Category Archives: Viva!

Thousands of Google employees call for company to cancel Pentagon work

via aleksey godin

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Google’s helping the Pentagon to build AI for drones, and a vocal group of employees have asked the company to drop the project.

Israel Bars Entry of Dublin’s Mayor Over BDS Ties

No free speech allowed?

Jerusalem/PNN/

Israel government barred Dublin Lord Mayor Mícheál Mac Donncha on Tuesday from entering Israel because of he supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions on Israel movement.

According Haaretz  news paper the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry, in charge of fighting delegitimation of Israel, said the reason for the decision was was Donncha’s ties with the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which promotes boycotts of Israeli companies and international companies who work in Israel.

According to the ministry, the mayor promoted the IPSC’s ideas through the city council and publicly expressed support for them.

Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan said that “the policy I set is clear: He who works consistently to boycott Israel will not enter here.”

In January, Israel summoned the Irish ambassador in Israel for clarification and to express dissatisfaction in light of a proposed bill in Ireland’s national parliament calling for a boycott of Israeli settlements.

For more news on this issue clik her

TV host who said he would sexually assault Parkland’s David Hogg resigns

folks – this type of talking head is hard to believe even existed but… this can even happen? sad beyond words

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Jamie Allman, who said he would use a ‘hot poker’ to attack David Hogg, is also taken off radio after advertisers exit shows

A conservative commentator who sent a tweet saying he would use “a hot poker” to sexually assault an outspoken 17-year-old survivor of the Florida high school shooting has resigned from a St Louis TV station and been taken off the radio after several advertisers withdrew from his shows.

KDNL-TV accepted Jamie Allman’s resignation and canceled The Allman Report, according to a brief statement from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which operates the TV station. Before the show’s launch in January 2015, KDNL-TV touted it as a nontraditional newscast with a conservative spin.

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The U.S. Government Only Believes Some Survivors

Last week Donald Trump expelled a rage-fueled series of tweets aimed at DACA, democrats, and the “caravan” of immigrants making their way to the southern U.S. border. Embedded in his temper tantrum were some grossly misinformed ideas about the criminality of the marchers and the nature of the DACA program. 

While no one is shocked at the blaring display of ignorance, this Trump-spun narrative is damaging to human rights movements everywhere. On behalf of the 400 women marching north, we have to straighten the story.

The “caravan” is a peaceful movement comprising roughly 1,000 Central American immigrants – mostly women and children – with hopes of openly applying for asylum in the U.S. The march was organized by an activist group called Pueblos Sin Fronteras. Zero evidence exists that Central American gangs and criminal groups are exploiting U.S. asylum procedures to their advantage.

A frequently dismissed player in the spike of asylum applications is the growing rate of gender-based domestic violence in Central America’s “northern triangle,” which includes El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. In a UN report  done last year, Latin American was found to be the world’s most violent region for women, with officials in northern triangle countries equating femicide and assault rates to epidemics.  In an attempt to escape, women make incredibly risky journeys to the U.S.-Mexican border where they have to prove the credibility of their trauma in order to be granted asylum. From there, asylum-seekers are indefinitely held in detention centers while awaiting their verdict, forcibly suspended in a traumatic purgatory very often without their children.

Passing a “credible fear” interview is the most critical, and potentially most difficult step to being granted asylum. In these interviews the subject is first asked a series of general questions, which quickly segue into inquiries about the source of their fear. If the subject answers “no” to whether or not their prior circumstances involved persecution for religion, ethnicity, political identity or nationality, they are not likely to pass. In other words, if a woman’s trauma does not fit succinctly into said boxes then she is set up to fail.

The Department of Homeland Security does not treat these women like holistic human beings with intersectional experiences. In many cases women are fleeing an amalgam of the listed options, or something excluded from the questionnaire (like sexual or domestic violence). In other cases women worry that fully disclosing their experiences will further harm them due to the volume of death threats they’ve received in their lives. The binary nature of credible fear tests poses an immense challenge to those whose persecution exists in a grey area.

Being denied entry into the U.S. can be a death sentence for many asylum-seeking women. They often feel forced to take enormous risks to get into the U.S. through other means. Several women have reported being sexually propositioned by U.S. border agents they encounter while crossing, or kidnapped by coyotes looking to take advantage of vulnerable migrants. Others return home to the violence they were trying to escape.

For border patrol agents, it all boils down to deeming one woman’s suffering believable and another one’s false. Contrary to Trump’s ideas, most people don’t actually want to leave their home.

