Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota said this week that the United States will never be a just and equal place so long as our economic and political structures prioritize profit, adding later that we must dismantle "the whole system of oppression, wherever we find it.

She said verbatim on Tuesday:

As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality. So we cannot stop at criminal justice system. We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression, wherever we find it.

Right-leaning news sites quickly picked up Omars remarks, reporting that she had advocated for the dismantling of the U.S. economy and its political system. This coverage prompted the Washington Post into action, publishing an exceptionally generous defense of her comments.

Omars words are being rearranged, writes Washington Post senior political reporter Aaron Blake, and rather speculatively so.

He adds, Omar didnt directly connect the dismantling to the entire U.S. economy and political system. She instead invoked broader inequalities produced by how our economy and political systems have prioritized things, and then she said we should set about dismantling the whole system of oppression, wherever we find it.

The article goes on to say Omar herself "disputes" right-leaning news outlets' characterizations of her comments. However, by disputes, the report means only that the congresswoman tweeted an insult at Donald Trump Jr., who claimed this week that she wants to dismantle the United States economy and political system.

Does our education system know it has failed you? Omar said on social media. Your level of comprehension is such an embarrassment to our country, maybe someone can offer you free English classes.

This hardly reads like a rebuttal. Nor does it clarify what she meant when she said, We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression, wherever we find it."

The Washington Posts defense of Omar continues, suggesting that a less conspiratorial reading of her remarks is that she merely views the system of oppression as being a symptom of how weve prioritized things in our government and economy, without believing that setup is itself inherently oppressive that the system of oppression exists inside our government and economy, without it constituting the entire thing.

The article goes on:

If she was saying the entire system was oppressive and must be dismantled, why allow for the idea that this oppression exists in some places but not others? Why suggest the systems of oppression exist inside these larger systems, if you mean to say the entire thing is the system of oppression which must be dismantled?

Why indeed? Perhaps Omar herself could clarify this. Her spokesman did not respond to the Washington Examiners request for comment.

Blake's defense of Omar goes on interminably. But why launch such a defense? If there is an ambiguity here, why not look at what the congresswoman has said previously about reforming and dismantling U.S. institutions? As it turns out, there is quite a lot to see, as cataloged by conservative commentator and Washington Examiner contributor Drew Holden.

For example, the congresswoman has said we need to dismantle capitalism. She says our economy, schools, and even our system are rigged. Omar called for the end to colorblind admissions. She has called for the dismantling of the police department in her congressional district. Omar has called for the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She claims the U.S.s refugee and asylum system, which her family used successfully and very much to their advantage when they fled Somalia, is oppressive. Omar claims employer-provided healthcare is part of an inhuman system.

At this point, it may be easier to catalog the institutions Omar does not think are "oppressive" and "inhuman" and need to be abolished, dismantled, or otherwise destroyed. It may even fill an entire cocktail napkin.

Honestly, perhaps the real marvel here is that right-leaning news organizations find it a story at all when Omar says we need to dismantle the U.S. economy and its political system. Indeed, her remarks this week about pulling down American institutions, which she has not actually disputed saying, are exactly in character for her. This is not new territory for Omar.

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Why is the Washington Post so eager to rescue Ilhan Omar from herself? - Washington Examiner

The anti-racist protests in the United States have helped inspire movements against oppression and discrimination in many parts of the world. One striking example comes from West Papua, which has been ruled as a province of Indonesia since the 1960s, with Jakartas security forces clamping down hard on agitation for independence or autonomy. The slogan Papuan Lives Matter, modelled directly on the African-American struggle, has become a rallying cry for Papuan activists.

A recent wave of unrestbegan in August 2019after nationalist vigilantes attacked Papuan students in Indonesias second-largest city, Surabaya, and called them monkeys. They accused the students of insulting Indonesias national flag, which they categorically denied. The police then rounded up the students, firing teargas into their dormitory.

The scenes in Surabaya angered West Papuans who saw clips of the violence circulating via television and social media. They went on to organise one of the biggest anti-racism protests in modern Indonesian history. Thousands of people from all over West Papua attended rallies, holding signs that declared West Papuans are not monkeys. The initial protest wavelasted for several weeks, but its repercussions are still being felt today.

No free choice

Like the other Indonesian provinces, West Papua is a former colony of the Netherlands. However, it remained under Dutch rule when Indonesia became an independent state after the Second World War. Indonesia took control of the province in the 1960s, calling it Irian Jaya, in what was meant to be a temporary arrangement until a referendum could be organised to determine its status.

When the so-called Act of Free Choice was eventually held in August 1969, it clearly did not represent the will of the people. Just 1,026 delegates, handpicked by the Indonesian military, took part in the exercise less than 2% of the population of 800,000. In a cablefrom July 1969, the US embassy in Jakarta described the nature of the referendum:

The Act of Free Choice (AFC) in West Irian is unfolding like a Greek tragedy, the conclusion preordained. The main protagonist, the GOI [Government of Indonesia], cannot and will not permit any resolution other than the continued inclusion of West Irian in Indonesia. Dissident activity is likely to increase but the Indonesian armed forces will be able to contain and, if necessary, suppress it.

Anothercablesent from the embassy that month suggested that the great majority of the population favour[s] a termination of Indonesian rule.

West Papuans who refused to accept the Indonesian occupation organised themselves to form the Free Papua Movement (OPM). A low-level insurgency has been simmering in the region ever since. In response, Indonesia has charged thousands of West Papuans with treason merely for expressing their political beliefs. Yet the movement continues to flourish.

The Indonesian state denied that West Papuans constitute a distinct community with their own Melanesian culture and sought toIndonesianizethe province after annexing it. The authorities in Jakarta encouraged migration of non-Papuans from Java, Sumatra, and other regions into West Papua, in a push for ethnic acculturation. The religious demography of the Christian-majority provincebegan to shiftas the Muslim population grew.

Also read: Whats At the Root of the Unrest in Indonesias Papua?

In spite of these developments, the influence of the Melanesian identity has been growing in West Papua. One manifestation of this is the popularity of the slogan Sorong-Samarai, which asserts a fraternal bond between West Papua and its ethnic neighbour Papua New Guinea. (Sorong and Samarai lie at the western and eastern extremes of the island respectively.)

Jakartas methodsAlthough it is little known in the United States, Washington played a key role in the annexation of West Papua, as the architect of the 1962New York Agreementthat paved the way for the Indonesian takeover and the Act of Free Choice. The US government approached the question of West Papua from the standpoint of the Cold War in the Pacific region.In the 1950s, the Soviet Uniongave supportto Sukarno, Indonesias first postindependence leader, while the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), the worlds largest nonruling communist movement, aligned itself with China after the Sino-Soviet split.

The United States responded by supporting the 1965 coup of Indonesian army general Haji Mohammad Suharto against Sukarno: the CIA supplied its own list of PKI members across the country for Suhartos hit squads. In his bookThe Jakarta Method,Vincent Bevinshas documented this American-made program of mass murder, which supplied a template for future massacres in Latin America. After supporting the decisive annexation of West Papua by Suhartos regime, the United States also went on to endorse the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in the 1970s, which was followed by large-scale atrocities against the civilian population.

The US mining companyFreeportMcMoRanFretook a majority stake in West Papuas Grasberg mine, which contains some of the worlds largest gold and copper deposits. Henry Kissinger joined the companys board in the late 1980s. The company hascontinuedto exploit the regions natural resources to the present day, dumping waste and polluting West Papuas rivers and parks.

A 2005New York Timesreportfound that there was an intimate relationship between Freeport and the Indonesian security forces in the region:

From 1998 through 2004, Freeport gave military and police generals, colonels, majors and captains, and military units, nearly $20 million. Individual commanders received tens of thousands of dollars, in one case up to $150,000, according to the documents. They were provided by an individual close to Freeport and confirmed as authentic by current and former employees.

US support for the Indonesian regime continued despite brutal repression in West Papua and elsewhere. In 197778, Indonesia launchedextensive US-backed military operationsin the Papuan central highlands in response to popular unrest that was linked to the state-controlled Indonesian national elections of 1977. The Indonesian military used warplanes supplied by Washington tobomb villages. Thousands of civilians were killed. Totalestimatesof the civilian death toll since the Indonesian takeover range from at least 100,000 to as many 500,000 people.

West Papua is still Indonesias most violent province. AcademicBobby Andersonhas compared thehomicide ratesin West Papua with other countries around the world. He found that the homicide rate in the Mimika district 29.2 per 100,000 people, thirty times greater than the Indonesian average puts Mimika on a par with Colombia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while the regional capital Jayapura had ten homicides per 100,000, comparable to Haiti and Liberia.

