The gist of many Holocaust books came down to “be kind and also look at how the Jewish people suffered, dont be like that to the Jews”

Instead of genocide is a process that starts with classification, symbolisation, discrimination and dehumanisation. Genocide can happen anywhere, to anyone. The Holocaust was a genocide that targeted Jewish people but also Roma people, Slavic People, Disabled people, LGBTQ people, black people, etc.

It started slowly enough and then came all at once. It started with propaganda. With fear-mongering a target identified as “the scary other”.

Genocides have been perpetrated before and after the Holocaust. Which means nothing has been “learnt”.

There is an ambiguity about Holocaust and Genocide Education as a whole. There is a vague “other” and a vague “hatred” instead of naming it for what it is: fascism.

The vagueness of Genocide Education has done precisely what it meant to do all along: erase the history and reality of how and what precisely happened. Focusing on one singular group in order to manufacture consent for the occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of a completely different group by that initial group. By making Holocaust and Genocide education into terms of ambiguity and vagueness instead of specificity and direct information, it has erase the suffering of countless groups of people, predating the Holocaust, during the Holocaust, and after the Holocaust.

It was painted as the single, greatest evil to ever occur. It turned into a perpetual mark of victimhood for the Jewish people alone and it turned Israel as the great saviour of the Jewish people, who had suffered deeply and horrifically and even uniquely in many ways…but not singularly.

Apparently the Israeli Embassy in Sarajevo will be hosting a special event to remember October 7th. Many are outraged, including the mayor. The event will be held at a private venue & some are saying how it should be shut down while others are claiming to shut it down is a violation of freedom of speech & people should protest it instead. This event is far less about commemorating the October 7th and its victims and far more about causing issues. Why you ask? B/c the Israeli Ambassador is one of the most vile people to exist & is throwing this event in order to cause agitation so they can play victim.

One of the dumbest things I hear, especially from liberals & even Balkan liberals, is that I should not criticise the USA because I lived there and got an education there.

& i love this imaginary world that they live in where they assume that these things were gifted to me by the USA instead of being things I actually worked for. I did get my education in the United States and did go to college there and did do my post-graduate there because I was a very hard-working student who worked a full-time job all while I was going to school.

I started working at 12 under the table and 14 legally by 17 I was working full-time.

I worked immensely hard at both my education and my job. I paid taxes. I took out student loans and I got scholarships and grants because I worked hard, not b/c the US government gave it to me willy-nilly.

I helped build two businesses and I created my own non-profit organisation, I got funding for that through, again, my own hard work.

During the Bosnian Genocide, when there was an arms embargo placed on Bosnia, it was Hezbollah with the help of Turkey that helped to smuggle weapons into Bosnia so we would not be entirely defenceless while the 4th greatest military force in Europe at the time was massacring us. & while Israel provided funding, weapons, and even training to Serbs and paramilitary groups, while they had a “great relationship” with Milosevic and Mladic too…Bosnia was left to rely mainly on the little weapons they had, much of it homemade & created out of bits & pieces.

Listen, I am totally fine with people correcting me when I am wrong and I am certainly not an expert in every field or on every subject.

But I am absolutely educated on genocide. What is happening in Palestine is a genocide. You are not more well-informed than me on this. Nor are you as informed as I am on the curriculum within schools on genocide, specifically the Holocaust, because I have quite literally worked with schools in the UK and the US to improve their genocide education.

For the past year, I’ve genuinely been stuck in this endless loop of trying to make a decision about whether or not I stay here in London, do I move back home to Bosnia, do I move back to Chicago or Iowa or New York…& in the end I have realised it is really miserable everywhere. The economy is bad here but it is much worse in Bosnia. In the US the economy is less bad than it is here but school shootings, the possibility of Trump, the expensive healthcare are all immediate drawbacks.

The job market in the UK is a disaster BUT it is a self-created disaster. I’ve been speaking to recruiter friends and here are some interesting tidbits of info:

1. Employers are forcing recruiters to put up job postings with lower salaries in order to “motivate” the team. I.e they are not actually looking to hire, they are simply trying to scare their current employees into thinking their jobs are potentially at risk and that if they don’t give it their all, they’ll be replaced.

There’s been such a massive shift in the way that we behave, our interests, our hobbies, and how we spend our time that it is genuinely a bit scary. I mean, 20 years ago if someone just stayed home all the time, had no friends, no interests, no hobbies they were considered weird. Now, most people go to work, come home and do absolutely nothing. People’s hobbies tend to be focused around scrolling on their phones or binge watching.

This isn’t a moral failing, obviously, but it is making everyone extremely isolated and lonely.

I know it caused a lot of outrage when that person said that they cannot stand to see the Star of David because of what Israel is doing.

I get it. For so many years, every time I saw a cross, the Serbian flag, the three finger salute I would feel so unbelievably uncomfortable. Seeing it would put me in a state of fear. Because everywhere you went in Bosnia, they would paint their cross on. They burned people alive on crosses. They massacred entire villages and then posted the flag. They’d wave the 3 finger salute while calling you a Balija.