While much of the country is caught up in the momentum of the movement, survivors who break their silence are praised and honored. And while we must recognize survivors who share their story, we must also honor those kept silent by enormous force – the President, immigration officials, and the American judicial system.  At the root of is the importance of believing a woman’s truth even amidst massive cultural skepticism. In the case of thousands of women attempting to find safety in America, their truths are ignored by our government institutions.. Our values are moot if not applied to all women.

Image credit: John Moore/Getty Images

Shy and Sweet #haiku #alzheimers

Thanks – someone I am close to is now in this shy and sweet spot as she approaches her next journey.

penned in moon dust

 shy once more

sweet are the years’  memories

what’s his name?

*

one red one black

yesterday’s thoughts blow by

whose shoes are those?

Sharing this set with Ronovan Writes the theme this week being Shy and Sweet.

Alzheimers is a tough disease that robs the present. Walk on yesterday’s path with these folks and try to find the daisies still left to enjoy.

photography © moondust designs

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Russia and the West Repeating Usual Mistakes of Dictatorships and Democracies about Each Other

via aleksey godin

Paul Goble
            Staunton, April 9 – Russia and the West are repeating the mistakes dictatorships and democracies make about each other, with the former viewing the latter’s slowness in responding as an indication of weakness rather than deliberation and the latter viewing the bold aggressiveness of the former as evidence of a strength the dictators do not have.
            In a commentary for Radio Svoboda, Kyiv commentator Vitaly Portnikov focuses on the Russian side of this equation, on the ways in which Moscow has been misreading the West and operating on the assumption that bold aggressiveness will be sufficient to win out, something that won’t work when the West reads Russia right (svoboda.org/a/29153823.html).
            “The strength of Russia is not in the powerlessness but in the inaction of the West,” he argues, and “the chief error of Vladimir Putin is to view inertness as weakness.” When the Western democracies did not take serious action against his aggression in Ukraine, Putin concluded that they were weak and that he could move elsewhere. 
            But that notion and the related one that Russia defeated the West in Ukraine “exists only in the fantasies of Putin and many of his fellow citizens.” For the West, “the Russian-Ukrainian conflict” was initially something far away and even inexplicable, and thus it acted as it did. But “the Russian president believed that the West is powerless, and he moved into Syria.
            There Putin repeated his mistake of thinking that he was fighting a war with the Americans, Portnikov argues.  In fact, Washington wanted to bring stability to that country and the region and didn’t view the Asad regime as being able to make a contribution to that goal, rather, just the reverse.
            Thus, Moscow and Washington have been fighting for different goals rather than with each other as Putin imagines.  But because Putin read the situation the way he has, the Kremlin leader felt that he could advance in yet another way against the West and hence the poisoning in Salisbury.
            But contrary to his expectations and assumptions, “the West began to respond in a serious way. Without any particular desire or delight and each time stopping and seeking agreement, but to respond.” And that has created a new and uncomfortable situation for Putin: how can he respond when the response involves “not declarations and telephone calls” but “real action?”
            The Kremlin leader had no real response to Trump’s airstrikes in Syria or even to the destruction of a Russian plane by Turkey; “and if the Americans again decide to bomb Asad, there will not be any answer. And in this is the main problem of the Kremlin,” according to Postnikov.
            Moscow’s ability to respond in “mirror-like” fashion to the West is something that exists “only in the Kremlin’s imagination because in the real world and not that which is shown on television, the US and Great Britain are at the center of the globalized world and Russia is on its periphery.”
            The Russian side can respond to sanctions only by taking actions that further weaken it. It can close a US consulate in St. Petersburg after the US closes the Russian one in Seattle but the fact is that “citizens of Russia are the ones who need both these consulates” more than does the United States.
And Moscow can impose sanctions on Western businessmen and politicians, but the situation they are in is not the same as that of Russian businessmen on whom the West has imposed sanctions: the Russians keep their money and property in the West and many want to live there. Few Westerners have villas in Russia or want to live in that country.
As long as the West doesn’t take serious steps, Putin can imagine he is winning by responding; but when the West does decide to do so despite all of Putin’s boldness and aggressiveness, the Kremlin leader’s weakness and lack of choices becomes increasingly obvious to all.

The untold story of Jewish anti-Zionists in Israel

For nearly as long as Palestinians have resisted their displacement, small groups of Jews have joined them. Ran Greenstein’s ‘Zionism and Its Discontents’ brings to life the complex, often contradictory story of those Israelis who saw Palestinian and Jewish liberation as one and the same. 

