Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 30, 2018 3:15 am


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfl9LgJR3iA

"This is flirting with fascism in the open, in broad daylight now."
Sanho Tree (Institute for Policy Studies) on Trump's demonization of immigrants.
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 30, 2018 6:50 am

TFN #14: No Tacos for Fascists

The Fuckin News returns this week to take on Stephen Miller and the mass deportation machine.


https://vimeo.com/277737020
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Tue Jul 03, 2018 9:06 pm

The Holocaust Analogy

Comparisons between Trump's border regime and the Nazi genocide often obscure more than they reveal about white supremacy, past and present.


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Some of the thousands of wedding rings the Nazis confiscated from Jewish detainees for gold salvaging, found at Buchenwald by US army soldiers. (1945).


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Rosaries confiscated at the Customs and Border Protections processing center in Ajo, Arizona (Thomas Kiefer).

If children like Yanela are only visible through the attempt to imagine our own children being stolen and our own families being ripped apart, we become able to pretend that routine dehumanization is not a familiar and foundational aspect of American racism, which then becomes invisible. Because white racialized seeing is largely trained to focus on a single issue at a time, it sees and protests detained Central American migrant children while failing to see and protest against the quotidian practice of holding non-white children in juvenile detention.

Violent images steadily dehumanize through spectacularity. Real suffering, then, can only be grand and consumable and retweetable; the pedestrian and processual experiences of social death and unpersoning, the embodied effects of mundane racial terror and psychological violence, the inheritance of trauma in successive generations cannot be so readily cannibalized. Some of the most devastating photographs are ones depicting a quiet suffering, leaving a visual absence that compels us to empathize and imagine the unimaginable. Migrants are often stripped of personal effects at the border. Children’s toys, a means of self-soothing, are confiscated. So, too, are their shoelaces, which could be used as tools for self-harm and are also deemed as non-essential (Yanela’s mother had unlaced her daughters shoes shortly before John Moore captured the photograph).

In a New Yorker profile of Tom Kiefer, the US Customs and Border Protections janitor who curated and photographed these seized items, he describes how finding them in the garbage and realizing they would never be returned fundamentally changed his relationship to his employer. One of his photographs shows the rosaries he found. In all of the horrors involved in immigrant detention experiences, there is something particularly sinister about taking away a source of resilience and the promise of a greater justice in the afterlife.

He quit his job to focus on his photography.


More: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3908-t ... st-analogy
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Thu Jul 05, 2018 12:50 pm

Lauren Southern Claims ‘Vindication’ After Far-Right European Politicians Turn Away Refugees

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She boasted that Italy’s Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini, blocked the ship, and quoted him as saying that Italy will “start to say no to human trafficking.” Southern rhetorically asked her critics whether they would call the Italian government “terrorists” or “refugee drowners” for their actions.

“No, no one in the left-wing mainstream press is going to do that because what they’re doing is completely rational and what any nation should be doing with its borders,” she said.

Southern also pointed out that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party went further than Italy by vowing to prosecute those who operate rescue ships — including the Sea-Eye, which rescued Southern and her compatriots. According to a Breitbart article, 42 MPs of the AfD Party backed this initiative, and even credited Southern’s reporting for having influenced this decision.

“This is exactly what [Génération Identitaire] and I were saying last year,” she said.

What Southern left out is that the politicians she referenced in support of her argument are far-right zealots. Matteo Salvini, a member of Italy’s Lega Nord Party, recently called for a “census” of Italy’s Roma population which will pave the way for their deportation. Worse still, Salvini was recorded last year calling for a “mass cleansing” of the Roma community.

Salvini remarked that, “We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighborhood by neighborhood,” adding, “We need to be tough because there are entire parts of our cities, entire parts of Italy, that are out of control.” To anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the Holocaust these remarks should set off alarm bells. The Nazi regime, after all, classified Roma as “racially inferior” and targeted them for extermination.


https://angrywhitemen.org/2018/07/04/la ... -refugees/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Sun Jul 08, 2018 7:28 am

The Logic of Militant Democracy

From domestic concentration camps to the war on terror

The heart of militant democracy was the suspension of laws and rights. Because totalitarianism operated especially through subversion, Loewenstein wrote, democrats had to get over their “legalistic blindness” and recognize that “the mechanism of democracy is the Trojan horse by which the enemy enters the city.” Governments had to move aggressively to limit rights—preemptively—to those deemed dangerous. Freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion would all be suspended, and the crackdown enforced through the creation of new, anti-totalitarian secret police forces. For Loewenstein, loyalty to the state preceded any discussion of rights. Anyone who questioned political norms found themselves outside the sphere of the law. “Fire should be fought with fire,” he wrote in 1935.

