Search

band annie's Weblog

I have a parallel blog in French at http://anniebannie.net

Open Search
Category

Uncategorized

Resistance Movements Can Be More Powerful Than President Trump

  Thousands of people across the U.S., including hundreds in downtown Seattle, have flooded the streets to protest Donald Trump’s presidential victory. (Ted S. Warren / AP)

  Thousands of people across the U.S., including hundreds in downtown Seattle, have flooded the streets to protest Donald Trump’s presidential victory. (Ted S. Warren / AP)

Truthdig | November 11, 2016 

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

From Barack Obama, the first African-American president, the pendulum has ominously swung to the Ku Klux Klan’s choice, Donald Trump. Just elected the 45th president of the United States, Trump opened his campaign calling Mexicans “rapists,” and promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico (and to make Mexico pay for it). He vowed to ban Muslims from entering the country, insulted people with disabilities, bragged about committing sexual assault, denied climate change and said he would jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton. With the House of Representatives and the Senate remaining in Republican control, Trump’s power could be almost entirely unchecked.

While people around the world express shock and financial markets plummeted as the election results came in, here in the United States, the Beltway prognosticators offer “mea culpas,” and pollsters attempt to explain the failure of their scientific methods. This political upset is truly without precedent in U.S. history. In the aftermath of this bitterly fought, often crude, vastly expensive and punishingly long election, two questions dominate: How did this happen, and where do we go from here?

First, Trump’s campaign was overtly racist, and this seems to have motivated a terrifying number of voters. An increase in white voters was matched by aggressive efforts to depress voting by people of color. This was the first national election in more than 50 years conducted without the full protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Systematic efforts to restrict voting in communities of color flourished in the South, including in the two key battleground states of Florida and North Carolina.

The media played a critical role in creating President-elect Donald Trump. The Tyndall Report, which tracks how much airtime different issues and candidates receive on the major news networks, summarized media coverage of the candidates in 2015. Donald Trump received 327 minutes, or close to one-third of all the campaign coverage, at a time when he had 16 Republican challengers. “ABC World News Tonight” aired 81 minutes of reports on Donald Trump, compared with just 20 seconds for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, according to Tyndall. On March 15, 2016, after the primary day dubbed “Super Tuesday 3,” the networks played all the candidates’ speeches, except for the speech by Sanders. The networks actually spent more time showing Trump’s empty podium, filling the time until he spoke, than playing any words of Sanders’, who addressed the largest crowd that night.

Earlier this year, CBS CEO Les Moonves told a Morgan Stanley-hosted media-industry conference, speaking about the volume of political advertising that the “circus” of Trump’s campaign was attracting: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. … The money’s rolling in.” As world-renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky says, “The media manufacture consent.”

Another element contributing to Trump’s unexpected win: the FBI. On Oct. 28, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to congressional Republicans suggesting more emails had been discovered “that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. This was 11 days before the election. Nine days later, he stated publicly that the emails offered nothing new. Early voting was happening during those nine days, with Hillary Clinton under the cloud of potential renewed FBI investigation. According to Business Insider, 24 million votes were cast during this period. We may never know how many votes Clinton might have lost as a result of that FBI intervention. “It would be entirely fair to say that the FBI swung the election to Trump,” journalist Allan Nairn said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “I don’t think anyone has ever claimed that J. Edgar Hoover swung a presidential election,” he added.

READ: How to Reinvent Democracy in America

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but Donald Trump prevailed in the Electoral College. (On election night 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”) Thus, he will assume the most powerful position in the world, the presidency of the United States. But there is still a force more powerful: movements. Within hours of Trump’s victory speech, protests were being planned across the country. In Morocco, where the United Nations climate summit convened just the day before the U.S. election, climate negotiators, environmental activists and stakeholders from around the globe organized ad hoc meetings, fearing that Trump could scuttle the entire Paris accord on climate change.

