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This week the government of South Africa, and President Kgalema Motlanthe, have decided to stand in solidarity with China against human rights. South Africa symbolically denied a visa to the Dalai Lama, who wanted to attend a peace conference for Nobel laureates in Pretoria. China is an important trading partner of South Africa, and so Motlanthe didn’t want to allow in a visitor who may remind people that China has a horrible human rights record. Because that might hurt money flows to elites.
Among those scheduled to attend were: Nelson Mandela, (another SA former president) FW de Klerk, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, (former Finnish president) Martti Ahtisaari, and Queen Rania of Jordan.
The planners have decided to cancel the conference in protest. The BBC reports:
The incident is a huge embarrassment for the South African government, which has placed a lot of importance on democracy and human rights since the end of apartheid in 1994…
Yeah, it is damn embarrassing to bar advocates of justice from entering your country because that might upset oppressors who pay you off.
A dear friend of mine is part of a group who started the Saint March Collective, a gallery located on 406 South Street in Philly. It just opened on March 15 and has an amazing show up.
Two dozen artists have created a “Saint” complete with relics of her body parts — each crafted as an artistic statement. Even the eyes are by two different artists. A portion of the moderate price for the art pieces will go toward an organ donor program. (The young creator of the liver is an actual liver transplant recipient!)
The gallery is a part of a “cultural renaissance” planned by landlords and “pioneers” along South Street to revitalize what once was a hub of Philly’s cultural scene. Five new galleries opened this month, all in donated space in formerly vacant storefronts.
Several more galleries are in the pipeline plus a performing arts center for theater, poetry, dance, and music which is scheduled to open by Easter.
…[The planners] have long lobbied to return the street to its artistic heritage established when the street was revitalized when a generation of hippie artists fought a crosstown expressway to save their arts -oriented community.
I hear there’s a new show going up on Sunday, so if you’re in the area check it out!
Media coverage: Art in the Age, Weekly Press, and South Street.
Thanks to Chris for this image.
The New York Times reports that the Israeli army is experiencing a clash between two groups within its ranks: the secularists and the religious nationalists.
It is all coming out in the aftermath of the Gaza invasion and the revelation of severe abuses against the Palestinians. Religious material was distributed to soldiers that framed the invasion as a religious war. The material claimed that Jews have a God-given right to the Palestinians’ land. The army’s chief rabbi himself, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, is an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank. He handed out a booklet to soldiers containing “a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy.”
In response:
Avshalom Vilan, then a leftist member of Parliament, accused the rabbi of having “turned the Israeli military’s activity from fighting out of necessity into a holy war.”
…[Rontzki] has written, for example, that what others call “humanistic values” are simply subjective feelings that should be subordinate to following the law of the Torah.
Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal says, “The right tends to make an equation between authenticity and brutality, as if the idea of humanism were a Western and alien implant to Judaism. They seem not to know that nationalism and fascism are also Western ideas and that hypernationalism is not Jewish at all.”
This is all thrown into even creepier relief by the revelation of certain army members’ predilection for violent and offensive T-shirt imagery.
The T-shirt on the left depicts a pregnant Palestinian woman wearing Islamic clothing, in the cross hairs of a gun. Underneath it says “1 Shot 2 Kills.”
Some other T-shirt designs of recent Israeli army popularity include:
A Palestinian child in the cross hairs, with the slogan: “The smaller they are, the harder it is”
A dead Palestinian baby with the slogan: “Better use Durex”
A soldier standing next to a bruised woman with the words: “Bet you got raped!”
“Let every Arab mother know that her son’s fate is in my hands!”
A ruined mosque and the slogan: “We came, we saw, we destroyed!”
This past January, the “Night Predators” demolitions platoon from Golani’s Battalion 13 ordered a T-shirt showing a Golani devil detonating a charge that destroys a mosque. An inscription above it says, “Only God forgives.”
…No one had a problem with the fact that a mosque gets blown up in the picture?
