Showing posts with label xenophobia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label xenophobia. Show all posts
Friday, September 4, 2009
Blackwater (Xe) Contract Extended by the government
Private contractors have proven to be highly controversial in Iraq where the security firm formerly known as Blackwater has been banned.
But the US state department has extended a contract with the firm, now known as Xe, indefinitely, just as its contract was due to expire this month.
Iraqis had long complained about incidents involving Blackwater's ground operations, particularly when a shooting by Blackwater guards in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, in September 2007, left 17 civilians dead.
The deaths further strained relations between Baghdad and Washington and led US prosecutors to bring charges against Blackwater and its founder, Erik Prince.
But sources say the department has agreed to temporarily continue using a subsidiary known as Presidential Airways to provide helicopter transport for embassy employees around Iraq.
Al Jazeera's Tom Ackerman reports.
source: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/09/200992185420888200.html
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Friday, August 21, 2009
Fear, racism at town hall meetings
By Rob Reynolds, senior Washington correspondent
Barney Frank, a Democratic congressman, took part in a health care reform "town hall debate" during which protesters held up placards depicting Barack Obama as Hitler.
This year August has been the month of rage.
In made-for-television "town hall meetings" across the country, grey-haired white men and women in t-shirts stand and hurl abuse at their Congress members and senators, snarling and shouting - their eyes popping apoplectically and choking with anger.
Moustached Obama
People have waved signs depicting Barack Obama, the US president, as Adolf Hitler with a toothbrush moustache, or with a hammer and sickle on his forehead.
"Protesters assert the health plan is merely the thin edge of the wedge for a socialistic overhaul of American society."
Placards denounce Obama as a fascist or a communist, or, in a proud display of historical and political ignorance, both at once.
Lately, men have begun showing up outside Obama events carrying weapons - strutting around like Doc Holliday, an iconic figure from 19th century literature of the Wild West, with six-gun pistols in holsters or, as in Arizona this week, with an assault rifle slung over shoulders.
One person in New Hampshire, with a loaded gun strapped to his leg, held a sign saying: "It's time to water the tree of liberty" - a phrase taken from Thomas Jefferson, an 18th century American revolutionary and third US president, who wrote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The clear implication was made even plainer by a man at a meeting in Hagerstown, Maryland who held up a piece of cardboard upon which he had scrawled: "Death to Obama, death to Michelle and her two stupid kids."
Outpouring of hatred
Congress members have been hearing voters' views on proposed health care reform.
The protesters assert the health plan is merely the thin edge of the wedge for a socialistic overhaul of American society, including "death panels" that will rule on whether individuals are worthy enough to keep alive.
These contemptible fantasies are avidly stoked and facilitated by Republican Party hacks and lawmakers, the big insurance companies and other moneyed interests who will fight dirty to prevent changing the lucrative for-profit health system that is bleeding the country white.
These are some of the same people who howled "traitor!" and "kill him!" at Sarah Palin's rallies last year.
They are the ones convinced Obama is a Muslim "sleeper agent" who will destroy American values and hand the country over to Osama bin Laden.
The flip side of their rage is fear. They scream: "We want our country back!" Their country is one where white, Christian conservatives rule.
The idea of a black president and a liberal democratic majority in Congress, elected by a huge landslide margin last November, is simply impossible for them to contemplate without teeth-grinding, choleric eruptions of hatred.
Egged on by a fair number of Republican members of Congress and right-wing talk show bloviators, so-called "birthers" have seized on the idea that Obama is not actually an American - that he was secretly born in Kenya and shipped to the US as a baby.
Racism? "You betcha!"
"Racism simply compounds something that runs even deeper, this fear of the "other" is not a new phenomenon"
Therefore, they argue, Obama is ineligible to be president and the office must be handed over to the runner-up in last years election, Republican John McCain who was born - and this is not disputed by anyone - on a US military base in Panama.
There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever to back up this fantasy, but facts - like copies of Obama's Hawaii birth certificate, the birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper, photos of Obama's mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii in 1961 and so forth - appear to be irrelevant. Their goal is to de-legitimise Obama's presidency.
Racism? Sure. Or as Palin would say: "You betcha!" That's part of it.
But racism simply compounds something that runs even deeper. This fear of the "other" is not a new phenomenon.
Centuries-old fears
It didn't start with Obama's rise to the White House.
In 1964, the great Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter unravelled what he called the "paranoid style in American politics".
Panics, conspiracy fears and militant campaigns against outsiders began almost as soon as the republic was founded, Hofstadter writes.
In the 1790s, ultra-conservative elements, particularly in New England, became obsessed with the supposed conspiracies of the Society of the Illuminati (a Bavarian Freemason group) to subvert established religions and overturn all the world's governments.
More anti-Mason scares followed in the 1820s and 30s.