If you decide that you want to dedicate your time, effort, energy and career to social justice, to activism, to research and education and progress…you have to literally fight against dissolutionism, apathy, and cynicism on a daily basis. I’ve done that for years…. And after almost 20 years, I think I have started to become disillusioned. I am not apathetic. I am not a cynic. But I have grown increasingly disillusioned with the world, our capacity for empathy, and our willingness to demand and ensure better for ourselves & each other.

I’ve been in the UK for a while now and honestly, I am still adjusting and learning.

In many ways, the things I was lauded for in the USA: my directness, my friendliness, my commitment, and even just being a passionate person are things I am disliked for & punished for here. Most of the friends I have made in London are ethnic minorities and very few were even born or raised in the UK.

British people do not like me very much because British people do not like directness, they prefer passive communication. Directness is too much.

Can I say something, possibly controversial?

I strongly believe, based on conversation I have had off the record with certain people, that in the US and UK (possibly throughout Europe) everyone is aware that Israel is committing genocide and they will let them do it…. Because nobody, no country especially, wants to be the one to threaten a Jewish state and certainly no country wants to be the one to bombs Jew throughout intervention in this genocide. An act they would certainly do eventually if it was a different state committing genocide.

I hate starting my sentences with “As a genocide survivor…” but as a genocide survivor, all the hope I had once held that it was just ignorance and it was just the lack of access to information, that allowed the Western world to sit by while we were massacred has evaporated. I had even held this hope that the Western Lefties who had clung to the idea that Milosevic was just an anti-imperialist, was borne out of ignorance and lack of information. I was so deeply wrong.

The conversation that is being had recently is a conversation I have had before. & as someone who has had it before, I know that it is just far too difficult to Americans of any race, any religion, and ethnicity to accept that they do hold extensive privilege over others. This does erase the oppression they endure in America. It does not erase their history. But it also does not change the reality that Americans do and have always held privilege over those outside of it, especially in the Global South or in 3rd world countries.

I’d like to genuinely ask why white liberal women seem so intent on keeping Muslim women oppressed and in a cage?I thought you wanted us to unveil? To dress modernly instead of modestly? To be free to mingle with men?

& then when we do it, we must be “men” for doing so.

https://twitter.com/lilylilymaynard/status/1822041315724444039

Algeria is not Saudi, for one. Algeria women are not a monolith. Muslim women are not a monolith. I’ve done it and seen it done with countless of my friends at concerts. We’ve had our guy friends pick us up so we could see. This entire conversation is genuinely pissing me off.

This is a bit over simplification. The Romani do a lot and it is precisely because the systemic oppression that they face that they end up having to do those things, never being able to assimilate anywhere, and therefore the cycle continues.

https://twitter.com/dragoncobolt/status/1819872019992989797

There’s issues with every group, the Romani are not an exception. Some of the cultural traditions such as marriage of teens, pulling girls out of school are obviously problematic but nobody looks out for those girls because they’re Romani…which then just allows the abuse to con.

Listen today I discovered that the life-saving medication I take is behind literally *all* of alignments which have severely affected my quality of life, my looks, and my general well-being.

And it makes me wanna bawl b/c not a single doctor told me the side effects of it. It has reduced my appetite to such a severe extent that I go days and days without eating and yet the medication also causes massive weight gain, no matter what you do. So I am gaining weight while also starving. It causes massive bloating and swelling. My feet, needs & hands?

I do not care who it is or which group of people it is, even when it’s my own people, I hold such a strong distaste for anyone who makes themselves and/or their community to be “the people who suffered most ever in history, are still suffering, will never stop suffering.” I strongly believe that perpetual victimhood as well as ownership of suffering has damaged us severely and continues to do so. Particularly b/c there is now an underlying option of violence with perpetual victimhood. Suddenly, their suffering also them to perpetuate it on others.

Not quite. The term “genocide” coined by Ralph Lemkin was originally used by him to describe the Armenian Genocide. He wanted a word which encapsulated such acts of mass violence & destruction. Following this, he then applied it to The Holocaust (as well as other atrocities).

https://twitter.com/buttuglybabies/status/1816940749738709467

There is also no way to “appropriate” a sociological term and act which predates the Holocaust. The countless Indigenous Genocides, the Herero & Nama Genocide, the Assyrian & Armenian Genocides, The Congo Genocide, even the Great Irish Famine all predate the Holocaust.

I’m going to keep saying this until people start to get it.

Referring to the Palestinian Genocide as anything other than the Palestinian Genocide is a way of localising the genocide to just Gaza and erasing the atrocities which occur throughout all of Occupied Palestine. The current atrocities are simply a much more extreme continuation of the genocide which has been continually committed against the Palestinians since the creation of Israel. The Genocide in Gaza or the Gazan Genocide is simply not the most accurate or encompassing term.

The comments on this are utterly unhinged. The fact our culture looks different than yours does not mean we are not Muslim. Gender segregation has no place in public and the Quran does not require it of Muslims. Beards are not required, there is no consensus on it.

https://twitter.com/Ahmed45670/status/1815855224822850048

No offence but South Asians will practice gender segregation to such an extreme extent that they end up not knowing how to function in the workplace or even how to talk to women in order to get married and then they'll whine about not being able to get married. Pls spare me.