something that's been rattling around inside my head recently in the middle of the genocide in palestine is the coverage of death counts, and how we use those counts to understand how morally bankrupt one side of the conflict is. the thing i've been noticing is mainly who gets to be a condemnation and who gets to be collateral damage.

women and children are the classic example of groups of people whose deaths are not quite sacred (violence against women and children is carried out worldwide and without much fanfare), but are certainly significant. a lot of people who discuss the genocide in palestine rely on a trope of communicating tragedy called "the perfect victim", which essentially means that people care more about the deaths of people they perceive as blameless or innocent. jokes have been made that newspapers often believe the best thing you can be is a dead baby: a blameless, innocent angel taken before their time, uncomplicated by living in the world.

this trope of the perfect victim gives us new ways to subtly dehumanize other people, while signing ourselves onto the virtuous side of a conflict. we get to ignore the complicated people who tend to be sex workers, drug dealers, prisoners, and a lot of other adults when something tragic happens because they're not the person that's going to win the argument for you: they're not rosa parks, they're claudette colvin.

in this way, there are protected classes of the dead, and then the nameless masses: children, women, occasionally the elderly, and people who we, often erroneously, consider to be innocent or childlike (autistic children fit into this category sometimes, due to our society's backwards view of people on the spectrum) all fit into the protected classes of the dead. men, in comparison, are rarely named specifically in the throngs of dead that conflict creates. at best, we are seen as righteous heroes who fell defending the important members of our families from the worst of harm's way. at worst, the faceless collateral damage of wars that all men supposedly love seems to welcome us into its strangulating embrace.

this is not an invitation for men's rights idiots to come onto my page and insist that women and children possess some sort of privilege in death, because they simply don't. i do, however, think it's an extension of the sense of toxic masculinity that men often suffer under that we are not seen as important deaths in moments of tragedy. equating men with war and death, coming from men or anyone else, does not make us heroes. it makes it so that the fact that we died is more justifiable than the loss of our story is tragic. every palestinian man who has been killed in this genocide deserves the reverence of the grave the way that their children do, the way that their mothers, their sisters, their wives do, not because they're more deserving than women and children, but for the simple fact that they're human too.

and if it wasn't clear. free palestine 🇵🇸

2018: A Timeline of Fascist And Bigoted Extremist Violence

(CONTENT WARNING FOR EXTREME RACIST LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE) 

In keeping with our 2017 list of violence committed by bigots and fascists, we thought it smart to continue this year.  The date of each incident noted and other details will yield the original media source(s) with some web searching.  We will be updating this on the regular, so check back once in a while.  Here’s hoping we have a much smaller and less-lethal list this year! January 1, 2018: Charles William Davis II - a black army veteran and gay man - is waiting for a ride home with his friend when six men start in with homophobic slurs before escalating to a full-on six-on-two assault.  When Davis begins getting the upper hand, one of the men pulls a gun before a passerby scares them off.  Davis suffers a broken nose and several lacerations; his friend spends the first few days of 2018 in an ICU.   January 1, 2018: A shelter for unaccompanied refugee children in Spinetoli, Italy is destroyed by arsonists. January 2, 2018: 19-year-old student Blaze Bernstein is stabbed nearly two dozen times and then buried in a shallow grave in a park outside of Los Angeles.  20-year-old Samuel Woodward, a former classmate, is charged with the murder and makes statements indicating that Bernstein was murdered because of his sexual orientation. It’s later revealed that Woodward is a self-described “national socialist” and member of neo-nazi terrorist organization Atomwaffen Division.

January 3, 2018: Muslim restauranteur Abdul Basheer is randomly targeted by BJP extremists in Karnataka, India, who beat him to death in retaliation for the murder of a BJP activist hours earlier.  Basheer’s murderers admit to membership in a Hindu extremist nationalist group. January 6, 2018: A black farm worker driving his employer’s tractor in South Africa was shot dead by a security guard in an unprovoked shooting described by the province’s agriculture minister as a hate crime.

January 9, 2018: After being vandalized repeatedly with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti the week before, a grocery store near Paris is set on fire by arsonists, causing extensive damage.     January 10, 2018:  Vicky Guiterrez, an immigrant and transgender woman, is killed when her LA apartment mysteriously is engulfed in flames.  Her friends claim that the attack was hate-motivated.  An autopsy determines that Guiterrez was stabbed to death and police charge Kevyn Ramirez with her murder. January 11, 2018: 31-year-old Aryan Nations gang member Ronnie Lucas Wilson is stopped for speeding in Knoxville, TN and opens fire on the police officer with a shotgun, seriously wounding him, before driving away.  Lucas remains at large until being apprehended two days later. January 11, 2018:  Believing that he is being followed, Alabama resident Lorenzo Freeman pulls into a parking lot where he is confronted by the driver of the other vehicle, who jumps out yelling racial slurs at Freeman, then pulls out a gun and fires at Freeman, killing him.   January 12, 2018: Over 30 armed Casa Pound fascists attack people putting up anti-racist posters in Genova, Italy, stabbing one of them twice in the back.   January 13, 2018: A meeting on Roma culture in a bar in Naples, Italy is disrupted when dozens of members of the racist group Forze Nuova crash the event, smashing up the bar and seriously injuring the woman who had organized the event. January 14, 2018: 44-year-old Manuel Lewis runs up to a table outside of a Tucson’s Starbucks where seven Muslim women are sitting and drinking coffee.  Shouting Islamophobic slurs and curses at them, Lewis knocks two of the women down to the ground, flips their table end-over-over, and smashes one woman’s smartphone.  A bystander stops Lewis from getting away and when police arrive to arrest Lewis, they found that his is carrying multiple knives.   January 19, 2018: 37-year-old neo-nazi Jacob Albert Laskey, who had previously served a prison sentence for throwing swastika-engraved rocks through the windows of a synagogue during services and conspiring to murder a witness, stabs a 41-year-old man in a Creswell trailer park.   January 19, 2018: After enduring years of harassment by Hindu extremists, the body of Christian pastor V. Gideon Periyasamy is found hanging from a rope in his hut in Chennai, India. January 20, 2018: As he was leaving the home of his date, 26-year-old Dashawn Horne is hit in the back of the head twice with an aluminum baseball bat by  an 18-year-old assailant.  As he laid bleeding and unconscious on the ground, the assailant said “this is what happens when you bring black people around here,” then struck him several more times with the baseball bat, then recorded himself yelling “Nigger” at Horne.  

January 21, 2018: Fascists in Thessaloniki, Greece set fire to a historic building occupied by leftists, gutting it.   January 23, 2018: A 25-year-old man makes several attempts to run over an Arab man sweeping the sidewalk in Beitar Illit after speaking with him and discovering he was Arab.  The racist driver later confessed to several other attacks on Palestinians as well as vandalizing Palestinian-owned vehicles. January 24, 2018:  A man approaches a student at Cupertino College yelling homophobic slurs.  He punches the student in the face and then flees. January 25, 2018: A car belonging to an Arab men is torched in Jerusalem, with “Death to the Arabs” and other racist graffiti spray-painted on the wall next to it.   January 26, 2018: After hearing someone calling for help, 58-year-old Thomas Williams leaves his Scottsdale, AZ apartment to investigate.  He is immediately confronted by a Keaton Formica, a 30-year-old neighbor, who begins calling Williams a nigger and stabbing him.  Williams is stabbed three times and manages to escape by rolling underneath a parked truck. January 26, 2018: when her Lyft driver stops to pick up a man outside of a gay bar in Miami Beach, 24-year-old Sherry Shelsey Moody becomes infuriated and begins screaming homophobic slurs at the new passenger, then stabbed him in the face with one of her high-heeled shoes, puncturing his forehead.

January 27, 2018: Two men in the bathroom of a Sacramento bar are physically assaulted by a man yelling homophobic slurs at them before fleeing.  One man is injured so badly that he will likely lose one of his eyes.   January 30, 2018: 59-year-old Jon Holte knocks on the door of a Latino family in Wisconsin and shoves the door in as they open it, forcing one man backwards and injuring him.  Holte then falsely claims to be an ICE agent and undercover deputy sheriff there “because of all the illegals.” He is charged with several hate crimes.

January 31, 2018: Two teenagers randomly ambush and assault an eight-year-old Jewish boy while he is walking to a tutoring class in a Paris suburb. January-February 2018: Members of the “Aryan Circle” and “Aryan Brotherhood of Texas” kidnap a man they suspect ripped them off in a drug deal.  They hold the man for several days, chopping off part of his index finger with a hatchet and trying to bludgeon him unconscious.  They then order an associate to take the man to another location and murder him, but the man escapes.   January-February 2018: 31-year-old Shane Sleeper makes a series of terrorist threats against several gay nightclubs in Chicago as well as the staff working there.  He is charged with several misdemeanors which are later upgraded to a litany of terrorism, hate crime, and stalking charges.  Sleeper was last arrested in 2015 for beating the owner of a gay nightclub in Atlanta. February 1, 2018: Ankit Saxena a 23-year-old Hindu photographer in West Dehli, India, is attacked by relatives of his Muslim girlfriend, who slit his throat, leaving him to bleed to death on the said of the road. February 3, 2018: 28-year-old white supremacist and failed candidate for the anti-immigrant Northern League party Luca Traini goes on a two-hour drive-by shooting  spree, seriously wounding six African migrants. February 4, 2018: Four African migrants in Pavia, Italy are attacked by a group of two dozen neo-nazis.   February 4, 2018: Transgender woman Celine Walker is shot to death in a Jacksonville hotel.     February 4, 2018: The Hungarian Cultural Center in  Uzhhorod, Ukraine is firebombed.  Three weeks later, it is firebombed a second time.  Police arrest  Michal Prokopowicz, 28, along with two other Poles associated with fascist groups throughout Europe.  At trial, Prokopowicz claims to have been acting on instructions from far-right German journalist and former AfD consultant  Manuel Ochsenreiter. February 4, 2018: 32-year-old Izmir Koch asks a crowd of people outside of a Cincinnati restuarant whether any of them are Jewish.  When a man answers in the affirmative, Koch runs up to him and punches him in the head, knocks him to the ground, and begins kicking him, along with some of his friends, fracturing the man’s eye socket.

February 6, 2018: 35-year-old transgender woman Tonya Harvey is shot dead in Buffalo, NY.

February 7, 2018: 36-year-old John Ross Niko is driving his truck through Keizer, Oregon when he spots a Latino man standing on the sidewalk.  Niko jumps out of his truck and approaches the man, saying “why are you standing here? Go back to Mexico!” before punching him in the face.  Niko had previously harassed the victim’s son and attempted to run him over.  When placed under arrest, Niko protested that he had “been attacked by an illegal” who “does not speak English” and admitting to harassing the man’s son.

February 9, 2018: Reigning Mr. Gay Belgium winner Jaimie Deblieck is attacked from behind on the streets of his hometown of Roeselare by assailiants yelling “fucking homo!” as they stomped on him. February 9, 2018: Dalit law student Dilip Saroj is beaten to death by four men armed with clubs, bricks, and chairs after Saroj’s leg brushed against the leg of another man in a crowded restaurant in Allahbad, India.  

February 10, 2018: A 19-year-old Muslim woman is speaking to a nurse in a Michigan hospital emergency room when 57-year-old John Deliz runs up behind her and punches her repeatedly in the head before he is subdued by hospital security.   February 10, 2018: Portland tattoo shop owner Joseph “Dymond” Vinci - who has publicly proclaimed his support of both the extreme right Three Percenter and Patriot Prayer gangs - confronts a homeless man in the parking lot of his business.  Vinci, who had bragged to neighbors about “beating the fuck out of” another homeless man three days prior, beats the man, 38-year-old Richard Hanley, with a metal police baton.  When a stunned Hanley produces a steak knife, Vince drops the baton, draws a pistol, and shoots Hanley dead.  

February 14, 2018: 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz walks into the high school he was expelled from with an assault rifle and murders 17 of his former classmates.  Cruz was known to his former classmates for making frequent anti-semitic, homophobic, and xenophobic comments publicly and over Instagram and had previously threatened to murder antifa.  His former classmates remember him wearing “really extreme” patriotic t-shirts and a MAGA hat and deriding Muslims as terrorists.  He had carved swastikas into several of the spare magazines he was carrying for his AR-15 assault rifle.   February 14, 2018: Declaring that “I hate turban people,” a man puts a gun in the face of Gurjeet Singh, a Sikh man, father and Uber driver.   February 17, 2018: A 70-year old men enters a refugee shelter in Heilbronn, Germany armed with a knife and stabs three refugees, seriously wounding a 17-year-old Afghan refugee.   February 17, 2018: While returning to their car after eating dinner at a Carmel, CA. restaurant, a Muslim family is nearly killed when Robert Budden attempts to run them down in his Porsche, hitting husband & father Amro Radwan.  Budden then gets out of his car, insults Radwan, and then drives into him a second time. February 20, 2018: While waiting for a Nottingham bus, 18-year-old Egyptian  engineering student Mariam Moustafa is set upon by a mob of six girls without any provocation.  Moustafa dies from her injuries three weeks later   February 22, 2018: A Sikh environmentalist waiting outside of British Parliament to speak to a politician is randomly attacked by a passing man, who attempts to pull off his turban while yelling “Muslim go home!” at him. February 23, 2018: An assailant fires several shots into the windows of Las Vegas’ only trans bar, seriously injuring a black trans woman inside.   February 23, 2018: 45-year-old trans woman Phylicia Mitchell is shot in the chest outside of her Clevland, OH. home.  She is found dead on her living room floor. February 25, 2018:  Eight neo-nazis armed with iron bars storm a social center in Piraeus, Greece - injuring five people in the center - three seriously. February 25, 2018: 57-year-old Daniel Owen Kelley approaches a 19-year-old Latino flower vendor in Anaheim and berates him with racial slurs before kicking over his flower bucket and beating him with a metal cane.  Kelley was previously convicted of a hate crime in 2015. February 25, 2018: A 21-year-old university student is dragged out of the Rust bar in Niagara Falls, NY by several employees who use brass knuckles to beat him until a passing police officer intervenes.  The student was targeted for bringing his girlfriend, a black woman, into the bar.  The attack left him with several broken facial bones and a concussion.  Rust is owned by the wife of active white supremacist Todd A. Brio, who frequents the bar.   March 2018 - 23-year-old Mark Conditt - a home-schooled Christian extremist and former member of a bizarre, militia-like organization for Christian extremist teens - builds seven parcel bombs and delivers them to black and Latino neighborhoods, killing two black men and severely injuring a black woman and a Latina woman, as well as three other unidentified victims.  Conditt killed himself by detonating a bomb inside his own vehicle as a SWAT team approached him. Conditt had previously posted online statements against abortion and calling for homosexuality to be made illegal.

March 2, 2018: An teenager in Cardiff, Wales receives a life sentence for plotting a terror attack at a Justin Bieber concert in the name of ISIS/Daesh.  

