Salute: Brothers of the Fist

1 July, 2009 — peoplesgeography

salute_1968The year was 1968, the occasion the Mexico City Olympics. In one of the most powerful moments in Olympic history, Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the Black Power Salute alongside their silent (but active) supporter, Australian Silver Medalist Peter Norman.

In a pre-medal awarding deliberation among the three, Tommie Smith (Gold) and John Carlos (Bronze) signaled their intent to make a statement of defiance and Peter indicated he would be supporting them. Smith and Carlos augment their political statement by appearing on the dais shoeless and, with Tommie and John, Peter Norman sports the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

For their trouble they were ejected from the stadium afterward, and lifetime bans for the two issued by the IOC. All three were ostracized in their respective countries in the uproar that followed.

Yet a powerful statement had been made in front of an international audience in a time of apartheid in South Africa and segregated teams, and international lifetime friendships forged.

SALUTE is a film by Matt Norman, the Olympic champion’s nephew. It tells the story of Peter Norman’s solidarity and an unforgettable moment in recent history.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Race, Sport, Video. Tags: , , , . Leave a Comment »

Danny Glover: Race and the Obama Administration

12 April, 2009 — peoplesgeography

Actor-activist Danny Glover takes a principled stand on calling for the Obama administration to display genuine leadership on the second Durban racism conference.

In 2001 I traveled to Durban, South Africa, to join the tens of thousands of people who came to participate in the United Nations-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. More than 2,000 came from the United States, a rainbow of people crossing all lines–racial, ethnic, national, language, immigration status, religious and much more–joining an equally diverse crowd from across the globe. It was an extraordinary opportunity to meet, discuss, argue and strategize over how to rid the world of these longstanding evils.

Our participation paralleled that of the official US delegation. And that’s where we faced a huge challenge. The Bush administration team, having only grudgingly agreed to participate at all, made clear they had no real commitment to fighting racism or offering leadership on other challenging issues of discrimination. When they didn’t like a few small parts of the sixty-one-page text, they packed up and walked out of the conference. It was a sad but hardly surprising moment, exposing once again the history of US failures to take seriously the consequences of its own legacy of racism, a point most recently made by Attorney General Eric Holder. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Race, Racism, USA. Tags: , . Leave a Comment »

Geoffrey Robertson on Why Britain Should Say Sorry To Australia’s Aborigines

18 February, 2008 — peoplesgeography.com

What really leapt out in this Guardian piece from Geoffrey Robertson is that the English Fabian Socialists, almost always looked up to by many of us in the labour movement and culturally lionised, were eugenicists who advocated the assimilation or “humane eradication” of what they saw as “lesser races”. It is surprising that George Bernard Shaw, who I otherwise quite like as a playwright and political commentator from that era, is among this group that includes Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence and others. Even making allowances for the prevalent modes of thought of the time in which they lived, this is a revelation. As late as 1934, a British Department of Health report recommended compulsory sterilisation of the “feeble-minded’, as Robertson points out. Ironically, he adds that it was opposition from Labour MPs that quashed the recommendation, “who feared that working-class people would be the real victims of the Fabian intelligentsia.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Australia, Genocide, Hegemon-watch, History, Human Rights, Indigenous peoples, Race, Racism, UK. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Australian National Reconciliation Starts With Sorry

12 February, 2008 — peoplesgeography.com

aboriginal_flaggif.jpgOn the 13th of March, at 9am Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivers the long awaited public apology to our indigenous Australians, and in particular the Stolen Generation as a central part of reconciliation with Australia’s past. This welcome landmark comes after his Prime Ministerial predecessor, John Howard, expressed regret but refused to say the word sorry. This simple yet powerful act means so much to indigenous Australians, traumatised by being stolen from their parents and for a whole raft of historical injustices. While there is a long way to go, with possible compensation, social indicators and federal intervention in remote central Australian Aboriginal communities still weighty issues, this is a good start.

sorry_midnight_oil.jpg

It is fitting that the famous “If you have come to help me …” quote highlighted below is from an Australian Aboriginal woman, Lila Watson, who wishes it to be attributed collectively.

