One year.

(Yes, I’m posting this late.) Today it has been one full year since the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, planned and carried out by Al-Qassam of Hamas against the oppressive occupying entity “Israel”. 

Right now I am supposed to be preparing for the major Hurricane Milton whose path I am literally sitting right in the center of. I am extremely lucky that I am far enough inland that I don’t have to worry about storm surge, and that my mother’s house is a solid structure, and that flooding due to torrential rain and ground saturation is still just down the street from us. 

In all honesty, I am having a hard time thinking about anything but the genocide (& etc) in Gaza, West Bank, and now Lebanon.

Don’t look away

Don’t look away from Gaza, and the West Bank, and Jerusalem. The IOF takes advantage of people’s attention being drawn elsewhere. Their massacres of Palestinians are still very numerous and brutal. And the Lebanese are being attacked precisely because they refuse to look away from Gaza and are standing up for the Palestinians. These people are such beautiful people, such honorable people. 

I told you…

I told you the resistance is ready.

Day one Zionazi troops actually try to enter Lebanon, and Hizbollah turns them right back around. Not a good start for the Zionazi IOF. 

The Terrorism of Western supremacy, imperialism and hypocrisy

What do I even say? How do I even begin? The terrorist regime of the Zionist occupying entity called “Israel” is carrying out a massacre on the people of Lebanon too. Slaughtering Palestinians isn’t enough, apparently. It is incomprehensible to me, both the horrors the Palestinians and Lebanese are going through and the mindset capable of carrying it out or supporting and justifying it. 
Watching this, and watching the world watch this, and watching my government pretend it’s not happening and pretend they’re so unaware and uninvolved while they facilitate it, and hearing the way people talk about it, the words they choose to use: this has put me in a state of so much stress and anxiety, anguish and grief, disgust and despair, and visceral outrage, that I sometimes start shaking.

To start with, for the record, Hassan Nasrallah was not a terrorist. Do not refer to Hizbollah as a “terrorist organization”.

Hizbollah’s hiding missiles in my house!

The IOF are not targeting Hizbollah sites. They say that, but that is not what they are doing. That’s just gaslighting, and a weak attempt to avoid liability for the consequences of their attacks. Do they really believe they are fooling anyone? How absurd are their gaslighting and hasbara going to get?

The IOF make public announcements and call and text people in Lebanon and send radio messages to warn everyone in the south of Lebanon: if you are located near a site used by Hizbollah, or there are Hizbollah rockets or weapons in your home or the building you are in, you are at risk of being bombed and so you need to evacuate north for your safety.

Because, you know, it’s just common knowledge where the sites are that Hizbollah uses for anything. 

Are you fucking stupid?

Actually, no, Hamas do NOT use “human shields”

Let’s dismantle the claim that Hamas use civilian Palestinians as “human shields” by embedding themselves within the civilian population and infrastructure, and that this is the reason why the civilian death toll in Gaza is so absurdly high. That is, the high death toll is Hamas’s fault, not the fault of Israel and the IOF who are the ones doing the actual killing. First, I will give you a bunch of reasons why we should believe the “human shields” claim is false. Then I will tell you how we can know definitively that it is false, and that the IOF are indeed targeting the civilian population, instead of civilian deaths being mere “collateral damage”.

I just have to say, it is grossly embarrassing how much the U.S. government and Zionists and genocide apologists think we are all very stupid and incapable of looking with our own eyes and figuring out what is really going on. If we took how they describe the situation and switched out the location and the people involved to be anywhere in the West, nobody would ever in their right mind claim what they are now trying to convince us about Hamas and the IOF. 

Lebanon has a right to defend itself

Israel is attacking Lebanon, not the other way around, and that’s obvious to anyone. Israel is striking first, not Lebanon, not Hizbollah, Israel is attacking first. The U.S. government has said several times it will only come to Israel’s aid to defend it, not aid it in a war it started. But now let’s see how quickly they go back on their word, and come up with some half-baked concocted and logically twisted claims that somehow it was Hizbollah who started it and now the U.S. must defend Israel. 

Israel must be stopped. And the U.S. government must be stopped. It is Israel and the U.S. government who are the terrorists and promote violence.

