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Posted in resistance
How can I not be back with all that has been going on lately in the region? Bad news is, I have a lot to say about it. I am excited.
Posted in resistance
We can buy Almaza and get to your uncle’s place while he’s having his Argileh with his friends outdoors.
We can buy some of the Armenian nuts you like.
We can sit next to each other on the Sofa.
We can get nervous.
We can allow silence to be so loud.
This is it.
We can turn Valentine into a sacred sin.
Would you break the law with me?
We can wait till we finish our first bottle.
We can forget about your tomorrow and mine.
You can let me start right here and now.
Posted in Arab Feminists, Dear diary, homophobia, i'm pathetic, immigrant workers' rights, Iraq, Lebanesims, Leftisms, LGTBQ rights, my kind of women, Neocolonialism/Colonialism, Occupation, Occupied Golan Heights, Occupied Palestine, On Systems, Postcolonialism, Queers for Palestine, racisms, razanisms, resistance, sexist harassment, smash authority, Syrianisms, women who inspire me, Zionisms
I would do whatever it takes for my right to live and dream
another fascinating video from Never Before Campaign
Katyushas have been through a lot. They used to live in peace before certain kinds of human beings decided they want to invade their lands. Suddenly, a new reality was imposed on them. They chose to fight and not to give in. It’s both, a human and animal instinct, to fight and not to give in-(well till modernism came and told indigenous species that they should fight the foreigner “peacefully”).
But Katyushas came up with primitive yet creative tactics to survive and protect themselves and their families from the occupiers. They sticked together, and fought back. They tried to survive in a system that does not acknowledge their right to be on their lands, that this land is no longer theirs.
Many Katyushas died as they were fighting the enemy and the system. We call them martyrs.
I found one of those Katyushas the other night in the street, he is tiny but strong. I brought him home where our bougie cat, Klio, was trying for the past seven days to stick his penis in Katyusha’s ass. Katyushas as fighters, don’t let no bougie or other, to abuse them. Katyusha knew how to fight back and teach bougie cats the difference between a fighter and a conformist. Klio never stopped trying. Katyusha’s battle with the system isn’t over yet, and he knows it’s a long way for liberation, and it won’t be nice.
Katyushas instinctively learned how to resist because only them experienced the oppressive system. and only them know how to defy it.
Katyusha in my house, and I am totally OK with it. hoping another form of Katyusha finds its way to my home soon.
Thanks to @ysalahi, a fellow blogger for suggesting the name Katyusha
Posted in Katyusha, razanisms, resistance
Ghassan Makarem founding member and current Executive Director of Helem replied to Joseph Massad’s interview conducted with him by Reset Doc website. Here’s an extract of the interview:
The real problem with Massad’s interview is the lies, fabrications, and insinuations of being agents of the West against the people in Helem. This is an opinion we have heard many times from Salafists and chauvinists. The contention that homosexuals are agents of the West, that they are “imposing Western values”, and that they belong to the upper classes was also used by Khomeini before rounding up homosexuals and executing them. It is the same justification given to call for the arrest of HIV positive persons in Egypt and elsewhere and to pass a viciously homophobic law in Uganda.
Read the whole article here.
This is simply outrageous and heartbreakening. I cannot imagine what his parents feel right now. He was arrested when he was 29 and now he will be released when he’s 34. and for what? for not giving the Syrian intelligence the names of people who spoke against the Syrian government in the forum he administrates. Yes, that’s Kareem Arbaji, Kareem is being sentenced because he is defending his friends, he is being sentenced as a punishment, because he defied not the “persona” of the government, but the very “system” of intelligentsia in Syria, where people got accustomed, out of fear and due to torture, to turning each other in to the government. Kareem did nothing “wrong” and said nothing “wrong”, but he paid two years for his “non-Syrian” principles, and now he is paying three more. This is unforgivable, they send children to Europe when they get raped, how you like them now grownups? hypocrite.
