Category Archives: Government Oppression

DeSantis signs LGBTQ+ bills for kids into law

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed bills Wednesday that ban gender-affirming care for minors, target drag shows, restrict discussion of personal pronouns in schools and force people to use certain bathrooms. DeSantis has made anti-LGBTQ+ legislation a large part of his agenda as he prepares to seek the Republican presidential nomination. (May 18)

AP

The NAACP issued a historic travel advisory for Florida over the weekend, listing five laws that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed as policies that were undemocratic and "hostile to Black Americans."

The civil rights group said that Florida has engaged in an all-out attack on Black Americans, accurate Black history, voting rights, members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, womens reproductive rights, and free speech, while simultaneously embracing a culture of fear, bullying, and intimidation by public officials, in the released advisory.

It added that these attacks include criminalizing protests, restricting the ability of educators to teach African-American history and engaging in a war against diversity and inclusion.

NAACP Florida travel advisory: NAACP posts Florida travel warning, warns DeSantis' policies 'hostile to Black Americans'

DEI in Florida: DeSantis' new law defunds DEI programs in Florida state universities. What does it mean?

What you need to know: NAACP says Florida is 'openly hostile' toward African Americans

Jeremy Redfern, the governor's press secretary, responded to the announcement by saying, "This is a stunt."

Here's a deep dive at the five laws the NAACP referenced in its announcement.

DeSantis signed the Combatting Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act into law in 2021, which created new criminal offenses and increased penalties for those who target law enforcement and participate in violent or disorderly assemblies.

This law was ruledunconstitutionalin a 90-page decision by U.S. District Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee.

Whats in Combatting Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act:

New Criminal Offenses to Combat Rioting, Looting and Violence

Who's benefited, who's targeted? Ron DeSantis Florida power play fueling a presidential run

Increased Penalties

Citizen and Taxpayer Protection Measures

Florida immigration law: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs sweeping immigration bill SB 1718 into law. Five takeaways:

What opponents said:

Before the law was ruled unconstitutional, opponents said that the law was unclear and overly vague. For instance, the law wasnt clear on whether a person needed to be participating in a violent act or within the vicinity while protesting to be charged.

This led to warnings that the law could be broadly interpreted by law enforcement. And there was ambiguity surrounding the laws definition of riot, leading to many saying that just participating in a peaceful protest could lead to severe criminal charges.

DeSantis signed HB 7 into law in 2022, and was meant to give businesses, employees, children and families tools to stand up against discrimination and woke indoctrination.

The bill included provisions to prevent discriminatory instruction in the workplace and public schools and defines individual freedoms based on the fundamental truth that all individuals are equal before the law and have inalienable rights, and was meant to take on corporate wokeness and Critical Race Theory in schools in one law.

What does 'woke' mean? What does 'woke' mean and why does Florida Governor Ron DeSantis want to stop it?

Whats in HB 7:

Medical conscience bill: DeSantis signs controversial medical conscience bill, touts Florida as 'Prescribe Freedom' state

What opponents say:

Heres what the ACLU says about the law:

DeSantis signed HB 543 into law in April. The new law strengthened Floridas Second Amendment rights by allowing Floridians to carry concealed weapons without a government-issued permit. It will go into effect on July 1.

Whats in HB 543:

HB 543 is a short bill that does exactly what it says: Allows Florida residents to carry concealed weapons without a government-issued permit.

To carry a concealed weapon or a concealed firearm without a license, the person must still be eligible for a Florida Concealed Weapon or Firearm License based on the outlined criteria in Section 790.06, however, the person is no longer required to complete training or pay a licensing fee.

Here are the criteria highlights:

Find the full listhere.

Florida anti-LGBTQ laws: Four new Florida laws target transgender, broader LGBTQ community. Here's what they do

In May, DeSantis signed HB 266, which prohibits institutions from spending federal or state dollars on discriminatory initiatives like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.

The bill prohibits programs, majors, minors, curriculum and general education core courses that violate Florida law regarding prohibited discrimination or that are based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities.

Whats in SB 266:

What opponents say:

Disney pulls plug on Florida: Yes, Disney pulled plug on $1 billion Florida project but not its future plans. What to know.

SB 7066 was signed into law in 2019 and addressed Amendment 4, which Florida voters passed in 2018, that restored voting rights for some convicted felons. The new law enumerated a uniform list of crimes that fall into the excluded categories and confirmed that Amendment 4 did not apply to a felon who had failed to complete all terms of their sentence.

This law required that people with past convictions must pay all of their outstanding legal fees, costs, fines and restitution before they could regain their right to vote, but U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle found that these requirements violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by discriminating based on wealth.

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Florida's 'hostile' laws? Five laws NAACP listed in travel advisory. - St. Augustine Record

A top Iranian budget official has revealed that President Ebrahim Raisis administration'sfaces a huge budget deficitthis year, despite official assurances.

Rahim Mombeini, the deputy head of Irans Planning and Budget Organization, whose boss was recently sacked by President Ebrahim Raisi, said Saturday that Irans budget deficit for the previous Iranian year which ended on March 20 was about 8,000 trillion rials (about $16 billion in todays exchange rates).

The figure is twice as much as the budget deficit of previous years, despite claims by Raisi administration officials who kept reassuring the nation that the budget did not have a deficit.

According to Mombeini, the amount of the Iranian government debts has increased about 900-fold over the past decade to 30 quadrillion rials, or $60 billion. This would be as much as 850 million barrels, or two years worth of oil exports at normal market prices.

