At least 90 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel’s assault on Gaza so far. This visual tella the story of Palestinian children in Gaza, who have experienced multiple assaults and multiple types of trauma since 2007, leading to a widespread mental health crisis among youth.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Guardian reports an increase in the number of young Palestinian demonstrators in hospital with gunshot wounds.
Their protests are in response to the Jewish invasions of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem and raids by the Israeli occupation forces into Gaza, as well as the continuing misery and hopelessness caused by Israel’s illegal and brutal blockade of Gaza since 2006.
Several have been admitted to hospital with bullet wounds to the ankle which is a notoriously difficult part of the leg to treat successfully, especially when Palestinian doctors lack the microscopic equipment to carry out such intricate operations. One young man had been shot through both ankles with the same bullet and it is not clear if he will ever walk again.
The latest violence, says the Guardian, echoes the “Great March of Return” protests that began in 2018 and lasted nearly two years, in which 227 Palestinians were killed during weekly demonstrations at the separation fences. The protests were triggered by Donald Trump’s decision to recognise the “disputed” city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
But Israel’s “shoot-to-cripple” policy isn’t new. Back in 2018, I told how retired trauma surgeon David Halpin, who had often worked as a volunteer in Gaza hospitals, drew attention to it in January 2011: “The deliberate injury of the limbs of 23 boys by high velocity weapons has been logged and described by Defence for Children International Palestine Branch (DCI-P) since March 2010.”
Extreme poverty among Gazans had forced men and boys to scavenge for broken concrete (gravel) among the rubble of the evacuated Eli Sinai settlement and the industrial zone by the Erez border control post where factories had been demolished by Israeli shelling. This material could be used to make blocks and poured concrete with cement imported mostly through the tunnels. They did this reclamation work – with donkey and cart, picks and shovels – for precious shekels in the shadow of Israel’s manned watch towers and under the drones constantly above.
The leg was the target in most cases, said Halpin. And where it wasn’t, the sniper would likely “aim up” so the flank, elbow etc was hit instead. “No weapons were carried by the gravel workers, so they posed no threat to Israeli occupation force personnel. Instead, they were bending their backs to their menial work within their internment camp.” In many cases those hit would be disabled for life. And that, it seems, continues to be the Israeli regime’s sickening aim to this day.
“Exit wounds the size of a fist”
In 2018 Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which operates in Gaza, reported
devastating gunshot wounds among hundreds of people injured during the protests… The huge majority of patients – mainly young men, but also some women and children – have unusually severe wounds to the lower extremities. MSF medical teams note the injuries include an extreme level of destruction to bones and soft tissue, and large exit wounds that can be the size of a fist.
Half of the more than 500 patients we have admitted in our clinics have injuries where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverised the bone. These patients will need to have very complex surgical operations and most of them will have disabilities for life.
Such high energy compound tibial fractures from Israeli live fire may require between five and seven surgical procedures, each operation taking three to six hours. The wounds appeared to be caused by ammunition with an expanding “butterfly” effect. “Mass lifelong disability is now the prospect for young Gazans who merely gathered in unarmed protest.”
Meanwhile, the snivelling international community does nothing to stop these horrendous crimes by the self-styled “most moral army in the world”.
About 60 per cent of the thousands of injured were hit in the legs by sniper fire, according to the local health ministry – admissions that overwhelmed an already crumbling medical sector. Since then, amputees using crutches have become a common sight on Gaza’s streets. In response, MSF has funded a new prosthetics clinic for Gaza residents, and a limb reconstruction centre at al-Awda hospital.
“It is sad to say we have become experts in this work. We have much better facilities and equipment now than we did in 2018 and we can do most orthopaedic and plastic procedures,” said Rami Abu-Jasser, one of the centre’s supervisors. “But we still cannot treat more than a handful of people a day.”
As I mentioned at that time, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva adopted a resolution to set up an independent, international Commission of Inquiry to investigate all violations of humanitarian and international human rights law in the occupied Palestinian territory, with a particular focus on recent events in Gaza.
The resolution passed with only two states opposing (the USA and another of Israel’s poodles, Australia), 29 in favour, and 14 abstentions. The UK was one of those abstaining, along with Croatia, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia.
“Systematic failure by Israel to carry out genuine investigations”
The preamble to the UNHRC resolution stated the reasons for action brilliantly and is worth repeating here:
Convinced that the lack of accountability for violations of international law reinforces a culture of impunity, leading to a recurrence of violations and seriously endangering international peace,
Noting the systematic failure by Israel to carry out genuine investigations in an impartial, independent, prompt and effective way, as required by international law, into the violence and offences against Palestinians by the occupying forces, and to establish judicial accountability for its actions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,
Emphasising the obligations of Israel as the occupying power to ensure the safety, well-being and protection of the Palestinian civilian population under its occupation in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,
Emphasising also that the intentional targeting of civilians and other protected persons in situations of armed conflict, including foreign occupation, constitutes a grave breach of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, and poses a threat to international peace and security,
Recognising the importance of the right to life and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association to the full enjoyment of all human rights…
The wording evidently stung Israel’s avid admirers Theresa May, barmy Boris Johnson and the gutless spivs populating the Foreign Office to such a degree that they couldn’t bring themselves to support the resolution.
“Gazans did all the dying and the Israeli soldiers did all the killing”
In a pathetic attempt to explain why they abstained, the UK mission in Geneva called the resolution “partial and unhelpfully unbalanced” for not “explicitly call[ing] for an investigation into the action of non-state actors such as Hamas.” The UK government then issued a statement saying it called on Israel to carry out a transparent inquiry into its occupation force’s conduct at the border fence and to demonstrate how this would achieve a sufficient level of independence. The investigation should include international members.
The death toll alone warranted such a comprehensive inquiry, they said. “We urge that the findings of such an investigation be made public, and if wrongdoing is found, that those responsible be held to account.”
Of course, that was never going to happen. And the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem called the internal Israeli military probe “part of the whitewashing toolkit.”
The British government was sharply criticised in Parliament for its limp-wrested performance and reminded of Israel’s self-exoneration over the killing of four boys playing on a beach during the 2014 military offensive on Gaza. Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, former Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, asked: “Given that Gazans did all the dying and the Israeli soldiers did all the killing, how does the minister expect an internal Israeli inquiry… to be less partial and less unhelpfully unbalanced than the inquiry mandated by the UN Human Rights Council?”
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Thread! Here's the real story btwn Epstein & Gates (credit to @_whitneywebb & her book "One Nation Under Blackmail"):
1) "Epstein has made many millions out of business links with the likes of @BillGates" — 2001 Evening Standard article https://t.co/o9ix1xLe7A
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 30, 2023
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Angela Davis with DDR Minister of Education Margot Honecker and Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, East Berlin, 1973. Credit: ADN-Bildarchiv.
From 28 July to 5 August 1973, eight million people, including 25,600 guests from 140 countries, participated in the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin (German Democratic Republic or DDR). The festival was a key activity organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), formed at the World Youth Conference held in London (United Kingdom) in November 1945. The 1973 festival marked an epochal moment: the Vietnamese appeared to be on the march against US forces while, from Mozambique to Cabo Verde, the peoples of Portugal’s African colonies were preparing to seize power, and in Chile the Popular Unity government was in a major struggle against copper multinationals and Washington.
As multiple possibilities unfolded, young people felt that they had a genuine future. Many of the festival’s participants had been radicalised during the campaign to free communist Black Panther Angela Davis from prison, and then there she was on the stage in East Berlin, standing beside the Soviet cosmonaut and first woman in space Valentina Tereshkova. The young attendees heard music from over 100 groups and soloists from 45 countries, including South Africa’s Miriam Makeba and Chile’s Inti-Illimani, who sang:
We will prevail, we will prevail.
A thousand chains we’ll have to break.
We will prevail, we will prevail,
We know how to overcome misery (or fascism).Peasants, soldiers, miners,
The women of our country, too,
Students and workers, white-collar and blue,
We will carry out our duty.We will sow the land with glory.
Socialism will be the future.
All together, we will make history
To prevail, to prevail, to prevail.
10th World Youth Festival opening celebration on East Berlin’s socialist boulevard Karl-Marx-Allee. Credit: Bild und Heimat.
Ours is such a different time. Of the 1.21 billion youth (between ages 15–24) across the world – which account for about 15.5 percent of the global population – seven out of ten ‘are economically disengaged or under-engaged’, according to a recent World Bank study. Those who are disengaged are ‘not in education, employment, or training’, also known as NEETs. In 2021, across the world, roughly 448 million youth were estimated to be disengaged or under-engaged – a horrifying figure. In Latin America, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, rates of disengagement or under-engagement have surpassed 70 to 80 percent. Overall, youth comprise 40 percent of the world’s unemployed population. Certainly, these facts weigh heavily on young people: amongst 10 to 19 year olds, one in seven experience mental health troubles, with suicide the fourth leading cause of death among adolescents between 15 and 19 years old. In Algeria, there is a word to describe these young people: hittis, which means ‘walls’ and refers to young people leaning against walls.
The feelings of great joy and hope that permeated East Berlin in 1973 simply do not exist amongst most of the world’s youth today. Those who are politically charged up are demoralised by the failure of the Great Powers to act speedily to address the climate catastrophe. Others find themselves sucked into the vortex of social media, where algorithms are designed to create a kind of apolitical politics, often one of malice and anger rather than struggle and hope.
Of course, there are pockets of enthusiasm, struggles led by young people on the fronts of redistribution and recognition, on picket lines and in marches, raising their own banners that echo the slogans of the youth of 1973. They are interrupted by the banalities of neoliberalism and offered false solutions such as those reflected in the pieties of the titles of the United Nations’ flagship World Youth Reports ‘Youth Social Entrepreneurship’ and ‘Youth Civic Engagement’. Nonetheless, the youth slogans in motion are richer and fuller than the solutions offered to them, marked by an understanding that a disengagement rate of over 70 percent will not be fixed by skills training or social entrepreneurship.
The band WIR perform at Alexanderplatz during the 10th World Festival. Credit: Imago/Gueffroy.
This week, we are looking back at the 1973 World Festival to revive our sense of the possibilities still available for young people, the desire for something far more enticing than the barrenness of capitalist solutions. Our colleagues at the International Research Centre DDR (IFDDR), based in Berlin, are commemorating the 1973 World Festival with a campaign from 28 July to 5 August 2023 on the festival’s impact on different countries, from Vietnam to Cuba, from Guinea-Bissau to the US and Chile (you can track the series on IFDDR’s social media channels).
A month after the festival ended, a section of the Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, left their barracks, attacked the Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende (who died in the melee), and began repressing all left forces in the country. In September, on the 50th anniversary of the coup, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research alongside Chile’s Instituto de Ciencias Alejandro Lipschutz Centro de Pensamiento e Investigación Social y Política (ICAL) will publish our dossier no. 68, The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973. The dossier will provide more context for that coup and its global impact, which was foreshadowed by the tone of the 1973 youth festival, described in an article written by IFDDR that is embedded in the rest of this week’s newsletter.
Chileans at the 1973 Festival. Credit: Jürgen Sindermann via Bundesarchiv Bild 183-M0804-0760.
In 1970, the Popular Unity, a coalition of left-wing forces, won the elections in Chile, and Salvador Allende became president. The euphoria over this victory reverberated in other socialist states, even though the situation on the ground remained tense. The fact that the resource-rich country wanted to take an independent path and have sovereignty over its extractive industries – which had been dominated by US and European companies for decades – was not accepted by the West.
Allende’s measures, such as the nationalisation of the mining sector, provoked those who stood to lose the most: the old Chilean elites, large landowners, foreign corporations, and their governments. From the beginning, this reactionary threat hung over the progressive alliance like a dark shadow. Attacks and assassinations of representatives of the popular front were not uncommon.
In view of the fragile situation in her homeland, Gladys Marín, then general secretary of the Chilean Communist Youth, emphasised in an interview: ‘The Solidarity Meeting for Chile here in Berlin had a significant international weight because it took place at a very critical time for my homeland’. She led the 60-strong Chilean delegation, which was made up of a cross-section of the organisations represented in the coalition government, to the 10th World Festival in the DDR. Chile was one of the defining themes of the festival, where solidarity with Popular Unity as it faced an ongoing imperialist offensive resounded again and again and Venceremos reverberated through the crowd.
But the certainty of victory experienced a bitter setback. Shortly after her return from an extended trip as a representative of the new government that stretched as far as Asia, Marín was forced into hiding after Pinochet’s coup on 11 September 1973. In West Germany the coup was met with joy, and trade with the Pinochet dictatorship subsequently boomed. In 1974, exports from West Germany to Chile increased by over 40 percent and imports by 65 percent. Franz Josef Strauss, long-time West German politician and chairman of the Christian Social Union (CSU), commented cynically on the coup at the time: ‘In view of the chaos that had reigned in Chile, the idea of “order” suddenly sounds sweet for the Chileans again’.
Marín, now in exile, repeated her journeys to fraternal countries. This path led her through the DDR again, among other places that offered refuge to exiled Chileans such as Michelle Bachelet (who later became president of Chile in 2006). The events in Chile deepened the solidarity movement in the DDR. Immediately after the coup, people gathered spontaneously on the streets of Berlin and expressed their support for Popular Unity. The Solidarity Committee of the DDR set up the Chile Centre in Berlin, which coordinated fundraising and aid for almost 2,000 Chilean immigrants. International solidarity campaigns were launched, including one devoted to the release of Luis Corvalán, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile. The Chilean delegation’s visit to the World Festival earlier that year had consolidated the solidarity movement, which would prove key in the years following the 1973 coup. As Marín told the enthusiastic youth who received her at the festival: ‘We have come to Berlin with great expectations… The festival will further strengthen our common worldwide struggle against imperialism’.
