Pakistan’s Military Plotted to Tilt U.S. Policy, F.B.I. Says
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and ERIC SCHMITT
July 19, 2011
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Pakistan’s military, including its powerful spy agency, has spent $4 million over two decades in a covert attempt to tilt American policy against India’s control of much of Kashmir — including funneling campaign donations to members of Congress and presidential candidates, the F.B.I. claimed in court papers unsealed Tuesday.
The allegations of a long-running plan to influence American elections and foreign policy come at a time of deep tensions between the United States and Pakistan — and in particular its spy agency — amid the fallout over the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden at a compound deep inside Pakistan on May 2.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation made the allegations in a 43-page affidavit filed in connection with the indictment of two United States citizens on charges that they failed to register with the Justice Department as agents of Pakistan, as required by law. One of the men, Zaheer Ahmad, is in Pakistan, but the other, Syed Fai, lives in Virginia and was arrested on Tuesday.
Mr. Fai is the director of the Kashmiri American Council, a Washington-based group that lobbies for and holds conferences and media events to promote the cause of self-determination for Kashmir. According to the affidavit, the activities by the group, also called the Kashmiri Center, are largely financed by Pakistan’s spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, along with as much as $100,000 a year in related donations to political campaigns in the United States. Foreign governments are prohibited from making donations to American political candidates.
“Mr. Fai is accused of a decades-long scheme with one purpose — to hide Pakistan’s involvement behind his efforts to influence the U.S. government’s position on Kashmir,” Neil MacBride, the United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, said. “His handlers in Pakistan allegedly funneled millions through the Kashmir Center to contribute to U.S. elected officials, fund high-profile conferences and pay for other efforts that promoted the Kashmiri cause to decision-makers in Washington.”
A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy denied any connection to matter, saying, “Mr. Fai is not a Pakistani citizen, and the government and embassy of Pakistan have no knowledge of the case.”
Law enforcement officials said Pakistan used a network of at least 10 unnamed straw contributors, which Mr. Ahmad helped organize, to make the campaign contributions and donate the bulk of the Kashmiri Center’s annual operating budget. The ISI would reimburse them — or their families in Pakistan — for the donations, the officials said.
Most of the straw donors who made contributions to the Kashmiri Center and to politicians in the United States were identified only by code in the court document, though the investigation was continuing and eight F.B.I. field offices executed 17 or 18 search warrants related to other suspected donors on Tuesday, an official said.
The goal of the group, according to internal documents cited by the F.B.I., was to persuade the United States government that it was in its interest to push India to allow a vote in Kashmir to decide its future. The group’s strategy was to offset the Indian lobby by targeting members of the Congressional committees that focus on foreign affairs with private briefings and events, staging activities that would draw media attention and otherwise to elevate the issue of Kashmir — the disputed region between India and Pakistan that each country controls in part but claims entirely — in Washington.
The F.B.I. said that there was no evidence that any of the lawmakers who received campaign funds from Pakistan were aware of its origins, and it did not name any of the recipients.
However, a search in Federal Elections Commission databases for contributions by Mr. Fai showed that he has made more than $20,000 in campaign contributions over the past two decades. The bulk of his donations went to two recipients: the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Representative Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana.
Mr. Fai made numerous — though smaller — contributions to Democrats as well, including to Representatives James P. Moran of Virginia, Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and Gregory W. Meeks of New York, and $250 donations to the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns of Al Gore and Barack Obama.
Mr. Ahmad also donated to Mr. Burton, records show. For at least 15 years, Mr. Burton has been a champion for Kashmiri causes in Congress, appealing to Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama to get more involved in attempting to mediate a settlement between India and Pakistan over the border region. He has also endorsed allowing the Kashmiri people to vote on their own fate.
Mr. Burton said he was “deeply shocked” by the arrest of Mr. Fai, because he had known him for 20 years and “in that time I had no inkling of his involvement with any foreign intelligence operation and had presumed our correspondence was legitimate.” He said he would donate the funds provided to his campaign to the Boy Scouts of America.
Both Mr. Fai and Mr. Ahmad also donated to Representative Joe Pitts, a Pennsylvania Republican who visited the region in 2001 and 2004, meeting with Pakistani and Indian leaders and calling for a cease-fire. He also introduced a resolution in 2004 calling for President George W. Bush to appoint a special envoy to help negotiate peace.
A spokesman for Mr. Pitts said he had donated $4,000 — an amount equal to the donations his campaign received from the two defendants — to local charities in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
Among the evidence that Mr. Fai was working for Pakistan, the affidavit said, are annual budget requests he allegedly submitted to his handlers along with lists of accomplishments and strategic-planning documents. Other documents and intercepts showed that they sometimes quarreled over reimbursing him for the costs of trips or about contracts for which he had not gotten advance approval.
The board of the Kashmiri American Council comprises mostly physicians and lawyers from across the United States, and election records show that several board members have made significant donations to lawmakers who have championed peace in Kashmir.
Gulam Hassan Butt, a retired California physician and member of the council’s board whose name does not appear in the donor database, said in a phone interview that the council carried out a “regular, honest, open campaign” with lawmakers and the State Department to get the United States to help resolve the Kashmir issue.
He also said he was unaware of any money that Pakistan’s government might have provided to the Kashmiri American Council, but Mr. Fai did not inform board members about all the sources of the council’s revenue: “Where does he get the money?” Mr. Butt said. “I don’t know. Who gives him the money? I don’t know.”
Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
NGOs in Haiti: "The Handmaidens of Imperial Domination"
NGOs in Haiti: "The Handmaidens of Imperial Domination"
An Interview With Ashley Smith
By Mike Whitney
January 26, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- MW--In your article in CounterPunch titled "Haiti and the Aid Racket", you said that "The catastrophe in Haiti has revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry". Can you explain what you mean?
Ashley Smith---After the earthquake, the imperial powers and international NGOs collected billions of dollars with the promise that they would provide relief for Haiti's quake victims and then rebuild the country. Today, even mainstream figures are profoundly critical of what the U.S. and the NGOs have done. For example, Ricardo Seitenfus, the special representative from the Organization of American States (OAS) to Haiti, told the Swiss daily Le Temps, "If there is failure of international aid, it is Haiti."
For that moment of honesty, the OAS fired Seitenfus. But he was right. Today, there are still over 810,000 people, essentially quake refugees, trapped in 1,150 tent camps in and around Port-au-Prince. Only 15 percent of the promised transitional housing has been built. Astonishingly only 5 percent of the rubble has been removed. And there has been next to no reconstruction.
The U.S. is principally to blame for this failure. Initially the Obama Administration used the cover of humanitarianism to deploy 20,000 troops and 17 naval ships to bolster the UN occupation in policing desperate people and preventing an exodus of refugees. This military response, as Doctors without Borders complained at the time, actually interfered with the distribution of humanitarian aid. Once it did turn to relief and reconstruction, it set up the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) under its control, which garnered promises of $10 billion in donations from the imperial powers. The IHRC, however, has only collected 10 percent of the promised sums. When and if they do collect the donations, the U.S. aims to implement a neoliberal plan of to exploit Haiti's cheap labor in sweatshops, export-oriented plantations, and tourist resorts. So what they claim to be an effort, in IHRC co-chair Bill Clinton's words, an "effort to build back better" is actually a ruse for the exploitation of Haiti.
