Dave Zirin writes: There are no words regarding the emotional whiplash I feel, having attended Muhammad Ali’s funeral on Friday and now, on Sunday, attending a vigil in Washington, DC, for the 50 — and counting — slaughtered at the Pulse in Orlando on Saturday. Was this really all the same weekend? The juxtaposition is beyond tragic.
To hear about the remorseless killing of predominantly Latino LGBT people during Pride month is shattering enough. To then see Donald Trump and a collection of the worst anti-gay bigots be boastful, almost gleeful, about it because the shooter was Muslim is all the worse. Muhammad Ali, as eulogist Billy Crystal said, truly devoted the last half of his life to building bridges. These bridges are fragile; that’s what makes them matter. It is so much easier to just burn them down, and that is exactly what one shooter aimed to do, and now in death he is being assisted by an entire right-wing apparatus, which despises bridges about as much as it detests irony.
Never mind that by all accounts, we know that the shooter — whose name I will not write — was an American citizen. Never mind that he bought the automatic weapons legally, or was a violent misogynist, or worked for one of those shadowy global private security firms for almost a decade, or wasn’t even religious. The fact is that powerful people are demanding their villain of choice. So it won’t be the gun nuts, or those poisoned by seeing women as objects of violence, or the internal culture of these private security firms. It will be Muslims. That’s their narrative of choice. [Continue reading…]
Category Archives: Issues
Trump ally: Clinton aide could be ‘terrorist agent’
Politico reports: In the wake of Sunday’s deadly terrorist shooting in Orlando, Donald Trump’s longtime friend and informal adviser wants the presumptive Republican nominee to hit Hillary Clinton even harder, suggesting the former secretary of state’s top aide Huma Abedin could be a “Saudi spy” or a “terrorist agent.”
Only Trump, Roger Stone said on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily,” will be able to draw the necessary amount of attention to the theories, which have drawn significant blowback from Democrats and Republicans alike.
“I also think that now that Islamic terrorism is going to be front and center, there’s going to be a new focus on whether this administration, the administration of Hillary Clinton at State was permeated at the highest levels by Saudi intelligence and others who are not loyal Americans,” Stone said. “I speak specifically of Huma Abedin, the right-hand woman, now vice-chairman or co-chairman of vice—of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.” [Continue reading…]
Let’s not give in to fear after the Orlando shooting
Steven W Thrasher writes: For generations, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans have turned to night clubs and bars like Orlando’s Pulse – the scene today of the deadliest shooting in American history – as places of refuge. They have been our sanctuaries.
When our homes would kick us out for being queer, there was the bar. When we were at risk of getting beaten up, as men, for wearing drag on the street, there was the club. When our places of employment might fire us for being queer (as they legally still can in most states), there were leathers bars and glam dance clubs where we could shake our moneymakers.
Bars offered us the illusion of a freedom from terror as queer people, the illusion that there was a place where our sexual desires and our communal need to gather with fellow queers would not be under attack.
This illusion was a lie, of course. Bars were not, and never have been, safe places. This should especially obvious every June when we celebrate Pride month. It’s when we remember the Stonewall riots, when all kinds of queers from all kinds of backgrounds were attacked by police inside a New York City dive bar 47 years ago, in June of 1969.
The police were violent to the queer people there. They thought they could do anything they wanted to them, because they knew queer people lived in fear. The police didn’t see the Stonewall as a sanctuary, but as a disgusting cage. They thought the patrons were sick and would be too ashamed of who they were to make a fuss.
But the brave queers at the Stonewall fought back against that. In finding the best spirit of themselves, they started what would become a worldwide movement – a movement that would evolve to fight legal oppression, challenge homophobia, organize around the holocaust of HIV/Aids, and lead to marriage equality many decades later. [Continue reading…]
The Orlando shootings and American Muslims
Robin Wright writes: Hena Khan, the author of best-selling children’s books, thought Muhammad Ali’s funeral on Friday was going to be a turning point for American Muslims. “Ali spent his life trying to show the real Islam—battling Islamophobia even as he battled Parkinson’s disease. That’s what was highlighted after he died,” she told me this weekend. “It was nice to feel proud—and to see people saying ‘Allahu Akbar’ interpreted in a positive way.”
