💥 ጊዜውን እንዋጀዋለን! 💥
የክፉው የኢሳያስ አፈወርቂ አገልጋይ ዝነኛዋ ሐበሻ-አሜሪካዊት ቲፋኒ ሀዲሽ በክርስቶስ ተቃዋሚ ቱርክ አውሮፕላን ማረፊያ ታግታ በማልቀስ ላይ ትገኛለች። ጣረ ሞት ላይ የምትገኘዋን አክስቷን ለመጎብኘት ወደ አሜሪካ በመመለስ ላይ ናት።
ተዋናይት እና ኮሜዲያን ቲፋኒ ሃዲሽ በባለጌ ቱርኮች እንደተሰደበችና ጨዋነት የጎደለው ድርጊት እንደተፈጸመባትም በለቅሶ ገልጣለች። አክስቷን ከማለፉ በፊት ለማየትና ወደ አሜሪካም ለመመለስ የምትችለው የፈረንጆቹ የገና በዓል ካለፈ በኋላ ነው። አሁን በክርስቶስ ተቃዋሚ ቱርክ ውስጥ ተጣብቃለች።
💭 Evil Isaias Afewerki’s Useful Idiot Tiffany Haddish Breaks Down Cries After Stuck At Turkey Airport Trying To Make It Home To Dying Aunt
Actress and Comedian Tiffany Haddish has a break down at Turkey Airlines and treated rude as she tried to make it back into the States to see her aunt before she pass. She’s stuck in Turkey until after Christmas.
💭 Tiffany Haddish Praised Eritrea’s Dictator. Then She Doubled Down In DMs With Young Eritrean Americans.
Standing side by side in front of rows of cultivated plants, a man and a woman beam at the camera, in a photo that could come straight from a family holiday album. The woman on the left is instantly recognizable to millions of people: the actor, comedian, and author Tiffany Haddish. The man on the right is less familiar, but behind the warm smile and the friendly arm across Haddish’s shoulder is one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators, Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki. Since coming to power 27 years ago he has been accused of ruling in a ruthless and brutal manner, as Eritrea earned the nickname the North Korea of Africa in the process.
💭 What was Haddish, whose career is founded on making people laugh, doing embracing a man like Isaias?
The picture was taken in January 2018 when Haddish visited Eritrea, the country of her father’s birth, for the first time.
In May 2019, she returned to become a naturalized citizen, and left behind a copy of her acclaimed autobiography, The Last Black Unicorn, for Isaias. It was signed with the message, “my brother, my president, thank you for doing what you do.” Her visit coincided with Eritrean Independence Day.
For many Eritreans in the ever-growing diaspora, the handwritten message confirmed their worst fears — that Haddish was inadvertently laundering the Eritrean regime’s reputation in the West by appearing to endorse its hardline leader.
In tweets and Instagram comments, Eritreans living outside of the country wrote to Haddish about the thousands of people, including children, imprisoned without trial, the underground prisons, the indefinite national service program likened to slavery by the UN where people are raped and tortured, the 5,000 people who flee the country every month. They begged her to speak out against the regime, not appear to endorse it.
Days after she gained Eritrean citizenship, Haddish responded: She agreed to talk about the situation in Eritrea with a group of young Eritreans mainly from the US in a Twitter DM conversation.
This is where I come into the story: I’m a Swedish Eritrean activist and freelance journalist based mainly in London. At the time the group chat was being set up, I was an undergrad student also working as a journalist alongside my studies. The young Eritreans setting up the group chat knew me from my Eritrean activism, so they asked me to join because they thought I could help convince Haddish to stop appearing to endorse Isaias and the regime.
Prior to the conversation, the young Eritreans shared Haddish on a Google Doc with all the main points they wanted to tell her about the nightmare inside Eritrea for normal people, including news articles and reports by the UN and Human Rights Watch. The young Eritreans looked forward to hearing how Haddish would respond. But what she said left them utterly crestfallen.
“Good morning y’all,” Haddish wrote. “I tried my best to keep my eyes open to chat with y’all but there was so much to read, I fell asleep on y’all sorry about that.”
