Daily Archives: April 19, 2017

Srinagar: Wearing black shrouds as a mark of protest and shouting slogans against Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, activists of Jammu and Kashmir Youth National Conference (JKYNC) took out a protest march on Tuesday, against the use of force and harassment by the government, from the party headquarter Nawai-Subah to Press Enclave in Srinagar. Led by its president Salman Sagar, the activists condemned the use of force against people including students. Sagar said the protest was against the unprecedented force used by the government against the people, especially against the students of various colleges, on Monday. He expressed solidarity with the students and claimed that even while Kashmir was burning the government was not waking up from its sleep. We do not even see any condemnations from them on the viral videos. If this government thinks that nothing is happening, then it is blind, deaf and dumb. We want them to see, hear and say something as the people had given them a mandate. We want the Governors Rule to be imposed in the state so that people get respite, Sagar said. Sagar said their protest was symbolic and the organisation wants to warn the government that if it does not stop oppression on people, the NC will come out on roads.

Education, Kashmir Students rise, Kashmiri students, National Conference

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In black shrouds, NC activists protest 'oppression' - Kashmir Reader - Kashmir Reader

DW: The confrontation between government and opposition in Venezuela is continuing, with no sign of reconciliation. The power struggle is increasingly taking place on the street, and it's now claimed another two victims, including a 14-year-old boy who was shot and killed. How can the spiral of violence in Venezuela be stopped?

Henrique Capriles: We Venezuelans are not violent; I think the world has realized that. We are a peaceful people trying to escape this crisis by means that are written into the constitution. What will end the phase in which our country currently finds itself? Allowing free and democratic elections and respecting the constitution, to put a stop to this coup d'tat that's being staged and controlled by Maduro together with the Supreme Court.

What is the limit of the violence the opposition is prepared to endure?

The violence is being promoted by the government itself. The government has paramilitary groups - armed civilians - that operate on the fringes of legality. We've also seen repression by state security forces. What we've experienced is rampant oppression, and the government has to stop this. The government is violating human rights. A thing like that has no statute of limitations. All democratic governments and international organizations have spoken out about this. Maduro has to understand that he can't place himself above the constitution, or on the fringes of the constitution, and that violating the constitution has consequences.

Protesters have clashed with police during anti-Maduro rallies in Caracas

What role should the international community play?

We've now heard a clear position from the international community for the first time. This explicitly calls on Maduro to respect the constitution. There's been a breach of the constitutional order, which must be reinstated. This is the position Germany and the European Union have taken. Just recently, it was announced that my political rights were being revoked for 15 years. The European Union and Germany responded to this, too.

What political scope do you still have now that your political rights have been withdrawn?

I don't recognize this decision. Of course I will fight for it to be rescinded. Maduro believes that by doing this he can prevent me from standing as a candidate and becoming president. He believes that when they decide to call an election, he can choose who gets to stand. He believes he can choose his opposition. That is absolutely unacceptable to the Venezuelan people.

Henrique Capriles Radonski is regarded as the opposition's most promising candidate for the coming elections in 2018. The Venezuelan politician is currently governor of the federal state of Miranda. Last week the government withdrew his right to hold public office for 15 years. What effect this has on his post as governor remains unclear.

The interview was conducted by Ana Plasencia

Violent protests erupted across the country following a Supreme Court decision in late March to strip the legislative branch of its powers. Amid an international outcry, President Nicolas Maduro reversed the decision, but it was too late. Thousands have taken to the streets in the weeks since to call for new elections. They show no signs of stopping.

As of March, Venezuela's inflation rate surpassed 220 percent, according to the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics. The country's largest bill - the 100 bolivar note - was worth just $0.04 at the end of last year. Shopping trips now require stacks, or even bags, of cash to buy the bare necessities.

An estimated 80 percent of food items and other basics were in short supply by last year. Venezuelans spend more than 30 hours a week waiting in lines to shop, and are often confronted with empty shelves when they finally can enter a store. President Maduro blames the crisis on US price speculation. The opposition, however, accuses the government of economic mismanagement.