On Saturday, Khan was herself honored for the publication of “It’s Ramadan, Curious George,” a groundbreaking new book that also tries to span the cultural chasm for a new generation. The Diyanet Center of America packed its auditorium with kids and their parents to hear Khan read from her book. In this latest spinoff, the mischievous simian learns from his friend Kareem about the sacred Muslim month of fasting, good deeds, contemplation, and evening feasts. Together, they help with a food drive for charity. George gets up to his usual antics, this time planning a good deed to donate all the shoes that Muslims leave outside a mosque when they go in to pray, only to be stopped in the nick of time. In the evening, George and Kareem break the fast together with pizza and chocolate-covered bananas. In honor of Ramadan, The Man in the Yellow Hat — the caregiver who brought Curious George to America seventy-five years ago — dons a yellow fez.
At the end of Khan’s reading, a teen-ager dressed as Curious George raced down the aisles, onto the stage, and fist-bumped Khan. The kids went wild. “It was a weekend of hope and feeling inspired,” Khan told me. “It was a time of reaffirmation,” especially during the first week of Ramadan.
On Sunday, Khan woke up and, as is her habit, checked the news on her cell phone before waking her family. It was consumed with the killings at Pulse, the gay night club in Orlando, Florida. “First it was twenty people, then fifty,” she told me. “I thought, Not another shooting! When is this going to stop? This is insanity.
“Then I saw the name,” Khan said, her voice choking back sobs. Omar Mateen, the lone gunman in the largest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11th attacks, in 2001, is an Afghan-American. Khan is Pakistani-American. Both are second-generation. Mateen, who was twenty-nine, was born in New York and later moved to Florida. Khan, who is forty-two, grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and now lives with her husband and two children in the Maryland suburb of Rockville.
“It added a whole new layer of anguish,” she told me. “I bore this tragedy as much as any American, and then to see his name. You can’t even find the words. It’s unbelievable. And during Ramadan! As a Muslim, your heart sinks.” [Continue reading…]
Investors are dumping shares of G4S, the security firm that employed the Orlando shooter
Quartz reports: G4S employs 610,000 people in 100 countries, and sources many of its recruits from police and military backgrounds. It has faced criticism (paywall) in the past for breaches of security such as prison escapes. Since 2012, it’s been trying to rebuild its reputation after it failed to provide enough security guards to the London Olympics, and the army had to step into the breach.
The company was one of the US government’s biggest federal contractors after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and employs 57,000 people in North America. [Continue reading…]
The Orlando massacre: A reminder of the dangers LGBT people live with every day
Michelangelo Signorile writes: We still know very few details about the horrific, heartbreaking mass shooting in an Orlando gay club, Pulse, where 50 people have been killed and over 50 more were injured. Omar S. Mateen of Port St. Lucie, Florida, is reported to have entered the club and soon went on a shooting rampage. It’s not yet been confirmed as a hate crime, a terror attack or random shooting.
Whatever the case, a Pride month night of celebration and fun — the weekly Latin Night at the popular club, focused on Latin music, performances and dancing — turned into a morning of mass death and devastation. It happened in an area where LGBT people feel welcome and accepted. Orlando has a large and diverse LGBT community, one in which, like so many across the country, many LGBT people surely feel comfortable and safe.
But the brutal reality that jarred Orlando’s LGBT community, and the entire nation, is something that LGBT have always experienced, as gay and lesbian bars and clubs have been targeted in the past by those who harbor hate toward LGBT people. And it’s a reminder — whatever the motives — of the animus against us, and the ever present danger, with which we still live. [Continue reading…]
America has 4.4% of the world’s population, but almost 50% of the civilian-owned guns around the world
Vox reports: America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, and presidential candidates in other nations don’t cook bacon with guns. But America’s relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms. These charts and maps show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix. [Continue reading…]
Father of Orlando shooter says his son’s homophobia may have been motive behind massacre
NBC News reports: While no one may ever know what was truly going through the head of the man who shot over 100 people at a gay Orlando nightclub on Sunday, his family says he may have been motivated by pure hate against the LGBT community.
