#NGOs Working for Refugees

[aurovedacharitable]

Winter Blanket Distribution to Help Poor and Needy People - Auroveda

The most meaningful gifts are often those that come from the heart and are given with compassion and love. Auroveda asks you to support the underprivileged with unused clothes, food, blankets, or any other essential items. Your gift makes a big difference. Extending a helping hand to the poor as well as the needy gives you peace and peace of mind.

[drumlincountry]

to remember:

Most effective social change comes not from paying passing awareness to all social issues, but from working with deep, sustained focus on a specific social issue.

You don't have to ignore everything that isn't your area. But you don't have to fight every fight with equal energy. limit guilt.

"Only when large numbers of people demand everything immediately do we ever get anything  eventually." Cleve Jones

"I'm not saying we'll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure." Leslie Feinburg

People need to eat.

You are people.

[sailorsally]

.

[meryton-etc]

Just realised i never posted this here.... if anyone wants to throw us a fiver it would really mean a great deal!

[fairuzfan]

AMAZING article about what it means to participate in anti-Zionism work both online and in person.

If your anti-zionism does not in any way acknowledge that it is a way of thought and practice led by and for Palestinians, then you need to reevaluate your "anti-zionism" label.

Some passages that felt especially relevant to tumblr:

If we accept, as those with even the most rudimentary understanding of history do, that zionism is an ongoing process of settler-colonialism, then the undoing of zionism requires anti-zionism, which should be understood as a process of decolonisation. Anti-zionism as a decolonial ideology then becomes rightly situated as an indigenous liberation movement. The resulting implication is two-fold. First, decolonial organising requires that we extract ourselves from the limitations of existing structures of power and knowledge and imagine a new, just world. Second, this understanding clarifies that the caretakers of anti-zionist thought are indigenous communities resisting colonial erasure, and it is from this analysis that the strategies, modes, and goals of decolonial praxis should flow. In simpler terms: Palestinians committed to decolonisation, not Western-based NGOs, are the primary authors of anti-zionist thought. We write this as a Palestinian and a Palestinian-American who live and work in Palestine, and have seen the impact of so-called ‘Western values’ and how the centring of the ‘human rights’ paradigm disrupts real decolonial efforts in Palestine and abroad. This is carried out in favour of maintaining the status quo and gaining proximity to power, using our slogans emptied of Palestinian historical analysis.

Anti-zionist organising is not a new notion, but until now the use of the term in organising circles has been mired with misunderstandings, vague definitions, or minimised outright. Some have incorrectly described anti-zionism as amounting to activities or thought limited to critiques of the present Israeli government – this is a dangerous misrepresentation. Understanding anti-zionism as decolonisation requires the articulation of a political movement with material, articulated goals: the restitution of ancestral territories and upholding the inviolable principle of indigenous repatriation and through the right of return, coupled with the deconstruction of zionist structures and the reconstitution of governing frameworks that are conceived, directed, and implemented by Palestinians.  Anti-zionism illuminates the necessity to return power to the indigenous community and the need for frameworks of justice and accountability for the settler communities that have waged a bloody, unrelenting hundred-year war on the people of Palestine. It means that anti-zionism is much more than a slogan. 

[...]

While our collective imaginations have not fully articulated what a liberated and decolonised Palestine looks like, the rough contours have been laid out repeatedly. Ask any Palestinian refugee displaced from Haifa, the lands of Sheikh Muwannis, or Deir Yassin – they will tell that a decolonised Palestine is, at a minimum, the right of Palestinians’ return to an autonomous political unit from the river to the sea. When self-proclaimed ‘anti-zionists’ use rhetoric like ‘Israel-Palestine’ – or worse, ‘Palestine-Israel’ – we wonder: where do you think ‘Israel’ exists? On which land does it lay, if not Palestine? This is nothing more than an attempt to legitimise a colonial state; the name you are looking for is Palestine – no hyphen required. At a minimum, anti-zionist formations should cut out language that forces upon Palestinians and non-Palestinian allies the violence of colonial theft. 

[...]

