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onemomstrash · 1 year ago

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The Ethics of Reselling

As a parent, you always want to lead a positive example for your kids. Most subjects and lessons aren't black and white - there are pros and cons to consider and sometimes you have to step back and calculate what does more harm than good. Reselling is no exception.

If you're new to reselling, you may not know that there is a hotly debated question that every reseller needs to think about: Is it ethical to purchase items from a thrift store to resell, or should thrift store goods be reserved for low-income shoppers who plan to use the items for themselves.

No one can answer this question without some bias. Your current and past personal finances, attitude about money, location, and more are going to affect how you feel about it. As you've probably figured out, I consider the pros of reselling to far outweigh the negatives, which is why I feel good about reselling in order to support my family.

But if you browse Reddit (as I do daily) for posts about reselling, you'll see many like this one from r/ThriftStoreHauls in December 2022: "Reselling goes against what thrifting is really all about and resellers have damn near ruined thrifting. The 'side hustle' is killing the hobby and killing a place for people with low income to buy half decent clothes."

I want to cover the pros and cons of reselling and point out some things to consider when thinking about the ethics of shopping at thrift stores and reselling.

Reselling Keeps Items Out of Landfills

Global warming - heard of it? Consumption and waste is a massive issue today, and the best ways to cut down on waste are to 1) avoid buying more stuff and 2) reuse the stuff you already have.

According to TheRoundUp.org, the world produces 92 million tons of JUST textile waste per year, with China contributing 20 million of that and the U.S. contributing 17 million. 66% of unwanted clothing ends up in the landfill, with less than 15% of it being recycled and 19% of it burned.

That's a TON of waste.

A lot of textile waste from developed countries is also sent to Africa or Asia. This is often referred to as a "gift" to these areas when in reality the textiles are often unusable, causing communities to have to figure out how to dispose of them. As you can read in this Greenpeace article, textile waste is literally sitting along African riverbanks because there is no other way to deal with it. With so many cheap clothing options being sent to these regions, textile waste is also crushing local textile markets with consumers choosing cheap prices over quality.

Resellers keep items from making their way to the landfill - and global riverbanks. And since we are talking about oversupply...

Most Thrift Stores Do Not Have An Issue of Low Inventory - Rather the Opposite

I'm not quite sure where the myth that there is not enough to go around when it comes to thrift stores came from - but it's absolutely a myth. Sure, there may be a limited number of designer items available at low thrift store prices, but when it comes to functional, warm, stylish clothing, thrift stores are literally overflowing.

Anyone who has ever been to the Goodwill Bins can attest to this. At the bins, donated items are dumped into large bins, where shoppers can sort through and pick up what they want, then pay per pound for their treasures. Certain larger items may be a higher, flat, price, but the general pricing for bin items is between $1 and $2 per pound.

Thrift stores get so many donations, that the goods are often not even sorted before heading right to the bins, meaning that they are never looked through in order for workers to pull items to sell at Goodwill retail stores. Because of this, you often have a better chance of finding designer goods at the cheap Goodwill bins than Goodwill retail stores, as many designer items are pulled from retail stores in order to be sold online at Goodwill auctions.

Many resellers are also niche resellers. They might focus on selling vintage, designer, or band tees. Some of the most popular and well-loved clothing and shoe brands don't resell for much, which means that they are often untouched by resellers. These items still provide warmth, comfort, and functionality, and are ALL over thrift stores. I've never been to a thrift store that wasn't filled with American Eagle jeans in a variety of sizes and Gap sweaters in tons of colors! I could easily take another reseller friend and a non-reseller friend with me to the thrift store, and all of us would find things to buy while leaving plenty for others.

Since I brought up bins pricing, I feel I need to mention a thrift store pricing reality:

The Goal of Most Thrift Stores is NOT to Provide Low-Priced Goods

Many thrift stores' main goal is to fund initiatives like career growth, NOT to provide low-priced items to shoppers. Even Goodwill, probably the first name you think of when you hear thrift store, has this as a mission statement:

"Goodwill® works to enhance the dignity and quality of life of individuals and families by strengthening communities, eliminating barriers to opportunity, and helping people in need reach their full potential through learning and the power of work."

Their #1 goal is to earn money, and resellers often spend more at thrift stores than regular shoppers. Browse through the Reddit thread I linked above, and you'll see a comment from a thrift store worker who said that they are a top three store in their region largely due to sales to resellers. Resellers keep thrift stores in business so that they can reach their goals and still continue to offer items at reasonable prices for low-income shoppers.

Resellers CAN Inflate The Prices of Sought-After Items - But So Can Thrift Stores

I often see resellers being blamed for inflated thrift store prices. People believe that because resellers are selling brands for resale-level prices and making content in order to promote brands that they like to pick up, they are giving thrift stores all of the information they need in order to mark up prices.

But here is the thing: Thrift stores are in charge of their own pricing. They may see that a brand is selling for hundreds online and then decide to price their item at hundreds as well - but this is a corporate choice. They get free donations, and they obviously want to profit off of these donations in order to stay in business, but sometimes their markup can get pretty ridiculous. I've seen my fair share of items that still have tags selling for $5 at the thrift when I can clearly see the original $3 price tag. Sometimes this pricing can benefit us as buyers, as overpriced and unsold items also often end up at the Goodwill bins to be sold by the pound.

Under this heading is also where I want to mention a type of reselling that I personally don't find to be ethical at all: The buying up of retail items such as medical equipment, basic necessities, or children's Christmas gifts to be resold at a profit.

Almost every Black Friday, I see someone with a pallet of the season's hottest toys and get embarrassed that they call themselves resellers. Last year it was Magic Mixies that started to pop up for triple the cost once they sold out of stores. The year before that, parents couldn't get a hold of Cocomelon dolls. During the pandemic, you had people marking up toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and other things that people needed to stay safe and healthy. To me, this is a completely different type of reselling and one that I can't support. If you're willing to have someone become ill or ruin a child's Christmas morning because you wanted to make a fast and high profit, I don't consider you a reselling peer.

Reselling Isn't Just Selling

It's hunting for the right items. It's washing and stain-treating them. It's mending holes or tie-dyeing away stains. It's steaming and photographing and listing and shipping. Reselling might be fun to those of us who do it, but it's also WORK. No reseller is sourcing for inventory and then laying around watching the money roll in. Many reselling skeptics will say that they feel it's okay to upcycle thrifted goods, but much of the work of reselling goes unnoticed. But this work is important! Often the difference between something heading to a landfill vs. heading to a new home after it sells on Poshmark is a deep cleaning and someone to believe in it.

Low-Income Shoppers May Not Be Able to Make it to the Thrift Store in Time to Nab Treasures

One of the most complicated aspects of reselling ethics is that there are so many factors related to someone's opportunity to shop and the amount of money they can spend. At what point does someone no longer qualify as low-income? Is it ethical for someone in poverty to start reselling in order to improve their financial situation? And does everyone have the same opportunity to shop for the same goods?

The answer to that last one is a complicated no. The area you live in is going to affect what is available at your thrift stores. This is the case when it comes to the quality of the items and the kind of items. A higher-income area will often have higher-dollar items donated. A store in the south will probably not be a great place to source for outerwear.

Schedules also play a big role in reselling. The more time you have to browse thrift stores, the more opportunity you have to source something good. I've seen many people point out that low-income shoppers also often work longer hours or multiple jobs, meaning that they have less free time to spend finding deals at the thrift store. Again, something I feel needs to be mentioned in order to paint the picture that reselling is a gray area.

Some People Want Thrifted Items but Don't Want to Thrift

I feel like it's not talked about enough that thrifting just isn't for everyone. It's time-consuming. It's overwhelming. It takes a lot of knowledge in order to make good buys. And sometimes it's just plain gross. I LOVE it, but if I didn't love it, I would absolutely buy from a reseller in order to get something I really wanted without all of the searching and cleaning. Luckily, I find that this is how most non-thrifters look at thrifted goods: I'm happy to pay a price we agree upon, especially because I didn't have to go hunting in a basement to find it.

Reselling Offers a Flexible Way for People to Earn Income

I started reselling 6 years ago when my son was about 6 months old. I was not living in poverty. We had just made the decision that I would be a stay-at-home mom because my mental health was struggling postpartum. Most of this was because I was working for a startup that offered me almost no resources as a new mom. I didn't get any paid maternity leave. They chose not to bring me on as a salaried employee but rather keep me on as a contractor so that they would not have to offer me benefits. I worked from home, which seemed like an amazing deal for a new parent, but they expected the baby to not be seen or heard. I was trying to do the bulk of my work at night, which meant that I handed the baby off to my husband when he got home and locked myself in my office.

Eventually, we couldn't take it anymore, and he told me I could quit. Because we were planning on me working, we had not been saving up for this transition. We very abruptly lost more than 33% of our household income and had a new baby who needed lots of things. So I started to shop for baby clothes at thrift stores. One day I found a nice pair of shoes that weren't his size, but they were SUCH a great deal. They were priced at $3 and I knew my in-laws had recently bought him a pair at the retail cost of $45. I decided to see if I could earn a little bit from them, went home to make an eBay account, and sold them the next morning for $15.

That's how it all started.

I could go on all day about how our country treats new mothers, but I'll focus on the fact that it is REALLY hard to be a mom and earn any kind of money. Whether you're a working mom who is having a hard time balancing it all, a stay-at-home mom who is struggling with not contributing financially, or a mom who just simply wants to earn some extra income for a special trip, new stove, or kids' activities, I love the flexibility that reselling has given me, and I want to help women make it work for them too. When I decided to stay home with my son, it was the first time that I hadn't worked since I was 15 and the first time I was financially dependent on someone since I was 18. That was tough for me. Until I discovered reselling, I felt like the only way to spend time with my kids and make money was to join a sketchy MLM and work for pennies while never looking away from my phone.

I'm happy that I found another option.

I'd love for this to be a post I come back to over and over again to edit. For it to be an accurate and insightful take on the ethics of reselling. So I'd love for you to drop your comments below and keep the conversation going.

#thrifting #thrift finds #reselling #secondhand #thrifted

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arafatshouvo · 1 year ago

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Bromo-dragonfly drug in powder. The contrast between what is viewed as a 'protected' portion and a deadly portion is

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nihongotravel · 2 years ago

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Let’s get started!

The culture I will be studying will be Japan. From a young age I have always been deeply fascinated by Asian cultures. This mostly comes from an incessant need to breach cultures and ideas outside my own. The first time school had seriously acknowledged other cultures in a somewhat unbiased and academic approach was my 7th grade world history class. Before that, any curiosities I had were sequestered to short themed days, countries in the context of wars America had some participation in, and independent study. It was my favorite class as I got a break from the previous straight 6 years of our Civil and Revolutionary war being shoved down my throat, and actually got to learn and appreciate something new outside my radar. It was like the breath of fresh air I needed to invigorate my academic need to learn again, that is, until the next year when I was shoved right back into another basic U.S. history class. Don’t get me wrong, history of any sort is fascinating to me, but when the same facts and people and quizlets are thrown at you year after year after year, you start to get cabin fever in your own country.

After that, I took every class I could learning about countries outside my own, whatever I could get my greedy little hands on. And because European countries were so close to what I was already familiar with, or at least were touched upon a lot more, I tended to stray further into territories I was much less accustomed to. These would be areas like South America, Africa, and territories of south and east Asia. My freshman year of high school I was extremely lucky to have been offered Japanese classes as a second language elective. The next year it was taken away, but a few more motivated of us partitioned the school to allow us to shuttle to the other high school just so we could continue on to Japanese 2, even being on a second bell schedule. Unfortunately, they did not allow us to do this a third time, but with the basics down, I was able to continue my studies on my own, albeit, with much more difficulty and not nearly as much cultural guidance.

Cut to today where I am majoring in both medical science and psychology, and am hoping to get a certificate in teaching English as a foreign language just so that I can go to Japan to teach, hopefully picking up where I left off in my own studies of that culture and language while I’m at it. As stated earlier, there is still so much I have yet to learn about Japan, and I’m hoping that through this blog I’ll be a bit more prepared in making my move there one day.

