Getting on top of COVID-19 is a stress test for governments globally. One of their key strategies for containing the virus is tracking cases. On a national and global scale, that is impossible, unless you have a lot of health data.

Luckily for public health officials, theres no shortage of health surveillance in the U.S. In the spirit of flattening the curve, privacy watchdogs and surveillance skeptics increasingly are debating if heightened tracking might be an appropriate approach to safeguarding public health under the exceptional circumstances the COVID-19 pandemic has created.

But even at a time when the benefits of these public health tools is clear, their privacy impact are uncertain and pose long-term risks to American citizens. For example, we simply cannot fathom how the information we collect to combat todays emergency will be repurposed tomorrow.

Everything becomes health data

In order to expand government and corporate surveillance in the name of public health, we are enlarging what counts as health data. It was an ambiguous term before coronavirus became a household name, but now the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) iscontact tracingtravelers movements with the help ofairline passenger manifests. Social media check-ins where users post their location to Facebook and other platforms, now are a tool for monitoring transmission sites. Suddenly, what movies you watch, where you travel, how you commute to work, and where you eat go from being consumer data into a metric of your COVID-19 exposure. This may, ultimately, inform whether we can work in the office, attend school, access mass transit or, indeed, see a doctor.

There are certainly cases in which this method has proved helpful. After the deadly spread ofsevere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002, Taiwan implemented travel monitoring systems that proved helpful in combatting COVID-19. Usingcustoms, immigration, and other travel records, officials were able to quickly identify individuals who had come into contact with the virus, conducting rapid testing and quarantine measures. Unlike in the U.S., this health surveillance has informed strict policies, ranging from total lock-downs to the rapid deployment of tests and other government-funded public health interventions. This type of evidence-based policy making is currently absent on American shores.

COVID-19 data can be re-used for oppression

In the U.S., COVID-19 has us rapidly developing new and invasive data collection practices that go far beyond what is needed to protect public health in the long-term. This weekend, for instance, the Wall Street Journal reported a previously undisclosed partnership by federal, state, and local agencies to monitor social distancing in over 500 cities using cellphone location data. This endangers democratic systems in the process. It should come as no surprise that the very same data that helps public health authorities to carry out contact tracing in the context of COVID-19 can easily be repurposed to monitor political movements, religious minorities, and other historically marginalized communities.

There are few restrictions on how much of the data being collected by the CDC. Private health-monitoring firms can be used by federal law enforcement, local police, or even ICE. Many of these records are subject to the third-party doctrine, the long-standing Supreme Court doctrine that holds that information provided to a commercial third party (e.g., a bank, a credit card company, etc.) often can be obtained without a warrant.

Some types of location tracking, such as the prolonged use of cellphone tower data, have recently been held to require a warrant, but nearly identical forms of tracking (such as automated license plate readers, GPS-based cell phone applications, and facial recognition), have yet to be addressed by the high court.

Bad laws stick, good laws are needed

In the U.S. there currently is nearly no legal guidance on how tracking and surveillance data should be treated in the public health context. History shows us that the American people are unlikely to get a nuanced response to that situation and face the danger of seeing a new law hastily passed that gives a free hand to the government, ignoring the risks to historically over-surveilled communities.

Notably, COVID-19 tracking sees these risks now crossing class lines: as of last week, New Yorkers who can afford to flee the city must pass traffic check points and enter mandatory quarantines. And while the outcry now is significant, it should have been from the get-go. Even though it remains to be seen how all Big Apple refugees will be monitored, we have to understand that we all face the risk that surveillance will turn state borders into 21st-century Iron Curtains, raising constitutional conundrums that would have been unthinkable just days ago.

For proof of the danger, one need only look at the aftermath of September 11th. When Congress enacted the USA PATRIOT Act, just a few weeks after the deadly attacks, the fear of terrorism blinded lawmakers to the threat of broad-based, suspicionless surveillance.Decades later, those same provisions, many ofwhich were supposed to sunset in 2005, were still being renewed as recently asthis week. If we pass hastily drafted measures to address the privacy impact of COVID-19 surveillance, there is no reason to think their impact would fade any sooner.

We need laws that protect citizens from the new privacy risks posed by COVID-19-induced data exploitation. This is even more crucial when we're including profit-motivated entities. Days ago, President Trump announced a larger private sector partnership as part of the White Houses COVID-19 response that included large-scale collaborations with Google, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and others. New legal frameworks need to impose clear limits on how health data from the COVID-19 response can be exploited for other business lines.

To protect our democratic institutions inand aftertimes of crisis and trauma, we need these frameworks fast, but we also need them to be resilient. We have all the information, tools and experts we need. We should get to work now.

Originally posted here:

Today's COVID-19 Data Will be Tomorrow's Tools of Oppression - The Daily Beast

At the start of the 21st century, the following things did not exist. In the US, a large network of purpose-built immigration prisons, some of which are run for profit. In western China, political education camps designed to hold hundreds of thousands of people, supported by a high-tech surveillance system. In Syria, a prison complex dedicated to the torture and mass execution of civilians. In north-east India, a detention centre capable of holding 3,000 people who may have lived in the country for decades but are unable to prove they are citizens. In Myanmar, rural encampments where thousands of people are being forced to live on the basis of their ethnicity. On small islands and in deserts at the edges of wealthy regions Greeces Aegean islands, the Negev Desert in Israel, the Pacific Ocean near Australia, the southern Mediterranean coastline various types of large holding centres for would-be migrants.

The scale and purpose of these places vary considerably, as do the political regimes that have created them, but they share certain things in common. Most were established as temporary or emergency measures, but have outgrown their original stated purpose and become seemingly permanent. Most exist thanks to a mix of legal ambiguity detention centres operating outside the regular prison system, for instance and physical isolation. And most, if not all, have at times been described by their critics as concentration camps.

We tend to associate the idea of concentration camps with their most extreme instances the Nazi Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulag system; genocide in Cambodia and Bosnia. But the disturbing truth is that concentration camps have been widespread throughout recent history, used to intern civilians that a state considers hostile, to control the movement of people in transit and to extract forced labour. The author Andrea Pitzer, in One Long Night, her recent history of concentration camps, estimates that at least one such camp has existed somewhere on Earth throughout the past 100 years.

The definition of a concentration camp is sometimes fuzzy, but at root, such camps represent a combination of physical and legal power. They are a way for modern states to segregate groups of civilians by placing them in a closed or isolated location via special rules that are distinct from a countrys main system of rights and punishments. Many have been set up under military jurisdiction by the British during the Boer war, for instance while others, such as the Soviet gulags, have been used in peacetime to deal with social undesirables.

Cruelty and the abuse of power have existed throughout human history, but concentration camps have not. They are little more than a century old. The earliest began as wartime measures, but on numerous occasions since then they have become lasting features. They are a product of technologically advanced societies with sophisticated legal and political systems and have been made possible by a range of modern inventions. Military technologies such as automatic weapons or barbed wire made it easier for small groups of officials to hold much larger groups of people captive. Advanced bureaucracy and surveillance techniques enabled states to watch, count and categorise civilians in ways they couldnt have done in earlier eras. As Pitzer writes, such camps belong in the company of the atomic bomb as one of the few advanced innovations in violence.

This innovation haunts the political imagination of liberal democracies. The concentration camp is a symbol of everything such societies are supposed to stand against: the arbitrary use of power and the stripping of peoples rights, the systematic removal of liberty; dehumanisation, abuse, torture, murder and genocide. When it is used to refer to contemporary places, the term concentration camp is often reserved for the locations of the most serious human rights abuses, as when Amnesty International used it in a 2017 report estimating that 13,000 people had been murdered by Syrias Assad regime in the Saydnaya military prison outside Damascus. But politicians, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among them, have also used the term to describe camps such as the ones the Trump administration has been running on the US border with Mexico.

To some, these comparisons minimise the use of concentration camps by Nazi Germany in its effort to exterminate Jews. For others, the comparisons are a necessary warning, not least because one kind of camp can easily transform into another. Pitzer gives the example of a refugee camp: if people are not allowed to leave, and are systematically denied their rights, then it starts to resemble more sinister creations. As authoritarians and rightwing populists reach positions of power in various parts of the world, liberals are voicing fears that history is repeating itself.