The common choice to centre the Oslo Accords, international humanitarian law, and the human rights paradigm over socio-historical Palestinian realities not only limits our analysis and political interventions; it restricts our imagination of what kind of future Palestinians deserve, sidelining questions of decolonization to convince us that it is the new, bad settlers in the West Bank who are the source of violence. Legitimate settlers, who reside within the bounds of Palestinian geographies stolen in 1948 like Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, are different within this narrative. Like Breaking the Silence, they can be enlightened by learning the error of colonial violence carried out in service of the bad settlers. They can supposedly even be our solidarity partners – all without having to sacrifice a crumb of colonial privilege or denounce pre-1967 zionist violence in any of its cruel manifestations. As a result of this course of thought, solidarity organisations often showcase particular Israelis – those who renounce state violence in service of the bad settlers and their ongoing colonisation of the West Bank – in roles as professionals and peacemakers, positioning them on an equal intellectual, moral, or class footing with Palestinians. There is no recognition of the inherent imbalance of power between these Israelis and the Palestinians they purport to be in solidarity with – stripping away their settler status. The settler is taken out of the historical-political context which afforded them privileged status on stolen land, and is given the power to delineate the Palestinian experience. This is part of the historical occlusion of the zionist narrative, overlooking the context of settler-colonialism to read the settler as an individual, and omitting their class status as a settler. 

It is essential to note that Palestinians have never rejected Jewish indigeneity in Palestine. However, the liberation movement has differentiated between zionist settlers and Jewish natives. Palestinians have established a clear and rational framework for this distinction, like in the Thawabet, the National Charter of Palestine from 1968. Article 6 states, ‘The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.’ When individuals misread ‘decolonisation’ as ‘the mass killing or expulsion of Jews,’ it is often a reflection of their own entanglement in colonialism or a result of zionist propaganda. Perpetuating this rhetoric is a deliberate misinterpretation of Palestinian thought, which has maintained this position over a century of indigenous organising.  Even after 100 years of enduring ethnic cleansing, whole communities bombed and entire family lines erased, Palestinians have never, as a collective, called for the mass killing of Jews or Israelis. Anti-zionism cannot shy away from employing the historical-political definitions of ‘settler’ and ‘indigenous’ in their discourse to confront ahistorical readings of Palestinian decolonial thought and zionist propaganda. 

[...]

In the context of the United States, the most threatening zionist institutions are the entrenched political parties which function to maintain the status quo of the American empire, not Hillel groups on university campuses or even Christian zionist churches. While the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) engage in forms of violence that suppress Palestinian liberation and must not be minimised, it is crucial to recognise that the most consequential institutions in the context of settler-colonialism are not exclusively Jewish in their orientation or representation: the Republican and Democratic Party in the United States do arguably more to manufacture public consent for the slaughtering of Palestinians than the ADL and AIPAC combined. Even the Progressive Caucus and the majority of ‘The Squad’ are guilty of this.

Leila Shomali and Lara Kilani

[zyptoskid]

Compilation of Gaza Direct Aid Resources

Gaza e-sims: an initiative to keep Gaza residents & reporters on the ground connected despite the targeted communication blackouts.

Ground initiatives: those are groups of people with the resources and ability to distribute aid in ad-hoc fashion to those most in need. Small scale groups like this are efficient in their crisis response and some are willing to put their lives in danger to push aid to hotspots like the north of the strip. + @careforgaza (twitter) + @gazadirectaid (twitter) + @ahelgaza (twitter) + PiousProjects feminine hygiene kits

The PCRF: Palestine Children's Relief Fund is an independent and reputable organization with 30+ years of service for Palestinian children.

UNRWA: The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, established in 1949 to support and pay reparations for Palestinian refugees whom are denied their right of return (most of Gaza residents at the moment). This org was recently defunded by your usual colonizer suspects, in an illegitimate attempt to put pressure on the UN after ICJ/CIJ ruling that recognized Palestinians as a distinct ethnic group in plausible threat of genocide.

Daily Click on arab.org: a NGO that collects interaction revenue and sends it to multiple other orgs in support of Palestine

[foxfinding]

I would find it so much easier to care about the people in the submarine, if I wasn't constantly fucking seeing headlines about ships going missing that were full of refugees and asylum seekers.

Like- look. Realistically?

Everyone in that sub is dead, and they are never going to be found.

But. All these rich dipshits who have never had a consequence in their lives, who willingly chose to sign a waiver and hop into a seriously unsafe submersible for funzies and bragging rights, like-

They still live in a different fucking world than everyone else.

