While Most Of The Arguments Attacking The Legitimacy Of Palestinian Gfms And The People Who Verify Them

While most of the arguments attacking the legitimacy of palestinian gfms and the people who verify them seem to boil down to the plain racism and the discomfort with having to think of palestinians as anything other than faceless statistics on your phone or tv screens instead of real living people who want to talk to us, there is a strain of of it that i find more aggravating than anything else.

[image i.d.: senatortedcruz, 6d ago: Friends I will be honest I don't think real life Gazans are taking time out of their day to make brand new tumblr blogs then send asks to big bloggers asking for money.]

This makes my blood boil for a couple of reasons:

FIRSTLY, there is the assumption that palestinians were somehow never on the internet before. The smear campaign against shahed began literally after some users found it impossible to believe that she was a real person who loves photography and to talk to me about her art and how important it was to her. This was IN SPITE of me linking her Instagram that has existed long before October 7th 2023 and has over 6k followers specifically there for her art, which they would have found easily if they had cared to actually read my posts about her.

This is nothing new, because it has always been the general assumption from users in the imperial core that you don't think we from the global south can exist on the internet and see all the shit you say and have opinions about it– but it never stops being shocking to me how thoroughly you are ready to pretend we aren't real people every time. We are directly seeing the results of that wilful ignorance manifest itself cruelly against palestinians in their time of need today.

And then SECONDLY comes the fact that they aren't entirely wrong– reaching out to us on the internet in the middle of a genocide IS insanely hard. There are constant network outages due to the incessant bombing, people have lost their homes and livelihoods, they have lost so much of their friends and families, they are sick and injured, they are struggling just to find any food or any clean water. A lot of people either lost their cellphones while fleeing violence or probably had to sell them and pick cutting themselves off from the world and each other over starving. They are experiencing atrocities beyond our comprehension. A lot of people have given up, especially in the face of the apathy they see from the rest of the world to what they are going through. But that doesn't mean everyone has and that they aren't reaching out to us anyway, often at great cost to themselves, because it is a matter of survival.

Shahed has told me that she has had to struggle a lot to reach out to us. Finding places where there is internet connection is very hard, and she often has to risk going by active combat zones to get a good enough reception to talk to me and others here she has befriended. The danger is even more so at night, and she has told me about how afraid she is at those times because of the presence of iof quadcopters in the area. Sometimes she is able to come by internet connection at night from someone with some solar cells nearby her tent now that running electricity has become so hard to come by in gaza, but she has to pay a high fee to get it from them, dipping into the meagre funds her family has saved for food and water instead.

Every single message that reaches us from gaza comes with a sacrifice we can't even begin to understand.

The cost she has to pay both literally and in terms of the dangers to her life to reach out to us are extremely high, but she still does it all because she is the sole provider for her family of seventeen right now– especially her little siblings Rafif and Masa, who are suffering from severe hepatitis right now and urgently need to get out of gaza so that they can seek treatment in egypt; and her months old nephew who was born just weeks before the genocide began and has no access to baby food or diapers right now.

It GALLS me to see people try to call her a liar for being able to have an internet connection at ALL when i know just how hard she had to fight to get it.

Just because YOU are unable to imagine yourself in that situation when you are in your comfortable homes with an easily available connection, DOESN'T mean there aren't people who are willing to fight to be heard and get the help they deserve. And of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the struggle that comes with crowdfunding when you are in gaza.

Your “cynicism” comes from a place of privilege and doesn't help anyone. You are only insulting all the palestinians who work so hard every day to reach out to us, all so some truly heartless people can call them bots or scams for being able to reach out to anyone at all.

WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. SHAHED HAS TO REACH 80K WITHIN THIS WEEK TO EVACUATE HER WHOLE FAMILY.

WE HAVE ONLY JUST CRACKED 68K/80K, AND THERE IS STILL A LONG WAY TO GO.

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Shahd in Gaza!, organized by Shahed Muhammad

Have you ever experienced seeing your dream broken in front of your eyes and not being able to do … Shahed Muhammad needs your support for H

Please donate to and share Shahed's fundraiser as widely as possible. Take it to your whatsapp groups, to your discord servers, your instagram stories. Repost her story and her photography, repost the link to the raffle at @journalsforpalestine wherever you have reach because there is only so much i can do with the deadline looming so close to us.

This CANNOT wait. You've gotten her this far, let's get her through this last stretch too.

Today I went to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital and helped an orphan girl whose father and mother were killed in the war. She was injured and is now unable to move.🙏🏻♥️

I also hope that you will support me in my campaign on Go Fund Me because I also need to help my family and my sick mother. Thank you everyone♥️

🍉🍉

@ibtisam @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @vakarians-babe @7amaspayrollmanager @fairuzfakhira @fallahsart @sayruq @humanvoreture @kaapstadgirly @sar-soor @dimonds456-art @plomegranate @commissions4aid-international @nabulsi @stil-macher @soon-palestine @communitythings @palestinegenocide @vakarians-babe @ghost-and-a-half @7amaspayrollmanager @kaapstadgirly @annoyingloudmicrowavecultist @feluka @marnota @toughknit @flower-tea-fairies @the-stray-liger @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @vivisection-gf @communistchameleon @troythecatfish @the-bastard-king @4ft10tvlandfangirl

🍉🍉

I hope you support me🙏🏻

gofundme.com

Donate to Save Umm Mohamed and her grandchildren’s lives, organized by Asia Rehman

My name is Asia Rehman and I have created this fundraiser on behalf of Umm … Asia Rehman needs your support for Save Umm Mohamed and her gra

Israel is one of the most racist countries in the world.

Please save what's left of my family

Hello dear

I am from the Baalousha family from Gaza.. 🇵🇸🍉

I hope you are well .

I write to you with a heart full of hope and faith, and I ask for your urgent help. My family is in great danger due to the war, and I am running a fundraising campaign to save them. My father and mother suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure. Help me secure them

Please, can you reblog my campaign post on my account? Every contribution can make a difference in my family's life and any donation, even a small one, makes a difference.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for any help you can provide. 🇵🇸🇵🇸

The campaign was documented by @90-ghost 🍉🍉.

@staff can you please do something to block these bots? Getting spammed by them

Also, @90-ghost seriously doubting your credibility at this point

*please donate to reputable organisations everyone

the palestinian olympic team in paris 🇵🇸

In the light of this heartlessness, blatant anti-Palestinian racism and callousness, please consider spotlighting a campaign. One person might not be able to spotlight all campaigns, but if a lot of people commit themselves to one or two campaigns, and hold themselves to the promise of fighting for it, we can all collectively do a lot of good.

You don't need any special qualifications to do this. Sure, if you were hosting the GFM campaign itself or are responsible for transfer of funds/information, then yes, you would need to be qualified and responsible to handle that, but I'm talking about simply taking it upon yourselves to make sure a single campaign (preferably more if you're able) is getting reach and doesn't die down.

Reach out to a campaign from the vetted list, especially if it's low on funds. Check regularly for progress and update in reblogs to reflect that. Tag people for reach in every update (as many as there are people who will whine and stomp their feet at being asked to care, and can't even do the bare minimum of ignoring being tagged and remaining silent and instead go on a racist rant, there are also people who are happy and willing to be tagged.) Cross-post on other platforms. Make banners or anything eye-catching if you can. Communicate with the campaign owner with machine translation or otherwise if you can and if they are comfortable updating you on their status. Send to your friend groups and discord servers. Reblog and queue for times where people are most active on here.

I could scream and cry at the people who made these accusation all day, but in the end the best justice is to actually try to make up for any lost traction.