#Refugee Crisis

[alwaysbewoke]

[drsonnet]

للنشر: الرصيف البحري العائم الذي تصطنعه #أمريكا و حلفاؤها في #غزة..ماهو إلا حصان طروادة (خدعة) و دعاية رخيصة بدعوى المساعدات الإنسانية من أمريكا المجرمة التي تشارك في إبادة شعب #غزة مع #إسرائيل.

The floating pier manufactured by #US and its allies in #Gaza… is nothing but a Trojan horse and cheap propaganda under the pretext of humanitarian aid from the criminal America, which is participating in the annihilation of the people of #Gaza along with #Israel.

Trojan horse, huge hollow wooden horse constructed by the Greeks to gain entrance into Troy during the Trojan War. 

#Gaza #GazaFamine #GazaGenocide #Biden2024 @LatuffCartoons

[houseofpurplestars]

Images of displaced refugee children in Sudan, Palestine, and Congo.

[feckcops]

The migrant shipwreck near Greece is a horrible tragedy – but it wasn’t an accident

“The Greek coast guard’s conflicting account states that the vessel was first spotted by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, at midday on Tuesday, June 13. It claims that once it achieved contact, those on board repeatedly stated that ‘the boat was not in danger, they wanted no help other than food and water, and that they wished to continue on to Italy.’ The coast guard states that at 1:40 a.m., the boat ceased moving, and at 2:04 a.m., a coast guard floating vessel reported that the trawler had capsized.

“International legal experts have noted that even if those on board the trawler said they did not want to be rescued, the coast guard had the obligation to independently evaluate if it was seaworthy and intervene if it was not. Photos of the trawler show that it was clearly overpacked, those on board did not appear to be wearing life vests, and the vessel was not flying any flag …

“These tragedies are no accident, but a product of political choices. Over the past decade, the EU has reduced access to asylum and made arriving on the continent ever more difficult — increasing policing and surveillance along its borders, erecting and expanding walls, and illegally pushing back thousands of people …

“There are years of evidence that Greece and Frontex regularly engage in and cooperate on illegal pushbacks — pushing migrants back over the border despite their right to seek asylum. In recent years, these pushbacks have been stepped up, both on the country’s northern land border and at sea. Those caught on the northern border are usually beaten, robbed of their phones and all their valuables, often stripped naked, and put in boats on the river Évros. People who arrive on Greek islands are usually gathered up, put on rubber boats, and abandoned at sea. Boats intercepted in the Aegean Sea are often damaged or have their engines removed, or else the Hellenic Coast Guard will simply tow them back to Turkish waters.”

[apenitentialprayer]

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, and all people of goodwill:

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is asked by a scholar of the law, "And who is my neighbor?" when faced with upholding the greatest commandment. Jesus replied with the parable of the Good Samaritan [10:29-37]. Today, our nation is divided by partisanship and ideology, which blind us to the image of God in our neighbor, especially the unborn, the poor, and the stranger. These negative sentiments are only exacerbated by gossip, which can spread quickly across social media with no concern for the truth or those involved.

From the beginning, the human race was made in the image of God, which distinguishes us from all other created things. The arrival of Jesus Christ in human history confirms the dignity God has given to each of us, without exception. It is our belief in the dignity of human life that guides our consciences and rhetoric when engaging in politics or personal conversation. Each of us, therefore, must turn to God and ask for eyes to see the infinite dignity of every person.

Throughout our nation's history, Catholic immigrants have come to our shores seeking freedom to worship and raise their families. Over 70 years ago, Pope Pius XII urged the Body of Christ to understand the Christian responsibility to care for migrants and refugees, writing "Indeed, there has never been a period during which the Church has not been active on behalf of migrants, exiles, and refugees." Today, we witness newcomers to our dioceses who have escaped extreme violence and poverty and are seeking work to support themselves and their families. Some are Catholic, some are not, but all are welcome in our parishes, and all are individuals loved by God.

What is our duty, as Catholics, to ensure all segments of our society, including our political leaders, view newcomers first as children of God while understanding the need to enforce reasonable limits to legal immigration? Do we ask ourselves how we would want to be received if forced to flee our homes?