They have multiple governments and military organisations and others "the private sector" working together trying to find them.

(I do know that there are lots of people who do really care about helping refugees and asylum seekers, "private sector" and NGOs and sometimes governments and stuff.)

I just...

I don't fucking care about these stupid fucking rich people.

I'm angry, that they decided to do something stupid and the world is apparently desperate to save these five people, and not...

All the fucking people who sign up for dangerous conditions because they are scared and desperate and hopeful.

I'm angry, that there are posts like

"Do you know how awful it would be to die like that? Have empathy!!!"

Like.

No?

I don't really care how cold that sounds.

I have limited emotional energy, and I choose to spend it ...not on fucking loser billionaires who thought they were fucking invincible.

I choose use my emotional energy to have empathy for the people who were seeking help and didn't fucking get it.

[aurovedacharitable]

Support the India Refugees |Auroveda Foundation

Auroveda Operating Foundation Charitable Trust NGO Support the Refugees, NGOs That Help Refugees, support the refugees in India, NGO Working for Migrants

Indian children have known nothing but struggle throughout their lives. All these years they have been facing extreme hunger and are forced to labor after being expelled from school. Their condition is worrying.

[septembriseur]

There have been so many parallels all along between the international response to the genocide in Gaza and the international response to the fall of Afghanistan. Obviously two extremely different events, but I’m talking purely about the international response.

One notable similarity (which I think is simply now becoming “how things work”) is what a colleague in Finland termed “distributed humanitarianism”: the extent to which large-scale NGO humanitarian interventions have been replaced by grass-roots, piecemeal interventions by individuals— essentially outsourcing humanitarianism to individuals. My colleague, who was talking about this in the context of Ukraine, saw this as an amazing disruption of traditional models. I countered by describing the sense of abandonment by organizations and moral despair that I and others experienced while trying to help people in Afghanistan— and the real sense that distributed humanitarianism privileged people who had strong connections to the West, who spoke English, and whose stories could be attractively framed to appeal to Western priorities.

Another similarity is the fact that the response has been (understandably) a response of urgency, which has no way to create infrastructure that will support a future of ongoing emergency. In Afghanistan, the focus was on getting people out immediately, with the expectation that organizations and governments would eventually get off their asses and take responsibility. When this did not happen, no one was prepared to provide long-term legal and financial support for refugees. Almost three years after the fall of Kabul, many friends of mine are still waiting for the resettlement that the US promised them (including US interpreters and security guards). Most of the ad hoc groups that formed to support them have collapsed due to lack of funding, because so few people (other than veterans, really) are actively advocating for Afghanistan now.

Already I see attention to Gaza waning as the emergency becomes normalized. In general, Western audiences want to feel that by taking a certain action (providing a certain sum of money), they can solve a problem. That mindset and that framework is not useful in a situation that requires sustained responsibility for other people’s lives— that requires an understanding that this is not an emergency, but rather a manifestation of a logic (cf Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics) that is fundamental to our way of existence.

One has to ask what is going to happen a year or two years from now, when the survivors of Gaza still do not have homes, still do not have legal status, still have no way to support themselves and their families, and are still receiving inadequate aid. This is not a criticism of current efforts, but rather an observation from my own experience: people need to be planning for a future of sustained, long-term mutual aid. No one (governments, big orgs) can be relied on to help you. No one is coming to save you. We are responsible for saving each other.

[eretzyisrael]

by Troy O. Fritzhand

A group of 3,000 teachers working in Gaza for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) — the global organization’s agency dedicated solely to the refugees and descendants of Palestinians who fled during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence — glorified and celebrated the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 pogrom across southern Israel in an internal Telegram group, according to a new investigation by UN Watch.

The Geneva-based NGO, which monitors the UN, found that on Oct. 7, when Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, massacred 1,200 people, and kidnapped 240 others as hostages to Hamas-ruled Gaza, the UNRWA teachers posted messages such as “welcome the great October” and “Allah is great, reality surpasses our wildest dreams.”

One principal, Iman Hassan, said the surprise attack was “restoring rights” of Palestinians. Other teachers called the terrorists “heroes” and said “foreign nationals should remain among the Israeli prisoners in the Gaza Strip until the siege … is lifted.”