March 3, 2018: A 27-year-old Louisiana man smashes his truck into a convenience store and robs it at gunpoint, later confessing to police that he targeted the store because the owners were Muslim (the owners are actually Sikhs).   March 3, 2018: The Spanish actor  and polyglot Marius Makon enters a Madrid café where a patron calls him a “black piece of shit” before smashing him in the head twice with a beer bottle, cutting his head open.   March 4, 2018: After MAGA hat-wearing “proud boy” bigots arrived at a left-wing bookstore at the University of California San Diego and threatened to burn the bookstore down, the bookstore was broken into, vandalized, and set on fire. March 5, 2018: 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow dies after blowing himself up in his apartment/armoury/bomb laboratory in Beaver Dam, WI.  Among the debris, police recover several firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, body armour, masks, and white supremacist literature.  The blast that killed Morrow was so powerful that twenty different fire departments responded and the entire apartment building had to be destroyed.   March 6, 2018: Six members of a suspected neo-nazi terror cell in Attica, Greece are arrested on explosives and arson charges. March 6, 2018: A former US Army interpreter and Afghan refugee has to have his leg amputated after 68-year-old Perry George Nicolopoulos drove his car right at the refugee & his wife and three-year-old son.  Nicolopoulos missed the former interpreter’s family but crushed his leg against another vehicle, then backed up and rammed him a second time.  The interpreter’s leg is later amputated.   March 10, 2018: 21-year-old self-professed white supremacist Shane Fletcher is arrested by police after they discover his plans to commit mass murder by driving a rented van through spectators at a medieval-style football match.  Police also discover plans for making bombs and napalm and had previously told probation officers that he dreamt of carrying out a mass shooting at a mosque.   March 13, 2018: Colorado resident William Ray Garcia begins screaming racial slurs at a black motorist in a vehicle two cars ahead of his because the black motorist looked at him.  Garcia soon he begins pursuing the other vehicle, then rams it in an attempt to force it off the road.  Police charge Garcia with criminal mischief, reckless endangerment, bias-motivated crimes, child abuse, second-degree assault and reckless driving.

March 14, 2018: Afro-Brazilian councilwoman Marielle Franco is assassinated, along with her driver, in Rio de Janeiro as she left an event when gunmen shoot her in the head four times. The 38-year-old  member of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), spent her political career advocating for women, LGBTQ rights, and police accountability .   March 16, 2018: 56-year-old Richard Gallegos pulls what appears to be a gun and points it at three people in a New Orleans neighbourhood, shouting, “I’m going to kill all you niggers!”  Police later confiscate a BB gun and knife when they arrest him.    

March 16, 2018: An 89-year-old Sikh man steps out of his car in a Calgary grocery store parking lot and is immediately set upon by an unidentified middle-aged white man who shoves him repeatedly until he falls to the ground, knocking the turban off his head and sustaining injuries to his hands and head. March 17, 2018: 52-year-old John Carothers pours lighter fluid over the head of 40-year-old Robert Miller before setting him on fire, killing Miller and burning down part of the Murfreesboro halfway house both were living in.  From jail, Carothers wrote to a white supremacist group admitting to targeting Miller because he was black. March 22, 2018: A group of masked men wielding clubs and tasers storm into a classroom at Montpelier University in France and attack the students occupying it as part of a protest.  The armed thugs - who are later identified as members of the fascist student group G.U.D. + sympathetic faculty - severely injure four people in the attack.  Philippe Pétel, the university’s dean of law, had let the thugs in through a back door and cheered them on as they fractured student’s skulls, later claiming in an interview that the violent attack was necessary and that he was proud of the armed attackers.  He is later compelled to resign. March 22, 2018: A neo-nazi terror group smashes their way into a community space for Afghan refugees in Athens, Greece, destroying computers and equipment before dousing it in petrol and setting it on fire.   March 23, 2018: The body of 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll is discovered in her apartment.  Ms. Knoll had been beaten and stabbed to death and her apartment was set on fire.  Police arrested two men - one of whom was previously convicted for the sexual assault of the daughter of Ms. Knoll’s domestic helper.  Police believe Ms. Knoll was targeted because she was Jewish.  

March 24, 2018: A gay couple on vacation in Mexico are confronted by a man as they walk through a Puerto Vallarta park holding hands.  The man pulls out a gun and shoots one of the men, seriously injuring him. March 26, 2018: 28-year-old trans woman Amia Tyrae Berryman is shot to death in a motel room in Baton Rouge, LA. March 28, 2018:  Sibtulla Rashidi, a sixteen-year-old sone of a Muslim imam in West Bangal, India, is abducted by a mob of Hindu extremists and beaten to death.

March 29, 2018: After being warned by upper-caste villagers to sell his horse because Dalits “are not allowed to ride horses,” 21-year-old Pradeep Rathod is found murdered, his murdered horse beside him, in Gujarat state, India

March 30, 2018: An international student from India waiting for an Ottawa city bus after work is approached by two white men in their 20s who attack him, drag him to the ground, and rip the turban off of his head while yelling racist slurs at him.   March 31, 2018: 21-year-old CJ Salmon viciously attacks a gay man outside of a bar, knocking the man and a woman standing beside him to the ground and punching him repeatedly in the face, after the man spoke to a group of people Salmon was walking with.   April 2, 2018: A Dalit youth is shot to death by Gujjars during escalating ethnic tension in Shobhapur, India April 3, 2018: A Muslim woman on her way to class at a Kansas City community college is confronted by a man who makes an Islamophobic comment, then punches her in the face, sending her tumbling down a flight of stairs.   April 5, 2018: A 25-year-old Muslim woman driving to her Houston home from her nursing job is nearly sideswiped by a truck.  When she gets out to inspect her vehicle, the truck U-turns and two white men jump out and confront her, yelling  “Oh my God, it’s a raghead,” “It’s an fucking raghead,” “sand nigger” and other derogatory terms.  As the woman tries to get back in her vehicle, one of them men pulls out a knife and stabs her. April 5, 2018: A gay man visiting Rome is robbed at knifepoint by four neo-nazis who beat him so severely he is rushed to the nearest hospital by ambulance. April 8, 2018: A gay couple are attacked by four men calling them homophobic slurs after Miami’s gay pride parade. April 8, 2018: Three men attack a gay couple in Washington, D.C. while shouting homophobic slurs at them.  One man was beaten unconscious and both were hospitalized with serious injuries. April 12, 2018: Two arsonists attempt to set a mosque in Nablus, West Bank on fire after spraypainting racist slogans on it in Hebrew.   April 12, 2018: 14-year-old Brennan Walker gets lost making his way to school and knocks on the door of a home to ask for directions.  When the woman who answers the door sees that Walker is black, she calls her husband, who rushes to the door with a gun and shoots at Walker, missing him.  Walker manages to flee without being shot as the woman asks her husband (as recorded by their own security system) “Why did “these people” choose my house?”  Retired Detroit firefighter Jeffrey Ziegler is charged with Assault with Intent to Murder; and Felony Firearms.   April 12, 2018: Police search the home of 19-year-old Jakub Zak, a supporter of the neo-nazi group Patriot Front (which splintered from the organization Charlottesville terrorist James Alex Fields Jr. belonged to), recovering five semi-automatic pistols Zak had illegally acquired, as well as ammunition. April 13, 2018: Several attendees at a party in Delaware turn on a 23-year-old man at the party, making homophobic remarks about him before physically assaulting him, breaking his leg.   April 13, 2018: Three men and two women randomly attack a Hasidic Jewish man walking down the street, beating him bloody. April 14, 2018: A gang of 20 men confront four Polish immigrants walking to catch a bus in Hull, UK after they overhear them speaking Polish.  The mob  throw bottles at the four, then chase the men back down the street until catching one, who they kick and beat with a nail-studded wooden board, hospitalizing him.   April 15, 2018: Shouting “who you eyeballing, nigger?,” 34-year-old Maurice Diggins and 27-year-old Dusty Leo jump out of their pickup truck in a Biddeford, ME 7-11 parking lot and smash a black man in the head, breaking his jaw and knocking him to the ground.  As the man got to his feet and ran away, the men shouted at him “go on, run nigger!” then chased after him in their truck.  Both are charged with aggravated assault and hate crimes. April 16, 2018: Police in Vernon Hills, IL. search the home of 19-year-old Patriot Front supporter Jakub Zak and seize several rifles, handguns, and parts designed to convert firearms into fully-automatic machine guns.   April 16, 2018: Christians leaving a church in Pakistan are fired upon by masked gunmen on motorcycles.  Two are killed and four others injured.  Daesh claims responsibility for the attack. April 17, 2018: 26-year-old Nicholas Rose is arrested by Orange Country police after his own family turns him in for plotting to murder prominent Jewish community members in the area.  Police recover ammunition, a “kill list” of local Jewish leaders as well as a written plan titled “Killing My First Jew” and a variety of anti-Semitic literature.  Police believe that Rose was also planning to commit terrorist acts against local Greek and Russian Orthodox churches because he believe them to be “sympathetic to the Jewish cause.”     April 18, 2018: A 23-year-man racially abuses and physically assaults two racialized women on a street in Manchester, injuring both of them.  He goes on to assault three other people before passerby apprehend and hold him until police arrive. April 20, 2018: A man wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat began verbally abusing a 24-year-old Mexican man on the NYC subway with racial slurs, claiming that he’s “taking American jobs.”  When the Mexican man gets off at the next stop, the abusive man follows him and assaults him on the platform, then pushes him onto the subway tracks before fleeing. April 20, 2018: A neo-nazi gang in Kiev wielding tear gas canisters, knives, and firearms attack an encampment of homeless Roma, injuring several and then setting fire to their camp in what was described as a pogrom. April 21, 2018: 40-year-old Jeremiah Greenwood throws rocks at the parked car of a Colorado couple, then proceeds to knocking their mailbox off their post.  When the couple come outside to investigate the commotion, Greenwood begins yelling racial slurs about their immigration status, pulls a knife, and tried to stab them.  The couple revealed to the arresting officers that Greenwood had targeted them for racial abuse in the past.   April 21, 2018: 40-year-old James Vincent purchases some ice cream at a store in Flatbush, NY.  Then, upon leaving the store, he spots a 52-year-old Jewish man leaving a synagogue.  Vincent yells “you fucking Jew!” at the man, then follows him, yelling anti-Semitic slurs at him until deciding to repeatedly punch the man and strangle him.  Vincent has been charged with hate crimes. April 22, 2018:  29-year-old Travis Jeffrey Reinking - a self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” and purveyor of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories who hurled racial slurs at shoppers in a Publix supermarket the week prior, walks into a Tennessee Waffle House with an assault rifle, killing three black patrons and one Latino patron. April 22, 2018: A transgender Afghan woman living in Shewa, Pakistan, is attacked by a group of armed men, who beat her before shooting her dead. April 23, 2018: 25-year-old Alek Minassian - an extremist misogynist that had published facebook posts declaring an “incel rebellion” and praising misogynist & mass murderer Elliot Rodger - drives a rented van down the sidewalk of a busy Toronto street, killing ten people and injuring thirteen others.   April 26, 2018: Screaming that his is going to “kill you black bastards,” 49-year-old Christopher Jones points a pistol at two boys, aged ten and sixteen, then chases them down an alley and into their garden in an unprovoked attack.  Jones is sentenced to four years in prison. April 26, 2018: A 28-year-old lieutenant in the German army is arrested after police discover his fingerprints match those on a loaded pistol planted in a public bathroom in a Vienna airport.  The police investigation uncovers the soldier’s plot to falsely claim refugee status in Germany using a fake identity and then commit a series of assassinations and terror attacks, which he hoped would be blamed on refugees. April 28, 2018: When a Hasidic rabbi says good morning to him while passing him on a street in Brooklyn, 40-year-old James Vincent responds with a litany of anti-Semitic slurs and death threats.  Vincent then beats the rabbi to the ground, fracturing his ribs, and strangles him.  Vincent has been previously arrested for hate crimes. April 29, 2018: A gay couple in Sydney are pursued by a man screaming homophobic insults at them.  The man soon attacked the couple, breaking the arm of one of them so severely he required surgery and the insertion of supportive pins. April 29, 2018: Two journalists in Fretterode, Germany are spotted by neo-nazis who chase them down and smash up their car.  The journalists are stabbed and beaten with a large wrench.  Two 24-year-old neo-nazis have been charged with assault and robbery. April 29, 2018: Two Jewish university students are walking home when two other students begin taunting them with shouted comments like “fuck the Jews!”  The pair are pursued by the anti-Semites, who assault them at the door of their home.

May 1, 2018: A 30-year-old Muslim woman is beaten unconscious in front of her four children in a McDonald’s in Liverpool.  Her attacker mocked her accent, told her to “go back to your own country,” and attempted to rip the hijab off of her head before beating her unconscious. May 1, 2018: 80-year-old Fredric Allan Shinerock decided to jump out of his car and criticize the parking of a young black woman at a university parking lot by yelling at her, “You don’t belong (unintelligible)! Go back to South LA! Shut your fucking ugly, nigger mouth. You’re a nigger!”  When the women took strong exception to the racist abuse, Shinerock punched her and attempted to kick her repeatedly.  Shinerock was charged with misdemeanor battery, with the event being investigated by police as a hate crime. May 1, 2018: A 22-year-old Jewish rabbinical student walking home in Brooklyn, NY is assaulted by two men who target him because he was speaking in Hebrew on his cell phone.  Darren Morgan, 20 and Justin George, 19 are charged with a hate crime for the assault.

May 3, 2018: While talking on the phone to his son, a 28-year-old Syrian refugee in Edinburgh is confronted by assailants demanding to know “why are you still here?  Why are you not back in your country?”  before stabbing him six times.  Shabaz Ali, the victim, is left permanently disabled by the attack; his assailant, 18-year-old Sean Gorman, receives a seven-year prison sentence.

May 5, 2018: Sonya King, a 5-foot-tall Muslim woman working as a food delivery driver, drops a meal off at 54-year-old Rick Painter’s home.  Painter proceeds to strangle her with her own niqab.  When Painter does not respond to her pleas and continues choking her, King fights for her life, gouging Painter in the eye and stabbing him with her car keys until she is able to flee.     May 5, 2018: Florida man Dustin Hughes, whose facebook profile picture was an image of him with a confederate flag and the slogan “heritage not hate,” repeatedly phoned a local mosque threatening to blow it up and murder all the worshippers there.  At 4:06pm that day, he also left a voice message, in which he said “You fucking Muslim piece of shit. I planted a bomb in your temple; I’m gonna blow your fucking temple up, you fucking Muslim piece of shit. Where you guys have your sanctuary and worship Allah, I’m gonna blow that motherfucker up. l have a detonator, l’m gonna cause that motherfucker to go off, you guys are all gonna be up in flames after l’m done with you! You guys wanna come here and cause mayhem to America, well, I’m gonna cause mayhem to your religion ‘cause your religion is nothing but lies. Lies, lies, lies from the Devil! Where’s Allah now?”  Hughes has been charged with hate crimes and pleads guilty in June.     May 5, 2018: A 38-year-old gay woman leaving a nightclub in Co. Tyrone, Ireland is confronted by a 17-year-old boy who assaults her then uses a cordless drill to drill a hole in her skull, leaving her gravely injured.   May 6, 2018: A fourteen-year-old boy leaving a Queens yeshiva is approached by a man who calls him “Jew boy” and then punches him in the face.   May 6, 2018: Two men jump out of a car outside of a popular gay nightclub in east London and begin punching and kicking clubgoers.  They run back to their car and return with two bottles full of acid, which they spray indiscriminately on clubgoers, seriously injuring three men in their teens and twenties.

May 7, 2018: Natasha and Shala Fross, two 26-year-old sisters, attack a Latina woman as she stands in front of her Colorado home, discussing home renovations with a neighbor, dragging her by her hair as they shouted racist slurs at her.  The two sisters are charged with a hate crime.