Haddish doubled down on thanking Isaias: He was, in her view, a veteran soldier, and people should be grateful for veterans. He was building dams to bring electricity to Eritrea. And he had given her honey from his farm, which had made her grandma feel better. The young Eritreans were stunned.
“I hated her response,” said Lidiya, a young Eritrean Canadian in the DM chat who asked that her surname not be used because, like many in the Eritrean diaspora, she fears reprisals against family in Eritrea by the regime as a price for speaking out.
After all, Haddish embracing Eritrean culture was something to be celebrated by the Eritrean community: They cheered when she wore a traditional Eritrean dress on the red carpet at the 2018 Oscars, when Haddish said she was “honoring her fellow Eritreans.”
Many Eritreans living outside of Eritrea were also understanding of how important discovering your roots could be for an individual’s identity, and aware of how this could potentially hinder someone from looking at a situation critically. When Haddish made her first trip to the country in 2018, she did so to bury her father and connect with her extended family, whom she had never met before.
Haddish told the state-run Eri-TV, the only TV station in the country, “I was trying to figure out, Who am I? And now I have a way better understanding of who I am and why I am on this Earth.”
But it was Haddish thanking Isaias on her visit in 2019 that made Eritreans decide to take more proactive action to speak to her about the realities of the regime. Many of the tweets criticizing Haddish used the #IsSheReady4Eritrea hashtag, referencing her signature #SheReady hashtag and She Ready! From the Hood to Hollywood comedy special and tour.
“I remember thinking, Thank you for what? Thank you for running all our youths out of the country? Thank you for locking up our brightest minds? Thank you for destroying our country?” said Lidiya, the young Eritrean Canadian.
“We don’t need celebrity visits that will only be good PR for the dictator, we have solutions and have told her about them for months,” said Yodit Araya, an Eritrean American organizer in the Yiakl movement, which means “‘Enough”’ in Tigrinya, one of the national languages of Eritrea.
The group chat was set up on the premise that Haddish was willing to learn about the situation in Eritrea, and during the exchanges she repeatedly asked what could be done to help. “what can we really do as a Group to make things better?” she wrote. “Come on y’all what can we do? I am only one person.”
Then in an interview with the Hollywood Unlocked show last December, Haddish criticized Eritreans for attacking her without taking any action themselves.
“Y’all can keep telling me all this stuff, but what’s the action? How do you fix it? Don’t come at me with all the shenanigans, rararara, but no damn action,” Haddish said. “Get out of here.”
She went on to defend Isaias and the Eritrean authorities once more.
“I get what that president, I get…look…everybody that’s in office over there, that’s into politics, when you do your research, all of them fought in a war, OK, all of them have fought, they are all freedom fighters, they all fought for their freedom. They have watched their friends die in front of them. So I don’t know about you, but if I’m in a war and I feel like, Oh, if I let this happen or let that happen we’ll be back at war, you’re going to do whatever it takes to defend and protect your land,” Haddish said.
“They were trying to rape that land,” she continued, referring to Ethiopia’s actions in the war. “And they messed it up, they raped the people, they killed a lot of people. So of course he’s going to be a little, maybe overly doing things… I don’t agree with everything that they do, I don’t agree with everything that’s done here in America.”
But Araya, the Eritrean American activist, said that to Isaias and his regime, the war with Ethiopia was “just an excuse, and besides, a peace deal was made more than a year ago, so why has he not changed anything?”
She described Haddish’s comments in the Hollywood Unlocked interview as “extremely disrespectful to the backbreaking work of our activists who have been fighting this regime for decades, most of whom still are imprisoned because of their work.”
“As an immigrant, I really looked up to her and admired how she, despite all the hardship she had gone through, managed to succeed. But I was hoping she would use her success to go back and help the underdog. I wouldn’t think she would turn her back on the underdog.”
Araya said Haddish had failed to grasp the impact someone with such a big profile could have, especially at a time when Eritrea is trying to present a new face to the world and avoid internal reforms.
“She is really famous in the US, she has huge influence. Eritrea is the most censored country in the world — the regime owns the narrative and has made the crisis unknown. Her support is not just symbolic. It’s more than just a picture or innocent visits. She is legitimizing him, whitewashing him,” Araya said.
“We are against her, as a superstar with the platform she has, normalizing our dictator.”
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