In the middle of the 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of Irish and German Catholics began migrating to the US, anti-Catholic hysteria bloomed like a fetid rose.
Jesuits and other priests, and Protestants, were creeping around every corner of the US, determined to enslave the US and carry out a war of extermination against heretics on the orders of the Pope in Rome.
Xenophobia
Reputable men, like SFB Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, entertained baroque and bloody fantasies involving Papist plots to install a Hapsburg as Emperor of America.
Populist, "Free Silver" anti-Semitic demagogues of the late 19th and early 20th century posited a vast conspiracy by European Jewish bankers and Wall Street speculators to oppress freedom-loving rural Americans.
The movement's greatest orator, William Jennings Bryan, was the Democratic nominee for president on three separate occasions.
Bryan drove crowds wild with his thundering speeches, proclaiming, in typically paranoid style: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
By the time of World War One, intense fears of a Bolshevik conspiracy gripped the country.
The federal government arbitrarily arrested thousands of left-wing foreign residents in the US and shipped them back to Europe.
Anti-communist hysteria grew in the 1950s to the national obscenity that has become known as McCarthyism, which ruined countless careers and lives with trumped-up charges and headline-grabbing congressional investigations.
At the same time, the foundations of the modern conservative "movement" that has now taken over the Republican Party were being laid in the ultra-right wing John Birch Society and other conspiracy-minded groups convinced that communist agents had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government.
Another gifted demagogue, Ronald Reagan, broadened the definition of the "enemy" to include the entire federal government.
'Big government'
Millions of people now firmly believe that "big government" is evil, that they should not be forced to pay taxes for any public services and that the true-blue American (white, of course) "goes it alone", with his grit and his guns, instead of relying on and participating in a wider community.
Of course, these people can realise their dream of living in a no-taxes, no-government, guns-for-all society simply by moving to Somalia.
"Of course, these people can realise their dream of living in a no-taxes, no-government, guns-for-all society simply by moving to Somalia."
So, when you see these town-hall hatemongers, gun-toting "patriots" and whacked-out conspiracy theorists on your TV, remember that they are not merely common, garden variety lunatics, but heirs to a rich and time-honoured American tradition.
The last word here must go to the irrepressible representative Barney Frank, the overweight, gay, Jewish Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, who is perhaps the smartest man currently holding public office in America.
Frank was confronted by a woman at a town hall meeting brandishing a poster of Obama-as-Hitler, who took the microphone and demanded: "Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy as Obama has expressly supported this policy? Why are you supporting it?"
Frank responded: "I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time?"
The woman kept talking, unaware that she had just been verbally body-slammed by a master.
Frank observed: "Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table."
That's the way to deal with the ignorant, paranoid style.
The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/08/200982075754210254.html
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Barney Frank, a Democratic congressman, took part in a health care reform "town hall debate" during which protesters held up placards depicting Barack Obama as Hitler.
In made-for-television "town hall meetings" across the country, grey-haired white men and women in t-shirts stand and hurl abuse at their Congress members and senators, snarling and shouting - their eyes popping apoplectically and choking with anger.
Moustached Obama
People have waved signs depicting Barack Obama, the US president, as Adolf Hitler with a toothbrush moustache, or with a hammer and sickle on his forehead.
"Protesters assert the health plan is merely the thin edge of the wedge for a socialistic overhaul of American society."
Placards denounce Obama as a fascist or a communist, or, in a proud display of historical and political ignorance, both at once.
Lately, men have begun showing up outside Obama events carrying weapons - strutting around like Doc Holliday, an iconic figure from 19th century literature of the Wild West, with six-gun pistols in holsters or, as in Arizona this week, with an assault rifle slung over shoulders.
One person in New Hampshire, with a loaded gun strapped to his leg, held a sign saying: "It's time to water the tree of liberty" - a phrase taken from Thomas Jefferson, an 18th century American revolutionary and third US president, who wrote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The clear implication was made even plainer by a man at a meeting in Hagerstown, Maryland who held up a piece of cardboard upon which he had scrawled: "Death to Obama, death to Michelle and her two stupid kids."
Outpouring of hatred
Congress members have been hearing voters' views on proposed health care reform.
The protesters assert the health plan is merely the thin edge of the wedge for a socialistic overhaul of American society, including "death panels" that will rule on whether individuals are worthy enough to keep alive.
These contemptible fantasies are avidly stoked and facilitated by Republican Party hacks and lawmakers, the big insurance companies and other moneyed interests who will fight dirty to prevent changing the lucrative for-profit health system that is bleeding the country white.
These are some of the same people who howled "traitor!" and "kill him!" at Sarah Palin's rallies last year.
They are the ones convinced Obama is a Muslim "sleeper agent" who will destroy American values and hand the country over to Osama bin Laden.
