Trying to destroy a people’s food source to drive them away is not a minor matter or a prank; it’s a disgusting, hideous crime, and if it happened to Americans or Israelis it would be labeled terrorism. I hope folks will read Avishai Margalit’s review of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine by David Shulman. From Shulman’s book:

It began some two weeks ago when Palestinians from [the village of] Twaneh noticed a settler —almost certainly from Chavat Maon, the most virulent of the settlements in the area—walking deliberately through their fields in the early morning. Shortly afterward the animals got sick and the first sheep died. Then the shepherds found the poison scattered over the hills, tiny blue-green pellets of barley coated with… deadly rat poison from the fluoroacetate family…. The aim was clear: to kill the herds of goats and sheep, the backbone of the cave dwellers’ subsistence economy in this harsh terrain, and thus to force them off the land.

Schulman travelled to Twaneh and verified that the poisoned barley was there. Margalit provides more background:

In the southern West Bank, Assaf tells us, southeast of Yata, the main township in the area, more than a thousand Palestinians dwell in caves, in an area of some 7,500 acres. Some of the cave dwellers live in this area only during the seasons for planting and harvesting; some live there throughout the year. Water is scarce and the cave dwellers are dependent to a large degree on local cisterns.

In the 1970s, Israel declared part of the Yata region a “closed military area.” In 1980, next to the closed area, Israel established four settlements, which now have about two thousand settlers. Between 1996 and 2001, these settlers erected four additional outposts—small, armed encampments, said to be needed to protect the larger settlements. A fifth outpost, Maon Farm, was set up inside the area that the occupation forces had said was closed to settlement, and the settlers at Maon Farm were evacuated by the army for a few months; but they soon returned. Before they did so, the army had already expelled the Palestinian cave dwellers by force from the closed area, destroying their wells, blocking their caves, and confiscating their meager property of blankets and food. The army justified the expulsion on grounds of “a necessary military need,” specifically, its need for a training ground that would use live ammunition, endangering anyone who lived there. But the settlers of Maon Farm returned to the closed area unopposed by the Israeli authorities, and there was no mention of live ammunition endangering them. [...]

There seems no chance that these young people will understand what Shulman is trying to do. On a cold, wet, and muddy January day, Shulman and his friends are on their way to bring blankets to the cave people. The settlers try to stop them. “One of the men shouts that we are on the side of Bin Laden…. They are determined to keep the blankets away from the cave dwellers.”

The review (and the book it’s reviewing) covers a lot more ground than just the poisoning; I encourage folks to click over and read the whole thing.

On October 15 the police raided over 60 houses throughout New Zealand. They arrested 16 people on jointly possessing a number of firearms, and one person on drugs charges. From the very first day the police were talking about charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

The raids were brutal, a 12 year old girl had a gun pointed at her head, and when her grandmother tried to comfort her the police yelled at the grandmother to shut up and moved closer to both of them (you can view the 12 year old’s comments here). In Ruatoki, a they put a roadblock on the line where the land had been confiscated so many years ago, and anyone who went in and out had to have their photo taken by their car. When one house was raided, the children were locked in a shed for hours by the police while the search was being carried.

Four people were arrested in Wellington; three of those were friends of mine - people I loved. They didn’t get bail; they went into the prison industrial complex.¹ Suddenly prisons stopped being an abstract concept to me, and became a reality that I attempted to navigate while trying to visit the prisoners and get them books and money.

But we didn’t, couldn’t, just do prisoner support, we also needed to stand in solidarity of people who had been attacked, particularly Tūhoe, the iwi ² that had been targeted in these raids. The four weeks that followed was prisons and driving and meetings and court and protests and meetings and supporting each other and meetings and prisons and court and driving and hugs and tears and and anger and love.

At 4pm, Thursday 8 November almost four weeks after people had been arrested, the Solicitor General announced that no-one would be charged under the terrorism suppression act (these were the first charges ever attempted by the police under the Terrorism Suppression Act). The following day all my friends got bail, and all 16 defendents are now free

I don’t think I could describe the sustained joy that started at 4.01 and continued for a week. They were released eleven days ago and I’m smiling right now, because they’re out and I can see them whenever I want.

