#silent towards racism against arabs and silent towards islamophobia!

[cairamelcoffee]

An Arab undergrad at Stanford was injured in a hit & run earlier today. The driver, a zionist who previously harassed SJP members at their campus protests, told the student, "fuck you and your people."

The student is in a local hospital being treated for his injuries. I has been over six hours since the attack, and Stanford still hasn't sent an alert to the campus to notify students of this dangerous hate crime.

via

[edenfenixblogs]

New Pinned Post: How This Blog Approaches The Conflict

I am not normally a politically-focused blog. I am normally a personal blog that enjoys fandom and occasionally processes my own past trauma. As this war goes on, I am finding that it is against my personal ethics and morals to stay silent when I have the ability to educate and remain more patient than most. (My patience is not endless. I’m still human). So, while disinformation/misinformation, and propaganda abound on all sides. I feel like the best way I can help lower the temperature is to put my skills to use.

Primary Political Goals:

1. Emphasize humanity above all and use verifiable information and good faith education and discourse to reduce tension.

2. Do my absolute best to move the conversation away from polarizing, accusatory discourse that forces Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Israelis, and Palestinians to play a desperate game of defense and toward a shared mutually beneficial peace that honors each grouped indigeneity culture, and connection to their ancestral homeland.

3. Demonstrate and emphasize both Jewish-Muslim solidarity and Israeli-Palestinian solidarity.

Primary Blogging Goals:

As a diaspora Jew, my primary goal is threefold

1. Educate about antisemitism and Islamophobia—including calling it out and explaining it to the best of my ability.

2. Elevate responsible, verifiable voices—regardless of religion or nationality—and information to the best of my ability.

3. Demonstrate effective activism and provide insight and encouragement for other to find their most effective way to contribute to fostering peace.

Elaboration:

1. I have the most experience with an understanding of antisemitism. I am more of an expert in antisemitism and have more ability to identify and educate about it. That said: I will not tolerate any Islamophobia or racism and if I don’t have the ability to educate about it, you will be blocked. If I have the ability to educate about it, I will do so and give you the chance to read about it and adjust your behavior. If you do not do so, I will block you.

2. This does not mean equal representation of all nationalities and religions. It means the best informed and most reliable voices AND the voices I personally have the best ability to vet, verify, and substantiate. This will often mean Jewish voices and Israeli voices. This is me staying in my lane, not choosing to suppress any voice. I will not elevate purposefully divisive, tokenized, or uninformed voices. This does not mean that I won’t elevate Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab voices as well. I will. But my primary goal here is responsibility. To do that, I have to stay in my lane.

3. I am most effective as an educator on this matter, a guide to finding reliable peace-oriented voices, and an example of patience. There’s a great desire among many to protest or create videos detailing their opinions and stances. Not only is this primarily performative—especially among non-Muslim/non-Palestinian goyim—it has the potential to be extraordinarily damaging to Jews both in Israel and in Diaspora as well as to Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, and South East Asians worldwide. If you truly desire to help and not just feel like you’re helping, the best thing you can do is follow the lead of much more experienced activists with a demonstrated track record of effectiveness and good faith in their areas of expertise. As I stated: mine is primarily education and greater than average (though not limitless) amounts of patience. If you want to donate money or engage in more direct action and aid, I suggest finding pro-Palestinian Israeli voices and peace oriented Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian voices as well as organizations with experience in this conflict that do not rely on eliminating any population or erasing anyone’s connection to the Levant. Follow their lead on that matter. If you are only just engaging in this conflict for the first time due to current events, you likely do not know nearly as much as you think you do about any of this. Being uninformed and spouting disinformation has actual dire consequences that can get Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Israelis, and Arabs killed. It is vital that you’re responsible in your engagement on this matter. Learning dogwhistles and how to spot bad faith arguments is a must. And to be effective, you should spend more of your time learning than you’re doing protesting or arguing. This is a 2000+ year old conflict. There is a lot to know and understand. And there are a lot of people willing to prey on your newcomer status and manipulate your existing beliefs to use you as a pawn to further their bad faith aims. The only consistent, trustworthy principal is to trust those who repeatedly affirm their goal as peace and shared prosperity and who reject any form of demonization based on ethnicity or religion. This is not a game. This is not the west’s fight. This is a conflict between two horribly oppressed, traumatized, and nearly exterminated ethnoreligous groups.

I am begging you to think, listen, and learn before joining the fray.

Note: I also don’t claim to be perfect. If I mess up or reblog something that causes unintended harm (which is very easy to do when engaging in discussions and activism about this conflict), I will say so and issue a correction. There’s no need to be hostile in informing me about this. Just message with your concern and I’ll evaluate from there.

Additionally, I will not interact with Hamas apologists. Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Anyone trying to make me feel like this is an Us vs. Them situation will be blocked.