The PM tabled and subsequently delivered the following text of the apology in Parliament.

RESOURCES: Audio, video and transcript (.pdf here) of speech (just after the fold) Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Audio, Australia, History, Human Rights, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Race, Speeches, Video. Tags: , , , , , . 10 Comments »

Race and skin colour

1 November, 2007 — peoplesgeography

Thanks Siri.

This was written by a black gentleman in Texas and is so funny. What a great sense of humor and creativity!!! Credited to Malcolm X apocryphally (see comments) — does anyone have a source?

When I was born, I was BLACK,

When I grew up, I was BLACK ,

When I went in the sun, I stayed BLACK,

When I got cold, I was BLACK ,

When I was scared, I was BLACK ,

When I was sick, I was BLACK ,

And when I die, I’ll still be BLACK.

———————————————————————————————-

NOW, You “white” folks…

 

When you’re born, you’re PINK,

When you grow-up, you’re WHITE ,

When you go in the sun, you get RED,

When you’re cold, you turn BLUE,

When you’re scared, you’re YELLOW,

When you get sick, you’re GREEN,

When you bruise, you turn PURPLE,

And when you die, you look GRAY.

So who y’all callin’

C O L O R E D folks?

Posted in Humor, Humour, Race, USA. 3 Comments »

Rabbi Lerner and Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA) on AIPAC’s influence

16 September, 2007 — peoplesgeography

tikkun-cover-sept-2007.jpgAs the much anticipated book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Walt and Mearsheimer is released this month, the liberal Jewish-spiritual progressive magazine Tikkun has its current issue devoted to the Israel Lobby (including, but not limited to, AIPAC) and its disproportionate and highly unrepresentative influence on US foreign policy, particularly towards the Middle East.

The cover reads: The Israel Lobby: Bad for the U.S., Bad for Israel, Bad for the Jews. With an interview of Democratic Congressman Jim Moran as its centerpiece (interview excerpt follows), the Israel Lobby’s major role in the decision to go to war in Iraq and its position on calling for an attack on Iran is scrutinised.

Congressman Moran speaks sensibly about Iran, and reading his comments here was a breath of fresh air.

Jim Moran’s voicing of the obvious has however all too predictably earned the ire of Lobbyists and some MSM journalists who sing to the Lobby tune (see WaPo here and here—thanks Fanonite). Interviewer Rabbi Lerner defends Moran’s statements as observations with which he himself would agree, supporting his assertions with evidence and personal experience. Lerner writes:

To take an example from these past few months of the Israel Lobby exercising its power, liberals in the House of Representatives in the spring of 2007 sought to include in the defense-funding budget an amendment that would require specific authorization from Congress before the Administration could use the defense budget monies for a military strike at Iran. The amendment failed. Most liberals in the U.S. today oppose preventive wars in general and a military strike against Iran in particular. So who supports such a move? The answer is: the right wing government of Israel and its champion in the U.S., the Israel Lobby.

Don’t be surprised that Jim Moran was pushed from his office as one of the leaders of the Democrats in Congress by AIPAC and other elements of the Israel Lobby. Here is how it happened: Congressman Moran was asked at a constituents’ meeting by a woman identified with the Jewish community why we had gotten into the war in Iraq. Moran responded provocatively “If the Jewish community had organized against it, we wouldn’t be in this war.” It’s the kind of statement I would have made to any religious community, or to any labor movement audience, citing their own failures to act as a critical factor in why we had gotten involved. In the case of the Jewish community there is the added factor that leading people in the Israel Lobby actively supported and still support the war in Iraq and that some of the strong supporters of the Israel Lobby played central roles in the effort to push the Iraq war inside the Bush Administration.

