القط الأسود

makhzoumi foundation - providing food and water assistance, medical care, psychosocial support, and other necessities

lebanon emergency relief - providing food, baby supplies, medication, sleep and hygiene necessities, and financial assistance

lebanese food bank - runs food and water security initiatives across the country

basmeh & zeitooneh - running various educational and psychosocial programs, providing food and water packages, shelter and sleeping supplies, and hygiene products

lebanese red cross - provides medical care, supplies for hospitals, search and rescue operations, and necessities for displaced people

lebanon solidarity collective - works with other grassroots networks to provide food, necessities, medical care, and financial assistance; runs additional long-term bioremediation projects

voices of the unseen - coalition of organizations working to provide food, clean water, hygiene products, weather-appropriate clothing, and medical supplies

islamic help's lebanon appeal - runs clinics and shelters, as well as providing water, food, hygiene products, and winter supplies

anera - provides food, water, hygiene supplies, shelter and weather necessities, and medical care, as well as running agricultural programs

islamic relief's lebanon emergency appeal - provides food, water, necessities, medical supplies

baitulmaal - operates a mobile clinic and provides food, water, shelter, and hygiene supplies

azahir - providing meals, sleeping supplies, baby and hygiene products, medical care, and pyschosocial support with a focus on children and families

jibal - coordinates community kitchens and food supply for shelters

foodblessed lebanon - providing meals and non-perishable food parcels

egna legna besidet - providing support for displaced migrant workers, including food, health supplies, clothing, and financial assistance

nation station - a Beirut-based community kitchen (provides about 1,000 meals daily)

beit aam - community space in Beirut currently serving as a hub for volunteer workers and supply gathering

queer mutual aid lebanon - providing housing and financial assistance to queer and trans people

In the colossal, cathedral sized water tank beneath the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, several heads of Medusa have been used as pillar bases for the past 1.500 years. It is not entirely known where the heads came from, but they were believed to be taken from some other Roman ruin. The heads are upside down or sideways to inhibit the power of the Gorgon Medusa's gaze.

Israeli authorities and security forces have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip and war crimes in the West Bank, the UN Independent International Commission said in a new report on Tuesday.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel examined violations and crimes against and affecting Palestinian children, including serious physical and psychological harm by the Israeli security forces since 7 October 2023 resulting in the death of at least 20,179 and injury of 44,143 children.

The Commission, which concluded last year that Israel had committed genocide against the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip, found that the intense scale and systematic nature of the Israeli military operations have continued, resulting in unprecedented death, injury and trauma of Palestinian children.

The Commission has also documented incidents of sexual and gender-based violence targeting Palestinian children, often during arrests or in detention, causing severe physical and mental harm.

Consistent with the Commission’s previous findings on sexual violence committed against Palestinians, Israeli security forces used sexual violence as a tactic of war to punish, instil fear, and treat the bodies of Palestinians, including children, as instruments of collective shaming and oppression, entrenched within a prolonged, ethnic, gendered, and intergenerational pattern of Israeli occupation and hostilities, the report concluded.

The Commission reiterates that the deliberate targeting of children is one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza.

You have all watched some of the worst crimes against humanity be livestreamed to you for years. Do not compromise with this.

West Papua faces a hidden political and humanitarian crisis. Conflict over the right to self-determination and sovereignty over accelerating industrial development has led to repression, extrajudicial killings, torture and disappearances. An extensive network of state and corporate security forces targets activists, clergy, students, local politicians and customary leaders through intensive military intelligence operations. The United Nations estimates that there are between 60,000 and 100,000 internally displaced people in West Papua since violence escalated in 2018 — up to 2 per cent of the population of 5.6 million. This mass displacement is largely driven by foreign investors and their palm oil plantations, often located on traditional land that local people fiercely defend. These plantations are often heavily militarised and frequently the site of human rights violations. Britain’s military and financial institutions are entangled in the exploitation and repression of West Papua. The British government supports the Indonesian military through arms exports and jungle warfare training, while British companies and investors profit from mining, gas extraction and plantation projects that local people staunchly oppose.

The nation of modern Turkey was founded built in the 1920s out of the chaos that ensued during the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, wars and genocidal campaigns against Greeks, Armenians and other “non-Turkish” people who lived in Anatolia and Asia Minor for generations.

Millions of Greeks, Armenians and Jews were forced to flee, while others were taken to other regions and sold into sex gangs or labor camps.

As the dust settled, these people eventually integrated into Turkish society. Names were changed and mass conversions to Islam took place. The human chaos out of which Turkish society was created, was a closely-guarded secret within Turkish government circles.

For decades, the confidentiality of genealogy data was kept strictly confidential by the Turkish government.

Any information that revealed ancestry details of Turkish citizens was always a sensitive matter, considered by the government to be a national security issue.

There were two main reasons for all this secrecy.

Revealing ancestry data– some of which stemmed back to Ottoman times– would open up a can or worms to Turkey’s bloody history of its founding in the early 1900s, specifically about how tens of thousands of of Armenians, Syriacs, Greeks and Jews had been forced to convert to Islam and became “integrated” into society.

Furthermore, revealing such information would also open up public conversations and debates about the idea of “Turkishness” or a single ethnic identity of the people that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk tried grouping together into a modern state when he founded the nation.

For a long time, the official policy was that Turkish people formed a cohesive ethnic identity.

But less than two weeks ago, on Feb. 8, population registers were officially opened to the public via an online genealogy database and the public went wild, crashing the website after millions flocked to learn where their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents came from.

The system allows users with a citizen number to inquire about the names, birthplace, dates of birth and death of their grandparents and great-grandparents, leading all the way back into the 19th century when the Ottomans kept meticulous records.

