Any tips on keeping your cool when people wave around Israeli flags during a pro-Palestine protest? I started shaking with adrenaline as if it was right before a fight. D:
What do you exactly mean by standing with Palistine? I've heard this sentence in so many contexts and everyone differs in the understanding of Palestine and standing with it.
oh my god ok jesus fucking christ
It literally just means we don't support the way Israel has historically bullied Palestine and its people, and that we especially stand against the current razing of gaza. I don't really think that our announcement of "standing with" Palestine accomplishes much of substance; it's more of a symbolic gesture. Do you have any further questions?
Whatever's left after Israel is done with its sanctioned genocide.
Just to be clear by Israel I refer to Natanyau and his goons.
Wether he represents the people of Israel is very debatable but not as much as Hamas which isn't democratic like at all and doesn't represent the Palestinians at all.
As has been experienced by many of my ancestors, for many as we're seeing, the only good Jew is a dead Jew. I've never seen a rape victim have their atrocities denied like we've seen here, or seen families have to prove their dead were decapitated and so forth after having their murders Live streaming for the world to see.
Believe all women ....until they're Israelis. I hope you are doing well in these lousy times. Am Israel Chai.
Hamas is no longer any sort of threat, and requiring written condemnation of their terror attack with every post about the current razing of Gaza indirectly reinforces the purported thesis behind Israel's continued wonton destruction which is that Hamas is a threat, and Hamas will attack the moment the bombs stop.
With all that dysentery, lack of food, shelter, constant threat of getting blown up? Ehh maybe 2 days cuz I'm twice as old as the average person there.
I'm not sure if you are attempting a platitude or are making a point, but to make a point your logic should be sound.
Your logic is that if an average first world person cannot live in a place comfortably, then you have an unstated implication that they should not receive support against death. Please correct if you were implying something else, would have been easier to know if you had spoken less vaguely.
Nonetheless regarding said "logic", (TLDR it's not logical) I don't see the logical connection between the tourism experience of visiting a country under siege and how that determines whether the residents of that country should be exterminated.
If you were making a point, could you elaborate on this connection? If however you were attempting a platitude, no explanation needed, you succeeded.
Those states are making conditions intolerable for trans people in the hopes that they either kill themselves or flee. I personally know trans people who moved across the country within the past year because of the uncertainty over whether it would even be legal for them to piss in a public restroom, or whether they would have access to medication necessary to keep them mentally healthy. I fled nearly 20 years ago because I saw the writing on the wall.
That’s not even discussing the stochastic terrorism that has made drag flat out dangerous, as in “your gay bar in Brooklyn will get burned down” dangerous. That’s not a hypothetical, it happened less than a year ago.
Ah great, well thank you for the explanation regarding their implication. That is helpful.
Do you happen to also understand if their position is logical, or is your meaning then, "They murder, so we must murder them, so that all of the murderers have been murdered."
(Please correct the above if I am misunderstanding)
Because there is a bit of a problem with that sentiment as well.
I'm not stating that you take this position, so do not take this next statement as targeted at you, rather it is targeted at those who may hold the above sentiment. That is, progress is rarely generated from the barrel of a gun. Then we live in a world where B's hate against A is justified, because A hates B. This is a perpetual cycle of endless violence and war, that is the end result of this type of thinking, and why these comments are so negative because a lot of us have lived long enough to see this cycle, every day, it does not end through bloodshed.
They make a valid point, that most of the residents of Gaza despise the rainbow community, and many of them would physically harm them given the chance.
With this in mind, it's quite bizarre that a Lemmy community built around the rainbow community is formally in support of them. I personally think the best thing to do in this situation would have been to stay out of it.
Plenty of people in the rural southern Appalachian county I grew up in would and did physically harm me when given the chance. Am I supposed to be okay with bombing their kids and hospitals now or something?
I think the best thing to do in this situation is not bomb hospitals and children. 🤷♂️
If it is, I guess we could all take a minute and talk about how Israel has such a problem controlling violent homophobic religious extremists that Jerusalem Pride has needed a ratio of 1 armed guard for every 6 marchers.
So a pride march in Jerusalem is just as safe as one in Gaza, except the one in Israel has more political willpower behind it to attract and maintain the goodwill of the west? Yeah I’d agree with that.
Israel and Palestine both have violent homophobic religious extremists.
Israel gets money hand over fist from the West by being the “good” country in the Middle East. Palestine does not.
Since the West now finds treating gay people as subhuman to be passé, Israel has a vested interest in maintaining the appearance of being somewhat less violently homophobic than their neighbors, even if it means they need to pay 1 armed guard for every 6 marchers.
This doesn’t make Israel free of violent homophobia or even gay friendly. The fact they need that many guards underlines how dangerous it is to be queer in Israel in general.
All of which is incidental to the fact that bigotry doesn’t make bombing hospitals and children alright.