It’s joy and a respite, but we’ve got so much work to do. All 16 are still facing charges under the Arms Act. The Terrorism Suppression Act - which allowed extensive bugging, has just been strengthened. While our friends are out of prisons, those vile instituations still stand, with far too many trapped inside. ³ I still live in a colonised country, where demands for Tino Rangatiratanga and Mana Motuhake⁴ are ignored.

I couldn’t write much. I was in too much of a whirlwind to know what to say. I’m looking forward to writing more regularly, but what’s happened over the last 6 weeks has affected me, and will affect what I write.

I’ve been promising to write more about feminism in prisons for a while now. While my analysis hasn’t changed much, your understanding changes as issues stop being abstract and distanced and become part of your reality, and the reality of those you love. So I imagine those posts will take a slightly different form than they might have two months ago, but will probably be stronger because of it. Most importantly, in the next few days (or weeks) I hope to write an introductory post that’ll cover some of the very basic history of colonialism in NZ, and Maori resistance, that I can use a reference point if I want to write more on Alas. I’ve generally avoided cross-posting what little I do write on Alas, but I think writing about colonialism where I live has resonances beyond, so that I should do the background work to make what I write intelligible.

I can answer questions if people have any, it can be hard to write about what’s going on here for another audience, but I think it’s worth doing.

Updated I realised I didn’t do any sort of explanation of the charges under the Arms Act. 16 of those arrested were charged under the Arms Act. These charges related to events that the police claim happened in the Urewera Mountains. Almost all the charges are joint charges - so 16 people are charged with co-possessing a rifle, or whatever.⁵ Most defendents are facing several charges under the arms act - the weapons they were alleged to possess were not found on their property during the raids. Just two people have additional charges - in relation to four guns the police claim to have found during the raids.

1. Being remanded in custody is much rarer NZ than America, and there is no such thing as money bail, so you never have to put up a bond (back)
2. tribe (back)
3. Please hold the inevitable ‘what about the rapists and murderers’ comments until I write a proper post about this and have time to reply (back)
4. I’m not going to try and translate - but I think land and freedom best conveys the meaning (back)
5. I’m the worst person in the world to try and explain this, because my knowledge of guns is so supremely limited that (back)

From the BBC:

According to the Arab News newspaper, the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in Qatif in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago.

Seven men were found guilty of the rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from just under a year to five years. [...]

The rape victim was punished for violating Saudi Arabia’s laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man.

On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence. [...]

The rapists’ sentences were also doubled by the court. Correspondents say the sentences were still low considering the rapists could have faced the death penalty. [...]

The Arab News quoted an official as saying the judges had decided to punish the girl for trying to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.

Mr Lahem [the victim's lawyer] said that the judges’ decision to confiscate his licence to work and stop him from representing his client is illegal.

Curtsy: Thene

Click on the cartoon to see a larger version…

I really don’t like the way the art came out in this one; the figures look stiff and overworked. Oh, well; the next one will be better. (I hope.)

I first heard about this case when I was listening to BBC radio on Tuesday. I tuned in during the middle of of this story, and it seemed so bizarre that I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Well, now I got the chance to hear the whole story. It turns out that some foreign aid groups tried to take a group of 103 children out of the country. The aid workers are now accused of child trafficking and violating international laws.

Some members of the NGO Children Rescue/Arche de Zoe have been arrested for attempting to take the 21 girls and 82 boys - the youngest being about a year old and the oldest about 10 - out of Chad. The agency workers were French. Three journalists who were travelling with the volunteer workers and the Spanish crew who were to fly them back to France are also being held. In Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, a prosecutor on Wednesday also charged Jacques Wilmart, a Belgian pilot involved in the affair, with “complicity in abduction”, before sending him to jail.

Zoe’s Ark says it wanted to rescue children from Darfur, but French officials and UN aid workers say they believe many were from Chad and were not orphans.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) called the attempt to separate the more than 100 young Chadian children from their parents and then take them to France for adoption an “illegal and totally irresponsible move.” The UN said the children had family in the country.

“They are not orphans and they were not sitting alone in the desert in Chad, they were living with their families in communities,” Annette Rehrl of U.N. refugee agency UNHCR told Reuters in Abeche.

