Monthly Archives: January 2022

Associate professor of history Edmund Abaka remembers Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist who received an honorary degree at the University of Miamis 2018 spring commencement.

Only Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu can describe the first voting experience as something like falling in love. This gentle giant was a teacher, Anglican bishop, archbishop, Nobel Laureate (1984), fearless defender of the defenseless, and a voice of the voiceless.

He was an apostle of civil rights when the dogs of war had been unleashed on South Africans of color by a shamelessly white supremacist government that believed in separateness.

If there were a one-line summation of the life and legacy of Tutu, it would be that he opened his mouth for the voiceless who were under the heel of apartheid, a political system of racial discrimination that turned people of color in South Africa into second- and third-class citizens whose rights, if they had any at all, no white person was bound to respect.

What made Tutu an influential world-historical figure was his adherence to the principles of truth, righteousness, and moralityprinciples by which he lived and died. He used those principles to fight against the awfulness of apartheid and the gravy train mentality of the African National Congress, South Africas post-apartheid ruling government.

One surprising thing about Tutu registered vividly in my mind when I had the distinct honor of meeting him at Florida International University a few years back. From newspaper and television reporting of the work of this larger-than-life figure who heroically and courageously confronted the evils of apartheid, one gets the impression of an imposing individual and a commanding presence.

But the revered archbishop was relatively diminutive and often dressed simply in a purplish shirt and a clerical collar, sometimes topped with a suit jacket. The point? The simplicity and humility of so enormously popular an advocate of social justice, of equal rights, of the humanity of people, of a rainbow nation in which people of all races would proudly feel part of, and of the goodness of humanity (while cognizant of the evils of humanity) is overwhelming.

He was against the oppression of black by white and white by black. He personified a worldview animated by a popular African philosophy: I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am. By implication, ours is a shared responsibility and shared humanity. Any injustice or discrimination diminishes us all. That personifies the world champion of the rights of oppressed people that Tutu was.

The smiling archbishopand I call him the dancing archbishop with the wicked sense of humorhas taught us what we can be, in our own right, in our work, and in our lives. He would ask us to see the humanity of people, eschew acts of intolerance, pursue knowledge in areas where we fall shortincluding biasand nurture inclusiveness to make the world a better place for all. It is not for nothing that the University of Miami conferred an honorary doctorate degree on Tutu at the 2018 spring commencement ceremony.

A graduate of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, West Africa, Edmund Abaka is an associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences.

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Anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu was 'an apostle of civil rights' - University of Miami

DetailsBy Williamson Chang & Abbey Seitz - Next CityJanuary 14, 2022

Guest Opinion The discussion on affirmative action usually involves workplaces or higher education, but never housing.Why not? In Hawaii, there is a century-old land and housing program for native Hawaiians, arguably one of the nations longest running affirmative action programs. Despite the lack of national attention this program has received, it offers a hundred years of lessons for any new effort that a city, state or federal government might design to counteract historic and ongoing racial discrimination.

[NOTE: This op-ed originally appeared on Next City, a nonprofit news organization with a solutions-journalism focus that amplifies solutions to the problems that oppress people in cities. It is reprinted here with permission. All rights reserved.]

Everywhere you look, policy makers are discussing how to address racial inequities, stemming from colonization, enslavement, segregation, and ongoing oppression. A commonly known and controversial strategy is affirmative action, which refers toprograms intended to affirm the civil rights of designated classes by taking positive action to protect them from, in the words of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the lingering effects of pervasive discrimination.

Most scholars believe affirmative action was not legally established in the United States until the late 20th centurythrough a series of court decisions interpreting the Civil Rights guarantees within the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, affirmative action policies had already taken hold in Hawaii through a housing and land program for native Hawaiians, created by theHawaiian Homes Commission Act(HHCA), in 1920.

This groundbreaking piece of legislation was born from harrowing events for the Hawaiian people. Pre-Western contact, an estimated 400,000 to over 800,000 people lived in the Hawaiian Islands. However,by 1840, the number of Native Hawaiians had declined by 84%due to disease and displacement by foreign settlers. In 1893,a U.S.-backed group of sugar and pineapple plantation owners deposed Queen Liliuokalani and lobbied the U.S. president for annexationof Hawaii, which occurred in 1898. Leading up to, and following the U.S. overthrow, Hawaiians were forcibly removed from their land, and denied the right to practice their native culture, religion, or language.

To combat this dire situation, in 1920,Prince Jonah Khi Kalanianaoledelivered an impassioned speech to Congress, in which he proclaimed: The Hawaiian race is passingand if conditions continue to exist as they do today, this splendid race of people, my people, will pass from the face of the earth. In response, Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, which set aside 200,000 acres of land across the islands for homesteading by native Hawaiians. Today, the homesteading program is managed by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which provides thousands of beneficiaries with 99-year homestead leases at $1 per year to live on, grow crops, or raise animals.

Full-length books can and should be dedicated to the HHCA to discuss all of its successes and faults, but for now, here are a few major lessons that can be gleaned for future affirmative action efforts, particularly for housing and land programs:

Defining an ethnic, racial or cultural group is difficult, and can lead to division.The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act provides benefits to people deemed native Hawaiians. While not the original intention of Prince Kuhio, when the HHCA was passed, it defined a native Hawaiian as someone with 50 percent or higher Hawaiian blood quantum. This was done because of the influence of plantation owners who understood that as Hawaiians increasingly mixed with foreigners, this blood quantum threshold would reduce the number of people eligible for the program. Then and now, these requirements have caused dividing lines between Hawaiians who qualify as beneficiaries and those who do not, and are seen as less than. (native Hawaiian (lower case n) refers to persons with 50 percent or higher Hawaiian blood quantum. Native Hawaiian (capital N) refers to all persons of Hawaiian ancestry regardless of blood quantum.)

