#the chosen one... my misunderstood little terrorist

[magpiepaws]

Imagine you find out about this godlike character called "The Chosen One, Angel of Death" and you go to the source media it's a fucking stick figure

Anyways go my biblically accurate stickman fanart

[ruminativerabbi]

Hatred, Fear, Hope

Like most Jewish Americans, I was caught off-guard back in 2017 by the sight of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, and carrying aloft the flags of the Confederate States of America and Nazi Germany. (That they were also carrying the so-called Gadsden Flag that was originally used by the Continental Marines during the American Revolution—the one designed back in 1775 by Christopher Gadsden featuring the words “Don’t Tread on Me” beneath a coiled-up, scary-looking rattlesnake—struck me primarily as a sign of how little these people know about the values upon which the nation was founded in the first place.) The sight of those flags being held aloft proudly and defiantly was beyond upsetting, but not particularly confusing. But what was confusing—to me and I suspect to most—was the chant “Jews will not replace us,” which I hadn’t ever heard before and which I now realize I misunderstood, taking it to mean something entirely different than what it apparently does mean.

Taking the slogan at what I thought was face value, I understood the marchers to be declaring their determination not to allow themselves to be replaced by Jews eager to take over their jobs and leave them without work and eventually destitute.  In other words, I imagined this somehow to be tied to the marchers’ skittishness about the job market and their need to find someone to blame in advance for losing jobs they fear they only haven’t lost yet and in which they fear they will eventually, to use their own word, be “replaced.” It hardly seems like a rational fear, but that’s what it felt like it had to mean, and so I ended up taking it as just so much craziness rooted not in anything corresponding to actual reality but in the malign fantasy that, left unchecked, we Jewish people will somehow take over the world and install our own people in whatever jobs we wish without regard to where such a move would leave the people currently holding them. And that is what I sense most Jewish people—and maybe even most Americans—hearing this chant took it to mean.

But now that I’ve read more, I see that that is specifically not what “Jews will not replace us” means and that the slogan specifically is not about Jews replacing Christians at work at all. Instead, the chant encapsulates the marchers’ fear that we Jews are working not to take over their jobs ourselves but to replace them at work with third-party others chosen specifically to deprive them of their livelihoods and their places in society. And who might these other people be? That, it turns out, is where anti-Semitism and racism meet: the hordes of jobseekers the marchers fear turn out not to be Jews at all, but hordes of dark-skinned immigrants feared already to be pouring over our borders and insinuating themselves into an already-tight job market. And it is those people who, because they are presumed ready to work at even the most menial jobs for mere pennies, are imagined to be threatening the white (i.e., non-immigrant) people who currently hold those jobs and who earn the American-sized salaries they use to support themselves and their families.

To say this is crazy stuff is really to say nothing at all. Yes, we have a huge and so-far-unresolved issue in this country with illegal aliens living in our midst and I’m sure that those people do take jobs that legal residents might otherwise have. And lots of non-crazy people, myself definitely included, are eager to find a way out of this morass that we ourselves have created by failing to police our borders adequately and by allowing the number of undocumented illegals in our midst to grow from a mere 760,000 or so in 1975 to something like 12.5 million today with no obvious solution in sight.

So wanting a reasonable solution to be found—one that is fully grounded both in settled U.S. law and in our national inclination to be just, fair, kind, and generous, and one that doesn’t make after-the-fact chumps out of all those countless millions of people who followed all the rules and immigrated here fully legally—is not crazy at all. What is crazy is the fantasy that Jewish Americans somehow possess the secret power to order Walmart’s and Costco and every other American business to fire specific employees and replace them with pre-selected others regardless of whether those others are or are not here legally. Crazier still is the contention that American Jews somehow control American immigration policy, and that we are somehow able imperiously to issue instructions that must be obeyed both to Democratic and Republican administrations. But craziest of all is the belief that, precisely because American Jews are so supremely powerful, we must be attacked violently before we order the administration to let even more immigrants into our nation. That, after all, was the specific reason the Pittsburgh shooter gave for his savagery in a comment posted online just before the attack: to give the officers of HIAS pause for thought before they work to bring in any more “invaders [to] kill our people.” My post-Pittsburgh proposal is that we stop dismissing that line of thinking as aberrant looniness that no normal person could actually embrace and start taking it far more seriously.

