Nick Timothy offers an answer to a question the government has fumbled: what is it for?

Mar 12th 2020

BRITISH CONSERVATISM is in an odd state: politically triumphant but intellectually dazed. A hundred days after the election the Conservative Party is still far ahead of Labour in the polls. But it has not provided a clear sense of what it stands for. Going back to the good old days of blue passports and royal yachts? Perpetual war on the liberal elite? Cutting red tape and unleashing business?

Such confusion is understandable. The Brexit explosion blew apart David Camerons post-Thatcherite synthesis of free markets with progressive values. But having been in power since 2010 the party hasnt had time for a rethink. The default contender to fill the vacuum is the populism that drove the Brexit revolution. Alas, such populism is an unstable mixture of emotions not a coherent philosophy, consisting in part of rage at the liberal elites, in part celebration of the noble savage in the form of the northern working class and in part nostalgia for national greatness. The party has failed to take on the biggest issue it faces: can it cleave to free-market orthodoxy (as it did when allowing the Flybe regional airline to go bust), while still catering to its new voters in the north?

Here Nick Timothy has an advantage. He was at the heart of government for over a decade, first as Theresa Mays adviser at the Home Office and then as her co-chief of staff in Downing Street. He was hurled into the wilderness after the election debacle in 2017 and given plenty of time to think, not least about his own mistakes. These were numerous. He alienated many colleagues with his abrasive management style and he was the principal author of the partys disastrous manifesto. Yet his northern strategy of winning Brexit-inclined Labour voters bore fruit in 2019, suggesting that the problem lay in its execution not its design. His conduct in Downing Street was a model of restraint compared with that of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnsons chief adviser. And unlike Mr Cummings, Mr Timothy is a conservative with both a small and a large c. His new book, Remaking One Nation: Conservatism in an Age of Crisis, provides something that the Johnson government conspicuously lacks: an answer to the question of what conservatism is now for and a blueprint for translating philosophical principles into detailed policy.

Mr Timothy argues that, since the French revolution, the role of conservatism has been to act as a corrective to the extremes of liberalism. Today those extremes come in two forms: neo-liberalism, which sees markets as the solution to all problems, and woke liberalism, which sees the world through the prism of minority rights and all-pervasive oppression. Many see these two liberalisms as polar opposites. But for Mr Timothy they are both degenerate versions of classical liberalism. The first undermines markets by failing to see that they require popular legitimacy and the second sacrifices what is best in liberalism (pluralism, scepticism, individualism) on the altar of group rights.

Mr Timothy presents a dismal picture of the consequences. Bosses have seen their compensation more than quadruple while the value of their companies has hardly risen at all. The largest demographic groupthe white working classhas seen incomes stagnate for over a decade. Britain has the highest level of regional inequality in Europe. It also has one of the worst systems of vocational education, with 80 undergraduate degrees awarded for every post-secondary technical qualification. Woke liberals are increasingly willing to no-platform or shout down opponents because they see their objectives as quasi-sacred and their critics not just as wrong-headed folk needing to be reasoned with but as evil-minded enemies who must be destroyed.

Rather than using its power to mitigate inequality the government has directed resources at the countrys most prosperous region. Transport subsidies are twice as high per person in London as elsewhere. London and Oxbridge get almost half of national R&D spending. Far from reviving vocational education, the government has poured money into universities which, as well as failing to defend free speech, load up students with debt at the same time as too often failing to provide them with any significant return on their investment.

Mr Timothy presents an ideologically eclectic list of solutions to Britains problems. They are reminiscent of John Ruskins description of himself as both a violent Tory of the old school and the reddest also of the red. But two ideas give his arguments organising force: the nation-state and civic capitalism. A long-standing Brexiteer, Mr Timothy argues that the nation-state has been uniquely successful in holding global elites accountable to voters while also giving citizens a sense of common purpose. He points out that the welfare state was constructed after the second world war, when the sense of common purpose was at its height. A proud citizen of Birmingham, he champions the sort of civic capitalism practised by Joseph Chamberlain, a local businessman who looked after his workers and went on to be a reforming mayor.

There are problems with Mr Timothys argument. He sees the upside of nationalism without the downside, such as the beggar-thy-neighbour policies of the 1930s. He sees the downside of lifestyle liberalism without the upside: two decades ago advocates of gay marriage were self-righteous extremists. But his book should be a jolt of electricity to a moribund debate in the Conservative Party. He makes a powerful case against the libertarian right, which sees Brexit as an excuse to shrink the state and liberalise further. And he presents a blueprint very different from the one that has ruled the right since the 1970s. This is a conservatism which celebrates the power of the state to achieve collective ends by dealing with regional and inter-generational inequalities; which challenges the self-dealing of business elites by rewiring the rules of corporate governance; and which puts a premium on rebuilding local communities and reigniting civic capitalism.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "The meaning of conservatism"

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The meaning of conservatism - The Economist

TUC Womens Conference discussed and debated a range of issues facing the labour movement when it gathered in London last week. Domestically it passed motions on equal pay, with the gender pay gap still seeing women disadvantaged 50 years after the Equal Pay Act was passed.

On the international front a motion proposed by the Transport and Salaried Staff Association (TSSA) provoked much interest among delegates and its passing has led to the establishment of a new and much needed labour movement-based organisation in solidarity with Turkey and Kurdistan.

Chair of the union s national womens section Sarah-Jane McDonough told the Star that the Turkey and Kurdistan Solidarity Initiative (Taksi) was being launched with other trade unionists in London later this month.

She has led campaigning within the union in solidarity with the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) which has faced unprecedented attacks from the Turkish state. The union sent a message of support to the HDP Womens Conference earlier this year which was read out to applause and cheers at the Ankara gathering.

Earlier this year TSSA Women in Focus (WiF) launched a petition against a horrifying proposed child rape law which would grant an amnesty to the perpetrators if they married their victims. This would also have seen the release of 4,000 convicted paedophiles.

WiF has been angered over the attacks on the HDP co-chair system, which guarantees sex equality at all levels of the party. Turkeys authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has branded the system an act of terrorism. According to him the women have been appointed to their posts within the HDP by the Kurdistan WorkersParty (PKK), a proscribed organisation.

In response to pleas for international solidarity TSSA WiF is planning a delegation to Ankara to meet the HDP Womens Platform, which the womens section of the union has affiliated to.

At TUC Womens Conference Ms McDonough urged other unions to follow suit, highlighting the oppression of women in Turkey.

She said she was proud of TSSA for building strong links with their counterparts describing women as the forefront of the resistance in Turkey.

Ms McDonough said the attacks they face are yet another bid from Erdogan to stop women participating in political life.

But she warned that the attacks are not just confined to the Turkish state. They are able to do this with the compliance of the British government which supports Mr Erdogan both politically and militarily, emboldening him in his efforts to crush democracy internally and wage deadly wars targeting Kurds in Syria.

This is why we are campaigning for an end to arms sales to Turkey and are pressing for this to be adopted as official policy by the Labour Party here, she said, explaining that the motion passed at TUC Womens Conference unanimously adopted this approach.

There is much work to be done, she told the Star. Lots of delegates came to speak to me to say they hadnt realised what was happening in Turkey and that they too thought it should have featured in Labour Party policy. They were genuinely interested in helping and getting their unions involved.

This gap in knowledge of the political situation in Turkey and the oppression of the Kurdish people is one of the reasons for the launch of Taksi, she explained.

It already has the backing of a range of trade unions who will attend the founding meeting on March 28 and has been welcomed by HDP officials, trade unionists and womens movement activists in Turkey.

When footage of the motion being moved was played to our sisters in Turkey I was told people in the room were in floods of tears. They said that finally their voices were being heard, Ms McDonough explained.

Last years Labour Party conference and TUC was filled with leaflets, meetings and motions on Palestine and there are well-established and effective campaigns in solidarity with the people of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries quite rightly, she said.

But there was not a single motion about Turkey, which is unacceptable.

There is an urgent need for a similar movement raising the voices of the people of Turkey and Kurdistan in the British labour movement, particularly given the role of our own government in propping up the Erdogan regime.

The motion also called for solidarity with journalists in Turkey, which holds more media workers behind bars than any other country in the world.

Taksi will work not just to raise awareness, but also build real and meaningful solidarity including the twinning of trade unions with their counterparts in Turkey, collecting funds, sending delegations to picket lines, court hearings and pressuring bosses, Ms McDonough explained.

One of the first initiatives will be a campaign to twin local authorities and councillors in Britain with their HDP counterparts in Turkey, where scores of municipalities were taken over by government-appointed trustees after last years local elections.

We started much of this work last year with councils including Doncaster and Salford indicating support for the campaign and many councillors committing to twin with a counterpart in Turkey, she explained.

Taski will also launch a high-profile campaign for the freedom of jailed former HDP co-chair Figen Yuksekdag who faces the rest of her life behind bars on trumped-up terrorism charges.

In many ways she is the face of the oppression of women in Turkey, singled out for harsh treatment because of her status as a leading woman in politics, something that is anathema to the misogynistic tyrant Erdogan.

But raising awareness of what has happened to her opens the door for the movement to find out more about the oppression and attacks on the HDP Labours sister party in Turkey. We want unions to adopt Figen and give her honorary membership as part of a broad campaign, Ms McDonough insisted.

On March 28 Taksi holds its launch meeting which will see trade unionists gather in London to plan ahead of an official founding conference planned for the summer.

They will have a Q&A session with HDP activists in Turkey via a live link and hear from a range of campaigns including trade unionists, womens movement activists, hunger striking Grup Yorum musicians and the experience of journalists including a display of photographs taken byKurdish reporter Seda Taskinduring her recent visit to Hasankeyf, a 12,000 year old city which is being flooded by the Erdogan regime in an act of cultural genocide against Kurds

The importance of international solidarity and the failure of the movement here in raising the voices of those fighting for peace and democracy in Turkey and Kurdistan cannot be underestimated. That has to change, Ms McDonough said.

To find out more about Taksi email turkeyandkurdistanSI@gmail.com , follow the Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/turkeyandkurdistanSI/ and to sign-up for the launch meeting register via Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/taksi-launch-meeting-london-tickets-99077259751

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Campaign of the Week Turkey and Kurdistan Solidarity Initiative - Morning Star Online

Zimbabwe government decision to hold its 40th Independence Anniversary in Bulawayo, Matabeleland, in the face of an infectious disease such as coronavirus smells of evil intentions.

Besides spreading coronavirus in Matabeleland to kill many, Zimbabwe Independence Day aims to celebrate Shona independence, Matabele genocide, tribal marginalisation and oppression of Matabele people which are the only "achievements" of Shona majority rule in the last 40 years. The people of Matabeleland have got nothing to celebrate.

When your worst enemy pretends to be your friend and wants to be close to you at a time when you are calling for your independence, you must not only be worried, but be on high alert. They may be hiding a sword behind their back.

We implore all the people of Matabeleland to avoid the death trap set by the oppressive and murderous Shona supremacist government of Zimbabwe by boycotting the so called Independence Day celebrations in their numbers.

MLO firmly stands by two critical demands that have already been delivered to the government of Zimbabwe ie the Notice of Demand for the Restoration of Matabeleland State as at 3 November 1893, and demand of US$100 billion as compensation for Matabeleland genocide, loss of property and our dignity, dispersal of Matabeles as refugees around the world, illegal exploitation and plundering of Matabeleland resources by successive Zimbabwe government.

The above demands are non- negotiable and binding to the present and future governments of Zimbabwe until they are fully met.

Take it or leave it! In case you decide to leave it, be prepared to face regrettable political consequences.

Holding the so called Zimbabwe 40th Independence Day in Bulawayo, the Capital City of Matabeleland will not make us change our mind. As a matter of fact no amount of pressure, apology, persuasion or force by the murderous and oppressive government of Zimbabwe will make us shift an inch from our demands.

We are aware that the panicking government of Zimbabwe is now in hurry to fast - track what they term as exhumations and reburials of Matabeleland genocide victims with the help of some unscrupulous organizations and individuals from Matabeleland. The heartless and shameless murderers who killed more than 40 000 innocent and unarmed Matabele civilians are not even shy to attempt to get rid of evidence in broad day light. The cold blooded killers are not even shy to pretend to be our sympathisers yet we know that their evil intention is to stop Matabeleland restoration cause and continue with their evil Matabele annihilation program. We are watching and can see through them.

The evil genocidists will not tell us when and how we must mourn our departed relatives. The evilmurderers will not dictate to us how and when our departed relatives should be exhumed and reburied.

Those buried in the shallow graves, thrown into disused mine shafts and caves are not cockroaches but human beings. They are our children, sisters, mothers, grand mothers, brothers, fathers, and grand fathers that we loved dearly. We will never allow dirty murderers who killed them to "fast- track" their exhumations and reburials. You can fast- track your land reforms and end there. Genocidists abused and killed our relatives in the most painful way and should not be allowed to abuse them in death.

Fast - tracking the exhumations and reburials of our beloved relatives will be tantamount to crossing the battle lines.

Matabeleland restoration is the idea whose time has come. Failure is the word not found in our vocabulary. We do not expect our journey to freedom to be a walk in the park. We are be prepared to make huge sacrifices. It is a pity that some of our own are misreading the fast changing political climate in Matabeleland.Some are being used by our enemy to put up barricades against the revolution, we are watching you. Be warned! We are not playing child games, this is war. Anyone found on the side of the enemy will die with the enemy, anyone who sides with the enemy is our enemy.

The revolution has no mercy for traitors!

With our AKs and glittering necklaces, we shall liberate ourselves.

Izenzo kungemazwi!

Israel Dube

MLO Secretary for Information and Public Affairs

All articles and letters published on Bulawayo24 have been independently written by members of Bulawayo24's community. The views of users published on Bulawayo24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Bulawayo24. Bulawayo24 editors also reserve the right to edit or delete any and all comments received.

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Holding Zimbabwe Independence celebrations in Matabeleland in the face of coronavirus smells of evil - Bulawayo24 News

When single mother Lilla Haiddar arrived in the U.S from Afghanistan with her two boys to escape Taliban oppression, she embellished her story in her bid to stay.

Nearly 19 years later, she likely will be stripped of her U.S. citizenship due to those lies.

A federal jury in Dallas convicted the Arlington woman on Monday of three counts, including committing lies of omission on two passport applications by not listing a previous name. The more serious charge of obtaining citizenship or naturalization unlawfully carries with it mandatory denaturalization, officials say.

Haiddar, a former U.S. Army interpreter, raised two sons in the U.S. and had a job at DFW International Airport for more than three years, helping travelers. Her conviction is punishable by up to 30 years in prison and a fine of up to $750,000. It also paves the way for Haiddar, 57, to be deported.

Her successful prosecution appears to be part of a stepped-up effort by the Trump administration to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans over a variety of infractions, including lying on government forms and to immigration officials.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a court may revoke naturalization through a civil or criminal proceeding if their citizenship was obtained through fraud or misrepresentation. The Justice Department has filed a total of 228 civil denaturalization cases since 2008. Of those, nearly 100 were brought since 2017 when President Donald Trump entered the White House.

Trump has made immigration a signature issue of his administration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently said it would begin investigating the citizenship files of 700,000 naturalized Americans. And ICE has asked for money to hire 300 more agents as part of the effort. The U.S. has about 20 million naturalized citizens, according to the Pew Research Center.

In the past, denaturalizations were rare and usually reserved for terrorists, war criminals, human rights violators, sex offenders and violent criminals, according to government reports and immigration attorneys.

Critics say cases of fraud in citizenship applications are rare and not worth the resources the Trump administration is committing to combat it. They allege that the effort is part of a political agenda that has nothing to do with safety or security.

Theyre being far more aggressive on denaturalization cases, said Lance Curtright, a San Antonio immigration attorney. I hope it doesnt have a chilling effect on people naturalizing.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The jury in Haiddars case returned its verdict after a four-day trial.

Prosecutors say the Afghan native flew to the U.S. in 2001 on a temporary transit visa and was supposed to leave for Canada the same day, but never did. Instead, she applied for asylum under a different name, Lilla Haiddar, and told a false story of how she made it to New York, prosecutors said.

