All posts by nedhamson

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

The Un-American Politics of Rejecting Refugees | GOOD

This obstructionism is pointless. The refugees are coming to America—as they should. Seven states to date (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington) have vowed to cooperate with resettlement plans. And once those refugees are in the United States, they have the ability to freely travel within the nation and to relocate wherever they may so choose. That means that these bans, even if they were legal, would do nothing whatsoever to stop potentially bad-actor refugees (who, given our vetting procedures, are unlikely to get into the nation in the first place).These refugee bans make no sense. They fail to recognize how dissimilar the U.S. situation is from Europe’s ordeal. They fail to recognize American legal realities. But more than any of that, as numerous politicians have pointed out, they betray fundamental American values of inclusivity and refuge. They shirk our moral responsibility to aid those displaced by a conflict that has killed 250,000, destroyed a nation, and for which we are at least partially responsible by merit of our chronically misguided and shortsighted Middle Eastern politics. (Americans often balk at that notion, but the sooner we own our culpability, the better it will be for us and for the world, now and in the view of history.) And, coming as they do alongside calls for tighter monitoring of Islamic communities in the States and implicit calls for religious or ethnic tests on migrants, they reek of a deep Islamophobia. Given that the vast majority of the Paris attackers were Europeans, and given the acknowledged presence of a massive homegrown terrorist front in Europe (consisting of white radicals and Muslim extremists), it’s bizarre that we’ve chosen to restrict entrance to Syrian refugees and not to Belgian or French citizens.

Source: The Un-American Politics of Rejecting Refugees | GOOD

www.german-foreign-policy.com German media pushing WWIII

The current front of Germany’s major national media, orchestrating domestic public opinion and publicistically habituating the population to a “World War” has been broken by a renowned business magazine. Gabor Steingart, Chief Editor of the German Handelsblatt warns, “the West shares the blame for the hostile climate between the cultures.” “Of the 1.3 million lives that the wars from Afghanistan to Syria have cost, the crusade against Iraq, waged under false pretenses – and therefore in violation of international law – alone, accounts so far for 800,000 dead,” explains Steingart. “The majority of these victims were peaceful Muslims – not terrorists.” “The automatism of severity and mercilessness, the premeditated incomprehension of one’s counterpart, the fiery speeches for the respective populations at home, the rapid take-off of bomber squadrons” have “brought us to where we are today.” “This is not how you stop terrorism; this is how you fan its flames. This is not how you obtain peace; this is how you spawn suicide bombers.” In the future, rather than banking on “combat or capitulation,” we should promote “order, respect, and moderation.” “There are alternatives to military escalation.”[13] Among the leading personalities of the German mainstream media, Steingart stands alone with his warning.

Source: www.german-foreign-policy.com

Protest march of women workers for higher wages, and against male domination in trade union politics in tea plantations at Munnar in southern Indian state of Kerala. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

IPS Inter Press Service posted a photo:

Protest march of women workers for higher wages, and against male domination in trade union politics in tea plantations at Munnar in southern Indian state of Kerala.  Credit:  K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

Protest march of women workers for higher wages, and against male domination in trade union politics in tea plantations at Munnar in southern Indian state of Kerala. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

Larissa Pham: The Architecture of Racism at Yale University – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

This tension is not new. It is a product of the systemic racism built into the institution, as ubiquitous as the architecture that characterizes the place in our shared consciousness. “Everyone who enters Yale is reminded that they’re in an environment that is a product of centuries of classism and racism,” Cynthia Hua, who graduated earlier this year, told me. “You can see it in the buildings. They’re symbols of the way society has been stratified—it’s even in their names.” (One of Yale’s residential colleges is named for the nineteenth-century politician John C. Calhoun, who advocated secession and spoke of slavery as a force for good.) And the problem goes beyond architecture—architecture just happens to be its most potent symbol.This breed of racism isn’t showy or overtly violent, which makes it hard to define, like a kind of low-grade radiation that kills slowly. It’s being the only woman of color in a seminar room, or feeling physically unsafe on campus, or having to endure stereotypical assumptions about one’s race in even the most innocuous of situations. Zack Graham, a black student who graduated in 2013, gave me this anecdote: “I showed up for office hours and the TA asked which sport I played—as though the notion that I was a regular student accepted through regular channels was an impossibility.”

Source: Larissa Pham: The Architecture of Racism at Yale University – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics