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I’m fuming at them making up their own north African history in order for it to fit their own agenda.

One account would not accept that north Africa is indigenously Amazigh. And proceeded to tell me, (you know, a north African/Algerian) that because my skin wasn’t black, I was NOT African.

Bouches-du-Rhône. Town of Marseille. September 1984 Northern district. “Cité Bassens”. Algerian wedding.

Dear DreamWorks Studios,

As moviegoers and fans of the original 1995 Ghost in the Shell film, we respectfully request that you cast an actress of Japanese descent for the lead role of Motoko Kusanagi rather than Scarlett Johansson.

The American film industry is already unfriendly to Asian actors without roles in major films being changed to exclude them. One recent survey found that in 2013, Asian characters made up only 4.4% of speaking roles in top-grossing Hollywood films.

Please use this opportunity to help talented Asian-American actors receive recognition for their work. There are so few opportunities for them to shine in Hollywood, and this film would be a perfect platform.

Arbeloa on Twitter.

‘The Roma Journeys’ (2000-2006)

We need to talk about Muhammad Ludovic-Zahed, a French-Algerian gay muslim and feminist, expert on the Koran and AIDS-activist, founder of HM2F (Homosexuels Musulmans de France, Homosexual Muslims in France).

Muhammad (to the left) met his South African husband Qiyaammudeen Jantjies-Zahed (to the right), also a gay muslim, in 2011 at a convention on AIDS, they got married in South Africa two months later. 

Muhammad Ludovid-Zahed has now opened the first ‘gay friendly’ mosque in Europe, France, where he says everyone should be able to come as who they truly are regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. The usual rules on seperating men from women will also be sidelined and women will be encouraged to lead Friday prayers.  “It’s a radically inclusive mosque, a mosque where people can come as they are.“

Mmm it’s not up to you to decide who’s Palestinian and who’s not. 

Palestinians don’t have to go around 24/7 telling everyone that they’re Palestinian in order for them to be Palestinian.

‘Iranian Fathers & Daughters’: A Photo Series Defies Stereotypes

For Iranian Fathers & Daughters, photographer Nafise Motlaq enters the homes of families in Iran, capturing the diverse bonds that tie young women and their dads. Her own relationship with her father changed when he fell into a coma while she was living in Malaysia. After he recovered from a life-threatening illness, Motlaq explains that the two of them became closer, and on her first trip back to Iran in over seven years, she was inspired to seek out other father-daughter pairings that defied the stereotypes she encountered abroad.

Given the brief time she had to execute the project, Motlaq chose to keep it strikingly simple. She met her subjects through a network of friends and family and photographed them in intimate household settings, allowing the daughter’s words about her father to serve as the caption for each image. Like all father-daughter relationships, each is colored by its own ambiguous joys and frustrations, connections and strains.

I’m not shocked but honestly I’m so disappointed. I’m a girl who grew up in Kolkata, someone who grew up hearing about Mother Teresa and to be honest I hate the fact that the liberal, white, Western media has held this woman as some sort of paragon of virtue. And she really wasn’t. Here are some things she did:

She was so anti-abortion that she actually used her Nobel Peace Prize speech to rail against population control, family planning and abortion. 

She supported Indira Gandhi’s declaration on the state of emergency in 1975, saying “People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes.”

She idolised poverty and suffering, stating that she thought it was beautiful that the poor had accepted their lot in life. But when it came to her, she would check herself into expensive clinics, in the West, in order to treat her own illnesses. 

She was also associated with and supported corrupt businessmen such as Charles Keating and Robert Maxwell, as well as the dictatorial Duvalier family and Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. 

She encouraged members of her order to secretly baptise dying patients with no regard for their own faiths. 

Her public image was super misleading because  only a few hundred people are served by even the largest of the homes. In 1998, among the 200 charitable assistance organisations reported to operate in Calcutta, hers wasn’t even ranked among the largest organisations- there were others doing a much better job.

In 1991, a journalist visited the home and described the medical care the patients received as “haphazard” and he observed that sisters, who had no medical knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors there. 

Her order did not distinguish between curable or incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment. She herself described her houses as the Houses of the Dying.

She reinforced the popular colonialist image of the white woman giving up her life to save the souls of the “wretched” brown people.

the amazigh tradition of tattooing protective symbols on our bodies is dying out because it is now looked down upon by moroccan society as wrong, ugly, and un-Muslim

oucham (marking our bodies with traditional tattoos) is becoming taboo, a lot of old amazigh women who have oucham are ashamed of their tattoos because it is a mark of “the old religion”, since morocco is now a predominantly muslim country, amazigh folk beliefs are being practiced less and less, the tradition of oucham is being practiced less and less, our ways of life are fading

in morocco, using tattoos for health reasons, for protective purposes, for aesthetic, for showing off which tribe you belong to with pride, are practices that are dying out because arabisation is still a thing in morocco and throughout tamazgha

the hamsa is one of those symbols that some people would get as a tattoo.

while there are old amazigh ladies looking down at their decorated skin in shame, looking at the reminders of amazigh folklore, amazigh life, in shame, not allowing their daughters and grandchildren to practice this beautiful and interesting tradition, because they are ashamed, there are people across the world getting the hamsa inked on their bodies without a care in the world. because it’s “pretty”