Various law-enforcement officials have identified the shooter as Omar Mateen, 29, who was born in New York and lived in Port . St. Lucie, Florida.
Because of his name and heritage, there were immediately questions about Islamic fundamentalism — but his father said it may have been a recent incident involving two men showing each other affection that set the gunman off.
“We were in Downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry,” Mir Seddique, told NBC News on Sunday. “They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, ‘Look at that. In front of my son they are doing that.’ And then we were in the men’s bathroom and men were kissing each other.’
“We are saying we are apologizing for the whole incident,” said Seddique. “We weren’t aware of any action he is taking. We are in shock like the whole country.”
Seddique added, “this had nothing to do with religion.” [Continue reading…]
The Daily Beast reports: [a] senior law enforcement source reports that Mateen became a person of interest in 2013 and again in 2014. The Federal Bureau of Investigation at one point opened an investigation into Mateen but subsequently closed the case when it produced nothing that appeared to warrant further investigation.
“He’s a known quantity,” the source said. “He’s been on the radar before.” [Continue reading…]
NBC News reports: The gunman who opened fire at a gay Florida nightclub early Sunday, shooting over 100 people, had called 911 moments before to pledge allegiance to the leader of ISIS, law enforcement sources told NBC News. [Continue reading…]
Europe ignores Syria at its peril. The country is burning and we must act
Natalie Nougayrède writes: While Europe is transfixed by the UK referendum, the crisis that has arguably done the most damage to the continent continues unabated: the war in Syria. Right on Europe’s doorstep, Syria still burns. It is high time to acknowledge that the peace efforts of the US and Russia have failed dismally. Whether there is any chance of this changing after a new US president takes office in early 2017 is anyone’s guess. But that’s precisely the question Europeans need to start preparing for. And the time to do so is now.
If anyone thought Syria had gone away, look again. Massive airstrikes carried out by Russia and Syrian government forces, some using barrel bombs, have picked up again over the besieged city of Aleppo. More hospitals have been destroyed and children killed: there are pictures of this online but they’re not receiving much attention. Let’s face it: we have slowly become numb to the suffering of Syrians.
But we ignore Syria at our peril. Future Arab and Muslim generations, if not today’s, will ask Europeans why they did not do more to help a nation butchered by a dictator’s army and his allies. Europe’s destiny is intertwined with events in its Arab neighbourhood in a way that the US’s is not. For each Syrian refugee who made it to Europe and was treated decently, how many rejected or stuck in the war zone will nurture resentment towards those in the west who preferred to erect barbed wire fences or wring their hands?
Preoccupied with terrorism and refugee quotas, we worry about the spillover effects but have stopped thinking about root causes. These causes are not in Raqqa, the capital of Islamic State’s self-styled “caliphate”. They are in the presidential palace in Damascus. [Continue reading…]
Vigilantes patrol parts of Europe where few migrants set foot
The New York Times reports: The People’s Party-Our Slovakia, after months of stirring up fears about foreigners and Muslim migrants, decided to take action: This spring, the group’s leader proudly stood in front of the main railway station in Zvolen, Slovakia, and announced that a new group of volunteers would begin patrolling passenger trains to keep the “decent citizens” of Slovakia safe from criminals and minorities.
Never mind that vanishingly few of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have reached Europe over the last year ever set foot in the Central European nation, or that only 10 people last year became crime victims on a Slovakian train system patrolled by 600 railway police officers.
