Sasha > Recent Status Updates

US Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a right-wing Christian nationalist, retains on her website a statement accusing Jewish Harvard professor Derek Penslar, of "despicable antisemitic views and statements."- it is only that the use of the term "anti-semitism" to curb Jewish progressive speech by people who passionately hate Jewish people is so hideously and profoundly ironic.

[Canada has] consistently voted against recognizing Palestine as a state in the United Nations, and we have refused to condemn Israeli settlements. How can you say that you are working towards a two-state solution when you don't even recognize the other state?

A free press must be willing to confront power, not simply echo it. Only then can legacy media begin to rebuild trust with a generation that has seen too much to accept euphemism over truth.

This disconnect cemented something deeper: the belief that legacy media are not just biased, but complicit in Palestinian suffering.

Stories now mention the spectre of a man-made famine; some even use the word "genocide." At first glance, it appears to be a long-overdue course correction. For many young Canadians, however, the damage is done. A generation raised with the world's images at its fingertips has concluded that legacy media cannot be trusted.

My role is not to make others comfortable- it's to speak the truth, to educate, and to advocate for our right to self-determination, sovereignty, and right of return.

It is said we use humor to cope, to experience a sense of relief and so on. I could cite Freud but my grandmother said it more eloquently "if we don't laugh, we cry."

These directives are not just acts of linguistic manipulation; they are acts of violence. When media institutions erase the very name of a people, they participate in their dispossession. This level of censorship exposes a Western media landscape that masquerades as objective but is, in reality, deeply compromised and controlled. This is not journalism. This is propaganda.

Or, to use an embittered proverb my grandmother used to mutter at the evening news, “They asked the Pharaoh, ‘Who made you a pharaoh?’ He replied, ‘no one stopped me.’”

-to indulge in guilt. But it is an unproductive sentiment, it does not start revolutions. Guilt, imposes itself like a nagging cavity, you are acutely aware of its presence but you continue to shovel the same sweets into your mouth, until your teeth rot. Until you self-destruct.

The enlarged Hate Crime Unit was put in charge of the "investigation of any occurrence generated as a result of protests and/or demonstrations related to the Middle East conflict," whether or not there was any allegation of either hate or crime.

"After they burned my homeland, my friends and youth.. how can my poems not turn into guns?" - Palestinian Poet Rashid Hussein

The machine swallows life and spits out convenience.

For someone fortunate enough to be born wearing the boot, the capacity for mercy may well extend only to how hard one chooses to step on the neck. That anyone should take the shoe off entirely, walk away from the site of the trampling, is unthinkable.

To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn't care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

-to see these things is to know the sand is sticking to the teeth. The gears will grind to a halt one day

"Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it's a handful, throw it. If it's a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can."
- Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi

There exists no other remotely plausible explanation for a moral worldview in which what a protester might hypothetically do to a hospital deserves the strongest condemnation, while what a military does-- has done-- to multiple hospitals deserves none.

It's an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside[.] But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?

[8] of these [9 ppl] are starting to understand that they cannot win; that no matter how much red meat they throw out, they are still unable to give the party's base what it craves. [Trump] is armored in a baseness the other candidates simply don't know how to wear. He understands what his opponents don't- that the people who will decide this election have gone well past red meat. They want the body served up alive.

this is where the
poets will interject
they will say: show, don't tell
but that
assumes most people
can see.
- Marwa Helal