#if i see one more anti migrant ad

[devilfish-wick]

white americans stop making up shit to be scared of challenge (impossible!)

[eaglesnick]

Smoke, Mirrors and Reform

UKIP and the Brexit Party (now renamed Reform) both led by Nigel Farage, promised to “take back control" of UK borders. All patriotic Britons had to do was vote for Brexit, leave the EU and migration would come to an end.

How did that work out?

Before Brexit, EU and UK citizens had the freedom to live, work or study in any EU country without needing a visa. This was of equal benefit for all working people across the EU. We came out of the EU January 1st 2021. For the year 2020/21, the last year of Britain’s membership, net migration for the year was 685,000.

The following year, 2022, net migration was 745,000, an all-time high.

 In May of this year Politico carried this headline:

“3 years after Brexit, UK net migration has never been higher”. (Politico: 25/05/23)

So much for the “taking back control of our borders” promise by the Brexiteers! Rather than protecting people jobs and wages from the competition of foreign workers the Financial Times reports that most of the recent surge in immigrant numbers comes from “skilled migrants”.

“Employers in the UK have made much greater use …of the new migration system to bring in workers.” (FT: 13/03/23)

In other words, now that we have sovereign control of our borders businesses are bringing in more labour form abroad than ever before.  Here is a chilling fact brought to us by Migration Observatory:

“Foreign workers made up over a fifth of the employed population in the first quarter of 2024” (MO: June 2024)

As the number of EU nationals working in the UK has fallen so the number of non-EU foreign nationals working in the UK has risen. We have taken back control of our borders but to whose benefit? Could it possibly be the multi-millionaire and billionaire businessmen bankrolling the Reform Party?

It is interesting to note that the Reform Party “contract” promises to  “freeze non-essential immigration” but that “smart immigration can target the essential skills our economy needs”. As the above figures show, UK businesses are already practicing “ smart immigration” with  foreign workers making up over a 20% of the employed population. So much for Reforms real concern for migrant numbers!

As well as importing foreign workers with “essential skills” Reform intend to undermine the employment rights of existing workers. Reform promise to:

“Scrap thousands of laws that hold back British business and damage productivity, including employment laws…”

At one level you have to admire Nigel Farage and his wealthy backers: the Reform Party are the masters of illusion. Their biggest appeal of Reform to the British electorate is that they are anti-immigration, and by association, pro-working class. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I would argue Reform is pro-big business, pro-its wealthy backers ad their interests, and anti-working class.

This is demonstrated by the very way the party is structured - as a limited company! Reform UK Party Limited is described as an “entrepreneurial political start-up”, with Nigel Farage as the majority shareholder. Reform is a business enterprise in its own right, not a political party, a business enterprise bankrolled by wealthy business owners, multi-millionaires and billionaires who expect a return on their investment.

Lets hope the British people see through the smoke and mirrors before it is too late!

[head-post]

Liverpool Muslims shocked by riots in UK

For Liverpool’s largest mosque, this week has been the first time most entrances are blocked, people in reflective jackets take turns patrolling, and a handful of worshippers sleep inside at night, according to Reuters.

Officials at the Al-Rahma Mosque say these are all necessary precautions during the worst riots in the UK in years.

The heightened vigil has come as some Muslims and ethnic minorities in Liverpool claim they feel unsafe amid widespread protests targeting mosques, immigration centres, and hotels where asylum seekers have allegedly been living.

Both mosque officials and other Muslims in Liverpool revealed they were shocked after two mosques further north in England were attacked by violent crowds, with hundreds of anti-immigration protesters and counter-protesters clashing in Liverpool city centre. Shops were looted and several police officers suffered injuries.

A second mosque in Liverpool, the Abdullah Quilliam, which describes itself as Britain’s first, has been temporarily closed due to violence fuelled by a false claim circulating online that the killer of three girls in neighbouring Southport was an Islamist migrant. Abdulwase Sufian, a 20-year-old student who helps at the Al-Rahma, said:

I was born here, I was raised here. So seeing this, it just doesn’t feel like home. Seeing what’s happened, it’s gotten me scared, not just for myself, but for the future.

Sufian added that the separate women’s entrance to the mosque, which served a wide range of Muslims from ethnic Yemenis to Pakistanis, had been closed to discourage women from entering the mosque in the evenings for security reasons. He himself did not go outside his immediate neighbourhood for fear of his safety.

Muslims are terrified

Saba Ahmed, a community worker and another Liverpudlian Muslim, said she had felt “terrified” in recent days. Nevertheless, many of Ahmed’s white English friends supported her, with some neighbours offering to go grocery shopping so she could stay safe at home.

That’s our people in Liverpool, that’s our fellow neighbours here.

Others, however, were less fortunate. Farmanullah Nasiri, a taxi driver, revealed he was attacked after picking up two passengers on Aigburth Road in Liverpool in the early hours of Tuesday morning. One of them, a woman, punched him in the face and smashed his video recorder as she got out of his silver Ford Focus after an argument over the fare had begun. She insulted him when she found out he was an ethnic Afghan, Nasiri said.

This is kind of a racism … Been here for more than 10 years in Liverpool. Everybody’s friendly. There’s no issue like this before. This is the first time.

Tell MAMA, a group that tracks anti-Muslim incidents, has received more than 500 calls and online reports of anti-Muslim behaviour from across the UK in the last week. This was five times more than the previous week, its director Iman Atta reported.

The group argues that anti-Muslim hatred had been growing in Britain even before the riots began, and especially since the conflict in Gaza started last year. More than a quarter of the 550 British Muslims surveyed last month said they had experienced an anti-Muslim hate incident in the past year.

Read more HERE

[sa7abnews]

Starmer: Far-right rioters will 'regret' worst disorder in years

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/06/starmer-far-right-rioters-will-regret-worst-disorder-in-years/

Starmer: Far-right rioters will 'regret' worst disorder in years

UK leader Keir Starmer warned far-right protesters on Sunday they would “regret” participating in England’s worst rioting in 13 years, as disturbances linked to the murder of three children earlier this week flared across the country for a fifth day.

Masked anti-immigration demonstrators smashed several windows at a hotel that has been used to house asylum seekers in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

Unrest related to misinformation about the mass stabbing last Monday in the northwestern English seaside town of Southport has impacted multiple towns and cities, with anti-immigration demonstrators clashing with police.

The violence is posing an early major challenge for Starmer, who was elected only a month ago after leading Labour to a landslide win over the Conservatives.

“I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder. Whether directly or those whipping up this action online, and then running away themselves,” Starmer said in a TV address.

He added that there was “no justification” for what he called “far-right thuggery” and promised to bring the perpetrators “to justice”.

Footage aired on the BBC showed rioters forcing their way into a Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham. They also pushed a burning bin into the building. It was not clear whether asylum seekers were inside.

In the northeastern English city of Middlesbrough, hundreds of protesters squared up to riot police carrying shields. Some threw bricks, cans and pots at officers.

The fresh disturbances came after more than 90 people were arrested on Saturday following skirmishes at far-right rallies in Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Blackpool and Hull, as well as Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Rioters threw bricks, bottles and flares at police — injuring several officers — looted and burnt shops, while demonstrators shouted anti-Islamic slurs as they clashed with counter-protesters.

The violence is the worst England has seen since the summer of 2011, when widespread rioting took place following the police killing of 29-year-old Black British man Mark Duggan in North London.

“We’re now seeing it (trouble) flooding across major cities and towns,” said Tiffany Lynch of the Police Federation of England and Wales.

Riots first flared in Southport on Tuesday night following Monday’s frenzied knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in the northwest coastal city, before spreading up and down England.

‘Wake-up call’

They were fuelled by false rumours on social media about the background of British-born 17-year-old suspect Axel Rudakubana, who is accused of killing a six, seven, and nine-year-old, and injuring another 10 people.

Police have blamed the violence on supporters and associated organisations of the English Defence League, an anti-Islam organisation founded 15 years ago whose supporters have been linked to football hooliganism.

Agitators have targeted at least two mosques, and the UK interior ministry announced Sunday it was offering new emergency security to the Islamic places of worship.

The rallies have been advertised on far-right social media channels under the banner “Enough is enough”.

Participants have waved English and British flags while chanting slogans like “Stop the boats” — a reference to irregular migrants travelling to Britain from France.

Anti-fascist demonstrators have held counter-rallies in many cities, including Leeds where they shouted, “Nazi scum off our streets”, as the far-right protesters chanted, “You’re not English any more”.

Not all the gatherings have turned violent. A peaceful one in Aldershot, southern England, on Sunday saw participants hold placards that read “Stop the invasion” and “We’re not far right, we’re just right”.

“People are fed up with being told you should be ashamed if you’re white and working class but I’m proud white working class,” 41-year-old Karina, who did not give her surname, told AFP in Nottingham on Saturday.

Commentators have suggested that the demonstrators may feel emboldened by the political ascendancy of anti-immigration elements in British politics.

At last month’s election, the Reform UK party led by Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage captured 14 percent of the vote — one of the largest vote shares for a far-right British party.

Carla Denyer, co-leader of the left-wing Green party, said the unrest should be “a wake-up call to all politicians who have actively promoted or given in” to anti-immigration rhetoric.

