Look. I’m a diaspora Jew. I don’t live in Israel. I have no family in Israel. I don’t contribute money to Israel. But when the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization says that the Western Wall, the most sacred edifice in all of Judaism, is nothing but a hitching post, how, exactly, am I supposed to believe that the UN gives a half a damn about Jews or our history when they are actively trying to erase it? This isn’t an anti-Israel resolution, it’s an anti-Jew resolution.
I didn’t see that language (hitching post) used anywhere. And the issues surrounding the Western Wall have to do with the displacement of Muslim families that live in the area. Your faith doesn’t trump the right of others to live in their homes.
Do you want an article with the hitching post language? Here.
And erasing Jewish history is antisemitism no matter who lives there. Take your condescension and antisemitism elsewhere. You clearly understand nothing about Jewish history or identity. You do, however, feel somehow entitled to speak over those who do have that knowledge and identity so you can get high on the ecstasy of sanctimony. Well, you’re not getting a free pass. Not this time.
Okay, so from that and some research elsewhere I see that in Muslim tradition the wall is holy as well, due to the idea that Mohammed (pbuh) hitched his horse Buraq to a place on the wall, where a mosque now stands. The resolution that UNESCO passed states that Muslims should have a right to worship at the Western Wall, too, and criticizes Israel for not allowing this.
Do you think Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to worship at the Western Wall?
The Western Wall and the Al Aqsa Mosque are two separate structues in two separate places adjacent to each other. Praying at one does not preclude praying at the other. Acknowledging the Jewish origins of the Wall is simple acknowledgment of historical fact. The Wall predates Islam by 700 years. It was part of the Second Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Stop talking. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Tag: racism
The thing that really gets me about a lot of fantasy and speculative works (include fic) is that the history of Jewish oppression is 9 times out of 10 used for the Featured Stand In Fantastically Oppressed Race in some way shape or form.
Tolkien’s dwarves are the worst kind of 19th-20th century Jewish stereotypes mixed in with our history of diaspora.
Dragon Age’s elves are a combination of the oppression and colonization of First Nation indigenous peoples and Jewish diaspora and ghettoization.
Not to mention we’re normally depicted as aliens in forms of sci-fi (Star Trek casts as both the good Vulcans and as stereotypes with the mercantile Ferengi) But wherever you go we certainly aren’t depicted as human.
The worst thing is is that these are shallow offerings of our history being used because they’re usually being written by gentile writers. DA’s Dalish elves and City Elves are coded as Jewish virtually everywhere, but one of the main elven characters, Solas, is going to be cast as a villain in future games. Because genocide is a much cheaper storyline than dealing with complicated ramifications of a people struggling with a millenia of diaspora and systematic oppression. And casting one of the coded Jewish characters as a propagator of mass genocide isn’t antisemitic at all, right?
I can’t tell you how discouraging it is to see our very real life stories getting used as cheap oppression bait when there’s room to tell nuanced and defined stories and characters IF we were the ones in control of these stories.
If you want to use our history for story you had better be committed to fully realizing that story and giving those characters a certain level of dignity.
But I truly don’t see that anywhere. Frequently I see even fans with their elven OCs or what have you not even bothering to research basic facts about what living in a diaspora culture looks like, or what that history does to you as an individual and the pressures you face that shape YOUR ENTIRE LIFE.
It just feels like both creators and fandom take all the history of people’s oppression for cheap tragedy points and conflict rather than using it to examine how we thrive, how we flourish, how we excel as a community and as individuals. Because that would require actually looking at us as humans, which considering that we’re already being depicted as dwarves, elves, animals, aliens, etc., tells you everything you already need to know about how white gentile authors see us.
Reblogging again until I see not the same few people and Jewish fandom noticing this because the rest of you are unnaturally quiet all of a sudden.
i’ve said this before but i want to repeat that i believe there’s a strong case to be made that holocaust denial is far more widespread, multifaceted, and insidiously institutionalized than it is often depicted.
the way we are taught about the holocaust, the way the narrative is constructed by states to alter the story and diminish and negate the experiences of the actual victims, the way the suffering is externalized from those who faced it, the way we are taught to focus in on the tragically flawed character of hitler and restrict the theatre of genocide to germany and german state actions, the way all of this is depicted in a way that pays no respect or recognition to all the players in this horrific atrocity of atrocities, is nothing short of holocaust denial. and it’s a denial that is played out in mainstream culture daily and diversely.
make no mistake, the holocaust was much bigger and much scarier than anything you have been taught, and its effects will likely continue to be felt for generations to come. this was a cataclysmic process with many components, and the way it is taught makes it easy for those who are not effected by it to forget and to silence those who are.
“Jews did not join the partisans as a normal act of choice. We were forced to fight the Nazis to save ourselves from extermination. We took the gun in our hands in a desperate situation, when our parents, brothers and sisters were murdered, when children were grabbed from their mothers and sent to their gruesome death. We fought in order to survive; we fought against fascism, which was our enemy, the enemy of all democratic forces and the enemy of Lithuania.
The activity of the Jewish partisans was self-defense — in the face of the most overwhelming instance of genocide in human history. In contrast to Lithuanian collaborators, who volunteered to put to death their unarmed civilian Jewish neighbors, and Soviet collaborators, who also volunteered to kill and oppress the Lithuanians, the Jewish partisans’ aim was not to kill anyone, not to ‘inherit’ the property of a murdered people, but to fight our common enemy.”