Surveying what he called a century of camps in the mid-90s, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman warned that the temptation for governments to use them would always be strong when certain humans are declared redundant or forced into a superfluous condition. There is no shortage of threats in the current century from environmental catastrophe to the unfolding coronavirus pandemic that are creating such conditions. The question is how to ensure that the concentration camp is not the states inevitable response.

It is tempting to regard the concentration camp as an anomaly, but for some observers, such camps are a grim reflection of the way modern states work. After the second world war, as knowledge of the Holocaust became widespread, leading theorists sought to offer explanations for the genocide that had taken place, and the methods used to carry it out. Writing in 1950, the Martiniquan poet and politician Aim Csaire argued that the Holocaust applied to Europe colonialist procedures that until then had been reserved exclusively for people of colour.

Concentration camps were indeed colonial in origin. Their earliest uses came at the turn of the 20th century by the Spanish in 1896 to put down a rebellion in Cuba, by the US in 1899 to do similar in the Philippines, and by the British empire in southern Africa during the Boer war of 1899-1902. The first use of concentration camps for a deliberate policy of extermination was not in Europe but in German South West Africa modern-day Namibia between 1904 and 1907. (Germany only recently officially acknowledged its treatment of the Herero and Nama tribes as genocide.)

For Csaire, the appearance of camps in Europe itself was a direct result of the way in which Europeans had attempted to dehumanise their colonial subjects in order to exploit them, but ended up dehumanising themselves. Colonisation, he wrote, works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism.

The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt also turned her attention to camps after the war. Like Csaire, Arendt drew links between the behaviour of European powers in their colonies and their conduct at home, but she also highlighted how some of the tools wielded by authoritarians had been put in place by democracies before the rise of fascism. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt pointed out that when France was occupied by Nazi Germany, for instance, the Gestapo was able to make use of draconian police powers already in existence to round up and detain civilians. These existed because France, like many other states in Europe, had been unable to deal with the mass displacement of people in the aftermath of the first world war and had instituted harsh measures to deal with unwanted migrants.

In 1940, Arendt had her own direct experience of this relatively novel form of containment. After fleeing Germany for France, she was placed in an internment camp at Gurs, near the Pyrenees. The camp had been established a few years earlier to detain republican refugees from the Spanish civil war; it was repurposed in 1939 for enemy aliens a practice instigated by the British in the first world war and subsequently copied by many countries. The inmates had to endure overcrowding, disease and insufficient food rations, and were made to live together regardless of the fact that some were Nazi party members and others, like Arendt, were Jewish refugees. It was partly the memory of this that led Arendt to place internment on a continuum with the Soviet gulags and the Nazi death camps as she saw it, the Hades, Purgatory and Hell of state violence.

That the British, Americans, Spanish, French and Germans, among other nations, had all used concentration camps led some thinkers to ask whether such camps were inevitable features of the modern state. Perhaps the most provocative answer comes from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose ideas have grown in prominence in the past two decades. For Agamben, the existence of the concentration camp reveals something fundamental about power who holds it, and what gives them the authority to wield it. His work is dense, ranging across ancient Greek and Roman law, Biblical texts and Renaissance literature, but it has been influential on a generation of scholars and activists in the past two decades particularly among those who wanted to understand the camp established by the US at Guantnamo Bay, under an emergency policy after 9/11, or the growing phenomenon of immigration detention at the borders of the rich world.

Sovereignty, as Agamben sees it, is founded on absolute power over human life, and has been since ancient times. The sovereign has the power not only to kill, but to strip people of rights through forms of banishment, reducing them to a state of what he calls bare life. In the past, sovereignty would have been concentrated in the figure of the monarch; modern states are supposed to have improved upon monarchy by restraining the arbitrary use of power through democratic checks and balances. But, according to Agamben, the tendency to banish and dehumanise keeps on coming back in the form of the concentration camp: a space where people are outside the law, yet more subject to its power than anywhere else.

For Agamben, this reveals the basis on which power is exercised by modern states. In his words, the concentration camp is the nomos or fundamental principle of modern societies, the hidden matrix of politics in our age. While they may only sometimes use it, governments retain the power to declare emergency measures a state of exception in Agambens words to strip us of rights, and confine us to spaces in which we live a kind of exile. The camps logic, he implies, pervades seemingly free societies through modern state techniques of surveillance, bureaucracy, violence and other forms of coercion.

Grand theories such as those of Csaire, Arendt and Agamben are valuable, but risky. By seeking to identify common patterns across specific societies, at different moments in history, they warn that all modern states have the potential to set up concentration camps. Misconstrued, however, they can end up obscuring crucial differences such as the distinction between camps used in a deliberate policy of extermination, and those where people die through neglect. Holocaust deniers, for instance, or people who seek to downplay the severity of colonial massacres, often try to muddy these distinctions.

When theory becomes dogma, it can also limit our understanding of the present. Agambens own recent trajectory offers a cautionary tale: in late February 2020, he published a short essay in the leftwing Italian newspaper Il Manifesto criticising his governments draconian restrictions on public freedoms aimed at halting the spread of the coronavirus. The piece referred to the invention of an epidemic, and went further than merely questioning the long-term impact of these restrictions; it condemned them as frenetic, irrational, and entirely unfounded, arguing the virus was not too different from the normal flu. The piece has been widely criticised, and provoked a retort from the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy that had he listened to Agambens advice not to have a heart operation 30 years ago, he would now be dead.

Agamben is hardly the only person to have underestimated the threat posed by the coronavirus in recent months. As more governments pass emergency laws to deal with the pandemic, in some cases including draconian surveillance measures and the establishment of segregated quarantine camps, it is right to ask where these might lead, and whether states will be willing to give up their new powers once the immediate danger to public health has passed. But that shouldnt obscure the fact that some emergencies are real: in these situations, the most important question is whether societies can respond to them without permanently destroying peoples rights.

Concentration camps are uniquely dangerous spaces. Their effects may vary considerably, from the horror of Auschwitz to the more mundane misery that Arendt experienced in Gurs, but the people caught up in them almost always end up being treated as less than human. And if the political and technological innovations of the late 19th century made them possible, does the 21st century make them any more likely?

In 2014, the Chinese government launched an initiative it called the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism, focused on the province of Xinjiang, in the countrys far west. In the English-speaking world, details of the programme remained scarce until 2017, when reports started to filter through that thousands of people from Xinjiangs ethnic Uighur population, most of whom are Muslims, were being detained. The following year, researchers who trawled through Chinese government procurement documents and satellite imagery pointed to the existence of a vast, newly constructed complex of internment camps, which they estimated had the capacity to hold anywhere between several hundred thousand and 1.5 million people. Former inmates have given testimony to journalists and researchers that they were forced into education programmes, made to eat pork and drink alcohol, and given compulsory sterilisation and abortions.

This is just one example of how globalisation and technology have added a new dimension to an old problem. China has a long history of running camps the political re-education programme launched by Mao in the 50s was one of the worlds most extensive gulag networks. But the latest crackdown has new features. First, the Xinjiang camps are backed up by state-of-the-art digital surveillance methods provided by leaders in the global tech industry: a computerised CCTV network developed by a state-run defence manufacturer, designed to apply the ideas of military cybersystems to civilian public security, which tracks individuals and analyses their behaviour to anticipate potential crime; a tracking app that visitors to Xinjiang are obliged to install on their smartphones; DNA analysis equipment partly supplied by US biotech firms. Second, China has justified its crackdown to the rest of the world by adopting the same rhetoric that the US and its allies used after 9/11. In 2014, the Communist party launched its so-called peoples war on terror in Xinjiang. Chinas methods may be extreme, but it is by no means the first country to have introduced policies that subject Muslims to collective suspicion and punishment, in response to violent Islamic fundamentalist groups.

What else could tempt states to open camps? In her 2014 book Expulsions, the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues that the particular form of globalisation the world has experienced in recent decades driven by a new form of laissez-faire economics has unleashed a dangerous new dynamic that excludes large numbers of people from economic and social life. The global shift to privatisations, deregulation and open borders for some has brutally punished the vulnerable and accelerated environmental destruction.

In richer countries, Sassen argues, this leads to low-income workers being forced out of established welfare and healthcare programmes into more punitive systems (such as the UKs universal credit scheme), the impoverishment of sections of the middle class through austerity policies, and more and more people being locked up in prison. In poorer parts of the world, this means mass displacement and the warehousing of migrants as they try to move elsewhere.