Inti-Illimani with Gladys Marin at the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students. Photographs courtesy of Jorge Coulon.Inti-Illimani with Gladys Marin at the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students. Photographs courtesy of Jorge Coulon.
Jorge Coulon, one of the founders of Inti-Illimani who travelled from Santiago to sing at the festival in Berlin, told me:
We were part of a very large delegation of union leaders, artists, workers, social organisations, journalists, and students. … A few months earlier, Salvador Allende had defined Chile as a silent Vietnam due to the underhanded nature of the Nixon administration’s attack on the foundations of the Chilean economy and its financing of forces interested in overthrowing the Popular Unity government. With the spirit of resistance, enveloped in the magnificent solidarity of the world’s youth [at the festival], we sang the hymn of Popular Unity at the inauguration, and the conscious and solidary world chanted the refrain with us: ‘Venceremos, a thousand chains we’ll have to be break’.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Anyone watching Sound of Freedom might wonder how such evil has become so embedded in human culture. One method involves the world of “entertainment” and the individuals we’re conditioned to view as heroes.
For example, below you will find a brief glimpse at two writers who enjoy places of honor in the American literary canon.
Trigger warning: Please don’t keep reading if you wish to avoid discussions of deviant and criminal behavior.
Click here to learn more about Allen Ginsberg than you probably know now:
Allen Ginsberg: poet, writer, artist, activist, teacher… and pedophile
MICKEY Z. JUNE 20, 2022
When you think of the iconic Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, what comes to mind? His poem, Howl? His appearance in a legendary Bob Dylan video? What about his omnipresence in a vast array of protests, marches, etc.? Or could it be the fact that Ginsburg — hero of radicals, outcasts, and rebels everywhere — was a member of North American Man/Boy Lov…
Moving on to another renowned Beat writer, William S. Burroughs is often called one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, most notably by Norman Mailer who deemed Burroughs to be, “The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.”
Side note: Norman Mailer also once declared, “A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul.”
According to the always reliable Wikipedia: “William Seward Burroughs II (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.”
Curiously, they left out the words pedophile or hebephile. Perhaps some enterprising soul out there will add something like this excerpt (from a 1955 letter written by Burroughs in Tangiers and addressed to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) to Burroughs’ Wiki page:
The Italian school is just opposite, and I stand for hours watching the boys with my 8-power field glasses. Curious feeling of projecting myself, like I was standing over there with the boys, invisible earthbound ghost, torn with disembodied lust. They wear shorts, and I can see the goose pimples on their legs in the chill of the morning, count the hairs. Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and I paid two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other — we demanded semen too, no half-assed screwing. So I asked Marv: ‘Do you think they will do it?’ and he says: ‘I think so. They are hungry.’ They did it. Made me feel sorta like a dirty old man…”
Contrary to the protestations of the swooning Left, none of the above is edgy or underground. It’s not trenchant or innovative. It’s criminal, predatory, and pathological.
To discuss Burroughs as a “culturally influential” icon and canonize his work without mentioning his sexual assaults on children (and his open celebration of such heinous crimes) is to support and sustain the rampant, ever-increasing pedophile culture.
We talk and talk and talk about the horrific state of human culture, then talk some more about what needs to be changed. We go round and round in our ever-tightening circles.
But when will we dig deeper — as deep as we can possibly go — to begin comprehending the many ways diabolical power manifests and the many ways we each choose to ignore and/or support it in one way or another?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
According to this article (sent to me by Allyn in New Zealand), “the number of Victoria Police employees self-identifying as ‘gender neutral’ has more than quadrupled since last year as the force confirms it is investigating reports some of its officers are gaming the HR system in order to gain an extra $1300 a year.”
ACANB? (all cops are non-binary)
“In its annual report last year, Victoria Police only had 32 employees who were so-called ‘self-described’ as neither male nor female. But workforce figures as of June 27 provided to news.com.au show that number had soared to 139 — 127 of whom are sworn officers.”
“Self-described.”
Let’s end the “gender ideology” psyop now — before they try pushing “gender-neutral” shopping discounts, tax breaks, advantages when applying for a job or school, and more.
Related: Two 14-year-old girls have written an open letter to the UK Education Secretary Gillian Keegan ahead of the forthcoming Department for Education report on transgender schools guidance.
The kids are asking for help. It’s our job to deliver for them.
If anyone tells you there’s nothing dangerous about chants like “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children,” show them this right here. Click the link if you think anyone is overreacting.
Again, the kids desperately need and are begging for help.
It’s our job to protect them.
Speak it into existence and speak up — loud and often.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
So… participants in NYC’s June 23 “Drag March” chanted:
“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children!”
(Watch a short clip right here)
I get it that, for some of those marchers, this was a tragically failed attempt at “satire” in response to (accurately) being called groomers.
For others, it was a legitimate, unabashed threat.
As I asked in an earlier post:
Why is drag so over-represented in Pride events? Crossdressing does not make you gay. The concept of drag is a niche entertainment field yet it dominates Gay Pride festivities as if it has anything to do with L, G, or B.
Why do gay people allow their celebrations to be fronted by men in drag who may or not even be gay and, at most, represent only a minuscule fraction of the LGB community?
Why is drag accepted and celebrated while blackface is shunned?
Why are prepubescent children being taught about sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation?
Why do grown men (or women) want to dance and gyrate half-naked in front of children in the first place?
Please read the full post here and share it widely:
Mickey Z. Feb 2
Questions provoked by the widespread decision to expose young children to drag performances: 1. Why are prepubescent children being taught about sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation? It’s one thing if a child has same-sex parents and other kids ask questions about it. Some basic details should be shared. Beyond that, why would a 6-year-old need t…
A few questions in closing:
Does any emotionally stable human being find it acceptable to declare (especially in a public chant), that they are “coming for your children”?
Would you ever want such a person to get anywhere near your child — or any child?
We all know the answer to both questions is a resounding NO.
We also all know that it’s time to step up and speak out in the name of protecting all children.
CJPME is proud to publish its latest analysis, “Heartbreaking Disparity: Child Detainees in Canada vs. Israel.” The report exposes the cruel and discriminatory treatment that Palestinian child detainees face in Israel’s military court system, and provides a call for action to protect and uphold their rights.
The report is unique in how it compares Canada’s treatment of child detainees to Israel’s treatment of Palestinian child detainees – the first-ever report to do so. In this way, CJPME hopes to make Israel’s abuses even more evident and tangible to Canadians.
Appalling Israeli Treatment of Palestinian Child Detainees
On average, Israel detains 500-700 Palestinian children in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT) each year, who face systemic violations including torture, house arrests, solitary confinement, and administrative detention.
This report clearly demonstrates that Israel’s abuse of Palestinian children is out of step with how Canadians expect children should be treated. The report’s top recommendation is that Canada should immediately appoint a Special Rapporteur to monitor and protect the rights of Palestinian children. This is a long-time demand of civil society groups like Canada Stand Up for Palestinian Children’s Rights (CSUFPCR), and is a policy that a group of Members of Parliament have been calling for since 2018.
Key Differences, Canada vs. Israel
CJPME’s report highlights several key distinctions in how Palestinian children are treated in Israel’s military court system, compared to Jewish Israelis and Canadian detainees. For example,
Report Recommendations
CJPME’s report offers several recommendations for the Canadian government to take to protect the rights of Palestinian Children. For example, it calls on Canada to:
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Updated: In 2019, Mohamed Ali Adel Maki, a 15-year-old Bahraini student, was arbitrarily arrested without an arrest warrant. During his repeated arrests, Mohamed Ali has faced multiple human rights violations during his detention, including torture, enforced disappearance, and unfair trial. He has been accused of multiple charges and is currently serving his sentence in the Dry Dock Detention Center. After the enactment of the 2021 Restorative Justice Law for Children and the Protection of Children from Mistreatment, Mohamed Ali has undertaken several hunger strikes, demanding a retrial according to this law.
On 31 January 2019, Mohamed Ali Adel Maki was arrested for the first time at the age of 15 years old. He was playing with his friends in the Shakhura area, and while he was tying his shoelace in a corner away from them, riot police snatched him by his hands and placed him in a jeep. They took him to Al-Badii police station, where he was held overnight. He was then taken to Hamad Town Police Station. After that, he was transferred to the AlQalaa Center and finally held in the Dry Dock detention prison for more than a month, after which he was released on bail of 200 dinars.
On 23 November 2019, Mohamed Ali was in the car with his mother heading to buy some necessities in the evening before going to his grandfather’s house to spend the night. Suddenly, they were surrounded by civilian cars, who had been watching and tracking them. Mohamed Ali was arrested by officers in civilian clothing from the Ministry of the Interior and intelligence services. He was handcuffed and put in a small car where there were other detained youths from other areas. A plain-clothes officer then returned, searched the car, and confiscated his telephone. When his mother asked why and where they were taking him, the officer told her to the Central Investigation Department (CID) but did not say why.
After his arrest, Mohamed Ali was transferred with the rest of the youth who were detained to a park near the Saar area, an unknown place where no one could see them. They were stripped naked, blindfolded, tortured, and beaten in sensitive areas to force them to confess. They were then transferred to the CID. Mohamed Ali was not brought promptly before a judge. Afterward, he was transferred to Jau Prison, building 15 (an NSA investigative building), where he was again interrogated and tortured. He was blindfolded, stripped naked, beaten on sensitive areas with clubs and rods, electrocuted, and placed in a very cold room. After a full week of torture, during which he was not allowed to speak to his lawyer, written confessions were presented to him, which he signed without knowledge of their contents. Following the coerced confession, he was transferred to the prosecution and then to the Dry Dock Detention Center. After several days, he contacted his parents. He appeared very tired and did not know his location, but he said that he was in solitary confinement.
Mohamed Ali was charged in multiple cases including joining a terrorist group whose purpose is disrupting the provisions of the Constitution and laws and preventing State institutions and public authorities from carrying out their activities; receiving the necessary funds to support them and finance their activities; receiving and storing explosives in separate locations within the Kingdom of Bahrain and using them for their activities with the aim of causing chaos and stirring up sedition; intentional arson by setting fire to an ATM room owned by the National Bank of Bahrain; collecting, giving and delivering funds and carrying out operations for the benefit of a terrorist group; and belonging to this group. On 3 November 2020, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, a fine of one hundred thousand dinars, and an obligation to pay the value of the damages worth 51,400 dinars. On 11 April 2021, the Court of Appeal upheld the judgment. On 12 July 2021, the Court of Cassation upheld the judgment.
Mohamed Ali is currently imprisoned at Dry Dock Detention Center, Ward 17. He suffers from a blood disorder called thalassemia, as well as an allergy in the eye. Mohamed Ali launched a humanitarian appeal through a call posted on social media to benefit from Law No. (4) of 2021, or the restorative justice law for children to protect them from abuse. His family submitted a request at the prosecution office to replace the sentence, and Mohamed Ali’s name was registered, but they have not received any answer or action yet. His family also requested the prison administration to allow its son to continue his studies in prison. He was able to take his exams, but he and his friends were constantly harassed by the prison’s administration while studying, as it only provided them with books shortly before the exams. One time, when he asked an Egyptian monitor for a pen while he was taking an exam, the monitor began to provoke him, prompting him to leave the class and submit a blank exam paper, as any objection made would result in the detainee being expelled from the room and subjected to beating. His parents have submitted a new request for him to complete his studies, but to date, no response has been received.
On 8 October 2023, Mohamed Ali began a hunger strike to demand again his right to a retrial before the Children Restorative Justice Court, and for the application of the Restorative Justice Law to himself, as he was sentenced at the age of sixteen, and to all minors. Despite receiving multiple promises from the prison administration regarding the application of this law in his case, no progress was made. Since his arrest and up to the present day, he has suffered injustice and has been deprived of his right to continue his education. He has faced obstacles while attempting to pursue education within the prison. Nevertheless, he desires to complete his high school and university education, thus demanding to benefit from the Restorative Justice Law for Children. Despite the fact that the right to education is guaranteed to all children by the constitution and does not cease during detention for any reason, the Bahraini authorities have deprived him of this right since his arrest and throughout his detention. He also demands that child rights organizations consider his case, as he believes he has been deprived of his most basic legal rights.
On 10 October 2023, Mohamed Ali once again requested Ebrahim Al-Fadala, the Public Prosecutor’s representative, to apply the Restorative Justice Law for Children to his case. However, instead of responding to his demands, he was surprised by Al-Fadala threatening him, saying, “You’ve been sentenced to 10 years, while it should have been a death sentence!”
Mohamed Ali’s warrantless arrest, torture, enforced disappearance, and unfair trial go against the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), and the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), both of which Bahrain is party to. Additionally, the violations that he faced despite being a minor violate the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
As such, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) sounds the alarm over the threat to issue sentences that could extend to the death penalty for him and other children for crimes they allegedly committed as minors. Also, ADHRB sounds the alarm over the continued danger posed to his health by his ongoing hunger strike. ADHRB calls on the Bahraini authorities to immediately release Mohamed Ali, as he has not been granted a fair trial and has been deprived of proper legal procedures, and to investigate the allegations of torture, enforced disappearance, and ill-treatment while holding the perpetrators accountable, and to respect his rights as a child and provide him compensation for all the violations he has faced in prison, or at least, to respond to his demand for retrial under the Restorative Justice Law for Children, leading to his release.
