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autismserenity · 5 months

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'Self-silencing': For Palestinians, talking about Hamas comes with hazards

"Nothing about us without us." Everyone knows you can't support and advocate for an oppressed group without listening to it. But we rarely notice how effectively Hamas drowns out Palestinian voices.

It has a long history of imprisoning journalists who even mention criticism of it, as well as civilians who so much as oppose it on social media.

This USA TODAY article from Nov. 21, 2023, is the first thing I've seen that talks directly to and about people living in Gaza. I've pasted most of it below; I cut out some parts that seemed pretty well-known, to try to make it less of a massive wall of text.

Long before Hamas's murderous rampage in Israel on Oct. 7, the group made a name for itself with its ruthless takeover of Gaza in 2007.

Its calling card? Killing its political rivals execution style in the streets, in hospital shootouts, and by throwing them off the rooftops of high-rise buildings. Since then, arbitrary detention, torture and enforced disappearances has been a hallmark of the regime.

Yet now, some Palestinians are "self-silencing" how they really view Hamas − and what they reveal about living under the U.S. and European Union-designated terror group in the Gaza Strip.

And according to more than a dozen Palestinians inside and outside Gaza interviewed for this story, being candid about what they truly think about Hamas is more fraught than ever.

Gazans fear retribution from Hamas; they fear Israel's bombings, too

Fear of reprisals is part of it.

But they are more concerned that doing so could detract from highlighting Israel's relentless bombings − its response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack − in the seaside enclave that have pulverized civilian infrastructure and caused mass Palestinian casualties.

For the last 17 years, Hamas − whose 1988 founding charter [cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in claiming Jews are behind the media, the drug trade, WWI, WWII, and are trying to take over the world, and so] called for the destruction of Israel to make way for a Palestinian state − has been accused by western governments, human rights organizations and some Palestinians in Gaza of corruption, restricting freedom of expression, and other abuses.

Still, as Lara Friedman, president of the U.S.-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, which advocates for rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians, recently pointed out, Hamas won a parliamentary majority in what turned out to be Gaza's last election − in 2006 − not on an incendiary platform to "kill the Jews," but as the "party of change & reform."

After years of rule by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' widely unpopular and potentially corrupt Fatah party, "a vote for Hamas was a vote against Fatah," she said. Fatah and Abbas, with whom Hamas fought a short civil war after the 2006 vote, still control the West Bank, the other Palestinian territory.

Surveys show most Gazans before Oct. 7 Hamas attacks favored a peace deal with Israel

Most people in Gaza, where roughly half the 2.2 million population are under 18, were either not yet born or children the last time there was an opportunity to express a political will.

And while some hardline pro-Israel voices have branded all Gazans as supporters of Hamas, surveys taken before the war showed that most Gazans had a poor opinion of how Hamas handled things they valued the most: access to food, education, healthcare, living conditions, and jobs.

These surveys, conducted by Arab Barometer, a non-partisan network of U.S.-based researchers working with local partners across the West Bank and Gaza, revealed that the majority of Gazans − 68% − believed that they had no way to safely participate in peaceful protests against Hamas' rule.

They were also more likely to blame Hamas leadership than Israel for material shortages in their lives despite a nearly two-decade blockade from Israel and Egypt that has affected every aspect of life for Palestinians in Gaza − from where they can live and study, to where they can travel and what health care they can access. Israel and Egypt say the blockade is necessary to prevent Hamas and other enemies from smuggling weapons into Gaza.

Some 73% of Gazans, according to the Arab Barometer survey, favored a peace deal with Israel.

Most Gazans 'just want to be able to do their jobs'. But support for Oct. 7 attacks has grown.

"Basically (most Gazans) just want to be able to do their job and have enough money to spend time with their family," said Michael Robbins, one of the authors of the survey along with Amaney Jamal, a professor of international affairs at Princeton and Stanford.

Robbins added that the survey showed that there was a correlation between Hamas supporters − who support armed resistance to Israel − and Gazans who were better off financially.

"You can think of that as some of the (Hamas) corruption issues, access to food and money and other things from the government itself. ... (Hamas) rewarding its own people," he said.[...]

Rahman said that Hamas runs Gaza like its own "personal fiefdom" and that Palestinians there have "no say, no agency over Hamas decision-making at a governmental level, at a political level, at a strategic level in terms of its engagement or resistance against Israel."[...]

Fights in bread lines, despair in shelters, and Hamas extorting money from Gazans

As Gaza has become more cut off from the outside world and aid agencies have warned its on the verge of collapse, there have been rare public shows of discontent in Gaza with Hamas.

Fights have broken out in lines at bakeries, while waiting for water and in overcrowded shelters. There have been reports of outbursts and insults shouted at Hamas officials.

