maraahmed.com

Teju Cole: There’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the “angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse. More here.

David Dennis: On Sunday, shots were fired into a crowd during a parade in the New Orleans 7th ward. Police said they saw three suspects running from the scene. This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free. So why am I allowed to go outside? Where’s the city quarantine or FBI and Homeland Security presence for this act of “terrorism”? Because this is an act of domestic terrorism right? Just because the alleged shooter was wearing a white tee and jeans does that suddenly make the shooting a gang-related affair? And we all know how irrelevant gang-related shootings are in America. The Mother’s Day shooting is so irrelevant that politicians haven’t even bothered to mention it to further their anti-gun agendas. If the shootings aren’t even important enough for politicians to spin, then it’s truly reached a black hole of irrelevance. More here.

65 years of nakba.

Terri Judd: Emaciated and frail, more than 100 men lie on concrete floors of freezing, solitary cells in Guantánamo, silently starving themselves to death. Stripped of all possessions, even basics such as a sleeping mat or soap, they lie listlessly as guards periodically bang on the steel doors and shout at them to move an arm or leg to prove they are still conscious. The notorious detention centre is in crisis, suffering a rebellion of unprecedented scale, with most of the camp on lockdown and around two-thirds of the 166 detainees on hunger strike.

This week 40 American military nurses were drafted in to try to stem a mass suicide. The last Brit inside, Shaker Aamer, has said he is prepared to strike to his death. The US administration does its best to keep prying eyes from the unfolding tragedy but the The Independent has obtained first-hand reports. Twice a day, the 23 most weak are taken into a room. Their wrists, arms, stomach, legs and head are strapped to a chair and repeated attempts are made to force a tube down their noses into their stomachs. It is an ugly procedure as they gag and wretch, blood dripping from their nostrils. “They won’t let us live in peace and now they won’t let us die in peace,” said detainee, Fayiz Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held for 11 years without charge. More here.

so PTI might not have won these elections but pls enough with all the negativity and fb jabs. this is the first time in pakistan’s history that an elected govt completed a full 5 yr term, voter turnout was spectacular in spite of attacks on political parties and polling stations (about 60%), first-time voters and pakistan’s youth were energized as never before, the brave people of khyber pakhtunkhwa voted for PTI and against oppressive imperial violence, sharif’s govt is likely to face some tough opposition in the yrs to come, and imran khan will have plenty of time to consolidate his political base. PTI’s most remarkable achievement is that it decimated pakistan’s two party system. can we even imagine that happening in american politics? it’s incredible. i also hope that these elections have put to rest, once and for all, the condescending racist debate on whether people are ready for democracy in a country like pakistan. as we all saw today, yes – not only are they ready to be a part of the political process but they’re willing to die for it. democracy is never just about winning elections. it’s about what happens the following day, the following week, the following year. the real work starts now. let’s get on with it.

Election workers count ballots after polls close for general elections in Peshawar. (Photograph by Faisal Mahmood)

YES!
…

A court in Guatemala has found former military leader Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. A three-judge tribunal sentenced the 86-year-old to 80 years in prison. Rios Montt was convicted of ordering the deaths of 1,771 people of the Ixil Maya ethnic group during his time in office in 1982 and 1983. Survivors described horrific abuses committed by the army against those suspected of aiding left-wing rebels. More here.

however much i detest time magazine, and other miscellaneous disney journalism, i love this picture of imran. captivating legend? yes. the long shot? yes. polarizing? i just don’t get it.
good luck imran.

imran khan

A verdict is expected as early as today in the historic trial against U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. He is charged with overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Mayan region after he seized power in 1982. ALLAN NAIRN: These massacres were not secret. They were acts of state terrorism where a big part of the point was publicity. When the assassinations were done in the cities, they would often make a point of throwing the bodies in the streets to terrify onlookers. In the massacres in the countryside, the executions would—and torture interrogations would often be carried out in the village square with all the survivors looking on so they would get a lifelong lesson that they would never forget, as they saw their families and their loved ones being strangled and shot in the head. This was all over the newspapers in Guatemala. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference in May of ’82, that same month that I had the interview with Ríos Montt where he talked about 10 civilians for every guerrilla, and his aide said they had sold out to subversion, they had to be killed—the Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued a pastoral letter saying, “Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes. These assassinations now fall into the category of genocide.” And the U.S. was in fact supporting Ríos Montt. The meeting between Reagan and Ríos Montt was very nice for Ríos Montt, because Reagan then came out publicly and said that Ríos Montt was a man of great integrity who was totally devoted to democracy and was getting a bum rap on human rights. Ríos Montt then said, “It’s not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists.” More here.

Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of Women, Action and the Media and editor of the anthology, “Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape,” says the Cleveland case is “an extreme example of a pervasive dynamic in our culture which is one of toxic masculinity.” Friedman explains: “It really expresses something that we see all over the culture, which is men trained to think that the way to be a man is to have power over and to dehumanize women.” More here.

Noam Sheizaf: The occupation – which will celebrate 46 years next month – is obviously an Israeli project, to which all elements of society contribute and from which almost all benefit. The high-tech industry’s connection to the military has been widely discussed, the profit Israeli companies make exploiting West Bank resources is documented and the captive market for Israeli goods in the West Bank and Gaza is known. Strenger’s own university cooperates with the army in various programs, and thus contributes its own share to the national project.

I would also say that at this point in time, paying lip service to the two state-solution while blaming the Palestinians for avoiding peace cannot be considered opposing to the occupation, unless you want to include Lieberman and Netanyahu in the peace camp. We should be asking ourselves questions about political action as opposed to discussing our views: where do we contribute to the occupation and what form of actions do we consider legitimate in the fight against it?

Prof. Stephen Hawking responded to a Palestinian call for solidarity. This is also something to remember – that the oppressed have opinions too, and that empowering them is a worthy cause. In Strenger’s world, the occupation is a topic of internal political discussion among the Jewish-Israeli public. Some people support it, some people – more – are against it; the Palestinians should simply wait for the tide to change since “it is very difficult for Israeli politicians to convince Israelis to take risks for peace.” And what happens if Israelis don’t chose to end the occupation? (Which is exactly what they are doing, over and over again.) I wonder what form of Palestinian opposition to the occupation Prof. Strenger considers legitimate. My guess: none (code phrase: “they should negotiate for peace”). More here.

Dave Marsh: Here, Bono becomes less the many-sided symbolic figure and more a fallible (sometimes likable, sometimes detestable) human. Think of the former Paul Hewson as the first self-created one dimensional man (all front, no back). Browne’s dug past the PR and the rhetoric and found…a Mad Men cliché for our times. But that’s not why you need to read The Front Man. You do need to. Not because you want to better understand Bono, let alone empathize with his plight, but because what topples is not only Bono’s stature but the excuses his chosen trade, liberal philanthropic paternalism, makes for itself. Langston Hughes wrote that the animal that should be chosen to represent liberals is not a donkey or an elephant but an ostrich. This book could be subtitled Bono (With His Head in the Sand). More here.

in case there’s any doubt left, i would’ve voted for imran khan if i could have. even if he doesn’t win this election, he will be an important part of the opposition. he can continue to hone his skills and consolidate his political base for many years to come. imran is not nawaz sharif or zardari. pakistan is ready for some change.

imran khan

Professor Hawking’s letter to the conference guest speaker organiser stated: “I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference. Had I attended I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.” More here.

rape is not just something that happens in india. this needs to stop.

“A shocking new report by the Pentagon has found that 70 sexual assaults may be taking place within the U.S. military every day. The report estimates there were 26,000 sex crimes committed in 2012, a jump of 37 percent since 2010. Most of the incidents were never reported. The findings were released two days after the head of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention unit, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, was arrested for sexual assault.” More here.

looking at the video, it’s absolutely incredible to me that there is no security detail for imran khan. i understand that he’s a man of the people, but for heaven’s sake let his entourage be a bit more organized. no one can step in and take his place in the coming elections. there is no back up plan. more here.