Throughout the 1930s, Loewenstein’s ideas were largely confined to academia. But World War II propelled an otherwise fringe concept like militant democracy to the maintenance of American power. To anxious government officials, the writings of Loewenstein and scholars like him captured new wartime exigencies. They clarified why curbing—and even abolishing—rights did not undermine democratic freedom, but actually enhanced it. Theories like Loewenstein’s also linked external and internal threats and rendered them indistinguishable. Japanese American or Latin American communities were thus the same—no matter where their members were born, they were both emissaries of global danger and thus not entitled to legal status. As his way of thinking spread, Loewenstein took on a more active role in America’s militant democracy. In 1943, he was recruited as legal advisor to the Justice Department, a position from which he joined the CPD and helped coordinate its campaign of surveillance, arrests, and deportations.

While Loewenstein ultimately returned to academic life, militant democracy outlived World War II. In the cold war’s harsh early years, some politicians and scholars continued to insist that international conflicts required the suspension of some rights at home. (The West German supreme court, for example, relied on militant democracy to outlaw the Communist Party in 1957.) Yet it wasn’t until the attacks on September 11 and the beginning of the war on terror that these notions reasserted themselves in the United States as forcefully as they did during World War II. The revival of militant democracy in the first decade of the 21st century helped prepare the ground for the tragedy unfolding in Texas.

Like their predecessors in the CPD, American officials during the 2000s were not concerned with foreign terrorists alone. Just as alarming in their eyes was the danger of internal subversion, a specter of “foreign” Muslim radicals who would infiltrate democratic regimes and would somehow bring down the entire Western order. For this reason, the unfolding of military actions, from unilateral invasions to drone campaigns and missile strikes, also brought about the suspension of rights. Those who government officials viewed as dangerous—particularly Muslim men from the Middle East and North Africa—were subject to “preventive” arrests and then deportations, which also relieved the government from the burden of ever making formal charges against them. Like the detainees in the CPD camps, the countless inmates brought to Guantanamo Bay and then deported to countries in which they never lived seemed to embody in the eyes of many American officials an existential threat to their order, a position that remained in place from Bush to Obama. Like their antecedents during World War II, they were guilty until proven otherwise, and thus indefinitely outside the protection of any legal norms. Such suspension of law has become so integral to our universe that we rarely even think about it. The lack of attention American citizens and their representatives pay to the detainees still languishing in Guantanamo Bay, almost two decades after its opening, is a testament to our growing tolerance of endless war’s legal impact.

In this context, the Trump Administration’s creation of new camps marks not so much a break with American history, but a radical and dark expansion of already existing traditions. Because they view asylum seekers and immigrants as a serious threat to the United States’ ethnic and racial composition—and thus, in their view, its very essence—Trump and his adjutants seek not only to limit the arrival of these outsiders, but to do so by suspending their access to legal rights and locking them in camps with no charges indefinitely. To be sure, the adoption of such policies also marks a shift in the objects of war. The “threat” posed by refugees of Honduras’s drug wars is different from those of Axis “beach head” teams or Muslim terrorists. Still, like the CPD detainees and the Guantanamo prisoners before them, these immigrants are seen as the vanguard of the enemy in the United States’ forever war around the globe. Now as before, fighting them therefore requires the logic of militant democracy.

The travesty of the camps in Texas, then, is not merely a product of long-standing xenophobia, nor is it only a sign of rising authoritarianism. It is also the harrowing side effect of the war’s legal emergency and the paranoid mindset it breeds. The Trump Administration’s joy in cruelty has forced some Americans to reflect on long-standing malice, especially the historical forces that foster racial animus. It should also lead us to rethink the price of prolonged military adventures.


https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/onl ... democracy/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Jul 08, 2018 1:47 pm

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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 16, 2018 9:16 am

Shiftiness: The Border in Eight Cases

BY JULIE CHINITZ
POSTED ON MARCH 16, 2017 IN NONFICTION


1. A Press Conference

It’s January 2013, and I’m watching some political theater on C-SPAN’s website. Senator Charles Schumer leans over a podium in a Senate pressroom. His glasses sit low on his nose, and he looks more like one of my great uncles than someone reading a policy statement to assembled reporters. But he and seven other senators have hammered out an immigration reform proposal, so this is News. “We still have a long way to go,” he says, “but this bipartisan blueprint is a major breakthrough.”

