Health, Fitness, and Wisdom
-Rham Akra-
Se noyant au milieu de l’ocean,
Tandi qu’il ne pense qu’a leur franc.
Le monde abomine tremblant.
Mais lui, il reste certain
Dans ce sombre hiver larmoyant
Les bague deviennent de plus en plus déferlantes.
Et engloutissent toute son âme en profondeur
Quel douleur de soutenir tel malheur!
La cause, elle existe bien
Or, L’humanité regarde sans fin,
Ignorant, sans compassion, ni chagrin
La mer se tache de rouge
Les ombres dansent sur le rivage,
Tandis que lui, il reste certain.
A world Gone Cold
By: -Reem Youssef-
In shadows deep where silence reigns,
The cries of many drown in chains,
What once was right now wears a mask,
As apathy becomes our daily task.
Evil walks with a casual grace,
While kindness fades without a trace,
We turn away, our hears grown numb,
As suffering echoes, a distant drum.
Children laugh in sheltered light,
Unaware of the endless night.
Yet guild creeps in like a thief at dawn,
For every joy, a sorrow drawn.
How can we feast while others starve?
Injustice thrives where we should carve
A path of hope, a hand to lend,
But instead, we watch as shadows blend.,
My partner and I decided to rewatch all the James Bond movies, starting with the Daniel Craig series and working our way backward.
I know if you’re reading this then you’re probably thinking “why tho…?”
And I can’t really say much besides that we’ve been together for 23 years, and we do stuff like this. I should probably also mention that neither of us are huge James Bond fans. I watched a couple of the Sean Conary ones as a kid, and then the Pierce Brosnan ones with my friends when I was a teenager. I mean…they’re movies, they passed the time and I chilled with friends, can’t really say more than that.
By -Sarah B-
Mornings become mournings,
witnessing new worst worsts.
Group chats flood with news
forwards and check-ins,
still alive,
for now.
I watch my neighbour pace,
el wad3 sa3b.
Fridge filled with Tupperware from
a coping mother cooking.
Every sentence ends with a prayer,
Hamdillah.
Another Halloween, I am haunted
by bones and blood, because in
Falastine,
there’s no pretend.
We watch our skies light up,
with weapons custom designed for
us.
People become landmines in
Lebanon.
Detonate. Decimate.
Desecrate. Des/create. create from
desecreation:
ovens out of oil cans,
wind powered electricity from
plastic fans,
sewing machines run by bicycle
wheels,
life from destruction,
hope from telling,
truth.
The great Ghassan Kanafani said this. The 36 year old author, and politician, was assassinated along with his 17 year old niece in a car bomb planted by the Israeli Mossad. Yet his ideas, values and virtues, that empowered his will to resist, reverberate decades later. To this day he stands as an insurmountable symbol of strength, sumud (steadfastness), and uncompromising integrity.
On Friday, September 27, 2024, Israel assassinated another powerful figure of the Lebanese Arab resistance and secretary general of Hezb’Allah, Sayed Hasan Nasrallah. Israel’s weapon of choice for murdering Nasrallah was infinitely more barbaric and monstrous than that of any other Arab resistance leader that I can recall; carpet bombing six residential buildings in the Dahiyeh, a small suburb in Beirut Lebanon.
Classical Colonialism and Settler Colonialism each have their own logic. As such we need a different pedagogy for understanding each of the two.
In part one of this post I talked about my experience growing up with the patriarchal western conceptions of Love and Masculinity.
I also mentioned bell hooks who, for me, was the catalyst for me to reexamine and redefine the concept of Love. In particular, I spoke about some of the limitations of the patriarchal conception Love, and the harm those limitations can bring.
There are a few other important issues I discussed, including how narcissism and codependency are born from the patriarchal conception of Love. I encourage to go back and read part one if you haven’t already.
I remember the first time I heard the opening lyrics to the song “Teardrop” by Massive Attack: “Love, love is a verb. Love is a doing word, fearless on my breath”.
It was during my ‘undergrad in philosophy’ years, when I was learning ways to critically examine and analyze concepts. It was at that point that I really began to question my understanding of the concept of Love.
Everything before that was just childish pseudo-intellectualism fuelled by Western RomComs, Shakespeare, and Christian self-sacrifice narratives. The ultimate act of Love, I used to believe, is to sacrifice one’s own self and interests for another.
For as long as I can remember, and back from when I was a young child still living in Lebanon, I would hear the word “Shaheed” and “Martyr”. And though I have not stopped hearing those words throughout my whole life, there have certainly been times where I’ve heard them used a lot more. Specifically, social media outlets in the West have a need to sensationalize the word “Martyr” and how it relates to Arabs, and specifically Muslims.
In this post I want to delve a little bit into both the meaning and the translation of the word “Shaheed”, most commonly used and understood in the West as “Martyr”. My hope is that critical analysis of these terms helps to expose the biases and discriminations that arise from misusing them.
A long time ago I wrote my Master’s Philosophy thesis on “Aesthetics, Human Freedom, and Technological Rationality”. Thinking back on it now I probably should have come up with a more simple title like “Art, Freedom, and Capitalism”.
I examined the work of two philosophers Friedrich Schiller’s “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”, and Herbert Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man”. In short, I was interested in looking at the creative capacities of human beings and how Capitalism basically squashes those capacities.