Haiddar told immigration officials she flew from Pakistan to Mexico and then was secreted across the border into the U.S. with the help of an uncle to escape oppression in her native country. Haiddar listed two different names and dates of birth on U.S. documents, court records show.

We have no idea who this woman is, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany H. Eggers told a magistrate judge during an April 2019 detention hearing.

Haiddar was taken into custody following the jury verdict. Her sentencing is scheduled for July.

The Justice Department on Feb. 26 announced the creation of a Denaturalization Section in its immigration office to bring justice to terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders, and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization. A department official told The New York Times that those who commit serious violations of the law would be a priority.

Some cases, like Haiddars, have involved lying on government paperwork. And the government is using high-tech methods to find violators. In Haiddar's case, facial recognition software snared her in 2018 when she applied to renew her passport.

When you lie, it can affect your good moral character, which is a qualification for citizenship, Curtright said. A lie could also be material, or relevant, if it cut off some lines of inquiry that might have disqualified you from asylum, he said.

Prosecutors say Haiddar obtained C-1 transit visas in May 2001 for herself and her two sons under the name Marufa Khashim Surgul. Transit visas allow travelers safe passage" through an intermediary country, according to court records. She received the visas at the U.S. embassy in Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan, court records say.

The following month, she and her sons arrived by plane at JFK International Airport in New York with the visas. They were scheduled to leave for Canada the same day but never did, prosecutors said.

Using the name, Lilla Haiddar, she applied for asylum in August 2001 and claimed to have fled Afghanistan after Taliban soldiers came to her home, the federal complaint said.

She told U.S. officials she traveled to Pakistan and eventually flew to Mexico City, arriving in June 2001. From there, she said she was driven to New York by an uncle, according to court records. An asylum officer met with her and denied her application, deeming it not credible, court records say.

Haiddar -- a moderate Muslim from the Tajik ethnic minority -- went before an immigration judge in Dallas in 2002 and testified under oath that she feared returning to Afghanistan due to a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of her religious beliefs, according to court records.

The judge granted her application, and she later became a lawful permanent resident, as is permitted under asylum law, court records say.

Haiddar applied for citizenship in March 2011 and it was granted several months later, court records say. She applied for a U.S. passport five days after that, resulting in the first count against her of making a false statement in a passport application, records show. Specifically, Haiddar did not disclose in her application that she had used another name, according to the indictment.

After obtaining her passport, Haiddar repeatedly traveled to the Middle East, to such countries as Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan, federal court records say.

Eggers said Haiddar traveled so frequently, her passport book filled up with visa stamps. So she applied to renew her passport early -- in November 2018 -- resulting in the second false statement count against her, according to court records.

She was caught when her 2018 passport renewal application was flagged for a match with her 2001 transit visa application under her previous name, according to a federal complaint. The Bureau of Consular Affairs facial recognition software helped make the match using photographs from the applications, which bore a very close resemblance, records said.

A federal complaint contains her photo for her transit visa with a different name, as well as more recent photos for her passport under the name, Lilla Haiddar. In her two passport application forms, she was asked to list all other names you have used. She left both blank.

Haiddar was interviewed at the Dallas office of the State Departments Diplomatic Security Service on March 15, 2018, during which she denied ever using another name, the federal complaint said. Haiddar told agents her father paid her uncle $20,000 to smuggle her out of Afghanistan and into the U.S., the complaint said.

Had the defendant not taken the steps prior to her interview for naturalization on October 20, 2011, she never would have been eligible to apply for citizenship in the first place, Eggers said in a court filing.

Haiddar began working at DFW International Airport in late 2016, after finding a job with an aviation support company, prosecutors said.

Her duties included helping passengers who needed interpreters to navigate the airport. She was given an identification badge that allowed her access to areas not available to non-travelers, Eggers said in the court filing.

Courtney Stamper, a federal public defender, said during Haiddars April detention hearing that her client was not a threat to anyone.

Haiddar, she said, helped prepare U.S. soldiers being deployed to Afghanistan to handle the customs and the culture there in a time when our nation needed it the most.

And so the notion that somehow shes the bogeywoman is false, and its quite frankly bothersome, Stamper said.

Eggers said in court documents that no matter how horrific conditions were for women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, it didnt excuse Haiddars lies on immigration and passport forms as well as lies to an asylum officer, an immigration judge and federal law enforcement officers.

A defense witness, a professor of Islamic history, testified during the trial last week about Haiddars identification papers. The witness is an expert on how the Taliban made it impossible for women to exercise control in their own affairs, according to a defense filing.

Defense attorneys wrote that the professor would tell jurors about how a potential alias would be a necessary component of any attempt to smuggle an unmarried woman from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan.

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After nearly 20 years in America, this woman will be stripped of her US citizenship for lying on forms - The Dallas Morning News

In The Matrix, the lead character, Neo, is offered a choice by Morpheus, the leader of a rebel band. Neo can take a red pill, and discover that the world around him is an entirely false construct. Or he can take a blue pill, and wake up in bed, blissfully unaware that everything about his life is a fabrication.

Of course, we are not living inside some artificial reality, like in The Matrix, controlled by powerful forces without even realising it. But if Western citizens were presented with a choice of pills, and opted for the red one, they would see that the world is not as they imagined. Many aspects of life they were told were unavoidable and universal, inevitable and irreversible, are no such thing at all.

We have grown used to being told that globalisation, in the form we have experienced it, is an irresistible force. We have been told that the nation state and the collective identity, democracy and solidarity it makes possible must be subordinated to supranational governance. We have been told that international market forces are impossible to shape, mass immigration is impossible to stop, and the destruction of culture is impossible to resist. We have grown to accept that markets trump institutions, individualism trumps community, and group rights trump broader, national identities. Legal rights come before civic obligations, personal freedom beats commitment, and universalism erodes citizenship.

These things have become the norm not because they are the natural order of things, but because our world is a construct of ideology. That ideology is not as extreme as those our leaders like to reject, such as communism or fascism. But it is an ideology nonetheless, and its name is ultra-liberalism. Like all ideologies, as its contradictions and failures mount, ultra-liberalism is growing illiberal and intolerant towards dissenters, and retreating into delusion and denial.

Consider how the political classes did what they could to thwart Brexit. How, when it comes to public services, the answer is always to turn them into a market. How politicians insist we need more and more immigration. And think about how those who disagree with them are smeared as bigoted, deplorable and incapable of understanding the complexity of the modern world.

My new book, Remaking One Nation, sets out why things have got this far, and what conservatives can do about it. We need to counter ultra-liberalism, and develop a new conservative agenda that respects personal freedom but demands solidarity, reforms capitalism and rebuilds community, and rejects selfish individualism while embracing our obligations towards others. In rejecting ultra-liberalism, however, conservatives must be careful to defend the essential liberalism that stands for pluralism and our democratic way of life.

Essential liberalism is what makes liberal democracy function. It requires not only elections to determine who governs us, but checks and balances to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. It demands good behavioural norms, including a willingness to accept the outcome of election results.

And it requires support for free markets. Essential liberalism does not seek to turn every aspect of life into a market, but it knows that economic freedom is closely related not only to personal freedom but other values, including dignity, justice, security and recognition and respect from our fellow citizens.

The power of essential liberalism is that it does not pretend to provide a general theory of rights or justice or an ideological framework that leads towards the harmonisation of human interests and values or a single philosophical truth. It respects political diversity and allows for all manner of policy choices, from criminal justice to the tax system.

And it understands that human values and interests are often in conflict. My right to privacy might undermine your right to security, for example. A transsexuals right to be recognised as a woman might undermine the safety of women born as women. We need institutions, laws, and a limited number of legal rights to handle those conflicts. We need customs and traditions to maintain our shared identities and build up trust. Keeping the fragile balance between conflicting values and interests is a delicate and difficult job, and this is why ultra-liberalism can be so dangerous.

Of course there is no single ultra-liberal agenda. The ultra-liberalism of Tony Blair may, despite party divides, be similar to the beliefs of Nick Clegg, George Osborne and John Bercow. But it is very different to the form of ultra-liberalism pursued by the Left-wingers who dominate todays Labour Party.

Blair and Osborne stand for elite liberalism. Their beliefs are shared by most members of the governing classes, but not the general public. And so, despite public opposition, and changes in ministers and parties in government, Britain continues with policies including mass immigration, multiculturalism, a lightly regulated labour market, limited support for the family and the marketisation of many public services.

And then we have the ultra-liberal ratchet: beliefs that are not shared across the party divide, but which keep propelling liberalism forward. On the Right, market fundamentalists think mainly of the economy, while Left-liberals pursue their agenda of cultural liberalism and militant identity politics.

One side might attempt to reverse some changes made by the other, but in the end most remain. And market fundamentalism and Left-liberalism reinforce one another: both leave us with economic dislocation, social atomisation and a state that is left trying to pick up the pieces.

The trouble with all these forms of ultra-liberalism is that they are based on a conception of humanity that is not real. Right from the beginning, liberal thought was built on the false premise that there are not only universal values but also natural and universal rights.

Early liberals made this argument by imagining a state of nature, or life without any kind of government at all. They argued that in the state of nature life in which was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short humans would come together to form a social contract setting out the governments powers and the rights of citizens.

This meant, from the start, liberalism had several features hard-wired into it. Citizens are autonomous and rational individuals. Their consent to liberal government is assumed. And rights are natural and universal.

This is why many liberals fall into the trap of believing that the historical, cultural and institutional context of government is irrelevant. Institutions and traditions that impose obligations on us can simply be cast off. All that matters, as far as government is concerned, is the freedom of the individual and the preservation of their property. Liberal democracy can therefore be dropped into Iraq, and made to work like in Britain. At home, we can be given legal rights without any corresponding responsibilities. Our duties to others are merely unjust hindrances.

Liberals ignore the relational essence of humanity: our dependence on others and our reliance on the institutions and norms of community life. They take community and nation for granted, and have little to say about the obligations as well as rights of citizenship. The nation state can therefore hand over its powers to remote and unaccountable supranational institutions. Transnational citizenship rights can be bestowed upon foreign nationals. Public services should be freely available to those who have never contributed to them.

With later liberal thinkers came further flawed ideas about humanity. The great Victorian, John Stuart Mill, devised the harm principle, in which the liberty of the individual should be restricted only if his actions risk damaging the interests of others. Even then, there could be no encroachment on liberty to ensure conformity with the moral beliefs of the community, to prevent people harming themselves, or if the restriction was disproportionate.

The problem with the harm principle is that it fails to acknowledge that all our actions and inactions to some degree affect those around us. And, precisely because human values and interests conflict with one another, we will never agree about what clearly constitutes harm. Yet ultra-liberals today echo Mills harm principle when they behave as though the use of hard drugs has no consequences for anybody but the individual user, or when they are reluctant to force fathers to meet their obligations to their families or refuse to take action against serial tax-dodging individuals or businesses.

Mill and other liberals sometimes made the case for pluralism and tolerance on the basis that the trial and error they make possible leads to truth and an increasingly perfect society. It is this teleological fallacy this assumption that ones own beliefs stand for progress that can lead liberalism towards illiberalism: its intolerance of supposedly backward opinions, norms and institutions can quickly become intolerance of the people who remain loyal to those traditional ways of life.

This illiberalism is a particular problem on the ultra-liberal Left. And here, Left-liberals are influenced by post-modernists such as Michel Foucault and the mainly American thinkers behind the rise of identity politics. Discourse, Foucault argued, is oppressive. People are not in charge of their own destinies. Their social reality is imposed on them through language and customs and institutions, and even the victims of the powerful participate in their own oppression through their own language, stories and assumed social roles.

Because oppressive discourses work to favour those at the top of exploitative hierarchies, we should not simply remove the hierarchy but penalise those who subjugate others. Equal political rights are therefore not enough: because historically power lay with white men, today whiteness and masculinity must be attacked. Because we do not understand how our social roles are constructed, we do not understand the meaning of even our own words. Those who hear us particularly if they are members of marginalised groups understand better than we do the true meaning of what we say. Because discourse is itself a form of violence, free speech is no longer sacrosanct, and it is legitimate to meet violent language with violent direct action.

On the ultra-liberal Right, support for the free market can turn into extreme libertarianism. Struggling communities shorn of social capital, deprived of infrastructure and lacking opportunities for young people are ignored, in the belief that the invisible hand of the market will come to the rescue.

Instead, policy energy is devoted to deregulating the labour market and marketising public goods. Friedrich von Hayek, a hero to many ultra-liberals on the Right, argued that no political system, not even a democratic one, nor even a very small and local one, can accurately reflect collective choice in the way a market does. For his disciples, it follows, therefore, that the NHS cannot be the right way of delivering healthcare, since consumer choices and real pricing do not drive decision-making. And the same goes for other public services, from public transport to schooling.

It is time for a decisive break with ultra-liberalism in all its forms. And there are signs that under Boris Johnson the Conservatives are shifting away from both economic and cultural liberalism. They are taking Britain out of the EU, toughening up sentencing and reviewing human rights laws. And as Rishi Sunaks impressive Budget showed this week, they are investing in the regions and appear ready to intervene far more in the economy.

Time will tell if they will break the domination of British politics by the Right, Left and centre of ultra-liberalism. But we should hope they do so. There is more to life than the market, more to conservatism than the individual, and more to the future than the destruction of cultures and nations. Its time for conservatives to take the red pill, see the world around them for what it is, and fight for a different future.

Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism, is out on March 27, and available to pre-order online now

Continued here:

There is an alternative to broken Western liberalism - Telegraph.co.uk

Members of Indigenous Youth for Wetsuweten during their occupation of the B.C. Legislature. Photo by Mike Graeme

While the hereditary chiefs were actively discussing a proposed deal with the government on land title, Teresa Tait-day, the co-founder of the Wetsuweten Matrilineal Coalition (WMC, also known as Wetsuweten Matriarchal Coalition), spoke at the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs in Ottawa.

As female Wetsuweten members and community leaders, we want to be heard, Tait-day said. Many of the male hereditary chiefs are acting out of internalized historical oppression. We face patriarchal domination.

Tait-day has been vocal in her opposition of the chiefs decisions. In her recent speech in Ottawa, for instance, she alleged she was being bullied by the hereditary chiefs and left out of decision making processes with the province. She also said people acting in solidarity with the chiefs throughout Canada were hijacking her nation.

She was invited to speak by a federal party. When CBC journalist Chantelle Bell Richard asked why Tait-Day was invited, they said the committee members decided by consensus that each party would suggest one Indigenous expert to speak to the complex underlying issues related to the study.

Since speaking to the committee, Tait-Day has been featured in CBC, National Post, and APTN articles.

The WMC is not, and was not ever, an independent Indigenous body or governance structure but rather a group founded with the B.C. government and CGL to sway Wetsuweten public opinion in favour of the pipeline, according to documents obtained in a 2017 F.O.I..

In 2015, the WMC was incorporated as a corporation, without consultation of the Wetsuweten hereditary chiefs. Documents obtained from the B.C. government show the WMC was a joint project between Coastal GasLink (CGL), the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and Reconciliation, and the three founding members Gloria George, Darlene Glaim, and Tait-Day.

In a resignation letter from Glaim, she says the group was formed with the intent to negotiate a benefit agreement for Clan/House members with [CGL], and that in 2017 the hereditary chiefs explicitly called the WMC a strategy used by the government and CGL to disunite their people.

We had a meeting with about 50 people, Tait-day explains in a video for Resource Works. And they said find a way to get this agreement done. As a result of that, we formulated the [WMC] .. .and we started to negotiate with [CGL].

WMC originally requested $181 721 in funding from LNG Canada, CGL, and the province. The B.C. government and CGL each donated $60 000 to WMC to carry out workshops, which aimed to educate the Wetsuweten about the economic benefits of LNG.

Since WMC was founded and began holding their workshops, there has been contention about their ability to hold any authority as they inherently attempt to undermine the Wetsuweten governance structure.

Documents show that the purpose of the WMC was not only to advance LNG, but also to delegitimize the hereditary chiefs by brainstorming new decision-making processes in relation to resource projects.

