Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation

Capitalism can neither be reduced to the “predatory practices of Wall Street banks” nor is it something which “intersects” with race, gender, and sexual oppression. Capitalism is a system based on a gendered and racialized division of labor, resources, and suffering. Violence and deprivation, premature death, and rape, are structural aspects of an economic system which requires that some work and some do not, some receive care and some do not, some survive, and some die. To say that poor people of color, queers, or immigrants are not interested or not profoundly impacted by the economy, and instead interested only in reaffirming their identities within existing hierarchies of power, is to work within a rigged zero-sum game for the liberation of a particular oppressed identity at the expense of all the others. In the US in particular, the celebration of cultural diversity, the recognition of cultural difference, the applauding of women and queers entering the workplace, and the relative decline of overtly racist or sexist beliefs among younger generations, has not improved but instead masked a dramatic deterioration of the material circumstances of racialized populations.

Massive accumulation through dispossession of native lands; racialized enslavement, murder, and incarceration; constant, intimate, and intensive exploitation of women’s unpaid labor, both in the home and as indentured domestic work, and always violently stratified according to race — all of these form the naturalized and invisibilized underbelly of capital’s waged exploitation of workers. The cumulative economic impact of centuries of enslavement, genocide, colonialism, patriarchy, and racial segregation is not simply peripheral but integral and fundamental to the nature of the global capitalist economy.

The US economy reproduces racial, gender, and sexual inequality at every level of American society–in housing, healthcare, food sovereignty, education, policing, and prison. And also endlessly recreated in these very same sites are the categories “man/woman,” “normal/abnormal,” “able/disabled,” “legitimate/illegitimate,” “citizen/‘illegal,’” and a series of stigmatized populations who always interfere with the smooth functioning of the national economy. The natural, “harmonious” relationship between citizens, patriots, taxpayers, owners, workers, rich, and poor, are disrupted by “illegals,” welfare queens, faggots, freaks, careless promiscuous teens, and so on. The category of “race” is materially recreated and endlessly renewed through these institutions which organize the lives of the undocumented, the imprisoned, the residents of aging ghettos which increasingly function as open-air prisons.

Speaking of capitalism as though it were somehow separable from racist exploitation, gendered violence, and the gamut of complex oppressions facing us in this world, confines antiracist and antipatriarchal struggle to the sphere of culture, consciousness, and individual privilege. The current dominant form of anti-oppression politics in fact diminishes the extent to which racialized and gendered inequalities are deepening across society despite the generalization of policies promoting linguistic, cultural, gender, and sexual inclusivity. Without attacking the material infrastructure which agglomerates power in the hands of some (a process whose end result is now called “privilege”), the equalization of “privilege” and the abolition of these identity-based oppressions in class society is a liberal fantasy.

III. The Limits of Contemporary Anti-Oppression Theory and Practice

a. Identity is not Solidarity

Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity categories with solidarity and reinforcing stereotypes about the political homogeneity and helplessness of “communities of color.” The category of “communities of color” is itself a recently invented identity category which obscures the central role that antiblack racism plays in maintaining an American racial order and conceals emerging forms of nonwhite interracial conflict. What living in a “post-racial era” really means is that race is increasingly represented in government, media, and education as “culture” while the nation as a whole has returned to levels of racial inequality, residential and educational segregation, and violence unseen since the last “post-racial” moment in American history – the mid-60s legal repeal of the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

Understanding racism as primarily a matter of individual racial privilege, and the symbolic affirmation of marginalized cultural identities as the solution to this basic lack of privilege, is the dominant and largely unquestioned form of anti-oppression politics in the US today. According to this politics, whiteness simply becomes one more “culture,” and white supremacy a psychological attitude, instead of a structural position of dominance reinforced through institutions, civilian and police violence, access to resources, and the economy.

Demographic categories are not coherent, homogeneous “communities” or “cultures” which can be represented by individuals. Identity categories do not indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not solidarity. Gender, sexual, and economic domination within racial identity categories have typically been described through an additive concept, intersectionality, which continues to assume that political agreement is automatically generated through the proliferation of existing demographic categories. Representing significant political differences as differences in privilege or culture places politics beyond critique, debate, and discussion.

For too long individual racial privilege has been taken to be the problem, and state, corporate, or nonprofit managed racial and ethnic “cultural diversity” within existing hierarchies of power imagined to be the solution. It is a well-worn activist formula to point out that “representatives” of different identity categories must be placed “front and center” in struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. But this is meaningless without also specifying the content of their politics. The US Army is simultaneously one of the most racially integrated and oppressive institutions in American society. “Diversity” alone is a meaningless political ideal which reifies culture, defines agency as inclusion within oppressive systems, and equates identity categories with political beliefs.

Time and again politicians of color have betrayed the very groups they claim to represent while being held up as proof that America is indeed a “colorblind” or “post-racial” society. Wealthy queers support initiatives which lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then offload reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers who are predominantly women of color.