UNICEF spokesperson Veronique Taveau told journalists in Geneva that what happened had violated international rules, such as The Hague Convention on international adoption and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Taveau said the case was not an isolated incident but one that was highly visible because of the size of the group of children.

L’Express reports the Europeans offered sweets and biscuits to encourage the children to leave their homes.

“My parents had gone to work in the fields. As we were playing some Chadians came and said here are some sweets, why don’t you follow us to Adre and then we’ll take you home. We were taken to the hospital in Adre,” said a young boy who gave his name as Osman. Adre is a town on the Chad-Sudan border.

“We spent seven days in Adre and I’ve been here in Abeche for more than one month. We were well fed by the whites, there was always food. I would like to go back to find my parents,” he told reporters at the Abeche orphanage where the children are being cared for by local and international aid workers.

Many European media outlets were putting a slightly more favorable spin on this, but as more information comes out, these so called aid groups are not looking good at all. The UN has said that most of these children were not orphans, which they found out from interviewing the older children. Now many of the children are separated from their families, and there are concerns that the youngest children may not be reunited because they are too young to talk. Needless to say this is not going over well with people all over Africa. As the International Herald Tribune article cited in this paragraph notes:

The scandal has sparked outrage and condemnation across Africa, where it has a deep resonance from the colonial era, when slave traders, missionaries and colonial officials blithely separated African families with little regard to their wishes. In Congo, government officials suspended all adoptions by foreigners to examine their procedures more carefully, according to The Associated Press, and protesters angry about the attempted kidnappings took to the streets in Chad.

The scandal has also raised tensions between Chad and France just as the European Union begins deploying a peacekeeping force in the region aimed at shoring up Chad, which has been increasingly drawn into the four-year-old conflict in neighboring Darfur.

This history is one reason why adoptions by Westerners are not common in African countries. Incidents like this contribute to the destruction black families, and I suspect these aid workers felt no need to respect the rights of poor black African families.¹

1. Why oh why am I having flashbacks to this old Rachel’s Tavern post/comment? I was so angry at that woman. I could barely contain myself. (back)

From The Observer:

In the words of one soldier: ‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.’

Another explained: ‘The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides… As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.’

The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. ‘We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn’t throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,’ he said.

The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. ‘With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with any more.’

Yishai-Karin found that the soldiers were exposed to violence against Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of basic training. On one occasion, the soldiers were escorting some arrested Palestinians. The arrested men were made to sit on the floor of the bus. They had been taken from their beds and were barely clothed, even though the temperature was below zero. The new recruits trampled on the Palestinians and then proceeded to beat them for the whole of the journey. They opened the bus windows and poured water on the arrested men.

Curtsy: Informed Consent.

From Para Justicia y Libertad!:

Congratulations to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner who has become the first woman to be elected president in Argentina’s history. Kirchner, 54, is the wife of current President of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner and a former senator for Buenos Aires Province. In the Oct, 2007 general election, Mrs. Kirchner, she ran for president of Argentina, representing the ruling Front for Victory party, a center-left Peronist party.

Fernández is the second woman to be elected leader of a South American nation in two years, after Michelle Bachelet, who became Chile’s president last year. [...]

Her election extends the trend of left-leaning elected governments in Latin America, although she is more moderate than the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez. Mrs Kirchner is expected to maintain her husband’s friendly relations with Chavez.

Fernández has vowed to continue the work of her husband after winning a presidential election widely seen as a referendum on his economic policies. She has fiercely rejected the pro-market policies of the 1990s, which she blames for the 2001 crisis.

From Brad Plumer:

For the past 20 years, the World Bank and assorted Western governments have been telling Malawi how to conduct its affairs. Stop subsidizing crop prices. Curtail spending. Float your currency. And so on. More recently, in 2000, donors demanded that Malawi dismantle a fledgling program that subsidized fertilizer for poor farmers–who often can’t afford it on their own–on the grounds that the subsidies would make it impossible for a “solid agricultural market to develop.”

