Category Archives: Rock on-Peace Out

Ukraine’s Eurovision pick highlights Russian oppression

A Crimean Tatar singer has been chosen to represent Ukraine with a song about Russia’s deadly deportation of the group. Jamala may face challenges if the song “1944” breaks Eurovision’s rules on political content.

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Source: Ukraine’s Eurovision pick highlights Russian oppression

Palestinian teacher announced one of top 10 in the world – PNN

Hanan Al-Hroub, primary class teacher who grew up in Deheishe refugee camp, Bethlehem, has been shortlisted to the top 10 international teachers nominated for the one million dollar 2016 Global Teacher Prize, organised by the Varkey Foundation. Hanan was named amongst nine other teachers from countries all over the world including Kenya, India, Pakistan, USA, Japan, Finland, Australia and the UK. According to the Varkey website, the inspirational teacher was regularly exposed to acts of violence. She went into primary education after her children were left deeply traumatised by a shooting incident they witnessed on their way home from school. Her experiences in meetings and consultations to discuss her children’s behaviour, development and academic performance in the years that followed led Hanan to try to help others who, having grown up in similar circumstances, require special handling at school.

Source: Palestinian teacher announced one of top 10 in the world – PNN

They Mad: Beyonce’s Middle Finger Salute to White America | Dame Magazine

What’s really behind the backlash to Queen Bey’s Super Bowl performance

They’re not just mad at Bey – they’re made at the Black women leading the Black Lives Matter movement.  They’re mad at #SayHerName.  They’re mad at the recent news that Black women activists refuse to endorse a political candidate for the presidency.  They’re mad because we be all up and down these fiber-optic streets clapping back and engaged in wig snatchery when racists come for us.

White anger is rooted in a long, deep history of needing to control the Black female body, mind and output. White America likes its Black women to be downtrodden, preferably subservient, suffering from any of the countless maladies and dysfunctions they create and maintain through racist and economic oppression, and coddling their fragile emotions.

This moment of White anger and down-by-the-riverside tears reveals deep-seated need to control our blackness. To dominate and define everything we say and do to serve their agendas. And Beyoncé brilliantly slayed all of that history and exploitation in “Formation.” She issued a clarion call to celebrate our Black selves in all of our diverse glory, and to connect to the fight for justice, be it via Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the Civil Rights Movement or Black Lives Matter.  The sight of leather, berets and Afros, not to mention Bey displaying her body on top of a police car and drowning it in the video, compels White panic.  Worse yet, she brought the unapologetic politics of Blackness into the Super Bowl, the yearly celebration of white masculinity.

– See more at: http://www.damemagazine.com/2016/02/12/they-mad-beyonces-middle-finger-salute-white-america#sthash.a20OLyAV.dpuf

Source: They Mad: Beyonce’s Middle Finger Salute to White America | Dame Magazine

Indigenous Otomí-Ñätho Communities in Mexico Exercise Their Autonomy to Defend Their Lands

Meanwhile, members of the National Human Rights Commission, who were invited by the comuneros (a Mexican term for members of an agrarian community) to document the assembly, left without warning.This did not stop the indigenous community members from exercising their rights in line with convention 169 of the International Labour Organization, the Mexican Constitution and agrarian legislation.During the assembly, by a show of hands, they unanimously choose the “candidates of the people”.The Ñätho, however, say that they were forced to confront a new assembly convened by the Agrarian Ombudsman without legal grounds on 18 January 2016.The Ñätho worried that the local government and the pro-government Institutional Revolutionary Party would impose another parallel authority instead of the authority which the people already had elected.They therefore decided to make efforts to reinforce their vote.“We are getting organised and visiting all the comuneros so we can win again”, said Abundio Rivera, one of the local leaders.In a statement released on 12 January, the comuneros criticised the town’s former authorities, who had links to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, for handing out 2,000 Mexican pesos to each person to persuade them not to support the chosen “candidates of the people”.

Source: Indigenous Otomí-Ñätho Communities in Mexico Exercise Their Autonomy to Defend Their Lands

Yanis Varoufakis, Edmund Burke and Mario Draghi stroll into a bar

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.” Edmund Burke’s brilliant line applies to today’s Europe perfectly.Here, on this site and across Europe, ‘something’ is brewing, ‘something’ is under construction…

Source: Yanis Varoufakis, Edmund Burke and Mario Draghi stroll into a bar