FOR GAZA

Tomorrow,the 27th of December, marks a year since Israel began its assault on the Gaza Strip killing around 1400 . Several protests , campaigns and other events have been oraginsed for Sunday. As Israel continues to violate international, we can either choose to stand back and watch or or do something about it, even in the smallest possible way.

Nadine Moawad and a few others have taken the initiative to raise awareness about gaza by a few simple, yet powerful ways.

The idea is simple. At every moment, there is a topic “trending” on twitter. It always results in drawing the attention of the world and the media. To trend a topic, thousands of people must hash it, i.e. tweet about it using the # before it. For example, the most trending topic over the next week is bound to be #xmas because everyone’s tweeting about Christmas. So what we want to do is push #GAZA to the top of twitter’s discussed topics on December 27. Get it?

Here’s what you can do:

• Open a twitter account if you haven’t yet. Get your friends to give you a crash course on how to use it – it’s very simple.
  
• On December 27, get online and tweet about #Gaza by citing news sources or re-tweeting links from others.
  
• Join the Palestine Action Network group to get updates via Facebook.
  
• Join the event: ACT – don’t mourn on Facebook.
  
• Take online action aroung the Gaza Freedom March.
  
• Recruit your friends and groups to do the same.
  
• If you’re an experienced tweep, please join the core team to brainstorm more ideas on how to succeed with our online campaign. It’s not going to be easy because we’re in the middle of a holiday season, so we need all the help we can get. Hit me up via twitter on @nmoawad.
  

If you are on twitter and wish to join the campaign, you might want to check out Nadine's post on how a topic trend on twitter works. The plan is to trend #Gaza by tweeting about Gaza for 4 hours on sunday.

There will also be a march on the 31st of December in Gaza , where around 1300 people from several countries are expected to march with the people of Gaza to the Israeli border.

Our purpose in this March is lifting the siege on Gaza. We demand that Israel end the blockade. We also call upon Egypt to open Gaza’s Rafah border. Palestinians must have freedom to travel for study, work, and much-needed medical treatment and to receive visitors from abroad.

You can read more about it here or on the GFM website.

Two good reads

The first post,'Smart muslim chicks who inexplicably scare off guys', is a bit old but it really cracked me up, so I thought I'd share it with you guys :)

Even though I hail from the other side of the Atlantic pond, I did empathise with the main character of the article, sister “Afaf”: in Western terms we are both far from being classed as “over-the-hill”, but in Desi (and perhaps other cultural) terms, we are perishable goods, close to hitting our respective expiry dates, and are in danger of being sold off at a 50% discount, in order to avoid being left on the shelf.

I thought the second article,'Women of Islam: Divinely fortified pillars of strength', was very inspiring. The writer talks about 4 great muslim women who underwent a lot of hardship but continued to remain strong and steadfast.

-The woman whose husband divorced her, then wanted her back:
-The woman who was left by her husband:
-The woman who gave birth alone, because she had no husband
-The woman who was slandered, and lost her husband’s affection for a month