Rahim Mombeini, the deputy head of Irans Planning and Budget Organization

This amount of debt, which is equivalent to 31% of the GDP, includes government debts to banks, the Central Bank of Iran, pension and social security funds, public and private sector contractors, and bonds that have been issued in previous years.

This colossal debt prompts the government to force the Central Bank to print money, leading to further inflation, which in turn forces the government to borrow more money, leading to a vicious circle.

British-Iranian economist Mohammad Hashem Pesaran, a former professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge,has recently warned that the current unstoppable decline in the value of the national currency and haphazard policies of the government is very likelyto trigger mass hyperinflation in Iran.

The former head of the Planning and Budget Organization Masoud Mirkazemi, who was replaced in March, had reacted to reports about a deficit of 4,000 trillion rials, claiming that that those who say there is such a deficitare"wrong" and that "we do not have a deficit at all". Mirkazemiclaimed that 93 percent of the budget was fulfilled in the previous Iranian year that ended on March 20.

Irans currency rial has halved in value since early September and is now trading at more than 500,000 to the US dollar. This immediatelytranslates into higher consumer prices, which have seen double digit annual increases since 2018 when the United States withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear deal and imposed sanctions.

Last week, a news website in Iran quoted a central bank sourceas saying that inflation in the first Iranian month of the year (March 21-April 20) rose by 68.7 compared to the same period last year.

If true, this would representa nearly 20-percentjump compared to the inflation rate last reported by the government in early 2023. The Central Bank of Iran and the Statistical Center of Iran have not released figures on point-to-point inflation for the past two months, comparing prices to the same months in the past year.

The period in question coincides withpersisting low exchange ratesfor the rial. One year ago, the rial was trading at around 300,000 to the dollar, while in early May it dropped to as low as 550,000.

Even though Iran has one of the worlds largest, and most untapped, sources of oil and gas, Iran would need oil priced at $351.7a barrel to balance its budget next year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its latest report released late last month.The current price of Brent Crude, which is way higherthan the OPEC basket, is about $70 per barrel. Add to this the handsome discount the regime has togive to buyers who risk US and international penalties to trade with heavily-sanctionedIran.

Another Iranian website compared the Islamic Republics economic situation to that of the Roman empire just before its collapse. The alarming comparison with the Roman Empire is not too far-fetched, as Iran faces a more immediate danger of rebellion by ever-impoverished masses.

Although large-scale anti-regime protests in the fall of 2022 were driven by social and political oppression, but the current economic crisis was also making hopeless young people restive. Also,labor unrest began to risein 2023, as workers real incomes declined.

See more here:

Iran Faces A Huge Budget Deficit It Tries To Conceal -

File photo (Image: Twitter/@SatyendarJain)

Jailed Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader and former Delhi minister Satyender Jain was taken to the Safdarjung Hospital on Monday from Tihar Jail after he complained of deterioration in his health, party sources said.

Jain was placed under arrest on May 30, 2022 by the ED under Section 19 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal prayed for better health of Jain and accused the Centre of oppression.

I pray to God for the better health of Satyendar Jain ji. The people of Delhi and the country are watching this arrogance and oppression of the BJP government very well. Even God will never forgive these oppressors. The public is with us in this struggle, God is with us, we are the disciples of Sardar Bhagat Singh ji. Our fight against oppression, injustice and dictatorship will continue, Kejriwal said in a tweet in Hindi.

Recently, Jain had consulted a psychologist inside the jail clinic who suggested that he should be around people and have social interactions after the AAP leader mentioned that he was depressed and feeling lonely.

The Supreme Court on Thursday had issued a notice on a bail plea by Satyendar Jain in a money laundering case.

Senior advocate AM Singhvi, representing Jain, submitted before a bench comprising AS Bopanna and Hima Kohli that his client has extreme health problems, he has lost 35 kgs and is a skeleton now.

The apex court issued notice on Jains plea and also gave him liberty to move the courts vacation bench seeking urgent listing of his plea against a Delhi High Court judgment denying him bail. The bench said, Issue noticeliberty to move vacation bencha. Additional Solicitor General SV Raju appeared for the Enforcement Directorate.

The ED had initiated a money laundering investigation on the basis of the FIR registered by the CBI in 2017 under Sections 13(2) read with 13(1)(e) of the PC Act, 1988 against Jain, his wife Poonam, and Ajit Prasad Jain, Sunil Kumar Jain, Vaibhav Jain, and Ankush Jain.

The CBI alleged that Satyendar Jain, while holding the office as a Minister in the Delhi government during February 14, 2015 to May 31, 2017, had acquired assets disproportionate to his known sources of income.

A charge sheet was filed by the CBI on December 3, 2018.

Earlier, the ED had provisionally attached immovable properties worth Rs 4.81 crore belonging to companies beneficially owned and controlled by Satyendar Jain on March 31, 2022.

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Satyendar Jain taken to Safdarjung Hospital after losing 35 kgs - The Statesman

The deepening repression of the far-right Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is providing plenty of reasons for concern. The government has moved to further undermine the judiciary, threatening to leave government decisions entirely untethered from meaningful judicial oversight. It has pursued increasingly deadly raids and continues to expand illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Yet the Western response to these dramatic and dangerous developments has been to recycle long-outdated talking points. Reacting to the latest settlement announcement, the German government, joined by France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, warned in March that the move might "undermine efforts to achieve a negotiated two-state solution."