Donald Trump closed his victory speech by saying, “I can only say that while the campaign is over, our work … is now really just beginning.” For the millions of people around the globe committed to opposing Trump’s dangerous and divisive agenda, their work, too, has just begun.

source

© 2016 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.Website development by Hop Studios

 

0

How can Progressives get through the Next 4 Years? Organize!

 how-can-progressives-get-through-378x230

Juan Cole
Informed Comment |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Anti-Trump demonstrations have broken out all over the country in the wake of his surprise victory on Tuesday. Latinos are afraid he will deport their undocumented relatives, breaking up millions of families. Women are afraid for their basic rights to control their bodies, a right Trump and his tiny hands clearly do not respect. Environmentalists are afraid he will ramp up carbon emissions, spelling curtains for planet earth. Muslim-Americans are afraid he will make them register, sort of like Jews had to register in Nazi Germany before the Holocaust (registering was the prerequisite for the Holocaust, along with removal of citizenship rights). African-Americans are afraid he will revive the KKK.

I have been asked on several occasions in the past couple of days about how we can possibly get through these next four years. I agree that it is an urgent question, and I disagree with the Pollyannas who maintain that everything will be all right. It clearly won’t be all right. The rights of millions of people will be injured. Racist gangs will target people of color because they think they have impunity. It is already happening. Critics could be targeted for dirty tricks. It isn’t hard for a government agent to sneak up behind someone at the airport and slip a bag of cocaine into their luggage. Nixon actually had an office of dirty tricks, and I expect most of the White House to be taken up with the vindictive and petty Trump’s such office. If you don’t know how Nixon did a number on rival Ed Muskie with the Canuck letter and allegations that his wife was a pill addict, look it up. Muskie could have defeated Nixon in debates and at the polls, if Nixon had played fair. Some people are incapable of playing fair.

So how can we get through all this? Do something. Organize! Individuals are weak. Organizations are strong. If you have the opportunity to join a union, do so. The decline of unionized workers, at which the corporations connived for decades, is a big part of our current problem. But nowadays we also have new forms of organization including crowdfunding, e.g. of political campaigns. The early 20th century labor organizer Joe Hill, castigated as a radical “wobbly” and ultimately framed by conservative officials for a murder he did not commit, then executed, inspired the famous song that Joan Baez song at Woodstock.

The song writer was wise, and any social scientist will tell you, was right. Organize!

We have a first past the post political system, which means that the winner takes all. That fact underpins our 2 party system. The only vehicle we have to oppose Trump on the national stage effectively is Democratic Party activism. Of course, that is at the level of the legislatures, e.g. Other kinds of organizing are also important. Here are some suggestions about what to do.

1. Speak out against the corporate media’s normalization of Trump. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, ABC and CBS are culpable in having given him billions of dollars of free air time. After the election the anchors suddenly started fawning on him. It isn’t all right to have an alt-Right president. Racism isn’t all right. Sexism isn’t all right. Religious bigotry isn’t all right. All those media have contact pages. Write them. Pressure them. Get up advertiser boycotts of the biggest ass-kissers. Organize pressure groups to make sure that Trump-inspired racist intimidation and violence is covered by the corporate media and not swept under the rug. Make sure that climate change is covered (it isn’t, presently). These are money-making enterprises. Hit them where it hurts. Threaten not to buy the products advertised on their shows unless they change their ways. This way of proceeding is contrary to liberals’ first instincts, since they believe in airing a variety of opinions. But some opinions are beyond the pale, and if we don’t draw a line in the sand here, white nationalism will become our reigning ideology and many of us will be jailed. There are some baby discourses that must be strangled in the crib.

2. Work toward a consumer boycott of corporations that gave money to Trump’s campaign or who support his presidency. Do some web searches to see which consumer companies have a history of belonging to ALEC and supporting right wing causes. Find ways of publicizing Trumpish leanings among them and embarrassing them.