UN Watch exposed 20 specific Gaza educators who celebrated the massacre, ranging from regular teachers to even directors of a training center.

“This is the motherlode of UNRWA teachers’ incitement to jihadi terrorism,” UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said in a statement. In a tweet accompanying the report’s release, he added that the agency was engaging in “the systematic incitement to terror.”

According to UNRWA, the agency has 702 schools with half a million students educated by nearly 20,000 teachers — including those who celebrated the Hamas attack.

Complaints that UNRWA is promoting antisemitism and terrorism are not new.

A report published in November by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), an independent research group, found that at least 14 teachers at UNRWA-run schools had praised the Oct. 7 pogrom carried out by Hamas terrorists in southern Israel.

Another UNRWA teacher was separately accused by an Israeli journalist of having held one of the hostages abducted during the onslaught, depriving him of food and medical attention. For its part, UNRWA has strongly denied that there is any basis to that claim.

The US is the largest donor to UNRWA and gave over $371 million to the organization in 2023. Former President Donald Trump cut funding to the group in 2018, a move that was ultimately reversed when current President Joe Biden took office.

UNRWA’s future role in Gaza after the Israel-Hamas war ends has been a point of discussion in the Jewish state. Hebrew media reported last month that the Israeli government has outlined plans to root out the agency completely from Gaza following the war.

Part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to endorse the idea of the Palestinian Authority governing Gaza should Hamas be wiped out is due to the education it supports via UNRWA that promotes incitement against Israel and Jews.

For example, a 2023 joint report by Impact-se and UN Watch found that UNRWA employees had created classroom material celebrating the firebombing of a Jewish bus as a “barbecue party,” encouraging students to pursue jihad and martyrdom, erasing Israel from maps, and encouraging students to “liberate the homeland” with “their blood,” among other examples of incitement to radicalism.

In its new report, UN Watch called for the immediate dismissal of the teachers it identified and the implementation of a zero-tolerance policy for any future instances of calls for incitement or glorifying terrorism.

[mariacallous]

Hours after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, refugees began pouring over the border to Moldova. Ludmila Popovici, the executive director of RCTV Memoria, a Moldovan nonprofit that works with survivors of war and torture, was in Romania at the time undergoing cancer treatment. But with the beginning of what some would now call an “endless war,” Popovici and her team immediately got to work.

They reached out to refugee centers and scoured Facebook groups for those in need of help, including sick children and women experiencing high risk pregnancies. Aided by small donations from partners overseas, they created food packages, delivered medicine, and provided direct cash assistance to the most vulnerable.

“We were all scared that we [Moldova] were going to be the next target for the Russian army,” Popovici explained. “But we knew our help was needed.”

However, more than two years into the war, organizations like Popovici’s are overworked, underfunded, and in many cases, at risk of collapse. Over-reliant on volunteers and facing staff burnout, they are struggling to meet the needs of the women and children they serve.

Every conflict is gendered—whether it’s the nature of conscription or the use of gender-based violence as a weapon of war. But the impact of the war in Ukraine, especially on forcibly displaced persons, has been more gendered than most, largely because of the country’s martial law which prohibits men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

As a result of this policy, women and children comprise a remarkable 80 percent of the 5.9 million Ukrainian refugees who have left the country since 2022. Many of them have faced gender-based violence, including sexual exploitation, human trafficking, or domestic violence, which has skyrocketed since the war began.

These risks persist today. Our organization, VOICE, has been working with women-led groups across the region since early 2022 to ensure they have access to the resources they need to participate in and lead the humanitarian response. Earlier this year, we conducted a survey of our partners across Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, and Romania, regarding the challenges they were facing and what they were seeing on the ground. They reported high rates of gender-based violence.

Many refugee women and children continue to reside in collective shelters with nonsex-segregated facilities, and limited oversight of who is entering and exiting the buildings. Another key challenge for forcibly displaced women both in Ukraine and abroad is lack of access to financial resources and employment.

In Ukraine, regular shelling has shuttered many schools, businesses, and childcare centers, making it difficult for displaced women to secure employment. Elsewhere in the region, factors such as language barriers, lack of childcare, and an absence of clear information about refugees’ right to work have made it hard to achieve a decent standard of living and put Ukrainian women at risk of exploitation.