A group of researchers from Australia and the UK set out to mapviolence in West Papuasince the 1970s. They found that many killings were committed while Papuans were peacefully protesting for independence from Indonesia, and that the perpetrators were not held to account in the vast majority of cases. The culture of impunity remainsdeeply embedded.

While the largest number of killings took place in the 1970s, atrocities have continued right up to the present. In December 2018, the Indonesian militarybombed villagesin the mountainous region of Nduga, forcing 45,000 local people to flee into the jungle or neighbouring districts for safety.

Crackdown

In response to 2019s anti-racism protests, the Indonesian government launched a crackdown on Papuan activists.According to figures fromTAPOL, a UK-based organisation that monitors human rights in Indonesia, there were 169 protesters arrested in total. InMalang, East Java, civilian militias attacked the demonstrators, who were kicked and beaten while the police watched. Indonesias national police subsequently detained six Papuan activists in Jakarta, along with seven more in the city of Balikpapan, who were depicted as the masterminds of the protest wave.

TheJakarta Six received eight- and nine-month prison sentences in April 2020 from a court in the Indonesian capital, having been convinced on charges of treason for flying the West Papuan Morning Star flag and chanting Free West Papua. Meanwhile, the seven activists in Balikpapan also faced treason charges, with the prosecution seeking up to 17 years in jail. The court convicted them, but handed down a lighter sentence of 11 months.

Protesters clash with police in Jakarta, Indonesia May 22, 2019 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Photo: Antara Foto/Nova Wahyudi/ via Reuters

The seven Balikpapan defendants included Buchtar Tabuni, a well-known leader of the National Parliament of West Papua, who has already been jailed for organising protests. His wife Dessy Awom has described the brutal raid that arrested Tabuni, a joint operation between the Indonesian military and police. The soldiers and police officers, who were fully armed, broke down the door of their home and smashed all the furniture. The security forces also destroyed their garden and killed their animals. The raid was carried out without a warrant.

Also read: #BlackLivesMatter Comes to Cricket as West Indies, England Players Take a Knee Against Racism

Twenty-three other West Papuans are stillfacing charges of treason. The crackdown continued on December 1, 2019. TAPOL has identified sixty-one new political prisoners arrested on that date, as West Papua marked its National Day the anniversary of the day in 1961when the Dutch colonial authorities acknowledged West Papua as a free nation for the first time. Every year, Papuans across Indonesia take to the streets with Morning Star flags and chants of Free West Papua.

As the Papuan human rights activist Welis Doga haspointed out, Indonesias current penal code draws directly on colonial legislation from the Dutch East Indies. One of the articles in that code relating to treason or anslaag was formerly used by the countrys Dutch rulers to silence Indonesian nationalists. Today, Indonesia uses it to criminalise Papuan dissenters.

Papuan Lives MatterIn the wake of George Floyds death and the eruption of protest in the United States, West Papuans have found inspiration to link their own struggle with the Black Lives Matter movement. They have put forward the sloganPapuan Lives Matterto express this affinity.The campaign has supplied a platform for West Papuans to insist that the Indonesian state should treat them equally and end the racial abuse they encounter from its police force and legal system. Students held a rally demanding the release of Papuan political prisoners and #PapuanLivesMatter became a trend on social media.

The Communion of Churches in Indonesiareleased a statementexpressing deep concerns over the Balikpapan Seven case, and condemning the criminalisation of young people by the Indonesian authorities. As TAPOLs Pelagio Da Costa Sarmento noted, there has also been international support for the West Papuan struggle. Some of these initiatives preceded the latest round of protest, but the context of Black Lives Matter has made it easier to raise awareness of what is happening in West Papua. TAPOL has noticed an uptick in interest: according to Sarmento, we believe this is the next stage of something bigger.

Many West Papuans think that the Indonesian courts were responding to international pressure when they handed down lighter sentences for the Balikpapan Seven than the prosecution had demanded. Benny Wenda, the chairman of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, described the verdict as a great victory for our movement worldwide, even though the verdict of treason should not have been handed down at all: The worldwide pressure made all the difference.

Student activists in Indonesia have organised public forums for West Papuans to describe their experiences of oppression and discrimination. The latest ones have focused on theBiak massacreof 1998, when Indonesian security forces tortured and murdered scores of unarmed civilians in the region. Victor Yeimo, leader of the National Committee for West Papua, hailed these efforts as proof that treason charges will not stop the unfolding dynamic of Papuan Lives Matter: Prison will never stop the struggle for Papuan independence.

Febriana Firdaus is a journalist based in Indonesia, and produces the Voice of Papua newsletter.

This article was published on Jacobin. Read the original here.

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How Black Lives Matter Inspired West Papuas Freedom Struggle - The Wire

This story originally appeared on The Nosher.

This may be surprising, but Jews have a long and very influential history in the alcohol industry spanning Europe, Israel and North America.

For most of the 1800s, Eastern European Jews held a virtual monopoly on the business in their regions. They produced much of the beer and hard alcohol, and ran nearly all the taverns where it was sold. Jews had been in the trade for centuries, but when Polish landowners saw they could make 50% greater profits by turning grain into alcohol than by selling it for food, Jews seized the chance to play an integral role.

At the time, Polish Jews could neither become nobility nor work the land as peasants. While many Jews turned to trading and peddling, the lords saw a different opportunity. Jews were considered good with business, they reasoned well, and would be unlikely to drink up the product. So, under a leasing system known in Polish as propinacja, Jews were granted exclusive rights to run the alcohol industries.

By the middle of the 19thcentury, approximately 85% of all Polish taverns had Jewish management. Jews similarly dominated the industry in the Pale of Settlement (in todays Ukraine and Belarus), though on a slightly lesser scale.

Jewish participation in the alcohol business was so prevalent that according to Glenn Dynner, author of Yankels Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland, 30-40% of Polands Jews (including women and children) worked in the industry. Thats an impressive statistic by itself, but considering that approximately three-quarters of world Jewry lived in Eastern Europe at the time, that amounts to about 25% of all Jews in the world!

The quirk of the outsize Jewish population in the region is not all that accounts for the high percentage. That one-in-four figure is without even considering Jews in other parts of the world. But the 19thcentury seems to have been a peak time for Jewish involvement in alcohol worldwide.

In Hungary, we encounter many Jewish families prominently involved in wine production. The Zimmermans, for example, were among the famous and award-winning producers of Tokaj wine. (Their pre-Holocaust winery is now owned by one of the regions top producers.) Similarly, the Herzog family produced such high-quality wine (alongside their beer and spirits) that Emperor Franz Josef appointed them his exclusive wine suppliers.

In Germany and France, meanwhile, Jews were dragging the local alcohol industries into the modern age. In France, Jewish wine producers were vertically integrating into sales as well, while in Germany, Jews created the first industrial-scale breweries.

Across the Atlantic, German Jewish immigrants to the United States were disproportionately represented in alcohol production. In Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition, Marni Davis points out that they primarily focused on distilling whiskey due to its nationalistic significance. Those who bought and drank whiskey championed it as a deeply American product.

Simultaneously, back in Ottoman Palestine, wine production was returning for the first time in hundreds of years. Though ancient Israel was well known as a wine-producing region, hundreds of years of rule by Muslims (for whom alcohol is forbidden) turned the industry into little more than a memory. But when more Jews began immigrating and joining the small community that was already living there, viticulture gradually returned.

In 1848, the Shor family opened a winery in the Old City of Jerusalem, adjacent to the Temple Mount itself. They were joined in the business in 1870 by the Tepperbergs and in 1889 by the winery later to be known as Carmel. These laid the groundwork for the booming wine industry that exists in Israel today.

Why were so many Jews prominently involved in the alcohol business during the 19thcentury? It was a period of transition in the world, with industrialization leading (among other things) to a big increase in alcohol production and consumption. At the same time, the old persecution of Jews had removed many other income sources, leaving Jews with few other ways to make a living. So part of the answer may be that, as had been the case so many other times throughout history, Jews simply took advantage of whatever opportunities they had, and succeeded.

Jews rapidly left the business toward the centurys end, thanks to both increased competition and government oppression, leaving this chapter in our history largely forgotten. Furthermore, even while Jews were prominent in the industry, there was an internal stigma against Jewish involvement in a profession that was seen as less than honorable and at times required the use of some loopholes to remain in compliance with Jewish law. In other words, the Jewish community also forgot because it wantedto forget.

