Links To Help You Actually Learn And Understand What Happened In Israel On October 7

Ah, that answers a lot of questions thank you.

A little while ago you reblogged(?) a post about not using certain monsters because they belong to certain cultures unless you belong to those cultures - I’m not trying to be offensive or ignorant, I was just wondering, if enough research is done and appropriate respect is taken to those origins, is it ok to use them? I mean, is there something to be said about sharing parts of stories? Is it any different than using monsters from Greek mythology?

You’re referring to this post.

It’s complicated, but it boils down to “Since so often the research isn’t done and appropriate respect isn’t given to the originating cultures, it is better to err on the side of caution; as part of that, abstain from using those entities (especially as they’re typically presented in pop culture), and instead use these substitutes.” 

I mean, is there something to be said about sharing parts of stories?

Yes, there is something to be said about sharing–when it’s shared by someone who it belongs to.  Otherwise, it’s theft.  And cultural theft–of dominant cultures taking the “fun bits” of cultures that they find interesting and discarding the rest–is a massive problem right now.  

Let me give an example that’s particular to my culture.  My culture is Jewish–or, speaking more specifically, Rabbinic Judaism, which developed from Pharisaic Judaism after the destruction of the Holy Temple by Rome almost two millennia ago.  For the last 1900 years, my culture has been living in diaspora at the (dubious) mercy of gentiles, and we’ve developed a wide array of religiously and culturally meaningful rituals, stories, foods and so forth.  These cultural artifacts are ours, and I can say without hyperbole that we have been brutalized and killed for practicing these parts of our culture.  We have paid, in blood and lives, for our right to these practices as part of who we are.

Now, after centuries of having killed us for our culture, Christians are instead stealing bits of Rabbinic Judaism’s cultural practices for themselves.  Christian “Seders” at Passover are a thing.  Christians write thinkpieces on why they should celebrate Channukah.  After centuries of persecuting Jews for practicing Judaism, It’s considered cute and trendy to take the “fun bits” of Judaism for themselves.  (And that’s not even touching “Messianic judaism” and it’s wholesale theft of Rabbinic Judaism’s cultural practices in an effort to convert Jews by trickery).  

Imagine how I feel about that sort of theft, seeing it again and again and again…

So you’re asking me if you can use the Golem in your stories?

Well, why should you?  Do you know that the Golem was made as a protector by the head rabbi of Prague to protect the Jewish community against the Christian community during a period of repeated accusations of Blood Libel?  That it was essentially made as a defender that wouldn’t abandon us, that wouldn’t take our money and turn on us like mercenaries did, when the mobs came with torches and knives to kill the Jews who they believed were kidnapping Christian children to use their blood?  That it was a story told by Jewish parents to Jewish children that we would have a magical bulwark to stand between us and a world that wanted to kill us in horrible fashions?  

Why should you take that and get to turn it into a generic constructed monster built by a wizard as a dumb defender of his wizard’s tower when there is a perfectly acceptable substitute in the form of elementals, which don’t have that baggage of coming from an abused culture watching the stories that they’ve kept for themselves be torn away from them and used for the enjoyment of the people who persecuted them?  Why do you have to take it?  Why does your desire for it outweigh our wish that you leave it to us?

As for the difference with the Greeks–while the Greek pagans are making a comeback, the original religion of the Greeks has been destroyed and paved over with Christianity.  There’s a fundamental difference between taking from a dead culture and a living persecuted one.  

I'm a Transgender Peace Activist Who Converted to Judaism. I Wasn't Expecting My Fellow Progressives to Turn on Me.

Here’s what they don’t tell you when converting to Judaism: Everyone has an opinion on Israel. And once you convert, everyone has an opinion regarding your opinions on Israel. To say I chose a rather interesting time to convert to Judaism is an understatement. Considering the current politica...

”Being queer, transgender, and Hispanic, I’ve had my share of slurs thrown at me.

