Today, September 23rd, marks the birthday of my brother, Dr. Refaat Al-areer, may God have mercy on him. Speak of him in words; don't hold back, he deserves more than that 😭 He was a doctor, a poet, an angel, a brother, and a friend. He was more than just a human being 🥹
The horrors in Sudan are connected to the horrors in Palestine. They are not separate. Arab Zionists of the UAE, along with Israel, are directly implicated in the funding, arming, and fomenting of this terror.
Heartbreaking. This morning, Israel's "@idf" executed Sami Zawaydeh in cold blood as he was driving home to his residence in the AAU student dormitories, as he himself is internally displaced due to Israel's Ethnic Cleansing of Jenin refugee camp.
Hear the dad talking about Sami:
Ed Sheeran performed to a half empty stadium in Philadelphia after endorsing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The concert failed to sell tickets at a 50% discount, proving that boycotts do work. Free Palestine!
I don’t know if anyone still cares about what I say, but what is happening here has become a catastrophe in every sense of the word.
Today was the first day of school for students in Gaza City after three years of war. It was supposed to be a day filled with joy, with children carrying their schoolbags, wearing new clothes, and returning to their classrooms. But the reality was completely different.
I saw children without schoolbags, without shoes, without notebooks or pens, and some wearing worn-out clothes. I saw a school that was nothing more than a suffocating, extremely hot tent, without desks or chairs. The children use stones and cardboard boxes from aid supplies to create something to write on.
There are no bathrooms for the children. There is not enough food or water. This is not simply a shortage of school supplies; this is a catastrophe affecting an entire generation.
A child who is supposed to go to school to learn leaves school to stand in line for water, then waits in another line for food. Their lives have become a constant struggle to find water, food, and simply survive.
How can a child learn under these conditions? How can we talk about the future of these children when the most basic necessities for education and life are not available? We are facing an entire generation at risk of being lost.
Every day that passes without real intervention means another part of these children’s future is being lost. This is a catastrophe that cannot be allowed to pass in silence. Write about the children of Gaza, talk about their schools, and share what is happening to them.
Do not let the world become accustomed to seeing children without a childhood.
I recently spoke to Dr Hussam Abu Safiya's son, Elias. He told me Israel tried to target him 3 times & wounded him, they killed his brother Ibrahim, shot his brother Idrees in the heart, wounded his 2 sisters... all to terrorize his father into submission & bury genocide evidence
good on zara larsson for canceling her UAE concert in solidarity with Sudan.
people NEED DIRECT support. PLEASE HELP THEM. none of us a free until we all are. 🇸🇩
https://t.co/nZV18HxcPZ
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Free Palestine
Free Sudan
Free Congo
Free Haiti
Free Cuba
Free Venezuela
Free Puerto Rico
Free Hawaii
Free all colonized people
Free the world
Free them all!
"This film won in Venice only because it was made by Israelis, if it was made by Palestinians, it wouldn't even be in the programme"
This is true and this sucks. It's an indictment against the festivals, against the mainstream media, against the powers that be. But this is not a criticism towards the film's creators. If they hadn't submitted the film to the competition, the award wouldn't have been given to a Palestinian film. The genocide just wouldn't have been mentioned in the programme at all.
On September 2, 1955, a train from Mississippi arrived in Chicago carrying the body of 14-year-old Emmett Till. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had sent her only child south to spend the summer with relatives in Money, Mississippi. Instead, he returned home in a coffin after becoming the victim of one of the most infamous acts of racial violence in American history.
Days earlier, Emmett had entered Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, where an encounter took place with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working inside. Exactly what happened has been disputed for decades, but Emmett was accused of behaving improperly toward her. In Jim Crow Mississippi, even an accusation involving a Black boy and a white woman could carry deadly consequences. During the early morning hours of August 28, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam abducted Emmett from the home of his great-uncle, Mose Wright. His badly mutilated body was discovered three days later in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down with a heavy cotton gin fan.
When Mamie finally saw her son, she made a decision that transformed private grief into public testimony. She insisted on an open-casket funeral, famously explaining that she wanted the world to see what had been done to her child. Tens of thousands of people came to Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago to mourn Emmett and witness the consequences of racial terror for themselves. Photographs of his mutilated body were later published by Jet magazine and circulated throughout Black America.
The photographs were difficult to look at, but that was precisely the point. Mamie understood that Americans could debate racism in the abstract while ignoring what it actually did to human beings. By refusing to hide her son's body, she forced the country to confront a reality Black families had understood for generations. Emmett was not simply the victim of two men. His murder took place within a system where segregation, disenfranchisement and racial violence had created an environment in which Black lives could be taken with little expectation of justice.
The trial made that painfully clear. Mose Wright entered a segregated Mississippi courtroom and identified Bryant and Milam as the men who had taken Emmett from his home. For a Black man in Mississippi in 1955 to publicly accuse white men of murder was an extraordinary act of courage. Yet an all-white, all-male jury acquitted both defendants after deliberating for little more than an hour. Protected from being tried again for the same murder, Bryant and Milam later admitted their involvement in a paid magazine interview.
Emmett Till's murder did not begin the Civil Rights Movement. Black Americans had been organizing against segregation and racial violence for generations. But the national outrage surrounding his death helped give new urgency to that struggle. Rosa Parks later recalled thinking about Emmett Till when she refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery that December, an act that helped ignite the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Mamie Till-Mobley could not choose what happened to her son, but she chose what America would be allowed to forget. She spent much of the rest of her life educating people about Emmett, speaking publicly and working with young people. Her decision to open that casket ensured that his murder could not be quietly buried with him. Nearly seventy years later, we still know Emmett Till's name because a grieving mother understood the power of making the world look at a truth it would have preferred not to see.
NEW: Human rights & anti-war orgs launch campaign to demand the top Biden officials who promoted or lied about the Gaza genocide be boxed out from future Democratic admins & other liberal spaces.
Rashida Tlaib & Chris Rabb signed on.
More expected to join.https://t.co/qsY7dkKWqZ