Affirmative action programs must be paired with a plan.Since Hawaiis statehood, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL), has been responsible for managing homesteading. The agency is under scrutiny for its inability to meet the growing housing demand of native Hawaiians. Critics of DHHL highlight the agencys underperformance: Only 10,000 homesteads have been leased since the program began and today over 29,000 beneficiaries are on the DHHL waiting list. This is attributed to bureaucratic constraints, underfunding, limited land and infrastructure, among other factors. Every grand vision, including affirmative action, needs a plan.

Acknowledge the history and meaning of the program.While DHHL is described as a housing lottery program, it represents so much more.Chapter 43 of the United States Codenotes that the United States has a special responsibility for the welfare of the Native peoplesincluding Native Hawaiians, and that the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act was intended to rehabilitate a landless and dying people. The dire impacts caused by Western colonization and the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy was further affirmed in the1993 Apology Resolution, in which President Clinton apologized on behalf of the United States for participating in the removal of the independent monarchy by force.

In Hawaii and abroad, there is little discourse on why this homesteading program was created, or fact that it is a revolutionary effort that aims to correct the wrongs of genocide and colonization. With more public discourse, we could shift the narrative away from what DHHL is doing wrong, to how this program could be improved understanding that land and housing is only one aspect of a much larger toolkit needed for Hawaiians to live and thrive in their homeland.

To broadly characterize the Hawaiian homesteading program as a success or failure seems misguided. Focusing solely on the programs underperformance would gloss over the fact that it has allowed thousands of Hawaiians to stay rooted to their land, an achievement that is invaluable to many indigenous communities. Like many government undertakings with a grand and virtuous vision, the results are mixed.

Despite July 2021 marking the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, it has received no national attention. At a moment when affirmative action programs and similar reparation efforts are beingdiscussed more than ever, we must acknowledge that we have a precedent that is a century in the making, and is still impacting thousands of people at this very moment.

At the very least, this program should encourage policy makers and urban planners toconsider the possibility of implementing affirmative action housing policies elsewhere in the United States. Although Native Hawaiians have faced unique oppression and discrimination, which persists today, the movement to affirm the rights of Hawaiians through access to land and housing provides lessons for reconciling our dark history with Black and Brown communities throughout this country.

By studying this effort, and other similar programs across the globe, we are better equipped to understand the factors that make implementing affirmative action programs so complex, and how, with the right vision and plan, affirmative action can lead to transformative change that our society so desperately needs.

Williamson Chang, professor of law, has taught at the William S. Richardson School of Law since 1976. He has been active in serving the Native Hawaiian community and in 2017 he was recognized as the Native Hawaiian Patriot of the year.

Abbey Seitz is a professional community planner and freelance writer with a masters in Urban & Regional Planning from the University of Hawaii at Mnoa. She foundedPlanning for Community LLC, a housing and transportation consultancy firm.

The truth about Indian Boarding Schools

This month, were asking our readers to help us raise $10,000 to fund our year-long journalism initiative called The Indian Boarding School Project: A Dark Chapter in History. Our mission is to shine a light on the dark era of forced assimilation of native American children by the U.S. government and churches. Youll be able to read stories each week and join us for Livestream events to understand what the Indian Boarding School era has meant to Native Americans and what it still means today.

This news will be provided free for everyone to read, but it is not free to produce. Thats why were asking you to make a donation this month to help support our efforts. Any contribution of any amount big or small gives us a better, stronger future and allows us to remain a force for change.Donate to Native News Online today and support independent Indigenous journalism. Thank you.

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Op-ed: Lessons from More Than a Hundred Years of Affirmative Action in Hawai'i - nativenewsonline.net

The fight between the federal government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) took on a new phase after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed decided to lead the war from the front lines. Moments after Abiy's decision, the government media aired footage showing him wearing military dress while prompting the federal troops. Although it was unverifiable, Abiy appeared to be at the battleground. His decision brought a tangible military gain as the federal troops forced the TPLF to withdraw from the territories they had captured and retreat to their home region as their leadership announced. This swing of the pendulum occurred after months of federal troops being on the back foot and TPLF forces reaching up to a day's drive away from Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia's current conflict goes back to 2018 when Ethiopia's political turbulences saw Abiy ascend to the premiership. To implement his reform agenda, Abiy seems to have been convinced from the outset of the inevitable need to take power from TPLF affiliates and consign them to the margins. Hence, the government embarked on purging Tigrayans from critical positions, particularly military and intelligence posts. Also, the government dissolved the infamous Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) that, besides the TPLF, had three other satellite parties under its umbrella. In addition to that, Abiy made a historical rapprochement with the isolated state of Eritrea the staunch enemy of Ethiopia for the last three decades. The opening to Eritrea brought international prestige to Abiy, culminating in his winning of the Nobel prize. On the other hand, it was part of a bigger move aimed at squeezing the TPLF.

The relatively settled down fight as it seems now broke out on November 2020 after the TPLF launched an attack on the Northern Command of Ethiopia's National Defense Force (ENDF). With the help of the Eritrean troops and paramilitary militias from the Amhara ethnicity, the ENDF captured the capital city of the Tigray region (Mekelle) within a few days. According to human rights organizations, the forces that entered Mekelle committed crimes against humanity such as extra-judicial killing, torture and mass rape against Tigray women. Also, the government imposed a total embargo on the region including the suspension of humanitarian aid entering the region. The collective punishment by the federal government sparked a huge international outcry, with some observers even warning of a potential genocide if the violence continued. Part of the fallout of the deadly conflict is the existence of more than 9 million people who are in a dire situation and need urgent humanitarian assistance according to the United Nations.