Interestingly, however, many common Jewish surnames today indicate a connection to the alcohol profession: Kaback, Kratchmer, Schenkman, Korczak, Vigoda, Winick and Bronfman, to name a few. Plus, many of the alcohol businesses run by 19th-century Jews still exist, including the Israeli wineries, Loewenbrau Brewery, Herzog Winery and Fleischmanns Spirits.

While the legacy of Jews role in the alcohol business may be partly forgotten, the impact is far from gone.

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The forgotten history of Jews in the alcohol industry - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

An Indigenous scholars long-standing research related to Mtis women comes at a pivotal moment when understanding and standing in solidarity with people who are oppressed is crucial.

Jennifer Adese, an associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, has dedicated her efforts to Indigenous research throughout her academic career.However, it was attending the National Aboriginal Womens Summit (NAWS) in 2012 that cemented her focus on the experiences of Mtis women.

It was at these proceedings in Ottawa that Indigenous women collectively came together to call on the provincial premiers in attendance to use their power to push the federal government to commit to a national inquiry on the high rates of Indigenous women who have gone missing and/or been murdered, said Adese during a recent interview for the VIEW to the Upodcast.

I had the privilege to sit alongside these women as they met with different members of government, other Indigenous organizationsand even with United Nationsrepresentatives, and it gave me a pretty life-changing insight (into) the complex public strategies of resilience practised by Mtis women.

Adese, who joined the department as a faculty member in 2018, says the experience was not a new encounter with the high rates of murdered Indigenous women, nor was it her first time countering Canadas reluctance to reckon with its history of oppression and colonization. But the event reinvigorated her commitment to be an informed advocate and to lobby for the rights of Mtis and all Indigenous communities. Through her work, she continues to examine the history of violence against Mtis girls and women, looking into why Mtis were largely ignored in the federal government inquiry.

In 2019, Adese received Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funding to pursue a project that explores Mtis womens mobilization and activism over the last 50 years.

When the two-year project wraps up, Adese has her sights set on strengthening existing collaborations with the academic community and Mtis organizations to raise awareness about Mtis issues through community engagement and dissemination of their findings.

It is this mobilizing of knowledge that Adese says is key to reaching a better understanding about the ongoing impacts of colonization, dispossessionand racism.

She says a central part of being involved in current activism confronting anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism is being informed.In her capacity as an educator, she feels that reading and educating oneself serves as a foundation for further action. So, too, is listening to and centering the voices of Black, Indigenousand other racialized groups.

Adese is currently wrapping up a book that is being published by UBC Press, titledAboriginal, which is an analysis of the term aboriginal and its more frequent usage after the Constitution Act of 1982 was passed.

In addition, Adese is a co-editor oftwo forthcoming anthologies:A People and a Nation: New Directions in Contemporary Mtis Studiesthat she has worked on with colleagues from University of Alberta;andIndigenous Celebrity: Entanglements with Fame, the first dedicated volume to explore Indigenous People's experiences with celebrity culture.

Adese has a personal interest in this area: She is Mtis and draws on her culture via a large family unit that is primarily based in Alberta. She says that her relationships with other Mtis people and communities provideher with a unique perspective for her work, writing and teaching.

A lot of previous research has been undertaken and published by non-Mtis, and the tendency through that work has been to analyze and discuss Mtis people as simply a byproduct of the intermarriage of two other populations, broadly First Nations and European, says Adese.

That is not how we understand ourselves and our existence as adistinct Indigenous people, and quite often how Indigenous Peoples represent ourselves through art, through literature, through political engagement is very different. So, for usit's very exciting work to push the conversation even further, and for the first time strive for this level of representation within Mtis studies research, but also within Indigenous studies research.

Read the original post:

With a focus on women, U of T researcher aims to raise awareness of Mtis issues in Canada - News@UofT

Deadly airstrikes have been orchestrated by the Saudi-led coalition, leading to the decimation of many areas and civilian casualties.PHOTO SOURCEL FLICKR, FELTON DAVIS The role of the media

As Catherine Happer wrote in The Role of the Media in the Construction of Public Belief and Social Change, the media are key to the setting of agendas and focusing public interests on particular subjects. In a content study of 1989 news bulletins relating to Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she found that there were only 17 lines of text (from transcribed bulletins) relating to the history of the conflict. When journalists used the word occupied, there was no explanation that the Israelis are involved in a military occupation Palestinian perspectives were effectively marginalised.

Such under-contextualised reporting on complex geopolitical issues is the central cause of the reality that the vast majority of us are under-informed on the Yemeni Crisis. People don't realise how involved the US and UK governments are in creating this catastrophe in Yemen, says Shireen al-Adeimi, assistant professor at Michigan State University. It's construed as something that just is happening somewhere to people who are fighting each other - as a sectarian war.

Since 2015, the US and UK have collectively sold more than $12 billion dollars-worth of weaponry to Saudi Arabia. The UK government issues arms licenses to private defence companies, allowing them to sell weapons which have been used in Saudi-UAE coalition bombings against Yemeni hospitals and funerals, and which have directly killed at least 2,582 civilians. The UK has also provided the Saudis with a fleet of Typhoon military jets which a former Saudi Air Force officer claimed are so crucial that without the Typhoon they will stop the war.On July 6th 2020, Dominic Raab announced that the UK government intends to impose sanctions against those involved in serious human rights violations, and yet the following day, the government announced its decision to resume arms sales to Saudi Arabia, dismissing the possible war crimes committed in Yemen as isolated incidents.

"Consistent underreporting by the British media on the events in Yemen means that too many of us are unaware of both the heinous complicity of our own government..."

These events highlight a startling degree of cognitive dissonance at the heart of government. As Kate Allen, Amnesty International UKs Director, said, How the Government can seriously describe a five-year Saudi-led aerial assault on Yemen which has seen numerous examples of civilians killed in schools, hospitals, funeral halls and market places as a set of isolated incidents is almost beyond comprehension. Private defence companies have often been the largest beneficiary of foreign arms exports, with estimates suggesting that by 2017, British weapons firms had earned 600 million in profit from arms sales to Saudi Arabia during the Yemeni conflict. However, the government recouped 30 million of this in corporate tax receipts, in addition to subsiding arms exports by between 104 million and 142 million. The result is a moral fiasco in which the government simultaneously allocates public funds to the production of weapons used in the killings of Yemeni civilians, and reaps revenue from them.

Suggestions that private companies bear the moral responsibility for these arms exports initially appear plausible, until one considers that the most senior members of the UK government have engaged in shameless lobbying on behalf of private defence companies. In November 2012, former Prime Minister David Cameron made a 3-day tour of Gulf States for the explicit purpose of promoting arms sales, and in February 2016, Cameron boasted of the UKs brilliant arms sales to Saudi Arabia. In 2019, then-Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt denounced calls to end arms exports to Saudi Arabia as an action that would surrender our influence in Yemen. But at what human cost do we acquire this influence?'

As a country, we have profited off of war crimes, and yet there has been little public outcry. Consistent underreporting by the British media on the events in Yemen means that too many of us are unaware of both the heinous complicity of our own government, and of the disastrous humanitarian consequences which that complicity has wrought. When we lack understanding of a crisis, it becomes easier to claim ignorance and push it to the peripheries of our minds to conceive of the crisis as an abstract reality happening far away. But the 19 million people who lack access to clean water are not an abstract reality. They desperately need our help. So what is happening in Yemen, and what can we do to help?

From 2010 to 2012, a series of anti-government protests took place across the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring. Among other things, this led to the ousting of Yemens president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Upon his ousting, his Vice-President, Abdrabbuh Hadi, assumed the Presidency, but in 2014, a rebel group named the Houthis began seizing territory across the country.

In January 2015, the Houthis seized the Presidential palace and strategic military installations, and in February, they declared themselves in control of the Yemeni government. What ensued was a civil war between the Houthis and forces aligned with Hadis government, including a Saudi-led coalition of nine countries from West Asia and Africa. That civil war is ongoing to this day.

The civilian population of Yemen has been decimated by the conflict. The Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition have engaged in firefights in civilian areas, and the coalition have launched airstrikes, both leading to huge numbers of civilian casualties.

Beyond direct civilian casualties from the fighting, the war has precipitated the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. Fighting has damaged essential hospital, water supply and sanitation infrastructure. Out of Yemens 29 million people, about 19 million do not currently have access to safe drinking water. This has been compounded by the ongoing cholera outbreak, which has been happening since October 2016, and has killed more than 2,500 people, 58% of whom are children.

"Fighting has damaged essential hospital, water supply and sanitation infrastructure."

