You gotta read and watch some old books and films that aren’t 100% modern politically correct. I’m not saying you should agree with everything in them but you need to learn where genres came from to understand what those genres are doing today and where media deconstructing old tropes is coming from.

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

Kill the censor in your head.

When we choose to avoid history because it's Problematic or Says Bad Things, we are choosing to divorce ourselves from understanding how we came from that time to this one, which makes it even more likely for the cycle to repeat, with no one but a few people with shelves of old books aware that it's happened before.

Absolutely. One of my favorite examples is Citizen Kane. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful movie about how a traumatized child becomes an authoritarian billionaire media mogul with apparently no soul. It was written, performed and directed by an anti-fascist who was a leader in the racial integration of the theater. It’s a movie that was timely in 1949 and remains relevant to this day, possibly more than ever.

And yet it’s also a product of 1949. Despite Welles’ track record on race, it barely has a black character. Its sexual politics are not blatantly offensive, but its female characters still exist to be props in Kane’s story. There’s a lesbian-coded librarian who’s very shrewish and cold to the reporter for no reason, and that’s probably not a coincidence. Its sole Jewish character is not the most negative stereotype ever, but there are definitely some very dated ideas about Jewish men still clinging to his character.

And we have to say, hey, this is a piece of art, it’s a window on a time that’s worth understanding, and it’s part of a conversation worth having about power, money and fame. What does it say that in some ways Welles failed to live up to his progressive ideals at time? What does that say about him and what does that say about society in 1949? And how does that inform and/or conflict with the themes of the film?

People with limited understanding of media can’t engage with a piece of art without either wholeheartedly endorsing its creator or wholeheartedly condemning them. And it’s like, both of those responses have their time and place, but much more commonly… artists are human and art is our window to understand them, perhaps their failings, the reasons for those failings, and what good they did or failed to do in light of those failings.

1980s - During the Boycott Divestment Sanctions campaign against racist South Africa, adversaries of the movement said that a “whites only” South Africa had a “right to exist” and that singling out South Africa was wrong when the BDS movement wasn’t also targeting the Soviet Union or “Black on Black crime.”

Jerry Falwell, the Ronald Reagan administration, and other right-wing forces accused BDS of aiding and abetting terrorism by advocating on behalf of the “convicted terrorist” Nelson Mandela.

As pride month begins, let us not forget our Palestinian brothers and sisters.

I don’t feel like I have anything to say to Zionists anymore except “this is what it sounds like to defend genocide.”

I just - can you hear yourself? I know many of you have studied fascism and the rise of genocidal attitudes. Do you think you’re immune? Do you think being Jewish, or educated, or the descendant of genocide survivors makes you immune? You know better.

My god, if the 20th century can teach us one thing, let it be that humans are great at justifying genocide to themselves and each other when motivated to. No education can inoculate against it. Every excuse had been used before. Every feeling of righteous justification for slaughter has already been invoked.

It is undeniable that there are tens of thousands of dead. So many thousands upon tens upon hundreds of thousands of children dead maimed orphaned traumatized by bombs that Israel dropped, shells that Israel fired, targets chosen by software Israel made.

This is undeniable; I can see it with my own eyes. You can say, this is the reality of war, and I will say: this is the reality of your choices. How Israel wages “war” is a choice. How they go about statecraft is a choice. We cannot and should never accept their justifications that some action of the enemy necessitated this response; they still chose the response.

There was a euphemism in some death camps in Poland: “dirty work”. It was often literally true - there’s horrific stories about the smell and texture of industrial amounts of human ash - but also figuratively; the work of mass executions is more often seen as a necessary evil for the accomplishment of a greater good. It’s rarely celebrated or acknowledged openly for what it is at the time. All of this is very normal in genocide.

I look at my timeline in the past months, at the choices Israel has made for its “greater good”, I have listened to the justifications. What I see is Israelis making the same old tired weak excuses for their own dirty work.

And all I have to say anymore is: this is what it sounds like when you defend genocide. You have not invented a new thought in all of it. “They’re not a real group, they’re monsters, we don’t want to kill them but we have to, we just want them to leave before they kill us all and they’ll try to exterminate us the second we stop killing them” - save it.

Do some fucking reading on other genocides - the Armenian one is particularly relevant - and read arguments from genocide deniers and you will quickly see it is all the same shit. Check out Facebook posts from Myanmar during the genocide and it’s basically indistinguishable from tweets from Zionists today. It’s the same shit, over and over and over again.

Literally billions of people with eyes can see what Israel is doing and call it what it is, because it’s been done before, and all the defensive answers and excuses have been done before too.

This is what it looks like when people defend genocide. Always just like this.

I found a list of 12 genocide denial tactics from the Turkish-Armenian genocide. See if you can spot the parallels to Zionists:

1. Question and minimize the statistics.

2. Attack the motivations of the truth-tellers.

3. Claim that the deaths were inadvertent.

4. Emphasize the strangeness of the victims.

5. Rationalize the deaths as the result of tribal conflict, coming to the victims out of the inevitability of their history of relationships.