I take Senator Schumer’s announcement personally. Over the years, I’ve known many people who’ve been in the United States when the law said they shouldn’t be. I’m a public interest lawyer, but I’m not talking about clients. My list includes friends, my husband, and even my father’s mother and aunt, who as teenagers landed at Ellis Island with documents that weren’t their own. Crowded in the steamer’s steerage hull, they must have wondered, “Will it work?”

My great-aunt and grandmother’s papers weren’t doctored or stolen, though—they’d switched with each other. Aunt Mary had stopped growing after falling from a tree, and her family was afraid she’d be rejected at the border as physically defective. Her parents decided she should pretend to be younger, hence the paper switch with my grandmother, her younger sister. The trick worked. My grandmother and Aunt Mary both made it into the U.S. and wound up working in the garment factories. My grandmother, who could sew anything, left the garment shops to raise her family, but Aunt Mary kept working, sealing box after box, inserting slips of paper atop the folded clothing: “Inspected by Number 9.” When finally it came time to retire, she asked my father for help with her Social Security application and handed him a clutch of documents. Each showed a different birthday. My father settled on one, and she started getting her checks.

“She was such a dear woman,” my father says. Holding his hand just above his abdomen, he adds, “She was only about this tall.”

I never met Aunt Mary, so all I know about her is that she was a tiny, unassuming woman who once did something brave and illegal, abetted by my grandmother. People leap into acts such as these when they know the rules don’t favor their survival but they want to live anyway. I have many friends who, like Aunt Mary, did whatever it took to get into the U.S. They plodded through the desert, scrambled over fences, convinced border inspectors at the airport that they were coming as tourists, not to stay. One friend spent the night in a safe house in Tijuana, where she met women who were fleeing the civil war in El Salvador and had traded sex for rides all the way through Mexico.

Then there was an acquaintance who told me his family’s story through choking tears. He and his brother-in-law were entering the country at El Paso, because both lived in the United States with valid papers. The rest of the family was crossing illegally, away from the border checkpoint. “Whose bag is that?” the officer asked the man and his brother-in-law, seeing a purse left on one of the seats.

“My mother left it by accident,” the brother-in-law said, as if she’d forgotten the bag while sending the young men off on their journey. “A woman never just leaves her purse,” said the officer.

But, in the rush to cross with the coyotes, she had left it in the van. His face red with panic, the brother-in-law explained, “I haven’t seen her for fifteen years.” He’d been living in central Washington, and she in a small town in Jalisco.

The officer took pity and said, “Hurry and find her before she gets caught.”

This family was lucky, and some other friends of mine have been lucky, too, falling through one trapdoor or another in our immigration law. They got their papers and eventually became U.S. citizens. But many of my friends haven’t had that chance. They’re still waiting.

So when I see Charles Schumer on my screen, I hope he understands. His proposal comes with a catch, though. The border would have to be stamped secure before anyone could get their papers. By June 2013, Senator Schumer and his colleagues have come up with a bill, which includes border enforcement metrics and timetables; an amendment adds fencing, high- tech surveillance, and electronic identity checks in workplaces—hardly a surprise as the title of the bill starts with the term “border security.”

But perhaps the tripwires and sensors are props in a border security dream, rather than a depiction of border security reality. As I write this essay, I run an online search and pull up images of the border that show corrugated metal fence cutting through the desert. That fence is the picture we put to the word “border,” helping us believe in it as something real and constant, if vulnerable. It provides a place for the border, which the border needs if it’s going to mark the line we think it marks. We want the border to be clear and provide clarity. For almost twenty years, though, I’ve been trying to figure out where the border is and what it does, and I still don’t know.

2. Seeking Asylum, Filling Out Forms

I didn’t grow up thinking of my family as refugees, but of course they were.

“They didn’t want to be drafted into the czar’s army,” I was told, or, “pogroms,” or “Grandpa’s older brothers and sister were revolutionaries.”

My family came with the stink of oppression on them. By the 1960s, we were upper middle-class, and I assumed that all American families followed this trajectory: the arc of the moral universe bends toward the suburbs. In those suburbs, my parents retained a sense of liberal responsibility. My father, a doctor, joined the nuclear disarmament movement and gave sidewalk talks on the medical effects of thermonuclear war. My mother opposed U.S. Cold War military interventions and on a file cabinet placed a bumper sticker that read, “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.” It wasn’t really, but from this I understood that El Salvador was more than just a far-flung place.

