for anyone interested, haymarket books is currently offering free ebook downloads of books that explore the history and struggle for justice in palestine.
“My message to the colonizers who left their home countries to occupy our lands is simply to go back home. As for those who were born here, my message is: You are secondary victims of this colonial project. You are being used to occupy other people’s lands, and your Jewishness is being politicized for colonial means. Meditate carefully on the examples of South Africa, Angola, Algeria—they may not apply wholesale to the settler colonization of Palestine, but they hold lessons for you. Today you must make a choice: Either support this deadly colonial project, or side against it by supporting the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a democratic state that liberates Palestinians, as well as Jews, from Zionism. A state that will honor the right of Palestinian refugees to return and compensation and that will welcome and protect its Jews as citizens of Palestine. This transition from Zionism to democracy will not cost anyone’s life; it will cost you your colonial privileges, and will free you—and us, its primary victims—from colonialism.”
—Mohammed Zraiy, Gaza coordinator for the One Democratic State Initiative in an interview with Jewish Currents
i will always hate/distrust the way western media reports on china for what looks like forever apparently but i rlly didn’t and dont love when ppl pretend everything is fine in that region. i can tell you even from my p uninformed view that racism against ethnic minorities is def a thing in china
back when twitter leftist circles were a bit more active i actually talked to oomf or oomf of oomf who wasn’t Uyghur but was Kazakh and had family in that region, they said a couple of things, mostly that anti-central asian racism, has been a thing in china for a very long time, anti-central asian racism was the main problem not islamophobia, and was very distrustful of the motivation of ‘vocational camps’. it didn’t make sense that uyghurs in that region should be subject to mandatory mandarin classes when people in that region would usually already speak mandarin. they also said they think that the us is using what has been a pretty long-term problem now to further their cold war agenda/conflict with china. they were going to try to get resources from their close relative that actually specialized in studies of central asians in xj, but i think their twitter account got swarmed by armies before then lmao. from what i gathered since then is that conditions for central Asians have improved(?) since 2017, but it’s still not great. idek. they also mentioned a uyghur woman activist that had petitioned mao for better treatment but he ignored her. wish i could remember or find her name rn, but google doesn’t show up much.
it’s a little hard to take people seriously after seeing them wholeheartedly believe accusations that uyghurs are all shady terrorists that aren’t properly integrated into chinese society or whatever
preface to the chinese translation of In The Camps
i always have trouble enunciating to people who lived most of their lives in china, or even those who are more fluent in mandarin, how different your perception of and your relation to china is if you’ve only had English sources to peruse. and i can’t imagine what that does to someone who isn’t chinese. so i don’t feel great when people ignore that aspect or even poke fun at it i guess. sore spots etc
kind of discovered i actually really fucking hate it when ppl try to make light of something extremely serious happening with twitter or tumblr or general internet speak i guess. not a moral judgement more of a preference but yeah.
