I'll be frank, I don't like Donald Trump. The man is a clown, the type of clown you see running around wildly with a machete and blood from unknown victims dripping down the blade. What's worse is his rhetoric. He spews hate speech, and his hate speech is having an impact on people around me.
I see people I am friends with, on Facebook, posting some pretty horrible and racist things about Arabs and Muslims. Now, I'm a Palestinian Christian, but when you're brown, you're lumped in with Muslims, and Muslims, of which ironically Arabs are actually not the majority, are thought to be all Arabs. You see where I'm going with this?
The current political and social climate feels like I've been rocketed back to the days of post 9-11, days that I was hoping to leave behind, days that I never want to relive again. They were days when I used to be terrified of walking home from the bus stop at school, wondering if someone was going to shoot me with a pistol. Days of hearing kids in the hallway saying that Arabs belonged in concentration camps. Days of being called a raghead or a sand nigger. Days of fellow students asking me, publicly humiliating me, if I knew a suicide bomber vest is made in their size. These weren't everyday occurrences, but they happened too frequently for my preference, and the result was making me feel isolated from the rest of the people around me. It was stressful.
It's starting again. I've received a couple of death threats on Facebook from total strangers. There's no merit to the threats, but it still sucks to receive them. Dating sucks again, too. People have become so desensitized to racism and prejudice that they don't even realize they are racist and prejudiced.
The Love Bomber, despite his myriad displays of affection, also screwed up royally with me. One night, he came over to my place, excited to show me an episode of the show Curb Your Enthusiasm. The title of the episode was "Palestinian Chicken." Love Bomber touted it as a show of comic genius. He told me I'd love the episode. I wasn't sure what to expect. Larry David is a Jew, and most Jews in mainstream American media tend to portray Arabs as animals. This show was no exception.
The show was abhorrent. It portrayed Palestinians as Jew-hating, over-sexed, animal-like creatures. It was some of the most racist rhetoric I had ever witnessed. Larry David hit a new low.
Another fun dating instance was another guy who wanted to know my background, because "you look so beautiful and so exotic." This guy seemed okay.
"I'm Palestinian."
"What? Oh." His expression changed. "Yeah, that's a hot-button issue, but because you're gorgeous, I'm on your side."
What? I didn't realize that my very existence as a Palestinian made me a "hot-button issue."
It's the New Hate.
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