Independent.co.uk

Johann Hari: We need to stop being such cowards about Islam

Thursday, 14 August 2008

This is a column condemning cowardice – including my own. It begins with the story of a novel you cannot read. The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.

You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohamed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as "the Prophet Mohamed", so our ability to explore this story is stunted. The Jewel of Medina was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller – before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it "a national security issue". Random House had visions of a re-run of the Rushdie or the Danish cartoons affairs. Sherry Jones's publisher has pulped the book. It's gone.

In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam – enforced not by the state, but by jihadis. I seriously considered not writing this column, but the right to criticise religion is as precious – and hard-won – as the right to criticise government. We have to use it or lose it.

Some people will instantly ask: why bother criticising religion if it causes so much hassle? The answer is: look back at our history. How did Christianity lose its ability to terrorise people with phantasms of sin and Hell? How did it stop spreading shame about natural urges – pre-marital sex, masturbation or homosexuality? Because critics pored over the religion's stories and found gaping holes of logic or morality in them. They asked questions. How could an angel inseminate a virgin? Why does the Old Testament God command his followers to commit genocide? How can a man survive inside a whale?

Reinterpretation and ridicule crow-barred Christianity open. Ask enough tough questions and faith is inevitably pushed farther and farther back into the misty realm of metaphor – where it is less likely to inspire people to kill and die for it. But doubtful Muslims, and the atheists who support them, are being prevented from following this path. They cannot ask: what does it reveal about Mohamed that he married a young girl, or that he massacred a village of Jews who refused to follow him? You don't have to murder many Theo Van Goghs or pulp many Sherry Joneses to intimidate the rest. The greatest censorship is internal: it is in all the books that will never be written and all the films that will never be shot, because we are afraid.

 We need to acknowledge the double-standard – and that it will cost Muslims in the end. Insulating a religion from criticism – surrounding it with an electric fence called "respect" – keeps it stunted at its most infantile and fundamentalist stage. The smart, questioning and instinctively moral Muslims – the majority – learn to be silent, or are shunned (at best). What would Christianity be like today if George Eliot, Mark Twain and Bertrand Russell had all been pulped? Take the most revolting rural Alabama church, and metastasise it.

Since Jones has brought it up, let us look at Mohamed's marriage to Aisha as a model for how we can conduct this conversation. It is true those were different times, and it may have been normal for grown men to have sex with prepubescent girls. The sources are not clear on this point. But whatever culture you live in, having sex when your body is not physically developed can be an excruciatingly painful experience. Among Vikings, it was more normal than today to have your arm chopped off, but that didn't mean it wasn't agony. If anything, Jones's book whitewashes this, suggesting that Mohamed's "gentleness" meant Aisha enjoyed it.

The story of Aisha also prompts another fundamentalist-busting discussion. You cannot say that Mohamed's decision to marry a young girl has to be judged by the standards of his time, and then demand that we follow his moral standards to the letter. Either we should follow his example literally, or we should critically evaluate it and choose for ourselves. Discussing this contradiction inevitably injects doubt – the mortal enemy of fanaticism (on The Independent's Open House blog later today, I'll be discussing how Aisha has become the central issue in a debate in Yemen about children and forced marriage).

So why do many people who cheer The Life Of Brian and Jerry Springer: The Opera turn into clucking Mary Whitehouses when it comes to Islam? If a book about Christ was being dumped because fanatics in Mississippi might object, we would be enraged. I feel this too. I am ashamed to say I would be more scathing if I was discussing Christianity. One reason is fear: the image of Theo Van Gogh lying on a pavement crying "Can't we just talk about this?" Of course we rationalise it, by asking: does one joke, one column, one novel make much difference? No. But cumulatively? Absolutely.

The other reason is more honourable, if flawed. There is very real and rising prejudice against Muslims across the West. The BBC recently sent out identically-qualified CVs to hundreds of employers. Those with Muslim names were 50 per cent less likely to get interviews. Criticisms of Islamic texts are sometimes used to justify US or Israeli military atrocities. Some critics of Muslims – Geert Wilders or Martin Amis – moot mass human rights abuses here in Europe. So some secularists reason: I have plenty of criticisms of Judaism, but I wouldn't choose to articulate them in Germany in 1933. Why try to question Islam now, when Muslims are being attacked by bigots?

But I live in the Muslim majority East End of London, and this isn't Weimar Germany. Muslims are secure enough to deal with some tough questions. It is condescending to treat Muslims like excitable children who cannot cope with the probing, mocking treatment we hand out to Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. It is perfectly consistent to protect Muslims from bigotry while challenging the bigotries and absurdities within their holy texts.