For many Ukrainian women, who are grappling with the impacts of trauma and displacement, the war has only exacerbated low access to health care. All this is happening against the backdrop of a broader crackdown in the region, which has seen abortion rights rolled back in countries like Poland, Hungary, and Romania; direct budget cuts to organizations serving domestic violence survivors; a weakening of institutions advocating for gender equality; and an elevated risk of violence for LGBTQI+ people.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, women-led organizations like RCTV Memoria in Moldova, Martynka Foundation in Poland, and NGO Fulcrum in Ukraine have mobilized rapidly across the region. In our survey, 78 percent of respondents reported that they have expanded their teams and operations, all while continuing to fulfill their original missions.

Like Popovici, they did this both because the situation required it, and because their expertise and credibility allowed them to take action swiftly while understanding cultural nuances in ways that larger, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and U.N. agencies could not. But they have done so without consistent resources and financial support, often forced to draw upon their own reserves or volunteer labor in order to deliver their services.

In 2022, Ukraine received almost $30 billion in humanitarian funding. However, less than 1 percent of that made its way to local women’s rights organizations, movements, and institutions, according to a report by the Institute for Journalism and Social Change (IJSC).

Organizations cite onerous funding requirements and red tape delays including heavy paperwork and narrow application windows (One large INGO, for example, required applicants to submit no less than 30 items for accountability checks.) Many organizations simply struggle to find the time to apply for funding opportunities while simultaneously meeting the needs of their communities. Often, they feel they are not trusted by mainstream funders like U.N. agencies and INGOs—not viewed as having the right accountability systems, or perceived as being too political for their public support for reproductive rights and LGBTQI+ rights.

These challenges are not unique to Ukraine. They play out in conflicts around the world—from Afghanistan to Sudan. As the IJSC report details, only about 2 percent of all humanitarian funding goes to local NGOs and civil society organizations based in the developing countries aid is being delivered to. The proportion of that funding that goes to organizations led by women and girls is even smaller. Only 12 percent of the leaders that responded to our survey reported that their organization has sufficient funding to operate and implement their planned work in 2024.

“Our biggest concern is that by the end of 2024, there will be no Ukrainian-led organizations providing GBV services in Ukraine,” said Nastya Podorozhnya, founder of Martynka Foundation, a Polish-Ukrainian NGO that supports victims of human trafficking, war, rape, and domestic violence.

Almost three-fourths of the organizations we surveyed reported that if the resources were available, they would further expand their services for survivors of gender-based violence. As one Moldovan respondent explained, “Often, the lack of resources prevents us from effectively addressing [gender-based violence]. Even when resources do become available, they may come too late, rendering the problem obsolete or causing survivors to withdraw, lose hope, and cease engaging in dialogue.”

Even by the U.N.’s own measures, response to gender-based violence remains underfunded. But it did not have to be this way. Unlike in typically new conflict or disaster settings, the U.N. had fostered strong relationships with local Ukrainian organizations which have dealt with the threat of a Russian invasion since 2014. Similarly, though Ukraine’s neighbors had not previously seen a large U.N. presence, they had fostered a dynamic women’s sector.

Together, this meant that the international community had a unique chance to innovate and reimagine the way it engaged with local stakeholders. They should have prioritized engaging with local women’s movements and networks and encouraged their active participation in decision making processes. Based on the information provided by the women’s rights organizations we surveyed, however, this chance has largely gone unseized.

Despite pledges toward localization, women-led organizations continue to find themselves on the outside looking in. The initial phase of the war may have ended, but the crisis it triggered has not. Ukraine continues to fight back against Russia’s assaults with insufficient international support. Millions of Ukrainians continue to be displaced across the region, struggling to meet their basic needs in the face of ongoing trauma and loss. The question of what happens after the war is over continues to loom over Ukrainians.

Popovici’s organization, RCTV Memoria, worked with over 300 survivors each year before Russia invaded. In 2023 that effort increased by tenfold, and the organization was working with over 3,000 Ukrainian refugees alone. To do this, they have had to work essentially nonstop, serving survivors during the day and doing administrative work at night, mobilizing volunteers, and working without vacations or weekends.

