All posts by nedhamson

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

Donald Trump, Interrupted. He Calls Flint Pastor Who Cut In ‘a Nervous Mess.’ – The New York Times

“Everyone plays their games, it doesn’t bother me,” Mr. Trump said, claiming Pastor Timmons was shaking when she came up to him. He added: “She was so nervous, she was like a nervous mess. I figured something was up.” Some conservatives defended Mr. Trump on Thursday, pointing to a Facebook post in which she wrote that the visit was an opportunity to educate Republican candidate as evidence that she was planning to embarrass him. While that post does not appear on her Facebook page, Pastor Timmons did address the controversy there on Wednesday night. “Had he stuck to what his camp claimed he came to do, we would not have had a problem!” she wrote.

Source: Donald Trump, Interrupted. He Calls Flint Pastor Who Cut In ‘a Nervous Mess.’ – The New York Times

The Push and Pull of Gender for Muslims at the Hajj – The New York Times

“Treat your women well and be kind to them,” Muhammad himself urged in his last sermon, during his final pilgrimage to Mecca. “It is true that you have certain rights with regard to your women, but they also have rights over you.” So, kindness and rights, but also women as something less than men. It can feel patronizing, and diminishing of our full humanity. It is why I started to lose faith after a childhood in an observant family and what I still struggle with, at 38, living a life that is secular but guided by Islamic values. Each day in Mecca provided powerful reminders of a religion that seems to simultaneously embrace women and push them away.

Source: The Push and Pull of Gender for Muslims at the Hajj – The New York Times

Sarkozy comes out of the closet as a climate skeptic – The Local – “What he really supports is eugenics, fewer colored, non-white French and definitely no more Polish immigrants like himself?”

The former president believes the world should be concentrating on the rise in the population and movement of people rather than worrying so much about global warming. “Never has the earth experienced such a demographic shock as it is about to,

Source: Sarkozy comes out of the closet as a climate skeptic – The Local

Hillary, ‘weak’? Not from where I’m standing | Jessica Valenti – “Women are stronger – if you do not believe it guys, try being nine months birthing a new human? Give up your false biases!”

Women’s supposed fragility was used as an argument against giving us the vote. The debate about Clinton’s pneumonia plays into the same old prejudices

Source: Hillary, ‘weak’? Not from where I’m standing | Jessica Valenti

The link between women’s mental and physical fitness to political engagement was so strong, in fact, that Susan B Anthony once said that bicycles had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world”. They not only quite literally got women out of the house and into more comfortable clothes, but they chipped away at the notion that women were physically weak.

Decades later, the notion that women’s bodies are somehow less suited for political life remains. After all, it wasn’t merely boorishness that led Donald Trump to criticize Megyn Kelly by alluding to her period – there’s a longstanding myth about women’s hormones making them unfit to lead. (Comedian Hari Kondabolu has my favorite response to sexists who think a woman’s judgement is impaired once a month: “I’m a man with a penis and testicles, my judgement is impaired every five to seven minutes.”)

It wasn’t a coincidence, either, that when Politico reported on Clinton’s illnessthey described her dizzy spell as “swooning” – a term rarely used to describe men. Even Trump’s comments that Clinton doesn’t have a “presidential look” signal a particular sexist disdain.

The truth is that the campaign trail is brutal, and working all hours through an illness like Clinton’s shows strength, not weakness. That we would see it as anything but stamina reveals a tired double standard. Besides, what’s more important right now than an individual’s health is the health of our nation. Coughs aside, I think we all know whose hands that would be safer in.

So blue. The heartbroken case for Hillary Clinton – Medium – I am for her but for those who doubt – read this, please.

Hillary Clinton will provide some small, inadequate measure of assistance to the growing masses of victims even while she continues to pander to the very forces of their destruction. She’s oblivious to techno-capitalism’s looming dead end, because it contradicts the story of human infallibility, and she’s too cynical to believe that a post-capitalist future is possible. But she won’t (overtly) suppress dissent or work to attack, disrupt and destroy progressive people’s movements or to terrorize and ruin the lives of immigrants (at least, not as aggressively as Trump surely would with a helping hand from ALEC, the NRA, the KKK and legions of confused, scared, heavily-armed white men). That doesn’t give us much breathing room, but it’s something.I won’t belabor the Trump-Hitler comparison here, but read this if you harbor any doubts about the nature of Trump’s personality disorder and intentions. This is a nihilistic man punch drunk on ego and power, hungry for violence, all in for cutthroat competition, incapable of self-reflection, one hand on the nuclear button and the other on Mein Kampf, capable of the unthinkable. What he cannot create he will destroy — such is the nihilist’s endgame.That, in the end, is why I’ll vote for Hillary Clinton — because she isn’t Donald Trump. I will vote for Clinton* and, if she wins, I will not be excited or happy, not even a tiny bit.