Israeli soldiers hold down an Israeli activist during a demonstration in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. (photo: Activestills)

Israeli soldiers hold down an Israeli activist during a demonstration in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. (photo: Activestills)

Zionism and Its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine (Pluto Press, 2014)

Solidarity with Palestinians facing eviction, expulsion and home demolitions has been a cornerstone of radical left-wing Israeli activism over the past decade. The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions raised international awareness of Israel’s ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians. Anarchists Against the Wall faced down Israeli military bulldozers. The Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement brought thousands of Israelis to East Jerusalem for weekly protests against evictions. Left-wing Israeli and international activists from various groups can be found alongside Palestinians facing forced displacement and home demolitions in the Negev, the Jordan Valley, and the South Hebron Hills.

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That activism has a history. The destruction of entire villages and the removal of Palestinians from their land was part of the practice of Zionism long before Israel’s founding. And for nearly as long as Palestinians have resisted their displacement, small groups of Jews have joined them.

The urgency of present political demands, however, often buries the history of past struggles. And without historical consciousness, today’s activists risk repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. Ran Greenstein’s Zionism and Its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine remedies this amnesia, providing a useable past for activists and scholars fighting for peace and justice between the river and the sea.

While the long history of resistance to Zionism is the subject of Greenstein’s book, Zionism and Its Discontents is not a history of events but a history of thought in action — a chronicle of the internal debates, shifting ideological positions, political aspirations, failures, and successes of four different movements from before Israel’s establishment to the present day. Greenstein deftly parses the sometimes arcane theoretical disputes of anti-colonial and left-wing groups as they attempted to articulate a politics of resistance to Zionism across the tumultuous twentieth century.

Martin Buber and Rabbi Binyamin, founders of the bi-national Brit Shalim movement, seen in Palestine. (Central Zionist Archives)

Martin Buber and Rabbi Binyamin, founders of the bi-national Brit Shalom movement, seen in Palestine. (Central Zionist Archives)

Greenstein begins with Brit Shalom, perhaps the best-known Jewish bi-nationalist movement during the British Mandate, which counted Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Henrietta Szold, and Hannah Arendt among its members and supporters. Greenstein shows that the movement lacked not for good intentions but rather clear-headedness. Many of the early Jewish bi-nationalists, often themselves officials in Zionist settlement organizations, failed to see how one hand’s work undid the other’s. The violence and displacement inherent to expanding Jewish colonial settlement undermined and outright negated calls for a peaceful federation of Arabs and Jews.

At roughly the same time, the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP) attempted to reconcile its mostly Jewish membership (at least in the early days) with support for an Arab peasants’ revolt against both large Arab landowners and the British colonial authorities. The PCP’s Jewish members remained within Zionist institutions like the Histradrut, the national trade union, while coming paradoxically close to advocating for an armed Arab uprising against evictions of Arab tenants by and land-sales to Zionist settlement organizations.

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The PCP’s policies, however, were often not of their own choosing, subject to the shifting dictates of the Communist International (Comintern), such as Arabization: transforming the party into a majority Arab party and replacing the Jewish leaders with Arabs. What was controversial, Greenstein writes, was not the process of Arabization itself but the “underlying rationale”: such changes implied “that the Arab masses were inexorably moving towards the revolution, regardless of their current leadership and its direction, and that Jews were second-class partners regardless of their personal record.”

Arab rebels seen during 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine against the British. (hanini.org/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Arab rebels seen during 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine against the British. (hanini.org/CC BY-SA 3.0)

While the Arabization debate within the PCP took place prior to Israel’s establishment, the larger question remains part of contemporary left-wing discourse in Israel/Palestine: Who should lead the struggle against the occupation? Should Jews, as the privileged class in Israel/Palestine, always follow the lead of Palestinians, or does that relegate them to “second-class partners?” How should anti-Zionist Jews relate to Zionist state and para-state institutions, like the Jewish National Fund? What forms should solidarity with Zionism’s victims take? Zionism and Its Discontents offers no easy answers, yet activists today will find a small measure of comfort in knowing that they are far from the first generation to grapple with these questions.

During and after the pre-state period, bi-nationalists and communists alike also debated the relationship between Zionism and colonialism. Was Zionism its own form of colonialism or merely a reactionary nationalism allied with imperial forces? Greenstein not only traces how the various movements’ answers changed over time as the political situation — and the tangible relationship between Zionism and European imperialism — shifted. He makes an important point about what distinguishes Zionism from other forms of colonialism: historically, Zionists have not sought to subjugate the native Palestinian population as a racialized subclass (in contrast, say, to South Africa), but to excise the Palestinians entirely from the body politic. The goal was the creation of a Jews-only nation-state.

