I am skipping your ads as fast as I can. I'm skipping past your sponsor read. I'm muting the tv. I'm muting the tab. If they get too annoying I will simply stop trying to watch.

Turning to the Jewish perspective, we might argue that these mechanisms of comparison derive from what Hannah Arendt in 1948 identified as the ahistorical character of Jewish self-perception: the exclusion of Jews from history, which constitutes Jewish victimhood as an immutable essence: "Jewish historians... used to ignore all those trends of the Jewish past which did not point to their own major thesis of Diaspora history, according to which the Jewish people did not have a political history of their own but were invariably the innocent victims of a hostile and sometimes brutal environment... In sharp contrast to all other nations, the Jews were not history-makers but history-sufferers, preserving a kind of eternal identity of goodness whose monotony was disturbed only by the equally monotonous chronicle of persecutions and pogroms." Drawing on Arendt’s observation that an “eternal identity of goodness” fails to recognize the Jews as active agents in history, we arrive at a critical consequence: in addition to elevating the Holocaust to the level of “absolute evil,” owing to its singular impact, this view of Jewish passivity places the Holocaust and the Israeli-Arab conflict on a single continuum, entitled “the persecution of the Jews.” “Such an approach,” wrote the historian Dan Diner, “does not allow one to perceive the significant distinction between Arabs or Palestinians fighting with Israel on a local conflictual basis and anti-Semites who are hostile to Jews as such. The conflict thus becomes transhistorical, like another round in an eternal, insoluble struggle between the world and the Jews.” Idith Zertal has shown how this discourse disconnects both the Holocaust and the Israeli-Arab conflict from their specific historical contexts, blurs their boundaries, and makes them “closed mythical realities, immune from criticism, interlocked and ever enhancing each other.”

re holocaust exceptionalism: as someone who's genuinely annoyed by how ashkenazim do not realize that they're "white" in the us, i really don't think ethnic ashkenazim being white by today's standards has anything to do with conclusions that the holocaust was "unique" or that it's worth recognizing, let alone why its memory is used to justify -sraeli atrocities. the us (for example) is perfectly capable of recognizing the danger uyghurs (largely not white) are being put through - the fault of china, the "enemy superpower" - while not recognizing the danger palestinians (largely not white) are being put through - the fault of their vassal state in the middle east and their own blind support for it.

So while it is crucial to challenge the Israeli state, it must be done in a manner that acknowledges the range of complicit actors. Historically speaking, settler colonialism has a long history of articulating its violence through the protection of serviceable figures such as women and children, and now the homosexual. Pinkwashing is only one more justification for imperial/racial/national violence within this long tradition of intimate rhetorics around "victim" populations. Further, Islamophobia has proliferated since the beginning of the "war on terror," but it also predates 9/11 in various forms (see, for example, Edward Said's periodization of Islamophobia as heralded during the end of the cold war). Pinkwashing works in part by tapping into the discursive and structural circuits produced by U.S. and European crusades against the spectral threat of "radical Islam" or "Islamo-fascism."

“The ad was in a women’s magazine and if I remember correctly, was for a perfume. It featured a white woman lying in bed with a black man. The man’s shirtless back was to the viewer, making only his taut, muscular form and powerful-looking arms and shoulders visible. He was faceless, unidentified. The woman looked sultrily at us from over his mysterious form, satisfaction writ large over her features. She had partaken of whatever delights this man had to offer and was smugly, luxuriantly basking in the afterglow. The ad copy was, “Take a walk on the wild side.” My teacher used the ad as an example of how marketers can use certain words and images to convey large amounts of information subtly and effectively. A white woman having sex with a black man? How risqué. The implication: be a little like that woman. Spray on that perfume and feel like the kind of girl who has sex with faceless, muscular black men in ritzy hotel rooms because it’s an adventure, a thrill, a risk, something illicitly pleasurable. These are the semiotics of race. This is why columnists will trip over themselves not to call Lupita Nyong’o or Angela Basset “beautiful”, choosing instead to use terms that call to mind a kind of savage, animalistic magnetism: fierce, striking, edgy, eye-catching. Words like “pretty” and “beautiful” and “cute” are for white women whose bodies and sexualities are not seen as wild, animal, or untamed. Black men are hulking, threatening, thuggish; white men are charming, sexy heartthrobs with hearts of gold. Brown women are exotic, with their “honey-coloured” skin and their “mystical”, “enchanting” beauty, unlike their white counterparts, who are held up as not only ideal, but knowable and safe. White people are beautiful; non-white people are dangerous.”

and you know what im not done i think that its actually a very normal and healthy ebb and flow of life

The war in Gaza hasn’t stopped it has only changed its face.

stuff you say when you don’t give a fuck about women quite frankly