RCTV Memoria has increasingly transitioned its activities with Ukrainian refugees to not just providing essential services to the vulnerable, but also to providing the psychosocial and economic support that displaced Ukrainians will need when they return home. “They are the most precious resource of Ukraine and they are in a safe place here,” Popovici said. “They will have to mobilize themselves to be ready to go back home and contribute to the reconstruction of their country.”

More than two years into this conflict, it is time the world started approaching it as the crisis that it is. This means giving the organizations that are working on the frontline the sustained, flexible, and long-term funding they need to increase their capacity and meet the needs of the populations they serve, instead of forcing them to compete for scraps and keeping them in a perpetual state of uncertainty.

Organizations like Popovici’s were there before the war, and they will be thereafter. They have proven they understand the needs and aspirations of the constituencies they serve, and that they have the skills and expertise to meet those needs. It is time the international community gave them the respect—and the funding—they deserve.

[girlactionfigure]

Meet Abier.

You have paid for most of her life.

Her education, food, and perhaps even her housing. 

You did the same for her parents, and her grandparents too. She is a 3rd or 4th generation 'Palestinian' refugee living and born in Jordan. A self-described Palestinian Keyboard Warrior - She has a special unique status no other refugee on Earth enjoys because her grandparents fled a war with the Jews either 56 or (am not kidding) 75+ years ago..

The reason she enjoys your tax dollars, generosity, and special privileges of never being granted status where she was born, is that her refugee status is passed on generationally, like DNA. She likely has citizenship in Jordan, maybe even a passport.

No other refugees on Earth enjoy these special privileges, including people living in tents fleeing horrific violence and death. Why?  Because the international community and the Arab world want to perpetuate the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is an industry worth billions of dollars a year for organizations like UNRWA, and through direct payments to the Palestinians, or through thousands of EU NGOs providing jobs and careers.. There are millions of people just like Abier and you are paying for it all. Millions of people.

An entire industry is dedicated to this cause of preserving this notion that millions of Palestinians who have never even been to Palestine, the great-grandchildren of refugees, will one day flood back into Israel with a fictional 'Right of Return', and destroy the Jewish State from within.

The Palestinians (this woman seems Jordanian truthfully) are being used as a weapon against Israel, generation after generation, and we pay for it all. Your tax dollars at work.

Ron M / @Jewtastic

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth Mandel

But it’s also the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in microcosm. Compare Khan’s description of the role played by NGOs and sympathetic media with how Matti Friedman, a former Associated Press reporter who wrote about the media’s problems covering Israel after the 2014 Gaza war, describes the effects of this same alliance on coverage: “these groups are to be quoted, not covered. Journalists cross from places like the BBC to organizations like Oxfam and back. The current spokesman at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, for example, is a former BBC man. A Palestinian woman who participated in protests against Israel and tweeted furiously about Israel a few years ago served at the same time as a spokesperson for a UN office, and was close friends with a few reporters I know. And so forth.”

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these NGOs are extremely powerful, because their perceived authority magnifies their voices above those who may know much more about the issues but who don’t have the megaphone or the credibility lent to the European-funded activist groups masquerading as “humanitarians.” Throughout the current war, polls of American public opinion have never demonstrated that the progressive pro-Hamas rump on college campuses or among city protest groups should be catered to. In Israel vs Hamas, Americans don’t hesitate to side with Israel. Even the “ceasefire at any cost” crowd is smaller than it looks and sounds. A Marist poll last week put their share of the public at 25 percent. Yet they have nudged President Biden’s policies in their direction.

How? The protests on college campuses showed not just the organizing power of the left but the role of the media in amplifying their grievances and whitewashing their violence and lawbreaking. And it works in the other direction too: In many cases the media plays a key role in feeding the wildfire of misinformation that fuels the protests before turning around and reporting on them.

UN groups have been uncritically parroting the obviously inaccurate Hamas-produced death tolls. So have the media. In explaining why the Washington Post trusts Hamas propaganda enough to report it as fact, the paper quoted Omar Shakir in Hamas’s defense. Shakir is the Israel/Palestine director of Human Rights Watch and someone who was expelled from Israel over his support for BDS-affiliated groups that seek Israel’s destruction. In other words, if you switched the staffing of the Hamas Health Ministry and Human Rights Watch, the output of both organizations would likely be unchanged.

