manicpixiemeatboy - Tumblr blog

[manicpixiemeatboy]

Another aspect of the Gaza Genocide that I want to talk about is the complicity of Internet banking and crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe.

I have seen multiple Gazans raise enough money to leave for Egypt, but the banks and the crowdfunding websites freeze their money or cancel their funds for "suspicious activity" or whatever. Every day that passes in Gaza supplies get more scarce, conditions get more deadly, and the price to cross into Egypt gets more expensive. I've seen people, like ghost-90 here on Tumblr, raise the full amount to get their entire family out of Gaza, but their money gets frozen for so long that the original goal is only a fraction of the price now needed to cross the boarder.

These financial institutions should not be allowed to get away with contributing to the death toll in Gaza. They are intentionally keeping people trapped in a kill zone by withholding money that is rightfully theirs.

I'm so pissed and angry that every avenue for relief for Palestinians is being cut of left and right. It is vile that Gazans are being extorted for 10s of thousands of dollars by the Egyptian gov just to save their family's lives, but even when they play by this corrupt game, the world still finds a way to make them suffer.

My heart is with every Palestinian for the rest of time, from river to sea you will all be free. 🇵🇸❤️

[manicpixiemeatboy]

Suddenly, we heard a loud noise. The bulldozer was coming for our house. Mom stopped and told me, “I must go out and try to stop them because we’ll die under the bulldozer. I’ll try to go out and tell them that we are civilians. If they hit me and let you all out, then you leave after me. If they hit me and continue to demolish the house, know that I tried everything I could with my last hope that you would be safe.”

I started crying. Everyone told her to stop, saying the army would kill her. At the same time, we could hear the bulldozer approaching. Mom quickly went out and stood in front of it, exactly in its path, and started telling them that there were civilians, women, elderly, and children in the house. The bulldozer kept coming.

[manicpixiemeatboy]

slightly extending the scott presence in uncanny x-men annual #16

[id in ALT]

[manicpixiemeatboy]

"You know, you remind me an awful lot of someone."

(id in ALT)

[manicpixiemeatboy]

From the bottom of my heart I fucking hate the people still making posts about how israeli soldiers are victims too because they're conscripted. This is the FandomTM site so they talk about israeli soldiers like a morally flawed character instead of an active member of a military invading and leveling gaza. This is not the time to talk about iof "victim hood. We're all victims of the system" and attempt to equivocation between what's happening in Gaza and a draft. Gazan men and boys are being taken to prisoner camps and getting amputations from handcuffs being intentionally too tight. No one would believe it if a Palestinian announced it until an israeli doctor confirmed it. An American doctor wrote an article where she witnessed palestinian children from ages 5 to 8 with sniper injuries To The Head. Again palestinians telling the news this with their dead child would not be believed so an American doctor had to confirm it. Israeli soldiers blew up a cemetery a piece of ground that is so significant to a nation's memory and cultural memory. Wiping it off means these people virtually do not exist unless the people who visited the cemetery is alive to remember. This would not be confirmed if CNN literally did not film them doing so.

We are allowed to hate this "army" these butcherers of Gaza. We don't have to sit and ponder which one is "conscious" of their crimes when it materially changes nothing about what they're doing. I thought "following orders" was viewed as a disdained excuse but as always Israeli exceptionalism excuses the IOF

Sources:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children

[manicpixiemeatboy]

“I first started noticing the journalists dying on Instagram. I'm a journalist, I'm Arab, and I've reported on war. A big part of my community is other Arab journalists who do the same thing.

And when someone dies, news travels fast. Recently, I pulled up the list that the Committee to Protect Journalists has been keeping and looked at it for the first time. There are 95 journalists and media workers on it as of today.

Almost everyone on it is Palestinian. Scrolling through, I started to get angry. These were the people carrying the burden of documenting this whole war.

Israel is not allowing foreign journalists into Gaza, except on rare occasions with military escorts. These people's names are being buried in a giant list that keeps growing. What I want to do is lift some of them off the list for a moment and give you a glimpse of who they were and the work they made.

I'll start with Sadi Mansour. Sadi was the director of Al-Quds News Network, and he posted a 22-second video on November 18. That was a report from the war, but it also gave me a picture into his marriage.

