Fair enough, I don’t think you understand how different middle eastern societies are though from your individualistic American society. It’s normal to have 10 siblings and literally 100s of cousins and uncles/aunts. It’s normal to have family spread across the entire Middle East, the entire world actually. Our diaspora communities are huge, we have friends from all kinds of places and we talk a lot. In the end all I can offer you is a perspective, take it or leave it and most importantly enjoy your day!

I mean I’m from the Middle East just fucked off from there a while ago

Yeah I mean that’s definitely true but I think it’s also very western centric to assume that everyone will automatically start stripping naked just because they can. I certainly don’t even though I absolutely can, and I don’t wanna take it away from anyone. It’s just not what I wanna do.

You can’t really sideload at least not in a way that it makes your phone safe like it’s possible with GrapheneOS.

Imo iPhones are an alright lazy choice. It’s a little bit more private than vanilla android and you get E2EE, PGP encryption support and some extras like their VPN like thingy that masks your traffic. Also apps are sandboxed so they can’t track you as easily. It’s not like this will stop anyone who’s really after you but even regular law enforcement will have a hard time getting your data unless you unlock your phone for them, I know this from experience.

That being said, you will still need to trust Apple to stay the way they are currently, plus they’re not gonna go out of their way to protect you, they’ll obey the law because they’re corpos.

For really sensitive stuff I’d still keep something like a pixel with GrapheneOS without play services and without ever logging into any personal accounts. Might make sense to physically remove the camera and microphone too if you’re really worried.

They thing is, even if you’re peaceful if they ask you to leave and you’re not leaving, they’re gonna break up your protest violently. And if you leave every time they tell you leave, they’ll learn that they can just ban you entirely from protesting because what are you gonna do about it?

So you end up staying and the police will break up your protest. They will say that you were throwing bottles or stones, you can deny it but all conservative and some liberal media will report anyway that that’s how it escalated. You will be at risk of being beaten, inhaling tear gas, being shot at, arrested, you might get sentenced to a fine, community service, or even jail time. And no one will come to your defense because you asked for it by escalating the protest.

That’s why protests are escalating, because the police repeatedly attacks peaceful protesters for no good reason. For the police, you are the enemy, because they report to the government, and they act to protect the government, not you as a citizen.

Source of all this: I have been going to Palestine protest for the better part of my adulthood and have witnessed this way too many times during all kinds of administrations, especially since the genocide started.

Not good because no one should tell wear anyone what to wear or what not to wear. Let’s not forget the obsession of conservatives and even liberals with banning hijabs and niqabs in the western world under the guise of "liberating“ women. I find it ridiculous that the whole world seems obsessed with telling women how to dress.

Anyway, this is definitely a hint at the society they imagine and I don’t think it’s a good direction. On the other hand I think westerners don’t understand the Middle East either.

The Middle East is very much class divided and the upper class wouldn’t go to public beaches anyway, while middle class and below is usually very conservative, no matter which religion or even if not religious.

That’s why even without this ban you wouldn’t really see women in a bikini on public beaches because that’s not the culture. You can find it good or bad but that’s how the culture is. Even in Tunisia which people love mentioning it’s not a common thing.

If you go to hotels it’s gonna be different because that’s where all the rich locals will go to be on their own and usually they have a more “western” lifestyle. To illustrate, not even in hotels in Saudi Arabia would they enforce such a dress code (we’re talking about luxury hotels here) because money talks.

I hate how this I just a thing now, firing indiscriminately at starving people seeking aid, these people are really modern Nazis.

So there’s people keeping pet dogs also in the middle east, which are very cute if you’re a dog person.

It’s more difficult to keep dogs than e.g. in most of Europe, because outside of winter you can’t really take them on walks during the day at temperatures of up to 40-50°C and most cities are incredibly car centered due to the high temperatures and the lack of public transportation.

Therefore it’s sadly not really a recreational activity unless you live in the countryside. That’s why people can’t really build positive associations with dogs.

Of course if there’d be funding to bring the strays to shelters, vaccinate & track them, do birth control, build and maintain dog parks etc. people would lose the association over time and see only the good boys being cute. In that sense I don’t think it matters how we got to this point or wonder whether it’s always been like that.

