~RM-Minded~

i hate asking this but i’m pretty desperate at this point. my rent is due in a few days and i’m short by £120 and have no one to ask for help. i’ve tried to buy some time to acquire it but it’s pretty bleak rn. i also have my phone bill due which is £28 and my line will be cut off in a day if i don’t pay it which is a nightmare because i’ve been trying to find a new job and need to be able to take calls or view my email at the very least for any interview opportunities i might get. add in the fact that i barely get to eat or travel these days with nothing in my card i am rn very desperate for some help.

CONCUPISCENCE

[noun]

1. sexual desire; lust.

2. ardent, usually sensuous, longing.

Etymology: from Latin concupiscentia, from concupīscō, “I desire strongly, I desire eagerly; I covet”.

When I was a child, from the time I was about four and could understand things, my mom told me and my brother that we should have a secret word. That way, if we were ever in trouble or felt unsafe and we didn’t want the people around us to know we needed her to come get us, we could let her know. So she let us pick the word and my brother and I chose the phrase “peanut butter cups.” (I’m happy to share the phrase now since both my brother and I are adults now). 

I used the phrase twice in my life. Once, I was at a friends house when I eight years old. Her dad got really drunk and was throwing things against the wall. I was really scared and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself on the phone when I called my mom to come get me because I didn’t know if he would get more violent if I asked her to come get me. So I called her and was calm and after a couple minutes I asked “Hey mommy, did you get me those peanut butter cups from the store?” And she said “I’ll be right there.” And she came and got me within minutes. 

Second, I was a teenager spending the night at a friends house. Her brother and dad were drinking and they started talking about things that made me uncomfortable - ie: what they liked to do to women. My friend didn’t seem perturbed and said that was normal for them and that I shouldn’t worry. But I was worried because they were really drunk and I was 15 and the only ‘woman’ around that wasn’t related to them. I went in my friends room, told her I needed to call my mom and say goodnight. Before I hung up with her I asked “Next time we go to the store, can we get some peanut butters cups? I’ve been craving them.” And she came and got me, just like that. 

In recent days, jihadists killed 41 people at Istanbul’s bustling, shiny airport; 22 at a cafe in Bangladesh; and at least 250 celebrating the final days of Ramadan in Baghdad. Then the Islamic State attacked, again, with bombings in three cities in Saudi Arabia.

By Tuesday, Michel Kilo, a Syrian dissident, was leaning wearily over his coffee at a Left Bank cafe, wondering: Where was the global outrage? Where was the outpouring that came after the same terrorist groups unleashed horror in Brussels and here in Paris? In a supposedly globalized world, do nonwhites, non-Christians and non-Westerners count as fully human?

“All this crazy violence has a goal,” Mr. Kilo, who is Christian, said: to create a backlash against Muslims, divide societies and “make Sunnis feel that no matter what happens, they don’t have any other option.”

This is not the first time that the West seems to have shrugged off massacres in predominantly Muslim countries. But the relative indifference after so many deaths caused by the very groups that have plagued the West is more than a matter of hurt feelings.

One of the primary goals of the Islamic State and other radical Islamist groups is to drive a wedge between Sunni Muslims and the wider world, to fuel alienation as a recruiting tool. And when that world appears to show less empathy for the victims of attacks in Muslim nations, who have borne the brunt of the Islamic State’s massacres and predatory rule, it seems to prove their point.

“Why isn’t #PrayForIraq trending?” Razan Hasan of Baghdad posted on Twitter. “Oh yeah no one cares about us.”

Hira Saeed of Ottawa asked on Twitter why Facebook had not activated its Safety Check feature after recent attacks as it did for Brussels, Paris and Orlando, Fla., and why social media had not been similarly filled with the flags of Turkey, Bangladesh and Iraq. “The hypocrisy is the western world is strong,” she wrote.

https://fas.org/irp/threat/nctc2011.pdf

“In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities over the past five years.”

That’s from a 2011 report.

Things have not changed.

Muslims still account for the majority of the casualties in terrorist attacks, as they have for over ten years at least.