Add to this the Covid-19 pandemic, for which effective combat requires robust health infrastructure, regular hand-washing, PPE for doctors and a comprehensive test-and-trace system, and the Yemeni population becomes mortally endangered by poverty. In a country of 29 million people, there are only a few hundred ventilator machines, and the fact that the number of coronavirus cases is unknown means that the virus has been able to spread unchecked throughout the population. The coronavirus may be the straw which will break the camels back,said the head of the United Nations Refugee Agency.

The range of compounding impacts of the war is staggering. NGOs report that women and children are at increased risk of sex trafficking as a result of the war, and UNICEF estimate that at least two million children have dropped out of school since the conflict began. According to the UN, at least 13 million people are on the brink of starvation.

Very often, our society tends to ignore crises that unfold slowly, as well as crises that unfold seemingly separately from the Western hemisphere. But we cant afford to ignore the crisis in Yemen. Babies are starving. Young girls cant go to school. Each one of the 13 million Yemenis at risk of starvation is a person who deserves the worlds attention.

Currently, donations are what is most urgently needed. Millions of Yemenis are currently dependent on food, water and medical assistance provided by NGOs. Doctors Without Borders are providing emergency medical assistance on the ground; UNICEF is working to provide water, nutrition, education and protection to vulnerable children; and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) provides over 12 million people in Yemen with monthly food assistance. These organisations depend on our donations to continue operating. We must donate.

We also need to educate ourselves. Reading about suffering is difficult, but if the Black Lives Matter protests have taught us anything, its that those of us with the privilege of living violence-free lives must not turn a blind eye to oppression. It is our imperative duty to pay attention. What Ive provided is a highly simplified version of events that excludes the complex geo-political factors involved in precipitating the war that we see today. For a more detailed account of the crisis, please visit the websites listed at the foot of this article.

".... we need popular outrage now more than ever."

Crucially, we must recognise that as British citizens, we are indirectly profiting off of Yemeni deaths. In a report entitled The economic costs and benefits of UK defence exports,the four economists who authored the report estimated that the Ministry of Defence would lose between 40 and 100 million annually if arms exports were halved. Theoretically, the savings made by permitting these arms sales to continue allows the government to invest more in public services. But such an economic upshot is unconscionable.

Just as one million people turned out onto the streets of London in 2003 to oppose our governments participation in international thuggery in Iraq, we need popular outrage now more than ever. We must petition our government to end arms exports to Saudi Arabia, no matter the economic benefit we reap from them. We must write to our MPs and implore them to support economic sanctions for Saudi Arabia and any other nations that commit human rights violations. The UK is the sixth largest economy in the world. As a nation, we have substantial influence when we choose to use it.

That goes for the rest of us too. Social media has blessed us each with a megaphone to amplify the causes that we care about. Activism in the digital era is no longer just about turning up to protests. Its about donating, educating ourselves, and writing to our MPs to demand the change we want to see.

So donate, educate yourself - take time for yourself, but when thats over, turn back to the work. Use your megaphone for good.

Organisations to donate to:

Further reading:

Articles used in the writing of this article:

Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges.

We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding, and during this unprecedented global crisis, we have a tough few weeks and months ahead.

In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content for the time being.

Therefore we are asking our readers, if they wish, to make a donation from as little as 1, to help with our running cost at least until we hopefully return to print on 2nd October 2020.

Many thanks, all of us here at Varsity would like to wish you, your friends, families and all of your loved ones a safe and healthy few months ahead.

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Underreporting on the crisis in Yemen, the complicity of the British government, and what we can do to help - Varsity Online

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

When we discovered in 1945 the atrocities that reigned during the Holocaust, we pledged: Never again. Now we have a chance to act on that promise. A recent report from scholar Adrian Zenz revealed the horrifying reality that Chinese officials are attempting to suppress the population of the Uighurs, a Muslim minority group, by routinely forcing birth control and sterilization measures on Uighur women.

This month, the United States seized an $800,000 shipment of hair products made with human hair which some national security experts suspect come from Chinese forced labor camps, where between 800,000 and 2 million Uighurs have been imprisoned.

This is an outrage. But it presents a dilemma that our nation has already faced, and we chose to fail humanity.

From the onset of the Holocaust, Americans were aware of the violent oppression of Jews. After all, German officials certainly werent trying to hide it. During a government-sponsored boycott of Jewish goods and businesses in 1933, German officials even printed signs in both German and English, knowing the American press was watching. American newspapers published thousands of articles between 1933 and 1945 on the plight of European Jews. By 1942, Americans knew the Nazis planned to exterminate at least 4 million Jews, thanks to a leaked telegram obtained by the World Jewish Congress in Geneva.

But the United States didnt respond strongly enough. Americans themselves were the ones who organized boycotts of German goods, sent petitions to the federal government and held rallies protesting Nazi actions against Jews. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke publicly and sympathetically about the ongoing oppression. President Roosevelt condemned the Kristallnacht attacks in 1938 and issued a public declaration condemning the Nazis bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jews.

We could have done so much more.

We didnt address immigration quotas, which prevented us from welcoming most refugees. We didnt officially support resistance efforts until 1944, after millions of Jews had already been murdered. We didnt even heed pleas to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz, because it would have diverted resources from the war effort.

The United States prioritized other issues economic recovery and winning the war over addressing a humanitarian crisis. Its the same reason that, despite our knowing about Chinas oppression of the Uighur people for years, the American governments response action has been terribly milquetoast. In 2018, President Trump even delayed a 2018 Treasury Department plan to impose sanctions on Chinese officials connected to Uighur oppression, hoping to preserve a trade deal with China.

Many Americans, for their part, have expressed horror at the Uighurs oppression. Weve heard testimony from Uighurs who have escaped the re-education camps in Xinjiang, and weve seen satellite photos obtained by the BBC that have confirmed the groups plight. The disgust with Chinas measures even led to the Trump administration placing sanctions on Chinese business and government organizations connected to the crackdown on the Uighurs in 2019.

Last month, Mr. Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which finally imposed additional sanctions on those responsible for Chinas human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also denounced Chinese actions against the Uighurs multiple times, and did so as recently as last week. These are all commendable moves, but theyre still not enough.

To actually help the Uighurs, we must give them a place to hide.

Back in 1939, a bill to admit 20,000 refugee children fleeing Europe received support from many Americans, including then-former President Hoover, but it died in the House before coming to a vote. In 1943, Treasury Department staff discovered that State Department officials had deliberately suppressed reports about the murder of Jews.

In response, President Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board in January 1944. The institution saved tens of thousands of Jews. But it came too late for the millions who had already perished by the time Allied forces landed at Normandy, more than 5 million Jews had already been murdered.

The United States could very well be repeating history. Last fall, the Trump administration slashed our refugee program, declaring wed only be accepting 18,000 refugees total for the next year. Even if most of those available slots were reserved for Uighurs, it would deny an opportunity for hundreds of thousands more to escape. But we could very easily have a policy allowing Uighurs a special exemption from that refugee cap, or even raise that cap altogether.

If China continues to accelerate its oppressive actions against the ethnic group, a moral United States must prioritize easing their suffering with stronger action. Evil of this scale demands a response greater than sporadic statements and limited sanctions. We should know it already when a million people are suffering in concentration camps, were already way behind.

Amy Lutz is a historian and graduate student in Missouri specializing in Holocaust Studies. She is also a contributor to Young Voices and you can find her on Twitter at @amylutz4.

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America must ease the plight of the Uighurs in China - Washington Times

Dear Editor,

As a dual citizen of the US and Canada and a scholar of internationalization in higher education, I took immediate notice to the Opinion column, titled International Students Shouldnt be Political Pawns,[i] by my friend and colleague Jenny J. Lee. In the context of Mondays announcement[ii] of a change to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP)[iii] where Non-immigrant F-1 and M-1 students attending schools operating entirely online maynottake a full online course load and remain in the United States, Lee stated that [w]hile this U.S. Department of Homeland Security policy has generated more questions than answers, what is clear is that it will have no real effect on immigration over the long term.

She continued by saying that [t]he recent SEVP policy is in no way neutral, nor is the concern a matter of immigration. It reflects a strong political stance toward reopening colleges and universities, regardless of international studentseconomic impact of $41billion and support for more than 450,000 U.S. jobs. Whether international students stay or return to their home countries is secondary.

I agree with Lee that the SEVP alterations are not neutral and that carelessly reopening campuses is a hidden agenda in these changes, but I cannot believe that there will be no real effect of these events on U.S. immigration in the short or long term, nor do I think that immigration is not a central target of this and other U.S. policy changes issued by the White House during the Trump administration.