[corpsebasil]

Hey!!! Just a quick message to my followers: As someone with anxiety life can feel really hard sometimes. I woke up this morning extremely anxious and felt worse than I have in a while. Remember this: A SMALL ISSUE WILL NOT END YOUR LIFE.

Need I repeat it?

A SMALL ISSSUE WILL NOT. END YOUR LIFE. IT WONT.

No matter what you’re anxious about right now trust me, you can do this. YOU CAN.

Remember the last time you worried over something small and it worked out?

:) exactly. Give it a second, I know we can all giggle over something we’ve been anxious about that was totally fine.

You’re okay. Trust me.

On that note, there’s an amazing NGO called Ale Askar that’s accepting cards for Syrian refugee children in Lebanon. It’s an organization that keeps those precious kids off the streets and gives them an education. It prevents young girls from marrying too early, it provides food, hygiene, and shelter, and helps these kids avoid being trafficked. I’m channeling my anxious energy into making cards for them this morning.

If you want details about sending cards let me know. :) It’s completely free.

REMEMBER: CHANNEL YOUR ANXIOUS ENERGY INTO SOMETHING GOOD!

[racefortheironthrone]

Hello. I was recently reading your "People's History of the Marvel Universe" series (an excellent read btw).

You made reference to critiques of Xavier and his political strategies, which got me thinking. Has anyone ever brought up the idea of a mutant advocacy group in the comics? Something akin to a NAACP, or an NGO? It feels like something that should exist, but I genuinely can't remember a writer ever attempting to create one.

This is an excellent question!

So I have certainly mentioned the issue in the past. If we think of the Marvel Universe as being roughly co-terminous in time with our own universe, as it was before the invention of the sliding timescale in the 90s, there should have been a mutant rights movement founded in the 70s during the "movement of movements" that saw the explosion of gay rights movements, women's liberation movements, environmental movements, etc. coming out of the 60s civil rights movement and New Left/anti-war movement. (I certainly would have been fascinated by how the All-New X-Men would have wrestled with the concept of "intersectionality" when it was brand-new coming out of the Combahee River Collective.)

In the comics, there have been sporadic mentions of mutant advocacy groups and NGOs - mostly in the context of campus organizations - but often very sporadically. Grant Morrison really changed the game completely by making X-Corp (a global mutant rights NGO) a significant element of his celebrated New X-Men run, and creators who followed their work have gone on to invent new groups with examples like Super Trans (a support group for trans mutants), Mutantes Sans Frontières (a mutant medical NGO), MUSE (a mutant rescue and shelter NGO), and Magnetic North (a pro-Magneto radical student group).

Whether the Krakoan Response Team (disaster relief) or the Marauders (refugee and black market pharmaceuticals) count as social movements or NGOs probably depends more on your theoretical perspective on social movements. Both organizations are state-sponsored, but aren't formal state institutions, but then again Krakoa doesn't have a well-developed political system. Most theorists insist that social movements have to be outside the political system, but I tend to agree with those who argue that social movements and political movements overlap, and that a lot of social movement work historically and today is done within the system of electoral politics.

[edwordsmyth]

"It has become clear during the past two months in the Gaza Strip that the Zionist entity is plenty capable of equaling the belligerence of the American frontier, an era of wholesale ethnic cleansing thought to be a feature of history.  (“It could never happen today,” people sometimes would foolishly declare.)  Colonial atrocities of the past—Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the Trail of Tears—are now everywhere in evidence.  The Zionist entity is carrying out a kind of primitive violence with modern technology.  This violence fills our computer and television screens. People around the world get minute-by-minute accounts of massive destruction and widespread murder. Certain images have become horrifyingly familiar: throngs of refugees queuing for bread; ambulances dodging tank and machine gun fire; hospitals in disarray; once-dense neighborhoods transformed by aerial bombardment into kilometers of rubble. We scroll through photos of men blindfolded and stripped to their underwear, lined up on the ground like antiquities in a museum courtyard. The scrolling continues into pictures of white body bags in shallow trenches and then into videos of little girls and boys screaming trauma into the ruins of their childhood. We are perhaps the first generation to witness genocide in real time. History books about the horrors of the past are written every time somebody opens social media.