The international NGOs' record is almost as abysmal. To be clear, some have done invaluable work, especially Partners in Health. But on the whole, the NGOs have failed the Haitian people. The NGOs have not spent the enormous sums of money they collected. The Red Cross, for instance, garnered $479 million in donations for Haiti, but has only spent or committed $245 million to projects. The NGOs do not coordinate their relief efforts. They are engaged in capitalist competition with one another for funds and are pre-occupied with branding their separate efforts so that they can advertise their "successes" to their donors. As a result, the NGOs provide at best provide a chaotic jumble of services to quake victims. At worst, they are sitting on piles of cash.
In truth, the U.S., its allies, and NGO surrogates have overseen and in many cases caused worsening conditions in Haiti worse over the last year. The failure of reconstruction left hundreds of thousands trapped in camps, vulnerable to storms, disease, and violence brought on by desperate conditions. On top of that, the UN occupation forces, specifically a contingent of Nepalese soldiers, most likely introduced cholera that has now become a countrywide epidemic, killing thousands and infecting hundreds of thousands more. The U.S. then precipitated a political crisis by pushing for parliamentary election to give a democratic veneer to American neocolonial rule. The election was a sham; it excluded the country's most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, and was marred by massive fraud and a contested outcome. Finally, like a nightmare, the former dictator, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, has returned to the country from exile, throwing the country into political chaos.
MW---Professor David Harvey says that NGOs act as "Trojan horses for neoliberal globalization." Do you agree with Harvey and, if so, would you elaborate?
Ashley Smith---Let's be clear first that NGOs form a big range of groups, from reformist organizations to large international humanitarians ones and others that are essentially appendages of various state powers, both major and minor. Some reformist NGOs have played a significant role in the World Social Forum and others are clearly on the side of neoliberal globalization. Harvey is absolutely correct about the role of the international NGOs. There is an insidious relationship between them, U.S. imperialism and neoliberal globalization.
After the economic crisis of the 1970s, the U.S. abandoned Keynesianism, whose emphasis on state-led development had failed, and adopted market fundamentalism, aka neoliberalism, at home and abroad to restore profits and growth in the system. In the U.S. the ruling class busted unions, cut the welfare state, and deregulated the economy. Internationally, as Walden Bello documents in Dark Victory, the U.S. used the debt crisis to compel third world countries to open up their markets, abolish regulations on foreign and domestic capital, privatize state industry, and shred state-run social programs.
Neoliberalism worked for the capitalist class, restoring profit and growth—however uneven—in the world system. But neoliberalism exacted an enormous social price everywhere. In the third world, it dislocated peasants, impoverished workers, and created enormous slums in many parts of the world. On top of that, the hollowing out of the states left many countries unable to provide services, regulate capital, or respond to natural and social crises.
The imperial powers, International Financial Institutions, and corporate foundations diverted their money from third world states to NGOs to fill the vacuum. In this way, the NGOs have actually accelerated the opening up of third world economies. In an apt phrase, David Harvey calls the process "privatization by NGO."
MW---Do the big NGOs see natural disasters as a "growth industry" or is their interest strictly humanitarian?
Ashley Smith---In reality the answer is both. They are part and parcel of what Naomi Klein has called disaster capitalism. International NGOs are really businesses and big ones at that. There are about 50,000 international NGOs that compete for about $10 billion in funding from the International Financial Institutions, the imperial powers, and local governments. Just like corporations, they have chief executive officers, boards made up of mainly capitalists, a middle class professional staff, and then down at the bottom poorly paid laborers in their countries of operation.
These NGOs raise their funds by highlighting problems in the third world especially catastrophes like the earthquake in Haiti, branding their relief projects, and then advertising their efforts to imperial, corporate, and individual donors to raise more money. They are in the business of poverty and disaster management. A couple of people in the international NGOs actually told me that when the earthquake struck in Haiti some NGO bureaucrats, excited with the new prospects of fundraising, celebrated the disaster as if they had struck oil.
As capitalist entities they affirm and exacerbate the class division in the societies in which they operate. Anthropologist Mark Schuller describes their impact in Haiti. He writes: "In addition to higher salaries, NGO employees have access to many privileges: clean drinking water, electricity to charge cell phones, e-mail and the ever-prized U.S. visa. These privileges in turn plug individuals into the global economy. People's first visits to the U.S. solidified neoliberal ideologies. This artificial, dependent middle class--the "NGO class"--thus directly support a form of economic globalization, accomplishes ideological work and further stratifies the Haitian population, selecting a chosen few for privileges denied Haiti's poor majority."
For all their professed humanitarianism, these NGOs in no way solve the ongoing crisis and at best mitigate the disaster in societies where they operate. Since they are inter-twined with neoliberal capitalism, they cannot and will not challenge the systemic roots of third world poverty that turn natural disasters into social catastrophes. They are in fact complicit with the problem. Thus, they do a booming business putting band-aids on the mortal wounds their neoliberal donors inflict. Haiti is the paradigmatic example. As Haiti spirals into greater poverty NGOs have exploded to over 10,000 across the country. The worse the conditions have gotten, the more NGOs have sprouted up, in a cycle of growing needs ever more inadequately met.
MW---Why has it been so hard to make progress in addressing the basic needs of the Haitian people? Is it a question of funding, logistics, access to heavy equipment, politics or something else?
Ashley Smith----It is really not a technical or logistics problem at all. Nor is it a problem with the Haitian people, as racists often argue. As Alex Dupuy documents in his brilliant book, Haiti and the World Economy, the fault of the Haitian underdevelopment lies with the Haitian ruling class and imperialism. After the Haitian Revolution in 1804—the first successful slave revolution in history—the new Haitian ruling class tried to maintain plantation farming for export to the world market. But the freed slaves fled the plantations to become peasants farming for subsistence and small-scale export. Unable to sustain their capitalist plantations let alone industrialize the society, the ruling class split into two parts—urban merchants and rural land barons, both parasitic on the domestic peasant majority and dependent on international capitalism.
Imperialism, however, was and is the central cause of Haiti's underdevelopment. The imperial powers—all slaveholders at the time—were terrified by the threat of the Haitian Revolution. They initially imposed an economic embargo on the fledgling society and then trapped Haiti in debt. In return for recognition of the country in 1825, France forced Haiti to pay 150 million francs, the equivalent today of $21 billion, in compensation for the loss of its slaves. Thus France structurally adjusted Haiti at its birth. As the rising imperial power in the region, the U.S. developed a predatory relationship to Haiti, invading and occupying several times at the end of the 19th century to ensure debt repayments. It occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, repressing the population and setting up the dreaded Haitian Armed Forces. Later it backed the Duvalier family dictatorship as an anticommunist ally against Castro in Cuba.
At the end of the 1970s, the U.S. convinced Baby Doc to implement a neoliberal plan to open up Haiti to American agribusiness, build sweatshops for the multinational textile industry, and set up swank tourist resorts for yuppies. Impoverished and fed up, the Haitian peasants, workers and urban poor rose up in the mass movement, Lavalas, that drove Baby Doc from power and then elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide President in 1990 on a program of social reform. The U.S. responded by backing the Haitian ruling class in two coups, one in 1991 and another in 2004. Their aim was to repress the mass movement and block the attempt to use the Haitian state to improve conditions for the country's masses. Since 2004, it has maintained a UN occupation in the country to police resistance, while it has tried to impose the same old economic plan.
MW---Author Mike Davis says that NGOs are a form of "soft imperialism." If he's right, then the work of the thousands of NGOs in Haiti could be seen as a form of occupation? Your thoughts?
