#tagging for visibility only as i'm neither jewish or israeli

[joannerowling]

I'd like to say a few words today for the Israeli victims of Hamas and especially for those of you who may have known a victim, or were simply affected because it's your culture, your country, your people.

I'm French, and i've been on and off tumblr since 2013, so i remember what it was like to be online during the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015. Different 7 of a different month and year, very different crimes and scale, but a similar scenario online. The whole Internet, lead by American users, almost immediately started saying the victims deserved it, using cartoons of the journal which they didn't understand to illustrate their point. These posts had millions of notes, while the French people's attempt to correct the misconception struggled to get a tenth of that. We were not allowed to mourn. Foreign press, especially in English speaking countries (= the internationally most read press) refused to publish the caricatures which their peers had been brutally murdered for, because, they said, it would be insensitive to the people who believed in Islam's god, a make-believe man in the sky concept which has been responsible for the death and enslavement of entire cultures. In those days i think i lost my faith in humanity, and i don't say that lightly. There's a before and after.

So i think i can imagine a fraction of the grief that you must feel, not just over what happened on 7/10/23 (which was so infinitely worse than what happened to CH), but the hostile reactions since. The rage at those callous dismissals, the minimising of horror, the insistence that "all sides must be heard" even on THAT day, the suspicious analysis of the ways you express your sorrow. And of course, the fear, as you know that some people are out there outright celebrating, and some would gladly kill again especially today, and some would excuse them.

What really helped me feel better in 2015 was seeing some people go against the grain and be frank about their support, and their understanding of who were the victims and who were the criminals. So today especially i wanted to let you know that i support you, and i know that there are more who do. You are not your government, you are not a mindless blob of [insert ethnicity here], you are people who went through something horrible, who were the target of barbaric men who sought only to explicitly torture, rape and murder innocents. There is no ambiguity on what happened on that day. Those were not casualities. 1200 Israelis is the same percentage of the population as 39960 Americans in the US. If nearly fourty hundreds American people – children, babies and women, were tortured, murdered and raped on the same day, you bet your arse that there would be ceremonies and public displays of mourning and international support.

So there, that's what i wanted to say. I'm sorry for your losses, may the dead rest and may the living heal in peace.