Well, it’s hard to flout the donors, and Malawi did as told. What happened next? Some 1,500 Malawians starved to death in 2002, and five million more needed emergency rations in 2005. So, last year, the government finally told its “advisors” to shove off and put the subsidies back in place. Two years of record surpluses followed, and Malawi is now shipping excess maize to Zimbabwe. As Toronto’s Globe and Mail tells it, the subsidies have worked wonders; they’re far cheaper than importing food aid; and even the EU has reversed its stance and pledge to underwrite the fertilizer coupons.

And from The New York Times:

Bank policies in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed African governments to cut or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, decontrol prices and privatize may have improved fiscal discipline but did not accomplish much for food production, the evaluation said.

It had been expected that higher prices for crops would give farmers an incentive to grow more, while competition among private traders reduced the costs of seeds and fertilizer. But those market forces often failed to work as hoped.

“The whole thing was based on the idea that if you take away the government for the poorest of the poor that somehow these markets will solve the problems,” Professor Sachs said. “But markets can’t step in and won’t step in when people have nothing. And if you take away help, you leave them to die.”

Professor Easterly said the bank’s managers had made elementary mistakes. “It was a simplistic, Economics 101 lesson, that if you raise prices, farmers produce more, which makes sense if farmers have roads, access to credit, good access to fertilizer markets,” he said. “But most of the time, farmers were lacking those.”

From a post on Oy Bay (curtsy to Muzzlewatch) entitled “San Francisco Art Gallery Censors Writing and Art Work as Too Zionist”:

Himmelberger Gallery, a well-known art gallery located in San Francisco’s tony Union Square, has decided to cancel plans to publish an art catalogue of one of its represented artists, noted author Alan Kaufman [...] The gallery objects to the expressly Zionist focus of several essay contributions to the catalogue by well-known authors and journalists[...]

The catalogue was to present 15 of Kaufman’s paintings which are under contract to the gallery and whose subjects range from the Holocaust to Israel to the New Antisemitism. The gallery’s prices for the works in question have been cited at between $3,275 and $36,000. The works have hung in the gallery and a cross-section of them also appeared on the gallery website.

At a meeting between gallery head David Himmelberger and Kaufman, Himmelberger surprised the artist and author with an eleventh hour decision not to proceed with the catalogue due to the Zionist “agenda” of the essays as well as some of the paintings. Himmelberger said that such a presentation was antithetical to the aims of the gallery, which promotes “international understanding” and forswears all forms of nationalism and religion. But the authors see this as a transparent example of the way in which the word Zionism has been exiled from civil discourse and has been turned by the cultural establishment into a refugee of a word, a pariah of an idea, and a euphemism for Antisemitism.

Oy Bay also quotes a statement released by the “Zionist Five,” who are the five authors who were to be published in the catalogue. From reading the statement, my guess is that it’s not the word “Zionism” that scared the publisher away, so much as the extremism of the views presented. For example:

Let us, then, be perfectly frank about one thing. To vilify, marginalize, suppress or outlaw Zionism politically, socially or culturally, for any reason whatever, is to wish no less then murderous extinction upon every Jewish man, woman and child in the world today.

Note the “for any reason whatsoever.” Next time I hear someone deny that Zionists mix up criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism, I hope I remember that quote; according to these folks, criticizing Zionism for any reason at all isn’t just anti-Semitic, it’s wishing Genocide upon the Jews.

Some thoughts:

1) It’s not censorship for a private publisher to decide not to publish a book. Kaufman’s belief that he’s been “censored for expression of a Zionist perspective” is over the top.

2) When I first read this story, I thought perhaps Kaufman was suffering from another form of censorship: When a publisher owns the rights to publish a work but refuses to publish it. I think that is censorship, but it doesn’t seem to be the case here; the gallery’s lawyer has said that Kaufman is free to publish the catalogue elsewhere.

3) There’s another form of de facto censorship, which is when objections to a point of view are so overwhelming that that point of view becomes impossible to publish, or is in some other significant way cut out of “the marketplace of ideas.” It’s implausible that’s the situation here, though; one gallery owner declined to print one catalogue, but most of the authors in the catalogue are published elsewhere.