Sadi's wearing his press vest and looks exhausted. He's explaining that cell service and the Internet keep getting cut off, and it's often impossible to text or call anyone, including his wife. So they've resorted to using handwritten letters to communicate while he's out reporting, sending them back and forth with neighbors or colleagues.

He ends the video with a picture of one of these letters from his wife. In it, she writes,

‘Me and the kids stayed up waiting for you until the morning, and you didn't come home. We were really sad.

I kept telling the kids, Look, he's coming. But you didn't show up. May God forgive you.

Come home tomorrow and eat with us. Do you want me to make you kebab or maybe kapse? Bring your friends with you, it's okay.

And give Azeez the battery to charge. What do you think about me sending you handwritten letters with messenger pigeons from now on? Ha ha ha.

I'm just kidding. I want to curse at you, but we're living in a war. Too bad.

Okay, I love you. Bye.’

A few hours after he shared that letter, Sadie and his co-worker Hassouna Saleem were at Sadie's home, when they were killed by an Israeli air strike that hit his house.

His wife and kids, who weren't there, survived.

Gaza is tiny, and the journalist community is really close. Reading the list, you can see all the connections between people. Like with Brahim Lafi.

Brahim was a photojournalist, one of the first journalists to die. He was killed while reporting on October 7. He was just 21, still new to journalism.

On his Instagram, you can see that in his posts just a few years ago, he was still practicing his photography, taking pictures of coffee cups and flowers. Then he started doing beautiful portraits and action shots. You can really feel him starting to become a journalist.

Clicking around on Instagram, I found a tribute post about Brahim from his co-worker Rushdie Sarraj. In this photo, Brahim staring intently at the back of a camera, his face lit up by the light from the viewfinder. He looks so young.

The caption reads, My assistant is gone. Brahim is gone. Rushdie himself was a beloved journalist and filmmaker.

And I know that because he's also on the list. He was killed just two weeks after Brahim. I read the tribute post to him too.

I saw this over and over again. Journalists posting tributes, who were then killed themselves soon after. And a tribute goes up for them.

And then the pattern continues.

Thank you.

Something else I saw over and over on the list, journalists later in the war who had become aware that they could be making their last reports. They'd say it at the beginning of their videos. And those were the hardest to watch, especially when it was true.

One video like that was posted by Ayat Hadduro. Ayat was a freelance journalist and video blogger. Her videos before the war covered a wide range from what I can tell, interviews about women in politics.

She even appeared in a commercial for ketchup-flavored chips. She clearly liked being in front of the camera. Once the war started, Ayat's pivoted to covering bombings and food shortages.

On November 20, she posted a video report from her home. You can hear the airstrikes hitting very close to where she is. It's scary.

‘This is likely my last video. Today, the occupation forces dropped phosphorus bombs on Beit Lahya area and frightening sound bombs. They dropped letters from the sky, ordering everyone to evacuate.

Everyone ran into the streets in the craziest way. No one knows where to go.

But everyone else has evacuated. They don't know where they're going. The situation is so scary.

What's happening is so tough, and may God have mercy on us.’

She was killed later that day.

Targeting journalists, in case you didn't know, is a war crime. So far, the Committee to Protect Journalists has found that three of the journalists on the list were explicitly targeted by the IDF, the Israeli military. Investigations by the Washington Post and Reuters, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have also raised serious questions in these three cases.

And the Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating 10 other killings. When we reached out to the IDF for comments, they said, quote, the IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists. That's the answer they always give in these situations.

Meanwhile, dozens of seasoned reporters have fled Gaza. Journalists who worked for Al Jazeera, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Agence France-Presse. So many media offices were demolished in Israeli airstrikes that the Committee to Protect Journalists stopped counting.

It's not just individual lives that have been destroyed. It's an entire infrastructure.

Thank you.

The name on the list that was hardest for me to look at was Issam Abdullah, because I'd crossed paths with him once. Issam was a Lebanese journalist, a video journalist for Reuters for many, many years. He had just won an award for coverage of Ukraine.

I'm Lebanese and still report there sometimes, and I'd worked with Issam a couple of summers ago. He helped me film a sort of random story in Beirut. I was interviewing this entrepreneur who had started a sperm freezing company after an accident where he spilled a tray of hot coffee on his private area, burning himself.