Some of the biggest aspects I already about are the language system, comprised of three separate alphabets, each with its own letters/symbols and uses. We have Hiragana, typically the first alphabet taught to school children, which has all the basic sounds of their language in an easy-to-use, streamlined alphabet. Then there’s kanji, which has about the same number of letters and most of the same sounds as hiragana, with the exception that it’s aimed at the phonics of foreign words they’ve picked up for their own usage, (examples being words like: パン pan, which is Spanish for bread, or ホットドッグ “ho-todo-gu” Or hotdog in English!) The last alphabet is that of Kanji, which is the hardest to master and can change its meaning and sounds based solely off of whatever to put next to it. It’s based on an old Chinese picture alphabet and consists of thousands of characters that even Japanese locals have a hard time with because of just how vast it is. These three alphabets make up the basics of the Japanese language system, and just like Americans, they have their own form of fancy letter form Caligraphy they pride themselves on! (https://learnjapanese123.com/japanglish-katakana-words/ for more examples and information)

Outside of its language, Japan has many branches of culture that range and vary wildly to make up its own unique people. Because of its island set-up, fish and rice is the main staple in many of their main dishes. Their clothing ranges from intricate patterns, robes, and silks and unique jewelries. From its Shinto 70.5% and Buddhist 67.2%t-based religions to its numerous seasonal festivals and unique holidays, Japan has a vibrant and noble culture that has a little of something for everyone. (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/japan/#people-and-society)

In studying other cultures, we do so from the perspective of their own culture, meaning that typically what is written down and recorded will undoubtedly be biased either in the way of how that culture wants to portray itself, or the somewhat ignorant version of the person exploring said culture for the first time through their own cultural lens. To avoid these biases, I aim to get my information from a variety of sources and from people from a variety of backgrounds, so that I may come to my own conclusions.

#travel #japan #japanese #learning #travel blog #Buddhism #shintoism #katakana #hirogana

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benevolentbirdgal · 4 years ago

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“Thirteen” Tips on Writing Jewish Characters / Some Jewish Identity Stuff Explained

So you want to write a Jewish character, but don’t want to write a caricature? Or are worried they won’t register as Jewish to readers, or something will be off or wrong? Well I, friendly (virtual) neighborhood Jewish professional, am here to help!

Note: The Jewish community is made up of roughly 14 million people worldwide with all sorts of backgrounds, practices, life circumstances, and beliefs. I’m just one American Jew, but I’ve had exposure to Jewishness in many forms after living in 3.5 states (at several different population densities/layouts), attending Jewish day school and youth groups, doing Jewish college stuff, and landing a job at a Jewish non-profit. I’m speaking specifically in an American or Americanish context, though some of this will apply elsewhere as well.

Let’s start with the word “Jew.” It’s not inherently a slur, but can absolutely be used as one. I am a Jew. You can call me a Jew, just not a Jew. Like most minority groups, there are slurs against us, but Jew is the proper demonym. It can be used disrespectfully as a noun, but isn’t inherently disrespectful. Think “Chava is a Jew” versus “You’re being such a Jew.” 1a. Any use of Jew as a verb by gentiles (non-Jews) is not okay. Your Jewish characters should be horrified by someone telling them they “Jewed down the price.” 1b. Any use of Jewess by gentiles is not okay and your Jewish character should not be cool with it. 1c. Many Jews would actively prefer to be called such because that’s what we are and “Jewish person” is stepping away from our Jewishness. But I get that not everybody is going to be comfortable calling us Jews. That’s okay, and “Jewish person/people” or “X is Jewish” is TOTALLY ACCEPTABLE. 1d. With that said, Jewish people refers to ourselves as Jews. If Sarah is Jewish but is squicked about referring to herself as a Jew, your Jewish readers will immediately know she’s written by a gentile. 1e. Actual slurs against Jews is a post for another time (did you know K*ke literally means circle?).

Your Jewish-American character likely does not speak Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, or any other Judeo-Language (languages that are a mix of Hebrew and at least one other language, typically written in the Hebrew abjad). Three notes on this, however: 2a. If your character is an immigrant or the child of an immigrant, they might speak the Judeo-language of the old country. The most common will be Israeli-Americans speaking Hebrew, but families still speaking Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and other families do still exist. The children of Jewish immigrants might also speak another language that isn’t a Jewish one, like Russian or Spanish. 2b. If they are in a VERY religious Ashkenazi community, they might speak Yiddish at home and in the community. 2c. Odds are decent, however, that your American Jew can read but not understand Hebrew. If your character went to Jewish Day School or Yeshiva, they definitely read Hebrew, and will have some understanding of it (but likely not fluency).

Despite what I just said above, your Jewish-American character likely drops a lot of Yiddish words and phrases into their day-to-day speech. Which words/phrases in probably a list for another time, but the most common will be foods, family names (i.e. “Zayde” instead of Grandpa), and sassy expressions. They may incorporate some Hebrew to a lesser extent.

There’s not just one version of kosher. There’s kosher, kosher-style, Halav Yisrael, glatt kosher, etc. Depending on your character’s level of kosher, they’ve need a hecksher (kosher mark) on any given item or only eat at kosher restaurants, although not all Jews keep kosher and many keep “kosher-style” (i.e. only eat theoretically kosher things).

Your Jewish character should be a whole character, both in general and in relation to their Jewishness. This means, among other things, that they aren’t obsessed with Israel and I/P discourse one way or the other and that while writing you remember that not all Israelis are Jews and not all Jews are Israelis. Your Jewish character is not constantly agonizing over the I/P situation, has a life outside of their Jewishness, and shouldn’t be a cardboard stand-in for your desire to discuss the middle east.

The Jewish experience varies dramatically with geography. Jews living in Omaha, Richmond, Philly, Kansas City, Boca Raton, and New York City are all American Jews. They will have drastically different Jewish experiences. I strongly recommend doing research on the Jews in the specific place your story takes places, but generally: 6a. The closer you are to the northeast coast and NYC (except south Florida) the better and more varied your Jewish resources. 6b. NYC has the highest Jewish population of any city on the planet. Big cities like Boston, Chicago, and L.A., as well as just outside of NYC in NJ and NYS, and suburban/exburb south Florida will have lots of Jewish resources: day schools (Jewish + secular education mix), maybe Yeshivas (Jewish focus), multiple synagogues, a Jewish Community Center, Jewish dating services, social stuff, Jewish charities, and youth activities. Your character will have other Jewish friends and their gentile friends will likely know other Jews. Antisemitism is still a problem and usually takes the form of excluding Jews from activism, thinly-veiled stereotyping or excusing antisemitism from people from other oppressed groups, but it’s usually not as overt as elsewhere. Almost always safe to disclose Jewishness. 6c. Small and mid-size cities Denver, Virginia Beach, Charleston, and Harrisburg will have a JCC or Jewish federation, multiple synagogues, and maybe a Jewish day school. Your character is not the only Jew their gentile peers have met, but the bagels are meh. They will have other Jews to bond and commiserate with. Antisemitism here is mostly like that in big cities with occasional burst of overt incidents and attacks. It is generally physically safe for them to disclose Jewishness. 6d. Big towns and small cities in the south or mid-west will have maybe one synagogue - probably reform or Chabad. Your character will have to seek out Jewish spaces, but they will be easy to find. They will not be everybody’s First Jew, but it will be unusual. Antisemitism here is mostly overt - most of the antisemites your character deals with will be very obvious and many will be violent. Jews in such situations will not hide their Jewishness per se, but will be more selective in choosing to disclose it. 6e. Rural areas and small-small towns will not have a synagogue. Your character and their family may be the only Jews or there might be a small group that meets on occasion or carpools to the nearest synagogue. They will have to actively seek out the others Jews and they will be difficult to find. Disclosing their Jewishness is a serious consideration and not always safe. Odds are they are many people’s First Jew, which gets really weird real fast. Beyond the harmless ignorant-but-trying-to-learn-from-their-first-Jew types your character will interact with, there’s also violent and overt antisemitism here. 6f. If your character is in college, they will likely have a Chabad and/or a Hillel on campus if they are at a large school or a school with a significant Jewish population.

Related: when Jews meet each other for the first time, a game of “Jewish geography” ensues as they try and trace people they know in the other person’s state/city/community.

Jews come in all shapes, colors, sizes, genders, sexualities, politics, and religious beliefs. There are all sorts of Jewish people with tons of different intersecting identities. Don’t box yourself in to writing one kind of Jew. Just research a ton on the particular subsection of the Jewish community your character is a part of - a Mizrachi-Jewish Persian-American bisexual woman is going to have a different experience than a straight Ethiopian-American Jewish man who is going to have different experience from a queer Ashkenazi-Jewish-American girl with non-Jewish family. 8a. Jews with Ashkenazi (eastern/northern European) ancestry and customs are the biggest group in the U.S., but by no means the only group or representative of every Jew. Sephardi (Spanish/southern European/north Africa), and Mizrachi (north Africa and the middle east) are the next biggest groups. It would not be unusual for your character to have Polish-Jewish, Iraqi-Jewish, Moroccan-Jewish, or Russian Jewish ancestry or a mix. 8b. Each of these groups have their own customs, Judeo-languages, local holidays, and local historic tragedies. Generally, historic Sephardi communities were linked between themselves, historic Ashkenazi communities were linked between themselves, and historic Mizarchi communities were linked between themselves. The three had some, but limited contact. Additionally, all three major groups have subdivisions within them. 8c. There are also smaller groups that don’t fall within the three traditional categories, like the Ethiopian Jews, the Cochin Jews (India), Chinese Jews, Gruzim (Georgian), and more. Most of these smaller groups were not in contact with the wider Jewish world. 8d. All Jewish groups start from the same base texts (the written Torah), and the majority include the oral Torah as well. Local interpretations and traditions develop, these are referred to as minhag(im) (customs). For example, the biblical commandment is to not boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk. Some communities extend this to mean no chicken and milk, others reason that chickens don’t produce milk so the mixture is acceptable. Both are equally valid interpretations rooted in tradition, but they are different. 8e. Marrying between Jewish subgroups in the U.S. is super common and outside of extreme or really intense groups is not frowned upon. Traditionally, the father’s minhagim are followed, i.e. a Syrian-Jewish father and a Spanish-Jewish mother would follow the Syrian-Jewish minhagim with their children. Many modern couples choose the mother’s traditions or mix them up, but that’s the traditional route.

Unless they are VERY religious, your character’s family is unlikely to be particularly wound up about them being LGBTQ the way a comparably Christian family might, at least not because they’re Jewish. Samuel’s Jewish mother is likely unconcerned he likes boys and is much more empathetic than he must marry a Jewish boy and raise any kids Jewish.

There are so many Jewish holidays, and they are not all celebrated the same or with the same intensity. Probably enough material for its own post, but the ones most likely celebrated by your character: 10a. Shabbat and/or Havdalah. Shabbat starts Friday nights with candles, wine/grape juice and challah bread, Havdalah ends Shabbat with a braided candle, wine, and aromatic spices. Shabbat dinner is usually a meat meal and it is common to invite guests or eat with friends and family (in normal times). 10b. The “High Holidays” - Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. Jewish students often skip school for these. Yom Kippur is a 25 hour fast with services all day, Rosh HaShanah has services in the evening and morning. 10c. Passover - arguably the most important holiday. Celebrated with two sometimes agonizingly long Seders (ritual meals), family gatherings, and abstaining from leavened bread for 7/8 days. 10d. Hanukkah - Not actually that spiritually important, but culturally important for American Jews. Typically celebrated with candle lighting, presents, visits to family members, and greasy food.

There’s a lot of wine involved in Jewish ritual, so it’s unlikely your character’s Jewish family are teetotalers.

Jewish families tend to be very intense, loud, opinioned, caring, and involved, compared to many other assimilated American families. Shabbat dinner is not quiet. Dissent is a Jewish value - differing opinions are allowed (and expected in many circles), as is the ability to argue/defend competently.

Jewishness can mean ethnic identity, cultural identity, and/or religion. There are several major denominations religiously, although that needs to be its own post in detail. The noteworthy movements at this point are Orthodox (further subdivided into Ultraorthodox and Modern Orthodox), Conservative (middle of the road, no relation to conservative politics), Reform, and Reconstructionist (both very “choose your own/your community’s adventure).

Probably will write more parts in the future, but this is heinously long already! Hope this is helpful!

