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Showing posts with label The Guardian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Guardian. Show all posts
Guardian ✒ ‘Written by Dick Wittenberg. Recommended by Christopher Owens.


'He killed my sister. Now I see his remorse’: the extraordinary stories of survivors of the Rwandan genocide who forgave their attackers. 

Half a million died in 100 days: neighbours attacked neighbours, children saw their families slaughtered. But 30 years on, many of the victims and perpetrators have forged reconciliations – even become friends. How did it happen?

The most extraordinary reconciliations are taking place across Rwanda. Thirty years after the genocide, unthinkable partnerships have formed between unlikely pairs: murderers and survivors; parents and children whose families were torn apart by mass murder. They have been hard won.

“After the genocide, people came to apologise,” says 70-year-old Liberatha from the Karongi district in Rwanda, where nine out of 10 Tutsis were murdered, including her family. “I said, ‘I will never forgive you.’ I never expected to exchange a word with those people again.” Yet now, after going through a process of community-based sociotherapy, she feels “a hint of joy”.

Every genocide eventually comes to an end. The survivors bear their scars and bury their dead. The murderers, looters and rapists either face consequences for their actions or get away with them. 

Continue reading @ Guardian.

Rwandan Genocide 🔴 Forgiveness

Guardian ✒ Former BBC One controller Paul Fox says anti-Catholic prejudice was deeply embedded at the corporation during the Troubles. Written by 
Richard Brooks. Recommended by Marty Flynn.


The British public were not told the truth about the Troubles in the 1960s and 1970s because “the bloody Protestants were running the BBC in Northern Ireland”, the then controller of BBC One has claimed.

This is the damning judgment of one of television’s most distinguished former top executives, Sir Paul Fox, who was editor of Panorama and then controller of BBC One. He firmly believes this meant that British viewers were not told the truth of what was really happening in Northern Ireland and in particular to the Catholics.

Fox, who was editor of Panorama in the 1960s, condemns “the censorship” of the Catholic viewpoint in a new documentary about the corporation’s fights and impartiality. Similar sentiments are expressed by Martin Bell and Irish-born Denis Tuohy, who were then both reporting from Northern Ireland and who agree that the BBC was prevented from telling the British public about discrimination against Catholics in education, work and housing.

Yet the documentary, Shooting the Rapids, was itself nearly “censored”. 

Continue reading @ Guardian.

‘The Bloody Protestants Ran BBC In Northern Ireland’ In 60s And 70s, Says Ex-TV Boss

Guardian 💣 South Africa brought the case, but one man dragged Israel into the dock at The Hague – Benjamin Netanyahu. Written by Jonathan Freedland. Recommended by Barry Gilheany.


The Israeli PM’s alliance with the far right made this case possible, and the result could be harmful to Jews all over the world.

There was so much history and so much tragedy in that room. For two days, ending today, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague witnessed a clash between two nations, each shaped by acts that live on in the global lexicon of good and evil.

In one corner, South Africa, which only a generation ago emerged from apartheid, still the universal shorthand for the wickedness of racism. In the other, Israel, established just three years after the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and the attempt to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of the Earth. In a global courtroom, those who bore the scars of those two great crimes – apartheid and the Holocaust – squared up against each other, as one accused the other of the gravest crime of all: genocide.

The two never debated. There was no cross-examination or back and forth. 

Continue reading @ Guardian.

Benjamin Netanyahu Dragged Israel Into The Dock At The Hague

Guardian ✏ Decades of skewed policy have led to one of Europe’s worst shortages of affordable homes. Now it is being weaponised against refugees.


11-December-2023

Ireland is in a dark place. Riots in Dublin last month exposed to the world the presence of a small, nascent but emboldened far right. 

A complex range of factors underlie this: social media conspiracy theories, toxic masculinity, an ugly underbelly of racism and persistent social and economic inequalities. But the far right is also weaponising a decade-long housing and homelessness crisis that afflicts the entire country and has placed thousands of people in a state of chronic housing stress, anxiety and fear.

The riots did not surprise those of us who have been warning about the rise of racism directed at immigrants. We have seen how the housing crisis is used to whip up hate against newly arriving asylum seekers. It doesn’t much matter to those who attack temporary accommodation centres for refugees that such buildings would never become private homes. Their message is that Ireland is “full” and we should house “our own” first.

The truth, however, is that Ireland’s shortage of affordable housing has not been caused by an increase in numbers of immigrants or refugees, but by 30 years of policies that have left delivery to the property market while decimating social housing. My phone pings daily with messages on social media from people who are losing their home. In the past few days, a disabled woman asked me to share her plea for “immediate accommodation”, as she is being evicted. A worker for Dublin city council is being evicted, but he and his family can’t afford any of the rents on flats they have viewed. He told me: “I clean our streets every day, and I haven’t even a home I can clean for myself.”

