I think about a lot of things a lot of the time, but one thing I stay stumped on daily is the paradox of people who don't understand things being filled with confidence in the understanding they lack. It needs to be a documentary. I remember one time this British teenager who called himself "Chris Middle East' (I kid you not), made a video mispronouncing my name (with equal confusion about everything else) and angrily insisting "Eleekaah, Jihad just means struggle!" Where do they get the confidence to lecture Middle Eastern people about what Jihad means? It's like lecturing Jews on what Nazis "meant," as if they didn't live exactly what it meant while being condescended by "westsplaining" elitists who use the real life suffering they're galaxies removed from as fodder for intellectual masturbation. Rarely have I come across people who understand so little, but see their incompetence through the lens of such high esteem. The problem is intensified when equally out-of-touch onlookers cheer them on, all of them not knowing enough to know what they don't know. How do they not see that they are the exact colonizers they claim to loathe, only this time, they're colonizing our stories instead of our lands. There is nothing more dystopian than revisionism of the Middle East that exploits their silence and denies their reality, just to reduce them to a laundry service for western guilt. So I don't lose my mind, is there even a possibility that self-awareness will find these Neo-western supremacists some day?
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