One result of these global pressures has been the rise of political movements that promise to shore up national, religious or ethnic identities. But identities are ambiguous, and when governments start using the tools of state power to reinforce the line between insider and outsider, there are always large numbers of people who get caught in between. In India, the government of Narendra Modi has been trying to reshape the country along Hindu nationalist lines, undermining the secular and pluralist principles that have held sway since independence. The emerging camps in Assam, a north-eastern state on the border with Bangladesh, are a result: they target thousands of mainly Muslim residents who may have lived in India for decades, but because they originally came from across the border in Bangladesh a legacy of partition have never been registered as citizens.

The understandable response when confronted with injustice is to look for someone to blame. Its easier to do so when oppression is perpetrated by villainous leaders, or in other peoples societies. But particularly in liberal democracies, the chains of responsibility can be complex. Who, for instance, is responsible for the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and slave-labour conditions that migrants and refugees in Libya are subjected to? The immediate answer seems fairly simple: the state officials and local militias, some linked to trafficking networks, who run the detention centres. Thousands of people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are imprisoned in a network of these centres where they are regularly subjected to starvation, disease, torture, rape, and forced labour.

But the reason those detention centres exist is because a range of European governments have been trying to get Libya to act as a block on unwanted migration across the Mediterranean for almost 20 years. The system was built with European support, both from national governments and at EU level first through agreements with the government of Muammar Gaddafi, then, as the country collapsed after he was overthrown by a Nato-backed uprising, a patchwork of arrangements with state officials and local militias.

There is no shortage of information about what happens in Libyan detention centres and European governments frequently profess their horror at the atrocities committed there. Yet the system persists, because those governments broadly agree that the goal of limiting migration is more important than dismantling Libyas detention system. The political consensus in most European countries, including the UK, is that limiting unwanted migration is a reasonable and desirable aim, and large numbers of their citizens have voted in support of it.

When Zygmunt Bauman turned his attention to camps in the 90s, he argued that what characterises violence in our age is distance not just the physical or geographical distance that technology allows, but the social and psychological distance produced by complex systems in which it seems everybody and nobody is complicit. This, for Bauman, works on three levels. First, actions are carried out by a long chain of performers, in which people are both givers and takers of orders. Second, everybody involved has a specific, focused job to perform. And third, the people affected hardly ever appear fully human to those within the system. Modernity did not make people more cruel, Bauman wrote, it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people.

When something today is described as a concentration camp, it almost always provokes an angry dispute. If camps arent being used to exterminate people, as they have been in their worst instances, then the comparison is frequently condemned as inappropriate. But condemnation can be a way for governments to shield themselves from criticism of their decisions, and from criticism of the legitimacy of state power itself.

In 2018, Donald Trumps government responded to a rise in the number of undocumented migrants many of whom were asylum-seekers fleeing violence in Central America crossing the US-Mexico border by drastically increasing the use of long-term immigration detention. Reports of overcrowding, filthy conditions and the denial of due process for asylum claims soon followed, accompanied by measures that seemed intended to make a symbolic display of cruelty, such as the separation of young children from their parents. In June 2019, amid the outcry from opponents of this policy, congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez recorded a video for her Instagram followers: The US is running concentration camps on our southern border, she stated, and that is exactly what they are I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that never again means something.

This was a political intervention intended to shock people into challenging the Trump governments immigration policy and in the row that ensued, some commentators objected that Ocasio-Cortezs reference to concentration camps and her use of the phrase never again was an inappropriate Holocaust analogy. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt commented, something can be horrible and not be like the Holocaust.

But much of the response from Ocasio-Cortezs Republican opponents was to downplay the extent of abuses happening as a result of Trumps policies, or to portray what was happening as normal and routine. Some pointed out, for instance, that Trump was only making modifications to a system built by his predecessors: deportations of undocumented immigrants, for instance, reached their peak under Barack Obama. These sorts of equivocations have accompanied the use of camps from their inception, and they always try to give the same impression: that whats being done is normal and legitimate, that criticisms are overblown, marginal and extreme; and that states have the right to behave this way.

The story of Britains concentration camps during the Boer war illustrates how a society that thinks of itself as liberal can make excuses for a mass crime. In 1899, when the British empire went to war against two breakaway Afrikaner republics in South Africa, it set up a network of camps that quickly expanded to detain several hundred thousand people. At first the camps were justified as protection for Boer civilians who had signed an oath of loyalty; later, they were used to imprison Boer undesirables who had not signed the oath, as well as black South Africans who the British forced off their land to make them act as lookouts for troops. Due to poor sanitation, meagre food rations and overcrowding, diseases such as typhoid and measles frequently ripped through the camps; at least 28,000 white people and 20,000 black people were killed by this system in just a few years.

The two most prominent critics of Britains camps the feminist campaigners Emily Hobhouse and Millicent Fawcett both had to struggle against political and public opinion that initially saw the camps as a wartime necessity, and both fought hard to alleviate suffering. But the grounds on which they did so were radically different, as the author Vron Ware has recently argued. Fawcett, who visited South Africa with the governments approval to produce a report on the camps, saw her concern for the welfare of vulnerable civilians as compatible with the wider aims of the camps. Saving the children, for her, was as true a service to the country as that which men were rendering by going into the armies to serve in the field. But for Hobhouse, who was the first prominent activist to visit South Africa and expose conditions in the camps, British military values and the nationalism that underpinned them were the fundamental problem. She was challenging the legitimacy of state power itself.

Hobhouse, who in her day was derided in sexist terms as a mad old lady, is now largely forgotten, while it is safe to say that Britains concentration camps are not well remembered: last year the Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg defended their use on an episode of Question Time, erroneously claiming that their mortality rate was only the same as that of Glasgows at the time. But without Hobhouses radical critique, it would have been harder to oppose the harm done by Britains camps a century ago, and would be harder to understand why camps still appear in the world today.

The point of historical comparisons should not be to find identical situations no two events in history are identical but to alert us to potential dangers in the way states exercise power. Not everyone, for instance, reacted with outrage to Ocasio-Cortezs comments last year. While she drew criticism from some Jewish organisations, including a rebuke from the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, the row also energised a US protest movement against Trumps immigration policy led by leftwing Jewish activists. The movement calls itself Never Again Action, explicitly drawing on a collective memory of persecution.

In his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, the Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi reflected on the conditions that had made the Nazi camps possible, and wondered what lessons, if any, could be applied to a world that had moved on. The unique combination of factors that had unleashed the horror of Nazism was unlikely to return, he thought, but that should not obscure the danger of violence in our own time, or the politicians who seek to wield it. Violence, he wrote, is there before our eyes it only awaits its new buffoon (there is no dearth of candidates) to organise it, legalise it, declare it necessary and mandatory and so contaminate the world.

If the state as we know it is here to stay, then what can people do when governments start building camps? The history of the concentration camp has also been a history of peoples resistance to camps, from both inside and out. Even in the most seemingly hopeless situations there are stories of people who have fought back against their treatment. The uprisings in the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka are among the most famous; and the Soviet Gulag system was beset by strikes and revolts. On their own, these may not have been enough, but camps work by enforcing a rigid distinction between people on opposite sides of the barbed-wire fence. Those inside are kept silent and invisible, while those outside are encouraged to ignore or accept what is happening. Successful resistance aims at breaking down this distinction: governments know this, and even states that operate relatively mild forms of mass detention make significant efforts to obscure the conditions inside, and to deter their own citizens from prying too closely.

One evening in February this year, I watched the Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani give a talk by video link to an audience at Birkbeck, University of London. Boochani, who currently lives in New Zealand, spent four years in Australias regional offshore processing centre for asylum-seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Australia has pioneered a type of long-term detention for unwanted migrants that is now becoming more common elsewhere in the world. Boochani and his fellow detainees were not merely being held for processing, but in harsh conditions intended to act as a deterrent to future travellers. The Australian government forbade journalists to report on the full extent of these conditions, which included the beating and abuse of detainees, and introduced a law threatening doctors and social workers with up to two years in prison if they spoke in public about what they had witnessed.

