hello! I was trying to use the book club link but it's expired... mayhaps you have a new link?
yeah, totally!
the next meeting is actually tomorrow evening - we'll be discussing chapters 14-17 of while mighty oaks do fall by witchofendor
m-ercutios reblogged
Happy black cat day!!
Here are some black cats I've drawn through the years
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How To Be Anti-Zionist WITHOUT Being Antisemitic
Yes! It's possible! But it's not automatic.
This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.
- Don't deny Jewish history in Palestine. There's been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn't succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn't mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn't help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.
- Don't whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel's Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they're in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying "Jews are white Europeans" is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.
- Don't invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to "go back where they came from". Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can't return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can't return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on "other people's land", the difference in Palestine is that we're the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.
- Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It's true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that "most" was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country's Black population, so...) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was "None is too many." Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.
- Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that "the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing" is specific and precise. To say that "Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want"... do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say "Zionists", what you really mean is "Jews"?
- Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don't apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn't involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It's evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.
- For fuck's sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They're very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they're also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don't give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.
- Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not "when Jews do a thing I don't like," and a Zionist is not "a Jew I disagree with/don't like". Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn't fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it's oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they're wrong. They're doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they're wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.
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I was asked why there's a zionist claim that the Palestininian identity is not legitimate. And I think it's important to understand why Palestinians as a whole are seen as a threat by Israel. To understand why it's not about Hamas.
The claim is that the Palestininian identity was made up in order to push us out. Palestinian existence is a threat to the legitimacy of Israel as a country.
I was taught in school that Palestine was empty when we got here. They used a Mark Twain quote. It was a barren land full of swamps and some nomadic people (Beduins) but as soon as we wanted to come here, the awful antisemitic Arabs sent people to settle here before we could to take up the space. I was in school in the settlements though. I was taught the most extreme version of this.
Another version of this is that Palestine was never its own thing, they're just Arabs the same as all Arabs from the surrounding countries. So they could just... scooch over and give us the space, please and thank you. In Israel no one uses the term Palestinian. If I do, people roll their eyes and dismissively go "Arab." An Arab is an Arab. It's a way to strip away their unique identity and blend them in with the rest to say they could always move to Jordan, or Syria, or Lebanon, and it's all the same to them.
It's a way to make Palestinian existence by itself into a malicious plot to deny us a homeland.
Because if Palestinians exist as a distinct group of people, we aren't the only ones with a connection to this land. And you don't create an ethnostate by sharing.
You still hear echoes of this mentality. Why won't all these Muslim countries take the people of Gaza as refugees? That's asking why they won't let Israel make its ethnic cleansing more neat and convenient. Yes, refugees should be taken in and given shelter. But this question shifts responsibility away from Israel. Palestinians shouldn't be forced suffer either ethnic cleansing that leaves them as refugees, or a genocide.
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I haven’t seen this linked on here so: this is an awesome resource for how you can help the people in Palestine. It has donation links, helps you figure out how to contact your representatives, and a regularly updated list of planned protests. It is USAmerican centric but the list of protests is international.
If you are American this site has a tool that sends an email for you. All you need to enter is your name, email address, and street address so they can auto-find your senators. It will take 30 seconds.
m-ercutios reblogged
so @cillyscribbles and i have been discussing an Order 66 au in which some kind of malfunction causes only the chips in the commanders to turn on
i just think. if it’s just the commanders who go obama-meme-then-perish.jpg, that would be really fun & interesting
m-ercutios reblogged
my oc lore is so normal to me until i have to explain it. yeah this is a guy. this other guy is an alternate version of this same guy. there’s a third as well. i’m sorry it’s cringe you just have to bear with me
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This is the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. Image description in ALT.
Can you imagine being even more isolated from the world and from each other.
Think how nany videos they made and posted in ENGLISH. I saw someone point it out, this isn't their native language. They were asking to be seen and heard. They need the world to care.
If they can't document this to show the rest of the world, it'll be easier for the news to move on. Don't let it.
We know what Israel did on camera, we know what it's trying to do by turning it off.
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“The most dangerous movement in American politics today is not Trumpism. It is Christofascism. With the election of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the organized effort to impose the extreme religious views of a minority of Americans on the entire country, at the expense of many of our most basic freedoms, took a disturbing step forward. The Speaker of the House […] represents a movement that is actively seeking to institutionalize the religious beliefs of evangelical Christians into law. In fact, even as we see with chilling clarity how those with a similar motive have sought to infuse the law with their religious beliefs on the Supreme Court and in state capitals across the country, Johnson may be the most extreme example of a dangerously empowered religious fanatic in our recent history—and yes, I remember that Mike Pence was, not so long ago, the Vice President of the United States. The term Christofascism may seem inflammatory. It is not. It is intended to provide the most accurate possible definition of what Johnson and those in his movement wish to achieve. Like other fascists they seek to impose by whatever means necessary their views on the whole of society even if that means undoing established laws and eliminating accepted freedoms. Christofascists do so in the name of advancing their Christian ideology, asserting that all in society must be guided by their views and values whether they adhere to them or not.”