#jewish #jewish writing #jewishwriting #jewblr #writeblr #writing advice #jewish identity #jews #jewishidentity #super long post sorry not sorry #writing jewish characters #writing jews #jewish writing help #jumblr

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creepingsharia · 4 years ago

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Kenyan Jihadi Pilot Arrested, Plotted to Conduct a 9/11-Style Attack Directed by al Shabaab

This guy was arrested in the Philippines a year and a half ago. Don’t be distracted.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Kenyan National Indicted for Conspiring to Hijack Aircraft on Behalf of the Al Qaeda-Affiliated Terrorist Organization Al Shabaab

Cholo Abdi Abdullah Obtained Pilot Training and Researched How to Hijack Aircraft in Order to Conduct a 9/11-Style Attack at the Direction of al Shabaab

The Department of Justice announced the unsealing of an indictment charging Cholo Abdi Abdullah with six counts of terrorism-related offenses arising from his activities as an operative of the foreign terrorist organization al Shabaab, including conspiring to hijack aircraft in order to conduct a 9/11-style attack in the United States. Abdullah was arrested in July 2019 in the Philippines on local charges, and was subsequently transferred on Dec. 15, 2020 in connection with his deportation from the Philippines to the custody of U.S. law enforcement for prosecution on the charges in the indictment. Abdullah was transported from the Phillippines to the United States yesterday, and is expected to be presented today before Magistrate Judge Robert W. Lehrburger in Manhattan federal court. The case is assigned to United States District Judge Analisa Torres.

“This case, which involved a plot to use an aircraft to kill innocent victims, reminds us of the deadly threat that radical Islamic terrorists continue to pose to our nation. And it also highlights our commitment to pursue and hold accountable anybody who seeks to harm our country and our citizens. No matter where terrorists who plan to target Americans may be located, we will seek to identify them and bring them to justice,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers. “We owe a debt of gratitude to the detectives, agents, analysts, and prosecutors who are responsible for this defendant’s arrest.”

“Today’s announcement shows that foreign terrorist organizations, like al Shabaab, remain determined to plot, plan, and conspire to commit terrorist acts across the globe against the United States, our interests and our foreign partners,” said FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Jill Sanborn. “Let there be no doubt that the FBI and our law enforcement colleagues, and in this case specifically those in the Philippines and Kenya, will not stop in our mission to hold terrorists accountable for their actions. The charges announced today against Cholo Abdi Abdullah eerily draws parallels to the heinous attacks on this country on September 11, 2001. The FBI, along with our U.S. Government and international partners, will continue to be in lockstep against terrorism and will not allow the safety or security of the public to be threatened – no matter where in the world it may be or whomever is responsible.”

“As alleged, Cholo Abdi Abdullah, as part of a terrorist plot directed by senior al Shabaab leaders, obtained pilot training in the Philippines in preparation for seeking to hijack a commercial aircraft and crash it into a building in the United States,” said Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss. “This chilling callback to the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, is a stark reminder that terrorist groups like al Shabaab remain committed to killing U.S. citizens and attacking the United States. But we remain even more resolute in our dedication to investigating, preventing, and prosecuting such lethal plots, and will use every tool in our arsenal to stop those who would commit acts of terrorism at home and abroad. Thanks to the outstanding investigative work of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the FBI’s global partnerships with law enforcement agencies around the world, Abdullah’s plot was detected before he could achieve his deadly aspirations, and now he faces federal terrorism charges in a U.S. court.”

“Nearly 20 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there are those who remain determined to conduct terror attacks against United States citizens. Abdullah, we allege, is one of them,” said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. “He obtained a pilot’s license overseas, learning how to hijack an aircraft for the purpose of causing a mass-casualty incident within our borders. Fortunately, the exceptional work by the men and women assigned to the many agencies that comprise the FBI’s New York JTTF have, once again, disrupted a threat to our communities.”

“As alleged in the federal indictment against him, Cholo Abdi Abdullah had obtained pilot training and begun plotting a terrorist attack against a target in the United States,” said NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea. “But the outstanding work of our NYPD detectives and federal agents of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, along with all of our law enforcement partners, put an end to those plans and ensured that no one would be harmed.”

As alleged in the Indictment,[1] unsealed today in Manhattan federal court:

The charges in the Indictment unsealed today arise out of a coordinated scheme by the terrorist organization Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, commonly known as “al Shabaab,” to target Americans both at home and abroad. Al Shabaab, which has sworn allegiance to al Qaeda and serves as al Qaeda’s principal wing in East Africa, is responsible for numerous deadly terrorist attacks, including attacks that have claimed American lives. Recently, al Shabaab has embarked on a string of terrorist attacks as part of an operation purportedly in response to the United States’ decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which the group has dubbed “Operation Jerusalem Will Never be Judaized.” In particular, these terrorist attacks perpetrated by al Shabaab include an attack on Jan. 15, 2019, at a hotel in Nairobi, Kenya, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 21 people, including a U.S. national and survivor of al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, New York; a Sept. 30, 2019, attack on a U.S. military facility in Somalia; and a Jan. 5, 2020, attack on another U.S. facility in Kenya, in which three Americans were killed.

As alleged in the Indictment, Abdullah was an al Shabaab operative who participated in a plot to hijack commercial aircraft and crash them into a building in the United States. Beginning in 2016, at the direction of a senior al Shabaab commander who was responsible for, among other things, planning the 2019 Nairobi hotel attack, Abdullah traveled to the Philippines and enrolled in a flight school there (the “Flight School”), for the purpose of obtaining training for carrying out the 9/11-style attack. Between 2017 and 2019, Abdullah attended the Flight School on various occasions and obtained pilot’s training, ultimately completing the tests necessary to obtain his pilot’s license.

While Abdullah was obtaining pilot training at the Flight School, he also conducted research into the means and methods to hijack a commercial airliner to conduct the planned attack, including security on commercial airliners and how to breach a cockpit door from the outside, information about the tallest building in a major U.S. city, and information about how to obtain a U.S. visa.

Thanks to the extraordinary work of the FBI, law enforcement authorities foiled this plot. Abdullah has remained in custody since his arrest on the local charges in the Philippines.

Abdullah, 30, of Kenya, is charged with conspiring to provide and providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization (al Shabaab), conspiring to murder U.S. nationals, conspiring to commit aircraft piracy, conspiring to destroy aircraft, and conspiring to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries. Abdullah faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, and a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. The specific penalties for each of the charges is reflected in the chart below. The maximum potential sentence in this case is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by a judge.

Assistant Attorney General Demers and Ms. Strauss praised the outstanding efforts of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, which principally consists of agents from the FBI and detectives from the NYPD. They also thanked the FBI Hudson Valley office and the New York State Police. Ms. Strauss also thanked the FBI Legal Attaché Offices in Nairobi, Kenya, and Manila, the Philippines; the Counterterrorism Section of the Department of Justice’s National Security Division; the Office of International Affairs of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division; the U.S. Department of Defense; “...the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations, the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit, the Joint Terrorism Task Force-Kenya, and the Kenyan Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions; and the Philippine National Police, Philippine Department of Justice, the Joint Terrorism Financial Investigations Group - Philippines, and Philippine Bureau of Immigration, for their assistance.

This prosecution is being handled by the Office’s Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys David W. Denton, Jr., Sidhardha Kamaraju, and Elinor Tarlow are in charge of the prosecution, with assistance from the Counterterrorism Section of the National Security Division.

The charges in the Indictment are merely accusations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

[1] As the introductory phrase signifies, the entirety of the text of the Indictment and the description of the Indictment set forth herein are only allegations, and every fact described should be treated as an allegation.

Attachment(s): Download u.s._v._cholo_abdi_abdullah_indictment.pdf

#Islam #Muslim #Jihad #Sharia #Terror #Immigration #Legal #Law #News #Media #Politics #Travel #9-11

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itonje · 4 years ago

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As we traveled the reservation that day, we came to see that her house was not unusual there. Everyone was so poor it would take your breath away. Most Americans could not comprehend it. It looked nearly identical, to me, to the state of hundreds, thousands of Vietnamese refugees I had seen, people whose entire life's effort had been reduced to a shack and some rags. So it was in Pima country--flat, desolate and arid--a desert, except for when it is a flood plain. As we drove around the reservation, one of the many that dot Arizona, the woman and her husband would stop every few miles, sometimes every few fields, and point to the place where some relative or friend had died. By that cattle guard, right over there. That's where they found Manuel. He was my cousin. His face was hacked off with an ax. See that old cottonwood, way over there? That's where his brother shot uncle Joe with the shotgun. Most were men. All were murdered or committed suicide. Thirteen of their relatives were on the list--brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, cousins. Yeah, it was clear. These motherfuckers were gooks. No doubt about it. No matter how the government dresses it up, you can always tell by the kill ratios. These people were definitely still gooks. Sometime during that drive I realized that Sacaton was where Sgt. Juan had grown up. He had not needed us to tell him about being a gook. He already knew. His people have been gooks for a long time. The theaters have changed now, of course. We no longer call it Vietnam--because it is not. It is a new, much grander era. It might be called the era of perpetual internal warfare: the Perpetual War. America's military and foreign policy apparatus is its hub--the driving, organizing, controlling center of an international security state. The Vietnam war never really went away: the tiger simply rearranged its stripes, changed its name--and grew. Its mechanisms of political control were also extended home, but that is a story for another time. Today, in Latin America, the U.S. pays for and sponsors "Vietnamized" wars of one kind or another in roughly half the countries from Mexico south. Every one of the drug war countries, for instance, is currently involved in some variation of a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency campaign. Some are disguised as "drug wars," others as counterinsurgency campaigns separate from simultaneous drug wars, or as in El Salvador and Nicaragua, as an outright counterinsurgency or insurgency operation. Each country has a MILGROUP, the modern variation on MACV, boatloads of traveling TDY (temporary duty) advisors, American military and/or drug war aid, and tons of American training. Other similar wars are also being waged in Africa and Asia. In every case, amazingly enough, the enemy happen to be citizens, usually large numbers of them, who oppose the government we support. Gooks, I guess you'd say. In each of those countries the tools, the tactics and the techniques of the Vietnam war are at work. The Pentagon calls it Low Intensity Conflict: Pentagon packaging of the same old thing. Richard Wright, the Assistant Commander of the School of the Americas (the U.S. Army training school for Latin American military leaders) said in an interview that LIC is nothing more than a sanitized version of counterinsurgency. Because few allegations of direct U.S. involvement in Vietnam war-style atrocities surface in the pages of America's newspapers, however, there is not much press or public interest in the perpetual war. The U.S. is nevertheless still orchestrating the slaughter of gooks throughout the world. Massacres, assassinations, disappeared ones, forced relocation of the rural poor, government "secure" zones, death squads, the torture of prisoners, the labeling of any and all opposition as "terrorists"--all have a familiar ring. Call it Nixon's revenge. It is Vietnamization that seems to work. We provide the money, the guns, the strategies, and plenty of on-the-scene advisors to our friends, the good gooks. They in turn steal most of the money, do the dirty work on the bad gooks, and if someone gets caught, take all the blame. A whole continent with gooks on one side and potential Lt. Calleys on the other. Gooks and Lt. Gooks. What could be more perfect in a world of perpetual war? The Perpetual War will be bigger than the Vietnam war. And longer, of course. It already stretches from Mexico south to Bolivia, a reach that covers eleven countries. If this entire region is looked at as one theater of operations, with each country the equivalent of a U.S. Army Corps such as I Corps in Vietnam, and each ambassador as a Corps level provincial military advisor, then the drug war suddenly starts looking a whole lot like a real war--a real big war. Some Corps are quieter within the Latin American theater, of course, but there is still plenty of action. If all the war news from each of the eleven Corps of the Drug War were ballyhooed and concentrated by America's daily newspapers the way the war news from the Gulf War was, how much space would the Perpetual War take? Too much. All the news--let's face it--is not fit to print. Some of it is R-rated: too strong for the stomachs of discerning adults. It's funny how people are. I never heard Mike Terry say the word "gook." If you'd have called him a racist, he would have denied it with the purest conscience. Sometimes I wonder, though, what Mike would have done if the people in that ditch at My Lai had been Mormons, white Mormons? Would he have put them out of their misery? Maybe, but I doubt it. That's kind of the way it is with the people trapped in the Perpetual War. We only catch occasional glimpses of the victims moaning from the ditch during our lunch. The audible sound of human agony is less obtrusive for us than it was for Mike and Billy that day at My Lai. We don't actually hear them. We still do not feel compelled to make a choice. Instead, we turn the page on the three-inch story at the back of the news section in the New York Times, down at the bottom just before the crossword puzzles begin, and barely have a second thought about the massacre of more villagers in some remote spot in some Latin American country. It doesn't even dawn on us that we're leaving them all to die in the ditch. Perhaps, if they were white Mormons, people would be pissed.