[One of the soldiers in the platoon said] “I don’t see what you’re getting at. I don’t like the way you’re going with this. Don’t take this somewhere you’re not supposed to, as though we hate Arabs.”
Huh. I don’t like the way this is going. Sounds like any other country that believes it has a religious mandate to do violence to others. Sounds like where Bush was trying to take the American military. Sounds like the religious right who framed the Iraq war as a “clash of civilizations,” a religious war of Christians vs. Muslims. Not all Americans are Christian. Some Americans are Muslim. Not all Israelis are Jews. Some Israelis are Arab (Jewish and not), some are Muslim.
I wish this holy war frame wasn’t so attractive for certain groups of people who already seem to lack signs of the kind of good judgment one hopes is inherent in war decision-making.
Arg. Most of you probably heard about the Pope’s little African snafu, when he declared that condom use cannot help prevent the spread of AIDS. Of course, like many of the beliefs he propagates, this is demonstrably false.
But many over-looked another, equally incendiary and thoughtlessly dogmatic statement he made while in Angola.
The Washington Times reports:
[Benedict] criticized the “irony of those who promote abortion as a form of ‘maternal’ health care.” The pope was referring to an African Union agreement signed by Angola and 44 other countries that abortion should be legal in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is endangered.
“How disconcerting the claim that the termination of life is a matter of reproductive health,” Benedict said.
Oh yes, how terrible it is that several African countries have taken steps to reduce maternal mortality and death from back alley abortion. It’s such a tragedy that these countries allow rape and incest victims choices regarding how to handle the crime done to them. Indeed, how disconcerting the claim that reproduction has anything to do with a woman’s body, health and life.
The pope has his finger to the pulse. Finger To The Pulse.
The pope left Africa on a final note of the importance of aid to the poor.
On Monday, the pope urged Angola’s leaders to make “the fundamental aspirations of the most needy people” their main concern.
“Our hearts cannot be at peace as long as there are brothers that suffer the lack of food, work, a house, and other fundamental goods,” the pontiff said in his airport departure speech.
However, the Catholic Church in Angola has been seizing land owned by poor families in order to build new Catholic churches. Over 2,000 families have been displaced, some violently. When Amnesty International pled with the pope to address this issue…
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi referred the question to Angolan Bishop Monsignor Jose Manuel Imbamba. The prelate denied anyone had been evicted or houses destroyed.
Nice one! Publicly declare compassion for the poor. Then violently remove families from their land to make way for new churches. Just what Jesus would do.
Pennsylvania court clerks are tired of issuing marriage licenses to opposite-sex couples who aren’t orthodox Christians.
Quakers, the non-religious, and Muslims have been targeted by righteous county court clerks upset by non-(traditional)-Christians exercising their rights.
They have also complained about US citizens daring to marry non-citizens.
To fight back against this brazen assault on marriage and Jesus, some of Christ’s warriors and marriage gatekeepers in PA have started demanding Social Security numbers (which they know immigrants don’t have and which law doesn’t require), photo ID (which they know some Muslims won’t have), made “self-uniting” (i.e. minister free) marriages more difficult to obtain, and warned some couples that their choice of minister may not be “religious enough to count”.
Feel our pain, straights! FEEL IT!
Via Philly.com.
UPDATE 3/21/09: I feel that I have more to say on this post, because the bit above doesn’t get to the main point I wanted to make. Which is that everyone’s rights are linked – we can’t stand by and watch one group be denied their rights without allowing our own rights to be threatened. The Christianists who fight to deny marriage rights to LGBT people are the same ones who now would like to push that battle further and deny certain “unfit” straight couples marriage rights. Straights who stand by and act all ho-hum, who think to themselves that asking for gay marriage is “too much” or who assume this is “not my battle” are putting themselves and their own rights at risk by their inaction.
Those who fight to deny rights to one group will probably find cause to fight to deny rights to another. If we don’t resist human rights abuses against any given marginalized group, we can’t really go complaining when our own rights get stepped on… we set a precedent.
In a weird tangential way, my ruminations on this subject reminded me of that old poem by the awesome priest Martin Niemoller. In a much more dramatic sense, he is talking about the same concept.
