All posts by nedhamson

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

Trump administration to review ‘role of human rights in public policy’

Pompeo pimps for faux-religionists who are actually cyrpto-fascists!

Advocates warn the new panel, helmed by an abortion and gay rights opponent, is a threat to progressive reforms

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has unveiled a new panel tasked with reviewing “the role of human rights in American public policy” in a move that some advocates warned could imperil LGBTQ and women’s reproductive freedoms.

Pompeo announced the launch of the “Commission on Unalienable Rights” at the state department in Washington on Monday, telling reporters: “As human rights claims have proliferated, some claims have come into tension with one another provoking questions and clashes about which rights are entitled to gain respect.”

Related: Revealed: the fringe rightwing group changing the UN agenda on abortion rights

Related: Trump administration wants to remove ‘gender’ from UN human rights documents

Continue reading…

Putting Oscar and Valeria’s deaths in context

The deaths of Oscar and Valeria Martinez continue to echo in El Salvador.   Their attempt to cross the dangerous waters of the Rio Grande was forced by exclusionary policies of the US government which drastically limit the number of asylum seekers who can cross a bridge at an official port of entry each day. Those policies instead push desperate migrants into the water or into the dessert away from walls and border patrols in their attempt to enter the US, often with fatal results.

We know Oscar and Valeria’s story because of one emotionally dramatic photograph.   Yet they are just two of the scores of migrants who have continued to die making attempts to cross the US border.  Data from the Missing Migrants Project, which tracks migrant disappearances and deaths worldwide, documents at least 181 deaths along the US-Mexico border so far this year, or almost exactly one per day.  This compares to 212 deaths in all of 2018.  The number of deaths has increased every year since 2014:

Death%2BUS-MexicoBorderThru%2B7-8-2019.J
Source: Missing Migrants Project

Yet instead of steps to reduce migrant deaths, this week brought the news that the US government will retry its case against Scott Warren of No More Deaths, the humanitarian activist charged with aiding migrants in the Arizona desert.  In June, a jury could not reach a verdict when the government prosecuted Warren for providing humanitarian assistance to two migrants he encountered in need of water and medical attention in the border area.  The government will try again to prove its case in a prosecution which critics see as harassment and intimidation of those who would provide humanitarian aid.

This makes it an appropriate time to view the documentary Lamento con Alas (“Lament with Wings”) a short documentary about good Samaritans Lavoyger Durham and Lori Baker who attempt to make a difference during the immigration surge in the summer of 2014.  In parallels to the Scott Warren case, Durham breaks stereotypes as a Texan rancher who sets up water stations that keep immigrants alive even as they illegally cross his land. And Baker, an associate professor of anthropology at Baylor University, exhumes deceased immigrants from unmarked graves and works to return the dead to their families in Latin America. She founded the Reuniting Families Project to establish a system for DNA analysis and identification of these deceased migrants. Durham and Baker both work to bring dignity to migrants who cross the US border in dangerous conditions…. The original score for the documentary was crafted by Carlos Colón, a Salvadoran composer who fled to Guatemala and then the United States as a refugee from El Salvador’s civil war.

Former Chief Justice Aharon Barak explains that punitive home demolitions of Palestinians are “a very, very, very complex issue.” In fact, it is a very, very, very simple issue. Collective punishment is prohibited. | @btselem director in @972mag https://972mag.com/aharon-barak-israeli-democracy-occupation/142124/ …

via aleksey godin

Former Chief Justice Aharon Barak explains that punitive home demolitions of Palestinians are “a very, very, very complex issue.” In fact, it is a very, very, very simple issue. Collective punishment is prohibited. | @btselem director in @972mag https://972mag.com/aharon-barak-israeli-democracy-occupation/142124/ …

Don’t wait for Israeli archives to prove what Palestinians already know

Israeli authorities are deliberately concealing historical documents to undermine evidence of the state’s dark and violent origins. And the world is still falling for it.

Illustrative photo of Palestinian refugees fleeing during the Nakba.

Illustrative photo of Palestinian refugees fleeing during the Nakba.

The village of Safsaf (“willow” in Arabic) appears on page 490 of the newest edition of Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, a seminal book that catalogues 418 Palestinian communities that were destroyed and depopulated during the Nakba. A Palestinian eyewitness account describes the day when Zionist forces conquered the village and rounded up its residents in October 1948:

As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead, they took them to our empty houses and raped them. About seventy of our men were blindfolded and shot to death, one after the other, in front of us. The soldiers took their bodies and threw them on the cement covering of the village’s spring and dumped sand on them.

On Thursday, Haaretz published a widely-shared investigative piece by Hagar Shezaf on how Israeli authorities are systematically concealing archival materials relating to the 1948 war, even after they have been officially disclosed. It begins with an Israeli historian stumbling upon a document four years ago that was written in November 1948 by the Haganah’s former chief of staff. The note, which was first unearthed by New Historian Benny Morris in the 1980s, is also quoted in Khalidi’s book:

Safsaf – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of Safed, girl of 14, 4 men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.

It is strangely consoling to see official Israeli admission of the event. As Shezaf’s excellent article shows, and thanks to the vital work of Akevot – an Israeli organization that works to expand public access to documentation about the conflict held in government and private archives – along with other historians, archive research has made it irrefutably clear that Zionist forces consciously carried out brutal acts of violence against Palestinians to facilitate their expulsion.

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Though this is hardly news, such archives remain valuable in providing what are essentially “confessions” by officials of the inhumane crimes they oversaw – crimes that are denied by Israel and its supporters to this day.

Yet, for many Palestinians, the bewildered reactions to these discoveries can be infuriating. They remind us of how thousands of Palestinian testimonies, and decades of Palestinian-led research, struggle to stir so much as a ripple in mainstream discourse about Israel’s history. A few Israeli documents, however, can swiftly rile up a storm.

The knowledge of this disparity has been a key reason for Israel’s obstinate archive policy: as one official blatantly told Shezaf, authorities deliberately continue to hide these documents in order to “undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the [Palestinian] refugee problem.” And many still fall for it.

Jewish workers demolish homes in Jaffa following the 1948 battle that cleared the city almost all its Palestinian residents, October 6, 1949. (Fritz Cohen/GPO)

Jewish workers demolish homes in Jaffa in 1948 after the majority of the city’s Palestinian residents were either expelled or fled, October 6, 1949. (Fritz Cohen/GPO)

This cruel double standard over who has “permission to narrate” the conflict has been raised before – and, it seems, it must be raised again and again.

The world should not have to constantly catch up to what Palestinians have always known about the Nakba. Many Palestinians reading about Safsaf in Haaretz would have reached for their copies of All That Remains or other collections, correctly assuming they would find the same facts recorded years before. Descendants of Safsaf’s survivors would likely know the harrowing story by heart, having heard it from their grandparents’ own lips. Like all settler-colonial states, Israel fears the ghosts of its dark and violent origins. Palestinians are those living ghosts. Listen to what they have to say.

The post Don’t wait for Israeli archives to prove what Palestinians already know appeared first on +972 Magazine.