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Massacres in Palestine!!!!
As the massacres in Palestine continue to unfold (with news just coming in that Israel has shelled a UN school killing at least 15 Palestinians and injuring 200 even though the UN had previously provided the Israeli occupation forces with the GPS/location information for that designated emergency shelter), I have noticed American responses largely following into one of these four categories:
• Those who remain silent, with or without knowledge that their tax dollars are fueli...ng this horror (financially and diplomatically), considering what the US calls its “special relationship with Israel,” manifested most recently in the US being the world’s only country to vote against the UN Human Rights Council’s decision to investigate Israel’s latest war crimes in Gaza.
• Those who repeat Israeli state and military propaganda about how Hamas, and Palestinians more broadly, are to blame for their own killing. Notice how Hamas and Palestinians are conflated. The dehumanizing tropes that all of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement are Hamas supporters is ridiculous. Anyone in feminist or anti-racist movements is familiar with how those in support of systems of oppression and subjugation blame the victims of those systems primarily for the structural and physical violences to which they are subjected.
• Those who choose to remain comfortable with platitudes about “humanity” and “suffering on both sides” without having to confront the profound asymmetry in power between Palestinians and Israelis, the former who are stateless and under a system of prolonged settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid, and the latter of who have a nuclear state with the fourth most powerful military in the world backed by the superpower as it imposes this system of ethno-religious supremacy.
• Those whose consciences move them to speak truth to power and who want to address their deep complicity in the oppression of Palestinians. They are courageous, despite the Zionist McCarthysim of the Israel Lobby in the US, in calling a spade a spade. And when they do invoke humanity and compassion, they do so with a recognition of the need to acknowledge and support both Israelis and Palestinians who are confronting this system of oppression in ethical ways, and with a recognition that the call for justice cannot be muzzled in the name of peace.
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Borrowed from an Egyptian friend.
• Those who remain silent, with or without knowledge that their tax dollars are fueli...ng this horror (financially and diplomatically), considering what the US calls its “special relationship with Israel,” manifested most recently in the US being the world’s only country to vote against the UN Human Rights Council’s decision to investigate Israel’s latest war crimes in Gaza.
• Those who repeat Israeli state and military propaganda about how Hamas, and Palestinians more broadly, are to blame for their own killing. Notice how Hamas and Palestinians are conflated. The dehumanizing tropes that all of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement are Hamas supporters is ridiculous. Anyone in feminist or anti-racist movements is familiar with how those in support of systems of oppression and subjugation blame the victims of those systems primarily for the structural and physical violences to which they are subjected.
• Those who choose to remain comfortable with platitudes about “humanity” and “suffering on both sides” without having to confront the profound asymmetry in power between Palestinians and Israelis, the former who are stateless and under a system of prolonged settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid, and the latter of who have a nuclear state with the fourth most powerful military in the world backed by the superpower as it imposes this system of ethno-religious supremacy.
• Those whose consciences move them to speak truth to power and who want to address their deep complicity in the oppression of Palestinians. They are courageous, despite the Zionist McCarthysim of the Israel Lobby in the US, in calling a spade a spade. And when they do invoke humanity and compassion, they do so with a recognition of the need to acknowledge and support both Israelis and Palestinians who are confronting this system of oppression in ethical ways, and with a recognition that the call for justice cannot be muzzled in the name of peace.
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Borrowed from an Egyptian friend.
Paul Marin -19 is one thing, 20 is a whole other matter. It gets even worse if they win the UCL. *groan*. 
05/18/2011.MU fans naah cough, but all a unuh a vomit?-Lazie 1/11/2015
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