The xenophobic Slovakian group has been one of a wave of such extremist organizations across Central and Eastern Europe that have seized on last year’s influx of migrants through Europe to advance their agenda and build popular support. In some cases, the vigilante groups have taken to patrolling borders, streets and other public places to defend against what they portray as a menacing incursion of asylum seekers, many of them Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other poor, war-torn nations. [Continue reading…]
The child refugees of Africa
Ashley Gilbertson writes: Last year, the news media focused intensely on the European refugee crisis. Some 800,000 people crossed the Mediterranean to Greece, many fleeing wars we had a hand in creating, in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Each segment of their journey was carefully documented by thousands of reporters and photographers.
But there is another humanitarian crisis in Europe we have heard much less about: the roughly 200,000 migrants and refugees who left Africa for Italy since last year. This year alone, some 2,000 have died while making the voyage.
No one gets excited by an epidemic of despair. Some African refugees — largely from Nigeria, Gambia, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Guinea — are escaping wars, but others are fleeing despots, corruption and poverty, a tapestry of problems that have plagued the Continent for generations. When they arrive here in Sicily, they face an overloaded system that is unable to meet their needs.
In May, I spent a week in Sicily with a team from Unicef taking photographs and interviewing those who have made the journey. In the island’s capital, Palermo, I met Peace, a 17-year-old Nigerian living in a shelter for girls. She fled home after being told she would have to marry a 40-year-old man. “This man took me to his house and made me his house girl,” Peace said. “I said to my aunt, ‘He’s older than my dad,’ but she said, ‘If you don’t marry this man, I will poison you.’ ”
Peace traveled to Agadez, Niger, a waypoint where smugglers load migrants into crowded trucks to cross into Libya. “So many people died in the desert. We saw dead bodies, skeletons,” she said. Upon arriving in Libya, she was locked in a windowless room for six weeks. “There was no water, no changes of clothes, not enough food. There was fighting outside, I could hear shooting.”
Libya is particularly brutal on migrants. Boys are set to work by local residents at backbreaking jobs in construction and in the fields for less than $5 a day until they earn enough to afford the $1,500 passage. Girls are often forced into sex work. “They used to rape us and beat us,” said Tsenga, an Eritrean woman who today lives at a sprawling refugee camp in Sicily. “The girls cried, they cried bitterly. They cried because they are just children.” [Continue reading…]
How Donald Trump bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos, but still earned millions
The New York Times reports: The Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel is now closed, its windows clouded over by sea salt. Only a faint outline of the gold letters spelling out T-R-U-M-P remains visible on the exterior of what was once this city’s premier casino.
Not far away, the long-failing Trump Marina Hotel Casino was sold at a major loss five years ago and is now known as the Golden Nugget.
At the nearly deserted eastern end of the boardwalk, the Trump Taj Mahal, now under new ownership, is all that remains of the casino empire Donald J. Trump assembled here more than a quarter-century ago. Years of neglect show: The carpets are frayed and dust-coated chandeliers dangle above the few customers there to play the penny slot machines.
On the presidential campaign trail, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, often boasts of his success in Atlantic City, of how he outwitted the Wall Street firms that financed his casinos and rode the value of his name to riches. A central argument of his candidacy is that he would bring the same business prowess to the Oval Office, doing for America what he did for his companies.
“Atlantic City fueled a lot of growth for me,” Mr. Trump said in an interview in May, summing up his 25-year history here. “The money I took out of there was incredible.”
His audacious personality and opulent properties brought attention — and countless players — to Atlantic City as it sought to overtake Las Vegas as the country’s gambling capital. But a close examination of regulatory reviews, court records and security filings by The New York Times leaves little doubt that Mr. Trump’s casino business was a protracted failure. Though he now says his casinos were overtaken by the same tidal wave that eventually slammed this seaside city’s gambling industry, in reality he was failing in Atlantic City long before Atlantic City itself was failing. [Continue reading…]
Poll suggests six times as many Sanders supporters would shift to Clinton over Trump
The Guardian reports: Nearly six times as many Bernie Sanders supporters are prepared to shift their support to Hillary Clinton than vote for Donald Trump in November, according to an exclusive new poll which suggests Democrats are in a strong position to convert energy from their passionate primary contest into general election success.
