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February 16 - February 22, 2019
Politics is a consequence of how a person understands their experience.
His friends have to parent him as well as his actual parents, because that is where real values are established, in the conflict between what our families tell us and the reality of the world.
This woman decided that she should punish all of civilization present and future, as well as herself, rather than let her son be responsible for the consequences of his actions.
There is something in the cultural apparatus that has imbued this woman with the self-perception that if she hurts the world and herself and maintains her son in a state of dependency, then she is a “good mother.”
Over the next eighteen days, under the pretext of “searching” for the Hamas members who were supposedly holding the teenaged boys, 400 Palestinians were arrested, 5,000 homes were raided, and six Palestinians were murdered by Israeli gunfire.
A few hours later, Israel admitted to thirty-four air raids on the Gaza Strip. As governments around the world remained silent, the first significant response came from the Algerian World Cup soccer team, who donated their salaries to the people of Gaza.
According to the United Nations, 77 percent of those first hundred Gazans whose lives he saved by killing them were civilians. Twenty-one were children.
Did Rihanna act naïvely, unaware of the political context? Did she simply, humanly, recognize the injustice? Did she understand that she was alone in expressing this view and that her celebrity coterie was especially silent? Was she informed that American history is filled with blacklists, official and unofficial shunning of both celebrities and civilians who take political stances on behalf of people without power? The irony of Rhianna, perhaps America’s best known battered woman, transgressing a pervasive fear of loss of currency is notable. When questioned by the media, her response was, “I
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That same day, France becomes the first country to specifically ban pro-Palestine demonstrations.
And of all the different communities of which I am a part, it is the theater people who were the most absent.
Obviously ringleaders, initiators, and enforcers of group cruelty originate the negative action, but those who don’t talk back, don’t interrupt, don’t say, “What you are doing is wrong” is what I find so offensive, even shocking. Israel sends 900 rockets in Gaza’s direction and kills over a hundred Palestinians. No Israelis are killed. This is falsely called “both sides.”
for some reason, this strikes me as out of place within the context of the rest of the book, which has mostly been focused on overstating -- that is, she's argued that almost exclusively everything so far has been conflict ("both sides") rather than abuse
Both Supremacy and Traumatized behaviors are by definition the denial of nuance, the refusal to recognize complicity in creating problems, and the rejection of mutual responsibility for solutions.
Instead, it is the bystanders who actively avoid the responsibility of intervention by invoking the theory of “both sides.”
again, this seems opposite of how she has constructed things in the rest of the book
How dare the dead telegenically splay their broken, butchered, unseeing bodies amid the rubble to court the pity of a pitiless world.
43% of #Gaza’s total territory has now been warned to evacuate. But borders are closed. Where are people supposed to go?
The article described a peaceful demonstration by Jews on July 12 that was attacked by “several dozen extreme-right activists, some of them wearing T-shirts with neo-Nazi designs.”
it'll never not be weird that neo-nazis come out pro-israel because of superseding islamophobia, like the the whole ilhan omar thing going on right now
This is the poison of Supremacy ideology: in this case, a clear dehumanization of the other through racism, so that the “monster,” created by the poster’s projections, can be reduced to “questions” devoid of empathy or recognition.
I note the false opposition of “Hamas and Israel.” It should either be “Hamas and Likud,” the two opposing ruling parties, or “Israel and Palestine.”
Rebecca Vilkomerson, the Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace, and seven others were arrested in New York for entering the office of Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces and reading out loud the names of Palestinians murdered in Gaza. The Washington Post reported that more than fifty former Israeli soldiers have refused to serve in the current ground operation in Gaza. The soldiers wrote: We found that troops who operate in the occupied territories aren’t the only ones enforcing the mechanisms of control over Palestinian lives. In truth, the entire military is implicated. For that
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Since the state of Israel had now murdered 600 people in Gaza because they claimed they were “defending” themselves,
openly wondering how Israel could simultaneously insist that the place was safe enough for tourism.
A concept of “defense” that relies on mass murder at the worst of times and oppression and denial of basic rights as status quo, is not acceptable.