It feels natural to consider the various kinds of prejudice that characterize our society as variations on a common theme. And in a certain sense, I suppose, that is true. But these pernicious attitudes are also distinct and different, both in terms of their root causes and the specific way they manifest themselves in the world: misogyny, racism, and homophobia, for example, are similar in certain cosmetic ways, but differ dramatically in terms of the specific malign fantasies that inspire them and thus should (and even probably must) be addressed in different ways as well. And we should also bring that line of thinking to bear in considering anti-Jewish prejudice: similar in some ways to other forms of prejudice, anti-Semitism also has unique aspects that it specifically does not share with other forms of bigotry. Indeed, the fact that the anti-Semitism put on public display in Charlottesville was rooted in the haters’ groundless yet powerful fantasy about the almost limitless power imagined somehow to have wound up in the hands of the hated is all by itself enough to distinguish anti-Semitism from other kinds of prejudice. And not at all irrelevant is that it appears not to matter at all how impossible it feels to square that fantasy about Jewish powerfulness with the degree to which powerless Jews have suffered at the hands of their foes over the centuries, and particularly in the last one. In that regard, I would like to recommend a very interesting essay by Scott A. Shay, the author and Jewish activist, that was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a few days after the shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue and which readers viewing this electronically can access by clicking here.

Nor is this a problem solely of one extreme end of the political spectrum. In the wake of Pittsburgh, the spotlight is on the anti-Semitism that characterizes the extreme right, but the same light could be shone just as brightly on the anti-Semitism of the extreme left…and particularly when it promotes hostility toward Israel’s very right to exist and to defend itself against its enemies. Indeed, the assumption that Israel—instead of being perceived as an outpost of democracy smaller than New Jersey trying to survive in a region in which it must deal with nations and political terror groups that openly express their hope to see Israel and its Jewish population annihilated—is perceived as an all-powerful Goliath seeking to eradicate its innocent opponents militarily rather than to negotiate fairly or justly with them, is part and parcel of this fantasy regarding the power of the Jewish people. Coming the week after Hamas fired over five hundred missiles at civilian targets in Israel, each capable of killing countless civilian souls on the ground, the image of Israel as the aggressor in its ongoing conflict with Hamas sounds laughable and naïve. But maybe we should stop laughing long enough to ask ourselves how this myth of Jewish power—whether focused on American Jews imagined to be in control of American foreign policy or Israeli Jews imagined to be intent on crushing their innocent victims for no rational reason at all—perhaps we should ask ourselves how we might address, not this or that symptom of the disease, but the disease itself.

Distinct (at least in my mind) from theological anti-Semitism rooted in the supersessionist worldview promoted for so long by so many different Christian denominations, this specific variety of anti-Semitism seems rooted not in messianic fervor but in fear. And that, I think, is probably how to go about addressing it the most effectively: by pulling that fear out into the light and exposing it as a fantasy no less malign than inane. By forcing young people drawn to the alt-right to look at pictures of the innocents murdered in Pittsburgh and to ask themselves if they truly have it in them to believe that U.S. government policy was until two weeks ago being dictated by 97-year-old Rose Mallinger or by Cecil or David Rosenthal, both gentle, disabled types whose lives were built around service to their house of worship. By forcing young people poisoned with irrational hatred of Israel to look at the portraits of the 1,343 civilians murdered by Palestinian terrorists since 2000 and to see, not predators or fiends, but innocent victims of mindless violence. By insisting that young people drawn to fear Jews and Judaism be exposed to the stories of Shoah victims—and, if possible, to surviving survivors themselves—and through that experience to understand where groundless prejudice can lead if left unchecked and unaddressed.