The theory that bearing witness will curtail Israel’s ability to act on exterminationist fantasies no longer holds. Information and knowledge, it turns out, aren’t reliable bulwarks against genocide. Impunity isn’t beholden to disapproval.

What does it tell us that the Zionist entity can conduct this genocide in high definition, with no credible deniability and amid condemnation from all corners of the world? It tells us that people serious about Palestinian liberation were right to despise the so-called radicals who laundered Zionism through celebrity activism, academic credentialism, NGO astroturf, and the Democratic Party. An entire class of influencers arose from Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential campaigns. They populate hundreds of podcasts and livestreams. They wasted incalculable energy and resources promoting a man who would go on to repeatedly justify the bloody campaign in Gaza. Now they deplore Sanders after having extracted all the clout appended to his name and having ostracized the outliers who accurately tagged him as a fraud from the get-go. It was the most noteworthy example of a timeworn practice: pursuing access to microphones and New Yorker profiles by subsuming Palestinian liberation to institutions constitutionally hostile to revolutionary politics. It tells us that international governing bodies and legal institutions are at best useless. Despite some halfhearted hemming and hawing, the UN has been an accomplice to the Zionist entity’s genocide. The ICC will never see an American, Israeli, or EU war criminal on its docket. The Arab League pretends to care, but its performance is entirely unconvincing. Such institutions have been captured by imperialism since their inception. It tells us that “dialogue” was always a pathway to submission. The idea that Israelis and Palestinians should dialogue as a means to peace was always dubious if only because dialogue can’t work in situations of disparate power. But now, with Israelis overwhelmingly in favor of the genocide, it should be clear that Palestinians never had anyone to dialogue with in the first place. It tells us that Western academe was completely unprepared for the material demands of decolonization despite its popularity as a professional brand. Many among the intellectual class, including scholars of Fanon like Adam Shatz and Lewis Gordon, either disavow or diminish anticolonial resistance or ignore it altogether. Academe is where resistance goes for processing and beautification after it has been completed. It’s rarely a place for the organizing stage. It tells us that deterrence isn’t a game of strategy played by eggheads on the internet, but an onerous project conditional on guns and rockets. Academics generally are too scared to say it, or, in an object lesson on arrogance, don’t actually believe it, but a cache of weapons will always be more important than a conference panel. It tells us that electoralism is a sham. There is no meaningful ideological variance among U.S. politicians at the national level. In practice, they range from center-right to fascist. In the upcoming presidential election, for example, voters will get to decide between two scarcely-functional old farts with histories of sexual misconduct and a complete devotion to Zionist genocide. It tells us that racism isn’t simply an attitude, for its origin is social violence and eventually it will become physically violent in order to perform its civic mandate. In the framework of settler colonization, racism manifests as a yearning for cultural purification through displacement of the native. It tells us that capitalism makes death a valuable commodity. The Zionist entity isn’t merely an imperialist beachhead; it is a major player in the international weapons trade. It tests new munitions, chemicals, and surveillance technology on Palestinians. It arms reactionary forces throughout the Global South. It serves as a conduit and accomplice to U.S. policing. Because of Zionist occupation, corporations enjoy the use of human subjects as raw material for development and innovation.

It tells us that we wasted a whole lot of time trying to convince the oppressor that we are worthy of life when the oppressor cannot live without our extinction.

More than anything, it tells us that in the benighted West there is no democracy, no free speech, no legislative remedy, no human rights, no right even to be human. These are illusions people repeat in an effort to survive pervasive depravity, or myths they cynically invoke to gather the crumbs of deprivation. There is a ruling class and various iterations of the dispossessed and the dispossessed exist only to serve ruling class gluttony.

That’s why countless people can deplore a genocide zoomed into our personal devices without being able to stop it. We are not simply ineffectual in the world of policymaking; policymakers are taunting us with their depravity.

What can we do, then? It’s important to start by recognizing that the entire political class, from presidents to online pundits, has no regard for us—detests us, in fact—and is therefore never a reliable source of empathy or relief. Denizens of this class do not want our feedback; they want us to scroll through the debris of their malevolence. Upon this recognition, the possibilities become clearer, albeit less convenient. But in the spirit of urgency, we can keep it simple: whether it happens in darkness or light, on screen or off, the Zionist entity needs to become an archive we browse as a cautionary tale, or else our future on this planet will be history."