#fight hate

Charity zine for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Deadline October 20th.

🌊 "A Stranger is Just a Friend We Haven’t Met Yet." Messages of welcome and resistance. 🌊

Deadline October 20th.

Anyone can submit in any artform that can be digitally shared. Simple letters are also encouraged, there is no need to be a creative to be included. All proceeds will go to @refugeeaction and @rnli (unaffiliated with this project).

Convened by Selina Shaw: [email protected]

Islands, including the UK, are crossing places in the sea. We have a role and identity as islanders to uphold. We dishonour our heritage and our ocean by denying arrivals to our shores. Coasts are a gift that let us take in new life. That comes with the responsibility to give safety. We are a nation of harbours and lighthouses. “A Stranger is Just a Friend We Haven’t Met Yet” will gather messages of welcome for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, sharing kindness, joy, and protest against brutality. It hopes to tell our friends that they deserve a home with us and xenophobes that they don’t speak for us. All art forms welcome, as long as they can be digitally captured. Simple greetings and letters are also encouraged if you aren't feeling creative. In support of Refugee Action and the RNLI. Out of love for our island and our friends.

The 15th Doctor never fails to pull at my heartstrings. And episode 2 of season 2 had a scene that made me sob.

Why? To say that it is timely, would be putting it too lightly.

So instead I’ll just write the dialogue here.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers and it turns out that they can also be fictional.

The Doctor’s words here brought me comfort. I hope they can do the same for you.

For context, he brought a man named Conrad into his TARDIS, and Conrad… well, there’s a lot of people like him out there in the world. And that’s the problem.

The Doctor and Conrad dialogue:

Doctor: …You have to be invited into my TARDIS, Conrad. To be special. But you, you’re special for all the wrong reasons. You see, I’m fighting a battle on behalf of everyday people who just wanna get through their day, and feel safe, and warm, and fed. And then along comes this noise. All day long, this relentless noise. Cowards like you, weaponize lies, taking people’s insecurity and fear, and making it currency. You are exhausting. You stamp on the truth, choke our bandwidth, and shred our patience because the only strategy you have is to wear us down. But the thing is, Conrad, I have energy to burn and all the time in the universe.

Conrad: (laughs) What is this? An intervention? Are you here to save my soul?

Doctor: You betrayed my friend.

Conrad: You’ve had plenty of friends. Have you met Belinda Chandra yet?

Doctor: Who?… You want spoilers? I’ll tell you your future. You die in a prison cell, boiling in anger and poison until your heart packs in at age 49. Alone and unloved. Forgotten. The world carries on. The world gets better. You aren’t even a footnote. Just ashes on the wind.

Conrad: I don’t accept your reality, Doctor. I reject it. So put me back in my prison and get off my world.

Untitled (Hommage a William-Adolphe Bougereau).

It is rare, especially now, for online content to make me really and truly happy. But today I saw something that both made me really happy and also made me think.

I was scrolling through TikTok and came across multiple videos of the same kind. A woman wearing a hijab was finding other Muslim women and was helping them try on a hijab for the first time. These videos brought me so much joy. The hijabi woman's gestures were so kind and loving, she seemed almost like an older sister to the other women. The care with which she helped them put on the hijab was so sweet. And then there was the reaction of the women to wearing a hijab for the first time. There were before and after shots, and every single time, the "after" photos of them in the hijab were so happy. It was so pure to see women finding joy in dressing in a way that brought them comfortable.

But even more interestingly, it was a joy I recognized. The sisterly and caring gestures of the more experienced hijabi were familiar too.

The joy I saw in the "after" photos was reminiscent of my emotions when I first intentionally dressed tznuis (Jewish modesty). It was recent, and I felt so comfortable and safe in the clothes I was wearing, and I recognized that comfort in the faces of the women in the videos.