There is now a pincer movement trying to silence critical discussion of Islam. To one side, fanatics threaten to kill you; to the other, critics call you "Islamophobic". But consistent atheism is not racism. On the contrary: it treats all people as mature adults who can cope with rational questions. When we pulp books out of fear of fundamentalism, we are decapitating the most precious freedom we have.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

©independent.co.uk

Slavery by Another Name: Author Douglas Blackmon on the Re-Enslavement of Black People in America

A new book by award-winning journalist Douglas Blackmon uncovers the forgotten history of neo-slavery imposed on hundreds and thousands of African Americans that continued well after the Civil War and persisted right up to the 1940s. Using extensive archival sources, Blackmon uncovers the shameful system created to re-enslave African Americans. Under new laws, they were intimidated, arrested, charged with exorbitant fines, and then sold as forced laborers to corporations, mines and plantations or compelled into involuntary servitude. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. He is also the bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta.
Rush Transcript
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* Slavery By Another Name

JUAN GONZALEZ: We now turn back in time to one of the ugliest chapters in American history: slavery. Most people think that this shameful chapter was closed with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and with even more finality in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that banned slavery.

But a new book by Douglas Blackmon uncovers the forgotten history of neo-slavery imposed on hundreds and thousands of African Americans that continued well after the Civil War and persisted right up to the 1940s. Using extensive archival sources, Blackmon uncovers the shameful system created to re-enslave African Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: Under new laws, they were intimidated, arrested, charged with exorbitant fines, then sold as forced laborers to corporations, mines and plantations or compelled into involuntary servitude.

The book is called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. Author Douglas Blackmon is an award-winning journalist, also the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta. He joins us now from Atlanta.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Why Slavery by Another Name? Why that title?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Because this was slavery, even though we didn’t call it that. The legal institution of slavery, the legal concept of slavery that had existed before 1865, had in fact been abolished, and there weren’t laws on the books anymore that authorized slavery, and you couldn’t file a deed on a slave down at the county courthouse anymore. But the reality was that in the years after the Civil War, all of the Southern states passed this array of new laws, which were specifically designed to intimidate African Americans out of the political process, to inhibit their ability to have economic success, and eventually to force first thousands, and then eventually hundreds of thousands, of African Americans back into a form of involuntary servitude. And it wasn’t called slavery, but it was slavery by another name.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you’ve gone back into county records in areas across the South to unearth this story. Tell us about how the mechanisms actually worked, especially places like Alabama and Georgia, how they—and also, where were these victims enslaved into? What were the areas that they worked in?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, a lot of conventional history that’s been written about this period of time acknowledged that there was this abusive system of county sheriffs and county judges and the state courts leasing prisoners, people who had been convicted of crimes, leasing them out to—as a way of paying off their fines, leasing them to commercial interests like coal mines and iron ore mines, timber camps, turpentine stills, where turpentine was made from pine trees, which was an incredibly important commodity for the whole entire US economy at that time. And that story has been somewhat documented.

But what I did was I went across Alabama and Georgia and Florida and really all of the Southern states, but I went courthouse by courthouse across key areas of the Deep South and discovered enormous numbers of records which really hadn’t been looked at in a hundred years and which made it very clear that among these thousands of people who were arrested and forced into this form of forced labor, that huge numbers of them had committed no crimes at all, or they had been arrested and convicted on the most frivolous charges, like vagrancy or the inability to prove that they had a job at any time, which was something that almost no one could do in an era without pay stubs.

It was against the law in the South for a farm worker to change jobs, to move from one landowner to another landowner without the permission of the first landowner. Now, that law didn’t say it would only be applied to African Americans, but overwhelmingly it only was enforced against African Americans, with the specific purpose of making it impossible for huge numbers of black people to have any kind of economic mobility or to break free from this life of de facto slavery. And that was happening in a pervasive way in every Southern state by the beginning of the twentieth century.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You talk in particular about a brick factory in Atlanta, where you are based, and say that the modern city of Atlanta depended basically on this new enslaved labor to lay out its physical structure.

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: At the end of the nineteenth century, there was this enormous brick-making concern on the outskirts of Atlanta. And, in fact, the company still operates today in a somewhat different form. It was owned by one of the most prominent men in the city. He had been the mayor of Atlanta in the 1880s. His name was James English. He was a famous Confederate war veteran. He was politically the most powerful man in the city. And by the beginning of the twentieth century, he probably was the wealthiest man in the Southern United States and one of the wealthiest men in America.

