You Literally Dont Need A Boyfriend. Go Help Someone

i've said this before but i suppose it bears repeating and clarification. it is arabs and palestinians who have suffered the most under islamist rule. we (middle easterners, revolutionaries, religious minorities, gender and sexual minorities) as people, understand what hamas represents better than israelis do, better than anyone does. we understand what the entire spectrum from political islam to outright jihadist extremism does. we understand dictatorship. we understand theocracy. we understand fascism.

the repression israel has created is so absolute, has destroyed civil, diplomatic, intellectual and peaceful avenues so absolutely, that it leaves no avenues for anyone to condemn hamas anymore. even the representative of hamas's ideological and political opponents, the PLO (which oversees the West Bank), is openly frustrated at the request to condemn hamas. and it's not because he sympathizes with them. he has absolutely no political, personal, ideological or economic reason to.

israel has bombed gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, each and every time with the declared intention of targeting hamas and instead murdering civilians en masse. everyone familiar with israel understands that 'hamas' is meaningless, that israel has no real interest in defeating them (and that defeating militant resistance to an occupation with military force is not possible), that they went so far as to fund them as their choice of preferred enemy. when palestinians hear 'hamas' they correctly understand that israel intends to kill everyone. it is, to use the lingua franca of this period, a dogwhistle. on october 7th, israelis were horrified to see this dogwhistle suddenly become an actual whistle, but nothing else changed except for the intensity and savagery of their attacks on gaza. instead, the more they say hamas, the more they murder civilians en masse, just as they always have. everyone in gaza has said "this is not new, just worse." they have always understood that they are the target. no amount of condemning hamas, being a good palestinian, a good civilian, or even a newborn will change that.

this includes all of hamas's ideological opponents and so-called victims as well. peace activists, intellectuals, palestinian christians, and queer palestinians alike are not condemning hamas right now. they can't because they are busy fighting for their lives and homes against the israeli occupation. if you understood the personal toll this takes on them, if you understood how deeply their trauma runs, you would understand just how evil the israeli narrative on hamas is for all palestinians.

if you want a plurality of palestinian opinion, get rid of the israeli apartheid state. if you want tolerance, get rid of the israeli apartheid state. if you want israelis to be safe in their homes from the threat of hamas militants, get rid of the israeli apartheid state.

the truth is, there is a base and deeply evil racism at the core of asking to condemn hamas, especially by those who would never condemn israel or the violence it requires to maintain itself. it presumes that they have the right to ask for a condemnation of child murder, without ever giving an apology for child murder or the promise to stop murdering children. ghassan kanafani once called this "a conversation between the sword and the neck."

it is absurdity in full display, a macabre delight in impunity disguised as moral superiority. more than treating every palestinian as a terrorist in interrogation, more than its dehumanization and islamophobia, it is at its core asking "do you agree our children are more important than yours?"

and lest you forget, Israel's current minister of national security has already said it directly. as he famously once told arab-israeli reporter mohammad magadli, “Sorry Mohammad, my right to life precedes yours, that is the reality.”

in many ways, that's far more honest than asking "do you condemn hamas?"

The Anatomy of a Trans Man

helping my homie on his first time (based on this tweet)

Art is a kind of surgery. Something must be removed from inside of you. The process will irreversibly change you but if you don't go through with it you will continue to be poisoned. Are you listening this is important. You have to do it yourself like in Saw

on my worst mental health days, when I need to keep up but can’t stand the dread of scrolling, I look to Let’sTalkPalestine’s Instagram channel for news updates. Today I read something that really fucked with me. It said that even if there was a ceasefire called tomorrow, and aid allowed in and etc. that it would take Gaza until 2092 for its economy to return to 2022 levels. 70 years of potential progress, stolen from them in 4 months. And you just know that even when that happens (because Palestine WILL recover and WILL be rebuilt after Israel’s settler colony fails) the world will see that they’re still years behind the West for reasons completely out of their control and power and use it as justification to be even more racist and demeaning. And y’know how I know that? Because they already do it to the rest of the Middle East.

@el-shab-hussein @huzni @palipunk

This isn't the first time. Last year, the IDF would leave behind explosives disguised to look like toys (they did this in Lebanon as well)

spotted this sticker outside my apartment building and I think it illustrates an important point about the moment we’re in.

on a surface level this is something that a lot of people who consider themselves antizionist would agree with. but take 10 seconds to google the url at the bottom and you’ll see that this is a sticker for a neo-Nazi group.

“We serve one nation” is a reference to the dual loyalty trope, the idea that Jews can never be loyal to America because they are first and foremost loyal to Israel.

There are a lot of hate groups taking advantage of the moment we’re in. It’s easy to replace “Jew” with “Zionist” and get a lot more people to agree with them. Do not fall for it.