What happens when we stand up for our own human rights to the government? Lately we’ve had some interesting examples of how powerful people respond to we commoners when we stand up to advocate for ourselves.
Case study 1: Henrietta Hughes, an elderly black woman living out of her car, spoke up at an Obama rally in Florida about her unmet housing needs. Donors and government officials, including the wife of Republican State Rep Nick Thompson, stepped in and she now has a roof over her head.
Case study 2: Ty’Sheoma Bethea wrote a letter to lawmakers about the wretched and shameful condition of her school. It eventually made it to the Oval Office, and Obama invited Ty-Sheoma to his “state of the nation” address to Congress in February.
More details from CNN:
…Mark Sanford, announced he wouldn’t use his share of the stimulus money on projects like rebuilding her school. “It’s easy to fall into the trap of we need to fix this one school,” said Sanford, a Republican.
…Taking a stand against government spending, Sanford said he would be willing to use the $700 million in the stimulus bill only if he believes he has discretion to control paying down the state’s debt.
That means Ty’Sheoma’s community is left with its school, whose condition is astonishing.
“The auditorium is condemned,” she said on the tour through the crumbling structure. “They use the stage for storage.”
She looked around and said the walls are peeling off and debris has fallen from the ceiling. The gymnasium is in such bad shape, the basketball coach has to cancel games when it rains.
…Many classes are taught in trailers on the school grounds. But the walls are so thin, teachers have to pause when trains roll by, which happens about five times a day.
The school lies in what’s been called the Corridor of Shame, a stretch of highway with enormously poor neighborhoods that are mostly African-American. Some critics say the state doesn’t want to spend money on black kids.
Ty’sheoma’s got something important to advocate for here. Her basic right to quality education is clearly going unmet. Yet Sanford doesn’t care, because he finds it more politically expedient to stick to his amoral conservative ideology. What does government exist for if not to guarantee the rights of the public? For people like Sanford to get and keep power?
What do you notice about these photos? These two individuals advocating for themselves and others like them, Americans who lack access to reasonable housing and education, are both black women. They are ridiculed and rebuffed by plenty on the right, but yet they risk that to raise their voices against injustice. It isn’t surprising that black women would be the ones to step out and take the lead here. Black women have a long history of advocating for human rights, and feel very acutely the lack thereof. Here are two more such women coming forward and speaking out to power.
I’m glad Obama is listening.
Bleh. I went to a greeting card store today to buy a “Congratulations on Your New Baby!” card. I knew I would get worked up, and I did.
The baby in question is an interracial girl born to a progressive couple.
I’m sure you can guess the troubles I had at the store.
First, as one would expect, all the cards are separated by gender. Predictably, the girl cards were all bright pink, many with sparkles and flowers, and making references to princesses, cuteness, and prettiness.
The boy cards were all blue and decorated with animals or trucks or sports.
So what if I didn’t want to start this baby off with an arbitrarily over-gendered card? No options except for general blank cards.
However, blank cards that depicted images of children depicted only white babies. Again, I didn’t feel that was quite appropriate for a baby that will probably be read as a POC later in life.
I was stymied. Greeting cards make life dumber.
Mark Danner published an important piece in the New York Times on Saturday. Called Tales from Torture’s Dark World, it reveals details about torture from previously unavailable interviews given by detainees held at CIA black sites around the world. Though these detainees never met and were held separately and in isolation, their narratives sound strikingly similar, making it unlikely that the details of their torture at American hands are fabricated. What they describe cannot be anything other than torture. Go and read it for yourself.
Says Danner:
The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.
In Williamsburg:
“These people use Sharia and Islam as an instrument to weaken women’s rights,” says lawmaker [Shinkai] Karokhel.
“In no country in the world can you find spiritual leaders holding such power over a parliament,” says [MP Fatima] Narzari.
Using religion to consolidate your power and oppressing women to control society? These warlord MPs are so original.
