j'en ai marre

                                          Run, you clever boy … and remember…..

1. Don’t take every thought and feeling seriously. Both of those tend to be patterned and habitual. Thus, they are not necessarily accurate and reliable.

2. Don’t blow small things out of proportion. Take control of your thinking and keep things in perspective. Don’t allow yourself to dwell on negatives, or critical thoughts.

3. Accept that we’re all hit by negative emotions. It’s a fact of life – and is unavoidable.

4. Work on strategies that work for you, and that help distract you from the way you feel.

5. Deliberately think about more positive things – like what is going well, or the things you’re thankful for – then shrug your shoulders and move on with your day.

If you dislike Gal Godot for her support of IDF initiatives during Protective Edge, that is also your prerogative. 

I am not going to tell you how to feel about that; you are entitled to make your own judgments as informed by your personal values.

But if you use those judgments as a platform to spread falsehoods—especially ones that rooted in anti-Semitic tropes about how Jewish people are evil child murderers—then you and I are going to have a fucking problem. 

Gal Godot spent her time in IDF as a fitness instructor, not as a sniper. She never saw combat, never shot any children, and certainly did not have kill notches on her rifle. She did not brag about killing Palestinians. She did not say “I want them all dead.”

She did make a post in 2014 that supported people in the IDF for “protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children” and tagged it with a few phrases including #loveidf and #coexistence. Now, again, maybe her support is antithetical to your beliefs, and I’m not here to lecture you on that. But no, she did not post anything about “praying for Palestinians to die quickly” or brag about killing people’s families. 

If her actual involvement with and statements about the IDF are things you find unsavoury, then fine; but if that’s the case, then you shouldn’t need to make up lies that evoke historical anti-Semitism to drive home your points. 

The things you oppose should hold up as they already are—otherwise, you’re effectively conceding that the things you don’t like aren’t bad enough to warrant your reaction on their own. 

For example, I don’t like the football player Luis Suarez because, despite being a talented goalscorer, he has a weird, creepy history of biting his opponents during matches. Now, this is a total valid reason not to like a professional athlete, so I have no cause to gild the lily. I don’t need to say “Well, actually I don’t like Luis Suarez because when he was at Liverpool he ate a Manchester United player’s liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti,” because his actual behaviour is aggressive, unprofessional, and straight up bizarre—meaning I don’t need to embellish the truth in order to be justified in how I feel about him. 

If you think serving in the IDF is bad, then just say “I don’t like Gal Godot because I think serving in the IDF is bad.” Don’t make shit up, don’t exaggerate the truth. Otherwise it looks an awful lot like you’re deliberately going out of your way to insinuate that Jewish people are evil child murderers, which says a lot more about you than it does about Gal Godot.