The stated purpose of the organization includes an agreement between the government and WMC, stating their goal to bring Wetsuweten people together to discuss decision-making processes for economic development opportunities, specifically natural gas development as that was identified as a gap in the decision-making process.

It further hopes to bring Wetsuweten members back into the information sharing and decision making processes based on the traditional practices but in a modern day context.

The WMC claims this pipeline is approved by 85 per cent of Wetsuweten people, but there is no further evidence of how they arrived at this figure. Because she caused so much contention between the clans, Tait-day is banned from attending traditional Wetsuweten feast halls.

Tait-day is not a hereditary chief but previously held the family name of a hereditary chief. She was stripped of her hereditary title in a feast hall.

Despite having no jurisdiction in the traditional governance model, Tait-Day has been cited in the Globe and Mail with her vocal opposition to the pipeline.

Micheal Lee Ross, the lawyer representing Unistoten to the B.C. Supreme Court, explained in court that WMC includes individuals who have improperly represented themselves as hereditary chiefs and who in consequence have been reprimanded and ordered to stop using a hereditary chiefly title or formally stripped of the claimed chiefly title.

The WMC hired a private firm called Impact Resolutions to assist them with creating websites, social media, and making their workshops effective. In their funding requests, its clear a lot of their funding goes towards this firm.

In June 2016, the hereditary chiefs interrupted a meeting between the WMC and TransCanada. Once the representative from the Ministry, Katie Scott, and representatives from TransCanada heard the hereditary chiefs were on their way, they quickly left.

In a Youtube video from the meeting, the chiefs are shown in their full regalia speaking to a crowd of about 60 men and women. They repeatedly spoke of this meeting as an effort by the government and TC, not the Wetsuweten, to create division and invited everyone to a traditional feast hall, including the government and TransCanada representatives that had already left, to resolve things.

[The WMC] is not sanctioned by the chiefs, Kloum Khun, a hereditary chief of the Laksamshu clan said.

The slide on the meetings interrupted PowerPoint visible in the video advertises the basis for moving forward as building Wetsuweten unity.

This is not unity, Madeek or Jeff Brown, of the Gitdumden house says, pointing to the slide. This is conquer and divide, and we dont need that.

Culturally, the Wetsuweten are a matrilineal nation, and the house that a person is a part of is determined on matrilineal lines. Apart from this society, there are Wetsuweten matriarchs that feel underrepresented by the all-male group of hereditary chiefs. This past week, during the talks with federal and provincial partners, the hereditary chiefs welcomed matriarchs to the table. These issues of representation are being worked out by the Wetsuweten, and that situation is separate from the WMC that was funded by CGL and the B.C. government.

Tait-day has a continued relationship with CGL. A press release following her address in Ottawa recently was authored by Coast Communications, a public relations firm that represents other clients like Pacific Northern Gas and First Nations LNG Alliance.

In the press release, people supporting the Wetsuweten hereditary chiefs are criticized for compromising our Nations social well-being and our peoples economic futures.

Continued here:

Wet'suwet'en Matriarchal Coalition funded by BC, Coastal GasLink to divide and conquer - The Martlet

Bruce Berglund is a historian and a writer. He works at a small college in Minnesota. But back in the winter of 1998, he was living in Prague, doing research on his dissertation on 20th century Czechoslovak history.

And that February, an event was being held 5,000 miles from Prague, in Japan, that Czechs were following quite closely: the Nagano Winter Olympics.

"This was the first Winter Olympics that included NHL players," Berglundsays. "So there was a lot of build up, a lot of excitement. And with that tournament, it was expected going into the tournament that Canada would come away with the gold medal. Canada was led by Wayne Gretzky. They had a roster that was stocked with players who are now in the Hall of Fame.The Russians were touted as one of the favorites. The Americans were touted as favorites.And the Czechs ended up surprising everyone."

In the semifinal, the Czech Republic defeated Canada in a shootout. In the final, they faced off against Russia.

"And, because the Olympics were in Japan, we had to get up early, early in the morning to watch the gold medal match," Berglund says.

"And a lot of Czechs tuned into that game, right?" I ask

"Yeah, it's estimated that 80% of Czech adults at some point during the game were tuned in," Berglundsays. "So I was in a small Czech town the day of the final match. And when the final horn sounded, when the Czechs had won, when they received their gold medals,everybody in the small town poured into the town square, cheering, singing, waving flags.

"The fire truck came down and drove around and and blared its sirens. A lot of alcohol was consumed for very early on a Sunday morning, and it was just this wonderful, enthusiastic celebration of the Czech hockey team."

The team returned home, flying into the airport on the outskirts of Prague.

"Crowds, huge crowds, at the airport there to greet them," Berglund says. "They stopped first at the president's house and they were out on the front lawn having shots of Slivovitz. They boarded the bus and went down into the center, where at least 100,000 people were packed into the old town square in the center of Prague."

So this moment was a big deal for Czechs for a bunch of reasons. For one, the Czechs had won world championships before and after splitting from Slovakia. But theyd never won Olympic gold.

But as Berglundwas talking to people in Prague, he realized that there was another reason Czechs were celebrating this win. It was a story that had been on peoples minds for a long time.

Widely Known Story

"This story of the 1950 hockey team, of the injustice that they experienced," Berglund says, "this is a widely known story among Czechs."

Berglund went back to Prague last fall. He visited the National Archives and the archives of the former state security services, known in Czech as the StB. And after viewing thousands of documents, he finally was able to piece together the story.

But to really understand what happened to the 1950 Czech hockey team, we have to go back to the end of World War II.

"People in Czechoslovakia were hungry for hockey after the war,"Stanislav Konopsek wrote in his memoirs. He was one of the players on that 1950 Czechoslovak national team. He died in 2008."We were happy when we could start playing international matches again. We had good results on our first trips, to Switzerland, Sweden and England."

"In 1947, Prague hosted the first hockey world championships to be hosted after World War 2," Berglund says.

Canada didnt send a team to those world championships, and without the best team in the world in attendance, Czechoslovakia won.

And this was a big deal. Because Czechoslavakia was in a unique political position. It saw itself as a bridge between the communist Soviet Union and the democratic West. And so any international success the country had was really celebrated as proof that Czechoslavakia could thrive in this middle ground.

But, while things were going great on the ice, political tensions were heating up.

"Czechoslovakia had a coalition government," Berglund says. "The president was a non-communistEdvard Bene. The prime minister was the leader of the Communist Party. Klement Gottwald. In 1948, communist parties in Europe, they get the signal from Moscow that it is time to take full control of their governments.

"President Bene recognizes that the situation is inevitable. A few months later,Bene resigns, and Gottwald becomes the president of the country."

Through all this, and a plane crash that killed six members of the team in 1948, the Czechoslovak national team continued to compete and they continued to win, even beating out the Canadians for the 1949 World Championships.

"So the following year, the 1950 World Championships are going to be staged in London, and the Czechoslovak national team is preparing to leave," Berglund says. "They go to the airport outside of Prague, and they don't board the plane."

"We waited a long time at the airport for our flight," Konopsek wrote. "We thought there must be some malfunction. After a time they told us that the flight was postponed until the next day. In the morning, we went back to the airport and waited again. Nobody believed anymore that there was a problem with the plane. After about two hours, the team manager and some security service officers came to announce that we were not flying to London."

"The security officers say, 'Well, two journalists accompanying the team have been denied their visas by the British,' " Berglund says.

"You don't want the people of Czechoslovakia to listen to the world championship over some foreign radio services, do you?" Konopsekremembered the security officers saying.

In other words, the players were told that in solidarity with the journalists and for the good of their country, they would be giving up their opportunity to win another championship ... for the good of their country. It didn't make a lot of sense.

"The players headed off to a pub. It was late in the evening. They were wanting to eat dinner. And when they went to the pub, they began to talk over beer of how angry they were, how upset they were with the government's handling of the team," Berglund says. "And while they're at dinner, it comes over the radio, a news announcement that the Czechoslovak hockey team had joined in solidarity with Czechoslovak journalists who had been denied visas by the British government. And this set the players off.

"They start swearing, they start cussing. They cussed out Gottwald. They cussed out the Communists. And of course, there were other people in the restaurant listening. And these people report to the police what's happening.

"So at about 9:00 p.m., the police show up, the StB. And the players are brought to the police station, and they undergo interrogation, including torture. The players were surprised to learn that they were being charged with treason."

"It was a huge shock," Konopsek wrote. "None of us had been interested in politics before. Never."

"The police are particularly interested in a man named Bohumil Modry," Berglundsays."Modry had been the team's goalie. During the summer and fall of 1949, Modry became more and more disenchanted with the way the team was organized, and particularly the way the communist sports authorities dealt with the national team.

"And so Modry had left the team before this planned trip to London in 1950. The questions kept revolving around Modry and Modry's contacts with foreigners, particularly with Americans who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Prague. And it was the case that Modry did have contacts with an American at the U.S. Embassy. Modry did introduce this American to other members of the team.

"So the charges were not fabricated. There were indeed connections between the hockey players and westerners. Talk of defecting, talk of emigrating had been circulating among the hockey players ever since the communists took power in 1948."

"The trial was very simple," Konopsek wrote.

"The trial is really perfunctory," Berglund says. "Their guilt had already been determined. They have the sense that word had come down from up above from higher authorities, that they were an anti-state element. And in a communist state, in communist Czechoslovakia, this was a high crime."

The players had individual greivances about the way their team had been treated, but they didn't think of themselves as an anti-state group.

"No," Berglund says. "But because the communists were still new in terms of having power in Czechoslovakia, they had to demonstrate that nobody, including the world champion hockey players, was excused from 'socialist justice.' "

Twelve players were put on trial. Twelve players were convicted. Their sentences ranged from 15 years for Modry, the goalie, to eight months for a player deemed to be less involved in the plot.

And this wasnt going to be easy time at a country club jail.

Sent To The Mines

"The players were sent to work in the uranium mines in the western part of Czechoslovakia, close to the German border," Berglund says. "And really, this is notorious as one of the worst places of communist oppression, a work camp extracting uranium which was used for the Soviet military in conditions without any safeguards whatsoever."

"We wore no masks," Konopsek wrote. "We breathe uranium dust fully into lungs. Uranium was on our clothes all the time. We didn't even have a shower. After work we just wash them before going to bed."

"So these were terrible conditions and the state police really had no regard for the health of the prisoners, whether hockey players or any other kind of prisoner," Berglund says.

"The players were released in 1955," Berglund says. "So this comes after the death of Stalin in 1953. And shortly after that, the death of Klement Gottwald, the president of Czechoslovakia. Many of the players are allowed to return to hockey. They play in the highest league in Czechoslovakia, but none of them are allowed to play for the national team again.

But...why?

"In my opinion, the whole event was managed from Moscow," Konopsek wrote.

"Stanislav Konopsek, he makes the case that this was something that was ordered from Moscow," Berglund says. "And the reason was, that it was at this time in the late 1940s, in the early 1950s, that the Soviet Union was developing their own hockey program. So, by getting the world champion Czechoslovak hockey team out of the way, this would open up the path for the rise of the Soviet hockey team."

And that plan worked.

More Than A Sporting Event

"So, knowing this whole story, how does that shape how you see what you saw in '98 with the great celebration over the Olympic win?" I ask. "Because it feels like more than just a win in a sporting event."

"During the winter of 1997, 1998, this was really a difficult time in the Czech Republic in terms of politics, in terms of the economy," Berglund says. "The economy was slowing down. So this was roughly a decade after the Velvet Revolution, the end of communism. There were a lot of questions at this time as to what ... the transition to democracy and capitalism [had] brought.

"One of the newspaper headlines after the Olympic win in 1998 called this the 'Victorious February.' When the communists took power in February of 1948, they called their bloodless coup 'Victorious February.' And so the headlines 50 years later, in February 1998, were intended to suggest that our difficult history of living under communism and then the difficult transition from communism, in some ways this has been mitigated. That we have a new 'Victorious February.' "

Bruce Berglund upcoming book is called "The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports." Our thanks to stage actorFrantiek paek for the dramatic readings of translated passages from the memoirs ofStanislav Konopsek.

Read more here:

Hockey, Politics And 'Treason': The 1950 Czechoslovakia National Team - WBUR

THERE has been seemingly good news recently of increasing levels of employment. It has been largely stimulated by the growing numbers of women entering the workforce.

Men however, and by contrast, are making up an increasing proportion of those who are economically inactive.This is a trend which has been a long time in the making and should not be ignored.

Rates of economic inactivity tell us who is not available for work, but not the reason. They may bestudents, retired, or, particularly in the case of women, looking after the family whether their children, their spouses or dependent parents.They are termed inactive yet many are productively engaged, albeit it in the private sphere, which in todays society doesnt seem to count for much.The rate ofadjustedeconomic inactivity is the key to telling us who actually might theoretically want employment, such as the long-term sick, the short-term sick or those who are discouraged by being unemployed, many of whom have become alienated from the world of work.

As women have moved out of so-called productive inactivity from the family into the workplace, this means an increasing proportion of the inactive (as opposed to simply short-term unemployed) will be men. Explaining this rise solely in terms of the decline in manufacturing and traditional male industries is clearly insufficient. It ignores the impact of feminist ideology on economic and social policy on peoples choices.

Feminists from Betty Friedan onwards have taken a dim view of womens traditional caring for the family role, seeing it a sign of womens oppression and a burden that rendered women dependent on men.They have made it their mission, for some 50 years now, to liberate women through work to bring about the financial independence they assumed would result.

Successive governments have come under huge pressure from this very active but not necessarily representative lobby to change taxation and social policy to free women from any financial dependence on men.

There have been some critical milestones in governments response.The first was the advent of independent taxation without a concomitant option of a household or transferable tax with the Thatcher government in 1988. Chancellor Nigel Lawson said it wasno longer acceptablethatthe income of a married womanshould be taxedas if it belonged to her husband. But hisreform ofpersonal taxation had two objectives:First, to give married women the same privacy and independence in their tax affairs as everyone else; and, second, to bring to an end the ways in which the tax system can penalise marriage.

Unfortunately he did not remain Chancellor long enough to see the second and critical part of his reform through.

The result, for the last 25 years, has been the penalising of families, none more so than where one parent wants to stay at home to look after the children, while the other (usually the man) acts as chief provider.Thanks to the UKs hyper-individualised tax system, families have been treated ever more unfairly over the years, in contrast with our OECD neighbours.

Thisoversight set the trajectory for a long line of feminist policy-makers, career women but also honorary woke men, with their quite different motivations from their mainstream female constituents,to complete their mission to get all women out of the domestic sphere and into work. The pressure from campaigners, such as Gingerbread, the Daycare Trust and the Equal Opportunities Commission which reported early on about the under-utilisation of women in the workforce came in tandem. Labours 1997 victory, seen as a victory for women with its record number of female MPs,but in fact a victory for feminism, put radical feminists such as Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Mo Mowlam none of whom hadsympathy for the mother at home or her male provider at the heart of government.

Tony Blairs New Labour government created a Womens Unit in the Cabinet Office while Gordon Brown furthered the working woman revolution with tax policy designed to encourage lone parents into work (rather than marriage) under the guise of lifting children out of poverty. Its effects were documented by Jill Kirby in her policy analysisThe Price of Parenthood,which was to be a combination ofminimum hours work at best to qualify for more generous levels of state support.

The 2010 Coalition government decided to reform rather than reject the tax credit system (leading to years ofdebate over Universal Credit) which had trapped so many families in a tax churn, explained by Peter Saunders in a detailed paper for Policy Exchange.Thisaccepted rather than rejected theBrown-Harman mantra that getting mothers out of the family and into work was the solution to child poverty, and committed to further tax free childcare incentives.With Nick Clegg, the husband of a feminist businesswoman, at the helm, the policy-makers ignored the fact that so-called inactive women were in fact productively engaged in the private sphere and that many had no desire to increase their working hours.You think we are worthless, Laura Perrins challengedhim on air to his dismay.