Though national attention has turned to Springfield, we know that throughout Ohio our neighbors include Haitians and others fleeing inhuman conditions in their countries. Our Haitian brothers and sisters in Springfield have been granted Temporary Protected Status, a humane federal program that protects foreign nationals from deportation to unsafe home countries. Like all people, these Haitians should be afforded the respect and dignity that are theirs by right and allowed the ability to contribute to the common good. The recent influx of so many migrants in a brief time has caused a strain on the city's resources. We applaud all those community groups working hard to advance the flourishing of Springfield, given the need to integrate newcomers into the social fabric. If we remain true to our principles, we can have a dialogue about immigration without scapegoating groups of people for society issues beyond their control.

The Letter of Saint James warns, "Consider how small a fire can set a huge forest ablaze. The tongue is also a fire . . . With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings who are made in the likeness of God" (James 3:5-6, 9). As the residents of Springfield, Ohio struggle with violent threats and life disruptions fueled by unfettered social media posts, we exhort the Catholic faithful and all people of goodwill not to perpetuate ill will toward anyone involved based on unfounded gossip. Instead, we ask for prayers and support for all the people of Springfield as they integrate their new Haitian neighbors and build a better future together.

Pope Francis, like Pope Benedict XVI and Pope St. Paul II before him, reminds us that we are all migrants on this earth headed toward the "true homeland," the kingdom of heaven. On Sept. 29, the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, we are asked by the Holy Father to reflect upon the need to open our eyes to those brothers and sisters who might live in the shadows of our parishes and communities. The Catholic Church continues to pray and work in places of violence and economic despair so that individuals and families do not have to flee their homeland. In the meantime, let us reject a mindset of judging who belongs to our community and put on the mind of Christ to understand that God walks with all his people, especially those in need.

With you in Christ Jesus,

Bolded emphases added. (This letter was signed by the bishop of every diocese and eparchy in Ohio; you can see their names at the end of the letter in the link.)

[luminalunii97]

An Iranian LGBTIQ activist is facing deportation to his home country. The Human Rights Association (IHD) announced on Friday that Elyas Torabiba-Eskandari was detained last Sunday at a Pride parade in Istanbul and taken into deportation custody. After a stay of several hours at the police station in the Beyoğlu district, Torabiba-Eskandari was initially taken to the deportation centre of the Turkish migration authority in Tuzla. In the meantime, he is being held in an identical facility in the border province of Urfa. Elyas Torabiba-Eskandari fled Iran ten years ago together with his mother. According to the IHD, both were victims of state violence, arbitrary detention and torture in their home country. Since their flight in 2013, they have been living in Turkey - however, they do not enjoy full refugee protection there in the sense of the Geneva Convention, but only have so-called conditional refugee status. Nevertheless, a deportation would violate the prohibition of refoulement, i.e. that refugees may not be deported to countries where their lives are in danger. However, the IHD regularly documents deportations of refugees from Turkey to Iran, but also to Syria and Iraq, where their lives are in danger.

LGBTQ+ activists face lethal punishments in Iran. This shouldn't be allowed.

[reasonsforhope]

Odd jobs are few and far between in Nearobo. Peter knows because every day he walks the streets of his village in south-east Liberia looking for one. In a good month, he might make $20 (£16.70). That’s hardly enough to feed himself, let alone his children.

But today things are looking up. As part of an innovative new donation scheme, Peter receives $40 (£33.40) per month for a minimum of three years. No paperwork. No requests for receipts. No catch of any kind, in fact. Just hard cash transferred straight to his mobile phone. 

The 59-year-old casual labourer plans to use the money to buy materials for a new home for himself and his family, he says. “Although it is going to take long, I will continue until my house is completed.”

The scheme is part of a new-look approach to development assistance that, if taken to scale, could potentially turn the £156bn international aid industry on its head.

At least, so says Rory Stewart, the former UK foreign secretary turned podcaster-in-chief (he co-hosts ‘The Rest is Politics’ with Alastair Campbell, a surprise hit which has topped the Apple podcast charts virtually every week since it launched a year ago). From his new base in Amman, Jordan, Stewart heads up GiveDirectly – the world’s fastest growing nonproft – who are behind the initiative.

“It’s a rather radical, simple idea to help people out of extreme poverty. We deliver the cash directly … there’s no middleman and no government getting in the way.”