The Israeli government's conduct certainly provides grounds for condemnation. But ritualistic invocation of the "two-state solution" cannot obscure the fact that for decades, the Israeli government has been expanding the settlements with the aim of making a Palestinian state impossible. It has largely succeeded. The settlements are war crimes, blatant violations of the prohibition in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention on an occupier transferring members of its population to occupied territory.

At some point the International Criminal Court, which has opened an investigation, may prosecute some of the Israeli officials responsible. But the settlements are nonetheless a reality that cannot be wished away. In 2019, a former Israeli soldier from the group Breaking the Silence gave me a hilltop tour of the West Bank to better understand the layout of Israels settlements, outposts, bypass roads, and other obstacles to Palestinians moving freely within their territory.What is left is a Swiss cheese of Palestinian enclaves, with little hope of ever becoming a viable, contiguous state.

Kenneth Roth is the former long-standing executive director of Human Rights Watch.

After more than five decades of occupation and 30 years of the "peace process," it is no longer tenable to regard the repression of Israels occupation as a mere temporary phenomenon to be cured by a "peace process" without end. The "peace process"is moribund. While governments speak of a two-state solution, what we have today is a "one-state reality."Indeed, the main people still invoking the two-state solution seem to be Western officials desperately trying to avoid coming to terms with the unceasing nature of Israeli oppression.

Admittedly, the Palestinian Authority (PA) does not yet speak of a one-state reality. Its officials cling to the illusion of a peace process as the only way to maintain their position of power. Yet the PA has in effect become an Israeli government subcontractor with the task of keeping discontent with Israels repressive occupation in check. The credibility of the government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is also limited by its failure to hold presidential or parliamentary elections since 2006. Along with the Israeli government, it fears that Hamas might win a new election, as it did last time parliamentary elections were held.

If Israel and Palestine are now bound together in a one-state reality, what is that reality? The leading Israeli human rights group, BTselem, and more than two dozen other Israeli groups; the leading Palestinian human rights group, al-Haq, and scores of other Palestinian rights groups; as well as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, United Nations experts, among others, have all concluded that it is apartheid.

This is meant not as an historical analogy to South Africa but as a careful analysis of the facts under the legal definition of apartheid contained in the United Nations convention on the crime of apartheid and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. That definition requires an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another, coupled with systematic oppression and specified inhumane acts, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis.

While there are differences in the scope of the various analyses, all agree that Israeli authorities are committing the crime of apartheid against millions of Palestinians. That has become the mainstream view of every serious human rights organization to have examined the issue. For example, Palestinians in the West Bank including East Jerusalem live with far fewer rights and far greater restrictions than their Israeli neighbors in the settlements next door.

Supporters of the Israeli government cannot avoid acknowledging this discrimination but have tended to dismiss its importance by arguing that it is temporarythat the "peace process" will resolve it. Given the endless "peace process,"with no serious talks in years, that response has long ceased to be credible.

Partisans of the Israeli government also cite Palestinian violence, but the challenge of meeting that violence does not explain building settlements that carve up the West Bankmaking Israelis more vulnerable, not lessstealing Palestinian water and land, or preventing Palestinians in Israeli-controlled parts of the West Bank from even adding a bedroom to their home.

Apartheid is not an easy label to apply, but it is the only fair one to describe the oppressive, discriminatory regime that the Israeli government imposesthe governments policy of privileging Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.

I understand that these are difficult truths for the German government especially to accept. It has understandably felt a special responsibility toward the Jewish people after the Holocaust. As the Federal Foreign Office puts it, "Germany has a unique relationship with Israel. This stems from Germanys responsibility for the Shoah, the systematic genocide of six million European Jews under National Socialism."

Or to put it in more negative terms, Israels far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said in March in response to mild criticism from German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, "The last ones who should be preaching to us are the Germans."

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and her Israeli counterpart Eli Cohen.

As the Jewish son of a father who grew up in Frankfurt and fled to New York as a 12-year-old boy in July 1938, I understand in a personal way the evil that the Nazi regime imposed. German reticence to speak of human rights to Israel is understandable, but today, it is wrong.

It is a mistake to equate the current Israeli government with the Jewish people. Jews took two very different lessons from the Holocaust, only one of which is represented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of extremist ministers.

They believe that the Nazis persecuted the Jews because the Jews were weak. Netanyahu and his ilk have constructed a state that is strong, which is understandable, but also brutal, which is wrong. The message seems to be that if anyone messes with Israel, they will be not only stopped but also crushed. Palestinians under occupation are the main victims of that logic of repression.

The alternative perspective, which I share, is that power is never enough for protection, especially in a world where a single nuclear weapon in the hands of a hostile state could do terrible harm. Rather, we need to build a world in which norms of conduct are strong enough that governments never resort to the mass persecution, let alone mass murder, of people whom they dislike. We need a world in which global pressure against any temptation toward such persecution or slaughter is consistently and intensely applied.

That is why so many Jews have taken as their lesson from the Holocaust the importance of upholding human rights, especially for disfavored minorities. It is why a majority of American Jews disapprove of the Netanyahu governments repressive policies.

These alternative lessons drawn from the Holocaust are not wholly contradictory. Each has an element of truth. Yes, the Israeli government needs a strong military to protect itself. But it also needs strong human rights standards. The Netanyahu governments one-dimensional approach to Israeli securitypower without regard to human rightsis undermining those standards.

The German government should reassess the lessons that it takes from its Nazi history. Feeling a debt toward the worlds Jews should not mean writing a blank check to the Israeli government as it rips up the important rights lessons that should be taken from the Holocaust.