Continue reading @ Guardian.

Ireland’s Housing Crisis Is A Disaster For Its People 🔨 And A Gift To Far-Right Fearmongers

Guardian 📰 Institutional defensiveness remains the default position from state bodies in inquests and inquiries into state-related deaths, writes Deborah Coles of Inquest. Recommended by Christy Walsh.

14-December-2023

After six years of waiting, the government response to the landmark review by James Jones, the former bishop of Liverpool, was a betrayal of and an insult to the Hillsborough bereaved and survivors and all they have fought for over more than three decades (Government rejects ‘Hillsborough law’ central to campaign by victims’ families, 6 December). 

The review exposed how the interests of powerful institutions and individuals prevail over bereaved people seeking the truth about how their relative died.

Institutional defensiveness remains the default position from state bodies in inquests and inquiries into state-related deaths. The government has rejected calls for a statutory duty of candour across public authorities, which would end obstructive and evasive practices following state-related deaths. Instead, it relies on a toothless code of conduct and an unenforceable charter. It has rejected increasing legal aid to ensure a level playing field between public authorities, which are routinely funded from the public purse, and those affected by inquiries and inquests.

The systems for responding to deaths must be fair and enable accountability. Both the lack of candour and inequality of arms undermine the fundamental purpose of inquests and inquiries to reach the truth and the identification of dangerous or defective practices so that learning can be enacted to ensure similar tragedies are averted.

As the Hillsborough Law Now coalition of survivors, the bereaved and others affected by contentious deaths argues, it is only the enactment of a “Hillsborough law” that will ensure there is no hiding place for official wrongdoing or failure, and address this power imbalance. At the crux of this is the democratic accountability of public authorities at an individual and corporate level.
Deborah Coles
Director, Inquest

Continue reading @ Guardian.

A ‘Hillsborough Law’ Would Ensure The Powerful Have No Place To Hide

Guardian 💣 As Jews, we condemn what Israel is doing in Gaza. Any mass slaughter will not just be on Israel’s hands, but on the hands of America.

Ellen Brotsky and Ariel Koren

It is now impossible for US politicians to ignore the slaughter in Gaza: more than 3,500 Palestinians have been killed in the 12-day barrage, including the 500 reportedly killed Tuesday at Al-Ahli Arabi Baptist hospital. Some 50 entire families have been wiped out — every living relative, including children and babies, gone. And Israel has issued a directive to those remaining that amounts to an ultimatum: leave northern Gaza, all 1.1 million of you, “for your own safety” — in other words, evacuate or risk death in the impending blitz and ground invasion.

The United Nations says such a mass evacuation is “impossible” and has potentially “devastating humanitarian consequences,” pleading with Israel to rescind the order. A UN special rapporteur was clear, calling the order “a crime against humanity and a blatant violation of international humanitarian law.”

We call it something else: unfolding genocide.

There is no other word to describe the pageantry of death embraced by Israel’s politicians. Under international law, genocide requires two things . . .  

Continue reading @ Guardian.

We’re Anti-Zionist Jews And We See Genocide Unfolding In Gaza

Guardian ðŸ’£ I covered the Rwandan genocide as a reporter. The language spilling out of Israel after the butchery of the Hamas attacks is eerily familiar.

Chris McGreal

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about how far to assign guilt for the worst single atrocity against Jews in his country’s history:

It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.

In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,300 Israelis and abduction of 199 – and therefore deserve what is coming to them – has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders.

In the US, Senator Lindsey Graham called for the wholesale destruction of Gaza. He told Fox News:

We are in a religious war here. I’m with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.

In the UK, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simons, took a different tack in generalising guilt by writing that “much of Muslim culture is in the grip of a death cult that sacralises bloodshed” before deleting his tweet after a backlash.

Continue reading @ Guardian 

Language Being Used To Describe Palestinians Is Genocidal

The Guardian ✏ Terms like ‘triggered’, ‘toxic’ and ‘narcissist’ are now bandied about in daily conversations. Is this mere psychobabble or are they useful tools in a complicated world? Recommended by Henry Joy.

Eleanor Morgan

If the language used on the internet is a reliable indicator, we’re more psychologically enlightened than ever. 