Whenever lawmaker Fatima Nazari rose to speak, she says the parliament’s chair snubbed her. Whenever one of her female colleagues made a suggestion, it was brushed aside.
…So Nazari, who represents Kabul province, and almost all other female Afghan MPs banded together and proposed a resolution, asking parliament’s leadership to stop the discrimination. It was ignored.
Female lawmakers say that they are still largely excluded from the political process in Afghanistan, where widespread religious fundamentalism and deep-seated cultural conservatism still pose big challenges to women’s advancement.
…Due to strong international pressure, Afghanistan has one of the highest percentages of female lawmakers in the world. The Afghan constitution mandates that two seats in every province be set aside for women, meaning that 64 of the 249 lawmakers, or more than a quarter, are female.
I am impressed with these women, who surely are at some personal risk for daring to speak out against warlords and religious extremists. I hope that over time, by supporting one another and banding together against the misogynist MPs, they are able to gain a louder voice and get some of the tasks done that they deem important. Read the rest at Anand Gopal Global Dispatches
The Australian reports:
13-Year ban on Australian foreign aid for abortion has been overturned by the Rudd Government, despite [Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd being opposed to the policy shift.
Foreign Minister Stephen Smith has followed the lead of US President Barack Obama, who has scrapped the policy preventing non-government organisations using official funds overseas to advise about abortions or provide services.
“This was a difficult decision. This is a deeply sensitive area. It’s one where strong views are held deeply and very personally. …” Mr Smith said yesterday.
“I was left with the very distinct impression that the substantial, if not the overwhelming majority of the parliamentary members of the Labor Party believed that this was also the correct outcome.”
…Mr Smith said the change would mean women in developing countries had the same options as those in Australia, if local laws allowed terminations.
But he said that Australian aidfunding would still focus on avoiding abortions through family planning.
Yay!
This picture has conservative pundit Michelle Malkin in a tizzy. She laughs at it as evidence of the failure of the “liberal” value of serving the poor.
Why? Because the homeless man Ms. Obama is serving has a cell phone. Therefore, he is not poor “enough” to deserve a free meal, therefore he is “working the system,” and Michelle Obama is “enabling” him. I find it incredible that conservatives find a First Woman serving the poor to be insult-worthy.
Malkin laughs at the idea that a homeless person could obtain a phone, though there are programs out there for exactly this purpose: “Some folks are wondering where the cell phone bills get sent. The answer is obvious: ACORN headquarters.” She mocks the idea that a homeless person would need a phone to have any hope of finding work: “The liberals’ argument is that they need cell phones to get jobs. Do they need Blackberry Pearls?!” I don’t think that’s a liberal argument. I think it’s an obvious argument. It seems she can’t quite get her mind around the idea of a poor person trying to find a job, because it contradicts her set-in-stone belief that the poor are poor because they are lazy.
Exactly how destitute do you have to be for Malkin to consider you “worthy” of help? She has previously mocked an elderly black woman who lived in her car for saying to Obama that she just wanted a kitchen of her own. What else does Malkin think the poor don’t deserve? More importantly, why?
What the hell is wrong with Malkin? Rarely do we see a person so publicly gloat over their economic privilege, and use their prominent position to further crush the downtrodden. And in a time of terrible recession as well- nice job Malkin. I bet you claim to have “family values.” I bet you tell your readers that liberals have no morals.
Her confident assumption that she deserves a kitchen, a cell phone, a home, regular meals, and a great job, while poor people, by virtue of being poor, do not, makes me think that she must avidly read Ayn Rand before going to bed every night. I would even call her righteous derision of the poor Rand-esque, except that she would probably consider it a compliment.
Who is that American flag in her picture waving for? Her. Because she deserves it. For her job security, for her above-average income, she deserves all the riches, the services, the amenities, the possessions America can offer her.
H/t Womanist Musings
Leave it to Kansas to try bringing book banning back into style.
The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library Board voted to “restrict access” to four books that discuss sex in a positive way, half of which are about gay sex. I’m sure that’s simply coincidence.
