15 yr old Florida teen attacked, imprisoned, denied medical treatment

Oh?

 

Dwight howard tweeted free palestine then he deleted it after getting 1600 retweets in 25 minutes.

 

#freepalestine

Hope rockets PR didn't ask him to delete it.

 

Nba players should not post about serious political topics imo. He chooses a side and casspi might be his teammate next year...things get merky.

I am surprised it lasted over 35 minutes.

 

The hashtag #FreePalestine = Support for Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation hell bent on the destruction & annihilation of Israel, as well as the death of all the Jewish people.

I'm glad Dwight Howard had the courage to take it down.

 

What a dumb post.

 

Okay, I am out of here.

 

LMAO WHAT?!

 

Looolllllllllll. Never heard anything as ridiculous as this. Not even from ATW.

#FreePalestine

 

Did you get off your meds or are you trolling?

 

Good goyim

Are u the Australian division of jidf

 

You have no concept of what #freePalestine means apparently.

Please get real.

 

I've steered away from the D&D for a couple of days, on the fence about still posting here. You just reminded me why its best I stay away, thankfully this will be my last post.

 

Unlkely .

 

Casspi went to twitter to justify the murder of at least 140 innocent civilians, half of whom were women and children.

Casspi is from the Israeli city of Holon. The mayor of Holon refers to black basketball players in the Israeli League as N****** on multiple occasions.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140304/israel-mayor-calls-black-basketball-players-******s

 

He probably used the Hebrew word "kushim" a contraversial word outside my Hebrew literacy to argue, though in polite circles, I was always told it was awkwardly anachronistic, if not blatantly racist and never to use it.

Holon is it's own municiaplity, basically the poorest suburb of Tel Aviv, and home to some of the poorest and least educated people you'll encounter in Gush Dan. If Casspi grew up there, while it's probably safe to say there wasn't much college and certainly not much wealth in his family tree, I've never heard him or any other players say anything racist. He's not Pini Gershon.

Also consider that Holon is sandwiched between Bat Yam and Rishon Lezion and not far from Gaza -- not only does it get it's fair share of the rockets, it's also getting them in a place where most people can't afford to eat well, much less live in a new building with a bomb shelter. Those same people are likely his friends and family.

 

Kushim, or kuchim, is a derogatory term undoubtedly. As is araboushim. The pejorative nature of the word is not in dispute.

Sure, in ancient times, cushi most literally implied dark skinned person. Today, to be called kuchi in israel amounts to being called a *****r in the US.

The location of Holon does not excuse the racism, let's be real. The far from lethal rockets fired from Gaza have nothing at all to do with the nearly 60,000 asylum seekers of African origin currently in Israel.

The actual policy of the Likud beitenu government is one of "concentration". They seek to concentrate the unwanted ethnic population into camp like accommodations. Why? Well because they are cuchi.

See: Holot Detention Center

Also see: a post of mine from earlier in this thread regarding the racism of many Israeli youth

 

@davidsheen has done some remarkable journalism regarding the status of Africans in Israel today.

 

In the bible, there's a break in Moses' narrative, where he went to the "Land of Kush" after leaving Egypt but before the burning bush and all that. If I'm not mistaken, that's where the term first appears in bible and in any case, it's where I first heard it. I incidentally studied a lot of rabbinical commentary about it (and published a paper about it, no less) since nothing that happened during that period is in the bible itself.

But you are absolutely right that it is regarded as a racial slur. All I really have to offer is anecdotal and I can't speak for the language or the people who speak it. For one, I'm not a native Hebrew speaker, so I have my own bias as an English speaker and I simply don't feel qualified to argue linguistics. And for the other, I'm an American, so racial slurs in general are a culatural taboo, wheras in Israel, they are commonplace, even among friends, and not in a way that would be at all acceptable in any English-speaking culture. I was always told that "Americans are too PC" when I would get pissed off when Israelis casually referred to the Ivorian drummer I played with as "that ******" who would swear they meant no offense.

It also made some (but certainly not all) people who were ostensibly educated and open-minded really unconfortable when they saw pictures of my family (particularly my African-American brother-in-law and his kids with my sister, and for that matter, a Korean ex-girlfriend -- take note Sir Jackie) that invited a lot of very personal questions and rude quips that would have again been absolutely unacceptable in the US.

And that's unfortunately the way it is, and it actually got worse as I travelled to other parts of the Middle East. Saul Williams, if you know him, was shocked when he was in Ramallah and kids were waving and smiling and shouting "******" oblivious to what the word meant, especially to him.

As upset as he was, he said he had to remember it's a construct of English speakers and American culture, and even then, the last generation of Israeli and Palestinian kids learned it from TuPac, not George Wallace.

I still never got used to that.

I'm not being an apologist for Israeli racism or the dogwhistles it engages in and it would be an understatement to say that I wouldn't be the first choice of defenders for those that are guilty of it -- I'm just making it clear that Casspi has good reason to be upset about his home being rocketed.

The only thing linking the government's treatment of asylum seekers with The Conflict is rooted in the collective obsession of certain parlimentarians and their supporters of "keeping Israel Jewish" which I'm sure is not lost on anyone as to what that means. Those kinds of slogans got a lot of people elected in the last election.

I am familiar with David Sheen and I've never read anything by him that would question his credibility. He (and you) have every reason to be concerned and I don't think the mentality is going to change considerably in our lifetimes.

I saw more than the average Israeli probably did of its unguarded predjudice toward Africans because of my drummer, and there was a point where I lobbied the band to cover Mississippi ******* for which I was categorically denied due to the fact that they all felt:

1. There was no piano in the band, so it would sound awful
2. I couldn't sing remotely like Nina Simone
3. The audience I wanted to reach not only wouldn't get it -- it would likely have an opposite effect, with the audience thinking I was celebrating American segregation rather than criticizising theirs.