الثامن من أيلول/سبتمبر 2009
صادر عن:
أحرار الجنس مناهضين للفصل العنصري الإسرائيلي، تورنتو
أحرار الجنس من أجل تقويض الإرهاب الإسرائيلي
الشبكة اليهودية الدولية المناهضة للصهيونية
أحرار الجنس الناشطون في حملة المقاطعة، وسحب الاستثمارات، والعقوبات على إسرائيل
تخطط رابطة شركات السفر الدولية للمثليين والمثليات IGLTA لعقد مؤتمر سياحي في تل أبيب، وذلك في السادس عشر من شهر تشرين الأول/ أكتوبر من العام الجاري، من أجل تعزيز السياحة الترفيهية الخاصة بالمثليين والمثليات والثنائيين والثنائيات والمتحولين والمتحولات جنسياً (م.م.م.م.). من المتوقع أن يتألف جمهور المؤتمر من وكلاء السفر المختصين بالترويج للسياحة المتعلقة بال م.م.م.م. وستقدم منظمة IGLTA من خلال هذا المؤتمر، وبالتعاون مع منظمة إسرائيلية للمثليين Aguda، الدعم المالي والرمزي لدولة تستمر في احتلال وقمع وتجريد ملايين الفلسطينيين من حقوقهم، إضافة إلى قتل وسجن الآلاف منهم.
لذا نتوجه، نحن مجموعات وأحرار جنس ناشطين بنداء إلى كافة الم.م.م.م والأصدقاء حول العالم لمشاركتنا احتجاجنا في مواجهة ترويج IGLTA للسياحة الترفيهية في إسرائيل الفصل العنصري، ونطالبها بإلغاء المؤتمر المزمع عقده في إسرائيل وبوقف أي شكل من أشكال الترويج السياحي لهذا البلد.
Posted in action alert, Activism/Volunteerism, Activists are my family, Israei war crimes in Gaza, Israeli apartheid State, Neocolonialism/Colonialism, Occupation, Occupied Palestine, Queers for Palestine, resistance, smash authority, The World Boycotting Israel, فلسطين المحتلة, فلسطينيّات, كلّنا مقاومة, مثليّات, معارضات بديلة, women who inspire me, Zionisms, أحرار الجنس من أجل فلسطين, أحرار الجنس ضدّ دولة الفصل العنصري للكيان الصهيوني, جرائم حرب من قبل جيش الاحتلال الصهيوني, حرب اسرائيل على غزّة, دولة الفصل العنصري للكيان الصهيوني, صهيونياّت, عنصريّات
On June 2009 Berkman Center’s Internet & Democracy team published a study that analyzes and maps the dynamics of the Arabic blogsphere. The research included 35,000 active Arabic blogs across 18 countries in the Arab-speaking region and the goal for the study was to:
Produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs.
So here’s the map of the study:
As you can see, some of us, Arab-speaking bloggers, are categorized into “Muslim Brotherhood” bloggers, “Secular reformist” bloggers, and “Islam focused” bloggers. The rest of the categorization is country-based.
First, I am not sure why the word “reformist” is associated with the word “secular”, are seculars inherently reformists? and what are they reforming exactly? that fact that our societies are not secular? and for some reason, that what needs to be reformed in our region? I am not sure why “secular” bloggers can be “reformists” while “Muslim Brotherhood” bloggers or “Islam focused” bloggers cannot. Can’t Islam be reformist?
This post is not well-documented for I don’t have the time to search for links to support my claims, hence I realize my argument is weak nevertheless I don’t think it’s baseless.
A lot has been said and done, both by Syrian netizens and by western human rights organizations, about the vicious no good evil Syrian regime censorship of websites in Syria. It’s the favorite topic for almost all of the human rights websites and organizations, alternative and mainstream ones, to pin point the illegal censorship policies of certain regimes mostly Syria and Iran.
Whenever a website is found blocked in Syria, these organizations hurry and publish their appealing reports to the western world condemning the act that devalues one of the most important human right to the western world, freedom of speech. A right I think it’s also important to us here in this region, but in a whole different context.
Whenever a prominent blogger or a Syrian/Iranian activist is arrested, or rather, whenever the Syrian regime commits the crime of censorship, reports in the western world never stop from flowing.
