life is fair but…

Levant woman

I seized a one thousand “Lira” which is the Syrian currency, and looked at it for several minutes… too much detail and actually most of the people didn’t like the new design. I didn’t like the content not the design. Before this Syrian crisis this piece of money was equivalent to 20 dollars and it could feed a family for one day. Now it is not more than 3 dollars and it almost means nothing, you need two of it to prepare an ordinary lunch.

They made a new design for money recently, they made it smaller and with less quality I don’t understand the reasons but I know this country is facing very hard times regarding the economic situation and it affects most of the population even more than the lack of security. A government employee earned from 400$ to 600$ a month before the crisis now after this…

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Boycotting Matisyahu is Reasonable, Even if You Don’t Agree with It

Liberal Zionists tolerate uncritical Israel supporters because they are family. But we shouldn’t be surprised when others don’t. To be sure, I doubt this Spanish BDS group would have much sympathy for anybody who didn’t endorse the three goals of the BDS movement. But that is their right. Had Matisyahu, who has made political statements in the past in favor of Israel, endorsed a Palestinian state, or justice for the Palestinians, he would not have been cancelled, even with the protest of the Spanish BDS group. But an artist who has politicized his work should not be surprised if he is called out on it.

Via

The Magnes Zionist: Why Boycotting Matisyahu is Reasonable, Even if You Don’t Agree with It.

I’ve read in many places how antisemitic is Spain. Well…. for being antisemitic, we should have some relevant proportion of Jewish comunities living in Spain, such as, let’s say, Gipsies, Moors or Chinese.

But there aren’t.

And one can’t be racist against some race they don’t even learn to identify.

When we, Spaniards, position ourselves against Zionism, we do the same we did against White, Anglo-Saxon, Christian Supremacists in South Africa during the times of the Apartheid. The same many of us do when we criticise Erdogan and the Turks for the way they treat other minorities, and specially Kurds. The same many of us do when we reject fascists, ultranationalists and supremacists of every kind.

Nothing else.

They call it leftist hypocrisy. I call it cowardice. Plain cowardice.

Satire has been a sanctuary historically monopolized by progressives, originally used as a discreet tool against Western religious fundamentalism. Of course, an authentic Muslim should not dress well, speak lucidly nor drink, of all things, a skinny flat white coffee. The real Muslim is scruffy. A credible Muslim can only be inarticulate, someone who requires an intermediary to ‘explain’ their anger, invariably through the prism of leftist ideological dogma. And if a Muslim does speaks for themselves, they must only do so when full of rage, obviously.

How patronizing.

As another blogger accurately noted in response, the problem begins when journalists and others seek out “community representatives,” or “credible Muslim voices” to fit into convenient boxes. This relies on so many assumptions that it is hard to know where to begin. Not all Muslims wish to express themselves in public through a communal religious identity. Identities are multiple, and some may wish to speak instead just as citizens in their professional capacity, through their political party, or their neighborhood body. Those Muslim who do speak through their communal religious identity are not homogenous. This particularly holds true because majoritarian Islam has no organized clergy, and no pope. The question of religious “representation” becomes particularly difficult to achieve as a result. And in its most extreme sense it is undesirable anyway, leading logically to nothing but ISIS-style bloodshed and theocracy. Muslim “credibility” is just as flimsy an idea to pursue doggedly. In fact, this is nothing but a variant of the African-American “not black enough” theme. Who decides whose “Muslim experience” is real, and whose is not? Is the credible Muslim only he who dresses in Arab robes, eats spicy food and drinks cava? And yet we then worry about profiling?

The great irony is that, unlike many of today’s champagne socialists and shisha-jihadists my entire life has been a prototype of their archetypal aggrieved Muslim. Unlike the Guardian’s private school, Oxbridge-educated journalist David Shariatmadari, I am a state school-educated Muslim and racial minority. I have been stabbed at by neo-Nazis, falsely arrested at gunpoint by Essex police, expelled from college, divorced, estranged from my child, and tortured in Egyptian prison, and mandatorily profiled. I’ve had my DNA forcibly taken at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 Laws, which deprive terror suspects of the right to silence at UK ports of entry and exit, among much else. I’ve been blacklisted from other countries. I am every grievance regressive leftists traditionally harp on. Yet their first-world bourgeois brains seem to malfunction because I refuse to spew theocratic hate, or fit their little “angry Muslim” box. Yet they talk to me about privilege, and non-fat lattes?

via

The British Left’s Hypocritical Embrace of Islamism – The Daily Beast.