[thegnmsolution]

Palestinian Smart City: Most Surveilled City on The Planet and Military Test City for Future Smart Cities Around the World

Health Impact News-- May 9, 2024 Palestinian Smart City: Most Surveilled City on The Planet and Military Test City for Future Smart Cities Around the World * * *Comment by Brian Shilhavy* *Editor, Health Impact News* /Mint Press News/ published a documentary yesterday that is less than 10 minutes long showing how the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank is currently the most advanced Smart City in the world where “/Palestinians are the most surveilled people on the planet/.” The documentary is filmed inside the Palestinian area of Hebron. To enter you need to have your face scanned, and pass through gates where AI-powered unmanned machine guns are pointed at busy sections of the city. Hebron is the test city for the Israeli “Wolf Pack” surveillance system. The journalist, a Palestinian American woman, says that many of the cameras in the city can see through walls, making no section of this Smart City private, not even people’s homes. I checked to verify that such cameras exist, and they do . Here is a video produced by the Israeli manufacturer, Camero, whose logo displays the “all-seeing eye”: It’s a 2-minute promo video for these cameras that can see behind walls: Here’s the Mint Press documentary (less than 10 minutes). The Palestinian section of Hebron is very obviously the world’s most advanced Smart City and the blueprint for future 15-minute Smart Cities that are already being planned throughout the U.S. Like Palestinian Hebron, these “cities” will be literal outdoor prisons, where everything people do in these cities is tracked, and you can only enter or leave by providing a face scan. They may start out as FEMA camps in the U.S., but the Government is going to need places to house migrants and “dissenters,” those who refuse government edicts like mandatory drugs and vaccines, or those who are arrested on the upcoming new antisemitism laws that are in the pipeline, and refuse to obey the Zionists. And if you still think I am exaggerating the dangers of these proposed new antisemitism bills that are now rapidly being advanced to take advantage of the backlash against the student protests, two more new antisemitism bills were just introduced to Congress by Zionist Republicans that want to send pro-Palestinians to Palestine where they would probably be confined in one of the Smart Cities, until the U.S. has some of their own. Republican House members suggest laws sending campus protesters to Gaza A group of House Republicans led by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) introduced a pair of bills Wednesday that would send anti-Israel protesters and others to Gaza or cancel visas if they are convicted of a crime on a college campus. The Study Abroad Act will cancel visas for those who have been arrested “for rioting or unlawful protest” or for establishing, participating, or promoting an encampment on college campuses since Oct. 7, 2023 — the date of Hamas’s invasion of Israel. “It’s time to send a clear message to foreign, Hamas-sympathizing students rioting: if you bring chaos to our universities, you can study abroad somewhere else,” Ogles told the Daily Caller. “Might I recommend Iran, Qatar, or Gaza? They seem more your speed,” Ogles added. The second bill, the Antisemitism Community Service Act, is much more broad. That bill would send anyone who has committed a crime on a college campus since Oct. 7, 2023, to Gaza to perform six months of community service. The bill’s current wording would include those who have committed crimes unrelated to recent anti-Israel protests. “If you support a terrorist organization, and you participate in unlawful activity on campuses, you should get a taste of your own medicine,” Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX), who introduced the bill alongside Ogles and Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC), said to Fox News Digital. “I am going to bet that these pro-Hamas supporters wouldn’t last a day, but let’s give them the opportunity.” (Source .) Read the full article

[jodilin65]

When I look at the comments on some of the IVF articles it amazes me how more and more people are anti-abortion and just how conservative this country is getting.

When I asked myself who I would vote for if I was going to vote, not that I’m going to vote for real of course, saying I would vote for Trump may be stretching it a bit but the little bastard may actually be better than Biden for a few reasons. First, the attack on gays and women is going to continue no matter who gets elected. That’s just something that’s going to get worse and worse probably for decades before it gradually gets better if it does. I think it will fluctuate over the decades and even centuries where sometimes women will have more rights and other times they won’t.

But Biden got absolutely nothing done but invited tens of thousands of people into the country to hog our resources and give billions of dollars to other countries. Yes, Trump is a misogynist who’s probably a closet case who can’t deal with his feelings and will take his frustration out on gays and women any chance he gets. And yes, it was horrible that he appointed bigoted justices and all that but what’s done is done and like I said, things are only going to get worse before they get better.

So maybe it would actually be better to have a president who’s going to staunch the flow of migrants from taking jobs away from Americans and calling for longer waiting times getting into doctors and adding to the overcrowding. And maybe he won’t be as quick to give as much of our money away. Just something to think about unless he plans to target older people next. The guy’s amount of popularity and supporters really stuns me. He is definitely the most talked about and the most popular president we ever had next to Obama.

I try to remind myself that if the masses believe, think, or do something, it’s usually for a reason yet I’m still not seeing the “human” in embryos or fetuses. I see the potential human but it’s kind of like a seed versus a tree. Well, a seed isn’t a tree. I also don’t see the sin in two consenting adults in love just because they may have the same body parts. Sometimes I wish I could see it their way because it’s the norm and following norms is always easier but I just can’t and I don’t.

In the latest episode of my show, they talked about how some scientists believe they have proof that some of the disasters mentioned in the Bible actually happened because the people living there pissed God off. Well, I still say there likely is no God and that the Bible is simply stories, but if they’re right, then we have a very evil, spiteful God who doesn’t love everybody unconditionally as many people claim. Besides, if that was the case, why isn’t he wiping us all out right now with the way things are so fucked up in the world?

I keep going back and forth in my mind as to whether or not my TSH is getting too low for comfort. My dry skin and hair and the way I feel cold say it’s not but I also could be cold from not eating much. Tom thanks my weight is down because I haven’t eaten much but with the way I’ve been feeling tonight, I think it’s down because my TSH is dropping. I tell you, I know my body and I don’t lose weight no matter how sick I get. In my twenties and even my thirties I may have but certainly not now. I know the drill and what to do about it if it is, though, and that’s to simply cut my waiting time a bit before food and drink and that will back it off. If I ignore it, the anxiety and the blah moods will intensify.

I still wish I was more connected at times. Being on nights half of my life doesn’t help but even if I was always on days I still wouldn’t have the friends and family I sometimes wish I had. Sometimes I wish I was surrounded by parents, siblings, cousins, and close friends who were totally supportive, accepting, non-judgmental, and not the least bit toxic in any way. But then I remind myself that things could be much worse like if I was alone with absolutely no one. I really believe that if I hadn’t met Tom I wouldn’t be alive. I also try to keep in mind that more people means more trouble. There are too many bad people out there. Too many backstabbing, lying phony people who just want to use you, judge you and try to change and control you.

I’ll still be doing a little socializing because I’m now signed up for the painting class on the 21st. I’m also going to get a pedicure sometime while Tom checks out a nearby store he wants to check out, so we do have some fun things to look forward to other than doctor’s appointments and labs.

We got bombs ready now that creepy crawlies are waking up, so we’ll be out for at least a couple of hours that day.

I want to go down to the beach but I don’t want to have to race against time to find the nearest charger that isn’t broken, in use, or taking a year to give us enough of a charge to get to our next destination.

In today’s junk mail came a postcard for looking up information to donate blood. I guess they do this all over town. They give you a T-shirt and a $20 gift certificate.

For just a buck I got frosty light pink lipstick with our last Walmart order and it looks nice. It’s noticeable but doesn’t stand out a mile away.

[newstfionline]

Friday, April 12, 2024

Study finds voters skeptical about fairness of elections. Many favor a strong, undemocratic leader (AP) Voters in 19 countries, including in three of the world’s largest democracies, are widely skeptical about whether their political elections are free and fair, and many favor a strong, undemocratic leader, according to a study released Thursday. The report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, concluded that “democratic institutions are falling short of people’s expectations.” The 35-member organization promotes democracy worldwide. In 17 countries, fewer than half of the people are satisfied with their governments, International IDEA found. The survey included three of the largest democracies—Brazil, India and the United States. In eight countries, “more people have favorable views of ‘a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament or elections,’” the institute said, adding that India and Tanzania stand out as countries “with relatively high levels of support for a ‘strong leader.’”

China allegedly interfered with Canada’s elections (Washington Post) The conclusions in the top-secret intelligence briefing were stark: China “clandestinely and deceptively” interfered in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections, seeking to support candidates favorable to Beijing’s strategic interests. The activity was aimed at discouraging Canadians, particularly Chinese Canadians, from voting for the Conservative Party, which it viewed as having an anti-Beijing platform, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service reported in the February 2023 briefing. China got the outcome it wanted in 2021—the reelection of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a minority government—but intelligence and national security officials have said there is no evidence that Beijing’s efforts had an impact on the result of either of the last two federal elections. CSIS prepared the document for the prime minister’s office after Canadian news outlets reported last year on allegations China sought to interfere in the elections. Now those claims are at the center of a public inquiry in Ottawa.

San Francisco MTA (Ars Technica) The very cradle of technological innovation in the United States, the San Francisco Bay Area that encompasses Silicon Valley, runs on floppy disks, and will continue to do so for quite some time (until 2029 or 2030). The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority runs on 5.25-inch floppy disks, which a few decades ago was deeply impressive and made it the bleeding edge of transportation software management in the world. Now it just makes it a bit of a dinosaur.

Higher gas and rents keep US inflation elevated, likely delaying Fed rate cuts (AP) Consumer inflation remained persistently high last month, boosted by gas, rents, auto insurance and other items, the government said Wednesday in a report that will likely give pause to the Federal Reserve as it considers how often—or even whether—to cut interest rates this year. Prices outside the volatile food and energy categories rose 0.4% from February to March, the same accelerated pace as in the previous month. Measured from a year earlier, these core prices are up 3.8%, unchanged from the year-over-year rise in February. The March figures, the third straight month of inflation readings well above the Fed’s 2% target, provide concerning evidence that inflation is stuck at an elevated level.

Desperate young Guatemalans try to reach the US even after horrific deaths of migrating relatives (AP) Every night for nearly two years, Glendy Aracely Ramírez has prayed by the altar in her parents’ mud-brick bedroom where, under a large crucifix, is a picture of her sister Blanca. The 23-year-old died alongside 50 other migrants in a smuggler’s tractor-trailer in Texas. “I ask God for my family’s health and that I might get to the United States one day. My mom asks God that she won’t have to see another accident,” said Glendy, 17, who has already packed a small backpack for her own journey from the family’s home 8,900 feet (2,700 meters) up in Guatemala’s highlands. Tens of thousands of youths from this region would rather take deadly risks—even repeatedly—than stay behind where they see no future. Blanca’s fatal journey was her third attempt to reach the U.S.

American Drones Failed to Turn the Tide in Ukraine (WSJ) The Silicon Valley company Skydio sent hundreds of its best drones to Ukraine to help fight the Russians. Things didn’t go well. Skydio’s drones flew off course and were lost, victims of Russia’s electronic warfare. The company has since gone back to the drawing board to build a new fleet. Most small drones from U.S. startups have failed to perform in combat, dashing companies’ hopes that a badge of being battle-tested would bring the startups sales and attention. It is also bad news for the Pentagon, which needs a reliable supply of thousands of small, unmanned aircraft. Made-in-America drones tend to be expensive, glitchy and hard to repair, said drone company executives, Ukrainians on the front lines, Ukrainian government officials and former U.S. defense officials. Absent solutions from the West, Ukraine has turned to cheaper Chinese products to fill its drone arsenal.

Kyiv’s conscription efforts (Foreign Policy) Ukraine passed a mobilization law on Thursday to replenish the nation’s troops. It requires all draft-eligible men to carry documents that show they are registered with the military. To try to prevent public backlash, the policy offers financial incentives for soldiers, including a bonus for front-line troops and death benefits for victims’ families, as well as new penalties on men who try to evade enlistment. The law’s timing aims to provide a reprieve for some of Ukraine’s exhausted and depleted troops as Russia continues its attacks.