Boochani, however, smuggled out accounts of life in detention, via text messages sent to his translator by WhatsApp, that were turned into articles for the Guardian and other outlets as well as a memoir, No Friend But the Mountains. Boochani explained to us how he saw his detention as part of Australias and Britains longer history of treating non-white people as disposable. Its worse than a prison, he said of the Manus camp. Its a place where they take your identity and freedom from you, and try to destroy you. Detainees were given numbers, he said, which the guards used instead of their names; his was MEG45.

The camp on Manus Island was eventually shut down by the Australian government, after widespread public criticism, although its broader asylum policies remain largely the same. For Boochani, writing was not simply a way to expose his conditions and link up with campaigners against detention on the outside, but to challenge the very basis on which the treatment of people like him was justified. I never use the language and the words that the [Australian] government use, he said. I say systematic torture, I say political prisoner. One of the things that gave him hope in confinement, he said, was the fact that animals could wander in and out of the spaces where human freedom was limited a reminder that the structure which held him was built by people, and could therefore also be dismantled. Nature, he said, always tried to reimpose itself on the prison.

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'It's a place where they try to destroy you': why concentration camps are still with us - The Guardian

If you think the coronavirus pandemic is the worst thing you have experienced, you havent experienced the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which has been far more brutal and lethal than any virus could ever be.

I was in occupied Palestine during the First Intifada, writing on the resilience and strength of the Palestinian people in the face of Israeli military oppression. My family lives in East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Beit Jala, Beit Hanina and Beit Sahour. I know what they are forced to experience every day by Israels oppressive government.

For many, the words and phrases most associated with the coronavirus outbreak lockdown, stay at home, and shelter in place may be new, but they arent to the Palestinians. They have lived with curfews, lockdowns and severe restrictions, and often been unable to buy groceries, get medical attention or even visit relatives for more than 70 years. They know what it is like to go without food, without schooling, without celebrations or events.

Israel has adopted more than 65 laws that discriminate against the Palestinian people simply because they are Christian and Muslim, rather than Jewish. One of the first grants immediate citizenship to any Jew from any country around the world and of any nationality or origin, but denies that same privilege to the Palestinians, who have been living on that land since time immemorial.

My family name, Hanania, is a Hebrew Word not Israeli, by the way. It means God has been gracious. My family, we believe, originated from the Hebrews and converted to Christianity in the first century, while even some converted to Islam in the seventh century. We have Christian, Muslim and Jewish relatives, so our history and rights are clear to everyone, except the Israelis. As heavily armed Israeli soldiers wandered through Palestinian cities and villages, we hunkered down eating mujaddara, the rice and lentil dish that became the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israels brutality.

As I watch Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urge unity with his political rivals, I wonder where that has been in the countrys dealings with the Palestinians.

There have been so many Palestinian deaths over the years that the world has become desensitized to them

Ray Hanania

So far, there have been more than 420,000 cases of the coronavirus worldwide, and there have been about 19,000 deaths. But those numbers continue to change so, by the time you read this, they will be less than what is reality. And yet the Palestinians have seen even worse statistics that continue to increase daily. The deaths have been staggering over the years. Tens of thousands died during the war of 1947-49. More than 20,000 were killed during the Israeli assault on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, including the civilians massacred under Ariel Sharons terrorist direction in Sabra and Shatila. Another 2,000 Palestinians were killed during the First Intifada, during which I secretly walked the streets at night with my cousins, collecting rubber bullets that were in reality lethal metal balls covered in a thin plastic coating. More than 2,300 were killed during Israels invasion of Gaza in 2014.

There have been so many Palestinian deaths over the years that the world has become desensitized to them. Palestinian deaths are little more than numbers in a news report, usually presented in such a way as to defend Israels extremist government. But those deaths are dwarfed by the injuries to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, maybe even millions.

This week, Israels government and the Palestinian Authority it controls issued orders to lock down citizens, block immigration and travel, and close all cultural and educational activities and events to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. But, when it is over, life will return to normal for the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis will be free to live a fantasy life of happiness, blocking the trauma they cause from their eyesight with an 8-meter-high concrete wall. The Palestinians will return to being oppressed, brutally beaten, and arrested by Israeli soldiers and the Shin Bet. They will continue to scramble for food, any work, and see power outages, restrictions on their movement, and punishments that range from beatings to killings for actions involving protest and militancy, which Israel labels as terrorism.

Pandemics are not as bad as occupation. If you want to know how to survive this coronavirus pandemic, take a look at how the Palestinians have managed to survive Israeli brutality. And why not take a minute to eat a plate of mujaddara with your family to show some solidarity.

What Palestinians have been forced to go through over the years under Israels oppression is no different than what the world is now going through as a result of the coronavirus. Although the truth is that Israels oppression has been far worse and there still is no antidote for that virus.

Ray Hanania is an award-winning former Chicago City Hall political reporter and columnist. He can be reached on his personal website at http://www.Hanania.com. Twitter: @RayHanania

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Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.

Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published The National Arab American Times newspaper (2004-2007).

Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.

Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Awards for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named Best Ethnic American Columnist by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.

His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.

Click here to send Ray Hanania email.

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Palestinians all too familiar with oppression of lockdowns - The Arab Daily News

In this season of infection, the stock market little more than a twitching corpse, in an atmosphere of alarm and despondency, I am reminded of the enlightenments of the strict curfew Uganda endured in 1966. It was, for all its miseries, an episode of life lessons, as well as monotonous moralizing (because most crises enliven bores and provoke sententiousness). I would not have missed it for anything.

That curfew evoked like today the world turned upside-down. This peculiarity that we are now experiencing, the nearest thing to a world war, is the key theme in many of Shakespeares plays and Jacobean dramas, of old ballads, apocalyptic paintings and morality tales. It is the essence of tragedy and an occasion for license or retribution. As Hamlet says to his fathers ghost, Time is out of joint.

In Uganda, the palace of the king of Buganda, the Kabaka, Mutesa II also known as King Freddie had been attacked by government troops on the orders of the prime minister, Milton Obote. From my office window at Makerere University, where I was a lecturer in English in the Extra Mural department, I heard the volleys of heavy artillery, and saw smoke rising from the royal enclosure on Mengo Hill. The assault, led by Gen. Idi Amin, resulted in many deaths. But the king eluded capture; he escaped the country in disguise and fled to Britain. The period that followed was one of oppression and confusion, marked by the enforced isolation of a dusk-to-dawn curfew. But, given the disorder and uncertainty, most people seldom dared to leave home at all.

The curfew was a period of fear, bad advice, arbitrary searches, intimidation and the nastiness common in most civil unrest, people taking advantage of chaos to settle scores. Uganda had a sizable Indian population, and Indian people were casually mugged, their shops ransacked and other minorities victimized or sidelined. It was also an interlude of hoarding, and of drunkenness, lawlessness and licentiousness, born of boredom and anarchy.

Kifugo! I heard again and again of the curfew a Swahili word, because it was the lingua franca there. Imprisonment! Yes, it was enforced confinement, but I also felt privileged to be a witness: I had never seen anything like it. I experienced the stages of the coup, the suspension of the constitution, the panic buying and the effects of the emergency. My clearest memory is of the retailing of rumors outrageous, frightening, seemingly improbable but who could dispute them? Our saying then was, Dont believe anything you hear until the government officially denies it.

Speaking for myself, as a traveler, any great crisis war, famine, natural disaster or outrage ought to be an occasion to bear witness, even if it means leaving the safety of home. The fact that it was the manipulative monster Chairman Mao who said, All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience, does not make the apothegm less true. It is or should be the subtext for all travelers chronicles.

The curfew three years into my time in Africa was my initiation into the misuse of power, of greed, cowardice and selfishness; as well as, also, their opposites compassion, bravery, mutual aid and generosity. Even at the time, 24-years-old and fairly callow, I felt I was lucky in some way to be witnessing this convulsion. It was not just that it helped me to understand Africa better; it offered me insights into crowds and power and civil unrest generally, allowing me to observe in extreme conditions the nuances of human nature.

I kept a journal. In times of crisis we should all be diarists and documentarians. Were bound to wail and complain, but its also useful to record the particularities of our plight. We know the progress of Englands Great plague of 1665 because Samuel Pepys anatomized it in his diary. On April 30 he wrote: Great fears of the sickness here in the City it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all! Later, on June 25, The plague increases mightily. And by July 26: The Sicknesse is got into our parish this week; and is endeed everywhere.