In the 1980s, El Salvador was steeped in a civil war in which the Salvadoran government committed massacres, tortured and disappeared its victims, fired on demonstrators, and murdered priests, nuns, and union members. I learned from my mother that our government was sending military advisors and supporting government death squads, which she thought we shouldn’t do. People were streaming from El Salvador by the tens of thousands, but my mother didn’t tell me about these refugees, because they weren’t arriving in the Philadelphia suburbs. I wouldn’t meet any until years later, when I helped a few apply for asylum.

That happened in 1994. I’d recently graduated from college and moved to Seattle. My boyfriend—now my husband—had come to the city from northern Mexico, and he found an apartment above the restaurant where he worked. The building was shabby, with second-story front doors along the balcony, motel-style, and access to the interior hallway (and laundry machines) through doors that opened directly into the apartments’ bathrooms.

I was working as a receptionist, and one day I saw a poster for an organization called the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP), which provided legal services to immigrants. I called to see about volunteering. “We’ve got a training coming up,” the executive director told me. “Come by on Saturday.”

A paralegal, Julie, gathered us in the office’s dim conference room and taught us the basics of asylum law, showed us how to complete the forms, and told us what questions to ask the people we’d interview. She seemed to know everything. She explained that the circumstances of these asylum applications were unusual. Because the U.S. had backed the Salvadoran government—pressed it to continue the war, even—Salvadoran refugees had a very hard time getting asylum when they’d reached the United States. In fact, in the 1980s, immigration officials denied 97 percent of Salvadorans’ applications, even with all the murder and torture: bloody Cold War politics. Refugees and church groups sued, and the government finally agreed to give them another chance to apply.

The next weekend, I started interviewing applicants. The NWIRP headquarters was packed with men, women, children. I called the next person on the list into one of the offices and started asking all sorts of questions to make the application as strong as possible: the more terror a person had seen the better. But my interviewees didn’t easily produce stories of brutality. When I asked, “Why did you leave El Salvador?” they usually said, “Well, because of the war, like everyone else.” I didn’t know how to get them to say more, or know if there was more for them to say.

Across the hall, Julie stood in another office, tilting toward a seated client. She was saying, or I thought I heard her say, “Don’t you remember anything? You must remember something.”

She had a way of shaking out recollections. Maybe the Salvadorans’ memories lay beneath a tough rind of trauma that needed to be torn open. Or maybe they’d come to see horror as ordinary, not worthy of note. Either way, I learned that you can’t tell what people have been through by just looking at them. None of the people I interviewed came in maimed or disfigured, except for one man who was missing the top half of his middle finger. Instead of the digit, he had a smooth blossom of knuckle. He hadn’t lost the finger in the war, though. It had been lopped off when he’d reached his hand out of a moving car and caught it on a wire. I took his fingerprints for the application, and Julie told me to write in “missing finger” in the box where the print should have gone. The man and I shared a laugh over that. I was twenty-four when I did those interviews. Since then, I’ve met countless people who’ve been through hard things. I’ve met gay men raped by police in Latin America, Jamaican sugarcane cutters nickeled and dimed by rich growers in Florida, a woman who shot her stepfather, a woman who killed her own child in a drug fury. You learn to speak with people about difficult experiences.

But in 1994, all this was new for me. I began to get the hang of it, and when a Salvadoran interviewee said, “I just left because of the war,” I’d ask, “Did guerrillas or soldiers ever come to your house? Was anyone in your family ever killed?” And sometimes this helped people remember, and they’d say, “Oh, yes, there was that time …” I wrote in the answers, and in my memories I picture my interviewee and me in the dusty air of a dingy office, leaning over the application to review it together. The word “alien” appeared on the application in clear black letters, but I didn’t think of the Salvadorans as aliens. If an army bombs a person’s town with weapons provided by the United States, aided by training in the U.S., doesn’t that person have a relationship with the United States? How can we talk about that person as an alien, if there’s no border between us that really counts?


Continues: http://www.zyzzyva.org/2017/03/16/shift ... ght-cases/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 25, 2018 6:49 am

Swedish student's dramatic plane protest stops man's deportation 'to hell'

Elin Ersson refused to take her seat on flight at Gothenburg airport until man being sent to Afghanistan was removed

David Crouch in Gothenburg Wed 25 Jul 2018 02.20


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSJ7du-EC9w

A lone student activist on board a plane at Gothenburg airport has prevented the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker from Sweden by refusing to sit down until the man was removed from the flight.