6. Blame “out of control” forces for committing the killings.

7. Avoid antagonizing the genocidists, who might walk out of “the peace process.”

8. Justify denial in favor of current economic interests.

9. Claim that the victims are receiving good treatment, while baldly denying the charges of genocide outright.

10. Claim that what is going on doesn’t fit the definition of genocide.

11. Blame the victims.

12. Say that peace and reconciliation are more important than blaming people for genocide.

verified ways to send aid to gaza directly

Help a Palestinian family directly:

Help provide tents (urgent):

Food, cash & essentials:

Water:

eSIMs (urgent):

Medical Aid

there’s nothing wrong with finding gay sex sexy, even if you’re straight. sex is sex. if a woman is attracted to men, it stands to reason that she might get turned on watching two dudes mack each other’s faces off. vice versa. that’s neither weird nor news to anyone. what is weird and fucked up is consuming queer sexuality without respect for the very-real human beings who are having the queer sex

and yes, that shit is prevalent and aggravating as hell! i get it. but criticizing how people derive pleasure (“she’s evil because she thinks gay-man-sex is hot even though she’s a woman”) rather than how they abuse power (“she thinks gay-man-sex is hot, and consumes queer media in queer spaces, but she also maintains that lesbians are gross and weird and uses her platform to talk over them”) is a recipe for weird puritanical nonsense that solves zero problems and in fact creates several new ones

I don't trust anyone who hasn't acknowledged their capacity for evil.

"I'm just a smol bean uwu" No sir, what you are is someone who is so habituated to thinking of yourself as innocent that you will continue to do so even when you're guilty.

To quote Chris Fleming

"You know that thing where the most toxic person you've ever met over-relates to woodland creatures on social media? I call it Vibe Dysphoria. She'll put up a picture of a mouse in a jean jacket with 'It's me.' That is not you. I don't know how you got under the impression that you are a mouse in a jean jacket. You are an eel with a gun.She posts a toad with a basket of mushrooms like 'Me doing my little things.' Oh madam, there is nothing little about your things. You gave me psychosexual issues I'll carry to my watery grave. You are not a toad in the forest...You are a cruel woman who just happens to be small."--Chris Fleming

I think what’s driving me genuinely a little insane as the committed Zionists around me continue being committed Zionists is that it’s like - such an explicitly protectivist, nihilistic, “might makes right” political ideology even if you pretend that the land they wanted to colonize was actually uninhabited.

Like The Jewish State kicks off with

Like I understand that the misery could be an activating force, but that’s a far cry from basing your political ideology on the idea that your people have always been miserable, will always be miserable, and can only be marginally more safe by creating a bunker nation on colonized land and enforcing an demographic majority with walls and an army.

The people who buy into this are the same people who tell me that genocide is inevitable; that “never again” means never again for specifically the Jews, that “sometimes ethnic cleansing is the only option” because “the Jews can never be an ethnic minority in their own land again”, that any crime is worth achieving that outcome because it is the only possible bulwark against another Holocaust

And it’s like do you not see that this is how fascism happened! This kind of ethnic in-group protectionism and Nihilism about the ability of humans to ever achieve long-term cooperation and the beliefs about fundamental human inequality and the assertion that nothing but maintaining a majority which can forcefully suppress any minorities is the only way to stay safe as a nation is - just nuke them already, if that’s what you think. just get humanity over with, because if youre right we're all fucked. there is nothing down that road but endless cycles of ethnic cleansing and revenge.

Like we could have gone down a road where international bodies had more power, where people had more ability to reign in nations committing civil rights violations, where human rights are not subject to national sovereignty. We could have lived in a world where Jews used their unique position as a people to act as advocates for all minorities everywhere, to establish political bodies which actually had some means of intervening if a state began to violate the human rights of its ethnic minorities.

Like fundamentally I don’t understand how you come out of WW2 and say “you know what the solution to this is? more nationalism”

reading Herzl is a trip because I did not expect him to so explicitly blame anti-Semitism on Jews

like man lay off mediocre Jewish academics, maybe the problem lies with the bigots

I’ll briefly throw the rest of my notes from The Jewish State on here since I’m a strong proponent of reading foundational texts of important ideologies:

In some ways I really recognize a naivety in Herzl in this book. I’m sure I’m not the only one to think so. He even says explicitly that the creation of a Jewish state will end anti-Semitism:

My guy is so shockingly wrong about this that it kind of hurts to read. And he is not coincidentally wrong; I think he’s wrong because his base assumptions about the causes of anti-Semitism lying in the Jews themselves is wrong.