In Colombia, Venezuelans are collecting medical supplies to send home, as seen in this picture. Hospitals around the country have compared conditions to those seen otherwise only in war zones. As patient deaths rise, health officials have sounded the alarm on the rise of malaria and dengue fever.

Electricity blackouts and fuel shortages have also driven Venezuelans to desperation. Despite Venezuela's possession of the world's largest oil reserves, drivers face long lines at the gas pump. A 50-percent collapse in oil prices in 2014 devastated the oil-dependent economy. In 2013, revenues were $80 billion. That figure dropped to $20 billion by 2016, according to IMF figures.

Lower poverty rates, better education and health, and economic growth: These are all part of the legacy of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013. Equally part of the socialist's legacy was mismanagement. Not only did he fail to keep the state oil company up to date under increased government control, but his government also overspent despite a drop in oil production after 2006.

Chavez's hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, has been in office for four years and has two more to go. The opposition center-right coalition, which has controlled the National Assembly since 2015, has accused him of "abandoning his post" by failing to stem the economic devastation. It has also denounced him for rights abuses.

The most recent example of Maduro's rights abuses was to silence opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, pictured above. In early April, Capriles was banned from seeking public office for 15 years due to "administrative irregularities" in his role as a governor. Capriles had been at the forefront of demands for a referendum on Maduro. The ban further inflamed tensions with protesters.

Aside from protests, the opposition collected 2 million signatures for a referendum last year, roughly 10 times the number required. And in a move against the Supreme Court - and in lieu of impeachment hearings - it also held a symbolic trial for Maduro. Numerous attempts to stymie its attempts to pressure the government have only emboldened these lawmakers.

Last September saw some 1 million Venezuelans march on Caracas. The opposition hopes April 19 protests - "the mother of all protests" to coincide with Maduro's fourth annivesary - will be even bigger. Meanwhile, the international community looks on with concern. The Organization for American States is mulling a suspension for Venezuela unless it calls elections to emerge from "dictatorship."

Author: Kathleen Schuster

Link:

Capriles: 'The government is promoting the violence' - Deutsche Welle

In light of the latest extreme attacks on the LGBTIQ+ community in Chechnya, Russia, which United Nations human rights experts have called unprecedented, English group Left Unity released the following statement on April 14.

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Left Unity strongly condemns the reported incarceration and abuse of gay men in Chechnya, Russia. We call for the closure of the reported detention centre for gay men in Chechnya. We send solidarity to all gay and Trans men suffering such oppression.

Even stories of such oppression send shock waves around the globe and encourage other oppressive governments to attack LGBT+ people.

We recognise that Chechnya is a minor power involved in global power struggles and that not all reports may be reliable.

Left Unity utterly condemns this vicious oppression of gay men and demands the Chechen and Russian governments do all in their power to stop these actions. We urge our government to pursue demands for a full investigation through the United Nations and to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.

Left Unity Principal Speaker Nick Jones said: Gay men were incarcerated in Nazi Germany, and persecuted and imprisoned for years afterwards, which is still in the lifetime of many people. Freedom for gay men has now been achieved in most of Europe.

We call for solidarity with those incarcerated and those who fear such oppression across the globe and most of all we hope they know they are not alone, that a tidal wave of good people around the world are fighting for them to be free and safe.

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Chechnya: Left solidarity with LGBTI community under attack - Green Left Weekly

April 21 marks the opening, at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, of the sixth annual academic conference on Islamophobia.If past conclaves are a guide, the conference will be marked by a morass of impenetrable academic jargon and an unremitting flow of anti-Western rhetoric.

Here, if one cares to observe, one may see the academic pistons of the blasphemy-law promotional industry pumping vigorously away at its task, to ensure that expression of hostility to the religion of Islam achieves cultural parity on campuses as a shaming thought crime, morally equivalent to expressed hostility to women, blacks, gays and aboriginals.

