If you want to live in a “Children of the Corn”-style bubble of innocence and purity, well, to me, that’s a startling approach to adolescence, but every generation’s got to find its own way to reject the one before, so: do as you will. But you can’t bring the bubble to the party, kids. Fandom, established media-style fandom, was by and for adults before some of your parentswere born now. You don’t get to show up and demand that everyone suddenly change their ways because you’re a minor and you want to enjoy the benefits of adult creative activity without the bits that make you uncomfortable. If you think you’re old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised, then you also think you’re old enough to be working out your limits by experience, like everybody else, like I did when I was underage and lying about it online. If you’re not old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised and you’re doing it anyway, then that’s on your parents, not on fandom.
If you were only reading fic rated G on AO3, if you had the various safe modes on other media enabled, you would be encountering very little disturbing material, anyway (at least in the crude way people tend to define “disturbing” these days; some of the most frankly horrifying art I have ever engaged with would have been rated PG at most under present systems, but none of that kind of work ever seems to draw your protests). In the end, what you really want is to be able to seek out the edges of your little world, but be able to blame other people when you don’t like what you find. Sorry. Adolescence is when you get to stop expecting others to pad your world for you and start experiencing the actual consequences of the risks you take, including feeling appalled and revolted at what other people think and feel.
Now, ironically, fandom’s actually a fairly good place for such risk-taking, as, for the most part, you control whether you engage and you can choose the level of your engagement. You can leave a site, blacklist something, stop reading an author, walk away from your computer. Are there actual people (as opposed to works of art, which cannot engage with you unless you engage with them) who will take advantage of you in fandom? Of course there are. Unfortunately, such people are everywhere. They will be there however “innocent” and “wholesome” the environment appears to be, superficially. That’s evil for you. There are abusers in elementary school. There are abusers in scout troops. There are abusers in houses of worship. Shutting down adult creative activity because you happen to be in the vicinity isn’t going to change any of that. It may help you avoid some of those icky feelings that you get when you think about sex (and you live in a rape culture, those feelings are actually understandable, even if your coping techniques are terrible), but no one, except maybe your parents, has a moral imperative to help you avoid those.
In the end, you’re not my kid and you’re not my intended audience. I’m under no obligation to imagine only healthy, wholesome relationships between people for your benefit. Until you’re old enough to understand that the world is not exclusively made up of people whose responsibility it is to protect you from your own decisions, yes, you’re too young for established media fandom. Fandom shouldn’t be “friendly” to you.
“In the end, what you really want is to be able to seek out the edges of your little world, but be able to blame other people when you don’t like what you find.”
Companies such as Twitter and Facebook will sometimes make content moderation decisions that seem hypocritical, inconsistent, and confusing. But private failure is better than government failure, not least because unlike government agencies, Twitter has to worry about competition and profits.
The apparent abduction, and probable murder, of the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 unmasked the ugly despotism behind the reformist image of the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
This is a story that goes back to the 18th century. Then, much of what we call “the Middle East” today, including the more habitable part of the Arabian Peninsula, was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul, then called Constantinople, by a cosmopolitan elite of mainly Turks and Balkan Muslims, including Bosnians and Albanians. The Hejaz, the western region of the Arabian Peninsula that included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, was revered for religious reasons, but it was a backwater with no political or cultural significance.
In the 1740s, in the most isolated central area of the Arabian Peninsula, called Najd, a scholar named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab emerged with a fiery call for the restoration of “true Islam.” Wahhab soon allied with a chieftain called Ibn Saud—the founder of the Saudi dynasty.
The First Saudi State they established together grew in size and ambition, leading to a big massacre of Shiites in Karbala in 1801 and the occupation of Mecca in 1803. The Ottomans crushed the Wahhabi revolt in 1812 via their protectorate in Egypt, and Wahhabism retreated to the desert.
Another tumult in Hejaz occurred in 1856 when the Ottomans, thanks to the influence of their British allies, introduced another heretical “innovation”: the banning of slave trade, which was then a lucrative business between the Africa coast and the Arabian city of Jeddah. At the behest of angry slave traders, Grand Sharif Abd al-Muttalib of Mecca declared that Turks had become infidels and their blood was licit. As we learn from the chronicles of Ottoman statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Turks’ sins included “allowing women to uncover their bodies, to stay separate from their fathers or husbands, and to have the right to divorce.”
These were the changes introduced during the Tanzimat, the great Ottoman reform movement in the mid-19th century by which the empire imported many Western institutions and norms. The Tanzimat allowed the Ottoman Empire to ultimately become a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament—something still unimaginable in the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia. It also allowed the rise of the modern Turkish Republic, where secular law became the norm, women gained equal rights, and democracy began to grow.
It was on a Wednesday morning (June 1, 2016) that the 20-year-old ‘top Israeli terror suspect’, Meir Ettinger, was released from custody after leading the arson attack on the Dawabsheh home in Duma village.