Elin Ersson, whose Facebook page says she is a student at Gothenburg University, bought a ticket for the flight from Gothenburg to Turkey after she and other asylum activists found out that an Afghan was due to be deported on it, according to Swedish press reports.

As she entered the plane Ersson started to live-stream her protest in English. The video received more than half a million hits on Tuesday.

Facing both sympathy and hostility from passengers, the footage shows Ersson struggling to keep her composure...


After a tense standoff, during which the airport authorities declined to use force to eject Ersson, passengers broke into applause when the asylum seeker was taken off the plane.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... fghanistan
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Sat Jul 28, 2018 9:24 am

Trigger Warning

‘If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine’: Inside the abusive immigrant youth shelters

According to logs obtained by ProPublica, some immigrant youth shelters are a hotbed of sexual abuse.

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Unaccompanied minors and children separated at the border from their families are living in shelters where sexual abusers look after them.

ProPublica obtained the police reports and call logs from more than two-thirds of youth immigrant shelters run and/or contracted by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. These shelters span 17 states and house around 10,000 immigrant youth at any given time.

Despite these shelters having a zero-tolerance policy against all forms of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior, the logs obtained by ProPublica show that in the past five years, police have responded to at least 125 calls reporting sex offenses these shelters.

That number doesn’t include another 200 calls from more than a dozen HHS-contracted shelters that care for at-risk youth residing in the U.S. The call records for those facilities don’t distinguish which calls came from unaccompanied immigrants and which came from other youth housed on the property.

“If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine,” Lisa Fortuna, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center, told ProPublica. “You have full access and then you have kids that have already had this history of being victimized.”


https://thinkprogress.org/sexual-abuse- ... 4367fe3e4/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 06, 2018 8:49 am

Phoenician or Arab, Lebanese or Syrian: Who were the early immigrants to America?

Hummus For Thought

This article is authored by Dr. Akram Khater, Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies and Khayrallah Distinguished Professor of Lebanese Diaspora Studies, and Professor of History at NC State. His earlier article focused on Lebanese-Americans in WWI. It was originally published on the Khayrallah Center’s website and republished on Hummus For Thought with permission from Dr. Khater.

Between the 1870s and the 1930s some 120,000 immigrants left the Eastern Mediterranean and traveled to the U.S., with another 220,000 departing for Central and South America and landing in destinations like Argentina and Brazil. These men, women and children, peasants and tradesmen, factory workers, teachers and merchants came from across “Greater Syria,” an Ottoman province that today encompasses Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine/Israel. We do not know for certain their religious distribution but they included Antiochian Orthodox, Druzes, Jews, Maronite Catholics, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.

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Places of Origin of Early Immigrants. To learn more about this map click on the image.

Their sense of self was located within villages and towns like Homs, Bayt Meri, Bethlehem, or Rashaya, and distilled through their experiences of family and religion. Ethnicity and nationality were meaningless to the great majority of them. In other words, when they left they were neither Lebanese nor Syrian, Phoenician nor Arab. However, their sojourns into the racially charged American social, legal and political landscape forced them to re-define themselves in terms of ethnic and national identity. Moreover, World War I and the subsequent division of their homelands into nations under the tutelage of French colonial power, engaged them in spirited—and sometimes violent—debates about who they were and where they came from. The result of these various forces differed but overlapped, and changed identities that were more fluid than fixed, and easier to use as labels than to substantially define.

As these immigrants traveled across the Mediterranean and Atlantic to “Amirka” they were required to have an ethnic/national identity if they were to gain entry to the place that they hoped would make them a handsome sum of money and afford them new opportunities. Ship companies’ clerks and Ellis Island inspectors were not interested in the intimate world of small villages like ‘Ayn Ibl (in South Lebanon), or even the geographically distinct and rapidly growing city of Beirut. Rather, until 1899 these company employees and state functionaries jotted down “Turkey in Asia” in their registers next to the migrant’s name, and after 1900 replaced it with “Syria” for most entries while keeping the earlier term in some cases. Thus, upon entrance into the US, immigrants acquired a different and larger identity—“Syrian”—than the ones they had left with. The label “Syria” made sense geographically as a designation for where they came from, but it also represented an emerging political project and idea among the educated urban elites of their homelands.