But all of that has nothing to do with religion, and my point was that the Iranian regime is just doing extremist stuff (to the surprise of no one).

Yeah I don’t think you understood my comment.

That’s a bit wild. I’m from the Middle East and there’s not much love for dogs because we have a lot of stray dogs that are legit scary and dangerous.

There are rules about not keeping dogs where you pray but it’s a pretty extremist stance to forbid keeping dogs. I have some pretty religious family and even some of those have dogs.

If you search on google for Islam rules you’re gonna find a lot of Westboro Baptist Church kinda sources that have nothing to do with how normal people live.

Yeah I’m very worried about the future of Europe. With trump & MAGA the US may be going crazy but they’re still a military super power and they’re at the forefront of tech, especially AI & crypto, so they’re gonna be fine.

We on the other hand boast about our culture and history and Blabla but what does that help us if we become economically irrelevant because there’s kinda 0 innovation coming from us. We don’t really have any answers and we’re drifting deeper into fascism ourselves in light speed.

One of them did a nazi salute in public, twice. The other staged a coup because he didn’t want to accept the election results and proclaimed himself king of America and said that with him people don’t need elections anymore.

If you don’t know what a fascist is, frankly, that’s on you and you should go look it up on Wikipedia, because you don’t seem to understand. Because if you did, you wouldn’t make such stupid claims.

Kycnot.me is your friend. Go to a public WiFi (ideally use a VPN), get some Monero, buy a phone plan without KYC.

We’re to the left of the US but if you look around Europe, our parliaments and governments are full with right wing extremists. The so-called centrists are politically and rhetorically where today’s Nazis were 10-15 years ago (at least that’s how the Nazis presented themselves to the public while they still had to).

Otherwise I do think your explanation makes sense.

Those people are irredeemable anyway, I don’t think Palestinians deserve such a punishment as having to deal with Antideutsch people additionally

Yeah you would. It depends on the exact implementation and luckily with so many countries involved there’s a lot less possibility to get consensus on privacy invasions, but from a technical perspective there’s nothing that stops the EU from later changing what they agreed upon now.

So what this means is that you’ll have to trust the EU that

1. they implement this how they say they will
2. they won’t later change the system to use it for mass surveillance

A proper replacement for cash is Monero. I know blockchain useless and crypto bad and all but that’s a real private digital currency where you’d have to be wanted by the CIA or Mossad to even face the threat of having your payments tracked.

You can say anything you want but it doesn’t mean that what you’re saying makes any sense.

South Africa was a nuclear power backed by the same countries that now back the genocide. It was hard to imagine back then that the apartheid would end, but it happened.

Yeah as I said, I’m against violence so I advocate for the boycott solution and not for the Nazi Germany treatment even though some might feel like the Zionists would deserve that…

Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany and all the colonies of the empire didn’t dismantle themselves because people asked them to do so. This has to happen through boycott, divestment, sanctions because I don’t think more war would be the answer, and I am against violence in any form.

Make Israel collapse by putting so much pressure on them that they just can’t anymore. Our governments won’t just do this, so we have to do it ourselves. It’s a slow process, but it’s a process and with every escalation by them it speeds up.

Unfortunately it doesn’t help the Gazans who are being annihilated right now, but the future I outlined is the only future Palestinians deserve.

So your solution is annihilation, let me guess you’re a liberal Zionist or something like that?

There’s only one solution, free Palestine, from the river to the sea. Palestine needs to be decolonized and Palestinians need to be given back what rightfully belongs to them.

Israel as a state should have never been established and this apartheid genocide state just needs to stop existing. All the rabid Zionists who can’t accept that Palestinians are human beings with equal rights can make use of their dual citizenship and leave. Or move to Germany or Hungary or something who seem to love them anyway.

There needs to be Nuremberg process to try all the war criminals and put them behind bars.

As for those who are willing to coexist with Palestinians can stay, but if they live on stolen land or in stolen property they can’t stay there and have to return that to their owners and move somewhere worse.

That’s (5) and what humanity has to strive for.