We discuss attachment styles like the weather. We joke about our coping mechanisms. We project, or are projected on to. We shun “toxic” people. We catastrophise and ruminate. We diagnose, or are diagnosed: OCD, depression, anxiety, ADHD, narcissism. We make, break or struggle to “hold” boundaries. We practise self-care. We know how to spot gaslighting. We’re tuned into our emotional labour. We’re triggered. We’re processing our trauma. We’re doing the work.

The language of the therapy room has long permeated popular culture. Common terms like “repression”, “denial”, “slip of the tongue”, “hysteria” and “inner child” all lead back to Freud. But over the last decade or so, with the vast expansion of social media networks, a new, seemingly sophisticated language sits on modern society’s tongue. Some call it therapy-speak. Or psychobabble. But despite its prevalence, the language is divisive.

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

‘That’s Triggering!’ Is Therapy-Speak Changing The Way We Talk About Ourselves?

Guardian ✒ Attorneys for protester argue law is unconstitutional restraint on free speech as legal defense fund organizers also arrested. Recommended read by Stanley Cohen.

Timothy Pratt
Attorneys representing an activist arrested while protesting against the building of “Cop City” in Georgia have launched a legal challenge to the use of a state domestic terrorism statute against protests, claiming an “act of free speech” is being unconstitutionally targeted, the Guardian can reveal.

The move comes amid the unprecedented arrests of organizers at a bail and legal defense fund that has helped some of the people arrested while protesting against the multimillion-dollar police and fire department training center planned for a forest south-east of Atlanta.

Cop City came to global attention after police shot dead an environmental protester in a raid on the forest and its defenders on 18 January – the first incident of its kind in US history.

Police staged a Swat-style raid on Wednesday on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF), arresting three of its members. The fund, operating in Atlanta since 2017, has helped some of the 42 protesters so far facing charges linked to protests against Cop City, nearly all of whom have been bailed out.

Continue reading @ Guardian.

‘Cop City’ Protest Lawyers Challenge Use Of Domestic Terrorism Statute

Guardian ✏ Cardinal was acquitted on appeal of child sexual abuse charges but remained tarnished by his response to paedophile priests over decades.


The Australian cardinal George Pell rose from modest beginnings to become one of the world’s most powerful Catholics but his reputation was fatally damaged by association with the church’s child sexual abuse scandals in his home country. 

Pell himself became the highest-ranking Catholic to be convicted of such offences, and he spent more than a year in jail before his convictions were overturned by Australia’s high court in 2020.

In his role as cardinal and inaugural treasurer of the Vatican’s Secretariat of the Economy, Pell had the ear of Pope Francis, but his influence had already begun to wane by the time he was charged with child sexual abuse offences in Australia in 2017. Pell was acquitted on appeal after his conviction in 2018, having spent 405 days in jail.

Pell, who has died in Rome aged 81, spent years crafting and defending the church’s responses to allegations of child sexual abuse as he rose to increasingly powerful positions, first in Australia, then in the Vatican.

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s Most Powerful Catholic, Who Was Dogged By Scandal

Mick Hall ☭ No country would sit easy if they had a hostile and powerful foreign military alliance hunkered down near their borders.

But that doesn't absolve those in the Kemlin who marched its military into the Ukraine recklessly, egotistically, and foolishly.

However what was Zelenskyy thinking when he tied his country's apron strings to the USA (and it's Nato allies) when historically their word is not worth a penny-farthing in old money as the Afghan people learnt only recently? 

What he has done is cut the umbilical cord from one satrap dictator and to put it crudely, tied it to another shower of shit. Still we shouldn't be that surprised as he is quite happy to tolerate having Azov fascists embedded within the Ukrainian military, security services and police. 

It's worth remembering if it marched like a fascist, talks like a fascist, barks like a fascist, it's a fascist!

James Meek who should know better, writing in The Observer has clearly got with the MSM programe when he wrote this:

The beauty of the EU, for Ukraine, is the capaciousness of its model for both liberals and nationalists. In some ways, the aims of European-era Ukraine closely resemble those of the Scottish National Party and the Irish republic.

Oh really? So if the SNP were to gain independence they would have a fascist Battalion/Regiment, of well over a thousand plus men and women in their military? As to the Republic of Ireland I'm not going there, in the modern era it's to ridiculous to even imagine.

Meek continues:

For Ukraine’s more conservative nationalists,* it’s Poland and Hungary that offer the more appealing EU models – stridently patriotic, subordinating media, courts and education to national ideals and social conservatism, all while getting subsidies and trading freely within the EU.
 
It wasn't that long ago when Meek's paper was trashing the record of the government's of Poland and Hungary and rightly so, not any more it seems, to use a fake slogan "there're all in this together."
Meek then quotes an unnamed Ukrainian friend:

I am a liberal, defending the independence of Ukraine. Part of Ukrainian society supports conservative values, linking them to security. If we’re really only going to preach universal, classical, liberal values … we promote discord in the country.

