Thread by @AmerTheAwesome1

I don't get offended but I have to say that it definitely irks me whenever I see westerners use us in a throwaway political line like "He is just like Saddam" or "They are turning the country into Iraq". It is just that they don't understand what it is like.

You may know the concept of Saddam's mass graves and how around 300,000 people were buried in it. But you don't understand losing family, relatives and friends.. You will never understand a mother taken away from her child to return years later to find him dead and physically dry

You may know what torture means and all the different methods and tools. But you simply don't understand my father sleeping in his bed safely and then uttering apologies and begging for mercy in his sleep at the age of 62.

You could possibly list me facts about my country that I didn't even know using google and books in a second, but it would take me literal years and you may or may not understand what is it like to know that your uncle is "there somewhere" among the skulls of dead people.

You know the term dictatorship but you don't understand watching your mother panicking as she hides her daughters as she works in a hotel where the president's son decided to have sex with someone. You haven't seen your older sister wishing that she would be "Unwanted"

You haven't seen a respectable singer forced to strip naked and sings happy songs in front of hundreds of people, including his family, forced to laugh and sing along so they wouldn't be next. You don't understand watching your neighbor honor killed after a minister'd raped her.

You honestly don't understand thing. You were taught those terms, us in the Middle East lived it. You don't know the aftermath of a mass grave where families search through skulls hoping to somehow find their 3 years old relative.

You also don't even understand Southern Kurdish Feyli stranded in the dessert, men, women, and children, between Iraq and Iran for days with neither letting you in. You haven't slept in the desert, you haven't stared helplessly onto your son as he asks you water.

What do you understand about watching your father beg a baker for bread, or a grocery owner for food? You haven't in prison where there is no food and people risking their lives to deliver you food then get tortured because you ate and are still alive.

Like honest to GOD, what do you know about dictatorships and someone being like Hitler or Saddam. Definitions? Do you understand what those are? Do you honestly understand being oppressed? When you are protesting in the street, trust me, you are not being oppressed then.

Being oppressed is barely being able to look up. It is not something you say, you see it in your neighbor's eyes just like he sees it in yours. Then you both walk in with your heads down and remain silent as someone might be listening.

You were never told "Shut up or they will kill us" as a kid and it was honestly, statistically, and truthfully said. Stop trying to relate, you don't understand what it's like. You may have cried while hearing a survivor sharing a story, but they weren't relatives of yours.

You haven't seen your grandmother crying as her son's cellmate shares his last few days before disappearing. You haven't been woken up at 3 AM in pitch darkness to look for a fly in a big garden.

You can sue anyone at all if they take a button off your shirt, you don't understand your sister getting dragged in front of you. You can make thousands if you find an insect in your food, you haven't been forcibly fed them.

You haven't lived knowing you're indefinitely fucked up. You haven't understood what it takes for a 17 years old Yazidi rape victim to make a joke like "Oh, she was only raped twice? Lucky girl", you haven't laughed at that joke knowing what it means just to encourage her humor.

The most painful part is all of that, isn't even 10% of it. And I am pretty sure you could google the rest and recite all of it, and you would remember all of it, and you would know all of it, but you won't understand any of it. You may even cry about it, but that'd be a choice.