Julio Godoy

"The attacks in Oslo and Utøya “surely [are] not the last acts of terror in the name of the armed fight against Islam”.

Common to the informal North Atlantic neo-fascist coalition is the hatred of Islam, the radical opposition to immigration and to multicultural society, the belief in white racial supremacy and in Christian fundamentalism, the unconditional support of Israel, sympathies for the U.S. ‘Tea Party’ movement, and contempt for democratic institutions.

Sympathetic to these neo-fascist groups are extreme right wing parties functioning in practically all European countries, from the Norwegian Progress Party, the Sweden Democrats, the True Fins, and the Danish People’s Party, to the French Front National (FN), and the Italian Lega Nord. The perpetrator of the massacre on Jul. 22 was a long-standing member of the Norwegian Progress Party.

Further evidence of the pervasiveness of extremist right wing views is the fact that 14 of the 27 countries represented in the European Parliament have at least one MP who defends xenophobic views and calls for stern anti-immigration policies.

While some of the parties – such as the FN in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the Lega Nord in Italy – have a relative long history, most of them were founded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in reaction to the growing multiethnic character of European communities and to immigration, especially of Muslims.

Leaders of all these parties and groups, including the Norwegian Progress Party, are trying to disassociate themselves from the mass murders in Oslo and on Utøya Island.

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Morten Lodberg
Dagbladet Arbejderen

Der er trangt og mørkt i de smalle gyder i Shatila-flygtningelejren
i Beirut. (Foto: Morten Lodberg)

På en rejse gennem Libanons flygtningelejre der er hjem for den største procentdel af Palæstinensiske flygtninge udenfor deres hjemland, stødte jeg på mange unge, der stod og hang I gaderne.

Skønt stort set alle yngre palæstinensere har gået i en folkeskole og gymnasiet, er de fleste af dem arbejdsløse eller tjener kun lige til dagen og vejen gennem sort arbejde eller gennem tilskud fra udenlandske slægtninge. 

Alle smiler og er venlige, men under overfladen fornemmer man en fortvivlelse, der simpelthen bunder i magtesløshed.. Smilene blegner og skuldrene synker. når samtalen falder på deres situation og fremtid, samtalen skifter næsten altid spor eller bliver høfligt afsluttet.

I et kaffehus i det centrale Beirut mødte jeg dog en ung fyr, som jeg kort havde snakket med på mit besøg i en af lejrene. Han indvilligede modvilligt i at fortælle om sin og sin families problemer som tredjegenerationsflygtninge i Libanon.

Som et fængsel

Natten er faldet på, og jeg sidder sammen med Raed og hans venner på et fladt tag med udsigt til alle sider, taget er svagt oplyst af flakkende neonlamper, der dingler i den svage brise fra havet, som ligger gemt bag beton og osen fra tusinder af udstødninger fra trafikken.

Udsigten består af halvfærdige betonbygninger med små lys af neon eller brændende stearinlys hist og her i de sorte silhuetter, der står klart aftegnede mod den lyse nattehimmels stjernekort.

Omgivelserne virker på engang beroligende med deres ubevægelige ro, men for dem, som er født her og har boet her hele deres liv, virker det som et fængsel, der dog er hjem og alt de kender til.

Shatila-flygtningelejren, der er berygtet for de massakrer, som kristne falangister udløste mod den civile befolkning med hjælp fra israelske styrker i 1982, er hjem for en stor gruppe af unge palæstinensere.

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Patrick Mac Manus

Formand for Horserød-Stutthof Foreningen, Anton Nielsen. Han og
talsmanden for Den Faglige Klub, Viggo Toften-Jørgen er begge til-
talt for at støtte terror.

Onsdag den 15. juni og torsdag den 16. juni klokken 9.30 i retssal 15 bliver Horserød-Stutthof Foreningen sat på anklagebænken i Københavns Byret.

I den tilpassede presse under den danske besættelse bliver modstanden betegnet som ’terrorisme’, de henrettede betegnet som ’terrorister’.

Dette skete stadig blot få dage inden Denmarks befrielse.

Som nærmest ironisk gentagelse af historien indledes nu en retssag mod Horserød-Stutthof Foreningen, mod efterkommerne af besættelsens konflikt.

Der er rejst tiltale for overtrædelse af straffelovens § 114 b, nr. 1 og 2. Efter disse bestemmelser er det strafbart at indsamle og yde økonomisk støtte til grupper, der ”begår eller har til hensigt at begå terrorhandlinger.”

Kriminalisering

Civilsamfundet mister i stigende grad sin beskyttelse mod statsmagten. Tilvæksten i hemmelige procedurer i retsplejeloven afspejler de nye vilkår. Retssikkerheden og ytringsfriheden er truet af svævende og elastiske bestemmelser, der baner vej for en høj grad af statslig vilkårlighed.