Before the war, Israeli media published stories of Gazans who had fled the enclave because of threats they faced from Hamas for participating in protests, because they didn't support its approach to Israel or for challenging the way it spent financing from Qatar on rockets and tunnels rather than schools or other infrastructure.

A Gazan worker USA TODAY met in the West Bank last month said that he was not able to return home because Hamas officials were trying to extort money from him.

Seven weeks into the war, more than half of Gaza's population has been displaced. Gazan officials say that more than 50% of housing units in the territory have been destroyed, damaged or left completely uninhabitable since Oct. 7. The U.N. says water is running low and starvation is a real risk. Reports say scabies, a skin infection caused by mites; diarrhea; and respiratory infections are spreading quickly.[...]

Hamas says it 'will do it again and again'

According to Ghazi Hamad, a senior member of Hamas, the attack on Israel the group engineered on Oct. 7 was about "teaching Israel a lesson" and it "will do it again and again."

"We are the victims of the occupation. Period," Hamad said in an interview with Lebanese TV channel LBC on Oct. 24. ''Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do."

But many Palestinians do blame Hamas for some things.

I'm not Hamas, and I will never be

"After Oct. 7 we all in Gaza have been (accused of being) Hamas supporters. In fact, I am not. And I will never be," said Tareq Hajjaj, a Gazan journalist, in rare public comments about Hamas.

Hajjaj said he knows many Gazans with strong feelings about Hamas who won't speak publicly about it.

One Palestinian, a women's rights advocate, said that in Gaza she has "always been in opposition with Hamas." She said that because she has called for gender equality, freedom of speech and is opposed to girls under 18 getting married this made her a target for Hamas and other militant Islamist groups in Gaza. She said she had written books about these topics, briefly used in schools and by social workers in Gaza, but they had since been withdrawn by the authorities.

LGBTQ communities in both Gaza and the West Bank face threats, repression and violence from Hamas and Fatah authorities.

'Hamas used to attack me because they were against feminist organizations'

"Hamas used to (verbally) attack me all the time, because they are against feminist organizations and they think, or don't just think, they claim that we (the women's rights organization she works for) are funded by the West to ruin the Palestinian society," she said.

But she said she never felt physically threatened by Hamas. Her frustration was more at not being able to promote ideas − human rights − that allow people to live in dignity and with equality.

For others, especially foreign visitors to Gaza, Hamas is an enigma.

One American who runs a large aid organization that has been involved in building infrastructure projects in Gaza said he's always struggled, before Oct. 7, to account for how "normal" every day life in Hamas-run Gaza can appear.

He didn't want his identity published because of his ongoing work in Gaza.

'It was shockingly comfortable'

"In terms of security and comfort, I would say to people all the time it was 'shockingly comfortable.' I would say, literally and honestly, that it felt more dangerous (and likely) in my (U.S.) neighborhood that you'd get shot with a stray bullet than in Gaza. I would walk from the hotel to a fish restaurant down the block, or a few blocks away, and think: 'You know, it'd be nicer if there were some better sidewalks and nicer lighting, but I don't actually feel scared.'"

The American aid worker said he recognized his impressions of Gaza may reflect his visits as a foreigner rather than some deeper truth about what life is like. More than 80% of Gaza's population lives in poverty, according to the U.N.

And while Hamas has received hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid and cash injections from Iran, Qatar and others, Israel, experts and western governments have questioned whether money meant for civilian use ends up used by Hamas for its military operations.

#gaza #gazaunderattack #palestine #israel hamas war #hamas is isis #wall of words

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dchan87 · 6 months

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Non-paywall version here

Peace in the israel-palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state. Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must. How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.

Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

#israeli palestinian conflict #israel #palestine #decolonize

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ameliafuckinjones · 3 months

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A few headcanons about nyo!America:

1.) England definitely would have placed nyo!America in one of the New England/Middle colonies, more specifically the Plymouth colony, for a variety of reasons. Chief among them being they had more women and children in the New England colonies, which were mainly filled with families fleeing religious persecution/seeking religious freedom as opposed to the Southern colonies like Jamestown which was male-dominated due to its foundation of agriculture and trade that attracted large numbers of male colonist. Another reason is because Plymouth in particular was more competently ran due to the religious and cultural emphasis on community cohesion (even brokering peace with the local native tribes via harvest feast) in comparison to Jamestown which was always succumbing to plague, famine and skirmishes with local native tribes. Taking all this into consideration, I imagine he'd feel it would be safer to leave a small immortal girl-child with the religious family dominated New England colonies than the oftentimes chaotic and violent male-dominated Southern colonies that focused more on agriculture than domesticity. As a result, Amelia would probably develop a lot of core New England/Middle Colonial characteristics and mannerisms down to the east coast (probably a Bostonian New Yorker hybrid) accent. Also, also I think it's cute that Plymouth is called America's Hometown so I think it'd only be right to have Amelia grow up there during her formative years (or even Alfred, cause I don't see a logical reason why England would place boy!America in the environmentally and culturally hostile Southern colonies either !!!)