One thing for sure is that Ethiopia's dilemma isn't a novel one that started with the TPLF. It emerged long before, during the second half of the 19th century when the northern Abyssinians, backed by Europeans, subjugated the southern people for the purpose of exploiting their resources needed by the European entrepreneurs. At that time, European colonizers bolstered the Abyssinians at the expense of the colonized southern people by creating a unique system not implemented in other parts of Africa an internal dependent superstructural colony that served the interest of the Europeans. In their seminal book "The Invention of Ethiopia," Bonnie K. Holcomb and Sisai Ibssa stated that in order for the Ethiopian regime to maintain existence it has had to successfully manage three basic requirements:

Thus, the tight control and oppression policy against the colonized nations have been part of keeping the state together; otherwise, the very existence of Ethiopia would be threatened.

Certainly, the state dominated by Abyssinians failed to embrace other nationalities through a creed-based state project, rather, they sought legitimacy through coercion and tight control. The state harnessed every available brutality to subjugate their colonized populations in the interior, like the Oromo, Afar and Somali people, with the land of the colonized people grabbed and distributed as booty to Abyssinian garrisons sometimes through spurious land-reform justifications.

By the same token, the TPLF regime, which ruled the country for nearly 30 years, followed the same path of coercion and subjugation with uninterrupted financial and technical support from Western powers. Since the turn of the 20th century, successive tragedies revealed the essence of the problem, which was a state project forcefully compelled by certain ethnic groups from Ethiopia's highlands at the expense of the subjugated majority who have been rejecting the project. The West's outcry against what is happening in northern Ethiopia is by no means a sign of goodwill, but only aims to sustain the miserable dictatorial system that serves the West's neo-colonial agenda.

In conclusion, the 13-month conflict achieved nothing and prolonged conflict will only lead to further bloodshed. Hence, the federal government and the TPLF should come to gather at the table of negotiation to prevent a metastasizing hostility. The government's victory over the TPLF could be a starting point for an alternative approach, particularly given the TPLF's announcement that they have pulled back in order to give space for negotiations. An incremental approach should be devised. Hence, a deal that firstly stipulates the cessation of hostilities should be reached so that other daunting issues can be dealt with at a later time.

Surely, reaching a settlement on the Tigray issue is not enough to solve Ethiopia's centennial dilemma, because the country's troubles stem from lack of popular legitimacy and deep resentment. Hence, listening to the voice of the subjugated people and searching for their acceptance is inevitable. Sorting out the current conflict in the north should not be the last object but rather a stepping stone to solving the other complex situations in the rest of the country.

As part of discovering a comprehensive solution, a practical step would be to call for an ambitious truth and reconciliation conference that aims to discuss and fix Ethiopia's future. First and foremost, the results of such a gathering should lead to the recognition of past atrocities committed by the ruling elite (highlanders) and should set the blueprint through which people could determine their destiny if they prefer to be within Ethiopia or not, or if they opt for a federal or confederated Ethiopia. Contrary to that, trying to use force for unity will open a Pandora's box of violence across Ethiopia that will have a negative impact on the stability of the region.

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Ethiopia's conflict and need for comprehensive settlement | Daily Sabah - Daily Sabah

Charles Loves Race Crazy: BLM, 1619, and the Progressive Racism Movement arrives in the midst of a glut of books about The 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, and the various incarnations of the modern woke movement. While many of these books are fine contributions to the corpus chronologizing Americas disturbing descent into tribal conflict, a decade from now, Loves booka brilliant admixture of deep-dive journalism and social commentaryis the book that will be remembered because of its patriotic ambition.

How is Race Crazy patriotic and how is it ambitious?

To appreciate the book, it would be helpful to explain what the book is most certainly not. Anyone looking for a polemic against left-leaning America or a screed bemoaning every policy position of the modern Democratic Party will be disappointed. It is not a political book in the modern sense of the term. Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden make any significant appearance.

It is a book that seeks to explain that there is a pernicious and stealth movement in modern America seeking to both undermine, and in some cases, dismantle, the basic tenets of Americas liberal traditions and institutions.

Love places himself squarely and proudly in the tradition of Jeffersonian liberalism, Madisonian constitutionalism, the redemption of Gettysburg, and the 14th amendment, as well as the titanic achievement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He juxtaposes this tradition of individualized liberty and personal agency with what he calls the progressive racism movement.

As he writes, The 1960s Civil Rights movement championed by Dr. Martin Luther King and other courageous advocates of racial equality, has been stood on its head. In our now race-obsessed society, ones identitylong regarded as personal and self-createdhas reverted to being tribal and genetically determined.

As Love sees it, there are two pillars to the progressive racism movement that are deeply misunderstood. The first one is BLM.

Anyone with a scintilla of political awareness now recognizes that there is a colossal chasm between affirming the sentiment that black lives matter versus offering financial, corporate, or political support for the ideals of the Black Lives Matter organization itself.

As Love writes, Corporations who donate to them are contributing to their own demise, blacks who march with them are marching for perpetually bad neighborhoods, and whites who support them are supporting their future unemployment. Do it at your own peril and the peril of the country.

The half of the book focusing on Black Lives Matter is not just a redundant denunciation of the Marxist roots of its founders or the violence it has been said to perpetuate. Instead, Love takes a deep journalistic dive into the Black Lives Matter organization. What he discovers would shock and surprise most Americans.

Black Lives Matter, he discovers and argues through voluminous research, is just the arm of a much wider but secretive organization called the Movement for Black Lives. As Love writes, While their anonymity is intriguing, their beliefs are dangerous. What they describe on their website is nothing short of an operational plan for takeover of the country.

