

Then it went to absolute shit. I sat in my desk on the front row and watched this woman I had only rolled my eyes at and joked about with my classmates give a 40 minute power point presentation on why homosexuality was a sin. She described how god designed men and women to love each other, and since gays couldn’t procreate in the normal way, they were incapable of real love. Being gay damaged one’s soul and relationship with god. She said there were special religious retreats for gay people to strengthen their relationship with god and overcome their gay urges. 

I was..horrified. Humiliated. Furious. Hurt. I just sat there, staring at the board with my fists and jaw clenched. I glared at her. I ignored her as I left. My classmates snickered at how stupid she was. I joked that I wanted to punch her and we laughed. It was their quiet way of saying they didn’t agree with her.

I shook the whole way to lunch and explained what had happened to the lower class men I ate with. And like a dam breaking, I felt that horrible weight in my chest. I grabbed a friend’s water bottle, trying to drown my crying before it could rise. I shook and shuddered and bit my lip and tried everything I could to stay steady. A few classmates sat with me and held my shoulders and told me Langomez was stupid. I admitted it was the first time I’d ever faced someone who so clearly hated me on the basis of my sexuality.

I couldn’t stand to stay there, so I left for the office with my backpack and told them I needed to go home. I’d already texted my dad. The principal saw me crying and asked if something had happened. Mrs. Langomez stood at the printer, half watching this. I told the principal I was fine and just needed to go.

I cried the whole way home. My mom called the principal and told her why I’d been so upset. I sent her an email later that night, explaining in better words than I’d be able to say, that it had been gut wrenching to sit somewhere I’d thought was safe, and be told in textbook language that I was a sinner and a perversion and incapable of love. I was promised an apology from Langomez that I never got.

It’s true that there are Catholics like Mrs. Khouzam. People who love unconditionally. But there are Langomez too. Hateful people. And they don’t all yell and scream. Sometimes they’re quiet and passive aggressive and pity you for being gay. And I couldn’t let that go. I was tired of the conflicting rhetoric. I was exhausted of grappling with god.

So senior year came. Langomez had moved to Japan with her husband in the military. My current teacher is a young woman who graduated from my high school in 2013. I don’t ever hide my sexuality. The whole school knows. We don’t talk about homosexuality in her class, because senior year theology is about vocations.

But I stopped taking communion. It felt horrible to cross my arms over my chest after so many years of cupping them in front of me. I nearly had an anxiety attack as I walked down the aisle. I imagined god striking me down then and there.

I only tell people I was raised catholic now. I once told my current theology teacher that my relationship with Catholicism felt like an abusive one. I was dragged up and down. I was shamed and ridiculed. I was dismissed and ignored. I don’t give a damn if not all Catholics are like that. I’m done having to take that gamble every time I meet one.

I’m not an atheist at least, which makes my mom happy. I believe in a Something. Maybe a polytheistic Something. I’ll figure it out when I’m somewhere I can learn it outside the context of catholic propaganda.

[livefromtheelephantsfoot]

Sorry for the long post, but I'd appreciate it if you would take a look.

I wanted to make a post about what happened this morning in Pittsburgh. I can't really add to what you can easily look up-- I don't have new facts or relevant information or anything like that (if I did I'd tell the police or call a news station). I don't even live in Pennsylvania, and I don't know anyone who goes to that synagogue. To most people, it would seem like I have no connection to this horrific tragedy, this terrible faraway misery, that happened in someone else's world, to someone else's loved ones. But it hit hard. Because it always hits hard. Because I'm Jewish. Because it could happen to my synagogue. Because we have to have extra security on the high holy days. Because we always wear our Stars of David small enough to tuck them into our shirts if we find ourselves in the wrong company. Because there's a plaque in one of our hallways that says Never Forget, and it's not talking about the destruction if the temples that we still fast for every year, or the Shoah (our word for the Holocaust) that our oldest members still only talk about in whispers because they still remember when they were small, or any other giant faraway tragedy I don't have to think about because I don't live in a world where these things happen, because I'm just far removed enough to not be scared of things my parents are. That plaque refers to the time about twenty years ago when someone set our congregation on fire, something I still don't know the details of because the hurt burns too close to our hearts to talk about yet. And if this hurt sounds familiar to those of you who are not Jews it's because you know it too. For LGBT people, we feel it whenever we hear another report of a gay or pan or ace or trans kid killing themselves because they couldn't feel welcome, or a murder like that of Matthew Shepard, whose ashes were finally laid to rest yesterday after having been murdered twenty years ago this month. Or with Nikki Enriquez, a Latina woman who in September became the 21st trans person to be murdered in 2018. Maybe you're reminded of the Pulse nightclub shooting. If you're a black or brown person, you felt that hurt for Nia Wilson, stabbed earlier this year. Along with Robert Smith, Charles Roundtree, Umberto Sanchez Ramoz, Samuel Morris, Diamonte Riviore, and LaJuana Philips, all shot by police THIS MONTH. If you're Muslim, you know the hurt because of the Chapel Hill shooting in 2015, or the reports everywhere of women being harassed and attacked for wearing hijabs, burquas, or niquabs, like what happened in Portland. We all know that pain. This post isn't aimed at minorities, not really, because if I've gotten my point across ok, you know what I'm talking about. You get what I mean. This post is for white people mostly, white-cis-het-christian-non-immigrant men, more specifically. Those who watch tragedies unfold on the news and feel separated, who don't understand privilege, who are confused at why these things seem to hit their friends so much harder. I wrote this so it might make a little more sense. Because when I get news alerts that list the casualties, that tell me whether or not the suspect is in custody or if they know why he did it or if he's been posting antisemitic things on Facebook, while I'm thinking about Tree of Life, and about that congregation and those victims and what their families must be going through, I'm not just thinking about them. I'm thinking about my synagogue, and the fire we don't talk about, and how the festering hatred that exploded out of that man's gun this morning isn't contained in Pittsburgh. It isn't someone else's problem. Every once and a while in my town, there are reports of vandalized gravestones, so we have regular groups that go to take care of our little fenced-in plot at the cemetery. I went once. When a Jew dies, we put small rocks instead of flowers on their graves because flowers die quickly, but rocks can last forever. Flowers forget. We don't.

[bijoumikhawal]

Writing and Recasting for Five Years

Writers

Writers Auditions: CLOSED. Additions to the writing team will be announced on August 13th.

Recasting

Recasts: OPEN. Recasts are scheduled to close November 14th, and will be pushed back two weeks if more time is needed.

Additional Info on Recasts:

• Why are you recasting? 

Some actors are either too busy, were mainly selected because they were the only ones to audition for certain parts, or do not truly reflect the racial, ethnic, or other backgrounds of various characters. At the time of casting I was inexperienced and young, and now want to be better in how I conduct my affairs when writing characters that aren't apart of my particular minority groups.

• What does that mean for me?

It means that I would greatly prefer it if white voice actors didn't audition for non white roles, and will not consider auditions of white VAs for non white roles, as well as cis actors for transgender or otherwise gender variant roles. 

• You've had years to write this podcast, why isn't it up?

My computer broke last winter, meaning we couldn't really edit audio, and due to the school year, a lot of us became less involved in the podcast. Due to this I've spent a lot of time researching things for the podcast and reflecting on choices I made, quite a few of which were hasty and ill informed. 

• how many auditions do you have?

I've had two eligible people contact me expressing interest in auditions, but have not as of yet received any in either my email, or the submissions on the official blog.

Characters being recast:

Bayzli Jancsi Lakatoš

 Gender: cisgender male

 Sexuality: biromantic and ace

A 21 year old Romani Jew that hails from Poland. Is working a 3 year contract under Captain Baker. He is neat and orderly, and while outgoing, is easily tired when dealing with people he doesn't like or know very well. He is known to notice things about others very quickly, and can remember minor comments people have made from years or months prior with near perfect clarity, is a tad self righteous, and does not back down from challenges or insults.

 Voice: young, on the deeper side, has an almost calming quality to it, frequently described as fruity or honeyed, has a Polish accent

Sample voice lines:

  "Oops... I really did not mean to do that, I swear. If you are mad about that, please do not kill me."

"Hey! What about that time you almost got our arms made into jerky?"