If the only way to achieve a goal is through mass murder, it is the wrong goal.
I’m supposed to be grateful that you are not doing this? Why is this even up for discussion?
to be fair, one of Schulman's central points is not overstating harm -- I wouldn't necessarily call attacks on (predominantly) civilians "war" but it's also valid to question the accuracy of calling it up and up genocide
what i mean is that this perverted invasion of privacy and sovereignty employs (surveillance) the very technology US military etc do to keep an eye and follow the lives of those they know have power (either spiritual, political, social, economic or military).
worth keeping in mind the US was able to get biometric data on almost the entire country of Afghanistan without any real comment
What’s the way to handle it? I know how some very idealistic young Jewish men and women handled in the early sixties, when the situation was only fifteen or sixteen years old. They went over, expecting to find they had a home, and, when they got there, they were appalled at what they found--and they came back to America, and sat in my kitchen and broke down crying because they were so outraged at what they’d seen.
AIPAC Is the Only Explanation for America’s Morally Bankrupt Israel Policy
I would be interested to see Schulman's take on the rep omar thing going on
Honestly, the prevalence of Christian Zionists (like George Bush) in the majority religion here creates a context for AIPAC’s extremist views.
“Hamas” is an excuse to justify all kinds of cruelties. It’s a Monster or Spectre that has been invented as a dehumanized repository of everyone’s blame. I am not religious and I don’t support religious parties.
gotta plead ignorance on some of this but aren't they actually a democratically elected party in palestine that would necessarily have stated goals/beliefs/intentions, etc (aside from the wider context as an organization which I think is not limited to Palestine in any case)? obviously that can be propagandized by opponents but I'm not sure it's entirely a fictional creation existing in propaganda only
After all, Hamas was a government that was democratically elected. Jimmy Carter oversaw its election and declared it to be free and fair.
see?
hi, I’m a conservative, I want to overthrow the US government because my lightbulbs are dimmer now but Palestinians have no right to resist
dammit dan
By late August, the war on Gaza had claimed over 2,000 lives and more would follow. Most of them were civilians, and many were children. Another 10,000 Palestinians were wounded. By contrast, sixty-five Israeli soldiers were killed and three civilians and several hundred Israeli soldiers were wounded. One-quarter of Gazans were made homeless; most of the country was in literal ruins. Israel destroyed their power plant, thereby knocking out electricity, contaminating water, and halting sewage processing. The destruction included a university, many mosques, most hospitals, 146 schools, and
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The US Senate voted 100 to zero to support Israel, and President Obama signed $225 million in further aid.
Netanyahu quoted just two lines, carefully avoiding the one preceding them: “Cursed be he who cries out: Revenge!”
I guess that's the way it always goes
“Do what feels right” is unfortunately considered the individual’s best guide to ethical action. But this can be a capitulation to the controls of impulsivity, rooted in trauma and egged on by bad friends and negative family relationships.
Yes, she quoted an Australian study published in 2013 which found that when people refused to acknowledge that they had made mistakes, they reaped more psychological benefits than those who copped to their errors. The study showed that people who refused to admit wrongdoing felt greater self-esteem and more in control than those who did apologize, even if they were liars.
She didn’t have to defend it. She didn’t have to pretend that it was okay. She didn’t have to re-inscribe any of its injustices. She could simply embrace change, of her own identity and self-concept. She could become a Palestinian Jew. And so, literally or metaphorically, can we all.
But the only way to truly get better is to face and deal with each other, sit down and communicate.
Some of these refugees, whose families and friends were murdered by fascists, actually wished to treat their tormenters, to have them as patients. They didn’t want them to go to jail or be killed. Instead, the refugee practitioners wanted to talk to their persecutors about their feelings. I find this to be remarkable.
But since this was not a private conversation, we got into a very rich and fruitful back and forth about some of the larger questions of accusation and punishment on college campuses. We started talking about the case at Columbia University in which a woman charged a man with sexual abuse and wanted him to be expelled. Rather than debate the details of that case, we went to an even larger conversation about the question of expulsion itself.
