I just posted this: https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/sop-poets-shall-resist
“Gaza Asks: When Shall this Pass?”, Refaat writes:
“It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine.”
[Over the years, Refaat encouraged and nurtured hundreds of young writers in Gaza, according to Yousef Aljamal, an author and researcher and one of Refaat’s closest friends and former students.
“The majority of young people [in Gaza] you see today on social media writing in English are his students,” Aljamal said on The Electronic Intifada livestream last month. “So he trained an army of writers and bloggers to write and to tell the story.”
Refaat edited the 2014 anthology Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, published by Just World Books.
He also contributed to Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing and Michael Merryman-Lotze, published in 2022 by Haymarket Books.]
from: In memory of Dr. Refaat Alareer, The Electronic Intifada, 7 December 2023
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And, here emailed to the Substack, the fecal matter — real name or not, it’s still that white race cancer:
I guess even poets aren’t immune to their shitty life choices.
deneimai@hotmail.com <deneimai@hotmail.com>
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Speaking of Life Choices (not):
From Victimhood, to Victim, to Survivor and the Chains of Broken Systems Dealing with DV by Paul Haeder / October 17th, 2023
Black and Blue: The Many Ways of Domestic Violence World by Paul Haeder / November 28th, 2022
Quoting myself, I’ll give the list here, first, and then continue with the personal story:
- One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime.
- An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.
- Historically, females have been most often victimized by someone they knew.
- Females who are 20 – 24 years of age are at the greatest risk of nonfatal intimate partner violence.
- Most cases of domestic violence are never reported to the police.
- According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, on average, more than three women and one man are murdered by their intimate partners in this country every day.
- In 70 – 80% of intimate partner homicides, no matter which partner was killed, the man physically abused the woman before the murder.
- It is estimated that anywhere between 3.3 million and 10 million children witness domestic violence annually.
- Boys who witness domestic violence are twice as likely to abuse their own partners and children when they become adults.
- Thirty to 60% of perpetrators of intimate partner violence also abuse children.
- The cost of intimate partner violence exceeds $5.8 billion each year, $4.1 billion of which is for direct medical and mental health services.
- There are 16,800 homicides and $2.2 million worth of (medically treated) injuries due to intimate partner violence annually, which costs $37 billion.
- Fifty percent of battered women who are employed are harassed at work by their abusive partners.
- Approximately one-half of the orders obtained by women against intimate partners who physically assaulted them were violated.
- More than two-thirds of the restraining orders against intimate partners who raped or stalked the victim were violated.
- Intimate partner violence affects people regardless of income. (source)
What follows is a 1,000 word piece that will appear in the local twice-a-week newspaper in my neck of the woods, Newport News Times, which is now under a paywall. It will appear around December 20 (I get a 1,000 words space every 30 days thus far). You know, discussing domestic violence during the holiday season when more abuse situations explode like a festering stye. Remember the stories of women trapped with their abusers during planned pandemic lockdowns? (A report released in 2021 by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice shows that domestic violence incidents in the U.S. increased by 8.1% following the imposition of lockdown orders during the 2020 pandemic.)
Violence against women increased to record levels around the world following lockdowns to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The United Nations called the situation a “shadow pandemic” in a 2021 report about domestic violence in 13 nations in Africa, Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. In the United States, the American Journal of Emergency Medicine reported alarming trends in U.S. domestic violence, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline (The Hotline) received more than 74,000 calls, chats, and texts in February, the highest monthly contact volume of its 25-year history. (source)
Everyday is Domestic Violence Awareness Day: Not Just a Week in October by Paul Haeder / April 4th, 2022
I will continue writing about this friend, and alas, the journey has not ended with the fucker pleaing out on lesser charges, like all of 11 out of 12 dropped to do some fucking bullshit on-line domestic violence once a week classes (pure putrid, I am sure). He supposedly went through another on-line class, on booze abuse. He’s out, he’s fucking with his fucker lawyer to still intimidate her in the divorce case. That happened a while back, November, and while he keeps the house, keeps all the money, has assets hidden away, she gets a fucking joke of a $28,000 settlement, but he still has not paid the full amount. Think only half, and his lawyer is the stain that makes most 98.5 percent of lawyers the scum that they present themselves as.
Here, a quick retort to some letters this ex-huband, still-abuser’s male fucking anal cavity lawyer has sent out. Threatening to (his client) call the same cops that came out to the house where they had to break down the bedroom door a year ago to extract the fucker after the 911 call was made after she escaped his strangulation. She was in the house while this scum bucket was in jail nine months, and she had 60 days to leave, or earlier if she decided AFTER the settlement.
She was smart, since a week after the fucker was jailed November 2022, she had to get some cash to survive. No joint checking, savings, anything. The abuser’s rules.
SO she sold some tools and things, and used things in this county don’t get a pile of cash, she did it BEFORE filing for divorce. End of story.