Love describes the byzantine maze of funding for BLM that is both difficult to decipher and shrouded in deep secrecy. As he vividly illustrates, The Movement for Black Lives is a force, yet they have remained in the shadows. I hope you will do internet searches to see what comes up. You will find mentions, but youll be surprised how few there are and how none are associated with any person. We at least know the faces of the women who started Black Lives Matter, though they are largely figureheads today.

He provides numerous chapters describing the Movement for Black Lives 2020 Platform, using this segment of the book as an exegesis tackling a variety of issues including incarceration, crime, drug laws, and education.

The second pillar of misunderstanding is The 1619 Project. Love is quite charitable to many of the features of the project. He claims much of it is eloquently written, fascinating, and replete with a lot of information that Americans should know about. But, he warns, the entire Project focuses only on Americas flaws. This will bring nothing but misery to all involved.

He then asks the question that reveals the thrust of his concern: Why should people who hold contempt for the country be allowed to educate our children, particularly about the country they despise?

Loves articulation of the stakes involved when a large segment of the nation decides to embrace pseudo-historic narratives over well-established historic facts is both eloquent and guttural. The basic questions of American identity that American schools have traditionally served to answerwhat are the self-evident truths of Jefferson, what does it mean to be a Madisonian when trying to understand the American regime, what did the Framers mean by the phrases limited government, natural law, or due processare simply missing from the educational orbit of todays educational system. The 1619 Project would double-down on this exercise in political ignorance, and a hearty embrace of 1619 curricula would have a profound impact on the experiment of self-government.

Heres why: the real agenda of the 1619 Project is to reformulate what America has always been about, away from the traditional view that America has historically fallen short of its ideals, yet steadily working from generation to generation to inch closer to them, and towards a more radicalized and deeply cynical narrative in which racism is in the nations DNA, that oppression was not really a contradiction of Americas founding, but was the very raison detre for the creation of the nation itself.

As Love writes, The 1619 Project is reframing American history to make it solely synonymous with slavery. They are succeeding at making this perspective mainstream and bringing this toxic approach to the classroom.Love uses the word danger frequently, and he is right to do so.

If being an American is not grounded in established churches, divine monarchs, or rigid class structures, but instead is the fragile consequence of a people believing in shared truths as articulated in our founding documents, then what is the logical consequence of a generation professing no belief in these truths? A generation that has no love or veneration for our founding documents? Who believe the real story of the nation is not one of nobly struggling for liberty, justice for all, and equality under the law, but instead is a sprawling and infinite tale of permanently subjugating large swathes of the country?

When President Obama eulogized John McCain in 2018, he perfectly articulated the fragility of the American creed: John understood, as JFK understood, as Ronald Reagan understood, that part of what makes our country great is that our membership is based not on our blood line, not on what we look like, what our last names are, not based on where our parents or grandparents came from or how recently they arrived, but on adherence to a common creed that all of us are created equal.

The 1619 Project suggests there is no common creed, only a stealth employment of highfalutin language in our founding and governing documents to hide what many revisionist historians now believe to be truethat America was never truly aiming for real justice.

Instead, sophisticates of the left believe modern enlightenment is synonymous with becoming hyper-aware of the truth of ubiquitous oppression, understanding that the country has not really made great strides towards racial justice and harmony, but has merely pivoted to camouflaged forms of injustice, cloaked in systemic or implicit structures of discrimination.

As Love phrases the matter, Where critical race theory and the Black Lives Matter Movement hold that racial problems are systemic, The 1619 Project goes further. The problem is not a few misguided, racist laws here and there. It is that slavery and its remnants are alive today.

My criticisms of Race Crazy are few. There is but a single section on how it is now Time to Act. An entire section devoted to the question of what now? would have been welcomed.

Also, while most of the book was probably written before the recent surge in parental interest about education, it would have been powerful to see Loves response to those who argue they simply believe CRT and the 1619 Project are merely trying to tell the complete story of America, blemishes and all, asking schools to expand beyond a sanitized version of American triumphalism.

Love is answering the call Lincoln makes in his much under-appreciated 1838 Lyceum Address, in which he states, If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

Race Crazy is the tonic we need to avoid this national suicide.

Jeremy S. Adams is the author of the recently released book "Hollowed Out: A Warning About America's Next Generation" (Regnery, August 2021). He has been a high school and university civics teacher for 24 years in Bakersfield, California.

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Why Fighting Divisive Racial Narratives Is A Patriotic Necessity - The Federalist

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, extremists have sought to exploit the pandemic environment to their own ends. Where most of the population sees an enduring health catastrophe, extremists tend to see opportunity.

Over the past two years, we have seen hospitals targeted by extremists, infrastructure attacked, and extremist narratives go viral. This has been most marked in western democracies, including Australia.

Funded by a Charles Sturt University COVID-19 Research Grant, we examined the Australian security context to better understand how extremists were understanding and responding to the pandemic. Our key consideration was what extremist responses would mean for the security of Australians both now and into the future.

Read more: In COVID's shadow, global terrorism goes quiet. But we have seen this before, and should be wary

Our focus quickly became extreme ideologies. Ideologies were important to our study because they helped us make sense of the link between knowing and doing, between thought and action. By observing extremist statements and behaviours, we were able to identify and map ideology in action.

Ideology can be divided into three parts:

it provides an explanation of the current state of affairs. That is, why the world is as it is

it imagines an alternative and preferred order.

it proposes a method of political action to achieve that alternative. For extremists, that method of political action is through severe, lethal violence that meets the threshold for terrorism.