May 10, 2018: A high school student and his mom are driving down the highway when a pickup truck tries to run them off the road, screaming “get out of our country, you niggers!” at them.  The truck succeeds in running them off the road and then the truck’s five passengers jump out and smash the car up with baseball bats, sticks, and (apparently) a frying pan.   May 11, 2018: A 19-year-old woman standing with friends outside a gay club in Dorset, England, tries to avoid an escalating confrontation with a man who accosted them by steering her friends away.  The man, Martin Keith Stephens, responds by grabbing her by the hair and throwing her against a wall after threatening to kill her.  Stephens also told the victim that if he spent “even a day in jail, she would pay for it.” May 12, 2018: 55-year-old Vincent Joseph O'Sullivan is arrested by police in Guerneville, CA after twice stealing the local chamber of commerce’s rainbow flag and then escalating to threatening to detonate a pipe bomb in a town grocery store in a plot to kill and injure many of the LGBTQ+ tourists that flock there for vacation. May 12, 2018: A Sikh man and father of six is shot and killed as he sits in his car.  20-year-old Broderick Malik Jones Roberts is charged with two counts of felony murder. May 13, 2018: A 36-year-old father and Pakistani migrant is set upon by five thugs in Athens, Greece near a police station.  The attackers knock him to the ground, punching him and kicking him in the head. May 13, 2018: 36-year-old trans man Nino Fortson is shot dead in the street in Atlanta, GA. May 14, 2018: A gang of six neo-nazis kidnap 13-year-old Zavion Parker from his school bus stop.  Parker, who is black, is forced into a truck and then taken to an abandoned building where he is beaten and robbed.  HIs assailants use his cell phone to send text messages to his mother threatening to hang him.  He manages to escape and a passerby in a car rescues him and calls police, who continue to investigate. May 14, 2018: A 35-year-old man driving in Virginia is forced to stop when a pickup truck cuts him off and slams on the brakes.  As the driver of the truck yells at him “you don’t belong here!” and “Go back to your own country!” the passenger jumps out, pulls the man out of his vehicle and assaults him.  The man is able to escape and drives away, with the pickup truck in pursuit.  He manages to call police, who identify and arrest 56-year-old Jimmy Lynn Greer and his 25-year-old Dustin David Greer on hate crime charges. May 16, 2018: While enjoying a walk in the French countryside, a Muslim couple and their three children encounter a racist woman shouting racial slurs at them.  The racist woman then fetches her husband, who fires a shotgun at the family but misses them. May 17, 2018: 25-year-old Shai Jevan Lewis walks down a street in Sydney, Australia, randomly punching and kicking Asians he encounters, including multiple women and a 70-year-old man.  Several of his victims sustain facial injuries and Lewis is charged with seven counts of assault and grievous bodily harm.

May 18, 2018: Two Muslim men in Madhya Pradesh, India are attacked by a HIndu mob who accused them of transporting beef.  One man is beaten to death by the mob while the other man is beaten into a coma.

May 19, 2018: A mosque located in a converted apartment in a residential apartment building in Hässelholm, Sweden is broken into and set on fire.  Five families are forced to evacuate their adjoining apartments during the blaze, which completely guts the mosque. May 19, 2018: Yiannis Boutaris, the 75-year-old mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece, is met with an angry mob of Golden Dawn supporters as he tries to attend an event commemorating the mass murder of Greeks in the early 1900s.  Upon his arrival, Boutaris receives jeers about his association with LGBTQ+ and Jewish people, then is pelted with rocks and bottles, knocking him to the ground where he is kicked as he lies on the pavement.  Boutaris is hospitalized for multiple injuries.  

May 19, 2018: A Latino woman buying strawberries at a Turlock, CA. fruit stand is approached by a white man who calls her several racist slurs then punches her in the face. May 20, 2018: A gay couple in Edinburgh, Scotland are brutally beaten outside of a nightclub for holding hands. May 20, 2018: 40-year-old  Mukesh Vaniya, a Dalit ragpicker in  Surendranagar, India, is attacked by the owner of a factory and four associates.  They tie Vaniya to the outside of the factory and film themselves taking turns whipping him to death, leaving his body lying on the ground for his wife to find. May 23, 2018: 43-year-old Vincent Teunissen, an ex-soldier and member of the extremist Islamophobe terror group “Anti Terror Brigade Special Forces,” is arrested after police raid his parent’s home in Lingewaard, Netherlands where he lives and seize evidence of his intention to launch a terrorist attack against Muslims. May 25, 2018: 33-year-old trans woman Roxana Hernández flees violence in Honduras only to be beaten to death while in ICE custody in New Mexico. May 26, 2018: Fascists in Dresden, Germany attack a refugee shelter at 4AM, pelting it with rocks and bottles and attempting to set it on fire while its residents huddled in fear. May 26, 2018: A gay couple in Denver, Colorado are approached by a man yelling homophobic slurs at them.  The man stabs both men repeatedly as they try to flee. May 26, 2018: After participating in a xenophobic rally in Aix-en-Provence, France, five members of the white supremacist Social Bastion group go on to randomly assault two racialized motorists passing by them. May 26, 2018: When two foreign women are confronted by a man screaming racial abuse at them in the streets of Bratislava, Slovakia, their Filipino companion comes to their aid. He is beaten to death by the racist. May 27, 2018: 40-year-old Robert Kelly, an off-duty Colorado cop, approaches a black man on the street and begins abusing him with racial slurs, then punches him several times in the face.  Kelly is later arrested and charged with assault and hate crimes and pleads guilty to disorderly conduct in a plea deal.  

May 29, 2018: After covering a school in Newport, Wales with nazi graffiti two days prior, a 23-year-old man returns to set the building on fire and is arrested.

June 1, 2018: 38-year-old trans woman Antash'a English is murdered in a drive-by shooting in Jacksonville, FL.  

June 2, 2018: Two gay man run for their lives after being set upon by a homophobic mob of around 20 people chasing them after the Salt Lake City Pride festivities.  They flee into a nearby café where the shopkeeper, coming to the aid of the two men, is thrown by the mob back into the door so hard it breaks the hinges and punched multiple times.  The shopkeeper fights back and manages to keep the homophobes out of the café. June 2, 2018: While out collecting scrap metal in an abandoned building, three migrant farm workers are shot at by Antonio Pontoriero in Calabria, Italy, who kills 29-year-old trade unionist Soumaila Sacko.   June 3, 2018: a 39-year-old woman walking to a bus stop in Bolton, UK with her two young daughters and teenaged son encounters a man who hurls racial insults at them.  When her son objects, the man attacks him.  The woman intervenes and is beaten unconscious.  She remains in critical condition in the hospital.   June 3, 2018: 56-year-old Joseph Minor approaches his neighbour in the parking lot of their Daytona, Florida apartment complex, calling him a “nigger,” and telling him that he hates him and that “his days are numbered.”  When his neighbour retreats into his apartment, Minor sets his car on fire.   June 3, 2018: A 25-year-old man walking through Queens, NY is chased by two men yelling homophobic slurs, who knock him down from behind and beat him. June 4, 2018: Two men drive through a Romani encampment in Amfissa, Greece, firing a shotgun through the window of their truck and killing a 13-year-old Romani girl. June 5, 2018: Around 4AM, arsonists set fire to both a mosque and a Sikh temple in Leeds.  Firefighters are able to extinguish both blazes before significant damage occurs. June 5, 2018: A 14-year-old black boy is getting off his school bus in North Brookfield, MA.  Two masked men yelling racist slurs at him drive by in a Jeep and throw a hatchet at him, barely missing his head. June 5, 2018: A mob of at least ten masked neo-nazis break into the  AZ Kim Hubert center in Salzwedel, Germany.  They head immediately to the 2nd floor and attack people sleeping there with axes, clubs, and pepper spray while also trashing the center before making their escape.   June 7, 2018: Former members of the neo-nazi Azov Battalion, armed with axes and sledgehammers, attack a Roma encampment in Kiev, Ukraine, driving the occupants out while livestreaming the whole incident.  Ukraine police watch but fail to intervene. June 9, 2018: Two gay men in  St. Petersburg, Russia for the World Cup are attacked by homophobes, leaving one of them with a broken jaw and serious brain injuries. June 9, 2018: Two gay men in Oakland, CA’s gay district are bludgeoned from behind with an iron bar, then punched, kicked, and dragged by an unknown assailant in two separate, unprovoked attacks.  One of the victims has to undergo reconstructive surgery to repair the damage to his jaw and cheekbone.

June 14, 2018: Three men in a car fire a compressed air pistol at two refugee boys walking on the sidewalk, hitting and injuring one.

June 16, 2018: The only mosque in Edson, Canada is set on fire by an arsonist caught on videotape armed with a jerry can, arriving just hours after worshippers departed. June 17, 2018: Wielding a 10-inch kitchen knife, a 47-year-old woman chases Jewish schoolchildren around a North London neighbourhood screaming “I want to kill all you Jews!”  She is apprehended by volunteers in a local Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood watch program and then arrested by police on hate crime charges.

June 17, 2018: While waiting for some pedestrians to cross the street in Cagliari, Italy, a Dominican youth on a motor scooter is ambushed and chased  by three assailants shouting racist abuse at him, then beating him so badly that he is hospitalized. June 18, 2018: 39-year-old trans woman Diamond Stephens is shot to death in Meridian, MS. June 18, 2018: Two Muslim men are attacked by a Hindu mob incensed over rumours that the two had slaughtered a cow.  One of the men is beaten to death.

June 20, 2018: 10-year-old Anthony Avalos dies after enduring five days of torture by his mother and step-father after telling them that he “liked boys.”  Although his mother told Lancaster, CA. police that he had died after “falling down stairs,” Anthony’s eight-year-old sister revealed that after his step-father picked him up and dropped him on his head “about ten times,” Anthony went to sleep and never woke up.

June 20, 2018: A 20-year-old immigrant from Mali and owner of a successful restaurant is walking home from work in Naples, Italy when a passenger in a passing car fires a shotgun at him, wounding him. June 23, 2018: a mob of right-wing extremists armed with knives and clubs attack a Roma encampment outside of Lviv, Ukraine around midnight, murdering a 24-year-old Roma man and injuring four others, including a ten-year-old boy.   June 23, 2018: Two men lob a bomb at a home in Philadelphia that serves as a safe refuge for transgender people.   June 23, 2018: Racist homophobes in Thessaloniki, Greece, separating a mixed-race gay couple from the rest of the crowd at the town’s Pride parade and throw them both into the sea.  Later that evening, a 17-ear-old Pakistani migrant is beaten by four men in an assault captured on CCTV.     June 24, 2018: Police arrest ten members of an Islamophobic terrorist cell, seize firearms and uncover an explosives factory in a series of raids across France. The majority of arrestees are police officers or members of the French military.   June 24, 2018: A 21-year-old woman of Colombian descent is attacked at a bus stop by a security guard who beat her to the ground and punched her repeatedly in the face while yelling racist abuse at her. June 24, 2018: 24-year-old trans woman Cathalina Christina James is shot to death in a Jacksonville motel.  She is the 3rd trans woman murdered in the Florida city this year. June 24, 2018: 54-year-old transgender woman Keisha Wells is found shot to death in the parking lot of a Cleveland, OH. apartment complex.  She is the second trans woman murdered in Cleveland this year. June 29, 2018: While returning from a visit with his mom in Renfrewshire, Scotland, 21-year-old Blair Wilson is subjected to homophobic verbal abuse by a complete stranger, who then crosses the street to beat him bloody. June 30, 2018: 30-year-old Timmy Kinner stabs nine people at a birthday party for a three-year-old refugee in Boise, Idaho.  The three-year-old dies from her injuries; all other victims were also refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Ethiopia; five others were also children.   June 30, 2018: 25-year-old Joshua Daniel Miller. a member of a “Three percent” militia, shoots 23-year-old Eddie Heahcoe after an argument, killing him.

June 30, 2018: 32-year-old Adam Kraus pulls up beside a car containing an African-American couple waving a handgun and yelling racial slurs at them. Kraus then threatens to murder the driver and hang him from a tree.  Kraus is charged with felony ethnic intimidation, making terroristic threats, and other charges. July 2, 2018: When asked to move to the smoking area of a London pub, two men and a woman berate the pub staff with homophobic verbal abuse before viciously assaulting them, breaking several bones.   July 4, 2018: A 19-year-old Muslim woman walking in Anderlues, Belgium is confronted by two men, who block her path, call her a “filthy Arab,” tear her hijab and her shirt off, knock her to the ground, and carve a cross into her torso. July 4, 2018: 92-year-old Rodolfo Rodriguez is beaten to the ground and smashed in the face with a brick by five assailants in Los Angeles who shouted racial slurs and told him to “go back to his country” while punching and kicking him.  Rodriguez suffers multiple broken bones and contusions from the attack. July 6, 2018: Missouri neo-nazi Ronald Kidwell is charged with a hate crime after admitting to police that he stabbed Meshon Cooper-Williams to death and then stuffed her body into a trash can.

July 7,  2018: A black man walks into the pool room of a Pennsylvania bar where he is confronted and assaulted by eight members of the neo-nazi “Keystone United” gang.

July 8, 2018: A Jewish man is attacked by a mob of ten people in Berlin, who beat him to the ground and continue punching and kicking him until passers-by intervene. July 10, 2018: A 41-year-old Bidjara man and veteran is stabbed to death behind a Moreton Bay, Australia 7-Eleven.  Police have issued an arrest warrant for the neo-nazi alleged to have committed the murder.   July 11, 2018: A 52-year-old First Nations man is hospitalized after being discovered badly injured on Water Street in Thunder Bay, Canada by unknown assailants in what officials are describing as a hate crime.

July 11, 2018: Two Nigerian migrants waiting for a bus outside of a migrant support center are shot by a passenger in a passing car with an air pistol.  Both are injured.   July 12, 2018: Acting on a tip, Miami police arrest 72-year-old  Walter Edward Stolper as he is in the act of burning down the 15-storey, 400-unit condo building he lives in.  Stolper, who had just received an eviction notice, had told a witness he was going to burn down the building “with all the fucking Jews.”  Police recovered dozens of jerry cans filled with gasoline, other arson materials, as well as book extolling nazi ideology and swastikas.   July 12, 2018: A Muslim food vendor in Manhattan is grabbed from behind by an attacker while he was working at his food cart and then dragged him out into the street, where the attacker began hitting him while yelling anti-Muslim slurs.  Hassane Elbaz says the man had been harassing him for several days prior to the attack.   July 13, 2018: Abu Sheikh, a Muslim man is walking home from his mosque in Saksatoon, Canada when a truck swerves on to the sidewalk in an attempt to run him over.  The driver then gets out of the truck and throws bricks at the windows of Sheikh’s home.   July 14, 2018: A 26-year-old Latino man is confronted by two white men outside of a Georgia bar while his is waiting for a ride service.  The men racially abuse him, accuse him of being a member of “the cartel,” and then stab him.   July 15, 2018: A Muslim couple returning to their car from a family picnic in Mississauga, Canada are confronted by two men walking by, who call them terrorists and “fucking Arabs.”  The two men then attack the couple, beating both of them in front of their two young daughters.  39-year-old Muhammed Abu Marzouk suffers a severe brain injury and several facial fractures and undergoes multiple life-saving surgeries.  Janis Corhamzic, 19, and Adem Corhamzic, 27, are being investigated on hate charges.     July 16, 2018: In a Leeds courtroom, 19-year-old Jack Coulson, pleads guilty to terror offenses after being discovered with a pipe bomb and bomb-making manuals.  Coulson, who likes to cosplay as a nazi and is an admitted member of the banned National Action white supremacist terror group,had previously praised the murderer of UK MP Jo Cos as a “hero.”   July 16, 2018: A photojournalist is attacked in the street in Barcelona by a fascist shouting “viva Franco!” at him.  The photojournalist suffers multiple facial injuries and is treated at a primary care facility.

July 17, 2018: A man walks into a quiet bakery in Heilbronn, Germany and fires six shots from a pistol at the cashier, a hijab-wearing Muslim woman before running away in an attack eerily similar to those carried out by the racist NSU terror group.  Fortunately, the pistol appears to have been loaded with blanks.   July 18, 2018: Two Chicago men are charged with a hate crime after punching and stabbing a 19-year-old relative because she was dating a Muslim man.