To hope that no one is drawn to extremism is entirely rational, but it really can’t be enough. Just as young people who seem drawn to a racist worldview should be forced—by their parents and their teachers in school, or by society itself—to look into the eyes of those poor souls gunned down in the Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston on June 17, 2015, after welcoming their murderer into their midst for an hour of Bible study, so should society itself rescue young people from themselves once they are perceived to be embracing the kind of anti-Semitism that led directly to Pittsburgh…and be forced to confront the bleak hatred that has taken  root in their hearts and to see it for what it is: a fantasy rooted in fear that can be overcome and eradicated by anyone truly willing to try.

[everydayanth]

22 July Film...

So I watched the Netflix movie last night, and I have a few thoughts.  

Warning: This turned into a personal rant with some anthropology-thoughts thrown in. TL;DR: I think this is an important example of the kinds of stories we need, and the debate about the representation of the terrorist on-screen as an ethical one seems to me a moot point.

Second warning: SPOILERS (kinda, vague ones)

I would love to see the Norwegian Utøya - 22 Juli (U- July 22) and do a better comparison of the perspectives. Both films were released in 2018, one by Norwegian director Erik Poppe, the other by English director Paul Greengrass. But that’s for later... after I’ve recovered a bit lol.  

Culture is an interesting thing, and so many of the critiques and comparisons of these films involve the ethical question of portraying a terror event and a terrorist him/herself as a story, or on screen at all. 

This was interesting to me, because the intended audiences for each film seemed to be so diverse, one was telling the world of the event, while the other (I have not seen it, so I can’t confirm) seems to be giving Norway an art piece preserving and telling the story of the event to the people who know it and need little context - cultural or otherwise. 

Terror and disaster are culture shaping and defining. How we respond, how we react, the consequences and the way we tell the story, they are all revealing. And how/why we portray them to ourselves and as outsiders is also revealing.

If this film did one thing perfectly, in my opinion, it was the portrayal of PTSD and the sudden and immediate flashbacks, often sounds, that don’t go away, the isolation and exhaustion that they cause, and the feeling that vulnerability is a weakness you can’t afford. I’m speaking from experience that I’m not ready to elaborate on here, those things are powerful and extremely misunderstood and misrepresented in American culture. PTSD is often used as a MacGuffin, a simple plot device that causes chaos or explains some rash and nonsensical choice, and is often reserved for stories about soldiers returning from war (thanks Hemingway), but sorely left out of conversations about rape, or abuse, or bombings, or terror attacks or any other trauma we go through (then again... so is the representation of those stories). 

It was so hard for me to watch, and I had to fast forward through a few parts, I didn’t sleep because of my own triggers and whatnot, but looking at it from what I would consider an “average” perspective, of people who haven’t witnessed or experienced something so traumatic, it puts viewers in a position they are forced to empathize with. And I think that is a valuable and powerful cultural perspective. 

How did human empathy get tied in with a connotation of weakness? This film challenges that cultural assumption, it asks us to consider: how did emotion and fear become synonymous with coward? How did we twist the world so that victims become responsible and personal forgiveness is a sin?

Maybe I pulled more questions from the film because of my personal experience, relating or overcoming my own challenges - it was something of a challenge to push play and it sat on pause for nearly an hour after the first 20 minutes. The film doesn’t give you answers, but it does seem to provide a safe place for asking questions as our primary protagonist, Viljar, learns to cope. We, the audience, are, if we allow ourselves to be, challenged with an unspoken question: have you chosen to live? Have you chosen hope? Or are you angry all the time, are you defeated and nihilistic, are you passive and apathetic, do you want to ignore and run away and hide in fear? Have you taken steps forward to face your life and made a conscious decision to live it lately?

And that was hard for me to hear because it’s what I’ve been working on, on living consciously and making choices consciously and forming thoughts and opinions and understanding my own values, and not living in my head where everyone else is more right, more valid, more everything; where I dismiss myself and my experiences because of what they are. I’m still working on coming to terms with a lot of things, Jake divides it between acknowledgement, acceptance, and growth or adaption. 