The losing battle against Greece’s tumbling birthrate (Reuters) Army sergeant Christos Giannakidis was planning to have a second child when Greece’s debt crisis exploded last decade, straining his finances and erasing hope of extending the family. One son is expensive enough, he says. Most afternoons he drives 13-year-old Nicholas 50 km (31 miles) to play soccer with the few other children scattered across the region. If Nicholas needs a paediatrician, it is even further. As much of Europe struggles with tumbling birthrates that experts say threaten long-term economic wellbeing, Greece is a stark example of how hard it will be to reverse the trend. In 2022, it recorded the lowest number of births in 92 years, according to most recent data, driven by the debt crisis that led to years of austerity, emigration, and changed attitudes among the young. Preliminary unofficial data indicate another drop in 2023. Greece’s fertility rate is one of the lowest in Europe: some villages have not recorded a single birth in years.

Nuclear deal in tatters, Iran edges close to weapons capability (Washington Post) For the past 15 years, the most important clues about Iran’s nuclear program have lain deep underground, in a factory built inside a mountain on the edge of Iran’s Great Salt Desert. The facility, known as Fordow, is the heavily protected inner sanctum of Iran’s nuclear complex and a frequent destination for international inspectors whose visits are meant to ensure against any secret effort by Iran to make nuclear bombs. The inspectors’ latest trek, in February, yielded the usual matrices of readings and measurements, couched in the clinical language of a U.N. nuclear watchdog report. But within the document’s dry prose were indications of alarming change. In factory chambers that had ceased making enriched uranium under a 2015 nuclear accord, the inspectors now witnessed frenzied activity: newly installed equipment, producing enriched uranium at ever faster speeds, and an expansion underway that could soon double the plant’s output. More worryingly, Fordow was scaling up production of a more dangerous form of nuclear fuel—a kind of highly enriched uranium, just shy of weapons grade. Iranian officials in charge of the plant, meanwhile, had begun talking openly about achieving “deterrence,” suggesting that Tehran now had everything it needed to build a bomb if it chose.

He Wanted to Serve His Community in Gaza. He Paid With His Life. (NYT) Saifeddin Abutaha, an aid worker for World Central Kitchen, was on his way home to see his mother when an Israeli missile struck the car he was driving in a humanitarian convoy last week. Mr. Abutaha, 25, doted on his parents, and he texted them frequently while out delivering aid across the Gaza Strip, which is on the brink of famine after six months of war. The killing of seven World Central Kitchen employees in the Israeli attack has drawn international outrage, especially from the countries from which six of them hailed: Britain, Poland, Australia, Canada and the United States. Mr. Abutaha, a Palestinian from Gaza, also perished in the attack. His death highlighted the grim fact that most of the more than 200 aid workers who have been killed since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began have been Palestinian, according to United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres. He called last week for an independent investigation into each of their deaths, which have drawn less attention than the killing of foreign aid workers.

Few Signs of Progress on Aid to Gaza After Israeli Pledges (NYT) There has been no apparent work done yet on increasing aid to Gaza by opening an additional border crossing from Israel and accepting shipments at a nearby Israeli port, but Israel said on Wednesday that both changes remain in the works. Facing international condemnation after an Israeli airstrike killed seven workers for an international aid group, Israel said last week that it would reopen the Erez crossing between Israel and northern Gaza for aid delivery. But satellite imagery taken on Tuesday showed that the road leading to Erez on the Gaza side was blocked by rubble from a destroyed building, a crater and other damage that was also visible in images from last week and last month. The United Nations says that a man-made famine is looming in Gaza, and many experts say that conditions in northern Gaza—which has mostly been cut off from aid deliveries since early in the war—already meet the criteria for a famine to be declared there. In that part of the territory, a few hundred thousand people are surviving on an average of 245 calories a day, according to Oxfam, an aid group.

End of the Line? Saudi Arabia ‘forced to scale back’ plans for desert megacity (Guardian) It was billed as a glass-walled city of the future, an ambitious centrepiece of the economic plan backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to transition Saudi Arabia away from oil dependency. Now, however, plans for the mirror-clad desert metropolis called the Line have been scaled down and the project, which was envisaged to stretch 105 miles (170km) is expected to reach just a mile and a half by 2030. At least one contractor has begun dismissing workers. The project, which had been slated to cost $1.5tn (£1.2tn), was pitched as a reinvention of urban design. However, it has long attracted scepticism and criticism, not least after the reported execution of several members of the Howeitat tribe who had protested over plans to construct on their ancestral lands. Then there were reports of Prince Mohammed’s changing vision for the project, budget overspends and an ever-changing roster of key staff, with some who have worked on the project describing it as “untethered from reality”.

[wirsindkrieg]

My apologies if this comes across as harsh, but given the many similar responses I've seen like this, apparently I need to be far more blunt about this. If I use "you" at any point in this, know that it isn't directly at anyone specifically.

Until the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868, African-Americans weren't considered to be people under American law. It took until 1971 and the Supreme Court case Reed vs. Reed for there to be a ruling definitively saying that women are full persons under the law, with the full rights and privileges thereof. The legal definition of who qualifies as a person has changed in the past, and there is no reason to think it can't change again.

More importantly than that, though, consider the fact that there are major politicians in multiple countries right now that are campaigning on the idea that their out-group of choice aren't actually people. You see it in the vicious anti-LGBT stances throughout Europe, the hatred against immigrants and migrants being used to stir up fear on the campaign trail, and the literal talking points of open fascists.

Denial of personhood was how slavery was justified; if Africans aren't considered people, it becomes okay to treat them as property. Denial of personhood is how policies are justified that send refugees back to the very places they are fleeing from; if refugees aren't people, it becomes okay to stop caring about their wellbeing. Denial of personhood is how the Holocaust was justified; if Jews aren't people, it becomes okay to exterminate them en masse.

This isn't me saying, "You don't get to choose how you're referred to." This is me saying, "The removal of personhood is often the first step towards fascism and genocide, and you need to be very careful with that."

If a fascist sees an LGBT alterhuman declare that they aren't a person, that fascist isn't going to care if it's just an attempt to distance oneself from being human. All that fascist is going to see is someone in the LGBT community agreeing with them that an LGBT individual isn't actually a person, and therefore exterminating them is justified. And I really hope that we can all agree that giving fascists any amount of help justifying their hate is a bad idea.

If you don't want to be referred to by the word "person", that's fine. But there is a very big distinction between "I don't want to be referred to as 'person', please call me something else," and saying, "I am not a person." And the latter is the one I take issue with, and the one that is frighteningly prevalent in non-human and alterhuman spaces.

So yes, it is correct to say that respecting someone's boundaries around what they want to be called does no harm. But it is equally correct to say that denying one's personhood is a dangerous act that needs to be considered very carefully, especially in a political climate in which we are seeing the visible rise of fascism around the world. A philosophy that, I will remind, is built on the idea that some individuals are lesser, do not deserve the rights and privileges of personhood, and are fit to be eliminated from society.

"Person" is not a personal identity label that one can choose to opt in or out of. It is a status granted by the society around you, and which comes with a guarantee of safety. A guarantee that, again, there are major politicians actively campaigning to remove from groups they hate.

To make my primary point incredibly blunt: There are fascists out there right now that would see many, if not most, of the members of our community killed en masse for reasons entirely unrelated to our non-humanity and alterhumanity. Giving up one's personhood is adding fuel to their fire, and gives them a potential foothold to continue advancing their literal genocidal ideologies.

All I'm asking the community to consider is this: Do we really want to be enabling fascists?

"Person" is not an Identity

The topic of nonhuman personhood came up in a conversation earlier, which led to me scrolling through the notes on the essay/rant I wrote on the topic at the end of last year [link]. While scrolling through, I saw multiple people express the view that if someone doesn't want to be referred to as a "person", that should be respected.

I would like to kindly but firmly disagree with that view.

Personhood is not a personal identity, and it should not be approached the same way that one approaches identity labels like sexuality, gender, or even species identity. Personhood is a social and legal category, which carries with it significant implications about how (and if) one is treated as a member of society.

Whether it is intended or not, a declaration like "I am not a person" is declaring that one does not see themselves as a being deserving of basic rights and safety. It is saying that they do not see themselves as deserving of dignity and basic respect as a thinking being.

The declaration that an individual (or more often, a specific group) does not have personhood has been used as the justification for all manner of atrocities, up to and including genocide. And I want to be very clear that I am not exaggerating that point. The removal of personhood is a key element of fascist ideology, and is not something to be done casually, even to oneself.

If someone tells me that they use a specific identity label, or set of pronouns, or even choose to not identify as human, I can respect that, and I will do my best to embrace their decision. On the other hand, if someone tells me that they are not a person, I consider that cause for alarm.

The important difference is that personhood is not a personal identity. It is the state of being recognized as worthy of basic dignity, rights, and respect. To deny one's personhood is to deny that you deserve basic rights like freedom from harm, the ability to own property, and the ability to make decisions about your own life and body. I would hope that it's abundantly clear why denying oneself those basic rights is a bad thing.

"Person" is not an identity. It is a fundamental trait that cannot and should not be removed from anyone, even voluntarily. The denial of one's personhood is, at best, incredibly misguided, and at worst incredibly dangerous.

So if you're someone who wants to not be called a "person", I implore you to examine why you feel that way in depth, and consider if the problem isn't being called a person, but the societal assumption that person = human. And if the problem is that societal assumption, the solution isn't to deny your personhood; it's to join the large number of people pushing for society to accept that not every person is human.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Machine learning's crumbling foundations

Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that’s unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that’s insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.

Even people who write secure code import insecure libraries, or plug it into insecure authorization systems or databases. Like asbestos in the walls, this cruft has been fragmenting, drifting into our air a crumb at a time.

We ignored these, treating them as containable, little breaches and now the walls are rupturing and choking clouds of toxic waste are everywhere.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

The infosec apocalypse was decades in the making. The machine learning apocalypse, on the other hand…

ML has serious, institutional problems, the kind of thing you’d expect in a nascent discipline, which you’d hope would be worked out before it went into wide deployment.

ML is rife with all forms of statistical malpractice — AND it’s being used for high-speed, high-stakes automated classification and decision-making, as if it was a proven science whose professional ethos had the sober gravitas you’d expect from, say, civil engineering.

Civil engineers spend a lot of time making sure the buildings and bridges they design don’t kill the people who use them. Machine learning?