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Louis Cheikho, Courtesy of Wikipedia

“Syria”—as a distinct political and cultural space—was first popularized during the 19th century by Jesuit missionaries in Mount Lebanon who established transformative educational establishments like the Oriental Seminary in the village of Ghazir, or the Université Saint Joseph in Beirut (founded in 1875). Starting in the 1880s their faculty, including intellectual luminaries like Henri Lammens and Louis Cheikho, undertook decades-long project to “resurrect” and write the history of “Syria”—with the district of Mount Lebanon as its religious, cultural and administrative heart—as a separate Christian entity radically different from the surrounding and predominantly Muslim Ottoman provinces. Lammens popularized the idea of Mount Lebanon as a refuge for oppressed Christian minorities in his iconic book La Syrie: Prècis Historique (Syria: A Historical Summary).

By 1908 these intellectuals, along with the Maronite church and its elites, French travelers and officials went one step further where they imagined the Maronites to be the “Français du Levant,” (The French of the Levant): a culturally distinct and European group who deserve their own entity in an expanded Mount Lebanon. This was perhaps best captured by Youssef al-Souda, a Lebanese émigré in Egypt—educated at the Université Saint Joseph between 1900 and 1907. In his book Fi Sabil Lubnan (For the Sake of Lebanon) which he published in 1919 he noted: “ Every nation has a strong desire to return to its roots…so is Lebanon proud to remember and remind all that it is the cradle of civilization in the world. It was born on the slopes of its mountain and ripened on its shores, and from there the Phoenicians carried it to the four corners of the earth.” (Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, p. 48)

Similarly, the Syrian Protestant College (a higher education institution established in 1866 in Beirut by American Presbyterians, and later renamed the American University of Beirut), played a critical role in giving substance to the idea of “Syria” as a distinct cultural and political region in the Middle East. Its American professors and more importantly local graduates were central to the Nahda—or the Arab renaissance movement of the 19th century—which used Arabic “as a vehicle for the formation of a secular identity in the territory they defined as geographical Syria.” (Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, p. 39). However, unlike the Jesuit missionaries and their students, the emphasis by this cohort of intellectuals was not on a Catholic/Christian nation, but rather on an ecumenical and secular Syria.

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Shipping Company Advertisements in Kawkab Amirka.

Thus, by the dawn of the 20thcentury, when the majority of Levantine immigrants arrived in the US, “Syrian” as an ethnic and national origin was reasonable enough to accept even if they were not quite sure what it meant. As community organizations and publications proliferated and gave ethnic substance to these migratory individuals and families, the term “Syrian” became more common. The center of the immigrant population in New York came to be known as the “Syrian Colony.” In letters sent back to the Maronite Patriarch Elias al-Howayek between 1899 and 1931, members of the diasporic communities regularly referred to themselves as “Syrians.” For example, in 1901 Mikhail Daher Abou Sleyman wrote asking to remove the local Maronite priest who was “bigoted” because “most of the Syrians in New York are cultured…and hate bigotry.” Community newspapers also adopted this term in their articles and advertisements. For instance, an ad in Kawkab Amirka (The Planet of America) by the Compagnie Generale Trans-Atlantique promised “Our Syrian Voyagers” comfort and security in their journey back to “Syria.” Others, like The Syrian World, adopted the name in their very identity. Even the Federal government of the U.S. adopted this term to identify immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1911 the Immigration Commission of the House published a Dictionary of Races or Peoples wherein the “Syrian” was identified as a native Aramaic “race” of Syria and distinct from Arabs. While both spoke Arabic and were Semites, and many Arabs lived in Syria, the “Syrians” were defined as predominantly Christian and were descendants of the Phoenicians.