He had many business concerns, but at the base of his wealth and the base of his enterprises was this brick-making factory, which was worked entirely with these forced laborers who had been acquired from jails and also simply purchased from men who had kidnapped black men from the roadways of the South, which became an incredibly common phenomenon as this new market for black labor developed. And the Chattahoochee brickyard, as it was called, was a place that generated millions and millions of bricks.

The workers there lived lives under excruciatingly terrible circumstances. They were starved, they were whipped, they were beaten. They didn’t receive medical care. Huge numbers of them died. Absolutely horrifying conditions that—but which were common to these forced labor camps that existed all over the South.

But those bricks, millions of them were purchased by the city of Atlanta to pave the streets and the sidewalks of the city. They’re in the foundations of almost every building in Atlanta that predates 1910, like the house that I live in and the sidewalks that I walk on in my neighborhood in downtown Atlanta.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you name the names of some other corporations. For example, you write about Morgan Stanley.

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Not Morgan Stanley, but I mention JPMorgan as a company, that in the past I’ve written about the role of JPMorgan in—I did a story some years ago about—that sort of raised the question of, what are the responsibilities of a bank when it finds itself wittingly or unwittingly involved in the financing of some enterprise or the transfer of funds related to enterprises that in hindsight today look very, very suspect?

And so—but in terms of the companies that I write about in the book, there’s Chattahoochee Brick, Captain English’s enterprise, but he then, on the basis of that wealth, he then founded a different bank in Atlanta, which eventually became the largest financial institution, the most powerful financial institution, in the South and eventually was subsumed into what is today Wachovia Bank.

There was another great entrepreneur of Atlanta, equally important figure in the creation of the modern city, who also relied heavily on this form of labor in coal mines and iron ore mines. He founded a bank that is today SunTrust Bank. That bank and his other enterprises were instrumental in the creation of the modern Coca-Cola Company. He had other enterprises that became Georgia Power Company and Southern Company, which are two of the biggest utilities in the Southern United States.

In Alabama, US Steel Corporation was the largest player in operating mines where you had thousands and thousands of these forced laborers at work. And there are many other companies today that, in one manner or another, have some sort of a connection—whether they know it or not, they have some connection back to these terrible events of a hundred years ago.

AMY GOODMAN: US Steel?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: US Steel Corporation.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And how was it—for instance, if someone was arrested on a vagrancy charge, you would assume that this would only be a very short sentence. How were they able to be then impressed into service for these companies for longer periods of time?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, take, for instance, the example of a man named Green Cottenham, around whom I built much of the narrative of the book. Green Cottenham was a child of former slaves who was born in the 1880s in the center of Alabama. And by the time he had reached adulthood, just after the turn-of-the-century, this whole new system of intimidation, really terror in many respects, had come into place against African Americans across the South.

And he was arrested in the spring of 1908, when a deputy sheriff in Columbiana, Alabama went out on a sweep, effectively, to round up a number of African American men, because a few days later, the man from the US Steel mine, who came by periodically to pick up laborers and take them back to the mines, would be arriving in a few days. And so, Green Cottenham was swept up. He was standing around with a number of other African Americans behind the train station in the town. And this group of men were arrested for no particular reason.

By the time they were brought before a judge two days later, the deputy couldn’t remember exactly what the charge had been, and so the original charge that’s written down on the day he’s arrested is different from the one that the judge finally decides to convict him of, which was simply vagrancy. And almost any farm worker, and certainly any indigent African American man, in 1908 could be charged with vagrancy, unless he had some powerful white man willing to step forward and say, “No, he works for me. He’s under my control.” Well, that didn’t happen for Green Cottenham, and so he is convicted of vagrancy.

He was sentenced to a fine of $10 or thereabouts, but on top of the fines, there would be imposed on these men—in those days, sheriffs and court clerks and many other government officials received their compensation not in salaries from the government, but from fees that were charged to the people they arrested and convicted. And so, in addition to his fine, there was almost $200 of additional fees tacked onto what he would have to pay to become free. Well, that’s two or three years’ wages in that era. And that was something that would be impossible for a young man like him to have produced.

And so, to pay off those fines, he was effectively sold into the control of US Steel Corporation, who would pay back his fines a month at a time. And this happened to thousands of people, many of whom, even after their fines had been paid off, were still not released, or the people who were holding them would invent another offense and make another claim of a spurious crime, have them convicted again and hold them for an even longer period of time.