I can only hope I can find a way to move out of this country in the not too distant future. But practically debilitating chronic health issues make that quite challenging, since I am not lucky enough to come from the wealth and privilege that would allow me access to do that. So I don’t have any clue how I will make that happen, but I have to get out of this country at some point, because I cannot stand what the U.S. government has done and is doing to so much of the rest of the world. Sure, not everything is bad, but most of it is, especially in these recent times. 

Terrorist attack on Lebanon

Do you condemn terrorism against a civilian population? 

Make no mistake: the explosions in pagers and other devices in Lebanon is a terrorist attack by Israel. And I have no doubt the U.S. government knew about it and played some role in it. Israeli citizens are literally online cheering and mocking and viciously laughing at the Lebanese who were injured and killed! If China or Russia had done something like that, the U.S. government would be screaming about how horrific of an attack of terrorism it was, and they’d be condemning it and demanding everyone condemn such a despicable and cowardly attack. But because it’s Israel, we play dumb and uninformed and are “concerned”. Fuck you, Blinken and Biden, and Sullivan and Hochstein too. Not only are you disgusting, but you will be to blame when we get attacked on our own soil. And we fucking deserve it! I will not be surprised when it happens. Nor when Zionism is what destroys your precious American Empire. 

Just a bit of health advice

Don’t become anemic! It’s really frustrating and not always easy to come back from. Especially when the cause of the anemia is something you can’t really avoid, like for example, a certain medication you absolutely need, so you keep falling back into anemia. :( I never expected anemia would be something I would struggle with.

 You know you’re getting old when you enjoy the taste of plain Cheerios, dry.

Are you ready?

https://x.com/TVFreePalestine
https://x.com/jonelmer

Click top right corner of video to open Google Drive file (if you want to view it larger) even if button doesn't show.

…

The Resistance is ready

Hoopoe Bird, part 1

Hoopoe Bird, part 2
Hoopoe Bird, special ed.

I feel like I’ve not slept in ten months

My head is so jumbled with rage and disgust and grief and angst and so many images and thoughts about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it’s nearly impossible for me to focus enough to write. Never before has racism so deeply shocked me to my core. I think because this racism is different from any other kind of racism; it is so specific, it is so contextual, it often feels it reaches the level of malicious. But it also comes with an amount and level of gaslighting and propaganda like nothing else. Of course we’ve experienced gaslighting and propaganda against blacks here in the U.S., for example regarding police brutality or intelligence. But the racist gaslighting and propaganda against Palestinians (in Palestine) feels, across the board, so deeply personal in its vitriolic viciousness. 

I am so enraged and disgusted watching the spokespeople for the U.S. government still to this day, after ten months of the most brutal and savage genocide, so condescendingly dismiss the ever increasing numbers of Palestinians slaughtered and gruesomely injured to bring up Oct 7 again, to emphasize Oct 7, to keep redirecting our attention to Oct 7, to keep trying to drill it into our heads that Palestinian lives just don’t matter nearly as much as Israeli lives do. They brazenly stand up there and keep bringing up Oct 7. In the face of the unspeakable horrific atrocities that Israel is committing and that the U.S. is helping them commit against the Palestinians in Gaza, they insist that we not pay attention to that, because Oct 7, because Hamas, because Israel must defend itself. 

I keep not posting my writing because I want to put my thoughts into a coherent order. After all, I am trying to lay out an argument, to make a case.

This is a mistake if I want to get anything posted and put out there. So I really just need to ditch presenting in a coherent order and just write and post whatever I can. 

(It wouldn’t be so challenging if I weren’t daily fighting against my conditions. And I know that sounds trite in comparison to what Palestinians are going through. And it is. I know that, with my conditions, I would not have survived long in Gaza after Oct 7.) 

…sigh…

Israel is sick

How sick does a society have to be in order to be openly in favor of torture without any restriction whatsoever? Including rape, raping men, women, and children—yes, they’re raping children—raping people to death, raping men with electrified metal rods! Perhaps even raping them with dogs, though I don’t know if that is confirmed, but no one would be surprised at this point if they were doing that too. Israel is the sickest and most sadistic regime, they are utterly disgusting. How could any nation be proud of torture?! And such sick sick torture. They are psychopaths, sick serial killers.
Polio has been confirmed to be in Gaza now, too. Nice job, Israel. If there’s an outbreak of polio, or any other infectious disease currently spreading in Gaza because of the savage cruelty of Israel, the whole world will know who to blame. 

