How’s it going y’all? Hopefully everyone had a good night’s sleep and is ready to face the day. For me I’ve been thinking more and more about the atrocities occurring in Gaza, I think at this point, collectively most of the world has at least some part of their consciousness focused on what’s occurring there. Now whatever your ethnicity, religion, etc I think most people with a soul can safely agree kids beings killed should never be a thing.
Here in America we’ve for the last ten years at least, collectively trained high-school students how to brace for active shooter scenarios. High-school and college students learned to form ranks at least five people deep like the Spartans at Thermopylae. The’ve learned how to efficiently form barricades, shield walls and so much more. Now?
Take ten years and then compare that against seventy five years the Palestinian people have been systematically imprisoned and oppressed in the Palestinian’s homeland. Prior to 1948 almost the entirety of what is now Israel was inhabited by the Palestinian people. Then, in 1948 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in what is now known as the Nakba. The Zionist agenda essentially boils down to Jews own Israel as the sole occupiers worthy to live there and being God’s chosen people.
Now I’m not the most intelligent in the world by any means…However, I remember in high-school then into my college years countless discussions and debates about how Hitler’s rise to power wasn’t an overnight thing. It was a series of things happening steadily, bit by bit that allowed a dictator to rise to power and empowered the Nazis to enact Holocaust. Looking around now? It’s like world of dystopia…
Interestingly the people threatened the most by the world’s stand with Palestine are those who just thoughtlessly, unequivocally, and brainlessly support Israel. I mean… look….In America we constantly talk about the threat of North Korea and Kim Jong Un is a tyrannical dictator but when it comes right down to it? America currently is the biggest Satan of all. I mean hell, in the city of Pine Bluff Arkansas we manufacture white phosphorous munitions. Which interestingly, happen to be against the Geneva Convention. According to the World Health Organization “The use of white phosphorus may violate Protocol III (on the use of incendiary weapons) of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCCW) in one specific instance: if it is used, on purpose, as an incendiary weapon directly against humans in a civilian setting.”
Now, if you’ve paid any attention to any of the boots on the ground perspective of what’s been going on in Gaza y’all know that white phosphorous munitions were deployed against the people of Palestine. Which looking right back at what the WHO had to say on the matter it’s a violation plain as day if you use it on humans in a civilian setting. So like hospitals, schools, homes…all places that were indiscriminately bombed into nothing. So right there we have Israel committing acts of terror on a civilian populous, funded by American tax dollars. I mean hell, those munitions had to make it to Israel someway right? Only logical conclusion is that the United States armed an illegal, occupying force with weapons that were straight up used in an internationally illegal way.
Going in another direction here I know beyond doubt there’s going to be some fool who’ll come at me with the whole but don’t you condemn Hamas? Fuck yeah I do. Was kidnapping people to make a point wrong? Yeah absolutely. Is it understandable that after roughly seventy five years of illegal occupation that the Palestinian people have well and truly had enough? Y’know…I’m gonna go out on a limb and say yeah, it’s understandable. If someone were to back you into a corner with nowhere to go, nowhere to hide and just started beating the shit out of you without stop I’m fairly certain you’d lash out too.
That’s essentially what’s happened here. The Palestinian people since 1948 have had their land stolen and sold off to the occupying apartheid Jewish state of Israel. Homes they were evicted from have had iron bars bolted into place so that even if the Palestinians were to return they wouldn’t be able to get into houses they own which they have keys to. Their ancestral crops and Olive trees have been put to the flame by the forces of the IDF. Israel shut off the access to electricity, their access to water, made it illegal for Palestinians to collect rain water. Bombed their homes, schools, places of worship. Hospitals have been reduced to rubble over and over and yet, somehow the Palestinian people are supposed to just be like nah that’s fine just keep doing what you’re doing?
Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t be able to just keep taking it. I doubt most reasonable people I’ve met would be either come to think of it. I’ve been blessed to have met some people in my life of the Muslim faith and in every single interaction with those people I’ve been blown away by their kindness, strength of spirit and graciousness. In fact I remember when I was going to school at the College of Southern Idaho and I was taken an elective course for rock climbing. Our final project for the class was a trip to the City of Rocks in southern Idaho and the night before the final climb day I was just about to sleep when I smelled all sorts of good seasonings.
Going outside the tent I was staying in I saw two of our Afghani foreign exchange students cooking some sort of meat and rice dish in the coals of the group campfire. While I sat and journaled these two young men rather insistently plied those who’d emerged from our tents with food. After refusing for the third or fourth time they finally just plopped a plate in front of me. It was some of the best food I’ve had and I can safely say that was when I first started re-evaluating what I’d been brought up to believe. That we shouldn’t trust people from the Middle East. That’s just patently untrue and blatantly false.
Nobody should ever just be like yeah XYZ people group is the problem. First that’s racist and xenophobic as fuck. Secondly, it’s for the most part taught propaganda. I remember when 9/11 happened, then right after that it was “there’s a war on terror” and that was used to send troops over to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the terrorists. Two decades later, likely billions of dollars in military assets and all that seemed to have achieved was a war to control the resources of the area (Opium poppies, oil, strategic positioning for bases abroad) HVT’s eliminated or not, that area of the world is no safer than when we started putting boots on their ground and the Taliban that we’d been fighting against reclaimed everything.