But more pertinent for our argument is the phenomenon of anti-oppression activists – who do advance a structural analysis of oppression and yet consistently align themselves with a praxis that reduces the history of violent and radically unsafe antislavery, anticolonial, antipatriarchal, antihomophobic, and anticiscentric freedom struggles to struggles over individual privilege and state recognition of cultural difference. Even when these activists invoke a history of militant resistance and sacrifice, they consistently fall back upon strategies of petitioning the powerful to renounce their privilege or “allow” marginalized populations to lead resistance struggles.

For too long there has been no alternative to this politics of privilege and cultural recognition, and so rejecting this liberal political framework has become synonymous with a refusal to seriously address racism, sexism, and homophobia in general. Even and especially when people of color, women, and queers imagine and execute alternatives to this liberal politics of cultural inclusion, they are persistently attacked as white, male, and privileged by the cohort that maintains and perpetuates the dominant praxis.

Some of Occupy Oakland’s “White Anarchist Outside Agitators”


http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com ... the-state/

[American Dream]

1969, the Free Breakfast for School Children Program
was initiated at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland by the Black Panther Party.
The Panthers would cook and serve food to the poor inner city youth of the area.

[American Dream]

Human beings can solve world hunger, climate change, pollution, obesity and disease with a simple yet profound shift in human consciousness, a shift from separateness and individuality to one which recognizes the interconnectedness of all beings. Most people do not want to think about it, but there is strong, undeniable scientific evidence that animals are sentient beings. Non-humans demonstrate sophisticated problem solving abilities, lead rich social lives and are capable of a wide range of emotions, including the ability to feel physical pain and mental anguish. In short, humans and non-humans are much more alike than previously conceived. Such as the artificial boundaries previously established between black and white, man and woman, there are no boundaries between humans and non-humans. The concept of "us" and "them" is purely a human construct. We are all sentient beings and are all equally invaluable to the future of life on this planet. All animals deserve respect and the right to live free of fear and suffering, and not just the human ones.

http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2012/08/a ... oster.html

[American Dream]

http://www.kenyonreview.org/2013/02/our-sea-of-plastic/

“Our Sea of Plastic”

Craig Santos Perez
February 1, 2013


Tongan writer Epeli Hauʻofa once wrote: “the sea is our pathway to each other and to everyone else, the sea is our endless saga, the sea is our most powerful metaphor, the ocean is in us” (“The Ocean in Us” 1997).


In the North Pacific Ocean, currents gather marine debris from the Western coast of North America to the eastern coast of Asia. Wind and surface currents trap the floating waste towards the center of the gyre. Turning. And turning as it widens.


One estimate maps the size of this “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” (or “Pacific Trash Vortex”) as twice the area of the continental US. An apt comparison considering that much of this trash comes from what we call out here in the islands, the “mainland(fill)”.


As plastic floats, the sun breaks it down. Down into smaller and smaller pieces, which will take centuries to fully decompose. These particulates remain suspended on the surface, or right below the surface, of the ocean. Oceania is vast, Oceania is plastic soup.


The Mōlī, or laysan albatross, live most their lives flying over the sea, and only nest on land when it is time breed and raise their young. The Mōlī nest on the northwestern Hawaiian island of Pihemanu, or “Midway Atoll”. They are such expert navigators of the air above the ocean, that they can sleep while flying. Some people call them the “true nomad of the ocean”.


When they hunt, sometimes a piece of plastic is tangled in their food, and sometimes they mistake the plastic for food. Adult birds feed their chicks the plastic. The birds swallow and feel full. Their food and water intake reduce, causing dehydration and starvation. Sometimes, the plastic tears their digestive tracts.


Pihemanu, an “unincorporated territory” of the United States, has been shaped by the imperial forces of global capitalism, militarism, and colonialism. The US annexed the circular atoll in the 19th century, and turned it into a military base in the 20th century. Pihemanu means “loud din of birds”, and it is managed by the state of Hawaiʻi, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and NOAA. It is a part of the Papahānaumoku Marine National Monument.


If you take a picture of this post-island paradise, as others have, you will capture birds strewn across the landscape: dead. Their bodies decomposing. Their bodies filled with plastic. Plastic will outlast bird bones.


Since the “Battle of Midway”, more than a billion tons of plastic have been produced, consumed, and discarded. A third of all Mōlī born on Pihemanu each year die.


When I see those pictures, I think about how our families have fed us breakfast lunch and dinner of imported canned meats with white rice, or imported canned meats with white bread. We were grateful for this food, saying our prayers. I remember Sundays, when my dad would fry Spam in the early morning because he knew it would be the one thing that would get us kids out of bed to go to church (I confess: those breakfasts made me fart into the pew).


Our families thought they were feeding us food. We didn’t know. It made us feel full and it was what we could afford and it was easy to cook. And it was American. We never knew it was tearing apart our insides. We never knew our Pacific bodies would be strewn across our islands: dead. From heart disease and diabetes and cancer.


Some call the albatross, “fool birds”. Everything, and everybody, is plastic.