Hamas & the Resistance are winning

How do we know that Hamas and the Resistance are winning against the IOF and Israel? Because the IOF admits they are running out of tanks. How could they be running out of tanks?! Because so many of them have been damaged or destroyed beyond repair in Gaza. How did that happen? Hamas and PIJ fighters are damaging and destroying them with their “homemade” weapons. 

The Resistance puts out video clips everyday. But many people have doubted the videos showing them damaging and destroying tanks, saying the explosions aren’t really penetrating the armor or that they are really part of the tank’s defense system. If that were true, and that all the video clips of the IOF hauling off the damaged tanks afterwards are somehow faked, then the IOF wouldn’t be running out of tanks. But they are. 

Hamas and the Resistance are winning. 🇵🇸

Good Riddance, Joe

Fuck Joe Biden. I’m glad they got him to withdraw from the presidential race, he was surely going to lose. But everyone tripping over themselves to say how much they love him and what a great guy he is and he’s done so much for the country and… disgusting! Fuck them, they’re sycophants and they have no real moral principles. Joe Biden is Genocide Joe, a war criminal gleefully participating and facilitating a genocide against the Palestinians. I don’t care what his career has been like, he has revealed his true colors, and his true color is white supremacy! 

I don’t care that he chose a black-Indian woman to be his VP and put a black woman onto the Supreme Court. I’m glad he did so, but that doesn’t “prove” he’s not racist. His unwavering Zionist imperialist genocidal war-mongering against the Palestinians reveals his deeply rooted racism. I once bought into the propaganda of Joe Biden as being an anti-racist, genuinely fighting for social justice and equality, and as being a good person, compassionate, etc. All that was completely obliterated in less than a month—too long, really, but I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt—by his support for and participation in Israel’s brutal and savage war and genocide against Gaza and the Palestinians.

So fuck Joe Biden and good riddance. 

And fuck all the sycophants praising him over and over again. Joe Biden has revealed himself to be no different than Trump in being egotistical and authoritarian and obsessed with power. And the Democratic establishment have revealed themselves to be corrupted sycophants no different from the Republicans. 

Trump assassination attempt makes an excellent distraction from genocide

I have to say this. Because it’s ridiculous, in a dark and twisted way. Especially given what looks like grave incompetence in the Secret Service. With the very high numbers of Palestinians the IOF have slaughtered the past few days, I cannot help thinking, half jokingly, that somehow Netanyahu—or perhaps Ben-Givr or Smotrich—is behind the assassination attempt on Trump, to give the U.S. such an extreme distraction we cannot take our eyes and ears off of, so that we stop paying attention to the U.S. backed Israel genocide against the Palestinians, at least for a little while. I am half joking, because I honestly wouldn’t put it past them to actually do something like that. Yes, I know Netanyahu wants Trump to win, but he’s starting to have bigger problems, and he knows it’s still a good bet that no matter who the U.S. President is, they’ll let him and Israel basically do whatever the fuck they want. Additionally, regardless of whether the assassination attempt were successful or not, it might also stir up the violent feelings and attitudes that Americans tend to have in spades, which might then morph into feeling more supportive of Israel’s mass murdering Palestinians everyday. 

Just sayin’, it’s not impossible…

FPTV Close range montage

 

Montage of close range resistance operations in Gaza, Palestine. Dated: 08/07/2024.
Donate: https://t.co/KbDCuHtZnX
Watch on RU: https://t.co/OW5FPzoejs pic.twitter.com/w35kXBnzPd

— Free Palestine TV (@TVFreePalestine) July 8, 2024

Do I support Hamas? (Are you racist?)

I don’t condemn Hamas. Does that mean I support them?

That’s a pretty loaded question. What do you mean by “support”?

I do support the Palestinian resistance—the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, the acts of resistance, the fight for resistance, the means of resistance. It just so happens that Hamas, qua Al-Qassam Brigades, is the largest and best equipped group providing armed resistance for Palestinians’ liberation from occupation in the Gaza Strip. In that sense, yes, I support Hamas and Al-Qassam, because they happen to be the ones who satisfy the description—and thus are in fact the ones being referred to by the description—“the leading resistance force that is standing up for and fighting for Palestinians’ liberation and freedom from occupation”. In a different possible world, some other political-military group would satisfy that description, and in that possible world I would support that group instead. I don’t support Hamas and Al-Qassam because they are Hamas and Al-Qassam; I support Hamas and Al-Qassam because they are leading the resistance.