Cut to our “closest ally” the terrorist occupiers of Israel and the US continues just brainlessly sending billions of dollars abroad to fund the continued illegal apartheid state. Meanwhile, in America that same amount of funding could immediately end the homelessness crisis or the food crisis let alone any other number of causes that ACTUALLY matter. Instead we just keep sending more billions of dollars to help murder kids.
I can safely say that’s it’s kids being killed too due to nearly half the population of Palestine (47.3%) are under the age of 18. According to this graph data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health dated 2022. Now look, I don’t care who you are or where you’re from but if you want to sit here and try telling me that Hamas kidnapping some Jews/Israelis is the whole reason that the systematic ethnic cleansing of an entire people group is due to Israel’s supposed “right to defend themselves” then not only are you insane you’re also an anti-semite. Let’s take a look at the etymology of that word. According to Brittanica.com the term Semite means the following…
Semite, name given in the 19th century to a member of any people who speak one of the Semitic languages, a family of languages spoken primarily in parts of western Asia and Africa. The term therefore came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians (including the Amhara and the Tigrayans), and Aramaen tribes. Although Mesopotamia, the western coast of the Mediteranean, the Arabian Peninsula , and the Horn of Africa have all been proposed as possible sites for the prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking populations, there remains no archaeological or scientific evidence of a common Semitic people. Because Semitic-speaking peoples do not share any traits aside from language, use of the term “Semite” to refer to the broad range of Semitic-speaking peoples has fallen out of favour. For this reason, some critics even encourage the removal of the hyphen in the term anti-Semitism to help dispel any pseudoscientific notions of a “Semitic race.” They advocate instead for the use of antisemitism to describe the hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group.
In fact, by 2500 BCE Semitic-speaking peoples had already become widely dispersed throughout western Asia. In Phoenicia they became seafarers. In Mesopotamia they blended with the civilization of Sumer. The Hebrews settled with other Semitic-speaking peoples in Palestine.”
By this logic then, anyone calling for Palestine to be turned into a parking lot or “getting rid of the vermin” in reference to the Palestinian people is by definition an antisemite. Anyone that sends out drones to play the sounds of children screaming or crying in order to lure hopeful family out. To then detonate those drones thereby killing more people? Is a straight sociopath. Tell your parents, grandparents, anyone who’ll listen. Disagreeing with and refusing to support businesses that profit off the killing of children (McDonald’s, Starbucks etc.)isn’t antisemitism. Neither is protesting in the thousands calling for universities to make it known to students how their tuition money is spent, calling for divesting from supporting a genocidal, sociopathic criminal apartheid regime.
Our senators and congresspeople ARE antisemitic and based off their morally bankrupt, completely unhinged responses we can tell. Meanwhile, everyone whose moral compass isn’t broken and their ethics are intact is finding some way to speak up and speak out. As there is a global strike for Rafah in solidarity with the Palestinian people starting this Friday May 10th I will be participating. The call to action is three bullet points as follows.
- Number 1) Don’t work (Use PTO, Call Out, etc.)
- Number 2) Don’t buy any goods or services.
- Number 3 Do not conduct any transaction on your debit or credit card.
The aim is to deliver a shock to the global economy and send a powerful message to the world leaders to fulfill their moral, political and legal obligations to take all necessary measures to prevent genocide. You can make a little video share to social media via Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, etc. and commit to these three bullet points with the hashtag #RiseForRafah.
Additionally, every year on May 15th Palestinians around the world mark the Nakba, or catastrophe, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. This May the 15th I plan on also doing practicing these three bullet points and standing in solidarity with my fellow brothers and sisters of humanity living in Israel-occupied Palestine.
There’s so much more information available about this topic and let’s be real between us friends. The real reason our Senators and Congresspeople want to get rid of TikTok is the fact that so much information is available and so many people are sharing and live documenting what’s actually going on in the world around us. Whether that’s college protests or genocide in another country the people in power don’t want any narrative they can’t 100% control and contort to suit their own ends.
Per an article from NBC News Journalist David Ingram dated November 7, 2023 and in the words of Republican Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri…
Hawley wrote that the Israel-Hamas war is a “crucial test case” for TikTok’s influence as a media organization and source of news, and he expressed concern about what he called “the ubiquity of anti-Israel content” on TikTok.
“While data security issues are paramount, less often discussed is TikTok’s power to radically distort the world-picture that America’s young people encounter,” he wrote.
Hawley’s letter cited a viral thread on the social media app X by venture capitalist Jeff Morris Jr., alleging that TikTok was the reason young Americans are more sympathetic to Palestinians than older Americans are.
Hawley wrote that CFIUS should ban not only TikTok, but also any app controlled by its parent company, ByteDance. That would also cover CapCut, a popular video-editing app.
Now I mean…I’m no rocket magician, but to me that sounds to me like trying to shut down anyone you don’t agree with which is pretty fascist if you ask me. The definition of fascism by the way, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary is as follows…
Fascism ~ Noun
- A political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
- A tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.
Now if that doesn’t sound exactly like Israel or the United States…I’m not sure what else does. Look, no matter which way you slice it if each and every one of us doesn’t exercise our God given right to free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to peacefully protest? Nothing will ever change. Worse than that it’ll only be a matter of time until those in power start rounding up the artists, the diplomats, the church leaders, and when all those who might’ve stood by your side are gone all that’ll be left is you and me alone.
Do your part and in the words of Dylan Thomas circa 1951 “Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Holy Water, Burning Man 