AMY GOODMAN: You say the system’s final demise came with World War II. Explain why that was so significant.

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, at the beginning of World War II, just days after Pearl Harbor, as President Roosevelt was mobilizing the national war effort, one of the issues that was being discussed at the Cabinet level in Washington were the propaganda vulnerabilities of the United States: what would be the issues that the enemies of America would raise to try to undercut morale in the United States? And immediately, one of President Roosevelt’s aides points out that particularly the Japanese would argue that America was not the country fighting for freedom and that the proof of that was the treatment of African Americans in the Deep South. Roosevelt realized what a vulnerability that was. He ordered that there be legislation against lynchings, making it a federal crime, that that be introduced in Congress, which it was.

And then, shortly after that, the attorney general was having a similar conversation with his deputies, one of whom said, “By the way, there are also many places in the South where slaves are still being held, and it’s been the policy of the federal government, of the Department of Justice, not to investigate.” And this was the case for many decades, that the Department of Justice had a policy not to investigate allegations of slavery in the South and not to bring prosecutions against those who were holding slaves. But because of the propaganda concerns at the beginning of World War II, the attorney general issued a new policy, which said, from this day forward, investigate these cases. And within a few months, there was an investigation and a prosecution underway against a family in Texas which had been holding a man named Alfred Irving as a slave for many, many years under terrible circumstances.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got five seconds.

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And they were convicted and imprisoned the following year. And that’s the technical end of slavery in America.

AMY GOODMAN: Douglas Blackmon, thanks so much for being with us. He’s author of the book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/27/barackobama.uselections2008

Why Bush has been a liberal's best friend

 Nick Cohen

The Observer, Sunday July 27 2008

If you search on the net for 'Jon Stewart', 'finance reform' and 'Obama', you will find one of the most unintentionally funny sketches the US Comedy Central network has broadcast. Stewart dissects Barack Obama's hypocrisy with his usual goggle-eyed relish. He shows that the Democrat had been all for the public funding of presidential candidates until he realised that his privately raised campaign donations would allow him to outspend John McCain.

Stewart's audience makes a far better spectacle than the comedian on the stage, however. They had roared when he mocked Bush, Clinton and McCain, but when he ridiculed Obama, a few tittered nervously and most sunk into a shocked silence. Ordinary political satire had become a kind of blasphemy.

'You are allowed to laugh at him,' Stewart said. Hardly anyone wanted to.

Like other US comedians, Stewart wonders if the public is frightened of seeming racist. I do not underestimate the significance of America rising above its original sin of slavery by electing a black President, but anti-racism cannot explain soft questions and kid gloves. Black politicians who have not conformed to liberal expectations have found that anti-racism counts for little and the veneer of politically correct manners can vanish faster than breath off a windowpane.

Gary Trudeau had Bush addressing Condoleezza Rice as 'brown sugar' in his Doonesbury strip. Ted Rall decided she was Bush's 'house nigga' and sent her to a 'racial re-education camp' to learn the error of her conservative views. Jeff Danziger drew her as Prissy, Scarlett O'Hara's slave in Gone With the Wind. All three white men had reached for the dirtiest racial insults they could imagine when confronted with a black woman who disagreed with their politics.

German has the useful word Tantenverführer: 'A young man of excessively good manners you suspect of devious motives [literally, an aunt-seducer].' The sight of 200,000 turning out to hear Obama in Berlin showed the personable young American had wooed and wowed old Europe. If you watched them, the reverence with which liberal sympathisers and journalists treat him might have seemed no mystery. Ignore the imperatives of anti-racism and remember that to a generation raised on The West Wing Obama is the perfect candidate: hip, handsome, commanding, charismatic.

Jon Stewart tried to take on Obama's glamour, too, and got his sidekicks to play American political correspondents covering the world tour. They giggled and gawped like love-struck teenagers and cried: 'He gives me a boner. He should be called Barack O'Boner.'

Crude maybe, but so close to the reality of the US media's coverage it barely qualified as satire. The Nation, once regarded as a serious, left-wing magazine, declared last week that Obama is the new 'Frank Sinatra, so cool he's hot', a centrifugal force that can make 'legions of little girls jump out of their panties'. Michelle was as much of a sex symbol, it continued. She gave him 'hot, married love', while the Republicans were stuck with the 'stiff, asexual, erratic McCain and his zombie-fied former drug addict wife'.

