Nobody tells you when you’re a kid that one random Sunday at Grandma’s house will eventually be the last time everyone is there at the same time.
The cousins are running in and out of the house.
Somebody’s yelling, “STOP SLAMMING THAT DOOR!”
The adults are sitting around the kitchen table talking about things you couldn’t care less about.
There’s food everywhere.
Someone is asleep in a recliner.
You can hear the TV from the other room.
You’re bored half the time and begging to go home.
And you have absolutely no idea that you are standing inside a memory you will spend the rest of your life wishing you could walk back into.
Then everybody grows up.
The cousins move away.
People get married.
Families get busy.
Grandparents get older.
The house gets sold.
Some people stop speaking.
Some people are no longer here.
And suddenly you’d give just about anything to sit at that kitchen table for ten more minutes and hear everybody’s voices coming from different rooms.
The older I get, the more I realize…
We weren’t “just going to Grandma’s house.”
We were going to the one place where our entire family still belonged to each other.
And somehow none of us realized it was temporary.
If you had a house like that growing up, you were richer than you knew. 🤍
Whose house was “the house” in your family?
My male cousin went to a clinic in Thailand and said "make me look like a woman".
We researched the clinic carefully beforehand to ensure it was fully inclusive.
For example, they never use the word "woman" without specifying "cis" or "trans", which we thought was great.
Unfortunately after the operation my cousin looked even more like a man than before.
When he complained, the clinic said, "We made you look like a trans women. You didn't say you wanted to look like a cis-woman."
Then my cousin got really angry and said "Trans women aren't women, you idiots!"
So then we had to call UK police and now my cousin's being extradited to the UK to face a charge of transphobic hate crime.
“We don’t hate Jews. But after Europe and the Muslim world genocided and ethnically cleansed them out of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in the 20th century, we totally randomly hate the country the survivors fled to—and only that country. We just hate Israel!”
Yesterday in Sweden, a father tried to stop three men from groping his daughter at a fast-food restaurant.
They beat him to death.
As of now, the perpetrators’ ethnicity is being censored…
All she knows is that she got to wear a pretty dress and everyone is treating her like she’s special. She doesn’t know that she’s being taken away from her parents forever, and sent to live with this old man, or what he’ll do to her. These are her last few moments of childhood.
If she were the only victim, it would still be an atrocity, but she’s only one of the hundreds of millions of women and girls who were sold into marriage as children, most of them to Muslim men.
“None of us knew each other when this started. What we have in common isn’t politics, it’s that we all found out, at the same moment, which of our friends would rather watch us go under than say a true sentence out loud.”
A tale in seven acts:
1. Zarah Sultana called herself a “proud anti-Zionist.”
2. Oliver Kamm said that she was actually “an antisemite.”
3. Zarah Sultana said that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” and demanded that Kamm delete the post and apologize, or she would sue him for defamation.
4. Oliver Kamm neither apologized nor deleted the post.
5. Zarah Sultana hired expensive lawyers to write a letter to Kamm threatening legal action if he didn’t delete the post, apologize, and make a charitable donation.
6. Oliver Kamm did not delete the post or apologize, nor did he make a charitable donation.
7. Oliver Kamm retained lawyer Mark Lewis, who promised to defend any case Zarah Sultana might bring, and said they were prepared to argue that the statement was true.
8. Zarah Sultana did not, as she had initially promised, sue Oliver Kamm, and the one-year limitation period on defamation claims has expired.
I met a producer who worked with Maureen Lipman recently & he told me she is genuinely fearful about her safety. This disgraceful shit is why. I ‘m repeating myself but don’t care: if this was happening to any other long persecuted ethnic minority there would be all hell to pay.
A naturally formed ice cave captured inside Iceland’s Sólheimajökull glacier
Nature really does create some of the most unreal places on Earth. This looks almost like a doorway into another world
🇩🇪A scandal has erupted in Germany after it emerged that a Syrian migrant with three wives, 32 children, and 25 grandchildren is receiving 100,000 euros a year in social benefits.
Meanwhile, 70% of his family members have criminal records.
A few weeks ago, three women all died of ‘heart attacks’ on the same boat.
Now we have two burned and one stabbed on today’s boats.
THE MEN WE ARE IMPORTING ARE ABSOLUTE MONSTERS.
WE WARNED YOU OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
Good piece by Times columnist Matthew Syed ( dad was a Muslim) demanding the end to an apartheid as bad as South Africa which exists in front of our very eyes - how women are treated by Islam.
He cites the face coverings, the suffering under the dominance of husbands encouraged by religious leaders, the cousin marriages, describing them as the prime mechanism knitting these insular communities together, and the Sharia courts ( almost all populated by men) which women go to for religious divorce while husbands can cancel marriages unilaterally.
There will be worse examples but I like this point he makes about the difficulty of ending an apartheid which he equates to South Africa;
“ It will be opposed by the Islamic patriarchs who control the bloc votes.
“ it will be opposed by their representatives in Parliament, the Gaza MPs and Labour members with large Muslim communities.
“ It will also be opposed by the ultra progressives in our institutions who called apartheid evil when perpetrated by whites but a “ cultural practice” when perpetrated by browns.”
So agree
Islamic terrorists killed Yazidi children in front of their mothers.
They would rape and starve the mothers for days, then kill the children, cook their bodies, and serve the flesh with rice so the mothers would unknowingly eat their own babies.
Most of the women committed suicide once they found out.
Everyone in the Muslim world knew what was going on, but not a single Muslim or Palestinian activist protested for the Yazidis!
Let me introduce you to a brave hero from my country, Iran.
She was 16 years old. Just a girl. And on the streets of Iran, she did something braver than most people do in a lifetime: she took off her hijab and burned it in public. Right in front of the regime. Right in front of the world.
That was her crime: civil disobedience. A teenage girl refusing to obey men who claimed authority over her hair, her body, her life.
Her message spoke for millions of Iranian women:
To every man who rules over women in the name of religion, honor, or culture: We do not obey you. Your laws were never made for us.
This is what real power looks like: unarmed, unafraid, unbowed.
For that defiance, she was arrested. Her family says she was tortured and killed after falling into the hands of security forces. The Iranian authorities denied responsibility and gave a different account of her death.
Her name was Nika Shakarami. She was 16.
Now ask yourself: How many women in the West know her name? How many know what she risked for a freedom they have never had to fight for?
Say her name: Nika Shakarami.