This is important, because ideology shapes strategy. It is a significant factor in who extremists determine are valid targets of their violence. With reports of attacks against Australians of Asian descent early in the pandemic, we believed it was important to investigate these ideologically motivated behaviours.

To understand this better, we mapped narratives and activities of three primary extremist threats over 2020. These included violent Salafi jihadists, the extreme right, and the extreme left in Australia.

While we found little data on the extreme left, we had four key outcomes from the data collected on the extreme right and violent Salafi jihadists with respect to Australia. They were active in using the emerging pandemic to support their own beliefs.

Read more: Why hundreds of westerners are taking up arms in global jihad

First, and most significantly, we identified ideological buttressing. This meant extremists were integrating the pandemic environment into their existing beliefs. For example, extremists incorporated COVID-19 to decry globalism, immigration, and modern society in general. This strengthened their existing narratives, which in turn positively influenced their ability to recruit.

This comes with national security implications. Extremists were able to cement beliefs and positions, thereby deepening the divide and distrust between fringe elements and their government. Buttressing ensures that the threat of lone actor and group terrorism will endure. It will also challenge future deradicalisation practices.

Second, we identified changes in existing ideologies what we called diversification. That is, we found extremists adopting new or contradictory beliefs in addition to their former positions. Often, this occurred where extremists who were diverse in ideological affiliation gathered in the same space (albeit with differing goals). For example, traditional White supremacists adopted some of the sovereign citizen movement ideas on government oppression.

Read more: 'Living people': who are the sovereign citizens, or SovCits, and why do they believe they have immunity from the law?

What this means is that extremists were exposed to different ideas, goals, and people. Their ideology was shifted by having a more diverse range of people in their networks, but often with chaotic results: supporters held seemingly contradictory positions simultaneously.

This shifting will challenge the efficient identification and categorisation of an extremist or group of extremists: the pandemic has made everything messier. There could be, as a result, flow-on effects, both to the community in reporting suspected extremists and the authorities investigating extremists.

The third outcomes was what we call idiosyncratisation. This is where extremists integrated specific conspiracies into their narratives. Conspiracies are not usually ideologies in a technical sense, because they rarely provide a alternative order. Nonetheless, we saw the adoption of objectionable and disconnected beliefs, such as 5G causing COVID-19 across both extreme left and extreme right movements.

Finally, our fourth outcome was that despite COVID-19 countermeasures the sharing of ideologically motivated ideas did not solely occur online, as might have been expected in a pandemic environment. Instead, misinformation and ideological content was shared offline, and in some cases, in person. While the internet was a highway for COVID-19 narratives around the world, it was not the only one.

Read more: Far-right groups have used COVID to expand their footprint in Australia. Here are the ones you need to know about

The context created by COVID-19 has complicated Australias national security environment. We have seen new leaders emerging and new ideas being adopted. At the same time, old movements are transforming and old ideologies being reinforced.

As we move into 2022 and the pandemic continues, there will be critical considerations for the national security landscape. Those include the increasing complexities associated with extremists and how they are using COVID to further their own means. The four key outcomes identified in our study shed light on this ever-evolving threat to our national security.

Excerpt from:

How extremists have used the COVID pandemic to further their own ends, often with chaotic results - The Conversation AU

Justice is an imaginary concept because those who get it are those who can pay top lawyers while those who cannot, dare not approach a polyvocal Supreme Court. This is why Law Minister Kiren Rijijus axiom of a cordial relationship between the government and the judiciary is worrying. Perhaps that may explain why the top court initially did not come to the migrants rescue in 2020.

Compare the alacrity with which retired Justice Indu Malhotra was appointed to probe the breach of security in Punjab for Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the tardiness of the apex court to issue directions in the petitions against those at Haridwar in Uttar Pradesh who called for genocide against the Muslims. What makes Rijiju happy should make us unhappy. It took over 76 public intellectuals, like a retired Admiral of the Indian Navy, and retired Justice Madan Lokur to point out the Supreme Court seemed to have abdicated its responsibility to uphold the fundamental rights of civil society.

This may explain why today there are few dissenting judgments in the apex court which sits in benches of two or more, unlike the 25 high courts where judges sit singly. Agreeing with the government is easy when the latter decides who will enter the Supreme Court. The government will never allow maverick judges like Akil Kureshi to enter the Supreme Court for consent guarantees ascent within the judiciary while great dissenters like the late Justice K Subba Rao, who dissented 48 times during his nine-year-term in the Supreme Court will never be replicated.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of judgments, the majority judgments, the concurring judgments and the dissenting verdicts. Conservative judgments stay strictly within the law while liberal judgments like the Ayodhya and Rafale judgments are delivered by forward-looking judges who look forward to post-retirement sinecures.

These liberal judgments traverse beyond law to be influenced by economics, politics + religion of contemporary society. Even dissenting judges will not risk offending the same society from where they have been elevated, opined an advocate well-known for his dissenting arguments, Mathews Nedumpara, who founded the National Lawyers Campaign for Judicial Transparency and Accountablity.

Majority verdicts are delivered by judges who agree, perhaps not in frequently, with the government perspective. Conversely, concurring judgments must give reasons which differ from the majority. But a dissenting judgment takes courage and skills to point out the flaws in the reasoning of their brother judges. These dissenting judgments are scholarly expositions of the law, upholding the peoples rights against state oppression.

Dissenting judges like M Hidyatullah declared in the habeas corpus case that life existed before the Constitution came into force which was why it could not be suspended during an Emergency. Such dissenting judgments uphold democracy while majority verdicts may succumb to autocracy. The unanimous five-judge Ayodhya judgment was exactly what the government wanted. And the five judges celebrated their unanimous verdict at Taj Mansingh hotel in Delhi to uphold their conviviality. Two of them were future CJIs. Soon after he retired, CJI Sharad Bobde visited the RSS shrine at Nagpur, which betrayed his ideology, for an ideal judge keeps a blank mind.

