Reminder that Israel is bombing such children with great kindness in their heart to share despite on-going genocide of Gazans that deprive them of basic necessities including food and water.
i want to highlight some of different pro palestine actions happened at the macy’s thanksgiving day parade.
let’s get started with a group of climate activists that super glued their hands to the concrete on 6th avenue, which is a key point on the parade route:
another group that made some noise and staged a sit-in were the writers against the war on gaza:
you can read their official statement bellow.
the mashpee wampanoe tribe of massachusetts had a member of their tribe lifting a palestinian flag on their float. this action noticeably made it onto national broadcasts of the parade:
and amogst all the planned disruptions were people in the crowds simply taking advantage of the visibility of this parade to make support known:
“War crime is a category which is starting to sound meaningless to us because everything we do qualifies as one” is not the brilliant defense of your actions you think it is
I found them because I had seen someone say that the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis fatalities since 2005 was 23:1 and i was wondering where the data for that originally came from. This website keeps such detailed accounts of fatalities, home destruction, and other human rights violations. It also has an interactive map that shows the timeline of the occupation, talks about different communities and settlements, shows check points, and more.
It is extremely informative, and honestly pretty remarkable.
[ID: A video clip showing a Black person in a green coat interviewing an elderly white person holding up a flag, with more protesters in the background displaying Palestinian flags.
The interviewer asks, “Why is it important for you to be here today?”
The protester responds, “Well, uh, I’m Jewish, I’m Israeli, my parents were the only survivors of their families from the Holocaust. They both survived Auschwitz. I’m not going to support genocide am I?
"I’m here with the Palestinians, and we are here with Palestine, because we don’t believe that what the British government is doing is correct. The British government is supporting this genocide! It’s arming Israel, it’s financing Israel.
"BBC and the other media here is supporting genocide. This is illegal. This is immoral. We don’t agree with it, we will never agree with it, and as Jews – and myself as Israeli – I am totally against it, and we will continue to be against it.
There are now more than 60 such events in the whole of Britain, uh, people don’t want to support this. They are against this government on so many other issues, but especially on this one.”
Another elderly white protester next to the first joins in, leaning forward to add:
“And, also, this didn’t start on October the 7th. In 1948, Palestinian villages, hundreds of them –”
Another elderly protester interjects specifically, “500 of them”.
The second protestor nods and continues, “were demolished, thousands of Palestinians, innocent men, women, and children were slaughtered, and seven-hundred and fifty thousand Palestinian refugees were created. That’s when it started, and it hasn’t stopped since!”
Your regular reminder that the first example is Canadian. (The clue is “first nations.”)
Much as we like to pretend otherwise, America doesn’t have a monopoly on racism, genocide, or whitewashing.
also a reminder than australian schools do not acknowledge our own history of slavery, or “blackbirding”. i had no idea 60,000 pacific islanders were kidnapped and enslaved in australia until after i graduated, because no one talks about it. and even what we do learn is watered down. the focus was always on white settlers and how they discovered land, their mapping, their dedication and their struggles; only very briefly do we get to focus on the murders they committed, the generational trauma they caused by stealing an entire generation for the sole purpose of breeding the indigenous blood out of them, the indescribable, abhorrent things they did to indigenous people.
i don’t really know how to relay the horrors that palestinians are describing first-hand, if you can speak arabic and follow people from gaza online there are some phrases i don’t think anyone will forget, some things for the arabic-speaking world will scar for life just like muhammed al-durra scarred me as a child. at least five of the people i followed since last week (journalists, photographers, students, artists, tiktokers) are dead now. it’s becoming terrifying to follow someone from gaza, because you don’t know if they’re going to be alive tomorrow. i don’t really know how to describe this feeling? what is it to follow some kid on tiktok who’s making jokes while planes drop bombs around him and think “i hope he stays alive?”
for those of you who don’t speak arabic, there are many many palestinians in gaza posting updates in english:
many of them are also translating other posts from arabic. you can follow them on twitter.
there are also many gazans reporting from gaza and recording vlogs in english for an international audience that you can follow on instagram
(yara eid is the only one who is not physically present in gaza, but her family is and recently lost her best friend, the photojournalist Ibraheem Lafi in the strikes. she has lots of good and informative videos & interviews on the situation)
please note that these are people living through an actual siege and genocide, experiencing hell on earth for the past fifteen days with no relief and risking their lives to even get these occasional messages through. the content they share is not easy to watch and even more difficult to forget.
