#Obaid Omer | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

steamedtangerine · 3 years

Text

There are four “lost artifacts” that I have long been despondent in lacking. Items of crucial interest that I happened across at one time or another, but for some reason, I never acquired them or held onto them.

I recently perused the fruit cellar in my Mom’s basement and happened across my old stereo system and was impressed by the many stickers I had pasted on the speakers. Behold!-one of the artifacts was there...this blue triangle sticker you see above. I must’ve carefully peeled one off, and pasted it on my speaker.

I happened across a slew of stickers like this one walking around the Cass Corridor of Detroit back in late 2001/early 2002. They were all blue and gave a name of a Muslim/Arab-American who has been “disappeared” following 9/11. Most likely the U.S. Government had abducted them and detained them as supposed “terrorist suspects”. Regardless, the matter was enough to have many concerned family and friends (who would attest to the character of each “disappeared” as not being “terrorists”) attempt to reach many agencies in this matter, only to get stone-walled. All those concerned were able to network, pull resources, and band together to create what is known (or as I now know it) “The Blue Triangle of Solidarity”.

I used to get into rather heated discussions with certain accounts on forums like Reddit or DetroitYes on the matter surrounding the “lost artifacts” (as they relate to a given topic).....and with this one in particular. I would get a lot of friction and push-back by those who were being obstinate and attempting to discredit my claims that these things didn’t exist.

I have recovered one item and have done the research....the only thing I can find about the triangles (and the exact name given above) can be found here:

-A Baltimore Sun article that surfaced a months after 9/11 bringing up the “possible” concern (and one that proved to be heavily verified later on) that torture was being used on suspected 9/11 detainees https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2001-10-10-0110100004-story.html

-This article from L.A. IndyMedia that has exchanges.....yet, if one heads down, the names of the “disappeared” (including the Egyptian man above) cited in the Blue Triangle of Solidarity/Network project are listed:

Mustafa Abu Jdai, Palestinian Abdou Tageldin, Egyptian Hasnian Javed, Pakistani Issam Sadak, Moroccan Mujahid Abdulqaadir Abdoul Achou, Syrian Abdul Wahid, Afghanistan Nacer Mustafa, Palestinian Mohamed Omar, Egyptian Mohammad Aslam, Pervez Pakistani Nabil Al-Marabh, Kuwaiti Adelal-Oteibi, Saudi Arabian Anser Mehmood Omer Bakarbashat, Yemeni Mohammed A . Khan, Pakistani Obaid Usmani, Pakistani Duraid Sulaiman, Iraqi Essam al-Habei, Saudi Arabian Osama Elfar, Egyptian Mohammed Jaweed, Azmath Indian Mohammed Abdi, Somalian Osama Awadallah, Jordanian Faizul Jabar, Guyanan Fathi Mustafa, Palestinian Rafiq Butt, Pakistani Mohammed Maddy, Egyptian Mohammed Suliman, Egyptian Rabih Haddad, Lebanese Gazi Ibrahi Abu Mezer, Palestinian Ghassan Dahduli, Palestinian Shakir Ali Baloch, Canadian Mohdar Abdallah, Yemeni Monir Gondal, Pakistani Ramez Noaman, Yemeni Hady Omar Jr., Egyptian Sheik Dib Aneef Shihadeh, Jordanian Youssef Hmimssa, Moroccan Uzi Bohadana, Israelli Tarek Albasti, Egyptian Yazeed Al-Salmi, Saudi Arabian Syed Gul Mohammed Shah, Indian http://oldweb.uwp.edu/academic/criminal.justice/disappeared01.htm

(link above does not work)

-and finally, and article from early 2004 discussing the importance of the Blue Triangle Network Project https://revcom.us/a/1229/immigrant-call.htm

Should anyone possessing the resources to examine and research the names mentioned above and try to unearth whatever became of them, PLEASE do so!...and remember to like/reblog this rare entry.