Kaufman might argue that San Francisco’s “marketplace of ideas” effectively disallows pro-Zionist discussion. If that’s true, then that’s a reasonable complaint on his part. On the other hand, the fact that his paintings were displayed in a major San Francisco gallery, apparently without being protested, suggests that the San Francisco experience may not be as bleak as all that.

4) Kaufman sees an equivalence between his situation and that of Black men (what about Black women?) in “the old South”:

“My standing up and declaring Zionist art in San Francisco is really like a black man standing up in the old South and declaring himself a free man.”

The comparison trivializes slavery and Jim Crow, in much the same way that stupid concentration camp comparisons trivialize the Holocaust. (I do think that comparisons can be worthwhile when they’re intelligently made, as The Sideshow argues.)

A week ago today the New Zealand police invaded homes all over the country. They arrested 17 (or 18) people with breaches of the Firearms Act. But the search warrants were issued under the Terrorism Suppression Act. Those arrested were called terrorists.

The police invaded Ruatoki, a Tuhoe community. They set up a checkpoint along the confiscation line. Those who wanted to go in or out of this community had to stand by their cars and have their picture taken. Armed police officers boarded the bus that takes kids to Kohanga Reo.

That paragraph may not make much sense to non-NZers. Maori are the tangata whenua, or indigenous people of New Zealand. Kohanga Reo is immersion kindergarten. Tuhoe are an iwi, or tribe, from the North Island of New Zealand. This is an attack on the indigenous people of New Zealand. On the indigenous people who are fighting colonisation. This has dominated the news in New Zealand for a week. It is the first time the Terrorism Suppression Act (the New Zealand version of the Patriot Act) has been used and it is being used against indigenous people who have been terrorised by the New Zealand state.

If that was all that had happened I would have written sooner. But the police also invaded a house I’ve spent many, many hours in. They took three of my friends.

There is an element of ridicule to all this. The police took a backpack that people had taken to the farmers market - with avocados and potatoes, later they brought it back because they decided it didn’t contain any evidence of terrorism. The paper claimed that groups from all over the country working on many different issues were going to launch co-ordinated attacks. They clearly don’t know us very well (anyone who has ever worked on the left will understand why).

But when I laugh it is only to relieve the stress, because my friends still aren’t free. In New Zealand almost everyone gets bail. The day that our friends were arrested the other news included a man who had serially raped prostitutes who was out on bail. That they are still there, that we are still going out to the prison everyday, would have seemed unreal a week ago.

I have closed this post to comments. I’m sorry, but I cannot handle abstract discussion about people I love, when I don’t know when we’ll get them back. I will be writing more about this, I will be writing about some of the issues involved. Right now I just wanted to let people know why I hadn’t been posting, and explain some of the background for when I have the energy to write about what is involved.

* There is no situation, no matter how serious and stressful, for which I don’t have the perfect Buffy quote.

Thomas, a 7 year old child I look after, is holding my inflatable globe. “I’m going to find England, where J K Rowling lives.”

A few minutes later he’s back, he can’t find England. “There it is,” I point to the pink splodge and get back to getting afternoon tea together.

“But it doesn’t say England.” The inflatable globe isn’t proving as distracting as I’d like.

“They’ve called it the UK, rather than England.”

“Why?”

“The UK is made up of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales”

“Why?”

“Well - ” I put afternoon tea on the table. “A long time ago England and Wales had a war and England beat Wales. Then England and Scotland had a war and England beat Scotland. Then England and Ireland had a war and England beat Ireland. Ireland fought back, so part of Ireland got to be free from England, but not all of it.” I have relatives who would not appreciate the implication that Wales didn’t fight back - but I don’t want to complicate things.

“England also beat Samoa” Where did he learn that from?

“Yes England beat Samoa, but that wasn’t till much later. Before England could go around beating countries on the other side of the world, it had to take over the countries closer to home.” It’s never to young to start on some basic education about colonialism. “England beat lots of places and took their land, like New Zealand, Australia and Zimbabwe.”

“South Africa beat England.” Oh.

“Yes, South Africa did beat England in the Rugby World Cup.¹ We use lots of the same words to describe war as we do to describe sport.” Not quite where I expected to end up, but I guess it’s a start.