Rather, I see the SEVP announcement as what our colleague Gary Rhoades at the University of Arizona calls a two-fer in US educational policy: in this case it is both a highly visible, racist and politicized posture-taking against foreign nationals who might enter the higher education system as a gateway to long-term immigration and a viable threat to globalizing colleges and universities that have become reliant upon international student tuition to sustain operations amid decades of public-sector erosion by lean government proponents.

Given Trumps ideological position on the social role of colleges and universities,[iv] we might go a step further and liken these recent changes to postsecondary policy as a type of Denial of Service attack (DoS attack) on the U.S. higher education system by this administration. The U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) describes a DoS condition as being accomplished by flooding the targeted host or network with traffic until the target cannot respond or simply crashes, preventing access for legitimate users. DoS attacks can cost an organization both time and money while their resources and services are inaccessible.[v]

If we view the SEVP change as part of an ongoing policy DoS attack by the White House, we can understand that higher education has been under a consistent, and potentially coordinated, attack dating back to the year of travel bans[vi] as its opening salvo, and continuing through the more recent questioning of Optional Practical Training (OPT) policies[vii], barring entry to certain Chinese students[viii], under-funding of Hispanic-Serving-Institutions (HSIs) as a result of the CARES Act[ix], expansion of immigration restrictions through the H1b and J-visa programs[x], and statements about federal hiring preferences relative to postsecondary degrees[xi]. These continued policy proposals and alterations have cost higher education institutions both time and money while their resources and services are inaccessible, akin to a denial-of-service attack on the sector as a whole.

Furthermore, these attacks divert attention away from academias ongoing work of creating more equitable and just colleges and universities, interrupting needed conversations about how to redress and address the harms done by decades of Indigenous land theft, pillaged meritocracy, racialization and oppression committed within and by our institutions. We might see these diversions as part of the modus operandi of the policy DoS attack.

In her opinion piece, Lee referenced Dr. Esther D. Brimmer, Executive Director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, who said [u]nfortunately, this administration continues to enact policies which only increase the barriers to studying here, and thats a serious concern. At a time when new international student enrollment is in decline, our nation risks losing global talent with new policies that hurt us academically and economically.[xii] I agree with Lee and Brimmer, but the stakes are much higher than educational barriers for international students. Their lives, our lives, and the viability of our institutions are on the line.

While it is true that international students are caught in this political power play between the Trump administration and the higher education sector as Lee describes, we should also understand that the U.S. federal government is issuing policy malware against the entire higher education sector. The White House is weaponizing the relative leverage of international student tuition within institutional budgets while simultaneously deporting or threatening to deport international students, punishing the sector for both its ideological openness and the good sense to not be physically open during an ongoing pandemic.

I cannot defend the way that some colleges and universities have leveraged their futures on international student enrollments and tuition dollars, which undervalues the many contributions of international students, but it is plain to see how reliance on this revenue stream has provided nationalistic isolationists with a system-wide vulnerability that enabled their deadly bargain, forcing the institutional choice of ransoming safety for sustainability, or vice versa.

We must view this as a viral era, metaphorically, digitally, and epidemiologically. Academic vulnerabilities, both personal and professional, are being targeted by governments at all levels, alongside threats to the health and safety of our most precariously positioned international and domestic students. In addition, academic outsiders in locations outside of the U.S., like myself, should not be silent and await the Trump Bump[xiii] in international student enrollments that might follow this continued self-immolation within the U.S. system. We face similar conditions, or soon will if business as usual continues in this viral age. As Lee said, now is the time to take immediate action in opposing this nonsensical order.

--Amy Scott MetcalfeProfessor in the Department of Educational StudiesUniversity of British Columbia.

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ICE rules are an attack on immigration and higher education - Inside Higher Ed

When the COVID-19 pandemic is over would you download an app developed by the state that has access to your everyday movement, in order to ensure your medical well-being and security?While 49.8 percent said no, 46.3 percent said yes. Those who dont know are a mere 3.9 percent.

The poll was conducted by the Istanbul Economics Research in cooperation with the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation.

One interesting finding of the poll was that 63 percent of those aged between 18-24 said they would download it. Are the youth careless about their privacy and less sensitive to their individual liberties?

Not necessarily, according to zgehan enyuva, from Middle East Technical University (ODT). Young generations are digital natives; they are born to the digital world and they accept the fact that it is there. They would not fight downloading the governments app. But they would troll it, manipulate it by entering wrong information, for instance, said enyuva at an online panel last month on the findings of the poll.

The debate on the youth at that panel was particularly timely since it came at a time when both the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the main opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP) both said they will be chasing the votes of Generation Z, the youngest segment eligible to vote in the next elections in 2023.

And interestingly, it was during the pandemic that the representatives of this generation got into direct interaction with the political elites. What pushed them to do so? The university admission exams. The date of the exam was changed twice due to the pandemic. The original date at the beginning of June was postponed to the end of July.

But as the government concluded that it started to take COVID-19 under control, it took forward the date to the end of June. The government wanted 2.5 million children who entered this years exam to go as soon as possible to holiday destinations to revitalize the domestic tourism.

The last change of date infuriated the youth, who had to readjust their working timeline, and they expressed their anger by launching the hashtag #SandiktaGorusuruz (Well see you at the ballot box) on May 4 on Twitter.

Known with his criticism of social media, one would assume President Recep Tayyip Erdoan is not a frequent user of social media, delegating the management of his accounts to his aides. But it was interesting to see that he chose YouTube as a channel of communication for the youth on June 26, one day prior to the university admission exam.

There, too, the youth did not miss the occasion to express their reaction. One cannot know whether he was aware of it at the time.

But his July 2 statement implying additional restrictions to social media platforms like YouTube came as a contradiction to the AK Partys urge to lure the votes of the youth.

Of course, there is still time until 2023. The AK Party might have prioritized an approach to restrict social media, which many believe will help silence dissenting voices, and lift the restrictions perhaps at a later stage, when they will need the votes of the youth. Or, perhaps, they are counting on their allies from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), as it seems to receive more support from the youth, than the AK Party.

Polls suggest the majority of the youngsters dont believe any of the present parties can solve the countrys problems. But they seem to be more attracted by the MHP, Y (Good) Party and the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP). The youth want clearer stances from the parties, explained prominent pollster Bekir Konda in a recent interview.

According to enyuva, an academic with extensive work on youth, the generation that grew up with Harry Potter, a boy who waits to be saved by an old wise man and learns to fight against oppression throughout seven books, is now followed by the generation of Hunger Games, where this time a girl who initially struggles simply to feed her family turns into a rebel fighting oppression in a short time.

Young people are not saving the world, but they are engaged and connected with their local communities, said enyuva. They are staying away from party politics, but they are organized among themselves.

Turkish youth were ordered to stay at home during the pandemic and they obeyed it, according to enyuva, but they also took initiatives to bring care, for instance, for the elderly. And obviously, they are organizing through social media.

But enyuva warns that the learning curve in terms of social media has increasingly been in favor of the governments.

Turkey,

Excerpt from:

Turkish youth and the governments stance on social media - Hurriyet Daily News

The ongoing awakening to the long-standing realities of discrimination against African Americans is marked by a scope and intensity that were unimaginable even one month ago. Polling shows a significant increase from 2015 among Americans who believe racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States are big problems, and widespread protestsincluding in rural and suburban communities where such activism is unprecedentedagainst systemic racism and police misconduct have erupted. The United States has thus entered a window of opportunity where real social change is more likely than at any time in recent history.

But are there foreign-policy implications for this moment? Could this enhanced recognition of racial discrimination at home result in meaningful differences in how the United States engages with the world? Its tempting to think sobut the answer to both questions is almost certainly no. The structural impediments to more seriously accounting for social justice and human rights in foreign policy are simply too great.

There are at least four such structural factors. First, the composition of foreign-policy shapers (think tank experts, columnists) and implementers (government officials) remains disproportionately white (and male). This is visibly evident from any photograph of senior military officials. But it also pronounced in Americas diplomatic corps. In 2002, 70 percent of all State Department employees were white; by September 2018, it remained nearly unchanged at 68 percent. Moreover, in 2018, the more senior the role, the greater the proportion of employees who were whitegoing from 35 percent for midlevel GS-10 rank up to 87 percent for the most senior civil service executives.