This is why great minds like those of the former CJIs Ranjan Gogoi, Sharad Bobde and our future CJI D Y Chandrachud find it much easier to conform to than confront the government on emotive issues of religion, or foreign policy. This is why the Supreme Court junked a petition asking the judiciary to direct the Modi government to take action against China which used the coronavirus to commit genocide. And in Kerala, a judge imposed hefty costs on a litigant for daring to challenge Modis mugshot on his vaccination certificate.

Rarely, very rarely, and in secrecy, a chief minister may direct a judge what to write, as Justice Ranjan Gogoi confessed in his book, Justice for the Judge, describing how a former Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi, told his (Justice Gogois) mother to influence his judgment. The government is interested injust 0.5per cent of the cases before the apex court while it is indifferent to the rest.

Having judges like former Justice Arun Mishra in the Supreme Court who was an unabashed admirer of Prime Minister Narendra Modi minimises dissent just as the former CJI P N Bhagwati congratulated the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on her electoral success just as he congratulated the Janata Party prior to that. Judges like Arun Mishra and Bhagwati may have always looked forward to their careers.

The last dissenting judgment which made waves was J Chelameswars dissent in the NJAC case, which struck down the 99th amendment and the NJAC Act, as it encroached on judicial independence. Chelameswar declared the collegium was a cabal of opacity where a CJI or some other senior judge proposed his own candidate for elevation as a judge with the favour being returned. Since October 2017, Chelameswar succeeded in getting the then CJI Deepak Misra to upload collegium resolutions.

The next crop of seven future CJIs are also unlikely to challenge the diktat of populist governments. Indias first-ever woman CJI will have a tenure of three months but she is no iron lady who will oppose tradition. Her counterpart in Pakistan, Justice Ayesha Malik, an Oxbridge elitist, has been appointed to Pakistans Supreme Court despite strong opposition from President Abdul Latif Afridi and the Pakistan Bar Council. Like Justice Bangalore Nagarathna, she too may consent but not dissent.

And so, behind-the-scenes, a judge like Ranjan Gogoi is happy when his daughter marries the son of the late Justice Valmiki Mehta, just as Justice Shelat was allegedly unhappy when a brother of the late Justice Bhagwati refused to marry his daughter, according to Supreme Whispers by Abhinav Chandrachud. These are human failings, which make us realise that judges, like the rest of us, eat, drink and arrange marriages for their offspring with other judges offspring in the hope that one day, their offspring might also make it to the Supreme Court. It is all in the family, one might conclude.

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Dissenting judges now a rarity in the Supreme Court - Free Press Journal

Tuesday 11 January 2022 7:00 pm

HSBC should be hit with economic sanctions if it does not sever ties with a firm that is closely linked to the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China, according to senior Tory MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith.

City A.M. can reveal the former Conservative leader and a group of other MPs will write to the Treasury to ask them to take action against HSBC, after it was revealed the British bank is holding 2.2m of shares in a subsidiary of Xinjiang Tianye Group a paramilitary organisation involved in Beijings campaign of oppression against the Muslim minority.

The shares are in the organisations subsidiary Xinjiang Tianye a chemical and plastics company.

The group has been instrumental in helping the Chinese government monitor and detain Uyghurs in a campaign of ethnic cleansing which some international organisations have branded as genocide.

The firm has been hit with a series of sanctions by the White House, which make it illegal for US citizens to do transactions or services for Xinjiang Tianye Group.

This incudes American citizens who work for companies that are based in other countries.

The Sunday Times reports that HSBC makes money from the share holdings as it acts as a custodian for a client, however the bank disputes the value of the share holdings and says it is far below the reported 2.2m.

Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng addressed the issue in parliament today, saying the Treasury has direct ownership of that relationship and its something Im discussing with the chancellor of the Exchequer.

Duncan Smith told City A.M. that chancellor Rishi Sunak should tell HSBC that they must sell the shares, which are being held for an anonymous client, and sanction them if they refuse.

Weve had serious problems with HBSC and I believe they are behaving very badly, he said.

They are in breach of the modern day slavery rules and they are in breach of US sanctions.

There has been growing concern among UK human rights groups about HSBCs involvement with the Chinese government.

The bank supported China in imposing the National Security laws in Hong Kong, which effectively ended freedom of speech in the region.

A senior executive from HSBC which is headquartered in the UK, but does much of its business in Hong Kong explicitly and publicly supported the draconian new laws at the time.

HSBC executive Noel Quinn, shortly before the laws came into place, called for Beijing to stablise the security situation in Hong Kong after more than a year of local protests against the Chinese government.

The bank has also moved to freeze the accounts of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong under command of local police.

An HSBC spokesperson said: We can confirm that HSBC has not invested in and does not have any proprietary holdings in Xinjiang Tianye Co. Ltd. Xinjiang Tianyes shares are listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and can be traded in Hong Kong through the Shanghai and Hong Kong Stock Connect.

Authorised participants in that system, including financial institutions like HSBC, are required to comply with the applicable rules relevant to the Shanghai and Hong Kong Stock Connect. HSBC complies with all applicable laws and regulations in the jurisdictions in which it operates.

Treasury was contacted for comment.

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Exclusive: Senior Tory calls for UK to mull HSBC sanctions over links to Uyghur oppression - City A.M.

What it took to get racial equity in front of voters and what's left to do.

If the municipal government of New York City got a grade right now for its contributions to racial equity, it would probably be a failing grade though, no worse than any other government.