I’ve acknowledged the things that happened, [SPOILERS] and I think that’s what Viljar does on the snowmobile. I’ve accepted the things that happened as beyond my control, I think that’s what Viljar does by deciding to appear in court, what his father does by encouraging him, and what his mother does by... well, personally I think she does this when he tells her to win the campaign for mayor, she decides then to carry on and try her best to reassure them and fight with her boys, not for them (the younger brother could have used a bit more character, but I get it). And then, for me, I’m struggling with the adaption, and we see Viljar struggle, constantly: physically, emotionally, mentally, it is his speech that tells us the truth - he is going to keep struggling, but he is ready to adapt to that, to grow from it, to choose to be vulnerable and depend on his friends and family, to reach out to them and to try, to understand himself and how this event has impacted him so that he can continue to live a life he values. 

This is where I, and I think a lot of people, get stuck, and why I think this film had to feature the terrorist, though I do understand the ethical fears of giving a terrorist a platform by featuring them. But this was a real event, and by giving the guy a face and a story, we see how it juxtaposes Viljar’s growth, how the terrorist did not grow or learn from his fears or struggles, how he isolated himself and what that intentional ignorance does to a person. If we do not grow from our trauma, if we do not adapt to the ways it has impacted us, like in Viljar’s speech, how he acknowledges that he pulled away from his family and friends, he avoided Lara’s calls for weeks, but he’s ready to understand that he is different now, and that’s okay.

We tend to leave this out of our stories in America, and probably other places as well. We end with the happily ever after when the physical body is saved and we rarely go into details about the mental or emotional journey that is yet to start. We can perceive it in films, we can write tumblr posts about Tony Stark’s PTSD and Steve Rogers’ issues, we can transpose ourselves onto these characters, which makes them so universal, but we do not see them specifically address or combat these problems. We do not see Captain America lamenting a world he knew or the confusion and trauma that would result from such a drastic transition, we do not see the Hulk’s loss of identity plague him as anything more than a good one-liner (okay, this one is a bit more debatable). These are good films, and they have limitations they have to work with - source material, fandoms, broader story archs, time limits, etc. But the mental health journey is nearly always left to subtext at best. 

Of course we struggle to understand our mental health in context in America, our stories don’t remind us of the importance of responsible emotion, of the pains of growing that last our whole lives, they don’t tell us about our changing identities as adults, or give us the tools to cope or find help after trauma. There are always exceptions, obviously, but collectively, they seem few and far between. But when they do happen, they stick around for a long time, like Christmas classics It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th St. that look at adult growth and development from the primary struggle. Then there are your intentional dives into mental health, diversity, and trauma like, A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, Rain Man, Room, Charlie Bartlett (a personal favorite, oh, also Gran Torino imo), even The Breakfast Club. 

I think we want stories that teach us how other people get through trauma, so we can learn from them, see ourselves reflected, and grow and adapt to our new identities after something has happened to us. We want to deal with difficult subjects, but to do that, we’re going to have to start talking about personal ethics and consumer responsibility more and more. We can’t dismiss that as classroom conversation or over-analysis or invalid. We’re going to make bad stories, and we’re going to mess up, but at least there will be more variety and we won’t just be repeating the same shallow stories that end as soon as the physical person is in a physical or economically stable place, occasionally a romantically stable one too. 

To encourage directors to look at mental health and tell new stories, we have to support them when they do. We have to watch and then discuss. We can’t just write it off as inherently right or wrong, because our worldviews are so different. People like that terrorist exist in the world, and ignoring it and not representing that social fear in our media does not even attempt to acknowledge the problem. Trauma hurts us and we’re often told to put some pretty tape around our cracked and broken selves and make do. We teeter through life fearing exposure, anxious, depressed, hidden, and we just keep cutting ourselves on all our jagged pieces. 

But films like this say it’s okay to be broken, it’s okay for Lara and his brother to feel the same as Viljar, even if they weren’t shot, it’s okay for them to face their fears in different ways and to be patient and understanding with themselves as they fit all those cracks back together and learn what they can do to glue them and sand them and make themselves whole again. It’s okay for the parents to struggle, to feel inadequate, terrified, and consumed by guilt and fear, and then to grow and gather strength from their own children and learn to be stronger together. 

