Republicans said happy Fourth of July, as you probably can expect but uh

That’s not the flag of the US

That flag?

That is the flag of Liberia

Love how smart my country’s politicians are ☺️

A carbon offset deal could see Liberia concede 10 percent of its territory to a private Emirati company, extinguishing customary land rights and giving the United Arab Emirates (UAE) pollution rights equivalent to the forest’s carbon sequestration. The deal would give the company blanket control over one million hectares of forest. The company would then “harvest” carbon credits, supposedly from restoring and protecting the land, which they would then sell onto major polluters to offset their emissions. If signed, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) would violate a number of Liberian laws, including the 2019 land rights law, a legislation that asserts communities’ right to “customary land”. It would also concede near total control of one of the most densely forested territories in Africa to the Dubai-based firm Blue Carbon for a period of 30 years. Additionally, the deal would prevent Liberia from using the land to meet its own international climate targets.

Liberia emitted 0.24 tons of CO2 per capita in 2019; UAE emitted 20.5 tons, or 85 times more than Liberia.

Kpelle dancer, Liberia, by Liberia Tourism

As a black person I actually find the logic of many Zionists to be audacious.

My people were sold and kidnapped. We were enslaved for hundreds of years. We had the most despicable things happen to us. I’m sure you may relate, we were put into breeding camps, they used our parts to make clothes and furniture, allegedly they ate us, they tortured us, etc.

There is more than enough proof I am indigenous to Africa hell I found and reconnected with the family one of my ancestors was taken from. I am very lucky.

At no point have I ever thought about going to West Africa and taking the land back, stealing property, imprisoning, and murdering people who’ve lived there for centuries and still live there today. Even though there’s a possibility that they’ve participated in the selling of at least one of my ancestors.

Just because I can trace my heritage there doesn’t suddenly mean I have a claim on the land. I have heard so many Zionist say they belong there more than Palestinians, that there claim on the land is stronger. Maybe it’s not all of them but it is enough to be concerning.

Also bring up Liberia if you want. We didn’t ask for that.

This is a fair critique and it brings up one of the most important aspects of Zionism, and of all Jewish life in the modern era and from now on: that Zionism was always morally RIGHT, but it did not have to be morally NECESSARY.

For decades there was a raging, controversial, legitimately two-sided intracommunity debate over Zionism, like nothing you see among Jews today, memorably portrayed in Chaim Potok's novel "The Chosen" (and subsequent film version). The Reform Jewish Movement, our largest denomination, was governed by an explicitly anti-Zionist platform for over 50 years..... until they changed their minds in 1937. The Jewish people always trace their heritage to Eretz Yisrael, always could claim a rightful place there - but things should never have been allowed to get bad enough, fast enough, that in the truest sense their only choice was to create a state of Israel or die.

As early as 1920, Hitler said his goal was total extermination of the Jews. Nobody cared. America sealed its gates to Jewish immigrants in 1924. Germany began visibly prepping for genocide around 1935, again nobody cared. At Evian 1938 - "the great betrayal" - pretty much every powerful state in the world acknowledged that the Jews were about to be wiped out, and knowing that, refused to allow refugees to enter (except for the Dominican Republic, the mensches). England bowed to Arab terrorism and sealed off immigration to Mandate Palestine - which was a violation of international law under the League of Nations but, again, nobody cared. Nobody, not one single country, fought to protect the Jews or to help them escape. The Allies couldn't be bothered to bomb the tracks into Auschwitz, but they would heroically sink refugee ships. After the war, 250,000 Jews lingered miserably in displaced persons camps for YEARS, with not one single country being willing to admit them, and in nearly all cases there being nothing to return to anyway. There were still Jews kept in Dachau, guarded by Germans, until 1951.

From a 1945 report to Truman: "Many Jewish displaced persons … are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences … including some of the most notorious concentration camps … had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb…. Most of them have been separated three, four or five years and they cannot understand why the liberators should not have undertaken immediately the organized effort to re-unite family groups…. Many of the buildings … are clearly unfit for winter…. [Author contrasted these conditions with the relative normal life led by the nearby German populations and wondered at the contrast] ...We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy...."

Those who attempted to return to their former communities were routinely murdered (seen at the end of "Maus"). There was a massacre of Holocaust survivors in Kiev, Ukraine in September 1945, another in Kielce, Poland in July 1946.

The Jews saw Palestine as their only hope, because it was. And when they saw their enemies there were led by actual red-handed Nazi war criminals, and heard that the stakes were once again their total genocide? Well, that's when you fight.... damn hard... to build the state and the military that will, FOR ONCE, protect you.

You talk about "At no point in my life have I considered claiming a part of Africa and fighting the people who I find there". Well - what if it was extremely obviously that or death?

A popular saying among Jews: "Israel was not created because there was a Holocaust. The Holocaust was created because there was no Israel." It's true - but it should not have been necessary to have an Israel to prevent the Holocaust. The rest of the world should have done that, and they didn't so much fail in preventing it as much as they succeeded in enabling it. You are correct to say that African-Americans did not ask for Liberia. The concept was made up by white people to try to get blacks out of America (though it gained popularity with black people after "milestones" of new cruelty such as the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, and I believe Marcus Garvey is well-liked to this day). Well, Jews did not ask to have no government in the world grant us equality or defend us from genocide. We did not ask to have no choice. And we do not ask for our response to the latest attempted genocide to be condemned by the same nations that enabled the last several.