But like the colour of his skin, Obama's good looks cannot fully explain the adulation. Few handsome men and fewer beautiful women claw their way to the top of politics. A panting BBC presenter interrupts the rolling news to tell the nation that Obama's flight has actually touched down at Heathrow, not because of the senator's race or charm, but because Obama is riding the crest of the global wave of relief that Bush is leaving. A wave that is about to break. It doesn't know it, but the liberal-left in Europe and North America has been lucky to have Bush.

By building him up into a great Satan, the oil man who invades countries to seize their reserves and the Christian who orders bloody crusades, they have hidden the totalitarian threats of our age from themselves and anyone who listens to them. Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy. Even those in the European elites who do not buy the full 'America has it coming' package believe that Bush is a cowboy who doesn't understand that the postmodern way to end conflict is to compromise rather than fight.

In January, Bush will be history, leaving liberals all alone in a frightening world. Little else will change. Radical Islam will still authorise murder without limit, Iran will still want the bomb and the autocracies of China and Russia will still be growing in wealth and confidence. All those who argued that the 'root cause' of the Bush administration lay behind the terror will find that the terror still flourishes when the root cause has retired.

In their book, After Bush, professors Timothy J Lynch and Robert S Singh highlight the obvious truth that the West is in a new Cold War. Whatever his disagreements with Bush on detail, the new President will have to stop radical Islamist movements and regimes gaining nuclear, chemical or biological weapons because he will know, as we already know, when we are honest with ourselves, that they will use them. Even if we have a President Obama, the continuities in American foreign policy will be more striking than the contrasts.

Obama made their point for them in his Berlin speech. Repeatedly, he emphasised that the resolve that had won the Cold War had to be applied to the war against terror. 'Partnership and co-operation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity,' he declared.

Not all Europeans will want co-operation. A minority will never escape from the slogans and attitudes of the Bush years and Obama and his wife must expect the same treatment as Condoleezza Rice. However, now that the majority of liberals seems likely to get the American President of their dreams, they will have to offer him their support, won't they?
 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/27/islam.highereducation

Radical Islam gains ground in campuses

Poll attacked over claim that a third of Muslim students think killing in the name of religion is justified and 40 per cent support sharia law in the UK

Jamie Doward, home affairs editor The Observer

Almost third of Muslim students on Britain's campuses believe killing in the name of religion can be justified, according to a controversial survey described as the most comprehensive of its kind.

The poll, conducted for Islam on Campus, a new report from the Centre for Social Cohesion think-tank, also found that 40 per cent of those interviewed supported the introduction of sharia law for British Muslims.

But the findings have been fiercely attacked by student groups which described the poll's methodology as 'deeply flawed' and accused the report's authors of isolating Muslims.

The YouGov survey found that 32 per cent of Muslim students polled said killing in the name of religion was justified, compared to 2 per cent of non-Muslims. A third of those polled said they supported a worldwide Islamic caliphate, or government, and more than half - 54 per cent - supported the idea of having their own political party at Westminster. Just under a quarter did not believe men and women were equal in the eyes of Allah, while 25 per cent said they had little or no respect for homosexuals.

'These findings are deeply alarming,' said Hannah Stuart, the report's co-author. 'Students in higher education are the future leaders of their communities. Yet significant numbers of them appear to hold beliefs which contravene liberal democratic values.'

But the claims were met with a ferocious response from the National Union of Students. 'This is just another report by a biased, right-wing think-tank whose conclusions are drawn from an extremely limited number of students,' said Wes Streeting, president of the NUS. 'It is a wilful misrepresentation of the views of Muslim students designed to create as sensational a picture as possible. It can serve only to generate a climate of fear on campuses.'

Ed Husain, author of The Islamist and a former member of the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which has been banned from most campuses, has claimed that universities are a fertile breeding ground for extremists.

In 2005, Professor Anthony Glees of Brunel University said that he had identified 'extremist and/or terror groups' at 30 universities. But his claims were largely dismissed by many academics and the NUS.

More recently, the government has published guidelines on combating Islamic extremism on university campuses. The higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said recently: 'There is evidence of serious, but not widespread, Islamist extremist activity in higher education institutions.'

In June, the government launched a series of roadshows at British universities aimed at countering the threat of campus radicalisation.

Stuart said that the report's findings showed there were signs of growing religious segregation on campuses. 'These results are deeply embarrassing for those who have said that there is no extremism in British universities.'

The report, based on a poll of 600 Muslims and 800 non-Muslims and which also drew on face-to-face interviews with representatives from leading student groups, also showed some members of Islamic societies held opinions that were significantly more extreme than those of non-members.

Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC), said the findings showed that groups such as the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, which claims to represent the 90,000 Muslim students attending Britain's universities, could not claim to represent mainstream opinion.