Keone Maata

  Gender: mahulani (identifies closer with female than male, AMAB)

   Sexuality: she doesn't know or care

A 17 year old Maori-Kanaka Maoli engineering prodigy from Washington DC. Working a contract, like Bayzli. She prefers to be alone, and spends almost as much time reading on new innovations as she does on making her own.  She gets anxious in large crowds, and cannot stand the smell of chalk. She is highly enthusiastic and persistent when it comes to her personal projects, takes things too personally, and is easily embarrassed. She is mistrustful of others, spiteful, is noted for having a bizarre humor, and makes decisions based on how she feels more so than what others view as logical.

  Voice: a bit raspy, husky, tenor range, has a classically dark voice- think old timey femme fatale actresses, but a bit deeper. 

Sample voice lines:

  "ZHENYA, THERE’S A PANCAKE DRINKING MY BLOOD, GET IT OFF!"

" Yeah, but considering what I haven’t fixed yet it could have been soooo much worse. Now c’mon, I want this pancake off me." 

Hannah Marilou Arrisen

 Gender: aylonit (classically, a type of intersex recognized in Judaism, but she identifies with it as a gender)

 Sexuality: pansexual 

A 18 year old passenger on the Lightning Struck from Harlem, NY. Very proudly black and Jewish. Pisses off everyone with her late night chemistry experiments involving fireworks and explosives. ADHD, bad at prioritizing and making decisions, frequently forgets what she's supposed to be doing, has an idealistic and upbeat worldview. Is notably dismissive of things she doesn't view as important, and is judgemental of those who get in her space. Can talk circles around most people, especially when aided by her brother.

  Voice: high, clear, silvery. Commands attention. 

Sample voice lines:

  "Did- did those pancakes just move?"

"Oh, yeah, that’s a brilliant plan, not like that might not work and go horribly wrong or anything."

Jans Antinous Arrisen

  Gender: transgender male

  Sexuality: gay

A 18 year old pen artist, musician, and aspiring legal consultant from Harlem, NY. Hannah's twin brother. Jans is fearless, vain, compulsive, disorganized, and easy to agitate. He is notably flamboyant, a lover of decadence, logical, confident, and quite charming. His sister has described him as "the personification of an eyebrow waggle and wink". He is intelligent and specializes in convincing or confusing people who he views as potential adversaries. He is anemic from long term radium exposure. 

  Voice: soft spoken, airy, and frequently sing song. Has issues breathing. 

Sample voice lines:

  "Technically, it's not on fire."

"We could- hear me out here- we could eat them."

Captain Florence Aria Baker

Gender: cis female

Sexuality: AroAce

A young black Muslim woman and former military captain. Capitain Baker was discharged after an accident where she lost her arm and most of her unit died. She refuses to speak about the incident, citing trauma, but the truth is much darker than the military would have you believe. She is passionate, no nonsense, hyper viligant, and at times controlling. She has come to hate the military, and is aggressively anti war. She is also notably charming, considerate, and future oriented.

Voice: on the deep side, like Hannah it commands attention

Sample voice lines: “I said set a small fire! This is not small!”

“Okay. There’s a secret room on this ship. That’s… fine. Great.”

Nadia Klara Pasternak (newly up for recast)

Gender: cis female

Sexuality: bisexual

Nadia is an 18 year old, and former gladiator. She has a love of reading and an extensive knowledge of interesting but useless words, and a very good knowledge of weaponry and various fighting styles. She grew up in the Aphrodite province on Mars, under the rule of Baron Semen. She is of Ukrainian-Mongol descent, and is autistic. She tends to avoid people she doesn't know, and often is quiet even around those she does know. She is compassionate towards those she views as misunderstood, and is patient and honest. She takes action quickly and enjoys working with others (hence why she often gets roped into the twins schemes), but is also skeptical and at times introverted. Like Jans, she is vain.

Voice: bubbly, has a soft Ukrainian accent. Doesn't sound like a girl who likes fighting.

Sample voice lines: "How about you lose!"

"Technically it is outwardly digesting you. Like a pineapple!"

What to include in audition: name, age (if comfortable), pronouns, contact information, previous experience (if any), and who you're auditioning for. Send all auditions to @fiveyearsthepodcast via the submission box, or to our email fiveyearsthepodcast@gmail.com. If you can't audition, please do us the favor of spreading the word.

[ruminativerabbi]

Dual Loyalties

I think most of us in the Jewish community take the accusation of “dual loyalty” as a feature specifically of anti-Semitic rhetoric. But the reality is that the insult itself, although always a popular way among anti-Semites to disparage Jewish Americans, has a far more complicated history than taking it “just” as a way of questioning the patriotism of American Jews would make it sound. And the philosophical underpinnings of the idea—the question of whether loyalty to one’s country by definition precludes the possibility of also harboring a deep sense of emotional, financial, or activist involvement in the affairs of some other country—is itself an interesting question to think through.

It is widely understood that the heart cannot love two other persons simultaneously with the exact same level of passion or vigor, and that, as a result, one of the two parties will always be the less loved and one the more no matter how pure one’s original intention to love them both equally well might have been. Indeed, it was the slow insinuation of this idea into our Western consciousness that led to even the most traditional Jews turning away from polygamy despite its scriptural bona fides and instead embracing the monogamous model in marriage. Nor is this just a non-binding instance of a custom falling into gentle desuetude: Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz formally interdicted polygamy in the year 1240—an amazingly daring move in his day in that it actually made (and makes) it forbidden to obey to least one of the 613 commandments according to the simple meaning of the text, which is surely how Scripture meant for it to be observed—and thus does it remain forbidden and not merely out of vogue for Jews even today.

What is true with respect to the love of another person is also widely understood to be true with respect to the love of one’s country. And, indeed, although fidelity to one’s spouse and allegiance to one’s country are hardly each other’s exact counterpart in every single way, there are features that both clearly do—and should—share. To consider the issue from an American vantage point, for example, I think it is entirely fair to say that the love of country that characterizes the patriotic citizen, rooted as it must be in a deep allegiance both specifically to the foundational ideas upon which the republic rests and more generally to the whole American ethos as it has evolved to our day, simply cannot co-exist with that citizen’s same level of allegiance to some other country and to its institutions and foundational ideas.

But does that concept of patriotic monogamy, so to speak, mean that citizens are somehow being untrue to the country of their own citizenship by caring deeply about, and feeling intensely involved in, the affairs of other nations? Is it an act of disloyalty for someone happily married to a loving spouse also to care deeply about other people—about a neighbor suffering from some terrible illness, say, or about a co-worker suddenly in danger of losing his or her home? Who would say it does? And yet the dual-allegiance derogation—with its implication that one cannot be a truly patriotic American if one also cares deeply about the affairs of another country and is emotionally or even spiritually caught up in that country’s affairs of state—continues to surface like an endlessly recurring infection that simply refuses to succumb until it has done the maximum damage possible…to those whose American patriotism it attempts to sully and, paradoxically, also to those who degrade their own allegiance to our nation’s democratic principles by using it to question the patriotism of others. And, yes, this does seem to be more focused on Jewish supporters of Israel than on others: I imagine Irish Americans care more about Ireland than most other Americans do, but I can’t recall anyone accusing them of disloyalty because of it.

Most recently, this has come up in the wake of a comment of Rashida Tlaib, the newly elected member of the House of Representatives from Michigan, who openly and publicly suggested that people backing a series of pro-Israel bills in the House appear to hear to have forgotten “what country they represent.” The implication of that remark, tweeted out to her 280,000 followers on Twitter, is completely clear in its suggestion that any member of the House of Representatives or the Senate who actively and vocally supports Israel cannot be a truly patriotic American and so should not be trusted to serve in the Congress or imagined invariably to have the best interests of American citizens at heart. (The irony that inheres in the fact that Tlaib is both a Palestinian-American and an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, yet presumably does not see herself as unsure what country she represents, went unnoticed only by some. See below.)

