Jennifer Abdo > Recent Status Updates

How the severe torture during interrogations forced him to confess to things he hadn't done.
How the Israeli soldiers would convince themselves their detainees were killers or terrorists — allowing themselves to torture our men without remorse. 2/2
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Most Americans actually believe Israel is fighting "terror" - but it's all lies - it's genocide. Don't ever talk to me about terrorism- you will sound ignorant.

But doubt haunts me. I see the wounds on Mohammad's neck and hands. I fear he has been through horrors.
When the visitors leave, we form a circle around Mohammad, eager to hear his story. He tells us everything:
How he and the other detainees were taken off buses in the freezing cold and beaten under the rain.
How most of the detainees had no political affiliations, but were randomly kidnapped from the road. 1/2

"My temporary neighbour knows all this and more. As soon as we meet, they understand how I spent the night and what my day will be like, because our problems are the same. And as soon as we begin to chat, we find that the problems are over because they are shared."

Continued from the quote that begins: "How will I console my close friend, who lives in Canada..."

So much is in those two paragraphs!! A must read.

"How will I console my close friend, who lives in Canada, when she tells me about her depression after someone rear- ended her car? How do I tell her that the struggle of obtaining today's bread, or receiving a feminine hygiene package, has become more important to me than her, her car and our entire friendship?"

See continued quote - it's about shared struggle/worry

Of course, we are residents of al-Nasr Street, living under occupation. The Israeli tanks need no excuse or reason to disrupt our lives. They can pass through our neighbourhood as often as the cup clinks against the pot', as the old Arabic expression goes. Unfortunately, our pot exploded into pieces long ago. It's too delicate an idiom to suit the life of a Palestinian today.

He is looking for blood, no doubt, and expecting to find it everywhere.

'Don't worry,' I whisper, 'we're still alive.

Munther takes a deep breath. He explains that a fleet of 30 Israeli tanks passed through our street under full air and ground cover. He had been hiding with his family in the kitchen the whole time: the furthest room from the street.

Have the soldiers moved away?
Is this a dream?
What's happening outside?
I look at my watch. It is 3am.

We endured the madness for three whole hours. If what we've just lived through isn't hell, I don't know what is.

My brother Munther, who lives in the apartment opposite us, gingerly opens the door and peers into the darkness, as if dreading what he might find. He is looking for blood, no doubt, and expecting to..

"I don't know who to share these feelings with. I don't know how to wave at someone and say, 'Hello, there's a massive fire inside me. Do you think you could help put it out?'

I feel alone with all these little details, and alone with all the big ones."

Of course, they don't intend to kill us, even when they drop 2,000-pound bombs on us. Even when they rain down bombardments across entire neighbourhoods and make life impossible in our city. No, no, don't misunderstand. They are merely eradicating 'terrorism." Two days ago, 'terrorism' was hiding in the body of Omar, my six-year-old nephew, perhaps in his heart, or maybe among his soft locks of hair. So they killed..

"Read these diaries and, no matter how much you think you already know, you will be shocked. But not only shocked: will see the strength of these women, of their families and of their communities. Love and friendship and honesty are the threads that bind these accounts together. Read their words and weep, but read them also...sense of shame about how little we in the West...have done to stop the slaughter."

If you ever need an example of anti-communist brain rot, these two pages contain several. The US tried to misinterpret everything so that it saw communism everywhere, especially where it wasn't. Everything is an excuse to wreak havoc and loot.

"And it was in the Congo that the CIA, for the first and only time, could plausibly claim credit-or take the blame for the assassination of a national leader. The United States still hasn't kicked its habit of intense meddling in the politics of the developing world. That was a habit it picked up in earnest in the Congo."

"The American intervention in the Congo was an early battle in a decades-long series of covert actions that would showcase the conflict between interests and values in American statecraft. The relatively genteel strategies crafted by the so-called wise men of U.S. foreign policy in the 1940s and 1950s gave way to the darker pursuits of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s."

"Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of authority turned."

The quadcopter arrived at the hospital and started calling for those inside to leave. [Israeli soldiers started calling for us using the quadcopter]: "You will be safe." Once we left [the hospital], Israeli soldiers took us [into custody] and began hitting us repeatedly. We asked, "Didn't you say we would be safe?" They responded, "There is no safety." They continued beating us until we were transported to the prison

"By labeling the Gaza genocide as a struggle between "light and darkness," as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did before the Knesset in October 2023, the Israeli leadership imples that Palestinians are consisted merely urban homines sacri--lives deemed expendable. Within such logic, Palestinians becomes "bare life," existing outside state protection, their lives devoid of potential worth."

"Television presenters now seem to be required to warn viewers that spectacles on the evening news may be distressing, giving them the chance to close their eyes or switch to another channel lest they see yet more disturbing footage from war-torn Syria or Yemen. We have become expert in refusing to allow the suffering of the world to impinge on our cocooned existence."

"Crucial to the traditional approach to scripture was the requirement of the altruism and compassion rooted in the right hemisphere. These are qualities that are sorely needed in our world today. At the root of many of our problems, global and national, is an inequality that, for all our good intentions, modern society has been unable to assuage."

"Armed conflict pushes humanity even closer to the precipice of climate catastrophe, and is an idiotic way to spend our shrinking carbon budget."

"Nothing prepares a teacher to attend the funerals of her students, one after another. There's no greater sense of defeat than standing in front of a class of young women, speaking of hope and peace, filling them with the belief that they are the promise of a better world--only for that world to hand them a tent the next day."

"He predicted that the people admitted to the Kingdom of God would not be those who had the correct beliefs but those who had given food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, who made the stranger welcome, clothed the naked, cared for the sick and visited those in person."

Lots of churches are failing this. Maybe Quakers are okay. That would be nice if all those things were all of our goals.

I came out of a tradition where the English translation of the Bible is the inspired, inerrant exact word of God and prophets were predictors of the future, conveyors of the direct communication with God. Armstong presents an intersting alternative, that prophets were political commentators or pundits.

Okay. I've done it again - bought something from one of my lists without any research. Turns out it's a middle school book. I suppose I'll keep going, it's just not quite what i was going for. Maybe i can find it a good home after I'm done.

If the widespread police violence in the US is instead framed as the product of counterinsurgency training, the coordination of tactical units in similar ways across hundreds of cities, and the expert use of surveillance and weaponry developed by Western militaries to crush liberation struggle in the Global South, then readers might reach different conclusions about whether the solution is to buy more of that stuff.

It is one thing to know intellectually thatthe punishment bureaucracy chooses not to persecute violations of drug laws, fraud, bribery, tax evasion, wage theft, environmental pollution, police brutality, and prosecutorial misconduct by elites, even though such crimes dwarf the harm of crimes they do prosecute. But it is quite another thing to see the ideology laid bare... harm by elites isn't "real" crime.

...the US cages six times more people per capita than its own pre-1980 historical average and five to ten times more than other countries, with a prison system that is one of the government's most bloated bureaucracies.

"Liberal democracies in the West were generally run for the benefit of the top, say, 20 percent of the wealth and income distribution. The trick...to keeping this scheme running smoothly has been to convince, especially at election time, the next 30 to 35 percent of the income distribution to fear the poorest half more than they envy the richest 20 percent." --James C. Scott

"The point is not that no one ever steals from trains or commits burglary. But the volume of news stories on police-reported crimes dwarfs their relative importance on any conceivable metric of objective global and domestic harm. Such a barrage of reporting affects which harmful things we feel emotionally terrified of and which harmful things we rarely think about."