Sociale og politiske løsningsmodeller trænges i baggrunden af en sikkerhedspolitisk strategi med kriminalisering, øget strafudmåling, udvidede politimæssige beføjelser og indskrænkninger i borgeres retsbeskyttelse.

Der er tidligere sket domfældelse i to retssager vedrørende økonomisk støtte til modstands- eller befrielsesbevægelser. I retssagen mod ’Fighters & Lovers’ stadfæster Højesteret den 25. marts 2009 Østre Landsrets domfældelse for forsøg på indsamling af økonomisk støtte til modstandsbevægelser i Colombia og Palæstina.

Et år senere sker domfældelsen af en talsperson for Foreningen Oprør for medvirken til forsøg på at yde økonomisk støtte til FARC i Colombia og den palæstinensiske befrielsesbevægelse PFLP. Sagen bliver afgjort med betinget fængselsstraf af Københavns Byret den 15. marts 2010.

Demokratiske vilkår og menneskerettigheder er ikke opstået ved et skrivebord. Historien igennem århundreder og på alle kontinenter er blevet drevet frem af folkelig modstand og forandring. Al forandring er skabt gennem konflikt, fra slavernes tid til i dag. Oftest har retssystemerne søgt at forhindre og fordømme en sådan historisk proces.

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Ilan Pappé
Patrick Mac Manus Blog

The view from Israel is that if they indeed succeed, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions are bad, very bad. Educated Arabs — not all of them dressed as “Islamists,” quite a few of them speaking perfect English whose wish for democracy is articulated without resorting to “anti-Western” rhetoric — are bad for Israel.

Arab armies that do not shoot at these demonstrators are as bad as are many other images that moved and enthused so many people around the world, even in the West. This world reaction is also bad, very bad. It makes the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and its apartheid policies inside the state look like the acts of a typical “Arab” regime.

For a while you could not tell what official Israel thought. In his first ever commonsensical message to his colleagues, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked his ministers, generals and politicians not to comment in public on the events in Egypt. For a brief moment one thought that Israel turned from the neighborhood’s thug to what it always was: a visitor or permanent resident.

It seems Netanyahu was particularly embarrassed by the unfortunate remarks on the situation uttered publicly by General Aviv Kochavi, the head of Israeli military intelligence. This top Israeli expert on Arab affairs stated confidently two weeks ago in the Knesset that the Mubarak regime is as solid and resilient as ever. But Netanyahu could not keep his mouth shut for that long. And when the boss talked all the others followed. And when they all responded, their commentary made Fox News’ commentators look like a bunch of peaceniks and free-loving hippies from the 1960s.

The gist of the Israeli narrative is simple: this is an Iranian-like revolution helped by Al Jazeera and stupidly allowed by US President Barack Obama, who is a new Jimmy Carter, and a stupefied world. Spearheading the Israeli interpretation are the former Israeli ambassadors to Egypt. All their frustration from being locked in an apartment in a Cairean high-rise is now erupting like an unstoppable volcano. Their tirade can be summarized in the words of one of them, Zvi Mazael who told Israeli television’s Channel One on 28 January, “this is bad for the Jews; very bad.”

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Human Rights Watch
Patrick Mac Manus Blog

The Iranian government’s high rate of executions and targeting of rights defenders, particularly lawyers, in 2010 and early 2011 highlights a deepening of the human rights crisis that gripped the country following the disputed June 2009 presidential election, Human Rights Watch said in issuing its World Report 2011 Iran chapter. According to Iranian media reports, authorities have executed at least 73 prisoners – an average of almost three prisoners per day – since January 1, 2011.

The 649-page report, the organization’s 21st annual review of human rights practices around the globe, summarizes major human rights issues in more than 90 countries worldwide. In Iran, since November 2009 authorities have executed at least 13 people on the vague charge of moharebeh, or “enmity against God,” following flawed trials in revolutionary courts. The government also harassed, arrested, detained, and convicted several lawyers in 2010 for their work defending the rights of others. At the same time, scores of civil society activists have spoken out against the government crackdown despite facing harsh consequences.

“The noose has tightened, in some cases literally, around the necks of activists in Iran,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The government’s crackdown has gone beyond silencing post-election demonstrators and is now a broad-based campaign to neutralize Iran’s vibrant civil society and consolidate power.”

The executions and mounting pressures against lawyers took place amid a broad crackdown following the election, and resulted in the killing of dozens of demonstrators by security forces and the detention of thousands of political opposition members and civil society activists. In early 2010 security forces announced that they had arrested more than 6,000 people in the months following the June 12, 2009 election. Those arrested included demonstrators, lawyers, rights defenders, journalists, students, and opposition leaders, some of whom remain in prison without charge. Iran’s revolutionary courts have issued harsh sentences, in some cases based on forced confessions, against dozens convicted of various national security-related crimes.

