As protests in Iran continue into their third week in what is more and more looking like a possible revolution, and major media outlets in the US remain fixated to distraction on Ukraine, do not forget that while US tax dollars may be fighting oppression in Ukraine, 3,280,000,000 (3.28 BILLION) of our dollars are going this year to fund the oppression of the Palestinians.
The occupation of Palestinian land never ends, nor does the attempt to wall in, silence, and control a whole population, not even with the “end” of a “war”—a false perception of what are actually battles in a decades’ long war—and never mind “truces” or “ceasefires.” Israeli guns never cease fire, and they never cease to be pointed randomly, seemingly casually, against everyday human beings who deserve what every human being deserves.
Yesterday was the Deathday anniversary for Mohamed Dura’s family. He would have been 32 these days but for the moments of terror captured on film that were the last he knew of life. Do not look away. If you paid US taxes in the 90s, you paid for the bullets and the gun and the training by which this child was murdered.
There are more murders all the time. A seven-year-old child died as he was being chased by Israeli forces.
This was his funeral.
Don’t look away. Our tax dollars funded this death.
And every day more indignities are committed against brutally oppressed people on the receiving end of an apartheid.
And let me stop you right there. Who cares what anyone did before this? No one has the right to treat an elder this way. Did that man survive? I saw what could have been a twitch of movement, or else someone trying to move him. Is he dead?
The scene is almost identical to others filmed in Iran that are condemned whenever they are mentioned. Except it wasn’t oil money funding the team terrorizing these people, it was our tax dollars. $3,820,000,000 this year alone.
And raids every day. The toll so far this year (as of 28 Sept 2022):
More than 150 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the 1967-occupied territories since the start of the year, including 51 in the besieged Gaza Strip during Israel’s three-day assault in August. More than 30 of those killed were either from Jenin or were killed in the Jenin region in the occupied West Bank.
Twenty people have been killed in attacks carried out by Palestinians in Israel and the occupied West Bank in 2022.
“Israeli Forces Kill Four Palestinians, Wound Dozens in Jenin Raid” (al Jazeera)
I won’t dismiss the 20 Israeli dead; they also deserved life but were forced into complicity by conscription and cultural norms due to a situation they did not create. And yet: rocks and rocket launchers are absurdly comical against US weaponry; these are not two equals locking in a competition among peers. This is a situation of apartheid, of oppressors and oppressed. It is rocks against the best weapons US dollars can buy.
Next up: what this situation has in common with the Spartans and what we ought to all understand from the corner into which the Spartans, like the Israelis, had found themselves.
Anti-antisemitism notice: I am speaking up for the Palestinians not from ill will against other humans who practice Judaism nor against the Israelis for being Israelis. I oppose Israeli occupation of what land remained to Palestinian families; but I do not oppose Israelis as Israelis or for the fact of their religion. “Love the sinner” is supposed to be a Christian thing, but here I am practicing it among only so few others. I don’t care who is doing it, I oppose oppression. Just as I oppose authoritarianism, tyranny, oligarchy, aristocracy, and other nondemocratic ideologies. I oppose apartheid. I oppose genocide. To those who do not accept that what is happening is exactly a genocidal apartheid, I would urge you to prove the opposite, but in any case know that the burden of proof will be found with you to disprove what is apparent to even the untrained eye. I have many Jewish friends, and I respect the religion itself as an ancient system of existence and perception. Religion is not revelatory of identity and does not add to or subtract from any human being’s rights as human beings. I will not be silenced from shouting for attention paid to the oppression endured by Palestinians, drowned out by claims that I am engaging in antisemitism when I am only calling out Israeli oppression because they are actively pursuing policies of oppression, apartheid and genocide, and when I am more directly calling on my fellow US citizens to demand an end to funding this genocidal apartheid.
Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog! 
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