The “dual loyalty” mud has been flung at many others as well over the years. The internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans in West Coast concentration camps during the Second World War could only be justified with reference to the fear that, now that war had come, Americans of Japanese descent might reasonably have opted to preference allegiance to their ancestral homeland over loyalty to their adopted one. The 1960 presidential election was marred by opponents of John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, openly wondering if the then-candidate’s true allegiance was to our nation or to the Vatican. There are lots of other examples too, of course. But all have in common the basic notion that caring deeply, personally, and intensely about the security and wellbeing of a foreign state is a form—albeit a minor and unactionable form—of sedition. But is that a reasonable supposition? It is one thing, after all, for the Constitution to require that the President of the United States be a “natural born Citizen,” presumably because of the fear that any citizen who was formerly the citizen of a different country will necessarily harbor in his or her heart the kind of indelible allegiance to that country that would make it impossible to be wholly loyal to this one. When spelled out that clearly, that sounds ridiculous. Or at least to me it does! But to posit that citizens in general, and not specifically those seeking the highest office in the land, are by definition disloyal if they care deeply about the fate or wellbeing of specific other nations strikes me as being infinitely more so.

Two essays published last week spoke directly to this issue and I’d like to recommend them both to you.

Writing on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency website, Andrew Silow-Carroll cited a remark by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis dating back to 1915 in which he could have been addressing himself to Rashida Tlaib directly. “Multiple loyalties,” he wrote, “are objectionable only if they are inconsistent. Every Irish American who contributed towards advancing home rule [i.e., in an Ireland then fighting for its own independence from Britain] was a better man and a better American for the sacrifice he made. Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will likewise be a better man and a better American for doing so.” In other words, caring deeply about an ancestral homeland and feeling a tie of kinship and emotional affinity to its inhabitants is not a sign of disloyalty, much less of sedition, but rather a natural extension of the allegiance we all feel to our extended families. But Silow-Carroll’s comment on that passage is also worth citing: “The Brandeisian notion that ‘multiple loyalties’ make you a better American has guided and justified Jewish activism for Israel even before its founding in 1948. It’s based partly on Brandeis’ theoretical notion that loyalty itself is an admirable and fungible quality, like honesty or sobriety. And it assumes, as Brandeis did famously, that American values, Jewish values and Zionist values are fully aligned.” I couldn’t agree more. To read Silow-Carroll’s piece, click here.          

The other essay was by Alan Dershowitz and was published on the website of the Gatestone Institute. His essay is less about Tlaib herself, however, and more about the anti-BDS legislation whose supporters Tlaib was attacking. (To read the essay in its entirely, click here.) That legislation, intended to make illegal discrimination against entities (commercial or academic or otherwise) that do business with Israel, is being widely attacked in some circles as an attack on the freedom of speech promised all Americans by the First Amendment. He addresses that charge, I think effectively and—for me, at least—conclusively, and then turns his withering gaze to Rashida Tlaib herself and addresses her tweet: “Tlaib argues that ‘boycotting is a right and part of our historical fight for freedom and equality.’ Would she have supported, in the name of equality, the right of white bigots to boycott Black owned stores in the South or Black apartment renters in the North? Would she support the right of homophobes to boycott gay owned stores? Or the right of anti-Muslim bigots to boycott Muslim-owned stores or products from Muslim nations? If she were to support legislation prohibiting anti-Palestinian boycotts, how would she respond to an accusation that she ‘forgot what country’ she represents?...No one has accused Tlaib of forgetting what country she represents when she supports the Palestinian cause, even though Palestinian terrorists, acting in the name of ‘Palestine,’ have killed numerous Americans. Americans of any religion have the right to support Israel, and most do, without being accused of disloyalty, just as Americans of any religion have the right to support the Palestinian cause. It is both bigoted and hypocritical to apply a different standard to Jews who support Israel than to Muslims who support the Palestinian cause.”

What else is there to say? I couldn’t feel myself to be a more patriotic citizen of our great country. My deep commitment to the security and wellbeing of the State of Israel is not solely rooted in the fact that Joan and I own property there, but far more deeply in my conviction that the future of the Jewish people is inextricably tied to the fate of the State of Israel. I can’t even begin to explain why anyone would argue seriously that that makes me less of an American patriot. 

[eovinmygod]

From www.newstatesman.com By Mehdi Hasan

As a Muslim, I struggle with the idea of homosexuality – but I oppose homophobia

I've made homophobic remarks in the past, writes Mehdi Hasan, but now I’ve grown up — and reconciled my Islamic beliefs with my attitude to gay rights.

’Tis the season of apologies – specifically, grovelling apologies by some of our finest academic brains for homophobic remarks they’ve made in public. The Cambridge University theologian Dr Tim Winter, one of the UK’s leading Islamic scholars, apologised on 2 May after footage emerged showing him calling homosexuality the “ultimate inversion” and an “inexplicable aberration”. “The YouTube clip is at least 15 years old, and does not in any way represent my present views . . . we all have our youthful enthusiasms, and we all move on.”

The Harvard historian Professor Niall Ferguson apologised “unreservedly” on 4 May for “stupid” and “insensitive” comments in which he claimed that the economist John Maynard Keynes hadn’t cared about “the long run” because he was gay and had no intention of having any children.

Dare I add my non-academic, non-intellectual voice to the mix? I want to issue my own apology. Because I’ve made some pretty inappropriate comments in the past, too.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that, as a teenager, I was one of those wannabe-macho kids who crudely deployed “gay” as a mark of abuse; you will probably be shocked to discover that shamefully, even in my twenties, I was still making the odd disparaging remark about homosexuality.

It’s now 2013 and I’m 33 years old. My own “youthful enthusiasm” is thankfully, if belatedly, behind me.

What happened? Well, for a start, I grew up. Bigotry and demonisation of difference are usually the hallmark of immature and childish minds. But, if I’m honest, something else happened, too: I acquired a more nuanced understanding of my Islamic faith, a better appreciation of its morals, values and capacity for tolerance.

Before we go any further, a bit of background – I was attacked heavily a few weeks ago by some of my co-religionists for suggesting in these pages that too many Muslims in this country have a “Jewish problem” and that we blithely “ignore the rampant anti-Semitism in our own backyard”.

I hope I won’t provoke the same shrieks of outrage and denial when I say that many Muslims also have a problem, if not with homosexuals, then with homosexuality. In fact, a 2009 poll by Gallup found that British Muslims have zero tolerance towards homosexuality. “None of the 500 British Muslims interviewed believed that homosexual acts were morally acceptable,” the Guardian reported in May that year.

Some more background. Orthodox Islam, like orthodox interpretations of the other Abrahamic faiths, views homosexuality as sinful and usually defines marriage as only ever a heterosexual union.

This isn’t to say that there is no debate on the subject. In April, the Washington Post profiled Daayiee Abdullah, who is believed to be the only publicly gay imam in the west. “[I]f you have any same-sex marriages,” the Post quotes him as saying, “I’m available.” Meanwhile, the gay Muslim scholar Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, who teaches Islamic studies at Emory University in the United States, says that notions such as “gay” or “lesbian” are not mentioned in the Quran. He blames Islam’s hostility towards homosexuality on a misreading of the texts by ultra-conservative mullahs.

And, in his 2011 book Reading the Quran, the British Muslim intellectual and writer Ziauddin Sardar argues that “there is abso­lutely no evidence that the Prophet punished anyone for homosexuality”. Sardar says “the demonisation of homosexuality in Muslim history is based largely on fabricated traditions and the unreconstituted prejudice harboured by most Muslim societies”. He highlights verse 31 of chapter 24 of the Quran, in which “we come across ‘men who have no sexual desire’ who can witness the ‘charms’ of women”. I must add here that Abdullah, Kugle and Sardar are in a tiny minority, as are the members of gay Muslim groups such as Imaan. Most mainstream Muslim scholars – even self-identified progressives and moderates such as Imam Hamza Yusuf in the United States and Professor Tariq Ramadan in the UK – consider homosexuality to be a grave sin. The Quran, after all, explicitly condemns the people of Lot for “approach[ing] males” (26:165) and for “lust[ing] on men in preference to women” (7:81), and describes marriage as an institution that is gender-based and procreative.

What about me? Where do I stand on this? For years I’ve been reluctant to answer questions on the subject. I was afraid of the “homophobe” tag. I didn’t want my gay friends and colleagues to look at me with horror, suspicion or disdain.