White leftists who say shit like “colonialism is a European invention” remember that China exists challenge lol. China was a colonial powerhouse back when Europe was illiterate and literally living in its own sewage. In your rush to acknowledge the horrors that were eg. the opium wars, some of y'all have circled all the way back around to completely denying the accomplishments - both positive and incredibly negative - of one of the most influential empires in the world, explicitly because you can’t wrap your brain around that empire being non-white. Ask anyone living in any part of SEA if Chinese colonialism only began after European meddling in the region, and they’ll laugh in your face. It’s possibly the stupidest noble savage nonsense I’ve seen in any part of the discourse.
Making all the problems in the world and history the result of capitalism, European colonization and US imperialism is just the more of the same Western egocentrism and USAmerican exceptionalism. Please treat all humans equally and allow the rest of us the right to have been oppressive, genocidal twatwaffles as well. Don’t make our humanity and right to determine our own futures contingent on being any better than you.
Excuse me??? This is exactly the sort of infantilizing bullshit that I was talking about. “We (white Europeans) did colonialism in a way that no one had done before” – do y'all know anything about the history of Chinese colonialism in SEA? Hell, do you know anything about current Chinese colonialism being perpetrated in the region? When I say the words “nine dash line”, “South China Sea”, “Belt and Road Initiative”, do these words mean anything to you at all??? When I say “China is currently engaging in both aggressive territorial expansionism and debt-trap diplomacy”, do you have even the slightest idea what I’m referring to? Or do you just assume, based on nothing but the fact that Europe is Europe and China is China, that surely whatever Europe does must be a more advanced, more effective, more brutal form of colonialism – a fully-realized Hitler to China’s primitive Genghis Khan? This is racist as hell, and if you go around repeating it, you are part of the specific problem of sinophobic infantilization and SEA erasure that I made this post about in the first place.
That reminds me of something I experienced that genuinely broke my mind. I have a Singaporean friend that loves France (my country) and moved here and is looking to settle (he’s likely to succeed). He told me that a Vietnamese friend of his said that he was happy that they got colonized by France because the other option was China.
That … broke my mind a fair bit.
French colonialism was utter shit. It was brutal, it was oppressive, it was exploitative. I don’t have the details, but I assume some level of crime against humanity as default. The idea that THAT was the better option broke my mind.
And then I thought about what Chinese colonialism implies, from what I know : appropriation of cultural figures (like with Genghis Khan for instance) and texts, forceful sinicisation of the culture (like with the Korean minority in the North of China), forcing women to marry Chinese men (like in Tibet and Xinjiang) while the men are imprisoned and/or executed, destruction of non-agreeable monuments, and so on and so forth. And I … I think I understood a bit.
French colonialism was oppressive, and brutal and exploitative. But it was also distant. The “civilizing” efforts were far more limited than China’s would have been. French colonialism was about extracting wealth, not murdering their Nation.
French colonialism was better in the way it’s better to be mugged than to be attacked by a serial killer.
It’d be a lot better to not have been colonized at all, but in that way, I guess French colonialism WAS the less shitty option.
I don’t know if this is what you meant @penrosesun, but that’s the closest I have, and if it’s not that I am willing to learn.
Yeah this is 100% exactly what I meant. And I want to be clear that there are a lot of things going on here, and a lot of reasons that these 1:1 comparisons are frequently not very useful, and are never universally applicable. For example, I think there are a whole lot of regions in Africa which would laugh at the idea that French colonialism was somehow better than Chinese colonialism – but of course, that’s in part because they’ve suffered something of the reverse experience, with France more interested in brutal colonial occupation, and China more interested in something closer to the sort of long-range economic exploitation that France practiced in Vietnam. And obviously, to run with your metaphor, getting mugged rather than murdered is also extremely bad! It’s unambiguously tragic that Vietnam was colonized by anyone, and “it could have been worse” is one heck of a bleak silver lining that shouldn’t be mistaken for an actual positive. But that said, a lot of the West has such an incomplete picture of what the realities of Chinese colonialism were actually like that even just understanding that there are plenty of places that saw (and still see!) European colonialism as “the lesser of two evils” is important. That’s very much not to say “whatever you think about Europe, China was so much worse that European colonialism looked like a cakewalk” – it’s to say “while you’re broadly right about European colonialism, Chinese colonialism was bad enough that you really need to place it in the same category, and failing to do so is racist erasure.”
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