We have this independent mindset, that to overcome by yourself is stronger, the lone wolf is the awesome badass, but we know, even our stories know, that we require teams. Even the Avengers need each other (getting into Civil War territory here lol). Our YA masterpieces teach us about the power of friendship and teamwork in developing our identities and overcoming pain and trauma. But we still walk around jaded and in pain, we don’t know how to talk or listen to each other, and we get frustrated and angry when others begin to talk about their vulnerabilities. 

But work like this, it gives us an opportunity to understand what we might not have the experience to relate to, it gives us the ability to be empathetic to something we may not be able to completely comprehend. It tells us that it’s okay to hurt, and it shows us that we can still grow, if we so choose, and that the choice we make is what we control. And we get so overwhelmed by our choices these days, there are so many, and yet so few. I think it’s hard for us to remember to choose to grow and reflect and redefine ourselves at all, hard to find the time to even consider our options. But it’s the most important choice we make every day. It defines who we are and we spend so much of our lives ignoring it or building a protective wall around it. 

This was not a perfect film, but it offered perspective in-context and I think it did justice to the trauma, and the resilience and growth required to overcome it, to choose to have hope. And I don’t think it could have done that without also showing us how easy it is to give up and assume we are right, like the terrorist, to assume we know best and can fix the world ourselves with our own walls firmly planted between us and our own identities. 

This film needed an antithesis to prove it’s point, for the same reason The Silence of the Lambs requires a Hannibal Lecter (and, like the greatly respected Anthony Hopkins, the actor, Anders Danielsen Lie, who played the terrorist, is an accomplished and greatly respected Norwegian actor, and that seemed important to me; this was not an opportunity for a new actor, this was an experienced artist telling the dark side of the story). 

We need filmmakers and story tellers to break rules so that we can all adapt and grow as a society. We need to start telling our stories and stop repeating our own folktales and bedtime stories over and over again. They lead us to sweet dreams, but they forget to help us learn how to stay asleep, and how to wake up, determined to live each day. 

We do not need to simply exist, and while existential crises are frickin’ impossible (there’s that personal experience again), and seem to be a massive current social problem, maybe they are not the cause of our lack-of-hope endings and false identities and fake happiness, but rather the result of a society that doesn’t allow itself to be broken, and therefore doesn’t allow itself to grow. 

You’re allowed to fail. You’re allowed to be wrong. You’re allowed to mess up and make mistakes and hurt the people you love. You’re allowed to be hurt and vulnerable in your life. 

And when you’re allowed to be these things, you’re allowed to be forgiven and grow from them, instead of hoarding all your broken pieces where they cut you over and over, or only revealing them to anonymous Tumblr netizens. You are not a static object, you are not made of stone that can only be cutaway, you are human, and flesh grows back. You can grow back. And I try to tell myself these things every day, to step into the world knowing it will hurt, but that I will grow back. 

Viljar has a hard time facing Lara, he doesn’t call her back, but when he meets her before the trial, she forgives him, and because of that allowance to grow, she is able to be persistent and keep being his friend, and he is able to be vulnerable and strong, which translates into his acceptance of help. We need art to tell us that it’s okay to be human, and to stop comparing us to these things that are supposed to be better than us - aliens, superpowers, mutants, super-spies, the wealthy elite, etc. 

And I think we need to focus on more than just romantic relationships, we need parents and friends and siblings and teachers and idols and well, more diverse romances; our stories reflect our values, and if this were a “Hollywood film,” I don’t think it would have done the story justice or let its audience come to its own conclusions. What does that say about us? Do we not give ourselves enough credit? Or do we intentionally misinterpret art that challenges our perceptions of reality, like trauma and relationships and other personal ethics because we find it offensive? Can we even hold others accountable for what offends us? Is there a line there involving accuracy and representation and culture, or is it all subjective?