I would venture to say, by a racial justice standard, the city is an abject failure as it is, says Lurie Daniel Favors, attorney and general director of the Medgar Evers College Center for Law and Social Justice.

As a member of the NYC Racial Justice Commission, Daniel Favors has spent the last several months helping to draft a set of three ballot questions that she believes would set the city on the path to improving that grade. She doesnt expect progress will come quickly or without some missteps along the way but thats okay.

We are currently in a state of perpetuating failure after failure, Daniel Favors says. So trying to get it right and perhaps not getting it perfect? Im okay with that as long as were moving from the level of sustained failure because the failures, so long as its borne by people who are not white, have always been a baked-in acceptable outcome of any calculus. Thanks to this work, it hopefully can no longer be that way.

Then-Mayor Bill De Blasio convened the NYC Racial Justice Commission last March, tasking it with drafting revisions to the city charter, which require final approval by voter referendum.

Given the pandemic and local elections that took up a lot of attention over the past year, there havent been ideal conditions for public engagement. But after months of public meetings, input sessions and occasionally heated deliberations, the commission submitted its three ballot proposals to the Office of the City Clerk just days before the administration ended at the close of 2021.

New York City voters will get to decide on those ballot questions this fall, in the general election set for November 8.

The first ballot question asks voters for approval to add a preamble to the city charter a broad statement of values and beliefs like that which opens the U.S. Constitution. New Yorks city charter currently doesnt have a preamble, which came as a surprise to members of the Racial Justice Commission.

The proposed preamble language declares the city to be a multiracial democracy, and that our diversity is our strength. It sets goals for the city government such as providing to each New Yorker a safe, healthy, and sustainable living environment, a resilient neighborhood, vibrant and welcoming public spaces, and resources necessary to prosper economically and build wealth.

But it also includes language acknowledging the grave injustices and atrocities that form part of our countrys history, including the forced labor of enslaved Africans, the colonialism that displaced Indigenous people from their lands, the devaluing and underpaying of immigrant workers, and the discrimination, racial segregation, mass incarceration, and other forms of violence and systemic inequity that continue to be experienced by marginalized groups.

If New York City voters approve the ballot question this fall, such a statement would be enshrined in their citys charter during a period when some across the country have been trying to silence any such discussion of that history and ongoing oppression.

I think therell be a great deal of reaction against it, and thats okay, says J. Phillip Thompson, a member of the commission and previously deputy mayor under the De Blasio administration. We need to have these conversations. Thats part of what it means to create a more just society. And, you know, its about time the city and our country faces up to our past. What weve done, the narrative of America, and the narrative of New York has mainly been told by people who are not of color, who have not borne the brunt of the injustices that were trying to address.

The second ballot question, if approved, would create a new Office of Racial Equity and require a citywide racial equity plan as well as agency-by-agency racial equity plans. There would be a requirement for annual reporting on progress or the lack thereof under those plans, and the plans would have to be updated every two years.

There would also be a new Racial Equity Commission consisting of city residents that would weigh in on racial equity plans, serve as a clearinghouse for complaints from the public about agency conduct that may be exacerbating racial equity, and offer recommendations for agencies to address those complaints.

Other local governments across the country have created racial equity offices in recent years, such as Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Marylands Montgomery County, or the District of Columbia. They range in function and power, and can evolve or expand over time, especially as racial equity data become more available or accessible.

Tacoma, Washington, established its Office of Equity and Human Rights in 2015. As I previously reported, since 2020, every city council action memo in Tacoma must include the citys equity index for any neighborhood involving the proposed action, as well as an analysis of how that action might affect the equity index score for that neighborhood or the city as a whole. Similarly, in D.C. since 2021 all local legislation has had to be assessed for racial equity, DCist reported.

The Office of Racial Equity that New Yorkers could approve this fall would have the power and duty to establish practices and standards for measuring and reporting racial equity data on the citywide and agency-by-agency level. Everything from each agencys hiring diversity, wages or promotions policies to its purchasing and procurement from the private sector to its primary functions would be considered under each agencys racial equity plan. While some goals like pay equity or equitable procurement might be similar across agencies, each agencys racial equity plan and how it measures progress would be specific to what that particular agency does. The Office of Racial Equity would be tasked with assisting agencies in crafting those plans and updating them every two years.

Commissioners intend annual reporting of racial equity data to help fuel outside organizers to push for continual change over time and institute ways to hold agencies accountable for poor performance on racial equity.

I would love to see successive generations of activists increase the penalties, increase the teeth, increase the pain that has to be borne by an agency when they do sit in that failure, Daniel Favors says. Theres a limit to what we could do with that in this round, but there are more rounds and many of us will still be here.

The proposed citywide racial equity planning process would align every other year along a timeline pegged to the citys annual budget process. Thats intentional, Thompson says, as a way of increasing the likelihood that the racial equity planning process can inform how the city spends money every year.

It will be more work in the beginning, but also, the results will likely be a lot more robust, Thompson says. I mean, the city spends a lot of money paying for social services and paying for jails because we didnt spend enough money actually making sure people had access to services and quality education or year-round opportunities to learn in the first place. I think, at the end of the day, these equity measures will make for more effective spending.

Thompson, also a professor of urban planning at MIT, counts himself among the small but growing camp of academics, analysts and even some investors who believe a more racially just budget is a more fiscally sound budget.

I really believe that to be the case, and I want us to rigorously track these programs and our spending so we can actually prove that, Thompson says.

The Racial Justice Commission did debate whether or not to require the citys budget be assessed for racial equity impact before passing. But in the end a majority agreed that the challenge of figuring out a methodology for such an assessment, never done before, posed too great a risk to getting the city through the budget process at all. Failure to pass a budget could risk having the state step in to manage the citys budget.