2.) Another headcanon is Francis and Arthur dueling over who gets to claim the new child-colony upon her discovery (which I place around the late 1500s rather than the popular 1607). Francis wins, because he's always been the better swordsman man and Arthur the bowman, but upon seeing him hurt/slightly injured and defeated Amelia goes to Arthur instead of Francis (and refuses to leave his side despite prying) and the French explorers reluctantly concede that the colony belongs to England (before traveling further North where after years of exploration they eventually discover Matthew and establish Quebuec!!)

3.) Before meeting Arthur, Amelia was initially found and sheltered by the Roanoke colonists during the early days of North America's discovery, then (after the Roanoke colonies' failure and "disappearance") with the nearby Croatoan tribe in what is now modern day Dare County.

4.) After her discovery, Arthur takes Amelia back to England, and she stays with him for a few decades and is christened in Queen Elizabeth's court (and briefly meets the Virgin Queen and Shakespeare, though she does NOT remember this much to her irritation)

5.) She was christened Elizabeth Amelia Kirkland (Elizabeth to honor the queen, Amelia, to pay homage to Shakespeare by referencing the rumored Dark Lady, and Kirkland for obvious reasons)

6.) Given that her birthday, on paper, was on July 4th, 1776 in Philadelphia, at precisely 5:10pm, she is a Cancer Sun, Aquarius Moon, and Sagittarius Rising ( which is actually America's birthchart in real life, make of that what you will!!!)

7.) Last but not least, she was made from literal starlight and stardust. I like the headcanon that nations are born from volcanoes or snow capped mountains or they come bursting from the green earth or rising from the sea, and considering America's fascination with the stars its only fitting that she was born from one. Like meteorites, pieces of shooting stars - which in this case were meteor showers born from meteoriods that were born from the tail of a comet (or cometary debris), a comet made from the very material present in the early solar nebula that formed our Sun and planets- that entered the atmosphere, falling to the earth and out she came from that celestial body. I imagine she'd explain it just like that, and that the moment of her birth is the one thing that she remembers clearly from her early babyhood, much like all nations. It also pairs well with the fallen angel vibe that I ascribe to all versions of America.

#hetalia headcanons #hetalia meta #hetalia #aph america #aph england #arthur kirkland #amelia f jones #nyotalia #this might seem like crazy ramblings because it is like im barely awake as i write this lmao

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news4dzhozhar · 12 days

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Amid the Israel-Iran escalation, it’s time for a region-wide ceasefire | Opinions | Al Jazeera

action. The US and other countries have come to the rescue of Israel and this means that it will have to pay back its allies by complying with the ceasefire.

Unless the world wants to deal with the economic and humanitarian catastrophe of a region-wide war in the Middle East, it must move quickly and lay the foundations for a comprehensive lasting peace in the region. The key to that is resolving the Palestinian question once and for all.

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xtruss · 8 months

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US ‘New Cold War’ Against China Is Self-Destructive

— By Jan Oberg | September 05, 2023

Illustration:Xia Qing/Global Times

Editor's Note:

The China-US bilateral relationship is one of the most important in the world. The trajectory of this relationship has attracted international attention. Still, the US is stepping up its efforts to suppress China on various fronts such as politics and diplomacy, economy, trade, technology, and military security, showing the true meaning of a cold war. The Global Times invites Chinese and foreign experts to expose the US' manipulation of the "new cold war" and reveal the damage it may potentially cause to the world.

A couple of years ago, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, in Sweden, of which I am the director, published "Behind The Smokescreen. An Analysis of the West's Destructive China Cold War Agenda And Why It Must Stop."

Among several perspectives of the US/Western accusation industry, we looked into the medialized stories about genocide in Xinjiang, forced labor and Taiwan, and nine mainstream media manipulation methods that aim to manufacture a systematically negative image of China in the Western mind.

We found that a cold war occurs by influencing the "free" press - also the Western state press - through three main mechanisms: a) Fake or fabricated stories, b) Omission - for instance, of every positive aspect of China's developments, and c) Source Ignorance: using the same few sources spreading disinformation, from the US rippling through and being repeated ad nauseam and never checking the root empirical evidence or validity of the assertions, in short, FOSI.

Ultimately, this causes a decay of the crucial and critical role of mainstream media and their conversion toward tabloid banalizing black-and-white worldviews - "we good, them evil" - that promote confrontation and warfare, all operated by the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC.