But what is not known to many people who follow and salute these human rights organization is that many Syrians are arrested and recently prevented from leaving the country for no explained reasons (which is now considered the threat to Syrians activists than imprisonment) and contrary to a stupid report published here calling US and European officials to put pressure on Syria concerning its human rights record. Only the prominent political prisoners get attention from these organizations and from the mainstream and alternative western media. Of course the case is relatively the same with Syrian human rights organizations, not every Syrian political prisoner or detainee get the same attention from local human rights organizations and many prisoners remain unknown.
My point is that the term “human rights” is never about people’s rights really. It’s one of the major political terms used heavily in political contexts to support or condemn certain people or regimes according to the organization’s agenda or its source of funding agenda. If an authorial regime arrests people who resist its authority, authorial human rights organization support authorial political prisoners and ignore “marginal” ones. If Syria censored websites, all western human rights organizations heavily condemn the illegal act, but these very organizations stay still, and thus become cooperatives, when censorship is practiced “legally” by American websites and corporations like Google, which prevents Syrian users from downloading most of its products like Google Talk, Chrome, Gears, Video chat and from uploading a video to Google Videos.
I cannot upgrade and renew my wordpress account from Syria, because wordpress deals with Paypal and Syria and Lebanon are not listed in its countries’ list to allow me to pay. I have to rely on my friends on other parts of the world to do so. And the only reason I reserved a domain on wordpress is because the domain blogspot is blocked in Syria and I fear wordpress domain might be blocked in the future as well.
So what did Amnesty or Human Rights Watch or Reporters Without Borders have to say about these websites who censor, as the Syrian regime, Syrian users from using their services?
Absolutely nothing.
Yes, these three websites have not published not one single report condemning Google or Linkedin or Paypal about their decisions to prevent Syrian users from using their services, but they did however, publish heavily on Syria’s act of censorship. These so called prominent human rights organizations do not condemn the act of censorship itself but rather the doer of that act, and this condemnation always goes hand in hand with the American foreign policy, sorry no, intervention, hmm not really, “imperialistic occupation” in the region, as Azmi Bshara rightly once called it.
From how I see it, human rights organizations are like the United Nations, their job is not to defend people’s rights but rather to show the world who’s in power at the moment. We can see that from Human Rights Watch reports on both of the Zionist war crimes on Lebanon in 2006 and on Gaza 2008-09. HRW reports on July war were clearly biased to Israel because the whole world was siding with it, whereas with Gaza, the story was slightly different; HRW can no longer ignore the heavy amount of documentations and visual proofs circulated widely around the world by the Gazans and activists condemning Israel of committing war crimes in sieged Gaza. HRW is not objective and certainly not condemning Israel as much is depicting a historical moment the world is processing right now against Israel as a war-crimes state.
Western human rights organizations are only tools used by authorial western countries to put political pressure on Syrian and Iranian regimes exactly because of their support to Hezbolla and Hamas, the one thing that pleases me about these regimes.
Syrian regime censor websites and arrest people to secure its domination over the country, some American websites prevent us from using their websites because we support Hamas and Hezbolla. President Assad did not claim not once that Syria is a democratic country, but these websites, coming from proud democratic and civilized nation that is, are punishing us Syrians for our democratic choice; supporting resistance. So please, don’t ever talk to me about democracy, human rights and freedom of speech before, and as a starter, put Bush and his soldiers on trial and fucking kill him in front of his people (who elected him) on Christmas as you killed Saddam in front of his people (who did not elect him) on Eid.
Posted in alternative-wannabe mainstream media, disgusting mainstream media, Human Rights, internet censorship, Iranian Regime, Israei war crimes in Gaza, Israeli apartheid State, Occupation, Occupied Palestine, On Systems, resistance, smash authority, terrorist "Israeli" occupation forces, The World Boycotting Israel, when activism sucks, Zionisms
From IGLHRC website:
The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) announced on January 23rd 2009 that it would award its 2009 Felipa de Souza Award to the Lebanese group Helem. IGLHRC’s Felipa Award recognizes the courage and effectiveness of groups or leaders dedicated to improving the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex (LGBTI) and other individuals stigmatized and abused because of their sexuality or HIV status. The first organization in the Arab world to set up a gay and lesbian community center, Helem’s work has consistently broken new ground in a country that criminalizes homosexuality and where violence and abuse are persistent problems.
