foggy sunset

"The promise of freedom and survival is a mirage which always disappears when I reach for it." Honour to publish this heartrending piece by @AbubakerAbedW on the pain of life outside Gaza He is one of the finest writers of his generation. Read it all👇 palestinedeepdive.com/p/survival-out…

ما في أي بهجة للعيد، الناس بتموت بشكل غريب في غزة وما إلها أي ذنب. مش عارف… ما في كلام، بطلت أعرف أحكي عقلي يكاد يصاب بالجنون من الحياة اللي بنعيشها، ما أقساها علينا. مش عارف، وين المسلمين؟ وين العالم العربي؟ وين الإنسانية مش قادر افهم ليه انتوا ساكتين

@marindatanow interesting, so he is! half-assyrian: looks like his dad came from the same part of iran as spouse's mom's family, near lake urmia. the assyrian community in northern CA is mostly in the central valley, especially turlock. still few & far between here in the northern bay area.

@sunsetfoglight I only learned about Assyrian Christians in ~2004 when a guy who had a bike accident came into our emergency room. I was charged with irrigating and cleaning the wound, and he told me about his language and culture. I didn't know Terrence Malick is Assyrian!

found these while looking for something else (books about Assyrian Christians here and in West Asia)

@DaveBall77 @heygurisingh ah got it! guess i'm analogy-challenged :)

@sunsetfoglight @heygurisingh I was implying that the writing styles might be similar because AI tries to emulate skilled writers.

@marindatanow i knew zero about it before meeting spouse decades ago. it's funny, you say "assyrian," the response half the time is, "syrian?!"

@sunsetfoglight I ended up finding eight books in the stacks at Cal Berkeley about the 1915 genocide of assyrians I also found some interesting stuff that I can pull from the archives at Bancroft. This is a really criminally under-taught piece of history.

The internet signal is so bad I hope my message reaches you. We are being massacred right now in Gaza. Right before Eid.

@DaveBall77 @heygurisingh hmmm, more like the reverse: the beach boys sound like little richard! they loved & emulated him. not sure this tweet-author consciously loves & emulates AI but who knows.

@sunsetfoglight @heygurisingh That is like asking why so many Little Richard songs sound like the Beach Boys.

The Western-backed Zionist regime has been committing genocide in Gaza for nearly 3 years. Iran will not allow Netanyahu’s regime to ethnically cleanse and exterminate the people of southern Lebanon. No deal without an end to aggression against Lebanon. youtube.com/live/XBySNPFep…

I was closer to the bombing than anytime before! This is how Eid Al-adha is in Gaza.

@JulianSayarer omg. now i've totally lost respect for him. threatening to report his neighbors to the INS?! 🤬

@heygurisingh everything written here is true, but why does it read like it was written by AI? or perhaps by a human who's read too much AI-speak, & adapted his pacing & paragraphs accordingly?

Rafif's family and their cat Abbey are still alive in Gaza🥹🇵🇸🙏

"In the US, there has been a huge uptick in occurrences of a fungal infection known as Valley Fever, and dust storms have been fingered as the cause. The illness, which often presents similarly to bronchitis or pneumonia, can last for months and is sometimes fatal."

I’ve now listened to half of this and I can say that my esteem for @normfinkelstein has dropped precipitously. 1) he asks incredulously and rhetorically whether anyone can possibly believe right wingers care about suffering and oppression, dismissively concluding they don’t and all ostensible concern for Palestine is really just about antisemitism. I know a number of right wingers, including @Villgecrazylady and @CurtMills reasonably well and I guarantee they are driven by Palestinian suffering more than concern for America first. They are also driven more by genuine concern than many left-wingers who simply use Palestine to virtue signal and are willing to destroy the pro Palestine movement from within in order to do so. 2) Finkelstein posits America first and concern for Palestinian suffering as antithetical values. Actually, the point I’ve heard many right wingers cogently make, including @TuckerCarlson and @RealCandaceO (who I disagree with on many other issues, btw) is that it is automatically detrimental to America to enable and ratify gross human rights violations. So the two are complementary. We can’t advance our values when we are actively destroying them in other parts of the world. 3) apparently, right wingers do not talk about the holocaust enough for Finkelstein’s satisfaction, which he believes evinces inherent antisemitism. Isn’t this the same guy who wrote the book of the Holocaust industry? Maybe it’s time to concentrate on the holocaust happening now, not the one that happened 80 years ago, with many others in between, by the way. And given how the Nazi holocaust has been weaponized to kill Palestinians and ironically commit a new Holocaust, I think it’s reasonable to determine we’ve discussed it enough and the right lessons haven’t been learned 4) Finkelstein warns about handing your enemies their arguments on a silver platter. He did just that in this podcast.

The best insight into Norman Finkelstein is his letter threatening to report his Brooklyn neighbours to immigration authorities for loud music. He was an embittered academic who'd handled his injustices with less dignity than most when Hamas broke out of Gaza and made his career.

“The city is almost entirely surrounded by wetlands, which act as a buffer against hurricanes and storm surges. These are fast disappearing, however, as humans drain them for development, dredge canals in them for the oil and gas industry and construct river levees, depriving them of the sediments that stop them being submerged. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost around 2,000 square miles of wetlands.”

The Australian, New Zealand, EU, UK, Canadian, and US regimes are behind the extermination of Lebanese children.

Finkelstein has rudely and gracelessly attacked Palestinian scholar Steven Salaita, he said arrogantly that if all the best scholarship on Palestine was jewish that's fine, he has consistently criticised even BDS. If he wants to further out where his loyalties lie, that's ok.