Ron Ridenhour, ‘Jesus was a Gook’, from Nobody Gets Off the Bus: the Viet Nam Generation Big Book

#g slur #racism #imperialism #my lai #vietnam war #ask to tag #death #violence #sui ment #this is really heavy but its required reading. genuinely

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danielimperato · 4 years ago

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market-researcher · 4 years ago

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Superplastic Alloys Market 2021 Valuable Growth Prospects, Size, Share, Demand and Current Trends Analysis 2028 | Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years ago

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* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 4, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

While coronavirus continues to burn across the country, Trump is focusing instead on continuing to contest the election results and on the Pentagon.

The main story in the country continues to be the coronavirus. As of tonight, according to the New York Times, more than 14,441,700 people in the U.S. have been infected with the virus and at least 278,900 have died. Official daily death counts are well over 2000.

As several states continue to count votes from the November election, President-Elect Joe Biden’s popular vote margin over Trump is now more than 7 million. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan, all states in which Trump contested the vote, have already certified their election results for Biden. In all six of those states, judges have ruled that Trump’s lawyers have provided no evidence of fraud. They have used words like “baseless,” “flimsy,” “obviously lacking,” “dangerous,” and “not credible.”

Trump’s obsession with winning an election he has clearly lost has brought into relief the struggle for control over the Republican Party. Trump is clearly trying to turn the party into a vehicle for loyalty to him and him alone. He has always turned on those who no longer serve his interests: Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was one of the first elected Republicans to support Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, giving it an air of legitimacy. He left the Senate to become Trump’s first Attorney General, only to have Trump turn against him when he recused himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, because he had lied about his own contacts with Russians. Trump forced Sessions to resign, and when Sessions ran again for the Senate, endorsed his rival and attacked Sessions on Twitter. Sessions lost his primary.

Now Trump has turned on men who similarly sacrificed their careers for his. Three days ago, Trump’s loyalist Attorney General, William Barr, undercut Trump’s election fraud arguments when he said that he had not seen such fraud. This apparently so infuriated Trump that he is considering firing Barr. Then, this morning, Trump turned on loyalist Louis DeJoy at the head of the United States Postal Service, who removed mail sorting machines and changed USPS rules to slow mail-in ballots expected to be for Biden. Trump tweeted that the USPS “is responsible for tampering with hundreds of thousands of ballots” and thus stole the election from him. He called the USPS a “long time Democrat stronghold,” although DeJoy is a major Trump supporter and donor.

While Trump is talking about running again in 2024, his turning against his most loyal supporters in the Republican Party will not inspire others to rally to his banner. Instead, it may simply be that he’s keeping the idea of his candidacy alive because it keeps money flowing in. Since the election, he has raised more than $200 million in donations.

While he is fighting over the election results, Trump has done very little else except to replace civilian employees at the Pentagon with his own hand-picked loyalists. This is unusual in a lame duck period, when presidents usually try to smooth the transition to the next administration.

Far from trying to smooth that transition, Trump is making it as bumpy as possible. His appointee at the General Services Administration delayed the start of the transition for weeks. Now that Biden’s team finally has access to Trump’s people to learn about their planning for the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, it turns out there hasn’t been much planning. Biden today noted that “There is no detailed plan that we’ve seen, anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container, into an injection syringe, into somebody’s arm…. It's going to be very difficult for that to be done and it’s a very expensive proposition…. There’s a lot more that has to be done.”

Also disturbing is that the Trump administration has denied the Biden team access to U.S. intelligence agencies that are controlled by the Defense Department, including the National Security Agency (which is the nation’s largest U.S. intelligence service), the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence services with a global reach. The Biden folks have, though, been able to meet with their counterparts at the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The refusal of the Pentagon to meet with Biden’s people comes at a time when Trump has been shaking up personnel there. Immediately after the election, Trump fired his fourth Defense Secretary, Mark T. Esper, and replaced him with an acting secretary of defense, Christopher C. Miller. Miller, in turn, has presided over the installation of a number of Trump loyalists both in the Pentagon leadership and on the Defense Policy Board, a group of advisors who consult with the Defense Secretary on specific issues when asked. Pushed out were about a dozen advisers, including former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, as well as former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Today, there was another major purge at Defense, this time from the Defense Business Board, a nonpartisan group of about 20 volunteers from the business sector who are appointed to give business advice to Pentagon leaders. The White House threw nine people off the board—informing them with a terse email—including its chair, Michael Bayer. Trump replaced them with his former 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and that year’s deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, among other loyalists. Both Lewandowski and Bossie are outspoken Trump supporters who have led the fight to contest the election.

So has another Trump nominee for a Pentagon post, Scott O’Grady, who has endorsed the idea that Trump won by a landslide and that Trump should declare martial law. Trump has nominated him to become an assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, overseeing operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Exactly what Trump is doing with this packing of the Defense Department is unclear. There are, though, three major issues on the table right now that may or may not be involved, but are worth keeping in mind.

The first is that Trump is trying to remove many U.S. troops from around the world before he leaves office, and had gotten serious pushback on that from the people he has now purged from the Defense Department. Today, he ordered nearly all of about 700 U.S. troops out of Somalia, where they have been training local soldiers to hold ground against terrorists. They will not come home, though; they are being sent elsewhere in Africa.

There is also still hanging out there the administration’s sudden announcement of a $23 billion sale of arms to the United Arab Emirates, including a number of advanced F-35 fighter jets and Reaper drones. Lawmakers of both parties object to this sale, concerned about risks to Israel and that the UAE could transfer the technology to China and Russia. The Senate will vote next week on banning the sale.

There is also the effort by the White House to force the Pentagon to lease its airwave spectrum to a private company, Rivada Networks, to create a nationwide 5G network. Rivada is backed by major Republican figures, including operative Karl Rove, but established Pentagon officials have little interest in the project, pointing out that there is no proof that Rivada knows what it’s doing or that the plan would be legal. It’s also not clear that the use of this spectrum for private carriers wouldn’t impact its use for national security. The Defense Department spectrum the White House would like to lease to private investors is worth between $50 and $75 billion.

I always believe in following the money, and that’s especially true now as Trump’s years in the White House, which have given him access to huge sums, are drawing to a close.

—-

[FROM COMMENTS]

Scott M. Krasner

I waver between bewilderment and rage when reading these daily summaries. I can almost "understand" his more political moves - installing loyalists, withdrawing troops, even trying to sell access to the Defense Department's wavebands. I don't agree or condone these actions, but they're consistent with his approach to governance to date.

What's comprehensible is ignoring - in any and every way - the coronavirus and its impact. Unconscionable doesn't begin to describe his failure to acknowledge the deaths of 280,000 Americans, or to endorse any means of protecting each other as best possible. It's inhumane. It's devoid of empathy, morally vacuous, and ethically deplorable. It is unequivocally and unalterably wrong.

And yet 74,000,000 thought it acceptable to return him to office. McConnell has personally obstructed any efforts to extend relief for 8 months and counting. It's Hobbseian in its social brutishness. Even Hobbes might be appalled. And Republican leadership is mute.

I'm almost beyond shock. Since the beginning, many thought each of Trump's transgressions would be the last straw, yet nothing happened. The only apparent imposition of accountability is his having lost the election. Court losses haven't swayed him. Our perverse campaign finance laws have given him license to steal despite the misleading fine print. His Cabinet, always incompetent for the task, is asleep, silent, or in on the game. Each day goes by with no visible effort to limit his efforts to salt the earth in advance of his successor. And Republican leadership ignores or enables him to proceed unhindered.

He's unmoored. He's looking to preemptively pardon family and loyalists who are most likely would be criminally liable but haven't yet been charged. His most ardent supporters are almost insane (read Giuliani and Powell) or seditious (read Flynn and Lin Wood). And still the Republican party watches with bloodless faces and dead eyed stares, saying not a word.

What is one to think? How does one explain this to children? How can one reason with any family, friends, or acquaintances who somehow believe Trump is in the right, brought low only by a grand, silent conspiracy of wrong minded citizens and foreign actors?

Perhaps history can look upon Trump's reign of terror more dispassionately. Today, however, I and many others feel like we're helpless, our minds and sensibilities best represented by the visage of horror in Edvard Munch's The Scream.

Linda Mitchell

Hannah Arendt's book (based on her reporting for The New Yorker), "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" encapsulates the issues TCinLA and the people who posted replies to it raise. I have read only bits of it but what she presents is a picture of evil that is stripped of glamour and that indicts everyone. As she says about Eichmann, "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all." If you have access to JSTOR (you can read online for free but not download if you don't have access through a library) there is a great short article in The History Teacher (1981) that discusses Arendt and her book in clear and concise terms. https://www.jstor.org/stable/493684

Miller and most everyone else surrounding the Deranged Cheeto--including the criminal enablers in Congress--fit Arendt's description perfectly. They are not monsters. They are not (most of them) pathological narcissists. They are sterile, unoriginal, uncreative people who have decided that personal advancement through doing terrible things is fine with them. It is actually harder, in our modern world, to be a good person than to be an awful one. Empathy, emotional maturity, awareness, and wisdom all require effort on the part of the individual. One has to engage, one has to become self-aware, one has to be brutally honest with oneself. Evil simply requires reaching down to that lowest common denominator of the id: a desire for self-advancement by any means necessary.

This is why they all seem so petty, so puerile, so childish, so joyless. This is why their tantrums are so infantile. And this is why Biden and Harris seem, by contrast, so refreshingly mature, so willing to allow joy. Both have been radically affected by what Hegel referred to as the "slaughter-bench" of history. The subhumans surrounding the Unelected Ex-President have not got enough imagination to be affected by anything except their own hunger.

[LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #political #election 2020 #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP

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blackkudos · 5 years ago

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Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, sex worker, nightclub dancer and performer, cast member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa. She was an actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Beginning in the 1990s, she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.

With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou publicly discussed aspects of her personal life. She was respected as a spokesperson for black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of black culture. Her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide, although attempts have been made to ban her books from some U.S. libraries. Angelou's most celebrated works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics consider them to be autobiographies. She made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family and travel.

Early life

Marguerite Annie Johnson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a nurse and card dealer. Angelou's older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or "Mya Sister". When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. In "an astonishing exception" to the harsh economics of African Americans of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II because the general store she owned sold needed basic commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments".

Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, a man named Freeman. She told her brother, who told the rest of their family. Freeman was found guilty but was jailed for only one day. Four days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles. Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing, as she stated, "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone." According to Marcia Ann Gillespie and her colleagues, who wrote a biography about Angelou, it was during this period of silence when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her.

Shortly after Freeman's murder, Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother. Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with helping her speak again. Flowers introduced her to authors such as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, authors who would affect her life and career, as well as black female artists like Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset.

When Angelou was 14, she and her brother moved in with their mother once again, who had since moved to Oakland, California. During World War II, Angelou attended the California Labor School. At the age of 16, she became the first black female cable car conductor in San Francisco. She wanted the job badly, admiring the uniforms of the operators—so much so that her mother referred to it as her "dream job." Her mother encouraged her to pursue the position, but warned her that she would need to arrive early and work harder than others. In 2014, Angelou received a lifetime achievement award from the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials as part of a session billed “Women Who Move the Nation.”

Three weeks after completing school, at the age of 17, she gave birth to her son, Clyde (who later changed his name to Guy Johnson).