“We are so pleased to be able to present our 2009 Felipa Award to Helem,” said IGLHRC’s Executive Director Paula Ettelbrick. “Helem works in very challenging circumstances to make a very real difference to the lives of countless LGBTI people in the Middle East and beyond. We applaud their courage and commitment to human rights for all.”
Founded in 2004, Helem (the Arabic acronym of “Lebanese Protection for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender”) is based in Beirut, with support chapters in Australia, France, Canada and the United States. The organization’s work is multifaceted, ranging from advocacy to public education. A major focus of its human rights advocacy work revolves around eradicating Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code, which is used to criminalize homosexuality; another advocacy focus addresses HIV/AIDS. Its community center has consistently offered the local LGBTI community a wide range of services ranging from HIV testing and counseling to workshops and publications about how to respond to harassment and arbitrary arrest.
The Felipa Award embodies the spirit of Felipa de Souza, who endured persecution and brutality after proudly declaring her intimacy with a woman during a 16th Century inquisition trial in Brazil.
The Felipa Award will be presented to Helem as part of IGLHRC’s A Celebration of Courage gala event on March 30, 2008 in New York and on April 2, 2008 in San Francisco. For more information regarding IGLHRC’s Felipa de Souza Award and its A Celebration of Courage events, visit: www.iglhrc.org.
Read the whole thing here.
Posted in homophobia, Human Rights, LGTBQ rights, resistance
Taken form the first post on the blog Lack of Common Sense:
“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” Albert Einstein
Participants in political debates sometimes appeal to common sense, particularly when they have exhausted other arguments. For example, partisans have attacked civil rights for African Americans, women’s suffrage, and homosexuality — to name just a few — as contrary to common sense. Similarly, opponents of many scientific and technological advances have invoked common sense. Such misuse of the notion of common sense exemplifies the fallacy of argumentum ad populum (appeal to the masses).
Posted in resistance
An article published on the Guardian on Thursday 12 March reveals that one of the leading football female players has been raped and stabbed 25 times for being a Lesbian:
The partially clothed body of Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa’s acclaimed Banyana Banyana national female football squad, was found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Simelane had been gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs. As well as being one of South Africa’s best-known female footballers, Simelane was a voracious equality rights campaigner and one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian in Kwa Thema… Human rights campaigners say it is characterised by what they call “corrective rape” committed by men behind the guise of trying to “cure” lesbians of their sexual orientation.
It is important to see that precisely because she’s open as a Lesbian and activist that she was subjected to this “corrective” criminal reaction in her society. Like in Lebanon, where gays and Lesbians have their NGOs, bars and night clubs mostly in Beirut and some are openly activists for their rights that we heard of two gay couple had been subjected to similar criminal reaction only this time by those who were supposed to protect the law.
Societies will never change if things kept in the secret, if things remain within the “political correct” constructed formula. While it is very difficult to be open as a gay person, it is very important to do so in order for societies to process this radical change in its structure even if by doing so you’ll be under serious attack.
In Syria there has been a sexual abuse by Shahabandar police station where police officers were harassing and mocking a transsexual person, male body with female sexual organs. They took off his clothes and touched him sexually and took pictures and videos of him. This harassment has been documented and videoed via cellphone that was distributed all over Damascus via bluetooth. My father who works in the Shahabandar area told me that the shops’ owners neighboring the police station heard a female voice shouting for help from within the station and hence they all went there to stop what they assumed to be a rape taking place. When the shop owners found out that the female voice was actually coming from a male voice with a female sexual organs they all disappeared and left the person alone facing abuse by the police just because he is neither a woman, nor a man, hence not a human being with equal rights that abusing him wouldn’t be exactly as abusing a woman, or man. Wondering if these incidents will ever take place in the Syrian streets, hmm..
There is something about these so called “protectors of law” and LGTB community. It is not a secret that the Tripoli police officers in Lebanon made arresting gays a hobby for them. No wonder why Anarchists hate the police so much ;-)
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