July 18, 2018: A Roma infant is shot in the back by a compressed air rifle as her mother cradles her in her arms in Rome, Italy.  The infant has to undergo surgery to have the projectile taken out of her back. July 19, 2018: 27-year-old trans woman Sasha Garden is found beaten to death in an apartment in Orlando, FL.  This same day, 30-year-old queer drag performer Jessie Sumlar is stabbed to death in the doorway of their Jacksonville apartment. July 20, 2018: Two AfD supporters assault a trade unionist from behind in  Hanau-Steinheim, strangling him unconscious.  The trade unionist is hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury and other injuries resulting from the assault.  The two attackers are charged with serious assault.

July 20, 2018: Two fifteen-year-old boys in Yorkshire, England known for espousing extremist right-wing ideology receive lengthy prison sentences for their elaborate plot to build explosives, murder an acquaintance’s father, steal shotguns, and execute a mass shooting and bombing at their school. July 20, 2018: Rakbar Khan, a 31-year-old Muslim man in Rajasthan, India, is beaten to death by Hindu extremists.   July 20, 2018: Khetaram Bheel, a 22-year-old Dalit man, is abducted by his landlady’s family, who are Muslim.  Accused of being romantically involved with the landlay’s daughter, Bheel’s abductors shatter every bone in both of his legs and then throw him in to a sewage pond to die.

July 21, 2018: 25-year-old Chad Merrill intervenes when another man begins calling another regular at a York, Pennsylvania bar “nigger” and other racial slurs.  The racist bar patron, 24-year-old James Saylor, responds by pulling a pistol and shooting Merrill in the chest, killing him. July 21, 2018: Two young Polish men getting of a bus in Edinburgh, Scotland are confronted by a racist mob of at least ten people, who attack them, hospitalizing one of the pair with serious injuries to his face, head, and arms.

July 22, 2018: Faisal Hussain goes on a shooting rampage on a popular street in Toronto, Canada, killing two girls and injuring 13 others before dying in a shootout with police.  During the subsequent investigation, police discover illegal high-capacity rifle magazines, cocaine, a copy of Mein Kampf, articles are incel terrorists Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian, and Alex Jones/Infowars DVDs in Hussain’s room in his family’s home.  

July 23, 2018: While attending a community block party, the mayor of Burien, Washington is attacked from behind and beaten to the ground by a man making derogatory comments about the mayor’s Latino ethinicty.   July 23, 2018: 29-year-old Doenton A. Rogers begins making insulting and homophobic remarks to a transgender woman at a Detroit gas station.  Following the woman into the station, Rogers pulls out a gun and shoots her, shooting her in the shoulder after a struggle for the weapon.  He now faces hate crime charges.   July 23, 2018: Bristol police visit the home of 37-year-old Matthew Glynn - known to his coworkers for his racist, homophobic, and rightwing extremist views, which he regularly shared on social media - and discover more than 6kg of explosives contained in 23 different improvised explosive devices, along with bomb-making materials and a collection of over 200 knives.  In December Glynn is sentenced to five years in prison. July 24, 2018: A 61-year-old woman waiting for a bus is stabbed in the face by a man wielding a kitchen knife and screaming anti-semitic slogans. July 25, 2018: A pack of 15-20 neo-nazis armed with knives and clubs attack migrants sleeping in a park in Thessaloniki, Greece, injuring four people, two seriously. July 25, 2018: Hooded fascists from the misogynist Social Patriotes gang attack a march for women’s reproductive rights in Santiago, Chile by throwing animal blood at the marchers and later stabbing four women and a security guard.   July 26, 2018: A man on a bicycle approaches a woman walking in downtown Portland with her friends.  The man makes disparaging remarks about the woman’s sexual orientation, then punches her in the face several times and rides off.  Police charge 38-year-old Timothy Walsh with a hate crime. July 26, 2018: A 19-year-old Senegalese man in Partinico, Italy, is greeted with racist slurs as he stands outside of a bar.  Then he is beaten in the streets by five men who injure him so badly that he is hospitalized for a week.  Two cousins, Gioacchino Bono, 34, and Lorenzo Rigano, 37 are arrested for the assault.

July 26, 2018: Two people run up to a migrant from Guinea in Caserta, Italy and shoot him in the face with a compressed air pistol, injuring him. July 27, 2018: A 33-year-old migrant working on scaffolding in front of the town hall in Vicenza, Italy is shot in the leg by a 40-year-old man firing from a condominium balcony nearby.  The resulting injury is bad enough to require the migrant worker to be hospitalized for a week.  Meanwhile that same day, at a migrant support centre in Caserta, an asylum seeker is shot in the face at close range by a compressed air pistol, with his assailant an an accomplice running off without capture. July 28, 2018: A Senegalese waiter working in a Sicily bar is attacked at his work by a group of seven men in Sicily, who punch and kick him while calling him a “dirty Negro” and demanding he go back to his country.

July 28, 2018: Two foreign citizens driving in Aprilia, Italy are spotted by local residents and chased.  Two local men catch up to them and attack them, beating a 43-year-old Moroccan man to death.

July 28, 2018: A Montréal couple taking down stickers of the racist gang Atlante  Québec are attacked by three members of the gang. July 29, 2018: 35-year-old Sandra Alexander approaches an 18-year-old girl waiting a bus stop in Brampton, Canada and begins to yell racial slurs at her and threaten to light her on fire.  When a Muslim bystander attempts to intervene, Alexander attacks her, attempting to tear off her hijab.  A third woman is also subjected to racial and physical abuse by Alexander before Alexander is arrested at the scene and charged with assault with a weapon, uttering threats, and is being investigated for additional hate crime charges. July 29, 2018: a gang of fascists injured six people in a park in Manresa, Spain after the six hung a Catalonian flag.   July 30, 2018: A group of men in a red Renault Clio attempt to run over a group of racialized youth chatting in a park in Beaune, France.  They fail, but hurl racial abuse and threats at the youth.  Three hours later two men return in a different car, produce a shotgun, and fire into the group, injuring six. July 31, 2018: A Sikh man doing volunteer work putting up election signs for Republican candidates in Modesto, California is attacked by two masked men who beat him while yelling “go back to your country!” and then spray-painted a neo-nazi Celtic cross symbol and “go back to your country!” on his truck.   August 2018: Nasir Naso, a transgender woman in Pehsawar, Pakistan, is kidnapped by her landlord and one other man, who torture her before shooting her to death and dumping her body in a sack.

August 3, 2018: A 32-year-old Senegalese immigrant is shot repeatedly by two assailants on a motor scooter in Napoli, Italy.  He suffers wounds to his leg but survives. August 4, 2018: A dozen masked goons barge into Bookmarks, the UK’s largest socialist bookshop, just before closing and ransack it before fleeing.   August 4, 2018: A 21-year-old Pakistani student studying at the University of Newcastle in Australia is driving to the school library when a group of nine people stop his car and surround it.  A woman reaches through his passenger window to grab his cell phone as a man pulls open his door screaming “go back to your country!  You don’t belong here!”  The student is then beaten by the mob, (at least one of whom uses brass knuckles) and is injured so badly he requires surgery.  

August 4, 2018: 22-year-old Allen Loftis assaults three men he suspects are gay at a nightclub in Springfield, Missouri and is charged with hate crimes after confessing to police that he did it because “he didn’t care for gays.” August 6, 2018: 71-year-old Sahib Singh Natt is out for a morning walk in Menteca, California when two men wearing hoods approach him, kicking him the stomach, knocking him to the ground, then repeatedly kick him in the stomach and head before spitting on him and fleeing the area.   August 6, 2018: Two gay men in Ghent, Belgium are attacked by and bludgeoned by assailants with a metal pipe in an assault being described as homophobic.  Both are hospitalized as a result of the attack.   August 8, 2018: German authorities document over 700 attacks on refugees or refugee shelters in the first half of 2018.  The attacks injure 120 people. August 11, 2018: Police arrest a member of Sweden’s neo-nazi terror gang Nordic Resistance Movement after finding evidence he was plotting to murder two mainstream media journalists.  Police seized a home-made shotgun, ammunition, silencers, and photographs of the journalists’ homes.  Last year, NRM members were convicted of a series of bombings of refugee shelters in Sweden.   August 11, 2018: Toronto police stop a car carrying two men.  Upon searching the car, the police discover stolen firearms, more than a dozen knives, cocaine, methamphetamine, and other illegal drugs, and nazi paraphernalia.

August 13, 2018: A middle school in Oklahoma is shut down after area parents post public threats to mutilate, stab, and murder a 12-year-old transgender student.

August 13, 2018: Dutch police arrest a member of the extremist terror group “Anti Terror Brigade Special Forces” and seize an illegal firearm from him after he goes online to declare his intention of carrying out a terror attack against Muslims.   August 16, 2018: Scottish Defence League member and ardent white supremacist Peter Morgan is convicted of terror offences and sentenced to 12 years in prison after police confiscate bomb-making materials, terrorist training manuals, white supremacist propaganda, and drug paraphernalia found in his Edinburgh apartment   August 18, 2018: Hundreds of xenophobes in Pacaraima, Brazil attack and destroy makeshift camps housing Venezuelan refugees, forcing 1200 refugees to flee for their lives from the rampaging mob.

August 18, 2018: 27-year-old Uber driver Max Lin is assaulted by a passenger in Melbourne, who calls him an “Asian loser,” disparages his English, tells him to “go back to where you fucking came from,” then punches him in the face and steals his phone.  

August 19, 2018: Three men in a pickup truck drive through a campsite at an Oregon country music festival waving a large Confederate flag.  When an 18-year-old black man voices his displeasure, one of the three jumps out of the truck and hits him several times, injuring him badly enough to require hospitalization.     August 19, 2018: A 34-year-old transgender woman leaving a Charleston, SC nightclub is confronted by a man shouting transphobic slurs at her.  The man kicks the trangender woman’s sister in the stomach and then punches the transgender woman in the head, knocking her unconscious.  34-year-old Christopher Lamar Price is charged in the attack.  

August 21, 2018: Sanjay Kumar, a Dalit man in Haryana, India, is murdered by three Muslim men who objected to his marriage to a Muslim relative of theirs.   August 23, 2018: A racist mob attacks an Ahmadi mosque in Faisalabad, Pakistan, burning it to the ground.  In addition, six Ahamdis are shot and injured in the attack. August 26, 2018: A lesbian couple are viciously assaulted by a homophobic mob on a downtown street in Calgary, Canada.   August 26, 2018: 33-year-old neo-nazi JR Wilson steals a bottle of wine from a New Orleans gas station and then immediately starts yelling racial slurs at a black man in the parking lot.  Wilson knocks the man to the ground and then punches and kicks him in the head until he is rendered unconscious.  When police arrive, Wilson brags to them about his swastika tattoo and alludes to planning to attack more black people in the future. August 26, 2018: 32-year-old Christian extremist and misogynist  Timothy Hernandez stabs his girlfriend to death and then beheads her in front of their 3-year-old daughter.  Hernandez confesses to police, saying he murdered 27-year-old Vanessa Cons because “women who did not follow God’s word would be struck down” and that “she would not repent.” August 27, 2018: A mob armed with rocks and iron bars attack Chemnitz, Germany’s only Jewish restaurant.  The owner is injured by a thrown rock as the mob shouts at him to “leave Germany, you Jew!” August 28, 2018: Joshua Castillo approaches a 63-year-old woman as she gets off of a bus in downtown Portland.  Shouting “you fucking dyke, I’m going to kill your ass!” at her, Castillo produces a knife but is arrested by police in the area. August 28, 2018: An arsonist sets fire to a Sikh temple in Leith, Scotland, causing extensive damage.

August 30, 2018: Vontashia Bell, an 18-year-old trans woman in Shreveport, LA., is shot dead in the street. August 30, 2018: 24-year-old trans woman Dejanay Stanton is found shot to death in a Chicago alley. September 1, 2018: A man in Albany, NY is beaten unconscious by another man shouting anti-gay slurs.  One of the victim’s ears is ripped off in the attack.  37-year-old Hubert Dabbs, who has a prior conviction for an armed assault in 2014, is charged with attempted murder and a hate crime.   September 8, 2018: At least ten neo-nazis armed with baseball bats and axe handles storm a leftist bar in Salzwedel, Germany, smashing it up and attacking patrons before fleeing in vehicles.  A 17-year-old by is injured in the attack and police only manage to arrest one suspect. September 8, 2018: A mob shouting “heil Hitler!” and “foreigners out!” attack an ice cream parlor in Wiesloch, Germany, throwing chairs and tables at patrons smashing a bottle over a man’s head. September 1, 2018: A 30-year-old Nigerian immigrant in  Bagheria, Italy is kicked and beaten in front of an ice cream parlor.   September 1, 2018: Two young refugees are chased through the streets of Chemnitz, Germany by seven masked assailants, who catch up to one of them and beat him.

September 2, 2018: A passenger on a bus in Turin, Italy is attacked by two men after coming to the defence of a black passenger the two men had been subjecting to racist taunts. September 3, 2018: A 16-year-old student from Tunisia is beaten to the ground in Raffadali, Italy by an assailant yelling at him to “go back to his country,” sustaining injuries that hospitalize him for five days. September 3, 2018: 45-year-old Dalit leader Sardar Singh Jatav is ambushed by three upper-caste men in Thati, India.  Two of the men pin him to the ground while the third man methodically carves his scalp off of his head, seriously injuring him.  After recovering in the hospital, Jatav reported the crime to police, who initially refused to accept the complaint and as of this writing have failed to arrest the three perpetrators, all of whom Jatav knows and identified by name and address. September 5, 2018: Shantee Tucker, a 30-year-old trans woman, is shot in the back and left to die on the shoulder of a highway in Philadelphia, PA. September 6, 2018: A trans woman in Sahwal, Pakistan is kidnapped by four men who attempt to rape her.  When she resists, they set her on fire and let her burn to death while they record it on video.

September 8, 2018: Londonn Moore, a black trans woman in North Port, Florida, is shot to death and dumped in the street.   September 14, 2018: 60-year-old Robert Ray approaches a 19-year-old woman in a store in Gonzales, Louisiana and tells her to “go back to Mexico.”  When the woman’s mother tells him that “was not a nice thing to say,” Ray pushes her to the floor and then hits the woman’s father with his fist and a boot.   September 15, 2018: A South Asian family flee their home in Kent, England after a gang sets it on fire.  Police investigate the arson as a hate crime.

September 16, 2018: Two gay men wearing t-shirts from a popular gay sports league are approached by four men and a woman on the street in Washington, DC.  The five begin yelling homophobic slurs and assault both men, knocking one unconscious and injuring both men - one badly enough to require intervention at a local ER.  It is the sixth attack in DC so far this year where the victims were attacked by people shouting homophobic slurs at them. September 19, 2018: After arguing with worshippers outside of a North London mosque and making Islamophobic remarks, a group of people get in a car and then drive it through the worshippers, injuring three of them, before speeding off. September 19, 2018: 40-year-old Alexander Carballido forces his way into the Miami home of a gay man, who he forces to strip at gunpoint and threatens him with death, saying that “all gay men should be dead” before robbing him and fleeing.  When police catch up to Carballido the next day, he opens fire on them with an AK-47 and is shot to death in the resulting firefight.

September 19, 2018: After enduring weeks of racist taunts and harassment on a job site in Cape Breton, Canada, 21-year-old construction worker Nhlanhla Dlamini is confronted by one of his harassers, who points a nail gun at him and fires, hitting him in the back as he flees.  Dlamini suffers a collapsed lung from the wound and undergoes emergency surgery, remaining in hospital for four days.

