"At 7:15pm, the low buzz of a drone was heard overheard. Seconds later, an enormous explosion engulfed the area, destroying the boat and several nearby homes. Sources say 46 Watertown residents were killed in the missile strike, including 12 children."
-A hypothetical narration of a drone targeting the Boston Marathon bombing suspect in Watertown by an American Facebook user based in San Francisco, has gone viral amongst Pakistani Facebook users. Within 24 hours the post was shared more than 5000 times and generated hundreds of comments.
What if Watertown was Droned?
(via globalvoices)
"I don’t care if she knew about this,” Coulter said. “She ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab. This immigration policy of us, you know, assimilating immigrants into our culture isn’t really working. They’re assimilating us into their culture. Did she get a clitorectomy too?"
-Ann Coulter: Boston suspect’s widow ‘ought to be in prison for wearing a hijab’
Read: The Raw Story (via brooklynmutt)
I think she is mixing up Muslims with The Borg.
(via waitingonoblivion)
the fuck? this is especially repulsive, even for her.
Cable news has, for all intents and purposes, ignored the shocking revelation that the fertilizer plant that exploded in West, Texas, was holding 270 tons of ammonium nitrate at the plant, 1,350 times the amount that is allowed without disclosure to the federal government.
But let’s just focus on Boston, shall we.
Sri Lanka and Coconut: The Many Uses of This Beloved ‘Drupe’
While traveling across Asia for their series on sustainable food, the duo from Perennial Plate stops by a modest coconut plantation near Negombo, Sri Lanka. Here, creators Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine meet an adorable family of eight, who eagerly demonstrate the coconut’s many virtues.
Queer Ijtihad: Queer Muslim Intersectionality and a Close Reading of Islamic Texts
Queer Muslims are policed and construed as illegal citizens not only in the Arab-Muslim world, but also in Western societies. They are seen as terrorists or dangers to the homonational and moral values of both the “East” and the “West.” This paper consists of two parts: the theorizing of Queer Muslims as intersectionality and a Queer Ijtihad (close reading and interpretation) of Islamic texts, the Qur’an and Hadith, with the goal of developing futurities that are inclusive of Queer Muslims.
These were our boards, 8’x6’ irl. Doubt you can see much here, but I’ll upload some close-ups when I get around to documenting the model, site model, and building episode
It’s so refreshing to do something I love and feel proud to the fullest extent about what I’ve produced. I really needed this semester (and this critique, which was the most successful I’ve ever had).
My project was entered into a competition for a scholarship and now all that’s left is to find out the results on Thursday… my professor kept telling my partner and I how much he was certain we’d win something, so I guess we’ll see if the panel agrees iA.
I’ve slept 50 minutes in the last 48 hours and pulled four all nighters-this week by the way so bye
this planned-alternating-all-nighters technique for the week leading up to my final critique is actually working really well. Fourth and hopefully final day/night this week of working in 30+ hour increments and maybe I’ll actually get a chance to recharge before my review for once. I don’t think I’ve ever worked this hard and not felt completely miserable doing it
It Took Two Whole Days for a Random Muslim to Get Assaulted in Boston
A Palestinian woman said she was assaulted while taking a late morning stroll with her baby daughter and friend by a man who accused her of being a terrorist. We thought someone would’ve been publicly attacked and berated for secretly planning the Boston Marathon bombings within hours of the explosions, but nope â racists managed to contain themselves for two days. Bravo.I am so disgusted, the stupidity, hate, and ignorance of most people continuously surprised me even though I’ve been long used to it.
so not surprised.
But it’d be awesome if articles about Muslim women would start to avoid the niqab/burqa stock-image cliché (I know, not gonna happen)
(Source: fagpimphoe)
"[Pakistani columnist] Rafia [Zakaria] does have a point; the scale of political violence in Pakistan is surely far greater than [America’s], and yet its victims received far less sympathetic attention from audiences outside the country than many of those elsewhere in the world. This habituation to the violence done to others (Others?) intersects with Susan Sontag‘s reflections on the suffering of others, and it’s that multi-stranded process of othering that deserves critical reflection. [T]his is about places as well as peoples – about the ways in which habituation and habitus are bound in to apprehensions of different places. Place is one of the crucial ways in which we navigate the world, physically and imaginatively, through the spatial cues provided by the meanings that become attached to place (what does ‘Baghdad’ signify to you?) and the places that become attached to meaning (which places are made to stand for ‘violence’?)."