“Plastic” comes from the latin “plasticus”, capable of shaping, and from the greek “plastikos”, able to be shaped. From oil derivatives. We drink from plastic water bottles, so we know / that the ocean is really in our blood.


The plasticity of colonialism can be felt in how its toxic presence crashes against the shore of these fragments and floats on (and below) the surface of the poem. The plastic ocean is in us. It molds our bodies and stories.


The plasticity of the poem can be read in how the poem lays the bird bare. How it shows you your own decomposed body, exposing the traces of trauma, the evidence of crime. The poem proves that if you are reading its currents of words, then you have survived, and it is not too late to re-shape our future.

[American Dream]

We Won't Be Silenced About Israel's Crimes

February 08, 2013

By Omar Barghouti and Peter Rugh

Controversy continues to swirl around a planned forum scheduled to take place on Thursday, February 7, at Brooklyn College to discuss the growing global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

In a letter to Brooklyn College President Karen Gould, nine members of the New York City Council threatened to cut funding for the school if its political science department continued co-sponsorship of the event. As of the night before the meeting, though, Gould was defending the right to hold the meeting, stating that Brooklyn College's and her own "commitment to the principles of academic freedom remains steadfast." This week, two city councilors repudiated their support for the letter, and even Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the right of Brooklyn College and its students to hold a forum protesting Israel.

The man at the center of the storm is Omar Barghouti. In 2005, together with Palestinian unions and civil society groups, he helped to launch the call for an international BDS campaign to challenge Israel over its occupation of Palestine and its racism towards Palestinians. The campaign is modeled on the boycott effort against apartheid South Africa during 1970s and '80s.

Barghouti talked to Peter Rugh about the Brooklyn College controversy, the global BDS movement and the Arab Spring rebellions across the Arab world, among other topics. A segment of this interview aired on Free Speech Radio News. Below is part one of the interview--we'll publish part two next week.

WHAT IS BDS, and why has it prompted several pro-Israel advocacy groups and ardent Zionist Alan Dershowitz to stir up this "controversy" about your appearance at Brooklyn College?

BDS IS a global movement that was formed in support of the Palestinian civil society BDS call issued in 2005 by the vast majority of Palestinian political parties, trade unions, women's groups, NGOs and so on.

The premise of the BDS movement is that given the international community's complicity with Israel's occupation and its denial of Palestinian rights, Palestinians cannot achieve our basic rights under international law without the mobilization of international civil society organizations. The basic tactic--which was also employed by the South African anti-apartheid movement--is to cut off links with Israel and institutions that maintain Israel's occupation and apartheid.

The BDS call specifically works toward achieving three basic Palestinian rights: one, ending the occupation of the 1967 territories (including the illegal colonies, the illegal wall, and so on); two, ending the system of racial discrimination within Israel against its indigenous Palestinians, who are citizens of the state of Israel but without equal rights; and three, establishing the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were expelled and ethnically cleansed from their homeland in 1948 and ever since. This right of return is guaranteed under international law.

So BDS is very much a rights-based movement that's anchored in universal human rights and international law. And it calls for boycotting, divesting from, and eventually sanctions against the state of Israel--as was done against apartheid South Africa--in order to achieve those Palestinian rights. It's the combination of internal popular resistance to Israel's occupation and apartheid with the external pressure of boycotts and divestments that can bring about the change necessary to guarantee our rights.

I SPOKE to a woman from the Jewish Community Relations Council in New York, and she had some choice words for you. She described you as an anti-Semite who has called for the destruction of the state of Israel, and she said the "one-state solution" you and the BDS movement advocate is a call for the extermination of the Jewish state. Another of her criticisms is that BDS creates an atmosphere of hostility that is counterproductive to peace and harming Palestinian workers. How would you respond?

THIS CLAIM is anti-Semitic. Why do I say that her claim that a call for boycotting Israel is anti-Semitic is itself anti-Semitic? Because she is equating a boycott of Israel with a boycott of the Jews--an attack on Israeli policy with an attack on the Jews. Equating "the Jews" with Israel--as if they were a monolithic sum of people, without diversity, without human differences--is an anti-Semitic statement. Saying that Israel speaks for all Jews, and that all Jews are represented by Israel and carry collective responsibility for Israel, is a very anti-Semitic statement.

There is no one who monopolizes the Jewish voice--in the United States or anywhere else. There are diverse Jewish groups. Some of our best partners who are leading BDS campaigns in this country are Jewish, like Jewish Voices for Peace, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and many other Jewish groups.

If you go to any random campus across the United States, and you look at the divestment campaigns waged on those campuses, you'll find a disproportionately high number of Jewish activists. This is something we are very proud of--that many, especially younger, Jewish Americans are abandoning Zionism and are realizing what Israel is about.

It's a colonial state, it's an apartheid state, and they do not want such a state to speak in their name, to speak on their behalf. And they are increasingly joining the cause for justice and peace.

The second point is that BDS does not take a position on whether a one-state or a two-state solution should be pursued in Palestine. So she's repeating a myth--it's a fabrication. Our movement is totally neutral on the terms of a political settlement to the conflict.