Tragically for democracy, mainstream media have become the leaders in promoting militarism, armament and legitimizing the empire and its wars. What are the elements of the cold war in all this?

First and foremost, the cold war is a psycho-political phenomenon. It dichotomizes our incredibly complex world into two: good versus evil. It seeks to preserve our superiority and keep others submissive and weaker. It promises war if its deterrence fails. And it precludes a world of equals, cooperation and mutual learning. If you are No. 1 in a system, you do not learn and listen; you teach, bribe and issue orders.

Cold wars may go well for the cold warrior when in ascendancy. In the "old" Cold War in Europe, two fundamentally Western systems - one based on Karl Marx, the other on Adam Smith, to put it crudely - competed while the US/NATO ascended after 1945. On all power scales, it was superior to the Soviet Union and its system. We know how it ended.

The winner then - foolishly - took it all: The US/NATO world did what it pleased within its exceptionalist "international rules-based order," not the UN Charter and other parts of international law. Catchwords: out-of-NATO-area military actions in violation of NATO's own Treaty - Yugoslavia - and regime change/resource/anti-terrorism wars on an assembly line basis; NATO's expansion against all promises given to the Soviet Union.

It all went so well and seemed so easy. Why listen to or empathize with others? Why focus on the changing world when "we" are the change-makers, God's own country par excellence? If we can get away with it, we do it. However, prudence, statesmanship and long-range thinking would have compelled global impact analyses instead of narcissist imperial self-aggrandizement.

The US Unilaterally Initiates New Cold War Against China! Illustration: Liu Xidan/Global Times

It went so well that the West overlooked the Rest: China's impressive socio-economic development based on an eclectic combination of Chinese concepts - that the West still doesn't understand - and imported Western elements; the establishment and maturation of organizations like BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and African and other regional organizations.

The West also did not sense the actual price that would be paid for its militarism: It's huge and growing burden on all civilian sectors, including technology and economy, and - in the wake of the history of colonialism and imperialism - the Rest becoming more and more nationally and collectively self-reliant - a concept developed about 50 years ago and ridiculed by the West.

And what was the result? Well, this is written the day after BRICS expanded with essential countries in Africa, the Middle East and South America - a huge step toward a multipolar and cooperative Rest saying: We can do without you, America and Europe! If you want to cooperate on new, reasonable terms, we are ready, but the days of your Western hegemony and universalization of Western values are coming to an end.

Such is global macro history: Empires have come and gone, and that of the US/NATO is the last: Nobody is so naive as to believe that it has a God-given right to be the ruler of the whole world and force others to accept its values.

The enormous world order changing before our very eyes is as predictable as it is inexorable. Only the ignorance - blinding intoxication - of power overlooks it. The West has run its race and become over-extended, insensitive to other cultures and ways of thinking, and unable to adapt to system changes but insisted on steering unilaterally. It's losing legitimacy in the eyes of others, relative economic and political strength and the creative ability to outline a better future world that the Rest feels attracted to: Classical decline indicators!

What I have said here is pure Gandhian thinking: You may harm others by using violence - physical, economic, military, structural, cultural and environmental - but, sooner rather than later, your violence boomerangs: It corrupts, debases, brutalizes and makes you more loathed than loved. A critical mass will develop.

In a deeper socio-cultural sense, the Christian Occident has never appropriately problematized those many types of violence upon which it built its relations with the Rest.

The West's cold war on China is about so much more than the issues that dominate daily news - chips, trade, Taiwan and the topics of the permanent accusation industry. It's about profound tectonic changes in humanity's way of developing - and about whether or not the West will join and contribute or become a de-developed periphery in the new world. And whether its empire will go down with a whimper or a bang, or adapt to macro history's unavoidable changes.

We know very little about humanity's future in the next 100 or so years. The safest philosophy will be for the Rest to, despite all, extend compassion and cooperation to the good forces of the West and abstain from tit-for-tat against its evil ones.

—The Author is the Director of the Sweden-based Think Tank Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research.

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

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By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Published: Oct 27, 2023

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

Very strange company for leftists.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israeli war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Oslo Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

Intersectionality and Postcolonial Theory have always been bogus and fraudulent, even just at the level of US society, where they were concocted by ignorant idiots and ideologues. The fact people are using them to interpret geopolitics - but not, for example, Syria or Nigeria - is idiotic and a failure of education. Or, more accurately, the capture and corruption of education, as this is not accidental.