This is classic bourgeois arrogance. It reminds me of the man with the black moustache who the German ruling class thought they could tame by bringing him in from the cold. Whilst Ukraine is not like Germany in 1932, however what has not changed is the fascists' overall strategy and the naivety of the bourgeoisie to believe they can coexist with armed fascists within the state apparatus.

* The Ukrainian National Defence and Security Council recently suspended the activities of a number of Ukrainian political parties. The list includes major opposition parties and less known ones that use words like 'progressive', 'left' or 'socialist' in their names. The Ukrainian fascists were not on the list.

⏩ Mick Hall is a veteran Left Wing activist and trade unionist.

Neither Washington Nor Moscow

Guardian ✒ The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart.

Moira Donegan

This weekend’s March for Life rally, the large anti-choice demonstration held annually in Washington DC to mark the anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision, has the exuberant quality of a victory lap. This, the 49th anniversary of Roe, is likely to be its last. The US supreme court is poised to overturn Roe in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, which is set to be decided this spring. For women in Texas, Roe has already been nullified: the court went out of its way to allow what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called a “flagrantly unconstitutional” abortion ban to go into effect there, depriving abortion rights to the one in 10 American women of reproductive age who live in the nation’s second largest state.

These victories have made visible a growing cohort within the anti-choice movement: the militias and explicitly white supremacist groups of the organized far right. Like last year, this year’s March for Life featured an appearance by Patriot Front, a white nationalist group that wears a uniform of balaclavas and khakis. 

Continue reading @ Guardian.

White Nationalists Are Flocking To The US Anti-Abortion Movement

UnHerd ✒ If you were bullied by 338 colleagues, what would you do?

 Suzanne Moore
It is March 2020. For several months now I have been trying to write something — anything — about the so-called “trans debate” in my Guardian column. But if I ever slip a line in about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, it is always subbed out. It is disappeared. Somehow, this very idea is being blocked, not explicitly, but it certainly isn’t being published. My editors say things like: “It didn’t really add to the argument”, or it is a “distraction” from the argument.

Distraction has always been a triggering word for me. In a good way. My PhD supervisor told me I was “a woman of too many distractions”. This was because I was venturing into journalism, frustrated by the dead language of academia ...

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before.

Continue reading @ UnHerd.

Why I Had To Leave The Guardian

From the Guardian ➤ How Did Britain Get Its Response To Coronavirus So Wrong?
By Toby Helm, Emma Graham-Harrison & Robin McKie

By late December last year, doctors in the central Chinese city of Wuhan were starting to worry about patients quarantined in their hospitals suffering from an unusual type of pneumonia.

As the mystery illness spread in one of China’s major industrial hubs, some tried to warn their colleagues to take extra care at work, because the disease resembled Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), the deadly respiratory disease that had killed hundreds of people across the region in 2002-03 after a government cover-up.

One of those who tried to raise the alarm, though only among a few medical school classmates, was a 33-year-old Chinese ophthalmologist, Li Wenliang. Seven people were in isolation at his hospital, he said, and the disease appeared to be a coronavirus, from the same family as Sars.

Continue reading @ the Guardian.

How Did Britain Get Its Response To Coronavirus So Wrong?

From The Guardian ➤ Mark Grenon wrote to Trump saying chlorine dioxide ‘can rid the body of Covid-19’ days before the president promoted disinfectant as treatment.

By Ed Pilkington

The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week.

In his letter, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”.

A few days after Grenon dispatched his letter, Trump went on national TV at his daily coronavirus briefing at the White House on Thursday and promoted the idea that disinfectant could be used as a treatment for the virus. To the astonishment of medical experts, the US president said that disinfectant “knocks it out in a minute. One minute!”

Continuye reading @ The Guardian.

Leader Of Group Peddling Bleach As Coronavirus 'Cure' Wrote To Trump

Prior to the onset of Covid-19, writing in the Guardian a junior doctor working at Worcestershire Royal hospital lashed Boris Johnson over the loss of life as result of the runnning down of the NHS.  
  By Andrew Meyerson

The prime minister’s neglect of the NHS has resulted in too many tragedies. If he were a doctor, he would be struck off. 

Dear Boris Johnson,

In medicine – unlike politics, where anything seems to go these days – we have situations called “never events”. These are instances that occur when a patient is seriously harmed in spite of all the protocols and protective measures to prevent this happening. “Never events” are such serious, manmade disasters that most clinicians involved in them will bear the burden of such tragic events for the rest of their careers. You are not fit to lecture us any more about what we need in our NHS hospitals

Like many junior doctors who have worked in overwhelmed and understaffed A&E departments, I’ve seen things happen as a result of the overstretched conditions that I believe should be classed as “never events”.