Ashley Smith---He's absolutely right about the international NGOs. In the past, imperialism used religious institutions as a means to justify conquest, colonization and plunder as a civilizing mission—they were bringing the light of Christianity to the heathen masses. Today while the imperial powers plunder the third world, they funnel money into NGOs to make it seem like they are interested in aiding the very people they are robbing and exploiting. Haiti is perhaps the worst example of this process. While the U.S. imposed neoliberal plans that impoverished the people, it poured money into NGOs, cultivating the self-congratulatory illusion that it is helping Haiti.
Just like the religious institutions of the past, the NGOs are part and parcel of imperial domination of third world countries. In Haiti, for example, 70 percent of the NGO funding comes from the U.S. state. As a result, they become vehicles for control through provision of the societies in which they operate. As Peter Hallward argues, "the bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti and to other countries in the region is explicitly designed to pursue interests--the promotion of a secure investment climate, the nurturing of links with local business elites, the preservation of a docile and low-wage labor force, and so on."
Perhaps one of the worst impacts of the NGOs is how they have become a vehicle for the cooptation of the indigenous resistance. As Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums, "Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at co-opting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left. Even if there are some celebrated exceptions—such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums—the broad impact of the NGO/'civil society revolution"…has been to bureaucratize and de-radicalize urban social movements."
MW---To what extent are NGOs being used to usurp the power of the state? Do they pose a direct threat to Haiti's sovereignty?
Ashley Smith---This is the most insidious face of the imperial use of NGOs in Haiti. As I noted earlier, even before the earthquake, imperial and corporate donors were bypassing the Haitian state to give money directly to international NGOs. They thus exacerbated the gutting of the Haitian state so much so that Haitians now refer to their own country as ruled not by their own government but by a "Republic of NGOs."
That phrase captures how Haiti has lost its sovereignty. But the reality is even worse than the phrase implies. The NGOs are not part of any republic; they are not democratically accountable to the Haitian people or even its government, but to international donors. And they are not truly non-governmental. They are in fact so dependent on imperial powers for their donations that they are better thought of as subsidiaries of those governments.
In reality, the NGOs are part of how U.S. imperialism rules Haiti today as a neocolony. It uses the UN occupation force as its repressive arm. And it uses NGOs to oversee social services. The combination of the UN and the NGOs undercut any notion that the Haitian state let alone its people control their own country.
MW---What is the relationship between the Pentagon and the NGOs?
Ashley Smith----Historically, NGOs had an established doctrine of neutrality in conflicts and refused to endorse imperial intervention. However, as Conor Foley documents in The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, many of the big NGOs like Doctors Without Borders have abandoned that stance and call for imperial intervention. They are thus handmaidens of imperial domination.
In Haiti, the U.S. deliberately used willing NGOs as allies in their destabilization and eventual overthrow of the Aristide government. The U.S. imposed an aid embargo to prevent Aristide from implementing any social reforms. They then channeled money through USAID into NGOs. Many of these NGOs would line up with the ruling class opposition, the Group of 184, some even backed the U.S.-backed death squads, and others supported the U.S. coup.
Today, Haiti is a neocolony of the United States. The U.S. has effective state power through the UN occupation. It controls its economy through IHRC. It dominates almost every aspect of civil society through its NGO raj. For all these reasons former OAS representative Ricardo Seitenfus said the UN was "transforming the Haitians into prisoners on their own island."
Ashley Smith writes for the Socialist Worker. He can be reached at: ashley05401@yahoo.com
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state and can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com
An Interview With Ashley Smith
By Mike Whitney
January 26, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- MW--In your article in CounterPunch titled "Haiti and the Aid Racket", you said that "The catastrophe in Haiti has revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry". Can you explain what you mean?
Ashley Smith---After the earthquake, the imperial powers and international NGOs collected billions of dollars with the promise that they would provide relief for Haiti's quake victims and then rebuild the country. Today, even mainstream figures are profoundly critical of what the U.S. and the NGOs have done. For example, Ricardo Seitenfus, the special representative from the Organization of American States (OAS) to Haiti, told the Swiss daily Le Temps, "If there is failure of international aid, it is Haiti."
For that moment of honesty, the OAS fired Seitenfus. But he was right. Today, there are still over 810,000 people, essentially quake refugees, trapped in 1,150 tent camps in and around Port-au-Prince. Only 15 percent of the promised transitional housing has been built. Astonishingly only 5 percent of the rubble has been removed. And there has been next to no reconstruction.
The U.S. is principally to blame for this failure. Initially the Obama Administration used the cover of humanitarianism to deploy 20,000 troops and 17 naval ships to bolster the UN occupation in policing desperate people and preventing an exodus of refugees. This military response, as Doctors without Borders complained at the time, actually interfered with the distribution of humanitarian aid. Once it did turn to relief and reconstruction, it set up the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) under its control, which garnered promises of $10 billion in donations from the imperial powers. The IHRC, however, has only collected 10 percent of the promised sums. When and if they do collect the donations, the U.S. aims to implement a neoliberal plan of to exploit Haiti's cheap labor in sweatshops, export-oriented plantations, and tourist resorts. So what they claim to be an effort, in IHRC co-chair Bill Clinton's words, an "effort to build back better" is actually a ruse for the exploitation of Haiti.
The international NGOs' record is almost as abysmal. To be clear, some have done invaluable work, especially Partners in Health. But on the whole, the NGOs have failed the Haitian people. The NGOs have not spent the enormous sums of money they collected. The Red Cross, for instance, garnered $479 million in donations for Haiti, but has only spent or committed $245 million to projects. The NGOs do not coordinate their relief efforts. They are engaged in capitalist competition with one another for funds and are pre-occupied with branding their separate efforts so that they can advertise their "successes" to their donors. As a result, the NGOs provide at best provide a chaotic jumble of services to quake victims. At worst, they are sitting on piles of cash.
In truth, the U.S., its allies, and NGO surrogates have overseen and in many cases caused worsening conditions in Haiti worse over the last year. The failure of reconstruction left hundreds of thousands trapped in camps, vulnerable to storms, disease, and violence brought on by desperate conditions. On top of that, the UN occupation forces, specifically a contingent of Nepalese soldiers, most likely introduced cholera that has now become a countrywide epidemic, killing thousands and infecting hundreds of thousands more. The U.S. then precipitated a political crisis by pushing for parliamentary election to give a democratic veneer to American neocolonial rule. The election was a sham; it excluded the country's most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, and was marred by massive fraud and a contested outcome. Finally, like a nightmare, the former dictator, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, has returned to the country from exile, throwing the country into political chaos.
MW---Professor David Harvey says that NGOs act as "Trojan horses for neoliberal globalization." Do you agree with Harvey and, if so, would you elaborate?
Ashley Smith---Let's be clear first that NGOs form a big range of groups, from reformist organizations to large international humanitarians ones and others that are essentially appendages of various state powers, both major and minor. Some reformist NGOs have played a significant role in the World Social Forum and others are clearly on the side of neoliberal globalization. Harvey is absolutely correct about the role of the international NGOs. There is an insidious relationship between them, U.S. imperialism and neoliberal globalization.
After the economic crisis of the 1970s, the U.S. abandoned Keynesianism, whose emphasis on state-led development had failed, and adopted market fundamentalism, aka neoliberalism, at home and abroad to restore profits and growth in the system. In the U.S. the ruling class busted unions, cut the welfare state, and deregulated the economy. Internationally, as Walden Bello documents in Dark Victory, the U.S. used the debt crisis to compel third world countries to open up their markets, abolish regulations on foreign and domestic capital, privatize state industry, and shred state-run social programs.
Neoliberalism worked for the capitalist class, restoring profit and growth—however uneven—in the world system. But neoliberalism exacted an enormous social price everywhere. In the third world, it dislocated peasants, impoverished workers, and created enormous slums in many parts of the world. On top of that, the hollowing out of the states left many countries unable to provide services, regulate capital, or respond to natural and social crises.