Hundreds of ML teams built models to automate covid detection, and every single one was useless or worse.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

The ML models failed due to failure to observe basic statistical rigor. One common failure mode?

Treating data that was known to be of poor quality as if it was reliable because good data was not available.

Obtaining good data and/or cleaning up bad data is tedious, repetitive grunt-work. It’s unglamorous, time-consuming, and low-waged. Cleaning data is the equivalent of sterilizing surgical implements — vital, high-skilled, and invisible unless someone fails to do it.

It’s work performed by anonymous, low-waged adjuncts to the surgeon, who is the star of the show and who gets credit for the success of the operation.

The title of a Google Research team (Nithya Sambasivan et al) paper published in ACM CHI beautifully summarizes how this is playing out in ML: “Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI,”

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf

The paper analyzes ML failures from a cross-section of high-stakes projects (health diagnostics, anti-poaching, etc) in East Africa, West Africa and India. They trace the failures of these projects to data-quality, and drill into the factors that caused the data problems.

The failures stem from a variety of causes. First, data-gathering and cleaning are low-waged, invisible, and thankless work. Front-line workers who produce the data — like medical professionals who have to do extra data-entry — are not compensated for extra work.

Often, no one even bothers to explain what the work is for. Some of the data-cleaning workers are atomized pieceworkers, such as those who work for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, who lack both the context in which the data was gathered and the context for how it will be used.

This data is passed to model-builders, who lack related domain expertise. The hastily labeled X-ray of a broken bone, annotated by an unregarded and overworked radiologist, is passed onto a data-scientist who knows nothing about broken bones and can’t assess the labels.

This is an age-old problem in automation, pre-dating computer science and even computers. The “scientific management” craze that started in the 1880s saw technicians observing skilled workers with stopwatches and clipboards, then restructuring the workers’ jobs by fiat.

Rather than engaging in the anthropological work that Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” the management “scientists” discarded workers’ qualitative experience, then treated their own assessments as quantitative and thus empirical.

http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Thick_Description.htm

How long a task takes is empirical, but what you call a “task” is subjective. Computer scientists take quantitative measurements, but decide what to measure on the basis of subjective judgment. This empiricism-washing sleight of hand is endemic to ML’s claims of neutrality.

In the early 2000s, there was a movement to produce tools and training that would let domain experts produce their own tools — rather than delivering “requirements” to a programmer, a bookstore clerk or nurse or librarian could just make their own tools using Visual Basic.

This was the radical humanist version of “learn to code” — a call to seize the means of computation and program, rather than being programmed. Over time, it was watered down, and today it lives on as a weak call for domain experts to be included in production.

The disdain for the qualitative expertise of domain experts who produce data is a well-understood guilty secret within ML circles, embodied in Frederick Jelinek’s ironic talk, “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.”

But a thick understanding of context is vital to improving data-quality. Take the American “voting wars,” where GOP-affiliated vendors are brought in to purge voting rolls of duplicate entries — people who are registered to vote in more than one place.

These tools have a 99% false-positive rate.

Ninety. Nine. Percent.

To understand how they go so terribly wrong, you need a thick understanding of the context in which the data they analyze is produced.

https://5harad.com/papers/1p1v.pdf

The core assumption of these tools is that two people with the same name and date of birth are probably the same person.

But guess what month people named “June” are likely to be born in? Guess what birthday is shared by many people named “Noel” or “Carol”?

Many states represent unknown birthdays as “January 1,” or “January 1, 1901.” If you find someone on a voter roll whose birthday is represented as 1/1, you have no idea what their birthday is, and they almost certainly don’t share a birthday with other 1/1s.

But false positives aren’t evenly distributed. Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names.

This is likewise true of the descendants of colonized and enslaved people, whose surnames were assigned to them for administrative purposes and see a high degree of overlap. When you see two voter rolls with a Juan Gomez born on Jan 1, you need to apply thick analysis.

Unless, of course, you don’t care about purging the people who are most likely to face structural impediments to voter registration (such as no local DMV office) and who are also likely to be racialized (for example, migrants whose names were changed at Ellis Island).

ML practitioners don’t merely use poor quality data when good quality data isn’t available — they also use the poor quality data to assess the resulting models. When you train an ML model, you hold back some of the training data for assessment purposes.

So maybe you start with 10,000 eye scans labeled for the presence of eye disease. You train your model with 9,000 scans and then ask the model to assess the remaining 1,000 scans to see whether it can make accurate classifications.

But if the data is no good, the assessment is also no good. As the paper’s authors put it, it’s important to “catch[] data errors using mechanisms specific to data validation, instead of using model performance as a proxy for data quality.”

ML practitioners studied for the paper — practitioners engaged in “high-stakes” model building reported that they had to gather their own data for their models through field partners, “a task which many admitted to being unprepared for.”

High-stakes ML work has inherited a host of sloppy practices from ad-tech, where ML saw its first boom. Ad-tech aims for “70–75% accuracy.”

That may be fine if you’re deciding whether to show someone an ad, but it’s a very different matter if you’re deciding whether someone needs treatment for an eye-disease that, untreated, will result in irreversible total blindness.

Even when models are useful at classifying input produced under present-day lab conditions, those conditions are subject to several kinds of “drift.”

For example, “hardware drift,” where models trained on images from pristine new cameras are asked to assess images produced by cameras from field clinics, where lenses are impossible to keep clean (see also “environmental drift” and “human drift”).

Bad data makes bad models. Bad models instruct people to make ineffective or harmful interventions. Those bad interventions produce more bad data, which is fed into more bad models — it’s a “data-cascade.”

GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out — was already a bedrock of statistical practice before the term was coined in 1957. Statistical analysis and inference cannot proceed from bad data.

Producing good data and validating data-sets are the kind of unsexy, undercompensated maintenance work that all infrastructure requires — and, as with other kinds of infrastructure, it is undervalued by journals, academic departments, funders, corporations and governments.

But all technological debts accrue punitive interest. The decision to operate on bad data because good data is in short supply isn’t like looking for your car-keys under the lamp-post — it’s like driving with untrustworthy brakes and a dirty windscreen.

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

The first significant wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in the industrial zone around Prato, a city fifteen miles northwest of Florence, in the nineteen-nineties. Nearly all of them came from Wenzhou, a port city south of Shanghai. For the Chinese, the culture shock was more modest than one might have expected. “The Italians were friendly,” one early arrival remembered. “Like the Chinese, they called one another Uncle. They liked family.” In Tuscany, business life revolved around small, interconnected firms, just as it did in Wenzhou, a city so resolutely entrepreneurial that it had resisted Mao’s collectivization campaign. The Prato area was a hub for mills and workshops, some of which made clothes and leather goods for the great fashion houses. If you were willing to be paid off the books, and by the piece, Prato offered plenty of opportunities. Many Wenzhouans found jobs there. “The Italians, being canny, would subcontract out their work to the Chinese,” Don Giovanni Momigli, a priest whose parish, near Prato, included an early influx of Chinese, told me.

“Then they were surprised when the Chinese began to do the work on their own.”By the mid-nineties, Wenzhouans were setting up textile businesses in small garages, where they often also lived. Soon, they began renting empty workshops, paying with cash. The authorities didn’t ask too many questions. Prato’s business model was falling apart under the pressures of globalization. As it became harder for Italians to make a living in manufacturing, some of them welcomed the money that the Chinese workers brought into the local economy. If you could no longer be an artisan, you could still be a landlord.

Throughout the aughts, Chinese continued to show up in Tuscany. A non-stop flight was established between Wenzhou and Rome. Some migrants came with tourist visas and stayed on. Others paid smugglers huge fees, which they then had to work off, a form of indentured servitude that was enforced by the threat of violence. The long hours that the Chinese worked astonished many Italians, who were used to several weeks of paid vacation a year and five months of maternity leave. In 1989, the newspaper Corriere della Sera, using racist language still common among some Italians, published an article about a Chinese worker under the headline “YELLOW STAKHANOVITE ON THE ARNO.”

While Florence was celebrated for its premium leatherwork, Prato was best known for the production of textiles. The Wenzhou workers tacked in a third direction. They imported cheap cloth from China and turned it into what is now called pronto moda, or “fast fashion”: polyester shirts, plasticky pants, insignia jackets. These items sold briskly to low-end retailers and in open-air markets throughout the world.

The Chinese firms gradually expanded their niche, making clothes for middle-tier brands, like Guess and American Eagle Outfitters. And in the past decade they have become manufacturers for Gucci, Prada, and other luxury-fashion houses, which use often inexpensive Chinese-immigrant labor to create accessories and expensive handbags that bear the coveted “Made in Italy” label. Many of them are then sold to prosperous consumers in Shanghai and Beijing. It’s not just Italian brands that have profited from this cross-cultural arrangement: a Chinese leather-goods entrepreneur I recently met with just outside Prato was wearing a forty-thousand-dollar Bulgari watch. More than ten per cent of Prato’s two hundred thousand legal residents are Chinese. According to Francesco Nannucci, the head of the police’s investigative unit in Prato, the city is also home to some ten thousand Chinese people who are there illegally. Prato is believed to have the second-largest Chinese population of any European city, after Paris, and it has the highest proportion of immigrants in Italy, including a large North African population.

Many locals who worked in the textile and leather industries resented the Chinese immigrants, complaining that they cared only about costs and speed, not about aesthetics, and would have had no idea how to make fine clothes and accessories if not for the local craftsmen who taught them. Simona Innocenti, a leather artisan, told me that her husband was forced out of bag-making by cheaper Chinese competitors. She said of the newcomers, “They copy, they imitate. They don’t do anything original. They’re like monkeys.”

Although it could be argued that the Chinese have revived Prato’s manufacturing industry, there has been a backlash against them. Native residents have accused Chinese immigrants of bringing crime, gang warfare, and garbage to the city. Chinese mill owners, they complain, ignore health laws and evade taxes; they use the schools and the hospitals without contributing money for them. In the early nineties, a group of Italians who worked in areas with a high concentration of immigrants sent an open letter to the Chinese government, sarcastically demanding citizenship: “We are six hundred honest workers who feel as if we were already citizens of your great country.”

The strangest accusation was that the Chinese in Tuscany weren’t dying—or, at least, that they weren’t leaving any bodies behind. In 1991, the regional government began an investigation into why, during the previous twelve months, not a single Chinese death had been officially recorded in Prato or in two nearby towns. In 2005, the government was still mystified—that year, more than a thousand Chinese arrivals were registered, and only three deaths. Locals suspected that Chinese mobsters were disposing of corpses in exchange for passports, which they then sold to new arrivals, a scheme that took advantage of the native population’s apparent inability to tell any one Chinese person from another.