The post Profile in Persecution: Mohamed Ali Adel Maki appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
What are workers? Are they human beings? Do they have only a bundle of muscles but, no brains? How do they feel and how do they think? Do they think at all? What do they face in their life – in factories, in foundries and other shops, in assembly lines, in unions?
Workers’ answers to the questions above differ from the response the workers’ masters present. The factor that draws the delineating line is, in short, class position, which is often blurred while discussing issues of life and work, be it related to workplace or economic program, politics or social initiatives, charity, cooperative, ideology or culture.
Michael D. Yates, a labor organizer, discusses this issue in the chapter 1, “Take this job and …” of his recently released book Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2022). The professor of labor economics begins the chapter with a statement, simple or complicated:
“It would be astonishing if the more than 150 million child laborers in the world were happily employed. Or if the 800 million farmworkers globally were content with their circumstances.”
The mainstream investigates: Child laborers’ happiness with employment? Isn’t it an invalid question? The system takes away happiness of childhood from millions of children, and then, searches whether or not the child workers are happy? The system shackles millions of farmworkers into bondage, and then, searches whether or not the farmworkers are happy? The system enslaves millions of workers into a life without humane condition, and then, surveys whether or not the workers are content with their life? Isn’t it a mockery by the system and its scholarship? Isn’t it a crude trick to hide the system’s cruelty and its scholarship’s identity – in the payroll of the system?
Michael Yates tells about two workers: his father and Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line (Warner Books, New York, 1991): “Both spent good portions of their lives as factory workers, my father in a glassworks and Ben Hamper in an auto plant.”
The description goes further: “Both became factory workers because it was almost predetermined that they would. All their relatives and friends were factory hands.”
“Predetermined” – the powerful process or factor that determines the lives of millions of toilers in the world system of exploitation! Workers’ fate is sealed forever, and for perpetuity in the system, if the system doesn’t get overthrown. This is eulogized, philosophized, rationalized, ideologized. Who rationalizes this? The philosophers defending the system, the scholars serving the system, the interests thriving on exploitation do this job. How is this rationalized? With illogic, by imposing the formula – never question, by creating a premise that stands on void, by ignoring struggle between classes, by denouncing the role of force in society’s historical journey, and by condemning the use of force by the exploited, although the system has established and keeps on sustaining its interests by force.
The author cites Ben: “Right from the outset, when the call went out for shoprats, my ancestors responded in almost Pavlovian compliance.”
What a tragedy in human life – Pavlovian compliance! But this tragedy was not only of Ben’s ancestors; it’s of all tied to the system of exploitation: comply, always comply, never question, never even dream to question, never defy, never be disloyal and disobedient, never be critical, never think over the role of force in historical journey of humanity, and denounce whoever proposes to raise questions, whoever brings to notice class rule and the role of force in class rule. And, this tragedy was neither created nor called by these people. The system of exploitation creates this tragedy, and it imposes on humans, as Ben narrates: “Drudgery piled atop drudgery. Cigarette to cigarette. Decades rolling through the rafters, bones turning to dust, stubborn clocks gagging down flesh, […] wars blinking on and off, thunderstorms muttering the alphabet, crows on power lines asleep or dead, that mechanical octopus squirming against nothing, nothing, nothingness.”Yates’s father was “a glass examiner; he checked glass plates for flaws under high-intensity lights. Four cutters, working on incentives, depended on him for plates, and they were not happy if he was too slow. The boss was not happy if he was too careful. He coped with the stress by taking aspirin and smoking, several cigarettes burning simultaneously.” It’s the story of all workers – in different forms, in different places, with different speeds and stress.
What happens then? Yates writes: “[Y]ou can almost feel what it does to people. Some become zombies, […] or the man who answers ‘same old thing’ no matter what you say to him. Not a few crack up completely; […] A few workers become so habituated to the line that they hate to leave it, like the pensioners who sat in the park in my hometown wistfully staring at the plant gate across the street.” A dehumanizing upshot! Souls, irrespective of blue or white collar, reach at this point: they hate to leave the machine that exploited them, that made them part of the machine, that compelled them to think as the machine dictated, they deny to question the machine and the machine’s process, they deny to define life and issues of life in some other way than the definitions the machine defines. It’s “staring at plant gate”. The plant, the machine appears a mirror of joy and happiness. A triumph of the machine!
Do the brains, the muscles sold, compelled to sale, to the system turn satisfied? A sort of satisfaction reins in a part of the brains and muscles. What sort of satisfaction is that? The author of Work Work Work, who also taught union workers for years, writes: “[S]atisfied compared to what? The lack of a job? An unknown alternative?” These are issues: compared to something, lack of or a lower-paying job or an unknown uncertainty. A bonus, an increase in wages, a promotion, a capacity to buy better clothes or food for daughter or son once or twice annually, a loan to buy a refrigerator or a car – these drive the indicator of satisfaction high. Is it a slave’s satisfaction –lifelong allegiance and obedience to the master, remain slave, in exchange of a better food and less or no flogging?
A mostly ignored fact is told by Ben that Yates refers to: Gulag City –a “Japanese-style” plant.
The mainstream scholarship and propaganda machine doggedly ignore the following facts: 1) capitalist system, which at times turns Gulag; and 2) persistent brutality of the system, which ceaselessly murders many over a long period of time, in addition to keeping millions in cages. The murder at mass scale 1) isn’t visible all the time, 2) is explained in some other way, 3) is attributed to other phenomena, and 4) is defined in isolated way. This murder is not accidents during the production process, which puts extra weight to the business of the murdering-system. The propaganda also depicts a rosy picture of certain labor management systems by hiding the inner-working of the system that efficiently hides its fangs – keep the workforce tamed and intensify exploitation. Instead, stories on the Soviet-Gulag are persistently propagated.
Michael Yates, regularly representing unions at bargaining tables, writes a burning fact, which is overlooked or ignored by all the rightist ideologists, all the philanthropists, many union leaders, many NGOs involved with labor activism, and a good number of “radicals”: “[W]ork itself, no matter how oppressive, does not engender class consciousness and solidarity. It is more likely to lead to such poor health and mental stress that coherent thoughts and actions are difficult.”
First, the mechanism takes away the capacity to think – a dehumanizing process. Isn’t it murder, murder of existence as human? Whatever remains there is incoherence – tongue-tied thoughts, actions without meaningful connections, undisciplined actions. The exploiters like it and love it. It takes away that capacity, which is essential to make radical change of the dehumanizing system.
Yates, as an example, refers to historians David Montgomery and Jeremy Brecher, and his father.
Montgomery and Brecher wrote: “[W]orkers eagerly debated great questions during the many mass strikes before the Second World War. Who should run the factories? Who should lead the nation?”
His father told him: “[A]fter the war, his factory was alive with talk of politics.”
Today, what’s happening? Yates writes: “[M]eaningful discussions are far outnumbered by talk of booze, sex, sports, and hunting.”
It’s not a scene only from the Uncle Sam-economy. In other societies dominated by exploiters, it’s basically the same also: Difficult to find workers talking about their politics and democracy, and organizations for radical change, not the exploiters’ politics, democracy and organization. The problem is not with the workers.
The problem begins at two levels: at the work mechanism, and with those that have usurped leadership. A part of the leadership has been deployed by the system with this particular assignment – let the workers get confused and forget their essential issues – while the rest is unaware and incapable, which is also the system’s capacity to keep that part crippled in terms of idea and thought.
Aren’t the exploiters happy with this realty? They are.
With this reality, Yates tells the urgent and inescapable fact: “[T]here is more work to be done than radicals might think.”
No doubt, more elementary and basic work, which may appear small and insignificant to somebody, to be done. Re-raising and re-debating “old” questions, including workers’ politics and political power, are essential. Imperialist agencies are active in the area of the workers’ movement. It’s a comparatively new development. Collaborationist big unions from the global metropolis organize unions in the southern hemisphere and influence workers’ movement in countries in the South. A group of labor organizers are picked up and mobilized as bargaining chips by capitals abroad. “Labor” organizations are floated to further imperialist agenda, and to blunt workers’ class consciousness. These issues/practices/trends go un-discussed in the circles claiming to be radical, although these are to be exposed and nullified immediately.
There’s further bitter fact told by Yates:
[U]nions, as currently constituted, offer working people a very partial victory. [….] In the old plants, the union made it hard to fire workers and made it possible for them to resist and sometimes to defeat the worst management abuses. But since the radicals were expelled long ago, it has not stood for anything except higher pay and some job security, and today it cannot deliver these. In the newer plants,it is firmly in bed with the companies, pushing the labor-management cooperation schemes […]
This is not only a snapshot from a single land. A deeper and wider search in lands will find this: major unions in bed with companies – a capitulation to capital, a sellout of workers’ position, a giving up of proletarian interest. It’s a major problem being faced by unions upholding workers’ interests.
This brings back a few of the questions related to unions that Lenin raised while struggling to organize a radical workers’ movement in Russia. The Orthodox priest, Georgy Gapon (a supposed leader of workers later discovered to have been a police agent) was not the only problem in the workers’ movement in Russia. That was a particular problem at a particular time there. Even, prior to the employment of Gapon by the Tsarist police, Lenin had to resolve other union-related issues. Otherwise, it was difficult to move forward for building up the workers’ political power in Russia. Many union organizers mostly ignore these issues and deny learning lessons from this episode of revolutionary workers’ movement.
This chapter, a review of Ben Hamper’s book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line, reminds us of the bitter parts of the reality with a tone of criticism of Ben: “[F]ailure, even unwillingness, to push his class consciousness forward”.
With a mild tone, Yates presents an answer: “Maybe it is too painful to do so. Maybe the unions have failed so utterly to create a working-class ideology that would force workers to ask the right questions and struggle toward […] a new world.”
Here, comes the question of class consciousness, which is brushed out by those in the service of capital, as class consciousness denies all authorities capital creates to carry on its rule.
The author has a more bitter tone: “No doubt radicals have failed workers too, either ignoring them for the pleasures of theoretical debate or trying to become one of them so hard that they forgot that work in this society destroys the human spirit.”
Pleasure of theoretical debate at the cost of abandoning workers! Undeniable fact overwhelmingly found around. It sounds spiritual, but it’s the reality: Work in this society destroys human spirit. This reality remains behind the eyes of a group of “emancipators” while they search saach, true, path to emancipation.
Yates proposes: “If we are ever to liberate ourselves, we must reinvent work.”
Liberation of ours is a fundamental question in the life of humanity, and reinventing work is a complicated task. Therefore, there comes the questions: How to reinvent work, and from where to begin the task of reinvention? Humanity’s journey is for liberation, liberation from all forms of bondage. It’s going on for ages, and it has to march forward.
The consequence of a failure to reinvent sounds like a dire warning from the author, as he writes: “Either we will convert the daily hell that is work today into something that connects us to other people and the world around us, or we will descend further into the alienation engulfing us.”
“But where is the way out?” With this question, Michael Yates concludes the chapter.
Probably, the author gives a space to readers to search for an answer to the question. Or, it’s a reflection of an overwhelmingly hostile reality, a capital-scape where exploiters’ standard flutters.
But, to dissect dialectically, there’s an opposite action moving on. It’s in the class struggle-scape. The way out begins with a scientific approach to find out the roots of failure, and the Vaporyod, forward. The way out is to begin by taking stock of the existing condition, immediately initiate work with a scientific approach, expose appeasements and sellouts, gain momentum, and be stubborn and defiant.
Farooque Chowdhury thanks Michael D. Yates for editing of this piece.
The post Tale of Two Workers first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The following text tells the whole story of what pro-Palestinian communities around the world are fighting for, and what pro-Israelis are fighting against: “We are delighted to report that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has removed a display of artwork designed by children from Gaza.”
That was the summary of a news report published on the homepage of the pro-Israel group, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). The group is credited for being the party that managed to successfully persuade the administration of a hospital in West London to take down a few pieces of artwork created by refugee children from Gaza.
Explaining the logic behind their relentless campaign to remove the children’s art, UKLFI said that “Jewish patients” in the hospital “felt vulnerable and victimized by the display”. The few pieces of artwork were those of the Dome of the Rock in occupied East Jerusalem, the Palestinian flag and other symbols that should hardly victimize anyone.
The UKLFI article was later edited, with the offensive summary removed, although it is still accessible via social media.
As ridiculous as this story sounds, it is, in fact, the very essence of the anti-Palestinian campaign launched by Israel and its allies worldwide. While Palestinians are fighting for basic human rights, freedom and sovereignty as enshrined in international law, the pro-Israel camp is fighting for a total and complete erasure of everything Palestinian.
Some call this cultural genocide or ethnocide. While Palestinians have been familiar with this Israeli practice in Palestine since the very inception of the state of Israel, the boundaries of the war have been expanded to reach anywhere in the world, especially in the western hemisphere.
The inhumanity of UKLFI and their allies is quite palpable, but the group cannot be the only party deserving blame. Those lawyers are but a continuation of an Israeli colonial culture that sees the very existence of a Palestinian people with a political discourse, including children refugees’ art, as an ‘existential threat’ to Israel.
The relationship between the very existence of a country and children’s art may seem absurd – and it is – but it has its own, albeit strange, logic: as long as these refugee children recognize themselves as Palestinian, as long as they will continue to count as part of a larger whole, the Palestinian people. This self-awareness, and the recognition by others – for example, patients and staff at a London hospital – of this collective Palestinian identity, makes it difficult, in fact, impossible, for Israel to win.
For Palestinians and Israelis, victory means two entirely different things, which cannot be consolidated. For Palestinians, victory means freedom for the Palestinian people and equality for all. For Israel, victory can only be achieved through the erasure of Palestinians – geographically, historically, culturally and in every way that could be part of a people’s identity.