[mideastsoccer]

Israeli soccer club’s anti-racism echoes Israel’s political divide

By James M. Dorsey

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.

Storied and crowned soccer club Beitar Jerusalem was for decades a pillar of the Israeli right-wing and an often-extreme symbol of Israel’s lurch towards the right as well as its`` ever more uncompromising attitude towards an equitable peace with the Palestinians and approach towards its Israeli Palestinian minority.

Today, in an anti-cyclical development, Beitar Jerusalem, with its acquisition by technology entrepreneur Moshe Hogeg, is at the forefront of the fight against racism, including anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia.

Beitar Jerusalem and La Familia, the mostly working-class militant segment of the club’s fan base, long prided themselves on the fact that the club has never hired a Palestinian player even though Palestinians have long been among Israeli soccer’s top performers.

La Familia still does. Raucous, fiercely loyal and menacingly racist, La Familia fans, dressed in the yellow and black colours of Beitar Jerusalem with the words La Familia stitched on their shirts, were clearly visible and vocally audible at matches in Jerusalem’s Teddy Kollek stadium.

Their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim chants accompanied by drums resonated throughout the stadium. Typical of La Familia chants, supporters often sang:

“Witnesses are stars in the sky,

For racism that is like a dream.

The whole world will testify

There will be no Arabs in the team!

I don’t care how many and how they are killed,

Eliminating Arabs thrills me.

Boy, girl or old,

We’ll bury every Arab deep in the ground.”

However, in the words of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, the times they are a changin’.

“I have zero tolerance for racism. Absolutely zero. And my reaction towards racism is not proportional. You shout one racist comment and I will sue you for a million dollars," Mr. Hogeg, the club’s new owner, said in a recent BBC interview.

Mr. Hogeg has backed up his threats with deeds. The club has accused fans who expressed racist or discriminatory sentiments in the stadium of damaging its reputation and threatened them in letters with lawsuits that would force them to pay large sums to lawyers hired to defend them.

For Mr. Hogeg, reforming Beitar is not just about the image of his newly acquired trophy.

It’s about Israel that under prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu, boosted by US President Donald J. Trump’s support for annexationist policies, has steered a course that increasingly precludes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and risks either compromising the Jewish character of the state or turning it into a civilizationalist entity whose democracy is undermined by the need to repress the other.

"I'm not trying to ruin anyone's life, I'm not trying to be their father and their mother, I'm not trying to educate them - it's not my job. But when you bring it to the stadium and you act in that way it reflects badly on all of the crowd and on our nation, so I can't take this," Mr. Hogeg said who has in the past suggested that he supports Israel’s right wing.

Mr. Hogeg’s uncompromising approach is producing results as it taps into a desire among Beitar’s broader fan base for a politically and racially less charged atmosphere in the stadium.

A majority of Beitar fans, who long were uncomfortable with La Familia’s aggressive support for the club, have voted with their feet. Families that stayed away from matches have returned and sponsors are expressing new interest.

The number of racist incidents has dwindled. There were only two incidents during the last season and none so far in the current season.

“It’s amazing. Hogeg has turned the club around. La Familia is lying low and has turned silent,” said a supporter of Beitar’s Jerusalem upcoming rival, Hapoel Katamon.

Mr. Hogeg further drove his point home with the acquisition in November of Ali Mohammed, a Nigerian Christian who quickly became one of the club’s top, if not its top player.

La Familia initially demanded that he change his Muslim name yet has since joined the chorus in celebrating him after he scored his first goal – a huge step for a group that long insisted in keeping the club “pure forever.”

Israeli soccer scholars acknowledge Mr. Hogeg’s success but doubt that La Familia will back off permanently.

"There's no doubt Moshe Hogeg has made a difference. But the fans at Beitar are unpredictable. It's like a ceasefire which is helped because the team are doing well,” said sociologist Yair Galily.

Added Mati Suleimani, an 18 year-old member of La Familia: “Moshe Hogeg thinks he can come in and tell us how to live our lives, like he knows better than us because he makes more money… He is mistaken.”

The litmus test of Mr. Hogeg’s effort will be if, and when he decides to hire an Israeli Palestinian player, defying a core La Familia slogan, Death to the Arabs.

Mr. Hogeg’s moves are about reputation management and inter-communal relations, not big political issues like Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Yet, they are significant as a statement against the backdrop of a discourse that has become progressively more discriminatory and racist.

The significance is enhanced as deadlocked Israeli politics move towards an election in March, the third in a year, in which the main contenders, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud and hawkish Benny Gantz’s Blue and White, differ more in tone and language than in policy.

Said former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, a potential kingmaker in the post-election formation of a new government: “In my opinion it can be Benjamin Netanyahu or Benny Gantz. There is no essential difference between them.”

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture