All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Ardern under pressure as Peters fuels opposition attacks

Profit before life/health pressure is inhuman trash!

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Analysis – The PM resists pressure to move immediately to level 1, Winston Peters’ tactics play into the hands of the Opposition and the government at last works out a commercial rent solution, writes Peter Wilson.

Another Brick In The Wall

In Saner Thought

All the protests over deaths has yet another victim to add to the list of black people killed in police custody.

This time it is Tacoma with the bad cops….

The Mayor of Tacoma, Washington, Victoria Woodards, has called for the firing of police officers involved in the death of Manuel Ellis. Ellis, a 33-year-old black man, died on March 3 in handcuffs while being restrained on the ground by police. His death has been ruled a homicide.

“I am demanding tonight that the Pierce County Sheriff review and confirm every action taken by each officer. I demand that the sheriff provide details of the actions of each officer on the scene and I am directing the city manager to fire each officer involved,” Woodards said at a news conference late Thursday night, adding: “The officer who committed this crime should be fired and prosecuted to the fullest extent of…

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A diary on Occupation : Forbidden Reflection

The ignorance of the Israelis in trying to make a myth about their history and forcing it into a new reality that denies our existence is a mere act of ignorance and panic. And the fact that we Muslims deny the existence of a two or three thousand years of history where Jewish people lived, and that life was under the earth of the modern Jerusalem is also ignorance.

I was listening to some news about the Israelis renewed the attempt to demolish the Mughrabi Gate and the installation of the new bridge, in preparation to create a museum or whatever…under the tunnels… and somehow behind all the political games of occupation and attempts of seizing more control over Jerusalem and AL-Aqsa and everything else. And somehow behind the reality that Israel wants to shake the grounds under the Aqsa. And somehow also that Israel works within a matrix of control as well in the surrounding of the old city, and this attempt would increase the possibilities of seizing the area at any needed time. There lies a good thing behind the current excavations and tunnels that are unveiling what the Israeli calls as the Torah city. And that what disturbs me when I hear our closed circle defense and shallow calls for defending the Place. The fact that there is a Torah city that existed thousands of years ago is only a complement to the greatness and authenticity of this town. The ignorance of the Israelis in trying to make a myth about their history and forcing it into a new reality that denies our existence is a mere act of ignorance and panic. And the fact that we Muslims deny the existence of a two or three thousand years of history where Jewish people lived, and that life was under the earth of the modern Jerusalem is also ignorance.

I really cannot understand that we have to fight against the findings of the city under the current city. It is part of our history as people of this land. It is part of our history of monotheists. It is part of our history as human civilization as well.

And admitting, recognizing, acknowledging, whatever term we might use, the presence of these people (the Israelis) in this land, doesn’t take our rights in it. The Islamic Jerusalem (Christian as well) cannot be denied. It is all there standing up high and proud, and deeply rooted and evolved despite three thousand years of history of various people who lived , resided or existed and continued to live on this land.

Paulo Freire says in the pedagogy of the oppressed: “It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves. It is, therefore, essential that the oppressed wage the struggle to resolve the contradiction in which they are caught; and the opposition will he determined by the appearance of the new man: neither oppressor nor oppressed, but the man in the process of liberation. If the goal of the oppressed is to become fully human, they will not achieve their aim by merely reversing the terms of the contradiction, by just changing poles.”

When would it be time, when we rise for who we truly are, and just acknowledge our existence without denial of the others? When we get there, we can end our vicious occupation, or at least can manage it as human beings, not as dehumanized people.

18-4-2012

A diary on Occupation : Feeling Nakba

A day, a month, a year, six decades… of crying over a loss of a land, of a diaspora of a nation, of imprisonment of a population, of occupation…. And yet… we fail to have a single voice for reconciliation … we carry on to a black fog of authority that exists on personal interests and draining every single vein of its people … a mist that certifies.. each single moment the death of Palestine.

Yes… this is Nakba.

I look around and wonder if it is just a foggy day or month or year or decades of my life as a Palestinian … holding up tight within myself waiting desperately for a clear day … just an average day when I will wake up and look at the sky and see it bright. Look at the sun and see it shine…look at the trees, the flowers and watch them moving in their destinies lively dance. Waking up one day to the Palestine I grew up thriving to have… to the Palestinian cause that was injected into our veins. To join the rally of humanity .. to feel normal.. to feel human .. to feel belonging to the human race…

But instead. I wake up not knowing if it is another dusty day .. if the sun that shines in the morning will keep its warmth to the night…

An ugly reality of our lives.. a nation that has been so fragmented when each one of us became a nation of his own. Palestine became a single unit for each. Each one of us has his own Palestine, with its people, its government, its ministers. It is not the Palestine we were raised to have.. it is not the Palestine we thrived to liberate…

It is a Palestine that is injected with egocentric needs and personal interests, and anything else is the enemy…

A day, a month, a year, six decades… of crying over a loss of a land, of a diaspora of a nation, of imprisonment of a population, of occupation…. And yet… we fail to have a single voice for reconciliation … we carry on to a black fog of authority that exists on personal interests and draining every single vein of its people … a mist that certifies.. each single moment the death of Palestine.

Yes… this is Nakba.

17-5-2012

White Women and White Supremacy

The political scientist Jenn Jackson has an excellent piece in Teen Vogue on the centrality of white women to the maintenance of white supremacy, as true in 2020 as in 1860 or 1935.

But women and white supremacy were bosom buddies long before we had the technology to capture them on film.

