The ummah of Gaza are asking Allah to curse Muslims for their inaction. Ma Sha Allah.

This means you. And me.

Are you doing everything you can to help the ummah of Gaza?

• If you said “yes”: are you sure about that? Still buying from Amazon? Still using Google products when you don’t really have to? I certainly hope you aren’t still stopping at Starbucks.

• If you said “no”: why aren’t you? Are you and I really that clueless and baffled?

I just started watching a recent Thinking Muslim interview with Gazan journalist Abubaker Abed, who’s now in Ireland out of the line of fire for the moment. He’s a scholar of Muslim sacred knowledge - a hafidh of Qur’an - for starters. He refers frequently to the Qur’an during this podcast.

And he offers simple common sense arguments to some of the frequent excuses for inaction. 80 million Muslims in Egypt “can’t” get their government to open up the borders and get some essential supplies into Gaza? Really? Is the Egyptian army capable of killing 80 million of their countrypeople?

Egypt is just one example. The “I don’t know what to doooooo, oh it’s so sad about Gaza, boo hoo hoo” ghafl extravaganza isn’t limited to Egypt. The Bosnian genocide was fought against by many Muslims who arrived in Bosnia from elsewhere.

Where are the mujahideen from outside Gaza today, other than the Yemenis?

You know that flotilla of Europeans that is on their way to Gaza right now? May Allah SWT make of them Muslims. That’s the kind of people we need alongside of us.

Me too. What I’m doing different, In Sha Allah.

I just read two raka’at of surat al-tawba. Why? I’ve been Ghafilina myself with regard to my personal usage of products from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and more.

I. Don’t. Have. To. Use. Any. Of. Those. Products. Not a single one. I run Linux at home, have been doing so for decades.

I’ll be closing my accounts with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google as soon as possible, In Sha Allah. Amazon first. Will I lose some digital books? Yes. Too bad. Microsoft 365 next, followed by Google, which will be a bit tougher because my Gmail is linked to some important accounts.

And I need to find a good independent cloud storage provider. (I don’t have the time or the spoons to figure out self-hosting.) To the best of my knowledge, Nextcloud, an independent cloud storage provider, has no ties to any of the demonic hydras I mentioned above. (I don’t yet know whether they use Amazon Web Services, but I’ll see if they can tell me. I suspect that they do not.) So I just opened a Nextcloud account to give their services a whirl, and like I said, before I get too tied into them, I want to check the AWS usage.

Proton is another provider of email, cloud storage space, document creation, and other services. They tout digital privacy, but for all the talking a good game about open source, their Linux support is pathetic. Windows? Mac? Any other evil-empire products? They have you covered. Sigh. I do have email accounts with them, and those work well enough. But given the lack of Linux support I won’t be committing further time or usage to them.

I’m actually psyched to close Amazon. Since I’m headed to Dar al-Islam shortly, In Sha Allah, I would have closed the Spain Amazon account soon anyway. The US account is next.

Double down on your deen

Every single effective fighter in the way of Allah SWT that I’m aware of lives (or lived) their deen. They’re scholars, they are people of near-constant du’aa, dhikr, salat, salawat. They recite a lot of Qur’an per day. In short, they don’t mess around with their time.

Do you spend time on hate-watching silly TV series, counting your footsteps on your FitBit, or changing your home decor? Stop wasting your time. You can find a good home for your time and energy.

Open your flipping pocketbook and give some sadaqa on a regular basis

You can’t afford to give anything ? REALLY? Do you live in the West and have a fulltime job? Yep, you have it.

5 USD a month makes a huge difference in places like Gaza. Pony it up. Launchgood has some excellent, reliable options for giving sadaqa.

You think the Zios and the MAGA folks will stop at Gaza?

The Zios and their good buddies the USians (and the Europeans too - remember the Crusades?) will come for us eventually if we don’t start showing some force.

Would you prefer to shrink into a corner cowering or would you rather fight with your Muslim brothers and sisters in the way of Allah?

Wake up. Really. This means you… and me.