The third and final ballot initiative from the NYC Racial Justice Commission would mandate the city to create and annually publish a new cost of living measure as an alternative to federal poverty measures. It could potentially be used to help set eligibility for public benefits administered by the city. Commissioners heard from many residents and social service providers that the current federal poverty measures dont accurately reflect the true cost of living in New York, leaving too many families clearly in need but ineligible for public assistance.

If we do not center on what it truly costs to live in a city such as New York and we rely wholly on antiquated and outdated federal policy measures, than were undercounting the needs and experiences of people made vulnerable by structural racism, says Jennifer Jones Austin, who chairs the NYC Racial Justice Commission and also serves as CEO of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies.

The commissions work isnt finished. It now has to take on the job of educating voters about the ballot proposals they have the chance to vote on this coming fall. Legally, the commission isnt allowed to advocate for voters to vote yes or no, it can only educate and explain what the proposals say and why they came up with them.

Legislation is not always binding in perpetuity, Jones Austin says. One legislative body may decide to advance and put into law and practice certain values beliefs but it can be upended and overturned. It is not as easy to overturn when you embed values and beliefs in the structural underpinning of the laws, and thats what the city charter is.

The commission recognizes that for these changes to the city charter to mean anything, they would need to start with an acknowledgement of history and an honest assessment of the citys current status with regard to racial equity which is not good, to put it mildly.

The people who live in this city, they know that things are bad, Thompson says. Its not gonna be a surprise to them.

Oscar is Next City's senior economics correspondent. He previously served asNext Citys editor from2018-2019, and was a Next City Equitable Cities Fellow from 2015-2016. Since 2011, Oscar has covered community development finance,community banking, impact investing, economic development, housingand more for media outlets suchas Shelterforce, B Magazine, Impact Alpha, and Fast Company.

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Racial Justice On the Ballot for New York City Voters This Fall - Next City

There has been a lot of news coverage and comments about Jisoo and Park Hae-ins latest Korean drama, Snowdrop. Before the K-dramas release in 2021, netizens petitioned for its cancellation over its controversial distortion of historical facts. Snowdrop uses South Koreas history of the Democratic movement of 1987 as a backdrop for its K-drama storyline.

Despite the K-dramas slight rise in ratings, South Koreans still see Snowdrop as an insult to the individuals who took part in paving the way for the countrys first democratic elections.

[Spoiler alert: This article contains mild spoilers forSnowdrop.]

The leaked synopsis online caused the spread of controversy concerning the K-drama. While the production company, JTBC, stated the storyline would differ while filming. After Snowdrops premiere, South Korean fans realized the story still had many elements of distorted history.

The Snowdrop K-drama entails a female freshman college student named Eun Young-ro (Jisoo). She meets an economics student from theUniversity of Berlin named Im Soo-ho (Jung Hae-in). They meet again under different circumstances when she finds him wounded, bloodied, and escaping from government officers in her room.

As the K-drama used the Democratic Movement of 1987 as a premise, Young-ro is under the impression that Soo-ho is a protestor. She and her friends help hide him from the government, who are, in reality, looking for a North Korean spy.

As Young-ro helps Soo-ho mend his wounds, they develop feelings for one another. But their love story becomes betrayal when Soo-ho is revealed to be the spy the government is after.

RELATED: 4 of Kim Seon-hos Most Recognized K-Dramas in His Career Alongside Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha

After the initial controversy over the leaked storyline for Snowdrop, JTBC claimed it would change as the K-drama aired new episodes. One fan on Reddit was disappointed in the cast agreeing to the original script before revisions.

Overall, this cast and crew has just been super insensitive to people whose struggle, fight, and loss all play a role in the freedom that they now experience, said the fan. The fan also noted Jisoos character in the K-drama and one of the reasons why the North-South Korean love story angered fans.

According to the fan, Jisoos character name was changed. But there was one major issue. Jisoos character name is also the name of a real-life protester whose husband got murdered ( yes murdered ) due to being imprisoned, tortured, and malnourished. The reason he was imprisoned was because he was falsely accused as an NK spy, said the fan.

South Koreans have shown their distaste toward using a romance story as the main hook in Snowdrop. In the K-drama, Young-ro, and Soo-ho fall in love at first sight. While the students and Young-ro are aware the government is looking for a spy, Young-ro still believes he is a protestor. As Soo-ho continues his assignment, Young-ros family backstory further complicates things.

RELATED: Snowdrop: Kim Mi-soos Most Profound K-Drama Roles Amid Her Death at Age 29

Besides the complex details of the romance story in Snowdrop, Korean fans showed their concern over another issue. They feared the K-drama showed certain characters in a different light. One fan on Reddit explained, To put it into context: What would be your reaction if you saw a romance Netflix Series that portrays the Nazis as somewhat likable and glorifies them?

The fan explained that the Central/government intelligenceagents tasked with catching North Korean spies in the drama are inaccurate.

They are a group who killed SO many innocent peopleespecially young students at the time who were protesting against the oppression, said the fan. Another fan added that the historical events resulted from college students protesting. The dictator at the time was jailing these students on the false reasoning that they were causing social unrests because they were North Korean spies.

As the petition to have Snowdrop taken off the air was denied by the Blue House, a new petition has surfaced. According to AllKPop, 30 professors and scholars have asked the president ofDisney+ Asia-Pacificto find experts to evaluate the misconstrued historical facts in the drama.

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'Snowdrop': Why The Controversial K-Drama Is Being Called 'Insensitive' Toward Koreans - Showbiz Cheat Sheet