Career

Adulthood and early career: 1951–61

In 1951, Angelou married Tosh Angelos, a Greek electrician, former sailor, and aspiring musician, despite the condemnation of interracial relationships at the time and the disapproval of her mother. She took modern dance classes during this time, and met dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford. Ailey and Angelou formed a dance team, calling themselves "Al and Rita", and performed modern dance at fraternal black organizations throughout San Francisco but never became successful. Angelou, her new husband, and her son moved to New York City so she could study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus, but they returned to San Francisco a year later.

After Angelou's marriage ended in 1954, she danced professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub the Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to calypso music. Up to that point she went by the name of "Marguerite Johnson", or "Rita", but at the strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at the Purple Onion, she changed her professional name to "Maya Angelou" (her nickname and former married surname). It was a "distinctive name" that set her apart and captured the feel of her calypso dance performances. During 1954 and 1955, Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She began her practice of learning the language of every country she visited, and in a few years she gained proficiency in several languages. In 1957, riding on the popularity of calypso, Angelou recorded her first album, Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD in 1996. She appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.

Angelou met novelist John Oliver Killens in 1959 and, at his urging, moved to New York to concentrate on her writing career. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met several major African-American authors, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and was published for the first time. In 1960, after meeting civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and hearing him speak, she and Killens organized "the legendary" Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and she was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator. According to scholar Lyman B. Hagen, her contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective". Angelou also began her pro-Castro and anti-apartheid activism during this time.

Africa to Caged Bird: 1961–69

In 1961, Angelou performed in Jean Genet's play The Blacks, along with Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson. Also in 1961, she met South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; they never officially married. She and her son Guy moved with Make to Cairo, where Angelou worked as an associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper The Arab Observer. In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to Accra, Ghana so he could attend college, but he was seriously injured in an automobile accident. Angelou remained in Accra for his recovery and ended up staying there until 1965. She became an administrator at the University of Ghana, and was active in the African-American expatriate community. She was a feature editor for The African Review, a freelance writer for the Ghanaian Times, wrote and broadcast for Radio Ghana, and worked and performed for Ghana's National Theatre. She performed in a revival of The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin.

In Accra, she became close friends with Malcolm X during his visit in the early 1960s. Angelou returned to the U.S. in 1965 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity; he was assassinated shortly afterward. Devastated and adrift, she joined her brother in Hawaii, where she resumed her singing career. She moved back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing career. Working as a market researcher in Watts, Angelou witnessed the riots in the summer of 1965. She acted in and wrote plays, and returned to New York in 1967. She met her lifelong friend Rosa Guy and renewed her friendship with James Baldwin, whom she had met in Paris in the 1950s and called "my brother", during this time. Her friend Jerry Purcell provided Angelou with a stipend to support her writing.

In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. asked Angelou to organize a march. She agreed, but "postpones again", and in what Gillespie calls "a macabre twist of fate", he was assassinated on her 40th birthday (April 4). Devastated again, she was encouraged out of her depression by her friend James Baldwin. As Gillespie states, "If 1968 was a year of great pain, loss, and sadness, it was also the year when America first witnessed the breadth and depth of Maya Angelou's spirit and creative genius". Despite having almost no experience, she wrote, produced, and narrated Blacks, Blues, Black!, a ten-part series of documentaries about the connection between blues music and black Americans' African heritage, and what Angelou called the "Africanisms still current in the U.S." for National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS. Also in 1968, inspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and challenged by Random House editor Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969. This brought her international recognition and acclaim.

Later career

Released in 1972, Angelou's Georgia, Georgia, produced by a Swedish film company and filmed in Sweden, was the first screenplay written by a black woman. She also wrote the film's soundtrack, despite having very little additional input in the filming of the movie. Angelou married Paul du Feu, a Welsh carpenter and ex-husband of writer Germaine Greer, in San Francisco in 1973. Over the next ten years, as Gillespie has stated, "She [Angelou] had accomplished more than many artists hope to achieve in a lifetime." Angelou worked as a composer, writing for singer Roberta Flack, and composing movie scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts, documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry. She produced plays and was named visiting professor at several colleges and universities. She was "a reluctant actor", and was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her role in Look Away. As a theater director, in 1988 she undertook a revival of Errol John's play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl at the Almeida Theatre in London.

In 1977, Angelou appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots. She was given a multitude of awards during this period, including over thirty honorary degrees from colleges and universities from all over the world. In the late 1970s, Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou would later become Winfrey's close friend and mentor. In 1981, Angelou and du Feu divorced.

She returned to the southern United States in 1981 because she felt she had to come to terms with her past there and, despite having no bachelor's degree, accepted the lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she was one of a few full-time African-American professors. From that point on, she considered herself "a teacher who writes". Angelou taught a variety of subjects that reflected her interests, including philosophy, ethics, theology, science, theater, and writing. The Winston-Salem Journal reported that even though she made many friends on campus, "she never quite lived down all of the criticism from people who thought she was more of a celebrity than an intellect...[and] an overpaid figurehead". The last course she taught at Wake Forest was in 2011, but she was planning to teach another course in late 2014. Her final speaking engagement at the university was in late 2013. Beginning in the 1990s, Angelou actively participated in the lecture circuit in a customized tour bus, something she continued into her eighties.

In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. Her recitation resulted in more fame and recognition for her previous works, and broadened her appeal "across racial, economic, and educational boundaries". The recording of the poem won a Grammy Award. In June 1995, she delivered what Richard Long called her "second 'public' poem", titled "A Brave and Startling Truth", which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.

Angelou achieved her goal of directing a feature film in 1996, Down in the Delta, which featured actors such as Alfre Woodard and Wesley Snipes. Also in 1996, she collaborated with R&B artists Ashford & Simpson on seven of the eleven tracks of their album Been Found. The album was responsible for three of Angelou's only Billboard chart appearances. In 2000, she created a successful collection of products for Hallmark, including greeting cards and decorative household items. She responded to critics who charged her with being too commercial by stating that "the enterprise was perfectly in keeping with her role as 'the people's poet'". More than thirty years after Angelou began writing her life story, she completed her sixth autobiography A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in 2002.

Angelou campaigned for the Democratic Party in the 2008 presidential primaries, giving her public support to Hillary Clinton. In the run-up to the January Democratic primary in South Carolina, the Clinton campaign ran ads featuring Angelou's endorsement. The ads were part of the campaign's efforts to rally support in the Black community; but Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary, finishing 29 points ahead of Clinton and taking 80% of the Black vote. When Clinton's campaign ended, Angelou put her support behind Obama, who went on to win the presidential election and became the first African-American president of the United States. After Obama's inauguration, she stated, "We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism."

In late 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers and career memorabilia to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. They consisted of more than 340 boxes of documents that featured her handwritten notes on yellow legal pads for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a 1982 telegram from Coretta Scott King, fan mail, and personal and professional correspondence from colleagues such as her editor Robert Loomis. In 2011, Angelou served as a consultant for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. She spoke out in opposition to a paraphrase of a quotation by King that appeared on the memorial, saying, "The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit", and demanded that it be changed. Eventually, the paraphrase was removed.

In 2013, at the age of 85, Angelou published the seventh volume of autobiography in her series, titled Mom & Me & Mom, which focuses on her relationship with her mother.

Personal life

Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended from the Mende people of West Africa. In 2008, a DNA test revealed that among all of her African ancestors, 45 percent were from the Congo-Angola region and 55 percent were from West Africa. A 2008 PBS documentary found that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother Mary Lee, who had been emancipated after the Civil War, became pregnant by her white former owner, John Savin. Savin forced Lee to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father of her child. After Savin was indicted for forcing Lee to commit perjury, and despite the discovery that Savin was the father, a jury found him not guilty. Lee was sent to the Clinton County poorhouse in Missouri with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou's grandmother. Angelou described Lee as "that poor little Black girl, physically and mentally bruised".

The details of Angelou's life described in her seven autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles tended to be inconsistent. Critic Mary Jane Lupton has explained that when Angelou spoke about her life, she did so eloquently but informally and "with no time chart in front of her". For example, she was married at least twice, but never clarified the number of times she had been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous"; according to her autobiographies and to Gillespie, she married Tosh Angelos in 1951 and Paul du Feu in 1974, and began her relationship with Vusumzi Make in 1961, but never formally married him. Angelou held many jobs, including some in the sex trade, working as a prostitute and madame for lesbians, as she described in her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name. In a 1995 interview, Angelou said,

"I wrote about my experiences because I thought too many people tell young folks, 'I never did anything wrong. Who, Moi? – never I. I have no skeletons in my closet. In fact, I have no closet.' They lie like that and then young people find themselves in situations and they think, 'Damn I must be a pretty bad guy. My mom or dad never did anything wrong.' They can't forgive themselves and go on with their lives."

Angelou had one son, Guy, whose birth she described in her first autobiography; one grandson, two great-grandchildren, and, according to Gillespie, a large group of friends and extended family. Angelou's mother Vivian Baxter died in 1991 and her brother Bailey Johnson Jr., died in 2000 after a series of strokes; both were important figures in her life and her books. In 1981, the mother of her grandson disappeared with him; finding him took four years.

In 2009, the gossip website TMZ erroneously reported that Angelou had been hospitalized in Los Angeles when she was alive and well in St. Louis, which resulted in rumors of her death and, according to Angelou, concern among her friends and family worldwide. In 2013, Angelou told her friend Oprah Winfrey that she had studied courses offered by the Unity Church, which were spiritually significant to her. She did not earn a university degree, but according to Gillespie it was Angelou's preference to be called "Dr. Angelou" by people outside of her family and close friends. She owned two homes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a "lordly brownstone" in Harlem, which was purchased in 2004 and was full of her "growing library" of books she collected throughout her life, artwork collected over the span of many decades, and well-stocked kitchens. Guardian writer Gary Younge reported that in Angelou's Harlem home were several African wall hangings and her collection of paintings, including ones of several jazz trumpeters, a watercolor of Rosa Parks, and a Faith Ringgold work titled "Maya's Quilt Of Life".

According to Gillespie, she hosted several celebrations per year at her main residence in Winston-Salem; "her skill in the kitchen is the stuff of legend—from haute cuisine to down-home comfort food". The Winston-Salem Journal stated: "Securing an invitation to one of Angelou's Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas tree decorating parties or birthday parties was among the most coveted invitations in town." The New York Times, describing Angelou's residence history in New York City, stated that she regularly hosted elaborate New Year's Day parties. She combined her cooking and writing skills in her 2004 book Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, which featured 73 recipes, many of which she learned from her grandmother and mother, accompanied by 28 vignettes. She followed up in 2010 with her second cookbook, Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart, which focused on weight loss and portion control.

Beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same "writing ritual" for many years. She would wake early in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff was instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She would write on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and would leave by the early afternoon. She would average 10–12 pages of written material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening. She went through this process to "enchant" herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang". She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences such as her rape in Caged Bird, in order to "tell the human truth" about her life. Angelou stated that she played cards in order to get to that place of enchantment and in order to access her memories more effectively. She said, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I'm in it—ha! It's so delicious!" She did not find the process cathartic; rather, she found relief in "telling the truth".

Death

Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014 at the age 86. She was found by her nurse. Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders. During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son Guy Johnson stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her life. He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of acuity and no loss in comprehension."

Tributes to Angelou and condolences were paid by artists, entertainers, and world leaders, including Obama, whose sister was named after Angelou, and Bill Clinton. Harold Augenbraum, from the National Book Foundation, said that Angelou's "legacy is one that all writers and readers across the world can admire and aspire to." The week after Angelou's death, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings rose to number 1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list.

On May 29, 2014, Mount Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, of which Angelou was a member for 30 years, held a public memorial service to honor her. On June 7, a private memorial service was held at Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. The memorial was shown live on local stations in the Winston-Salem/Triad area and streamed live on the university web site with speeches from her son, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton. On June 15, a memorial was held at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, where Angelou was a member for many years. Rev. Cecil Williams, Mayor Ed Lee, and former mayor Willie Brown spoke.

Works

Angelou wrote a total of seven autobiographies. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's third autobiography Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas marked the first time a well-known African-American autobiographer had written a third volume about her life. Her books "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the U.S., and take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In her fifth autobiography “All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes” (1986) Angelou tells about her return to Ghana searching for the past of her tribe. She published her seventh autobiography Mom & Me & Mom in 2013, at the age of 85. Critics have tended to judge Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first", with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise. Angelou wrote five collections of essays, which writer Hilton Als called her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung together with autobiographical texts". Angelou used the same editor throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House; he retired in 2011 and has been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors." Angelou said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers."