Some people who had always boasted of their “pure” Turkish ancestry were shocked to learn they actually had other ethnic and religious roots– a Greek grandmother or a grandfather who was Armenian.

Turkish social media soon began trending with the topic as people shared their ancestry results online. Hardcore nationalists began targeting those who had mixed ancestry and called them “crypto-Armenians” or “infidel Greeks.”

Genealogy has always been a popular topic of conversation in Turkish society, but also a tool of social and political division.

“I hope my family isn’t Greek or Kurdish,” one Twitter tweeted.

Many families often acknowledged privately that their lineage was Armenian or Greek or that a long-dead relative was a convert to Islam, but those conversations were kept secret.

The mindset of society was starkly clear when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once complained, “We are accused of being Jews, Armenians or Greeks.”

Being a descendant of a Greek, Armenian or other non-Turkish lineage in Turkey carried a stigma that could not be erased. The government has always had this information about its citizens and even created a secret “branding” or “race code” of citizens based on genealogy data they possessed.

Those with Greek lineage were branded in public records with a “1” next to their name, while Armenians were marked with a “2” and Jews with a “3.” This classification was secretly used when a young man became of military age or when someone applied for a job with the government.

If their lineage was known to be Greek or Armenian– even unbeknownst to the actual individual, they were denied jobs or favored positions within the military or civil service.

I have no patience for genocide apologists that treat the oppression of Greeks (as well as other minorities) by the Ottomans/Turks as if it's some dick measuring competition over who gets Constantinople and not systemic oppression, ethnic cleansing and displacement of indigenous populations.

The amount of insensitivity it takes to treat this issue as some inconsequential event that happened hundreds of years ago and we should drop already, when in reality it's 4+ centuries of colonisation that resulted in a genocide just three/four generations back, a pogrom in the 1950s as well as the invasion of Cyprus that's still fucking occupied to this day. In the span of the 20th century the once vibrant Greek community of Anatolia and Pontus was fucking wiped out. To this day Turks not only deny the triple genocide they committed and upon which their country is built, but make jokes about Greeks “better knowing how to swim” in reference to refugees from Smyrna in 1922 throwing themselves at sea in order not to get raped and murdered by the Turks.

Cringing (yet insolent), the Armenian-as-victim was of course the flip side of the second strand: the Armenian-as-shyster, who fleeced the Turkish peasant, amassing the entire Ottoman economy into his own sticky hands.

Barth himself “proved” the stereotype by trotting out a “proverb” beloved of all self-proclaimed experts on the Orient from London to Petersburg: “One Greek is able to cheat two Jews, but one Armenian can cheat two Greeks.” Elements of this discourse had already appeared in the works of orientalists such as Alfred Körte, the archaeologist; Karl Krummbacher, founder of Byzantine studies in Germany; […]

“Even Jews have their good points, but Armenians have none”: Sir Mark Sykes, quoted in G. S. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915

In his Zukunft piece, Barth omitted the couplet’s reference to “Jews,” probably in deference to the sensitivities of (the now baptized) Harden. But purged of its slur against Jews, Barth’s “proverb’s” charge against the Armenians was then multiplied tenfold: “When it comes to sharp practices, one Armenian is a match for twenty Greeks.”

Variations were endless. Karl May’s “Der Kys-Kaptschiji” (1896–97) puts one Jew over ten Christians, one Yankee over fifty Jews, but one Armenian over a hundred Yankees.

“Russians are never tired of repeating that it takes two Greeks to swindle a Jew, two Jews to cheat the devil, but it takes two devils to cheat an Armenian.” 

“Whatever the version, the Armenian always comes out worst.”

In describing an evening spent with German expats in Constantinople, Naumann quoted at length one who, to unanimous accord, justified the massacres as the “self-defense” of honest, upright Turks, a people exploited by the grasping Armenian, who would steal from his own brother, sell his wife and prepubescent daughter, and morally befoul the whole city. In the Empire of the Silver Lion (1898) quoted Naumann to add force to the novelist’s own axiom that the “hawk-nosed Armenian” was someone who (“speaking generally and on average”) could be counted on to have a hand in the game “whenever and wherever in the Orient any kind of vile thing” went down. Since May’s previous writings had long made his distaste for Armenians clear, we may wonder who was recycling whom.” We recognize these stereotypes, of course, but associate them with other victims

And we have become so familiar with Edward Said’s famous analogy between antisemitism and its “secret sharer,” Orientalism (described by him as antisemitism’s “Islamic branch”), that we have all but forgotten that these tropes were once used against a Christian people on behalf of a Muslim one.

from “Down in Turkey, far away”: Human Rights, the Armenian

19th May - remembrance of the Pontic Greek Genocide

“The persecutions of the Greeks are assuming unexpected proportions. Only a fortnight ago they reassured and told that the measures taken against the Greek villages in Marmora were temporary and not comparable with those against the Armenians. Now it looks as if there is equality in suffering and that the intention existed to uproot and destroy both peaceful communities.” - Lewis Einstein

The systematic expulsion and extermination of the Armenian population (Armenian Genocide) also became the fate of the Greeks from 1914-23 by the Ottoman Empire and then Turkish National Movement. It followed the same process of forcing people from their homes, death marches, starvation and massacres. The infamous catastrophe of Smyrna (September 1922) subsequently destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters in the city and resulted in the estimated at least 10-100,000 deaths. 

“We must at last do with the Greeks as we did with the Armenians…” - Rafet Bey, 1916

Overall, figures put it to at the very least 353,000 victims (possibly up to by 750,000). Just like with the Armenian Genocide, recognition for the Pontic Greek Genocide is not fully recognised or accepted.