There was a note of jealousy to the Pratans’ complaints, as well as a reluctant respect for people who had beaten them at their own game. Elizabeth Krause, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has written about the changes in Prato. She told me, “While I was there, people would say to me, ‘Eravamo noi i cinesi’ ”—“We were the Chinese.”

Even as many Italians maintained a suspicion of Chinese immigrants, they still criticized them for not contributing fully to the wider economy. Innocenti, the leather artisan, claimed that “the Chinese don’t even go to the store here. They have a van that goes from factory to factory, selling Band-Aids, tampons, and chicken. And in the back of the van they have a steamer with rice.” The under-the-table cash economy of Prato’s Chinese factories has facilitated tax evasion. Last year, as the result of an investigation by the Italian finance ministry into five billion dollars’ worth of questionable money transfers, the Bank of China, whose Milan branch had reportedly been used for half of them, paid a settlement of more than twenty million dollars. Many of the transfers, the authorities said, represented undeclared income from Chinese-run businesses, or money generated by the counterfeiting of Italian fashion goods.

In Italy, these sorts of investigations are often more show than substance, and many Chinese residents see themselves as convenient targets. “We didn’t invent this way of doing business,” one mill owner pointed out to me. “If you go south from Rome, you’ll find people who are a lot worse than the Chinese.” He speculated that some Italians disliked the Chinese for working harder than they did, and for succeeding. In the Prato area, some six thousand businesses are registered to Chinese citizens. Francesco Xia, a real-estate agent who heads a social organization for young Chinese-Italians, said, “The Chinese feel like the Jews of the thirties. Prato is a city that had a big economic crisis, and now there’s a nouveau-riche class of Chinese driving fancy cars, spending money in restaurants, and dressing in the latest fashions. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

At a time when Europe is filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric, political extremists have pointed to the demographic shifts in Prato as proof that Italy is under siege. In February, Patrizio La Pietra, a right-wing senator, told a Prato newspaper that the city needed to confront “Chinese economic illegality,” and that the underground economy had “brought the district to its knees, eliminated thousands of jobs, and exposed countless families to hunger.” Such assertions have been effective: in Italy’s recent national elections, Tuscany, which since the end of the Second World War had consistently supported leftist parties, gave twice as many votes to right-wing and populist parties as it did to those on the left. Giovanni Donzelli, a member of the quasi-Fascist Fratelli d’Italia party, who last month was elected a national representative, told me, “The Chinese have their own restaurants and their own banks—even their own police force. You damage the economy twice. Once, because you compete unfairly with the other businesses in the area, and the second time because the money doesn’t go back into the Tuscan economic fabric.” He added that he had once tried to talk with some Chinese parents at his children’s school. “They had been here six or seven years, and they still didn’t speak Italian,” he scoffed. “Because they didn’t need to!”

TL;DR: coronavirus is the ultimate globalism virus, where it’s direct access to and rapid spread throughout Europe is owed to a massive illicit Chinese textile industry in Northern Italy, where Chinese run manufacturing plants that have displaced indigenous ones filled with Chinese workers paid under the table for the “made in italy” label, is currently the hardest hit area of Coronavirus outside of China.

[mideastsoccer]

Athletes knock the legs from under global sports governance

By James M. Dorsey

Sports governance worldwide has had the legs knocked out from under it. Yet, national and international sports administrators are slow in realizing the magnitude of what has hit them.

Tectonic plates underlying sports’ guiding principle that sports and politics are unrelated have shifted, driven by a struggle against racism and a quest for human rights and social justice.

The principle was repeatedly challenged over the last year by athletes as well as businesses forcing national and international sports federations to either support anti-racist protest or at the least refrain from penalizing athletes who use their sport to oppose racism and promote human rights and social justice, acts that are political by definition.

The assault on what is a convenient fiction started in the United States as much a result of the explosion of Black Lives Matter protests on the streets of American cities as the fact that, in contrast to the fan-club relationship in much of the world, US sports clubs and associations see fans as clients, and the client is king.

The assault moved to Europe in the last month with the national soccer teams of Norway, Germany, and the Netherlands wearing T-shirts during 2022 World Cup qualifiers that supported human rights and change. The Europeans were adding their voices to perennial criticism of migrant workers’ rights in Qatar, the host of next year’s World Cup.

Gareth Southgate, manager of the English national team, said the Football Association was discussing with human rights group Amnesty International tackling migrant rights in the Gulf state.

While Qatar is the focus in Europe, greater sensitivity to human rights appears to be moving beyond. Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton told a news conference in Bahrain ahead of this season’s opening Grand Prix that “there are issues all around the world, but I do not think we should be going to these countries and just ignoring what is happening in those places, arriving, having a great time and then leave.”

Mr. Hamilton has been prominent in speaking out against racial injustice and social inequality since the National Football League in the United States endorsed Black Lives Matter and players taking the knee during the playing of the American national anthem in protest against racism.

In a dramatic break with its ban on “any political, religious or personal slogans, statements or images” on the pitch, world soccer governing body FIFA said it would not open disciplinary proceedings against the European players. “FIFA believes in the freedom of speech and in the power of football as a force for good,” a spokesperson for the governing body said.

The statement constituted an implicit acknowledgement that standing up for human rights and social justice was inherently political. It raises the question of how FIFA going forward will reconcile its stand on human rights with its statutory ban on political expression.

It makes maintaining the fiction of a separation of politics and sports ever more difficult to defend and opens the door to a debate on how the inseparable relationship that joins sports and politics at the hip like Siamese twins should be regulated.

Signalling that a flood barrier may have collapsed, Major League Baseball this month said it would be moving its 2021 All Star Game out of Atlanta in response to a new Georgia law that threatens to potentially restrict voting access for people of colour.

In a shot across the bow to FIFA and other international sports associations, major Georgia-headquartered companies, including Coca Cola, one of the soccer body’s longest-standing corporate sponsors, alongside Delta Airlines and Home Depot adopted political positions in their condemnation of the Georgia law.

The greater assertiveness of athletes and corporations in speaking out for fundamental rights and against racism and discrimination will make it increasingly difficult for sports associations to uphold the fiction of a separation between politics and sports.

The willingness of FIFA, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and other national and international associations to look the other way when athletes take their support for rights and social justice to the sports arena has let a genie out of the bottle. It has sawed off the legs of the FIFA principle that players’ “equipment must not have any political, religious or personal slogans.”

Already, the US committee has said that it would not sanction American athletes who choose to raise their fists or kneel on the podium at this July’s Tokyo Olympic Games as well as future tournaments.

The decision puts the USOPC at odds with the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) staunch rule against political protest.

The IOC suspended and banned US medallists Tommie Smith and John Carlos after the sprinters raised their fists on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to protest racial inequality in the United States.

Acknowledging the incestuous relationship between sports and politics will ultimately require a charter or code of conduct that regulates the relationship and introduces some form of independent oversight akin to the supervision of banking systems or the regulation of the water sector in Britain, alongside the United States the only country to have privatized water as an asset.

Human rights and social justice have emerged as monkey wrenches that could shatter the myth of a separation of sports and politics. If athletes take their protests to the Tokyo Olympics and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the myth would sustain a significant body blow.

Said a statement by US athletes seeking changes to the USOPC’s rule banning protest at sporting events: “Prohibiting athletes to freely express their views during the Games, particularly those from historically underrepresented and minoritized groups, contributes to the dehumanization of athletes that is at odds with key Olympic and Paralympic values.”

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel,  Castbox, and Patreon.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute as well as an Honorary Senior Non-Resident Fellow at Eye on ISIS.

[antifainternational]

Listen, I wanted to join you guys when Im older, but when I told my friends, they said they be disappointed because antifa is quote unquote "terrorist group" and that they harm innocent people over nothing. They also added that antifa keeps fuelimg the fire with more gasoline (gasoline meaning violence) and it was a wsste of time and that people are just gonna be racist *ssholes. How do you respond to my friends claim?

We’d probably start of by saying that your friends are terrorists, since we have the same amount of evidence as you’ve stated they gave you to support calling us terrorists.  We’d also point out that if they’re concerned about terrorism and harm coming to innocent people then they should really look at the fascist/extreme right, who have murdered 282 people so far this year and injured over a thousand others; and who were also responsible for every extremist killing in the U.S. last year.  If anti-fascists are terrorists then we are certainly awful at terrorism, given that we haven’t killed anyone in recent memory.  But yeah - the “violence” of antifa!  It’s so extreme!  Surely it’s just like pouring gasoline over a fire, right?  Well, then maybe your friends should explain how to oppose and stop violent, murderous bigots (see above paragraph) without being able to physically defend ourselves & our communities from them.  Should we hug it out with them, maybe?  Just ignore them and hope they’ll go away?  Turn the other cheek and let them slaughter us?  Here’s what one Christian pacifist had to say after going to Charlottesville in 2017 to non-violently protest the mob of white supremacist terrorists that murdered Heather Heyer and injured at least 30 other people there that weekend. And here’s what Dr. Cornel West had to say about the anti-fascists that defended him and other pacifists from the bigots that were going to attack them in Charlottesville that same weekend:

But people are just going to be racist assholes so it’s a waste of time to try to stop them from hurting or killing racialized people or migrants of LGBTQ+ people or disabled people though, huh?  Sounds like your friends come from a really privileged, entitled place where they don’t have to worry about being persecuted or killed because of any of those things.  It also sounds like they have zero interest in using their positions of privilege and entitlement to defend other people not so lucky.  It also sounds like if push came to shove and people were harassing or attacking or coming after you, your friends would be nowhere to be found if you looked for them to have your back.So it sounds like maybe you need some better friends, friend.Finally?  There’s no age limit to doing anti-fascist work.  If you’re against fascism + willing to do something about it, then you’re antifa!  THAT’S THE SOLE REQUIREMENT!  Here’s a list of 30 antifa things you could probably pull off where you live, maybe with the help of a couple of actual friends as opposed to the ones you’ve been talking to about all of this.

[jennymanrique]

Contra-Vax

Vaccines to the rescue? Only if people roll up their sleeves. Photo courtesy of Valleywise Health

Science moved at unprecedented speed to develop vaccines against the new coronavirus. It was too fast for some latinos -- especially those egged on by myth and misinformation 

On the ranch where Gabriela Navarrete was raised in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, she learned early on that the land could provide what she needed to cure her ills. Mesquite bark, olive oil, corn vinegar and baking soda were useful for treating everything from joint pains to throat infections. In case of indigestion, the medicine was a good old stomach rub.

