It is complex and yet it isn’t. There are understandable psychological and historical causes for the current state. It is not black and white. But nothing is. We just want to make things to fit nice boxes.

If you want to understand it, you need to understand radicalization and how it applies to MENA including Israel. Actions do not come from the vacuum and people are messy. Every person has an agenda.

At the same time, in this specific situation, there are what according to well-established parameters amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. While there is terrorism committed by Palestinian groups, these crimes are largely committed by Israel. It might be that if the power imbalance were a little less we would see similar actions from the Palestinian state. But it is not.

Just in the last week, we have seen apartheid, ethnic cleansing, what could be genocide, collective punishment, embargo and cutting vital supplies to the area you are occupying. This list is not exhaustive. This is univocally wrong.

The most complex part is not understanding it. The most complex part is solving it.

While Israel is part of the cause of Islamic terrorism in Europe, I think we should not pat too much on our backs. Yes, our countries’ positions taking sides on Israel is problematic as hell and so is us being tied to the US in the minds of many people outside Europe. But so is our own Islamophobia. I get where it comes from, but othering and sidelining people will lead to further radicalization. Which for people whose Islamophobia is rooted in current oppression in many Islamic societies, is entirely opposite of what they want.

Which was influenced largely by the antisemitism of the West and the rise of Zionism for Jewish people which is partly radicalization as a response to thousands of years of oppression. But Brits were still in power with colonialism in full force.

And criminalization of civil society is in general thriving in many European countries including France.

Starting fire is pretty relevant skill in Finland for multiple reasons from saunas to cabins to campfires. While I partially learned at home, scouts are pretty good here and definitely taught me a lot of wilderness and survival skills.

Can’t union members vote them on or off? I am not American but how I was taught is that unions are what members make them of. This works here but unions are also not for one job place but for job classes (academics, nurses, doctors and teachers unions are separate for example). This means that employee contracts are negotiated nationally with unions for different employers. It makes the system less likely to be abused.

That is actually a great way to teach kids these things. I was nine when my mom took me to her workplace as she was organizing strike monitors. I passively learned a lot. Admittedly between 59-69% of the workforce of my country belongs to unions so it is pretty much generally thought that unions are amazing. I have belonged to one if I was working in Finland either since I was 18 or 19. But that original experience with all the union work that goes behind the scenes is one of my foundational experiences.

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I get it. Part of my job is human rights advocacy. It is highly depressive and is getting to the point where I don’t really think we can change things really for the better in at least the next decades. If we had fewer existential threats I would think based on history that the day when we again decide human rights are a good idea would come again. I am purely doing it for the belief that defending human rights even when not changing anything is worth it.

In Finnish. Pilkunnussija is the word.

But they don’t actually want to help long term. They see collapse as a chance to seize power for their own benefit as even the loose control we have to check the power of the powerful is too much for them.

People have no idea what it means. Like no grasp even when stories are everywhere. I’m an aid worker. Focusing on refugees. They can’t even imagine what they go through and what the people who never got to me/safety survived until unsurvivable came in front of them.

Just be warned Moomins are a gateway to communism (Weird internet theory). Or at least to more Moomins. We literally have Moomin everything here.

In addition to general learning which might be my favourite, I have multiple.

Maybe the most niche is a historical reenactment and historical costuming. Latter usually based on extant garments or garment finds. I try to get as close to the original in techniques, tools and materials using the best evidence I can find.

I also plan things that will never happen. I decorate houses and apartments on paper. I make extensive plans for travel that I can never afford unless I win in Lottory. Which I even never play.

I spend absolutely too much time playing with spreadsheets.

At least in Europe, a lot of people find sparring partners through historical reenactment groups. I encourage you to join reenactments for other reasons too.

Do you also do historical reenactment or just sword fighting? I never personally got into the fighting side of things but the former has been one of my favourite hobbies for decades.

My personal favourites from Finnish.

“Ei ole kaikki muumit Muumilaaksossa” “Not having all the Moomins in Moomin Valley” Used for people who are either stupid or lack sanity. There are other variants of this and Moomin one is not older than a couple of decades.

I find our version of Grammar Nazi pretty great. We call them comma fuckers.

“Ei voi kauhalla ottaa jos on lusikalla annettu” “You can’t take with a ladle if it was given with a spoon”. This refers also to a lack of something, usually a lack of intelligence or sense.

This goes with being mRNA free that some anti-vaccine people tout around. They did their research well enough not to figure out what mRNA is.

They are a Salafi Jihadist group but they had their own idiocy added to Salfism which in itself has roots in Wahhabism.

I have lived in multiple as non-Muslims for long periods of time. My group of friends is pretty varied. I am not disagreeing with that in any way. A lot of Muslims are problematic at best. Why it is so is a lot more complex than just Islam. The skewed image comes not from the fact that a lot of the criticism of Islam, and especially Islamic countries, is not true. It comes from not knowing what religion says theologically, what the jurisprudence of Islam says and what Muslims actually do both in good and bad. Instead in the West we majorly hear about negative things without similar group understanding we have with Christians. When we hear that Iran is shooting people for protesting mandatory hijab majority of us do not have knowledge that mandatory hijab is pretty clearly against religious texts and that neighbour Bill while being Muslim is a good person. We do that with Christianity for example. For example, even Christian fundamentalists do similar you need to act like my religion says thing. A case-and-point example is the overturning of Roe vs Wade in the US. Nor did people start really deciding all Catholics are bad because the church had a huge CSA problem and might still have it.

Fundamentalist religion is a problem as it usually comes with extending religious values outside oneself. How Islam landed on that in many countries is a very complex issue but one thing is that it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Radicalization has a huge component of different types of marginalization. One huge and studied cause is colonialism.

It doesn’t sit well with me how the West is part of the cause for radicalized Islam while the widespread Islamophobia means that Muslims are treated badly no matter of their own actions which is likely to further radicalize Islam.