'It is vital that students and government understand that groups like [the federation] - who represent a highly conservative interpretation of Islam - are not representative of all Muslim students,' Murray said. 'Empowering these groups risks giving an official stamp of approval to extreme forms of Islam.'

But Streeting disagreed. 'The CSC has an unhealthy obsession with Muslims and Islam,' he said. 'Muslim societies are the key to forging a culture of inclusivity and the way this report suggests that they are part of the problem is extremely damaging.'

The report also found that many non-Muslim students hold negative attitudes towards Islam. Half of the non-Muslim students polled believed Islam and western democracy were incompatible. More than three-quarters said they believed men and women were not considered equal in Islam.


 

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9683.shtml

Israeli soldiers torture 10-year-old in his home

4 June 2007

Moved to HERE

See BRICUP  British Committee for the Universities of Palestine

An organisation of UK based academics, set up in response to the Palestinian Call for Academic Boycott

Mohammed Omer (see box below) describes his ordeal - torture, to give it its proper name - at the hands of the Shin Bet. There are also excellent comments from Nora Barrows-Friedman and Ali Abunimah.

Flashpoints at kpfa.org radio From Monday, June 30th, 2008 (archive)

"Award-winning journalist and Flashpoints contributor Mohammed Omer beaten and tortured by Israeli secret police, we speak to him in his hospital bed; also, Ali Abunimah responds to the attack and speaks about the anti-Palestinian stance of the major presidential candidates ..."

http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=27095

Dennis Bernstein intro starts at about 4:35

5:42 Bernstein discusses the incident with Nora Barrows-Friedman, Flashpoints Senior Producer

13:15 to 26:40 approx (ie a bit over 13 mins in length) Nora Barrows-Friedman - interview with Mohammed from his hospital bed

30:27 to 48:35 approx Bernstein interviews Ali Abunimah


==============

50:04 Chris Hedges discusses his new book and the dangers of the seemingly imminent invasion of Iran

With thanks to Dr David Halpin for this information

Brian 

---

 

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43005

 

MIDEAST: Israelis Assault Award Winning IPS Journalist
By Mel Frykberg

GAZA CITY, Jun 28 (IPS) - Mohammed Omer, the Gaza correspondent of IPS, and joint winner of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, was strip-searched at gunpoint, assaulted and abused by Israeli security officials at the Allenby border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank on Thursday as he tried to return home to Gaza.

Omer, a resident of Rafah in the south of Gaza, and previous recipient of the New America Media's Best Youth Voice award several years ago, was returning from London where he had just collected his Gellhorn Prize, and from several European capitals where he had speaking engagements, including a meeting with Greek parliamentarians.

Omer's trip was sponsored by The Washington Report, and the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv was responsible for coordinating Omer's travel plans and his security permit to leave Gaza with Israeli officials.

Israel controls the borders of Gaza and severely restricts the entrance and exit of Gazans allegedly on grounds of security. Human rights organisations accuse the Israelis of using security as a pretext to apply collective punishment indiscriminately.

While waiting in Amman on his way back, Omer eventually received the requisite coordination and security clearance from the Israelis to return to Gaza after this had initially been delayed by several days, he told IPS.

Accompanied by Dutch diplomats, Omer passed through the Jordanian side of the border without incident. However, after arrival on the Israeli side, trouble began. He informed a female soldier that he was returning home to Gaza. He was repeatedly asked where Gaza was, and told that he had neither a permit nor any coordination to cross.

Omer explained that he did indeed have permission and coordination but was nevertheless taken to a room by Israel's domestic intelligence agency the Shin Bet, where he was isolated for an hour and a half without explanation.

"Eventually I was asked whether I had a knife or gun on me even though I had already passed through the x-ray machine, had my luggage searched, and was in the company of Dutch diplomats," Omer said.

His luggage was again searched, and security then proceeded to go through every document and paper he had on him, taking down the names and numbers of the European parliamentary officials he had met.

The Shin Bet officials then started to make fun of the European parliamentarians, and mocked Omer for being "the prize-winning journalist".

The Gazan journalist was repeatedly asked why he was returning to "the hell of Gaza after we allowed you to leave." To this he responded that he wanted to be a voice for the voiceless. He was told he was a "trouble-maker".

The security men also demanded he show all the money he had on him, and particular attention was paid to the British pounds he was carrying. His Gellhorn prize money had been awarded in British pounds but he was not carrying the entire sum on him bodily, something the investigators refused to believe.