The flip side of their rage is fear. They scream: "We want our country back!" Their country is one where white, Christian conservatives rule.
The idea of a black president and a liberal democratic majority in Congress, elected by a huge landslide margin last November, is simply impossible for them to contemplate without teeth-grinding, choleric eruptions of hatred.
Egged on by a fair number of Republican members of Congress and right-wing talk show bloviators, so-called "birthers" have seized on the idea that Obama is not actually an American - that he was secretly born in Kenya and shipped to the US as a baby.
Racism? "You betcha!"
"Racism simply compounds something that runs even deeper, this fear of the "other" is not a new phenomenon"
Therefore, they argue, Obama is ineligible to be president and the office must be handed over to the runner-up in last years election, Republican John McCain who was born - and this is not disputed by anyone - on a US military base in Panama.
There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever to back up this fantasy, but facts - like copies of Obama's Hawaii birth certificate, the birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper, photos of Obama's mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii in 1961 and so forth - appear to be irrelevant. Their goal is to de-legitimise Obama's presidency.
Racism? Sure. Or as Palin would say: "You betcha!" That's part of it.
But racism simply compounds something that runs even deeper. This fear of the "other" is not a new phenomenon.
Centuries-old fears
It didn't start with Obama's rise to the White House.
In 1964, the great Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter unravelled what he called the "paranoid style in American politics".
Panics, conspiracy fears and militant campaigns against outsiders began almost as soon as the republic was founded, Hofstadter writes.
In the 1790s, ultra-conservative elements, particularly in New England, became obsessed with the supposed conspiracies of the Society of the Illuminati (a Bavarian Freemason group) to subvert established religions and overturn all the world's governments.
More anti-Mason scares followed in the 1820s and 30s.
In the middle of the 19th century, when hundreds of thousands of Irish and German Catholics began migrating to the US, anti-Catholic hysteria bloomed like a fetid rose.
Jesuits and other priests, and Protestants, were creeping around every corner of the US, determined to enslave the US and carry out a war of extermination against heretics on the orders of the Pope in Rome.
Xenophobia
Reputable men, like SFB Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, entertained baroque and bloody fantasies involving Papist plots to install a Hapsburg as Emperor of America.
Populist, "Free Silver" anti-Semitic demagogues of the late 19th and early 20th century posited a vast conspiracy by European Jewish bankers and Wall Street speculators to oppress freedom-loving rural Americans.
The movement's greatest orator, William Jennings Bryan, was the Democratic nominee for president on three separate occasions.
Bryan drove crowds wild with his thundering speeches, proclaiming, in typically paranoid style: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
By the time of World War One, intense fears of a Bolshevik conspiracy gripped the country.
The federal government arbitrarily arrested thousands of left-wing foreign residents in the US and shipped them back to Europe.
Anti-communist hysteria grew in the 1950s to the national obscenity that has become known as McCarthyism, which ruined countless careers and lives with trumped-up charges and headline-grabbing congressional investigations.
At the same time, the foundations of the modern conservative "movement" that has now taken over the Republican Party were being laid in the ultra-right wing John Birch Society and other conspiracy-minded groups convinced that communist agents had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government.
Another gifted demagogue, Ronald Reagan, broadened the definition of the "enemy" to include the entire federal government.
'Big government'
Millions of people now firmly believe that "big government" is evil, that they should not be forced to pay taxes for any public services and that the true-blue American (white, of course) "goes it alone", with his grit and his guns, instead of relying on and participating in a wider community.
Of course, these people can realise their dream of living in a no-taxes, no-government, guns-for-all society simply by moving to Somalia.
"Of course, these people can realise their dream of living in a no-taxes, no-government, guns-for-all society simply by moving to Somalia."
So, when you see these town-hall hatemongers, gun-toting "patriots" and whacked-out conspiracy theorists on your TV, remember that they are not merely common, garden variety lunatics, but heirs to a rich and time-honoured American tradition.
The last word here must go to the irrepressible representative Barney Frank, the overweight, gay, Jewish Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, who is perhaps the smartest man currently holding public office in America.
Frank was confronted by a woman at a town hall meeting brandishing a poster of Obama-as-Hitler, who took the microphone and demanded: "Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy as Obama has expressly supported this policy? Why are you supporting it?"
Frank responded: "I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time?"
The woman kept talking, unaware that she had just been verbally body-slammed by a master.
Frank observed: "Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table."
That's the way to deal with the ignorant, paranoid style.
The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/08/200982075754210254.html
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Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Spain cracks down on neo-Nazis and skinheads
11 August, 2009, 13:07 Spain's “inadequacy” in deterring racism has been blamed for rising xenophobic attacks. Will the recent first-ever sentencing of neo-Nazis mean a new intolerance to racism? Or is it just a feeble stab to appease critics?