But the abusive lawyer just keeps the one-two fucking team wrestling going. But she persists.
She’s out of the house that was in his name, and she is seeing a counselor, writing her memoir, working two jobs and tweaking her resume. So much more, too, than this scum bucket who doesn’t work, just purchased a small dick motorcycle and a pick-up.
He’s out, nine months in county lock-up, and the ankle and wrist monitors are off.
Here, my make believe letter to this scum bucket’s lawyer. A thought experiment, a letter to HER divorce lawyer in response to the dirty twins — DV ex and DV Loving Lawyer.
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So, the lawyer for my ex-husband finally admits I am “amazing.” [“She amazingly sold these items before filing for divorce.”]
Indeed, I was attacked Nov. 11, and that was attempted murder. He barricaded himself inside our house. The deputies asked him to come out and discuss my 911 call.
He refused. They had to get a search warrant and then enter our house. He would not come out of the bedroom, so they forcefully pushed it in, which damaged the door and the door frame.
Yep, the grand jury went with 11 of the 12 charges leveled against him by the investigating sheriff’s deputies.
I’m not going to get into my own working through this hell hole of almost five years with him — the lawyer — or this ex-husband. But I will say, it’s called Battered Wife Syndrome, and I have a counselor and others who will testify to that. We are in many levels of trauma and Stockholm Syndrome (sort of, but more complicated).
It was already brought up in court — with proof — that I had attempted to file divorce papers, before this attempted murder, and he “talked me out of it.”
Nice work, lawyer, complete disregarding DV and Battered Wife Syndrome evidence based informaiton. Now, one letter he wrote alludes to not knowing if my ex-husband will file criminal complaints against me for theft? That’s a baseless threat, and for a lawyer to spew that in a letter is, well, it just shows his colors. Threats. The abuse continues now through his lawyer.
Then, in another letter the lawyer also threatened me (yeah, a veiled threat is how I take it) with a theft charge, an arrest and then calling up INS and then “checking” on my immigration status, which could be being revoked with a criminal charge.
I see this lawyer really knows nothing about Do0mestic Abuse and the Battered Wife Syndrome, and how that threat of green card being taken away is another open threat to my well-being. No knowledge of Oregon having organizations and some legislation to prevent that.
I am “amazing” because I went ahead and planned for a possible few months without decent work and so I sold saws and a few other tools WE both bought and WE both used to build the house? And, I sold a broken e-bike which he just tossed into the shed — a bike he broke while driving drunk? We bought two of them, and then his got stolen, so this bike, he took from me and crashed it over rocks in his drunken stupor.
Yes, those were tools WE used to build the house. I used those tools for various aspects of the construction. I sold them to a fellow who pointed out they were a bit worn down and there were rusty (locked) adjustment nuts. Not exactly prime equipment.
Yep, that was pretty amazingly smart of me to plan for tough times with the husband in jail facing a $750,000 bond, and his mother harassing me, and alas, the electricity shut off while he was in jail.
Pretty amazing that I weathered the abuse, and alas, it did take me into the first week of December to get a counselor to help me with the PTSD this ex-husband precipitated over four years of abuse, but specifically especially through this attempted strangulation.
Funny how BWS works on the esteem and psychology of the abused victim. Yo-yoing back and forth. He campaigned so many times for me to return. I was, up until I filed for divorce, not sure what I would do. And, so, that’s great this lawyer, this Mister DV-INS-Threatening Women, sees me that way.
And since November 12, 2022, what have I been doing while this piece of shit husband did squat in jail? I have worked hard to recover from the strangulation and this guy’s motivation to kill his wife. I have worked to deal with his criminal case, the no contact order for him and his mother. I have worked to make sure this guy received punishment for his crimes.
Ernie (psuedonym), along with his lawyer, just seems to want to continue the abuse. SO much for domestic violence classes. I have not been paid the full amount of the divorce settlement per the judge’s order. He will be in contempt of court at the end of the business day Dec. 16.
This is the result of a man who has not learned anything about domestic abuse. He is just the constant abuser, but this time with a lawyer, butluckily for me, I am out of the house and so far away from him emotionally, that getting through this extortion, this manipulation or whatever the lawyer believes he’s doing for “his” client, pales in comparison to the years of abuse and the murder attempt.
The judge will want to be informed of my ex-husband’s recalcitrance and continual financial abuse. And now, threats of contacting immigration and threats of filing theft charges?
What’s next up the sleeve of the lawyer practicing his dark arts, his rather unprofessional interpretation of the law? Are you going to go after my dog again?
What a combination of a sick client and his dirty lawyer. Or, prove me wrong.
Just getting that adjective — amazing/amazingly — in reference to me is worth a few hours of revelling. From a divorce lawyer on the “other side,” no less.
LIFE fucking choices, Mister John McIntosh!
Paul Haeder, Author 