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fiercynn · 6 months

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palestinian poets: fargo nissim tbakhi

fargo nissim tbakhi is a queer palestinian performance artist, a taurus, and a cool breeze.

or, for a longer version: fargo nissim tbakhi is a queer palestinian-american performance artist and writer. he is the winner of the ghassan kanafani resistance arts prize, a pushcart and best of the net nominee, and a taurus. he has received fellowships from rhizome dc, visarts, desert nights rising stars, halcyon arts kab, mosaic theater, and RAWI. his writing appears in foglifter, mizna, peach mag, apex magazine, strange horizons, the shallow ends, prolit, and select bags of nomadic grounds coffee. his performance work has been programmed at OUTsider fest, INTER-SECTION solo fest, the rachel corrie foundation’s shuruq festival, the alwun house monster’s ball, mosaic theater, and has been supported by the arizona commission on the arts.

you also learn more about his work by reading his artist statement, which to me is a work of art itself.

IF YOU READ ONLY ONE POEM BY FARBO NISSIM TBAKHI, MAKE IT THIS ONE

"captain's log" was originally published by fiyah literary magazine in the palestine special issue, which was curated, edited, illustrated and comprised entirely of palestinian creators, in december 2021. the collection was edited by guests nadia shammas and summer Farah, and featured cover art by leila aboutaleb.

if you have the means, you can purchase the e-book of the fiyah lit palestine special issue for USD $5.99, the proceeds of which go to medical aid for palestinians.

OTHER POEMS ONLINE THAT I LOVE BY FARGO NISSIM TBAKHI

PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM: THE DREAM at strange horizons

The Wise American Poet Brings Peace to the Middle East at prolit

Craft Talk at jewish currents

OF at protean

PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM: NEOLOGISMS at bahr // بحر

antigone at the border fence at baest journal

Image of a dabke at the Great March of Return at peach mag

american-Palestinian incantation at poetry daily

On learning Palestine does not exist at the rachel corrie foundation for peace & justice

#poetry #fargo nissim tbakhi #free palestine #palestinian poets series

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livewireatalanta · 2 months

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task 001. muse dossier NADIA ATALANTA; "LIVE WIRE"

Dragged by the wind / Taken by the stars / Carried with the madness and scars. -"Dark Matter", Les Friction **art credit: Vietnamese Holy Beasts by Xuân Lam

BASICS.

𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄. Huỳnn Loan Phượng The name on Nadia's birth certificate is her family name, Huỳnn, her middle name, Loan and her given name, Phượng. The luan is a deified bird across East Asian mythology, often representing an omen of peace to come and virtue. The phượng hoàng (pictured in the banner art of this post) is commonly referred to as the "Chinese phoenix," a composite creature made up several birds (which often change) and other animals. Its body represents celestial bodies and the 5 fundamental colors of its feathers represent the 5 virtues of Confucius. While it does not bear many similarities to the Western phoenix, there is an association with fire, as it is said to have been born of the sun and is commonly depicted with a fireball. It is a positive symbol, often an omen of peace, prosperity, and happiness, but also represents loyalty and honesty.

Nadia Atalanta Growing up in middle America in the late eighties/nineties meant that Nadia was encouraged to pick an "American" name that was "easier" for American teachers and friends to pronounce. Nadia was chosen from a list of names her first grade teacher had (a little dated, as she believes "Nadia" was there due to the popularity of Nadia Comăneci in the seventies). Atalanta was the call sign given to Nadia when she joined MTF Delta-5. In Greek mythology, Atalanta is associated with Jason and the Argonauts and was a disciple of Artemis. Prior to those adventures, she refused to marry unless her suitor could best her in a footrace.

𝐍𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒. None. Some of the more childish members of MTF Xi-13 took to calling her "Nads." She provides her current surname, "Atalanta," when asked her preference. (She will be rolling her eyes at all of their new call signs and will probably be huffy about responding to "Live Wire.") If you call her Nadia, well...you had better be Dying Breed.

𝐅𝐀𝐂𝐄 𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐈𝐌. Levy Tran

𝐃𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐔𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐅𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄𝐒. A long-healed scar around the left side of her chin not quite reaching her bottom lip; a deep scar that looks like gouged claw marks at the center of her abdomen and trailing off toward her left hip; an uneven circle of puncture scars around her right shoulder that sure does look like something bit her...but what has a mouth that large? She's usually seen with her shoulder-length hair done in twin French braids, tight, down the back of her head. When not in tactical or field gear, she's likely to be wearing a sweatshirt or flannel that doesn't seem to fit right, too large and for a more masculine frame (these items belonged to her brother).

𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐎𝐎𝐒 / 𝐏𝐈𝐄𝐑𝐂𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒. She has two piercings in both ear lobes but rarely wears anything in them. No tattoos, despite Levy Tran's extensive artwork. Nadia is still living by the regulations of MTF Delta-6 and undercover best practices.

𝐀𝐆𝐄 / 𝐃.𝐎.𝐁. 38 / January 25, 1985

𝐙𝐎𝐃𝐈𝐀𝐂. Aquarius Sun, Scorpio Moon, Taurus Rising. All Nadia knows is that she’s an Aquarius and that makes her an air sign. Anything beyond that is out of her range.