Source: thedailybeast.com
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Verso Books has made several e-books on the history of Palestine available for free
1) Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe — examines the claims that are repeated endlessly in the media, enforced by the military, accepted without question by the world’s governments and reinforce the regional status quo. download here: https://versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/solidarity-with-palestine-free-resources-and-further-reading?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
2) The Palestine Laboratory by @antloewenstein — uncovers how Israel has become a global leader in spying technology and defence hardware that fuels the globe's most brutal conflicts. download here: https://versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/solidarity-with-palestine-free-resources-and-further-reading?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
3) Palestine Speaks ed. by Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek — a collection of testimonials from Palestinians narrating their own experiences and their own suffering. download here: https://versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/solidarity-with-palestine-free-resources-and-further-reading?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
4) Blaming the Victims ed. by Christopher Hitchens and Edward W. Said — shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine. download here: https://versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/solidarity-with-palestine-free-resources-and-further-reading?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
5) The Case for Sanctions Against Israel ed. by Audrea Lim — considers all sides of the movement—including detailed comparisons with the South African experience. download here: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2239-the-case-for-sanctions-against-israel
6) The Punishment of Gaza by Gideon Levy — Tracks the development of Israel policy, which has abandoned the pretense of diplomacy in favor of raw military power. download here: https://versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/solidarity-with-palestine-free-resources-and-further-reading?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
[ID: Tweet by Verso Books reading "We have collated free resources that offer a clear history of the occupation, Israel's military industrial complex, and this latest explosion of violence in Gaza. This includes 6 free ebooks:" an image follows of two forms in silhouette holding up Palestinian flags. Text on the image, in black, red, and green, reads "Solidaity with Palestine / free sources and further reading." The tweet is timestamped October 26 2023 10:11 am and has 51.1k views. End ID]
m-ercutios reblogged
Just a reminder that of the approximately 7 million Jews in the State of Israel, only about 300,000 of them (about 5%) are of American origin. Somewhere between 40-60% of them are Mizrahim from the SWANA region who were ethnically cleansed from places like Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, or are Jews whose presence in the Holy Land predates Zionism entirely, and even among Ashkenazim, the largest source of immigration was Soviet Jews fleeing antisemitism in the USSR.
The idea that all or even most Israelis are wealthy Brooklynites or American citizens with dual passports is flatly untrue and antisemitic, and obscures the way that settler-colonialism utilizes the desperate and the dispossessed even among the people it claims to protect. It doesn't help anyone to fall back on antisemitic canards solely for the sake of making what's going on easier to process.
m-ercutios reblogged
In case it isn't obvious to people...
If you are adding subtitles to a video and you change the language, that isn't ~accessibility~, it's fucking ableist.
I saw a video of Yocheved Lifshitz earlier, the 85 year old Israeli woman who was released by Hamas, and someone had captioned the video accurately except that every time she said the word "Hamas" the caption replaced it with "the Resistance," and rendered it as if she was saying that she supported the militants. There was, I should note, also omission in that they cut out the parts of the interview where she described violence by Hamas at her kibbutz and her own abduction, and only left the parts about being taken care of; the goal seemed to be making it sound like she supported the militants, or at least to remove her mentioning violence at all.
What she'd said (in the cut version) was that she was well-treated as a prisoner by Hamas (she used the name repeatedly); the captioner changing the language to make a political statement makes it misinformation but only if you're using the captions. People listening could tell the difference.
I should not have to explain why that's ableist as all fuck.
Do not do that. Do not alter wording to your political positions. Do not censor words (swear words, graphic descriptions, it doesn't matter). People who use subtitles, for whatever reason, deserve the same access to information as people who listen to it.
Also, here is the full interview and a complete transcript. Nothing omitted. Her genuine gratitude for the care that was taken, her horror at the attack itself and the violence that was done to her, and her critique of the IDF for failing to take note of obvious warning signs are all there.
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theory for americans: calling your reps to demand a ceasefire + release of hostages in the same message might be the most politically tenable way of getting them to listen
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To head off any well-intentioned geopolitical questions:
I support and will fight for the safety, security, and civil rights of civilians always, and without regard for nationality. I reject the nation-state induced view that citizens of a polity are inherently guilty for the actions of said polity’s government/military by virtue of citizenship, race, ethnicity, or religion; and I reject the concept that people of a certain national or ethnic determination are inherently responsible for the actions of any government/military, including ones which purports to speak/exist for them.
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I'm an antizionist, I support a free Palestine, I oppose the concept of an ethnostate. I'm also an Israeli Jewish person and a grandchild of holocaust survivors who grew up in the settlements and now lives in Jerusalem. I know the mentality in Israel, I've never lived anywhere else.
A lot of things are complicated about this situation, but some things are simple. For example: genocide is always wrong. Apartheid shouldn't exist. Palestinians deserve to be free and you should be speaking up and supporting their freedom. All of these are simple truths. "Israel is an oppressive colonial regime" will get you some arguments, but I already outlined why I think it's also true, regardless of indigeniety.
Here's something complicated:
Israel benefits from antisemitism. It's literally the best propaganda you can give it, all for free.