Both Labour and Conservative remain blind to the downside of the economic productivity equation the money they would need to spend on financial incentives such as childcare and paternity leave and the cost to businesses of introducing family-friendly flexible employment.They have not yet grasped that childcare will nevermake economic sense or be affordable to anyone but the high-paid,nor have they grasped that the desire to provide for their families lies at the heart of the male productive role.

Such blinkered vision has led to taxpayers money and policy going in one direction only getting women into work and throwing good money after bad into ever more round-the-clockchildcare, whether this is what mothers and fathers really want, and regardless ofchildrens best interests.

The outcome of this strategy has been bad for everybody.Work provides men with more than just an income. It provides them with the wherewithal to express their desire to care for their families.It provides structure, purpose and social networks. It lends to a mans sense of identity and self-worth. Take it away and you remove part of their manhood. This is why changes in employment have a particularly severe and well-documented impact on the health of men.

Yet governments and the media still regard getting women into the workforce as their priority, though the resulting male inactivity extends well beyond its impact on men as these statistics show:

Awoman is38 per cent more likelyto file for divorce if she works more than her husband;

She is 29 per cent more likely to divorce if she has had to increase the number of hours worked outside the home in the last five years; [i]

And despite those years offeminist indoctrination, 80 per cent of women said they would ostracise a man who failed to provide for his family as he should.

An analysis of the emerging gender gap in labour markets and educationdemonstrates the links between unemployment and single parenthood. Increasing numbers of mothers (including those with children under four) in full-time employment means homes are empty. Families spend little time together and children are packed off into wrap-around schoolcare from morning till night. State boarding schools are starting to open for children as young as four.

There really should be little mystery about high rates of depression and mental health issues which we hear young people are suffering from. All too often they are growing up without knowing the meaning of family and home or experiencing its security.

It has also had an impact on community. Women who are now compelled into the workforce once shaped their families and communities in ways which extended well beyond the home.It is not only about looking after children, crucially valuable though this is.It is about creating a realm which provides security, safety, and an alternative arena with a set of values which are independent of the state. It is about cultural activity, whether choirs, reading groups, theatre or going to church. It means having people at the grass roots who can inform local and central politicians about the measures which would make a difference to their communities. It is about having a body of parents monitoring their schools who are ready to step into action when they see profoundly damaging ideologies being taught. It means having eyes in the community so that burglars will not feel that they can so easily walk into your home. It means having people around to help care for elderly or sick family members, or simply do shopping for the disabled person down the road.

When feminists sent women into the workplace they didnt just destroy the family, they also destroyed the community which sustained mothers, fathers and children. Perhaps it is a reflection of the value of men to the workforce that with the advent of additional and replacement female labour force growth in productivity did not go up. It went down.

Reference:

[i]A Cherlin,Worklife and Marital Dissolution, in George Levinger and Oliver C Moles, eds,Divorce andSeparation, 1979, pp. 151-66.

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The long march of men from the workplace - The Conservative Woman

An opinion piece by Selangau MP and Bakelalan assemblyman Baru Bian.

Since finding myself with some unaccustomed free time, I have been reading a book by Kerry Kennedy called Robert F Kennedy Ripples of Hope about her fathers impact on the lives of several prominent individuals. I find a quotation by Senator Kennedy in this book to be profound and meaningful, especially given the current political developments in Malaysia.

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance

Now the dust has more or less settled and we have read various reactions and responses from political analysts and the public. To me, the piece Tell Me You Want Me To Stay written by a heartbroken Yin is the one that encapsulates the reality of the matter for many of us.

On my part, I made the decision to stay out of the new government and remain as an independent MP.

Since the events of the political convulsion that has shaken the country these past few weeks, I, like many Malaysians, have questioned whether there is any hope left for Malaysia, and indeed, for Sarawak.

Is there any hope for those who have fought for their NCR to be fully recognised?

Is there any hope for those who have been made to feel unwelcome and unwanted in their own country?

Is there any hope for those who feel unappreciated despite having contributed to the building of this nation?

Is there any hope for those stateless people who long for their citizenship applications to be granted?

Is there any hope for those who have spoken out against racist politics?

Dwelling on these questions, my mind was drawn back to a speech I made on Malaysia Day 2012 when the Kuching Declaration was unveiled. In that speech, I laid out the many injustices and hardships borne by the people of Sarawak. In the same speech, I shared my dream and vision for Sarawak and Sarawakians, in the spirit of Martin Luther Kings I have a dream speech.

My opponents had mockingly called me a dreamer, whose struggle for justice and fairness had no hope of succeeding. Many years have passed since that day - I have experienced numerous highs and lows in my political journey, and learnt many lessons along the way.

Having collected my thoughts after a period of reflection, I am thankful to discover that the same dreams and vision still firmly reside within me, and are very much alive with every beat of my recently restored heart.

Malaysia has gone through the trauma of a political haemorrhage, and understandably many Malaysians are disillusioned and bitter about the outcome. However, the simple fact is that there is still hope as long as we, the people do not give up, and we resolve to unite to fight the injustices that have been inflicted upon us. There is still hope if we believe that there are still good and sincere leaders from the different races who are ready to lead us. There is still hope if the voters continue to fearlessly speak up against all those who have betrayed our trust.

I believe, deep in my core, that Sarawak still has the potential to make the difference in Malaysia, to be the model State for peaceful racial relationships, harmonious living and religious acceptance. We have the potential and resources to be an economic powerhouse and an advanced agricultural centre.

In order to achieve our goals, I believe that we need to focus on three key areas: Unity, Infrastructure and Education.

To be united, we need to have political stability and social cohesion, and I believe that these are achievable in Sarawak. Good road infrastructure is fundamental to connect people and places, thereby acting as a catalyst for economic activity and growth. Education is the golden key to enlightenment and freedom from manipulation and oppression, and paves the way to personal growth and the progress of a nation.

In my 2012 Malaysia Day speech, I said that in 2007, an African American named Barack Obama announced his lofty dream to the nation, proclaiming: For that is our unyielding faith that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. Obama went on to become the president of America.

Perhaps at times our love for our country feels very much like unrequited love. It is easy to give in to feelings of anger and cynicism and give up all hope. Nevertheless, we must continue to love and to hope, and to rise above all the turmoil that engulfs us at seemingly regular intervals.

I believe in a God that is sovereign over the world, our country and state. I believe that there are many of us who are looking for like-minded people to come together to send forth tiny ripples of hope that will cross each other from a million different centres of energy that in turn will build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression, injustice, religious and racial bigotry, corruption in this beloved State and country of ours.

God have mercy upon us.

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Ripples of Hope - The Borneo Post

And so, last week, to Aberdeen, where I was to talk on politics, power and journalism at an event to mark International Womens Day.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, in 21st-century Scotland, a woman talking to women about women in politics, has become a lightning rod for protest around the proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) no matter how nebulous the connection.

And with the police notified to a possible protest outside the university venue, a risk assessment done, 999 on speed dial, and campus security on alert, it was left to me to decide whether I wanted to carry on. I did.

This policy has all the hallmarks of the Named Person and the Offensive Behaviour at Football Matches

And while the potential risk felt frightening and I was hyper vigilant to what might happen, the event was uplifting, genuinely life affirming, and importantly, without incident. Just as any womens event should be.

But my tenuous brush with the Orwellian practices employed by campaigners to silence women is nothing compared to the wider madness that is going on right now.

Glasgow Womens Library banning a feminist organisation from holding an event to discuss womens sex-based rights.

Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre changing their toilets to be gender neutral. And their assistant director asserting that sex is not binary.

Labour leadership contenders saying babies are assigned a gender at birth, or worse, born without a sex.

The civil service avoiding the use of the word women, even when talking about menstruation.

And with academics being threatened with the sack, pioneering feminists barred from speaking at womens events, journalists no-platformed, politicians called Terfs and doughty equality campaigners accused of bigotry, there is something very rotten at the heart of this debate. And it will take a long time to heal.

That isnt transphobia, that is the lived experience of a lifetime of male oppression because of biology, not gender

If the Scottish Government believed its own rhetoric, that the move to self-ID for trans people was simply an administrative change that would affect only trans people, then they have seriously misjudged the harm that their naivety, and the ensuing wider debate, has inflicted.

The GRA consultation the second now to be held closes in just over a weeks time and the nature of the deliberations has only got worse.

More than half of Nicola Sturgeons ministerial team privately admit the proposed reforms are a complete mess, unlikely to stand up to legal scrutiny, never mind get through the committees or win a parliamentary vote. One told me that the hope was that the coronavirus would overtake events and any bill would be kicked into the long grass. Others have just said they cant go there.

And in the wider SNP membership, there is the threat of revolt with a widescale loss of support and people already abandoning a party that they see as having been captured by a group of activists who care more about gender identity than they do about independence.

But it isnt just an issue for the SNP. MSPs across the house are frightened to talk. Little wonder, when Green MSP Andy Wightman was vilified by his own party and made to publicly apologise for attending a university event on sex-based rights. Wightman was left in no doubt that he could be thrown out of the Greens for the crime, it would appear, of educating himself.

Labour is in a similar quandary, with women like former leader Johann Lamont, Elaine Smith and Jenny Marra keeping up the good fight and refusing to bend to a mantra of trans women are women which threatens much of what their feminism is about.

And already in the parliament, the Presiding Officer, Ken Macintosh, has had to intervene in a row about whether it was appropriate for Patrick Harvie, the co-leader of the Greens, to use the word cisgender, which he even acknowledged some women found offensive [so why use it?], during a debate for International Womens Day, after women MSPs complained.

How have we got to this place? There is almost wholesale consensus that equality is a good thing. There is recognition that trans people are a terribly oppressed group and an acknowledgement that they shouldnt need to suffer to prove who they want to be. There seems to be a societal desire for everyone to live their best life, free from harm to themselves and unto others, and we truly appear to be a progressive country.

But this proposal, no matter how well intentioned, has ignored the sensitivities and ethos of hard-won womens rights and the way issues of equality can butt up against each other and have serious consequences. It is currently unpopular, unworkable, potentially illegal, and could be dangerous to women and trans people. It is a cheap and quick fix to a complex issue that cant be resolved by a simplistic approach to what being equal really means.

Policy doesnt happen in a vacuum and that appears to be what the government wants us to believe.

There is no room here for sense, nor reason. We have been on a dangerous journey where shutting down debate, silencing detractors and steam-rollering on has simply trumped science, history, legislation and logic.

And at its heart is womens fear of male violence. That does not mean that women believe trans women are predators, but they do, quite justifiably, have questions to ask about the risks associated with male bodied people self-identifying as women and having access to their protected single-sex spaces.

That isnt transphobia, that is the lived experience of a lifetime of male oppression because of biology, not gender. It is what has shaped many womens feminism and how they live their lives. They should be allowed to raise concern.

The UK Government has already called a halt to its move towards self-ID amid concerns about the medical interventions being made around children. And the Scottish Government needs to find a way to do the same.

But Shirley-Anne Somerville, the Cabinet Secretary responsible, has made clear that she believes that the GRA reforms proposed by her government are the right thing to do and that the role of the consultation is simply to persuade those that do not already agree, to agree. That is not listening.

This policy has all the hallmarks of the Named Person and the Offensive Behaviour at Football Matches and will be a political bloodbath for the SNP if it ever gets as far as the floor of the parliamentary chamber.

Given everything else she is currently facing, Nicola Sturgeon will need to decide whether this is the hill worth dying on.

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On reform of the Gender Recognition Act - Holyrood

I, _____, appointed a _____ in the Army of the United States, do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever, and observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the rules and articles for the government of the Armies of the United States. Officers Oath, U.S. Army, 183062

Treasonagainst the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. Constitution of the United States, Article III, Section 3

Gen. David Berger, commandant of the Marine Corps, just made news for forbidding the display of Confederate symbols on Marine installations. But the debate over the Confederate battle flag, images, statues, and other symbols has been raging for years. Cloaked in terms of history and heritage, the continued use of Confederate symbols has often ignored the nature of that heritage, which is grounded in secession, oppression, and war. Today, one of the continuing holdouts on this issue is the United States Army, which currently names ten Army posts after Confederate generals. Often upheld as monuments to military history, they are indeed that, but that history does not belong to the United States. That history belongs to the Confederate States of America, to slaveowners, oppressors, and oath-breakers. To memorialize Confederate generals is to uplift symbols of treason. It should go without saying that the U.S. Army has no business doing this.

After the Charleston church shooting in 2015, the Army again resisted renaming its bases. Brig. Gen. Malcolm Frost, the Armys director of public affairs, held the line: every Army installation is named for a soldier who holds a place in our military history. Under that logic, we could have posts named after Field Marshal Irwin Rommel, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Gen. Iwane Matsui, Gen. Ernst Kaltenbrunner the former two being honorable opponents and the latter two being convicted war criminals. You cannot separate a soldier from the causes he or she served. The individual cannot be separated from cause or conduct.

The cast of characters selected for memorialization is a mixed bag of miscreants. Several were slaveowners. Seven, including Robert E. Lee, were oath-breakers, having graduated from West Point and taken an oath to the United States. These officers should be singled out for opprobrium, and not commemorated. They violated those most sacred oaths, given freely, in the service of a rebellion against the very military they had once pledged to serve honestly and faithfully. They did neither. Indeed, Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard fired the first shots of the Civil War, on the Union garrison of Fort Sumter.

That accusation of oath-breaking cannot be levied against the remaining three, but that is hardly absolution. Maj. Gen. John Brown Gordon had no military background, was a slaveowner from a slave-owning family, and remained anti-reconstruction until his death. Brig. Gen. Henry L. Benning was a virulently pro-secession and pro-slavery politician for more than a decade before the Civil War and for a decade after. Col. Edmund Rucker enforced a rebel draft order in pro-Union East Tennessee and maintained a long association with Nathan Bedford Forrest, tainting any Army legacy beyond redemption. Indeed, Rucker was never a part of the U.S. Army, and why he should be associated with an Army fort used for the training of aviators is unclear. All of these officers served an armed rebellion that resulted in the death of over 600,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians and the devastation of wide swaths of countryside. These men did nothing to deserve lionization by todays Army, the descendent of the Union Army that fought valiantly, if imperfectly, against those who rose in revolt.

Despite claims that the war was less about slavery and more about states rights, that position is not supported by the evidence. The war was primarily about the southern states desire to keep people from a different race as property. The Declarations of Causes made by Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, and South Carolina are replete with mentions of slavery (83 times), while thin mention is made of rights (16 times). Records of the proceedings which led to the Ordinances of Secession are clear: The key issue was the institution of slavery and the differential between the northern and southern states as a result of this reprehensible practice. In the words of Henry Lewis Benning himself, before the Virginia Convention in 1861:

What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the north shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case.

Pay tribute to the soldiers who fought in the U.S. Army and not against it. Its perverse that the Army has retained bases that honor rebels without a corresponding memorial to Union soldiers. Brig. Gen. William Bowen Campbell and Gen. George G. Meade still have their forts, but Maj. Gen. George B. McClellans was closed in 1999, Gen. Winfield Scotts was renamed and closed. Where is Fort Grant (abandoned in 1905) or Fort Chamberlain, or perhaps Fort Sherman? Gen. Ulysses S. Grant became president and led Reconstruction efforts for eight years. The erudite and eloquent Brig. Gen. Joshua Chamberlain earned a medal of honor at Little Round Top and later became governor of Maine. Gen. William T. Sherman? His results were unambiguous but his methods questionable. Still, we named a widely used medium tank after him surely that is worth consideration as a new name for Fort Benning home of the U.S. Armys Armor Center.

We need not limit ourselves to the Civil War or to general officers; a base named after Gen. and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower or Pvt. Rodger Young would both commemorate the best the Army had to offer.

Today, more than ever, Americans are more widely (although by no means universally) equating confederate symbols and attitudes with pervasive racism and oppression, which was not ended by the Civil War. Indeed, by retaining those symbols we are perpetuating the philosophies that were the very foundation of the Confederate States, and the very rationale for treason. Today every single individual in the U.S. Army who enlists or accepts a commission swears an oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States. To elevate those who rebelled against those United States to a status which obscures their perfidy or conceals their service to a government founded on oppression rather than freedom should be unacceptable for a military service. Treason it was, and treason most foul, and it is not too late to reconsider the historical influences that led the Army to retain base names that commemorate officers whose cause was despicable, conduct dishonorable, and legacy disgraceful. We should not retain such obvious symbols of treason.