3. Speak out! Everyone can now be an op ed writer. Social media is everywhere. Start a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a blog, and update it at least weekly. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get many hits at the beginning. If you are regular and keep at it, it may well grow. Try to develop a “beat”– cover something no one else is paying enough attention to, and show the ways Trump’s reign is harming the country. Corporate media will try to crowd out our voices and normalize Trump and Trumpism. Don’t let them invade our social media space.

4. Mobilize to ensure the Democrats take the Senate in 2018. That is a tough proposition, since only 8 Republicans are up for reelection, mostly in reliable red states, whereas 25 Democrats face a contest, and some of them may be in trouble, as in Missouri. But this configuration is a challenge, not an insuperable problem. It needs money and effort. Republicans often do better in the midterms because only a third of people vote, and they are disproportionately older and whiter and wealthier, as compared to presidential election years. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s aim for a massive voter turnout in the 2018 midterms. For instance, Arizona could be trending blue, with a significant increase in the number of Latino voters and more importantly in the number of registered Latino voters. This trend could make Sen. Jeff Flake vulnerable in Arizona. Likewise, Latino voters are key to bluing Nevada and defeating Sen. Dean Heller. But it isn’t just Latinos. White workers and millennials and middle classes at risk from Trump’s policies are even more numerous. But youth in particular tend to stay home in off-year elections. They can’t afford to do that if they want health care and want a liveable planet. Despite gerrymandering, there isn’t actually any barrier to the Democrats taking the lower house, as well, in 2018, if enough people get of their duffs and devote resources to it and actually go out and vote. Walk your neighborhood. Donate to the progressive candidates. Mobilize.

5. Latino-Americans who worry about Trump and his policies toward them haven’t registered to vote should think seriously about a) registering and b) voting in 2018 and 2020. And, Democratic activists need to volunteer their time for voter registration drives in minority neighborhoods. Some 71% of registered Latino voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama in 2012. Only 65% voted for Hillary Clinton. While in crucial Florida Clinton actually did better with Latinos this time than Obama had in 2012, she lost Cuban-Americans compared with Obama and she didn’t pick up as many Puerto Ricans as she needed to in order to take Orlando. Trump couldn’t have won without Florida, so it matters.

6. Where you can vote for judges, mobilize to elect progressive ones who will strike down Trumpist legislation.

7. Take risks. If Trump follows through and tries to register Muslim-Americans, insist on being registered along with them. Muslim with a large “M” means a follower of Muhammad and someone who practices Muslim faith and law. But in the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture, “muslim” with a small “m” actually just means generic believer in God. Abraham was a “muslim,” it says, and even Jesus was. The small “m” “muslim” could even be understood as someone who accepts Reality as it is. So in this sense, everyone can be a “muslim.” The Federal government doesn’t have the right to Establish an official religion or tell us what to believe, by dint of the First Amendment. Let’s all be “muslims.” Let’s all register. If he tries to keep Muslims from entering the country, let’s tie up the bureaucracy by saying we are “muslim.”

The Republican Party will expect the scattered protests to die out. They and their corporate backers will expect people to go back to being couch potatoes and letting the grown ups run the government. They will expect us to be silent when goons beat up Latinos or African-Americans or Muslims or liberals. Only sustained activism and organizing and effective steps to change the balance of power in Washington and in the statehouses can actually challenge Trumpism.

Let’s foil their expectations.

source

(c) 2016 All Rights Reserved

 

0

ANIMAL FARM

0

40 Years Gone: The Literary and Social Legacy of Taha Hussein

By  mlynxqualey
Arabic Literature (in English) | October 28, 2016 

This is the third and final day of events commemorating the 40th anniversary of Taha Hussein’s passing at Cairo’s Taha Hussein Museum:

200px-TahaHusseinThe author, sometimes called the “Dean of Arabic Literature,” died on October 28, 1973.