September 20, 2018: Police in Kent, England arrest two 15-year-old boys on suspicion of plotting a right-wing extremist terror attack.   September 23, 2018: An unidentified man approaches two gay men in Brooklyn.  Yelling homophobic slurs at them, he attacks both men, knocking them unconscious and breaking bones.  

September 26, 2018: A 15-year-old student in Pensacola, Florida is attacked by a classmate, who berates him with a slew of homophobic slurs as he punches and kicks him, leaving the student with a broken nose and damage to his eye socket.

September 26, 2018: 55-year-old Joseph Magnuson stops African-American FedEx driver Timothy Warren as Warren is finishing his route with his truck.  Witnesses hear Magnuson screaming at Warren about his driving, calling him a “fucking nigger” several times before throwing a drink at Warren and trying to punch him in the face.  Warren dodges the punch and swings back at Magnuson once, knocking  Magnuson to the pavement where he dies as a result preexisting medical conditions.  Prosecutors, deciding that Warren was clearly acting in self-defense against a racist attack, choose not to press any charges. September 27, 2018: Four white supremacists attack a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a Louisville bar, pepper-spraying attendees and bar staff alike.  When police arrive, they refuse to intervene or search the attackers, allowing them to go free without charges.  

September 28, 2018: German police arrest six men accused of belonging to the terrorist group “Revolution Chemnitz” on charges related to the armed assaults of foreigners on September 14th and plotting terror attacks.

September 28, 2018: Three neo-nazis confront a journalist in Naumberg, Germany in a grocery store parking lot as he gets into his car.  When the journalists confronts them, he is stabbed in the stomach by the seig-heiling bigots.  

September 28, 2018: A 48-year-old black man is randomly attacked by up to 50 racist football hooligans in Sofia, Bulgaria.  He is kicked to the ground and kicked and beaten unconscious.  At the hospital, he is diagnosed with a concussion, broken jaw, and broken teeth. September 28, 2018: As a gay couple board a public train in Vancouver, a passenger kicks one of them and berates both with homophobic slurs, then punches the other member of the couple in the face before fleeing the train. September 29, 2018: Two men in Berlin stop a passerby and ask if he’s “a Jew.”  When the man responds by asking them why they would want to know that, both men attack him, then flee the scene in a taxi.

September 30, 2018: 25-year-old Vitali Safarov - a Jewish/Yazidi man working for an anti-hate NGO in Tblisi, Georgia - is stabbed to death by three neo-nazis in a café after they began racially abusing him.  

October 2, 2018: An arsonist lights a can of gasoline on fire in the third-floor hallway of a Toronto hotel hosting refugee families.  The hotel had previously been targeted in a video by a self-described “nationalist” social media group “dedicated to exposing the idiocy of the Left.” (sic). October 3, 2018: 31-year-old trans woman Ciara Minaj Carter Frazier is stabbed to death and her body is dumped behind an abandoned building.

October 4, 2018: 48-year-old Boulder man Jeffrey Karol Bonczyk approaches a racialized woman on the street and yells at her to “go back to China.”  When the woman tells Bonczyk that she’s Native, Bonczyk replies by saying “I’m the Viking!  I’m the first one here!  I’m the white one!” before knocking her to the ground and kicking her repeatedly.  Bonczyk was previously convicted for felony assault, criminal mischief, harassment, and other crimes. October 7, 2018: 68-year-old Taylor Reginald Rosario da Costa is speaking with his brother and his cousin in a bar in Salvador, Brazil about the elections.  Their conversation is interrupted by 36-year-old fascist supporter Paulo Sérgio Ferreira de Santana, who interrupts the conversation and starts an argument with the three.  de Santana leaves, but rushes back five minutes later armed with a knife and stabs da Costa to death.   October 7, 2018: The body of Regina Denise Brown, a 53-year-old trans woman, is found in her burning South Carolina home.  Coroners determine that she was beaten to death.   October 11, 2018: A car carrying AfD supporters and leaders in Regensburg, Germany drives by a counter-demonstration against the racist party.  The driver leans out of the car and fires two shots at the demonstrators.  Luckily, none are injured.   October 14, 2018: A 62-year-old Orthodox Jewish man walking to his Brooklyn synagogue is attacked by a 37-year-old man who jumps out of his car, chases him, knocks him to the road and repeatedly beats him.  When another elderly Jewish man attempts to intervene, the assailant chases him off and continues beating his first victim.    

October 14, 2018: More then a dozen uniformed Proud Boys members attack two protestors outside of a Republican Party event in New York City, repeatedly smashing their heads into the pavement while calling them “faggots” and “bitches.”  NYPD officers look on but refuse to intervene or arrest the attackers.

October 15, 2018: A teenager wielding a stick chases an older Orthodox Jewish man down the street in Brooklyn, smashing him in the head and shoulders with the stick until it breaks.

October 16, 2018: South Dakota resident and right-wing extremist Mark Einerwold is arrested when police raid his home on burglary charges and find an improvised explosive device, illegal weapons, and bomb-making materials.  Hilariously, the police at first identify Einerwold as “antifa,” prompting his brother to vociferously deny the label, explaining that his brother hated “antifa” and pointing reporters to years of extreme-right social media posts made by his brother.     October 16, 2018: After receiving anonymous threatens calling her a “dirty Jewish cow,” and warning that she is being watched, the home of a politician in Lund, Sweden is set on fire by arsonists in the middle of the night, completely destroying it.  This is the second arson attack on a Jewish person’s home in Lund this year. October 18, 2018: While over 50 Filipino worshippers huddled inside, attackers launched a volley of molotov cocktails at Seattle’s Iglesias Ni Cristo church.| October 18, 2018: After threatening to murder New Jersey resident  Koebere Bull and her three biracial “monkey children,” 20-year-old Dylan Jarrell was stopped by Kentucky state troopers as he left his house with “hundreds of rounds of ammunition and  a detailed plan of attack on two school districts - Anderson County Schools and Shelby County Public Schools.”     October 19, 2018: 29-year-old Colorado Springs resident Sean Scappaticci decides to tell the Uber driver giving him a ride him that he was going to kill him because he “hated brown people.”  After making repeated threats, the Uber driver stops and car and runs for his life, with Scappaticci giving chase.  When police arrive on-scene, Scappaticci continues making threats to “kill all brown people” and fights with the cops.   October 20, 2018: As he returns from his daughter’s home in Bihar, India, 80-year-old Muslim man Zainul Ansari is attacked by Hindu extremists, who beat him to the ground, drag him through the streets, and then set him on fire, burning him to death. October 21, 2018: After unsuccessfully attempting to gain access to the predominantly black First Baptist Church,  51-year-old Gregory Allan Bush walks into a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky where he shoots 69-year-old Maurice Stallard and 67-year-old Vickie Jones repeatedly, murdering both of them.  Both Jones are Stallard are black.  An armed eye witness who came face-to-face with Bush immediately afterwards reports Bush saying to him  “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.“ October 21, 2018: After a former houseguest leaks photos of him with his partner, a gay immigrant from Cameroon living in Seattle is attacked and assaulted by two men in the parking lot of his apartment, injuring his knees and ears as they yelled homophobic slurs at him.  Days later, the man’s mother is assaulted in Cameroon and her house destroyed   October 22, 2018:  “22-year old Dinesh Kumar barged into the home of one of his neighbours in a remote village in Tamil Nadu’s Salem district and chopped off the head of a 14-year-old girl as her mother watched in horror. He then carried the severed head to his own home before tossing it out on the road.”  Kumar is from an upper-caste family while his victim was Dalit.  The victim’s family allege that Kumar had been sexually harassing the girl and yelling casteist slurs at her and her family. October 25, 2018: Mohammad Azeem, an eight-year-old Muslim student at a South Dehli madrassa, is beaten to death by a mob of local teenagers.   October 26, 2018: After sending a dozen mail bombs to targets linked to the Democrats, 56-year-old Cesar Sayoc - an ardent and vocal Trump supporter, is arrested as the MAGA bomber. October 26, 2018: An arsonist sets fire to the home of a Muslim family in Highland Park, MI. while the family are asleep inside.  The father of the family wakes up in time to put out the fire.  Two days later, the arsonist returns and firebombs the home, forcing the family to jump out of a second-storey window to save their lives.  Their home is completely destroyed in the blaze. October 27, 2018: 46-year-old extreme-right anti-Semite and gun collector Robert Bowers walks into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, screams “All Jews must die!,” and begins shooting.  Eleven people are killed and six others injured before Bowers surrenders after making several anti-Semitic statements during his rampage.  

October 27, 2018: A transgender woman riding a train in Calgary, Canada is subjected to transphobic verbal abuse by an unknown man, who then punches her in the face before fleeing the train. October 29, 2018: Police raid the home of 41-year-old Thorton Heath resident Steven Bishop, seizing bomb-making instructions and materials.  Bishop, facing various terrorism charges, pleads guilty in 2019 to plotting to bomb Morden Mosque.

November 1, 2018: After speaking with a 66-year-old Jewish woman in Cambridge, MA. about a property, 62-year-old Jarrett Harris follows her down the street yelling at her to “shut the fuck up Jew bitch!” before pushing her and attempting to choke her while using more anti-Semitic curses.  Harris now faces hate crime charges.   November 1, 2018: Two men traveling on Italy’s Roma-Lido train spend their trip seig heiling, singing fascist songs, and making loud racist insults before turing their attention to a fellow passenger from India, who they both assault.  When a woman on the train attempts to intervene, they beat her to the floor.   November 1, 2018: 15-year-old “Kekistan” and Donald Trump fan Gregory Ramos ends an argument with his mother about his school grades by strangling her to death.  Ramos then calls on two friends to help him bury his mother under a fire pit and stage a break-in to cover up the murder. November 2, 2018: Arsonists set fire to seven Brooklyn synagogues and Jewish schools overnight, in addition to spray-painting “Kill All Jews” inside a synagogue. November 2, 2018: 40-year-old Scott Beierle walks into a Tallahassee, FL. yoga studio and opens fire, killing two women and injuring four others before turning the gun on himself.  Beierlie was a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed misogynist and “incel” who railed against women, black people, and immigrants in a series of online videos and songs. November 3, 2018: Four teenagers launch a metal pole through the window of a Brooklyn synagogue as members were praying inside.   November 6, 2018: Six far-right extremists are arrested across France and charged with plotting to assassinate French president Emmanuel Macron. November 6, 2018: Two neo-nazis in Skyttorpsvägen, Sweden attempt to beat an anti-fascist to death with crowbars.  The anti-fascist manages to fight both of them off and escape.

November 6, 2018: A man is arrested in Los Angeles after ripping the wig off of the head of an Orthodox Jewish woman.  It was the third time he had attacked an Orthodox Jewish woman in such a fashion.   November 8, 2018: Three African American men and one Latino man walk into a Chicago 7-11 only to be met with a slew of racial slurs from the store clerk, 32-year-old Ranferi Basilio.  Basilio chases the men outside the store, then produces a knife and chases them away from their own car, slashing the car’s tires.   November 10, 2018: German police uncover a terror plot involving a secret terror cell consisting of over 200 elite German soldiers who planned to assassinate German politicians and leaders of refugee support groups.   November 11, 2018: Four Orthodox Jewish boys are walking in their Toronto neighborhood when a group of nine teenagers confront them yelling anti-Semitic slurs before punching and kicking them.   November 15, 2018: 61-year-old Indian immigrant Sunil Edla is confronted by a teenaged boy outside of his New Jersey home and shot dead in what is being described as a hate crime. November 15, 2018: During a drug trafficking sting operation against white supremacist gangs “The Unforgiven” and “United Aryan Brotherhood” in Florida, police seize over 100 firearms, several pipe bombs, and a rocket launcher, in addition to several pounds of meth amphetamine and fentanyl.  Thirty-nine individuals are charged as a result. November 16, 2018: Former captain of the Wales rugby and out gay man Gareth Thomas is physically attacked by a homophobe in his hometown of Cardiff, Wales, leaving him with multiple cuts and bruises to his face. November 18, 2018: A march for trans rights in Kiev, Ukraine is attacked by 30 transphobes and the police.  Activists and journalists are punched and pepper-sprayed by far-right transphobes while the police haul trans activists away. November 19, 2018: 55-year-old Lloyd Edward Johnson begins harassing and antagonizing four Black Muslim teenaged girls as they order food in a McDonald’s in a Minneapolis, MN. suburb.  When the girls respond, Johnson pulls out a gun and threatens them with it.  Johnson is later arrested and charged with second-degree assault.

November 19, 2018: Arsonists set fire to palestra Valerio Verbano - a popular public gym in a leftist neighborhood in Rome named after a 19-year-old antifascisti murdered by fascists in 1980.  The blaze causes extensive damage.   November 23, 2018: 32-year-old Mohamed Mohamed Abdi yells anti-semitic slurs towards two Jewish men as he drives by then in Los Angeles before doing a U-turn and trying to run over them twice before crashing his car.  Abdi is charged with hate crimes. November 25, 2018: A Donegal, Ireland hotel that was set to host refugees is set on fire by arsonists, nearly killing the owner and his daughter.

November 25, 2018: After arguing in a café in Lefkimmi, Greece with 63-year-old Albanian national  Petrit Zifle, a Golden Dawn activist guns him down with a shotgun, throwing his body in a ditch and confessing to the crime after being arrested by police.   November 26, 2018: 37-year-old Balitmore resident and trans woman Tydi Dansbury is shot to death in the street.

November 27, 2018: Yelling “I fucking hate Mexicans,” “I’m here to kill a Mexican,” and asking if the proprietors of the Lopez tire shop in Salt Lake City, UT were “part of the Mexican mafia,” 50-year-old Alan Dale Covington smashes a five-foot metal pole into the face of 18-year-old Luis Gustavo Lopez, knocking him unconscious, then attacked Jose Lopez, Luis’ father, as he tried to help his son.  Luis was hospitalized with serious injuries for several days.   November 27, 2018: After leaving a kosher restaurant in Brooklyn, a 16-year-old Jewish boy is confronted by a mob of about twenty teenagers, who beat him while chanting “Kill the Jew.”  The boy is injured so badly that he is hospitalized for over a week.   November 29, 2018: A gay couple in Las Vegas are followed home from work by two men - one of them a homophobic co-worker, who proceed to punch, kick, and stab the couple while calling them homophobic slurs.   November 29, 2018: In a completely unprovoked assault, 22-year-old Dylan Reynolds and 24-year-old Michael Walters chase a black woman out of a Louisiana Wal-Mart, yelling “nigger!” at her and chasing her through the parking lot before launching a shopping cart at her vehicle as she fled.  Both men face hate crime charges. November 30, 2018: As he leaves a Brooklyn synagogue, a 33-year-old Hasidic Jewish man is punched in the head from behind in an unprovoked attack. November 30, 2018: A 20-year-old woman is confronted in the New York subway system by a man yelling homophobic slurs at her.  As she walks away, the man punches her in the back of the head and shoves her to the ground, breaking her spine in the process.   December 2, 2018: Winchester, VA. resident Robin Anne Coffman yells at a black family walking by her house, calling them “niggers” and threatening to shoot them before brandishing a shotgun. December 6, 2018: Three young men are arrested in various locations in the UK on suspicion of terrorist activities due to their involvement in a nazi terror gang called Sonnenkrieg Division. December 6, 2018: Three men accuse a Roma woman of pickpocketing on a Rome subway station.  They pull her hair and punch her repeatedly in the face.  When her three-year-old daughter cries out, they throw the child to the ground.   December 7, 2018: An arsonist sets fire to a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall in Lacey, WA., gutting it.  This is the sixth attack against Jehovah’s Witness buildings in the country this year.    