My social group and volunteer work are where I find a safe place from the nonsense outside. If things got bad after my conversion, I had this community to turn to. Imagine my surprise, then, to find accusations and anger not from the usual suspects, but from my own progressive communities. To give a few choice examples:

1) My Catholic parents bought me a Star of David necklace to celebrate my conversion. I showed this to someone I had attended numerous LGBT events with. Their response was to call it “pro-apartheid jewelry” and said I was wearing “that star on the Jewish flag.”

2) For about a year, I catalogued footage of humanitarian disasters during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for use by a humanitarian organization. I’m proud of that work. I mentioned my conversion to a few friends who knew me at the time. All immediately asked if I had changed my views on Israeli politics.

3) Whenever I mention my conversion to anyone in my larger social circle, the response is never congratulations. Four out of five times, I’m immediately grilled on my views regarding Israeli policy.

When I chose to convert, my rabbi made it very clear that conversion was just a ritual. “You’re already Jewish,” he told me. “This is confirmation of what already exists.” In some ways, that’s true. I was the same person when I entered the bet din as I was when I exited the mikveh. What has changed, though, is how others see me regardless of who or what I am.“

A Brief History Of The Palestinian People And The Jewish Religion According To Widespread Leftist Views

10,000,000-100,000 BCE: The Palestinian People emerge and live continuously in Palestine through to the present day (precise date estimates varies).

50,000 BCE: Evolution of Behaviorally Modern Humans

~1000 BCE: The Palestinian nation-state is founded as a sovereign kingdom under the renowned Palestinian warrior-monarch King David.

0 AD: Jesus Christ, a Palestinian Socialist Person Of Color, is born under Jewish Occupation to Palestinian Refugees.

33 AD: Jesus is tortured and murdered by Jewish occupiers in Palestine. The Romans stand by and don't have anything to do with this.

~50 AD-600 AD?: The Jewish Occupation of Palestine ends and all Jews cease to exist. Details unavailable.

700s AD: The White Khazars convert to Judaism, and are the source of all modern Jews.

700s-1933 AD: Jews spread through Europe, living as rich, privileged bankers, and face no widespread antisemitism, prejudice, or any negative experiences at all; they are the Whitest of White people, simply following a different Abrahamic religion that is just a type of Christianity, and has no ethnic component. They have this degree of privilege even as they scheme and plot against their fellow European Whites by fomenting wars, run the entire Atlantic slave trade, and routinely betray and stab their Fellow White People in the back, being more loyal to their fellow Jews than to their own hosts. Meanwhile, Jews in Arabic nations are also well treated.

1933-1945 AD: The Nazis invent antisemitism, picking the Jews as an arbitrary target, and manage to get all of Germany to hate the Jews for no reason, and supposedly kill six million Jews, possibly in collaboration with the Zionists.

1946 AD: Antisemitism is over and gone, and will never exist again. Any future attempts to claim antisemitism is an effort to distract from legitimate criticisms of Zionist fascism in occupied Palestine.

1947 AD: The Jews go to the other Europeans and play the sympathy card and the other Europeans tell them that they can now have a colony of their very own for the plentiful oil in Palestine.

1948 AD: History formally begins. White European Jews invade the sovereign socialist, progressive, democratically perfect state of Palestine, who accepted the Jewish refugees without any reservations, problems, or other issues, purely out of the goodness of their hearts, and were promptly betrayed, colonized, ethnically cleansed and mass murdered.

1948 AD-2023 AD: The illegal, settler-colonialist, genocidal fascist state of Is-Not-Real proceeds to routinely genocide and cull the innocent Palestinian people. For example, every three days, IOF soldiers kill a Palestinian child, and harvests their organs, and regularly kills tens of millions of other Palestinians out of the existing population of five million. During this time, Israel uses its control over the governments, media, and economies of the West to cement its genocidal control over the occupied Palestinian territories and cover up its millions of murders, while crying "antisemitism" as the Zionists kill Palestinians, who are the only true Semites.

