something to talk about

standardreview:

this-is-not-jewish:

Please note up front that I am not Palestinian, or Arab, or Muslim. I am an American Jew. So any list I draw up with this title is doomed to be incomplete, because there are a lot of facets of the Palestinian experience that I just don’t see.

HOWEVER.

I’ve seen a shocking amount of orientalist…

“People who are poor and oppressed, on the whole, engage in more violence and subscribe to more extremist forms of religions—regardless of what religions they practice, because the real problem isn’t the religion, it’s the poverty and oppression.”

Just to nitpick in this otherwise excellent post: We have a tendency to see the way oppressed people behave as violent in a way we don’t see capitalism, hegemony, and political power as violent. I get this, and I appreciate that this post understands the roots of that kind of violence, but rhetorically I’d like us to move away from it. Oppression is violence. Capitalism is violence. If you use a ballot measure, or a vote, or a dollar to fuck someone up, that’s violence. Using police to quell protests is violence. Even if we think of violence as value-neutral, as just a tool to be used on the side of right or wrong (I don’t feel this way, but…), sitting in an office wearing a tie and signing a piece of legislation that takes away rights like health care, or someone’s home, or the right to move freely from one town to the next is an act of violence. So when we turn on the TV (I’m for a moment going to talk about my experience in America, even though this post was originally about Israel, because most of this blog’s readership is in America) and see that someone poor robbed a convenience store, we must not forget the acts of violence committed by rich people, constantly, that give the poor no options.

Took the words right out of my mouth!