Gary Younge: First, Obama’s second-term cabinet will probably have fewer black members than his first and those of either George W Bush or Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, there are the same number of black governors and Congressmen and one less elected senator than in 2008. “For all of the euphoria about the election of Barack Obama in black America, his election has not had coat-tails,” said talk-show host Tavis Smiley. Second, African Americans, as a group, are far worse off now than when Obama was elected and the wealth gap between whites and blacks has grown since the recession. Between 2007 and 2010 black families’ wealth decreased by 31%; for white families it was 11%. “[Theracial wealth gap] was already dismal,” Darrick Hamilton, a New School professor, told the New York Times. “It got even worse.” You can argue about the degree to which the relationship between Obama’s presidency and that reality is causal. But you can’t contest that it is factual. Obama’s meteoric rise has coincided with black America’s precipitous economic descent. [...] It isn’t that black Americans are entitled to special consideration because the president is black. Quite the opposite. They should demand of him what they would and have done of any president – greater equality and social justice. Only more so, because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group or to any other president. The “talented tenth” is barely worthy of the adjective unless it makes space for these debates or its progress is in some way related to the remaining 90%. More here.

Assata Shakur: Please let me take a moment to tell you about myself. My name is Assata Shakur and I was born and raised in the United States. I am a descendant of Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas as slaves. I spent my early childhood in the racist segregated South. I later moved to the northern part of the country, where I realized that Black people were equally victimized by racism and oppression.

I grew up and became a political activist, participating in student struggles, the anti-war movement, and, most of all, in the movement for the liberation of African Americans in the United States. I later joined the Black Panther Party, an organization that was targeted by the COINTELPRO program, a program that was set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to eliminate all political opposition to the U.S. government’s policies, to destroy the Black Liberation Movement in the United States, to discredit activists and to eliminate potential leaders.

Under the COINTELPRO program, many political activists were harassed, imprisoned, murdered or otherwise neutralized. As a result of being targeted by COINTELPRO, I, like many other young people, was faced with the threat of prison, underground, exile or death. The FBI, with the help of local police agencies, systematically fed false accusations and fake news articles to the press accusing me and other activists of crimes we did not commit. Although in my case the charges were eventually dropped or I was eventually acquitted, the national and local police agencies created a situation where, based on their false accusations against me, any police officer could shoot me on sight. It was not until the Freedom of Information Act was passed in the mid-’70s that we began to see the scope of the United States government’s persecution of political activists.

At this point, I think that it is important to make one thing very clear. I have advocated and I still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the United States. I advocate self-determination for my people and for all oppressed inside the United States. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty.

To make a long story short, I was captured in New Jersey in 1973, after being shot with both arms held in the air, and then shot again from the back. I was left on the ground to die and when I did not, I was taken to a local hospital where I was threatened, beaten and tortured. In 1977 I was convicted in a trial that can only be described as a legal lynching.

In 1979 I was able to escape with the aid of some of my fellow comrades. I saw this as a necessary step, not only because I was innocent of the charges against me, but because I knew that in the racist legal system in the United States I would receive no justice. I was also afraid that I would be murdered in prison. I later arrived in Cuba where I am currently living in exile as a political refugee.

The New Jersey State Police and other law enforcement officials say they want to see me brought to “justice.” But I would like to know what they mean by “justice.” Is torture justice? I was kept in solitary confinement for more than two years, mostly in men’s prisons. Is that justice? My lawyers were threatened with imprisonment and imprisoned. Is that justice? I was tried by an all-white jury, without even the pretext of impartiality, and then sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years. Is that justice? More here.

On the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, thousands are commemorating the 10th anniversary of when the U.S. Navy stopped using their home as a bombing range. Since the 1940s, the Navy used nearly three-quarters of the island for bombing practice, war games and dumping old munitions. The bombing stopped after campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience, but the island continues to suffer. At the current cleanup rate, the Navy says, it will take until 2025 to remove all the environmental damage left by more than 60 years of target practice. A fisherman recently discovered a giant unexploded bomb underwater. The island of about 10,000 people also lacks a hospital to treat illnesses such as asthma and cancer that may be attributed to the military’s former bombing activity. “We believe the military is really not interested in cleaning up Vieques and rather interested in continuing to punish Vieques for having thrown the U.S. Navy out in 2003,” says Robert Rabin of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques. “This is a process that we believe is happening with no real supervision, no genuine community participation.” More here.