Since the official list of Nobel nominations aren’t opened until 50 years after they’re made, Hussein is the only Arabic writer officially known to have been in Nobel consideration, outside of 1988 winner Naguib Mahfouz.

Hussein has several works that continue to be read and loved forty years after his death. These include the novelwhich was turned into a celebrated film; his controversial autobiogaphy, The Days; and his also controversial On Pre-Islamic Poetry. There have been several attempts to remove The Days from the Egyptian school curriculum; according to some it tarnishes Al Azhar’s image.

The Days was originally serialized in Hilal and then published as a three-part book. Unlike Hussein’s novels, The Days — a landmark of Arabic autobiographical writing —is available in English. It was published as a single volume, translated byE.H. Paxton, Hilary Wayment, and Kenneth Cragg.

This month, the Egyptian General Book Authority published an English version of  Hussein’s The Fulfilled Promise, translated by Dr. Mohammad Enani, although it wasn’t clear whether the book would be distributed beyond GEBO’s official shops and book-fair stand.

Hussein’s legacy includes scholarship, literature, politics, and advocacy for the blind. Hussein los his eyesight at the age of three, but went on to earn his PhD in 1914 with a focus on the poetry of the also-blind al-Maari. He worked as a professor of Arabic literature and was later Egypt’s Minister of Education.

Helen Keller wrote of visiting Hussein in Egypt in 1952:

For years I had read about Taha Hussein Pasha, and I cannot express my delight one day when he visited me at the Semiramis Hotel, bringing his wife and son, and stayed a whole hour. I was privileged to touch his face, and how handsome, scholarly and full of inward light it was! His responsive tenderness warmed my heart, and I felt as if I had known him always. We discussed many topics — Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato and Socrates, the liberating power of philosophy, Taha Hussein’s studies of the great blind Arab philosopher of the tenth century [al-Maari] and his work for the blind.

The museum in his name is at 11 Taha Hussein St, off Haram St. in Giza. According to Al Ahram, the Taha Hussein days will be an annual event.

source

0

Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton Third Debate Cold Open – SNL

0

History of the World Part 1 1981 Movie – Mel Brooks & Gregory Hines

0

The Prison

 

Qunfuz |

blinding-absence-of-lightThis article about Arab prison writing was published at the National.

From ‘Prisoner Cell Block H’ to ‘Orange is the New Black’, prison dramas fill the Anglo-Saxon screen. In the Arab world, you’re more likely to see them on the news. In recent months, for example, detainees of the Syrian regime have staged an uprising in Hama prison and been assaulted in Suwayda prison.

No surprise then that contemporary Arab writing features prisons so prominently, sometimes as setting, more often as powerful metaphor.

“About My Mother”, the latest novel by esteemed Moroccan writer Taher Ben Jelloun (who writes in French), is an affectionate but unromantic portrait of his parent trapped by incoherence. The old lady suffers dementia, mistaking times, places and people, but there is a freedom in her long monologues, the flow of memory and shifting scenes, torrents of speech which eventually infect the narration.

The novel is family memoir and social history as well as an experiment with form. Jelloun’s mother was married thrice, and widowed first at sixteen. At the first wedding, the attendants presenting the bride chorus: “See the hostage. See the hostage.”

Fettered by tradition and domestic labour, now by illness and age, she responds with superstition, fatalism and resignation. Her own confinement is echoed by memories of national oppression, first by the French, then by homegrown authorities. She learns to mistrust the police even before her son Taher’s student years are interrupted by eighteen months in army disciplinary camp, punishment for his low-level political activism. “That’s what a police state is,” the adult writes, “arbitrary punishment, cruelty and barbarity.”

Yet the ultimate prison here is death, frailly resisted by language and dreams.

Jelloun has also written about prison as a lived experience. His 2001 ‘non-fiction novel’ “This Blinding Absence of Light” is loosely based on the actual testimony of Aziz Binebine, refigured here as ‘Salim’. Salim “became ageless on the night of July 10th 1971”. In this historical respect his story is somewhat representative of the many who disappeared from sight as the Arab security states consolidated themselves in the early 70s.