An attack in which the 18-month-old baby was burned alive on his peaceful sleep, while both of his parents died in hospital. As for Ahmad, their 5-year-old son, he spent months in hospital recovering from third degree burns on 70% of his body.
The Israeli terrorist was released chargeless from that day on and what was most ironically symbolic is that he was released on what is known to be “Children’s Day”.
Anyways, the question that lingers on my conscience is: why do we hear of such news only from local media?
It has been remarkable how, since the Holocaust, in particular, the hoopoe – that is to say, the “Israeli national bird” – sings everyone’s pen to sleep. We are living the claimed freedom of speech era, yet whenever it comes to the occupying Israel, the mass media is seen to be taking a nap. No one could ever say anything sensitive or critical about Jews unless they were “anti-Semetic”.
International day to end impunity for crimes against journalists
Over the past decade, a journalist has been killed every four days on average. Each year since 2016, more journalists have been killed outside of conflict zones than in countries currently experiencing armed conflict.
A total of eighty-six killings of journalists worldwide have been reported between 2020 and the end of June 2021. The majority of killed journalists are killed in their country of nationality. Among the 400 journalists killed from 2016 to 2020, 22 (6%) were foreigners.
Impunity for crimes against journalists continues to prevail, with nine of ten killings remaining unpunished. The year 2020 saw a slight improvement, however, with thirteen per cent of cases worldwide reported as resolved, compared to twelve per cent in 2019, and eleven per cent in 2018.
In many cases, impunity results from bottlenecks within the justice system itself.
Ending impunity for crimes against journalists is one of the most pressing issues to guarantee freedom of expression and access to information for all citizens.
While fewer women journalists are among the victims of fatal attacks, women are particularly targeted by offline and online gender-based threats and harassment. These attacks have increased significantly in recent years.
Women journalists have identified political leaders, extremist networks and partisan media as some of the biggest instigators and amplifiers of online violence against women, according to the UNESCO discussion paper The Chilling: Global trends in online violence against women journalists, 2021, based on a major interdisciplinary study produced by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ(link is external)).
In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, media workers around the world have also been subject to harassment, persecution and detention as a result of their work to keep citizens informed about the health crisis.
I’m a person who believes there should always be the right to have freedom of expression, even if sometimes is not comfortable to others, because the fact it’s not nice, doesn’t mean, that expression is looking to offend those who don’t like it. It’s only the venting of an idea or the wish to share something with others.
Since last year, after I fortuitously got to know about Susan Klebold and her journey after the crime her younger son perpetrated and his subsequent suicide. I not only developed an interest in her and what she has to say about such crime, her son and her fight to create consciousness around mental health issues, but I also felt able to look at this person in a new light, i started to see him as a human being, which took me to want to reproduce some of the photos Susan has shared of him through the years, because I wanted to represent that human, that child she raised.
However, for the first time in 20 years of having been learning to draw and have become an arts mayor, I’ve found a huge percentage of rejection and hostility towards this reproductions, people rush to conclude that my only interest is to glorify and enhance him, giving him attributes he didn’t had, pretending he didn’t do anything wrong or even believing I support or condone such atrocities.
By no means and in no moment, I’m pretending to promote these kind of ideas, but I think is sad and frustrating that those who only wish to make images or illustrations about these topics or any other that turns out to be polemic, whether is for a certain interest or just for the exercise of making any artwork, don’t have the right to share those without being attacked and referred to as deranged and sick persons who only wish to promote the actions of these persons or who only want to disrespect or disregard it’s victims and pretend they were right for acting as they did or deserve more attention than those who lost their life at their hands.
Art is a mean of expression, a way to share what we feel, what we live, what we think, what we fear, about things that makes us hurt, things we want, things we enjoy and, tho, sometimes those messages can be uncomfortable or hurtful, it’s also a right and a necessity for it to exist and generate such disconfort, this, with the objective of create a debate, generate consciousness and analysis, promote the search for learning and a better understanding of the topic it represents or sometimes just share a visual composition.
In my case, I’m not trying to take away the responsibility and concecuences of the actions this young man perpetrated, nor I pretend to force others to see him differently as what they perceive of him, I just wish I didn’t feel like I have to hide what I’ve been drawing, I wish people could see that I’m only making visual pieces about a topic that got me thinking and has helped me widen my views about some of the biggest issues of our time which is our mental health.
My personal belief is that demonizing this people is as harmful as glorifying them, I feel we should try to see them as humans, even and specially, if it is inconvenient and uncomfortable, because anyone of us could be them, anyone of us could reach their point, if we, as them, don’t get the chance to be helped, anyone of us could be as hateful and ruthless, anyone of us could get as lost as they got and pretending they were plain evil, it’s not only naive, but potentially dangerous, the last 20 years and the continuous occurrence of these kind of tragedies is sadly, the best proof we haven’t learned enough of it, we haven’t payed enough attention.