I know, ridiculous. It was a really silly shoot. Right after we said cut and started to rap, Issam started this whole bit about being in his late 30s, reconsidering his own sperm quality and everything he now realized he was doing to hurt it, and no one could stop laughing.

It was a really good day that felt good to remember and to remember him that way. Issam was killed by the IDF on October 13. His death was one of the three that the Committee to Protect Journalists has identified as a targeted killing.

He was fired upon by an Israeli tank while standing in an empty field on the Lebanon-Israel border with a small group of other journalists. Everyone was wearing press vests with cameras out. They were covering the Hezbollah part of this war.

A few other journalists were injured in the attack, which was captured on video. The IDF says they were responding to firing from Hezbollah, not targeting the journalists. But multiple investigations, including by Reuters, the United Nations, Amnesty International and the AFP, found no evidence of any firing from the location of the journalists before the IDF shot at them.

The journalists in the group and video footage confirmed that there was no military activity near them. I had only met Issam once, barely knew him, but it affected me so much when he died. I know that he understood the risks of his job, but somehow it still felt so random and unfair that he would be struck down like that, following the rules, wearing his press vest and helmet, and a pack of reporters on a sunny day in an open field.

I find myself thinking about him all the time. His last Instagram post was commemorating another journalist, this iconic reporter Shereen Abou Aql who had been killed by the IDF. When I first saw that post in October, I thought how ironic because a week later, Isam also was killed by the IDF.

But then, after spending time reading the list, I realized how common this had become. I still haven't finished going through the list and looking up the people on it. I keep finding things that stick with me, like the funny way this one radio host would cut off a caller who was rambling on for too long.

A tweet from reporter Al-Abdallah that quoted Sylvia Plath. It read, What ceremony of wars can patch the havoc? I'm going to keep going down the list, even though this story is over now.

Just for myself. My own way of bearing witness. Which is, in the end, all that these journalists were trying to do.”

—DANA BALLOUT, The 95. Dana sifts through a very long list—the list of journalists killed in the Israel-Hamas war, and comes back with five small fragments of the lives of the people on it. Dana is a Lebanese-American, Emmy-nominated documentary producer.

[manicpixiemeatboy]

Brothers beneath the Moonlight By IxpertishVela

[manicpixiemeatboy]

too heavy with filth and sin.

[manicpixiemeatboy]

manga vs anime

[manicpixiemeatboy]

as someone who has been involved in union organizing through my dad's union since i was literally in second grade, the way that people on tumblr think unions work drives me literally insane

[manicpixiemeatboy]

Al-Jazeera stole a video from Moataz Abu Sakran, a video which he singlehandedly filmed and edited. They then incorrectly credited a different account, the owner of which is not even in north Gaza.

Moataz risked his life to get this footage, and shared it so that the world would see the damage inflicted on his home by the occupation. Al-Jazeera has way too many resources at their disposal to carelessly commit misattribution like this.

Moataz has started a fund to rebuild his house for himself and his wife and baby girl. The fund is linked here. Please share it and donate if you can.

[manicpixiemeatboy]

🚨 The Government Media Office in Gaza publishes an update about the scale of destruction of the zionist on Gaza from October 7th, 2023 to February 11th, 2024.

• 128 days of the war of genocide.

• 2,438 massacres.

• 35,176 martyrs and missing.

• 28,176 martyrs reached the hospitals.

• 12,300 child martyrs.

• 8,400 women martyrs.

• 340 medical worker martyrs.

• 46 civil defense martyrs.

• 124 journalist martyrs.

• 7,000 missing; 70% of them are children and women.

• 67,784 wounded.

• 11,000 wounded in need of travel for life-saving and critical treatment.

• 10,000 cancer patients at risk of death.

• 700,000 Gazans infected with infectious diseases as a result of displacement.

• 8,000 cases of viral hepatitis infection due to displacement.

• 60,000 pregnant women are at risk due to lack of access to health care.

• 350,000 chronic patients are at risk due to lack of administration of medications.

• 99 arrests of health workers.

• 10 arrests of journalists whose names are known.

• 2 million displaced in the Gaza Strip.

• 142 government headquarters destroyed by the occupation.

• 100 schools and universities completely destroyed by the occupation.

• 295 schools and universities partially destroyed by the occupation.

• 184 mosques completely destroyed by the occupation.