Why the “Liberal” Media is Illiberal on Israel

I’ve had similar experiences with the Israel Lobby and the media. For the first few years of Tikkun’s existence Tikkun’s perspective was covered on many topics in American politics. But once we got on AIPAC’s radar screen, this began to change. I finally got the op-ed editor of The San Francisco Chronicle to tell me the story. He had been approached by the Executive Editor, Dick German and told by German in no uncertain terms to stop publishing op-eds from American Jews critical of Israel, because Israel had “too many enemies.” This is what he told me.

A similar thing happened to me at The New York Times. I was asked by The Times to do a review of a book on Israeli settlers. Without any shame, my editor insisted that I change what I had written so that it would accord with his politics. I was never again given a chance to write a review for The Times. Hundreds of other liberal Jews have had similar experiences trying to write for The Times op-ed or book review—the voices of those of us who are seriously and intensely critical of Israeli policy but still lovers of Israel and proudly committed to Judaism are rarely part of the acceptable discourse.

Here is an excerpt of the Tikkun interview between Rabbi Michael Lerner and Congressman Jim Moran on AIPAC and its role in pushing the United States into war with Iraq and calling for an attack on Iran:

TIKKUN: What do you think the reasoning is for the Democrats who voted against the amendment requiring that the president get authorization from Congress before attacking Iran?

JIM MORAN: Well, AIPAC strongly opposed it. In fact, Rep. Murtha, Rep. Obey, and myself wanted it in the supplemental. We had it in and then the leadership had to take it out because AIPAC was having a conference in Washington, and insisted with the leadership and many of the members with whom they have close alliances.Yesterday [NB. interview conducted in May], AIPAC had an amendment to recommit the whole Armed Services Bill in order to add language requiring America to develop missile defenses jointly with Israel, to share all its missile defense technology with Israel. That passed overwhelmingly. There were only thirty members—that’s less than 10 percent—who voted against sharing all our missile technology with Israel. It received about 400 votes in favor of it. I was one of the thirty.

My feeling was that it wasn’t just the incendiary language that Israel is under immediate attack and we need to protect it from another Holocaust, it was also the idea that the solution to Israel’s security is a militaristic one. I would urge you to read the Congressional record for the debate on the recommital. It put our loyalty to Israel in terms of complete military support. My feeling is that both America and Israel have acted in counterproductive fashion and have undermined their security by focusing exclusively on military capability.

That was a key vote yesterday. It was phrased by many as an “AIPAC vote.” As a result, it prevailed approximately 400 to thirty.

TIKKUN: In your estimation, how does AIPAC get that power?

MORAN: AIPAC is very well organized. The members are willing to be very generous with their personal wealth. But it’s a two edged sword. If you cross AIPAC, AIPAC is unforgiving and will destroy you politically. Their means of communications, their ties to certain newspapers and magazines, and individuals in the media are substantial and intimidating. Every member knows it’s the best-organized national lobbying force. The National Rifle Association comes a close second, but AIPAC can rightfully brag that they’re the most powerful lobbying force in the world today. Certainly they are in the United States. Not in Europe, obviously. Most people that are involved in foreign policy especially look at a broad range of issues and consider a person’s entire voting record. AIPAC considers the voting record only as it applies to Israel. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Boycotts, International Law, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lobby watch, Media, Militarism general, Military-Industrial Complex, Neocons, People, Politics, Propaganda and psy-ops, Race, Religion, UN, US Foreign Policy, USA, War, Zionism. 8 Comments »

Honouring the victims: Sonja Karkar on Sabra and Shatilla

16 September, 2007 — peoplesgeography

Sonja Karkar is an Australian Palestinian advocate and founder of the Melbourne-based Women for Palestine. Her pieces regularly appear in the Electronic Intifada, Z-Net, Counterpunch and local mailing lists.

Another worthwhile read, I post this in honour of the memory of all the victims of that terrible episode, and all those affected by it; that is the least we in the alternative press and blogosphere can do.