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Kurdistan Commentary

Jalal Barzanji, Kurdish poet and journalist, will soon release The Man in the Blue Pyjamas: Prison Memoir in the Form of a Novel, his memoirs about the time he spent imprisoned under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The first draft of the book, completed in 2007, was written in Kurdish. After many rounds of revisions and translations, the novel will be available in April 2011 from University of Alberta Press.

‘It is a narrative about a part of my life which I (held) for years in my heart and memory,’ says the author.

The part of his life Barzanji speaks of is from 1986-1989, during which time he endured imprisonment and torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime because of his literary and journalistic achievements—writing that openly explores themes of peace, democracy, and freedom. For those three years, Barzanji wrote only on scrap paper, smuggled in to his cell in Iraq.

As an outspoken critic of the censorship under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Barzanji had been fully expecting to be either imprisoned or executed. ‘The regime was against freedom, and I was asking for freedom. I wasn’t a follower of the ideology and mentality of the regime. My pain was double – I was a modern writer and I was Kurdish…I was living in fear because I knew I was doing something dangerous, talking about peace, democracy, freedom,’ he said.

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Patrick Mac Manus
Patrick Mac Manus Blog

A Congolese rape victim, left, at the Heal Africa clinic
in Goma on August 8, 2009.

Violence against women, especially rape, has added its own brand of shame to recent wars. From conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina to Peru to Rwanda, girls and women have been singled out for rape, imprisonment, torture and execution.

Rape, identified by psychologists as the most intrusive of traumatic events, has been documented in many armed conflicts including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cyprus, Haiti, Liberia, Somalia and Uganda.

Systematic rape is often used as a weapon of war in ‘ethnic cleansing’.

More than 20,000 Muslim girls and women have been raped in Bosnia since fighting began in April 1992, according to a European Community fact-finding team. Teenage girls have been a particular target in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, according to the State of the World’s Children 1996 report. The report also says that impregnated girls have been forced to bear ‘the enemy’s’ child.

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Patrick Mac Manus in Palestine
Patrick Mac Manus Blog

An estimated 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested and detained since 1967 under Israeli military orders, which govern nearly every aspect of life in the occupied Palestinian territory today, including more than 750 Palestinian women arrested by Israel between the years 2000-2009.

Both HaSharon and Damon Prisons lack a gender-sensitive approach and, as such, female prisoners detained there suffer from harsh imprisonment conditions and interlocking systems of oppression, which are enacted through medical negligence, denial of education, denial of family visits, solitary confinement, and overcrowded cells. A majority of these cells are infested with insects, dirty, and lack adequate ventilation and natural light. The Israeli Prison Service, even in cases involving the detention of pregnant female detainees, rarely addresses personal health and hygiene needs.

Other forms of abuse perpetrated against Palestinian women detainees and prisoners include numerous forms of sexual harassment, namely: threats of rape (in some cases threats of rape are made towards the detainee’s family members), sexually degrading insults, and invasive body/strip searches used as a method of punishment. These occurrences are a fundamental part of Palestinian women’s prison experiences and should be understood as a common and systematic form of racial and gendered State violence.

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Patrick Mac Manus
Patrick Mac Manus Blog

“To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. … To be gover…ned is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality…” ~ Idée Générale de la Révolution au XIXe Siècle [The General Idea of the Revolution] (1851); quoted in The Anarchists (1964) by James Joll, Ch. 3, p. 78

“I stand ready to negotiate, but I want no part of laws: I acknowledge none; I protest against every order with which some authority may feel pleased on the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule my free will. Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government…” ~ “The Authority Principle” in No Gods, No Masters : An Anthology of Anarchism (1980) Daniel Guérin, as translated by Paul Sharkey (1998), p. 90

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Patrick Mac Manus in Palestine
Patrick Mac Manus Blog

The Deir Yasin massacre

Targeting the weakest and the most vulnerable is neither new nor surprising.

It is the mentality of all occupations. It is the mentality of an Israeli army who write on their helmets: Born to Kill and who wear T-Shirts with images of dead Palestinian children. It is proud of slogans showing images such as that of a pregnant Palestinian woman with a target sign on her belly and the inscription: 1 shot, 2 kills.

During the Nakba, there are countless massacres. Often it is the women and the children who are first targeted as a warning and to frighten others and force them to leave.
nts of the Deir Yassin massacre mention that among the 254 Palestinians victims are 25 pregnant women who are bayoneted in the abdomen while still alive. Another 52 children are maimed in front of their mothers before being killed.

After the village of Beit Darras has been surrounded, the Zionists call on Palestinian residents to leave the village safely from the south side. The villagers decide that it is safest for the women and children to leave. Upon leaving the village, all women and children are massacred.

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