Salim was a junior officer, a dazed participant (following orders) in the first attempted coup against King Hassan II. Formally sentenced to ten years, he spent almost eighteen in Tazmamart, a secret, underground prison. The law itself may be lenient or harsh, it makes no difference; once imprisoned you move beyond all notion of law or justice. This arbitrariness is itself the key point of the system.

Salim is entirely cut off from his past life. “I could only communicate in thought with the world above.” In the presence of scorpions and cockroaches, and the ravening absence not only of light but also hygiene, medical care, motion, time, sex and hope, men murder themselves, or die of diarrhoea, hunger or hatred. In Cell Block B, the darkened scene of all the action, 19 of 23 men die.

As a means of survival, the survivors speak to each other. One, working by intuition, serves as the timekeeper; another as the Quran reciter. Salim is the storyteller, remembering aloud Balzac and Camus, even the plot of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. His tales sustain the prisoners to such an extent that one dies when Salim is too ill to talk.

A Westerner might read these books for the same reason they read thrillers, or accounts of mountaineering – because they depict the protagonist in extremity (and this is a fine reason to read). But in contemporary Arab literatures prison is an enormous theme, an entire category in its own right. These stories from the buried frontline of dictatorship bear significance for the whole of society.

In “Dancing in Damascus”, her soon-to-be published analysis of Syrian revolutionary art, cultural critic and Arabist miriam cooke (so she writes her name) argues for the proto-revolutionary nature of prison writing, its role as prefigurer if not catalyst of revolt. Certainly these texts formed a whispered counter-current when Syria was known as a ‘kingdom of silence’. Cooke suggests their authors were truth tellers who re-established value after its defeat by the vast propaganda system. The possibility of honest speech ultimately made resistance possible.

Such a writer is the polar opposite to the tamed state intellectual, imaged in Jelloun’s novel by Salim’s father, a courtier, actually the king’s court jester, who tells jokes and reads poems in return for favours. Who publically disowns his prisoner son.

In Iraq, prison writing straddles the regime change, from “Saddam City”, Mahmoud Saeed’s fierce portrayal of Baathist prisons, to Hassan Blasim’s character (in the occupation-era story “The Reality and the Record”) who pleads so effectively on ransom videos he ends up being sold, perpetually, from one militia to another. A thousand tyrants have replaced one, Iraqis often say. The prisons are endlessly replicated.

Prisons inevitably mean torture, perpetrated not to glean information but to display unadulterated power. Its enactment follows the same logic behind an ISIS atrocity video, or an Elizabethan hanging, drawing and quartering. Intelligent regimes don’t advertise it abroad, though the domestic audience should know and be suitably frightened. But inside the interrogation chamber the immediate audience is the torturers themselves. For them it becomes a matter of habit. Bara Sarraj, author of “From Tadmor to Harvard”, an account of incarceration in Syria’s notorious Tadmor prison, describes a newly-arrived guard at first trembling in the torture room, but dealing blows with visible pleasure after a couple of weeks.

In “The Treachery of Language and Silence”, poet Faraj Bairaqdar calls Tadmor “the kingdom of death and madness”. Leftist intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh was another long-term inmate. Rejecting easy categorisation, he calls his memoir, “With Salvation, O Youth: Sixteen Years in Syrian Prisons”, “a matter of concern” rather than ‘prison literature’.

The most celebrated account of the Tadmor experience is Moustafa Khalifa’s “The Shell”. Khalifa is a Christian accused of Muslim Brotherhood membership, but in actual fact he’s an atheist, which means he’s doubly cast out, shunned by the Islamist prisoners too. The prison is an absurd realm where logic is as alien as justice. Freed detainees talk of meeting children inside, hostages held to pressure an activist relative to surrender, or simply by mistake.