As Karkar writes, citing Robert Fisk fifteen years after the massacre,

“Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years ago, would anyone doubt that the world’s press and television would be remembering so terrible a deed this morning? Yet this week, not a single newspaper in the United States – or Britain for that matter – has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila.”

Warning: the following article depicts the horror of a massacre and should be read by mature readers — details of the atrocity appear over the jump.
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Sabra And Shatila

On massacres, atrocities and holocausts

by Sonja Karkar

September 16, 2007
Women for Palestine

The Massacre

It happened twenty-five years ago – 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.

Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children – more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses – doctors, nurses, journalists – who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Empire, War and Terror, Genocide, Geopolitics, International Relations, Israel, Israel Watch, Justice, Lebanon, Media, Palestine, Political Economy, Race, UN, US Foreign Policy, Violence, War crimes. Leave a Comment »

On MoveOn’s General Betray-Us Ad

11 September, 2007 — peoplesgeography

petraeusnytad.jpgMild Congressional Democrat-front group MoveOn.org have launched a full-page $65,000 ad in the New York Times entitled “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?: Cooking the Books for the White House.“

First, credit where its due: MoveOn recognises the obvious danger of General Petraeus (read his testimony here), like Colin Powell before him, serving as a shill to deliver the Bush-Cheney White House version in order to justify its agenda of prolonged war, as well as to downplay the extent of violence wracking Iraq. The advertisement (.pdf here) notes, for example, that “We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.” This is the type of public mainstream dissent that was altogether absent when it was Colin Powell justifying war in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

In terms of historic parallels, we are reminded about the Johnson administration’s General Westmoreland during the Vietnam War here (read Westmoreland’s address here). Are these former generals and administration officials troubled about their role? In Powell tried to talk Bush out of war (Sunday Times, 8 July), the former US secretary of state subsequently claimed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade Bush not to invade Iraq. He believes, moreover, that today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

While General Petraeus is rightly copping flak, he’s outranked by the Thief-Commander-in-Chief: he’ll ultimately deliver what’s favourable for the Bush-Cheney junta and the AIPAC lobby, and ultimately do as he’s told. He has been called the iPod general (Pepe Escobar), programmed to play the tune(s) selected by his owner, the White House.

A major glaring error of the advertisement, however, is MoveOn’s claim that

“Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

An unwinnable war, yes; a “religious” war, no. This claim altogether fails to address the fact that the root cause of violence is the occupation. Sunni and Shia have been living together and intermarrying for centuries here, why a sudden “religious” war? Any sectarian enmity that now exists is largely being created, its not pre-existing. This also deflects scrutiny from Bush administration culpability and attempts to instead pretend that the “real conflict” is between Shiites and Sunnis and has nothing or little to do with the US military presence. In his ‘progress report’ (video here), General Petraeus also spouted this notion in declaring that “the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources.”

Contrary to MoveOn’s and General Petraeus’s claim, the US-UK invasion, occupation and several psy-, black- and false flag-ops manufactured this sectarian conflict. We recall the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, which Mike Whitney argues has been used as a “Pearl Harbor-type” event. We recall the two British SAS snipers who were caught out in Basra disguised as locals, captured with explosives in their car. We recall that the possibility of employing the Salvador Option to use Shia death squads against Sunnis had been openly entertained in the US, and the appointment of John Negroponte as US ambassador to Iraq—Negroponte oversaw death squad activity from Honduras in the 1980s—only added to the suspicions of US-Israeli designs for instigating a civil war in Iraq.

Why would the occupier and its neocon-AIPAC underwriters want to manufacture a civil war? At least three reasons. A civil war in Iraq serves the occupation’s interests not only in deflecting attention away from the crimes of the occupier, it furnishes further rationale for their continued presence, to “protect” the civilian population. This ignores, among other things, how US soldier atrocities in Iraq have been systemic and that increasing numbers of soldiers, already stretched, are resisting the war. Thirdly, it sets up the case for the ‘soft partition of Iraq‘, as raised openly by many punters, including columnist David Brooks in today’s New York Times. Dividing Iraq makes it easier to divide the spoils of war and removes the threat (primarily to Israel) of Iraqi regional hegemony.