A month later he notes the contraction of business: To the Exchange, which I have not been a great while. But Lord how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people, and very few upon the Change, jealous of every door that one sees shut up lest it should be the plague and about us, two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.

In that outbreak of bubonic plague, spread by rat fleas, a quarter of Londons population died.

My diary these days sounds a lot like Pepys, though without the womanizing, snobbery or name dropping. The progress of the Covid 19 pandemic is remarkably similar to that of the plague year, the same upside-down-ness and the dizziness it produces, the muddle of daily life, the collapse of commerce, the darkness at noon, a haunting paranoia in the sudden proximity to death. And so much of what concerned me as important in the earlier pages of my diary now seems mawkish, trivial or beneath notice. This virus has halted the routine of the day to day and impelled us, in a rare reflex from our usual hustling, to seek purification.

Still writing gives order to the day and helps inform history. In my journal of the Ugandan curfew I made lists of the rumors and tried to estimate the rate at which they traveled; I noted the instances of panic and distraction there were many more car crashes than usual, as drivers minds were on other things. Ordinary life was suspended, so we had more excuses to do as we pleased.

My parents habits were formed during the Great Depression, which this present crisis much resembles. They were ever after frugal, cautious and scornful of wasters: My father developed a habit of saving string, paper bags, nails and screws that he pried out of old boards. The Depression made them distrustful of the stock market, regarding it as a casino. They were believers in education, yet their enduring memory was of highly educated people rendered destitute college graduates selling apples on street corners in Boston! My mother became a recycler and a mender, patching clothes, socking money away. This pandemic will likely make us a nation of habitual hand-washers and doorknob avoiders.

In the Great Depression, Americans like my parents saw the country fail and though it rose and became vibrant once more, they fully expected to witness another bust in their lifetime. Generally speaking, we have known prosperity in the United States since the end of World War II. But the same cannot be said for other countries, and this, of course, is something many travelers know, because travel often allows us glimpses of upheaval or political strife, epidemics or revolution. Uganda evolved after the curfew into a dictatorship, and then Idi Amin took over and governed sadistically.

But Id lived in the dictatorship and thuggery of the Malawi of Dr. Hastings Banda (Ngwazi the Conqueror), so Ugandas oppression was not a shock. And these experiences in Africa helped me deconstruct the gaudy dictatorship of Saparmurat Niyazov, who styled himself Tukmenbashi Great Head of the Turks when, years later, I traveled through Turkmenistan; the Mongolia of Jambyn Batmnkh, the Syria of Hafiz Assad, the muddy dispirited China of Maos chosen successor, Hua Guo Feng. As for plague, there have been recent outbreaks of bubonic plague in Madagascar, Congo, Mongolia and China, producing national moods of blame-shifting and paranoia, not much different from that of Albert Camuss The Plague.

Were told not to travel right now, and its probably good advice, though there are people who say that this ban on travel limits our freedom. But in fact, travel produces its own peculiar sorts of confinement.

The freedom that most travelers feel is often a delusion, for there is as much confinement in travel as liberation. This is not the case in the United States, where I have felt nothing but fresh air on road trips. It is possible to travel in the United States without making onward plans. But I cant think of any other country where you can get into a car and be certain at the end of the day of finding a place to sleep (though it might be scruffy) or something to eat (and it might be junk food). For my last book, I managed a road trip in Mexico but with hiccups (bowel-shattering meals, extortionate police, bed bugs). But the improvisational journey is very difficult elsewhere, even in Europe, and is next to impossible in Africa. It is only by careful planning that a traveler experiences a degree of freedom, but he or she will have to stick to the itinerary, nagged by instructions, which is a sort of confinement.

In fact, most travel is a reminder of boundaries and limits. For example, millions of travelers go to Bangkok or Los Cabos, but of them, a great number head for a posh hotel and rarely leave: The hotel is the destination, not the city. The same can be said for many other places, where the guest in the resort or spa essentially a gated and guarded palace luxuriates in splendid isolation.

The most enlightening trips Ive taken have been the riskiest, the most crisis-ridden, in countries gripped by turmoil, enlarging my vision, offering glimpses of the future elsewhere. We are living in just such a moment of risk; and it is global. This crisis makes me want to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. It would be a great shame if it were not somehow witnessed and documented.

Paul Therouxs latest book, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey, was published in 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.

Originally posted here:

Paul Theroux Recalls a Fear-Filled Lockdown - The New York Times

Donald Trump has been roundly criticized for calling the virus that causes Covid-19 a "Chinese virus" it has been said that using a term invented by Chinese state media the "Wuhan Virus" is also racist. He is trying to rebut the propaganda and lies of the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party which has said via official channels that they think it came from an American serviceman who visited Wuhan China. That it was developed by the US Army to use against China. That is a lie on the order of stating that the Great Leap Forward was a huge success and the Tiananmen Square protest never occurred. It must be rebutted with all available force. However, Asian Americans have suffered "racist" xenophobic and discriminatory attacks because of this. That said, a stern lesson from history shows why we cannot simply concede to the language chosen by the Chinese Communist Party in the name of not being called racist. To criticize this party is to stand up for over one billion Chinese people who cannot dare speak out. According to the Chinese communist party the Tiananmen square massacre never occurred. That is a lie,a huge lie.Compared to that lie a bit of propaganda about a virus is nothing.

Asian Americans, Casualties of a Propaganda Battle.

East Asians are a smaller group here in the US who have a complex relationship to racism. Suffering greatly yet also being thought of as an treated as a "model minority". Accepted in some context yet rejected in others. Thought of as smarter than the other students and so not needing as much help YET being no more able than any other students. As a result, they may struggle latter on in school unless they study hard on their own. This virus has reminded people that both sides of that status are rooted in the idea of Asians as "other" than white. No it is not quite the same as that which was done to Africans the world over. We were as Robin DiAngleo describes it treated as the ultimate racial other. (Chinese and Japanese people got the exclusion acts black people were property.) This makes it hard for some people to see this discrimination for how bad it is even if it does not rise to the level of something like chattel slavery or the holocaust. Yet it is a great evil and can lead to such thing if unchecked.Asian Americans have suffered hundreds of xenophobic attacks in the last few weeks as foolish people think that a virus originating in China means that all Asian people are responsible. Those people are the same kind who when told bleach will kill the virus might drink a cup of bleach.

It is a very real problem that fighting this propaganda battle with the CCP will cause as a casualty suffering for Asian Americans. The blame for that lies on the fools and bigots who firstly cannot see the difference between people from China VS Vietnam VS Japan VS Korea. The same ignorant people, and even many who think themselves enlightened cannot see that the Chinese Communist Party is not of by or for the Chinese people.

The story of the tank man. In 1989 students in Beijing China created a protest camp in Tiananmen square. It started out as mourning a communist party official who had died and evolved in time into a pro-democracy movement. The military was called in once and backed off. Then they came one night with tanks and live ammo and cleared Tiananmen square with deadly force. To this day if you try to discuss it on the internet or in public in the Peoples republic of China you may be disappeared.

The great leap forward was portrayed as a huge success by the CCP. This economic program of Maos lead to approximately 45-50 million deaths due to famine. He had the children of city people shipped to the country to work on collective farms called peoples communes. He had people who lived on the communes try to produce steel in back yard furnaces. Both agricultural production and steel production were lied about. The deaths due to starvation were lied about. Then the whole thing was covered up. Mao was out and free years latter to launch a cultural revolution which would devastate traditional Chinese culture.

Beware of Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Not Random Asian People You Meet.

The Chinese Communist Party whose propaganda has been unwittingly spread by western media and social media is the greatest oppressor of Asian people inside and outside of China in history. They have killed millions via their inability to punish the incompetence of party members including their paramount leaders. They have made criminal their negligence by refusing to acknowledge even that mistakes were made. In the covid-19 situation their same old pattern has repeated.

The largest country by population on Earth is China to hate China is to hate a large fraction of humanity. To love Chinese people is not to love the Chinese government. To equate China or Chinese people with all Asians is ignorant. To attack Asian people in America for a situation that is, at worst, due to the mismanagement of a government they never had anything to do with is criminally stupid.