1. Readers may come from countries where rugby is less important than war, and so will not understand how easy it is for a NZ 7 year old to make this mistake. When NZ got knocked out of the Rugby World Cup in the quarter finals there were serious discussions about what impact this would have on next years election. There are people here who don’t quite understand that when two teams play sport one team loses and the other wins. (back)

Very few issues fill me with despair like thinking about Israel and Palestine.

I don’t understand why, when American Jews lean left, virtually all the major lobbies and organizations representing American Jews are on the far right. (Groups like AIPAC are strongly in favor of the Iraq invasion and have loyally supported Bush’s policies). Why, oh why, can’t we have a representative Jewish lobby?

(Speaking of which, see Glenn Greenwald’s recent posts on the ADL’s extreme reluctance to call out major right-wing figures for casually slinging around trivializing Nazi and Holocaust comparisons — 1 2 3 4 — even though they jump to criticize such important left-wing figures as an anonymous poster on Moveon.Org’s message board. Again, why do we American Jews — most of whom are liberal democrats — accept right-wing partisan hacks representing us in Washington?)

(But Glenn, you’ve missed a major example — the way that the ADL has never found time to criticize the word “Feminazi,” coined by Rush L., which Rush and other major right-wingers have been using nonstop for almost 20 years).

I’ve given up on any possibility of an honest debate or engagement with 99% of Israel’s supporters. I get it: Anyone who criticizes Israel, ever, in anything but the mildest of terms, is an anti-semite. (Edited to add the following sentence:) Meanwhile, far too many of Israel’s defenders are far too quick to dismiss any but the mildest criticism of Israel as anti-semitic. Rootless Cosmopolitan reports that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has now been branded an anti-semite, and St. Thomas University has accordingly cancelled a scheduled speech by Tutu:

Having asked sane and rational people to believe that Jimmy Carter is a Holocaust denier¹ simply for pointing out the obvious about the apartheid regime Israel maintains in the occupied territories, the same crew now want us to believe that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is an anti-Semite. No jokes! That was the reason cited for Tutu being banned from speaking at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis. “We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy,” explained university official Doug Hennes.

Since the above quote includes the word “apartheid,” which people are bound to object to, I’ll point out this post by Tony Karon defending his (and Jimmy Carter’s) use of the term. (Karon, who is Jewish, is branded “self-hating” rather than anti-Semitic.)

Also branded anti-Semites: Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Harvard and Columbia University of Chicago professors, authors of the current best-seller The Israel Lobby. Neither of them has a single documented instance of anti-Semitism, but they’ve published a scholarly book criticizing Israel, so they’re anti-Semites. Daniel Levy’s review of the book in Haaretz is critical and balanced, the most reasonable commentary on the book I’ve read so far.

UPDATE: Here’s the fourth post from Glenn Greenwald on the ADL’s apparent bias.

1. Tony is exaggerating here; Carter was called all sorts of foul things by Israel’s partisans, but they stopped short — just barely short — of calling him a Holocaust denier. (back)

Today, hundreds — thousands? — of bloggers are posting the above link, in one way or another, to drive traffic to free-burma.org. Please follow the link for more information.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that George Bush can’t open his mouth without saying something stupid:

This has received attention from “Bush is stupid” commenters around the world. But in commenting on George Bush’s inability to communicate even the most basic of concepts - they missed the fallacy in what Bush was trying to say.

Whatever Nelson Mandela has become, the ANC, and larger black resistance against apartheid, was not the movement that Bush wants to persuade us it was. Mandela was arrested as a terrorist. The ANC was not non-violent; they blew stuff up and killed people.

You can say the ANC should have stuck to non-violent resistance (although I think to do so from the comfort of your own home would make you look like a right dick), but to imply that the ANC was non-violent (even if no-one understands what you’re trying to do) is just lying.

Here’s a nifty stencil. While I might take issue with the limited image it paints of the resistance - but I understand the advantages of a simple image.

The condemnation of SLORC is coming from all sides, including Bush and New Labour in the UK (with Helen Clark bleating on behind). These are government’s that don’t exactly have a history of supporting democracy and democratic movements, unless there’s a buck or two to be made. Australia and NZ eventually supported East Timorese independence from Indonesia, but only because they got some natural resources out of it. We cannot see Western governments as the great white horses that will protect people who are being oppressed by their own government.

I recommend Lenin’s Tomb:

There has been a popular movement against the ruling State Law and Order Council for years, obviously, and this is part of a real revolt. The monks are an important and esteemed segment of society because they provide education and social services, whereas the dictatorship simply exploits people. So why should it be that the United States government has, for the last few years, been applying sanctions to Burma along with its allies? Why is it championing the main democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi? Only an ostrich would imagine it has anything to do with democracy. Well, it’s the same as East Timor in many ways. The West, after having backed a genocidal regime for years, has terrorised the opposition into accepting a neoliberal programme. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy has promised that, upon taking power, it will implement structural adjustments opening up huge parts of the economy to international investors. There is more than a parallel there: Suharto was one of the Burmese junta’s closest allies before an uprising threw him off, and a polyarchical neoliberal regime in both states will restore the symmetry to some extent. So, it’s another phase in the transition from anti-socialist dictatorships used by Washington to slightly less coercive regimes in which the opposition has basically been neutered. The experiment launched in Chile in 1973 was really that successful. Britain, which has been doing fine out of the old regime, now hopes to do even better out of the new one. And at the same time, it has a chance of re-moralizing its disgraced foreign policy. New opportunities for intensified capital accumulation will open up, and in all probability the health and nutrition indices - already so miserably poor that they contribute to genocidal levels of death in some segments of the population - will get worse. Of course, while the NLD are the natural beneficiaries of any successful rebellion, there is no guarantee that people will simply accept the neoliberal programme. It depends how much the overthrow of the SLORC is a result of mass mobilisation, and how much of it comes about as a result of the elite compromise and handovers that were prevalent in Eastern Europe after 1989, and in recent colour-coded revolutions. A recently victorious rebellious mass can be surprisingly disobedient.

I don’t think this analysis should change our support for resistance in Myanmar. But I do think it’s important that we challenge the idea that Western government’s could plan a benign, or even a positive role in Myanmar. It’s up to the people of Myanmar to decide how to fight against their government; it’s up to the rest of us to fight our governments to keep their greedy hands off Myanmar.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to international affairs, there is a major protest (estimates of 100,000 people) against the military dictatorship in Burma,which is now called Myanmar. The protest, lead by Buddhist monks, has been peaceful, but tension is rising, and as I writing this post I just found out that 4 monks have been killed by the military.

This dictatorship has been in place for 20 years, and the last major protest ended with the military killing thousands of protesters. You can learn more about the history of Burma/Myanmar in this article.

Here’s a photo of the protest from the AFP.

Caption: “Buddhist monks protest by marching with a banner that reads, “We shall replace (crackdown) unjustice with justice” before police conduct a crackdown in downtown Yangon. Myanmar security forces used batons, tear gas and live rounds Wednesday in a violent crackdown on mass protests against the military junta, killing at least four people including three Buddhist monks.(AFP)”You can also find more info. at Women of Color Blog.

The right-wing Washington Times, reporting on Bush’s speech at the UN, reports:

At the United Nations, Mr. Bush avoided talk of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bringing up Iran only as one of several briefly listed countries that squelch freedoms.

Outside, about a dozen people were arrested during a peaceful demonstration of about 400 opposed to the Iraq war and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Via Ezra.

From Dani Rodrik:

The slave trade, whereby able-bodied Africans were shipped to other parts of the world and sold into slavery, was a despicable economic institution for sure. But did it also have long-run effects on the economic development of African countries? Yes, is the surprising answer of Nathan Nunn (pdf link):

I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa, in each century between 1400 and 1900. The estimates are constructed by combining data from ship records on the number of slaves shipped from each African port or region with data from a variety of historical documents that report the ethnic identities of slaves that were shipped from Africa. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from each country and subsequent economic performance. The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken.

Nunn is careful to try to rule out reverse causation: he finds that the regions from which slaves were taken were, if anything, the more developed parts of Africa at the time.

The most likely explanation for the result? “[The] procurement of slaves through internal warfare, raiding, and kidnapping resulted in subsequent state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.”

There’s some interesting discussion in the comments there, too.

