The English translation of this article was originally published by International Boulevard
From Al Safir Al Arabi
Behind the violence shaking occupied Jerusalem, writes Haneen Naamnih in Al Safir Al Arabi, is a vast colonial enterprise slowly remaking the city.
The October 10 Labor, Peace, and Democracy Rally in Turkey’s capital of Ankara was called to demand an end to the violent policies of the Turkish state. Organized by trade union federations and progressive organizations, the demonstration was also supported by the People’s Democracy Party (HDP), a leftwing pro-Kurdish party consistently demonized in recent months by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Strikes, boycotts, marches and demonstrations were held throughout Turkey on Oct. 12 in protest against the massacre at the Labor, Peace and Democracy Rally in Ankara on October 10 that killed at least 97 people, with funerals of the victims being held one after another, daily Hürriyet reported.
Turkey’s leading labor unions and professional organization–the Confederation of Public Sector Trades’ Unions (KESK), the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK), the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) and the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects (TMMOB)—called for a nationwide strike and boycott for Oct. 12 and 13 to protest the massacre. The Revolutionary Workers Party has issued this statement. – Dan La Botz, Co-Editor
One month from today marks the first anniversary of the horrific state crime perpetrated against the students of the Ayotzinapa teachers' college in Mexico.
On September 26 and 27, 2014, Mexican police attacked protesting students from Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero. The police killed six people, including three students and three bystanders. They forcibly disappeared 43 Ayotzinapa students, who remain missing.
May First/People Link is being attacked in a Denial of Service attack that is unprecedented in its length and viciousness. We have been fighting off this attack for over three weeks now.
We are convinced that the attack is political. We know how the attackers are targeting us, we know they are targeting the entire organization’s systems and we know that they are carefully monitoring our responses because they are quickly adapting to every move our technologists make to return us to service.
On July 20 at least thirty-two people were killed and at least 100 people were wounded by an ISIS suicide bomber. The attack took place in the Turkish town of Suruç, which stands only thirty miles away from the Syrian border. The victims, members of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations (SGDF), were part of a 300-person contingent en route to Kobanî to assist in reconstruction efforts. The group consisted of a number of Turkish and Kurdish anarchist and socialist youth. As such, the solidaristic venture represented a major effort to create further bridges between the broader Turkish left and the Kurdish left.
Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014. 528 pages. Paperback, $19.
“Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood, or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled…Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.”
— Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told
This vital and enthralling book reveals how U.S. capitalism was built on the torture of enslaved people. Edward Baptist quotes a Mississippi overseer telling his friends that “the whip was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain.” The whip “might open deep gashes in the skin of its victim, make them 'tremble' or 'dance'…but it did not disable them.”
May First/People Link is the organization that hosts the New Politics website. But it is more than a hosting platform: it is a membership-based political community that tries to use the Internet to advance progressive causes. It has now come under attack by rightwing anti-abortion hackers because it hosts the National Network of Abortion Funds. We express our solidarity with May First/People Link and with the National Network of Abortion Funds. Below is the statement sent by May First/People Link to its members on August 4.
On Monday June 29, the Governor of Puerto Rico, Alejandro García Padilla, delivered a live message to the people of Puerto Rico stating that the government’s $73 billion debt is unpayable. The governor stated, “The public debt, considering the present level of economic activity, is unpayable”.
A quarter century has passed since the June Fourth Massacre that took place in Beijing, China’s capital, near the end of the last century. But the truth of this tragedy has to this day not been laid bare to the world, and the massacre victims, who have still not received justice, cannot rest in peace. This is a disgrace for the whole Chinese people, and a disgrace for all of civilized humanity!
More than 800 migrants died on April 19 this year when their overcrowded boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast. The tragedy sent soaring this year's Mediterranean death toll which was by then around 1,500 – 10 times the deaths during the same period last year.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), between 23,000 and 24,000 migrants had tried to cross over to Italy since the beginning of the year, while just under 21,000 migrants made the same journey between January and April 2014. While the number of migrants rose to some extent, migrants perishing at sea have hit the roof.
The protestors marched through the streets of Los Angeles on April 7 carrying 617 coffins representing the death of 617 individuals killed by Los Angeles law enforcement since 2000. Participants convened on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors from the north, south, east, and west, staging die-ins at strategic locations along the way. Family members of those murdered along with individuals who have suffered at the hands of the LAPD delivered powerful messages of anger, hope, and sadness, urging the need for continued and escalated community response to LAPD oppression and brutality.
[Ed. note: Readers of David Finkel's November article on "The Trials of Rasmea Odeh" will be interested in this alert from the Rasmea Defense Committee.]
Gilbert Achcar is a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and the author of many books, including Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder, Read more ›
There have been mostly two kinds of responses to the Charlie Hebdo killings. On one side are those who have simply seen it as a satire versus intolerance issue, with a subtext: Satire being seen as a western/universal (artistic) value and intolerance being a fundamental aspect of religion (more specifically: Political Islam).
On December 24 a sixteen-year-old student named Mehmet Emin Altunses was arrested in the Turkish city of Konya. His crime? Apparently the youth insulted President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, saying in a speech that the new president (who served two terms as prime minister between 2003 and 2014) was “the leader of corruption, bribery and theft,” as well as the owner of an “illegal palace.”
Julio Scherer, who worked as a journalist for 70 years, will be most remembered for founding Proceso, the weekly news magazine that transformed Mexican journalism and helped to contributed to the ongoing struggle for democracy in Mexico.
The time I saw Charb in Paris was January 24, 2010, the day of the crowded commemoration of the French philosopher and activist Daniel Bensaïd at La Mutualité. During the speeches, Charb kept drawing and projecting vignettes about his comrade Daniel, whose book, Marx: Mode d’Emploi, he had illustrated a year earlier.
The killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, by police who were not indicted by grand juries in Missouri and New York, represent only the latest in a string of such police or vigilante killings—sometimes clearly murders—of African-American or Latino men.
As human rights organizations, representing struggles ranging from disability rights to labor rights to criminal justice reform, from migrant justice to climate justice, we recognize the struggle for black liberation as central to securing all of our human rights in a country founded upon systemic racism.