Angelou's long and extensive career also included poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and public speaking. She was a prolific writer of poetry; her volume Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she was chosen by US President Bill Clinton to recite her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" during his inauguration in 1993.

Angelou's successful acting career included roles in numerous plays, films, and television programs, including her appearance in the television mini-series Roots in 1977. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original script by a black woman to be produced, and she was the first African-American woman to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998.

Chronology of autobiographies

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969): Up to 1944 (age 17)

Gather Together in My Name (1974): 1944–48

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976): 1949–55

The Heart of a Woman (1981): 1957–62

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986): 1962–65

A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002): 1965–68

Mom & Me & Mom (2013): overview

#04/04 #05/28

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Headlines

A world without tourism (AP) With no American visitors to show around the D-Day beaches or the Loire Valley’s chateaux, and no work on the immediate horizon, Paris tour guide Linda Zenou frets about how she’ll pay off a loan and continue to care for her ailing mother in the achingly lean months ahead. “My situation is going to become completely inextricable,” she said. “We have nothing to live on.” For growing numbers of businesses and individuals who depend on the global tourism industry, the question is not so much when the coronavirus pandemic will end but how and if they’ll survive until business picks up. In trying to fend off the virus, countries that put up entry barriers to tourists have done so at a mounting cost to themselves and others. “It’s now survival of the fittest,” said Johann Krige, CEO of the Kanonkop wine estate in South Africa, where the drying up of wine-tasting tourists threatens dozens of wine farms around the historic town of Stellenbosch, near Cape Town. “A lot of them are going to go under because they just don’t have sufficient cash flow,” Krige said. Around the world, travel amid the pandemic is becoming a story of tentative steps forward in some places, but punishing steps back elsewhere, of “yes” to letting back visitors from places faring somewhat better against COVID-19 but not from others where outbreaks are flaring. The result is an ever-evolving global mishmash of restrictions and quarantines, all of which are providing zero long-term visibility for businesses trying to make payrolls and for everyone in the industry from trinket sellers to luxury hotels.

In Canada, hockey’s return is a partial sign of normalcy during precarious times (Washington Post) As professional sports leagues spent the spring searching for ways to salvage their seasons after the novel coronavirus forced a shutdown in March, the best solution for the National Hockey League became increasingly obvious. The safest place to stage a modified playoffs turned out to be also where the sport is most popular. As a country, Canada has been far more successful in controlling the virus, so this week, 24 NHL teams have gathered within strictly enforced perimeters in Toronto and Edmonton to compete in a postseason that begins today. If it’s completed, the Stanley Cup will be hoisted on Canadian soil for the first time since 1993.

In sprawling Capitol, leaders struggle to keep virus at bay (AP) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are under increasing pressure from lawmakers to boost testing for the coronavirus in the Capitol, an idea they have so far rejected because of concerns about the availability of tests across the country. Despite the unusual nature of work in the Capitol—lawmakers fly in and out weekly, from 50 states, and attend votes and hearings together—the two leaders have maintained that they will not institute a testing program for members, staff or the hundreds of other people who work in the complex. The lack of tracking was highlighted this week when a GOP lawmaker, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, found out he had contracted the virus. He was tested only because he had been scheduled to travel with President Donald Trump. The dilemma for Congress is similar to the one facing workplaces and schools as they struggle to reopen. Lawmakers and staff during the summer have been wearing masks, keeping their distance, cleaning surfaces, limiting crowds and working from their homes when possible. But it’s difficult if not impossible to fully protect against the coronavirus without a robust system of testing and tracing, and there’s a lack of infrastructure nationwide to make it happen.

Philadelphia trash piles up as pandemic stymies its removal (AP) What would Ben Franklin think? The Founding Father who launched one of America’s first street-sweeping programs in Philadelphia in the late 1750s would see and smell piles of fly-infested, rotting household waste, bottles and cans as the city that he called home struggles to overcome a surge in garbage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. For the City of Brotherly Love, another unfortunate nickname has been “ Filthadelphia.” Poverty and litter often go hand in hand, and in the nation’s poorest big city, the sanitation department has been short-handed and overworked. The city’s 311 complaint line received more than 9,700 calls about trash and recycling in July, compared with 1,873 in February. Faced with social distancing restrictions, residents are staying home and generating more trash than ever before—about a 30% increase in residential trash collections, said Streets Commissioner Carlton Williams. Baltimore and Memphis are among some of the cities facing similar problems. In Boston, some residents have reported rats the size of cats. People are cleaning out garages and attics, Williams said. That’s in addition to household trash that has increased as more people cook at home or bring home takeout from restaurants that have not yet fully opened. His department also has had to clean up after protests over racial injustice.

Oregon police try to tamp down nightly Portland protests (AP) Oregon police took over protecting a federal courthouse in Portland that’s been a target of violent protests as local authorities try to tamp down demonstrations that have wracked the city every night for more than two months following the killing of George Floyd. Having state and local officers step up their presence was part of a deal between the Democratic governor and the Trump administration that aimed to draw down the number of U.S. agents on hand during the unrest. In preparation for the handover, state troopers, the local sheriff and Portland police met and agreed not to use tear gas except in cases where there’s a danger of serious injury or death, Mayor Ted Wheeler said. Federal agents sent to the city in early July have used it nightly as protesters lob rocks, fireworks and other objects. Wheeler, who himself was gassed when he joined protesters outside the courthouse last week, added that tear gas “as a tactic really isn’t all that effective” because protesters have donned gas masks and often return to the action after recovering for a few minutes.

Hurricane Isaias batters Bahamas as storm targets entire U.S. East Coast (Washington Post) Hurricane Isaias became 2020′s second Atlantic hurricane overnight Wednesday on its way to the Bahamas, which it has already begun to blast with drenching rain, strong winds and ocean surge. The storm is now poised to ride up the East Coast, first encountering Florida this weekend before zipping up the rest of the Eastern Seaboard through the Mid-Atlantic and New England during the first-half of next week. “There is a risk of impacts from winds, heavy rainfall, and storm surge late this weekend from the northeastern Florida coast and spreading northward along the remainder of the U.S. east coast through early next week,” wrote the National Hurricane Center. North Carolina, in particular, may be hit hard by the storm from Monday into Tuesday, where Isaias could crash ashore. Earlier this week, Isaias dropped up to eight inches of rain in southwest Puerto Rico, and knocked power out to more than 400,000 residents on the island. The storm then plowed through the Dominican Republic, strengthening more than expected.

Brazil reopens to tourists (Daily Telegraph) Brazil registered record daily numbers of infections and deaths from the new coronavirus on Wednesday, sending its overall death toll surging past 90,000 people. Despite the record figures, the government issued a decree reopening the country to foreign visitors arriving by plane, ending a four-month travel ban in hopes of reviving a lockdown-devastated tourism industry. The tourism industry has already lost nearly 122 billion reals ($23.6 billion) because of the pandemic, the National Confederation of Trade in Goods, Services and Tourism (CNC) estimates. As a whole, Latin America’s biggest economy is facing a record contraction of 9.1 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund.

More than three million Chileans seek to withdraw pensions amid pandemic (Reuters) More than 3 million Chileans on Thursday asked to withdraw a portion of their pension funds as a controversial law took effect allowing citizens to tap into retirement savings to buffer the economic impacts of the coronavirus. Long lines formed in Santiago outside the offices of Pension Fund Administrators (AFP) as Chileans sought to take advantage of the new law. The emergency measure allows those with savings to withdraw up to 10% of their pensions. The websites of several of the fund administrators collapsed Thursday amid the deluge of requests, prompting an apology from the companies.

Excess deaths during Europe’s coronavirus outbreak were highest in England, according to U.K. analysis (Washington Post) England topped Europe’s grim league table for highest levels of excess deaths during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new analysis published Thursday by Britain’s Office for National Statistics. The analysis of more than 20 European countries—including the four nations of the United Kingdom—found that England’s death rate was 7.55 percent higher this year through the end of May, compared with its five-year average. Spain was next, with a 6.65 percent increase over its average. Scotland was 5.11 percent above its average and Belgium 3.89 percent. Because different countries have used different methods to calculate coronavirus deaths, many scientists consider excess mortality a more reliable way to measure the impact of the virus and to draw comparisons. Excess mortality would include not just fatalities that were directly related to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, but also the deaths of people who were hesitant to seek care for serious conditions or who did not receive the usual level of care while the health system was focused on the pandemic.

Beach ban (Foreign Policy) As temperatures rise above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32°C) in England and local lockdowns are imposed to prevent further coronavirus outbreaks, British police are preparing to keep crowds away from the sea after approximately 500,000 people flocked to beaches in Bournemouth and Poole during an earlier heatwave in June.

Clashes on Pakistan border leave more than a dozen Afghan civilians dead, Afghan officials say (Washington Post) More than a dozen Afghan civilians were killed and many others wounded Thursday when clashes broke out on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Afghan officials said. Ahmad Bahir Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, which borders Pakistan, said 15 people were killed and 80 wounded. One Afghan official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said more than a dozen Afghan civilians were killed. The Afghan Defense Ministry blamed Pakistani forces for the attack. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry appeared to reject that assertion, saying in a statement Friday that “Afghan forces opened unprovoked fire on innocent civilians gathered towards Pakistan’s side of the international border." “Pakistan troops responded to protect our local population and acted only in self-defense,” the statement said, claiming Afghan forces opened fire first and casualties also occurred on the Pakistani side of the border.

China tightens its grip on Hong Kong (Foreign Policy) The crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong continues as the local government announced on Thursday that it was barring 12 pro-democracy activists from running in the upcoming legislative elections scheduled for September. The move follows Beijing’s passage of a draconian national security law earlier this month that severely limits the civil liberties of Hong Kongers, aiming to curtail opposition to the ruling pro-Beijing administration. Pro-democracy candidates rode a wave of public discontent in the recent local elections in November, notching major victories across the territory that shocked observers in mainland China.

The Dictator Who Waged War on Darfur Is Gone, but the Killing Goes On (NYT) On camels, horses and motorbikes, dozens of Arab militiamen stormed into the remote village in Darfur, in western Sudan, firing wildly, witnesses said. Houses were pillaged, animals stolen and water tanks smashed. Villagers ran for their lives. United Nations peacekeepers scrambled to the scene but said they found the road blocked by obstacles placed in their way, and continued on foot. When they arrived after two and a half hours, it was too late. At least nine people lay dead, including a 15-year-old boy, and another 20 were seriously wounded, according to the United Nations. The attack in Fata Bornu, a remote hamlet of 4,000 people, echoes the grimmest days of the Darfur conflict in the 2000s. But it happened just this month—over a year since euphoric protests toppled Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the detested dictator whose alleged atrocities in Darfur earned him an indictment on genocide charges in an international court. But while the revolution brought some change to Sudan’s cities, that is not the case in Darfur, where the notorious janjaweed—nomadic Arab militias—still ride free. Heavily armed gangs continue to massacre, plunder and rape in scorched-earth tactics that recall the worst days of Mr. al-Bashir’s rule.

Zimbabwe on the brink (Foreign Policy) The streets of the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, were empty on Friday save for hundreds of soldiers and police dispatched to squash planned anti-government protests amid rising public anger over corruption, food shortages, and rampant inflation. The government has cautioned that protests will be regarded as an insurrection and that anyone who attends them will “only have themselves to blame.” Tensions have risen dramatically in recent months as the pandemic has tipped the country’s fragile economy into crisis. The local currency, which was reintroduced last year after being shelved for a decade due to a hyperinflation crisis in the late 2000s, has imploded with inflation over 700 percent, obliterating people’s savings and salaries. The World Food Program warned this week that by the end of the year 60 percent of the country’s population would lack food security, and it appealed to the international community to step up to prevent “a potential humanitarian catastrophe.”

#headlines #news

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grantebanja · 4 years ago

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In the midst of the current pandemic and the recent protests on Black Lives Matter, we set out some information on the topic as below.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) began as a trending topic on Twitter in 2016, the current wave of protests were triggered by the death of George Floyd and a number of other black people in the U.S.