A realm of unreason. Activist AbdulRahman Jalloud (interviewed for our book “Burning Country”) told us he would deliberately break prison rules (staying longer than a minute in the toilet, for instance) in order to increase his torture, because he preferred physical pain to the mental torments of solitary confinement. AbdulRahman gave us another paradox: “Prison was the only place in the country where you didn’t see Assad’s picture.”

And for Jelloun’s Salim, “death turned into a superb ray of sunshine” because funerals in the yard were the only opportunity to breathe the open air.

Salim endures by mental gymnastics, keeping to “the immutable instant” and shutting out the past. His meditations tend towards the spiritual: “Since being condemned to the slow death of bodily decay, I had called unceasingly upon God. The nearness of death, the destruction of all dignity, the perverse oppression lurking around me had pushed me onto the path of this transparent solitude.”

To resign himself to his lot, he must raise a mental barrier to accompany the physical, a screen that cannot be penetrated, not by “dreams, or plans, or the perfume of a rose.” The necessary austerity of this attitude recalls the enthusiasm which too easily turns into violent, traumatised religiosity. After all, Sayyid Qutb’s seminal jihadist texts – so influential today in our prison-bred region – were the offspring of an Egyptian cell.

In 2011 prisons helped spark the Arab Spring and served the gathering counter-revolutions too. The first protests in Libya commemorated Qaddafi’s 1996 slaughter of inmates at Abu Slim prison. Challenged in Egypt, the Mubarak regime’s first response was to release criminals into the streets.

In Syria, once the revolution erupted, the prisons burst their walls and took over everything outside. Mass incarceration overcrowded the dungeons, so hospitals, schools and sports stadiums were converted for use. At least 200,000 currently languish in the Assadist gulag. But even this repression didn’t staunch the rebellion. When stubborn whispers of resistance give way to the language of bullets, entire cities were made to resemble torture chambers, sealed shut and filled with screams, human entrails, flying fragments of bone. At least 900,000 are currently trapped in such besieged communities.

How much longer? This is the age of prison breakouts. The people will no longer be buried quietly.

source

 

0

Ne me quitte pas – Toots Thielemans RIP

0

Twitter censors what Israeli State Attorney asks it to

Jews for Justice for Palestinians |

At Israel’s request, Twitter is blocking Israelis from viewing certain tweets published overseas. Similar take-down notices have been sent to other international online platforms, the Justice Ministry confirms.

Israeli authorities are taking steps to block their own citizens from reading materials published online in other countries, including the United States.

The Israeli State Attorney’s Office Cyber Division has sent numerous take-down requests to Twitter and other media platforms in recent months, demanding that they remove certain content, or block Israeli users from viewing it.

In an email viewed by +972, dated August 2, 2016, Twitter’s legal department notified American blogger Richard Silverstein that the Israeli State Attorney claimed a tweet of his violates Israeli law. The tweet in question had been published 76 days earlier, on May 18. Silverstein has in the past broken stories that Israeli journalists have been unable to report due to gag orders, including the Anat Kamm case.

Without demanding that he take any specific action, Twitter asked Silverstein to let its lawyers know, “if you decide to voluntarily remove the content.” The American blogger, who says he has not stepped foot in any Israeli jurisdiction for two decades, refused, noting that he is not bound by Israeli law. Twitter is based in California.

Two days later, Twitter sent Silverstein a follow-up email, informing him that it was now blocking Israeli users from viewing the tweet in question. Or in Twitter-talk, “In accordance with applicable law and our policies, Twitter is now withholding the following Tweet(s) in Israel.”

The tweet is still available from American and non-Israeli IP addresses, but viewed from Israel, it looks like this:

[The offending Tweet, BREAKING: Israeli Judge Accused of Sexually-Abusing Daughter, Investigated in Secret,  is here]

Because I am writing this from Israel, I am legally forbidden from telling you what Silverstein’s original tweet said. I can’t even tell you the specific legal reason why I can’t tell you what I can’t tell you.