Navarrete, 69, passed on to her three daughters and one son the lesson that "everything natural is what is good for the body."

So when the COVID-19 pandemic began, she quickly stocked up on Vitamin C, infusions of ginger, chamomile and peppermint, and linden tea for sleeping.

And while this arsenal failed to defend her against the coronavirus last year, she remains resolute: Her principle of "consuming everything natural," she said, is more powerful than the idea of getting vaccinated.

That's why she’s decided that the new COVID vaccines are not for her.

"Getting the vaccine is going to be very bad for me because I think they are made from the virus itself," Navarrete said, talking from her home in Anthony, New Mexico, a small town on the border with Texas. "The only time I got the flu shot, I got a lot worse and I don't want to do that to my body anymore."

Graciela Navarrete and her grandson, Diego.

The coronavirus reached Navarrete’s family through her 17-year-old daughter, an athlete who resumed volleyball practice once the school gym was opened after the lockdown. Everyone avoided hospitalization. They were treated by the family doctor with antibiotics, ibuprofen and albuterol in inhalers.

"The virus gave me very bad headaches and I still struggle when walking, so I accepted the medicines. But I am definitely not getting vaccinated."

Like others her age, Navarette is at a higher risk of infection. Yet that’s not enough for her or her children to discount messages they’ve gotten via WhatsApp, complete with videos, that claim, for example, that vaccines are made with tissues of aborted fetuses.

Doubts and fears 

Nationwide, people across demographic lines have lingering doubts about the new COVID-19 vaccines, according to a new survey by the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Half of the survey respondents said they plan to get vaccinated as soon as they’re allowed to. But 19% say they want to first see how others react to the inoculations, while 24% say they will avoid the vaccine if they can.

Among Latinos, according to recent data from the COVID-19 vaccine monitor launched by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) to track attitudes and experiences with the vaccines, 18% of adults said they will definitely not get the vaccine. Another 11% said they will only do so if it’s required by employers. And, among those who have decided that they will get vaccinated, 43% said they want to wait and see how the innoculations affect other Latinos.

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Latinos are nearly twice as likely to be infected by COVID-19 as non-Latino whites. The same population is more than four times as likely to be hospitalized and almost three times as likely to die of the virus. This is due, partly, to the large number of Latinos working in essential jobs that expose them to co-workers and the public. Other factors, like access to health care, also play a role.

Despite the higher risk, some Latinos remain uncertain about the safety of the new coronavirus vaccines.

An example: Navarrete in Texas, said she believes the myth that vaccines carry bits of an actual virus.

"There are other vaccines that have virus particles, including live virus particles," said Gerardo Capo, chief of hematology at Trinitas Comprehensive Cancer Center in New Jersey. "This vaccine is more modern. It has internal proteins of the virus that are not considered to cause an infection. It is impossible."

Vaccine hesitancy among Latinos in the U.S. is not necessarily an ideological issue or a belief in the anti-vaccine movement. "It has more to do with not having enough information or having inadequate information," said Nelly Salgado de Snyder, a researcher with  the University of Texas at Austin.

Doubts exist even among Latino health care professionals.

Ada Linares, a nurse in the New York area, told palabra. that it’s not the suspicious messaging seen on social media or via WhatsApp texts, but her own unfamiliarity with this vaccine -- how it was developed and potential side effects perhaps overlooked in testing and trials that moved at unprecedented speed.

“I have always been pro-vaccine, and I think this is why we are here today,” she said. “But at the same time, I don’t know much about (the vaccines).”

Nurse Ada Linares hesitated for some time but she eventually rolled up her scrubs and took her doses. Photo: Jorge Melchor

Avoiding the needle 

In Texas, officials started by vaccinating health care workers, residents of nursing homes and some people older than 65 years.

Throughout the state, according to the KFF monitor, only 15% of vaccines have reached Hispanics, even though Latinos account for almost 40% of the population, 44% of coronavirus cases and almost half of COVID-19 deaths.

"We need to focus on equity as part of the COVID-19 vaccination effort," said Samantha Artiga, director of KFF's racial equity and health policy program. "It is important to monitor data by race and ethnicity to understand the experiences of the communities ... , who is receiving the vaccines, and who has been the most affected by the pandemic."

But it’s more than just reluctance. Studies into low flu vaccination rates among low-income Latino seniors show that being uninsured -- and even the lack of transportation to get to vaccination centers -- are huge barriers.  

Experts suggest that no-cost COVID-19 vaccines, available to everyone regardless of health insurance or immigration status, could help close the gap, “if the information is available in linguistically appropriate materials and the concerns of people are clearly addressed. Immigrant families should be assured that their medical data is private and will not be used by federal agencies,” Artiga said.

Conspiracy theories

In addition to debunked conspiracy theories that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can alter DNA, or contain microchips implanted by Bill Gates to monitor people with 5G technology, other rumors specific to the Latino community have spread through social media.

“The viral disinformation includes anonymous voice messages on WhatsApp that say that since Trump does not like Mexicans and built the wall, he wants to vaccinate us so we cannot have more children, or that the vaccine is a poison for those of us who are here undocumented, that it is a way to get rid of us,” Salgado de Snyder said.

Photo illustration by FrankHH/Shutterstock

She suggested one possible reason such disinformation is embraced: “People believe it because they don't have the level of education or the institutional support to confirm this information that they hear from other Latinos. Many of them do not speak English and most of the scientific information is not available in Spanish,” she said.

Salgado de Snyder is the co-author of the study, “Exploring Why Adult Mexican Males Do Not Get Vaccinated: Implications for COVID-19 Preventive Actions,” conducted by the Migrant Clinicians Network and published last September.

Data was collected in 2019 at the Ventanilla de Salud at the Mexican Consulate in Austin. Before the pandemic, the clinic offered free vaccines against maladies like influenza, tetanus, hepatitis A and B, and human papilloma, in association with Austin Public Health.

Some 400 patients gave researchers a variety of reasons for not getting vaccinated, including lack of time or money, fear of injections and of potential side effects, insufficient information or motivation, and the perception that they are  healthy and don’t need inoculation.

"While women are more familiar with the health system because in Mexico there is a universal voluntary and free vaccination program, men have the mistaken belief that vaccines are the cure for a problem, they do not see (a vaccination) as a preventive tool," Salgado de Snyder said.

“As breadwinners, they do not want to miss a day of work to go to get vaccinated,” she added. “That is why our recommendations in times of COVID are that through some type of mobile clinic, employers offer vaccines in workplaces such as construction companies or meatpacking plants,” she said.

Moving too fast

María del Rosario Cadena remembers that during her childhood in Tampico, in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, she received vaccines against hepatitis and polio without any side effects. But she is "very suspicious" about the COVID-19 vaccines that seem to have been developed and approved so quickly.

"I've seen on TV that it affects various parts of the body and people get very sick after receiving it," del Rosario Cadena said.

Maria del Rosario Cadena

Apart from her doubts about the vaccine, del Rosario Cadena insists she follows all recommendations to guard against COVID-19: She wears a mask, she practices social distancing, and she’s always washing her hands. And, since she doesn’t go out "at all," the 71-year-old said she believes that “isolation is my vaccine. I feel I don't need it."

Her daughter, Rocio Valderrabano, 55, is diabetic, so she will soon have access to a COVID-19 vaccine. But she has doubts, so she’ll wait and see how some friends -- nurses -- react to their second doses. "I know people who have had COVID and spent four days with oxygen. I know they had a very bad time ... but I still want to wait and see if there are side effects (to the vaccine)."

Clinicians said mistrust also comes from knowing there were few people of color in the vaccine trials. In the trial for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, participants were 13% Latino, 10% African American, 6% Asian, and 1% Native American. Moderna’s trial population was 20% Hispanic, 10% African American, 4% Asian.

"We hope that the labs that are developing new vaccines will include more Latino patients in their trials," said Dr. Lucianne Marin, a pediatrician at Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic in Dallas, one of 75 community centers in Texas that will provide vaccines in immigrant neighborhoods.

Marin and the rest of the Barrios Unidos staff have already received both doses --  injections that caused her "a bit of discomfort, fatigue, and a headache."

“Anything strange that enters the body can cause a reaction,” she said. “But one has to understand that the vaccine is not made from the live virus. It’s from genetic material that will help to generate antibodies. … I tell my patients that a fever or a pain in the body cannot be compared with the exposure to the coronavirus.”

The community clinics are out to debunk myths and dispel fears. They emphasize the greater risk of infection for Latinos who have chronic health problems like diabetes, hypertension, and excessive weight.

In doctor’s offices or in telemedicine visits they invite grandmothers to be champions in their families and spread the message about the need to get vaccinated. “Among Latinos, the elders of the family are highly respected and they are listened to; if they are convinced (of the vaccine), the family will be too,” Marin said.

Community health workers also share messages on Facebook, or partner with local Spanish-language media on virtual discussions featuring doctors and public officials -- even representatives from consulates of Latin American countries.

“It is our job to be the reliable messenger,” Marin said. “Vaccines are safe and free.”

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here

[berniesrevolution]

They call themselves the “Squad.” From climate changeto student debt to migrants in detention, progressive House Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley have been energetic and outspoken since getting elected last November — and, as a result, have become inured to constant attacks from congressional Republicans and, of course, Fox News.

But how about from their own boss?

In an interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed the Squad as “four people” who have their “public whatever and their Twitter world” but don’t “have any following.”

Ouch. This isn’t the first time Pelosi has trolled the left-wing quartet. In April, when she was asked by Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” to comment on the newly emboldened progressive wing of her party, Pelosi responded: “That’s like five people.”

In the wake of November’s midterms, Pelosi mocked calls from AOC and her allies for a Green New Deal: “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”

To be clear: None of these freshmen Democrats have personally attacked Pelosi, and all four of them backed her bid for the speakership. As CNN’s Nathan McDermott tweeted, “It is pretty notable that the most vocally anti-Pelosi Democrats (ala the moderates in swing districts who opposed her leadership) don’t get as much criticism from her as the left-wing of the party.”

How about Donald Trump? Pelosi is willing to criticize Trump — “I’ve never encountered, thought about, seen within the realm of my experiences as a child or an adult, anybody like this” — but only criticize. Nothing more. Not impeachment, that’s for sure. The top Democrat in the House told Dowd that the president has engaged in criminal behavior but — wait for it — “you can’t impeach everybody.”