7 October, 2023-Present: Israel kills 1200 of their own people and kidnap hundreds of others as a false flag, managing to trick the innocent and naive freedom fighters of Hamas to broadcast the propaganda killings on their own social media accounts. The IOF then proceeds to kill 14,000 millions of innocent Palestinians, nearly all of them innocent, blameless children, whose bodies are taken by Israel for organ harvesting and to use to fake other Hamas attack victims, because apparently the Brown Palestinians are perfect stand-ins for White Israelis and can't be told apart easily on sight.

Ambulance Bill Passed Due

gofundme.com

Donate to ambulance bill, organized by Varda Cassar

I received a final notice for an ambulance bill which I can't afford, I didn't receive the previous letter… Varda Cassar needs your support

I hate to log back in to Tumblr just to beg for help, but I have 14 days to cough up $1200 for an ambulance bill.

I would really appreciate if you reblogged this for reach. Thank you 💓💓💓

There’s a Senate inquiry into the worsening rental crisis!

Thanks to the Greens you can now write a submission to a committee inquiry into how the rental crisis is affecting you and your community, provide evidence, and shape the reports that’ll be given to the National Cabinet in September and November to suggest how they can address the rental crisis.

This is super important! The information that YOU give to this inquiry will inform both the state and federal government about just how dire the situation is and help it understand how it needs to do more to fix the rental crisis in Australia.

So share - and don’t forget to click here to submit BY 28 JULY!!!

People are claiming Israel is blocking baby formula from Gaza. Do you know where this rumor comes from and is there any basis?

Hi Nonnie,

I searched through journalistic sources, and while I have found a few reports in Amrican media, which say that baby formula is hard to find in Gaza (which is no surprise if Hamas steals about 60% of all humanitarian aid entering Gaza (this was happening even before the war, that donations were being stolen by Hamas), in part to sell it to Palestinians for much higher prices (again, something that happened before this war as well), in part to produce anti-Israel propaganda, that allows Hamas to falsely claim Gazans are being deliberately starved (but divert the blame away from themselves), but as far as I can tell, there's no fact checked source that says anything about it being completely blocked. My guess is that this rumor is exactly what so many of the other anti-Israel ones are: a libel, meant to help demonize the Jewish state.

Where did this libel originate? It might be tied to the reports about the baby formula being hard to find, once again using demonizing hyperbole (stretching it from 'hard to find' to 'none is being brought in') and taking it out of context (leaving out that humanitarian aid in general, including baby formula, is hard to find in Gaza, because Hamas steals it). Another option is that they're simply relying on the horror of the story. I've found a few cases with the same claims about babies not having food / baby formula in Gaza dating back to 2017, 2010 and 2009.

It seems like COGAT, the unit in the IDF that exists solely in order to coordinate help for the Palestinians, has already heard about this rumor, and has posted its own date about this, which refutes the rumor and specifies how much baby formula has been allowed in, and that there are no restrictions on any humanitarian aid (posted Mar 21):

But what if people don't trust the IDF's word? Well, then how about that of organizations which are def pro-Palestinian, ones which have been asking for people's donations to provide Gazans with humanitarian aid, and who claim that they've delievered baby formula inside Gaza? Since Israel approves of anything going in, this couldn't have happened (or be posted about publicly) if Israel were blocking all baby formula from entering Gaza.

Or how about the word of the Jordanians, fellow Arabs, who reported that their air drops of humanitarian aid in Gaza include baby formula? And again, nothing gets air dropped in Gaza without Israel's approval.

I hope this helps!

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

Twitter thread by Melissa Caruso about a labyrinthine magical bookstore in Syracuse, NY. Link to the first tweet in the thread; most pictures have image descriptions! Now here are the screenshots of that thread:

And then a hero of the labyrinthine magical bookstores of the world put all the bookstores that people listed in the replies on a map! (Google Maps link)

Astrid redraw:>

I've never tried to exactly redraw an image in digital before, as I did in traditional, although I think this is an oversight))

Hope you like it, I tried very hard on this, her skirt is just a pain🥲

Of course you don’t. Free college might hinder the school-to-prison pipeline your  prison owning donors depend on