After being unable to produce the prize money, he was ordered to strip naked.

"At first I refused but then I had an M16 (gun) pointed in my face and my clothes were forcibly removed, even my underwear," Omer said.

At this point Omer broke down and pleaded for an end to such treatment. He said he was told, "you haven't seen anything yet." Every cavity of his body was searched as one of the investigators pinned him down on the floor, placing his boot on Omer's neck. Omer began vomiting, and fainted.

When he came round his eyelids were being forcibly opened and his eardrums probed by an Israeli military doctor, who was also armed. He was then dragged along the floor by his feet by the Shin Bet officials, with his head repeatedly banging on the floor, to a Palestinian ambulance which had been called.

"I eventually woke up in a Palestinian hospital with the doctors trying to reassure me," Omer told IPS.

The Dutch Foreign Ministry at the Hague told IPS that Foreign Minister Maxime Zerhagen spoke to the Israeli ambassador to The Netherlands and demanded an explanation.

The Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv has also raised the issue with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which in turn has promised to investigate the incident and get back to the Dutch officials.

Ahmed Dadou, spokesman from the Dutch Foreign Ministry at the Hague told IPS, "We are taking this whole incident very seriously as we don't believe the behaviour of the Israeli officials is in accordance with a modern democracy.

"We are further concerned about the mistreatment of an internationally renowned journalist trying to go about his daily business," added Dadou.

A spokeswoman at the Israeli Foreign Press Association said she was unaware of the incident.

Lisa Dvir from the Israeli Airport Authority (IAA), the body responsible for controlling Israel's borders, told IPS that the IAA was neither aware of Omer's journalist credentials nor of his coordination.

"We would like to know who Omer spoke to in regard to receiving coordination to pass through Allenby. We offer journalists a special service when passing through our border crossings, and had we known about his arrival this would not have happened.

"I'm not aware of the events that followed his detention, and we are not responsible for the behaviour of the Shin Bet."

In the meantime, Omer is still traumatised and in pain. "I'm struggling to breathe and have pain in my head and stomach and will be going back to hospital for further medical examinations," he said. (END/2008)
 

---

 

NEWS RELEASE 29 June 2008

 

AMBASSADOR PROSOR ASKED TO INVESTIGATE BEATING UP OF INTERNATIONALLY-HONOURED JOURNALIST

 

Concerned citizens have asked the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Ron Prosor, to investigate reports that the young award-winning Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer was brutally assaulted by Israeli security officials on his way home to Gaza.

 

Omer had been in London to receive the coveted Martha Gellhorn award for journalism. The Dutch government made arrangements for him to leave occupied Palestine for the trip, which included speaking engagements in Sweden, Greece, the Netherlands and France. The letter to Mr Prosor reads....

 

Dear Ambassador Prosor,

 

Our good friend, the young prize-winning  journalist Mohammed Omer, was assaulted by Israel's Shin Bet at the Allenby Bridge border crossing as he returned home to Gaza, according to the reports below.

 

He had been in London to receive the coveted Martha Gellhorn award for journalism in war. Last year he was in America to collect a US award. He left Gaza at the invitation of the Dutch government and had been well received by a number of EU governments during his trip.

 

A few days ago we heard that he was marooned in Amman after being denied permission by the Israeli authorities to return home to the bosom of his family. As a result he missed his brother's wedding. Yesterday we were shocked by the sickening reports below and are extremely worried especially as we have been unable to establish direct contact.

 

Mohammed Omer's family has suffered grievously at the hands of the Israelis. One of his brothers was shot dead, anotherwas shot in the leg which had to be amputated, the family home in Rafah was demolished in 2004 and their belongings burnt, and his mother was injured as the house was pulled down around her.... and now this.

 

You recently spoke of an anti-Israel campaign being stoked up in Britain "to harass, humiliate and discriminate purely on grounds of nationality". You said (in The Daily Telegraph) that Britain is "a hotbed of anti-Israeli sentiment" and "Israel faces an intensified campaign of delegitimisation, demonisation and double standards". It must be embarrassing for you that Israel exhibits the very racist vices you complain of. Will not your countrymen's conduct towards Mr Omer simply fan the flames, here and in the Holy Land?

 

Some of us have witnessed and experienced for ourselves the gratuitous humiliation inflicted on people passing through crossings and checkpoints. We invite you therefore to persuade the authorities back home to investigate the incident and, if there's any truth in it, to make a fullsome apology to Mr Omer for their brutal conduct, compensate him for the  injury and in future respect his and his fellows right to go about their work unmolested.