…the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest association of US physicians, has sent a letter to Chuck Hagel, US secretary of defense, protesting against the force feedings, arguing they violate medical ethics. “The American Medical Association (AMA) noted in 2005 and 2009, when concerns arose about the treatment of hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay Base, that the forced feeding of detainees violates core ethical values of the medical profession. Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” read the AMA letter. “We urge you to ensure that this matter receives prompt and thorough attention to address any situation in which a physician may be asked to violate the ethical standards of his or her profession.” But one Pentagon spokesman told Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald reporter, that it is “un-American” to let a detainee starve and that it “violates the very code of civilised peoples everywhere.” So as the crisis in Guantanamo intensifies, is it finally time for justice to be done? More here.

David Shorter: If I pay attention to my own body as a person going through checkpoints, I see how I start to look down, not wanting to make eye contact. How your shoulders start to cave in so you do not look too broad or proud. If you are big like me, you put a little bend in your knees so that you look easily push able, not one to stand tall or seem offensive. You have to control your emotions, not to look too frustrated or incensed. You have to done a respect when what you feel is disgust. So the checkpoints cause you to start lying to your own body: You feel mad, but show submission. Look at yourself, they have turned you into the animal they called you to justify taking your land in the first place.

There are other checkpoints too. Like when walking down the street with my Yaqui friends in Mexican cities and to see people not move out of their way when walking. When I see men literally shove a shoulder into my Yaqui friends as they pass by. These are check points to see keep my friends “in check.”

When I rushed one of my godchildren who had fallen to the state funded clinic and was told by the Mexican doctor that, “perhaps these Indians should stop having kids if they cannot take care of them.” This checkpoint is seeing if I will say anything back and risk the care of the baby now in his control.

When the waitresses at restaurants only take the orders from me, not from my indigenous friends who I want to treat to a meal. They Mexican waitresses do not look them in the eye, not wanting to lower themselves by taking orders from an Indian. These are checkpoints. If we want to be served and not caused a scene, we will comply.

But at the end of the day, when all you wanted was a day to live your life, you cannot help feeling, in your body, the sum total of all the times you were checked at some point. This is a big one: you just feel fatigue. You just wanted to go visit your friends. You wanted to say hello for their birthday, or take them a gift. You want to just go do your work. And this fatigue is unshakable, like the heat, or the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, or the lack of clean water. And this fatigue wears on your like the knowledge that life did not use to be this way. That someone came at a historical moment and did this; that others let it happen. This fatigue changes your body, changes how you want to love or be loved. And this fatigue, well, this fatigue is colonization.

[...] So when asked to come and speak about how I understand Palestinian rights to be indigenous rights, I did not want to once again refer to the International Court of Justice or the United Nations, or Desmond Tutu, or Jimmy Carter, Judith Butler, Angela Davis, or Noam Chomsky. I did not want to quote too many books or lecture you about theories of indigeneity or settler colonialism. I wanted to show up, in my body, and tell you how indigenous struggles feel, how colonization feels, as I empathize with native people being a person privileged by both race and nationality colonized by my education system, and epistemologically harassed by my incessant media. I empathize; I embody the feelings of fear, and of hope, because I do not need Frantz Fanon, or Aime Cesaire, or Linda Tuhiwai Smith to know that those holding the whip and the machine guns, those dispossessing and colonizing, they are proving themselves to be, again and again, the actual savages. More here.

Private First Class Kimberly Rivera — a conscientious objector and pregnant mother of four — has just been sentenced to military prison for refusing to serve in the Iraq War. Rivera was on a two-week leave in December 2006 when she decided she would not return to Iraq for a second tour of duty. She and her family fled to Canada in February 2007, living there until their deportation back to the United States last year. On Monday, a military court sentenced her to 10 months behind bars. Her fifth child is due in December. We’re joined by Mario Rivera, Kimberly’s husband and now the primary caretaker of their four young children, and by James Branum, a lawyer who represents Kimberly and dozens of other conscientious objectors. More here.