It feels like an odd statement from someone who has spent much of his life in government service: first as a junior diplomat for eight years (during which he penned a bestselling book about dodging Taliban bullets and hungry wolves whilst walking across Afghanistan), followed by almost a decade as a politician at Westminster.

Pictured: Rory Stewart and GiveDirectly’s Ivan Ntwali talk with a refugee household in Rwanda. Image: GiveDirectly

His enthusiasm is even more surprising given his initial caution. During his various ministerial stints at the UK’s department for international development (including three months as secretary of state), he was an out-and-out “cash sceptic.” 

Giving away money with no strings attached was, he felt at the time, an impossible sell to tax-paying voters. What’s stopping recipients spending it down the pub? Or investing in a hair-brained business venture? 

Quite a lot it turns out. No one knows the value of money more than those who don’t have any, he argues. Give an impoverished mother-of-four $40 (£33.40) cash and, 99 times out of 100, she’ll spend it on something useful: repairs to the house, say, or school fees for her kids...

By virtue of GiveDirectly’s model, participants can spend their money on whatever they choose, but the charity’s research indicates that most goes towards food, medical and education expenses, durables, home improvement and social events.

On the flipside, Stewart also has numerous examples of well-funded aid projects that deliver next to nothing. A decade ago, the then United Nations general secretary Ban Ki-moon estimated that 30 per cent of aid money disappears in corruption. There is little to suggest much has changed.

The aid industry doesn’t need corrupt officials to see its funds evaporate, however; it has its own voluminous bureaucracy. Stewart recalls once visiting a $40,000 (£33,560) water and sanitation project in a school in an unnamed African country. The ‘deliverables’ were two brick latrines and five red buckets for storing water...

The beauty of direct giving, he stresses, is not just that it annuls opportunities for thievery and red tape; it also frees the world’s poorest individuals from the well-meaning but, very often, misplaced guidance of donors. An aid expert in Brussels or Washington DC may well have a PhD in development economics, but who is best to judge what a single mother in a Kinshasa slum needs most and how to obtain it most cheaply: the expert with her degree, or the mother with her hungry children?

Empowering recipients to decide for themselves helps end the kind of “mad world” where aid agencies pay to ship wheat from Idaho, US, to Antananarivo, Madagascar, only for local people to sell it in order to buy what they really want, Stewart reasons.

“So often, these communities are having to turn the goods we send them into cash anyway, but just in a very inefficient and wasteful fashion … instead [with direct cash transfers] they are given the choice and freedom in how to spend it.” 

Pictured: Villagers in Kilif, Kenya, at a public meeting about the GiveDirectly programme. Image: GiveDirectly

Is the system perfect? No, clearly not. Stewart concedes that opportunities for fraud and coercion exist. To minimise these risks, GiveDirectly employs field officers to meet face-to-face with recipients, as well as a team of telephone handlers and internal auditors to follow up on reports of irregularity.

By his reckoning, however, the biggest impediment to direct giving really taking off is donor reticence. At present, only 2 per cent of official aid is given direct in cash. Stewart thinks it should be closer to 60 or 70 per cent...

‘My children will not have to beg anymore’

Happiness Kadzmila from Malawi enrolled on GiveDirectly’s Basic Income project last summer. She will now receive $50 (£41) a month for a year ($600/£496 in total).

What are the biggest hardships you’ve faced in life?

I am a divorced mother of four children. I got divorced in 2020 while I was eight months pregnant with my last-born child. Since then, I have been depending on working on other people’s farms. I get paid $0.49 (£0.43), or a plate of maize flour per day. As a result, it has been a challenge to feed my children, buy clothes for them, and to pay their school fees My firstborn child is in year 4, the school charges $0.69 (£0.61) per day for her. My second is in year 3, I pay $0.49 (£0.43) for him. There were days when I would have no food in my home, and my children would go to my neighbours’ homes to beg for food. This made me feel sorry for my children as a mother.

What does receiving this money mean for you?

I was so happy the day I received cash amounting to $51.75 (£43.56) from GiveDirectly. I used the money to buy maize at $9.88 (£8.32). My children will not have to go to our neighbours to beg for food anymore. I also bought a sheep at $34.58 (£29.10). I will be selling sheep in future when they multiply. I also bought lotion and soap at $1.88 (£1.58).