Col. Mike Starbaby Pietrucha was an instructor electronic warfare officer in the F-4G Wild Weasel and the F-15E Strike Eagle, amassing 156 combat missions over 10 combat deployments. As an irregular warfare operations officer, Colonel Pietrucha has two additional combat deployments in the company of U.S. Army infantry, combat engineer, and military police units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is mere weeks from retirement.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Air Force or the U.S. Government.

Image: Bowling Green Daily News (Photo by Miranda Pederson)

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The Army Should Rid Itself of Symbols of Treason - War on the Rocks

The following is largely excerpted from author Ted Glick's book Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Lefts Resistance to the Vietnam War, coming out this June.

Since Trump took office three years ago at least 18 states have seen the introduction of legislation by right-wing climate deniers tied to the fossil fuel industry to criminalize organized protests against new gas or oil pipelines. Other movements have also experienced repressive action by local, state and federal governments.

It is an issue that we must take seriously.

My first years of progressive activism and organizing took place during the presidency of Richard Nixon, without doubt one of, if not the, most repressive Presidential administrations we have experienced in the US in the modern era. It was under Nixon that the Republican Party with its southern strategy began its move toward becoming the kind of regressive entity that allowed pathological liar, racist and sexual predator Donald Trump to be elected President in November of 2016.

During Nixons first term, from 1969 to 1973, he oversaw the use of government agencies to attempt to destroy groups like the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords and the American Indian Movement, including armed attacks by police leading to deaths. Newly-enacted conspiracy laws were used to indict leaders of the peace movement and other movements. An entirely illegal and clandestine apparatus was created to sabotage the campaigns of his political opponents in the Democratic Party, leading to the midnight break-in at the Watergate Hotel which eventually led to the exposure of this apparatus and Nixons forced resignation from office in 1974.

I personally experienced this repressive apparatus primarily via my inclusion as a defendant in the Harrisburg 8/7 case. I learned several things during those Nixon years about how to deal with government repression.

One critical lesson is the disparity between how the government deals with people of color, Black, Latinx, First Nation and Asian/Pacific Islander, compared with people of European descent, white people. The historical realities of military aggression, broken treaties, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, assumed white dominance and institutionalized racism continue to have their negative, discriminatory impacts.

Among these impacts is a willingness by some police to carelessly shoot and brutalize young black and other men of color for no justifiable reason, which has given rise to the deeply important Movement for Black Lives.

Another impact is the unequal treatment meted out within the legal system, from police to prosecutors to prison personnel, when it comes to people of color as compared to white people. For example, people of color arrested as part of a nonviolent civil disobedience action can be subject to stronger charges or additional hardship while in police custody or behind bars as compared to whites.

Those of us of European descent must be conscious of these realities and act accordingly, ready to speak up and challenge unequal, discriminatory or explicitly white supremacist words and actions wherever they happen. This is also our responsibility when it comes to discriminatory words and actions toward immigrants, LGBTQ people, women, or any other group.

Another lesson as far as dealing with government repression is not to let it paralyze or divide organizations or movements.

This is one of the objectives of unjust governments trying to repress those who challenge its policies and practices. The efforts to criminalize demonstrations against new fossil infrastructure, for example, are all about discouraging people from taking part. But if we intelligently speak out against the proposed legislation and accurately portray those supporting it as un-American, anti-democratic, pro-pollution and climate deniers, their efforts can end us strengthening our base of support.

Another method of repression is to send government infiltrators into our meetings who are trained to look for differences within a group or movement and make efforts to deepen and harden them. That is one of the reasons why we need to be about the development of a movement culture that is respectful and healthy. Within such a cultural environment, it is much harder for people trying to create divisions to succeed.

Its similar in regards to agent provocateurs, people who try to get others to engage in violent speech or action toward police or others representing government.

Anger against injustice and oppression is not just legitimate; it is a necessary component of successfully building a movement for real change. But anger needs to be used in a disciplined way. Those who are quick to call cops pigs or throw bricks or in other ways prone to display anger negatively are either government agents attempting to discredit the movement or are people who need an intervention. They need to be taken aside and spoken with in a direct, to-the-point and loving way about the counter-productiveness of what they are doing. Some will keep doing so, but some will change, if not right away over time.

We need to accept that government surveillance is a given if we are serious about challenging the oppressive system and fundamentally changing it, if we are about revolutionary change. We should be on the alert for such people. When legitimate suspicions are aroused, we should do research and, if it seems necessary, directly confront the person or persons in question.

There are other affirmative steps we can take to prevent government disruption of our actions. For example, if we are organizing a nonviolent direct action that includes the element of surprise, we need to take whatever steps are necessary for the action to happen, like encrypted email, use of secure forms of communication, and consciously limiting what is said or written about it beforehand to only what is absolutely necessary.

Ultimately, what I have learned is that government repression can have a disruptive impact on our work, for sure, but we can also turn a negative into a positive. To the extent to which we can creatively, intelligently and fearlessly expose the truth of what we are about as we respond to what they are doing to us, to that extent will we strengthen and build our movement.

Ted Glick is the author of the forthcoming Burglar for Peace and an activist, organizer, and writer since 1968. Past writings and other information can be found at https://tedglick.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jtglick.

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STRATEGIES FOR DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT REPRESSION IN 21ST CENTURY - Black Star News

Recent news that the U.S. House of Representativesoverwhelmingly (if not unanimously) passedthe anti-lynching bill that advanced by passed the Senate last year has been greeted with some measure of relief. Many feel that finally, we can put to rest the era of legislative shame when southern Democrats scuttled any attempt to make mob violence a federal crime.

We cannot know for certain if such a law, implemented in the early twentieth century, would have saved lives. After all, the states where lynchings occurred had laws against murder, property damage, assaulting police officers, and other crimes that were often part of the total lynching event, but the will to enforce them was often lacking. Federal anti-lynching legislation might have only accelerated the transformation of lynching from a public spectacle into the quiet assassinations that became common following World War II. But the fact that Congress was unable to overcome regional intransigence and declare lynching an evil worth suppressing has been a cause for righteous indignation since the moment Leonidas C. Dyer introduced his first anti-lynching bill 102 years ago down.

Where the federal government failed, some states succeeded in passing their own anti-lynching measures. However, this does not mean that these states were particularly enlightened, or that these measures actually functioned to save lives. In fact, such measures often reflected a trend described by historian Michael J. Pfeifer inThe Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching.According to Pfeifer,legislators across the nation reshaped the death penalty in the early twentieth century to make capital punishment more efficient and more racial, achieving a compromise between the observations of legal forms long emphasized by due process advocates and the lethal, ritualized retribution long sought by rough justice supporters. Perhaps the best example of this was ArkansassAct 258 of 1909.

Titled An Act to Prevent Mob Violence or Lynching within the State of Arkansas, Act 258 stipulated that, whenever the crime of rape, attempt to commit rape, murder or any other crime, calculated to arouse the passions of the people to an extent that the sheriff of the county believes that mob violence will be committed, the sheriff was required to notify the district or circuit judge in order to request a special term of court in order that the person or persons charged with such crime or crimes may be brought to immediate trial. Said judge, upon finding that the apprehensions and belief of the sheriff are well founded, was to arrange for an immediate trial set for no more than ten days from receipt of notice. However, there was no punishment for a sheriff or deputy who allowed a lynch mob to kidnap and murder someone in his charge, and neither was there any special punishment laid out for the members of said mob. The only thing this bill accomplished was to expedite a trialspecifically, regarding those crimes which, at the time, could warrant the death penaltywhile the spirit of mob violence was still in the air.

For example, following the arrest of three black men for the December 28, 1923, murder (and alleged rape) of a white woman named Effie Latimer in the Arkansas River bottoms near the Oklahoma state line, violence erupted against the black colony of Catcher, resulting in what has become called theCatcher Race Riot. Mobs threatened to lynch the three men and murdered the father of one of the men. Some burned down black homes, desecrated a black cemetery, and issued warnings that all black residents of Catcher should flee the area. While this violence was ongoing, the first murder trial was held, in accordance with Act 258, on January 4. The trial lasted exactly one day, and the jury deliberated about ten minutes before rendering a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death against defendant Charles Spurgeon Ruck. The next trial, that of William Son Bettis, occurred the following day and also resulted in a quick sentence of death. The third defendant, fourteen-year-old John Henry Clay, testified against the other two (possibly under duress) and received a life sentence of hard labor, though he died in prison four years later.

And thus we see how Arkansas used its ostensible anti-lynching law to transform the bad violence of the mob into the good violence of the state, to transform lynching into officially sanctioned execution. But the law was not even effective at preventing actual mob violence. In fact, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on May 24, 1909, less than two weeks after the bill had been signed, a mob lynched Lovett Davis despite the local circuit judge pleading with them and promising to order a special grand jury at once. Following the June 19, 1913,lynching of Will Normanin the Arkansas resort town of Hot Springs, the local circuit judge put out a statement insisting: A trial could have been had in 24 hours after the negro had been incarcerated in jail. It would have been a much better lesson had he been executed after a fair trial, not by self-appointed executioners who had neither legal nor moral right to take away his life. But those self-appointed executioners were never apprehended or prosecuted despite performing their deeds downtown in the full light of day.

In fact, lynchings increased in number following the passage of Act 258. While there were four lynchings recorded in Arkansas in 1909, the next year sawmore than twice that many. One could argue that, by reflecting what Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, inThe End of American Lynching, called the lynching for rape discourse, Act 258 served to justify the very violence it was designed to prevent. After all, it lists rape first in its list of crimes calculated to arouse the passions of the people, despite accusations or murder being employed far more often to justify lynching at the time. Because Act 258 essentially legitimized the states violence against African Americans, it also legitimized the mobs.

So while it is certainly all well and good to celebrate the present effort to implement, finally, a federal anti-lynching law, it would do us well to remember the success of state-level anti-lynching legislation. Such laws can serve as a warning to us about the ability of the state to reflect the spirit of the mob, even while touting the values of progress and civilization.

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When Anti-Lynching Law Was a Tool of Oppression - History News Network (HNN)

LAHORE - Provincial Law Minister Muhammad Basharat Raja called on Acting Punjab Governor Ch Parvez Elahi at the Governors House here on Tuesday.

Both the leaders consulted Punjab Assemblys proposed 9th March session agenda and exchanged views about legislation.

Acting Governor Ch Parvez Elahi said that as a result of government measures prices of essential articles had started decreasing. In federation and Punjab the ally governments would take all possible measures for providing relief to the people, all opposition should help the government in peoples welfare projects.

He said the Muslims genocide in India and occupied Kashmir and oppression are condemnable and shameful, reaction of Iran and other countries of the world against Indian Governments measures is important. International community should stop Modi Government from committing atrocities on Muslims living in India and occupied Kashmir.

Ch Parvez Elahi further said that after Gujarat, Narendra Modi was writing new history of oppression in Delhi, Pakistan Government is fully exposing Indian atrocities and international community should also take notice of the Indian atrocities in occupied Kashmir.

Provincial Law Minister Raja Basharat also consulted Ch Parvez Elahi over discussion in the House about Orange Line fare. He said that during the session, all parties input would be welcomed about Orange Line fare and heard all political parties suggestions with open heart.

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Govts bold steps bring down prices of essential items: Parvez Elahi - The Nation

(Welcome toThe Soapbox, the space where we get loud, feisty, political, and opinionated about anything and everything.)

Its difficult to place into words the impact Italian Neorealism has personally had on me. The genre speaks to me on a visceral level. The old Italian films, born out of desperation, still hold up against the blockbusters of today. In an age where authoritarianism is making a comeback, we are witnessing a subconscious reemergence of the formerly communist left-supported Italian Neorealism movement. A genre reboot, so-to-speak, passionately defiant of the Donald Trumps, the Boris Johnsons, the Kim Jong-Uns, the Rodrigo Dutertes, paralleling the recent wave of democratic socialism and a greater societal readiness to accept left politics.

In order to contextualize the circumstances surrounding its reemergence, one must revisit the circumstances out of which Italian Neorealism was born. By drawing modern parallels to classics of the genre with recent films such as Roma, The Florida Project, Tangerine, Support the Girls, Cold War, American Honey, and Winters Bone, the sociopolitical and stylistic similarities between Italian Neorealisms reboot and its cinematic predecessor succinctly emerge.

In the early 1940s, the emergence of Italian cinema essentially represented the complete opposite of the glamorous dramatizations of American cinema in the form of Italian Neorealism. Italian citizens lived in fear under Benito Mussolinis oppressive, fascist regime during World War II. Italy was a stomping ground during Hitlers Third Reich. While American films became more propagated on escapism in the 1940s, Italian cinema carried the tradition of the Lumire Brothers actualits. Italian filmmakers that emerged during the war and post-war were not profit-driven, but rather, emerged from a humanist necessity to expose the harsh truths around them. The Italian Neorealism genre lasted until the early 1950s. Since its themes were specifically related to war-torn, poverty stricken Italy and the ill-effects of an authoritarian-leaning government during WWII, the genre dissolved after the war.

Italian Neorealism is regarded as the beginning of the Golden Era of Italian cinema. The film genre was inspired by the Verismo (literally translating to realism) literary movement a generation prior in the late 1800s and early 1900s, legitimatized by Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana. Capuanas manifesto, Giacinta, is widely regarded as the fundamental structural integrity of the Neorealist movement. Other prominent voices of the Verismo movement included Federico de Roberto (I Vicer, a novelistic docudrama exploring the blind pursuance of power at the expense of a just and equal society), Salvatore di Giacomo, and Grazia Deledda. Verismo would experience a literary revival during WWII, the prolific voice of which was novelist Italo Calvino (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947).

Taking after its literary predecessors, Italian Neorealism was a grassroots, guerrilla cinematic movement that sought to place its censored audiences as flies on the walls of uncompromisingly unfiltered situations that accurately reflected the unpalatable truths that its various artistic contributors observed around them. It was founded by a close band of comrades that consisted primarily of film critics, the leader of which was Luchino Visconti, a gay communist who was said to have smoked upwards of 120 cigarettes on a given day. Visconti and his posse of writers and filmmakers began expressing their malcontent with society in the publication Cinema, whose editor-in-chief was none other than Vittorio Mussolini, son of Benito Mussolini.

In anyauthoritarian regime, it is common for the government to oppress the media (Trumps repeated attacks on the media and accusations of fake news are eerily reflective of WWII fascism). After these artists were censored (reminiscent of the DoDs Philip Strubs extensive censorship in film regarding any critique about the U.S. government and its institutions in modern U.S. history), they looked to film to give their honest observations a deeper impact. In order to accomplish this unadulterated window into the jarring realities around them, Neorealist filmmakers would often hire untrained, nonprofessional actors (off the street, working in the same vocations as the characters in their script) in secondary, sometimes leading roles, make it a point to never use sets (owning the concept after their film production studio was accidentally bombed by the Allies), instead using real settings with real people to further the actualits effect, and receive funding by the Communist Party (the political left), making them a potential threat to American values, particularly when these these films didnt portray communism in a negative light.

Viscontis most essential Neorealist film was 1948s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles). The films sociopolitical commentary about the negative impact of aggressive consumerism on the working class fishermen in Sicilia earned it the International Award at the La Biennale di Venezia (Venice International Film Festival). La terra tremas nonprofessional cast of genuine Pescatori Siciliani (Sicilian fishermen), struggling to support their families as the wholesale fishing industry emerges, is a snapshot of unlivable wages and living conditions with an underlying theme of the importance of collective action in addressing socioeconomic ills. Visconti, like many prominent artistic figures in Neorealism, was willing to suffer in order to spread his truth to the masses, even pawning both his mothers jewelry and his home in Rome to complete funding for the remainder of the film, barely finishing the final cut in time. The fascists wouldnt let Visconti write a film about impoverished people at odds against a fascists state to begin with, but he did it anyways, they banned it, then tried to destroy the film. However, Visconti, kept a duplicate negative. Its because of his brave efforts to stand up against the violent suppression of media and press that we have this seminal piece of film history safely archived.