Jewish people have centuries upon centuries of history telling us that gentiles will turn on us for any reason. This is often the basis of the support for Israel. This kind of danger isn't exclusive to Jews - we saw that when a Muslim child in the US got murdered by someone he knew and had a good relationship with. But it's an experience we've had for such a long time that in many ways it shaped our cultural identity. It's everywhere in our history.
I'm not saying "if you want Palestinians to have human rights, first fix antisemitism!" - Palestinians shouldn't be paying for this, they deserve to be free on their lands regardless of worldwide antisemitism. Fight for a free Palestine because that's what's right, and don't let Israeli propaganda make you think that it's automatically antisemitic. What Israel is doing are acts of genocide, nothing could justify them. None of what I'm saying is meant as a justification.
Before, during, and after the holocaust, many different countries refused to take us in. That's why in a different post I said Israel is a place made up of refugees and the children of refugees trying to find safety in their ancestral homeland. We had nowhere to go, other than what Europe and the Zionist movement offered us. And then SWANA countries kicked us out too - around 60% of Israelis are Mizrahi who most likely come from those countries, not Europe.
When you attack a Jewish person who is completely unrelated to Israel, you're reinforcing the idea that we aren't safe among you. More than that, you make it true that we aren't safe among you. You're putting people in danger. Antisemitism is hurting Jewish people who have no influence over Israel, adding unnecessary harm with a form of hatred that resulted in countless deaths throughout history, and it's helping Israel.
When you see a Jewish person just existing and you respond "free Palestine!" - you're turning the desperate need of an oppressed people facing genocide into an antisemitic dogwhistle, and you have no right to do that. Israel wants to pretend it represents all Jews, but it doesn't. And you're helping it make its case.
I just learned that a synagogue in Tunisia, where my father's family comes from, was burned. The oldest synagogue in Africa. Other synagogues were attacked. And for over a week I've seen people talk about how the nazis should have finished us off. Being absolutely hateful towards Jewish people for just existing as Jews.
This is one example. This creator is not Israeli. She's Ukrainian. Currently not in Ukraine, but she's never been to Israel and expressed no plans to move here. But as soon as Israel does anything:
It's not Palestinians VS Jews. This is the story Israel will tell you, but it's not. If you believe this you bought into Israeli propaganda. When you equate Israel with any and every Jewish person, you're giving Israel more legitimacy. The fact that Jewish people online can't trust leftist spaces, including those of us who are antizionist, is concerning.
When you use antisemitism in the name of Palestine, you're affirming the notion that everyone else wants us dead. It's an idea that Israel uses to make crimes against humanity make sense to the people here and paint them as self defense. When you say "you shouldn't attack Gaza like this" they hear "you should roll over and let Hamas exterminate you."
The idea is that when we were victimized by the holocaust you felt so bad for us because we were such pitiable victims, but as soon as we fight back you're yelling at us to stop. It's nonsense, the people we're fighting are our victims, not our victimizers. Again, fight for Palestine. Be unapologetic about it. Don't use antisemitism. Fight against antisemitism. Because when your voice comes with burning synagogues, it's drowned out by the flames.
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in many ways. an underground parking garage is a Beast
the constant internal body temp, the gaping maw. the Liquid. it has it all
these are the criteria for a beast i think
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“he would not fucking say that” but it’s “he would not fucking be a cop”
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You have full control over one major decision in the Stranger Things 5 writing room, and can use it to make a ship canon/endgame, make a couple break up, canonize a headcanon, revive a character, or anything else that you wish. However, as a price you must kill off one of the following characters in the final season.
m-ercutios reblogged
I absolutely despise unicorn hunters and unicorn hunting, but if Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent saw me from across a bar and dug my vibe, I would simply have no choice but to leave with them and join them in their marital bed. I don't make the rules.
m-ercutios reblogged
camp counselor cool dad figure percy loudly making increasingly stupid offerings at the dining hall so the new kids don’t feel awkward doing it as well and inadvertently starting a revolution where the gods get such absurd requests some of them even start happening and it’s a mess but he thinks it’s hilarious and lets it continue bc the idea of zeus fuming over a kid asking for a hoverboard in the brazier offering makes him (maybe not so) secretly smile
annabethchasy
new kid: so do i just.
percy: yeah go on!
new kid: do i just. throw my food in and talk?
percy: yeah, pretty much
new kid: not gonna lie sounds kinda sketch
new kid: like do u blame me for not really getting it
percy: not at all
new kid: what would i even ask my godly parent for anyway… not like they care
percy, softening by like a hundred degrees:
percy, very very loudly: HELLO DAD YES TODAY I WOULD LIKE TO ASK YOU FOR THE HAPPINESS AND WELLBEING OF BABY SEALS. WHY? BECAUSE THEY’RE MY FRIENDS AND I LIKE THEM AND THEY ARE ALSO VERY CUTE. PLEASE MAKE SURE THEY’RE HAPPY THANK YOU
passarino
@transannabeth why would you leave this in the tags. poseidon is definitely in on it and “accidentally” leaks to percy which specific requests make the other gods angrier bc he thinks it’s hilarious and also loves to play favorites