The New York Times interview is yet another reminder for liberals and leftists that if they want to oppose Trump, they have to oppose Pelosi too.

Think I’m exaggerating? Consider three recent — and shameful — episodes.

First, the rape allegations against the president. On June 21, New York magazine published a cover story from the famed advice columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll, in which she documented in excruciating detail how Trump, back in the mid-1990s, forced “his penis halfway” inside of her in the midst of a “colossal struggle” in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

Pelosi’s response to a reporter who asked her for comment a whole six days later? “I don’t know the person making the accusation … I haven’t paid that much attention to it.”

Now, she tells Dowd: “I respect the case she has but I don’t see any role for Congress.”

The sitting Republican president has been credibly accused of having committed a sexual assault and yet Congress, says the Democratic speaker of the House, has no “role” in holding him to account for it. Oh, and the speaker herself hasn’t been paying “attention to it.”

This, my dear liberals, is your (feminist) champion.

Second, the crisis at the border. One of the reasons Pelosi cited for not being familiar with the E. Jean Carroll story was that she was “busy worrying about children not being in their mothers’ arms.” Yet on that same day, as the New York Times reported, Pelosi “capitulated to Republicans and Democratic moderates and dropped her insistence on stronger protections for migrant children in overcrowded border shelters” by signing onto a bill from the Republican-led Senate, giving the Trump administration $4.6 billion to tackle the situation on the southern border.

Last time I checked, though, this administration’s horrific decision to separate migrant children from their parents had nothing to do with a lack of funds. “The cruelty is the point,” as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer so memorably put it. Plus, 18 so-called “centrist” Democrats pushed Pelosi into dropping her objections to the Senate bill and yet in her New York Times interview, the speaker decided to level her attack on — you guessed it — the Squad. They made themselves irrelevant and shouldn’t have voted against “our bill,” she told Dowd, adding: “They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

Yet they were far from alone in opposing Pelosi’s decision. “The final vote, 305 to 102,” reported the Times on June 27, “included far more Republicans in favor, 176, than Democrats, 129.”

(Continue Reading)

[newstfionline]

Headlines

World refugee numbers rise (Foreign Policy) A new report by the United Nations refugee agency found that the number of refugees worldwide increased by 9 million in 2019, adding to a total of roughly 80 million people. Only 107,000 refugees were resettled in third countries, with Canada receiving the most with 31,100. The United States received the second highest number with 27,500 resettled in 2019.

Migrant farmworkers die in Canada, and Mexico wants answers (Washington Post) Each summer for the past five years, Aaron has traveled from his home in Mexico to Canada as one of the tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers who seed, tend and harvest the crops that keep the country fed. This year’s journey was unique. Flights were limited. There were temperature screenings and questionnaires before he took off and after he landed. On arriving in British Columbia this month, he was checked into a hotel for a 14-day quarantine. But in this year of the coronavirus, the precautions have not kept all of Canada’s migrant farmworkers safe. At least 600 have contracted covid-19, and at least two, both Mexicans, have died. Mexico, which provides nearly half of Canada’s migrant farmworkers, has become so concerned that officials said this week they’re hitting the “pause button” on plans to send up to 5,000 more to Canada until they’re satisfied the conditions that led to the deaths will be rectified—threatening a labor crunch for Canada’s already squeezed agricultural sector. The pandemic has highlighted Canada’s dependence on the 60,000 temporary foreign workers who arrive each year from countries such as Mexico and Jamaica as part of a federal government program, and without whom hundreds of thousands of tons of blueberries, asparagus stalks and grapes would wither on the vine.

DACA lives on (NYT) When this country started hearing a decade ago about Dreamers—people who came to the United States as small children without legal permission—many of them were in their teens or early 20s. These Dreamers are now full adults, with careers and families, and many have spent years anxiously wondering whether they would be thrown out of the only country they’ve really known. Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, which barred President Trump from deporting the Dreamers anytime soon, came as a tremendous relief to them. “It feels amazing,” Vanessa Pumar, 31, an immigration lawyer who came from Venezuela at age 11, said. “I have been holding my breath. It feels like I can finally breathe.” Roberto G. Gonzales, a Harvard professor who has been studying DACA since it went into effect in 2012, calls it “the most successful immigration policy in recent decades.” Gonzales explains: “Within a year, DACA beneficiaries were already taking giant steps. They found new jobs. They increased their earnings. They acquired driver’s licenses. And they began to build credit through opening bank accounts and obtaining credit cards.”

AP-NORC poll: Majority of Americans support police protests (AP) Ahead of the Juneteenth holiday weekend’s demonstrations against systemic racism and police brutality, a majority of Americans say they approve of recent protests around the country. Many think they’ll bring positive change. And despite the headline-making standoffs between law enforcement and protesters in cities nationwide, the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also finds a majority of Americans think law enforcement officers have generally responded to the protests appropriately. Somewhat fewer say the officers used excessive force. The findings follow weeks of peaceful protests and unrest in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man who died pleading for air on May 25 after a white Minneapolis police officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes. A dramatic change in public opinion on race and policing has followed, with more Americans today than five years ago calling police violence a very serious problem that unequally targets black Americans.

Atlanta police call out sick over charges in fatal shooting (AP) Atlanta police officers called out sick to protest the filing of murder charges against an officer who shot a man in the back, while the interim chief acknowledged members of the force feel abandoned amid protests demanding massive changes to policing. Interim Chief Rodney Bryant told The Associated Press in an interview that the sick calls began Wednesday night and continued Thursday, but said the department had sufficient staff to protect the city. It’s not clear how many officers called out. “Some are angry. Some are fearful. Some are confused on what we do in this space. Some may feel abandoned,” Bryant said of the officers. “But we are there to assure them that we will continue to move forward and get through this.”

Beware the trampoline (NYT) Sales of outdoor equipment has surged as families try to keep their children entertained while on lockdown. But that has led to a spike in injuries from bikes, scooters, and especially trampolines. Some E.R. doctors have begun referring to trampolines as “orthopedic fracture machines.” Many injuries occur when multiple children, especially a mix of older and younger ones, are jumping on a trampoline at the same time. That’s what happened to the daughter of our colleague Adam Pasick, who broke her tibia on a trampoline on Wednesday. Stay safe out there, kids!

Missing in Mexico (Foreign Policy) Families of people thought to have gone missing amid Mexico’s drug war surrounded a motorcade carrying President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the state of Veracruz on Monday demanding he do more to bring their loved ones home. Some 61,000 people are estimated to be missing in the country, and relatives fear that austerity measures, which could see a 75 percent budget cut to a government agency that provides funding and support to families of the disappeared, will only make matters worse. While coronavirus-related lockdowns have stalled search efforts, gang violence and disappearances have continued.

France and Turkey spar over ship incident (Foreign Policy) Tensions between France and Turkey rose after French Defense Minister Florence Parly said a Turkish ship refused to identify itself and its mission after an approach by a French vessel on a NATO mission to check on suspected weapons smuggling to Libya. Turkish sailors donned bulletproof vests and took up positions behind light weaponry during the incident, according to Parly. “This act was extremely aggressive and cannot be one of an ally facing another ally who is doing its work under NATO command,” Parly said. Turkey called France’s claims “baseless.” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters that NATO is investigating the incident “to bring full clarity into what happened.”

Anger Surges in India Over Deadly Border Brawl With China (NYT) An Indian government minister has called for Chinese restaurants to be closed. Other Indian officials have suddenly put contracts to Chinese companies under review. And crowds of men are now smashing Chinese-made televisions in the street. A wave of anti-Chinese anger is cresting across India as the nation struggles to absorb the loss of 20 Indian soldiers beaten to death this week by Chinese troops in a high-altitude brawl along India’s disputed border with China. And the tensions are hardly easing. Sonam Joldan, a teacher in the Ladakh region near the India-China border, reported on Thursday seeing a line of 100 Indian Army trucks heading toward the front line, wending its way up the Himalayan mountains “like a caravan of ants.”

China charges Canadians with espionage (Foreign Policy) Chinese prosecutors announced today that they have charged two Canadians in Chinese detention with espionage. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor have been held by Chinese authorities since 2018 in what is seen as a reciprocal move by Beijing after the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, by Canadian police. Meng is currently under house arrest in Vancouver while fighting a Canadian court battle to halt her extradition to the United States.

Singapore opens gyms, dining out as China outbreak steadies (AP) Singaporeans can wine and dine at restaurants, work out at the gym and socialize with no more than five people at a time as of Friday, when the city-state removed most of its pandemic lockdown restrictions. Getting back to business in Singapore came as China declared a fresh outbreak in Beijing under control after confirming 25 new cases among some 360,000 people tested. That was up by just four from a day earlier. Singapore’s malls, gyms, massage parlors, parks and other public facilities reopened their doors with strict social distancing and other precautions.

Palestinians fear displacement from an annexed Jordan Valley (AP) For generations, the people of Fasayil herded animals on the desert bluffs and palm-shaded lowlands of the Jordan Valley. Today, nearly every man in the Palestinian village works for Jewish settlers in the sprawling modern farms to the north and south. The grazing lands to the west and east, leading down to the banks of the biblical Jordan River, have been swallowed up by the settlements or fenced off by the Israeli military. So instead of leading sheep out to pasture, the men rise before dawn to work in the settlements for around $3 an hour—or they move away. “Everyone here works in the settlements, there’s nothing else,” said Iyad Taamra, a member of the village council who runs a small grocery store. “If you have some money you go somewhere else where there is a future.” Palestinians fear communities across the Jordan Valley will meet a similar fate if Israel proceeds with its plans to annex the territory, which accounts for around a quarter of the occupied West Bank and was once seen as the breadbasket of a future Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex the valley and all of Israel’s far-flung West Bank settlements, in line with President Donald Trump’s Middle East plan, which overwhelmingly favors Israel and has been rejected by the Palestinians. The process could begin as soon as July 1.