Sadly, the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital is now an active participant in this tragic erasure of the Palestinians, the same way that Virgin Airlines bowed to pressure in 2018 when it agreed to remove “Palestinian-inspired couscous” off its menu. At the time, this story appeared as if it was a strange episode in the so-called ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’, though, in reality, the story represented the very core of this ‘conflict’.
For Israel, the war in Palestine revolved around three basic tasks: acquiring land; erasing the people and rewriting history.
The first task has been largely achieved through a process of ethnic cleansing and unhinged colonization of Palestine since 1947-48. The current right-wing extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu is only hoping to finalize this process.
The second task involves more than ethnic cleansing, because even the mere awareness of Palestinians, wherever they are, of their collective identity, constitutes a problem. Thus, the active process of cultural genocide.
Though Israel has succeeded in rewriting history for many years, that task is now being challenged, thanks to the tenacity of Palestinians and their allies, and the power of social and digital media.
Palestinians are arguably the greatest beneficiary of the rise of digital media. The latter has contributed to the decentralization of political and even historical narratives. For decades, the popular understanding of what constitutes ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ in mainstream imagination was largely controlled through a specific Israeli-sanctioned narrative. Those who deviated from this narrative were attacked and marginalized, and almost always accused of ‘antisemitism’. While these tactics are still unleashed at critics of Israel, the outcome is no longer guaranteed.
For example, a single tweet exposing the ‘delight’ of UKLFI has received over 2 million views on Twitter. Millions of outraged Brits and social media users around the world have turned what was meant to be a local story into one of the most discussed topics, worldwide, on Palestine and Israel. Expectedly, not many social media users took part in the ‘delight’ of the UKLFI, thus forcing them to reword their original article. More importantly, millions of people have, in a single day, been introduced to a whole new topic on Palestine and Israel: that of cultural erasure. The ‘victory’ has turned into a complete embarrassment, let alone defeat.
Thanks to the growing popularity of the Palestinian cause and the impact of social media, initial Israeli victories almost always backfire. A more recent example is the dismissal and the quick reinstatement of the former Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth.
In January, Roth’s fellowship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School was revoked due to the recent HRW report that defines Israel as an apartheid regime. A major campaign, which was started by small alternative media organizations, resulted in the reinstatement of Roth within days. This, and other cases, demonstrates that criticizing Israel is no longer a career-ender, as was often the case in the past.
Israel continues to employ old tactics to control the conversation on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is failing because those traditional tactics can no longer work in a modern world in which access to information is decentralized, and where no amount of censorship can control the conversation.
For Palestinians, this new reality is an opportunity to widen their circle of support around the world. For Israel, the mission is a precarious one, especially when initial victories could, in hours, become utter defeats.
The post Palestinian Children’s Art Exposes Israel’s Cultural Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.
A recent expose in the New York Times documenting how U.S. corporations exploit migrant children sheds light on a crucial issue facing the American Left. Nowadays, many left activists rightly focus on identity politics. To them, diversity is the order of the day. No argument here. Years ago, Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, put it clearly: diversity is a beautiful bouquet of flowers. But the celebration of differences oftentimes ignores what holds us together, what we have in common. The Times article makes clear what that is: It’s about class struggle, the battle against
economic subjugation and oppression of the vulnerable.
Just look at what these desperate children are up against. Driven by extreme poverty that’s exacerbated by climate change, a by-product of capitalist consumer driven production, migrant children from Central America cross the U.S. border by the tens of thousands. Out of desperation, many are sucked into the maw of the worst labor abuses perpetrated by American business. According to the Times, food giants such as Hearthside Food Solutions lure these kids into the country’s most dangerous jobs. Suffering endless workdays and worknights, they are forced to meet the high-pressure speed-up routines demanded by corporate America’s incessant need for profit. Deadening fatigue and exhaustion, illness, and injuries abound. One young woman had her scalp ripped apart by a machine. According to the U.S. Labor Department, 12 child workers have been killed at their jobs since 2017. Then there’s the emotional toll of family separation, loneliness, fear, and the ruinous effect of sometimes being denied an education. Undoubtedly some of these teens identify as Nicaraguans or Guatemalans, many as straight, gay lesbian or bi. Culturally they form a rich diversity of difference. Each is a unique living example of Kimberle Crenshaw’s valuable concept of intersectionality, the idea that each of us is a composite of the multiple
identities that our heritage, place and experience make of us.
The shared horror these children experience demonstrates unequivocally how the relentless drive to exist is conditioned by their absolute dependence on the basic need to work under any conditions they can find, no matter how bad. Driven north by economic desperation, borders mean nothing to them. And why should they? As Canadian activist Harsha Walia declares in her recent book, Border and Rule, “the borders of today are completely bound up in the violences of dispossession, accumulation, exploitation”, and their intersection “with race, caste, gender, sexuality, and ability,” a global dispossession that has fired the engines of capital since the 16th century. The horrors of child labor that Marx excoriated 160 years ago remain part of a system that sniffs every chance to eke out the last ounce of unpaid labor from the most vulnerable humans on the planet.
In a truly humane and democratic world, diversity and difference would surely reign. But in this ugly real world where teenage lives from so many different places are stunted, injured, and destroyed, it becomes increasingly clear that the overarching reality that most threatens the very human need to exist is class oppression. Class is the relentless reality that compels people to live by serving the terms of capital, no matter where they come from, how young or old they are or how they “identify” as unique human beings. The only way that reality will change is when working people recognize and challenge class as the commonality of their oppression. Democratic power comes from unity, division is its nemesis. The Roman imperialists understood the counter-power of division. They called the strategy divide et impera, divide and rule. When will the American Left finally stop playing the Romans’ game?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Censorship is never innocent, made worse for its strained good intentions. For those responsible for setting and policing such policies, the inner judge comes out, stomping on assumed meanings, interpreting and removing things to ensure the masses are not corrupted. Children’s stories and tales have not been exempted from this train of revision, expurgation and adjustment.
In modifying the language of children’s texts, a number of agents come into play: concerned parents, worried authorities, and the considerations that reflect the temper and mores of the time. Publishers, keen to ensure a wider readership, feel pressure to alter the original text to stay modern and trendy.
In 1853, Charles Dickens took the illustrator and former friend George Cruickshank to task in an essay “Frauds on the Fairies” for meddling with fairy tales through incorporating a temperance message. “We have lately observed with pain the intrusion of a Whole Hog of unwieldy dimensions into the fairy flower-garden.” It was vital, Dickens warned, to respect fairy tales, most notably in the utilitarian age Britain found itself in.
The latest victim of this lack of respect, albeit one posthumously affected, is Roald Dahl, whose books for children have drawn unwanted attention from a wretched consultancy in conjunction with veteran publisher Puffin Books. Evidently not feeling anyone capable within their ranks, Puffin Books decided to retain Inclusive Minds, which claims to “offer a range of services to help people engaged in all aspects of children’s literature build a new, more inclusive world.”
This all took place in step with the announcement in September last year that the streaming company Netflix had bought the Roald Dahl Story Company for the princely sum of £500 million. The contract is reportedly the biggest content deal of its kind, a fact no doubt helped by the company’s observation that Dahl’s books have sold more than 300 million globally and been translated into 63 languages. “Netflix and The Roald Dahl Story Company,” the company announced, “share a deep love of storytelling and a growing global fan base. Together, we have an extraordinary opportunity to write multiple new chapters of these beloved stories, delighting children and adults around the world for generations to come.’
With the mantra of inclusivity heavy at Puffin Books, in addition to the “growing global fan base”, the publishing outfit faced a fundamental problem. Any position on being inclusive reaches a tipping point where it must exclude. And at Inclusive Minds, there are “Inclusion Ambassadors” who constitute a network of advisors with a nose for sensitivity and a mind for removing the uncomfortable. “The network,” Inclusive Minds goes on to say, “offers book creators a chance to connect with ‘experts by experiences’ at the very earliest stage in the book creation process.”
With the razors ready to modernise (read purge) any of Dahl’s texts, a number of words came in for the chop. A focus was placed upon gender, race, mental health and weight. “Enormously fat” was adjusted to being merely “enormous”, in reference to the gluttonous character of Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Oompa-Loompas were transformed into “small people”, with words such as “titchy” and “tiny” excised.
In “Witches”, an “old hag” became the less offensive “old crow”. Other patently silly changes included removing “black” in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in favour of “murderous, brutal-looking” tractors. The three sons, for some reason, become three daughters, while the Cloud-Men in “James and the Giant Peach” become Cloud People.
Many of these changes are not cosmetic, constituting a direct alternation of the author’s meanings and intentions. Matilda’s reading of Rudyard Kipling, for instance, is considered inappropriate to the sensitivity police. Far better to make her read Jane Austen instead of that bard of British imperialism.
These changes prompted novelist Salman Rushdie, himself all too familiar with the mortal dangers of censorship, to suggest that Puffin Books and the Dahl estate reel in shame. It was sporting of him to do so, given Dahl’s own lack of sympathy for Rushdie’s treatment at the hands of murderous Islamic fanatics for the publication of The Satanic Verses.
Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Spectator, was adamant that Dahl had been culturally vandalised, being “well and truly Ministry of Truthed.” The fun in the texts had been redacted, confined to “the memory hole.”
PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel was also “alarmed at news of ‘hundreds of changes’ to venerated works by [Dahl] in a purported effort to scrub the books of that which might offend someone.” Those wishing to “cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.”
During his life, Dahl was also the subject of attention from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for language used in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The 1964 text originally described the Oompa-Loompas as African “pygmies”. In sympathy with the NAACP, Dahl rewrote the text for the second US edition, turning the Oompa-Loompas into white dwarves with origins in fictional Loompaland.
Ironically enough, Dahl’s agent convinced the author to change Charlie’s identity, who was originally intended to be a black boy. The reason was crude but simple: making Charlie white would be more appealing to readers.
Amidst the protests against the latest rewrites and cuts, Penguin Random House, which owns Puffin Books, announced that it would publish the “classic” versions alongside the new editions, enabling readers “to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.” That’s just what the children need.
Puffin Books should have already heeded the lessons of previous failed efforts to run rewritten texts for contemporary audiences. Efforts in 2010 to subject the Famous Five series of Enid Blyton to “sensitive text revisions” failed. These included alterations of “awful swotter” to “bookworm”, and “tinker” with “traveller”. The publisher Hachette had to concede in 2016 that the project had not worked.
This latest affair prompted a suggestion from Philip Pullman on Radio 4 on February 20. Let the passage of time judge the works, rather than the officials of the age. Eventually, they may go out of print, leaving room for other authors and their stories to enchant a new readership. In Dahl’s case, that time is a considerable way off. A salient lesson, then, to avoid overly paid and ill-informed consultancies and respect children’s stories.
The post Sensitivity Rewrites: The Cultural Purging of Roald Dahl first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
You may wonder if the “trans” madness is as nefarious and widespread as some say. To help address that contemplation:
Click here to see the deluded and manipulated souls seeking “bottom surgery.”
Click here to see the deluded and manipulated souls seeking “top surgery.”
You may also wonder if it’s any of your business what adults do to their bodies. When their insane decisions impact your legal protections and infringe on the rights and safety of females everywhere, it sure is.
But, for the sake of this post, I wanna focus on a very crucial point: It’s not just about adults.
From an October 2022 article published by Reuters (part of the very pro-trans legacy media):
“Thousands of children in the United States now openly identify as a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth … As the number of transgender children has grown, so has their access to gender-affirming care, much of it provided at scores of clinics at major hospitals.”
From the same article:
“A total of 17,683 patients, ages 6 through 17, with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis initiated either puberty blockers or hormones or both during the five-year period. Of these, 4,780 patients had initiated puberty blockers and 14,726 patients had initiated hormone treatment.”
For more details, listen to my interview with Brandon Showalter here.
Children as young as 6 are being manipulated and eventually mutilated by complicit members of the Medical-Industrial Complex to fulfill a transhumanist agenda.
This won’t go away until we get informed and fight back together. Spread the word and get loud…
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”
— John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
It takes a special kind of evil to prostitute and traffick a child for sex, and yet this evil walks among us every minute of every day.
Consider this: every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex.
Hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day.
Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States alone.
In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 to 500,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
Child rape has become Big Business in America.
This is not a problem found only in big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
Like so many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.
It is estimated that the number of children who are at risk of being trafficked or have already been sold into the sex trade would fill 1300 school buses.
The internet has become the primary means of sexual predators targeting and selling young children for sex. “One in five kids online are sexually propositioned through gaming platforms and other social media. And those, non-contact oriented forums of sexual exploitation are increasing,” said researcher Brian Ulicny.
It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable, either.
According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”
Every year, the ages of the girls and boys being bought and sold get younger and younger.
The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.”
“They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re little girls.”
This is America’s dirty little secret.
But what or who is driving this evil appetite for young flesh? Who buys a child for sex?
Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
According to criminal investigator Marc Chadderdon, these “buyers”—the so-called “ordinary” men who drive the demand for sex with children—represent a cross-section of American society: every age, every race, every socio-economic background, cops, teachers, corrections workers, pastors, etc.
America’s police forces—riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct and drug abuse—represent another facet of the problem: police have become both predators and pimps. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex.”
Young girls are particularly vulnerable to these predators in blue.
Former police officer Phil Stinson estimates that half of the victims of police sex crimes are minors under the age of eighteen. According to the Washington Post, a national study found that 40 percent of reported cases of police sexual misconduct involved teens.