But each one of us, as a human and as an activist, has a position on this, and I'm not ashamed of mine. For 30 years, I've advocated for the one-state solution in my personal capacity. I've researched and written about the one-democratic-state solution in historic Palestine. That means equality for everyone--irrespective of identity, ethnicity, religion or any other attribute. And what's wrong with that? Why is one-person, one-vote good for every land in the world except Palestine? Why is it that democracy suddenly becomes a bad thing here?

Jewish Americans were at the forefront of the civil rights movement to overturn Jim Crow segregation in the American South. They stood alongside African Americans calling for equality for everyone, separation between religion and state, and equal rights for all humans. But in Israel, pro-Israel groups are defending an apartheid system.

This isn't something only the BDS movement is saying. The famous Jewish American writer I.F. Stone, as far back as 1967, said that Zionism and Israel are creating a schizophrenia among Jewish communities. On the one hand, they are defending civil rights and equality in the countries where they live, and in Israel, they are defending a set of laws that is racist, that doesn't allow mixed marriages, that frowns upon equality, that rejects equality in a categorical manner. This schizophrenia is more recognized by younger Jewish activists everywhere, especially in the United States.

Finally, the idea that BDS is counterproductive and that it hurts Palestinian workers who work in Israeli settlements. Let me start off by saying that this is an exceptionally patronizing, very colonial argument. For someone to have the chutzpah to claim that she knows what is in the Palestinians' best interests more than the Palestinians--that's the epitome of hypocrisy and condescension.

The assumption is that we--just because we're brown, just because we live the global South--somehow don't have the faculty to reason, that we cannot speak about nor understand how to defend our own best interests, that we need somebody from above, from the North, a white person, to tell us how to think, how to formulate our will, and how to express it. This is extremely racist.

But putting aside her patronizing outlook for a moment, that Palestinian workers have to work in Israeli projects, including illegal settlements, is a testament to the occupation's corruption and its strangulation of the Palestinian economy. Israel has systematically destroyed Palestinian agriculture and industry; it has systematically stolen the best, most fertile Palestinian land and water resources; and it has made the Palestinian economy completely dependent on the occupying power.

Those Palestinian farmers thrown off their lands when they were confiscated for Jewish-only settlements had no choice but to become workers. Given the total destruction of the Palestinian economy, the only option for many people is to work with Israeli projects. Is that ideal? Absolutely not.

Ending the occupation would allow the Palestinians to build our own economy and to have our own economic projects, where we wouldn't need to be dependent on a colonial power to sustain our lives. We can build, we can plant, we can produce, we can be creative--if given the chance. And to get this chance, we need the help of every conscientious person around the world, including conscientious Jewish persons around the world, to help us end Israel's occupation and apartheid, so that we can carry on with our sustainable development.

YOU'VE SPOKEN at countless campuses across the U.S. and around the world. Have you encountered this kind of vitriol at your other events?

WE SO far have yet to experience any disruptions at our campus BDS events in the U.S. We hope Brooklyn College will be the first and last, but we're not assured of that because of the rabid anti-Palestinian sentiments that have been stirred up. There has been extreme racism and violent language directed at the event.

Some of the most extreme people behind these statements are supporters of Meir Kahane and his Kach Party, which is officially considered a terrorist entity by the U.S. government. Kach was even barred by the government of Israel at one time from standing in Israeli elections.

The supporters of this fascist and fanatical party are the ringleaders of the circus targeting the Brooklyn College BDS event. They are trying their best to suppress academic freedom in the United States by saying, "We, the pro-Israel lobby, get to decide who is allowed to speak on campus and who is not allowed, what subjects are allowed and what subjects are not allowed to be discussed on campus."

They're destroying the notion of academic freedom by twisting it around to serve their hard-right, anti-liberation and anti-Palestinian agenda. To be honest, it's been many years since I have faced such vile and violent racism as I have encountered around this Brooklyn College event. I've spoken on campuses large and small in the last couple years, and we've never had any disruptions.

We continue to hope there won't be any disruption, but alas, we are very concerned for our safety. With such incitement to violence and such racial hatred as has been conveyed by figures such as Dershowitz and others, I fear for my safety, and I hope that Brooklyn College will take the necessary steps to prevent these rabid voices from attacking us and/or disrupting the event.

If they have arguments against BDS, let's address them in a civil way. Let them come to the event, let them listen to Prof. Judith Butler and myself, and then present their points in a rational, cool-headed manner. Let's have a proper debate about it. That's how rational beings settle and discuss differences of opinion. This is how society progresses, by discussing differences.

The U.S. is directly, immediately and deeply responsible for maintaining Israel's occupation and apartheid through the billions of dollars that it sends to Israel every year--at the expense of social justice, at the expense of health care, at the expense of education here in the U.S. Instead of spending in this country to improve education, employment opportunities, job training and environmental protections, the U.S. is sending billions and billions of dollars to Israel to buy weapons--to kill, to maim, to ethnically cleanse. This has to stop.

