Mask Removed - Israel Is A Terrorist State

Translation / Interpretation / Caption Text / Source

Source:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/14741767639/

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Small text on poster reads: 

Dedicated to U.S. activist, artist, Emily Henochowicz. Shot directly in the face with a tear gas canister, losing an eye, as she non-violently demonstrating against the Flotilla Massacre

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  • On May 31, 2010, Emily Henochowicz, a 21-year-old art student from Maryland, lost her left eye when she was struck by a tear gas canister while protesting near Qalandiya checkpoint. Another ISM volunteer at the scene claimed that the Israeli soldiers deliberately aimed at Henochowicz.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Solidarity_Movement

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Village Voice article on Emily Henochowicz:

EXCERPT

At the annual parade of incoming freshmen at Cooper Union, the art majors create their own costumes. In 2007, freshman Emily Henochowicz of Potomac, Maryland, dressed up as one big eyeball. This image of her—arms and legs poking out from the giant eye, the iris and her shoes a matching lime-green, the eye ensconced in some sort of gray matter—has been the icon of her blog since she started it in June 2009.

Now it’s more than an avatar.

At the end of this past May, on the other side of the globe, a tear-gas canister fired by the Israel Defense Forces hit her in the face and blasted her left eye out of her head. The grandchild of Holocaust survivors and daughter of a man who was born in Israel and emigrated to the U.S., she had been protesting at a West Bank checkpoint the morning after the IDF had killed nine people aboard a Turkish aid flotilla bound for Gaza.

As Henochowicz recently wrote of her blog icon, “I’ve had it since I made this blog, and it’s proven oddly predictive. The older I get, the more ridiculous life seems.” Back in the States and getting ready to resume school in the fall, she has referred to herself as “Cyclops” on the blog. For her, it’s still about the art. She doesn’t seem to be into the martyr thing. In the hospital in Israel, Henochowicz says, she immediately began drawing again. She says she doesn’t even know whether her future art should still be about the Middle East—or even about politics at all.

After all, her political activism, she adds, “was a real change from who I was before—an experiment, in a way. And it ended in me losing my eye. But it’s OK.”

Source:

https://www.villagevoice.com/a-cooper-union-student-lost-an-eye-protesting-in-israel-but-none-of-her-vision/