Rasha208

Rasha - a bit of Africa, a bit of Belgium, a bit of UK, a bit of Kuwait but originally Lebanese ;)

[Rasha208 @Rasha208]

@HHShkMohd عظم ألله أجركم والله يرحمه ويغفر له ويجعل مثواه الجنة يا رب

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

Below is the statement by @macklemore in response to being removed from Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour. Read it in its entirety, because it's a masterclass in class, the primacy of integrity, and having the courage of one's convictions. [also, @edsheeran being "apolitical" in a moment of genocide is disgusting. Throwing his friend under the bus to appease zionists is gross too.]:

I’m not sure how to start this. So I’m going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from the Loop Tour.

But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced, and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don’t lose sight of that.

Ed is my friend. I’ve known him for 13 years. We’ve shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I’ve grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we’ve had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I’m writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can’t change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.

Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.

Ed was in a fucked up position. He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before. He told me that the words “Free Palestine” and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to al to of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn’t get past his public facing, “I don’t take sides.”

And I get why people don’t. Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I’ve lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn’t leave you in the middle.

What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I’m sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, “Free Palestine” becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, which Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that’s why this time it became so important to silence me.

One of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that's exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying "Free Palestine" gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn't protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.

I hope this isn't the end of my relationship with Ed. Thirteen years of friendship doesn't disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door is always open to continuing that conversation.

When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there's a phrase in Arabic: لا شكر على واجب.

"La shura ala wajeb." There's no thanks [needed] for a duty.

That stayed with me. Because that's what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.

Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn't, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people being displaced, starved and killed while the world debates which words we are allowed to use to describe it, how those words make us feel, and whether our discomfort matters more than the people living through a genocide.

I didn't need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2. Two chances to stand up in front of 90,000 people and say the words that somehow became too dangerous to say.

Free Palestine.

But if those words cost me the rage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I've ever been on.

[MoFA وزارة الخارجية @mofauae]

بيان مشترك لوزراء خارجية دولة الإمارات والسعودية وقطر والأردن وإندونيسيا وباكستان وتركيا ومصر

https://t.co/zomAFsBVgy

[Rasha208 @Rasha208]

"You give your power away"...when a stranger nails it...

[Orlando Curioso @Orlando71156528]

‼️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿En manchester, Inglaterra, la gente sale a las calles en apoyo de Palestina. En el mundo, el odio y el desprecio por el sionismo genocida, crece todos los días más. ✊🫵

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

No lies detected.

[Earth Hippy 🌎🕊️💚 @hippyygoat]

Yep, this is so true.

[Rasha208 @Rasha208]

@readswithravi That my sentence ❤️ forever repeating that (well not MY quote) but I am wondering who wrote it and where u read it

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“Every pattern in your life repeats until you learn the lesson. The moment you choose differently, the loop ends and growth begins.”

[tim anderson @timand2037]

"Israel is the only non-colonial state in the Middle East". Watch Iran's Professor Mohammed Marandi dismantle the lies of Alan Dershowitz, Epstein's lawyer.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

I renew my appeal for an end to the ongoing violence against the Palestinian civilian population in the West Bank, and I urgently call on the international community to work toward advancing the two-state solution, for a just and lasting peace.

[Neena Jha @DrNeenaJha]

I’ve often been asked:

“Why do you care about what’s happening in Gaza so much?”

No, I am not Muslim
I am not Palestinian
I have no links to Palestine

I am just a human witnessing a genocide, is that not enough of an explanation?

My answer - I am simply a human.

[Muhammad Mazen @mhmd_s09]

One of the most brutal scenes in human history has been exposed.

This video shows three young men trying to help an injured person, but Israel bombs them with a missile, killing them all.

A moment the world must never forget.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Life in the 2020s comes with so much dissonance and dysphoria because everyone knows this civilization is doomed, but it’s not being acknowledged by any of our mainstream institutions.

We can all see everything getting worse and worse before our eyes in real time, but our government officials don’t talk about it. Our mass media outlets don’t report on it. Our education systems don’t recognize it. There’s a giant elephant in the room with us at all times, and normal people are acutely aware of it, but the talking heads keep speaking as though everything’s going to keep ticking along normally into the foreseeable future.

We can all see the summers heating up.

We can all see that there are fewer insects and less wildlife around than when we were young.

We can all see that the western empire is on borrowed time.

We can all see that younger generations are having much more difficulty affording housing and life expenses than their parents and grandparents.

We can all see that technology has stagnated as capitalism’s innovation-for-profit model hits the limit of how far it can carry us as a species.

We can all see the apps, search engines, social media platforms and tech services getting shittier and shittier year by year.

We can all see AI making everything worse and turning everyone into cognitive infants who can’t do anything for themselves while consistently failing to deliver what its proponents say it will deliver.

We can all see the people around us getting dumber, crazier and more miserable as we are pushed into dystopian conditions where everyone gets more and more alienated and must pay a monthly fee for the experience of connection.

We can all see that state authoritarianism is escalating in proportion to public discontent with the status quo.

We all know we’re in a completely unsustainable situation. We all know we are riding a bus with disintegrating wheels.

But it doesn’t get acknowledged by anyone at the top. The news reports are still about the latest celebrity gossip and whether the economy arrow is pointing up or down. The movies and shows are still about wacky and witty characters for whom capitalism is working perfectly fine. The politicians are still talking about culture war issues and the Evil Dictator of the Day.

It is taken as a given that our grandchildren will be living in more or less the same kind of world we are living in, when we all know there’s no way this is true.

The wheels on the bus are coming off, boys and girls. The ride is near its end.

I’m not saying we’re all going to die, I’m just saying this civilization as it presently exists cannot possibly be sustained. Immensely drastic changes are coming up around the bend whether we like it or not, either by a deliberate transformation or by some cataclysmic event occurring against our will.

Life in the 2020s feels so spiritually dissonant because we all know this is the case, but all the sources we’ve been trained to look to for information and context are acting like everything’s perfectly fine. They’re painting a cheery picture over reality while every normal person is staring at the giant black cracks that keep appearing in the paint job.

Which tells you all you need to know about the competency of the people who are steering the bus. The people in charge are just going to keep driving this thing into the ground until there’s nothing left to save. If there’s going to be a world-saving revolution, it’s going to come from we ordinary people who are willing to acknowledge reality, not from the oligarchs and empire managers presently steering things who have been blinded by the pursuit of profit and power.

We either find some way to get their hands off the steering wheel and take control, or we find ourselves confronting the future horrors they’ve been discouraging us from thinking about while they drive us to our doom.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

“I did a leg amputation on a 5-year-old girl, and the only anesthesia that we had was the anesthesia doctor singing to her… We were praying for her to faint. She stayed awake the whole amputation.”

Absolutely devastating testimony from doctors in Gaza.

[Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur]

If a Palestinian did this to an Israeli baby, our media would repeat it thousands of times and use it to justify endless occupation. Their bias is disgusting. At this point, only radical Zionists don’t recognize that legacy media is pure Israeli propaganda.

[ZainTECH @ZainTECHMEA]

ZainTECH partnered with Nile to introduce a new generation of Secure Network-as-a-Service, enabling organizations to modernize networking through autonomous operations, built-in Zero Trust security, AI-powered management. Read more:

https://t.co/kuOJ9oijlj

[Rasha208 @Rasha208]

@Gosleepriya 13115

[Rasha208 @Rasha208]

@SqSehrish 005