This relatively homogenous composition of the foreign-policy eliteincluding yours trulymatters because the recognition of racial oppression at home and abroad is a glaring blind spot. In 20-plus years of working at academic institutions and think tanks, I can recall very few mentions of race. And even these observations were made not out of inherent concern for racial underrepresentation or discrimination within the United States but because the lack of progress toward combating those twin evils could lessen Americas relative power on the international stage.

Second, the predominant frame through which foreign-policy debates are conveyed is as national security interests. These seemingly neutral concepts are conveyed through principles or objectives, ranked by their purported interest-ness: vital, extremely important, important, or secondary. Those categories come from a landmark 2000 report by the Commission on Americas National Interests, which was representative of many comparable bipartisan initiatives. The 23-member commission included just three women, one of whom was the only person of color (Condoleezza Rice). The sole mention of individual rightsone of 10 important national interestswas in promoting pluralism, freedom, and democracy in strategically important states as much as is feasible without destabilization. The caveats that this august group of geostrategic thinkers added on demonstrate that rights are not universal and should never hinder stabilitymeaning a government that endorses U.S. interests retains power.

Though the facts shift, and allies and adversaries come and go, the narrative of Americas global role is always conveyed via static interests, which remain wholly uninformed by human rights concernsunless it can be weaponized selectively to highlight an adversarys human rights abuses. Foreign policy cannot be reconfigured in enduring and impactful ways without updating the thinking and language that could enable such change.

Third, and relatedly, a consistently missing element in elite foreign-policy debates is the livelihoods of actual humans. The central unit of analysis is countries, which are overwhelmingly evaluated through the words and actions of their leaders. When people are considered at all, it is as demographic clusters that might influence the countries or regions where they residethe Arab youth bulge, Russias population decline, and Chinas graying citizenry are popular examples. So-called voices from the regions are those few media-tested, English-speaking people who reside in the rolodexes of TV producers, serve as visiting think tank fellows, or are escorted through Capitol Hill offices by K Street lobbyists.

Without a reimagining of Americas global influence from the perspective of the individuals who experience hatred, bigotry, and oppression, it is impossible to conceive of a foreign policy that ever truly confronts racism.

Finally, the defining manifestation of U.S. foreign policy for 75 years has been the threat or use of military force. The global architecture required to use force anywhere at any time requires host nation basing and overflight permissions. These, in turn, require permanently stationing U.S. troops abroad, which increases civil wars and enables human rights violations by host nation governments. These governments enjoy military assistance in the form of arms sales. According to the State Departments latest World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers report, the United States is the top arms exporter to the least democratic countries (meaning those in the lowest quintile as determined by Polity Project rankings)accounting for 66 percent of all such sales. In short, to project military power, the United States tolerates or abets subjugation.

Moreover, military spending ($712 billion) absorbs more than half of all federal discretionary spending, towering over the diplomacy and development budget ($48 billion), which could be far better suited to promoting individual rights and freedoms globally. Unfortunately, when you review what country receives the most foreign assistance from the United States, it is a conspicuous list of occupiers, autocrats, and illiberal regimes. The top six proposed recipients for 2020, in order, are: Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Uganda. These are so-called strategic partners showered with aid because of their geographic location, security partnerships, or a consequence of great-power competition (Uganda). Congress could vastly increase funding for international and nongovernmental organizations that work to protect groups experiencing prejudice and seriously hold recipients of foreign aid to account for their human rights violations. But there is nothing in recent history to suggest that legislators will fulfill this needed role or even its most basic oversight functions.

For these four reasons, and many others, an overdue turn toward an individual, rights-centric foreign policy is unimaginable, at least for now. The current defensiveness among elite foreign-policy institutions toward considering the role that race plays in U.S. foreign policy is simply too overwhelming. A more diverse group of future foreign-policy thinkers and leaders could one day lead the waybut that group wont arrive in time to keep pace with the current push for racial justice across the rest of U.S. society.

Here is the original post:

From National Interests to the Diplomatic Elite - Foreign Policy

Videos showing hundreds of Uyghur people being transported to forced labor schemes have shed new light on Chinas continuing oppression of the Muslim ethnic group.

In the early months of the coronavirus outbreak, the government locked down more than 50 million people in Hubei province and imposed strict stay-at-home measures in cities across the country. However, footage shared on social media suggests that, at the same time, a state-mandated mass migration of Uyghurs was taking place in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.

In January, dozens of videos began to surface on Douyin a version of TikTok, made by the same company, only available to Chinese users showing crowds of people being packed onto trains, buses and airplanes.

The footage shows Uyghurs being transported as part of what Beijing refers to as a poverty alleviation initiative. Sent far from home, they are put to work in tightly surveilled factory labor programs and often housed in dedicated labor compounds.

In February, more videos were posted by a local media center in the Xinjiang city of Hotan. In one, a crowd of people stand in formation, dressed in matching red anoraks, their faces obscured by surgical masks. Each also wears a blue lanyard and has a suitcase beside them. A caption explained that the men and women are migrant workers, ready to board a plane to the heavily industrialized coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangxi.

Chinese national state media also covered the transportation, which took place in late February just as Chinas coronavirus numbers had reached a peak.

One report stated that the workers were being sent on a free charter flight. Another featured images of men and women about to fly to Hunan province, where they were to work on the production line at a technology company. Although the mask covered most of her face, she could still feel her excitement, it said of one Uyghur woman. The article then quoted her as saying, As long as your hands and feet are quick, the more you do, the more you earn.

Chinese authorities maintained they were helping pull Uyghur people out of deprivation. We will do our utmost to help laborers who are willing to go out to work as soon as possible, to ensure that the prevention and control of the epidemic and the struggle against poverty are both addressed, a spokesperson for Hotans Human Resources and Social Security Bureau told state-run Xinhua News Agency.

Another video posted on Douyin in March shows, according to the caption, a group of 850 people being moved to Korla, Xinjiangs second-largest city, to work in the textile industry. Masked Uyghurs are seen walking in single file and lining up to have their temperature checked, before boarding buses and trains.

The government-run relocation of Uyghurs has been described by experts and human rights groups as an extension of Chinas mass surveillance and indoctrination system. Since 2016, as many as a one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have been held in concentration camps, referred to by the Chinese Communist Party as vocational training centers or re-education facilities.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Darren Byler is an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, who specializes in Uyghur studies. Referring to the labor program, he said, Theres very likely a re-education aspect to it or some really tight form of control in the factory environment.

While information from Xinjiang has been scarce during the pandemic, reports have emerged that in some areas placed under lockdown, Uyghurs were not allowed to leave their homes and were dependent on state deliveries of essential supplies. The Washington D.C.-based Uyghur Human Rights Project has drawn attention to footage circulated on Chinese social media, in which people say that their households were starving.

Xinjiang has reported just 76 coronavirus cases and six deaths since January. Uyghurs living abroad consider these figures to be suspiciously low, given the provinces population of almost 22 million people.

While Beijing maintains that most people have been released from government camps and returned to society, many observers believe that they have been shuttled into labor programs or other forms of detention.

The Chinese government seeks to portray the forced labor program as a benevolent initiative, providing economic opportunities to the people of a historically deprived region. In recent months, state media in Xinjiang has reported that these work placements will emancipate the mind and eliminate old habits.

Zumret Dawut, 38, spent two months in a detention camp in Xinjiangs capital city of Urumqi. While there, she underwent hours of indoctrination, during which she was beaten and made to recite Chinese Communist Party propaganda. A report by the Associated Press in June revealed that China has been forcing birth control and sterilization on Uyghur women. In the course of her confinement, Dawut was given regular injections and pills that tranquilized her and stopped her periods.

After her release in June 2018, Dawut left Xinjiang. The following year, she flew to the U.S., where she now lives. Using a cellphone that she brought with her from China, she is still able to access Douyin, which is usually firewalled outside of the country.

I first started seeing videos of Uyghurs being transferred back in January, she said.

Dawut engaged with the content via likes and comments, so the apps algorithm showed her more. Though some of the footage sent her way originated from state media agencies, dozens of videos were posted by Uyghurs themselves. She noticed that clips in the latter category all featured the same haunting, Chinese-language rendition of the Italian protest song Bella Ciao.

I have to be very quick to download these videos, she said, explaining that the app usually swiftly deletes them.

Asked whether Douyin censors Uyghur-related content, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company treats all users on our platform the same, regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation.

One video found by Dawut, posted to Douyin by a Xinjiang news outlet in March, shows a group of more than 500 Uyghurs arriving for a work placement in Korla. The footage includes their new accommodation: austere rooms fitted with bunk beds, shared kitchenettes and a common living area.