However, the research, conducted by SurveyUSA for the Guardian, also shows that if Sanders were to find a way of staying in the presidential race, it could hand the White House to Trump, who would beat Clinton by three percentage points in that scenario.
Carried out the day after the California primary, the polling news comes amid residual pressure from some Sanders supporters for him to continue his struggle – either as an independent or perhaps by replacing Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, on that party’s ticket.
But the survey of 1,408 registered voters reveals limited appetite for this option, which would split the progressive vote. Presented with a four-way choice of Trump, Clinton, Sanders and libertarian Gary Johnson, 35% would vote for the presumptive Republican nominee, versus 32% for Clinton, 18% for Sanders and 4% for Johnson.
Yet when Sanders is removed from the equation and voters are offered the more expected lineup of Trump, Clinton, Stein and Johnson, it is the presumptive Democratic nominee who emerges on top with 39%, followed by Trump on 36%, Johnson at 6% and Stein on 4%. Only 5% of respondents told pollsters they would “stay at home and not vote” in this scenario. [Continue reading…]
The case for Hillary Clinton, by a Bernie voter
Sally Kohn writes: During the early moments of the Democratic primary, my 7-year-old daughter Willa declared that she wanted Hillary Clinton to win “because she’s a girl.”
“That’s not enough of a reason,” I almost said, but then caught myself. For 270 years, maleness and whiteness was an implicit prerequisite for president. Wanting to vote for a woman candidate isn’t sexist; it’s an act of undoing sexism. It’s a way to symbolically support the equality of women everywhere while substantively putting into office a candidate who personally understands the needs of half of the population who have heretofore not been represented in the White House. That’s not to say that voting for a woman is an implicitly feminist act (see Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina), nor is it to suggest that not voting for a woman is an inherently, entirely sexist decision. But our democracy has always been inextricably entwined with race and gender. We only notice it when the candidate isn’t a white man.
Women make up more than 50 percent of the American population but just 20 percent of Congress — which, incidentally, is the highest percentage of women in Congress in history. Since the United States Senate was established in 1789, there have been just 46 women senators — 20 of whom are currently serving. There has been just one African American woman senator in the entire 227 years of the institution.
India elected a woman head of state. Liberia elected a woman head of state. So did Britain and Israel and Germany and South Korea and Indonesia. Our supposedly inclusive, equitable democracy has never managed to do what Bangladesh and Chile have done. Now, we finally have a chance.
On Tuesday evening, when it became clear that Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee, I looked at my daughter and my eyes filled with tears. She will grow up in a world that is still imperfect, still bending toward justice, but with markedly more opportunity and fairness than my grandmother ever knew. And my little girl, who once looked at the faces of the 44 presidents so far and asked why none are women, may now know not only that the world can change but that there can be a place for a girl like her at the top of it. [Continue reading…]
Ryan’s honesty about Trump’s racism provokes criticism from fellow Republicans
The Hill reports: Speaker Paul Ryan’s handling of Donald Trump is coming under criticism from Senate Republicans, many of whom prefer the way their leader, Mitch McConnell, deals with the unconventional candidate.
McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, has steadfastly declined to call Trump’s criticism of a federal judge “racist,” a term that Ryan pointedly deployed.
“It sets up journalists to ask, ‘Do you agree with Paul Ryan that it was racist?” said an aide to a vulnerable GOP senator
Trump set off a firestorm last week by claiming that a Mexican-American federal judge handling a lawsuit against Trump University was biased because of his heritage.Republican lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol swiftly expressed strong disapproval but Ryan ratcheted up the criticism significantly by calling it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Ryan’s remarks quickly became a Democratic talking point used to batter vulnerable Senate Republican incumbents. [Continue reading…]
Canada is the least xenophobic country in the Western world. Here’s why
Zack Beauchamp writes: While most of the Western world is seeing a surge in nativism and Islamophobia, the Canadian government has become more and more open to minority groups and immigration.