December 7, 2018: FBI agents posing as ISIS operatives arrest 21-year-old Ohio resident Damon Joseph after selling him two inoperable assault rifles he told them he would use to commit a mass shooting at a synagogue.  Around the same time, police arrested Elizabeth Lecron and Vincent Armstrong - two fellow Ohio residents with neo-nazi ties who they allege had purchased bomb-making materials and were planning to bomb a pipeline in Georgia. December 7, 2018: 23-year-old engineering student Rohan Sharma and his sister Amrita Sharma are assaulted in their home by their own neighbours after enduring weeks of verbal racist abuse from them, leaving Sharma with a broken nose and various contusions.

December 7, 2018: 35-year-old trans woman Keanna Mattel is found shot to death in her Detroit neighbourhood. December 8, 2018: At least nine members of the Hammerskins, in Washington state to commemorate the death of a white supremacist terrorist and murderer, show up at a bar in Lynwood, WA. and almost immediately attack the African-American DJ, who is hospitalized due to the injuries he sustains in the attack.  Police charge at least six of the attackers with hate crimes. December 9, 2018: Jessica Fowler, 31, and Amber Harrell, 38 encounter a trans woman in the bathroom of a Raleigh, North Carolina bar and proceed to restrain her and sexually assault her.  Both Fowler and Harris now face sexual battery and kidnapping charges. December 9, 2018: Police arrest 20-year-old Monroe, WA. resident Dakota Reed - a self-professed KKK member - who had posted extensively online about plans to commit a mass shooting targeting Jews.  Police seized a dozen firearms along with white supremacist literature from Reed.  When a detective asked Reed why he had targeted Jews, Reed replied “I’ve been around some Jews in my life.  There’s a community here in Washington. They’ve done things as far as to — um. Maybe it wasn’t too personal, but I’ve had them lie to me, I’ve had them, um, I guess, well, this one probably wasn’t their fault, but I’ve had girls like them over me. I’ve, uh, what was the other one?” Before remembering that someone who happened to be Jewish had allegedly gotten him fired from a job once. December 12, 2018: A 32-year-old transgender woman is beaten to death by four men in Klang, Malaysia. December 15, 2018: A Warsaw man of Turkish descent is attacked on a public bus by football hooligans who taunt him with racist insults as they assault him.  Police initially refuse to take any action but begin investigating after it is reported in the media.   December 17, 2018: A black woman riding the subway in Rome with her infant daughter is subjected to racist abuse by a man on the train, who then slaps the woman, spits in her face, kicks her stroller, and punches two other passengers who attempt to intervene.  Police take the man off the subway at the next stop but do not arrest him. December 18, 2018: 60-year-old Portland resident Michael T. Amatullo greets his eight-year-old African-American neighbor by shouting racist slurs at him while the boy is taking out the trash.  When the boy’s 14-year-old brother comes out of the house to investigate the shouting, Amatullo produces a butcher knife and threatens to stab both boys, prompting them to run and hide under a staircase while they call 911.  

December 20, 2018: 24-year-old Brandon Troy Higgs allows his dog to walk over a freshly-laid cement driveway in Reistertwon, MD. as a pretext to start a fight with two African American construction workers, who we calls "boy” and tells them to “go back to Africa.”  Higgs leaves and then returns to verbally abuse the construction workers some more before drawing a pistol.  The two workers wrestle the gun away from Higgs, but not before Higgs shoots one of them in the leg.  Higgs now faces attempted murder & hate crime charges. December 23, 2018: While waiting behind an African-American mother and her two children in line at a Wichita, KS. grocery store check-out, 31-year-old Trace Riff decides to kick the mother’s 1-year-old son in the back with his cowboy boot, knocking him face-first on the floor.  While bystanders subdued him, Riff went on a screaming tirade, calling the mother and her children “niggers” and loudly declaring that he was a white supremacist.  

Islamophobia: A “Zionist Plot”?

In response to Hating Muslims, Loving Zionists: Israel a Far-Right Model, where Al Jazeera gets everything wrong

Al Jazeera penned an opinion piece trying to lump anti-Muslim terrorism, rational critics of Islamism with Zionism of all things. The “logic” goes that “x Israeli politician is a far-righter”, many leading political figures in far-right politics that criticize Islam have expressed affection and approval for Israel; Palestine is oppressed by Israel and as such all of these things are related to each other. They even used the censored picture of Brenton Tarrant to drive the point home that “See? if you hate Islam, you are also just like this guy and oh, you support Israel too”. 

I can’t even begin pointing out what is wrong with this “some x are y, some y are z, therefore x are y” fallacy, I am even more surprised that right-winged critics of Israel didn’t even try to debunk it. In one hand, it’s pretty observable that support for Israel is strong among mainstream conservatism than other movements across the political spectrum. On the other hand, there is one figure who is never discussed when the topic of alt-right and Zionism overlap, being very little-known outside of Israel.

This is Meir Kahane, a ultra-Orthodox Jewish rabbi from the USA who migrated from to Israel and was a co-founder of the Jewish Defense League and the Kach political party. Also known as “Israel’s Ayatollah”, he urged the establishment of a Jewish theocracy codified by Maimonides (a Reconquista-era Spanish Jew), the immigration of all American Jews to Israel before a “second Holocaust” could take place and was very vocal about advocating the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, violence against Palestinians and those he deemed as “anti-semites”. He was extremely divisive: there were people who found his Jewish supremacist rhetoric intolerable and equated him to the Nazis, while in other camp you had those who supported him largely because of Arab aggression as The Los Angeles Times reported that “[he] is a reaction to the wanton murders of innocent men, women and children in Israel” (which you can find many parallels with modern day politicians supported by the alt-right). Kahane was arrested at least 62 times by Israeli authorities for inciting hatred.

While in prison, Kahane wrote a manifesto titled “They Must Go” where he advocates the complete exile of Palestinians and the necessary process how to do it arguing that if they didn’t they’d begin outbreeding the Jewish population and take over Israel in 20 years (he wrote it in the 80s). His manifesto reads a lot like the anxiety Europeans feel about Muslim migrants which isn’t alleviated in the slightest by them speaking out in the open how they will establish a European caliphate.

Kahane was popular enough with the Israelis that he was elected with one seat to the Knesset. However, he was never really popular with his fellow parliamentarians, whom he regarded as “Hellenists” (Jews who assimilated into Greek culture after being conquered by Alexander the Great), since Kahane thought they weren’t Jewish enough. Most of his proposed laws included: imposing compulsory religious education, stripping citizenship status of all non-Jewish citizens (including Christians) and demanding that relations with Germany and Austria being cut but monetary compensation for the Holocaust being kept.

In 1990, Kahane was assassinated by an al-Qaeda member (it’s believed he was one of the first victims of the terrorist group), who was initially cleared of the murder, but was arrested later for being implicated in the 1993 WWC bombing attempt, where he confessed his first crime and was jailed to life imprisonment. His death made him a martyr leading to Kach member Baruch Goldstein to swear revenge and in 1994, he walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs on the West Bank and shot up the place, killing 30 Muslims before being lynched by the survivors. Given the Cave of the Patriarch status as a important religious site to Islam, this atrocity would have provoked probably worse reactions than Christchurch.

While researching about these things, I couldn’t help but see so many parallels between that and the Christchurch mosque incident. Kahane’s manifesto reads a lot like Tarrant’s own. Even if they were not familiar with Kahane’s own views, it was probably not lost to those that really read into Tarrant’s manifesto that not once he denounces the State of Israel for the current state of Europe - instead he blames Angela Merkel, Reccep Erdogan and Sadiq Khan, straight up calling for their deaths. This seemed enough for many people to conclude Tarrant was an Mossad agent.

To those reading this you may be asking: you listed so many things in common with the alt-right, Islamophobia and Zionism, so what did Al Jazeera get wrong?

Ah, if you actually paid attention to the fringe discourse, you realize that nothing discredits you faster than declaring yourself far-right and voicing support for Israel. I sincerely doubt that white supremacists would have liked a Jewish supremacist like Kahane, specially his demands that Germany to continue paying reparations forever. The fringe right actually finds lots of solidarity with Palestinians and common ground with the liberal left than either side cares to admit. Sure many right-wing politicians happen to be Zionists, but those are the mainstream old guard. 

I also observed that they also are overwhelmingly in support of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in large part because he is an authoritarian model that stands up against Israel. Does it mean that all people who support Assad are also the same? No. Many support Assad because he is considered a bulwark against Islamism (even though he is a Muslim himself, albeit not considered one by terrorist extremists because he is Alawite). Despite his many flaws, normal people are willing to stand up for him because he represents stability in Syria.

I also take huge issue with Palestinians being referred to as exclusively Muslim because it erases their small and long-suffering Christian minority, which is never on anyone’s minds every time someone discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite the fact that Palestinian Christians played a huge role in resistance against Israel before the rise of Islamism ended up alienating them and Christians across the Middle-East aren’t necessarily thrilled about Israel either, not even Israeli Christians themselves.

It’s probably no coincidence that Al Jazeera, who denounces both Israel and the Assad regime who are antagonistic to each other, also happen to be big Islamist apologists which explains why they insist in portraying the Palestinian cause as a religious struggle rather than a nationalist one. It’s in their interest to denigrate critics of Islamism who run across the board in the political spectrum from atheists like Bill Maher and Sam Harris, Christians like David Wood, Brother Rachid and Zacharias Botros and Muslims like Majid Nawaz, Ed Hussein and Mohammed Tawid and many, many, many people worried about the dangers of Islamism, which they use so vociferously the term “Islamophobia” coined by the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization disguised as political party. This way they can lump all the opposition into one camp and paint them as Zionist Islamophobes.

With all that said, the rise of conservatism and nationalism across the world is co-related with the modern liberal left’s weakness to confront the Islamist Question. One of the key reasons that led to Donald Trump’s election were fears of Hillary Clinton increasing immigration as observed by the skyrocketing of sexual abuse cases in Western Europe. Even though he is a more despotic and authoritarian figure than Trump, Erdogan from Turkey is subjected to much less scrutiny from the Western media when he locks up more journalists anywhere in the world.

And this isn’t contained to the West either, the Bharatiya Janata Party characterized as Hindu nationalist and anti-Islamic continues being elected into power because of India’s spats with Pakistan and being formed in the first place because of Indian secularists appeasing to Muslims. And if the future is any indication, you can expect more persecutions of Muslims in Sri Lanka by Buddhists and Christians after the Easter bombings from this year. Those has less to do with Zionism and more with the fear of Islamism.

There is a good reason why I brought up Kahane into this editorial: much like modern day politicians, he was considered too radical by the status quo of the time yet gained the support of a silent majority like modern day because the current status quo proved intolerable. The same thing happened in my country with Jair Bolsonaro, who was already saying absurd things as early as the 90s and would never be considered as President of Brazil yet here we are, though Kahane was assassinated before he got the chance of being Prime Minister.

How many times are we going to deflect the problem like Al Jazeera before we confront it straight in the eye?

A Toast to the Mystery of the Incarnation in the Margins

Father Kenneth Tanner is a priest in the Charismatic Episcopal tradition. He pastors Holy Redeemer church in Rochester, Michigan. http://holyredeemer.us/

I’ve never heard him preach, but avidly read his spiritual meditations that he frequently post on FB like the several I’ve reposted below: The choice of art is by him as well.

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The God who speaks all things into being, makes himself speechless

When the divine community we call God created the visible (and invisible) universe they spoke words like "let there be light" and things that were not in one moment began to exist in the next. Stars. Planets. Oceans. Mountains. Trees. Animals. Flowers.

All these things and more were breathed into existence by God. When the Father began to make all things, our wisdom tells us that it was the Son by whom the Father spoke all things into being; Christ spoke the things that were not as though they were and they were so. Orchid. Zebra. Maple. Everest. Atlantic. Jupiter. Andromeda. And so on.

Instead of speaking humanity into existence, our wisdom tells us that God hand-crafted men and women from the clay, breathed into our motionless humanity the breath of life, invested flesh with his image, and gave us something the rest of creation does not have except metaphorically: the divine capacity of language.

Though all living things communicate, only humans have the gift of speech and this capacity is creative (like God) or destructive (like the dark powers), depending on our choice.

The mystery of the Incarnation is so great that every year—in this time of Advent and Christmas, six blessed weeks of waiting and celebration—I eventually see something I have never seen before, encounter a facet of the birth narrative I missed or neglected or did not see in all its beauty.

The season from Thanksgiving to Epiphany allows Christians to marinate in the story of the Word made bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh and we come away not as spectators but as *participants* in the mystery.

Ponder with me the humility of a God who speaks all things into existence making himself speechless, making himself incapable of sounding words.

The Sacred Three invite a teenager into their community and ask her to bear God—to bear the One who cannot be contained—in her tiny womb. She consents. And in her womb by the Spirit the Son who spoke the far-flung galaxies into motion aeons ago comes to complete silence, knit together in that holy space by a mystery that Jesus' forefather David knew was awe-inspiring and wondrous.

Christ emerges from her womb into this world of struggle and pain and vulnerability and beyond crying out as most babies do, he has no power to address his human brothers and sisters beyond the glory of his personal presence among us as God and man together.

Mary lays the Word made silent into the feed box. And the Word submits to silence until in the mystery of his genuine humanity God learns to speak as we all do by being spoken to—primarily by hearing the voice of the teenager who welcomed him to be born in her.

Words like "immah" (mother) or "abba" (father) Jesus learns from Mary. And as he learned to speak as we all do, his words in time begin to reveal the majesty of his unique person so that while still a boy all the men of wisdom in the Temple marvel at his speech, as does everyone who encounters in the gospels the mystery of divinity and humanity that is spoken in Jesus Christ.

"I am the door." "I am the bread of life." "I am the light of the world." "I am the resurrection and the life." "Do good to those who hate you." "I have called you friends." "Father forgive them." "Love your enemies."

Above all—here in the Word made flesh—all other words about God find the tongue that interprets them *in* Jesus Christ.

I am astonished, and in my heart I am on my knees, before this mystery that God becomes silent for us and for our salvation. So much—infinity, it seems, by this account—can be spoken without words. The divine community who spoke the worlds into existence as One God reveal their love in a profound wordless action.

The mystery is great. Good news of great joy. Glory in the highest!

https://medium.com/@kennethtanner/when-the-divine-community-we-call-god-created-the-visible-and-invisible-universe-they-spoke-words-630408c99457 https://www.facebook.com/kenneth.tanner/posts/10214615909528800 http://www.clarion-journal.com/clarion_journal_of_spirit/2016/11/the-god-who-speaks-all-things-into-being-makes-himself-speechless-kenneth-tanner.html

‘Madonna and Child’ by Parker Fitzgerald (pencils) and Brittany Richardson (colors). Layout by Brian Gage Design. https://ninebreaker.deviantart.com/art/Madonna-and-Child-72795161

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Christmas Happens in the Margins

Christmas is not about greatness but smallness, not about strength but weakness, not about force or coercion but invitation and welcome. Christmas does not need anyone to accept its joy or embrace its light.

Christmas happens in the margins, away from the spotlight. Christmas is elusive for the proud and the blustery, and threatening to every form of politics: Judean or Roman, British or Irish, Indian or Pakistani, Russian or American, Chinese or Korean, Iranian or Iraqi.

Christmas is about the vulnerability of God, about the revelation that God is the servant of his universe, that if we too serve the creation with God then we join his smallness, an insignificance that displays for all to see the mystery of a profound divine weakness, a humility that casts down all greatness and arrogance and elevates poverty and lowliness.