Thank You

P.S.(not that you have to read any further)-The other “three artifacts” include:

-a xeroxed notice that was being left on every table and corner of the bars of the Majestic complex (Cafe/Theater/Garden Bowl/Magic Stick) warning patrons of a recent brash of “drink tamperings” that was going on around at “other bars” (I quickly made confirmation by an employee working there in confidentially that it was very much happening there at that location). This was a spree of tamperings in 97′-2003. It led to friends of mine (after a brief meet-up there), a bouncer at the Garden Bowl, and a fellow employee my Mom knew at the photo developing store she worked at (a person I had smoked with often at an afterhours in Eastern Market) all getting their drinks messed with....and eventually the same happened to me (still didn’t know how I got home or why I puked in a wicker basket) and a girl I knew who ended up getting raped by two carloads of men and later laughed at by the cops (she later moved to Arizona; I posted some art of hers exactly a year ago). The whole matter was a network involving a rundown Food Co-Op in the Cass Corridor, the Serengeti Ballroom, a Martial Arts facility on Grand River Ave., the police (the police also threatened one of my friends doped), a man who worked at Chrysler who ran the same afterhours in Eastern Market, a CCS graduate who became a well-known artist for Ford, and many more....when I put the pieces together and started getting loud about the matter, I started to get threatening visits by a certain man skilled in Isshin-Ryū Martial Arts (who worked at the Serengeti) posing as a crippled homeless man pressing me for answers about my neighbor (the police were deliberately ineffective in not delivering the man the PPO my neighbor and I filed, seeing as the place he trained at also trained cops.). This was one of many things that led to me falling out of the scene and going into hiding for quite a while.

-an early 1999 bottle of Kiwi-Strawberry Fruitopia that has the ingredient “Cochineal” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochineal) in it. That ingredient (made of crushed-up red insects---yes, very voodoo...very Burroughsesque) was in a certain Banana-Strawberry yogurt (from a brand that starts with a Y) that caused by throat to tighten and lungs to seize up and cause me to go to the hospital. I would find occasional mentions of it in dictionaries, PETA literature, and oddly enough, a tame syndicated comic (which I think I still saved). It was only after my hospitalization, that I saw a murmur of a 6 o’clock health segment on the news just casually mentioned this ingredient, what it does, and what products (like Fruitopia) contain it. Catching that stunned me. I discovered that item that very night at an Amoco gas station after picking up my GF from work-but, alas, I didn’t buy it....a week later, each and every bottle of Fruitopia at the gas station had been replaced by new ones with new labels on them...that means a huge effort was being done to cover-up this error by them (far-reaching enough to hit a gas station on the Detroit/Grosse Pointe border).

-a magazine I saw at a Wal-Marts in Wisconsin while hiking in 2012. The magazine was in the guns and ammo section of the periodicals, and it took a very odd approach of grafting firearm-enthusiasm onto the zombie craze of that time. The magazine boasted products geared towards those “ready for the zombie apocalypse” (a weird kind of LARP enticement)...the magazine was packed with horror comic graphics of hoards of zombies with grey/brown skin, but many of them were clearly portrayed with non-Caucasian features. The text accompanying the images would state things like “The streets are overrun with them!”, “The White House has been overtaken!” I wouldn’t even say it was crypto-racist, cuz’ it was quite plain as day where they were going with this. Since then, the closest I’ve found were a number of articles (whittled down to about two) about these “bleeding shooting targets” Zombie Industries (cannot be too sure if that was the same company that put out the magazine) had on display at NRA events (including a misogynist one for “ex-GF” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ex_(target) ) ...one named “Rocky’ in particular looked strangely like Barrack Obama. https://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/obama-the-zombie-msna57862

#request #top tier #atrocity #Detroit #stickers #just another day on reddit #careful-man-theres-a-beverage-here #diabeetus #ballistic #propaganda

4 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years

Link

By: Obaid Omer

Published: April 23, 2021

I was raised in a religious Muslim home and practiced the faith for a long time. Eventually, I realized I was not a religious man, after spending a long time educating myself, immersed in our texts. Certain things bothered me after I investigated them deeply. I felt the hijab was misogynistic, and I opposed the strain of violence that had emerged from our holy books. Then there were the blasphemy laws outlined in the Quran, which seemed like the opposite of the liberal values I believe in. As a secular man, I went about my life, working as a contractor for the Canadian military for over a decade in Kosovo, Sudan, Bosnia, Haiti, and then Afghanistan. I encountered other Muslims, and others like me, who were not longer Muslim. But when I came back to Canada in 2014, I returned to a different country than the one I had left.