𝐇𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐎𝐖𝐍. A suburb of Rockford, Illinois. She usually just says "Chicago," because it's easier.

𝐅𝐀𝐌𝐈𝐋𝐘. Mother, deceased 2011 Father, resides in Boston Brother, deceased 2017 Nadia's father left when she was a child and she has had no contact with him since. Her mother died of complications from lung cancer in 2011. Her brother, Mark, was her twin. They were recruited into the Foundation together and shared an apartment (when Nadia was home). He was a researcher primarily focused on habitation of anamolies in containtment. His death was the result of a fatal containment breach and the official ruling is that Mark's lack of adherence to protocol caused said breach. As you may imagine, Nadia does not believe this and has tried to discover anything she can about the incident.

𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑 / 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐍𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐒. Cis woman; she/her/hers

𝐒𝐄𝐗𝐔𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐘. Bisexual

𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐀𝐋 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐒. Single. Never married. Dare you to ask a second follow up.

𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐈𝐓𝐒. Level-headed, just, resourceful

𝐍𝐄𝐆𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐈𝐓𝐒. Stubborn, defensive, sarcastic

𝐇𝐀𝐁𝐈𝐓𝐒. Unnerving eye contact, going barefoot in private quarters, wearing her brother's clothes, a weakness for high-end body and hair care products, usually has a packet of some kind of candy on her person and will be pulling it out to snack on noisily during boring meetings, prefers Dr Pepper to coffee but makes an exception for Barb's vanilla caramel lattes, seems like a smoker but really only does it socially or when peer pressured in the field or when trying to annoy Dying Breed by stealing his cigarette, generally eats like a teenaged boy (in taste and quantity), as of late has been relying on misuse of prescription medication to sleep more

𝐇𝐎𝐁𝐁𝐈𝐄𝐒. Watching documentaries, doing puzzles (of all kinds), strength and combat training, running outdoors, reading historical books (nonfiction and fiction alike), visiting fine art or natural history museums

𝐏𝐄𝐓𝐒 (𝐋𝐄𝐅𝐓 𝐀𝐓 𝐇𝐎𝐌𝐄). none.

THE FOUNDATION.

𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐅𝐅 𝐓𝐈𝐓𝐋𝐄. Ranked Corporal as MTF Operative with MTF Chi-00

𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒 𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍(𝐒). Operative with Decommissioning Department (2023 - 2024) MTF Operative (Corporal); MTF Xi-13: Sequere Nos (2019 - 2023) MTF Operative (Sergeant); MTF Delta-5: Front Runners (2008 - 2019)

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐀𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐆𝐍𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓: Decommissioning Department Nadia has only been with the Decomissioning Department for a few months. Prior to this post, she was on 8 months of medical leave due to injuries sustained during the incident with SCP-192001-01 while with MTF XI-13.

𝐒𝐊𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐒 / 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐅𝐈𝐂𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐒: Fluent/conversational in several languages (English, Vietnamese, Latin, Spanish, Greek; Cantonese, French, German, Italian), hand-to-hand combat, knife/blade combat, basic firearms, basic SERE skills, undercover work

EXTRAS.

𝐁𝐈𝐎𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐏𝐇𝐘. Nadia was recruited into The Foundation directly out of upper-education, concurrent with her brother, Mark, in the greater Chicago metro area. Both Nadia and Mark excelled quickly, she in field work and infiltration and he in research and containment. Mark would eventually become respected within the Experimental Containment Research group and Nadia would be assigned to Mobile Task Force: Delta-5: “Front Runners.”

The majority of her career was spent with Delta-5. There, she proved intelligent, adept, and obedient. She expressed a deep satisfaction for the work within MTF Delta-5 and it has been reported from multiple supervisors throughout this time that Nadia was one of the brightest operatives they had seen in an age. The general consensus was that she would achieve MTF Commander at an exceptionally young age.

In 2017, Mark entered into a routine encounter with an anomaly that would prove fatal. Officially, the Foundation maintains that failure to adhere to protocol led to Mark’s death. Nadia vehemently disagrees, as Mark was always meticulous. Directly following his death, inquiries were made and the initial decision was upheld. Nadia has refused to accept the Foundation’s explanation. Most information and files related to his death and the incident have been expunged and data-locked.

Following 3 months of leave, Nadia returned to active duty. Her discipline had collapsed and her behavior became erratic and dangerous. There were numerous disciplinary warnings and write-ups, culminating in the incident with a member of GoI-004: “Church of the Broken God,” where Nadia deliberately sabotaged her cover to enter into an unprovoked physical altercation. She was reassigned to Mobile Task Force Xi-13: “Sequere Nos” as a consequence. There was a successful, largely uneventful year with MTF Xi-13 – and then the encounter with SCP-19-2001-1.