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A Toast to our Maker Made One of Us

The humanity you share with Jesus Christ is seated next to the Father, forever bearer of Mary's DNA with a yet-beating heart and wound-marked hands with which to embrace us and—we should not forget this—memories of his life with us as one of us.

Memories of home-cooked meals and frigid desert evenings. Sawdust memories of hard work and sweat. Recollections of wine and friends and laughter at midnight. He made our sometimes brutish but (somehow also) beautiful existence his own and did not spare himself any of our sleepless small hours, our helplessness in the face of the suffering of children, our hunger for bread, our world weariness—this endless, gnawing awareness of contingency—and our bone-tired aches at end of day.

So a toast to our Maker made one of us, a real high priest who knows our justice-starved laments and our human joys, the sound of the wind in the trees and of birdsong; who is acquainted with our tears of shattered anguish; who knows our music and cuisine, our courts and our cemeteries; who loved us in the face of torture and agony.

To him who rules all times and places, who made all things seen and unseen, now made judge of his human brothers and sisters by the things he suffered, be glory and honor forever.

https://www.facebook.com/kenneth.tanner?hc_ref=ARSDueoQFTTPjONIpQmiaJFqyr2nJg-pWamb_EvFlOQjup4BN_gUkm2diS_gLvLz5tA&fref=nf

‘Madonna and Child’ modern icon by EvitaWorks https://www.etsy.com/listing/122130677/mary-and-jesus-folk-art-icon-religious?ref=related-3

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The One

The One who cannot be contained in Solomon's temple (much less the expanding universe) is contained in the womb of a Palestinian-Jewish teenager. The One who is timeless and omnipotent and changeless makes himself truly vulnerable and contingent to all the natural forces he has breathed into existence as he lays in a feed box, dependent on Mary and Joseph for nourishment and protection, as he somehow holds together the wood of that manger that cradles him in Bethlehem. The One who is the origin of all things and who holds all things in existence—galactic to microscopic—is the carpenter from Nazareth. He who made the Pleiades and Orion now sets beams and crafts tables with his stepfather, sweeps sawdust from his forearms. The One who baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fire is baptized with water so that humanity has a baptized God. The One who does not eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats is now in Jesus a hungering creature of necessity, set to fast in the Judean desert. The One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills and Lord of angel armies is now homeless and a sojourner, cloaked against the cold night air and all alone, tempted by satan. The One who never sleeps and who ever watches over Israel naps on a boat out on Galilee. The One who embodies the Law dines with tax collectors and wine enthusiasts. The One who is a consuming fire of holy otherness beyond all comprehension, who dwells in light inaccessible from before time and forever, embraces lepers, prostitutes, the blind, and all who are ritually unclean; he shines on all who sit in darkness and the shadow of death. The only One who is without sin forgives and does not condemn as he draws in the sand, throws no stones, and takes all condemnation upon himself. The eternal One hangs on a tree as the sands of his mortal life seep from the hourglass until "it is finished." The One who knows no sin bears the sin of the whole world. Nazi sin. Rapist sin. American sin. The sins of children. White collar sin. Blue collar sin. Red light district sin. Stained glass sin. Domesticated sin. Christian sin. The almost endless banality of evil. Your sin. My sin. These and other sentences like them are what we mean when we say that Jesus Christ is both God and man. The Gospel has a definitive content. The contemporary church (across all denominations and movements) may have misplaced this bright Lantern, or forgotten about it altogether, but it shines on in the darkness and the darkness can never extinguish it. The Word became flesh and took up residence among us.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10211138299550724&set=a.2253573056187.137248.1154125675&type=3&theater

‘Holy Family’ by Janet McKenzie https://www.janetmckenzie.com/prints.html

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The Incarnation and Rescue

It must be self-evident to most people that humanity needs rescue from sin, violence, and death. A God who participates in sin, violence, and death is not other than fallen humanity but a projection of our worst fears and hatreds. A God who liberates us from sin, violence, and death is good and welcome news from outside ordinary human experience and thought. Such a God would be light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made. And it is the Incarnation that makes this God known to us, and makes this God real for us. For it is the nails driven into the flesh of Christ by humanity and spirits of darkness that decisively counter and make vain all human, demonic, and anti-Christian imagination that the Father who creates and upholds the world by love is in some other part of himself the one who destroys the world or his Son. There is a destroyer but his false, homicidal way of violence, abuse, coercion, and death is defeated by the humility of God acting in Jesus Christ. He is the father of detestable instruments of death like nuclear weapons, for only a "god" who hates humanity and creation would author such abominations, and in sin we partnered in their "creation" with this god's hatred of the image of God in humanity and in human civilization, his hatred of creation, his contempt for the Incarnation. The nails driven into the flesh of Christ are also the nails driven into the coffin of the idea that the Living God sends evil or participates in darkness or desires the death of anyone.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10211110130166507&set=a.2253573056187.137248.1154125675&type=3&theater

Feast of the Epiphany icon, artist unknown

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The Babe Who Breathed the Stars into the Astonished Sky

Every moment — all our breaths — ought to resound with praise for this radical identification of God with us.

Mary is as baffled and quietly grateful as we are; that God chose her, that he sides with humanity permanently against all who oppose us, even our own hatred of ourselves.

At the end of a long season of bearing, at the end of a long journey, at the end of a long day and after excruciating pain, after holding him close to her heart, she stops bearing God for the first time since she said to Gabriel "let it be."

She lays his bright flesh in a feed trough, swaddled against the anxiety of leaving her womb, nestled by wool and straw from the cold night's sting.

The One who was God before all worlds lies there, as helpless against fragile existence as any of us, bound to the poverty of homelessness, a slave now to the elements he created, a hungering creature of necessity, soon to be an immigrant fleeing political terror, held aloft from the damp ground by wood that as God he holds together.

At the dedication of the Temple, Solomon said of this tightly wrapped bundle of dust, "the heaven of heavens cannot contain you." Yet contained he was for nine months within this weary teenager, smeared with dirt, sweaty from her labor, catching her breath in time with this baby, the One who in the beginning breathed the stars into the astonished sky above them.

The beginning and end of the Christian revelation of God, of all that Jesus does for us and for our salvation, is this baby, this mother, this manger, this dust, this sweat, these halting breaths.

Come let us adore him. Repeat the sounding joy. Not only this week, not only this season, but with every breath.

Excerpted from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-kenneth-tanner/too-great-a-mystery_b_4499218.html

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Christmas is for Worship [2013] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-kenneth-tanner/post_6280_b_4344762.html

Some are worked up about a “war on Christmas.”

Not me. I am not compelled to “reclaim” or “rescue” Christmas from the many who ignore and the few who despise its magnificent origins.

How can I be anxious or offended? I am in too much awe of its startling truth: that a baby is God, gasping for air, clasping for mother’s milk, flailing his small limbs in a feed trough; taking on my frailty, contingency, vulnerability, that I might share his everlasting nature.

The baby is now Lord of all things visible and invisible, forever one of us, still bearing his now glorified, nail-scarred flesh at the Father’s side, making all things new for all, hallowing every star in the far-flung cosmos — matter’s maker now made matter, redeeming every atom and every stoney heart. This reality overpowers me with its brilliant mystery.

I want to share this authentic Christmas. I want everyone to know this God become clay so that all might be like God.

Whether others believe the story, whether they practice holy Christmas — with deep joy that prostrates before his Incarnation — does not dampen my praise or slacken my faith. I do not skip a beat. It does not alarm me.

The season society calls “Christmas” falls short of this great mystery, but I wonder if the frustration and anger of some believers springs from an unexamined need for the culture to boost our untested faith in the God who became man. Can we trust the real deal without their cooperation or support? Why does so little set us at odds with our neighbors?

Should we not welcome the chance to embody genuine belief and practice, to live incarnate love in the face of all lesser versions and visions of Christmas? This is an opportunity. This is our calling.

After all, the first Christmas occurred in obscurity, without tinsel or holly. In a small town, in a cave amid manure, straw, and animal breath, Magnificence came forth breathing, born of a woman and almost no one noticed. A star and angels are needed to find him, down a blind, trash-strewn alley, the holy family are huddled against the night air.

At dawn, the world went about its business, unaware that a glory had shone that night that would never be put out, a glory that in time will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. No lack of awareness or poverty of reverence, no stubborn denial, can prevent this.

It’s time to worry a lot less about getting Christ back into Christmas (he can’t be blasted out of Christmas, no matter how hard anyone tries).

What needs to get back into Christmas is worship. As it was with the shepherds and angels, Christmas is about worship before it’s about anything else: falling on our knees, falling flat on our faces, adoring the brilliance of this God who comes to us as a baby, lying in a feed trough, breathing with other animals, wrapped tightly against the cold and the anxiety of leaving his mother’s womb.

If every Christian worshipped that majestic mystery at Christmas, lived thatworship in every moment of our celebrations, yes, but also actually worshippedin churches, storefronts, cathedrals, living rooms and high schools on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day — wherever the body of believers they call home worships weekly — we wouldn’t have to worry about getting “Christ back into Christmas.”

All would see that Christians worship Incarnate Love as their first priority on this day — not their decorations, or gifts, or lights, or money, or family, or food, or tinsel, or charity or even their merely human, corporate goodwill but their God.

When the wood of the manger joins the wood of the cross, when Jesus Christ is revealed in the worship of a people captivated by the hardwood glories of Bethlehem and Golgotha, we will no longer need to talk about reclaiming or rescuing anything.

Christmas does not require our defensiveness or salvage operations. It beckons us to a deeper imitation and worship of Divine Clay.

Bedouins in the West Bank hold fast to their land—as pressure builds for them to leave

Joshua Mitnick, Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2017

The predawn sky exposes the outlines of the slopes of the Judaean desert. A strip of lamps on a new highway bathes the rocky earth in a ruddy glow, as motorists zip through the lonely expanse toward Jerusalem.

Here amid a chorus of crowing roosters, a cluster of dilapidated shacks on the desert hillside marks a tiny Bedouin encampment known as Khan al Ahmar.

The 160-person outpost, like dozens of other Bedouin hamlets clustered around the roadway, populates a region that descends from the Jerusalem mountains toward the West Bank city of Jericho and the border with Jordan.

It is a rugged, sparse landscape--but one that is at the center of a political tug of war. The region is coveted by Israelis who want to expand Jewish settlements and to solidify control over Jerusalem, as well as Palestinians who see it as part of their own state someday.

The Bedouins, caught in the middle, may soon be forced from this land.

In one home open to the chilly morning air, members of the Abu Dahouk family were wrapped in blankets as they began to stir shortly after 6, rising from mattresses set on large rugs covering the desert floor of rock and dirt.

In a shack that serves as the family kitchen and dining room, 12-year-old Nasrin and 14-year-old Iman, the two youngest in the family of nine, knelt over a fire tended by their mother, Sara. Their father, Eid Abu Dahouk, offered the young girls some spare change before they left for school.

The family’s flock of sheep and goats needed grazing, but for the father, known to most by his nickname, Abu Khamis, the next order of business was meeting with European diplomats.

An affable envoy representing an insular community, Abu Khamis served the diplomats sweet tea and pita bread prepared by his wife. He briefed them on an upsurge in home demolitions by Israeli military authorities.

Foreigners, diplomats and human rights workers are frequent guests here because the encampment--illegal under Israel’s military occupation--sits on such a strategic fault line of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Displaced to the West Bank from ancestral lands after Israel gained independence in 1948, the Jahalin tribes settled in the open area outside Jerusalem with their flocks of sheep and goats. Some families live less than a mile from one another while others live two or three miles from the nearest neighbor.

The Bedouin here are registered with the United Nations as Palestinian refugees. But they live apart from Palestinian society, and Abu Khamis complains that the Palestinian government in nearby Ramallah hasn’t made good on promises to provide school transportation for the children.

The Abu Dahouk family lives in a row of partially open shacks made of wood beams, corrugated metal and canvas. One day recently, a wisp of smoke rose from the entry to a soot-blackened kitchen where the family prepared lentil porridge over an open fire. At the end of the row, a lone acacia tree overlooked the cottages of a tiny Israeli settlement, Kfar Adumim, sitting on a ridge about a half mile in the distance.

Foreign-funded solar panels helped power a medium-sized flat-screen television mounted alongside couches in a shack that doubled as sleeping quarters and a common area to host visitors.

Abu Khamis, 50, said the family prefers to stay at Khan al Ahmar despite the pressure to relocate.

“What I really want is to remain where we are now,” he said. “Why not build for us a community or village right here? Why take us somewhere else?”

As the rising morning sun colors the desert a burnt orange, outlines of uniformed school children appear on a nearby hilltop above Abu Khamis’ home. One by one and in pairs, they come skipping down toward a fenced off enclave of single-floor rooms constructed of mud and tires, the Khan al Ahmar elementary school.

Nicknamed “the tire school,” it is a hive of activity and noise in an otherwise sleepy encampment. At recess, shouting students raced in between classrooms and kicked a soccer ball on a playground of artificial grass. Many of the 160 pupils make daily treks through the desert hills of up to two miles from homes in nearby encampments.

Children learn English, math, Arabic and geography in tiny classrooms whose facades are decorated with murals of doves and Palestinian flags.

Before the school was built in 2009, the Bedouin children would have to cross the highway to catch rides to schools in Jerusalem or Jericho. Some of the children died in highway accidents.

“They really love to come here. They really want to study and keep the school clean. They suffered from not having a school,” said Halaime Zahaikah, a science teacher from Jerusalem. “It’s a place where they can play and have fun.”

The school, built with the help of foreign and Israeli human rights activists, has become a symbol of the Bedouin struggle to remain in the hills. So far, it has survived several court petitions sponsored by residents from the Kfar Adumim settlement calling for its demolition.

“An elementary school is different from a home,” said Yehiel Grenimann, an activist from the Israeli group, Rabbis for Human Rights, which helped build the school. “A school represents life and hope” for the community.

The Israeli military’s Civil Administration said it is offering the Bedouin properties in West Bank neighborhoods outside of Jerusalem and Jericho where, the Israeli officials say, they will be able to preserve their customs, own a home, and get hooked up to water and electricity. Most have refused the offer.

At the entrance of Khan al Ahmar, barefoot toddlers with unwashed faces and tattered clothes greeted visitors. Women, many dressed in long dresses and head scarves, shielded their faces from strangers. Not far away from the children, men from Khan al Ahmar and nearby encampments sat on a carpet outside a public meeting shack in a cloud of tobacco smoke, discussing recent demolitions.

They were awaiting the arrival of a shipment from the World Food Program. Soon, two trucks roared up the unpaved road to the encampment loaded with giant sacks of wheat flour, bottles of cooking oil and lentils to supplement the residents’ food supply.

The Bedouin encampments can appear as if discarded amid the wilderness of the Judean desert. Strewn about the hamlets are junked cars, shipping pallets, canvas and sheets of corrugated metal. Sheep and goat pens are built from wood planks and chain-link fencing.

There is, however, a logic behind the location, said Abu Khamis. The Bedouin can persist if they have access to a highway to bring their livestock, milk and yogurt to cities, a nearby water source, and room for their goats to graze, he said.

But over time, the grazing areas have shrunk substantially amid the expansion of nearby settlements, the construction of Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank, and the closing off of land for military training zones.

Abu Khamis said the head count of livestock dropped about 75% in the last 20 years, while the East Jerusalem-based International Peace and Cooperation Center estimated it dropped about 33% during that time. To make up for the lost income, most of the men work outside of the encampments in nearby Jewish settlements or in agriculture plantations in the valley around Jericho. For many years, Abu Khamis drove a bulldozer that helped build Kfar Adumim.

In an encampment about two miles from Khan al Ahmar, Khalil Mohammed Jahalin kneeled over a pot of tea and recalled how he and his family awoke two days before to bulldozers and an Israeli official with a demolition order.