• 266 mosques partially destroyed by the occupation.

• 3 churches targeted and destroyed by the occupation.

• 70,000 residential units completely destroyed by the occupation.

• 290,000 residential units partially destroyed by the occupation.

• 66,000 tons of explosives dropped by the occupation on Gaza.

• 30 hospitals taken out of service by the occupation.

• 53 health centers taken out of service by the occupation.

• 150 health centers partially destroyed by the occupation.

• 123 ambulances completely destroyed by the occupation.

• 200 archaeological and heritage sites destroyed by the occupation.

[via RNN]

[manicpixiemeatboy]

For more Palestinian poems -- Arab Lit & Arab Lit Quarterly (who are also on here @ arablit) have produced and are updating a resource of Palestinian writers and the work they have produced called "Palestinian Poems with & for the Now" mostly written in the last four months.

[manicpixiemeatboy]

today the first person in the united states will be executed using a gas mask containing 100% nitrogen gas, meaning he will suffer and die of sudden hypoxia. although the state of alabama claims to predict that the nitrogen gas will "cause unconsciousness within seconds, and cause death within minutes,” medical experts have pointed out that there are risks that a person subjected to this form of execution could suffer from seizures, choking on their own vomit, and prolonged suffering, and claim that “alabama has refused to be forthcoming with the fine details of execution by forced nitrogen gas inhalation” affecting the defendant’s ability to “adequately make a legal defence.”

the UN has warned that this plan could constitute torture. the American Veterinary Association has advised again the use of nitrogen hypoxia for euthanasia of almost all mammals. experts also warn that safety issues for those in the vicinity of the execution could block prisoners right to have a spiritual advisor in the execution chamber as established by the supreme court in 2022, as well as the right to healthcare as established by the supreme court in 1976 should they not die immediately.

Kenneth Smith, who will be the the guinea pig for this inhumane punishment, could not be sentenced with the death penalty if his case was tried today as this sentence was imposed by a judge overruling the decision of a jury, which is no longer permitted.

the use of nitrogen hypoxia to kill prisoners has been approved in alabama, mississippi, and oklahoma, and is a risk in arizona, oklahoma, and nebraska.

you can sign this petition to several of these states’ governors and legislators here. if you’re a jewish community leader wanting to join the jewish community statement opposing the gas chamber you can sign here. you can also reach out directly to your reps, especially alabama governor Kay Ivey, who has the authority to stop this execution (although time is running very short) and other executions of this type in the future.

if you’re in “canada” like me, the canadian company walter surface companies, owned by a canadian private equity firm called onex corp is complicit in this execution as one of its subsidiaries is producing the gas masks that will be used in these executions. you can sign a petition here and do anything else you can to put pressure on these groups.

i’m horrified that any country still uses the death penalty. i’m horrified at the precedent that this particular execution sets. nobody should be okay with this.

[manicpixiemeatboy]

yiddish theatre, yiddish newspapers and other yiddish cultural stuff was illegal in israel for years and actively discouraged and attempted to make obsolete, yiddish lectures were disrupted and the israeli state translated the testimonies of holocaust survivors to hebrew rather than keep them in yiddish (the language spoken by most jewish holocaust survivors) but tell me more about how israel and zionism are saving jews and making jewish cultural identity stronger rather than destroying and devaluing jewish diasporic culture 🤔

[manicpixiemeatboy]

award-winning palestinian children's illustrator baraa awoor writes:

"what use is it to be an illustrator of children's books when the world has sentenced the children of your country to the death penalty, to vanish, to genocide?"

some of baraa's illustrations:

this is an illustration for youssef, whose mother is remembered running desperately into the hospital asking if anyone had seen a "small white boy with beautiful curly hair, his name is youssef," a description which was remembered by millions when she finally identified his body:

this illustration is for young omar, who was hugging his little brother and teaching him how to repeat the shahada after him (a prayer spoken by muslims before their death) as he lay on his hospital bed:

"we want a new year that doesn't kill us or our children, we want it a year without blood, without screaming, without pain, we want a new attempt to get our lives back, or something that resembled our life, even if life is a lie we still cling to it, return life to us—a new year's card unlike any other year:"

[manicpixiemeatboy]

A Kris Kringle gift for Twitter. Johnny's the brightest star, baby!