Nadia’s assignment has been in flux for the past year since the encounter with SCP-192001-01. Directly following the incident, she was remanded to 6 months of medical leave. An additional 3 months of mental health leave was recommended, but Nadia declined. Since returning from leave, she has been working in the Department of Decommissions.

𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒. Paragon, Fallen Nadia used to be an exemplar within the Mobile Task Forces, particularly MTF Delta-5. She rose through ranks fast and easy, enjoying her work and eager to gain her own command. That's all in shambles, now, but it if your character has been through MTFs, they may have heard about Atalanta, or any of her triumphs from the earlier days. If not, there's still the chance that your character worked with MTF Xi-13 and could have encountered the current shade of Nadia. Personal Project Nadia is still desperate to find out exactly what happened to her brother. I can definitely see her picking the brains of anyone who might have information, whether about that specific incident or just containment and breaches in general. Hand-to-Hand When she's not avoiding everyone in her room, Nadia will likely be training in the gym facilities. While she prefers to train solo, she also loves to spar and practice combat. If your character is a fighter, or would like to be, they could potentially cross on the mat. Wilderness Scouts Nadia has not joined the Walking Club (Seriously?), but she is often wandering through the wooded area around the base. While she is absolutely looking for solitude on these treks (with the rare exception being made for Dying Breed), your character could encounter her and, if they're quiet, they may just be allowed to walk with her.

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑 / 𝐍𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐒. Action Girl, Aloof Dark-Haired Girl, Angsty Surviving Twin, Braids of Action, Chosen Zero, Deadpan Snarking, Final Girl, Haunted Hero, Ice Queen/Defrosting the Ice Queen, The Paragon Always Rebels, Seeker, Showing Up Chauvinists, Tsundere, Twin Telepathy

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐏𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒. Alanna of Trebond (Song of the Lioness Quartet), Veronica Mars (eponymous), Jessica Jones (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Rosa Diaz (Brooklyn 99), Megara (Hercules, 1997), Jyn Erso (Rogue One), Dana Scully (The X-Files), Rogue (The X-Men)

𝐌𝐄𝐌𝐄𝐒.

#fhq.task #tell a hunter's gun ; about #parental death tw #death tw #cancer tw #drugs tw #xenophobia tw #[all just mentions but better safe than sorry!]

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bringmemyrocks · 4 months

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On 501c3s, Foundations, Donor-advised funds, and "Zionist money"

This is not tax advice. If you're like me and don't make much money, you likely haven't run into this stuff before unless you've worked for a nonprofit.

In the USA, to get a tax write-off on your donation, your donation has to go to a 501c3 nonprofit that is registered in the USA. In the USA, donating to organizations overseas in any way that requires paperwork (aka not just handing over literal cash) can be dicey. Especially if those orgs are Palestinian.

A 501c(3) nonprofit is a mission-driven, not-for-profit organization that serves public interest and is not part of government. Churches, mosques, food banks, and civil rights organizations all fall into this category. It can only do limited political advocacy without losing its 501c3 status. It cannot donate large sums directly to other nonprofits without a ton of paperwork, but it can allow donors to earmark donations for specific causes, including other international nonprofits.

A 501c4 gets to do more political work, but in exchange, donations aren't tax-deductible. JVP and American Muslims for Palestine both have partner 501c4 orgs that do lobbying.

A Foundation, unlike a 501c3, does not have a mission statement and functions primarily through giving grants. These grants can be no-strings attached, or they can have particular rules (eg. Foundation A will only give you $2000 to sponsor a summer intern if you promise that money will not be spent on food.) Foundations do not “control” the organizations they provide grant funding to, especially since most foundation-funded orgs get donations from multiple sources.

Foundations can give grants in multiple countries (ex. the Foundation for Middle East Peace functions in both the Middle East and USA and gives funds to JVP (USA) and Al-Haq, a Palestinian org.)

A Donor-Advised Fund is a 501c3-managed fund where you can earmark your donations (usually minimum donations around $1000) for a specific group. That group can be a nonprofit in the US or a partnered NGO/CSO in another country that you cannot donate to either at all, or without getting a tax writeoff as it's not a US based 501c3. (Why you'd use a donor advised fund instead of donating directly to a nonprofit if that nonprofit is already a US-based 501c3 is for tax reasons and not relevant to this post, I promise.) A foundation can also serve as a DAF. I believe FMEP does this where you can donate a $1500 minimum to Al Haq through them because you can’t donate to Al Haq otherwise.

So a lot of foreign orgs, especially Palestinian orgs, partner with US-based nonprofits and/or foundations to raise money. These can be nonprofits specifically created for this purpose (American Friends of Peace Now, etc.) or they can be nondescript DAFs managed by a philanthropic organization.