For example, in California, a police sergeant—a 16-year veteran of the police force—was arrested for raping a 16-year-old girl who was being held captive and sold for sex in a home in an upscale neighborhood.
A Pennsylvania police chief and his friend were arrested for allegedly raping a young girl hundreds of times—orally, vaginally, and anally several times a week—over the course of seven years, starting when she was 4 years old.
Two NYPD cops were accused of arresting a teenager, handcuffing her, and driving her in an unmarked van to a nearby parking lot, where they raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them, then dropped her off on a nearby street corner.
The New York Times reports that “a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio was charged with sexually assaulting the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented Guatemalan woman and threatening to have her deported if she reported the abuse.”
And then you have national sporting events such as the Super Bowl, where sex traffickers have been caught selling minors, some as young as 9 years old. Whether or not the Super Bowl is a “windfall” for sex traffickers as some claim, it remains a lucrative source of income for the child sex trafficking industry and a draw for those who are willing to pay to rape young children.
Finally, as I documented in an earlier column, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators.
Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on … social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.
Rarely do these children enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).
For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.
Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.
A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men.
As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”
One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.
This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.
Unfortunately, as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government’s war on sex trafficking, much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime, has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public while doing little to actually protect our children from sex predators.
That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
The post Child Trafficking Has Become Big Business in America first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Every Sunday about a dozen high school teenagers gather without their iPhones on a little hill in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, USA. They form a circle and quietly start to read serious books (Dostoevsky, Boethius) (paperbacks or hardbacks), or draw in sketchbooks, or just serenely sit listening to the wind.
As the New York Times reporter Alex Vadukul wrote last month these youngsters have had enough of the addictive Internet Gulag run by corporate incarcerators. “Social media and phones are not real life,” said Lola Shub a senior at Essex Street Academy. She expressed the group’s consensus: “When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed. I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person.”
Before peer group sanctions get to them, I’ve got to have a couple of these daily “self-liberators” on my Ralph Nader Radio Hour. This is a rebellion that needs support and diffusion.
These youngsters may not know the full extent of how corporate giants like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have broken up families. These corporate predators are separating millions of kids for 5 to 6 hours a day from their parents, communities and nature with iPhones and tablets.
Among the books in their satchels should be Susan Linn’s latest, Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children. These young mavericks would learn just how premeditated these company bosses are in tempting, seducing, then addicting youngsters and moving them into the Internet prison (en route to Zuckerberg’s mad metaverse). Marketing strategists use peer pressure and cultivate narcissistic behavior. Numerous studies and public hearings have shown the physical, mental and emotional harm done to children by relentless corporate hucksters’ direct marketing to them and bypassing parental authority and guidance.
A few other high school students in Manhattan and Brooklyn are joining this escape from the grip of commercial-driven “virtual reality” and connecting with the realities they will have to confront as they grow into adulthood.
The teenagers, who have formed the “Luddite Club”, are trying to liberate themselves in a world of technology that envelopes them without a framework of ethics and law.
They may gain further self-confidence and knowledge about the controlling processes around them by reading the “think-for-yourself” book – You Are Your Own Best Teacher! (in print only) by Claire Nader. Fifty-four topics will give young readers solid self-confidence and better classroom performance, and the book’s liberation exercises will spark their curiosity, imagination and intellect.
Curious young people may also want to follow the lawsuits against Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube “which also operate social media products that cause similar injuries to adolescents.” The large law firm Beasley Allen in Montgomery, Alabama is “handling lawsuits for teenagers who became addicted to social media and suffered serious mental health consequences, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, ADD/ADHD, self-harm and suicidal ideation.”
These lawyers have plenty of experts who will back them to make the connections between these affiliations and the deliberate actions driven by these greedy companies who know full well the consequences of their relentless drive for profits. Many of these executives restrict their own children’s Internet time. They know!
The post Teenage iPhone Rebellion in Brooklyn first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When children realize how big businesses are controlling their childhood, their rebellious sense of being exploited connects with their instinct for safety and self-respect.
The commercial pressures descending on our children through relentless direct marketing, radically bypassing parental authority, are at a fever pitch.
It will take more than studies by nutritionists and health specialists, more than congressional hearings, more than repeated findings about harm to physical and mental health to make real changes.
Companies with children’s marketing divisions treat these alarms as so much water off a duck’s back. They continue to pitch junk food, sugary soft drinks, violent video programming and other damaging products that result in obesity, child diabetes, serious mental anguish and other ailments.
More apps are fashioned to elicit more personal privacy-invading data from these children for the purpose of increasing targeted sales and internet-connected screen time.
The California legislature has passed a bill that, effective 2024, explicitly orders companies to “prioritize the privacy, safety, and well-being of children over commercial interests.” Corporate executives know such a vague “kids code” law is largely unenforceable, even if there was the will to do so, especially when there are no criminal penalties. The law has always had difficulty controlling companies that traffic in manipulation, seduction and addiction.
Parents have limited ability to protect kids
What then can be done about the abduction of the time, the minds and the bodies of our children?
Parents cannot control their children, so long as phones, tablets and other devices reach apps and sites that expertly lure them online five to seven hours a day.
What if the children themselves, with their innate intellect, curiosity and imagination, learn how to defend themselves from what psychologist Susan Linn calls “the hostile takeover of childhood”? After many impromptu conversations with youngsters, I believe one way to start is with the children themselves and to work from there to their parents, teachers and other adults.
My new book, You Are Your Own Best Teacher!, speaks directly to tweens: the 9- to 12-year-olds who absorb facts and have a developed sense of right and wrong. And, in the words of Harvard professor Robert Coles, “a yearning that justice be done.”
When they exercise these virtues, without the vested interests of grown-ups, they release a reservoir of moral authority that we as a society badly need. We have seen this work at a personal level with children when they admonish, with haunting pleas, their fathers and mothers to stop smoking, to use seat belts or to stop drinking.
We have also read about tweens working their practical idealism on a larger scale, with, for example, environmental activist Greta Thunberg igniting millions of children in many countries to demand acceleration of changes that thwart climate disruption.
A world where kids can be kids
My book provides diverse examples of children seeing conditions as they are in reality without the distortions of propaganda or adult self-censorship. It goes further, raising some 54 topics to have them see for themselves that there is another wonderful, safer, more confident, resilient life outside of the omnipresent clutches of the “corporate parent.”
About two dozen citizen/parent organizations are devoted to what one of them – Fairplay for Kids – describes as “a world where kids can be kids, free from the false promise of marketers and the manipulations of Big Tech.” They need to band together and advance the most dynamic power against commercial predators, which is the learned self-empowerment of the children themselves.
When children realize how big businesses are controlling their childhood, their rebellious sense of being exploited connects with their instinct for safety and self-respect. They will come to realize that the nurturing they crave comes from real-life conversations and experiences with family and friends.
Nothing is more likely to put forces in motion than tweens discovering how their aroused consciences can shift in the public discourse the burden of proof onto these perpetrating companies. This can propel a resigned adult society into reasserting its historic role, that of protecting children and the world they will inherit from the crassness of Big Tech.
When children stand up to speak out the truth, they have a moral authority second to none.
The post Corporations Want to Exploit Your Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Remember that time, in 1980, when paramedics were summoned to the home of a major female rock star? Once there, the medical professionals found two young girls with the rock star. A 15-year-old was arrested on a drug-related charge and a 16-year-old was charged with prostitution.
The rock star in question was not a woman, of course. It was Don Henley of The Eagles (net worth: $200 million) and he was fined a mere $2,500 and only given probation for these transgressions.
How about the hard-rockin’ chick who pulled strings to become the legal guardian of a 17-year-old girl in Hawaii rather than face kidnapping charges?
Or the once-iconic female pop star who invited a Norwegian “escort” to her home under the guise of doing a nude photoshoot but ended up handcuffing him to a wall fixture and beating him with a chain?
Surely you’re familiar with that pantheon four-piece girl band who once gave a press interview in the backroom of a music club — all the while being serviced by underaged “baby groupies” under the table?
Those would actually be Ted Nugent (net worth: $30 million), Boy George (net worth: $50 million), and Led Zeppelin (collective net worth: $900 million).
Okay, one more try. Have you read about the female hip-hop hero who was accused of participating in a gang rape, was subsequently convicted of first-degree sexual abuse, and did a mere nine months? The victim is still labeled “accuser” while the rapper is posthumously worshipped to the point of hologram status. Remember that?
Yeah, me neither.
Because it was Tupac Shakur (net worth of estate: $40 million).
This is not to say a female pop star would never engage in any kind of criminal abuse. It is to say that the default setting for male musicians is “creep” (at best) and more likely: sexual predator.
But their talent — coupled with deeply embedded societal misogyny — excuses us for “not knowing” about their crimes and/or giving them a pass when we do find out.
Consider Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Legendary rocker. Hall of Fame member. Net worth: $160 million. Career revived multiple times — including on television:
In 1975, Tyler met 15-year-old Julia Holcomb and decided he wanted to bring her on the road with him. To do so, the 27-year-old singer coerced the girl’s mother to sign over guardianship of her daughter to him so he could travel across state lines with her without fear of being arrested.
“I was subordinate to him as in a parent relationship and felt I had little control over my life,” Julia Holcomb later explained. “I remember my surprise when Steven told me, and trying to take this in mentally. A sense of vulnerability came over me, knowing that I was his ward, but we were not married. He had not expressed his intentions of a long-term relationship with me.”
Holcomb eventually became pregnant and when Tyler’s apartment caught on fire, she ended up in the hospital where the singer forced her to get an abortion. Soon after, they split.
“When I returned home to my mother, I was a broken spirit,” Holcomb remembers. “I could not sleep at night without nightmares of the abortion and the fire. The world seemed like a dark place.”
Tyler still refers to the whole thing as an “affair” — describing the teen as “a skinny young mall chick who had more legs than a bucket of chicken.” In his memoir, Tyler calls Holcomb “my Little Oral Annie,” adding: “She lost her childhood. I lost my mind.”
But the Rock God
clearly did not lose his reputation, his money, or his enduring legacy. I mean, he somehow still gets invited to sing at Nobel Peace Prize concerts and is glowingly interviewed by Oprah (net worth $2.5 billion).
As “Sir” Paul McCartney (net worth: $1.2 billion) gushes: “Steven Tyler is one of the giants of American music, who’s been influential for a whole generation of Rock ’n’ Roll fans around the world. Long May He Rock!”
Reminder: None of this will change until we collectively choose to identify and address the root problems.
The post Remember All Those Female Rockers Who Turned out to be Sexual Predators? (Yeah, Me Neither) first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“Do Masks and Respirators Prevent Viral Respiratory Illnesses?“
The post Mandated Child Abuse first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.
• 20th CPC National Congress report
• China’s EV battery supplies to the US
• Rice growing in salty, alkaline soil
• Physical growth of rural children in a decade
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Children of my Gaza refugee camp were rarely afraid of monsters but of Israeli soldiers. This is all that we talked about before going to bed. Unlike imaginary monsters in the closet or under the bed, Israeli soldiers are real, and they could show up any minute – at the door, on the roof or, as was often the case, right in the middle of the house.
The recent tragic death of a 7-year-old, Rayan Suliman, a Palestinian boy from the village of Tuqu near Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, stirred up so many memories. The little boy with olive skin, innocent face and bright eyes fell on the ground while being chased by Israeli soldiers, who accused him and his peers of throwing stones. He fell unconscious, blood poured out of his mouth and, despite efforts to revive him, he ceased to breathe.
This was the abrupt and tragic end of Rayan’s life. All the things that could have been, all the experiences that he could have lived, and all the love that he could have imparted or received, all ended suddenly, as the boy lay face down on the pavement of a dusty road, in a poor village, without ever experiencing a single moment of being truly free, or even safe.
Adults often project their understanding of the world on children. We want to believe that Palestinian children are warriors against oppression, injustice and military occupation. Though Palestinian children develop political consciousness at a very young age, quite often their action of protesting against the Israeli military, chanting against invading soldiers or even throwing stones are not compelled by politics, but by something else entirely: their fear of monsters.
This connection came to mind when I read the details of the harrowing experience that Rayan and many of the village children endure daily.
Tuqu is a Palestinian village that, once upon a time, existed in an uncontested landscape. In 1957, the illegal Jewish settlement of Tekoa was established on stolen Palestinian land. The nightmare had begun.
Israeli restrictions on Palestinian communities in that area increased, along with land annexation, travel restrictions and deepening apartheid. Several residents, mostly children from the village, were injured or killed by Israeli soldiers during repeated protests: the villagers wanted to have their life and freedom back; the soldiers wanted to ensure the continued oppression of Tuqu in the name of safeguarding the security of Tekoa. In 2017, a 17-year-old Palestinian boy, Hassan Mohammad al-Amour, was shot and killed during a protest; in 2019, another, Osama Hajahjeh, was seriously wounded.
The children of Tuqu had much to fear, and their fears were all well-founded. A daily journey to school, taken by Rayan and many of his peers, accentuated these fears. To get to school, the kids had to cross Israeli military barbed wire, often manned by heavily armed Israeli soldiers.
Sometimes, kids attempted to avoid the barbed wire so as to avoid the terrifying encounter. The soldiers anticipated this. “We tried to walk through the olive field next to the path, instead, but the soldiers hide in the trees there and grab us,” a 10-year-old boy from Tuqu, Mohammed Sabah, was quoted in an article by Sheren Khalel, published years ago.
The nightmare has been ongoing for years, and Rayan experienced that terrorizing journey for over a year, of soldiers waiting behind barbed wires, of mysterious creatures hiding behind trees, of hands grabbing little bodies, of children screaming for their parents, beseeching God and running in all directions.