Consequently, if you want to support the Palestinians in their resistance and their fight for liberation, freedom, and self determination, and you are not against armed and potentially violent resistance on principle, then you have to support Hamas and Al-Qassam in some sense, because they are leading the resistance right now. (Yes, with help from other groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad; but Hamas outnumbers them all by far.) If you refuse to support them, then your position is self-contradictory and you’re a hypocrite. 

I know you might already be thinking, but what about their beliefs and ideology? I will get to that later, in a future essay. But suffice it to say at the moment that, for the most part, their beliefs and ideology are irrelevant.

[Just an fyi: I am not doing much editing and cleaning up of my writing, here and recently and in the near future, due to time constraints. Because when I do that for my writing, I am obsessive and perfectionist about it and it takes a long time; but these days, I just don’t have the time available for that kind of editing, and I’ve already spent way too many days writing this particular essay. So, yes, my writing is rather messy and rambling and disorganized and has some “stream-of-consciousness” feel to it.]

This needs to STOP.

 This family needs justice. People with disabilities, especially things like autism, suffer enough, they are the most vulnerable, they don’t deserve to be abused. 

Let’s remember who train our cops! The fucking Israel Occupation Forces! 

Puppets for Israel and Zionism… how embarrassing

I’m sorry, but it’s a pathetic sight to see so many famous and public figures tripping over and slobbering over themselves and each other blathering and spitting out hasbara zionist talking points and lies so they don’t upset Israel and hopefully even please Israel. You can tell they’re just repeating what they’ve been instructed to say, or what they’ve heard other Israel apologists say, because they repeat it over and over, one talking point after another, and they don’t go any deeper than the talking points themselves, because they haven’t actually thought about these things, they’re just parroting. So if you start asking questions, they deflect deflect deflect in one way or another. Watching these people do this is pathetic enough; but when they’re actually intelligent people, even if I disagree with them on many other things, it’s kind of embarrassing, because they have to spew these hasbara zionist talking points and lies that tend to be quite obviously abhorrent, whether because they’re just plain hypocritical and contradictory or they make them look puzzlingly foolish because they have to appear to believe ridiculous and implausible things or just plain insanely horrific because they’re trying to justify genocide and/or ethnic cleansing, or at least murdering thousands upon thousands of children. 

(No, I’m not cleaning up my run-on sentences. Sometimes I like them, because they’re a closer representation of my actual thoughts.) 

Watching them I can’t help sometimes thinking, oh you poor puppets… 

But I don’t feel the least bit sorry for them for willingly publicly embarrassing and shaming themselves in front of the entire world, and for putting themselves on the historical record, just for the sake of defending a psychopathic theocratic ethnostate committing genocide against a people they’ve oppressed and imprisoned and dehumanized and brutalized in every way possible.

Do I condemn Hamas?

The question so many are so obsessed with: Do you condemn Hamas?!

I’ll come right out and say it: No, I don’t condemn Hamas!

Why should I? I reject the premise of the question. 

[Sure, go ahead and add me to your “terrorism watchlist” if that makes you feel better. It’s not as if I’m going to give up my right to free speech. I have principles, y’all.]

To declare up front that you condemn Hamas for the alleged “atrocities” committed on Oct 7 is begging the question—and I mean the true form of begging the question that is a form of fallacious logical reasoning. You cannot begin the discussion by asking me to assume the very conclusion you are intending to argue for. 

Besides, what does it matter whether I condemn Hamas? What is the point of the question? What are you trying to accomplish? It seems the point is purely to begin the conversation from a place of prejudice against the Palestinians. Furthermore, the question, Do you condemn Hamas?, assumes adequate knowledge of the events of Oct 7, something I am unwilling to simply give to you even just for the sake of argument, because it really matters here what actually took place. (I will get into that discussion in another essay.) To grant you that assumption would be to give in to your prejudice against the Palestinians. The problem with that is that the origin of that prejudice is inherently causally related to the very thing for which Hamas is “on trial”, so to speak. For, that prejudice derives from the oppressor and occupier who created the very situation the Palestinians are resisting and fighting against; and that very resistance is what lies at the heart of the issue that Oct 7 brought to the table. Thus, to give in to your prejudice against the Palestinians and against Hamas would bias the conversation in a way that is significantly relevant to the topic of the conversation itself, and is antithetical to the purpose of the conversation. 