What ends in law often begins in academia. And the Berkeley conferences are ground zero in North America for hardline theories around Islamophobia. This cadre does not shy away from definitions of Islamophobia, unlike those who promoted and voted for Motion 103, championed by Liberal MP Iqra Khalid and recently passed by Canadas Parliament. The motion calls for a committee to study how to develop a a whole-of-government approach to reducing and eliminating Islamophobia, specifically. That word, Islamophobia, left truculently undefined by all politicians supporting its inclusion, glows with radioactive intensity.

Does M-103s Islamophobia mean expressed hatred of people the Wests normal definition of hatred or hatred of a belief system, normally a protected category of expression here, as religious Christians know to their chagrin? Canadians have no idea if their right to express distaste for Islam would still be protected in a bill premised on the recommendations of this study.

I therefore contacted Jasmin Zine, who teaches race, ethnic, gender and postcolonial studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is a regular and ideologically representative participant in the Berkeley Islamophobia conferences, including this one.

I asked her to define Islamophobia for me, which she promptly did: Islamophobia is a fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims that translates into individual, ideological and systemic forms of oppression. This is quite an insidious, though admittedly clever, definition. Note that it puts fear and hatred of Islam, not Muslims, at the centre of the phobia. And the word translates is a masterstroke.

Under this definition, if I write publicly that Islam is inherently Christophobic and anti-Semitic according to its own texts, and a Muslim declares himself oppressed by my statement, who would be the interpeter for the alleged translation? The courts? Iqra Khalid? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

As one can see from her defined area of study, Zine is an intersectionalist, who sees the world in Marxist tropes of power and powerlessness, with white imperialists and their issue holding the power, and all disadvantaged minorities, into which category Muslims are now tucked, as the systematically disempowered.

It takes a certain chutzpah to hold that Islam, given its history of conquest of indigenous peoples, sexism, homophobia and violence against Christians and Jews, is equal in victim status given their respective histories to blacks, native Americans, gays and Jews. Yet that is the basic narrative thrust not only of Zines work, but of all the scholars promoting the Islamophobia blasphemy-law agenda.

Their guruis Hatem Bazian, faculty sponsor, IRDP creator and effective leaderof the Berkeley conference. Founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, Bazian is also a former fundraising speaker for the anti-Israel organization KindHearts, shut down by the U.S. government in 2006 for its alleged ties to Hamas.

(Bazian is often cited for what appeared to be a call to violence at a 2004 San Francisco rally, when he shouted: Well, weve been watching an intifada in Palestine, weve been watching an uprising in Iraq How come we donthave an intifada inthiscountry? theyre gonna say (Im) being too radical. Well, you havent seen radicalism yet!)

At a former conference, Jasmin Zine spoke on Constructing the Enemies Within: Muslim Youth, Islamophobia, and the Racial Politics of Canadas Home Grown War on Terror. Zine concluded that it was not jihadist ideology at the root of homegrown terrorists rather, it was Islamophobia, the politics of empire and the racialized security industrial complex.

Zine does not outright condone terrorism, but insists it is necessary to situate these acts within a broader historical context such as the racial violence of colonialism, genocide, slavery, occupation and apartheid. She has likened Americas Guantanamo Bay detention centre to a colonial plantation and a Nazi concentration camp. And Zine sees Omar Khadrs radicalization as the result of Canadas failure to properly integrate his family. Uh-huh.

Ominously, Zine calls Canadian Muslim reformists like Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah Muslims who want to see an Islam emerge that is compatible with democratic principles native informers, because they are eager to co-operate with security services in identifying radicalizing elements within the Muslim community.

Will Zine be invited to participate in the M-103 study? I am guessing she will be. Will Canadian patriots and democratic Muslims Tarek Fatah and Raheel Raza be invited as well? I would hope so. If all three are, to whose testimony will greater weight be assigned, to whom more deference shown?

National Post kaybarb@gmail.com Twitter.com/BarbaraRKay

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Barbara Kay: How academics portray Islam as a' victim' of ... - National Post