“It hurts that, in a place that’s yours, the place where you live is being destroyed, and they’re making a mess out of it. They don’t want the Bedouin here. And in another 10 or 20 years, you’ll see [settlement] buildings. What kind of a country is this? What kind of a life is this?”

Back at Khan al Ahmar, a gentle winter rain fell on the roof of Abu Khamis’ shacks as the afternoon sun grew weak and the winds picked up. After returning from school, the girls played games, and stared at cartoons on the family TV until they were shooed away by an older brother.

With the help of the children, Abu Khamis’ wife, Sara, prepared a pot of lentils and fresh pita bread for an early dinner. As the family warmed itself by the fire, Abu Khamis said that he hoped his young daughters will continue their education at a university when they get older. Whether the encampment will still be in the same place for the children to return to, he can’t say. Representatives of the Israeli military visit regularly to remind him eventually Israel will force the Jahalin to leave Khan al Ahmar.

He recalled a conversation with an Israeli official, who told him: “Sooner or later you will be evacuated.”

“All Bedouin communities from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea are under a demolition order,” Abu Khamis told the visitors.

Many Palestinians and rights activists worry that evicting the Bedouins to make way for settlement growth would create an Israeli wedge between the northern and southern West Bank, making the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state physically impossible.

Meanwhile, there has been growing pressure within Israel’s coalition government to annex Maale Adumim, a settlement east of Jerusalem with a population of about 38,000, whose enormous boundaries nearly ensconce all of the Jahalin Bedouin.

“There is no way to have a Palestinian state with Israel controlling this area,” Abu Khamis said. “If Israel evacuates the Bedouin community from this area, the boundary of Jerusalem will be extended to the Dead Sea. It will be the end of the last hope for peace.”

Oct. 16, 2019: Columns

Another great trip with Carl White

The winners of the Jousting Contest, “Friar Tuck” and Ken. 

Photos by Carl White

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

  When we received notification that The Record had won some awards from the North Carolina Society of Historians, I immediately began making plans to go to the ceremony--an event we have been proud to attend for the past 10 or so years (see story on page 1A). 

Being the worst driver in the state, I was particularly pleased when Carl White, the producer of Life in the Carolinas, told me he was also going to the ceremony and agreed to let me ride along with him, Carl has been a supporter of the work of the Society of Historians for several years and was last year’s Historian of the Year.

While I was looking forward to the annual awards ceremony with the Historians, I was especially pleased when Carl asked me if I could make a little side trip with him after the event ended at noon.  He didn't say where we would be going, but I have learned that a trip with Carl White is going to be special day, so I asked my friend, Nancy Sorbello, if she could check in on my dog, Angel, to give me a while longer away.  When she agreed, I knew Angel was in good hands — Nancy is a dog person like no other.

I didn't think much more about the upcoming "side trip" with Carl, but remembered what a great time we had touring an artist's studio and home in Lenoir on our way home last year.  After we left Davidson College and made it back to I-77, I did notice he went south toward Charlotte instead of north toward home.  After a few miles he left the interstate and soon I saw where we were heading to Huntersville as we turned by a large sign that read "The Carolina Renaissance Festival and Artisan Marketplace."

The event is referred to as "RenFest" to many seasoned visitors.

I had heard about the festival for years, but had never been. In fact, as we were driving down the road to acres ands acres of parking lots, Carl told me that he figured I would never go on my own, and, since we were this close, we could spend the rest of the day there.

And what an afternoon it was.

I thought I had some idea about the Renaissance Festival from what other folks had told me, but in reality, I was clueless.  From the first step through the entrance I was blown away.  It’s huge.  It’s fun. And everyone who worked there — to a person — was as kind, friendly, and accommodating as I could ever hope to find again.

I really don't even know where to start, but there is entertainment non-stop for all ages, along with arts, crafts, games, rides, glass blowing, candle making, blacksmithing, leather work, costumes, jewelry making, and on and on.  We even got to see the day’s last show of knights on horseback jousting.  If hitting themselves with 10-foot poles while riding wide open on huge horses wasn't enough, once the jousting ended, the loser challenged the winner to a sword fight to the "death."  There was mayhem all over.  It was wonderful entertainment and the place was packed.

Ken even got his photo taken with a belly dancer.

There is no way to tell it all here, but go to renfest.com and be amazed.

Toward the end of the day, Carl did a little camera work with me and asked me about the festival.  I said simply, I had never been, but would be back every year. Or maybe even next week.

Saturday was a great day — from start to finish.  But how could it help but be? It was another great trip with Carl White.

Abuse and murder - just part of the culture

By AMBASSADOR EARL COX and KATHLEEN COX

As much as the information contained in this article will shock you, it is meant to serve as a warning.  Despite what the uninformed may say, whether they be members of the U.S. Congress, the mainstream media, religious leaders or others, Islam is not a religion of peace and wherever it gets a toehold, it grows like cancer.

In a recent ruling handed down by top level PA (Palestinian Authority) religious leaders, Palestinian Muslim women are prohibited from filing complaints with the Israeli police against their husbands for cases of abuse and even murder.  

Within the Israeli Knesset, a governing body which is akin to our U.S. Congress, there is a political party called the Israeli Arab Party.  Yes, it is made up of Israeli Arabs who are often very critical of the State of Israel.  In fact, this party boycotted the recent swearing-in ceremony of the Israeli Parliament in protest of what it considers the Israeli government's failure to address the rising levels of violence in Arab towns. Yet, while Israeli Arab politicians are complaining that not enough is being done to tackle the growing problem of violence in Israeli Arab communities, the PA is telling Palestinian women not to go to the Israeli police with complaints over their husbands.

A religious ruling is known as a fatwa and within the Arab Palestinian culture, the price for breaking, or ignoring, a fatwa is often death. This ruling, handed down by two top religious leaders, prohibiting Palestinian women from approaching Israeli police, is life endangering for Palestinian women as it removes a major deterrent against domestic violence and abuse. According to statistics gathered by a nonprofit women's group, 63 percent of Palestinian women suffer from marital violence. 73 percent suffer from verbal abuse, 24 percent from physical abuse and 29.5 percent from mental abuse.  In a culture filled with hate, married women are often not forthcoming about violence perpetrated against them by their husbands.  As in most cultures, their silence is due, in part, to a sense of shame but, more dramatically, it is because the prevailing culture forbids discussing such "family" secrets.  Islamic culture teaches that the man believes he has bought and paid for the woman therefore she has become his property and must obey his orders.  This is the culture of Palestinian society, and Palestinian laws give husbands the right of ownership making him the one who "commands and prohibits" everything in the life of his wife. Palestinian religious leaders are brainwashing Palestinian women into believing that the Israeli police are trying to destroy Palestinian families therefore they should not contact police with complaints.  The religious leaders are claiming that the Israeli police encourage women to rebel against their spouses in order to break up the family and separate the children.  Of course, this is an outrageous lie.  To an Israeli, family is everything. 

Honor killing is another horrific practice which is deeply ingrained in the Arab Palestinian culture where women are viewed as nothing more than bodies and property created to serve the men.  For minor offenses, or even simply perceived offenses, an Arab Palestinian woman can be stoned to death or repeatedly raped and/or denigrated in some other heinous way with no consequence or punishment for the perpetrator(s).  Honor killings do not happen in a vacuum.  They happen in environments in which such killings are legitimized by the leaders who either turn a blind eye or endorse it.  

Last month a young Palestinian woman was the victim of an honor killing for doing nothing more than posting a video of herself with a man who had proposed to her but with whom she was not yet formally engaged.   What a tragedy.  These are the people the world is constantly pressuring Israel to embrace as neighbors.  It's like trying to mix water and oil.  Israeli values and virtues are absolutely opposite those of the Palestinians.  Israelis value life while the Palestinians value death and killing.  Until the Arab Palestinians are able to move beyond barbarism, having a state of their own, unless it be at the North or South Pole, would be disastrous.   

9:1 ¶  Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. 2  And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick. 3  And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece. 4  And whatsoever house ye enter into, there abide, and thence depart. 5  And whosoever will not receive you, when ye go out of that city, shake off the very dust from your feet for a testimony against them. 6  And they departed, and went through the towns, preaching the gospel, and healing every where. 7  Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was done by him: and he was perplexed, because that it was said of some, that John was risen from the dead; 8  And of some, that Elias had appeared; and of others, that one of the old prophets was risen again. 9  And Herod said, John have I beheaded: but who is this, of whom I hear such things? And he desired to see him.

 Jesus now send out His twelve disciples to the people of Israel, having authority and power to expel devils and cure sickness. They were to preach the kingdom of God, that the power of God was with them, as they healed the suffering. In this stage of God’s plan they took nothing with them but depended completely upon the good will of the people to whom they were preaching and whom they healed.

 The stir caused by their actions sparked Herod to want to meet this man that some were saying was John the Baptist risen from the dead. Others said that Elijah had returned or one of the Old Testament prophets. Herod the tetrarch, not the former King Herod who is dead now, wanted to see Christ.

     9:10 ¶  And the apostles, when they were returned, told him all that they had done. And he took them, and went aside privately into a desert place belonging to the city called Bethsaida. 11  And the people, when they knew it, followed him: and he received them, and spake unto them of the kingdom of God, and healed them that had need of healing. 12 And when the day began to wear away, then came the twelve, and said unto him, Send the multitude away, that they may go into the towns and country round about, and lodge, and get victuals: for we are here in a desert place. 13  But he said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they said, We have no more but five loaves and two fishes; except we should go and buy meat for all this people. 14 For they were about five thousand men. And he said to his disciples, Make them sit down by fifties in a company. 15 And they did so, and made them all sit down. 16  Then he took the five loaves and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed them, and brake, and gave to the disciples to set before the multitude. 17  And they did eat, and were all filled: and there was taken up of fragments that remained to them twelve baskets.

 Here, Christ performs the feeding of a multitude of people, five thousand men, a number that does not include the women and children that were there. As I do not want to start making this study a harmonization of the gospels, as there are many of those that are good, I am not going to discuss the different accounts of these mass feedings.

 Again, we have the number twelve as significant in this passage. Remember, the nation of Israel was built on signs and wonders and the Jews required signs to make them believe.

 Deuteronomy 4:34  Or hath God assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by a stretched out arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?

 1Corinthians 1:22  For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: 23  But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness;

24  But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

 There is so much preaching material here it is staggering. I have heard many good sermons on things like, “what are you going to do with your five and two?” that suggested we can do great things with very little. I heard that sermon given by a great African-American preacher from Baltimore named Sewall Smith.

     9:18 ¶  And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am? 19  They answering said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again. 20  He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? Peter answering said, The Christ of God. 21  And he straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell no man that thing; 22  Saying, The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain, and be raised the third day. 23 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. 24  For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. 25  For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away? 26  For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s, and of the holy angels. 27  But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.

 Peter declares that Jesus is God’s Messiah. To prevent people from trying to make Him king, to delay His mission of bringing human history and God’s plan of reconciling mankind to Himself at the Cross and the empty tomb Jesus orders them not to declare that. It is something that will come from the grass roots level as people realize who has performed miracles among them and healed them. We are talking about Jews here, first-century Palestinian Jews. Jesus then declares what His end on earth must be for this plan to go into effect. God’s own blood must be shed to save a dying humanity, lost in its rebellion, its sins, against Him. Then, He must rise from the dead.

 Verse 23 is one of the great verses of the Bible. The true follower of Christ must push his own demands, desires, and even needs behind and put Christ first. He then must take up his or her own suffering, their own cross, daily, and carry it, following Christ. We are all born in dying bodies that will eventually fail us and our suffering at the end of our lives will be horrific typically without drugs. Our eyes must be on eternity and on our Creator at all times. Otherwise we will overthink our suffering, dying, and death. We must, at all times, maintain an eternal perspective or we will wallow in our humanity and in our suffering. Even the most spiritual minded atheist tries to justify their own suffering by philosophizing and rationalizing to justify themselves. But, only one things justifies us; Christ, God in the flesh, the Word by which we were all created, who shed His blood on the Cross for our sins and rose from the grave for our justification. We must keep our eyes on Him.

 When we struggle carnally for our life trying to hold onto it, we lose it. When we willingly die for Christ….

 1Corinthians 15:31  I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.

 Galatians 2:20  I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

 …we have eternal life with Him. Eternity is a long, long time compared to this short biological existence.

 There is nothing that this life has to offer that can compare to an eternity with our Creator.

 At the end of this passage Christ again speaks of persecution for our faith and how important it is to stand fast in our faith in Him. It is absolutely essential and spoken of in several places.

 Verse 27 is about to be fulfilled in the next passage.

Palestinians condemn Hollywood stars’ fundraiser for Israeli Wehrmacht

The Middle East Eye London-based news outlet reported that the gala was organized on November 1st, by Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, adding that Hollywood stars such as Ashton Kutcher, Gerard Butler and Andy Garcia attended and celebrated the event.

"A memorandum of understanding signed between Israel and Barack Obama's US administration in 2016 included a record $38bn deal to provide Israel with military assistance over a ten-year period, the largest such pledge in American history."The event was met with condemnation in Palestine and by Palestinians on social media.One of the organizers of "The Great March of Return," which takes place every Friday at the eastern borders of the besieged Gaza Strip, Ahmad Abu Artema, told Middle East Eye that "The Israeli army will use these funds to buy more bullets and more bombs, only to kill more civilians."

"The Great March of Return" protests were launched on March 30th by thousands of Palestinian refugees demanding their right of return to their homes.

Abu Artema added to MEE "The Israeli army has killed more than 200 civilians and wounded some 20,000; these people were men, women and children calling for basic human rights. They did not pose any threat to the Israeli army."

"Despite cries of human rights abuses and violations of international law, the voices of Palestinians were nowhere to be heard at the Los Angeles event."MEE added that attendees at the gala enjoyed a performance by producer and rapper Pharrell Williams, who was recently attacked on social media for asking US President Donald Trump to refrain from playing his song "Happy" at his rallies only to perform it at this fundraiser for the Israeli army. Abu Artema said "It is difficult to understand how actors and performers, who carry the message of life, can support an army that carries out systematic killings, which contradict the essence of life and art.""To us, anyone who funds this army has blood on their hands," he added.For Mahmoud Shobi, a resident of the West Bank city of Nablus, funds from the US government, US taxpayer money and donations from American citizens have only allowed Israel to "intensify its occupation and colonialism."MEE said that Shobi lost eight family members in 2002 when US-made bulldozers, bought by Israel, demolished his home with his family still inside.Shobi told MEE that "Israel has used its money and weapons to destroy our homes, our trees, and kill our people."

"It doesn't matter where this money is coming from," Shobi added, "They've labelled us 'terrorists', though we fight for our land. Even in ‘peaceful’ resistance, as we see in Gaza, the protesters are being met with live bullets.""But as families of martyrs and political prisoners, as people who are facing the occupation, these donations will only empower us to become more resilient."Farid Taamallah, a political activist based in Ramallah, told MEE that he believes more needs to be done to raise awareness of the situation on the ground by the Palestinians in the West.Taamallah said "Israel has effective tools to market itself as the only democracy of the Middle East and claim that it holds the same values as the American people, particularly with the Zionist lobby," adding that "They try to show Israel as a victim of Arab and Muslim terror.""We need to work with Palestinians in the US and Europe to change the narrative. We must be more active in raising awareness of where this money goes."The activist said that the money raised in Hollywood would undoubtedly be used to further suppress Palestinians, pointing to Israel's Nation-state law passed earlier this year. "Every American dollar donated to the occupation's state translates into our suffering as a Palestinian people," Taamallah said.

http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=781750