Persecuting Palestinians not only violates basic human rights principles that the German government and its Western partners regularly invoke in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, but it also is not good for the Jews of the world, most of whom live outside of Israel and depend on those norms. And it is not good for Israel, whose security cannot be enhanced by the permanent suppression of the Palestinians with whom it shares a small slice of land.

Apartheid is not a long-term solution. Western governments should say so. The lessons of the Holocaust, far from impeding such candor, compel it.

Read more:

Opinion: Reassessing the approach to Israel | DW | 22.05.2023 - DW

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No serious player really wanted it, so a special counsel gets the tap on the shoulder. Mostly unlimited in scope, budget, and remit, the office has about as long a leash as exists in the current environment. Years upon years of work later, the project releases its final report. One side finds the results indisputably damning. The other insists the damning part is how little was found.

Washington has played out this routine on a loop. First came the release of the Mueller Report. Then, this week, the Durham Report. Each focused on different aspects of the Trump orbits interactions with Russia and the FBI investigation that followed. Muellers report yielded convictions, plea deals, and jail time, but nothing that stuck to Trump. Durhams report yielded two acquittals, one plea deal, and a ton of second guessing. More than anything, both gave partisans fodder for hours of trolling. Taken together, they reveal how our self-perpetuating partisan outrage machinery makes it harder for Washington to get anything constructive done with the fruits of investigations that cost tens of millions of dollars.

Maybe its entirely our fault. We are a suppositioning sort. Where there are blanks, we fill them in, often in ways to match our existing biases. In fact, those vagaries allow many of us to arrive at book club meetings with very different interpretations of the same work based on the assumptions we brought to the plot and characters. The holes actually make for more compelling conversations than the agreed-upon facts.

Its no different in politics, which relies on storytelling as much as policy. The gray area can sometimes be the most colorful.

Special counsel John Durham, who then-Attorney General William Barr tapped to investigate those who had investigated his boss, released his much-awaited final report on Monday. Democrats largely shrugged off its 300 pages of findings as old news, recycled from reports from the Department of Justice inspectors general and three criminal cases that arose from the investigation. (Two of those cases ended in not guilty verdicts; a third defendant pleaded guilty to altering an email for a wiretap application.) Republicans, meanwhile, screamed bloody murder and political oppression so foul that one contender for the White House suggested it was time to dismantle the FBI.

The response has been an almost perfect reflection of the reaction to Robert Muellers two-volume report on the Trump campaigns interactions with Russia. In that case, Democrats spotted sin after sin committed by Trump and his crew while Republicans brushed it off as fake news that was, at best, old. The facts were damning, the indictments seemingly self-writing, the consequences manifestly missing.

None of this is new, and little of it will be surprising for those who have watched special prosecutors wield almost unlimited power to produce lackluster results, time and time again. (Did we learn nothing from the Bill Clinton era?) But that doesnt make the instinctive reaction to such findings any less a threat to society in which facts are ignored in service of a political agenda. While the timing was dodgy, the findings of the FBIs probe of Hillary Clintons private email server were as clear as the Durham and Mueller probesand carrying the same gaps that we tend to fill in with our own armchair indictments. Give us a gap, we will fill it with what we think we already know.

As Durham rightly notes early in his report, efforts to bring criminal charges against anyone based on his investigation would face an uphill trek: The law does not always make a persons bad judgment, even horribly bad judgment, standing alone, a crime, he writes. (Emphasis added.) Nor does the law criminalize all unseemly or unethical conduct that political campaigns might undertake for tactical advantage, absent a violation of a particular federal criminal statute. Finally, in almost all cases, the government is required to prove a persons actual criminal intentnot mere negligence or recklessnessbefore that persons fellow citizens can lawfully find him or her guilty of a crime.

In other words, poor choices alone dont automatically become legally criminal, no matter how much partisan outrage those choices may provoke. We can There Ought To Be a Law things to death, but absent a relevant law, sketchy decisions about doctored, damning, or deleted emails, often skirt by just fine. The wrongdoing can be spelled out as plainly as possible in these reports, but special counsels traditionally have been fairly unsatisfactory, especially when the missing pieces remain in desk drawers and off legislative calendars. Its as if the expired law that made special counsels possible has rotted on the vine, and incompetence seems to breed plenty of reasons to think this is sadly normalizing.

So, as yet another special counsel has found, peopleeven smart people in powerful positionsmake boneheaded decisions. Yet unless theyre explicitly against the law and the fool knows it, those actions dont rise to the level of crime. Add in the question of conviction, and its terribly tough for these special counsels to yield anything approaching anything resembling consequences. Which is why, yet again, partisans will reach for the PDFs of these final reports and sketch their own indictments in the blank spaces. It is a Choose Your Own Adventure approach to political realities, one that may feel good to everyone involved but bad for the larger system, to boot.

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Durham Report Is Latest Choose-Your-Own-Reality Adventure - TIME

When Queen Elizabeth II died, Stan Grant called her the last white Queen. For Grant, the Queen was a bastion of whiteness the suffocating whiteness that justified the invasion of his country and the genocide of his people but those enduring notions of whiteness like Cleopatra or Helen of Troy, [are] now a thing of history. [The Queen] is a relic. It is time to bury her. Not just her body, but the very idea of her. For Grant, and the thousands of First Nations people who continue to be crushed by the empire she symbolised for so many decades, the Queens death is not to be mourned.