I don’t know, I’ve just been thinking about all this while I spent all night and morning not-sleeping. So I thought I’d just get it out there where it can float for a while. I thought it was a good film, because it was a good story, and it was a good story because it focused on that elusive symptom of trauma, that nihilistic existential identity that refuses to reform. And because that is the story I am living right now, that is the story I needed to hear. Because we are social learners, like all primates, and if Viljar can choose to live and be vulnerable and strong, then maybe I can do it too. 

This turned into a personal rant more than a review... whoops. But I don’t have context enough to compare the film, I think I would have to see the Norwegian-made one (though the cast and setting were still Norwegian in this one), to really compare, and look at what happened in real life, how the world reacted to that event, and basically do a full lit-review to get an understanding of whether this film was accurate or if its portrayal was “good.” But then I would have to define good, and we all know where that will lead. 

So in my opinion, we need more stories about tragedy that don’t end with the acceptance of others, but the acceptance, acknowledgement, and reformation of self. And this movie followed that whole story, or at least, I think it did, and I appreciate it for that. 

[iamsielow]

Why did Trump use the chosen words to describe the Death of al-Baghdadi?

Why did Trump use the chosen words to describe the Death of al-Baghdadi?

There are few greater wordsmiths on this world than Donald Trump.  The best wordsmiths, a person who uses words as tools, are those who make you wake up in the middle of the night suddenly realizing what exactly was said. Donald Trump displayed this talent no better than in his description of how the terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder-leader of the Islamic State, died.

In case you missed it many have criticized Trump on his description of the end of al-Baghdadi which went along these lines:

(Paraphrased) "Our brave troops and their dogs drove a whimpering al-Baghdadi deep into a dead end tunnel that he had dragged three of his children into.  There, crying and begging for his life, he detonated a suicide vest killing him and his three children and wounding one of the dogs that had been chasing him."

I immediately understood why Trump chose to use these phrases but it seems to have completely gone over the heads of many in the media and many non-Muslims.

First, the Koran SPECIFICALLY forbids using children as shields.

Yes, yes, I know there are ENDLESS examples of Muslims purposely using women, children and elders as shields in battles and events, but this does not mean the Koran endorses these actions and there WILL be Hell to pay once those who have done such things reach the end of their time on Earth.

By dragging along three of his children as shields, al-Baghdadi violated a fundamental rule of Islam.

Second he was being chased by dogs.  Many non-Muslims do not realize that at one point in his rule, The Prophet, Blessed Be His Name, declared that ALL dogs were evil and were to be put to death. (There’s a non-Allah reason why he did this but I’ll save that for another day.)

Unfortunately for The Prophet, many of his followers had dogs and loved them VERY much.  The Prophet faced a mutiny so large he almost lost control of his empire.  Suddenly  he declared that he misunderstood Allah's commands OR Allah had changed his mind and decided only BLACK dogs were evil and needed destroyed.*

The above is why you generally do not see many Muslims owning dogs where it is an option.  There is even a phrase in Islam that says, "The angels do not enter a house in which there is … a dog."

*Yes, yes, I know, I know. If the Prophet, Blessed Be His Name, got the instructions about dogs wrong, were there other things he didn't interpret correctly?  One does not ask such things out loud.

The third aspect of this description was that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder-leader of the Islamic State, died begging for his life.

ALL Islamic fighters, even those in suicide vests, are supposed to willing give up their lives for Islam.  Few are the times you ever hear of a terrorist begging for his life before blowing himself up.

Yet here, at the highest point in the organization, the leader of All Things, died a whimpering, begging coward.

Using children as shields, chased by unclean dogs and dying while crying for mercy.

There is no martyr in this description.   There is no rallying point in his death.  Instead, Donald Trump announced to the world that the man who had sent many a Muslim to their deaths had, himself, died a coward and a traitor to Islam.

Every single person hearing Donald describe Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi should have woken up that night, laughed a sudden little laugh of understanding and gone back to sleep with a smile on their faces.

Donald Trump, one of the best wordsmiths in the world, I salute you.  While we may be few, there are those who know EXACTLY what you did in your description of al-Baghdadi's death.  I hope the ripples spread as far as they need to.

I Am Sielow, These are my words.

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