The imperial powers, International Financial Institutions, and corporate foundations diverted their money from third world states to NGOs to fill the vacuum. In this way, the NGOs have actually accelerated the opening up of third world economies. In an apt phrase, David Harvey calls the process "privatization by NGO."
MW---Do the big NGOs see natural disasters as a "growth industry" or is their interest strictly humanitarian?
Ashley Smith---In reality the answer is both. They are part and parcel of what Naomi Klein has called disaster capitalism. International NGOs are really businesses and big ones at that. There are about 50,000 international NGOs that compete for about $10 billion in funding from the International Financial Institutions, the imperial powers, and local governments. Just like corporations, they have chief executive officers, boards made up of mainly capitalists, a middle class professional staff, and then down at the bottom poorly paid laborers in their countries of operation.
These NGOs raise their funds by highlighting problems in the third world especially catastrophes like the earthquake in Haiti, branding their relief projects, and then advertising their efforts to imperial, corporate, and individual donors to raise more money. They are in the business of poverty and disaster management. A couple of people in the international NGOs actually told me that when the earthquake struck in Haiti some NGO bureaucrats, excited with the new prospects of fundraising, celebrated the disaster as if they had struck oil.
As capitalist entities they affirm and exacerbate the class division in the societies in which they operate. Anthropologist Mark Schuller describes their impact in Haiti. He writes: "In addition to higher salaries, NGO employees have access to many privileges: clean drinking water, electricity to charge cell phones, e-mail and the ever-prized U.S. visa. These privileges in turn plug individuals into the global economy. People's first visits to the U.S. solidified neoliberal ideologies. This artificial, dependent middle class--the "NGO class"--thus directly support a form of economic globalization, accomplishes ideological work and further stratifies the Haitian population, selecting a chosen few for privileges denied Haiti's poor majority."
For all their professed humanitarianism, these NGOs in no way solve the ongoing crisis and at best mitigate the disaster in societies where they operate. Since they are inter-twined with neoliberal capitalism, they cannot and will not challenge the systemic roots of third world poverty that turn natural disasters into social catastrophes. They are in fact complicit with the problem. Thus, they do a booming business putting band-aids on the mortal wounds their neoliberal donors inflict. Haiti is the paradigmatic example. As Haiti spirals into greater poverty NGOs have exploded to over 10,000 across the country. The worse the conditions have gotten, the more NGOs have sprouted up, in a cycle of growing needs ever more inadequately met.
MW---Why has it been so hard to make progress in addressing the basic needs of the Haitian people? Is it a question of funding, logistics, access to heavy equipment, politics or something else?
Ashley Smith----It is really not a technical or logistics problem at all. Nor is it a problem with the Haitian people, as racists often argue. As Alex Dupuy documents in his brilliant book, Haiti and the World Economy, the fault of the Haitian underdevelopment lies with the Haitian ruling class and imperialism. After the Haitian Revolution in 1804—the first successful slave revolution in history—the new Haitian ruling class tried to maintain plantation farming for export to the world market. But the freed slaves fled the plantations to become peasants farming for subsistence and small-scale export. Unable to sustain their capitalist plantations let alone industrialize the society, the ruling class split into two parts—urban merchants and rural land barons, both parasitic on the domestic peasant majority and dependent on international capitalism.
Imperialism, however, was and is the central cause of Haiti's underdevelopment. The imperial powers—all slaveholders at the time—were terrified by the threat of the Haitian Revolution. They initially imposed an economic embargo on the fledgling society and then trapped Haiti in debt. In return for recognition of the country in 1825, France forced Haiti to pay 150 million francs, the equivalent today of $21 billion, in compensation for the loss of its slaves. Thus France structurally adjusted Haiti at its birth. As the rising imperial power in the region, the U.S. developed a predatory relationship to Haiti, invading and occupying several times at the end of the 19th century to ensure debt repayments. It occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, repressing the population and setting up the dreaded Haitian Armed Forces. Later it backed the Duvalier family dictatorship as an anticommunist ally against Castro in Cuba.
At the end of the 1970s, the U.S. convinced Baby Doc to implement a neoliberal plan to open up Haiti to American agribusiness, build sweatshops for the multinational textile industry, and set up swank tourist resorts for yuppies. Impoverished and fed up, the Haitian peasants, workers and urban poor rose up in the mass movement, Lavalas, that drove Baby Doc from power and then elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide President in 1990 on a program of social reform. The U.S. responded by backing the Haitian ruling class in two coups, one in 1991 and another in 2004. Their aim was to repress the mass movement and block the attempt to use the Haitian state to improve conditions for the country's masses. Since 2004, it has maintained a UN occupation in the country to police resistance, while it has tried to impose the same old economic plan.
MW---Author Mike Davis says that NGOs are a form of "soft imperialism." If he's right, then the work of the thousands of NGOs in Haiti could be seen as a form of occupation? Your thoughts?
Ashley Smith---He's absolutely right about the international NGOs. In the past, imperialism used religious institutions as a means to justify conquest, colonization and plunder as a civilizing mission—they were bringing the light of Christianity to the heathen masses. Today while the imperial powers plunder the third world, they funnel money into NGOs to make it seem like they are interested in aiding the very people they are robbing and exploiting. Haiti is perhaps the worst example of this process. While the U.S. imposed neoliberal plans that impoverished the people, it poured money into NGOs, cultivating the self-congratulatory illusion that it is helping Haiti.
Just like the religious institutions of the past, the NGOs are part and parcel of imperial domination of third world countries. In Haiti, for example, 70 percent of the NGO funding comes from the U.S. state. As a result, they become vehicles for control through provision of the societies in which they operate. As Peter Hallward argues, "the bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti and to other countries in the region is explicitly designed to pursue interests--the promotion of a secure investment climate, the nurturing of links with local business elites, the preservation of a docile and low-wage labor force, and so on."
Perhaps one of the worst impacts of the NGOs is how they have become a vehicle for the cooptation of the indigenous resistance. As Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums, "Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at co-opting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left. Even if there are some celebrated exceptions—such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums—the broad impact of the NGO/'civil society revolution"…has been to bureaucratize and de-radicalize urban social movements."
MW---To what extent are NGOs being used to usurp the power of the state? Do they pose a direct threat to Haiti's sovereignty?
Ashley Smith---This is the most insidious face of the imperial use of NGOs in Haiti. As I noted earlier, even before the earthquake, imperial and corporate donors were bypassing the Haitian state to give money directly to international NGOs. They thus exacerbated the gutting of the Haitian state so much so that Haitians now refer to their own country as ruled not by their own government but by a "Republic of NGOs."
That phrase captures how Haiti has lost its sovereignty. But the reality is even worse than the phrase implies. The NGOs are not part of any republic; they are not democratically accountable to the Haitian people or even its government, but to international donors. And they are not truly non-governmental. They are in fact so dependent on imperial powers for their donations that they are better thought of as subsidiaries of those governments.
In reality, the NGOs are part of how U.S. imperialism rules Haiti today as a neocolony. It uses the UN occupation force as its repressive arm. And it uses NGOs to oversee social services. The combination of the UN and the NGOs undercut any notion that the Haitian state let alone its people control their own country.
MW---What is the relationship between the Pentagon and the NGOs?
Ashley Smith----Historically, NGOs had an established doctrine of neutrality in conflicts and refused to endorse imperial intervention. However, as Conor Foley documents in The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, many of the big NGOs like Doctors Without Borders have abandoned that stance and call for imperial intervention. They are thus handmaidens of imperial domination.