Both Andrea Arnolds American Honey and La terra trema address what can occur when an abandoned part of society is ignored, largely due to the fact that they either refuse to subscribe to or cant viably keep up with the competition that a rapidly changing economy surrounding them demands in each respective time period. The impoverished children find a home as traveling magazine salespeople, not working for anyone but themselves. One gets the notion that they dont have the economic means to obtain a job that would require a more traditional life. Similarly, the Sicilian fishing community, as much of a family as the group of abandoned young salespeople, are pit against each other by a new form of competition as capitalism infiltrates their lives; both films are reflective of a societal shift in each, respective time period. Much like La terra trema, American Honey features a non-actor, in this case, Sasha Lane (now a prolific film presence with an abundance of natural acting talent), in a leading role.

Many historians, film critics, and filmmakers alike consider Viscontis 1943 film, Ossessione (Obsession), the first film adaption of James M. Cains novel The Postman Always RingsTwiceto be the first Neorealism film. However, I consider Roberto Rossellinis Roma citt aperta (Rome Open City) to be the first fully-realized vision of the genre. Rossellini is endearingly regarded as the father of Italian cinema. His film won the Cannes Grand Prize, and his mentee, Federico Fellini, was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 19th Academy Awards; Roma citt aperta introduced Italian Neorealism to world. It wasnt what audiences were used to seeing in Hollywood: visceral scenes of torture, perverse abuse of authority, shocking violence, and an uncompromising execution scene to underscore the brutality of Nazi-occupied Rome. In Roma citt aperta, Nazi-occupied Rome is countered by the communist-led partigiani (partisans, the hardcore anti-fascist resistance), but the SS uses a Catholic priest and partigianos faith to attempt to turn the resistance against each other. Martin Scorsese refers to it as the most precious moment in film history.

Both films actively reject the artistic Socialist realism that dominated the Soviet Union for half a century. Socialist realism is a form of propagandistic art passed as realism that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall, prevalent in the Soviet Union and beyond after World War II. Socialist realism is characterized by the idealized portrayal of communist values in artistic expression, particularly the working class commons as willful heroes for the cause. Instead, these depict them as political prisoners, punished for fighting for the cause. Its a reminder that doing the right thing in the midst of oppression doesnt always mean following the direction of the complicit populace. As in Roma citt aperta, Pawe? Pawlikowskis Cold War doesnt shy away from depicting a time periods positive and negative aspects through honest observation, similarly ending on a somber note.

Taking advantage of his newfound acclaim, Rossellini followed Roma citt aperta with Pais (Paisan) in 1946, for which he and Fellini were nominated for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Oscar at the 22nd Academy Awards. Rossellini and Fellinis Maestro e Studente relationship flourished during these two collaborations. Pais features a series of six vignettes covering the Allied invasion of Italy, spanning July 1943 in Sicilia to winter 1944 in Venezia, geographically covering most of Italy. In the fourth vignette, theres a leader of the partigiani named Lupo, partly whom I named my dog after. Pais shows the unflattering side of the American military mindset. Rossellini wasnt trying to be ungrateful for Americans trying to fight the Nazis, but rather, he was merely exposing what he saw, the behavior, and the amoral recklessness war can devolve into.

El Halconazo, or The Corpus Christi Massacre, is featured in true Verismo fashion in Alfonso Cuarns Roma. Similarly, Pais features a scene in Episode 6 where two partigiani are executed instead of being taken in as POWs, as they are not protected under the Geneva Convention due to their rogue status, despite working with the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Both films analyze the absurdity of not being accepted in ones own country for standing against oppression. Roma stars non-actor Yalitza Aparicio, who went from preschool teacher to Oscar nominee in less than a year.

In Stromboli, terra Dio, released in 1950, a Lithuanian immigrant (Ingrid Bergman) is freed from an Italian internment camp by marrying an Italian ex-POW and fisherman (another display of working class characters), only to enter an abusive relationship within a community that ostracizes her. Although featuring a decidedly more famous actor to play his lead (rumors of extramarital affairs aside), Rossellini uses both documentary clips and actual footage of the town evacuating during the island of Strombolis volcanic eruption, accentuating the films climax. It marked his final purely Neorealist directorial effort.

In Stromboli, Bergmans Karin escapes an abusive marriage, with the volcanic eruption symbolizing both the courage and release of emotion that her decision begets. Tangerines plot is not dissimilar in that the main character Sin-Dee Rella (untrained actor Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), endures an abusive pimp/boyfriend relationship. Written, edited, and directed by Sean Baker on three iPhone 5s phones, featuring non actors, it is one of the most stylistically married films to the Italian Neorealism movement. The film was lauded for its accurate depiction of the unsettling epidemic of transphobia throughout the U.S.

Sciusci (Shoeshine), released in 1946, is a simple film about the messy, anarchic, merciless nature of reality and circumstance. Receiving an Honorary Academy Award, an early iteration of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the Academy Awards, it depicts a group of impoverished young, male shoeshiners that is forced into crime to make ends meet. It offered the world a preview of Vittorio De Sicas singular eye for portraying working class realism.

Two slices of life. One about children struggling to navigate the social stratosphere of an economically wounded Italy. The other about the everyday trials and tribulations of working class woman struggling to stay afloat, dealing with abuse and ignorance amidst an economy that has systematically reduced itself to transactional interactions within the service industry. One about young boys. The other about grown women. Both about societies detached from the citizens who appear to need their support the most. Directed by Andrew Bujalski, Support the Girls is an expos that provides an uncompromising glance into an oppressive workplace in which its abused employees dont have basic union rights. De Sica and Bujalski are interested in displaying the lengths people will go to in order to break free of the confines of corrupt capitalism.

Perhaps the most famous Italian Neorealist film is De Sicas Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), also released in 1948. The film received the Honorary Academy Award at the 22nd Academy Awards. Cesare Zavattini narrowly missed winning the Oscar for Best Writing, Screenplay, and won Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs. Ranked 95 on IMDbs list of the 250 best films of all time, Ladri di biciclette tells the story of a bicycle delivery man and his son on a quest to find his stolen bicycle. The simplistic story explored complex issues of classism and the uneven distribution of wealth between the upper and working class in the post-WWII era. Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola as the father and relinquish, arguably, the most memorable performances of the Neorealist movement.

Jennifer Lawrence, an untrained actor at the time of her casting in Debra Graniks Winters Bone, portrays Ree, a 17-year-old girl and the matriarch of her family, rounded out by her mentally ill mother, and significantly younger siblings whom she raises, all while attempting to financially make ends meet against the shady, remote backdrop of the meth-stricken, poverty-ridden, crime-riddled Ozarks. In order to survive, Ree will endure anything to prove her fathers death so as to avoid forfeiting her house to pay for his bail bond. No matter how grizzly circumstances get, she tries her hardest to maintain her siblings dwindling innocence. Similarly, the father in Ladri di biciclette needs his bike, his only means of obtaining a steady income, to provide for his family, all while attempting to preserve a faade of normalcy for his child.

Giuseppe de Santis, one of Viscontis former Cinema comrades who had graduated to directing since lending a helping hand in adapting Cains novel for his mentors Ossessione, crafted one of the final Italian Neorealist films with Roma, ore 11 (Rome 11:00) in 1952, shedding light on the lack of public programs, jobs for women, and the social unrest of the working class in post-war Italy.

Both films are about the decay of a society at a specific time during its reincarnating life cycle. Unemployment, the elusiveness of the American Dream, the lack of social programs for the underprivileged, societys willingness to turn a blind eye on its own; they are capitalism beginning and ending stories. One is a warning. The other is a reflection of the damage already inflicted after said warning. Also directed by Sean Baker, The Florida Project stars non-actor Bria Vinaite in a leading role.

The parallels through some of the aforementioned socially conscious modern examples, which observe the chaotic, contentious, divisive state in which our society has been suffocating over the past two decades since 9/11, may seem obvious. The commonality throughout the Neorealism films and their reboots is that they both center on the struggling proletariat. Many films in the industry are still funded by what Trump and the GOP like to call the Hollywood Left, (this traces back to a clash between extremist evangelicals and the successful Jewish entrepreneurs who ran most of the major films studios in the 1920s; it was a battle of which religion could transmit their ideals to the masses through a new medium, a mode of thinking that mostly the evangelical leaders partook in the evangelicals won by obtaining the monopoly on film censorship via the MPAA and beyond) which might as well be code for the DNC (which doesnt indeed provide any funding for the arts) in their minds. In reality, he thinks every major studio, by default, is liberal.

If the Hollywood of today were truly apples to apples, if you will, in comparison to Italian Neorealism during WWII and post-war Italy, then the films in theaters that the American people frequent would be funded predominantly by a Democratic Socialist Party or another left political entity/entities. In reality, Trump simply detests any film that aims to critique him or his base (his backlash on The Hunt being a prime example).

In the 1990s, the French New Wave cinematic movement echoed that of Italian Neorealisms, stylistically and thematically, as well as that of the American independent filmmaking movement, revived in the 1990s by Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith, and continued by Jim Jarmusch (who flirted with Neorealism in Down by Law in 1986). Through their narrative structure and marked pacing, Linklaters Slacker and the Before Trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight), Smiths Clerks and Mallrats, and Jarmuschs Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai are important additions to the first American revival of, for lack of a better term, in the context of the reboot today, faux-Italian Neorealism.

However, it is important to note that the sociopolitical landscape out of which this Americanized version of Neorealism was built was considerably different than that of Italian Neorealisms.. Italian Neorealism was far more politically motivated, whereas Linklater and Smiths work, especially, highlighted the vapid, existential dread that characterized 1990s America suburbia.

Italian Neorealism was based upon a mindset of political and class awareness. Contrarily, the American Neorealist iterations over the past 30 years carry a collective mindset of introspection and a more selfish focus on personal fulfillment; that is until the past decade following heightened global socioeconomic turmoil. Italian filmmakers had to battle poverty, censorship, and an authoritarian regime, fueling the liberal communist support shared by Italian filmmakers over the next several decades. American filmmakers in the 1990s had the luxury of living among the suburban middle-class in a society obsessed with consumerism, where they had the privilege to choose their own subject. It is also important that these movements did not use non-professional actors in majors rolls, if any, because of the need for ROI in the age of consumerism (something that didnt exist under Italian Neorealisms conditions), and did use formal film sets.

It has to take a specific set of circumstances for a genre like this to have to be born again. And although it could never identically be replicated throughout its recurring historical reiterations, it has never so distinctly returned so thematically and stylistically close to its genre roots than in the past decade. And despite its short-lived presence in film history, because of the fact that real-life history is doomed to repeat itself, it remains the single most influential film genre in the history of cinema.

After 9/11, the brief, American faux-Neorealist revitalization in the 1990s eroded. That inward expression appeared obsolete in the context of such a drastic change across our country and its values. However, during the past decade, the Italian Neorealism movement has resurfaced again on an international stage, this time more authentically and true to form. The examples set forth in the beginning of this piece not only embrace the thematic elements of the Italian Neorealism movement, but they begin to use some of the technical characteristics of the genre as well such as non-professional actors, minimal to non-existent sets, and the very fact that they were born out of a desperation to observe and express themselves in order to incite change. A necessary, positive change in the face of direness. For many filmmakers like Cuarn, this direness seems more severe than others. If providing nothing else but new unadulterated windows into the illaffects of a new oppressive government taking after those of old, these latest films express a plea for compassion in a time where commodity takes precedence over compassion.

Indeed, we are presently seeing the genre rebooted with shades of the genre traits of old, but also with new characteristics to reflect the particular circumstances in which our society currently finds itself. The new wave of leftism in the form of democratic socialism undoubtedly parallels the subject matter explored throughout this impassioned reboot. Sure, these filmmakers align with the liberal left, and although they may not be leftists, per se, the themes and issues they choose to cover range from democratic socialist to Marxist-Leninist. Other, less politically-immediate but wholly stylistically connected films tied to the reboot include The Lighthouse, Paterson, The Rider, Eighth Grade, Sword of Trust, Moonlight, and If Beale Street Could Talk (although it could be argued that the latter two deserve to be more fully embraced as Neorealism reboot role models).

Even for people on the right side of the political spectrum who dont buy that Trump aspires to be a dictator, any logical human being can connect the glaring dots of similarities between the conditions we are seeing today in the supposed land of the free in 2019 and those of Nazi- occupied fascist Italy during WWII: Mexican human beings in concentration camps, inhumane border patrol, the increasing presence of a militant police state willfully ignorant toward minorities and regard for law, foreign government collusion, overt racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of human prejudice, election fraud, deep state censorship and political and artistic suppression, systematic oppression of the freedom of press, the rising threat of war, the imminent eventuality of climate change. It appears that the sociopolitical context of today has fundamentally changed, leaving little room for Linklater, Smith, and Jarmuschs classic, acclaimed, but now-untimely obsolete meditations of existential middle-class banality and the miasma of mumblecore films that they inspired. Boredom has turned into a palpable social unrest. A call to action. And we can expect more from this immortal cinematic style until structural societal changes are put into place.

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Exploring the New Age of Neorealism on Film - /FILM

A meeting last month between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the interim leader of Sudan, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, caused widespread uproar over the perceived normalization of ties between the two countries.

Both men are in a complicated position: Netanyahu is entangled in legal affairs and leading a third election campaign this year, while al-Burhan a military ruler and head of Sudans sovereign council is struggling to distance himself from the regime of Omar al-Bashir, whose 30-year tyrannical reign came to an end last April. Al-Burhan and some of his peers in the transitional institutions were key figures under al-Bashirs rule who participated in his violent oppression of Sudans marginalized groups, and of political dissidents across the country.

Netanyahu and al-Burhan were representing two countries whose historical relations are fraught with tension and hostility, as well as secret collaborations and rapprochement efforts.

Israel has for decades considered Sudan an enemy state, while at the same time seeing it as a potential target in the alliance of the periphery a policy by which Israel strove in its early decades to find partners among Middle Eastern and African countries, mainly out of narrow political and security-led interests. In the 1950s, on the eve of Sudans independence, Israel and the Sudanese Umma party made mutual attempts to create an alliance in order to curb Egypts influence in Sudan and the Middle East.

From the mid-1960s, the Israeli government closed off the route to Khartoum amid Sudans shaky political situation, while simultaneously supporting South Sudanese liberation movements. These groups were rebelling against their political exclusion and the Sudanese governments violent control over the south of the country; in time, their ongoing struggle devolved into civil war.

Sudanese soldiers seen patrolling the streets of Juba, the capital of South Sudan. South Sudan became an independent state on July 09, 2011, and soon thereafter also a UN member state. August 20, 2011. (Moshe Shai/FLASH90)

During the same period, the regime in Khartoum increasingly identified itself with political Islam, developing warm ties with Iran after the 1979 revolution and with movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Against this backdrop, Israel has led several air strikes in Sudan in recent years, aimed at thwarting ammunition production and shipments to the Gaza Strip.

Over the past decade, Sudan has been viewed in Israel as the origin country of thousands of asylum seekers, most of whom are from the marginalized groups and regions in conflict with the Khartoum regime. These people, alongside other African refugee groups, have become a political tool and a burning issue among the Israeli public.

Common xenophobic arguments about jobs, crimes, and the so-called globalist left are used in conjunction with a uniquely Israeli anti-immigrant argument: that being non-Jewish, these immigrants are a risk to the Jewish demographic majority. And although Sudans image as a violent dictatorship was reinforced among Israelis, it did not always translate into greater tolerance of Sudanese asylum seekers.

Meanwhile, Israel has gained a significant place in the Sudanese mindset. In 1948, 1967, and 1973, Sudanese soldiers were sent to assist the Egyptian army in its wars against Israel. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Khartoum hosted a conference of Arab states that ruled against peace with Israel, against recognizing the country, and against negotiations. This agenda aligned with that of General Jaafar al-Nimeiri, who came to power in a military coup about two years later and who increasingly reinforced Sudans Arab identity and, eventually, its Muslim identity as well.