“The only real outlier [to the nativist trend] is Canada,” Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia who studies nativism and far-right politics in Europe, tells me. He continues:
[Trudeau] has handled, so far, the Syrian refugee crisis incredibly well, having taken in 25,000 Syrian refugees against the majority will. Initially, he wasn’t supported by the majority — but when they finally arrived, a majority of Canadians did support it. That’s one of the few encouraging lessons that we have seen over the last several years: that if you have a positive campaign, which is supported by a large portion of the media, that you can actually swing public opinion in a positive direction.
Why? It’s because Canada is genuinely different from other Western countries in terms of its attitude toward immigrants. It’s far more welcoming than basically everywhere else.
“Compared to the citizens of other developed immigrant-receiving countries, Canadians are by far the most open to and optimistic about immigration,” Irene Bloemraad, a sociologist at UC Berkeley and its chair of Canadian studies, wrote in a 2012 study published by the Migration Policy Institute.
“In one comparative poll, only 27 percent of those surveyed in Canada agreed that immigration represented more of a problem than an opportunity. In the country that came closest to Canadian opinion, France, the perception of immigration as a problem was significantly higher, at 42 percent.”
Why? According to Bloemraad, the Canadian government has spent decades attempting to foster tolerance and acceptance as core national values, through policies aimed at integrating immigrants and minority groups without stripping them of their group identity. [Continue reading…]
Saudis used financial threats to coerce UN in effort to cover up war crimes in Yemen
The New York Times reports: The United Nations secretary general is supposed to answer to every nation on earth — and no nation at all.
So the unusually frank admission by the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, on Thursday that he had essentially been coerced into removing a Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen from an ignoble list of armies that kill and maim children was a rare window into the limits of his moral and political authority — and an object lesson for whoever succeeds Mr. Ban next year.
On Thursday, Mr. Ban told reporters that he had been threatened with the loss of financing for humanitarian operations in the Palestinian territories, South Sudan and Syria if he did not temporarily delete the Saudi-led coalition from the list.
The coalition has been accused of indiscriminately bombing civilian and nonmilitary targets in its battle against Houthi rebels in Yemen for more than a year. The coalition, which is backed by the United States, has consistently denied the accusations.
Mr. Ban’s office issued a report last week on violations of children’s rights in war zones, and it cited deadly coalition attacks that had hit schools and hospitals. By Monday, however, the coalition was taken off the list, after lobbying by Saudi Arabia and some of its wealthiest allies who help finance United Nations humanitarian operations. [Continue reading…]
Human Rights Watch: “The secretary-general’s decision flies in the face of overwhelming evidence that violations by the Saudi-led coalition have killed and maimed hundreds of children in Yemen,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “Allowing governments that commit abuses against children to bully their way off the list makes a mockery of the UN’s children protection efforts.”
The UN has verified that at least 785 children have been killed and 1,168 injured in Yemen during fighting in 2015, with 60 percent of the casualties attributed to the Saudi-led coalition, the secretary-general’s report said. The UN also verified 101 attacks against schools and hospitals, attributing nearly half of the attacks to the Saudi-led coalition. Nongovernmental organizations have made similar findings. [Continue reading…]
Tel Aviv mayor says the occupation is a cause of Palestinian terror
Edo Konrad writes: Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ron Huldai shocked many Israelis Thursday morning when he cited Israel’s occupation as one factor that leads Palestinians to turn to terrorism. Speaking on Army Radio about Wednesday’s deadly shooting attack in Tel Aviv and reported celebrations of it in the West Bank and Gaza, Huldai argued that Israelis should focus instead on the fact that Israel is “perhaps the only country in the world holding another nation under occupation without civil rights.”
“On the one hand the occupation has lasted 49 years, and I took part in it,” Huldai told veteran journalist Ilana Dayan, “I recognize the reality and know that leaders with courage must look to take action and not just talk. The fact that we are suffering does not lead to a change in understanding of what must be done… There is no courage to do what needs to be done in order to reach a [peace] agreement.”
“There is no way to hold people in a situation of occupation and think that they will reach the conclusion that everything is okay and they will continue to live like that,” Huldai added. [Continue reading…]