 

We now look forward to the matter being resolved in a courteous and humane way.

 

Sincerely,

 

(signatories)

Mary Bedforth, Guildford

Barbara Mayhew, Bury St Edmunds

Nanny Brett, Cambridge

Felicity Arbuthnot, London

Tim Williams, Exeter

Paul Maddison, Huntingdon

Mark Brett, Cambridge

Stuart Littlewood, King's Lynn

David Halpin, Newton Abbot

 

The group says the thuggish treatment handed out to Mohammed Omer is typical of the daily humiliations, beatings, detentions - and not infrequent deaths - at Israel's borders and checkpoints.

 

Mr Prosor recently berated Britain in the press for anti-Israel harassment, humiliation and discrimination. The group feels that this country needs no lectures from a regime that thrives on demolishing Palestinian homes, stealing their lands, crushing their economy and generally making life a misery. Diplomatic representatives from Israel like to portray their country as 'the only democratic state in the Middle East' and 'a democracy under fire', but the facts on the ground contradict these claims.

 

David Halpin, who has met Mohammed Omer several times and attended the award-giving in London, commented: "The Zionist entity has eleven basic laws.  That on human dignity and liberty requires that 'there shall be no violation of the life, body or dignity of any person as such' (Section 2).  The violation and torture of Mohammed is one of the latest instances amongst millions which have been carried out for the purpose of ethnic cleansing.  It is apparent that this Basic Law does not apply to the Palestinian and one can therefore assume the entity regards Mohammed and all his people as being 'untermenschen.'
 

 

Writer Felicity Arbuthnot said: "The appalling treatment of Mohammed Omer demonstrates utter disregard for international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - now 60 years in being - in which is enshrined the right for all to travel freely."

 

"Israelis should put their own house in order before preaching to the British people. They win no friends by inflicting suffering on this brilliant young man and the countless other Palestinians who are harrassed, humiliated, dispossessed and impoverished by the regime's brutal occupation," said Stuart Littlewood.

 

-ends-

29 June 2008

 

For more information please contact [phone nos removed in this copy - BR]

David Halpin

Felicity Arbuthnot

Stuart Littlewood

 

 

http://rafah.virtualactivism.net/news/todaymain.htm

 

June

 

    June 27th

 

    Action Alert from WRMEA:

 

    At a June 16 ceremony in London, Mohammed Omer, author of the regular Washington Report feature "Gaza on the Ground," received the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (a link to the presentation and Omer's remarks can be found on our home page, <www.wrmea.com>). He shared the prestigious prize with independent American journalist Dahr Jamail, who was honored for his "unembedded" reports from Iraq.

 

    Before traveling to England to receive his award, Omer spoke in Sweden, the Netherlands and Greece about the situation in Gaza. Dutch MP Hans Van Baalen, head of the parliament's foreign relations committee, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Pilger spent weeks lobbying Israel to issue an exit permit to allow this young reporter to travel to Europe and London.

 

    Not for the first time, however, getting home was even harder than leaving.

 

    As soon as Omer arrived in Amman, the Dutch diplomats who were helping facilitate his travel arrangements informed him that the Israelis did not want to allow him to return. After further intervention by his Dutch sponsors, Omer finally got the green light, and on the morning of June 26 crossed from Jordan into the occupied territories via the Allenby Bridge. There he was interrogated, strip-searched and manhandled for several hours. After losing consciousness, he finally was taken to a hospital in Jericho, and from there escorted back to Gaza.

 

    MP Van Baalen has demanded that Israel launch an investigation into Omer's barbaric treatment.

 

    

BMJ  2008;336:1458-1459 (28 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.a490

News

Medical evidence exposes US use of torture

A report of their investigations details the "severe physical and psychological pain and long-term disability that has resulted from abusive and unlawful US interrogation practices."

The report details the practices "used to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end." These included:

• Suspension and other stress positions
   
• Routine isolation
   
• Sleep deprivation, combined with sensory bombardment and extreme temperatures
   
• Sexual humiliation and forced nakedness
   
• Sodomy
   
• Beatings
   
• Denial of medical care
   
• Electric shock
   
• Involuntary drug treatment, and
   
• Threats to their lives and families.
   

A Department of Defense spokesman told the BMJ that the report represented "sweeping conclusions based on dubious allegations."

Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and its Impact is available at http://physiciansforhumanrights.org.

MusicWeaver note:  See below for testimonies of torture victims in Israel compiled by PCATI, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel

Also see box just below this - latest letter from Dr Derek Summerfield to Dr Baum