Sorry, I didn’t realize you were unfamiliar with the idea of pinkwashing.
Do you think being despised by people for being queer is a new experience to me? It doesn’t make me want to turn away when children and hospitals are bombed, especially when half the politicians in my own country are working tirelessly to instate their own Christofascist government.
Starving people being bombed in hospitals in Gaza are not my enemies, even if they’re bigoted. Thinking that saying “but they’re homophobic” over and over like that’s going to make me go “oh okay, kill them then lol” is what the kids call a self report.
Palestinians are quite liberal and progressive compared to other Arabs, and being gay is legal in the West Bank -- that doesn't mean that there's no issues, this article about a planned LGBT youth camp gives a good impression. There's allies, but keep your head down and out of sight of religious nutjobs. It's pretty much the same thing atheists do over there: Plenty of them around with all that secular history but the religious nutjobs are simply too rabid to allow public discourse about the topic. It's way easier to go the "secular Muslim" route: Fast, but not for Allah.
In Gaza the legal situation is undetermined (scholars disagree on whether British mandate law prohibiting gay sex still applies) but anyway Hamas is in power, they instituted a religious police, tried to enforce headscarfs, go after male hairdressers cutting women's hairs without any legal basis etc. don't look at the statute book Hamas doesn't care and they're crazy. Also you don't want to go to Gaza right now. Also, you probably can't even if you're an UN aid worker.
If an average person is constantly subjected to food insecurity, lacking access to clean water and sanitation, lacking medical treatment, random injury and death through constant bombings, random injury and death of relatives and friends through constant bombings and limited access to education and working opportunities, how likely are they able to concern themselves with social progress?
If we look at western countries, social progress came in times of relative safety and wealth for the broad population, while reactionary politics came in times, where these were lowered or cut. It is no coincidence that reactionary politicians combine economic hardship for the masses with scapegoating and fighting against minorities.
The way to progressive politics in Gaza is paved with working infrastructure, proper access to basic needs and a perspective for social and personal development.
IMO that's not very pertinent since we have the privilege of not being in that situation. Here's a quote from something I read that might help reconcile this:
If we understand this sense of negative and positive freedom, what appears as a contradictory stance within anarchism makes perfect sense. An anarchist might firmly believe that the Palestinian people deserve to be liberated from occupation, even if that means that they set up their own state. That same anarchist might also firmly believe that a Palestinian state, like all states, should be opposed in favor of nonstatist institutions. A complete sense of freedom would always include both the negative and positive senses—in this case, liberation from occupation and simultaneously the freedom to self-determine. Otherwise, as both actually existing Communist and liberal regimes have demonstrated, “freedom from” on its own will serve merely to enslave human potentiality, and at its most extreme, humans themselves; self-governance is denied in favor of a few governing over others. And “freedom to,” on its own, as capitalism has shown, will serve merely to promote egotistic individualism and pit each against each; self-determination trumps notions of collective good. Constantly working to bring both liberation and freedom to the table, within moments of resistance and reconstruction, is part of that same juggling act of approximating an increasingly differentiated yet more harmonious world.
-Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (2010)
This is something I just happened to read, but we've been discussing Palestine a lot in my discord server. If anyone would like links to some more readings about Palestine and why things are the way they are, I have a lot of links to free ebooks I'd be happy to share (freely accessible, non-pirated). I'm not sure it would be appropriate to post them here, and I lack the mental bandwidth to deal with the possibility of sea lions and other bad-faith responders, but I'd be happy to share the links in a DM.
Sorry I picked you at random to reply to. Revisiting this comment with a sober mind, I have no idea what I was talking about. Maybe create a bot that identifies the top 400 riches people in the world and spends its existance phishing and scamming them at a rate no human can do? The idea sat better when I couldn't think it through.
Not defending Hamas or the IDF here Fuck both. This conflict was planned by both sides to galvanize support for their respective "governments". Civilians are currency to both regimes it's just a different exchange rate. Perhaps we should stand with the civilians, but realize that the governments of both are corrupt and will gladly continue this conflict.
I'm sorry but Hamas is almost completely annihilated at this point. in addition, they do not represent the Palestinian people. I do not condone terrorist attacks, but once a nation has killed 20-fold greater numbers of people, and is currently razing the entire nation (who at this point has little to no military) innocent lives and all into dust it becomes a lot easier to pick a side.
Remember that one side won't release the hostages still... So the other side will keep exploding the first side violently until the hostages are back. As I said, both governments consider people currency.
Not to mention releasing hostages will not in any way change the status quo. When someone has held their boot on your neck for decades what incentive do you have to give them anything? Absolutely fuck terrorists but Israel's treatment and process going back a long time has created this very situation. They have the power so they must be the ones to acquiesce. But typical rightwing fuckoffs running that place of course don't want to acknowledge this simple aspect of power balance.