Language

Initially, when I started sharing information from people on the ground in Palestine, I was worried to share stuff that was in Arabic.

My thoughts behind this were ah I can't share posts in Arabic because people won't think they are credible. People that watch this will ignore it because the content doesn't matter to them because of the language that it's conveyed in.

There are 109 million people that can speak Arabic. How ethnocentric can we possibly be?

Whilst English is a common language, it is not the only one and it's definitely not the language that is of the most educated people.

Almost half of the world is said to be bilingual and nearly 20% is multilingual. That puts people that speak english as an only language in the minority. Yet we still expect people to speak english as fluently as us. We still consider people that don't speak english as well as us as credible, smart or reliable, even though they may speak significantly more languages than us.

We are so used to thinking that english is what makes us consider people as safe, that we fail to identify what the omission in that information is.

We are inadvertently saying I don't trust you, because you speak broken english or I am smarter than you or even "I think that you are talking about me and disrespecting everything I stand for."

We can't embrace any aspect of multiculturalism or diversity if we are unwilling to challenge the narrative. Our biases are so inbuilt to think that Allahu Akbar is a threat of violence, that we don't stop to consider that it may only mean something as simple as God bless

you and that is the exact same thing we say when a person sneezes.

I don't know about anyone else but this ethnocentricity has got to go. It's ridiculous that we use one single language as a measure of a human being. As someone that is privileged to be able to speak 3 languages, but is embarrassed to speak 2 of them.... I ask myself why?

When my son makes a joke to someone in another language, and they just look like he has cursed them... my heart breaks for him. I'm very aware that it could also be that they don't understand what he has said, but that isn't the look that he gets. He doesn't understand why this person looks at him like this, when his grandparents, uncles and auntie laugh with him.

We are so easy to vilify, abuse and denigrate those that speak differently to us, that we can't even identify the fact that maybe it's not them that needs to change.

I know that you love to think you're better than us. But your tone policing, and correcting our word choice and grammar and how we should say things and just how we should generally behave is not being better than us. It is trying to exert a random and imperialist set of views and ideals and it actually just unmasks your fear of people that are different.