In Haiti, the U.S. deliberately used willing NGOs as allies in their destabilization and eventual overthrow of the Aristide government. The U.S. imposed an aid embargo to prevent Aristide from implementing any social reforms. They then channeled money through USAID into NGOs. Many of these NGOs would line up with the ruling class opposition, the Group of 184, some even backed the U.S.-backed death squads, and others supported the U.S. coup.
Today, Haiti is a neocolony of the United States. The U.S. has effective state power through the UN occupation. It controls its economy through IHRC. It dominates almost every aspect of civil society through its NGO raj. For all these reasons former OAS representative Ricardo Seitenfus said the UN was "transforming the Haitians into prisoners on their own island."
Ashley Smith writes for the Socialist Worker. He can be reached at: ashley05401@yahoo.com
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state and can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com
Saturday, June 19, 2010
U.S. Cracks Down on Farmers Who Hire Children
June 18, 2010
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
WHITE LAKE, N.C. — The Obama administration has opened a broad campaign of enforcement against farmers who employ children and underpay workers, hiring hundreds of investigators and raising fines for labor and wage violators.
A flurry of fines and mounting public pressure on blueberry farmers is only the opening salvo, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in an interview. Ms. Solis, the daughter of an immigrant farm worker, said she was making enforcement of farm-labor rules a priority. At the same time, Congress is considering whether to rewrite the law that still allows 12-year-olds to work on farms during the summer with almost no limits.
The blueberry crop has been drawing workers to eastern North Carolina for decades, but as the harvest got under way in late May, growers stung by bad publicity and federal fines were scrambling to clean up their act, even going beyond the current law to keep all children off the fields. The growers were also ensuring that the workers, mainly Hispanic immigrants, would make at least the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
“I picked blueberries last year, and my 4-year-old brother tried to, but he got stuck in the mud,” said Miguel, a 12-year-old child of migrants. “The inspectors fined the farmers, and this year no kids are allowed.”
Child and rights advocates said they were encouraged by these signs of federal resolve, but they were also waiting to see how wide and lasting the changes would be. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of children under 18 toil each year, harvesting crops from apples to onions, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch detailing hazards to their health and schooling and criticizing the Labor Department for past inaction.
“The news from North Carolina shows the value of strong enforcement,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch and the report’s author. “We also need to change the law to make sure this isn’t a flash in the pan.”
Unannounced visits to several fields here by a reporter and by migrant aid groups, and interviews with workers from more than a dozen blueberry farms, indicate that the changes — for this crop and this region — are real.
Soon after dawn, the vans stream through the roads here, ferrying migrant workers from trailer camps to blueberry farms, where they pluck the fragile fruits for 10 hours or more.
“Last year, the fields were filled with children, so this is encouraging,” said Emily Drakage, North Carolina regional coordinator of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, a national network of state and private agencies.
Beyond barring children from the fields, growers here also spruced up migrants’ trailers and barracks and adopted scanners to record the buckets of berries collected by each worker.
A federal law adopted in 1938 exempts agriculture from child-labor rules that apply to other industries. It permits children 12 and up to work without limits outside of school hours, exposing them, critics say, to pesticides that may pose a special threat to growing bodies and robbing too many of childhood itself.
After years of what rights groups said was lax attention, the Labor Department this week announced a large increase in the fines that farmers can face for employing children, to as much as $11,000 per child, from around $1,000.
On May 24, the department fined a labor contractor and a farmer in Arizona more than $30,000 for employing 10- and 11-year-old children, underpaying workers and other violations.
In an interview, Ms. Solis said she had added more than 250 workplace investigators, bringing the department’s total to near 1,000, and started a campaign to educate workers about their rights. Acknowledging that officials had sometimes ignored child farm violations in the past, she added, “I am totally changing the direction of this department.”
But to make deep inroads, Congress would first have to change the law. A proposal to ban the hiring of 12- and 13-year-olds, cap working hours by 14- and 15-year-olds and keep teenagers out of hazardous jobs is gaining support in Congress. Some 91 representatives have co-sponsored the Care Act, put forth by Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California.
Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said he planned to introduce a similar bill in the Senate. The American Farm Bureau, the nation’s largest farm lobbying organization, has opposed it, saying it could imperil the tradition of children working in farm communities.
This spring’s restrictions on teenagers in North Carolina were unsettling for some parents who said they counted on their earnings, and for teenage migrants, some traveling on their own.
“I need to help pay our own way,” said Edgar, 15, who has helped support two younger siblings since his mother rushed back to Mexico in 2009 for a family emergency. Last spring, he often skipped school to spend 10-hour days picking blueberries, he said. He was disappointed to be turned away by a farm on a recent Saturday and hoped that growers would let him work after the school year ended.
Migrant farm workers, many of them Mexicans who are in the country illegally, remain desperately poor, traveling across the country for sporadic stretches of backbreaking work, vulnerable to gouging by contractors and afraid to complain. Although a federal program tries to aid migrant children with their education, few finish high school.
The Migrant Head Start program aims to give parents an alternative to taking infants and toddlers into the fields. Here in Bladen County, a new Head Start center opened in 2008. It provides free day care to 138 children but still falls short of the need.
In nearby Wayne County, Celidania Diaz, who has worked there for nine years, planned to start picking when Head Start’s free bus service began in her area the following week.
“With the kids, the farms are very strict now,” she said. “It was better before, because if you didn’t have someone to take care of the kids, you could take them along.”
Her family’s situation is typical: they and a second family share an aging trailer, paying $50 a week each. The workers also pay $6 a day to a van owner to transport them to farms nearly two hours away. On good days, in fields where plump berries are still plentiful, they may earn $80 to $100, filling four buckets an hour at $2.50 a bucket to surpass the minimum wage. But when it rains, the berries are too fragile to pick and they cannot work.
Blueberry farmers here, like George Mote Jr., insist that they have never wanted children in their fields but that parents would sneak them in; rights groups say the farmers often looked the other way.
Shaken by fines imposed last August on 9 blueberry farms and 17 labor contractors in North Carolina, owners this spring played it safe by going beyond the law to bar anyone under 16 from the fields. But some farmers said that when school ended this month, they would allow younger teenagers to work, as the law allows.
Rafaela, 35, who lives in a three-bedroom trailer with her two children and six men placed there temporarily by a labor contractor, said not all parents supported strong controls on work by teenagers. “In the summertime when there’s no school, I think it’s O.K.,” said Rafaela, who did not provide her last name because she feared scrutiny by immigration officials. “But to take them out of school, that’s not right.”
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
WHITE LAKE, N.C. — The Obama administration has opened a broad campaign of enforcement against farmers who employ children and underpay workers, hiring hundreds of investigators and raising fines for labor and wage violators.
A flurry of fines and mounting public pressure on blueberry farmers is only the opening salvo, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in an interview. Ms. Solis, the daughter of an immigrant farm worker, said she was making enforcement of farm-labor rules a priority. At the same time, Congress is considering whether to rewrite the law that still allows 12-year-olds to work on farms during the summer with almost no limits.
The blueberry crop has been drawing workers to eastern North Carolina for decades, but as the harvest got under way in late May, growers stung by bad publicity and federal fines were scrambling to clean up their act, even going beyond the current law to keep all children off the fields. The growers were also ensuring that the workers, mainly Hispanic immigrants, would make at least the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
“I picked blueberries last year, and my 4-year-old brother tried to, but he got stuck in the mud,” said Miguel, a 12-year-old child of migrants. “The inspectors fined the farmers, and this year no kids are allowed.”
