Biiftuu

#OromoProtests 🌳 | Retweet ≠ endorsement

[Biiftuu @Biiftuu_]

This‼️

[ቢፍቱ @biiiftu]

Here is a compiled list of links and educational texts regarding the history of Oromo People for anyone wanting to educate themselves further.

Black Liberation Reading List:
The Oromo of East Africa

https://t.co/t5BRuQ7UuH

[Lakota Man @LakotaMan1]

@Bartaway Someone needs to explain to me how Elon Musk became so wealthy being so incredibly stupid?

[AFRICAN & BLACK HISTORY @AfricanArchives]

In 1969, when Black Americans were prevented from swimming alongside whites, Mr. Rogers decided to invite officer Clemmons to join him and cool his feet in a pool, breaking a well known color barrier.
Breaking Color Barriers.

A THREAD!

[yeri / otto FOREVER IA @awttto]

“boycotting isnt worth it” actually, it is!

thread of companies being desperate / failing due to boycotts (old n new) 🍉

[Brandon 🎉 @brandonhli]

Hotels > @Airbnb, a horror story 🫠

It’s 2:30am in London. Flight delayed 3 hours. Raining.

I message our host that we’re going to miss the check in window. There’s a fee. Weird since it’s self check in, but ok

We get to the airbnb and the lockbox doesn’t work.

Rain, rain..

[Krishna Patel @krishnapatel888]

@brandonhli @Airbnb I stopped using @Airbnb a while back after I had a similar experience like yours many years back. @AirbnbHelp is useless, they don’t value your time or prioritize the customer. After all of this, you wont even b allowed to post a review for the host warning others to beware.

[Brandon 🎉 @brandonhli]

I’ll never be able to figure this out on my own so twitter, do your thing:

[Rania @umyaznemo]

A French, Jewish lady who lived happily in Gaza for a few years tells it as it is. Can't get whiter than that!

[Paul Williams @freemonotheist]

Do you agree?

[Sim Kern @sim_kern]

Jewish author here, and for years I've used my social media to teach folks about the history of "antisemitism," but I will not be using that term anymore. And to fully explain why, we need to get clear on the history of the word. 1/🧵

[Sim Kern @sim_kern]

Jews in 1930s Germany had far more in common with Palestinians today than w/Israeli Jews, in terms of oppression.
Because antisemitism in Germany THEN was white supremacy. And anti-Palestinian hate NOW is white supremacy. All that’s changed is who gets to define whiteness. 16/

[Growing Curiosity @growing_curio]

The story of his life:

Ota Benga was born around 1883 in the Ituri Forest of the Congo Free State, which is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He belonged to the Mbuti people, a group of Congo pygmies known for their nomadic lifestyle.

After returning from a hunting trip to find his village destroyed and his family killed, Benga was captured and sold into slavery. In 1904, he was discovered by American businessman and explorer Samuel Phillips Verner at a slave market. Verner brought Benga to the United States to be displayed at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, and later at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, where he was exhibited alongside an orangutan.

Following protests against his inhumane treatment, Benga was released from the zoo and placed in the care of James H. Gordon, who supervised the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn. Benga was later moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he received tutoring in English and worked at a tobacco factory.

Benga longed to return to Africa, and efforts were made to facilitate his journey back. However, the outbreak of World War I in 1914 halted passenger ship travel, trapping him in the United States.

Struggling with depression and unable to return home, Ota Benga took his own life on March 20, 1916, in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was approximately 33 years old.

Benga’s story is a stark reminder of the dark aspects of colonialism and the exploitation of individuals for entertainment.

[AFRICAN & BLACK HISTORY @AfricanArchives]

On this day in 1968, the FBI formed COINTELPRO, a "counterintelligence program" against Black American Nationalist groups.

John Huggins and Bunchy Carter who founded the Southern California chapter of the Black Panthers, were assassinated by the FBI in 1969 while attending UCLA and were early victims of the FBI's COINTELPRO.

An FBI memo dated November 29, 1968 described a letter that the Los Angeles FBI office intended to mail to the Black Panther Party office. This letter, which was made to appear as if it had come from the Us Organization, described fictitious plans by Us to ambush BPP members. The FBI memo stated that "It is hoped this counterintelligence measure will result in an 'Us' and BPP vendetta."

—At a Black Student Union meeting at UCLA's Campbell Hall on January 17, 1969, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, another BPP member, were heard making derogatory comments about Karenga, the founder of Organization Us. Other versions mention a heated argument between Organization Us members and Panther Elaine Brown. An altercation ensued during which Carter and Huggins were shot to death. BPP members originally insisted that the event was a planned assassination, claiming that there was a prior agreement that no guns would be brought to the meeting, that BPP members were not armed, and that Organization Us members led by Ron Karenga were.

Organization Us members maintained the meeting was a spontaneous event. Former BPP deputy minister of defense Geronimo Pratt, Carter’s head of security at the time, later stated that rather than a conspiracy, the UCLA incident was a spontaneous shootout. The person who allegedly shot Carter and Huggins, Claude Hubert, was never found.

During the Church Committee hearings in 1975, evidence came to light that under the FBI's COINTELPRO actions, FBI agents had deliberately fanned flames of division and enmity between the BPP and Organization Us. Death threats and humiliating cartoons created by the FBI were sent to each group, made to look as if they originated with the other group, with the explicit intention of inciting deadly violence and division.

Following the UCLA incident, brothers George and Larry Stiner and Donald Hawkins turned themselves in to the police, who had issued warrants for their arrests. They were convicted for conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of second-degree murder, based on testimony given by BPP members. The Stiner brothers both received life sentences and Hawkins served time in California’s Youth Authority Detention.
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[Alon Mizrahi @alon_mizrahi]

Note to yourself:

You are not going crazy.
You are not growing numb.
You are, all of us are, in unchartered territory.