Such dormitories are often part of larger compounds, complete with watchtowers and onsite indoctrination centers. These facilities feature prominently in Uyghurs for Sale, a report published in March by Australias Strategic Policy Institute.

Its authors state that the forced labor program amounts to re-education 2.0, in which Uyghurs undergo mandatory indoctrination after working long hours in factory jobs, and fear detention if they attempt to quit.

The report also details Uyghur workers being offered to factories in batches of 100, via online forums,then sent to work in supply chains linked to international companies, including Apple, Nike and Gap. It also explains that Uyghur labor is a lucrative industry: companies that hire Uyghurs on a long-term basis receive payments of up to $720 per person from the Xinjiang government.

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A series of advertisements on Baidu Chinas answer to Google suggest that this incentivized market for cheap Uyghur labor has thrived throughout the pandemic. One advert, from April, offered Xinjiang Uyghur workers, all female, 18-35 years old, proficient in Chinese, obey arrangements. Another, from late March, stated that the government assures security, an apparent reference to the widespread perception of Uyghurs as dangerous extremists. The posts said workers could be paid as little as 13 yuan ($1.86) per hour.

Baidu did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Forced labor also forms part of Xinjiangs prison system. Nursimangul Abdurashid, 32, left the province in 2013. She now lives with her husband and six-year-old daughter in Turkey, where she works as a marketing executive. In the years since she left the city of Kashgar, her parents and two brothers have been detained, and the family home now stands empty.

In 2017, Abdurashid learned that her older brother had been put to work in an electronics factory, while being held in a detention camp in the city of Artux for the alleged non-payment of a debt. The same year, her younger brother was arrested and charged with preparing to commit terrorist activities, after applying for a passport to study in Turkey.

Abdurashid recalled how he had been desperate to go to university. He wanted to be a teacher. He gave up his dream, she said.

Abdurashid now fears that both of her brothers aged 30 and 34 have been pushed deeper into Xinjiangs forced labor system. Now, she scours the faces of Uyghur workers in Douyin videos, trying to find out what has happened to them.

I want to see them alive, at least, she said. Seeing so many young boys and girls heading into the unknown makes me so sad.

China experts believe that detentions and forced labor are part of a deliberate strategy to destroy Uyghur life in Xinjiang. While language, architecture, religion and culture have all been attacked and suppressed during the government crackdown, the forced migration of thousands of Uyghurs can be viewed as an attempt to tear apart a whole community.

The main goal is to move people away from their hometowns, to isolate them from their family, from their roots, and to make it harder for them to escape or move around, said Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, the Australian reports lead author, during a Zoom call. They become more dependent on these work arrangements that are assigned to them. This is part of the efforts of the re-education campaign.

In mid-June, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill to sanction China for its treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The new legislation was introduced shortly after leaked extracts from a new book by former National Security Adviser John Bolton alleged that Trump told President Xi that he should go ahead with the construction of prison camps in the province.

Meanwhile, Zumret Dawut continues to monitor Douyin, searching for more evidence of Chinas oppression of her people. She thinks a lot about the Chinese version of Bella Ciao heard in so many of the videos. Once an anthem for agricultural workers protesting against harsh conditions in the rice fields of 19th-century Italy, the songs lyrics include a line that translates as, The day will come when we will all work in freedom.

This is a message to our people, said Dawut. Dont forget about us.

Rachel Sherman and Joseph Gordon contributed research.

The rest is here:

Revealed: New videos expose China's forced migration of Uyghurs during the pandemic - Coda Story

What does patriotism really mean to us? We live in a country that professes to love itself, yet it so clearly hates wide swaths of its own citizens, whole sections of its own Constitution, science and the peace it exports elsewhere at gunpoint.

In the wake of the ongoing uprisings sparked by police brutality and systemic racism, every American once again needs to ask themselves whether truly being a patriot requires unquestioning loyalty to a piece of land and a government or an unwavering commitment to making that government live up to the highest ideals expressed in its chartering documents and our shared understanding of what this country is supposed to stand for.

We as a culture often profess to love the flag until true love for our ideals means allowing marginalized people to fully utilize their First Amendment rights to stand up for issues with which we disagree. We as a people say we stand up for our fellow Americans at all costs, until it requires us to bolster public health by behaving in ways that are mildly inconvenient. We recite that this is a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and yet many Americans support the systematic disenfranchisement of many of the people because they fear those Americans vote for a different partys politicians.

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But then, stolen lands worked by stolen people are not conducive to the myth of the United States that we like to tell ourselves, even if they are the perfect places to highlight the lies that a country rooted in oppression can tell itself with a straight face.

The America that balked at a football player using his First Amendment rights to protest the extrajudicial abuses and murders of Black and brown people calling it disrespectful to the flag, a disservice to veterans who served and fought under that flag would of course ignore that Black veterans are among those unjustly killed by police and immigrant veterans face deportation after they serve this country.

Patriotism, you see, apparently stops meaning quite so much when it might involve protecting veterans who are not white.

At every turn, it seems that making America great has really meant making marginalized people suffer even more for the perceived sin of not being white, for the perceived sin of needing their oppression to stop and for the perceived sin of seeking a safer place to go with their families. America has gone from being a country that paid lip service welcoming those in search of a better life to a country that actively refuses asylum to people who most need help.

Until recently, patriotism hasnt meant selfishness; now it rejects selflessness as unpatriotic. Witness the willingness of many to sacrifice their fellow Americans health to avoid having to give up even one iota of personal comfort, demanding that workers put themselves and their families at risk to give haircuts or wait tables or clean homes, often to people who refuse to wear masks as a gesture of basic courtesy. We arent asking those people to risk death to fight an enemy abroad, let alone a foreign invader. We are demanding that they provide services to people here including some who proclaim themselves to be Real Americans, as though anyone who doesnt believe what they do is something else.

But I guess a country that values access to guns over childrens lives so often that the response to what was, pre-pandemic, near-daily mass shootings is thoughts and prayers instead of gun control doesnt really have any pride left in itself.

A country with decades of data on the harm that hunger does to people and communities that then lets its own people go hungry including veterans and their families, who are among those expected to be the hardest hit by current and proposed cuts in food assistance isnt a country that loves itself.

And a country in which people applaud while politicians repeatedly try to restrict access to health insurance and thus health care in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic is not a country that values itself let alone its veterans, when more and more service members and veterans are being diagnosed with COVID-19. When the politicians who should be offering guidance and help to the people are instead largely focused on helping the economy despite the increased risks to the people, telling us that it is for our own good, that is not a nation dedicated to serving the people that shall not perish from the earth, but one that is at risk of perishing.

Patriotism has to be more than obsequious adherence to a tortured myth; it cannot just be loving a country that doesnt love you (or anyone else) back. In order for patriotism to have any real meaning, being patriotic has to involve more than flags (or flag apparel) or support for individual politicians. Real American patriotism is about supporting each other and looking out for each other with more than just slogans and memes. It is showing up to vote in and be the kinds of leaders who take care of all of our communities, who prioritize people over arbitrary borders or inane ideas about respecting objects.

The most patriotic thing anyone can do in America is try to make it a better place for everyone and not just you. At the very least, having a modicum of real patriotism would mean acknowledging just how un-American it is to try to make our nation a terrible place for most people and a great place for fascists.

Mikki Kendall is a writer from Chicago. Shehas written for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, Ebony, Essence and other online and print publications.

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On the Fourth of July, ask when patriotism became synonymous with selfishness - NBC News

CALGARY -- Anti-racism groups say the City of Calgary should be ashamed of how its handling a public hearing on systemic discrimination.

There are more than 200 Calgarians registered to speak over the course of the hearing that has now extended into a third day, but many are concerned about a five-minute time limit to explain their story.

Shuana Porter, who is a member of the anti-racism group called United Black People Allyship (UBPA), has compared the hearing to herding in cattle and lumping every person of colour into one group. She says each ethnic group must be given a separate time to speak so the city can understand each persons unique experience of racism.

"We live in a community with thousands of Black individuals, but then theres the Indigenous community and the Asian community and they thought it was productive to have a two day hearing to hear the voice and the plight and trauma of thousands of people," she said.

"That alone shows intentions could never have been with the result of actually creating change. I had to sit in a room for seven hours to get five minutes to speak."

Porter adds that the UBPA is instead planning to hold its own town hall meeting without the requirement for anyone to register. The group plans to allow members to ask questions and create a poll to define a list of discriminatory issues the Black community faces.

"At the citys hearing they said they dont typically allow speakers to ask questions and that protocol alone goes against change.

"That system the city put in place for this hearing is the same system of racism and oppression because people get demotivated and discouraged and then they dont speak up and when they dont have a voice, you dont get the true essence of whats actually happening."

