nothingtenderhere

[nothingtenderhere]

A cardboard sign said what a hundred press briefings won’t:

The shooter. The weapon. The silencer. The victim.

This is how it feels when the world calls your bloodshed “complicated.”

In one glance, this handmade sign maps the structure of global violence:

🇮🇱 Israel pulls the trigger

🇺🇸 The U.S. funds and furnishes the gun

🇪🇺 The EU hushes the sound

🇵🇸 And Palestine bleeds from the bullet

When official language becomes a tool of erasure (terms like escalation, security, regrettable civilian loss) then it’s cardboard and marker that carry the moral record. Because protest doesn’t ask to be credible. It demands to be witnessed.

Last week, I wrote A Timeline of Unpunished Crimes: The War on Gaza in 10 Violations — a piece that traces the deliberate starvation, targeted killings, and media distortion behind this violence.

This image is the visual echo of that record.

📖 Read the full piece here:

📌 Footnoted with casualty counts, named deaths, and foreign complicity.

Some things can’t be de-escalated. Only named.

[nothingtenderhere]

🚢 “Freedom Flotilla” — Blocked by Blood and Silence

Carlos Latuff, 2025

Palestinian hands reaching from the ashes. Aid intercepted by empire.

The sea is not neutral when it swallows the lifeline.

📦 Not just a cartoon anymore.

[nothingtenderhere]

Border patrol beware: full moon solidarity.

Werewolves bite back. Always have. Always will.

werewolves against fascism

free or pwyw download of hi-res, printable versions available here: https://ko-fi.com/s/a2e5b9f250

feel free to use/repost/reprint however much you want. if you leave a tip, a portion (70%) will go to various immigrant rights nonprofits around the country.

[nothingtenderhere]

You don’t need a theory to know who’s suffering.

You don’t need permission to stand beside them.

The system is designed to make you forget who your people are.

Most people don’t look away because they don’t care.

They look away because it hurts, and no one taught them what to do with that.

[nothingtenderhere]

She Called Me Brother While the World Called Her a Terrorist: The Fourteenth Circle

These images were forged in sorrow,

beneath the sky that watches Gaza burn.

It was made for the silence that screams beneath the rubble,

and for every moral insurgent who stays human in a world that rewards the inhuman.

It began with the kind of breath you only notice

when someone exhales

and doesn’t realize

they’ve been holding the world in their lungs.

I didn’t set out to be seen.

I whispered something into the dark,

and still, she heard me.

Mid-bombing.

Mid-censorship.

Mid-century-long siege.

She paused—

Bisan,

answering a signal I didn’t know I was sending,

a transmission breaking through the static of a genocide made digital,

and let my words move through her like air through a warzone.

But you have to understand—

in a place like Gaza,

the 14th circle of Hell,

even that means something

too deep to tremble words over.

All I could think was: God, I just want to be where her breath goes each time she exhales.

In Gaza,

that’s what it means

to long for breath

in a place where breathing is a form of resistance.

In Gaza, the 14th circle of Hell is not dream symbolism.

It is a school shelter bombed in sleep.

It is cousins buried beneath the remains of the alphabet.

It is children dismembered beside bread.

She’s surrounded by the dead,

hunted by drones,

silenced by the algorithm that governs what the world pretends to know.

And still,

she showed up

and handed me the names of all the dead.

Small universes—

swallowed by a state that calls itself chosen.

Every syllable she spoke

bruised the spine of heaven.

Every number she named

is a wound on the world’s conscience.

Each child,

a star we let be consumed.

I cried.

But I didn’t flinch from the horror.

I couldn’t.

I stayed human,

and remained with her.

My hand on her back.

Even as she stitched the numbers

into the skin of our silence.

And maybe that’s when she trusted me.

I looked at Israel

and saw a demon in ceremonial robes,

pissing on olive trees,

bombing breadlines,

renaming the murdered

as if that could unbury them.

Calling itself “holy land.”