What I can say is that as the use of military censorship in Israel has become less common and less sweeping over the years, authorities are increasingly using court gag orders to control the flow of information in the country. Often times those gag orders cover the very existence of the gag order itself.

+972 has seen Twitter’s correspondence with Silverstein, but not the Israeli Justice Ministry’s specific request of Twitter. Justice Ministry spokesperson Noam Sharvit denied, however, that Israel demanded any concrete action of Twitter in Silverstein’s case, only that it “brought the violation of the gag order to the company’s attention.”

A page on Twitter’s website explaining the practice of “withholding” content stresses its commitment to being as transparent as possible about its censorship. The company notes that it has partnered with Lumen to make “requests to withhold content” themselves available to the public.

The database of take-down notices provided by Lumen and Twitter, however, does not include the publication of a single request that either mentions or originates from Israel or the Israeli government. Therefore, it is impossible to know with absolute certainty exactly what the Israeli request entailed.

Facebook, on the other hand, provides public data about the number of requests to restrict content in Israel “alleged to violate harassment laws, as well as content related to Holocaust denial.” Facebook says it restricted 236 pieces of content in Israel in the second half of 2015, the most recent period for which data is available.

Israeli legal authorities censoring information published inside Israel’s geographic and legal jurisdiction might seem like standard practice, albeit morally and ethically objectionable. Attempting to block information published overseas, however, is more akin to the type of censorship we’re used to hearing about in countries like China, Turkey, Syria, and Iran.

In most countries where internet censorship is most prominent, the practice is most commonly associated with the suppression of political dissent and attempts to control the free flow of information, upon which democracy and healthy political debate are fully dependent. Those who want to circumvent internet censorship, however, have an array of technical options for accessing blocked content.

This development also comes as the Israeli government has declared non-violent political activists as a high-priority target. Earlier this week, the public security minister and interior minister announced their intentions to deport foreign anti-occupation and BDS activists, and make Israeli citizens whose political activism includes nonviolent tactics like boycotts, “pay a price.”

Most of the public discussion surrounding internet censorship in Israel in recent months has focused on alleged Palestinian incitement to violence, which, at least at face value, can be interpreted to be a matter of public safety. Enforcing a gag order, however, is the state attempting to control the flow of information, plain and simple.

Which is not to say that there are not legitimate uses of gag orders, for instance, to protect minors and victims of certain crimes. According to the Israeli Justice Ministry spokesperson, Silverstein’s tweet indeed included information that could be used to identify a minor who was the victim of a sex crime.

In a more general sense, however, when a state has demonstrated its willingness to use gag orders and censorship to cover up its own crimes (the Bus 300 Affair and evidence of extrajudicial killings exposed by Anat Kamm) and to stifle legitimate free speech that challenges an undemocratic military regime, it becomes a moral imperative to fight all forms of censorship.

One recent and unfortunate example of how gag orders and censorship can be used to obfuscate justice, and at the very least give the impression of a coverup, is the shooting deaths of two Palestinian siblings by Israeli security contractors at the Qalandia checkpoint in late April of this year.

Palestinian witnesses said that the two, who were said to have knives in their possession, posed no immediate threat to the Israeli guards or police officers stationed at the checkpoint. Israeli authorities, however, have refused to release CCTV footage of the shooting, and placed a sweeping gag order on the investigation and the identity of the suspects. On August 2, the gag order was once again extended until August 31 — 126 days since the shooting.

It may have been possible to justify the original gag order, which was supposed to last only one week, with investigatory considerations. More than four months later, however, it is hard not to question what it is police have to hide.