Nota bene: "NGO" and "Civil Society Organization" are the same things. They are both non-governmental organizations that are supposed to improve society, but "NGO" gets used to refer to Israel and US based orgs while "civil society org" is used for Palestinian orgs like Al Haq.

Examples:

Jewish Voice for Peace is a US-based 501c3 anti-zionist Jewish nonprofit that advocates for Palestinian rights within the Jewish community. Any American can get a tax writeoff on a donation to JVP. For tax reasons, JVP takes donations only to JVP and not JVP Action, which is funded by JVP. JVP also receives donations through the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

The Adalah Justice Project, a Palestinian organization that tracks legal inequalities (apartheid) in Palestine, is based in Palestine, but takes donations through the New Israel Fund. This means that if you want to give money to Adalah, it goes through NIF. NIF is legally obligated to send that money to Adalah and cannot use it for other purposes, even if NIF is not in itself an antizionist org.

Al Haq, a Palestinian CSO, was declared a terrorist org by Israel with no evidence or investigation. This means it cannot receive donations directly, and anyone who donates to it could be prosecuted. However, it can receive grants from the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Thus less-political foundations can be the only way that Palestinian civil society orgs can receive much-needed funding. This would not work if FMEP was aggressively anti-normalization because FMEP has to stay less-than-radical in order to avoid government persecution.

This is the most important thing on this list. Partnering with organizations like FMEP is the only way many essential Palestinian organizations can continue to exist. Read that again.

Al Haq has existed in Palestine since 1979. Its services are essential. Yanking funding whether because Israel calls it a terrorist org or because you’ve decided any interaction with Israel is never acceptable, does huge harm.

https://www.alhaq.org/ for more info

BDS's definition of anti-normalization:

"Normalization is the participation in any project, initiative or activity, local or international, that brings together (on the same “platform”1) Palestinians (and/or Arabs) and Israelis (individuals or institutions) and does not meet the following two conditions:

The Israeli side publicly recognizes the UN-affirmed inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, which are set out in the 2005 BDS Call, and

the joint activity constitutes a form of co-resistance against the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid."

Source: https://bdsmovement.net/news/bds-movement-anti-normalization-guidelines

But can't you still donate to Palestinian civil society organizations directly and just not take the tax write off? #upholdthethawabet!

Unfortunately, a lot of the time you cannot because of how Palestinian orgs are labeled by the US and Israel. Look at what happened to the Holy Land Five--five men who wanted to raise funds for Palestinian welfare in Gaza were "convicted" of sending money to Hamas and all spent time in jail. Right now Al-Haq and 5 other Palestinian CSOs are designated as terrorist organizations. Wiring money to Al-Haq without going through an approved partner is a thoroughly bad idea.

More info: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/11/after-israels-designation-human-rights-groups-terrorists-biden-should-release

A Palestinian refugee organization that I won't name (I'll call it Org X, it's well-known and does good work) finds itself in this place right now. The only way they can take donations from Americans is by physically coming over here and accepting cash. No checks, no credit cards, no PayPal, nothing, because they don't have a 501c3 partner in the USA or a foundation to support them.

This is an even bigger problem if you are a business or nonprofit organization. I as an individual can give money to a Palestinian civil society org, but if my business or my nonprofit does so, even as a cash donation, said CSO may not be able to accept the money because of US and/or Israeli regulations, and my org could get investigated. So I can take cash from my bank account and give it directly to an Org X representative, but businesses and nonprofits have to account for where their money goes. If SJP National takes out $100 in cash to give to Org X, SJP will get in trouble.

One exception (for now, anyway) is Al Qaws. This is an LGBT Palestinian organization that is working to oppose the occupation and improve the lives of LGBT Palestinians. They take donations via Paypal. These donations are not tax-deductible because Al-Qaws does not have a US-based nonprofit partner. So far Al Qaws has not been targeted by Israel to prevent foreigners from donating, but this could happen at any time. However, Al Qaws is limited in the services it can provide because having no partnerships means having a much smaller budget. And again, Israel could cut off all donations at any time.

Because this may get brought up: It would be great if Palestinians and marginalized communities did not rely on nonprofit organizations/civil society orgs to supply basic needs. Ideally NGOs would not be necessary, either because the government provides for needs, or because we’d live in a utopia, whatever. There’s a book called The Revolution will not be Funded that talks about this. It’s an issue worth discussing. But yanking funding because of “antinormalization” does not address the root cause–it yanks the proverbial band-aid off the deep wound. Sure, the band-aid isn’t helping as much as a systemic change could, but now you’ve made it that much worse.

@feelingbitch thanks for asking!

#jvp #palestine #activism #antinormalization #anti normalization #fmep #i

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