Based on early Zionist thinkers’ descriptions of the Jewish condition and my own knowledge of how things played out, it seems to me that Herzl placed the root cause of anti-Semitism in Jews when in reality the roots of anti-Semitism are the overlap between their unique geopolitical status and the world order which places minorities and their resources in a uniquely vulnerable position. And Zionism is essentially an attempt to just put some Jews in a better, more “normal” geopolitical position. It accepts as inevitable a world order in which Jews can never and will never be safe as a minority.

I can’t actually fathom how all of this isn’t seen as wildly anti-Semitic itself. There is nothing wrong with the Jews, they do not sow the seeds of their own destruction, they aren’t destined to be hated or cast out, there was nothing wrong with the vast majority of what Jews have been doing over the last two millennia. The solution to anti-Semitism is not and has never been for Jews to just stop being a minority, or for Jews to stop being Jewish. It’s to make it safer to be a minority. I want Jews in my community! I refuse to accept that a state which enforces a Jewish majority with walls and tanks halfway around the world is the only possible way to keep Jews safe. Jews as a class should be safe wherever they are. Why is that not the goal?

I think what’s driving me genuinely a little insane as the committed Zionists around me continue being committed Zionists is that it’s like - such an explicitly protectivist, nihilistic, “might makes right” political ideology even if you pretend that the land they wanted to colonize was actually uninhabited.

Like The Jewish State kicks off with

Like I understand that the misery could be an activating force, but that’s a far cry from basing your political ideology on the idea that your people have always been miserable, will always be miserable, and can only be marginally more safe by creating a bunker nation on colonized land and enforcing an demographic majority with walls and an army.

The people who buy into this are the same people who tell me that genocide is inevitable; that “never again” means never again for specifically the Jews, that “sometimes ethnic cleansing is the only option” because “the Jews can never be an ethnic minority in their own land again”, that any crime is worth achieving that outcome because it is the only possible bulwark against another Holocaust

And it’s like do you not see that this is how fascism happened! This kind of ethnic in-group protectionism and Nihilism about the ability of humans to ever achieve long-term cooperation and the beliefs about fundamental human inequality and the assertion that nothing but maintaining a majority which can forcefully suppress any minorities is the only way to stay safe as a nation is - just nuke them already, if that’s what you think. just get humanity over with, because if youre right we're all fucked. there is nothing down that road but endless cycles of ethnic cleansing and revenge.

Like we could have gone down a road where international bodies had more power, where people had more ability to reign in nations committing civil rights violations, where human rights are not subject to national sovereignty. We could have lived in a world where Jews used their unique position as a people to act as advocates for all minorities everywhere, to establish political bodies which actually had some means of intervening if a state began to violate the human rights of its ethnic minorities.

Like fundamentally I don’t understand how you come out of WW2 and say “you know what the solution to this is? more nationalism”

reading Herzl is a trip because I did not expect him to so explicitly blame anti-Semitism on Jews

like man lay off mediocre Jewish academics, maybe the problem lies with the bigots

I’ve seen several media outlets trying to claim that the UN has ‘quietly’ halved the number of Palestinian women and children killed since October 7th. Some have gone so far as to allege that Hamas fabricated the original numbers to try and cover for the 1:1 ratio of insurgents to civilians killed.

They’ve chosen to ignore the fact that the UN published a completely separate report, comprised of individuals whose remains have been identified.

The UN has clarified that the total number of women and children killed in Gaza since October 7th remains unchanged.

Rafah Crossing and Kerem Shalom Crossing have been closed since the Rafah invasion began. The little aid that trickled in kept its starving population alive and hospitals open. Israeli settlers have increasingly attacked aid trucks preventing them from entering the Strip by destroying bags of flour and blocking the streets with stones, all while the Israeli army bombed water pipes and warehouses storing aid.

And now they're doing this

This was an attempt to lynch to a Palestinian because they thought he was bringing food and fuel to a population that's being bombed hundreds of times a day

A Reminder

Palestine is not over. Palestine is not dead. Gaza, the West Bank, the entire region between the river and the sea, and the various countries across the world where refugees have fled to, house a surviving people and surviving culture. Palestine is not dead, and WILL NOT die.

I'm seeing a lot of very valid despair online, but if you're someone like me, living a privileged life in a Western country NOT under active bombardment, and which is actually COMPLICIT to some degree in that bombardment: we don't get to give up. Not now, not ever.

You can still get involved in protests or direct actions (e.g. blocking supply), you can still donate eSims or fund UNRWA on your government's behalf, you can still hassle the crap out of your local MP. No, it won't roll back the harm that's already been committed, but all of those things are STILL WORTH DOING. PEOPLE ARE STILL ALIVE OVER THERE. PALESTINE IS STILL WORTH SAVING.

If you've bothered to read this far, you're probably already aware of what's going on over there right now. If not, check out Al Jazeera's fantastic coverage. But also remember that Palestine, and Palestinian culture, is more than just death and despair. Examples below:

Long live Palestine, from the river to the sea.