 |
| "We Are Burning," the last work by digital artist Mahasen al-Kateeb. The image depicts the death of 19-year-old Sha'ban al-Dalou, who made headlines when he was burned alive on October 14, 2024 by an Israeli airstrike on a makeshift hospital in Gaza. Al-Kateeb herself was killed by an Israeli airstrike four days later. |
More and more, Thee Optimist sees calls on social media, and on the interwebs in general for people to preserve whatever evidence they can find about the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Not sure what this drive is all about. Of course, the large tech companies, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and numerous others, are complicit in the genocide, and will do whatever they can to disappear evidence.
The American, English and German governments are more than complicit in the genocide - in particular, the US is paying for and providing the weapons to carry it out.
But many organizations, like the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the like, along with media outlets like Al-Jazeera, are doing everything they can to preserve evidence.
Moreover, the Palestinians themselves have been livestreaming their own demise for the past 18 months. Israeli war criminals have been gleefully doing the same thing.
There is no shortage of evidence.
Thee Optimist is hopeful people are preserving evidence so that some day, the modern equivalent of the Nuremburg Trials can be carried out, and people like Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Antony Blinken and Donald Trump can all be publicly hung by their own intestines.
Genocide Joe Biden will likely be dead long before then, so he'll have to take a miss. Sorry Joe. Would have loved to see you dangle.
Then again, I understand cancer in the bones is rather unpleasant.
That's not what this post is about, though.
This is really just some Palestinian artists that have been killed by the Israelis during their indiscriminate slaughter of the civilian population in Gaza.
 |
| The aforementioned digital artist Mahasen al-Khateeb. She was in her early 30s, and died during an October 18, 2024 Israeli bombing attack on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. |
A big part of genocide is destroying the culture of the victims
Thee Optimist is into art. This is well-known. He is something of an amateur artist himself.
He feels protective of artists. He dotes on them, and purchases their original artifacts.
More than a sideshow to the freak parade that is the human race, art is a bedrock part of it.
The world's oldest known art, the paintings in Indonesia's Leang Tedongnge cave, are thought to be as old as 51,000 years, well-predating the rise of civilization.
So art is important.
As part of genocide, the genociders often try to erase the culture of their victims.
The Israelis are doing this in Gaza - they are hoping to "cleanse" the Palestinians out of there, and destroy any memory of them.
Otherwise, why murder artists? They are non-combatants.
The fear is that some echoes of the people you are destroying will remain afterward. Artists create those echoes.
 |
| Dina Khaled Zaurub was a 22-year-old pencil artist killed this past April, by an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp near Khan Younis. She specifically drew pictures of people who had been murdered by the Israelis. |
 |
| Dorgham Bassam Qreiqea, 28-year-old oil painter. He was killed on March 18, 2025, along with his wife and 30 members of his family (I wish I was making that up), by an Israeli bombing attack on Gaza City. The family had returned to Gaza City from a refugee camp in the south during a ceasefire. |
 |
| A painting of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Old City of Jerusalem, by Palestinian artist Heba Zagout. Zagout was a well-established painter and novelist, who was killed with two of her children during an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City in November, 2023. She was 39 years-old. |
 |
| Another painting by Heba Zagout. |
 |
| Heba Zagout. Before she died, she said: “I consider art a message that I deliver to the outside world through my expression of the Palestinian cause and Palestinian identity.” |
Words of Wisdom
"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
No comments:
Post a Comment