Today about 90% of Jews are Zionists. Not just out of the everlasting moral principle, but because of the life-or-death reality that when we needed ANY OTHER OPTION TO WORK, NOTHING DID. And since then, there has been even clearer demonstration of the tenuousness of Jewish survival and the depths of inhuman hatred we face from our enemies, as the 3,000-year-old Mizrahi Jewish civilization was successfully uprooted and purged from dozens of countries (which had already been oppressing and massacring them long before Zionism) as collective racial revenge against Israel. The mere fact that that was logistically possible - that it could be done, quickly and repeatedly - speaks worlds about the normalized culture of eliminationism surrounding us. What do you really think are the chances that African-Americans could be altogether physically purged from the USA or some of its states? Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Eritrea finished their Jews within the last 5 years.

As "critics of Israel" have made it extremely clear that all Jews worldwide remain legitimate targets, that all "colonizers" (unquestionably including Americans like me) "deserve it" ("it" to include infanticide, rape, kidnapping, and mass murder), and as America visibly decays into algorithmic racist authoritarianism and climatic desperation.... you should not expect that 90% to change.

Marcus Garvey's Back-to-Africa Movement: The Rise and Fall in Liberia

African countries are being forced to spend billions of dollars a year coping with the effects of the climate crisis, which is diverting potential investment from schools and hospitals and threatens to drive countries into ever deeper poverty.

Dealing with extreme weather is costing close to 6% of GDP in Ethiopia alone, equating to a spend of more than $1 repairing climate damage for every $20 of national income, according to research by the thinktank Power Shift Africa.

The warning comes just before the major new scientific report from the global authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This report, the second part of the IPCC’s comprehensive summary of global climate science, will set out the consequences of climate breakdown across the world, looking at the floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms that are affecting food systems, water supplies and infrastructure. As global temperatures have risen in recent decades, and as the impact of extreme weather has become more apparent around the world, efforts to make infrastructure and communities more resilient have largely stalled.

Africa will be one of the worst-hit regions, despite having done least to cause the climate crisis. According to the Power Shift Africa study, titled Adapt or Die: An analysis of African climate adaptation strategies, African countries will spend an average of 4% of GDP on adapting to climate breakdown.

These countries include some of the world’s poorest people, whose responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions is many times less than those of people in developed countries, or in large emerging economies such as China. Sierra Leone will have to spend $90m a year on adapting to the climate crisis, though its citizens are responsible for about 0.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year each, while US citizens generate about 80 times more.

Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, said: “This report shows the deep injustice of the climate emergency. Some of the poorest countries in the world are having to use scarce resources to adapt to a crisis not of their making. Despite only having tiny carbon footprints compared with those of the rich world, these African countries are suffering from droughts, storms and floods which are putting already stretched public finances under strain and limiting their ability to tackle other problems.”

He called for more funding from developed countries, which promised at the Cop26 UN climate summit to double the money available to help poor countries adapt to the climate crisis. Rich countries promised in 2009 to provide $100bn a year to help poor countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the effects of climate breakdown. But so far they have fallen short of that target, and most of the funds that have been provided have gone to projects to cut emissions, such as windfarms and solar panels, rather than efforts to help countries adapt.

The study examined national adaptation plans submitted to the UN by seven African countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan and Togo. South Sudan, which is the world’s second poorest country, was hit by floods last year that displaced 850,000 people, and led to outbreaks of water-borne diseases. The country is to spend $376m a year on adaptation, about 3.1% of its GDP.

Chukwumerije Okereke, director of the centre for climate change and development at the Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria, said rich countries must respond to the findings, and to the IPCC report.

“It is both irresponsible and immoral for those that are the chief cause of climate change to look on while Africa, which has contributed next to nothing to climate change, continues to bear a disproportionate share of the impact,” he said. “The time for warm words is long gone. We need urgent, scaled-up, long-term support from the world-leading climate polluters.”

  —  African countries spending billions to cope with climate crisis

Seen in Monrovia, Liberia by Elliott Verdier

West African countries such as Liberia, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, communities have designated biodiversity hotspots, including forests and lagoons, as sacred. This system has served as a conservation tool respected by these communities for generations. The community's existence is intricately linked to the well-being and survival of the biodiversity and natural resources surrounding it.

The Western African method is to reinforce communal stewardship of the land, rather than ownership. The system starkly contrasts with some current, non-Indigenous North American methods of prohibiting humans from living in certain protected areas. Placing a dollar value on conserving these areas risks destroying the very belief system and way of thinking that have ensured their survival in the first place. Their value of biodiversity cannot be translated into monetary terms.

Please reblog for a bigger sample size!

If you have any fun fact about Liberia, please tell us and I'll reblog it!

Be respectful in your comments. You can criticize a government without offending its people.

“West Africa Liberia Kpelle Tribe potter decorating clay pots before cooking them”

Friendly fire was a "normal" thing during the Liberian civil war, especially between rebel factions and other rebel factions with different "commanders" or warlords. Many of them are untrained, worse still fighting while using heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

LGBTQ+ Africans on Magazine covers in 2022

Bassa Kru woman, Liberia

They used the flag of Liberia, twice.