During the period of legal enslavement of continental Africans and their African-American descendants in the United States, the slave household was the primary domain of white women who were married to white slave masters. They were called “slave mistresses.” Slave mistresses set out to “civilize” enslaved black women whom they forced to nurse their children, cook the family’s food, and act as handmaids for the white children who technically owned them. According to Duke University historian Thavolia Glymph’s book Out of the House of Bondage, “mistresses beat and humiliated slaves” in an effort to silence discontent and quell resistance. Meanwhile, these enslaved women’s proximity to slave masters made them even more susceptible to rape and other physical abuse. These aren’t the popular images and myths about slavery, though.

What is critical here is that white women were working in the plantation household to normalize white supremacy. Thus, even when the peculiar institution of slavery was eradicated, the culture and logic underlying it prevailed.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in December 1865 — just days after the States ratified the 13th amendment abolishing slavery and during the period of Reconstruction, which lasted from 1865 to 1877 and during which some Southern political leaders made an attempt to “build an interracial democracy on the ashes of slavery,” as Columbia University history professor Eric Foner wrote in The New York Times. Black Americans during this period saw increased access to voting and political representation, property rights, and education. Southern whites, many of whom were destitute and economically unstable after the vast material and human losses of the Civil War, felt threatened by the newfound freedom and success of previously enslaved black Americans. In response to the potential loss of their “heritage,” new organizations emerged at the end of the 19th century.

One of the most prominent groups to participate in the preservation and purification of the failed white supremacist regime was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894. The Daughters worked alongside organizations like the Klan to grow white supremacist frameworks in the South. They were integral in erecting statues and monuments to commemorate the Confederate generals and soldiers who were their own family members. While they claim these efforts were about history, they instead sanitized our memory of those states that had seceded from the Union, and downplayed the Confederate states’ enduring commitments to those ideologies even after the war ended.

During that time, the perception that black Americans would dispossess white Southerners was met with swift racial violence in the form of lynchings.

There are many accounts of the horrors of the more than 4,000 recorded lynchings in the United States. These events between 1877 and 1950 are often described using the term “strange fruit” (popularized especially by the Billie Holiday song) because beaten and burned black Americans’ bodies would be swinging from trees. The earliest and arguably most thorough account of white women’s role in the lynchings of black American men came from anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells in A Red Record.

Wells found that black men accused of raping white women were often lynched without ever going to trial which “had the effect of fastening the odium” upon them. The clearest example of this “odium” is the brutal 1955 kidnapping and killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till for supposedly whistling at Carolyn Bryant Donham — a fact that she now admits was a lie. Perhaps these events shed light on the strange invisibility of white women among the white nationalists rallying in Charlottesville and some of their political behavior today.

Not to mention the Scottsboro Boys.

In conclusion, Amy Cooper is just the latest in a long line of racist white women at the forefront of racial oppression. And we have to recognize the special role of women in this, especially at a time when white men are, rightfully, being seen as the the real problem in America due to their overwhelming support of Trump. The problem of racism is much deeper than Donald Trump and his supporters. It’s in the heart and soul of every white person unless they fight it actively and even then it is still there. White women have played a significant role in creating and supporting this racist society, past and present, and it must be recognized as such.

Trump doesn’t trust Secret Service to keep him safe

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After cowering in the White House bunker didn’t work out for Trump, nor the ridiculous photo-op that followed it, the building itself is being surrounded by shabby fortifications: a fence to prevent protestors getting too close to the executive mansion.

More fencing going up around the White House complex early this morning pic.twitter.com/VLBRnx1lgz

— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) June 4, 2020

“More fencing going up around the White House complex early this morning,” writes CNN’s Betsy Klein. “In addition to the new fencing, which now extends past the EEOB down 17th Street, @abdallahCNN reports that additional concrete barriers have been installed behind existing fencing at 17th and Pennsylvania Ave. NW.”

From Stonekettle: “We’ve reached the ‘Walling yourself off so enraged citizens don’t drag you out of the palace’ stage of Making America Great Again.”

The funny thing about Trump is that you know that he has asked for a moat. Less funny is that he doesn’t trust the Secret Service to keep him safe.

Maybe Journalism Needs a Coup

Would they accept an editorial by head of KKK or American Nazi Party? mafrkqmvzamkmttlzaqu.jpg

On Wednesday, the New York Times Opinion section made the choice to publish an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton that can only be described as a fascist call for the military to crack down on people protesting against police violence and brutality, under the incendiary headline “Send in the Troops.” Earlier that…

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Opinion | Stacey Abrams: I Know Voting Feels Inadequate Right Now – The New York Times

Every night for more than a week, we have witnessed the anguish and anger of demonstrators, their cries punctured by politicians urging them to vote their power. Both are right. Protest to demand attention to the wrenching pain of systemic injustice. Vote because we deserve leaders who see us, who hear us and who are willing to act on our demands.

Voting will not save us from harm, but silence will surely damn us all.

Airlines Say Everybody Onboard Must Wear a Mask. So Why Aren’t They? – The New York Times – Second Wave flying to you today! :(

“Airlines have said follow the guidelines, but don’t enforce them, don’t tackle people to the ground and don’t turn flights around if they don’t listen,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants union. “That gets around to the public then it’s, ‘I don’t have to do this. There are no consequences if I don’t do this.’ That, too, can lead to conflict, not just with the flight attendants, but with other passengers, who get angry and all of a sudden we have to break up a fight.”

Recent passengers on Delta Air Lines have posted on Twitter about fliers failing to wear masks (“What’s the point in requiring if there is no follow through?” one man asked the airline in a tweet). Another Delta passenger wrote on Twitter that he asked a flight attendant about the mask rule after seeing a passenger, a flight attendant and the pilot without masks on. He was told that the rules couldn’t be enforced.