As veteran correspondent Robert Fisk acknowledged last year in his suspicions about attempts by the occupation authorities to provoke a civil war in Iraq:

The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I’d like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much…We’re not hearing of death squads all being arrested…Somebody is operating these people…Is it really the case that all of these Iraqis that fought together for eight years against the Iranians – Shiites and Sunnies together in the long massive murderous Somme-like war between the Iranians and Iraqis — suddenly all want to kill each other?…

We need to look at this story in a different light. That narrative that we’re getting – that there are death squads and that the Iraqis are all going to kill each other, the idea that the whole society is going to commit mass suicide – is not possible, it’s not logical. There is something else going on in Iraq…something is wrong with the narrative we’re being given the press, from the West, from the Americans, from the Iraqi Government.

MoveOn started with a strong antiwar message; after coopting 3 million antiwar activists, it watered down to insipid levels its antiwar agenda and became a front for the Democratic “impeachment is off the table” branch of the War Party. Recalling that most voters gave the Democrats a mandate to end the war, let us hope the MoveOn leadership does not betray its own constituency, never mind the contrived establishment outrage.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Boycotts, Dissent, Empire, War and Terror, False flag ops, International Relations, Iraq, Israel, Media, Military-Industrial Complex, Neocons, Politics, Propaganda and psy-ops, Race, UN, US Foreign Policy, USA, War. 1 Comment »

Over to you, Washington: Sept 15 March to End the War

9 September, 2007 — peoplesgeography

sept-15-wash-dc-march.jpgFriends in the USA, its over to you for the Sept 15 March on Washington campaign. The rest of us will be there with you in spirit. The march and series of actions will involve many groups such as CodePink whose tenacious and creative activism is laudable.

sept-15-impeach.jpgGatekeeper Left groups who keep criticism of Israel off the agenda take note: this date is also the 25th anniversary of the massacres of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. This day, and September in general, is redolent with peoples history from many places.

Here’s my stance on the effectiveness of marches and rallies. To be sure, marches and rallies usually are, on their own, insufficient. On their own, they do not stop wars as Jeff Gibb argues. But that overlooks other critical functions and reasons to choose to participate. Rallies can play an important role in the wider repertoire of actions available to us, especially when taken as a starting point or supplement to a wider campaign to disrupt business-as-usual, rather than somehow accepted as a substitute for this full range, as Catherine Fenton argues:

I will stay in the days after the march to engage in civil disobedience, to disrupt the business as usual of Congress as much as I can, and to plan further. Women didn’t get the vote the first time Alice Paul chained herself to the White House fence. But Alice Paul didn’t throw up her hands and say “what’s the use?” Blacks didn’t get access to voting booths the first time Martin Luther King marched. And there were always others who told him he hadn’t done enough. But he marched again and again, because he knew that every time he did, that was one more white American who said, this is not right. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Activism, Arab, Audio, Boycotts, Dissent, Empire, War and Terror, International Relations, Iraq, Justice, Palestine, Peace and Justice, Peace education, People, People power, Politics, Race, US Foreign Policy, USA, War. 3 Comments »

More from the Peoples History of APEC 2007

8 September, 2007 — peoplesgeography

4 short videos from APEC 2007 follow. H/T Green Left Weekly

The High School Walkout Against Bush; US Marine (7.36)


Bush, Howard, USA! How Many Kids Have You Killed Today! (1.36)

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Posted in Activism, Australia, Conferences, Dissent, Empire, War and Terror, Europe, Hegemon-watch, International Relations, Iraq, Militarism general, Peace and Justice, People, People power, Politics, Race, US Foreign Policy, USA, Video, Youth. Leave a Comment »
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