The only thing worst is to mindlessly parrot the CCP propaganda and to prolong, even slightly, the brutal oppression of over 1.4 Billion people. Including the specific oppression of minorities in Tibet, Uighurs of Xinjiang in concentration camps, and the repression of Falun Gong practitioners. In all cases chiefly for having a cultural identity that is not in lock step with that of the Han Chinese dominated CCP. That is an evil that must be opposed right along with our own domestic racism.

We in the west can and must do both.

Do not believe anything the CCP says about this virus. Do protect the rights and lives of Asian Americans.

More reading on this.

"Coronavirus Is More Fodder for Chinese Propaganda" By Jonah Goldberg, National Review

"Life in China Has Not Returned to Normal, Despite What the Government Says" Charlie Campbell Time.

The Comprehensive Timeline of Chinas COVID-19 Lies By Jim Geragthy, National Review

Visit link:

China's Government Lies: Tiananmen Square and Mao's Great Leap - Science 2.0

On March 29, 2020, a group of 100 Iranian academics and political and social activists published a letter holding Irans Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei chiefly responsible for the COVID-19 epidemic becoming a national disaster. The letter was posted on the Kalame.com website, identified with the supporters of Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has been under house arrest since 2011 for criticizing Khamenei and other regime officials for their oppression of the Green Movement protests and for falsifying the 2009 presidential elections.

The signatories of the letter list a series of failures for which they hold Khamenei and the regime officials directly responsible, including concealing information about the coronavirus outbreak from the public and failing to take measures to curb the spread of the disease, out of political and religious considerations. Instead of acting to save the Iranian people, they state, Irans sole leader, Khamenei, explains the situation using conspiracy theories about bio-terror and demons who assist Irans enemies,[1] and even prevents the people from receiving American or other humanitarian aid, while he and other regime officials do have access to medical treatment. The signatories also accuse President Rouhani of being complicit in the disaster by cooperating with Khamenei in inciting and attributing the crisis to an enemy plot.

The regimes financial and media apparatuses, which Khamenei controls, add the signatories, are not being used to serve the people but only the small hedonistic sector of regime henchmen. The large funds serve the regimes project of exporting the revolution; the security apparatuses, who put down even the slightest protest, fail to follow the guidelines of the medical experts and minimize public movement in order to restrain the spread of the disease, while the broadcasting authority and media hide information from the public and even blame the public itself for the situation.

Criticism of the regimes handling of the coronavirus crisis was also expressed by Parvaneh Salahshouri, a member of the outgoing Majlis, in a March 15 interview with the Jahan-i Sanat daily. She accused the authorities of hiding the truth about the epidemic from the public, refusing to take measures to limit its spread from the outset, evading responsibility and circulating conspiracy theories blaming Irans enemies, the U.S. and Israel, for the epidemic instead of helping the people.

The following are the main points of the academics letter condemning Khamenei and of MP Salahshouris interview.

The 100 Academics Protest: Khamenei, You Are Responsible For This National Disaster

The March 29, 2020 academics' letter stated:

"Mr. Khamenei, you are the No. 1 culprit in the COVID-19 pandemic becoming a national disaster!

"According to senior staff in Iran's Department of Health, one person is infected with the coronavirus every minute, while every 10 minutes, someone dies from the virus. Iran's doctors, as well as the heads of the World Health Organization, estimate that the number of officially recognized deaths [in Iran] is much smaller than the true number. The evidence suggests we are facing a national disaster.

"Everyone now knows that the initial obfuscation by the regime and its security forces robbed the Iranian people of their chance to curtail this dangerous virus. Everyone knows the facts of how the lives of Iranian citizens were sacrificed, irresponsibly and inhumanely, in service of the regime's political interests both within the country, as in the February 11 [Revolution Day] parade, the [February 21] Majlis elections, and the failure to quarantine the city of Qom [the epicenter of the virus' spread because of its long-standing connection with China], as well as outside the country, as in the China policy [allowing Mahan Air flights to continue even after the scope of the pandemic became known].[2] All these were terrible blows to us, the citizens of Iran. Everyone knows that the regime's irresponsible handling of the reactionary traditions[3] contributed to the accelerated spread of this virus, etc.

"We now bear witness as the regime's most powerful and senior [official, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei], the man who makes all the important decisions, leverages a preposterous theory about bio-terrorism, in an effort to defend his conspiracy-based worldview and excuse his foolish decision to reject several offers of international assistance.[4] As the crisis is reaching its peak, Leader [Khamenei] adds demons to his list of perpetual enemies, and aid from Doctors Without Borders is turned away. While all citizens are forbidden from performing burial rites, military personnel under the leader's command held a funeral for the IRGC general who died of the coronavirus, calling him a martyr, and misinforming citizens with the utter falsehood that the funeral was a spontaneous event.

"The life of every single Iranian citizen is in the hands of the leader, his advisors, and the police and security forces. [Iranian President Rouhani's] obedient government is also abiding by these policies, and failing to take the necessary actions, despite all the warnings of officials in the health and hygiene systems. Thus, Iran's citizens, including its medical personnel who are risking their lives, are paying the price of this stupidity and ineffectualness. It should be noted that even low-income sectors have yet to receive anything but promises.

"Everywhere the world, politicians are deferring to the words and directions of [medical] experts. But here in our Iran, [medical] experts must obey the commands and directions of political and military officials...!

"Now more than ever, Mr. Khamenei must face the questions posed by the Iranian public:

"Should the National Development Fund [Irans] foreign currency reserves which belongs to all Iranians but is controlled by [Khamenei], be spent on the [IRGC's] Qods Force in service of Iran's regional interests alone, or should it support the pressing issue of public health in laying the groundwork to minimize public movements, equip hospitals, and offer low-income populations [aid] and mitigate further misery?

"Can the regime, so practiced at suppressing even the smallest public protest, not act to minimize intra- and interurban traffic?

"Should the capital and many resources of the vast organizations controlled by Khamenei including Imam Reza's Shrine [Foundation], the Foundation of the Oppressed and Disabled, the Executive Headquarters of Imam's Directive, and so on all of which in fact belong to the Iranian people, be spent on the Arba'een pilgrimage[5] and [cover] the vast expenditures of the leader's office, instead of [being spent on] on the vital national issue [of fighting the coronavirus]?

"Why are Khamenei, and other senior officials, who live in ideal quarantine conditions, selfishly and stubbornly withholding international aid from the Iranian people, on the most absurd pretexts?[6] Following the [2003] earthquake in the city of Bam [in Kerman province], they accepted U.S. aid and American presence in that region, and allowed the field hospital built [by the Americans] to continue to provide services for a long time. Why are they now deporting the highly reputable Doctors Without Borders organization?

"Why are the Leader [Khamenei] and his security forces and judicial authority insisting on blocking the release of all political prisoners? Why are those who help spread free information still being arrested, despite the current circumstances?

"Why is the [Iranian] broadcasting service, which acts against the nation and obeys Khamenei, so busy obfuscating facts, spreading superstitious ideas, and blaming the public, instead of acting with transparency on this vital matter and providing accurate, useful, and well-coordinated information to improve national cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus?

"During the fuel [protests] crisis,[7] which was supposed to impact public budgeting, Khamenei personally and immediately entered the fray, silencing critics, including religious scholars affiliated with [President Rouhani's] government. Why then, now that there is a crisis in which the lives of the public are at stake, is the regime leader maintaining an opportunistic silence in the face of superstition and conservative reactionaries who squandered their chance to quarantine the city of Qom and ban large gatherings for a few weeks?

"There is no need to spell out the fundamental critique of the initial (and ongoing) obfuscation and lies, as it is already known to all.

"In the opinion of the signatories of this document, Khamenei is the main culprit in the making of the current crisis into a national disaster. Furthermore, [President] Rouhani is complicit in exacerbating this process, because of his cooperation with Khamenei in inciting and attributing the crisis to an enemy plot.

"We conclude with a few words for our alert, overwhelmed, yet concerned and endangered countrymen:

"Dear people of our homeland!