So let me be clear: yes, I’m a progressive who supports a secular society in which you don’t impose your faith on others – and in which the government, no matter how big or small, must always stay out of the bedroom. But I am also (to Richard Dawkins’s continuing disappointment) a believing Muslim. And, as a result, I really do struggle with this issue of homosexuality. As a supporter of secularism, I am willing to accept same-sex weddings in a state-sanctioned register office, on grounds of equity. As a believer in Islam, however, I insist that no mosque be forced to hold one against its wishes.

If you’re gay, that doesn’t mean I want to discriminate against you, belittle or bully you, abuse or offend you. Not at all. I don’t want to go back to the dark days of criminalisation and the imprisonment of gay men and women; of Section 28 and legalised discrimination. I’m disgusted by the violent repression and persecution of gay people across the Muslim-majority world.

I cringe as I watch footage of the buffoonish Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claiming: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals . . . we do not have this phenomenon.” I feel sick to my stomach when I read accounts of how, in the late 1990s, the Taliban in Afghanistan buried gay men alive and then toppled brick walls on top of them.

Nor is this an issue only in the Middle East and south Asia. In March, a Muslim caller to a radio station in New York stunned the host after suggesting, live on air, that gay Americans should be beheaded in line with “sharia law”. Here in the UK, in February, Muslim MPs who voted in favour of the same-sex marriage bill – such as the shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan – faced death threats and accusations of apostasy from a handful of Muslim extremists. And last year, a homophobic campaign launched by puffed-up Islamist gangs in east London featured ludicrous and offensive stickers declaring the area a “gay-free zone”.

I know it might be hard to believe, but Islam is not a religion of violence, hate or intolerance – despite the best efforts of a minority of reactionaries and radicals to argue (and behave) otherwise. Out of the 114 chapters of the Quran, 113 begin by introducing the God of Islam as a God of mercy and compassion. The Prophet Muhammad himself is referred to as “a mercy for all creation”. This mercy applies to everyone, whether heterosexual or homosexual. As Tariq Ramadan has put it: “I may disagree with what you are doing because it’s not in accordance with my belief but I respect who are you are.” He rightly notes that this is “a question of respect and mutual understanding”.

I should also point out here that most British Muslims oppose the persecution of homosexuals. A 2011 poll for the think tank Demos found that fewer than one in four British Muslims disagreed with the statement “I am proud of how Britain treats gay people”.

There is much to be proud of, but still much to be done. Homophobic bullying is rife in our schools. Nine out of ten gay or lesbian teenagers report being bullied at school over their sexual orientation. LGBT teens are two to three times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers.

Despite the recent slight fall in “sexual orientation hate crimes”, in 2012 there were still 4,252 such crimes in England and Wales, four out of every five of which involved “violence against the person”. In March, for instance, a man was jailed for killing a gay teenager by setting him on fire; the killer scrawled homophobic insults across 18-year-old Steven Simpson’s face, forearm and stomach.

Regular readers will know that I spend much of my time speaking out against Islamophobic bigotry: from the crude stereotyping of Muslims in the media and discrimi­nation against Muslims in the workplace to attacks on Muslim homes, businesses and places of worship.

The truth is that Islamophobia and homophobia have much in common: they are both, in the words of the (gay) journalist Patrick Strudwick, “at least partly fuelled by fear. Fear of the unknown . . .” Muslims and gay people alike are victims of this fear – especially when it translates into hate speech or physical attacks. We need to stand side by side against the bigots and hate-mongers, whether of the Islamist or the far-right variety, rather than turn on one another or allow ourselves to be pitted against each other, “Muslims v gays”.

We must avoid stereotyping and demonising each other at all costs. “The biggest question we have as a society,” says a Muslim MP who prefers to remain anonymous, “is how we accommodate difference.”

Remember also that negative attitudes to homosexuality are not the exclusive preserve of Muslims. In 2010, the British Social Attitudes survey showed that 36 per cent of the public regarded same-sex relations as “always” or “mostly wrong”.

A Muslim MP who voted in favour of the same-sex marriage bill tells me that most of the letters of protest that they received in response were from evangelical Christians, not Muslims. And, of course, it wasn’t a Muslim who took the life of poor Steven Simpson.

Yet ultimately I didn’t set out to write this piece to try to bridge the gap between Islam and homosexuality. I am not a theo­logian. Nor am I writing this in response to the ongoing parliamentary debate about the pros and cons of same-sex marriage. I am not a politician.

I am writing this because I want to live in a society in which all minorities – Jews, Muslims, gay people and others – are protected from violence and abuse, from demonisation and discrimination. And because I want to apologise for any hurt or offence that I may have caused to my gay brothers and lesbian sisters.

And yes, whatever our differences – straight or gay, religious or atheist, male or female – we are all brothers and sisters. As the great Muslim leader of the 7th century and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, Ali ibn Abi Talib, once declared: “Remember that people are of two kinds; they are either your brothers in religion or your brothers in mankind.”

Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, where this article is crossposted

Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the co-author of Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader. He was the New Statesman's senior editor (politics) from 2009-12.

[caseywrightdigitalart]

My superhero (Super Stitch) solves the worlds problems by spreading love and happiness to everyone that encounters him with his cuteness.

 P.S. s/o to Suyze for showing me how to make the GIF bigger

After completing this list, how do you understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement to be connected across different identities, communities, borders, times, spaces, and realities?

Okay, after finishing reading the Eisenhower article there was one paragraph towards the end that I believe might’ve actually been in my reading lexile range. It reads:  “In order to challenge such a positioning of a subject as other, Judith Butler (1999) argues that it is the lack of unity, the expressions of difference that should inform ideas of dialogue. Without such an attention to the disunity of subjects and groups, we run the risk of models of dialogue "relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes 'agreement' and 'unity"' (p. 20). Failures to entertain differences result in failures to recognize inequalities.” This reminds me of a discussion we had in my art ed 310 class where we talked about why it is wrong to say you don’t see color in regards to race. Yes, we strive for equality but that doesn’t mean our differences should be overlooked. Overlooking these differences can be equivalent to overlooking a core part of one’s identity and can cause you to overlook the oppression and inequalities that they may face in our society. That is why as a teacher it is especially important for them to recognize these differences in their students.

The #BlackLivesMatter movement is about showing not that only black lives matter, like some believe, but that black lives matter TOO. The first word that popped into my head when I read this question is intersectionality or “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” Within the black community there are also varying genders, religions, classes, and sexualities. After watching “This is Unity” I was trying to look up the lyrics to the song to get a better understand of the message when I stumbled across a webpage  about Y-Love. Y-Love is a gay, black, jewish man. At the end it reads: “Y-Love’s “This Is Unity,” an anthem calling for awareness of Jewish diversity and for Jewish unity. As he raps, “Olam echad, Hashem echad, ha’am echad” (One world, one God, one people).” So he is just one example of how the #BlackLivesMatter movement is connected across different identities, religions, and sexualities.  

The purpose of Plug-in Studio’s Street Arcade is to raise awareness about current social issues such as white privilege and racial profiling which is also a core goal of the BLM movement. I believe that the street arcade is a great way to educate people that otherwise might not be so willing to be educated. They reel them in with a simple video game, something that is usually a source of entertainment and pleasure. This video game platform brilliantly allows them to reach larger audiences, including children. 

Some of the lyrics in Janelle Monae’s Q.U.E.E.N music video that stood out to me are as follows: “Say will your God accept me in my black and white? Will he approve the way I'm made?” “Add us to equations but they'll never make us equal” and “Well I'm gonna keep leading like a young Harriet Tubman.” After watching the music video I researched the song to try and get a better understand of it. Interestingly enough, I found out that Q.U.E.E.N. is an acronym (Q- queer U- untouchables E- emigrants E- excommunicated N- negroid). Monae said that she wanted to create this song for "everyone who's felt ostracized. I wanted to create something for people who feel like they want to give up because they're not accepted by society." This includes black people who are constantly being racially profiled and wind up being killed by police when they weren’t even armed or a threat to anyone. This includes queer people in the LGBTQIA+ community who constantly face societal backlash from those who fear what they don’t understand. This includes people of certain religions, muslims and jews that have been used as a scapegoat and blamed for issues out of their control.