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Naoum_Mokarzel

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Al-Hoda Newspaper

Two key Maronite intellectuals amongst the early immigrants to America concurred on this distinction but disagreed with each other on its meaning. Naoum Mokarzel (publisher of al-Hoda) and Philip Khuri Hitti (professor of Middle East studies at Princeton) both arrived in the U.S. just as the “Immigration problem” was being debated in the U.S., and where attempts to limit immigration to “Caucasians” was gaining steam. Mokarzel used al-Hoda as a platform to proclaim that the “Syrians” were part of the white race different from Arabs and Turks, and thus not subject to these emerging restrictions. (This is an argument that was carried into the courts to defend the rights of “Syrians” to become US citizens). He argued, like Hitti, that their Phoenician roots made them part of European culture. Hitti wrote explicitly of this in his book The Syrians in America where he noted: “With this [Phoenician-Canaanite] Semitic stock as a substratum the Syrians are a highly mixed race of whom some rightly trace their origin back to the Greek settlers and colonists…others to the Frankish and other European Crusaders…” (Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, p. 77) Yet, while Hitti remained dedicated to the idea of Lebanon as part of a larger Syria, Mokarzel slowly moved toward a “Lebanist” position by World War I. He argued, along with the Lebanese League of Revival (based in Alexandria, Egypt) that Lebanon was distinct from the rest of the area in its non-Arab identity. Acting on this belief, he traveled after World War I to the Peace Conference in Versailles (France) to agitate for an independent Lebanon. On September 1, 1920 this project came to fruition when the French colonial authorities—at the behest of the Maronite church and intellectuals, and to satisfy its own imperial interests—created Le Grand Liban(Greater Lebanon). The newly created nation-state began to formally recognize Levantine immigrants in the U.S. and beyond as Lebanese citizens. Similarly, the French colonial authorities came to count and regard these immigrants as citizens of Lebanon.


Continues: https://hummusforthought.com/2018/08/05 ... o-america/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Fri Aug 10, 2018 9:35 am

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Jenny Holzer, Times Square Marquees, 1993.
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Fri Aug 31, 2018 9:19 am


https://vimeo.com/287449961

Montreal: Canadian Border Services Shutdown
By submedia.tv - August 30, 2018

Video report of action in Monreal that shut down a border services building in response to the death of Bolante Idoqu Aloi.

This morning in Montreal, over 20 migrant justice activists locked down the headquarters of Canadian Border Services (CBSA) and Immigration Canada, blocking employees from entering the building. This was done in response to the death of Bolante Idowu Alo, a Nigerian migrant who died while being deported from Canada, while in the custody of Canadian Border Services (CBSA). Find out more about this struggle at http://www.solidarityacrossborders.org/en/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 01, 2018 9:03 am

DEPORTING US CITIZENS: TRUMP’S NEW FASCISTIC USE OF LAW

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The reason early 20th century fascists attacked liberal parliamentary government was because supposedly “effeminate” bourgeois politicians allegedly enabled Jews, communists, Freemasons, homosexuals and others to weaken the nation and/or race amidst the all-important Social Darwinian struggle for supremacy. The true, organic identity of the collective, according to these fascists, was suppressed by “artificial” laws enacted by paper-pushers that they claimed failed to protect property from the insurgent left and failed to protect German women from “lecherous” Jews.

In recent decades, self-avowed fascists and far-right groups in Europe and elsewhere have reinvented this critique of liberal law and order in a struggle against a reconfigured constellation of threats: immigration and so-called “refugee crises,” “globalism,” multiculturalism, Islam, shifting norms of gender and sexuality, and others. The far right claims that current laws in the US, Germany, France and elsewhere leave the true organic community of the (racialized) nation too helpless to defend itself from disintegration. Nowhere is this articulated more clearly than in the white supremacist fear of an imaginary “white genocide.”

Since the true source of collective authority for fascists is understood as emanating from the essence of the nation or race as articulated by the charismatic leader, no infringement of “artificial” law is off-limits in the struggle to ensure group survival. To that end, Italian Blackshirts, German Brownshirts, and other fascist forces launched campaigns of street violence to “cleanse” their societies of “undesirables” and restore “order.” Later, Hitler purged his Stormtroopers in order to assuage middle-class anxieties about “chaos.” He imposed “order” upon a force allegedly intended to “restore order” — the fascist snake bites its tail.


http://blackrosefed.org/deporting-us-ci ... stic-bray/
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 10, 2018 6:49 pm

TWISTING PAN-AFRICANISM TO PROMITE ANTI-AFRICANISM

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Those following immigration politics in Europe, especially Italy, may have noticed the appropriation of the words of Marxist and anti-imperialist heroes and intellectuals by the new nationalist and racist right to support their xenophobic or nationalist arguments. From Samora Machel (Mozambican independence leader), Thomas Sankara (Burkinabe revolutionary), Che Guevara, Simone Weil (a French philosopher influenced by Marxism and anarchism), to Italian figures like Sandro Pertini an anti-fascist partisan during World War II, later leader of the Socialist Party and president of the Italian republic in the 1980s, or Pier Paolo Pasolini (influential communist intellectual).

The use of Marxist-inspired arguments, often distorted or decontextualized, to support racist, traditionalist or nationalist political positions, is referred to as rossobrunismo (red-brownism) in Italy.