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince uses travel restrictions to consolidate power (Washington Post) The formal term in Arabic is mana’a al-safar, or “travel bans.” But the practical effect of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s policy of restricting journeys abroad by what appear to be thousands of Saudis is to intimidate those he regards as political threats. “This is hostage-taking as a tool of governing,” argued Khalid Aljabri, a Saudi cardiologist who lives in Toronto. Two of his younger siblings, Omar and Sarah, now both in their early 20s, were banned from travel in June 2017 shortly after MBS, as he’s known, became crown prince. MBS wanted leverage against their father, a former Saudi intelligence official named Saad Aljabri, hoping to force him home to face corruption allegations that Khalid says are false. An investigation shows that this practice of restricting foreign travel is much broader than generally recognized and is part of a larger system of organized repression in the kingdom. MBS has used these tools to consolidate power as he moves toward what some U.S. officials believe may be an attempt, perhaps this year, to seize the full powers of government from his ailing father, King Salman. The total number of Saudis who are subject to travel restrictions, according to Saudi and U.S. analysts, probably runs into the thousands. Those who are banned don’t usually know about their status until they go to the airport or try to cross a border post, where they’re stopped and told that exit is forbidden on order of the state security organization, which operates through the royal court. No formal, written explanation is typically given.

Zimbabwe on the brink (Foreign Policy) Three female opposition activists in Zimbabwe have been forced to remain in prison following a bail hearing on Monday as they face charges of fabricating allegations of being abducted, tortured, and humiliated by police. The charges against the women are widely thought to be politically motivated, while the U.N. called on the authorities to “urgently prosecute and punish the perpetrators of this outrageous crime.” The case against the women, one of whom, Joana Mamombe, is a member of Parliament, comes at a tense time in the country as inflation has risen to 785 percent. The price of bread and sugar has surged by 30 percent over the past week, evoking memories of the hyperinflation seen in 2008 that rendered the country’s currency worthless. Economic crisis and rising public anger have led to mounting speculation that a coup could be in the works. The national security council of Zimbabwe dismissed the rumors in a press conference last week, saying they were being fueled by allies of the late Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

[jewish-privilege]

...There are two related, yet distinct, kinds of anti-Semitism that have snuck into mainstream politics. One is associated with the left and twists legitimate criticisms of Israel into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. On the mainstream right, meanwhile, political leaders and media figures blame a cabal of wealthy Jews for mass immigration and left-wing cultural politics in classic anti-Semitic fashion.

[Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN)] tweet was a pretty clear example of the first kind of anti-Semitism. Plenty of Jews who are critical of the Israeli government, including me, found her comments offensive...

But it’s also clear that a lot of Omar’s critics don’t have much of a leg to stand on. Conservatives have been trying to label Omar an anti-Semite since she was elected in November, on the basis of fairly flimsy evidence. (...) Trump once told a room full of Jewish Republicans that “you’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” adding that “you want to control your politicians, that’s fine.”

The fact that Omar apologized under pressure, and that Trump and McCarthy have never faced real consequences for their use of anti-Semitic tropes, tells you everything you need know about the politics of anti-Semitism in modern America.

...There are two core truths about this incident. First, Omar’s statement was unacceptable. Second, Republicans going after her — including the president — should spend less time on Democrats and more time dealing with the far worse anti-Semitism problem on the right.

...In the day and a half since Omar’s initial comments, a number of left-wing writers have emerged to defend her. They argue that Omar was attempting to point out the financial clout of the pro-Israel lobby — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC — and not to make generalizations about Jews. The pushback against Omar, they say, is part of a broader campaign to smear a young Muslim congresswoman and silence criticism of Israel.

...It’s true that in some cases, all criticism of Israel or AIPAC, even if it’s legitimate, is labeled anti-Semitic — and that’s a real problem. Omar’s faith has made her a particular target, and it’s fair to want to defend her against these smears in the abstract.

But the specifics of Omar’s tweet make things quite different. In the original context — where she was quote-tweeting [Glenn Greenwald]— she says that US lawmakers’ support for Israel is “all” about money. Yes, it’s a Puff Daddy reference, but she’s a member of Congress and maybe should be a little more careful about the implications of what she says...

There are two problems here: First, the tweet isn’t true. The US-Israel alliance has deeper and more fundamental roots than just cash, including the legacy of Cold War geopolitics, evangelical theology, and shared strategic interests in counterterrorism. Lobbying certainly plays a role, but to say that “US political leaders” defending Israel is “all” about money is to radically misstate how America’s Israel politics work (and discount the findings of the scholars who study it).

Second, and more important, totalizing statements like this play into the most troubling anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous early-20th-century Russian forgery, describes a plot by Jewish moneyed interests to subvert and destroy Christian societies through their finances. This in turn draws on longstanding European anti-Semitic traditions that portray Jews as greedy and conniving.

After World War II and the creation of the state of Israel, the conspiracy theory shifted. Anti-Semites started using “Zionist” or “Zio” as a stand-in for “Jewish,” using Jewish activism in favor of the Jewish state as proof that they were right all along about the Jewish conspiracy. David Duke, the former Louisiana state representative and Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, released a YouTube video in 2014 that bills itself as an “illustrated” update of the Protocols. The video features footage of leading Democratic and Republican politicians speaking to pro-Israel groups, with the caption “both are in the grips of Zio money, Zio media, and Zio bankers.”

...Omar is, of course, not coming from the same hateful place as Duke is. But by using too-similar language, she unintentionally provides mainstream cover for these conspiracy theories. After her comments, Duke repeatedly defended her, even tweeting a meme that said “it took a Muslim congresswoman to actually stand up & tell the truth that we ALL know” (he rescinded the praise after her apology).

This is not to equate Duke and Omar — which, to be clear, would be absurd — but rather to point out how if you’re not careful when talking about pro-Israel lobbying, you can provide ammunition to some awful people. By saying that US support for Israel is “all” about money, Omar was essentially mainstreaming ideas that have their roots in anti-Semitism, helping make them more acceptable to voice on the left.

...There’s a real dilemma here. Pro-Palestinian activists, writers, and politicians have every right to point out what they see as the pernicious influence of groups like AIPAC. The group is undeniably powerful, and it’s worth mentioning in our conversations about both Israel policy and money in politics. You can and should be able to say, “AIPAC’s lobbying pushes America’s Israel policy in a hawkish pro-Israel direction,” without saying that it is literally only about dollars from (disproportionately) Jewish donors.

At the same time side, there is a special need on the left — where most pro-Palestinian sentiment resides — to be careful about just how you discuss those things. It’s not just a matter of providing ammunition to the David Dukes of the world; it’s about the moral corruption of the left and pro-Palestinian movement. If references to the baleful influence of Jews on Israel policy become too flip, too easy, things can go really wrong.

...When left-wing insurgent Jeremy Corbyn won the center-left Labour Party’s leadership [in Britain] in 2015, the people who inhabited these spaces seized control of the party power centers.

Corbyn, who had once referred to members of Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends,” opened the floodgates for the language of Labour’s left flank to go mainstream. The result is a three-year roiling scandal surrounding anti-Semitism inside the party.

Dozens of Labour elected officials, candidates, and party members have been caught giving voice to anti-Semitic comments. One Labour official called Hitler “the greatest man in history,” and added that “it’s disgusting how much power the Jews have in the US.” Another Labour candidate for office said “it’s the super rich families of the Zionist lobby that control the world.” The party has received 673 complaints about anti-Semitism in its ranks in the last 10 months alone, an average of over two complaints per day.

...This is why Omar’s tweet was so troubling, and why the pushback from leadership really was merited. If the line isn’t drawn somewhere, the results for Jews — who still remain a tiny, vulnerable minority — can be devastating.

...The way Omar handled the controversy is interesting. Her apology was certainly given under immense pressure, but it reads (at least to me) as quite sincere[, and] this kind of sincere willingness to reconsider past comments is characteristic of Omar. She had previously gotten flak for a tweet about Israel “hypnotizing” the world, and recently gave a lengthy and thoughtful apology for the connection to anti-Semitic tropes during an appearance on The Daily Show.

“I had to take a deep breath and understand where people were coming from and what point they were trying to make, which is what I expect people to do when I’m talking to them, right, about things that impact me or offend me,” she told host Trevor Noah.

This is not the kind of behavior you see from deeply committed anti-Semites. Yair Rosenberg, a journalist at the Jewish magazine Tablet who frequently writes about anti-Semitism, argued on Monday that Omar has earned the benefit of the doubt:

“I’ve covered anti-Semitism for years on multiple continents, and this level of self-reflection among those who have expressed anti-Semitism is increasingly rare. Not only did Omar apologize for the specific sentiment, but she put herself in the shoes of her Jewish interlocutors and realized that she ought to extend to them the same sensitivity to anti-Semitism as she would want others to extend to racism.” 

...This is what it looks like when the system works. A member of Congress says something offensive, most of her party explains why it’s wrong, and then she issues a sincere apology and demonstrates an interest in changing. That is a healthy party dealing with bad behavior in a healthy way.

This is not what you see on the Republican side when it comes to most forms of bigotry — up to and including anti-Semitism.

...Last summer, McCarthy sent a tweet accusing three Democratic billionaires of Jewish descent — George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg — of trying to buy the midterm election...

...Around the same time, President Trump claimed that protesters against Brett Kavanaugh were being paid by Soros...

And Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz suggested Soros was behind the so-called “migrant caravan” coming to the US through Mexico, a theory spread when Trump tweeted the video in Gaetz’s original tweet...

This all follows years of Soros demonization in the conservative press, with everyone from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to Fox News anchors blaming the Jewish billionaire for various ills in the United States.

The defense of these lines is the same as the left-wing defense of Omar: It’s not anti-Semitic to simply state facts. But many of these “facts,” like Soros masterminding immigrant caravans, are false. Moreover, creating a narrative in which Soros and other left-wing Jews are puppet masters, using their money to undermine America from within, they are engaging in the same normalization of Protocols-style anti-Semitic tropes as Omar.

What’s more, they’ve done it with virtually no official pushback. The GOP has not reacted to the Soros hate and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories with the same fierceness with which the Democrats responded to Omar’s comment. There has been no leadership statement condemning the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism; in fact, demonizing Soros has long been part of the overall party strategy. In 2016, Trump released a campaign ad that played a quote from one of his speeches over footage of Soros and former Fed Chair Janet Yellen (also Jewish) that comes across as an anti-Semitic dog whistle...

...“Don’t kid yourself that the most violent forms of hate have been aimed at others — blacks, Muslims, Latino immigrants. Don’t ever think that your government’s pro-Israel policies reflect a tolerance of Jews,” Jonathan Weisman, the New York Times’s deputy Washington editor and author of the new book (((Semitism))), writes. “We have to consider where power is rising, and the Nationalist Right is a global movement.”

...While the Democratic Party handled an offensive comment quickly, Republicans have never shown a willingness to do the same when it comes to right-wing anti-Semitism. There’s a reason most Jews in the United States are Democrats, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

[Read Zack Beauchamp’s full piece at Vox.]