***

Asked how many take-down requests have been sent to overseas social media platforms, the Israeli Justice Ministry spokesperson responded:

The Cyber Division, works, among other activities, with various internet providers to remove content that violates Israeli law, including the terms of use of the providers themselves. The division acts against forbidden content like the publication of pedophilia content, incitement to violence and racism, and publications that violate judicial or statutory gag orders. It should be noted that in the terms of use of most providers, the providers themselves declare that they comply with state orders. As part of the division’s activities, a number of providers have been approached in recent months with requests to remove such content, in various cases.

Asked whether it has also sent international media outlets requests to block certain content from Israeli readers, the Justice Ministry spokesperson said: “there have been such requests in the past which were sent to foreign providers, also including [publications] that were published in Israel.”

By Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam
August 05, 2016

Twitter wrote to me this week, asking me to censor a tweet I had posted saying that Israeli judge, Shamai Becker had been accused of sexually assaulting his daughter. Their request originated from a demand by the Israeli attorney general that Twitter censor the tweet because it allegedly violated a gag order in the case.

I told Twitter that I would not do so because the tweet was a truthful report based on Israeli media*. I argued that Twitter should not censor the tweet because the government of the State of Israel had no right to extend the jurisdiction of Israeli law either to me or to U.S. companies.

Twitter replied earlier today with this disappointing message:

Dear Twitter User:

This is a follow-up to our correspondence, dated August 2, 2016, regarding your Twitter account, @richards1052.

In accordance with applicable law and our policies, Twitter is now withholding the following Tweet(s) in Israel.

Follow Tikun Olam @richards1052
השופט שמאי בקר חשוד בביצוע עבירות מין בבתו. צא”פ הוטל על זהותו

http://ln.is/com/3wDGc

9:40 AM – 18 May 2016

BREAKING: Israeli Judge Accused of Sexually-Abusing Daughter, Investigated in Secret
.השופט שמאי בקר חשוד בביצוע עבירות מין בבתו. צא”פ הוטל על זהותו For the past year, the Israeli police have been investigating charges against Israeli magistrate judge, Shamai…
linkis.com
17 17 Retweets 7 7 likes

For more information about withheld content, please review our Country Withheld Content policy page: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169222.

We cannot provide legal advice. You may wish to contact your own attorney about this matter.

Sincerely,

Twitter

Twitter calls this “withholding” its content. I know what I call it: censorship. They have permitted themselves to be intimidated by the State of Israel, whose officials refuse to honor freedom of expression and the press. They have dragged Twitter down to the low level of Israel.

Imagine this scenario: you are a public figure in your country and the police arrest you for a serious crime. Your lawyers obtain a gag order forbidding the media in your own country from associating your name with the charges. Then your lawyers approach the foremost legal officer of the State and demand that he use the full weight of the state to enforce domestic law in a foreign country. And the State, on your behalf, bullies a foreign company into doing so. I hope you can see the absurdity of this hypothetical case.

This is a slippery slope. Imagine every tin-pot dictator (or even a lowly street-sweeper) in the world finding hundreds or thousands of tweets which accuse him of crimes or misdeeds. The dictator succeeds in obtaining the judgment of a court that silences the media in his own country. After that, the State’s leading lawyer tells Twitter that they must censor all content that violates the laws of that country.

Twitter’s decision offers a field day for Erdogan or al-Sisi or Xi Jinping. They can now go to town cleaning up all the objectionable content on Twitter. And it could involve not just foreign leaders, but any average citizen who can avail himself of the laws of his land in this fashion. Anyone may object to anything tweeted about them. As long as you can get your nation’s legal officer to take up your cause, Twitter will have no recourse because this decision sets a precedent they can’t ignore.

Here’s another analogy to consider: Israeli media are not legally responsible for what readers post in the talkback section. This is also the case under U.S. law. But the Israeli attorney general is, in effect, arguing that Twitter is directly liable for whatever any of its users tweet which violates Israeli law. If Haaretz isn’t responsible for a comment posted which violates Israeli law, then why is Twitter?

* Serious affair court system trying to hide, Ynet, in Hebrew.The judge is not named. Google translation

 

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