-Derek Gregory - The tragedies of other places.
Rafia Zakaria’s article in Guernica is worth reading:
Pakistan suffered 652 of [bomb blasts] last year; terrorist attacks took down everything from girls’ schools to apartment buildings and felled members of Parliament, singers, and school children—each person sentenced by coincidence to be at a given location in the moment it became a bomber’s target.
[…]
Boston is no different, no more or less tragic than the bombings that have razed the marketplaces of Karachi, the school in Khost, the mosque in Karbala.
[…]
And yet it seems so. Attacks in America are far more indelible in the world’s memory than attacks in any other country. There may be fewer victims and less blood, but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response. Within minutes American victims are lifted from the nameless to the remembered; their individual tragedies and the ugly unfairness of their ends are presented in a way that cannot but cause the watching world to cry, to consider them intimates, and to stand in their bloody shoes. Death is always unexpected in America and death by a terrorist attack more so than in any other place.
In case you haven’t read Susan Sontag’s brilliant work on the same theme (death, inequality, grieving, pain), you can read it now.
(via mehreenkasana)
A French court has convicted Air France of discrimination after a flight crew member interrogated an activist about her ethnicity then had her ejected from a plane headed to Tel Aviv, where she had planned to attend a rally.
Thirty-year-old French nursing student Horia Ankour proved in a French court that she was approached in April 2012 by a flight attendant and asked if she had an Israeli passport, and then if she was Jewish. Replying in the negative to both questions cost Ankour her seat on the plane. She was planning on flying from Nice to Tel Aviv to attend a solidarity initiative called ‘Welcome to Palestine.’
“We cannot tolerate this kind of conduct on our territory,” state prosecutor Abdelkrim Grini said during the trial. “Today they ask you if you’re Jewish, tomorrow if you’re Muslim, after tomorrow if you’re homosexual or a trade unionist.”
An Air France official stated shortly following the incident that the flight attendant’s treatment of Ankour came “on demand from Israeli authorities and in their name,” Le Monde Diplomatique reported at the time.
That claim was confirmed by Air France attorney Fabrice Pradon, who testified that the demand to interrogate Ankour came “directly from Israeli authorities.”
Ankour, like other activists who have experienced the same intimidation tactics and discrimination, was later sent a sarcastic letter from the Israeli government ‘thanking’ her for trying to come to Israel for humanitarian reasons, according to Israel Nation News.
She was also placed on an Israeli government list of “undesirables.”
Air France was ordered to pay 13,000 euro ($16,700) in fines, damages and interest in the Thursday ruling. Meanwhile, Pradon said the airline would appeal.
"
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) warned Wednesday that “radical Islamists” are being “trained to act like Hispanic[s]” and cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We know Al Qaeda has camps over with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border,” he said Wednesday on C-Span. “We know that people that are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanic [sic] when they are radical Islamists. We know these things are happening. It is just insane not to protect ourselves, to make sure that people come in as most people do … They want the freedoms we have.”
He compared the United States to Israel, and said that the nation might need a border fence in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. “Finally the Israeli people said, ‘You know what? Enough.’ They built a fence, and the rest is a wall to prevent snipers from knocking off their kids. They finally stopped the domestic violence from people that wanted to destroy them. I am concerned we might need to do that as well,” he said, adding he didn’t know whether the attack in Boston was domestic or foreign in origin.
" -u triedlmao in the last five minutes half the news sources switched from “arrest made” to “woops, jk” and the other half went the other way around.
this is fucking ridiculous. how does anyone believe breaking news anymore?
Lady Gaga, Dan Savage, the Human Rights Campaign and the rest of those hug brigade assholes are all intensely focused on creating a really hurtful narrative wherein you can be accepted, you can have your rights, you can be entitled to basic human decency if you show the right type of queerness, if you want to get married, if you can say “We’re just like you! See” that leaves behind queer people, trans people, people of colour, people who don’t fit that narrative in the dust. Time and time again these self-proclaimed activists actually go out of their way to exclude those people. It’s not slipping their mind. They literally don’t want them. Because the world just isn’t ready for that alleged ugliness, according to them. Wait, wait for a bit, then we’ll see about the rest
Your body and your sexuality and your gender and your priorities must meet a minimum level of permissibility and shitheads like Lady Gaga sign off on all of it and everyone gives her a pass because “well at least she’s doing something which is more than we can say about you!”