Following Rayan’s death on September 29, the US State Department, the British government and the European Union demanded an investigation, as if the reason why the little boy succumbing to his paralyzing fears was a mystery, as if the horror of Israeli military occupation and violence was not an everyday reality.
Rayan’s story, though tragic beyond words, is not unique but a repeat of other stories experienced by countless Palestinian children.
When Ahmad Manasra was run over by an Israeli settler’s car, and his cousin, Hassan, was killed in 2015, Israeli media and apologists fanned the flames of propaganda, claiming that Manasra, 13 at the time, was a representation of something bigger. Israel claimed that Manasra was shot for attempting to stab an Israeli guard, and that such action reflected deep-seated Palestinian hatred for Israeli Jews, another convenient proof of the indoctrination of Palestinian children by their supposedly violent culture. Despite his injuries and young age, Manasra was tried in 2016, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
Manasra comes from the Palestinian town of Beit Hanina, near Jerusalem. His story is, in many ways, similar to that of Rayan: a Palestinian town, an illegal Jewish settlement, soldiers, armed settlers, ethnic cleansing, land theft and real monsters, everywhere. None of this mattered to the Israeli court or to mainstream, corporate media. They turned a 13-year-old boy into a monster, instead, and used his image as a poster child of Palestinian terrorism taught at a very young age.
The truth is, Palestinian children throw stones at Israeli soldiers, neither because of their supposedly inherent hatred of Israelis, nor as purely political acts. They do so because it is their only way of facing their own fears and coming to terms with their daily humiliation.
Just before Rayan managed to escape the crowd of Israeli soldiers and was chased to his death, an exchange took place between his father and the soldiers. Rayan’s father told the Associated Press the soldiers had threatened that, if Rayan was not handed over, they would return at night to arrest him along with his older brothers, aged 8 and 10. For a Palestinian child, a nightly raid by Israeli soldiers is the most terrifying prospect. Rayan’s young heart could not bear the thought. He fell unconscious.
Doctors at the nearby Palestinian hospital of Beit Jala had a convincing medical explanation of why Rayan has died. A pediatric specialist spoke about increased stress levels, caused by “excess adrenaline secretion” and increased heartbeats, leading to a cardiac arrest. For Rayan, his brothers and many Palestinian children, the culprit is something else: the monsters who return at night and terrify the sleeping children.
Chances are, Rayan’s older brothers will be back in the streets of Tuqu, stones and slingshots in hand, ready to face their fears of monsters, even if they pay the price with their own lives.
The post Strangers Behind the Trees: On the Death of Rayan Suliman and His Fear of Monsters first appeared on Dissident Voice.
So, it was all pretty much his fault. Now he’s gone; we finally got rid of him and we don’t have Pete Arredondo to kick around anymore. Who, or what, will we have to blame for the next one?
He was in over his head, perhaps one of the unfortunates whose inadequacies become apparent when promoted a level beyond their capabilities – unfortunate for him, but way more unfortunate for the 19 children and 2 teachers killed in the Uvalde school massacre. Texas Department of Public Safety Director, Steve McCraw, described Pete Arredondo’s response to the school massacre as “an abject failure.” In a move that showed how truly serious Texans are in addressing gun violence, the 14 members of the Uvalde School Board unanimously voted to fire Arredondo, the school’s police chief.
It wasn’t just the school board, and it wasn’t just Texas – the whole country was enraged and disgusted with what was seen as Arredondo’s ill-prepared response (or lack of response) when a killer commandeered a classroom of children for one hour and 14 minutes on May 24, 2022. He was vilified in the country’s media for 3 months on an almost daily basis. The nation’s palpable sentiment was summed up by a child’s statement made to the Uvalde School Board just before the casting of their unanimous vote: “I have a message for Pete Arredondo and all the law enforcement that were there that day. Turn in your badge and step down. You don’t deserve to wear one.”
Pete Arredondo may well have deserved the ire directed his way – and we should all be thankful that he was there to receive it. If not for him, who else would there have been to blame? If not for him, upon whom would we have vented our righteous moral outrage?
Governor Abbot should be extra thankful. In 2019 Abbot signed 10 bills to ease Texas gun restrictions. In 2021 he signed 7 more bills to reduce restrictions even further. Abbot should be grateful that there was a convenient Arredondo to dump on. If not for him, who would there have been to decry? If not for him, to whom could he have diverted attention from the blood on his hands?
Abbot didn’t sponsor and sign all those permissive bills in the midst of unleashed pandemonium. There was no chaos unfolding or the sound of gunfire to befuddle his mind. He signed amidst the congratulatory sound of clicking cameras, calmly dismissive of the repercussions his signatures would bring. He signed for perceived political advantage, with full knowledge of what transpires when more guns are pushed into the hands of more people. Governor Abbot was willing to put the lives of small children and innocent adults at risk for his own personal gain – and the consequences did come. Real people were murdered because of his signatures, but another man’s ineptitude stole the spotlight. Thanks to Arredondo, “The Eyes of Texas” have had elsewhere to look.
Pete Arredondo messed up really bad. 19 children and 2 teachers died from the bullets of a deranged killer armed with an assault rifle. Had Arredondo reacted to the chaos in a more heroic and competent manner, some of those lives would surely have been saved. If in the bedlam, he had made all the right decisions and had issued perfect commands, perhaps only 10 children and one teacher would have been murdered … or maybe it would have been 8 children and 2 teachers … or maybe it would have been 12 children and no teachers. Who can really say? Whatever the case, at least some of those lives would have been saved … but not all of them.
However, if Governor Abbot had not promoted and signed the bills that so easily enabled a troubled 18-year-old boy to buy two assault rifles and 375 rounds of ammunition, it’s quite likely that all of the 19 children and each of their protective teachers would still be alive today … all of them, not just some of them.
So, where is the outrage? Why was there such visceral disgust aimed at Pete Arredondo, and so little at Greg Abbot? It was Abbot’s action that led to the massacre that Arredondo so poorly reacted to, but he’s not likely to lose his governorship. Why fire Pete Arredondo in August but reelect Greg Abbot in November? Will the 14-member Uvalde School Board that unanimously voted to remove their police chief be unanimous in voting to unseat their governor? Will Steve McCraw, the Texas Department of Public Safety Director who called Arredondo “an abject failure,” see the abject failure of his governor and vote to remove him? Probably not – amidst all the outrage that’s been aimed at Arredondo, Texans seem poised to reelect Abbot as their governor. Recent polls show him still enjoying a comfortable lead over challenger Beto O’Rourke, who has repeatedly called attention to Abbot’s hand in the Uvalde carnage. How is it even possible? How can Texans appear ready to reward and reelect the politician whose actions predictably precipitated the slaughter of their children?
Is it possible that it wasn’t actually real – that the outrage aimed at Arredondo was somewhat of a ruse? Did Texans (and the nation) vent on Pete Arredondo to deflect awareness of personal culpability? How else to explain it?
Overtly we cherish and celebrate our children, but all across the country we repeatedly elect representatives who boldly vow to defend and enhance the availability of weapons to an ever-widening population. We do it clearly knowing that more people will die – that more children will be murdered because of the people we strive to elect. We want them elected because, without ever quite saying it, we’d rather have our guns protected than our children. When the inevitable killings and the massacres take place, we then try to find a way to assure ourselves that it wasn’t because of us. When someone like Pete comes along, we can salvage some of our decency; we can rage and rage at how he let it happen – it was him, not us.
“I have a message for all the folks who have vented on Pete Arredondo but still plan to vote for Greg Abbot or any other gun proliferation advocate. Turn off your alligator tears and stop screaming. You don’t deserve the pathos.”
The post Pete Arredondo: I Know I Am, But What Are You? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) published on its website their Opinion from 20 July 2022 concerning five young Bahraini citizens sentenced in an unfair mass trial known as the Soleimani Cell Case. The Working Group found that the individuals were arbitrarily arrested in violation of international human rights law. These five individuals are part of a group of 18 defendants tried by the Bahraini High Criminal Court on 31 January 2021. The WGAD called on the Bahraini government to take immediate measures which include releasing the prisoners.
As a matter of practice, Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) regularly receives information from Bahraini individuals and employs their accounts as key evidence in submitted complaints by the United Nations (UN). ADHRB welcomes this Opinion by the UN and urges the Bahraini authorities to follow the recommendations without delay.
The WGAD is one of the Special Procedures offices of the UN Human Rights Council. As part of its regular procedures, the Working Group sends allegation letters to governments concerning credible cases of arbitrary detentions. The Working Group may also render opinions on whether an individual or group’s detention is arbitrary and in violation of international law. The WGAD reviews cases under five categories of arbitrary detention: when it is clearly impossible to invoke legal basis justifying the deprivation of liberty (Category I); when the deprivation of liberty results from the exercise of the rights to equal protection of the law, freedom of thought, freedom of opinion and expression, and freedom of assembly, among others (Category II); when violations of the right to a fair trial are so severe that the detention is rendered arbitrary (Category III); prolonged administrative custody for refugees and asylum seekers (Category IV); and when the detention is discriminatory on the basis of birth, national, ethnic or social origin, language, religion, economic condition, political or other opinion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or any other status (Category V).
The individuals involved in this case are Ali Naser Ahmed Naser, Ali Hasan Mansoor Yusuf Marzooq AlJamri, Ali Mohamed Hasan Ali Husain, Sayed Redha Baqer Mahdi Mohsen Fadhul, and Sayed Falah Hasan Naser Mohsen Fadhul. The WGAD found that all individuals involved suffered illegal human rights violations.
The five individuals, three of whom are minors, were all arrested on 16 January 2022 and taken to the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) for interrogations which lasted for 27 days up to a month. The alleged violations include arrests without a warrant, enforced disappearance, and torture. All individuals were subjected to enforced disappearance, during which they were interrogated and tortured; the torture was physical and psychological, ranging from beatings, slapping, and electric shocks to blindfolding, threats of further violence, and deprivation of sleep. Some of the victims refused to disclose much details of their torture for the sake of their families’ feelings, and all but one of them (Sayed Falah Hasan Fadhul) ended up confessing, though other individuals’ forced confessions were used to convict him.
The individuals were all interrogated without the presence of their lawyers, whom they did not have access to at any time before the trial proceedings. During trial, two of the victims (Ali Naser Naser and Sayed Falah Hasan Fadhul) could not communicate with their lawyer, while Sayed Redha Baqer Fadhul’s lawyer was not allowed to respond during court sessions and could only submit notes. None of the victims present before the court were permitted to provide evidence or speak in their own defense and challenge evidence against them. The court evoked the coerced confessions and disregarded the victims’ denial of the charges against them.
Since the court classified the defendants and their activities as terrorist, and despite their young age, the court was able to rely on Law No. 58 on protecting society from terrorist acts, rather than the Bahraini Penal Code. The significance of this is that the former’s penalties are harsher than the latter. The Human Rights Committee has found this law to include an overly broad definition of terrorism, and the WGAD asserted that the provision is overly vague.
On 31 January 2021, the Bahraini High Criminal Court convicted all five individuals of joining a group or organization for the purpose of disrupting the law or violating rights and freedoms. Four of them were also convicted of providing or receiving support and funding for an organization that practices terrorism. Only one individual was convicted of training to use weapons and explosives with the intention of committing terrorist crimes. The prison sentences varied between 5 and 15 years. While most of the alleged crimes were committed between 2017 and 2019, the terrorist group which the victims were convicted of being a part of was allegedly focused on avenging the 2020 assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.
While the government has insisted that lawful procedures have been followed, the Working Group contends that since a prima facie case for breach of international law constituting arbitrary detention has been established, the burden of proof falls upon the government to refute these allegations. Thus, the government’s assertion that an arrest warrant was issued does not meet the obligation of presenting the warrant at the time of arrest, especially considering the systemic failure in Bahrain of complying with arrest procedures, which was noted by the WGAD. Since the warrants were not presented and the reasons behind the arrest were not indicated, Bahraini authorities did not establish a legal basis for the arrest of the five victims.
Furthermore, four of the victims were not allowed to contact their family and thus their location remained unknown. The government has denied any enforced disappearance, without substantiating these assertions to refute the allegations. The Working Group was consequently inclined to consider this as enforced disappearance, referring the case to the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Similarly, the government did not provide any counter evidence to the claim that the individuals were held incommunicado at the initial stage of their detention, meaning they could not challenge their detention, a violation of Article 9(4) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The WGAD noted with concern the delay in presenting the victims before a judge, especially in the cases of minors Ali Hasan AlJamri, Sayed Falah Hasan Fadhul, and Sayed Redha Baqer Fadhul, who, as minors, are subject to a strict standard of promptness obliging authorities to present them before the court within 24 hours of their arrest. The government provided no justification for this violation of Article 9(3) of the ICCPR and Article 37(d) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). As a result of these violations as well as the use of the overly broad terrorism law, the government failed to establish a legal basis for the detention of all five individuals, whom the WGAD found to be arbitrarily detained under Category I.
While the government has denied the allegations of torture which these victims were subjected to, claiming to have adhered to international standards, the WGAD found their claim unconvincing and deemed the allegations of torture credible and in violation of Article 5 of the Universal Declaration, Article 7 of the ICCPR, and Articles 2 and 16 of the Convention Against Torture. The Working Group noted that the use of force on a child, in the case of these three minors, is an extremely serious abuse of power, in violation of Article 37 of the CRC, and called for a thorough and independent investigation into all torture allegations. Additionally, finding the allegations of coerced confession to be credible, the Working Group referred the case to the Special Rapporteur on Torture.