Speaking with me, Grant described his powerful new book, The Queen is Dead, as a journey into my history, in which he explores the notion of whiteness a spell, an evil magic that apotheosises empire and genocide. Grant painfully recalls the suffocating oppression of white institutions stories of his grandfather being tied to a tree like a dog by police and left all day without food or water to swelter in the sun, stories of seeing Aboriginal men arrested for drinking alcohol and roped together and marched down the main street of his hometown, stories of family members who died as children, stories of cousins being sent to welfare, stories of aching hunger.

These experiences and stories are not unique. They belong to all of us. They are etched into the collective memory of First Nations people. It is a part of the enduring legacy of empire on this continent. The Queen was heir to that legacy a legacy which enslaved, exploited, and subjugated hundreds of millions of people over many centuries. Grant makes the case that this legacy has left in its wake a world that is politically anxious and lacking a moral core.

Grant explained this to me: My father summed it up for me once. I asked him why he taught our Wiradjuri language to people who arent Wiradjuri. He said that language does not tell you who you are, it tells you where you are. In that simple sentence, he upended everything that Western modernity rests on its all about the individual, all about who you are. The one thing in the heart of this chasm between us is that white Australians constantly ask themselves who they are and never ask themselves where they are. We cling to the Eastern seaboard. We have the flag of England in the corner of our national flag. Weve imported a system of government from another country. We hold onto these vestiges of other places, and never allow ourselves to sink into the ground here.

Grant and I spoke about Country the notion of a place which transcends something as simple as geography. It is who we are, it is everything that we are.

Grant recalled, I was back home recently, and I had this incredible feeling. There was absolutely no separation, not a sliver of light, between Baiame [Wiradjuri creation spirit], me, and the land that I stood on. Thats my relationship to Country. Its the only place that I could ever call home, and Ive found a way of carrying that sense of Country with me wherever I am in the world, and seeing the world through the eyes of a boy raised on that Country.

Grant examines the impact of whiteness and empire around the world. He quotes historian Caroline Elkins in saying that the empires velvet glove contains an all too familiar iron fist. From India to Africa to Ireland, the Pacific, the Caribbean and of course here, Australia, people from the other side of history have felt that fist.

Grant walked me through his writing process, especially the difficulty he faced in reconciling his history with a need to move forward with love the notion embodied by yindyamarra, a word from mine and Grants language of Wiradjuri.

That crown had symbolised so much suffering for our people, and I had to confront that but I had to not lose myself at the same time, said Grant. I found through the book that its a journey from anger to resentment to betrayal, through to love.

For me, writing is an expression of love I dont see any other reason to write. I dont write to slay, I dont write to convince, I dont write to speak back. I just write to find that expression of love that comes from my people to a world that often has never loved us.

I asked Grant about his inspirations those people who must have informed his writing style and the way he approaches storytelling.

James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison these people are really important writers out of the black American tradition that have influenced me. But so have so many others the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, the Polish Nobel laureate Czesaw Miosz, James Joyce may be above all.

All of the writers I have mentioned have emerged from systems of political oppression. [Writing] is finding ourselves free and exploring the dimensions of freedom through language and through stories that allow us to break the chains of our histories, yet still carry who we are in the world. Its an interesting and very delicate balance.

And yet for First Nations writers the pen, the keyboard, the written word are all alien to us. Our culture is one of oral tradition. It is dynamic and alive. Our stories are passed down through generations by word of mouth. I asked Grant how he negotiates this contested space between our peoples traditions and the methods of communication imposed upon us.

I try to incorporate that into the writing process, to get as close to the spoken word and my voice as possible, says Grant. What often happens in the process of writing is that you lose something between our soul and the pen. The act of writing, the mechanical process of it, inevitably gets in the way.

To explore language and writing is an exploration of the soul but its also an act of translation. We try to make ourselves visible to people who cant see us, and translate our experience into a language our oppressors can understand.

Turning from the book to broader political discussions, Grant spoke about his trepidations as Australians face an era-defining referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

For me, quite painfully, it feels like a judgement.I find politics to be a distasteful place. Im not a political person. I like to think Im a poetic person. So for me, increasingly, Im looking less at the referendum and more at the day after. Because irrespective of whether people vote yes or no, we are still going to wake up in a nation still so deeply wounded, and we are all implicated in this moment. We come to it in different ways, but we are going to wake up and well be in the same place asking who we are rather than where we are.

My conversation with Grant took place just days before the coronation of King Charles III. He expressed to me a sense of incredulity and disbelief at the absurdity of this spectacle, this antiquated ceremony of coronation, which has no place in the modern world.

I write in the book that the white Queen is the last white Queen. Yes, King Charles is a white man, but he doesnt occupy the space of whiteness that was so assured throughout the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth. I look at this all through the lens of absurdity, and I see how this speaks only to the past. It does not speak to us today, and it certainly doesnt speak to the future.

In closing, I asked Grant to tell me more about yindyamarra the essence of being at one with your place in the world and how Australians can adopt its tenets at a time where we are more politically divided than ever before.

Its a word that sits deep inside us, says Grant. Its the generosity and the love that comes from our people, even to those who have shown no love for us.

Its a fundamental way of being that allows me to walk down the street in New York or Islamabad or Jerusalem with the same spirit of yindyamarra that I find on my own Country. Its what whiteness has failed to find with all the gifts of modernity, weve become so untethered and alienated from yindyamarra. It is a beautiful and fragile gift from the Wiradjuri people to the world.