From a review of World War IV, the new book defending Bush’s Iraq policy, by Norman Podhoretz:

The most astonishing part of “World War IV” is Podhoretz’s incessant use of violent imagery to describe American politics. Critics of the Iraq war represent a “domestic insurgency” with a “life-and-death stake” in America’s defeat. And their dispute with the president’s supporters represents “a war of ideas on the home front.” “In its own way,” Podhoretz declares, “this war of ideas is no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East.”

I’ve written in the past about European countries being forced to confront racism and xenophobia, which is especially the case in nations where large scale immigration is making the countries more ethnically and racially diverse. One of the latest countries confronting discrimination is Ireland. Unlike many other Western European countries, Ireland was never colonial power. In places, like France, Spain, and Britain many immigrants are coming from former colonies, but since Ireland didn’t have colonies, Irish immigration is a little less predictable. Nevertheless, Ireland is facing some of the same problems as other European countries. Many Irish people do not accept the new immigrants, and this is especially true for Black immigrants, who come mostly from West African countries like Nigeria.

Traditionally, Ireland has been a country of emigrants.¹ Given this fact, it should be no surprise that there are more people of Irish descent in the US alone than there are in Ireland, but in a surprising twist of fate, the trend is beginning to reverse.² With Irish birth rates above replacement level and a new wave of immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe, Ireland is actually gaining more people than it is losing. Some hope that this will contribute to growth in the Irish economy, which has been one of the weakest economies in western Europe.

Right now, there is little research on this trend, and the manifestations of anti-immigrant attitudes and racism come to light with stories this one. The gist of the story is that in a suburb of Dublin nearly all of the approximately 90 children who couldn’t find a school to attend were black kids.

The children will attend a new, all-black school, a prospect that educators called disheartening.

About 90 children could not find school places in the north Dublin suburb of Balbriggan , a town of more than 10,000 people with two elementary schools. Local educators called a meeting over the weekend for parents struggling to find places and said they were shocked to see only black children.

“That overwhelmed me. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I just find it extremely concerning,” said Gerard Kelly, principal of a school with a mixture of black and white students in the nearby town of Swords.

The parents at Saturday’s meeting in a Balbriggan hotel said they had tried to get their children into local schools but were told that all places had to be reserved by February.

Almost all of the children are Irish-born and thus Irish citizens, under a law that existed until 2004.

There is no way this is merely a coincidence, especially when a neighboring town has mixed schools. It should be noted that they are not starting a school that only admits black pupils, like this poorly worded headline from The Times Online suggests. The school is made up overwhelmingly of black children because those children “mysteriously” were not allowed to enter many of the local schools.

Part of the problem is that the Irish government allows schools to discriminate on the basis of religion, which ends up being a form of indirect institutional racism.

About 98 percent of schools are run by the Roman Catholic Church, and the law permits them to discriminate on the basis of whether a prospective student has a certificate confirming they were baptized into the faith. Some of the African applicants were Muslim, members of evangelical Protestant denominations or of no religious creed.

Since many immigrants are not Catholic, these schools were allowed to not accept them without a Catholic baptism certificate. It is difficult to know how many black children who were Catholic were also excluded. I know many of the African children are Nigerian, and many Christian Nigerians are Catholic, so I’d be curious to see how much religious discrimination and racial discrimination overlapped in this case. Clearly, this is a great case for the separation of church and state, and this is an issue that the Irish will have to confront as they become a multicultural nation.

I suspect that the 2004 referendum changing laws that allow parents of Irish citizen children to also become citizens is part of an anti-immigrant backlash. It will also be interesting to see how the role of the Catholic church changes because of immigration. They may lose some power. Ireland can’t call itself democratic when 98% of their schools are run in an openly discriminatory fashion.

Over the next few years, I expect to see more stories on discrimination like the case in Balbriggan. Hopefully, we will see more pro-immigrant organizations developing from ethnic Irish and immigrants.

1. Emigration with an “e” refers to people exiting the country. This is how I teach the words in class: Immigration with an “i” means into and emigration “e” means exit. (back)
2. Unfortunately, this article is now a paying article, but I was able to read in my New York Times home delivery. (back)