American citizens have an obligation, a duty and a right to question in order to stop this enormous flow of money as well as the complicity that goes with it. We also have a right to debate Israel in this country, and to stand up against Israel's policies of occupation and apartheid here in the U.S., especially in this country that is so complicit in Israel's colonial project.

No one can stop this questioning from happening. They may succeed with their violence--and the impunity that they've enjoyed so far--in scuttling one or two events, or in throwing an academic out of a university, or in haunting a dissenter or a journalist who dares to question Israel. Yes, they've succeeded before, and they still continue to succeed in some cases.

But they cannot hide the sun with the palms of their hands. They cannot hide the sun with this violence and their violent language and their incitement to hatred. The movement is growing. BDS is growing. Israel's accountability to human rights and international law is growing every single month, every single year, including in the United States.

Many Jewish students across the United States are abandoning Zionism, and if not yet joining the BDS movement, at least questioning Israel's policies and questioning whether Israel indeed speaks on their behalf. The winds of change are blowing, and Alan Dershowitz and others cannot stop them.

They are coming to understand this, and that's why they are so fanatical and violent in their reactions. They've been absolutely hysterical, and this is a sign of weakness. If they felt strong and confident, they wouldn't have to resort to such incitements to violence and racial hatred. They would come and face our argument with a counterargument, as any rational person would.

CAN YOU describe how this apartheid system impacts the day-to-day lives of Palestinians living in Israel, in the West Bank and in Gaza?

FIRST, LET me explain why I use the term apartheid, because people are sometimes startled when supporters of Palestinian rights say that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. Israel's defenders and anti-Palestinian voices exclaim in anger, "How dare you say Israel is an apartheid state? Israel is so different than South Africa."

But this is a misunderstanding of what apartheid is. Apartheid is not just a South African crime. It's an international crime recognized and defined by international law, especially the 1973 UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Of course, South Africa was a very clear case of apartheid, but so were the Southern states in the United States before the civil rights movement. So what makes one racist system apartheid and another one not apartheid?

The difference is not that this is only a racist policy being adopted here or there, or racism existing here or there, it's when this racism is institutionalized and legalized, when you have systematic oppression of one racial group against another group in a legalized manner. That's when it becomes apartheid.

So just to give a concrete example: 93 percent of the land of Israel can only be used for the benefit of the Jewish population of Israel. Not for the inhabitants of the state of Israel, not for the citizens of the state of Israel in general. So any non-Jewish citizen of the state of Israel can't benefit from 93 percent of the land. In comparison, in South Africa, it was 86 percent for the benefit of the whites and the rest for the indigenous population.

There are literally dozens of laws in Israel that discriminate between its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. In that sense, Israel is clearly guilty of the crime or apartheid, because that is what apartheid is. That's how it's defined in international law. You have laws that discriminate between Jew and non-Jew, giving a distinct set of privileges only to Jewish citizens.

Another very basic reality that Palestinians in Israel face is that Israel is the only country on earth that does not define itself as a state of its citizens. It's a state of the "Jewish people." What does that mean? It means that even if you have lived in Palestine for generations, even if you were there before it became Israel, you don't receive the full set of rights if you are not Jewish. Israel does not belong to you; it belongs to the "Jewish nation." In fact, the very concept of a "Jewish nation" is controversial, and Jewish communities around the world have debated and continue to vigorously debate it.

Imagine the equivalent here. Imagine if the U.S. declared itself a "Christian state"--a state of the Christian nation. Any Christian around the world would have full rights in the United States, but not its Jewish, Muslim or other non-Christian communities. Would anyone accept such inequality written into the laws themselves? Would anyone accept unequal treatment based on their identity? Why then is it acceptable that Israel has dozens of laws that discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens?

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and in Gaza, such apartheid treatment is obviously much more pronounced than within Israel. At least Palestinian citizens of Israel can cast a vote. Yes, all parties have to take a loyalty oath to the state as "a Jewish and democratic state," but this is, of course, an oxymoron: a state cannot be both a Jewish exclusivist supremacist state and democratic.

If we go to the West Bank and Gaza, we see that apartheid is concrete. Israel's "separation wall"--Israel's apartheid wall--lies predominantly within the Occupied Territories, and it has been ruled a violation of international law by the International Court of Justice.

You also have colonial settlements in the Occupied Territories that are for Jewish Israelis only. They are considered a war crime, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention. Transferring part of the occupying state's population to occupied territory is considered a war crime, and that's exactly what Israel has done. Since 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, it has transferred part of its population to the occupied territory in violation international law.

This means that those settlers have full citizenship privileges--they are part of the Israeli legal system, and they get to vote for the Israeli parliament--while Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are a totally different franchise. They are not part of the system, and they don't enjoy any rights under Israeli military law. The settlers get their settler-only roads, which serve Jewish Israelis only, whereas the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza quite often are not allowed to use those roads.

After Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza in 2005, it doesn't have any settlers there, but Gaza is still under occupation. Israel is in full control of passage into Gaza, whether by air, land or sea. Israel is in full control of the territory, which under international law makes it the occupying power. Israel surrounded the West Bank and Gaza with walls and fences and hundreds of military checkpoints, which prevent freedom of movement for the Palestinians. So the reality of apartheid is extremely pronounced there.

IN WHAT ways have the uprisings that began shaking the Middle East in 2011 changed the situation on the ground?

THE ARAB Spring has opened up a huge opportunity for building support for Palestinian rights in the Arab world. Across the Arab world, support for Palestinian rights has always been a de facto reality, a consensus. Every single citizen of every Arab state--with very few exceptions--supports Palestinian rights.

However, in countries run by dictators and non-democratic governments, this support has never led to any effective change. And a successful BDS campaign requires a certain minimum of democracy and of civil rights in order to succeed.

It's not enough to have a million Moroccans demonstrating against Israel's bombing of Gaza, as they did during Israel's bombing of Gaza in late 2008-early 2009. We indeed had 1 million people in the streets of Rabat demonstrating for Palestinian rights. This was an extremely important display of solidarity.

But did that translate into effective campaigns against Caterpillar, against Veolia, against international companies that are violating Palestinian rights in their complicity with the Israeli occupation? No, it did not. And it couldn't in a country that lacks basic democracy.

With the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, we are seeing the dawn of freedom and the beginning of democratization, and we're not saying that it's a mature democracy yet. But despite the turbulence, despite the struggles that people have to go through to really build their democracies, this has already created a huge opening for Palestine solidarity efforts to become effective and sustainable campaigns that can lead to concrete results by holding corporations and institutions accountable to basic principles of human rights.

It hasn't been even two years since the beginning of the Arab Spring, so it is too early to expect big results. Revolutions take a long time to get past internal conflict and build a stable democracy. It will take some time until Egyptians, Tunisians and others sort out their internal strife and build their own systems on the foundation of social justice, freedom and rights for all citizens--and until they are able to address their obligation to stand with the Palestinians.

When we talk about Arab solidarity, solidarity is not even the most accurate term, because it's a family. That's how Palestinians feel--we're part of this family of Arab nations and Arab states. It's not like asking a neighbor for help. It's asking your father and mother and sister and daughter for help.

That's how we feel when we ask Egyptians to support our rights. We're not asking our neighbor for help, we're asking our brother for help. But the brother is in a lot of trouble at this point and is still trying to get his or her house in order so we need to wait patiently until they can stand on their feet. Then we're sure to have massive support.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/we-wont- ... -barghouti

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/gallery/art-carlos-cortez

[American Dream]

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

— Erotic As Power - Audre Lorde

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Shamsia Hassani - An Afghan Street Artist

“If you have an exhibition, most uneducated people won’t even know about it. But if you have art like graffiti in the street, everyone can see that … If we can do graffiti all over the city, there will be nobody who doesn’t know about art.”

Afghan street artist Shamsia, 24, paints on the street walls in Kabul, Afghanistan. The young artist says she hopes her public art can have a positive effect in Afghanistan. A contemporary art painter, she took to graffiti easily despite the restrictions imposed by her gender.


http://kalisherni.tumblr.com/post/42828 ... han-street

[American Dream]

http://decolonization.wordpress.com/201 ... ole-model/

My Grandfather, My Role Model
FEBRUARY 11, 2013

I am Métis. In my family, we call ourselves Chippewa Cree because of the group that we travelled with after the North West Resistance. My grandfather’s family originally signed Treaty 4 but was later discharged from Treaty because of their participation in the Resistance. The Canadian government wasn’t particularly fond of Indigenous people standing up for their rights. Some things are slow to change.

When I first heard the court decision recognizing the rights of Métis and Non-Status as “Indians” under the constitution, I went through a rapid succession of thoughts and emotions in mere seconds. First was pure heart-swelling pride: I wish my Grandpa Lou was here to see this! A Métis elder in Medicine Hat who instilled in me a love of the land and a deep connection to horses, he was a fierce defender of the rights of the underdog. In the factory where he worked, he was the man that women turned to when they were being sexually harassed because he was the only man they knew who would do something about it. And when he was arrested as a union organizer at a strike, it was those women who marched down to the police station to free him. He was so proud when he won his hunting and fishing rights, and he would have been even more proud to be recognized as Indian.

Even though we are from diverse nations and the government has repeatedly tried to disconnect us from our ancestry, we are all connected. As Black Elk said, “In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished.” But the nation’s hoop has been broken and scattered.

Every child taken from their family, every woman stolen from her community affects us all. Did you know that there are more Native children in state care now than during the time of residential schools? Did you know that while the “official” number of missing and murdered Aboriginal women is 600, the unofficial number is closer to 2000? Our communities know when our women are missing. We need our women and children for our communities to survive, to mend the sacred hoop.


All too recently, a First Nations woman was attacked in Thunder Bay, left for dead by two men who told her that she “deserved to lose her treaty rights.” When I read about that, I couldn’t breathe. I have to do something, I thought. But what?