It has been regarded as a radical breakthrough in Spain's fight against racism, intolerance and xenophobia. The recent sentencing of a neo-Nazi gang known as Hammerskin is the first of its kind and has been welcomed by many as a fundamental achievement in Spain.
The Madrid Provincial Court declared the Hammerskin gang to be illegal and sentenced 15 of its members to between 18- and 30-month prison terms for illegal association, possession of illegal arms and espousing Nazi philosophies.
Spain has for years been home to much racially-motivated abuse from both far-right extremists as well as less radical racist individuals. But the country's seemingly tolerant attitude towards the problem, coupled with the Government's apparent indifference, as evidenced by inadequate formalities and punishments, have been criticized nearly as much as the perpetrators of racist acts themselves.
Throughout this decade, Spain has been involved in many violent incidents involving neo-Nazi gangs. In 2004, two soldiers, members of the fascist Social Republican Movement, were arrested for beating up and stabbing a homeless person in Madrid.
Several months later, a group known as The Black Front, which also championed Nazi ideologies, was arrested by police in Barcelona for attacking Muslim mosques and businesses. In 2007, a group of Hell’s Angels was arrested for illicit association.
Neo-Nazi material was amongst the items seized by police. According to El Rincon del Vago website, there are at least 14 neo-Nazi groups acting in Madrid alone, and Spain has the largest number of Nazi movements in Europe. Despite Spain's neo-Nazi European dominance and the frequent disputes between gangs and authorities it inevitably causes, up until the recent sentencing of the Hammerskin gang, extreme fascist groups in Spain have never been declared illegal.
While the illegal declaration of the neo-Nazi gang for inciting violence has been fundamentally approved of, some believe the sentences given were not harsh enough and reveal the Spanish Government's arguably “trivial” attitude towards racism and the inconsistency of penalties.
Estaban Ibarra, president for the Movement Against Intolerance in Spain, however, welcomes the Court's decision and sees it as an important progression in the battle against racism. Ibarra told Europa Press:
“We are happy with the sentencing. It is a step forward in the fight against racism, xenophobia and intolerance.”
Although the gang's leader has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison, the prosecution was asking for much longer prison terms of between three and six years, and some believe the criminals “got off lightly”.
Alfredo Garcia Lopez is among those who does not see the “Hammerskin ruling” as a victory in Spain's fight against racism, but rather as a weak attempt to satisfy the critics. The 58-year-old from Madrid told RT:
“I have seen the terror these fascist gangs can put people through and it is getting worse and worse in Madrid. 18 to 30 months is a pittance of a ruling for these kinds of crimes, and is a pitiable attempt to look like they are trying to stamp racism out.”
It is commonly accepted that the surge of xenophobic attacks has been fueled by the increase of ethnic minorities that have immigrated to Spain in recent years. According to Amnesty International, the country is now the biggest magnet for migration in Europe, with the number of immigrants in Spain rising from 500,000 in 1996 to currently 5.2 million.
Although racism and racially motivated attacks are difficult to measure at the best of times, they are especially hard to determine in Spain, where there is no equivalent of the Commission for Racial Equality, resulting in many racial incidents going unreported.
In a country so rife with racism and xenophobia, it was quite shocking when the National Council of Judicial Power and the Social Affairs, Justice and Interior Ministries recently admitted that they did not bother to keep figures on incidents involving racism. Estaban Ibarra told The Guardian:
“We calculate that there are more than 1,000 racist attacks every year. There has been no adequate following of this, however, by governments.”
One victim of racially motivated prejudice is 15-year-old Sara, who has been “suffering in silence” for the last eight years. Sara moved to Girona, in the Catalonia province, from London when she was seven, and has since endured a miserable and lonely existence at school as the victim of ongoing racist taunts.
“Being black and being English I have suffered years of bullying at school. It is not just the other children, but the teachers have never really given me any support. It was like the whole school was in on it.” Sara said.
Amnesty International echoes both young Sara's beliefs, that those in power are not providing adequate support, and Alfredo Garcia Lopez's views, that the Spanish authorities are not doing enough to combat racism. A spokesperson for Amnesty International said to Expatica.com:
“Any government measures to fight racial discrimination in past years have been insufficient.”
But the human rights group's discontentment stretches even further, as Amnesty believes that the Spanish authorities are criminalizing immigrants, namely by the rise in police operations targeting undocumented immigrants. The Spanish press recently reported that police officers in Madrid are feeling increasingly pressurized to arrest a certain number of immigrants each week.
Although whatever the reasons behind the authorities’ alleged victimization of immigrants, the imprisonment of 15 Hammerskin members in a country that is frequently being referred to “racially regressive” has to be a symbol of progress.
Gabrielle Pickard for RThttp://www.russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-08-11/harsh-spaniard-xenophobe-sentence.html
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