The core message of BLM is about people coming together in allyship against racism, essentially ‘Black Lives Matter as much as everyone else’s lives and should be treated as such.’

Black Lives Matter is a movement for social justice and not a political organisation, despite people acting as self-appointed spokespeople and making claims on its behalf.

There is no specific charter or set of policies of BLM that all its supporters subscribe to.

To properly tackle this treatment of black people under the law and within society there have been calls for the identification of, and an end to, systematic and institutional racism.

A Brief History

I have written a piece below to attempt to speak to those that wish to read on about the issues and suggest some ways to address them.

I must preface this by saying these are my own personal views and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

I feel compelled to add some gravity to this. These issues of injustice under the law are distressing and pressing to many UK based black people because they mirror the daily experience also faced here, albeit to a lesser degree of violence.

No single individual, unless knowingly and overtly racist, should feel any personal guilt or shame from this piece. We can however look to learn so as to effect change in the future.

The piece is designed to give some insight into the issue of racism and discrimination and how it can manifest itself in our daily life.

I am happy to discuss any of this article with any individuals in confidence.

A Brief History…

In order to tackle the issue of systemic and institutional racism, one has to first look at its causes and its effect. We know its effect is the discrimination of black and non-white people under the law and many other measurable metrics.

Racism is the discrimination of people based on the colour of their skin and their being in a different ‘race’.

People are born indiscriminate, thus any inherent biases are learnt behaviour.

This raises the question why have the learning and ergo teaching of this racial discrimination become so commonplace to systemic and institutional proportions?

The answer, lies in Europe and their American cousins’ history of imperialism and colonialism. This started with the enslavement of Africans and the commodification of black people’s lives and land.

people in the UK have always been taught that the original insurrections into Africa were about introducing religion and civilising the natives. Similar ‘missions’ and methods were adopted by Europeans in every inhabited continent across the world. However, what ensued was chattel enslavement, and the subsequent African colonisation, which remains one of the biggest atrocities in human history.

The resulting enrichment of the European countries and the U.S on the back of these atrocities, I believe has been stripped or ‘airbrushed’ from national consciousness. There is very little collective or national guilt about this fact, in the same way there is with other atrocities in human history.

In an attempt to justify these atrocities and the imperialism that ensued, the ideology that that these missions were to introduce civility, where there had once been savagery and backwardness, were invented. This resulted in concerted effort to portray black people as ‘savage’ and ‘backward’.

This was the inception of the racist agenda toward black People.

How Does This Affects Us ALL Today?

The effect of this agenda to portray black people as ‘savage’ and ‘backward’ has evolved over the subsequent years to less insidious stereotypes, many of which you are aware of.

It all stems from a perception perpetuated through media; from outright racist or stereotypical depictions to the current use of softer language or perspectives taken on white people doing exactly the same thing black people do. This has been propagated by socio-economic policy and generally taught down through generations, which has resulted in an implicit and often unconscious bias, that affects the way black people are viewed and treated by wider society.

Studies show that black people are disproportionally over represented in reports on crime, acting roles for black men are disproportionately hyper athletic, criminal or intimidating characters, punishment for crime, arrest rates, school expulsion rates and career progression. Nearly every metric of the standard of human life has black people at the negative end.

The main stereotype that has resulted to the unjust killing of black people is that they are ‘innately violent and criminal’. General stereotypes for black women are as loud, disruptive, aggressive, opinionated, feisty and domineering characters.

At the sharp end, these implied biases often impact the way police will treat a black suspects, judges will give harsher sentences or how a recruiter interviews.

In the more middle ground, there are micro-aggressions; which are comments or actions that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally states a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalised group. It can be as innocent as complimenting a black colleague on something that is taken for granted by all other colleagues, as it reinforces the stereotype that we are somehow an exception to the rule.

Being acutely aware of how we as a race of people are portrayed, makes black people adopt unnatural characteristics. For black women it often leads to them often adopting submissive non-confrontational personas to avoid such stereotypes. This corrective behaviour can take away from the strong assertive characters that others without this insecurity benefit from. As such their true potential may never been seen, to an employer’s detriment.

But I’m personally not racist

Probably not, but throughout time, this implicit bias has resulted in black people not being afforded the same human & civil rights, opportunity and general treatment as our white counterparts.

This trend is generally prevalent in every measurable metric of the human experience; healthcare, housing, education, careers and justice under the law. There is a wealth of statistics, facts and figures globally to back this assertion up.

These incidents are symptoms of systemic discrimination, where the systems are often setup in a way that unfairly impacts people of colour. So although the people working within these systems may not have discriminatory views, they are inadvertently perpetuating a system that inherently is.

The resulting issues of this systemic discrimination over numerous generations has assisted in the reinforcing negative stereotypes and the biases mentioned earlier.

How does it make many ‘Black People’ feel?

These issues form an insight into the ‘black experience’ and leads to many black people feeling like they must ensure that they act in a way that does not re-inforce these stereotypes and feeling personally ashamed when others do. As mentioned, this leads to having to ensure you correct all your behaviour, all of the time, in a way that people of other ethnicities do not. Enhanced corrective behaviour and an almost religious like adherence to always ensuring that you are in control.

For instance, it is rare that you would see a black person act emotively or confrontationally to a situation in the workplace, where people from other racial backgrounds when confronted with the same scenario would.

Can you think of a time a black person in your office has ever raised their voice, cried, and been ashamedly drunk at a work event, outwardly bullish or confrontational?

I can think of many instances, I cannot think of one where that person was black.

I am not arguing that this behaviour is acceptable, or that any person should not adopt some adaptive behaviour for the work environment. The point is that others do not carry the need for such enhanced corrective behaviour to ensure they are not be judged by their race and reinforce the negative stereotypes.

There is also an overarching feeling of not being comfortable enough to correct or address behaviours and systems you know to be inherently discriminatory for fear of being labelled a troublemaker.

In many ways, it’s just easier to ignore and swallow small indignities and instances of casual racism. It’s easier not to ask the Security Guard why he asked me for ID but not my white colleague. It is often not worth challenging the small things, as a) it can get exhausting b) it can get you the label of ‘playing the race’ card and c) it’s probably worth choosing which battles are worth fighting.

These are examples of workplace specific issues that nearly all black people live with. Not to mention the wider issues that have to be navigated throughout daily life.

It should noted that, any marginalised group may have experienced the some of the same issues in microcosms, but they tend not to have the implicit connotations and stereotypes to contend with. Most other groups also have the opportunity to assimilate to the dominant culture either immediately or generationally, black people and indeed all people of colour do not.

#racism blacklivesmatter blm

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creepingsharia · 5 years ago

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“Kidnapped, Raped, Humiliated, and Forced to Convert to Islam”: Muslim Persecution of Christians, December 2019

Martyred on Christmas Day: Islamic State in Nigeria videotaped the slaughter of 11 Christians

by Raymond Ibrahim

The following are some of the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of December, 2019; they are categorized by theme:

The Slaughter of Christians

Nigeria: The Islamic State in West Africa Province released a video of the execution of 11 Christian aid workers on the day after Christmas. The brief video shows one Christian being shot followed by 10 others being beheaded by masked jihadis standing behind the tied hostages. “This message is to the Christians in the world,” a man’s voice narrates over the footage. “Those who you see in front of us are Christians, and we will shed their blood as revenge for the two dignified sheikhs, the caliph of the Muslims, and the spokesman for the Islamic State [who were killed by the U.S.]” Before being slaughtered, the captives reportedly made pleas, including to Nigeria president Muhammadu Buhari, to save them. Buhari, who has himself been accused of turning a blind eye to the persecution of Christians in Nigeria—and even abetting it—condemned the executions, adding that “these barbaric killers don’t represent Islam.”

A separate report cited by Fox News found that more than 6,000 Christians have been slaughtered by Islamic terrorists since 2015—a thousand of them in just 2019. According to the report,

They attack rural villages, force villagers off their lands and settle in their place — a strategy that is epitomized by the phrase: “Your land or your blood.” In every village, the message from local people is the same: “Please, please help us! The Fulani are coming. We are not safe in our own homes.”

The nomadic Fulani herdsmen “seek to replace diversity and difference with an Islamist ideology which is imposed with violence on those who refuse to comply,” Baroness Caroline Cox commented. “It is—according to the Nigerian House of Representatives—genocide. Something has to change—urgently. For the longer we tolerate these massacres, the more we embolden the perpetrators. We give them a ‘green light’ to carry on killing.”

Kenya: After armed Muslim militants stopped and stormed a passenger bus near the Somali border on December 6, they proceeded to separate the 56 passengers into Muslim and Christian groups—reportedly by asking them to recite the Islamic shahada (creed); 11 of those who would or could not due to their Christian faith, were paraded out of the bus. “They were told to lie on the ground face down and were shot at close range,” one report said. “The militants then ordered the bus to leave with the rest of the passengers.” The attackers apparently also relied on whether a passenger appeared to be local (meaning likely Muslim) or not (meaning likely Christian). “The majority of the population in this region is Muslim,” Rev. Nicholas Mutua, a Catholic priest, explained. “The non-locals had come from other parts of the country and they would definitely have been Christians.” “One of the Muslim men gave me Somali attire, and when the separation was being done I went to the side of the Muslims, and immediately we were told to get [back] into the bus,” a survivor recalled. “As the locals were getting back into the bus, the non-locals who were left behind were fired upon with gunshots.” Separating Muslims from Christians before slaughtering the latter has long been the modus operandi of Islamic terror groups. In the Garissa University College massacre of 2015, when militants slaughtered nearly 150 people, a survivor explained how the Islamic terrorists burst into a Christian service, seized worshippers, and then “proceeded to the hostels, shooting anybody they came across except their fellows, the Muslims.” Another witness said the gunmen were opening doors and inquiring if the people inside were Muslims or Christians: “If you were a Christian you were shot on the spot. With each blast of the gun I thought I was going to die.”

Burkina Faso: On Sunday, December 1, Islamic terrorists stormed a church during service and opened fire; 14 worshippers were killed and many injured. The gunmen fled on motorbikes following the massacre. Discussing this incident, a separate report offers statistics:

Burkina Faso’s Christian minority used to live in relative peace. Now the violence and persecution of Christians has quadrupled in the last two years and is expected to increase by [another] 60%… Radical Islamic groups such as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and other local insurgents have pushed nearly half a million people from their homes. Sunday’s attack comes after a Catholic priest was executed in February, five Christians were killed during an attack on a Church service in April, and 13 Christians were killed in a Church arson attack and procession in May. Most recently was on October 26 when unknown gunmen stormed a Christian village and reportedly killed 12 and abducted several others.

Cameroon: In just the first half of December, Islamic militants “began an onslaught of attacks on Cameroonian Christians that left 7 dead and 21 captive to the terrorist group.” According to the report:

On December 1, gunmen opened fire at a funeral in Mayo Sava district, in the far north of Cameroon. Four were killed and three were wounded. In another attack on the same day, militants ransacked homes and looted them of food and basic necessities. The next night, three more people were murdered and another was injured in another looting of Zangola village. A few days later on December 5, militants methodically searched for children and young adults and kidnapped them. In the middle of the night they came and stole nine girls and twelve boys from their homes, ranging from 12 to 21 years old. Four of the captives managed to escape. While en-route to their base, the Boko Haram militants attacked Tahert village where one girl was injured and a motorbike was stolen. Nearly 300 people have been killed in Cameroon in 2019 by Islamic militants, with 80% being civilians.

Pakistan: Naveed Masih, a 24-year-old Christian man was found hanging from a tree, dead, because he had earlier prevented Muslim men from harassing and pressuring a married Christian mother to convert to Islam. Due to this, “a mob of 20 individuals attacked Naveed’s house,” the report says. “The mob beat Naveed and damaged many of the family’s belongings. The mob further threatened Naveed to not interfere with their efforts to convert the Christian woman.” Two months later, he was lured to a supposed parley. When he arrived at the meeting point, “he was brutally tortured and he was hanged from a tree as a result of protecting a Christian woman’s faith,” his father, Herbert, recalled: “Carrying your son’s dead body in your arms is heartbreaking and unbearable. It almost ended my life when I had to shoulder my son’s funeral…. My family is still under threats to withdraw the case against the culprits. However, I have nothing to lose now.”