Child and rights advocates said they were encouraged by these signs of federal resolve, but they were also waiting to see how wide and lasting the changes would be. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of children under 18 toil each year, harvesting crops from apples to onions, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch detailing hazards to their health and schooling and criticizing the Labor Department for past inaction.
“The news from North Carolina shows the value of strong enforcement,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch and the report’s author. “We also need to change the law to make sure this isn’t a flash in the pan.”
Unannounced visits to several fields here by a reporter and by migrant aid groups, and interviews with workers from more than a dozen blueberry farms, indicate that the changes — for this crop and this region — are real.
Soon after dawn, the vans stream through the roads here, ferrying migrant workers from trailer camps to blueberry farms, where they pluck the fragile fruits for 10 hours or more.
“Last year, the fields were filled with children, so this is encouraging,” said Emily Drakage, North Carolina regional coordinator of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, a national network of state and private agencies.
Beyond barring children from the fields, growers here also spruced up migrants’ trailers and barracks and adopted scanners to record the buckets of berries collected by each worker.
A federal law adopted in 1938 exempts agriculture from child-labor rules that apply to other industries. It permits children 12 and up to work without limits outside of school hours, exposing them, critics say, to pesticides that may pose a special threat to growing bodies and robbing too many of childhood itself.
After years of what rights groups said was lax attention, the Labor Department this week announced a large increase in the fines that farmers can face for employing children, to as much as $11,000 per child, from around $1,000.
On May 24, the department fined a labor contractor and a farmer in Arizona more than $30,000 for employing 10- and 11-year-old children, underpaying workers and other violations.
In an interview, Ms. Solis said she had added more than 250 workplace investigators, bringing the department’s total to near 1,000, and started a campaign to educate workers about their rights. Acknowledging that officials had sometimes ignored child farm violations in the past, she added, “I am totally changing the direction of this department.”
But to make deep inroads, Congress would first have to change the law. A proposal to ban the hiring of 12- and 13-year-olds, cap working hours by 14- and 15-year-olds and keep teenagers out of hazardous jobs is gaining support in Congress. Some 91 representatives have co-sponsored the Care Act, put forth by Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California.
Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said he planned to introduce a similar bill in the Senate. The American Farm Bureau, the nation’s largest farm lobbying organization, has opposed it, saying it could imperil the tradition of children working in farm communities.
This spring’s restrictions on teenagers in North Carolina were unsettling for some parents who said they counted on their earnings, and for teenage migrants, some traveling on their own.
“I need to help pay our own way,” said Edgar, 15, who has helped support two younger siblings since his mother rushed back to Mexico in 2009 for a family emergency. Last spring, he often skipped school to spend 10-hour days picking blueberries, he said. He was disappointed to be turned away by a farm on a recent Saturday and hoped that growers would let him work after the school year ended.
Migrant farm workers, many of them Mexicans who are in the country illegally, remain desperately poor, traveling across the country for sporadic stretches of backbreaking work, vulnerable to gouging by contractors and afraid to complain. Although a federal program tries to aid migrant children with their education, few finish high school.
The Migrant Head Start program aims to give parents an alternative to taking infants and toddlers into the fields. Here in Bladen County, a new Head Start center opened in 2008. It provides free day care to 138 children but still falls short of the need.
In nearby Wayne County, Celidania Diaz, who has worked there for nine years, planned to start picking when Head Start’s free bus service began in her area the following week.
“With the kids, the farms are very strict now,” she said. “It was better before, because if you didn’t have someone to take care of the kids, you could take them along.”
Her family’s situation is typical: they and a second family share an aging trailer, paying $50 a week each. The workers also pay $6 a day to a van owner to transport them to farms nearly two hours away. On good days, in fields where plump berries are still plentiful, they may earn $80 to $100, filling four buckets an hour at $2.50 a bucket to surpass the minimum wage. But when it rains, the berries are too fragile to pick and they cannot work.
Blueberry farmers here, like George Mote Jr., insist that they have never wanted children in their fields but that parents would sneak them in; rights groups say the farmers often looked the other way.
Shaken by fines imposed last August on 9 blueberry farms and 17 labor contractors in North Carolina, owners this spring played it safe by going beyond the law to bar anyone under 16 from the fields. But some farmers said that when school ended this month, they would allow younger teenagers to work, as the law allows.
Rafaela, 35, who lives in a three-bedroom trailer with her two children and six men placed there temporarily by a labor contractor, said not all parents supported strong controls on work by teenagers. “In the summertime when there’s no school, I think it’s O.K.,” said Rafaela, who did not provide her last name because she feared scrutiny by immigration officials. “But to take them out of school, that’s not right.”
U.S. Cracks Down on Farmers Who Hire Children
June 18, 2010
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
WHITE LAKE, N.C. — The Obama administration has opened a broad campaign of enforcement against farmers who employ children and underpay workers, hiring hundreds of investigators and raising fines for labor and wage violators.
A flurry of fines and mounting public pressure on blueberry farmers is only the opening salvo, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in an interview. Ms. Solis, the daughter of an immigrant farm worker, said she was making enforcement of farm-labor rules a priority. At the same time, Congress is considering whether to rewrite the law that still allows 12-year-olds to work on farms during the summer with almost no limits.
The blueberry crop has been drawing workers to eastern North Carolina for decades, but as the harvest got under way in late May, growers stung by bad publicity and federal fines were scrambling to clean up their act, even going beyond the current law to keep all children off the fields. The growers were also ensuring that the workers, mainly Hispanic immigrants, would make at least the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
“I picked blueberries last year, and my 4-year-old brother tried to, but he got stuck in the mud,” said Miguel, a 12-year-old child of migrants. “The inspectors fined the farmers, and this year no kids are allowed.”
Child and rights advocates said they were encouraged by these signs of federal resolve, but they were also waiting to see how wide and lasting the changes would be. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of children under 18 toil each year, harvesting crops from apples to onions, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch detailing hazards to their health and schooling and criticizing the Labor Department for past inaction.
“The news from North Carolina shows the value of strong enforcement,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch and the report’s author. “We also need to change the law to make sure this isn’t a flash in the pan.”
Unannounced visits to several fields here by a reporter and by migrant aid groups, and interviews with workers from more than a dozen blueberry farms, indicate that the changes — for this crop and this region — are real.
Soon after dawn, the vans stream through the roads here, ferrying migrant workers from trailer camps to blueberry farms, where they pluck the fragile fruits for 10 hours or more.
“Last year, the fields were filled with children, so this is encouraging,” said Emily Drakage, North Carolina regional coordinator of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, a national network of state and private agencies.
Beyond barring children from the fields, growers here also spruced up migrants’ trailers and barracks and adopted scanners to record the buckets of berries collected by each worker.
A federal law adopted in 1938 exempts agriculture from child-labor rules that apply to other industries. It permits children 12 and up to work without limits outside of school hours, exposing them, critics say, to pesticides that may pose a special threat to growing bodies and robbing too many of childhood itself.
After years of what rights groups said was lax attention, the Labor Department this week announced a large increase in the fines that farmers can face for employing children, to as much as $11,000 per child, from around $1,000.
On May 24, the department fined a labor contractor and a farmer in Arizona more than $30,000 for employing 10- and 11-year-old children, underpaying workers and other violations.
In an interview, Ms. Solis said she had added more than 250 workplace investigators, bringing the department’s total to near 1,000, and started a campaign to educate workers about their rights. Acknowledging that officials had sometimes ignored child farm violations in the past, she added, “I am totally changing the direction of this department.”