"In the absence of a responsible, efficient, and truthful regime, only doctors and medical professionals are devoted to protecting citizens from this virus. They can be the source for citizens seeking to carry on with life despite all the limitations... "[8]

Outgoing Majlis Member Parvaneh Salahshouri: "The Authorities Hid The Outbreak Of The Virus From The Outset, And Told The Public About It Only After It Had Peaked"

Two weeks earlier outgoing Majlis member Parvaneh Salahshouri criticized the regime's conduct as exposed by the coronavirus crisis. In an interview published March 15, 2020 in the Jahan-i Sanat daily, she said openly that the authorities had concealed the truth about the outbreak from the public, had refused to take steps to stop it from the outset, had evaded responsibility and propagated conspiracy theories according to which the virus was created by Iran's enemies, the U.S. and Israel. The following are the main points of her statements:

"Let us not forget that in Iran, the running [of the country] is not in the hands of a single organization [hinting that in addition to the executive branch, i.e. the government, there are many other bodies such as Khamenei's office, the IRGC, and parallel organizations]. As usual, in recent years those in charge are avoiding the responsibility with which they are charged. They are passing the buck from one to the other. Recently, they have been calling for fighting the 'bio-terror' of the coronavirus and saying that the ultimate responsibility [for defeating it] rests upon the shoulders of the armed forces...

"In our country, there are three common elements: one, concealing the truth; two, lying; and three, politicizing various things. That is, if the authorities do not manage to conceal the truth and to lie, but the matter still heads the agenda, then they offer conspiracy theories and turn the [matter] into a political affair.

"Our country's administrative weakness is almost unmatched in the world. All these elements together have created a situation in which not only [the cities of] Tehran, Qom, and Gilan but most of the provinces in Iran have been impacted by the coronavirus. Indeed, the public no longer believes the authorities and the media as they once did. The most dangerous thing is public's lack of confidence in the system, and this is even more dangerous than the coronavirus... It appears that there is a real shortage of information in the country which enables the broadcasting authority to play a double game with the public. That is, on the one hand they tell the public to stay home, while on other they conceal the scope of the catastrophe from it...

Parvaneh Salahshour (Source: Iran-emrooz.net, March 15, 2020)

"In my view, it is impossible to quarantine the capital [Tehran], but the authorities could have quarantined the city of Qom [where the outbreak in Iran began] from the beginning, instead of concealing reality. In this way, they could have acted to prevent the virus from spreading to other cities. Those who prevented the quarantining of Qom are accountable to the public and to God.

"In another country in such a crisis, the [national] airline [a reference to the Iranian national carrier] Mahan would surely be recognized as the main factor in the outbreak of this disease, because of its negligence [Mahan's continuing its Iran-China flights even after the disease spread through Iran], and the judiciary would certainly have held it to account. But in our country, they arrest those who care about the matter [and warned about the spread of the disease]...

"These days, everyone is saying 'stay home.' When some of the public has no choice but to leave the safety of their homes in order to make a living, the government must allocate aid packages for supporting the poor so that the lives of as few as possible are in danger. For a long time, our country's economy has been in shambles, and therefore neither the government nor any other organization can quarantine Tehran. Quarantining would only be possible if they used the 200 million euros that the Majlis allocated to the IRGC a short time ago, and only if the IRGC wanted to use these funds to help the public since it is obliged to use this money for the public... Due to ineffective administration, we have no positive outcome. The authorities hid the outbreak of the virus from the outset, and told the public about it only after it had peaked, and now everyone's work is difficult...

"In Iran, the senior officials were infected with the coronavirus before the people. The only way to control the virus is quarantine, but there is no such option for our country... The meaning of quarantine is that the government must bring food products to all the homes. But is our government capable of this?

"Thus, the only solution is to maintain personal and public hygiene and to stay home as much as possible. But we cannot actually order the worker who needs to be out on the street [to earn] a single loaf of bread to stay home, because we cannot support him...

"There is no greater disgrace than a public afflicted with poverty and starvation in a country awash in petroleum."[9]

[5] The Arbaeen Pilgrimage is a political/religious march from Najaf, Iran to Karbala, Iraq, established by the Iranian regime to mark the anniversary of the 40th day after the death of the Third Shi'ite Imam Hussain bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, in the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. The Iranian regime is promoting this pilgrimage as a rival to the Sunni Hajj to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

[6] A reference to the expulsion of a Doctors Without Borders delegation and the rejection of humanitarian aid offered by the U.S.

[8] Kaleme.com, March 29, 2020.

[9] Jihan-i Sanat (Iran), March 15, 2020.

Excerpt from:

Visions Of The Post-Coronavirus World Part III: 100 Academics And Political Activists In Iran Tell Supreme Leader Khamenei: 'You Are The No. 1...

Yesterday, the Chinese city of Shenzen became the first in the Peoples Republic to ban wild animal consumption. China is notorious for its consumption of wild animals as part of an exotic cuisine. Like Nigeria, much of this exotic cuisine was introduced into Chinese culture thanks to years of extreme famine and government oppression that forced citizens to consider wild animals as an alternative source of meat and proteins as famine as poverty and famine decimated domesticated livestock. In Nigeria, there was a significant spike in the consumption of wild animals like Deer, Grass cutters and bats during the Nigerian Civil War, where a food siege by the Nigerian government forced many in South Eastern Nigeria to look to wild life for sustenance. Decades later, many of these practices persist in both culture, leading to severe health complications.

The dreaded Ebola virus that ravaged West Africa, like many other virus was a zoonotic illness, an illness caused by a pathogen that was transferred from an animal to a human being and mutations allowed the virus to move from animal to human infections to human to human infections. Many health authorities have long recommended that the consumption of wild animals either be heavily regulated or banned outright.

Domesticated species that are killed for food are often heavily bred to make them immune to many zoonotic bacteria and viruses and are carefully prepared to be fit for human consumption. This isnt the case for wild animal consumption where the wildness of the animal is part of the allure of consumption. With China finally leading the charge for the banning of mass consumption of wild animals, after years of actively resisting any attempts to ban or restrict wild animal consumption in its country, it begs the question when Nigeria will finally follow suit and begin to either restrict or regulate our own wild animal consumption.

We already know from our handling of the Covid-19 crisis that Nigeria is not ready to handle an epidemic of any capacity and if we continue to consume wild animals, it will only be a matter of time before we become the epicentre of a new virus epidemic.

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#Covid19: Wild animal consumption was just banned in China, should Nigeria follow suit? - YNaija

LAHORE: Speaker Punjab Assembly Ch Parvez Elahi Wednesday said that no oppression or excesses with the Tableeghi Jamaat will be tolerated.

Tableeghi Jamaat no doubt is peaceful but not derelict, do not invite wrath of Allah by committing oppression and excesses, the Pakistan Muslim League leader said in a statement here.

Ch Parvez Elahi has said that this Jamaat is the biggest representative Jamaat of the Muslims in the world and calling for peace throughout the world, its members are recognized in every region and country of the world as the ambassadors of peace. He said this is such a Jamaat whose Tableegh (preaching) has not caused chaos anywhere ever.

Ch Parvez Elahi said that he has also contacted Chief Minister Punjab Usman Buzdar regarding Tableeghi people matter, regretfully implementation has been taken in Sindh but it has not been implemented in Punjab, IG Sindhs notification was also sent to Punjab Government but still no action has been taken.

He said that negative propaganda in the context of Tableeghi Jamaat should be stopped, has Corona Virus also been spread in Europe, US and Italy because of Tableeghi Jamaat, guests who have come here from foreign countries Punjab Police should not commit any excesses with them, correct its attitude and the guests should not be treated as the culprits.

The Punjab Assembly Speaker has said those people who have been picked from the mosques and locked up in the police stations, they should immediately be released and shifted to the mosques or Tableeghi Centers and these mosques and centers be declared as quarantine and there ration and facilities should be arranged for them.NNI

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Negative propaganda in the context of Tableeghi Jamaat should be stopped - Aaj News

"If you really want to change society, change the economic power of women," says Dorothy Spence.

Spence is the founder of Imaginal Ventures, a business advisory, management consulting and training firm based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They work with businesses aiming to be a force for goodhelping to scale their impact to a broader audience.

And she's not wrong. According to the UN, financially empowering women not only grows economies but is key to realizing gender equality targets and achieving global sustainable development goals. And women are good for businessmore employment and leadership opportunities for women translate to increased effectiveness and growth, and a better bottom-line across the board.

"Statistically the stats are mind-blowing," says Spence. "The same goes for women on boards of directors, too. The research is clear that when (at least) 30 percent of your board is made up of women, all performance measures of corporations are much stronger."