With respect to the right of access to legal counsel, the Working Group recalled that all persons deprived of their liberty have the right to legal assistance by counsel of their choice at any time during their detention, including immediately after apprehension. As such, it found that the government failed to guarantee the five individuals’ right to legal assistance at all times in accordance with Articles 9 and 14 of the ICCPR, as the victims were denied access to their lawyer at various points of their interrogation, detention, and trial. The Working Group raised concern over the fact that this violation has substantially undermined and compromised all individuals’ capacity to defend themselves in any subsequent judicial proceedings. Moreover, the Working Group emphasized that mass trials do not meet the standards of fair trial since it is impossible during such proceedings to conduct a specific assessment of individual responsibility. Thus, the WGAD found that the following violations to the victims’ fair trial rights rendered their detention arbitrary, falling under Category III.
Finally, the Working Group found Sayed Falah Hasan Fadhul and Ali Naser Naser to be arbitrarily detained under Category V. Pictures of Sayed Falah Fadhul’s participation in protests from more than nine years ago were presented as evidence by the prosecution, and Ali Naser Naser has previously been arrested for participating in peaceful assemblies around the home of his grandfather, a prominent religious figure in Bahrain. Therefore, their expression of their political opinion has been a reason for their conviction in the unrelated case, a claim the government did not provide an explanation to.
The Working Group concluded by expressing its concern over the health conditions of the prisoners and has called on the government to immediately release all five individuals, raising further concern regarding the many cases of arbitrary detention in Bahrain and noting that the widespread or systematic deprivation of liberty, in violation of rules of international law, may constitute crimes against humanity. The WGAD also stressed the importance of allowing the prisoners to contact their families – even though the government has denied allegations they restricted the prisoners’ access to their family – as a reminder of the government’s legal responsibility. The Working Group also highlighted that three of the prisoners were minors who received harsh sentences instead of the government focusing on reintegrating them. The Working Group conveyed its readiness to visit Bahrain and to engage constructively with the government.
ADHRB fully supports the WGAD’s recommendations and echoes its calls to release the five individuals immediately and provide them with appropriate compensation in accordance with international law. ADHRB additionally echoes the Working Group’s demands for a full and independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of the five victims in order for appropriate measures to be taken against those responsible for the violation of their rights.
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This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
“We regret we failed to protect you.” This was part of a statement issued by United Nations human rights experts on July 14, urging the Israeli government to release Palestinian prisoner Ahmad Manasra. Only 14 years old at the time of his arrest and torture by Israeli forces, Manasra is now 20 years old. His case is a representation of Israel’s overall inhumane treatment of Palestinian children.
The experts’ statement was forceful and heartfelt. It accused Israel of depriving young Manasra “of his childhood, family environment, protection and all the rights he should have been guaranteed as a child.” It referred to the case as ‘haunting’, considering Manasra’s “deteriorating mental conditions”. The statement went further, declaring that “this case … is a stain on all of us as part of the international human rights community”.
Condemning Israel for its ill-treatment of Palestinian children, whether those under siege in war-stricken Gaza, or under military occupation and apartheid in the rest of the occupied territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is commonplace.
Yet, somehow, Israel was still spared a spot on the unflattering list, issued annually by the United Nations Secretary-General, naming and shaming governments and groups that commit grave violations against children and minors anywhere in the world.
Oddly, the report does recognize Israel’s horrific record of violating children’s rights in Palestine. It details some of these violations, which UN workers have directly verified. This includes “2,934 grave violations against 1,208 Palestinian children” in the year 2021 alone. However, the report equates between Israel’s record, one of the most dismal in the world, and that of Palestinians, namely the fact that 9 Israeli children were impacted by Palestinian violence in that whole year.
Though the deliberate harming of a single child is regrettable regardless of the circumstances or the perpetrator, it is mind-boggling that the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres found it appropriate to equate the systematic violations carried out by the Israeli military as a matter of course and the 9 Israeli minors harmed by Palestinian armed groups, whether intentionally or not.
To deal with the obvious discrepancy between Palestinian and Israeli child victims, the UN report lumped together all categories to distract from the identity of the perpetrator, thus lessening the focus on the Israeli crimes. For example, the report states that a total of 88 children were killed throughout Palestine, of whom 69 were killed in Gaza and 17 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, the report breaks down these murders in such a way that conflates Palestinian and Israeli children as if purposely trying to confuse the reader. When read carefully, one discovers that all of these killings were carried out by Israeli forces, except for two.
More, the report uses the same logic to break down the number of children maimed in the conflict, though of the 1,128 maimed children, only 7 were Israelis. Of the remainder, 661 were maimed in Gaza and 464 in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The report goes on to blame “armed Palestinian groups” for some of the Palestinian casualties, who were allegedly injured as a result of “accidents involving children who were near to military training exercises”. Assuming that this is the case, accidents of this nature cannot be considered “grave violations” as they are, by the UN’s own definition, accidental.
The confusing breakdown of these numbers, however, was itself not accidental, as it allowed Guterres the space to declare that “should the situation repeat itself in 2022, without meaningful improvement, Israel should be listed.”
Worse, Guterres’ report went further to reassure the Israelis that they are on the right track by stating that “so far this year, we have not witnessed a similar number of violations”, as if to suggest that the right-wing Israeli government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid has purposely changed its policies regarding the targeting of Palestinian children. Of course, there is no evidence of this whatsoever.
On June 27, Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) reported that Israel “had been intensifying its aggression” against children in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the beginning of 2022. DCIP confirmed that as many as 15 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli forces in the first six months of 2022, almost the same number killed in the same regions throughout the entirety of the previous year. This number includes 5 children in the occupied city of Jenin alone. Israel even targeted journalists who attempted to report on these violations, including Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed on May 11, and Ali Samoudi, who was shot in the back on the very same day.
Much more can be said, of course, about the besiegement of hundreds of thousands of children in the Gaza Strip, known as the ‘world’s largest open-air prison’, and many more in the occupied West Bank. The lack of basic human rights, including life-saving medicine and, in the case of Gaza, clean water, hardly suggests any measurable improvement in Israel’s track record as far as Palestinian children’s rights are concerned.
If you think that the UN report is a step in the right direction, think again. 2014 was one of the most tragic years for Palestinian children where, according to a previous UN report, 557 children were killed and 4,249 were injured, the vast majority of whom were targeted during the Israeli war on Gaza. Human Rights Watch stated that the number of killed Palestinians “was the third-highest in the world that year”. Still, Israel was not blacklisted on the UN ‘List of Shame’. The clear message here is that Israel may target Palestinian children as it pleases, as there will be no legal, political or moral accountability for its actions.
This is not what Palestinians are expecting from the United Nations, an organization that supposedly exists to end armed conflicts and bring about peace and security for all. For now, the message emanating from the world’s largest international institution to Manasra and the rest of Palestine’s children will remain unchanged: “We regret we failed to protect you.”
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Horn of Africa (HoA) is once again being battered by climate change induced drought, with the UN report, over “20 million people, and at least 10 million children facing severe drought conditions.”
Desperately needed support from UN agencies (World Food Programme (WFP), UNHCR and UNICEF) is limited due to lack of donations from member states. WFP have been forced to halve food rations due to the “lowest levels of funding on record”. Leading to what UNICEF describes as a “humanitarian catastrophe……. Urgent aid is needed to prevent parts of the region sliding into famine.” The disruption caused to supply chains and food production by the war in Ukraine is adding to the crisis, dramatically increasing food prices and limiting availability.
The region’s agriculture has been decimated by year on year rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall. Food insecurity, in a region with some of the poorest people in the world, is intensifying with the threat of famine looming, and food prices have sky rocketed. Livestock have perished – in Ethiopia alone 2.1 million livestock have died and 22 million are at risk, emancipated with little or no milk production – the primary source of nutrition for young children.
Child malnutrition is increasing and huge numbers of people are being displaced. Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea are all impacted by the most severe drought in forty years.
The effect on rural communities, and children specifically, is devastating. UNICEF estimate 2 million children are in need of treatment for “severe acute malnutrition,” particularly in Ethiopia and in the arid lands of Northern Kenya and Somalia, where the drought is most severe.
As well as decimating food production, drought is intensifying the water crisis in the area – with, the UN say, 8.5 million people (including 4.2 million children) facing water shortages. In Ethiopia, where around 60 per cent of the population (roughly 70 million) do not have access to clean drinking water with or without a drought, the situation is dire. Streams, wells and ponds, that people living in remote areas rely on, are either drying up or are completely parched. Such sterile water sources become contaminated by animal and human waste, increasing the risk of water borne diseases, cholera and diarrhea, which are the leading causes of death among children under five in the country; cases of measles have also been increasing at alarming rates in Ethiopia and Somalia, resulting in some cases in deaths.
Desperate families are being driven to extreme measures to try to survive, with hundreds of thousands leaving their homes in search of food, water, fresh pasture for animals and assistance. This is creating and intensifying numerous issues: Access to health care, education and protection/reproductive services is made difficult, or impossible. Children are forced out of school – approximately 1.1 million; schools close (in a region overflowing with children where 15 million children are already not in school); girls and women are made more vulnerable to physical coercion, sexual/child labor and forced marriage; displacement of persons explodes. Already a massive problem throughout the region, specifically in Ethiopia, where, according to UNHCR (as of March 2022) “an estimated 5,582,000 persons” were internally displaced due to armed conflict and natural disasters.
“Natural” disaster no longer natural
As the world heats up due to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) pouring into the lower atmosphere, the inevitability of extreme weather patterns including drought increases.
Like forest fires, heat waves and monsoon rains, drought was historically regarded as a “natural disaster”, but the frequency and intensity of such events is no longer “natural” and must now be understood to be man-made. Far from being freak happenings, such catastrophic climate explosions are becoming commonplace, and despite producing virtually none of the poisons that are driving climate change, those most affected are the poorest people in the poorest countries or regions.
The seed of the deadly drought in the HoA was planted and fed by the behavior of people in the US, in Europe, Japan and other rich countries. It is the materialistic lifestyles of wealthy developed nations (and disproportionately the richest people within such countries), rooted in irresponsible consumerism (including diets centered around animal food produce), that has caused and is perpetuating the environmental crisis. But to their utter shame the governments of such nations refuse to honor their debt, their responsibility to clean up the mess. On the contrary, because economic health is dependent on rapacious consumption, they continue to promote modes of living that are deepening the crisis.
Commitments made 12 years ago in 2009 by rich nations to give 100 billion USD a year to developing countries are yet to be fulfilled. In 2019 a high of 79.6 billion USD was reached, 71% of which was in the form of loans. Loans – for some of the poorest nations in the world, to mitigate the impact of climate change that they haven’t caused; loans that enable donor nations political and economic influence, perpetuating post-colonial exploitation and control, and ensuring Sub-Saharan Africa remains impoverished, and, more or less enslaved.
Imperial powers have outsourced the most severe effects of climate change; they either refuse to act at all or offer limited support with strings to countries and regions most at risk. At the V20 Climate Vulnerable Finance Summit in July 2021, heads of state demanded that higher income nations do more to meet their promises and called for grants not loans. UN Secretary General, António Guterres said that in order to “rebuild trust, developed countries must clarify now how they will effectively deliver $100 billion in climate finance annually to the developing world, as was promised over a decade ago.” But four months later at COP 26 in Glasgow, where climate finance was a primary issue under consideration, once again the rich nations failed. Failed to honor their word, failed to act responsibly in the interests of poorer nations, failed to stand for the collective good and the health of the planet. Shameful, but predictable. Politicians cannot be and, in fact, are not trusted; national and international climate pledges should be legally binding and enforceable.
Climate change and the environmental emergency more broadly is a global crisis; as such, it requires a global approach. This has been said many times, and yet national self-interest and political weakness continue to dominate the policies and priorities of western governments/politicians. If this crisis, which is the greatest issue humanity has ever faced, is to be met, and healing is to begin in earnest, this narrow nationalistic approach must change. As with other major areas of concern – armed conflict, inequality, displacement of persons, poverty – united, coordinated global policies and a powerful United Nations (UN) are urgently needed, but the single most significant change that is required is a fundamental shift in attitudes; a move away from tribalism, competition and division to cooperation and unity. A recognition, not intellectually or theoretically, but actually, that humanity is one, that we form part of a collective life that is the planet.
As the UN has said the men women and children in the Horn of Africa whose lives are being ravaged by drought need “the world’s attention and action, now.” Sustained action rooted in the realization of our individual and collective environmental responsibility. This requires governments to honor commitments: the $100m billion mitigation fund (as grants not loans), and making up the cumulative shortfall; it means funding the UN properly so emergency humanitarian aid can be supplied to those currently affected by drought in the HoA; it means supporting countries most at risk of man-made climate change in drawing up plans and initiating short and long term projects to minimize where possible the social and economic impact of extreme weather events; and individually, it means living thoughtful, conscious lives, in which the effect on the natural world is at the forefront of daily decisions, including diet, shopping and travel. It is our world, the people displaced by drought in Ethiopia and Somalia are our brethren, and we are all responsible for them.
The post Drought in the Horn of Africa: Worst in 40 Years first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Did it ever strike you as odd that the foundation on which standardized testing is based is a self-contradiction? Standardized testing embodies the assumption that only the learning that can be measured is better than learning which cannot be measured. The problem is, can that assumption itself be measured? No, it cannot. Can it even be proven? No, it also cannot because it’s a value judgment, which cannot be proven, nor can its converse.