For many of us, Grants book will be uncomfortable and difficult reading. In part, because it is always a challenge to look our history in the face and hold our own. But also because we have always been complicit in, and benefited by, the dispossession and genocide of First Nations peoples. We have all, at one time in our lives, bent a knee to the Crown to that iron fist that weighs on the souls of Indigenous people across the world. Grant said to me that his goal in writing The Queen is Dead was to disappear. To become insignificant, and vanish into the world he has woven with his words. And yet, there is a need for all of us to make ourselves significant in this conversation. By asserting ourselves, particularly as First Nations people, we rail against the crushing force of whiteness and empire which was upheld by the steadfast Queen Elizabeth II, and now rests upon the head of her son.

The White Queen is dead. May she be the last White Queen.

Stan will be speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival at Carriageworks in Eveleigh. He will be in conversation at Stan Grant: The Queen is Dead, at 1pm on Friday 26 May; in panel at Coffee & Headlines with the Saturday Paper, at 8:30am on Saturday 27 May; and in conversation at Reckoning, Not Reconciliation, at 2pm on Sunday 28 May. He will also be speaking at PHIVE in Parramatta, for Stan Grant: The Queen is Dead, at 5pm on Saturday 27 May.

See the original post here:

In Conversation with Stan Grant - Honi Soit

Madison Tonight, Representative Mike Bare (D-Verona) voted against the Assembly Republicans rushed proposal to reform local government funding.

For many years, Republicans in the Legislature have taken tools and resources away from local governments that they relied on to succeed. I know from my time as a Verona City Council member and member of the Dane County Board that local governments have been pleading with the Governor and Legislature to positively transform how we fund local governments.

The Republicans plan attaches dozens of strings to the funding that step on local control, further limit crucial powers that public health officers used to keep us safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, undermine local diversity programming, and unnecessarily restrict the states primary environmental stewardship funding program.

A major goal of the Republicans proposal is to ensure the City and County of Milwaukee can succeed financially under the heavy weight of a looming unfunded pension liability. Instead, the Republicans plan perpetuates the systemic and historic oppression of the people of Milwaukee. Ive lived three years of my life in Milwaukee and it holds a special place in my heart. As a State Representative of some of the most privileged communities in this state, I cannot look the other way on that oppression no matter how much more money might be inequitably coming to communities in my district.

Democrats offered amendments that would have given local governments adequate funding without unnecessary strings attached. Assembly Republicans refused to discuss those amendments, walked away from productive negotiations with Democrats in the Legislature and Governor Evers, and rammed through their deeply flawed plan. This was an easy no vote and Im hopeful the Governor and Republicans in the State Senate negotiate a better plan.

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Rep. Bare: Assembly Republicans' local government funding plan is ... - WisPolitics.com

On November 9, 1938, my great-grandfather Hugo was beaten by Nazi paramilitaries and sent to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp forty minutes outside of Berlin. Nearly two years earlier, at the age of sixteen, my grandfather Uli had left Germany by himself to live with family in America. Hugo had been shot in the butt while serving in World War I. He survived, the bullet ripping through his diary and denting the canteen in his back pocket, and his status as an injured World War I veteran protected our family from some of the earliest anti-Jewish laws following Adolf Hitlers ascent to power in 1933. But as conditions progressively worsened and Uli could no longer attend school, his family thought it best to get him out of the country.

Hugo was one of thirty thousand Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps between November 9 and 11, 1938. Days earlier, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish-Jewish refugee living in Paris, assassinated a German diplomat. Germans responded by imposing collective punishment on Germanys Jewish population, staging a state-backed pogrom infamously known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. German mobs set ablaze and broke the windows of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues, blanketing the streets with shattered glass while assaulting and arresting Jews en masse.

A Christian colleague successfully secured Hugos release two weeks later, and Hugo was immediately rushed to a hospital due to internal bleeding from multiple beatings. In 1939, Hugo, my great-grandmother Lotte, and my grandfathers twin sister, Isa, escaped to England. Lotte died from cancer in England before the war was over, and Uli never saw her again.

They were some of the lucky ones. Millions of other European Jews would be arrested and sent to concentration camps, used for slave labor, and ultimately exterminated in the Nazi governments Final Solution.

Following the Nazi Holocaust, the phrase never again has been deployed to insist that the world learned its lesson during World War II and would never again let such a horrific crime happen. For the Zionist movement, this collective trauma and moral imperative provided a powerful ideological bulwark in achieving its goal of building a Jewish nation-state in historic Palestine.

In practice, this has meant a staunch defense of Israel and its apartheid state, erasing the violent settler-colonialism at the heart of its founding and continued oppression of Palestinians. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), for instance, lists among its examples of antisemitism, denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Growing up as the descendent of a Holocaust survivor and in a Jewish community committed to social justice, I also regularly heard the refrain never again. But instead of being used as an ideological cover to shield from criticism of Israeli apartheid and the ongoing military occupation of Palestine, it instilled in me a duty to fight racism and oppression wherever it sprouts its head.

My father became a rabbi, leading our New York City congregation with a social justice ethos. Following my graduation from our Bar Mitzvah program, I became a teaching assistant in our synagogues Sunday school for five years, spending most of that time educating sixth graders on the history of antisemitism and the Jewish response to poverty. When Donald Trump initiated his Muslim ban, our congregation mobilized in protest, my father carrying a homemade cardboard sign that read, My father was a refugee too.

This form of never again has also pointed me to look at Israel, but not in its defense. As I grew older, it became clear that the country that claimed to represent me in the name of the horrors my family went through was founded upon and remains propped up by an ongoing ethnic cleansing. In a painful twist of historical irony, large sections of a historically displaced and oppressed group have interpreted that groups traumatic past as an imperative to repeat the same crimes it once faced. And just as never again has acted as an ideological underpinning of Israels settler-colonial project, it has been used to dismiss critics of Israel as no better than the Nazis.