Despite the mounting evidence that economically empowering women benefits all, women still face a host of economic barriers, both locally and around the globe. Women are more likely to be unemployed and are over-represented in informal and vulnerable employment. Additionally, women bear the brunt of unpaid and domestic workaccording to a report by Oxfam, "if all the unpaid care work done by women across the globe was carried out by a single company it would have an annual turnover of $10 trillion43 times that of Apple."

Unfortunately, that unrealized economic power becomes a compounding loss as research shows that when women make money, they invest in their family and their community, making them stronger.

Even when women do get a piece of the pie, it's not divided equally. Globally, women are still paid less, to the tune of 77 cents for every dollar paid to men. We're less likely to be entrepreneurs, and when we do take the plunge, we face increased disadvantages. And with only 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies led by women, it shows there are still constraints to women's ability to rise to the highest levels of leadership. Constraints that impact marginalized women, and women (including Black, Indigenous, disabled, queer, transgender) who live at the crossroads of oppression, the most.

Since 1978 Business Roundtable, an association of leading American CEOs that aims to promote a thriving economy and enhanced opportunities for all Americans through smart public policy has periodically issued their Principles of Corporate Governance.

Since 1997, this document, which profoundly influences how corporations operate (in the US and beyond), has endorsed principles of shareholder primacy or the idea that corporate purpose is to serve shareholders first. That all changed in August 2019 when Business Roundtable released a new statement prioritizing the benefit of all stakeholders customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders.

"The purpose of business is no longer simply to maximize profits for the shareholders but to take care of your communities, your families, the environment, and your staff as well," says Spence. "I believe that that broader view of the purpose of business is one that women really resonate with."

Spence should know. In addition to Imaginal Ventures, she leads The Purpose Led Business School, a growth acceleration program aimed at founders looking to build their business as a force for good, a group that (so far) has, overwhelmingly, been women.

Additionally, Spence spent 2019 working as a Development Guide with SheEO, a global community and 'radically redesigned ecosystem' that uses a visionary business model to support, fund, and celebrate female innovators and entrepreneurs. Rather than trying to level the playing field by forcing women to conform to existing business models, they've developed a whole new gameone based around treating each other with radical generosity.

"When we emerge from what's going on right now globally, there'll be no doubt that we're in a hyper-collaborative environment," says Spence, of the (still not fully known) impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic. "I think that as we emerge, there is going to be the opportunity for women to step into stronger leadership roles, but in a way that is true to them."

One of the first things we can do to advance the empowerment of women financially is to close the wage gap so that men and women doing the same work receive equal compensation.

"That's clearly change one," says Spence.

A 2019 study by job search titan, Glassdoor, found Canadian women earn just 84 cents on the dollar as compared to men overall. Even when factors like education, experience, and title get taken into account (what Glassdoor calls the adjusted pay gap), Canadian women make 4 cents less than the dollar paid to men. And the numbers are even worse for women from marginalized communities.

Another way to empower women financially is to give traditionally gendered industries their economic due. A 2016 study by Oxfam Canada and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that female-dominated industries' average pay is lower than those of male-dominated sectors.

For example, Early childhood educators (a position often held by women), working full time, make a median annual wage of $25,334. Meanwhile, the median salary for truck drivers (a role overwhelmingly taken up by men) is $45,417. This is despite Insure.com's 2019 Mother Day Index finding, which estimated the 'value of a mom' at $71,297. Clearly, there's a disconnect.

"We need to make powerful requests of society," says Spence. "And we need to step up and say, you know, I would be a great board member. I could contribute. I have a lot of wisdom; I have a lot of experience."

Spence believes the government certainly has a role to play as we start to create large-scale system change. Her experience with SheEO taught her that going it alone for that level of system change is an enormous task. And, and for small businesses, it can become debilitating.

"Government is doing a great job in terms of turning their funding towards women in business," says Spence. "But the more of that, the better, I think."

And while Spence believes viewing the world through a gendered lens is critical to our ability to make the right choices, she is quick to caution against inflaming the gender divide. To her, we must work together to enact the necessary change.

"How are we going to do this together? How are we going to learn to be accepting of diversity and the perspectives of all of us? And how are we going to make choices with all these different perceptions?," she asks. "That is a much higher level of consciousness we're asking to operate on."

"How we come together is going to be key here," she adds, speaking again to our (very) current viral challenge. "Do we come together and say I need all of this because everything's scarce or do we say, what's the highest and best use of our resources today? Those are two different conversations. We've had the everything is scarce conversation in business for the last while. I think it'd be refreshing to have that different conversation: What do I really need, how can I support you? And how do we uplift the whole society right now? We could do with an upgrade anyway."

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Show her the money: Empowering women economically will empower us all - TheChronicleHerald.ca

During the long moments of any campaign season you know, that time when all else revolves around the invective and venom candidates for whatever office hurl at each other in the hopes of convincing us that their message is the one we should accept candidates uniformly conclude that, by extension, we will accept and approve of them for that special office to which they aspire.

They saturate us with their definitions and examples of, let us say, freedom or liberty.The irony is that each has her/his own very well-defined concept of those two fundamentals of our American cultural heritage.They, furthermore, present them in such diametrically opposed applications that it borders on the comical.

A case in point is the recent impeachment of President Trump attempts by the Democrats.Both sides presented their positions in this context:We are dong this to save our libertyor save our freedom, and they blathered on with such nonsensical palaver love that wordmy Scottish Great-Grandmother used it all the time that it made my head spin!

All this has prompted me to re-examine the notionsof freedom and liberty. In so doing, I have tried to considermore closely how we apply these rudimentary principles of our democracy in ourdiscussions and in our approaches to our interactions with the rest of ourworld.

Taking a look at definitions of both liberty and freedom shows that in the Oxford Dictionary, liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on ones way of life, behavior, or political views. And the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines freedom as the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous.

A further analysisof liberty was offered by Isaiah Berlin in his iconic publication, FourEssays on Liberty (1969). Berlin theorizesa further assessment which differentiates a positive liberty from anegative liberty in which he posits, Positive libertyis the possessionof the capacity to act upon ones free will, as opposed tonegative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint on ones actions.

From this, I have developed a concept that the essential difference between liberty and freedom can be reduced to the following proposition: freedom is the release or exemption from institutionally or structurally imposed regulations and strictures; whereas, liberty is the exercise of unrestrained individual free will in ones life, expression, behavior or political views. Hence, it can be said that liberty has to do with will and freedom has to do with practice.

So now, bydefinition and commitment, you can see why my political party is theLibertarian Party.

Thus, from myanalysis, it can be deduced that liberty has more to do with theindividual free will, and, on the other hand, freedom is a reflection ofthe necessary separation of the individuals behavior from institutional limits.

Why is it important to make such nuanced differences between liberty and freedom?For all practical purposes it could be just another of my esoteric ventures into onion peeling. Still, I believe that the more distinctions we can develop when it comes to fundamental concepts we exercise in our daily lives, the more informed we can be, and the less we can be made subject by those who would limit us.

Further, it seems tome that the difference between liberty and freedom can be seen inthe differences in laws which affect either one of these two rudiments of ourAmerican societal and political order.

Given that every lawtakes away another of our freedoms or liberties, when we focus on the specificintent of a given law we can begin to see which is limited more our freedomor our liberty.

It is vital in myperspective to keep in mind that the founders of our Nation in large part weremotivated by two facts of their existence: 1) the oppression of King George andthe excesses of his dominion; and 2) their philosophical belief in the sacrednessof the individual and in the sacredness of the individuals exercise of freewill.

We see this in the structure and the intent of our Constitution, and more specifically in our Bill of Rights.The structure of our government is predicated upon a clearly defined separation of powers and the Bill of Rights was/is a specific response to the declaration and protection of individual liberties.I mull these over every time I hear of a new law, or new regulation, or new Department of(whatever) is about to be introduced.

It can be frightening, and it should be!Understanding the liberties and freedoms upon which our Nation has been founded is absolutely vital in protecting and preserving it.

Still, it is not in just understanding them.It is in understanding the means by which they can be taken away from us!

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Penny Thoughts: The Blessings of Liberty and Freedom - West Alabama Watchman