Inequality, oppression, discrimination, privilege, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, will always exist but the people that perpetuate these societal issues do so, I believe, because they are not properly educated to think with an open-mind and open-heart (either that or those people are just born evil idk). Janelle Monae’s and Y-Love’s songs, Plug-in Studio’s Street Arcade, and Eisenhower’s article all have something in common - they aim to spread awareness about our differences and the inequalities/discrimination that people are STILL facing in today’s world as a result of these differences. 

[wonderwalnut123]

Damn people really dont understand how harmful capitalism is...

Capitalism should exist with strong socialist influence, obviously. So everyone has access to education, higher education, healthcare, high minimum wage, lower cost of living, low wage gaps. How un-American, truly.

I'm American. That means that I was born likely to be poor. So I can't afford college without debt I'll never afford to pay, so I can be made to wiggle whenever it's deemed necessary, to make sure I'm not too successful to be a threat despite what I was promised, because the alternative is a life of suffering. It means even if I could afford it, I can't go, because I have to work full time to buy my mother's insulin or she will die. It means my dad gets fired for spending too much time inpatient in the hospital and now can't pay the bill, because he's "lazy" and needs to just get over his PTSD already. It means those born disabled are left to die, or even worse, have to be the ultimate swear word- a "mooch." In America, you better rather die than be that word.

Pay into social security so it can callapse before retirement. Can't afford rent, can't afford time. Can't afford to stay alive.

I know socialism is the devil incarnate. I know supporting public schools and lower tuition makes me into a Communist. Because buzzwords are easy ways to kill people, right? And it's even affordable!

You're poor because of poor people! It's not us elites, who bless you by allowing you to do our work. It's the Mexicans, it's the Polish, it's the Natives, the disabled, the Jewish, the Muslim, the Non-white, the women, the gays. They are the cause of your struggle. Maybe if they were all gone, you'd be able to snag a third job, and an 100-hour week might let you pay your bills on time and even buy you something nice.

It's never the rich. It's never the white men running oil companies, it's never those who dump poison in the water, it's never those who pay so little and demand the impoverished down the rainforests for 1$ an hour to feed themselves- it's the disabled person on food stamps, it's the workers, it's those drinking the water, it's those holding the axes.

Celebrate hard work. The billionaires who lobby Congress, those running the oil, those dodging their taxes. They earned it. They deserve it. They should be the only ones with the time to- perhaps- vote, write, draw, influence, and socialize. It'd be just a true nightmare if these well-off fellows couldn't drive the American culture. Or else, it just might change.

We shouldn't settle! Unless it's to avoid debt, mental break, or low wage, because we should be grateful, so, so grateful we're even allowed to work at all. I know you can't go to school, have friends, follow your dream, buy that thing you want (because a house counts as both a 'dream' and a 'want'), because obviously you just don't deserve them. Maybe you should've been born better off! Or smarter, hardier, healthier, meaner, maler and whiter. But it's all just climate change under the bridge.

When the water turns to sludge, when the fish all die in 2050, when the islands are flooded, when the air turns to smoke, when the forests all burn, maybe us poor folk should've done better. Taken shorter showers. Dehydrated a little more. Worked a little harder.

Work until you break or else we'll get you. 'We' are the bank. The government. The bills. The insurance company. Those health problems. And then we'll convince you it was your fault until your pride is so broken you blame your neighbors and those even worse off than you.

"You're just unlucky." You're right. I am. So are my parents. My teachers. My schools. And my town. My state. And my country.

But I'm pretty sure the solution here is to beat our kids more, so they stop being weak and gay and m**ches. If we do that, build a wall, ban the Muslims, poison the Natives, raise the price of medicine, stagnate minimum wages whilst betting on inflation, and make college a rich-only priviledge, us rich people won't have to worry about any unfortunate changes to our great country. God bless America, and may God damn the poor.

It'd be unfortunate, if we couldn't boast our wealth... if people had 1% of what we had, they might just stop accepting our abuse. And then the whole country will be nothing but lazy m-words! Taking my money through taxes I don't pay to fund their disabilities and schools whose cost I so carefully manufactored.

God just dreams of the day that us poor people just stay out of sight, shut our traps, and die quietly with... "dignity." God tells us to obey the system and work. God commands us to hate the Other, to destroy the homes of the Other, to stifle our emotions and blame the Other who doesn't, to be still and accept the inevitable, to commodify our bodies and minds as machines and just do what we're told already.

Anyone can be happy if they take their 50$ depression pill.

I mean, that's the American Dream, right? That anyone can be successful with hard work?

Oh, I forgot. That's only for the people born wealthy enough to afford it.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Hey just in case you're curious what an actual Jewish person thinks; Muslims and Jews aren't natural enemies. The actions of a tiny fraction of Muslims don't represent core concepts of Islam any more than the actions of some Christians represent core concepts of Christianity. Is there antisemitism in the Muslim community and on the Left in general? Certainly, but that doesn't represent the views of every single Muslim. I'm tired of gentiles using us as a means to attack vulnerable people

I’m tired of apologists like yourself using “not all Muslims” to excuse a hugely disproportionate problem with Islam. You act as if it’s only a tiny percentage of Muslims who hold these views yet you ignore the fact the top 16 countries with the highest rates of antisemitic views are all Muslim countries, you ignore Muslims are more than twice as likely to harbor antisemitic views than any other religion, you ignore the fact 16 Muslim countries strictly forbid Jews from entering, you completely ignore the fact more Muslims than any other religion deny and mock the Holocaust, you ignore the fact that violent crimes against Jews across Europe are mostly committed by young Muslims. 

You ignore the fact more than a thousand Jews were killed in anti-Jewish rioting in Muslim countries which has led to mass exodus of almost a million Jews from Arab countries, you completely ignore research has found that 47 percent of Muslims in the UK stated that they hold “unfavorable” views of Jews compared with 7 percent of the population as a whole; that 28 per cent of Muslims in France hold unfavorable views of Jews compared with 13 per cent of the population generally; and that 44 percent of Muslims in Germany hold such views compared with 20 percent of the population generally, you completely ignore the fact antisemitism is spread all over Arabic news and media, it’s being taught all throughout mosques and it’s ingrained in Muslim families and history, you completely ignore the fact that right now every single neighbor of Israel is a Muslim country who are all hellbent on destroying Israel and killing every last Jew. These are entire nations, not just a small minority ffs.

You may have a case by saying a fraction of Muslims are actually butchering and hunting Jews but how the fuck can you sit there and say that only a tiny fraction of Muslims hold these views so we should never talk about it and if we do, then it’s an attack on “vulnerable people”. Are you kidding me? The evidence is right there, what the fuck is wrong with you? You do realize there’s more Muslims in the world than just the ones who go to your university and who tells you how awesome Islam is, right? Muslims and Jews aren’t natural enemies? Have you ever read a history book? What kind of Jew are you? You don’t even know your own history? You don’t even know what’s happening in Israel? Or are you just choosing to ignore it along with everything else because it shows Islam isn’t quite as peaceful as your Muslim friend tells you? Well, it seems like somebody needs a history lesson. 

Muhammad traveled to Medina in 622 to attract followers to his new faith. When the Jews of Medina refused to convert and rejected Muhammad, two of the major Jewish tribes were expelled and in 627, Muhammad’s followers killed between 600 and 900 of the men, and divided the surviving Jewish women and children amongst themselves. The Muslim attitude toward Jews is reflected in various verses throughout the Quran. "They [the Children of Israel] were consigned to humiliation and wretchedness. They brought the wrath of God upon themselves, and this because they used to deny God’s signs and kill His Prophets unjustly and because they disobeyed and were transgressors" (Sura 2:61). According to the Quran, the Jews try to introduce corruption (5:64), have always been disobedient (5:78), and are enemies of Allah, the Prophet and the angels (2:97­98).

The traditional concept “dhimma” (“writ of protection”) was extended by Muslim conquerors to Christians and Jews in exchange for submission to the Muslims. People subjected to Muslim rule usually had a choice between death and conversion, but Jews and Christians who adhered to the Scriptures were allowed as dhimmis (protected persons). This “protection” did little to insure that Jews and Christians were treated well by the Muslims. On the contrary, an integral aspect of the dhimma was that, being an infidel, he had to openly acknowledge the superiority of the true believer the Muslim and pay Muslims “tributes” (jizya), as a yearly tax, symbolized the inferiority of the Jews and Christians. Muslims also forced Jews to wear yellow badges, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany.