I had left a country that was proud of being the opposite of what bothered me about Islam, that was proud of a tradition of free inquiry and free speech, open debate and civil discourse. The Canada I returned to resembled the religion of my youth more than it did its opposite.

I left a culture that was steeped in a sentiment that could be summed up as, "I may disagree with what you say, but I respect your right to say it." I returned to a culture summarized by, "I disagree with what you say, so shut up."

Now, Ex-Muslims like me who criticized the religion of our youth were called horrible slurs: "house Muslims," "native informants," "Uncle Toms," or bounty bars, implying we were brown on the outside but white inside. Strangers called me a white supremacist for saying the hijab is misogynistic. In October of 2014, Sam Harris had his infamous exchange with Ben Affleck. Harris laid out a compelling case about Islam and spoke of its concentric circles of fundamentalism. Affleck called his argument "gross and racist."

The dam broke. Once they started calling it racist to criticize Islam, it was easy to shut the conversation down completely. The accusation meant the accused was morally beyond the pale, and thus completely dismissible. Words like micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces became mainstream. An emphasis on pervasive racism grew exponentially. To even question the extent to which racism was everywhere resulted in accusations of being a racist. Like with religious blasphemy codes, you can only talk about certain topics in specific ways.

I couldn't help but notice there was an almost fundamentalist, faith-like aspect to these claims. It was as if in the years since I'd been gone, our society had decided to adopt the blasphemy codes of my youth. When I heard people asked to check their privilege or introspect the ways they have been racist, it sounded like the inner jihad that Muslims are supposed to perform to make sure they are on the correct path.

How did this happen? How did the religious tenets I had abandoned come to take over the liberal culture I had abandoned them for?

To answer this question, I did what I had once done with the texts of Islam: I educated myself. I started reading about critical race theory and Intersectionality. I spent eighteen months reading critical social justice scholarship, and gender and queer theories. It was here I found the rejection of the Enlightenment values that made these theories closer to religion than to its opposite.

But there are many other similarities. In Islam, giving offense to the pious is considered a grave sin. Recall the 2015 murders at the French publication Charlie Hebdo; the artists had insulted the Prophet Muhammad and his followers, and thus deserved to die. But there's a less extreme version of causing harm through giving offense that's known as "fitna"—doing something that causes civil strife. A woman can cause fitna by dressing provocatively, as can someone who questions Islam publicly.

You can see this idea that giving offense causes harm everywhere in the new critical social justice culture. Anything that gives offense to marginalized people must be repressed for the good of society. And anyone criticizing people of color too strenuously or offending them must be deplaformed and canceled.

And just as in Islam, there is a jockeying for who is the accurate representation of the faith, Sunnis or Shia, in the social justice camp, believers decide who the true representatives of each oppressed group are. Fall afoul of the right political view and you will be denounced; people throw around terms such as "political blackness" or "multi-racial whiteness." Just as apostates from Islam are said to not have been real Muslims, detransitioners are told they were never really trans and Black people who speak out against the tenets of critical race theory are told they're not really Black.

In Muslim countries, biology textbooks will censor evolution. Now, due to gender theory, biology is similarly coming into conflict with an ideology—and losing. A mixture of post-colonial theory and critical race theory is behind a push to disrupt texts, a call to decolonize the Western Canon and school curricula. Critical social justice ideologies are in direct conflict with Enlightenment values and the rigors of the scientific method, like Islam, and are thus a huge threat to liberalism—like Islam.

I have had the good fortune to meet and speak with many brave people in the fights against fundamental Islam and critical social justice. As I once did when speaking to Muslims, I keep hearing about the silent majority that is opposed to CSJ.

That silent majority needs to become vocal very quickly. We need more people to be brave enough to speak up and push back. The long march through the institutions is sprinting into the final lap, and it cannot be allowed to win. Take it from an ex-Muslim.

Obaid Omer is a podcaster and free speech advocate. He was born in India and lives in Canada.

94 notes · View notes