In a separate but similar incident in Pakistan, after sexually abusing him, two Muslim men killed Daud (“David”) Masih, a Christian teenager, on December 14 in a factory. According to a local Christian activist, “Daud and his elder brother started working at the embroidery factory during the night shift about three months ago. They were additional breadwinners for the family as the mother is sick and their father is a day laborer.” Weeks before the murder, Masih had complained about the “unethical behavior from his Muslim co-workers.” Because the owner of the factory did not seem to care or intervene, Masih stopped going to work, until the owner assured him of protection. He was abused and killed on the same day he returned to work; one of his murderers is allegedly the brother of the owner. Last reported, the individuals accused of the crime have not been arrested and were pressuring and trying to bribe the victim’s family to drop the case: “Although I am a poor Christian woman, I want justice for my son and punishment for those who killed Daud,” his mother said. “I will never go for compensation or reconciliation, as my son was killed brutally.”

Attacks on Churches

Philippines: During Sunday Mass on the evening of December 22, Islamic terrorists detonated a bomb just outside Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Cotabato, a city on the island of Mindanao. Twenty-two people were injured in the explosion, 12 of whom were soldiers patrolling the church as part of security measures adopted during the Christmas holidays. Parish priest Zaldy Robles, who called it “a cowardly act on the eve of the Christmas celebrations,” said “casualties would have been unimaginable” had the bomb reached the inside of the church. In 2009, a similar bomb attack on the same cathedral in Mindanao killed five people and injured 34. Most of the Philippines’ Muslim minority live in Mindanao, which has been a hotbed of terrorism in recent years. Among other attacks, “Islamic State-affiliated terrorists were blamed for twin suicide bombings at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Cathedral in Jolo, Sulu Province on Jan. 27 [2019], which killed at least 22 people and wounded more than 100. Jolo is a small island off the coast of Mindanao.”

Iraq: The Catholic Church of Divine Wisdom in Baghdad, built in 1929, was invaded on the day after Christmas in what was described by one report as a “hostile takeover attempt”: “Details remain scarce. Security footage of the invasion show that an Islamic leader was present amongst the invaders, who attempted to open the gate and remove the cross.” Later reports revealed that the church had been “marked for demolition by the authorities, together with some surrounding buildings, as part of a redevelopment programme in the city,” but that “local residents say the project is driven by commercial and political forces, and does not take into account the significance of the church for the community.”

Indonesia: Several reports appearing around Christmas indicated the difficulties churches experience during the holiday season. In “Aceh Christians forced to celebrate Christmas in a tent,” the BBC reported on December 23 that:

Christians in the Indonesian province of Aceh are preparing to celebrate Christmas in makeshift tents in the jungle. Their churches were destroyed four years ago by Islamic vigilante groups and the police. Indonesia – the world’s largest Muslim population – has a pluralist constitution that is meant to protect the rights of followers of all the major faiths. But Church leaders in Singkil Aceh say the local authorities are stopping them from rebuilding….

Separately, authorities on the Indonesian island of Sumatra banned Christians from celebrating Christmas in private homes. According to Sudarto, the director of an intercommunity initiative, “They did not get permission from the local government since the Christmas celebration and worship were held at the house of one of the Christians who had been involved. The local government argued that the situation was not conducive.” He added that the ban on Christians to celebrate Christmas and the New Year “has been going on for a long time [since 1985], so far they have been quietly worshiping at the home of one of the worshipers, but they have applied for permission several times. Yet the permit to celebrate Christmas was never granted. The house where they performed worship services was once burned down in early 2000 due to resistance from residents.”

Discussing yet another incident, the Jakarta Post reported on Christmas Day that “Christians in Jambi city, Jambi, still struggle to find joy on the eve of the holy day since the authorities sealed a number of local churches in the city…. Several Christians in the region were aghast when they were welcomed by a notice plastered on the closed front doors of the Assemblies of God Church (GSJA) informing them the church was sealed on Dec. 24, instead of the customary Christmas prayers and services.” This church is among three churches in the area to be closed down by the Jambi city administration following protests by local Muslim residents who cited the lack of building permits. “This is the second Christmas celebration to feel depressing for us,” said its pastor Jonathan Klaise on Christmas Eve. “It’s a difficult situation. We have no other choice but to cope with it… We can only hope that we will soon be able to pray in our church.”

Attacks on Muslim Converts (“Apostates”) to Christianity

Uganda: A Muslim man with three wives abandoned one of them and their three children on learning that she had converted to Christianity. Problems began for Florence Namuyiga, 27, when she took her eldest son, aged 7, to the church that she had been secretly attending following her conversion last May. “That evening, while back at home, my son began singing some of the Christian songs that were sung in the church,” she explained. “My husband began questioning me where the son picked such kinds of songs, but I kept quiet. He then turned to our son, who narrated what he saw in church of both men and women worshipping together in one big hall. Thereafter we went to bed with no communication with my husband.” Then, on November 29, her husband, Abudalah Nsubuga, 34, insisted she to go to Friday mosque prayers. “I refused,” she said. “He started beating me up with sticks, blows and kicks.

When I fell down, he left me and went to the mosque. I began bleeding with serious injury on my left arm. That evening he did not come to the house but slept in the house of one of my co-wives.” On the next day,

He arrived [home] and pronounced [ritual Islamic] words of divorce and threatened to kill me if I remained in the homestead… There and then I left the homestead, leaving all my belongings behind…. I have been supporting my three children by washing peoples’ clothing around the village. Indeed life is quite difficult for me and the children. I have realized that following Jesus is not easy. Sometimes I spend sleepless nights thinking on my future and that of my small kids, especially their school fees.

Iran: On December 20, Mohammad Moghiseh, the head of Tehran Revolutionary Court, sentenced nine Muslim apostates to a total of 45 years in prison. “These Christian converts have objected to the verdict issued by the Tehran Revolutionary Court and are awaiting final appeal,” the report states. The day before sentencing, on December 19, the US Treasury Department accused Mohammad Moghiseh and another Revolutionary judge of violating justice and abusing the rights of religious minorities and others.

General Abuse of and Discrimination against Christians

Tajikistan: A Christian pastor who was sentenced to three years in prison on the charge of “singing extremist songs in church and so inciting religious hatred,” was released on December 18, 2020, after serving two-and-a-half years. In 2017, authorities had raided the Good News of Grace Protestant Church in Khujand. Many of the congregation were beat, lost their jobs, and faced other forms of repercussions in the wake of the raid on their church. Pastor Bakhrom Kholmatov, a 43-year-old married father of three, was then sentenced on the aforementioned charges. According to the report,

Officials claimed that Christian songs found on his computer and the book More Than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell are “extremist materials.” They alleged that religious “experts” recognised the songs Praise God, O Unbelieving Country, Army of Christ and Our Battle is Not Against Blood and Flesh as “extremist and calling people to overthrow the government.”

“I’d like to express my huge gratitude to all the people who supported and prayed for me, my family and my church,” Kholmatov said in a statement. “All these three years I felt your prayers, they helped me to stand, they helped my precious wife and children, they helped the members of my church who were left without a pastor, then kicked by the authorities out of our building.”

Iran: “The Iranian regime has begun cracking down on evangelical Christians in Iran in the run-up to Christmas,” Al Arabiya reported on December 15. “Security officials routinely arrest Christian citizens during the Christmas season, according to the 2019 US Commission for International Religious Freedom report, which found the regime arrested 114 Christians during the first week of December in 2018.” Dabrina Tamraz, who experienced persecution as a Christian before she managed to flee the Islamic republic nine years ago, shed light on the plight of Christians by recounting her own experiences: “Christmas celebrations make it easier for Iranian authorities to arrest a group of Christians at one time,” said the escapee who currently resides in Europe. During a family Christmas gathering in Tehran in 2014, “My brother opened the door only to be confronted with about 30 plain clothes officers who pushed their way in. They separated men from women and conducted strip body searches. Three people, including my father, were arrested and charged with acting against national security and conducting evangelism.” The report adds that “The Iranian government considers evangelism—the sharing of the Christian faith—a criminal act.”

As another example of the persecution and discrimination Christians routinely experience around Christmas, the annual Armenian Christian market at Tehran’s Ararat Club, which was supposed to be held between Christmas Eve and the New Year, was canceled by officials. According to that report,

In a situation where the economy is declining and the business market is sluggish due to the policies of the Islamic Republic … this cancellation for preventing ‘Christian propaganda’ is an irrational decision. The cancellation of the market, which is a clear sign of discrimination and inequality, has received widespread criticism in the Armenian community… Every year on the eve of Christmas, pressure on the Iranian Christian community by various government agencies is increasing, including arresting Christian activists, obstructing the business of Christian sellers, even those who sell Christmas decorations!… Christian compatriots are subject to double discrimination, whether in the labor market, employment, job position or in violating their right to run private businesses.

Pakistan: “A 14-year-old Christian girl from Zia Colony, Karachi, was kidnapped, forcibly converted and married off to a Muslim man,” Asia Times reported on December 3. “Our daughters are insecure and abused in this country,” the mother of Huma Younus, explained. “They are not safe anywhere. We leave them at schools or home but they are kidnapped, raped, humiliated, and forced to convert to Islam.” The eighth grade student was seen by neighbors being forcefully dragged into a car by three armed men. “She was kidnapped by Abdul Jabar, a Muslim,” her father said. After the girl’s family went to police, Jabar sent documents to the family over WhatsApp: “He asked us not to be worried for Huma as she is now his wife and has entered into Islam”; however, “the religious conversion documents are fake,” said the mother, noting that the date of the document of the 14-year-old’s alleged conversion is the same date of her abduction. “My daughter’s life is in danger. She could be tortured or killed. I beg the authorities to recover my daughter as soon as possible.” “Christian girls are being abused and forcefully converted,” Fr. Saleh Diego, Director of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Karachi, said while discussing this latest incident:

The kidnappers are misusing religion for their motives and spoiling the lives of hundreds of young girls from the marginalized Christian community….Huma must be recovered with no further delay. This unethical and illegal practice must also be stopped and the kidnappers of Huma and other girls must be brought to justice and punished for their crimes.

To date, police and courts have largely been unresponsive. “Abducting for the purpose of forced conversion and marriage is a major issue in Pakistan,” Asia Times concludes. “Most of the victims are Christian and Hindu girls and young women, forced to wed against their will to much older Muslim men.”

United Nations: According to a December 4 CBN News report, “Christian Syrian refugees … have been blocked from getting help from the United Nations Refugee Agency … by Muslim UN officials in Jordan.” One of the refugees, Hasan, a Syrian convert to Christianity, explained that Muslim UN camp officials “knew that we were Muslims and became Christians and they dealt with us with persecution and mockery. They didn’t let us into the office. They ignored our request.” “Hasan and his family are now in hiding,” the report adds, “afraid that they will be arrested by Jordanian police, or even killed. Converting to Christianity is a serious crime in Jordan.” Timothy, another Jordanian Muslim convert to Christianity, confirmed: “All of the United Nations officials [apparently in Jordan], most of them, 99 percent, they are Muslims, and they were treating us as enemies.” Addressing this issue, Paul Diamond, a British human rights lawyer, elaborated:

You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been “genocided,” they can’t even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you [from] getting in and laugh at you and mock you and even threaten you…. [saying] “You shouldn’t have converted. You’re an idiot for converting. You get what you get,” words to that effect.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of the new book, Sword and Scimitar, Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

About this Series

The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has become endemic. Accordingly, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed in 2011 to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that occur or are reported each month. It serves two purposes:

1) To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, persecution of Christians.

2) To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Islamic Sharia.

Accordingly, whatever the anecdote of persecution, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; apostasy, blasphemy, and proselytism laws that criminalize and sometimes punish with death those who “offend” Islam; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya (financial tribute expected from non-Muslims); overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed dhimmis, or second-class, “tolerated” citizens; and simple violence and murder. Sometimes it is a combination thereof.

Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the West, to Indonesia in the East—it should be clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Islamic Sharia law, or the supremacist culture born of it.

#Islam #Muslim #Religion #Sharia #Jihad #Legal #News #Politics #Media #Mosque #Travel #Persecution

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