Ayesha A. Siddiqi@AyeshaASiddiqi I write and forecast trends http://bit.ly/OfficeHours9 ayesha@thenewinquiry.com I don’t want to talk about politics anymore, tell me your favorite song LA theoneswelove.shop Joined January 2010 975 Following67.1K Followers
Her tweet for today, à propos of nothing except that yesterday was September 11th:
“I don’t think I can ever really be that close to people who didn’t experience the aughts the same way I did. muslims who did, im automatically close to you.”
(She just pops that one out of the oven, but otherwise, she doesn’t want “to talk politics anymore”. Check her Twitter account.)
My response:
“That’s great guys. Hunker down with only your kind. And then expect things to get better. Who am I, though, to question how delicious victimhood is? I experience some slight tension when I first get close to, say, Latin Americans, who never lived through the Stalinist nightmares my family did in eastern Europe and have never even heard about them even. But we talk, they get it, etc. And I try to understand that they’ve mostly experienced oppression and violence from the US and from the Right, so they may not have had any reason to know too much about the communist world. I’ve never said or thought “Oh, I can never be close to them.”
“This is the kind of monopoly on suffering and rejection and discrimination that too many Muslims think they have and it alienates a lot of fucking people…
“Surprised and disappointed at some of the people who “liked” your exclusion.
“And what were you all? Pleeeeease… Like four years old at the time? And from a generation that keeps talking woke shit about inclusion… Especially unfortunate because it alienates people who would otherwise be on your side — LIKE ME.”
But then I decided editing Ayesha’s tweet for my purposes would put things more clearly:
“I don’t think I can ever really be that close to people who didn’t experience …. [communist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships, the taking away of grandfathers to labor camps where they disappeared and were never heard from again, and ended up in mass graves in some unknown place, the mass massacring of families, the mass confiscation or burning or destruction of property, land, home in brutal collectivization, or those whose lives in the Soviet Union were nearly ruined because they dared to be friends with me when I was studying there; and I don’t think I can be close to anybody who’s not descended from communities who experienced centuries of Islamizing pressure and violence and held on to their faith through it all, like Christians in my part of the Balkans did, or who isn’t an Istanbullu Greek, who lived through decades of slow-motion but brutal ethnic cleansing by the Turkish Republic, or with anybody whose people weren’t wiped off the map by the Croatian Ustaše and their vigorous Bosnian Muslim collaborators during WWII, and I don’t think I can be close to people whose silence about the existential threat that an Islamist Turkey poses to my country is deafening, or to people who “like” my posts when they’re about saving the wooden mosques of Georgia, but whose silence when Erdogan deprives the rest of humanity of two equivalents of the Sistine Chapel in Istanbul ’cause it satisfies his own Muslim Brotherhood and most of his people’s — who have voted for him repeatedly — monotheist hard-on about images, is equally deafening] ….the same way I did.
[….But you racist, drunk Russian thugs who beat up Tajiks in Moscow, asshole Serbs, who have a lot of reason to feel aggrieved, but take it out on Albanians or LGBTQ folk in Belgrade, or assholes like the leaders of Hungary or Poland, who think they’re defending the boundaries of Christian Europe, or just any Orthodox Christian, no matter how reactionary or fascist an idiot you are, or ridiculous clergy who not only won’t allow new mosques to be built for a sizeable Muslim community in Athens, but want the four, beautiful old Ottoman ones torn down….] who did, [experience what I or mine did] im automatically close to you.”
You don’t know how good you have it, Ayesha-jaan…
And — oh shit — I forgot the link she’s got to a site that sells hammer-and-sickle t-shirts. No clue that that’s the equivalent of a swastika to hundreds of millions of people.
But “ok, gen-x-millenial border person”. Don’t wanna spoil your fun.
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
One Response to “Editing Ayesha A. Siddiqi — I thought she was just a millenial whiner from Dearborn; turns out she’s kind of a big deal, which is even more disappointing.”