Category Archives: Apartheid

Racism And The Invisibility Of White Privilege. | Rebelle Society

I thought I might share a few things as a white mama of black boys. I actually have three sons — two black and one white. My white son is 29, and my black boys are 14 and 15. Here are some of the privileges I never realized I experienced raising my white son: Not once… … did I ever have to explain to my white son that people might be mean to him, and even hurt or kill him, simply because of his skin color. … did I ever have to tell him to keep his hands out of his pockets while in a store. … did I ever have to go into a store or a school with him to assert myself as his mother so that people would treat him fairly… so they’d think, “Oh, his mom’s white, so he’s okay.” … did I ever have to tell him not to wear the hood up on his hoodie.

Source: Racism And The Invisibility Of White Privilege. | Rebelle Society

David Morris: A Long (and Still Unfinished) Road to Democracy – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

In 1963, only 156 of 15,000 eligible black voters in Selma, Alabama, were registered to vote. Between 1963 and 1965 the federal government filed four lawsuits but the number of black registered voters only increased from 156 to 383 during that time. In 1964 the 24th Amendment prohibited poll taxes in federal elections. At the time, five Southern states still imposed that election requirement. One might accurately say that only in 1965, a century after the Civil War ended did blacks effectively gain the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act sent federal examiners to seven Southern states to help register black voters and required states with a history of voter discrimination to gain pre-approval from the federal government before changing any voting requirements.

Source: David Morris: A Long (and Still Unfinished) Road to Democracy – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

“People are afraid to speak,” says arrested Israeli Jewish activist | The Electronic Intifada

A Jerusalem court eventually ordered Butavia’s and Nawi’s unconditional release, stating that the police had provided no substantiation of the suspicions against them. But Butavia told The Electronic Intifada that the court did order them not to speak to each other for two to three months, as the police had requested, significantly hindering their work. In the video, Butavia says that he cannot discuss details of his interrogation but that torture methods were used against him and others: “Things with which you don’t imagine you’ll have to cope. It appeared that for them, the goal justified the means.” Butavia refers to experiencing “psychological warfare” as well as physical violence and allegations of pedophilia. He believes the attack on him and Nawi has succeeded in silencing others.

Source: “People are afraid to speak,” says arrested Israeli Jewish activist | The Electronic Intifada

Donald Trump Warns of ‘Riots’ if Party Blocks Him at Convention – First Draft. Political News, Now. – The New York Times

Is he yelling “fire” in a crowded theater or just paraphrasing his heroes Stalin, Hitler and Il Duce?

“I think we’ll win before getting to the convention, but I can tell you, if we didn’t and if we’re 20 votes short or if we’re 100 short and we’re at 1,100 and somebody else is at 500 or 400, because we’re way ahead of everybody, I don’t think you can say that we don’t get it automatically,” Mr. Trump said. “I think it would be — I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous, many, many millions of people.” He added:” If you disenfranchise those people and you say, well I’m sorry but you’re 100 votes short, even though the next one is 500 votes short, I think you would have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen, I really do. I believe that. I wouldn’t lead it but I think bad things would happen.”

Source: Donald Trump Warns of ‘Riots’ if Party Blocks Him at Convention – First Draft. Political News, Now. – The New York Times

AfD party compares itself to Holocaust victims – The Local German Far-Right learning from American Far Right in Accusing those who oppose them as being racists!?!

After media reported that the Worker’s Welfare Institution (AWO) said it would not hire members of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) or similar groups, one branch of the hard right party took to Facebook to respond. AWO is a non-statutory welfare organization that assists, in particular, socially disadvantaged people with workers’ rights issues. AWO said that AfD’s ideas were not compatible with its own principles, according Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. According to the Rheinische Post, the Krefeld branch of the AfD in North-Rhine Westphalia wrote in a post that soon members of the party would have to wear “blue stars” – a reference to the yellow star of David that Jewish people were forced to wear to identify themselves under Nazi Germany. “And there continue to be more bans on AFD members working. Are you excited to already be wearing the blue star? We know: We will have to wear the star as a mark of honour! To the bitter end!”

Source: AfD party compares itself to Holocaust victims – The Local

Woman arrested in France for T-shirt critical of Israel | The Electronic Intifada

The feminist collective 8 Mars Pour TouTEs denounced the arrest and pledged support for the activist and for the BDS movement. The arrest was evidence of the “criminalization of political struggles,” the group said, vowing to mount strong solidarity in response to “the police state and political and racist repression.” The left-wing grouping Ensemble has condemned the arrest, describing it as a consequence of the “security climate” in France. The Palestine solidarity group BDS France noted that the day after the arrest, Prime Minister Manuel Valls told a dinner hosted by the Israel lobby group CRIF that “anti-Zionism is nothing more than a synonym for anti-Semitism and the hatred of Israel.” “Today, politicians who support the Israeli apartheid regime are out of arguments,” BDS France said in a statement. “They conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and terrorism, and take all the Jews of the world hostage, stubbornly insisting that they become accomplices of the war crimes and apartheid of a state which is foreign to them,” BDS France added. The campaign group said that with the growing global success of BDS, “a nonviolent, anti-racist citizen movement for the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people,” Israel and its allies in the French government had no recourse but to try to smear it as anti-Semitic. Court rulings and government decrees have outlawed calls to boycott Israeli goods, prompting defiance from French civil society. Undeterred BDS France is also vowing not to fold under government repression.

Source: Woman arrested in France for T-shirt critical of Israel | The Electronic Intifada

A Texas Candidate Pushes the Boundary of the Far Right – The New York Times

Ms. Bruner’s anti-Obama, anti-Islam, anti-evolution and anti-gay Facebook posts have generated national headlines and turned an obscure school board election into a glimpse of the outer limits of Texas politics. In a part of the state dominated by conservative Christians and Tea Party activists, Ms. Bruner’s candidacy has posed a question no one can answer with any certainty — how far to the fringe is too far for Texas Republicans? Ms. Bruner was a relative political newcomer when she started her campaign to represent a 31-county section of northern East Texas on the 15-member board that sets curriculum standards, reviews and adopts textbooks, and establishes graduation requirements in Texas public schools. Because of the board’s clout in selecting textbooks for all of the state’s schools, it can influence the content of textbooks produced nationwide. Here in Ms. Bruner’s hometown, Mineola, and elsewhere in intensely conservative East Texas, her views fit a widely accepted anti-Obama and conspiracy friendly antigovernment mind-set. Inside Kitchens Hardware and Deli, the combination hardware store and diner where Mr. Clark was eating, a sign on a shelf read, “Hillary for Prison 2016.” A woman in a nearby store who declined to give her name said she would not hold Ms. Bruner’s Facebook posts against her, and spoke at length about her belief that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 was a government-staged hoax.

Source: A Texas Candidate Pushes the Boundary of the Far Right – The New York Times

Knesset bill to deport family members of Palestinian assailants gains massive support – {Collective punishment was popular with Germans in countries they invaded from 1939-1945 and has been popular in Israel for years.}

PNN/Jerusalem A bill was formally submitted to the Israeli Knesset on Wednesday by Israeli

Source: Knesset bill to deport family members of Palestinian assailants gains massive support

Settlers spray death threats over home walls, southern Bethlehem

PNN/ Bethlehem/ A group of Israeli settlers on Thursday have sprayed hate slogans and death threats on a Palestinian family home in Shushahla village south of Bethlehem, central West Bank. Local sources said that the settlers from Danial illegal settlement made a hole in the razor wire between the settlement and the village, broke in, and

Source: Settlers spray death threats over home walls, southern Bethlehem