But if there is any comparison to be made with the Nazis, it is not with the critics of Israel but the Israeli state itself. Not only was Israel founded upon decades of militia and state violence, and the expulsion and ghettoization of its Palestinian population, but over the past few years, the Israeli government has careened even further to the right, resembling more and more the Nazi regime from which my family fled.

Nazi comparisons should never be made lightly. But the idea that many of my people have become the same monsters from whom my grandfather fled has become harder and harder for me to stomach. If never again is to mean anything, it must require action right now in Palestine.

The colonization of Palestine began in earnest in 1897, with the founding of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Political Zionism was rooted in two reactionary ideologies. First, an ethnonationalist pretext similar to the Nazis Blood and Soil, identifying an innate connection between a diasporic Jewish people and our biblical home. Second, it was built on, and in turn inspired, other European settler-colonial projects and collaborated with European imperial powers. From the start, Political Zionism advanced demographic and territorial maximization, seeking to establish a Jewish majority and control all the land in historic Palestine.

The world-historic tragedy of the Holocaust renewed international support for a Jewish nation-state. Following the 1947 UN partition plan, Zionist militias began campaigns of ethnic cleansing, expelling three hundred thousand Palestinians from the land designated for Israel. This mass ethnic cleansing provoked the intervention of neighboring Arab countries, and by the end of the war, seven hundred fifty thousand Palestinians had been removed from their land, hundreds of towns were destroyed, and thousands were massacred. Through this mass expulsion a historic event Palestinians term Al Nakba, the Catastrophe the modern state of Israel was born.

Following the Six-Day War, Israel came to occupy the rest of Palestine, taking military control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, a military occupation that continues to this day. Despite multiple decades of military rule, expanding settlements, and a Jim Crowlike apartheid regime for Palestinians, Israel has been heralded by the United States as a democratic beacon in the Middle East, and any criticism of Israel, no matter how tame, has been decried as antisemitic, citing the Shoah as proof of the Jewish states historical necessity and infallibility.

But over the past few years, the countrys liberal-democratic facade has come undone as it has lurched even further to the right. In 2018, Israel further cemented Jewish supremacy in its Nation-State Law, officially demoting Palestinians to second-class citizens. In the ensuing years, the Israeli military has escalated its bombing campaigns on the Gaza Strip, increased its assaults on Muslim worshipers in the Al Aqsa mosque, and last year even assassinated the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Somehow, the Israeli government inaugurated this past December is even worse, embracing an explicitly fascist politics and orienting toward the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The parallels between Israels race-based occupation and the Nazi government are far too abundant to ignore, especially for those of us who grew up with a deep and painful connection with the Holocaust. Just as Germans acted in collective revenge against German Jews on Kristallnacht, in late February, Israeli settlers laid siege to the town Huwara and surrounding villages in the West Bank, punishing the Palestinian residents for the murder of two settlers earlier in the day. Jewish mobs burned down Palestinian homes, businesses, and even a school, and assaulted Palestinians, injuring hundreds and killing at least one.

The violence on display was so disturbing, even Israeli commentators compared the night to Kristallnacht. In response to the bloody events, Israels finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called on Huwara to be wiped out, while insisting that the military should take on the job, not vigilantes.

Alongside the rise of the Israeli far right has been an immense increase in settler and state violence. In 2015, settlers set fire to two Palestinian homes, murdering an eighteen-month-old Palestinian baby, burning him alive. In many towns, Israel Defense Force soldiers have stood by as settlers have attacked Palestinians, while in other cases theyve protected settlers or joined in on the assaults. In 2022 alone, one hundred fifty Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the deadliest year for Palestinians under the occupation since 2004, which is already being quickly outpaced by 2023s death toll.

The parallels between the Nazi regime and Israel dont stop at their similar embrace of state-backed race-based mob violence. Millions of Palestinians under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza live under a system of Jim Crow, barbed wire, checkpoints, and restricted movement. These features, not bugs, of Israeli society have created a military occupation in which the residents of the Gaza Strip live in conditions eerily similar to those imposed on the Jews confined in the Nazis Warsaw Ghetto.

The comparison between Gaza and Warsaw is not new but bears repeating. In 1940, the Nazi occupation established the Warsaw Ghetto to sequester and imprison Jews within the Polish city. At its height, the ghetto, which spanned just over 1.3 square miles, was home to nearly half a million Jews confined in subhuman conditions. The Nazis established a barricade to restrict the movement of its inhabitants, and denied the Jews living there sufficient food, water, health care, energy, and supplies.

The German occupiers killed the ghettos Jewish population indiscriminately, leading to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a last-ditch revolt to prevent their peoples extermination. Though the uprising was brutally suppressed, the world honors the Jewish freedom fighters who fought the Nazi regime and whose martyrdom is a reminder of the fight against oppression and tyranny.

While the Israeli government does not have the same orientation toward the systematic mass execution of Palestinians as the Nazi regime established against Europes Jews, the parallels between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza Strip are uncanny. Just as in the German occupation of Warsaw, the Israeli occupation of Gaza restricts its Palestinian populations movement, confines them to dense living quarters, and denies them access to basic needs. These severe conditions are exacerbated by regular bombing campaigns and military assaults on the population-dense Gaza Strip, which destroy civilian infrastructure like homes, offices, pipelines, and sewage treatment and have killed thousands of civilians.

The open-air prison environment in Gaza and pogroms in the West Bank are part of an overarching system of apartheid with de jure and de facto segregation, a state commitment to Jewish supremacy, and the domination of Palestinians. Jews like myself who have no roots in Israel have the right to return and become Israeli citizens, while millions of Palestinian refugees round the world cannot return to their ancestral home. And in Israels deeply undemocratic society, Palestinians under military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank have no say in the government that controls their daily lives.

In recent years, Israel has further enshrined explicit racial hierarchy and oriented toward eliminating Palestines Arab population to ensure a permanent Jewish majority. Palestinians are harassed out of their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Right-wing politicians like Smotrich call to wipe out Palestinian towns, while other fascists like Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the illegal settler movement, have been given crucial state positions like security minister. Ben-Gvir has called for establishing a ministry to encourage the emigration [from Israel] of enemies and people who are disloyal to the state not dissimilar from the Jewish emigration encouraged by the Nazis before implementing their Final Solution.

While those of us in the United States hope to see more democratic oversight over our reactionary courts, in Israel, the Right seeks to circumvent the last checks on their genocidal program. In many ways, the Nakba has never ended, and the full goals of Zionism will never be achieved until the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the river to the sea is complete. The new Israeli government is hoping to fulfill that mission.

Ben-Gvir and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus right-wing government have provoked a series of unprecedented protests from Israels secular liberal society in defense of an independent judiciary against the governments recent attacks. Protesters have limited their dissent to opposing what they view as the erosion of liberal norms within Israeli society. Its encouraging to see Jewish revolt against the Israeli government. But the protests near-silence on Israeli apartheid is glaring, especially given the governments objectives in attacking the courts, blaming them for blocking the governments ability to demolish terrorists houses, [revoke] the rights of terrorists families, reimplement the death penalty for terrorists, and [give] soldiers immunity.

While protesters declare theyre out in defense of a democratic and Jewish state, a democratic and Jewish state in Palestine are incompatible. As Peter Beinart writes in the New York Times, Democracy means government by the people. Jewish statehood means government by Jews. In a country where Jews comprise only half of the people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the second imperative devours the first.

Israeli democracy is all the more an illusion when you consider the millions of Palestinian refugees who are still waiting on their right of return as Israel continues to displace more and more Palestinians. Despite what the protesters might claim, Israels latest right-wing government is not anathema to Israeli values; its the inevitable outgrowth of Zionisms Blood and Soil ideology.

Observing the protests, I couldnt help but be reminded of Martin Niemllers famous poem First They Came in which Niemller describes standing on the sidelines as the Nazis attacked one group at a time. By the end of the poem, no one is left to speak out for Niemller as the Nazis come for him. After decades of complicity in the expansion of Israeli apartheid, no one is left to speak for liberal secular Israelis as Netanyahu consolidates his power and establishes a fascist regime.

Despite the glaring similarities between the Israeli government and the Nazi regime from which my family fled, for decades, my family and peoples experience has been wielded in defense of Israels systematic racial oppression. This cynical deployment of identity politics has been used to denounce the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, blacklist pro-Palestinian academics, and smear anti-apartheid politicians like the UKs Jeremy Corbyn and Minnesotas Ilhan Omar as antisemitic. And to punish and intimidate pro-Palestine organizers, Canary Mission, a right-wing site devoted to documenting anti-Israel activism, routinely publishes the personal information of Palestinian activists, students, professors, and Jewish allies.

These defenses of apartheid and ethnic cleansing under the guise of fighting antisemitism have always deeply disgusted me as a descendent of Holocaust survivors. As a people whose history has been defined by displacement, we should, more than anyone, empathize with and stand in solidarity with those displaced by settler colonialism. Instead, too many Jews see our peoples freedom as contingent on the ongoing oppression of Palestinians.

My familys history taught me to stand up in defense of the exploited and oppressed. Yet mainstream Jewish institutions tell the world that to be a real Jew is not to be a defender of the oppressed but of apartheid. As a Jew, simply speaking out against Israels racism and brutal violence against Palestinians elicits accusations of forsaking my people and the label of self-hating Jew. My mom recently told me a story about attending a Humanistic Jewish conference during the Second Intifada where she was attacked as a traitor for simply saying if we believe in equal rights for all people, we believe in equal rights for all people.

Ironically, the Anti-Defamation League even recently denounced some of the liberal Zionist protests in Israel as antisemitic. Seeing this, I couldnt help but laugh just as in Niemllers poem, many supporting the protests had used the same denunciations against me and other Jews and non-Jews for our criticisms of Israel.

Despite the dominant narrative by Israel and its powerful lobbying institutions like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that deploy Jewish identity in support of apartheid, Judaism has a long history of fighting oppression and exploitation. Throughout the nineteenth century, the majority of European Jews rejected Zionism and instead embraced working-class socialist internationalism. These Jews recognized their liberation as wrapped up in the liberation of all of humanity, identified class society and capitalism as the culprit for social ills and antisemitism, and fought to transform the world rather than retreat from it. I embrace their Judaism.

Rabbi Hillel asks us, If not now, when?, imploring Jewish people to fight injustice, an imperative I internalized from a young age. Our peoples centuries of oppression and struggle for freedom has only strengthened this resolve. In the face of a fascist Israeli government, we must recognize that Palestinian freedom and Jewish freedom are inextricably linked, and that freedom cannot be achieved until there exists one free and democratic state for Jews and Palestinians. The struggle to make never again a reality is far from over.

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Never Again Is Right Now in Palestine - Jacobin magazine