The idea of good and bad, crime and punishment, is central to a functioning psychology.

They are not going to change that.
They are just delaying their inevitable demise.
-
We are going through hell. We have no choice but to accept everything that it brings with it. The shame, the fear, the I'm-going-crazy, the all-is-lost, the what-is-happening-to-me, all of it.

If you haven't cried a couple of days you may be feeling closed up a bit, so go cry a little (this is what I'm going to do, and writing this helps me to do it).

They are not going to change the rules of nature or human psychology. Right will be right and good, and wrong will be wrong and evil.

Genocide will not be normalized, and we are going to be the ones telling the story of what happened.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The Most American Thing That Has Ever Happened

A man set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington today. He said he did it in protest of the genocide in Gaza.

Independent journalist Talia Jane reports that she was able to obtain footage of the incident, which the unnamed man apparently recorded himself. Jane reports that the man said he is “an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force” and that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide.” After igniting he repeatedly yelled “Free Palestine.”

According to Jane, a police officer showed up pointing a gun at the man’s burning body; I guess that’s just what American cops do when they aren’t sure what to do. Someone who was actually trying to save the man reportedly yelled “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!”

This just might be the most American thing I have ever heard of. It’s more American than the fake bald eagle cries they put in Hollywood movies. It’s more American than monster trucks and mass shootings. You simply cannot fit more America into a single incident than a man dying a horrifying death in protest of war crimes while a first responder screams at cops to stop pointing their guns at him and go get fire extinguishers. If you were to pick a single moment in history to sum up the essence and expression of the US empire, that would be it.

The New York Times reports that the man “was taken to a nearby hospital with life-threatening injuries and remains in critical condition.” A spokesman for the US Air Force has reportedly confirmed that the man is an active duty member.

“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” the man reportedly recorded himself saying before the incident. “But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

The nameless protestor is correct. People in Gaza are being burned alive, are suffocating to death under collapsed buildings, are having operations and amputations without anesthesia, are starving to death, are watching their loved ones die in front of them, are experiencing suffering of a degree that very few of us here in the west can even imagine. And our ruling class is absolutely attempting to normalize this for us.

This isn’t even the first self-immolation we’ve seen in protest of Israel’s US-backed atrocities after October 7; back in December an unnamed protester with a Palestinian flag self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate building in Atlanta.

And as I reflect on this I can’t help thinking, how many Israel supporters have self-immolated in protest of October 7? How many Israel supporters have self-immolated in protest of the super serious antisemitism crisis they claim is making Jews feel unsafe in their communities? Surely their claims are just as serious and sincere as those of Palestine supporters, no?

Of course not. This has not happened and the very idea is laughable. Israel apologists insist that it is they and their favorite ethnostate who are the real victims in all this, rather than the population of Gaza who has seen tens of thousands of Palestinians annihilated while Israeli soldiers openly celebrate their mass displacement and death. But you don’t see them self-immolating; you see them cheerleading for ethnic cleansing and genocide. They wouldn’t do anything to cause themselves pain or inconvenience to promote their pet agenda. They wouldn’t even miss brunch for it.

It’s a horrific thing, burning alive. I suspect that pretty much everyone who’s ever self-immolated has had serious regrets about it within the first few seconds. There’s simply nothing one can do to prepare oneself for the experience of that kind of pain, or for how long it can take them to lose consciousness after it’s started. At that point the only comfort they could possibly offer themselves is that it can’t go on forever.

But the fact that anyone would ever take such a measure at all shows how profoundly urgent they recognize this issue to be, and how much more sincere they are about it than those on the other side.

[Pelham @Resist_05]

If we can allow over 15,000 children to be slaughtered in 140 days, while choosing to stay silent because you will be labeled “antisemitic”…

Then the world we are creating is a world where a child’s life holds no value..🇵🇸💔

[UN News @UN_News_Centre]

#Gaza: "What type of world do we live in when health workers are at risk of being bombed as they carry out their life saving work?" - @WHO chief, Tedros Ghebreyesus

[AFRICAN & BLACK HISTORY @AfricanArchives]

J. Marion Sims “the father of modern gynecology” purchased Black women slaves and used them as guinea pigs for his untested surgical experiments.

He repeatedly performed genital surgery on Black women WITHOUT ANESTHESIA because according to him, "Black women don't feel pain.”

J. Marion Sims is called the "Father of Gynecology" due to his experiments on enslaved women in Alabama, who were often submitted as GUINEA PIGS by their plantation owners who could not use them for sexual pleasure.

Anarcha, one of those women, was an African-American slave woman who was forced to regularly undergo surgical experiments while positioned on Sims' table, squatting on all fours and FULLY AWAKE without the comfort of ANY anesthesia.

It's been calculated that Anarcha was operated on roughly 34 times between 1845 - 1849. These operations helped Dr. Sims hone his techniques and create his gynecological tools.

It would be more than appropriate
to credit Anarcha, along with other nameless slave women, as the "MOTHERS OF GYNECOLOGY"

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[Biiftuu @Biiftuu_]

@MJebzi @UssamaMakdisi Wow

[Mark Ruffalo @MarkRuffalo]

“More than 1,000 Black pastors representing hundreds of thousands of congregants nationwide have issued the demand. In sit-down meetings with White House officials, and through open letters and advertisements, ministers have made a moral case for President Biden and his administration to press Israel to stop its offensive operations in Gaza…” #ceasefire https://t.co/ng1hZeIvlZ