i missed you.
🇵🇸
still absolutely cannot wrap my head around how ppl are not condemning the iof and calling for a permanent ceasefire even after the news broke out about hind. she was six years old. trapped inside a bombed car where five of her relatives are martyred. iof tanks laid siege on a six year old girl calling her mom for help. because she was scared and alone and starving. iof waited until the paramedics came to save hind and killed them all. remember hind. remember yousef. remember ahmed. death to israel. ceasefire now.
"We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians."
~ Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.
“genocides can’t be compared because each one is unique” as if literally anyone on planet earth making comparisons between genocides isn’t aware that history is more complicated than a set of infinitely repeating identical events. how fucking condescending can you get. the word genocide is a legal term that is meant to standardise our ability to identify a broad set of violent actions and behaviours as genocide even when they differ in the details, because the outcome is the same - a crime against humanity. if no genocide is comparable then genocide does not exist as a category of crime. to deny the comparability of genocides is tantamount to genocide denial
Being from Gaza, Palestine is so different.
I tell people I'm from Gaza and I get pity, I get the "oh... do you have family there?" and I have to act tough, I am tough, it runs in my veins. Being from Gaza is expecting that reaction, the sorrow, it's dealing with dumbass people everyday, it's getting the "can you go there?" question. (No i cant btw).
I am from Gaza, I feel emotions just like everyone else, I feel anger and hurt and longing for a place I cant visit, I feel love and comfort and right now I feel alone and like im yelling at the world to pay attention and NO ONE CARES.
I am from Gaza, my thoughts belong to Gaza, my heart, my skin color, the way I speak, the way I say words a bit differently than the rest of the Palestinians, the way I wish I was a filmmaker to share my culture with the world.
I am from Gaza, i am aware of how different my people are, i am aware that i grew up differently, I am aware I grew up looking at the news from my grandparents television with my aunt waiting for news about her family, I am aware that I have trauma in my veins, I am aware that my culture is taken over and that I can't really speak about it, I am aware that not everyone experiences your aunt screaming that her brother died and yelling "He's apart of my soul, my soul died"
I am from Gaza, I hurt, I feel, I love, I care and my heart, soul and mind all belong to my beautiful land and its people.
A week before the death of George Floyd in the US city of Minneapolis in May, Brazilians were mourning one of their own.
Fourteen-year-old João Pedro Mattos Pinto was killed while playing with friends during a botched police operation in a favela in Rio de Janeiro.
The two deaths happened thousands of kilometres apart, yet millions of people were united in grief and anger. “Black lives matter here, too,” Brazilians chanted in the weeks following the deaths.
But history keeps repeating itself.
Only last week, a police officer in São Paulo stepped on the neck of a black woman in her fifties. The video that surfaced showing the incident caused outrage. She survived, but so many do not.
Joyce da Silva dos Santos shows me a video of her son Guilherme celebrating his birthday with a big cake and candles. He was a 15-year-old with his whole life ahead of him. He had dreams of following his grandfather into the bricklaying business, of one day buying a motorcycle, too. But his dreams were cut short.
Last year police here killed nearly six times as many people as in the US and most of them were black.
Continue reading.