But to make deep inroads, Congress would first have to change the law. A proposal to ban the hiring of 12- and 13-year-olds, cap working hours by 14- and 15-year-olds and keep teenagers out of hazardous jobs is gaining support in Congress. Some 91 representatives have co-sponsored the Care Act, put forth by Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California.
Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said he planned to introduce a similar bill in the Senate. The American Farm Bureau, the nation’s largest farm lobbying organization, has opposed it, saying it could imperil the tradition of children working in farm communities.
This spring’s restrictions on teenagers in North Carolina were unsettling for some parents who said they counted on their earnings, and for teenage migrants, some traveling on their own.
“I need to help pay our own way,” said Edgar, 15, who has helped support two younger siblings since his mother rushed back to Mexico in 2009 for a family emergency. Last spring, he often skipped school to spend 10-hour days picking blueberries, he said. He was disappointed to be turned away by a farm on a recent Saturday and hoped that growers would let him work after the school year ended.
Migrant farm workers, many of them Mexicans who are in the country illegally, remain desperately poor, traveling across the country for sporadic stretches of backbreaking work, vulnerable to gouging by contractors and afraid to complain. Although a federal program tries to aid migrant children with their education, few finish high school.
The Migrant Head Start program aims to give parents an alternative to taking infants and toddlers into the fields. Here in Bladen County, a new Head Start center opened in 2008. It provides free day care to 138 children but still falls short of the need.
In nearby Wayne County, Celidania Diaz, who has worked there for nine years, planned to start picking when Head Start’s free bus service began in her area the following week.
“With the kids, the farms are very strict now,” she said. “It was better before, because if you didn’t have someone to take care of the kids, you could take them along.”
Her family’s situation is typical: they and a second family share an aging trailer, paying $50 a week each. The workers also pay $6 a day to a van owner to transport them to farms nearly two hours away. On good days, in fields where plump berries are still plentiful, they may earn $80 to $100, filling four buckets an hour at $2.50 a bucket to surpass the minimum wage. But when it rains, the berries are too fragile to pick and they cannot work.
Blueberry farmers here, like George Mote Jr., insist that they have never wanted children in their fields but that parents would sneak them in; rights groups say the farmers often looked the other way.
Shaken by fines imposed last August on 9 blueberry farms and 17 labor contractors in North Carolina, owners this spring played it safe by going beyond the law to bar anyone under 16 from the fields. But some farmers said that when school ended this month, they would allow younger teenagers to work, as the law allows.
Rafaela, 35, who lives in a three-bedroom trailer with her two children and six men placed there temporarily by a labor contractor, said not all parents supported strong controls on work by teenagers. “In the summertime when there’s no school, I think it’s O.K.,” said Rafaela, who did not provide her last name because she feared scrutiny by immigration officials. “But to take them out of school, that’s not right.”
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
WHITE LAKE, N.C. — The Obama administration has opened a broad campaign of enforcement against farmers who employ children and underpay workers, hiring hundreds of investigators and raising fines for labor and wage violators.
A flurry of fines and mounting public pressure on blueberry farmers is only the opening salvo, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in an interview. Ms. Solis, the daughter of an immigrant farm worker, said she was making enforcement of farm-labor rules a priority. At the same time, Congress is considering whether to rewrite the law that still allows 12-year-olds to work on farms during the summer with almost no limits.
The blueberry crop has been drawing workers to eastern North Carolina for decades, but as the harvest got under way in late May, growers stung by bad publicity and federal fines were scrambling to clean up their act, even going beyond the current law to keep all children off the fields. The growers were also ensuring that the workers, mainly Hispanic immigrants, would make at least the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
“I picked blueberries last year, and my 4-year-old brother tried to, but he got stuck in the mud,” said Miguel, a 12-year-old child of migrants. “The inspectors fined the farmers, and this year no kids are allowed.”
Child and rights advocates said they were encouraged by these signs of federal resolve, but they were also waiting to see how wide and lasting the changes would be. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of children under 18 toil each year, harvesting crops from apples to onions, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch detailing hazards to their health and schooling and criticizing the Labor Department for past inaction.
“The news from North Carolina shows the value of strong enforcement,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch and the report’s author. “We also need to change the law to make sure this isn’t a flash in the pan.”
Unannounced visits to several fields here by a reporter and by migrant aid groups, and interviews with workers from more than a dozen blueberry farms, indicate that the changes — for this crop and this region — are real.
Soon after dawn, the vans stream through the roads here, ferrying migrant workers from trailer camps to blueberry farms, where they pluck the fragile fruits for 10 hours or more.
“Last year, the fields were filled with children, so this is encouraging,” said Emily Drakage, North Carolina regional coordinator of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, a national network of state and private agencies.
Beyond barring children from the fields, growers here also spruced up migrants’ trailers and barracks and adopted scanners to record the buckets of berries collected by each worker.
A federal law adopted in 1938 exempts agriculture from child-labor rules that apply to other industries. It permits children 12 and up to work without limits outside of school hours, exposing them, critics say, to pesticides that may pose a special threat to growing bodies and robbing too many of childhood itself.
After years of what rights groups said was lax attention, the Labor Department this week announced a large increase in the fines that farmers can face for employing children, to as much as $11,000 per child, from around $1,000.
On May 24, the department fined a labor contractor and a farmer in Arizona more than $30,000 for employing 10- and 11-year-old children, underpaying workers and other violations.
In an interview, Ms. Solis said she had added more than 250 workplace investigators, bringing the department’s total to near 1,000, and started a campaign to educate workers about their rights. Acknowledging that officials had sometimes ignored child farm violations in the past, she added, “I am totally changing the direction of this department.”
But to make deep inroads, Congress would first have to change the law. A proposal to ban the hiring of 12- and 13-year-olds, cap working hours by 14- and 15-year-olds and keep teenagers out of hazardous jobs is gaining support in Congress. Some 91 representatives have co-sponsored the Care Act, put forth by Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California.
Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said he planned to introduce a similar bill in the Senate. The American Farm Bureau, the nation’s largest farm lobbying organization, has opposed it, saying it could imperil the tradition of children working in farm communities.
This spring’s restrictions on teenagers in North Carolina were unsettling for some parents who said they counted on their earnings, and for teenage migrants, some traveling on their own.
“I need to help pay our own way,” said Edgar, 15, who has helped support two younger siblings since his mother rushed back to Mexico in 2009 for a family emergency. Last spring, he often skipped school to spend 10-hour days picking blueberries, he said. He was disappointed to be turned away by a farm on a recent Saturday and hoped that growers would let him work after the school year ended.
Migrant farm workers, many of them Mexicans who are in the country illegally, remain desperately poor, traveling across the country for sporadic stretches of backbreaking work, vulnerable to gouging by contractors and afraid to complain. Although a federal program tries to aid migrant children with their education, few finish high school.
The Migrant Head Start program aims to give parents an alternative to taking infants and toddlers into the fields. Here in Bladen County, a new Head Start center opened in 2008. It provides free day care to 138 children but still falls short of the need.
In nearby Wayne County, Celidania Diaz, who has worked there for nine years, planned to start picking when Head Start’s free bus service began in her area the following week.
“With the kids, the farms are very strict now,” she said. “It was better before, because if you didn’t have someone to take care of the kids, you could take them along.”
Her family’s situation is typical: they and a second family share an aging trailer, paying $50 a week each. The workers also pay $6 a day to a van owner to transport them to farms nearly two hours away. On good days, in fields where plump berries are still plentiful, they may earn $80 to $100, filling four buckets an hour at $2.50 a bucket to surpass the minimum wage. But when it rains, the berries are too fragile to pick and they cannot work.