And being antithetical to the conversation is precisely the point of biasing the discussion against the Palestinians from the outset; because it is a way of undermining the conversation and ultimately shutting it down.

People say their heart is in Gaza

I started calling it a GENOCIDE on October 12.
And on October 6 I knew almost nothing about the Palestine-Israel issue.
All it took me was five days of obsessively learning as much as I could take in—reading, listening to audio, watching videos, etc.—to see clearly what was beginning to unfold before the world’s eyes. In all honesty, I truly don’t understand why I could figure out in only five days what too many people haven’t yet figured out after years of being aware of far more than I ever was before Oct 6. I’m not being condescending; if anything, besides being confused, I am alarmed. 

I know I should have been writing months ago—or rather, posting my writing that I have actually been doing bit by bit. Aside from personal life and health issues, in all honesty this genocide and ethnic cleansing and all of the media surrounding it have been mentally and emotionally consuming in a way that so often leaves me in a kind of mental paralysis. And it’s been a little traumatizing too. If I do sleep, I wake up tossing and turning and my first awake-aware thoughts are of the Palestinians, of Gaza… I cannot help it, I think about almost nothing else but the Palestinians—yes, the West Bank too, I know. 

I don’t know why I have become consumed by this. There is no rational, logical, historical reason that I care so much. I can rationalize it, of course, that’s easy. The question is, why this issue? Why the Palestinians? Why have I not been this moved and mentally and emotionally consumed by some other atrocious current injustices? I have not a single connection to Palestine or any Palestinians, or to Israel or Israelis; and I am an atheist, though raised in a Roman Catholic family, both immediate and extended on both sides. I knew pretty much nothing about the Palestine-Israel issue my whole life. The only thing I had learned about 15 years ago from a friend who’d been there is that it’s an apartheid state. That struck me and stayed with me. He was trying to explain to me what it was like, and trying to be careful because he knew how delicate the issue is for so many people; but I think he must have seen the genuinely thoroughly puzzled look on my face, and then he used the word apartheid, and that was all I needed to hear, then I understood—shocked, as I wasn’t expecting it, but I understood nonetheless. And so that stuck with me, the word apartheid being attached to Israel.

There is no logical beginning to writing my thoughts on the Palestinians and the current affairs and state of things in Palestine. Anywhere I try to begin, I end up adding prefatory tangents to either contextualize or give background or depth or chronological order or to lay out the perspective from where I am coming. It feels like such a swirling mess inside my head and in my heart. It’s like a whole section in a library has been thrown on the floor: a whole section of stacks of rows of books pulled from the shelves and tossed on the floor: this is what it feels like inside my head, navigating my own mind. 

But my heart? Navigating my own heart feels like…

Perhaps if I come up with a suitable metaphor one day I will add it here. 

No vote for Genocide Joe

Israel’s attack and slaughter and torture and ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians has brought out in clear view who people really are and what they really believe in and stand for. People are showing their true colors. 

I will not apologize for refusing to vote for Biden this November. I absolutely cannot, in good conscience, give my vote to someone who is not just complicit in genocide, but is actively participating in it. Not passively. Actively. This genocide and everything Israel is doing literally would not be possible at all without the United States. I don’t care what Biden and his ghouls say publicly, they have made it very clear that they do not care one iota about Palestinian lives. But, you’ll ask, don’t I care about domestic issues affecting Americans’ lives? Yes, of course! Reproductive healthcare and abortion access are extremely important to me! Lack of such healthcare and access is already having grave consequences, disgusting consequences, outrageous and shocking and enraging and terrifying consequences. That will only get worse if these misogynistic and sadistic Rs get their way. And it makes me sick to my stomach to think of how many girls and women would be hurt, and all the different ways in which they would be hurt. 

However. 

If I truly care about the rights and the safety and wellbeing and autonomy of women and girls, then I care about it for all women and girls, period.