You see, my grandfather didn’t just instil in me his love of horses and the land; I also inherited his passion for justice. My Grandpa Lou. Louis. Named for Riel.

And so I am reminded of Riel’s words: “My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” Reminded of who I am. Métis. A Métis artist.

I began studying film in 2006 and I knew early on that I needed to make a film to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, a day that made a deep impact on me. Through that event my eyes were opened to the real danger that women in Canada face on a daily basis. Just because I had been safe, didn’t mean other women were. It hit home in a way it hadn’t before… I was a second year science student when those women studying engineering were killed… it could easily have been me.

I worked on that film with spoken word artist Evalyn Parry, who taught me an invaluable lesson on empowerment. I had become depressed after doing the research for the film. I knew things hadn’t improved for women as much as mainstream media would like us to believe; it seemed like things were actually getting bleaker every year. But Evalyn wouldn’t let me wallow there and ended her spoken word piece with an empowering list of 14 reasons why you should be proud you are a woman. One of these reasons was: “You are enough.” That really resonated with me.

Another line that Evalyn wrote which haunted with me was, “Women’s bodies farmed out, used up, disappeared.” It was a specific reference to the Pickton farm and the missing and murdered women from Vancouver’s East End. Métis dancer Charity Anne Doucette represented those women in that film. That was when I started to think about creating a film to focus on the missing and murdered Aboriginal women, the Sisters in Spirit. That was the genesis of “When It Rains.”



Thoughts of Charity inevitably lead me to thoughts of our mutual friend—Charity’s soul sister—Marsha Ellen Meidow, who worked on the front lines with at risk girls in Calgary. Marsha and I were planning a series of writing workshops for those at-risk girls, encouraging them to tell their stories. The majority of the girls were Aboriginal and we had visions of creating a grassroots Aboriginal version of the Vagina Monologues, connecting with like-minded writing groups in cities across Canada. Unfortunately, Marsha died suddenly from a brain aneurysm shortly after that inspiration, so that project never happened, but maybe there’s a way to make it happen after all.

The films I create are intended to draw attention to issues of violence against women, partly in an attempt to shift perspectives and create dialogue, but my primary goal is to empower the women themselves. I believe that Idle No More is an excellent example of how to do both. On the one hand, it is educating people, all people, about the issues. On the other hand, the Round Dance Revolution reminds us the power of our drums. As much as they are a reminder to others that we’re still here, they are also a reminder to ourselves.

I believe the political goals of Idle No More are of primary importance to the health of this country and this planet, but I believe the long-term success of Idle No More will be seen in a resurgence of Indigenous knowledges, cultures, languages and pride. And I believe that women will continue to lead the way.

Our women are vital to healthy communities. Our nation is strong only when our women are strong. And between Chief Theresa Spence and the four women who started Idle No More—Sheelah McLean, Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam & Jessica Gordon—our nation is strong indeed. And do not mistake diversity with divisiveness. Regardless of our different approaches, our goal is the same: to mend the sacred hoop.

There is a Chinese proverb: “When sleeping women wake, mountains move.” I don’t know about you, but I can hear the Rocky Mountains rumbling.

________________________________________________________________

Cara Mumford is a Metis filmmaker and screenwriter from Alberta, currently living in Peterborough, whose short films have screened regularly at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, and toured throughout Australia and internationally with the World of Women Film Festival. Her short screenplay, “Ask Alice,” won Best Short Script at the Los Angeles Women’s International Film Festival and her poetry dance film, “December 6,” continues to be screened every year at Montreal Massacre memorials across Canada. In 2012, Cara was commissioned by imagineNATIVE to create “When It Rains,” a one-minute film for their Stolen Sisters Digital Initiative.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Drug War Mexico, NAFTA and Why People Leave

[American Dream]

"How Jews Became White Folks” by Karen Brodkin

[American Dream]

"Harvest of Empire" Recounts How U.S. Intervention Caused Mass Latin American Migrations

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/25/h ... m_recounts

[American Dream]

http://decolonization.wordpress.com/201 ... esistance/

We Hold Our Hands Up: On Indigenous Women’s Love and Resistance

FEBRUARY 12, 2013

Over the past few months, the world has witnessed the boundless love that Indigenous women have for their families, their lands, their nations, and themselves as Indigenous people. These profound forms of love motivate Indigenous women everywhere to resist and protest, to teach and inspire, and to hold accountable both Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies to their responsibilities to protect the values and traditions that serve as the foundation for the survival of the land and Indigenous peoples. These ways of being also provide a framework that ensures Indigenous women’s relationship to the land and their human right to bodily sovereignty remain intact and free from violation. Specifically, women in the #IdleNoMore movement seek to protect the waters, the environment and the land from the threat of further destruction. Indeed, they seek protection not only for themselves but for those values, practices and traditions that are at the core of Indigenous women’s power and sovereignty — concepts that have been, and remain under attack, and which strike at the core of a settler-colonial misogyny that refuses to acknowledge the ways it targets Indigenous women for destruction.