Later the inferior status of Jews and Christians was further reinforced through a series of regulations that governed the behavior of the Jews and Christians. They were forbidden to criticize the Quran, Islam or Muhammad, to proselytize among Muslims or to touch a Muslim woman (the scary part is they still practice this today.) Jews and Christians were excluded from public office and armed service and were forbidden to bear arms. They were not allowed to ride horses or camels, to build synagogues or churches taller than mosques, to construct houses higher than those of Muslims or to drink wine in public. They were not allowed to pray or mourn in loud voices as that might offend the Muslims. Jews and Christians were not allowed to give evidence in court against a Muslim and his oath was unacceptable in an Islamic court. To defend himself, Jews and Christians would have to purchase Muslim witnesses at great expense. This left them with little to no legal recourse when harmed and attacked by a Muslim.

When Jews were perceived as having achieved too comfortable a position in Islamic society, antisemitism would surface with often devastating results: In 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5000 inhabitants. The riot was incited by Muslim preachers who had angrily objected to what they saw as inordinate Jewish political power. Similarly, in 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated a Muslim woman in “an offensive manner.” Other mass murders of Jews in Arab lands occurred in Morocco in the 8th century, where whole communities were wiped out by Muslim ruler Idris I, North Africa in the 12th century, where the Almohads either forcibly converted or decimated several communities, Libya in 1785, where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews, Algiers, where Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830 and Marrakesh, where more than 300 hundred Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880. And most recently in the 1940s where more than a thousand Jews were killed in anti-Jewish rioting in Muslim countries which has led to mass exodus of almost a million Jews.

Decrees ordering the destruction of Jewish synagogues were enacted in Egypt and Syria (1014, 1293-4, 1301-2), Iraq (854-859, 1344) and Yemen (1676). Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790-92) and Baghdad (1333 and 1344). Jews during the 19th century in Muslim countries of North Africa were forced to live in ghettos and Muslim children participated in the degradation of Jews, throwing stones at them and harassing them and Jews were only allowed to work as shoe shiners. The frequency of anti-Jewish violence increased and many Jews were executed on charges of apostasy. Ritual murder accusations against the Jews became commonplace in the Ottoman Empire. The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, who he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed. 

This is still happening right now. It’s not only history but it’s still very real and very current and people wonder why Islam gets called the primitive religion. Their hatred of Jews, gays and women is brushed off as “not real Muslims” when it’s impossible to make it any clearer that this is real Islam, as it always has been. Sure, many Muslims have been Westernized enough to adopt our laws and values but you’re completely failing to understand these Muslims do not make up the majority. You look at countries such as Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and almost 100% of their Muslims admit they don’t like Jews. But sure, tell me again there’s no natural tension between Jews and Muslims, keep telling me what a tiny minority antisemitic Muslims are. You’re a fucking disgrace.

[lots-of-kenopsia-here-blog]

Islam: Extremism, LGBTQ+ Community and Other things

If you don’t know me, that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I just want you to read and understand. There is nothing complex in the text below, and if there is any amount of human inside you, you will understand.

I’ve seen some Tweets going around lately about how all the ‘anti-gay’ movement and attacks happen in the month of Ramzan because it was the favorite month of the Holy Prophet of God (Allah), and that all of these deaths and blood is on the hand of Muslims. It’s not.

Okay first of all- there is fine line between being a Muslim and being an extremist. Every single religions has them. Christians had them (or still might do, I don’t know), Jews do, Buddhists do, Hindus do- and these are just a handful of religions that I can count on my fingers. My point is that,

Being a Muslim is not the same as being an extremist Muslim

Being a Christian is not the same as being an orthodox or extremist Christian

Being a Jew is not the same as being an extremist Jew

Being a Hindu or a Buddhist is not the same as being an extremist Hindu or Buddhist

You see, but the thing is no one talks about how Christianity may be a bad religion or Buddhism or Hinduism may be bad or how being Jewish is bad. They don’t do that very often and they talk about it show Islamic Beliefs are the ones that are the cause of unrest among the world.

You think everyone of the Muslim community wants everyone to be a part of their religion? Do you believe Hindus wants that? Or the Jews do? I would state a number of facts of how Islam stands over the other religions, but I won’t. Because I know that is going to inflame your short-tempers and you’re going to chew me down. But let me talk about how in the Quran it is very clearly said that //Deen k mamlay mein koi jabbar nahi// meaning, as translated from Urdu //When it comes to religion there is no compulsion//

Islam clearly has given a free choice whether or not you want to accept it. And the people who don’t are free to go: Muslims have no right over them, no power over them to assassinate them for not taking up their belief. Our history remains proof that it was in fact condemned to take a life until and unless a life has been taken from you, and that the revenge of the father cannot be taken on his son. So when Islam was presented to the Pagan Arabs and they refused to accept it, The Prophet of God did not cease them and he did not have them executed or followed or anything. He let them go, because “when it comes to religion, you cannot be forceful”

Islam tells you not to be forceful. It tells you not be violent. It tells you not to kill.

ISIS is not an Islamic movement. You have no idea how we are terrified of them just as much as you are. And as far as it goes to the differences between religions, it’s not like the Christians didn’t differ with the Greek and Roman and Norse empires. It’s not like they don’t differ with the Atheists. I’m only taking Christians as an example because it (Christianity) is the largest religion of the world.

When it comes to the topic of LGBTQ+ community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and other such sexual orientations) I admit that Islam says that it isn’t okay for a man to like a man or for a woman to like a woman but Islam does not say that the murder of these people is okay. There in no way lies any proof that Islamic beliefs include that the LGBTQ community should be eliminated from the face of the Earth, and we all know that it isn’t even humanly possible. SO my point here is that although it may be wrong in some religions and although it maybe looked down upon in certain communities but that is not reason to hate on Muslims for that as a whole because not everyone, even if their religion says, is homophobic. Islam does not encourage homosexuality or bisexuality or being queer but it also doesn’t preach to be violent against these people or to be forceful with these people because- I repeat again, When is comes to religion, you cannot be forceful. However many times anyone says that Islam  forces people to starve themselves, it forces people to kill- it does not. Islam does not teach you to be forceful even when you have accepted Islamic faith.

The Orlando attack was led by a Muslim, but it does not mean that Muslims were supportive of it. The man, whoever he was, was an extremist because Islam does not encourage the bloodbath of innocent people. That man will not be rewarded for what he did. He will suffer as much as he deserves. In fairness, as it is decided by Allah, he will die as many deaths as he caused.

The propaganda against the LGBTQ community goes back centuries and the fact is that even at some point in history it was discouraged in Christianity as well. It still is, as it is in Islam but as we grow and we learn we have accepted that the people belonging to this community must be accepted in the society, be they be Muslims or not, be they Christians or not but because they’re human.

When the Orlando attack took place, people in my country raised their voice in their favor. A news anchor was talking about it (Hamza Ali Abbasi, if anyone is interested to know but proof of what he said has either been unfortunately removed or I could not find it, otherwise I would link you to it) how he will bend to the discouragement of their activities but why should they be killed? Why should they be murdered for something that they just are. He said himself that they are just as human as we are. My own grandfather said the same thing- that yes, they are as human as you or me and if you’re human, Islam wants you living. If you’re human, Islam will make sure that you get a fair judgement in the end and the person who caused your death pays for it. 

Islam gives you right enough to verbally protest against it. It is the same as the issues these days of how ‘being rude’ and ‘stating your opinion’ is different. Being verbally against something is what Islam allows you to do. To verbally protest and to get your message through by mere use of your manners, behavior and how you talk and how well you get your point through. This would fall under ‘stating your opinion,’ whereas the violation of such liberty and being aggressive and harsh to the people that you are addressing and being physically violent (killing, hurting) is AGAINST Islam.