Nonetheless, al-Nimeiri collaborated with Israeli officials in the 1980s and allowed Ethiopian Jews to immigrate through Sudan under Operation Moses in late 1984, as part of his efforts to strengthen Sudans ties with the United States. This gesture was actually an attempt by al-Nimeiri to ensure his political survival; but while it brought him some financial benefits, it eventually contributed to the downfall of his regime.

Asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea wait in line to enter the Ministry of Interior in the city of Bnei Brak, in order to renew their temporary visas or submit their asylum requests, in the early morning hours of February 4, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

The legacy of colonial rule in Sudan, and its conditions at independence a vast, ethnically- and culturally-diverse territory sparked a war of visions over whether the country would be Arab or African, Muslim or multi-religious and multicultural. As this contest deteriorated into civil war, the southern independence cause relied primarily on regional and global Christian support, as well as on Israeli backing.

Successive Sudanese governments, meanwhile, have embraced a strong Arab-Muslim identity, gaining legitimacy as Africans in the Arab world through, among other things, propaganda against Israel regarding its oppression of Palestinians. This propaganda, especially during the al-Bashir era, was supplemented and reinforced by the influence of Arab media outside the country, and helped implant Israel into the Sudanese public consciousness.

Accordingly, for certain groups of dissident Sudanese, a change in hostile attitudes toward Israel and Jews went hand-in-hand with expressing general opposition to the regime. Urban liberals, supporters of secularism or reformist Islam, activists from the peripheries at odds with the regime, and immigrants and refugees abroad, among others, began to take an interest in Israel as a complex, multi-narrative country, beyond a singular Zionist entity. For some, this was manifested by making contact with Israelis to learn various narratives about the state and its inhabitants, and even to learn Hebrew.

At the same time, a sense of nostalgia emerged for Sudans former small Jewish community, which gradually left the country following independence. Today, a spectrum of attitudes toward cooperation with Israel can be found among Sudanese liberals in the country and in the diaspora. These include groups heavily influenced by growing pro-Israeli propaganda efforts (including in Arabic), to staunch opponents who condemn Israel for systematically violating the human rights of Palestinians.

Sudan is currently facing a challenging transitional period. The people who took to the streets en masse to overthrow the al-Bashir regime, and those who supported the revolution from the diaspora, are filled with hope and anxiety over the transitional institutions prospects of bringing political, security, and economic stability, and even democratic rule, to Sudan.

Omar al-Bashir, former president of Sudan, listens to a speech during the opening of the 20th session of The New Partnership for Africas Development in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Jan. 31, 2009. (US Navy photo by Jesse B. Awalt)

In these conditions, Israel is offering Sudan a possible lifeline from a much-feared economic disaster. The meeting between Netanyahu and al-Burhan was the most publicized move to date between the two countries leaders, due to its suggestion of a rapprochement.

However, it is worth noting that during the final years of his rule, and like al-Nimeiri before him, al-Bashir had similarly viewed engagement with Israel as a channel for warming up ties with the U.S., even as his anti-normalization rhetoric continued.

This has to do with Sudans entanglement in the coalition of Arab Gulf countries and Egypt vis--vis countries like Iran and Qatar. This is expressed in part by Sudans dispatching of tens of thousands of soldiers including children to Yemen in recent years to fight against Iran in a coalitional proxy warbetween the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia.

Israel shares the latters anti-Iran stance, and has therefore provided Sudan with some lobby support in Washington, resulting in the U.S. lifting most of its economic and trade sanctions on Sudan in October 2017. Yet Sudan remains on the United States list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Among other sanctions, this makes it difficult for Sudan to obtain aid budgets, which are considered essential by the authorities for the success of the transitional period.

While many Sudanese see the warming of relations with Israel as an opportunity for economic survival, others highlight the problem of the country succumbing to the economic and political interests of influential Arab neighbors, Israel, and the U.S., especially while it is stuck in financial distress and at a diplomatic disadvantage.

Given the sensitive regional situation stirred by Donald Trumps so-called Deal of the Century, as well as Sudans intricate domestic dynamics, resistance to normalization is based not merely on religious sentiments or a sense of Arab nationalism, but also on pragmatic considerations.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a conference on Israeli-African relations, organized by Likud parliament member Avraham Negusie, at the Israeli parliament on February 29, 2016. (Miriam Alster/FLASH90)

For one, Netanyahu met with Sudans military ruler but not with the head of the civil cabinet, Dr. Abdalla Hamdok, an apparent exclusion that has caused a great stir. The meeting thus illuminated the numerous difficulties in post-Bashir Sudan, including uncertainty over who is in charge the military or civilians and where Sudans interim leaders are taking the country at such a fragile moment.

Despite the clear opposition in some circles to normalization with Israel, foreign powers interests may yet compel Sudan to continue down this road. In the process, however, Sudanese asylum seekers in Israel could become a human, cultural, and social bridge, which also has business and economic potential. This group has both the knowledge and the skills to disperse preconceptions about Sudan, and to provide a more informed context to the discourse on normalization.

Still, despite a degree of integration and coexistence, the fact remains that the reality of life for asylum seekers in Israel has been defined by the countrys racism toward non-Jews in general, and African communities in particular. Unsurprisingly, there has been speculation regarding the potential deportation of Sudanese asylum seekers in Israel back to Sudan under the auspices of normalization between the two countries.

This issue serves as a reminder for the Israeli government that Sudans rulers do not represent the whole country, and that it is more than just a strategic asset. It remains to be seen how Israel will treat the citizens of the country it wishes to partner with, when those citizens are within its own borders.

A version of this article was first published in the Forum for Regional Thinking (in Hebrew). Read it here.

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What is behind Israel's warming ties to Sudan? - +972 Magazine

How can you be an artiste and not reflect the times? asks Nina Simone in the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? The 2015 documentary was recommended to me by Arivu. We are on our way to Guindy in his car and hes passionately talking about Simone. I learned about her only recently, he says.

He is not talking about Simones music. He is talking about her politics, how she was married to an abusive capitalist Andrew Stroud, later her manager who only wanted to milk her talent for money and fame, but her concerns lay elsewhere. In the stage, she found a place she could use to speak out for her people, says her daughter Lisa. As response to the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, where four black children were killed, Simone wrote Mississippi Goddam, her first civil rights song. She sang the song in front of thronging crowds at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches.

The day before our meeting, Arivu had just returned from Kochi, Kerala, after performing at a We The People protest event against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens. As we are driving, he remembers Rohith Vemula, for the day of the march coincided with Rohiths death anniversary, and Arivu tells me he became emotional on stage while performing Snowlin from his album, Therukural, with OfRo in the protest. Snowlin is named and written for J Snowlin, the 19-year-old girl who was shot dead during the Sterlite protests in Thoothukudi in 2018.

How can you be an artiste and not reflect the times?

***

A cursory look at Arivus shelf more than hints at his voracious appetite for books. A Malcolm X autobiography (I like him a lot!), a book on Tupac Shakur and Stormzys Rise Up, a Tamil translation of Woman and Socialism by August Bebel, Brian Senewiratnes Sexual Violence Against Tamils in Sri Lanka, Eleanor Zelliots From Untouchable to Dalit, and Tamil Prabhas Pettai. He says this is only a sample of his stash, the rest are in boxes for lack of space.

The reading habit was one imbued in childhood thanks to his parents, both educators. Arivus father is a recently retired college professor and mother a government school teacher, back in Arakkonam. Both moved from Kaganam, Cheyyar in Tamil Nadu in search of a better life. They value education; both were part of the Tamil Nadu governments Arivoli Iyakkam back in the 90s. That work has rubbed off on their son. Art has always been on his mind, for that is the prism through which he both views and receives life. He says music is what taught him about society and politics, he had relatives who played the parai and sang oppari; special functions on Ambedkars birth anniversary or remembrance days were centres of learning for him. These events reflected and reiterated a lifestyle that while he recognised, he also had a lot to learn from.

Arivu | Photo courtesy Error Studio | Image via Facebook/@arivuofficial

His parents strove hard to send him to a school that was beyond their means at that time, the cognisance of which was never lost on Arivu. He had friends who mingled at school but were aliens outside the walls. They never visited the cheri where he lived. Even playgrounds neatly marked the divide. The kind of cricket bat on either side will tell you the difference between the two groups, he says.

Arivu wanted a government job, but music found him in college where, again, he was sidelined. In his college in Coimbatore, there were bands with panoply of trained musicians Carnatic, western, instruments who were the gatekeepers.

He took it upon himself to shine a light on his work, he had no other way.I was always a kid with inferiority complex but anything that affects me emotionally, I channel it in my writing, in my poems, Aruvi says. In his second year in college, he self-published a book of his poems, not for profit, but just for the satisfaction of having created something and putting himself out there. It was called Gunindhu Varaverkum Gudisaigal (in Arivus own translation: Huts that Welcome You Humbly). It was an extremely uncharacteristic thing to do in an engineering college! Look at this guy writing poems instead of attending seminars or publishing papers, he laughs.

***

There has been an inflection point in the last decade in Tamil Nadu where political awareness and rationalism espousing roots of early Dravidian politics have strengthened with vigour. The political side itself has only been further dumping its effluvia on the public but as if in response, the changes have come through other means pop culture, music, literature, and, well, memes.

A resurgence can be spotted in areas of Dalit history, caste consciousness and Ambedkar-Periyar politics. In popular consciousness, it began with several films directly or indirectly placing the anti-caste narrativeat the forefront and either introducing characters rarely seen before in popular cinema, or reshaping the way those characters were depicted by an older generation of filmmakers.

The breaking of the mould occurred on both sides. People writing about cinema learned better to spot everything from caste pride to misogyny as a result, questioning their own biases and checking privilege providing context for the subaltern assertion that was happening right in front of their eyes. It is nothing short of a revolution and a huge face of this movement is director Pa Ranjith, who has not only been creating space in the fictional worlds he imagines, but also the much-needed space for this conversation in the real world.

Pa Ranjiths oratory skills awed Arivu. It had nothing to do with Ranjiths cinema or directorial abilities. I rarely watched cinema growing up and television was frowned upon at home. Studies were the focus. Ranjiths speeches gave him the opportunity to interrogate his own past. I liked Ranjiths speeches and his personality. He spoke about the life that I have lived, it was so relatable. Only after his speeches did I start respecting my grandparents. Till then, I was fairly ignorant.

Those speeches ledArivu to a window to his own past, what his grandparents had been through, [re-examining] the violent ways in which caste manifests. He says he read stories of untouchability assuming they were fiction but as he grew older, his knowledge from books and experiences around him began to interject. Pa Ranjith was a major influence in making this happen.

***

It was during such a visit to listen to Ranjith speak that Arivu met Udhaya of Neelam Cultural Centre, a different flank of Ranjiths multifaceted efforts in the revolution. At the Neelam Cultural Centre office in Triplicane, I met Udhaya. The office projects an air of egalitarianism; there is no hierarchy with a separate office for the branch head. There is reading table with four chairs and three other rooms, the main one filled with Ambedkar paraphernalia including a life-size cut-out.At the entrance is a shelf stacked with copies of the new books published by Neelam Publications.

Udhaya recalls meeting Arivu by pure chance, having missed his original train. (This was a time when Neelam Cultural Centre had representatives in about 32-33 districts in Tamil Nadu, and it was one such event that Udhaya was travelling to.) He said that Arivu wrote a poem during that event and was keen to present it on stage but due to various reasons, it wasnt to be. But they kept in touch and Arivu even attended the press meet called by Ranjith at Chepauk Press Club when Prakash (a student from Govt. Fine Arts College) committed suicide.

Around the same time,during the Naanum Oru Kuzhandhaiphoto exhibition at the Lalit Kala Academy, some gaana artistes performances gave Ranjith the idea of changing the perception of the genre and using it as a tool to bring about change. Thats how the idea of The Casteless Collective came to be. Ranjith anna wanted this taken to a higher league, make these artistes mainstream, and therefore we started auditions to form a collective," Udhaya says. "I recalled Arivu and wanted him to be part of it. He hesitated because he was in Arakkonam and didnt want to travel all the way. Arivu made it on Udhayas insistence and arrived almost at the last minute to perform 'Android Yugathu Ambedkar Perargal'.

***

Concept albums are dime a dozen but what about a concept band? A uniform, collective significance informs a concept album but here is a conceptually united band, ecumenical in its approach to annihilation of caste. The Casteless Collectives first album underlined several issues and even registered protests. Titled Magizhchi, the songs ranged from 'Beef' and 'Naanga Platform' to 'Quota' and 'Vivasayam', majority of them penned by Arivu.

Music has been a part of protests for ages, right from 'Bella Ciao', famously used to fight fascism, both against the Nazis and Italian Social Republic, to Faiz Ahmad Faizs 'Hum Dekhenge', an anthem against Zia Ul Haqs regime made iconic by Iqbal Banos version in Alhamra Hall, Lahore. The echoes of 'Hum Dekhenge' crossed over to India in the end of December when the protests over the Citizenship Amendment Act and NRC erupted countrywide, especially following the violence in Uttar Pradesh. History is witness to a long lineage of art created for this very purpose but in the Indian zeitgeist that was exploding with awareness and fighting to sustain an artistic revolution against the privileged and the establishment, a space for a new idiom had to be carved out and thats exactly what Pa Ranjith and friends did. As Tenma says, For some artistes, their music is politics. For some, their existence is itself politics.

Tenma, the independent musician who is at the forefront of the collective, expands on that story. I just liked being with and around Ranjith, first, he says. Having been an independent musician for close to 15 years, Tenma has seen it all. For him, independent music is a lifestyle choice, its a life with all its ups and a lot of downs that one has no option but to make peace with. He was already on a quest to create a musical scene thats more socio-politically aware, with his Madras Indie Collective and events like Madras Medai. So when Ranjith got in touch with him, their visions coincided. Tenma was there at all the auditions and he selected and trained the members who would go on to form the collective.

***

Poster for Arivu's Sanda Seivom

The day Tenma and I met was also the day Kalakshetra withdrew their permission to host the release event of TM Krishnas book Sebastian & Sons. Tenma guffaws. This is fear. There is comfortable art and uncomfortable art. For almost 200 years, weve gotten so used to comfortable music and the conversations on who owns classical music that we ignored the implications of shying away from that uncomfortable art. Kurangan [an erstwhile band Tenma was associated with] has performed in Kalakshetra but, so far, The Casteless Collective hasnt.

On Firstpost: In his new book, TM Krishna explores how caste oppression invisibilised India's mridangam-makers

He has observed the reception of The Casteless Collective in various places. While the performances have been acclaimed and written about, the conversations have indeed been uncomfortable. For example, there have been problems in engaging with a member, due to language barrier for instance. Tenma has seen the English media respond with typical refrains, Local pasangala?.

Tenma and Neelam Cultural Centre as an organisation took it upon themselves to undertake not just musical training but also classes on politics, sexism, Ambedkar-Periyar etc. Social commentators and activists took part in them, such as Nityanand Jayaraman, who talked to the collective about the environmental issues he has been actively working on. Nobody comes armed with knowledge, so it is important to cover their blind spots, Tenma says.

It comes through that for Tenma, training independent musicians is his lifes mission, and has been for several years now. Right now, he is working with other artistes on songs on climate change. He sees the collective as a platform from where these artistes can expand and become independent musicians with their own body of work. Like Arivu, a lot of them have already done that. Its a collective. As we go, it will have new members, and soon, it must be able to run without me too.

***

The independent artiste tag is something Arivu takes pride in, even though he has now written and performed several film songs. With a few other artistes, he performs in public parks around the city every week. Recently, they even performed in the rains, to protest the sudden slum clearance of 3,500 people living along the Cooum river in Chintradipet. His single Sandai Seivom, a protest song against the Citizenship Amendment Act, was entirely self-produced. He wrote it on a whim, his friend shot it right where Arivu is seated across from me, and another friend did the subtitles. Arivu doesnt qualify protestors Some peoples protest ends with Facebook and Twitter, some get on the road, and some get arrested. All of it matters.