This point is an important distinction when we discuss what Indigenous women want for themselves and their communities. I would humbly ask all of us to think about what it means for men, on the one hand, to publicly profess an obligation to “protect our women” and, on the other, take leadership positions that uphold patriarchal forms of governance or otherwise ignore the contributions and sovereignty of the women, Indigenous and not. But that is another subject for another time. What I want to focus on is what the women in #IdleNoMore have shown us all—that Indigenous women’s love is powerful. It is a love that can inspire a whole world to sing and dance and be in ceremony for the people. This has always been so.


Yet, I would be mistaken to not address how this love has also made Indigenous women targets. Indeed, popular backlash against women in the #IdleNoMore movement demonstrates how Indigenous women’s love is countered in patriarchal settler colonialist societies–with epidemic levels of violence, sexual assault, imprisonment and cultural and political disempowerment.

Because the colonizer has always known that to counter the power of Indigenous womanhood, you need to make acceptable the practice of hating Indian women.

To normalize this hatred and violence, Indigenous women’s power to love and to inspire is turned into something insidious; their powerful love for who they are and where they come from becomes distorted in mainstream consciousness and those distortions become the narratives and images society pulls from in times like these. When Indigenous women’s love inspires a nation to round-dance, question destructive environmental policy or demand justice for children living in sub-standard conditions, other forces counter with vitriolic hate. It is at this point that we see the power of Indigenous women’s love turn into something ugly in the mainstream media—this love becomes self-serving, opportunistic, and a lie—or as Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Simpson has shown us in her beautiful essay about Chief Spence’s sacrifice, settler colonial misogyny can turn something as sacred as a Native woman’s ceremonial fast for her people into a publicity stunt, a cynical smokescreen, and a Senator’s ugly joke. It is what makes it acceptable to run political cartoons such as this one, mocking her love with an image of death and words that are to put all Native women leaders in their places.


Malcolm Mayes, Edmonton Journal

Mobilizing this hate seems alarmingly easy in the popular consciousness. Indigenous women have always known of its presence and the violence it provokes. This kind of violence has a history, one that in 1883 led Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca to write these words:

My people have been so unhappy for a long time they wish now to disincrease, instead of multiply. The mothers are afraid to have more children, for fear they shall have daughters, who are not safe even in their mother’s presence.

Violence against Indigenous women is so normalized in settler society, it even becomes a category of desire in the public consciousness. For that we don’t have to look far. Even in popular so-called homages to our womanhood, violence and sexual degradation saturate the picture.


No Doubt’s “Looking Hot”

But, I do not want to dwell on this darkness. Movements like #IdleNoMore are more than a response to oppressive conditions that structure all of our lives. These movements are about the profound love that Indigenous women have for the future stability and health of their families, their land and their nations. And of this love there are countless historical and contemporary examples. I want to close with just a few that are specifically about the love Native women have for one another despite the pervasiveness of settler colonial misogyny and violence.

There is the example of Dakota writer and activist Zitkala-Ša who went to Oklahoma in the 1920’s to investigate the rampant violence against Indigenous women and girls in Indian Territory. To conduct this investigation, Zitkala-Ša spoke with women in these communities, listening to their stories of the ones who had gone missing or turned up murdered, the girl-children whose oil money and headrights made them targets of lawyers, judges and other white men in power. This work underscored the love Zitkala-Ša had for Indian women and for this research; she too became a target. Indeed for naming a prominent judge’s criminal behavior in her final report, she was threatened with imprisonment if she ever stepped foot in Oklahoma again.

In this vein, I think of the many Indigenous women activists, scholars and artists whose love for murdered Mi’kmaq activist Anna Mae Aquash have made sure she is not forgotten in our histories of resistance. There are the Indigenous women writers such as Marie Clements, Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and countless others who never let us forget the power of women’s love. And there are Indigenous women filmmakers such as Alanis Obomsawin, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Christine Welsh, Catherine Martin and Sandy Osawa whose films tell the stories of women warriors in our lifetime.

In recent weeks, we have seen the letter of the Women of Turtle Island in support of Chief Theresa Spence that reminds us all that “as mothers, aunties, sisters, grandmothers, our concern is for the safety and well-being of all peoples.” On February 14th, there will be the Women’s Memorial March committees in Vancouver and other cities that will show love for the murdered and missing across Canada and the world.

Profound love of the kind that moves nations, starts movements, and inspires action does not go away; it deepens and becomes stronger with time. It is of a generous spirit and one that is captured in the words of Nancy Ward, Nan-ye-hi, Beloved Woman of the Cherokee Nation. I close with her words to the US Treaty Commissioners in 1781, words that remind all of us, Indigenous and settlers alike, the true meaning of building a lasting and loving relationship based on kinship and a respect for women’s rights and obligations:

We are your mothers, you are our sons. Our cry is all for peace; let it continue. Let your women’s sons be ours; our sons be yours. Let your women hear our words.

_________________________________________________

Dory Nason (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Anishinaabe and an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. She currently holds a joint position with the First Nations Studies Program and the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her areas of research include contemporary Indigenous Feminisms and related Native women’s intellectual history and literature.