The murder of the people in Orlando was NOT a Muslim movement. It was extremism and I beg the world to stop being assumptive about it because one thing that everyone needs to get through their heads is that a “Muslim is only he whose hand and tongue do not harm another” 

I don’t know if this is enough for you, but if anyone has gotten what I’m trying to say, thank you so much for taking the time. Also, to the Muslims out there and to other people reading- the differences have come to point that even the Muslims are divided into two groups. The Sunnis and the Shias. I will not fall into their detail, but all I have to say is that if you’re Shia or if you’re Sunni, it matters not who you are because both of us belong to the People of the Prophet, and by not following His example of verbal protest and leading physical detours against the LGBTQ people, you are bringing a bad name not only upon us, but to THEM and any one of who does that, is going to pay for it in the end for besmirching Their names.

You cannot force a person to be a part of Islam, you cannot force a person to accept your beliefs, you cannot force a person to be who they aren’t.

It’s like fat-shaming and racism. Both of which are also discouraged and condemned. In the last sermon of the Holy Prophet, he said

“An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, and a non-Arab has no superiority over an Arab. Neither does a white have any superiority over a black nor does a black have any superiority over a white”

It clearly delivers that all humans are equal, so don’t you think it would be the same for the gays? We are people. They are people. We are all people and we are all equal and anyone who thinks they have any superiority over anybody is wrong because superiority lies only in the pureness of faith.

Everyone will have an equal judgement. If a Muslim has more evil deeds than a Christian, he will go to hell. If a Jew has more good deeds than a Muslim, he will go to heaven. That’s just how it works! The same is the case for Lesbians and gays and transgender people- who, by the way, are completely valid in Islam as long as they don’t transform.

I was told by my Religious Studies’ teacher that on the Day of Judgment, they (trans people) will be given a fair trial as any of the other straight people because they are born that way. And if what the LGBTQ community says is true (I don’t know, I’ve never come across someone) and that they are that way or they feel that way by birth, then they will, too, be given a fair trial as any of the other people and if they end up having better deeds than Muslims or Christians, who knows- maybe they might go to heaven too-

It’s all that I have to say, and that is all there is to say- Islam isn’t a bad religion, and it does not force people to be a part of it. It does not force people to accept. Even after acceptance you have your own free will, and you choose what you do with it. My purpose here was to get these points through 

Islam does not teach violence.

Islam does not preach physical abuse

Islam gives you a free will.

Extremism and Terrorism are not taught in Islam

and I just hope that I have. Have a good day, and may God bless you all.

[eretzyisrael]

HOW A PRO-PALESTINIAN AMERICAN REPORTER CHANGED HIS VIEWS ON ISRAEL AND THE CONFLICTBYHUNTER STUART  FEBRUARY 15, 2017 12:17

A year working as a journalist in Israel and the Palestinian territories made Hunter Stuart rethink his positions on the conflict.

The author walks past Ofer Prison near Ramallah, during a Palestinian protest outside the facility in November 2015. (photo credit:COURTESY / JONATHAN BROWN)

IN THE summer of 2015, just three days after I moved to Israel for a year-and-a-half stint freelance reporting in the region, I wrote down my feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A friend of mine in New York had mentioned that it would be interesting to see if living in Israel would change the way I felt. My friend probably suspected that things would look differently from the front-row seat, so to speak. Boy was he right.

Before I moved to Jerusalem, I was very pro-Palestinian. Almost everyone I knew was. I grew up Protestant in a quaint, politically correct New England town; almost everyone around me was liberal. And being liberal in America comes with a pantheon of beliefs: You support pluralism, tolerance and diversity. You support gay rights, access to abortion and gun control.

The belief that Israel is unjustly bullying the Palestinians is an inextricable part of this pantheon. Most progressives in the US view Israel as an aggressor, oppressing the poor noble Arabs who are being so brutally denied their freedom.

“I believe Israel should relinquish control of all of the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank,” I wrote on July 11, 2015, from a park near my new apartment in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood. “The occupation is an act of colonialism that only creates suffering, frustration and despair for millions of Palestinians.”

Perhaps predictably, this view didn’t play well among the people I met during my first few weeks in Jerusalem, which, even by Israeli standards, is a conservative city. My wife and I had moved to the Jewish side of town, more or less by chance ‒ the first Airbnb host who accepted our request to rent a room happened to be in the Nachlaot neighborhood where even the hipsters are religious. As a result, almost everyone we interacted with was Jewish Israeli and very supportive of Israel. I didn’t announce my pro-Palestinian views to them ‒ I was too afraid. But they must have sensed my antipathy (I later learned this is a sixth sense Israelis have).

During my first few weeks in Jerusalem, I found myself constantly getting into arguments about the conflict with my roommates and in social settings. Unlike waspy New England, Israel does not afford the privilege of politely avoiding unpleasant political conversations. Outside of the Tel Aviv bubble, the conflict is omnipresent; it affects almost every aspect of life. Avoiding it simply isn’t an option.

During one such argument, one of my roommates ‒ an easygoing American-Jewish guy in his mid-30s ‒ seemed to be suggesting that all Palestinians were terrorists. I became annoyed and told him it was wrong to call all Palestinians terrorists, that only a small minority supported terrorist attacks. My roommate promptly pulled out his laptop, called up a 2013 Pew Research poll and showed me the screen. I saw that Pew’s researchers had done a survey of thousands of people across the Muslim world, asking them if they supported suicide bombings against civilians in order to “defend Islam from its enemies.” The survey found that 62 percent of Palestinians believed such terrorist acts against civilians were justified in these circumstances. And not only that, the Palestinian territories were the only place in the Muslim world where a majority of citizens supported terrorism; everywhere else it was a minority ‒ from Lebanon and Egypt to Pakistan and Malaysia.

I didn’t let my roommate win the argument early morning hours. But the statistic stuck with me.

Less than a month later, in October 2015, a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Jewish-Israelis began. Nearly every day, an angry, young Muslim Palestinian was stabbing or trying to run over someone with his car. A lot of the violence was happening in Jerusalem, some of it just steps from where my wife and I had moved into an apartment of our own, and lived and worked and went grocery shopping.

At first, I’ll admit, I didn’t feel a lot of sympathy for Israelis. Actually, I felt hostility. I felt that they were the cause of the violence. I wanted to shake them and say, “Stop occupying the West Bank, stop blockading Gaza, and Palestinians will stop killing you!” It seemed so obvious to me; how could they not realize that all this violence was a natural, if unpleasant, reaction to their government’s actions?

IT WASN’T until the violence became personal that I began to see the Israeli side with greater clarity. As the “Stabbing Intifada” (as it later became known) kicked into full gear, I traveled to the impoverished East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan for a story I was writing.

As soon as I arrived, a Palestinian kid who was perhaps 13 years old pointed at me and shouted “Yehud!” which means “Jew” in Arabic. Immediately, a large group of his friends who’d been hanging out nearby were running toward me with a terrifying sparkle in their eyes. “Yehud! Yehud!” they shouted. I felt my heart start to pound. I shouted at them in Arabic “Ana mish yehud! Ana mish yehud!” (“I’m not Jewish, I’m not Jewish!”) over and over. I told them, also in Arabic, that I was an American journalist who “loved Palestine.” They calmed down after that, but the look in their eyes when they first saw me is something I’ll never forget. Later, at a house party in Amman, I met a Palestinian guy who’d grown up in Silwan. “If you were Jewish, they probably would have killed you,” he said.

I made it back from Silwan that day in one piece; others weren’t so lucky. In Jerusalem, and across Israel, the attacks against Jewish Israelis continued. My attitude began to shift, probably because the violence was, for the first time, affecting me directly.

I found myself worrying that my wife might be stabbed while she was on her way home from work. Every time my phone lit up with news of another attack, if I wasn’t in the same room with her, I immediately sent her a text to see if she was OK.

Then a friend of mine ‒ an older Jewish Israeli guy who’d hosted my wife and I for dinner at his apartment in the capital’s Talpiot neighborhood ‒ told us that his friend had been murdered by two Palestinians the month before on a city bus not far from his apartment. I knew the story well ‒ not just from the news, but because I’d interviewed the family of one of the Palestinian guys who’d carried out the attack. In the interview, his family told me how he was a promising young entrepreneur who was pushed over the edge by the daily humiliations wrought by the occupation. I ended up writing a very sympathetic story about the killer for a Jordanian news site called Al Bawaba News.