The U.S. military has acknowledged for the first time the number of prisoners on hunger strike at the military prison has topped 100. About a fifth of the hunger strikers are now being force-fed. Lawyers for the prisoners say more than 130 men are taking part in the hunger strike, which began in February. One of the hunger strikers is a Yemeni man named Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, who has been held at Guantánamo for 11 years without charge. In a letter published in The New York Times, he wrote: “Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made. I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.” More here.

shameful how the lives of human beings can be sacrificed for the sake of cheap walmart clothing. listen to one of the survivors on democracy now here.

excellent interview with Trevor Aaronson about the FBI’s sting operations (reminiscent of the war on drugs) and their prior contact with tamerlan tsarnaev in 2011, followed by an interview with Charlotte Silver on preemptive prosecution, the FBI’s complete lack of accountability and civil rights attorney lynne stewart’s unbelievable sentence. listen to interviews here.

also read charlotte silver’s “shocked conscience: the case of lynne stewart” here.

Your book describes, I think you call it, “suffering on an almost unimaginable scale.” Artillery shelling, bombing, the destruction of villages by infantry, revenge missions, massacres, incredibly sadistic rapes, the gunning down of Vietnamese farmers and fisherman from helicopter gunships, free fire zones. You cite an estimate of 3.8 million war deaths, the majority Vietnamese civilians. What turned so many young American men into such monsters?

Nick Turse: It’s a difficult question to answer. I went out and interviewed well over 100 American veterans for this book, and read sworn testimonies of many more. I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer. I talked to one veteran, he talked to me about the war. We were on the phone for several hours. He was very jovial. He had a really infectious laugh.

But he quieted down and said he wanted to tell me a story about a member of his unit. And he talked about how they were going through a village and burning it down, which was standard operating procedure. And in the midst of this, this woman runs up and grabs this GI by the sleeve, and is tugging at him and yelling at him—obviously because her home is being burned down, all her possessions are going up in flames. And she’s angry, scared, upset. And he said this GI just pushed her off, and then took his rifle and hit her squarely in the nose with the butt. And he said her face just erupted in blood. She was screaming. And the GI just turned around and walked away laughing. And he paused a second and said, “Do you know that GI was me?” He had such a tough time figuring out how he could have done it. All these years later. At the time he didn’t think anything of it, and in the years since, he couldn’t help but think of it on a constant basis. And it really haunted him. And I had the same problem trying to match up the man that I was talking to with his 19-year old self.

He told me about how the training that he went through dehumanized the Vietnamese to the point where they didn’t think of them as human. They thought of them as—they had a whole bunch of slurs that were used: dinks, slopes, slants, gooks. And he talked about how “I didn’t become exactly like a robot but it was like that.” You’re trained to kill, you chant “Kill, kill kill.” It psychologically readies you for this.
…

The Vietnam War was fought using an attrition strategy. This wasn’t a war like World War I, where you had two armies facing off across a well defined battlefield. It’s a guerrilla struggle, where the Vietnamese revolutionaries are radically outgunned. So they’re not going to stand toe to toe with the Americans. And the Americans aren’t trying to take territory or capture an enemy capital.

They were searching for some metric, some measure to show that they were winning a war. They settled on the attrition strategy which was used during the second half of the Korean War, and the main measure was body count. You would kill your way to victory by piling up Vietnamese bodies, and the Americans were always chasing this crossover point when they would be killing more Vietnamese guerrillas than the enemy could put into the field. And the idea was that at that moment, the enemy would give up the fight.

Because they would view the war as a rational effort the way the Pentagon did: this was a ledger sheet. And once the debits outweighed the credits, then they would end the war. They didn’t think the way the Vietnamese did, that this was a revolutionary struggle. The Vietnamese saw it as a continuation of their anti-colonial fight against the French.

The troops in the field, they were pressed for bodies. Their commanders were leaning on them heavily. You were told to produce Vietnamese bodies, and if you didn’t you were going to stay out in the field longer. They learned pretty quickly that the command wasn’t discerning about what bodies were turned in, that just about any Vietnamese bodies would do. This pushed American troops toward at least calling in all Vietnamese who were filled as enemies, and also to the killing of detainees and prisoners and civilians, and calling them in as enemy dead. More here.

Bill talks to scientist and philosopher Vandana Shiva, who’s become a rock star in the global battle over genetically modified seeds. These seeds — considered “intellectual property” by the big companies who own the patents — are globally marketed to monopolize food production and profits. Opponents challenge the safety of genetically modified seeds, claiming they also harm the environment, are more costly, and leave local farmers deep in debt as well as dependent on suppliers. Shiva, who founded a movement in India to promote native seeds, links genetic tinkering to problems in our ecology, economy, and humanity, and sees this as the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth. More here.