What are these evil, sinful tomes? Why, they are “The Joy of Sex,” “The Joy of Gay Sex,” “The Lesbian Kama Sutra,” and “Sex for Busy People.”
Here’s an interesting tidbit: the request to ban “restrict access” to these books came from an individual, one Kim Borchers of the group “Kansans for Common Sense Policy,” who attends church each Sunday with 4 of the 5 Library Board members who voted for the ban “access restriction.”
No conflict of interest there!
“Board Chair Kerry Storey said it was the most disappointing moment in her 25-year association with the library.
…The board will decide whether to put the books on the top shelf, put them behind the counter or do something else with them at next month’s meeting.”
“Do something else”… like burn them perhaps? ; )
This Kim Borchers individual, a stay-at-home mom whose Kansans for Common Sense Policy organization does not turn up in web searches, has been advocating for greater censorship in libraries for a few years now, it appears. She also has been photographed twice speaking at Americans for Prosperity Kansas, a conservative organization closely partnered with Townhall. Interesting.
CNN:
Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house…
One of the men Khamisa Mohammed Sawadi had raised from infancy as her own son. The other was his friend. They were at her house delivering bread.
What shocking abuse of power by the religious police, sanctioned by a theocratic government. However, the people aren’t taking this silently anymore.
“It’s made everybody angry because this is like a grandmother,” Saudi women’s rights activist Wajeha Al-Huwaider told CNN. “Forty lashes — how can she handle that pain? You cannot justify it.”
…The actions of the religious police have come under increased scrutiny in Saudi Arabia recently, as more and more Saudis urge that the commission’s powers be limited.
I see this as hardly about religion in actuality. This is about control of a populace through fear, using religion as a justification. Which is what I believe any theocracy will look like.
Al Huwaider had great thoughts on this matter: “This is the problem with the religious police, watching people and thinking they’re bad all the time. It has nothing to do with religion. It’s all about control. And the more you spread fear among people, the more you control them.”
Indeed. That is why my liberation and her liberation, while surrounded by such different material circumstances, are bound together. Control and debasement of women is a tool used by corrupted power around the world. Whether in Saudi Arabia or America or elsewhere, women who refuse to be controlled and who insist that they are full human beings are a threat to the powers-that-be and a force for change.
Domestic, outspoken anger and international outrage have forced pardons in cruel anti-woman cases before, so let’s try and muster our outrage again!
This story brings tears to my eyes.
[Rev. Fred] Winters deflected the first of the gunman’s four rounds with a Bible, sending a confetti-like spray of paper into the air in a horrifying scene worshippers initially thought was a skit, police said.
…Winters had stood on an elevated platform to deliver his sermon about finding happiness in the workplace — titled “Come On, Get Happy” — and managed to run halfway down the sanctuary’s side aisle before collapsing after the attack, Cunningham said.
Autopsy results showed that Winters was hit with one bullet that went straight through his heart…
What a tragedy. It appears that the culprit, Terry Joe Sedlacek, may be suffering from mental illness caused by Lyme Disease. No one wins here.
For those that pray, the First Baptist Church of Maryville (Illinois) is asking only for prayers.
“I worked my whole life and all I have now is my broken body.”
-Mexican migrant worker in the US, photographed and quoted in the 1930s by Dorothea Lange.
I guess I’m posting this to in a small way counteract the myth that all it takes is hard work to achieve the American Dream. And therefore, the poor are poor because they are too lazy to better themselves. Re: loathing of the poor.
In honor of International Women’s Day (today), here is a link to a great article at the Vancouver weekly, the Georgia Straight.
Remembering the working class roots of International Women’s Day
by Hetty Alcuitas
An excerpt:
Today, for working-class women and children, the chaos and crisis caused by imperialism is a daily fact of life. At the same time, the organization and resistance of the people is growing—often with women in the lead as we stand up for ourselves and our sisters, our families, and our communities.
She also discusses how this day is inspired by the Jewish and Italian immigrant garment workers protesting in New York City, and how this spirit was later carried further by protesting Russian peasant women.
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