On the subject of CAA-NRC, he says, Everyone is an immigrant. Nobody knows what their great-great-grandfathers name is. According to Arivu, CAA-NRC is just legal sanction. In its implementation, the practice has existed for ages. Getting a community certificate is something you need to jump hoops for, and you are left to the whims of the bureaucrat. He knows who you are, where you are from, that you dont own a house or land, but he still wont give the certificate. But he is confident that things are changing rapidly.

There is definitely a cultural war afoot, youngsters are speaking up and there are people breaking their privilege and coming out to dissent.

Its only 70-odd kilometres but Arivu has his hands fullfor a trek home. When he visited recently for Pongal, he met several youngsters who were familiar with him through his music, videos and interviews. I stressed on the importance of talent and artistic skills. And that such talents shouldnt be ignored by the parents. He expresses sadness over the fact that children in his town still dance to devotional beats. Or that installing an idol of Ganesha is a matter of pride for teenagers around town. I did make some sarcastic remarks, he admits.

When he was honouredat a small event, he took to the stage. I asked all the kids who danced to those songs to raise their hand. And told them that there is someone else above all this. Someone who strove for us, who got educated so that he can teach us the importance of education and social awareness. He is not a god. He is a mortal, Dr BR Ambedkar, who must be remembered. Not what you are dancing in the name of.

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'How can you be an artiste and not reflect the times?' The inside story of Arivu's fight against oppression - Firstpost

Day of Absence is a show with one joke and two audiences. The joke is revealed in the title: one day, all the people of color disappear from a Southern town. This provides an occasion for some rather gentle satire of white people's helplessness and cluelessness once they lose their entire heretofore invisible support structure. For a Black audience, at least the audience at the Congo Square Theatre Company's press opening of the show, the predictable jokeswhite people don't know how to comfort their own babies; white people can't drive themselves or throw out their own garbage; white people are confounded by an African American woman's having short hair today and long hair tomorroware riotous. It must be pleasant to see people who've ridiculed you be ridiculed in turn; but "pleasant" is not the same as "funny."

The second audience is white people, for whom the show is intended as a mirror into our own ugliness. White audience members are supposed to be made uncomfortable. Perhaps at its debut in 1965, the show performed its function; but for a reasonably liberal audience in Chicago 55 years later, it's too easy to dismiss the portraits of white people as well-deserved comeuppance for those other white peoplethe ones named Clem, with southern accents and MAGA hatsand remain comfortably sure that we are the exception. The play just isn't harsh enough to evoke anything else.

There's another layer of joke beyond the central conceit: every white character (that's all but one in the play) is played by a person of color in whiteface; author Douglas Turner Ward called Day of Absence "a reverse minstrel-show." But whiteface fails as commentary on the disgrace of blackface: the latter is insulting, and intended to be, a joke played on people who couldn't defend themselves. This was a point still struggling to be heard in 1965, even after Ralph Ellison's pivotal 1958 essay "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" condemned blackface; so the use of whiteface at that time was clever, and even slightly subtle. Today, though, we recognize blackface as a punch in the nose, while whiteface is just makeup. To the extent that it comments on white people at all, it's a joke played on people who have no need for defense.

The idea of a day of absence remains vibrant. Women in Mexico are currently organizing one to highlight the government's indifference to violence against women, and it was an annual event for many years at Evergreen State College in Washington, where students of color stayed off campus to discuss issues of equity and inclusion. The tradition came to an end in 2017 when it finally succeeded in its purpose of making white people uncomfortable: the nonwhite organizers announced that to observe the day that year, whites would be excluded from campus. In protesting this decision, one faculty member wrote, "There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles . . . and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself." The professor did not address what should happen when the "forceful call to consciousness" loses its force.

All the actors, under the direction of Anthony Irons, do a fine job with the agitprop script, which includes significant updatingreferences to "POCs," pronounced "pox," and allusions to Latinos, including jokes about ICE. I would have preferred if Ann Joseph, as the Mayor, had varied her delivery more: when you start out yelling, there's really no place to go but louder. But her speech to the absenteesincluding an embarrassing anecdote about her "Mam-nanny"is a tour de force. And when the white people have a complete meltdown and start picketing, there are two sides to every sign: "Come back and we'll stop" [reverse] "AND FRISK." Kudos to Sydney Lynne Thomas for her scenic and property design.

But Day of Absence, at least in this iteration, is less a condemnation of racism than a historical artifact. I'm glad to have seen it, but it hasn't changed the way I look at the worldand I know it was supposed to.v

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Day of Absence gets a rare revival with Congo Square - Chicago Reader

Congresswoman Betty McCollum is not backing down from her criticism of AIPAC.

After issuing a daring statement lambasting the pro-Israel group, the US legislator vowed to continue advocating for the human rights of Palestinian children and push against attempts to silence her.

In an interview with Middle East Eye, McCollum said AIPAC's attacks on Israel's Democratic critics in Congress prove that the organisation is not "inclusive or non-partisan" as it claims to be.

McCollum's remarks come as dozens of her Democratic colleagues gear up to attend the annual AIPAC conference that opens on Sunday. She said she did not ask anyone to skip the event. "Everybody has to make their own decision," but she herself will boycott the gathering.

'I am not going to look the other way and not acknowledge speech that is hateful which was directed towards me'

- Betty McCollum

"I choose not to attend. Why would I go to an organisation that thinks I'm a terrorist, thinks I'm worse than ISIS... I am not going to look the other way and not acknowledge speech that is hateful which was directed towards me," said McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat.

The controversy started last month, when AIPAC - formally known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee - ran inflammatory social media ads against legislators it called "radical Democrats". One of the posts featured McCollum along with Muslim-American congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.

The post was accompanied with a petition suggesting that Congress members who oppose Israel are "more sinister" than the Islamic State militant group, known as IS or ISIS.

On 12 February, McCollum issued an unflinching response accusing AIPAC of acting like a "hate group" that is using incitement to silence debate.

"Hate speech is intentionally destructive and dehumanising, which is why it is used as a weapon by groups with a stake in profiting from oppression," her statement said.

The congresswoman, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2000, appears to have zero regrets about confronting the pro-Israel organisation head-on.

"I live in a country which values freedom of speech and freedom of opinion," she told MEE, adding that it was important for her to reject attempts to "bully" and "belittle" those challenging governmental policies.

AIPAC's recent attacks against McCollum seem to stem from her introducing a bill that would ban US aid to Israel from being used to detain Palestinian children.

How AIPAC is losing bipartisan support in Washington

"I am free to criticise the actions of my government here as a member of Congress who supports the safety and security of Israel as well as the Palestinian people," she said.

"If I think that there's a policy decision that's detracting from the safety and security of people,I have a right to speak up and speak out about it."

The congresswoman also rejected accusations of antisemitism levelled against her, saying that making sure children are protected from the trauma of arrests and interrogations is the opposite of bigotry.

"To say that it's antisemitic to stand up for children's rights and human rights, that has nothing to do with antisemitism," she said. "Antisemitism is wrong, but it's not wrong to criticise a government's policy of detaining children."

McCollum's bill is currently in the Foreign Affairs Committee, which will decide whether to hold a hearing on it. The committee is chaired by Elliot Engel, a staunch Democratic supporter of Israel.

McCollum said legislators take many factors into consideration before proceeding with a proposed piece of legislation, including its chances of passing.

"We will, of course, be following up and asking for a hearing because we would love to shed light on to what's happening to these young Palestinian children in detention," the congresswoman said.

The bill has 23 co-sponsors, so far. Still, two legislators who initially backed it have withdrawn their support.

"A lot of people, when it comes to Middle East politics, they are hesitant to get involved because it is so complicated, and we have seen sometimes when you take a stand or make a step forward, there are people out there who are ready to vilify your action," McCollum said.

The Israeli military arrests as many as 700 Palestinians between the age of 12 and 17 annually, prosecuting them militarily "in violation of international standards",the bill states.

'If I think that there's a policy decision that's detracting from the safety and security of people. I have a right to speak up and speak out about it'

- Betty McCollum

The congresswoman introduced a similar measure in 2017, but after it failed to advance in the House, she reintroduced it to the new Congress last year.

"As someone who trained as a teacher, I think children are important and if we want to have peace in future generations, that means we need to invest in education and health care and opportunitiesfor children," she told MEE.

"When it was brought to our attention in 2015 what was happening to the Palestinian children, I wanted to make sure that my country, my government, was good enough to protect children. And that's how I started getting involved."

From her early days in the House, McCollum has shown willingness to oppose AIPAC, leading her to cast some lonely votes.

In 2006, she was one of 36 House members to oppose a bill that would have cut aid to the Palestinian Authority. The proposal passed in the House with the backing of 361 legislators.

Her first run-in with AIPAC dates back to that vote. At the time, the congresswoman demanded an apology from the pro-Israel group after she said an AIPAC representative told her chief of staff that "support for terrorists will not be tolerated".

'Antisemitism is wrong, but it's not wrong to criticise a government's policy of detaining children'

- Betty McCollum

"This response may have been the result of extreme emotion or irrational passion, but regardless, it is a hateful attack that is vile and offensive to me and the families I represent," McCollum wrote in an open letter to AIPAC at the time.

Sixteen years later, the congresswoman is still as fierce in rejecting AIPAC's tactics.

After the latest episode, McCollum said her colleagues from both sides of the aisle were outraged by the ads, and so were the people in her district. "My constituents have been absolutely marvelous," she said.

"And I acknowledge and appreciate the support I've received from the Jewish community both nationally and at home in Minnesota.

"They may disagree with me on policy, but they don't disagree that I have the right to criticise the policies of a government if I think that government is doing something that harms children."

Bernie Sanders says he will skip AIPAC conference

AIPAC eventually issued an "unequivocal apology" for its posts, but fell short of addressing the concerns of the lawmakers who were targeted.

"The ad, which is no longer running, alluded to a genuine concern of many pro-Israel Democrats about a small but growing group, in and out of Congress, that is deliberately working to erode the bipartisan consensus on this issue and undermine the US-Israel relationship," AIPAC said earlier this month.

McCollum said the half-hearted apology was not sufficient.

"If they are to make an apology, it needs to be sincere, heartfelt, and it should come with a caveat - 'We will not repeat this mistake again'."

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'I have a right to speak up': Congresswoman McCollum not backing down to AIPAC - Middle East Eye

WE ARE writing on behalf of Unite to condemn in the strongest terms the printing of a deeply discriminatory, offensive, transphobic, sexist, and divisive cartoon in the Morning Star.

Our members feel betrayed and let down, particularly given our long-standing relationship with the Morning Star, as the only daily paper actively supporting the struggles of trade unions and working people.

Our trans members suffer daily discrimination and pressure as working people and as trade unionists it is abhorrent that the Morning Star has added to this in such a disgraceful and unacceptable way.

We welcome the editorial that was printed in the morning star on Friday February 28, setting out a clear commitmentto put in place an independent inquiry.

We do welcome the recognition that more than an apology is needed. The steps being taken to identify how this could have happened are essential. However, Unite and Unites LGBT+ members in particular need to be assured that any commitment we make to assisting the Morning Star in this process is genuinely respected and will ensure that this can never happen again.

Jenny Douglas Executive Council LGBT+ representativePhil Jones Chair National LGBT+ CommitteeJane Stewart Executive Council Womens representative and Chair National Womens CommitteeDiana Holland Assistant General Secretary EqualitiesSiobhan Endean, Harish Patel National Equalities OfficersTony Burke Assistant General Secretary and TU Coordinator Peoples Printing Society

Below is the full text of the Unite Executive Statement (#3) on Gender Identity, agreed at Unite Policy Conference 2018

UNITE is firmly committed to equality for all, and the members of our union are a strong representation of the diversity within our communities. Equal and fair treatment both at work and in society is a key priority for our union, and we make it clear that we all have a duty to challenge discrimination, harassment and bullying whenever possible. Unite acts on behalf of its members and bargains with employers to achieve greater equality within the workplace.

A key objective of the union is:To promote equality and fairness for all, including actively opposing prejudice and discrimination on grounds of gender, ethnic origin, religion, class, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, caring responsibilities; and to pursue equal pay for work of equal value.

We oppose the current governments agenda of division, greed, prejudice and inequality. We need investment in jobs, in real opportunities, not racist vans of hate and attacks on the Equality Act.

Youth unemployment, womens poverty, pregnancy discrimination, hate crime, disabled workers access, lack of opportunities for black workers, workplace bullying and harassment, cuts to support for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans people, poverty in retirement all need action now.

We oppose and challenge those employers who refuse to deal with discrimination and to eradicate barriers to equality and fair pay. And we continue to call for statutory rights for union equality representatives - who make a real difference in the workplace.

Unite is committed to the empowerment of all working people and in tackling under representation and discrimination against our members. Unite believes that in order to tackle discrimination, it is essential to ensure those who experience that discrimination are at the forefront of our campaigns and their voices are heard.

Unite takes positive action through minimum proportional representation of women and black and Asian ethnic minority members on all constitutional committees, equality monitoring of our membership and established constitutional committees and conferences to represent and empower the interests of our Women, Black and Asian Ethnic Minority, Disabled and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans members.

Unites National Womens Committee and National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Committee came together to agree the following statement on gender, which was also agreed by the Unite Executive Council.

Unite believes in the principle of self-determination and empowerment through collective action as the route to tackling the discrimination that working class people face. Unite believes that by working together and tackling discrimination and oppression faced by our individual members we improve the working conditions of all workers.

Respect and tolerance are crucial and we oppose all hate crime, bullying and harassment, we therefore oppose any construct of a debate which seeks to divide and set one group of workers against another and will defend our members against any homophobic, transphobic or sexist hate language or abuse. Unite also believes that our members have the right to freedom of speech and that we have the right to disagree.

Unite recognises that there are people who do not identify as either male or female whose identities are not widely recognised by society. Individuals with non-binary titles, pronouns and modes of dress as well as the issues associated with being unable to express ones gender identity within the workplace. Unite believes there is a lot of work to be done, across both workplaces and government, to recognise additional gender identities.

Unite believes that any worker has the right to determine their gender identity without unnecessary medicalisation, and supports the review of the process of applying for gender recognition process / certificate.All Unite members who identify as women and meet the rule 6 qualifications of being a union workplace representative in employment are welcome to participate in the womens structure of Unite.

Unite recognises that sex discrimination at work arises from deeply ingrained patriarchal and systemic oppression of women and that our womens structure empowers women through a process of democratic policy making and collective action against gender stereotyping, occupational segregation, violence, harassment and pay discrimination and recognising our diversity as black, Asian and ethnic minority women, lesbian, bisexual and trans women, disabled women, younger and older women.

Unites womens structure has prioritised the gender pay gap, social security and pensions, decent work and employment rights, equality monitoring and auditing, positive action to tackle under representation of women, flexible working and decent child care, pregnancy discrimination, menopause, abortion rights, gender sensitive health and safety, sexual harassment and violence against women, a womans right to choose a legal safe abortion on the NHS and the right to organise in a trade union. Unite recognises that some of these issues may well affect trans men, and not all of these issues affect trans women.

Unites womens structure supports women only spaces in addition to gender neutral spaces and is particularly concerned that our trans members should be protected the from harassment and violence they face from the lack of gender neutral space.

Unite addresses the issues of transphobia within its Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans structure. All Unite members who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans and meet the rule 6 qualifications of being a union work place representative in employment are welcome to participate in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans structure of Unite.

Unites LGBT structure and union reps play a crucial role to ensure discrimination against our Trans members is prevented and a trans friendly environment is created in workplaces. UnitesLesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transstructure has prioritised tackling transphobic hate crime and negotiating trans work place policies.

By working together to tackle the discrimination we all face, Unite believes that we will create a more tolerant, fairer society for all. We recognise that many of the issues we face are intersectional and at the same time we reject the notion of hierarchy of oppression. We oppose division between our Womens movement and our Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans movement, our campaigns to tackle discrimination are inclusive and member led. Join us.

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A Letter from Unite on the cartoon that appeared in the Morning Star - Morning Star Online