How will you spend your future payments?

I plan to renovate my house. I have always admired those who sleep in houses made of a roof with iron sheets because they do not have to think of fetching grass every year for a new roof. I will also start a business selling doughnuts to sustain my income after I receive my last transfer. I did not know that an organisation like GiveDirectly would come to help me this way All I can say to those who are giving us this money is ‘thank you’."

-via Positive News, 3/3/23

More and More People to Help

In addition to their universal basic income programs, GiveDirectly also has dedicated programs where you can donate to emergency disaster relief, people living under the protracted civil war and human rights disaster in Yemen, refugees, and survivors of the Syria-Turkey earthquake.

They have also commissioned a number of large-scale, third-party studies on the effectiveness of their numerous universal basic income models. Find these and other projects here.

[myboredgeneration]

Politicians won't give a shit about your financial situation making you stop/cancel being a parent. Instead of improving it, they will simply allow refugees into your country to breed like animals so the gears of industry can spin with cheap labour.

[alwaysbewoke]

#Sudan #KeepEyesOnSudan

[annasellheim]

Hello!

If you sign up for my Patreon by Sunday, July 21st at ANY TIER (for as little as $1), I will send you some of my refugee students' comics in the mail! And if you sign up for my Patreon at a $10+ tier, you will get a button or sticker made by one of my students as well.

My Patreon charges per project, not monthly. You only get charged when i make a new zine (about 4 a year).

All profits of these zines go towards the student snack fund- help me feed my students!!!

t

[sparksinthenight]

“In the last ten years, hundreds of children have been killed undertaking this journey. These deaths are as preventable and unnecessary as they are tragic. Since 2014, at least 2,508 people have died in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.”

https://www.unicef.org/eca/press-releases/second-deadly-shipwreck-aegean-sea-week-claims-lives-two-more-childre

[drsonnet]

Art: Eli Valley

Eli Valley is a Jewish Currents contributing writer.

[inkyswampbonesart]

I drew a displacement tent based on the current shelters of many people of Gaza and refugees worldwide. There's two versions: full colour and just linework.

These images are free for anybody to use in transformative works to call for a free Palestine, a permanent ceasefire, support for the people displaced from Gaza, etc. Also, as this piece of art is less specific to Palestine, please feel free to use them in work that benefits refugees from other places. See below for more details:

You can download these images and use them in your own work as long as it is a non-commercial piece that is pro-Palestine or in support of refugees from parts of the world such as Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and many, many other countries where the citizens are facing forced displacement.

Examples: use them in a digital collage, add text to make stickers, print them out and use them in a physical collage, use them as clipart in a presentation or infographic. Put filters on them, trace them, or just use them as they are. As long as it's part of a work to further the cause of refugee populations.

You do not have to credit me (although it's always appreciated!) but please do not claim them to be your own drawing.

Non-commercial here means that you should not be making money from any materials using these images- however, if you want to use them to make something that will be sold to directly benefit Palestinian or refugee support charities, fundraisers etc, please message me! That will most probably be totally fine.

Feel free to use it in posts drawing attention to/promoting Palestinian/Sudanese/Congolese/other refugee fundraisers-- that's fine.

Also, please reblog!

[apenitentialprayer]

Pope Francis’s June 2024 Prayer Intention: For Migrants Fleeing Their Homes

Loving Father, who welcomes all Your sons and daughters, we pray to You today for the migrants who flee from war or hunger. May they find welcome and new opportunities in the countries that receive them. For hospitality is an expression of love, of that dynamism of openness that inspires us to pay attention to others, to seek the best for their lives.

But we know that immigrants are often seen as usurpers who have nothing to offer, and so this leads to the simplistic belief that the poor are dangerous and useless while the powerful are rich benefactors.

Teach us to be a Church that is a field hospital, to live an even better way of welcoming, to promote a culture of welcome that protects and integrates; to think for and develop an open world, to not judge the usefulness of the person, but to see the value in itself that the person represents; and that the different countries of the world be able to think not only as a country, but also as a human family, because only a social and political culture that incorporates gratuitous acceptance can have a future. Amen.

Mark Seitz, Bishop of El Paso, with a family from Honduras (x)