A synagogue of the possessed.1 (see footnote)

Accusing the innocent of its own crimes,

and still expecting to be called Chosen,

as they shoot children in the neck

and bomb cribs to rubble.

And the West—

baptized in complicity.

Murderers. Dressed in state flags and scripture.

The blessed West—

applauding.

Kneeling.

Calling it diplomacy.

While children burn,

and poets fast,

and the algorithms smother

the only witnesses

who still wake up in the morning

and say the names.

She was shaking.

Compressing entire massacres into 60-second reels

because the platforms preferred it that way.

And still, somehow,

amid the censored screams,

she found time

to exhale beside me.

I know the value of that breath.

It took me a while to find the words.

But when I found them,

they arrived like blood returning to a sleeping limb.

“You don’t owe the world your softness.

You don’t have to be a candle.

You don’t owe that to anyone, Bisan.

You don’t have to smile for a ‘humanity’

that devours your children and praises the butcher.

But if you need a place

to bring what the world won’t hold—

bring it here.

I won’t look away.

And I won’t ask you to explain.

I am not here to repackage your pain,

or to witness for applause.

I am here

because you matter beyond the metrics.

Because the numbers are not numbers to you—

they’ve never been numbers to me either.”

You don’t understand what it means

to be called brother

by someone encircled by death,

by someone reporting live

from the intestines of the beast,

by someone who bleeds truth

into a feed built to suppress it.

Because she knows I won’t look away.

And that means something

beyond sacred

on this inverted planet.

It’s worth more than every blue check,

every book deal polished by the bloodless.

When she reassures me

that I am what prophets tried to be

before the pulpits sold them out:

Unbought.

Unshaken.

Unashamed to speak for children,

for the mouths

that will never finish their last sentence.

A moral insurgent,

with nothing to lose

but silence.

And whether or not she ever touches my heart,

she’s already validated my soul.

She called me “brother”

when the rest of the world

was calling her a terrorist.

And the awards,

followers,

headlines,

Emmys,

Nobel nominations,

broadcast rights…

None of it feels as sacred

as the moment she pressed her phone to her chest,

read the name of a murdered child aloud,

and let me be

where her breathing landed.

1

This piece is written in fierce moral defense of the people of Gaza as a theological and political indictment of settler-colonial Zionism, not Judaism. It addresses the desecration of sacred language by a state weaponizing it for genocide. While it condemns Zionist ideology and colonial violence, it does not indict the Jewish faith.

I stand against antisemitism and against the appropriation of sacred tradition to justify ethnic cleansing, and I always will.

[nothingtenderhere]

“God is love.”

That’s what they tell you.

But here’s what their holy book actually says.

Verses your church will never quote.

Verses you’re told not to read too closely.

Verses that glorify infanticide, rape, sexual slavery, and mass murder. Not as sin, but as law. As divine will.

So go ahead.

Quote Jeremiah 29:11.

Frame Isaiah 40:31 above your bed.

Whisper Psalm 23 at every funeral.

But don’t you dare turn away when the same “God” commands child slaughter and calls it sacred.

Read. Every. Word.

Then ask yourself if this book is truly holy or if it’s just a long, loud echo of empire.

— Nothing Tender Here

[nothingtenderhere]

83 Palestinians have starved to death.

80 of them were children.

This is not war.

It’s starvation as strategy, occupation as doctrine, and genocide rehearsed as democracy.

This essay is for the record.

A Timeline of Unpunished Crimes: The War on Gaza in 10 Violations — How They Starved a People and Called It Peace

— Nothing Tender Here

[nothingtenderhere]

Nothing Tender Here is a writing project for those who see propaganda in the polite, betrayal in silence, and still believe that the sharpest essays are the ones that bruise, not flatter.

This archive is for what survives the censorship, the cowardice, and the spin. We don’t write for consensus. We write for the clarity history deserves.

If you’re looking for easy takes or polite language, this isn’t it.

But if you’re ready to read like it matters—you’re welcome here.

http://nothingtenderhere.substack.com