–Sara Ginaite, a native of Kaunas, was incarcerated in the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto and lost almost her entire family in the Holocaust. She escaped into the forests and joined the anti-Nazi partisans. After the war, she was a professor of political economy at Vilnius University for almost twenty-five years before emigrating to Canada in 1983. She published ten books in Vilnius and another two in Toronto,where she taught social science at York University. She was instrumental in arranging for Yad Vashem to honor a Lithuanian family that saved a Jewish child during the Holocaust and has recently negotiated exchange student agreements between Vilnius and Toronto Universities. Her best-known work on the Holocaust is Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community of Kaunas, 1941-1944 (2005).
tbqh i’m extremely uncomfortable with white people who talk about white people as a group the way poc talk about them.
like “fucking white ppl are getting their shit all over [poc thing white ppl are appropriating].”
you realize this is a group you belong to, right? like, this is not how radical antiracism works from white people’s end.
poc don’t need or really want white people’s help talking shit about white people. it’s a thing we do to untangle all the shit that white people do to us internally and externally, to take the people who have always been tacitly and explicitly portrayed as “better than” us down a peg. there is nothing radical or antiracist in white people talking shit about white people.
if you want to really be a useful white race traitor, you gotta refuse the privileges granted to you and interfere with the privileges granted to others for being white. at the very least, use your white privilege to help serve the immediate needs of poc if you can’t be assed to sacrifice the comforts of your white life.
and as far as dealing with other white people who you see or hear act out racism or cultural appropriation, it doesn’t help anybody to respond to it by yelling about white people as a group doing those things. YOU don’t need to vent like that. you should challenge the statements or behavior directly and individually or in a meaningful group context and make sure you engage directly with the person(s) who are doing the thing. in doing this, you spare a person of color having to choose between the exhaustion of letting another fucking racist thing go to spare them a fight or doing the same thing (in which case they’d be putting much more on the line than you ever could—materially as well as emotionally; think about how badly employers, police, officials, and service providers think of “militant” poc and you’ll see what i’m getting at).
tell the person who’s fucking up that they’re fucking up and how. rip them individually apart if they won’t budge or if they double down. it will never be as difficult or risky or draining or painful for you as it is for us.
and individual white people don’t connect their behavior to racism when you talk shit about white people as a group doing that, as you’ve probably noticed as you never seem to feel you’re what poc are talking about when we repeatedly say white people getting in on jokes about white people makes us uncomfortable.
when i see a white person talk shit about white people as a group, i see someone who’s trying to act like they’re not part of the problem and too materially invested in white supremacy to actually work to stop being the problem. it’s making yourself out to be an exception to the white supremacy inherent in being white without doing a fucking thing of any significance to undermine white supremacy.
I kinda already thought that Samara was Muslim due to the fact that her father was a Moor from Spain, and during that time it didn’t matter what the color of your skin was, if you were a Moor then that meant that you were Muslim. So if he was Muslim, then he would have raised his daughter as a Muslim. Or I’m just projecting
no no that’s solid! i didn’t pick that up but that’s bc i didn’t know that moor was synonymous with muslim (and now i need to go read othello in a whole new light…). i guess the writers did slip it in canonically, just in more time-appro language.
moor isnt always synonymous with muslim – its also used more generally to mean anyone of (particularly north) african descent or even just anyone with darker skin. but in this context it probably is – but that doesn’t really make a lot of sense for the time period in spain. (also cause its not actually a self defined term and that makes it more complicated)
depending on how they are fudging the dates (and they are fudging the dates) practicing islam in secret could definitely be the treason charge they are being brought up on. Because as of 1502 (when their were some riots and the christian crown decided that voided the treaty of granada and therefore the protection for muslims freedom of religious practice which was a clause in that) practicing islam was a crime.
1502 is the convert or get out decree for muslims/moors in spain, those who converted and stayed were called moriscos (though there may be a more preferred term nowadays). They, or rather their descendants, were officially expelled in 1609 (honestly by the standards of this show thats not too far off)
Between those two dates if you were caught practicing islam in secret (and reading arabic poetry is probably a little bit too obvious really) which people absolutely were doing, you’d be deported or killed. by the time the decree in 1609 comes about it didnt matter whether you were a ‘good convert’ or still practicing islam everyone was forced out – some of what they were saying kind of implys they are at or at least very close to this point (which actually happened 20 years earlier…but still)
shabbat shalom
This breaks my heart so thoroughly I can’t even begin to describe the feeling.
read again, this hasnt happen since france was occupied by nazis.
Race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health.
Dorothy E. Roberts, Fatal Intervention (via betheintrepid)
You cannot say that you like Pocahontas. The genocide of my people is turned into a cartoon musical with a singing raccoon? I mean, think about it, dawg, the real story of Pocahontas is about a bunch of white boys who come to my land, bribe the corrupt indian chief, kill off all the warriors and fuck the indian princess silly.
does this have a source?
It’s from an HBO miniseries about the Iraq War called Generation Kill
the night porter, the black parade, the boy in the striped pajamas is the same premise but not romance…so yes they absolutely would.
using other people…using the genocide of other people, as a retorical device is kind of a shitty thing to do anyway. But also the whole ‘you wouldn’t do this to [other opressed group]’ tends to weaken your position cause well…you’re usually wrong and they would and you’re giving them too much credit to think they wouldn’t. Which is a shame when your basic position is good like here.
mind you…on this particular issue saying this while you’re invading someone elses country also weakens your position.
(while we’re at it we can stop pretending that the shoah wasn’t racialised violence just like all previous genocides and persecutions of jewish people and the ones that continue today. Wherever you stand on whether (light skinned) jews are white today -and if you aren’t jewish you can stay the fuck out of that one- there were no white jews in the third reich)
fearlessstateofmind backup 