Zionism’s eliminationist tendency remains part of both Israeli political discourse and state policy to this day. It is expressed in the demolition of Palestinian homes and entire villages. It can be seen in policies to “Judaize” areas with large Arab populations within Israel, like East Jerusalem, the Negev and the Galilee. It is on full display in the direct and indirect removal of Palestinians from Area C of the West Bank so that if Israel ever officially annexes the West Bank, it will be able to claim maximum territory with minimum Palestinians. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and others have proposed transferring large Palestinian cities within Israel, like Umm al-Fahm, into a future Palestinian state. Members of Naftali Bennett’s far-right Jewish Home party openly speak of the “voluntary transfer” of Palestinians out of Palestine.

A Jewish right-wing activist seen walking on a road near where a Jewish outpost was established in the controversial E1 area of the West Bank. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

A Jewish right-wing activist seen walking on a road near where a Jewish outpost was established in Area C of the West Bank. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Since the Oslo Accords, though, Israeli elites’ approach to the presence of Palestinians in territory under Israeli control has become somewhat contradictory. While centrists and the center-left still speak about the need for “separation” and “a divorce” from the Palestinians, the one-state reality, simultaneously temporary and indefinite, provides a cheap, exploitable labor source — Palestinians from the occupied territories. Endless occupation has transformed Israelis into inadvertent colonialists of the more conventional variety.

One of Greenstein’s most valuable insights relates to the failure of Jewish bi-nationalist movements to find Arab partners. The Arabs, Greenstein argues, recognized what the Jewish bi-nationalists could not: that the mainstream Zionist movement had the power to determine the shape of Jewish politics in Israel/Palestine, and that it had no intention of peacefully co-existing. The Palestinian leadership therefore met Zionist eliminationism with rejectionism — the refusal to recognize Jewish political rights out of fear that doing so would lead to Jewish domination of the Arab population.

Though far from inevitable, the conflict in Israel/Palestine has, as a result, been one of two opposed, irreconcilable nationalisms. Even today, over 50 years after Israel first occupied the West Bank, the Palestinian national movement, at least within historic Palestine, remains committed to a nationalist struggle with the goal of establishing an independent, Palestinian state. The sad irony is that Israel, having achieved the Zionist goal of a Jewish state and more, is now committed to making sure that never happens.

Israeli border policemen arrest an Israeli protester during a protest marking ten years for the struggle against the Wall in the West Bank village Bil'in, February 27, 2015. Yotam Ronen / Activestills.org

Israeli border policemen arrest an Israeli protester during a protest marking ten years for the struggle against the Wall in the West Bank village Bil’in, February 27, 2015. Yotam Ronen / Activestills.org

The closest Israeli and Palestinian movements came to serious bi-national cooperation was what Greenstein calls the “incipient dialogue” between the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a militant, Marxist organization within the Palestinian national movement, and Matzpen, the socialist, anti-Zionist movement. The DFLP and Matzpen’s communication, however, was cut-short by state repression and the outbreak of civil war in Jordan in 1970, but those were not their only obstacles. Among the points of contention between the two movements was the right to Jewish national self-determination within historic Palestine. In a one-state solution, which would be a majority Arab country, would Jews have collective rights — to cultural autonomy, to the Hebrew language — or only rights as individuals within the framework of a democratic Arab state?

Today, as illusions about the two-state solution fade away, Israelis and Palestinians have begun to think together, again, about what sharing the land of Israel/Palestine might look like in practice. However, one-state and federation initiatives remain small, lacking any real influence or public support. The questions that previous movements raised — from the implications of PCP’s Arabization debate to national self-determination for both Jews and Arabs within Israel/Palestine — remain unanswered.

And yet, Jews and Arabs, even without a unifying platform or a coherent strategy, continue to join together on the frontlines of Israel’s efforts to remove Palestinians from their land — in the Negev, the Jordan Valley, Jerusalem, and the South Hebron Hills. The bi-nationalists failed, in part, because they could imagine a shared society, but could not commit themselves to a shared struggle. Perhaps contemporary anti-occupation activists, through committed, steadfast, shared struggle, will lay the groundwork for a future shared society.

Trump administration issues rule further watering down Obamacare

As it becomes clearer that this leads to unnecessary deaths, what will the haters have to say and what will the friends and relatives of the dead say? WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration took additional steps to weaken Obamacare on Monday, allowing U.S. states to relax the rules on what insurers must cover and giving states more power to regulate their individual insurance markets.

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