In Italy it got so bad, that a group of writers—some gathered in Wu Ming collective—made it their work to debunk these attempts. They found, for example, that a sentence shared on several nationalist online pages and profiles—attributed to Samora Machel—that condemned immigration as a colonial and capitalist tool to weaken African societies, was fake news.

It also contaminated political debate beyond the internet: During his electoral campaign, Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigration party Lega and current minister for internal affairs in Italy’s government, explicitly mentioned the Marxist concept of “reserve army of labor” to frame the ongoing migration across the Mediterranean as a big conspiracy to import cheap labor from Africa and weaken Italy’s white working class. As for who benefits from cheap, imported labor (as Afro-Italian activists Yvan Sagnet and Aboubakar Soumahoro have pointed out), Salvini says very little.

The typical representative of red-brownism is Diego Fusaro, a philosopher who first became known, about a decade ago, for a book on the revival of Marxism in contemporary political thought. More recently, he promoted through his social media profiles and collaborations with far-right webzines like Il Primato Nazionale (published by neo-fascist party Casa Pound), a confused version of an anti-capitalist critique aggressively targeting not only the liberal left, but also feminist, LGBT, anti-racist activists and pro-migrant organizations. Fusaro has theorized that immigration is part of a “process of third-worldization” of Europe, where “masses of new slaves willing to do anything in order to exist, and lacking class consciousness and any memory of social rights” are deported from Africa. As if collective action, social movements and class-based politics never existed south of the Sahara.

Yet, the appropriation of pan-Africanist thinkers and politicians like Machel and Sankara brings this kind of manipulation to a more paradoxical level. What could motivate the supporters of a xenophobic party, whose representatives have in the past advocated ethnic cleansing, used racial slurs against a black Italian government minister, or campaigned for the defense of the “white race,” to corroborate their anti-immigration stance through (often false) quotations by Machel or Sankara?


Continues: http://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2018/09/t ... -anti.html
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Re: Refugees, “worthy” and “unworthy” victims

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 24, 2018 9:50 am

“Good” Refugees, “Bad” Refugees: A Conversation in Paris with Viet Thanh Nguyen


You’ve started to answer my next question, which is: I know you take issue with some of the terminology used in the migration debate, going back as far as the use of “boat people” — or, as you prefer, “oceanic refugees” — and today’s distinction between an “official” refugee, who is fleeing war or political persecution and therefore “deserves” food and shelter, and the “economic migrant,” who is fleeing poverty or hunger and is therefore welcome only if she fulfills certain conditions. The latter often end up stigmatized as purely “illegal” or “undocumented” immigrants. Can you speak to the way that the terminology has become politicized and what we can do about it? And a corollary question would be: What is the role of the storyteller in all this? Is it enough to just tell refugee stories and hope that they motivate people to change policies?

I’ll take that first from the perspective of writers, of fiction or nonfiction — that is, what’s our obligation? It is to try as best we can to connect things that don’t seem connected. Because when it comes to the refugee issue, if we don’t see war, drugs, and climate as being connected to migration, then we’re never going to be able to solve the problem to begin with. So it’s necessary for books like The Displaced to appear, it’s necessary for writers and journalists to talk about climate catastrophes and the connections to our consumerist lifestyles, because this is all part of the necessary work to broaden people’s understandings.

People often react to immigration or refugee policies by saying, in essence, “Well, you can’t connect what’s happening now to what’s happening somewhere else because they’re not connected.” Michiko Kakutani just wrote an article describing what life was like for her family in a Japanese internment camp, connecting it to what’s happening with undocumented migrants at the US border, and people in the comments section responded: “Those two things are not the same!” Of course they’re the same! Refugees and climate catastrophe, they’re linked phenomena. So that’s the first step: expand the consciousness.

Second step: What do we do? Fuck if I know! My job is to be a writer. That takes up all my time. The politicians should be doing something about it, and every citizen should be doing something about it. We need to be mobilized politically, no matter what. And the more we see that all these issues are connected, the more we see that the local actions we take could have a broader impact if they’re part of a larger agenda. The average citizen who just sees, “Oh my God, there’s a refugee crisis and a global climate crisis,” obviously feels he can’t do anything about it as an individual person. These issues are just too large. But, if you feel politically motivated, you start with the local and you connect that to the rest.

So I would say: Find the issue that matters to you and then make sure you understand how that issue resonates globally. That’s how all activism begins. If you start by saying, “I can’t stop the global problem,” of course you can’t. You have to start with the local problem and make sure you understand that these things are all connected together.


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/goo ... nh-nguyen/
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