The sweet and caring gestures of the experienced hijabi reminded me a bit of my interactions with rebbetzins and other older religious women in various communities. They're always so sweet and kind (in my experience of course), and I noticed that they frequently try to connect through touch. You know, putting a hand on my shoulder or elbow. Hugs, of course. Using those gestures to make people feel heard and listened to.

And that made me think. We are so much more similar than the media gives us credit for. In fact, it reminded me of an interaction I had with a classmate just last week.

In one of my classes, we were talking about cultural traditions, and we were supposed to pair up and discuss family traditions we have. I mentioned that I love celebrating New Year's because my family doesn't celebrate Christmas, but due to them coming to the US from ex-USSR countries, they brought over similar yet secular and unique traditions for New Year's.

The girl I ended up pairing up with mentioned that she also didn't celebrate Christmas, because she was Muslim, and then she started talking about what her family does for Ramadan.

We ended up having a really nice discussion, connecting over having to fast for holidays, being surrounded by a majority Christian world, and other things we had in common.

And at the very beginning of the year, a Jewish friend of mine and I were complaining to each other about how lame it was that there were only two cheese pizzas at the event, and the rest were all pepperoni (and therefore not kosher), which led into a discussion of accommodating dietary restrictions. We unintentionally ended up sitting next to a few Muslim girls who heard our conversation and joined in, and we had the fun experience of bonding over the pork-obsessed world we all live in.

So yeah. We're actually not as different as the media and politicians make us look.

This is why, as much as I try to advocate about antisemitism, I still try to call out Islamaphobia in my day-to-day life.

There really isn't an excuse for hating an entire group. No excuse for awful and slanderous generalizations, which I've seen made about both us and Muslims. Just as antisemitism shouldn't have any place in these discussions, neither does Islamaphobia.

In fact, I think it would be amazing if we could set aside our differences and unite on this issue.

I know we may feel adversely towards each other in regards to the Israel-Hamas war and our views on it. And I'm not going to force anyone to agree/disagree on all the same things about it. Both sides are hurt. Both sides are accusing each other of genocide, and neither one (majority, I know extremist views exist on both sides, that's not who I am talking about here) actually hates all of the other side to the point of wanting to kill each other.

Yes, we disagree. Yes, our disagreement right now is serious and valid. But there is something we can, I hope, agree upon, and that's the fact that neither side of what's happening should employ Islamaphobic/Antisemitic rhetoric.

So here's a summary of what I'm trying to say:

We aren't as different as we are portrayed to be. We aren't "natural enemies" or whatever people think. We are all human, and we should all be united in the fact that generalized hate has no place on either side.

Both Antisemitism and Islamaphobia are rising right now. We may not see eye to eye on everything, but we are all human, and we should all do our part in dealing with that rise in hate. Not contribute to it.

...

Even though I am trying to speak against hate and division right now, I am certain that I'm probably going to receive at least a few hateful or negative responses to this. But you know what?

I don't really care anymore. Those hateful people are not anyone I could ever change or convince. So I'm going to try and remind myself to pick my battles and not waste energy on pointless arguments. Hateful responses to this post will be blocked and deleted.

However, Muslims of Tumblr, if I did say anything culturally problematic or inaccurate (for example, if the term "hijabi" or "experienced" in regards to being a hijabi is somehow a problem) (or like if comparing wearing a hijab at all to tznuis clothing is an issue) please let me know so I can fix it! I tried to not be culturally insensitive but I don't really know all that much so please do let me know!

I will be less inclined to selecting, highlighting, praising, writing texts, pointing to the YWAMag galleries of the scornful artists. There are two reasons for this hate (cold hate, most of the time, aka passive aggressiveness) : slander, and “anti-racism”, as I am considered by neo-collaborationnists as a “white racist”, which I’m actually not, but having daily worked for about 6 years on crime and terrorism, my fact reports and logical conclusions don’t please those neo-collaborationnists. Yet, the mag is literally full of neo-collabs’. It doesn’t matter, I can’t do otherwise, I just have not to know it or think about this shit.