Source: So blue. The heartbroken case for Hillary Clinton – Medium

A Holiday in Palestine? An Indian Woman Travels through Guns, Graffiti and the Strange Denial of Stamps – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

We walked through the souk, the market in the old city, and took a turn towards the entry of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Three Israeli soldiers stood at the corner. Overhearing us talking in English, they approached to ask us where we were going. This, because there are two entrances to the Al-Aqsa mosque, one for Muslims, and another for non-Muslims, which sort of translates into one for locals and the other for foreign tourists.We were headed to the Muslim entrance. Assuming we were tourists, they probably wanted to tell us we weren’t allowed entry from this side. As they approached us, AK retorted, “why?” They asked us where we were going. Why are you asking us, she snapped back. Where are you from, they insisted. It’s none of your business. We are trying to help you, they responded. We didn’t ask for your help. We walked away. One of them walked ahead of us and into the mosque. We stopped to look at an Afro-Palestinian neighbourhood. We then walked over to the entrance of the mosque where we were stopped and asked if we were Muslim. We were asked to recite a verse from the Quran. Neither of us could. After a short altercation we returned.As we approached the same corner again, one of the two remaining soldiers called out to us. AK snapped back again. He stopped us and asked where she was from. I’m Palestinian, she answered back. Can I see your ID, he responded. AK has a Blue ID because she resides in Jerusalem. Those living in West Bank and Gaza have a Green ID. She handed over her ID in anger and told him to keep it because she wasn’t going to sit around and be made to wait for hours as they harassed her. She had broken no law and there was simply no need for her to be stopped, she snapped and walk off. I followed her silently, wondering what would happen next. Don’t you need your ID to cross the checkpoint to go to work tomorrow, I asked. Yes I do. She called her cousin who ran a juice shop in the same market and turned around to get her ID back before the soldier disappeared with it. When we returned to the corner he told her she needed to stay there until he was done with her. She asked what his problem was again. So hurt simply because I wouldn’t listen to you? As she carried on, enraged, he snapped back, “Ok you need to shut up now.” At this point she lost all cool that she had left and demanded to see his captain.

Source: A Holiday in Palestine? An Indian Woman Travels through Guns, Graffiti and the Strange Denial of Stamps – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

The Woman Who Wasn’t To Be Believed | Dame Magazine

Hillary Clinton’s aggregate truth rating on PolitiFact is 72% (this includes True, Mostly True, and Half True ratings). In spite of this, her Republican opponent Donald Trump has coined the nickname “Crooked Hillary,” a reflexive attack on her honesty.       And his campaign even launched the website Lying Crooked Hillary this year, which accuses her of, “Spinning lies and weaving a tapestry of deceit that she hopes will cover the truth.” Donald Trump’s aggregate truth rating on PolitiFact is 30%.  Thirty Percent.So how can he get away with calling her a liar?

Source: The Woman Who Wasn’t To Be Believed | Dame Magazine

In the Shadows of men (excerpt)

نادية حرحش

It’s difficult revisiting those memories.

A friend who worked for the organization told me, “Write down what happened and circulate it.” I was active in the Coalition of Women for Peace back then. Sending the message I wrote after that dark, hollow night gave me a sense of liberation. Writing had empowered me.

The image of my mother and cousin rushing into that presentation hall has never left me. It’s like a nightmare that stays with me. I imagined myself the way they saw me, as if in a movie scene where they catch a woman committing prostitution or adultery. Whatever. Any woman is seen as a whore when society insists on perfection.

How the female among us is considered both sacred and inviolable. Heavens lay under her feet. As the holy hadith says, “Paradise waits beneath the feet of the mother.” Yet she herself is the burning coal of…

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Egyptian Aak 2016 – Week 36 ( Sept 5-11)

What’s going on in Egypt? Read on!

Nervana

Top Headlines

  • Egyptian police ‘investigated’ Giulio Regeni days before his murder
  • Egypt names six provincial governors, mostly ex-generals
  • A newly-established militant group published a video of footage from a an attack against a security checkpoint in Menoufiya governorate
  • Court orders release of 5 activists accused of attempting to overthrow the state
  • Egyptian lawmaker Elhamy Agina: Female genital mutilation needed because Egyptian men are sexually weak

 Main Headlines

 Monday 

 Tuesday

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Donald Trump and 9/11: the lies, exaggerations and eye-popping claims | US news | The Guardian

Immediately after the attacks, the lifelong New Yorker spoke with a local news anchor who asked whether, given his property in the financial district, he had learned anything about the devastation. Trump’s mind turned to his buildings.“It was an amazing phone call,” Trump replied. “I mean 40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually before the World Trade Center was the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”Trump later collected a $150,00 grant for 40 Wall Street, from a state recovery program meant to help small businesses after 9/11. In April 2016, he claimed that the funds were “probably a reimbursement for the fact that I allowed people, for many months, to stay in the building, use the building and store things in the building”.Officials who helped with the recovery have disputed Trump’s account to the New York Daily News, and questioned what help the businessman ever provided. But at recent rallies Trump has continued to take credit, saying at one campaign stop: “Everyone who helped clear the rubble, and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit.”

Source: Donald Trump and 9/11: the lies, exaggerations and eye-popping claims | US news | The Guardian