It’s like claiming that “classical music is better than popular music,” or its converse that “popular music is better than classical music.” Neither statement can be measured nor proven because both statements are simply a matter of taste. What’s there to argue? It all depends on the person you ask. Or chocolate tastes better than vanilla because, well, it just does because it’s so self-evident that it doesn’t need proving, which is also the fallacy of the “self-evident truth.” You cannot prove a value judgment because you’ll have those on both sides who know that they’re right, when it’s simply subjective.
Which brings us back to standardized testing that states, without proof or being measurable, that only knowledge that can be measured is better than knowledge that cannot. But stating isn’t proving.
How do you measure things like faith, hope, and love; kindness and mercy; ideals and yearning after the Infinite and all the other beautiful things that make life worth living? Without these things, no one could live and be human. Yet they cannot be measured since they are abstractions, but does that mean that these intangibles aren’t important? In fact, some would argue that next to these things that cannot be measured, those things that can are quite trivial!
In other words, the entire basis of the Standardized Testing Industry, the justification for testing tens of millions of children yearly for almost two generations that has wrought havoc on American education, is based on a subjective, unprovable value judgment or an act of faith. Now, please, don’t misunderstand me. There is certainly nothing wrong with acts of faith. People make them all the time in church, temple, ashram, or whatever their house of worship may be.
However, in justifying a curricular innovation like standardized testing, which for decades has upended the American educational system, demoralized millions of students and parents, had principals and teachers fired because of low test scores, closed public schools which then reopened as charters, to which billions of tax dollars were diverted from public schools with no accountability and oversight, which led to many of these charters being shuttered for fraud, you had better have something more than an unprovable value judgment or an act of faith to justify this train wreck! You had better have proof, of which there is none.
However, let us be frank. The real reason for mandating standardized testing was never about proof at all, but because there was money in it! It is, and always has been, nothing more than a grandiose pretext for annually scamming taxpayers of billions of dollars and giving those billions to testing companies, the Privatization Industry, and charters.
That said, charters spend precious little of those billions on students and teachers, and the lion’s share on administrators, investors, and “overhead,” as part of a carefully camouflaged right-wing agenda of destroying public schools and replacing them with charters, which forbid unions, detested by the GOP.
Why wasn’t the case for standardized testing ever publicly debated, but imposed from on high? Because there was no credible case to be made for it and, as everyone knows, it’s always better not to debate something publicly when you, too, will be exposed as a fraud.
Just savor the chutzpah of these testing companies and the Charter School Lobby causing billions to be funneled into their coffers with a special account for “Bribes” (a.k.a. “campaign contributions”) to compliant governors, members of Congress, and state legislators who had seen the light about this Educational Second Coming!
It was all about money with no regard for the colossal wreckage to public schools and the irreparable harm to millions of children. But when you’re scamming the public whom those politicians had taken an oath to protect while on the Charter Industry payroll, it’s always better not to look too closely into such legal niceties like perjury and embezzlement of taxes.
But, as lawyers know, when you have no case, it’s always good to smear your opponent – in this case, public schools where all those billions of tax dollars had been going until they too were smeared, so that those stolen billions could then be laundered by going to investors and charters.
Just imagine those billions fraudulently taken from public schools, with those responsible not even arrested, tried, convicted, imprisoned, or forced to make restitution for this colossal collusion of politicians and privatizers! Will there be televised trials to underscore the magnitude of this plundering of the public treasury to recoup those ill-gotten gains to reimburse public schools? Or will it all be quietly swept under the carpet as business-as-usual in the Councils of the Mighty until the next assault upon public schools and their teachers?
Teachers must believe in what they are doing, but when they see themselves being made complicit in such mindlessness by preparing students for tests that do nothing but kill incentive for learning, many leave teaching, the profession they always loved until standardized testing was forced upon them.
Or when they see students racing to complete these tests because they just don’t care any longer, they see that this testing mania is creating a cynical regard for learning among children. It’s precisely this kind of brain-numbing busywork schools should be preventing, not aiding and abetting.
Schools should be about opening young minds, not closing them; about teaching critical thinking and critical reading that will make them wise beyond their years and protect them for the rest of their lives; about opening vistas to the vast riches of knowledge that will gladden their hearts, lift up their spirits and make their minds soar by learning a traditional curriculum, not filling in the right bubble on a standardized test.
Students should love to come to school where they can learn, grow, laugh, and be happy during the magical years of their childhood. Instead, they are being relentlessly tested, prepped, and tested again ad nauseam, so that the joy of learning and thinking for themselves are never experienced, just the incessant ingesting of facts in the inexorable drills of a Prussian parade ground.
Dickens skewered such “education” in his grotesque portrayals of Victorian schools in Hard Times, Nicholas Nickleby, and David Copperfield, where gargoyle schoolmasters like Gradgrind, Squeers, and Creakle are let loose upon children. The interminable mantra of “facts” heaped upon “facts,” the dogmatic incantations that only what can be measured is real and important and that all else is vanity and vexation of spirit — this pestiferous doctrine was unmasked for all times by Dickens as tragically destructive to impressionable children.
Such was the national fury at what innocent children were being made to endure that many of these schools were swept away overnight only to return in our own time by those who know nothing about learning, even less about children, but everything about making a profit!
A curriculum that knows nothing of the excitement of learning; that forbids children to be creative and curious; that favors rote learning to the magic carpet of reading to be spirited away to faraway realms of wonder and enchantment– all this has returned from the grave because these would-be reformers had never read their Dickens when young!
Every child is different, with different hopes, aspirations, and dreams. If we as a nation want our children to become what each of them could become if schools were only given the means to foster those dreams, schools could fulfill this noble mission.
As the Good Book says, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so, a nation exists for the educational needs of its children, not children for the anthill-needs of a Corporate State with its own dark agenda.
Children are the immortality of a nation, which should be lavishing far more of its treasure on them and far less on its Pentagon budget of $733 billion for contracts with the Military-Industrial Complex, while 20% of its children go to bed hungry.
It is now clear to millions of parents across America that their children have been sacrificed to the Moloch of Standardized Testing and have “opted out” of having them relentlessly tested.
They have been outraged by the effrontery of Washington’s illegal intrusion into the classroom by mandating standardized testing, as well as government’s dismissal of their parental rights to have their children properly educated by qualified teachers who have given years of their lives to teaching in schools that have served our nation well for generations.
Parents and their children’s teachers brought pressure to bear on Candidate Biden, who promised to consign such testing to the dustbin of history, only to have a change of heart once safely ensconced in the White House!
President Biden now stands before a Faustian bargain of ominous import: either to serve the long-term educational interests of our children, a nation’s only real treasure, or to continue abandoning them to the tender mercies of the Standardized Testing/Charter School Complex only too willing to sacrifice them upon its grisly altar of Corporate Greed.
The post Standardized Testing: A Self-Contradiction first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Nú Barreto (Guinea-Bissau), A Esperar (‘Waiting’), 2019.
The world is adrift in the tides of hunger and desolation. It is difficult to think about education, or anything else, when your children are not able to eat. And yet, the sharp attack on education during this past decade forces us to consider the kind of future that young people will inherit. In 2018, before the pandemic, the United Nations calculated that 258 million, or one in six, school age children were out of school. By March 2020, the start of the pandemic, UNESCO estimated that 1.5 billion children and youth were affected by school closures; a staggering 91% of students worldwide had their education disrupted by the lockdowns.
A new UN study released in June 2022 has found that the number of children experiencing distress in their education has nearly tripled since 2016, rising from 75 million to 222 million today. ‘These 222 million children’, the UN’s Education Cannot Wait programme notes, ‘are on a spectrum of educational needs: about 78.2 million (54% females, 17% with functional difficulties, 16% forcibly displaced) are out of school, while 119.6 million are not achieving minimum proficiency in reading or mathematics by the early grades, despite attending school’. Far too little attention is being paid to the calamity that this will impose upon the generations to come.
The World Bank, in collaboration with UNESCO, has pointed out that funding for education has dropped in low and lower-middle income countries, 41% of which ‘reduced their spending on education with the onset of the pandemic in 2020, with an average decline in spending of 13.5%’. Whereas richer countries have returned to pre-pandemic levels of funding, in the very poorest countries funding has been driven below pre-pandemic averages. The decline in funding for education will produce a loss of nearly $21 trillion in lifetime earnings, much higher than the $17 trillion estimated in 2021. As the economy splutters and as the owners of capital come to terms with the fact that they simply will not hire billions of people who become – for them – a ‘surplus population’, it is no wonder that the focus on education is so marginal.
A teacher writes on a blackboard at a PAIGC school in the liberated areas in the Guinean forests, 1974.
Source: Roel Coutinho, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal Photographs (1973–1974)
Looking to the national liberation experiments of an earlier era reveals an utterly different set of values, which prioritised ending hunger, increasing literacy, and ensuring other social advances that enhanced human dignity. From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes a new series called Studies in National Liberation. The first study in this series, The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation in Guinea-Bissau, 1963–74, is a fabulous text based on the archival research of Sónia Vaz-Borges, a historian and the author of Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, and Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau, 1963–1978 (Peter Lang, 2019).
The PAIGC, short for Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, or the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, was founded in 1956. Like many national liberation projects, the PAIGC began within the political framework set up by the Portuguese colonial state. In 1959, dockworkers at the Pidjiguiti docks went on strike for higher wages and better working conditions, but they found that the Portuguese negotiated with the gun when they killed approximately fifty workers, wounding others. This massacre convinced the PAIGC to pursue an armed struggle, setting up zones liberated from colonial rule in then Guinea (today Guinea-Bissau).
In these liberated zones, the PAIGC set up a socialist project, which included an educational system that sought to abolish illiteracy and to create a dignified cultural life for the population. It is this pursuit of an egalitarian educational project that attracted our attention, since even in a poor country facing the armed repression of the colonial state, the PAIGC still moved precious resources away from the armed struggle to build the dignity of the people. In 1974, the country won its independence from Portugal; the values of this national liberation project continue to resonate with us today.
Students inside of a PAIGC classroom in a primary school in the liberated areas, 1974.
Source: Roel Coutinho, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal Photographs (1973–1974)
The national liberation project that the PAIGC embarked on had two simultaneous objectives:
Until 1959, there were no secondary schools in Guinea-Bissau, which the Portuguese monarchy had controlled since 1588. In 1964, the first congress of the PAIGC, under the leadership of Amílcar Cabral, laid out the following promise to:
Set up schools and develop teaching in all the liberated areas. … Improve the work in the existing schools, avoid a very high number of pupils which might prejudice the advantage to all. Found schools but bear in mind the real potential at our disposal to avoid our having to later close some schools because of a lack of resources. … Constantly strengthen the political training of teachers… Set up courses to teach adults to read and write, whether they are combatants or elements of the population. … Little by little set up simple libraries in the liberated areas, lend others the books we possess, help others to learn to read a book, the newspaper and to understand what is read.
All who know must teach those who don’t know, said the cadre of the PAIGC as they put a great deal of effort into teaching basic literacy, the history of their land, and the importance of their struggle for national liberation.
A student uses a microscope during a PAIGC medical consultation in a college in Campada, 1973.
Source: Roel Coutinho, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal Photographs (1973–1974)
Our study explains the entire process of the educational system set up by the PAIGC, including an assessment of the educational forms and practices. Central to the study is a close look at the PAIGC’s pedagogy and its anti-colonial and Africa-centred curriculum. As our study notes:
The experiences of African people, their past, their present, and their future had to be at the heart of this new education. The school curricula needed to grapple with and be shaped by the forms of knowledge that existed in local communities. With these new approaches to knowledge, the PAIGC intended to cultivate in the learners a personal sense of obligation to themselves, their peers, and their communities. As early as 1949, Cabral advocated for knowledge production to focus on the existing African realities through his research experiences of the agricultural conditions in Portugal and its African territories. He argued that one of the best ways to defend the land lay in learning and understanding how to use the soil sustainably and consciously improve the benefits we reap from it. To know and understand the land was a form of defending the people and their right to better their living conditions.
The study is gripping, a window into a world that has been vanquished by the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment austerity that has dragged Guinea-Bissau into turmoil since 1995, its literacy rate floundering near 50% – shocking for a country with the kind of national liberation possibilities set in motion by the PAIGC. Reading the study opens earlier windows, hopes that remain alive so long as our movements remain attentive and return to the source to build better futures.
Cesária Évora (Cabo Verde) sings Amílcar Cabral’s poem ‘Regresso’, 2010.
The PAIGC leader Amílcar Cabral was assassinated on 20 January 1973, a year before Portuguese colonialism suffered a historical defeat. The PAIGC struggled from the loss of its leader. In 1946, Cabral wrote a lyrical poem, ‘Regresso’ (‘Return’), which pointed to the ethics of the movement for which he gave his life. ‘Return’ was an important term in Cabral’s vocabulary, the phrase ‘return to the source’ central to his view that national liberation must treat the past as a resource and not as a destination. Do listen to the great singer from Cabo Verde, Cesária Évora, sing Cabral’s poem above, and read it below, a door to the hopes we have for liberatory education:
Old mama, come, let’s listen
to the beat of the rain against the door.
It’s a friendly beat
that pounds in my heart.
Our friend the rain, old mama, the rain
that hasn’t fallen this way in a long time…
I heard that the Cidade Velha
– the entire island –
becomes a garden in just a few days…
They say that the countryside is covered in green,
in the most beautiful colour, because it is the colour of hope.
That now, the land really looks like Cape Verde –
Calm has now replaced the storm…
Come, old mama, come
regain your strength and come to the gate.
Our friend the rain has already said to hang on,
and can beats in my heart.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.