Since 2016, nearly 5,500 patients have died in England alone as a direct result of having waited too long to be admitted to hospital. To put that in perspective, that’s nearly twice the number of people killed in terror attacks in the UK since 1970. We should be outraged.

Continue reading @ the Guardian.

Johnson Has Contributed To Thousands Of Deaths

From The Guardian ➤ With help from Fox News and Elon Musk, a misleading French study prompted a wave of misinformation that made its way to the president.
By

This weekend, Donald Trump used his daily White House coronavirus briefings to again urge Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that has not been shown to be safe or effective against Covid-19.

“What do you have to lose? Take it,” the president said on Saturday as he boasted that the US had amassed 29m doses of the drug. On Sunday, facing questions from the press about his aggressive promotion of an unproven treatment, he argued against waiting for the completion of clinical trials. “In France, they had a very good test,” he said. “But we don’t have time to go and say, ‘Gee, let’s take a couple of years and test it out, and let’s go and test with the test tubes and the laboratories.’”

Meanwhile, Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease doctor, has repeatedly warned that there is no conclusive evidence to support using the drug. Asked whether it should be considered a treatment for Covid-19, he said on 24 March: “The answer is no.”

Continue Reading @ The Guardian.

Hydroxychloroquine ➤ How An Unproven Drug Became Trump’s Coronavirus 'Miracle Cure'

From The Guardian a report on the death of a hunger striker ➤ Singer Helin Bolek, 28, of Grup Yorum, was protesting against government’s treatment of group.
 
A member of a popular folk music group that is banned in Turkey has died on the 288th day of a hunger strike. The singer and a colleague had started the strike while imprisoned to protest at the government’s treatment of their band, according to a post on the group’s Twitter account.

Grup Yorum, known for their protest songs, said Helin Bolek, 28, had died on Friday at a home in Istanbul where she had been staging the hunger strike in an attempt to pressure the government into reversing its position on the band and its members.

Grup Yorum is a folk collective with a rotating membership. The group has been prohibited from performing in Turkey since 2016, and authorities have jailed some of its members.

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

Member Of Banned Turkish Folk Group Dies After Hunger Strike

From The Guardian ➤ Economic adviser gave worst-case scenario of 500,000 deaths ➤ Trump claimed no one could have predicted disease’s severity.
By Ed Pilkington and Martin Pengelly

Donald Trump was warned at the end of January by one of his top White House advisers that coronavirus had the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and derail the US economy, unless tough action were taken immediately, new memos have revealed. 

The memos were written by Trump’s economic adviser, Peter Navarro, and circulated via the National Security Council widely around the White House and federal agencies.

They show that even within the Trump administration alarm bells were ringing by late January, at a time when the president was consistently downplaying the threat of Covid-19.

According to figures from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, by Tuesday more than 368,000 cases of Covid-19 had been confirmed in the US and more than 11,000 people had died. New York is the hardest-hit state: on Tuesday the governor, Andrew Cuomo, said the death toll was nearly 5,500, after the biggest single-day increase. 

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

Trump Was Warned In January Of Covid-19's Devastating Impact, Memos Reveal

From The Guardian ➤The rich and famous are desperate to prove we are all in this together – in fact, the outbreak has highlighted just how false that is.

By Arwa Mahdawi
Would you spare a thought for all the poor, suffering celebrities out there? While this is a difficult time for everyone, it has been particularly tough on the famous. They have been upstaged by a virus. No one cares what they are wearing or who they are snogging any more; the world’s attention has been diverted by a headline-hogging pandemic. It seems as if some celebrities are starting to grapple with the realisation that they are not quite as important or beloved as they thought they were.

Gal Gadot was the first victim of the great celebrity backlash of 2020. “We’re all in this together,” the Wonder Woman star assured us in a video on Instagram a couple of weeks ago, before launching into a star-studded rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine. Can you imagine how little self-awareness you must have to enlist a bunch of multimillionaires to sing about a world with “no possessions” while huge numbers of people are losing their jobs? The tone-deaf performance was swiftly savaged.

One would have thought the glitterati might have learned from the scathing reaction to Gadot’s singalong. But no, the vapid messages of hope from celebs keep coming – as do the disgusted responses from the public.  

Continue reading @ The Guardian.

Coronavirus Crisis Has Exposed Ugly Truth About Celebrity Culture And Capitalism

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