Writing about the attack with the detached analytical eye of a journalist, I was able to take the perspective that (I was fast learning) most news outlets wanted – that Israel was to blame for Palestinian violence. But when I learned that my friend’s friend was one of the victims, it changed my way of thinking. I felt horrible for having publicly glorified one of the murderers. The man who’d been murdered, Richard Lakin, was originally from New England, like me, and had taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children at a school in Jerusalem. He believed in making peace with the Palestinians and “never missed a peace rally,” according to his son.

By contrast, his killers ‒ who came from a middle-class neighborhood in East Jerusalem and were actually quite well-off relative to most Palestinians ‒ had been paid 20,000 shekels to storm the bus that morning with their cowardly guns. More than a year later, you can still see their faces plastered around East Jerusalem on posters hailing them as martyrs. (One of the attackers, Baha Aliyan, 22, was killed at the scene; the second, Bilal Ranem, 23, was captured alive.)

Being personally affected by the conflict caused me to question how forgiving I’d been of Palestinian violence previously. Liberals, human-rights groups and most of the media, though, continued to blame Israel for being attacked. Ban Ki-moon, for example, who at the time was the head of the United Nations, said in January 2016 ‒ as the streets of my neighborhood were stained with the blood of innocent Israeli civilians ‒ that it was “human nature to react to occupation.” In fact, there is no justification for killing someone, no matter what the political situation may or may not be, and Ban’s statement rankled me.

SIMILARLY, THE way that international NGOs, European leaders and others criticized Israel for its “shoot to kill” policy during this wave of terrorist attacks began to annoy me more and more.

In almost any nation, when the police confront a terrorist in the act of killing people, they shoot him dead and human-rights groups don’t make a peep. This happens in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh; it happens in Germany and England and France and Spain, and it sure as hell happens in the US (see San Bernardino and the Orlando nightclub massacre, the Boston Marathon bombings and others). Did Amnesty International condemn Barack Obama or Abdel Fattah al-Sisi or Angela Merkel or François Hollande when their police forces killed a terrorist? Nope. But they made a point of condemning Israel.

What’s more, I started to notice that the media were unusually fixated on highlighting the moral shortcomings of Israel, even as other countries acted in infinitely more abominable ways. If Israel threatened to relocate a collection of Palestinian agricultural tents, as they did in the West Bank village of Sussiya in the summer of 2015, for example, the story made international headlines for weeks. The liberal outrage was endless. Yet, when Egypt’s president used bulldozers and dynamite to demolish an entire neighborhood in the Sinai Peninsula in the name of national security, people scarcely noticed.

Where do these double standards come from?

I’ve come to believe it’s because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeals to the appetites of progressive people in Europe, the US and elsewhere. They see it as a white, first world people beating on a poor, third world one. It’s easier for them to become outraged watching two radically different civilizations collide than it is watching Alawite Muslims kill Sunni Muslims in Syria, for example, because to a Western observer the difference between Alawite and Sunni is too subtle to fit into a compelling narrative that can be easily summarized on Facebook.

Unfortunately for Israel, videos on social media that show US-funded Jewish soldiers shooting tear gas at rioting Arab Muslims is Hollywood-level entertainment and fits perfectly with the liberal narrative that Muslims are oppressed and Jewish Israel is a bully.

I admire the liberal desire to support the underdog. They want to be on the right side of history, and their intentions are good. The problem is that their beliefs often don’t square with reality.

In reality, things are much, much more complex than a five-minute spot on the evening news or a two paragraph-long Facebook status will ever be able to portray. As a friend told me recently, “The reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so intractable is that both sides have a really, really good point.”

Unfortunately, not enough people see it that way. I recently bumped into an old friend from college who told me that a guy we’d both known when we were freshmen had been active in Palestinian protests for a time after graduating. The fact that a smart, well-educated kid from Vermont, who went to one of the best liberal arts schools in the US, traveled thousands of miles to throw bricks at Israeli soldiers is very, very telling.

THERE’S AN old saying that goes, “If you want to change someone’s mind, first make them your friend.” The friends I made in Israel forever changed my mind about the country and about the Jewish need for a homeland. But I also spent a lot of time traveling in the Palestinian territories getting to know Palestinians. I spent close to six weeks visiting Nablus and Ramallah and Hebron, and even the Gaza Strip. I met some incredible people in these places; I saw generosity and hospitality unlike anywhere else I’ve ever traveled to. I’ll be friends with some of them for the rest of my life. But almost without fail, their views of the conflict and of Israel and of Jewish people in general was extremely disappointing.

First of all, even the kindest, most educated, upper-class Palestinians reject 100 percent of Israel ‒ not just the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. They simply will not be content with a two-state solution ‒ what they want is to return to their ancestral homes in Ramle and Jaffa and Haifa and other places in 1948 Israel, within the Green Line. And they want the Israelis who live there now to leave. They almost never speak of coexistence; they speak of expulsion, of taking back “their” land.

To me, however morally complicated the creation of Israel may have been, however many innocent Palestinians were killed and displaced from their homes in 1948 and again in 1967, Israel is now a fact, accepted by almost every government in the world (including many in the Middle East). But the ongoing desire of Palestinians to wipe Israel off the map is unproductive and backward- looking and the West must be very careful not to encourage it.

The other thing is that a large percentage of Palestinians, even among the educated upper class, believe that most Islamic terrorism is actually engineered by Western governments to make Muslims look bad. I know this sounds absurd. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s comical until you hear it repeated again and again as I did. I can hardly count how many Palestinians told me the stabbing attacks in Israel in 2015 and 2016 were fake or that the CIA had created ISIS.

For example, after the November 2015 ISIS shootings in Paris that killed 150 people, a colleague of mine ‒ an educated 27-year-old Lebanese-Palestinian journalist ‒ casually remarked that those massacres were “probably” perpetrated by the Mossad. Though she was a journalist like me and ought to have been committed to searching out the truth no matter how unpleasant, this woman was unwilling to admit that Muslims would commit such a horrific attack, and all too willing ‒ in defiance of all the facts ‒ to blame it on Israeli spies.

USUALLY WHEN I travel, I try to listen to people without imposing my own opinion. To me that’s what traveling is all about ‒ keeping your mouth shut and learning other perspectives. But after 3-4 weeks of traveling in Palestine, I grew tired of these conspiracy theories.

“Arabs need to take responsibility for certain things,” I finally shouted at a friend I’d made in Nablus the third or fourth time he tried to deflect blame from Muslims for Islamic terrorism. “Not everything is America’s fault.” My friend seemed surprised by my vehemence and let the subject drop ‒ obviously I’d reached my saturation point with this nonsense.

I know a lot of Jewish-Israelis who are willing to share the land with Muslim Palestinians, but for some reason finding a Palestinian who feels the same way was near impossible. Countless Palestinians told me they didn’t have a problem with Jewish people, only with Zionists. They seemed to forget that Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years, along with Muslims, Christians, Druse, atheists, agnostics and others, more often than not, in harmony. Instead, the vast majority believe that Jews only arrived in Israel in the 20th century and, therefore, don’t belong here.

Of course, I don’t blame Palestinians for wanting autonomy or for wanting to return to their ancestral homes. It’s a completely natural desire; I know I would feel the same way if something similar happened to my own family. But as long as Western powers and NGOs and progressive people in the US and Europe fail to condemn Palestinian attacks against Israel, the deeper the conflict will grow and the more blood will be shed on both sides.

I’m back in the US now, living on the north side of Chicago in a liberal enclave where most people ‒ including Jews ‒ tend to support the Palestinians’ bid for statehood, which is gaining steam every year in international forums such as the UN.

Personally, I’m no longer convinced it’s such a good idea. If the Palestinians are given their own state in the West Bank, who’s to say they wouldn’t elect Hamas, an Islamist group committed to Israel’s destruction? That’s exactly what happened in Gaza in democratic elections in 2006. Fortunately, Gaza is somewhat isolated, and its geographic isolation ‒ plus the Israeli and Egyptian-imposed blockade ‒ limit the damage the group can do. But having them in control of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem is something Israel obviously doesn’t want. It would be suicide. And no country can be expected to consent to its own destruction.

So, now, I don’t know what to think. I’m squarely in the center of one of the most polarized issues in the world. I guess, at least, I can say that, no matter how socially unacceptable it was, I was willing to change my mind.

If only more people would do the same.