Glenn Greenwald: Needless to say, Tsarnaev is probably the single most hated figure in America now. As a result, as Bazelon noted, not many people will care what is done to him, just like few people care what happens to the accused terrorists at Guantanamo, or Bagram, or in Yemen and Pakistan. But that’s always how rights are abridged: by targeting the most marginalized group or most hated individual in the first instance, based on the expectation that nobody will object because of how marginalized or hated they are. Once those rights violations are acquiesced to in the first instance, then they become institutionalized forever, and there is no basis for objecting once they are applied to others, as they inevitably will be (in the case of the War on Terror powers: as they already are being applied to others). As Bazelon concludes:

“No one is crying over the rights of the young man who is accused of killing innocent people, helping his brother set off bombs that were loaded to maim, and terrorizing Boston Thursday night and Friday. But the next time you read about an abusive interrogation, or a wrongful conviction that resulted from a false confession, think about why we have Miranda in the first place. It’s to stop law enforcement authorities from committing abuses. Because when they can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will.”

Leave aside the fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been convicted of nothing and is thus entitled to a presumption of innocence. The reason to care what happens to him is because how he is treated creates precedent for what the US government is empowered to do, including to US citizens on US soil. When you cheer for the erosion of his rights, you’re cheering for the erosion of your own. More here.

Tim Wise: White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and Joe Stack and George Metesky and Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton and Herman Frank Cash and Robert Chambliss and James von Brunn and Robert Mathews and David_Lane and Michael F. Griffin and Paul Hill and John Salvi and James Kopp and Luke Helder and James David Adkisson and Scott Roeder and Shelley Shannon and Wade Michael Page and Byron Williams and Kevin Harpham and William Krar and Judith Bruey and Edward Feltus and Raymond Kirk Dillard and Adam Lynn Cunningham and Bonnell Hughes and Randall Garrett Cole and James Ray McElroy and Michael Gorbey and Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman and Frederick Thomas and Paul Ross Evans and Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons and Kathy Simmons and Kaye Wiggins and Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe and David McMenemy and Bobby Joe Rogers and Francis Grady and Demetrius Van Crocker and Floyd Raymond Looker, among the pantheon of white people who engage in politically motivated violence meant to terrorize and kill, but whose actions result in the assumption of absolutely nothing about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.

And white privilege is being able to know nothing about the crimes committed by most of the terrorists listed above — indeed, never to have so much as heard most of their names — let alone to make assumptions about the role that their racial or ethnic identity may have played in their crimes.

White privilege is knowing that if the Boston bomber turns out to be white, you will not be asked to denounce him or her, so as to prove your own loyalties to the common national good. It is knowing that the next time a cop sees you standing on the sidewalk cheering on runners in a marathon, that cop will say exactly nothing to you as a result. More here.

Samar Hazboun: Over the past 11 years, according to Defence for Children International, some 7,500 children have been detained in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. Muhammad Daoud Dirbas, at the age of six, was the youngest child to have been detained by Israeli soldiers. Such practices are considered illegal under international law, as are other policies that children are subjected to, such as solitary confinement.

I started working on “Detained” about one year ago, because of the lack of visual documentation on the subject. I contacted some human rights organizations, which put me in contact with a few children. Unfortunately, those children refused to be interviewed; having been contacted several times by journalists, they were afraid of repercussions. I then decided to contact people I knew from Palestinian cities like Nablus and Hebron where child detention is most prevalent. Through these friends, I was able to find and contact additional children. Sadly, it was quite easy to find them since it is such a common phenomenon.

In most cases, I found children who suffer from various traumas. Some were not able to talk about what had happened in prison; others burst into tears, and it was sometimes hard for me to hold my own tears back as I was conducting the interviews. Many children agreed to talk to me “off the record”; I thus know their stories but was not able to officially interview them or take their pictures. In some cases, I was able to talk to the parents once the child left the room, and thus obtained more detailed information about how the children were dealing with what had happened to them. More here.

“When you think about the fact 4,500 Americans die a year in workplace accidents and we only spend $500 million [on OSHA], and then you compare that to the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend overseas protecting Americans from acts of terrorism, it seems like there’s some misplaced priorities,” notes labor journalist Mike Elk. More here.