The Canadian Cultural Mosaic Foundation agrees. That CEO of that group, Iman Bukhari, started a petition which received more than 70,000 signatures, calling on council to take action.

"But we didnt want a hearing, we wanted consultation," Bukhari said. "Consultation involves working with the community and this is just rushed, there wasnt a website dedicated to this hearing, no one knows when theyre speaking and many people had less than a day to sign up."

Bukhari continued and said city councillors should be ashamed, adding that many city workers havent been properly trained on how to handle racism in the community.

"Council doesnt understand because their responses and reaction to racism are normal and the pain behind it needs to be focussed on," she said. "These are very serious and intense stories of police harassment and real trauma and the city doesnt even have mental health support on site."

Ward 6 Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra, who is co-chairing the hearing, admits the criticism is fair, but says 95 per cent of speakers have been allowed to go over the five-minute time limit and the city is more than willing to listen.

"We really are encouraging people to be respectful of the time and try to consolidate their thoughts and to meet that time limit but we are extremely and deeply understanding if they are unable to do so as they tackle a very difficult subject," Carra said.

"Whats critical about the work were doing here is that its a start and not just checking a box, that its a meaningful symbol thats leads to something and not just an empty performance."

Carra added that a panel of five experts are also supporting councillors to help them better understand whats going on in the community.

Dr. Melinda Smith is among the panelists and also co-chairs the hearing. She recently became a Canadian citizen and was named vice-provost of equity, diversity and inclusion at the University of Calgary.

Carra says now is the time for city hall to create real change.

"Were trying to balance bringing the Black Lives Matter protests in the street into the halls of government," he said. "Were saying that this is a government thats not here to systemically oppress you, but rather a government of, by and for everyone and including you and if its not for you it not for anyone."

Calgarys community and protective services committee hopes to finish hearing from all speakers Thursday. Their next step will be the formation of a city committee on anti-racism and a an action plan on how to create positive change moving forward.

Excerpt from:

Anti-racism activists unhappy with process of Calgary's hearings on systemic racism - CTV News

Jul 11th 2020

Your special report on the UN (June 20th) outlined several great fractures that could lead to worldwide bedlam. One scenario missing from the list is the possibility of China annexing Taiwan. This would confirm the UNs impotence. Just as America vetoes any resolution condemning Israel, China can veto any resolution condemning its actions, even if those actions are condemned by every other UN country.

Your call for a summit of the five permanent members of the Security Council is timely. But with at least four of those five showing little of the statesmanship that created the UN and much of the thuggery, self-interest and bloody-mindedness that could destroy it, few could have any confidence that such a gathering would resolve that, or any other, crisis.

Instead, it is time for we the people of the digital world to harness our borderless technologies to prevent delusional governments from pushing us into collective suicide through war, resource depletion or climate change. In this regard, the UN High-level Panel on Digital Co-operation, led by Melinda Gates and Jack Ma, has a role in sorting out the new world disorder you speak of.

DAVID WOOLLCOMBEFounder and presidentPeace Child InternationalBuntingford, Hertfordshire

The digital era has enabled governments to engage in aggressive finger-pointing through social media, making calmer, less-public efforts at consensus-building more difficult. Yet the wider benefits of digital connections have not been fully explored by diplomats. A collective, virtual telediplomacy would work away from the glare of trolls and memes. If tele-education and telemedicine can bring mutual benefits through engagement, why not a permanent telediplomacy platform?

Leaders engage in diplomacy because it is to their advantage, to produce shared actions that meet shared interests. Platforms of diplomatic engagement do not evolve accidentally. We knew before covid-19 that the UN needed to reform; the pandemic has shown that diplomacy needs new options for constant real-time interaction.

PAUL HAREPardee School of Global StudiesBoston University

One cause of the UNs tragic mistakes in peacekeeping and other missions is the fact that it has immunity. This means that it conducts its operations without any accountability to the people whose lives it is directly affecting. Immunity does give the UN the necessary space to carry out its tasks, but there is no justification for it not to be accountable to those who are harmed by its actions. The responsibility for correcting this lack of answerability rests with the leadership of the UN Secretariat and its specialised agencies. They need to create an independent accountability mechanism with the authority to investigate complaints, report its findings directly to the secretary-general and to make the report publicly available.

This may be a big step for the UN but it is not unprecedented. Such independent accountability mechanisms have existed in many multilateral development banks for decades.

PROFESSOR DANIEL BRADLOWCentre for Human RightsUniversity of Pretoria

I read your article about which government department in Britain should allocate aid money (Will charity begin at home?, June 20th). The more critical question is, what happens to aid money when it reaches a poor country? Downing Street has proclaimed zero tolerance for corruption, and aid contracts normally contain anti-corruption clauses.

Our statistical analysis shows that aid money does affect corruption, but not in the direction those donors would like. Transparency Internationals Corruption Perceptions Index is 14 points lower in countries in which aid is the highest proportion of national income than in countries receiving no aid.

In addition to enriching senior politicians, foreign aid also encourages a culture of corruption at the grassroots. Where aid is most important, it increases the likelihood of individuals paying bribes for services, such as health care and education, by 18%.

PROFESSOR RICHARD ROSEUniversity of StrathclydeGlasgow

It is true that Olof Palme considered himself a democratic socialist and improved diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba (Who killed Olof Palme?, June 13th). He was also an opponent of the South African apartheid regime, his awareness of racial oppression a result of his travels in the American South as the first Swedish leader to receive a university education in the United States. But Palme was, like nearly all social democrats of his generation, a staunch anti-communist. He publicly criticised Swedish student radicals and elements in the labour movement in the 1960s for their naive support of communism. Indeed, he presided over an administration that controversially registered communist sympathisers through a branch of Swedish military intelligence (the IB Affair).

Palme did indeed oppose Americas war in Vietnam, referring rather bluntly to the Nixon government as bloody murderers in the wake of the Christmas bombing campaign of North Vietnam in 1972, but if anything his views on the North Vietnamese (and the Cubans) were rooted in a strong sense of the right of smaller nations to determine their own fate even in the shadow of superpowers, rather than any kind of pro-communist sentiment. This is why Palme was so strong in his denunciation of the Soviet Unions puppet states in eastern Europe.

STEFAN ANDREASSONBangor, Down

Green investing* Your leader rightly tackles the importance of the global energy transition challenge and the nexus between capital investment, climate and energy systems developments ("The trouble with green finance", June 20th). Whilst pointing out that public discourse is often full of woolly thinking, marketing guff and bad data you omitted to say that the grand transition represents the largest capital reallocation in the history of mankind and that accelerating the process is not solely about new supply.

The World Energy Council has been using scenarios for almost two decades to navigate the disruption as usual nature of the grand transition era. Our latest covid-19 scenarios highlight that the human qualities of ambition and trust could be the determining factors in deciding the future of the global energy landscape and the direction and speed of the transition process.

Put simply, what degree of trust and ambition do investors, governments and, increasingly, other stakeholders have to address is the need to rethink resilience, enable sustained behavioural change and to move away from the single-issue and siloed quick-wins agenda? High-quality, inclusive and informed debatecovering the whole systems experience, analysis and co-operationwill play a critical role in shaping the energy landscape of the future.

ANGELA WILKINSONSecretary General and CEOWorld Energy CouncilLondon

Chinas casual approach to casualties it may have suffered reminded me of a story about the old communist regime (Death valley, June 20th). Perusing a mandarins feasibility study of a dam project, Mao Zedong underlined the reports sentence that Such measures would benefit the citizens, then scrawled a rhetorical question in the margin, What is a citizen? Appropriate demotion was swiftly meted out to the studys author.

BUSH GULATIToronto

I was amused by Johnsons survey of the pandemic panglossary (June 27th). Yet it struck me that a calendar term for this new epoch was missing. How else am I to refer to the normal days of having a drink: BC (Before Corona)? I am aware that this may mask an existing nomenclature, but we have to move with the times.

ULRICH ATZNew York

Though it may have become popular again during the pandemic, the word smizing was coined in 2009 by Tyra Banks on an episode of Americas Next Top Model. Credit where it is due.

CHARLES HAWKINGSWashington, DC

Here in New York, people who refuse to wear masks or practise social distancing are known as coronassholes. And quite rightly, too.

JOHN S. MAJORNew York

* Letters appear online only

This article appeared in the Letters section of the print edition under the headline "On the UN, foreign aid, Olof Palme, green finance, China, coronaspeak"

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Letters to the editor - The Economist