Blueberry farmers here, like George Mote Jr., insist that they have never wanted children in their fields but that parents would sneak them in; rights groups say the farmers often looked the other way.
Shaken by fines imposed last August on 9 blueberry farms and 17 labor contractors in North Carolina, owners this spring played it safe by going beyond the law to bar anyone under 16 from the fields. But some farmers said that when school ended this month, they would allow younger teenagers to work, as the law allows.
Rafaela, 35, who lives in a three-bedroom trailer with her two children and six men placed there temporarily by a labor contractor, said not all parents supported strong controls on work by teenagers. “In the summertime when there’s no school, I think it’s O.K.,” said Rafaela, who did not provide her last name because she feared scrutiny by immigration officials. “But to take them out of school, that’s not right.”
Monday, November 2, 2009
Nationalism in response to Clinton
Paksitani students take Hillary Clinton to task. Now imagine brown nosers of the west and how they would treat her here in India.
BTW - her bs on "how democracy work" is priceless (!!!)
Part II
BTW - her bs on "how democracy work" is priceless (!!!)
Part II
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Race in America (cont) a familiar pattern
July 24, 2009
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Stanley Fish (NY Times Blog)
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Stanley Fish (NY Times Blog)
I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.
As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.
The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?
At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.
The Associated Press Henry Louis Gates, Jr., during a book signing in 2006.
The unkindest cut of all was delivered by some members of the black faculty who had made their peace with Duke traditions and did not want an over-visible newcomer and upstart to trouble waters that had long been still. (The great historian John Hope Franklin was an exception.) When an offer came from Harvard, there wasn’t much I could do. Gates accepted it, and when he left he was pursued by false reports about his tenure at what he had come to call “the plantation.” (I became aware of his feelings when he and I and his father watched the N.C.A.A. championship game between Duke and U.N.L.V. at my house; they were rooting for U.N.L.V.)
Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?
He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.
Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.
Race in America (cont)
July 30th 2009
Two recent incidents that have come under public scrutiny are symptomatic of what many white Americans think but know better than to say on record:
Justin Barrett, a national guardsman in Boston referred to Professor Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" in an email that came to light: “If I was the officer (Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent noncompliance,” the e-mail reads.
Boston Globe
Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and defending racial profiling"
I beleive Ms Landor speaks for many white people in America. Ms. Landor wrote in one post, “O-dumb-a, the situation got ‘out of hand’ because Gates is a racist, not because the officer was DOING HIS JOB!”
In response to one Facebook user who voiced disagreement, Ms. Landor referred to Professor Gates using a vulgarity and added: “And racial profiling does exist, but for good reason. Take a look at this country’s jails: who makes up the majority of inmates? Exactly.”
In another Facebook post, Ms. Landor wrote, “You know what, I am really getting SICK of hearing about how white people are evil racists.” She added: “I get it — white men have dominated for hundreds of years and there’s a lot of anger there. But HOW MUCH MORE can the white people do to correct past injustices of their ancestors?”
New York Times
Two recent incidents that have come under public scrutiny are symptomatic of what many white Americans think but know better than to say on record:
Justin Barrett, a national guardsman in Boston referred to Professor Gates as "a banana-eating jungle monkey" in an email that came to light: “If I was the officer (Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent noncompliance,” the e-mail reads.
Boston Globe
Lee Landor, until recently deputy press secretary to Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, posted comments on her personal Facebook page criticizing Henry Louis Gates and the President, and defending racial profiling"
I beleive Ms Landor speaks for many white people in America. Ms. Landor wrote in one post, “O-dumb-a, the situation got ‘out of hand’ because Gates is a racist, not because the officer was DOING HIS JOB!”
In response to one Facebook user who voiced disagreement, Ms. Landor referred to Professor Gates using a vulgarity and added: “And racial profiling does exist, but for good reason. Take a look at this country’s jails: who makes up the majority of inmates? Exactly.”
In another Facebook post, Ms. Landor wrote, “You know what, I am really getting SICK of hearing about how white people are evil racists.” She added: “I get it — white men have dominated for hundreds of years and there’s a lot of anger there. But HOW MUCH MORE can the white people do to correct past injustices of their ancestors?”
New York Times
Monday, July 27, 2009
Race in America (cont)
Drama in the People's Republic of Cambridge: Boston Has Two Faces
July 22, 2009 0
Richard M. Benjamin
in the Huffington Post
Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger
Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The Harvard scholar was handcuffed having been accused as a thief on his own property.
The first joke reveals an age-old truism: All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from police abuse.
The second joke, well -- that's the New York take on Cambridge. My friend Chester, a white, cutting-edge architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity. Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy. Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living -- oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- exact a stifling, conservative effect.
"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.
Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.
Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people. But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves. Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.
And I am not exactly imagining things.
Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press), named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City."
"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."
A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of theTom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.
Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 national study. Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." Yet Skip Gates got reported by a neighbor and arrested by the police in an apparent bit of racial profiling.
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice. After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there. Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves. What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides. The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby. Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine. This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism. Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.
Poor Skip Gates. He likely experienced racial profiling.
July 22, 2009 0
Richard M. Benjamin
in the Huffington Post
Q: What do you call a black man with a PhD?
A: Nigger
Q: Where do liberal white people go to socially die?
A: Cambridge
These two jokes come to my mind when contemplating the horrific Skip Gates arrest. The Harvard scholar was handcuffed having been accused as a thief on his own property.
The first joke reveals an age-old truism: All the credentials in the world do not protect black men from police abuse.
The second joke, well -- that's the New York take on Cambridge. My friend Chester, a white, cutting-edge architect who had a cushy professorship at Harvard's graduate school, nevertheless fled Cambridge, since he feared he would die of either boredom or conformity. Chester complained that Cambridge's upscale, vanilla lifestyle would condemn him to a life-sentence of smug liberal orthodoxy. Chester noted that Cambridge is the most socially conservative politically liberal bastion in America: The town's p.c. doctrinaire ways of thinking and living -- oh, the dull dinner parties discussing The Nation -- exact a stifling, conservative effect.
"Cambridge is where fancy white people go to spiritually die," Chester likes to say.
Having lived in Cambridge for six months in the mid-1990s, and visited several times in later years, I have similar opinions of Cambridge.
Liberals in Cambridge, in my experience, like to make big statements about improving the status of black people. But they don't have much use for ordinary blacks themselves. Hands down, Cambridge is one of the most racially hostile places I've ever lived.
And I am not exactly imagining things.
Sudhir Venkatesh, the William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day (Penguin Press), named Boston, in 2008, "America's Most Racist City."
"The city puzzled me. I knew about the strong liberal sentiment among the populace, but I didn't have to look far to see that racism was part of its historical core. For example, school integration was violently resisted by many of its white ethnic residents. In sports, the city has been home to some of the most extreme forms of racism -- check out Howard Bryant's terrific book, Shut Out, in which he explores the longstanding bigotry in the Red Sox baseball organization."
A paradox reigns: Next to the racism of theTom Yawkey Red Sox syndicate is the forward-thinking, inclusive racial legacy of Red Auerbach's Celtics.
Even sports expose the two faces of Boston.
Cambridge was ranked "The Most Liberal City in America" by a 2005 national study. Residents even call it "The People's Republic of Cambridge." Yet Skip Gates got reported by a neighbor and arrested by the police in an apparent bit of racial profiling.
Gates's arrest revives Cambridge's, and greater Boston's, two faces: the bastion of liberalism and the fortress of prejudice. After all, Cambridge's mayor, E. Denise Simmons, is a black woman who even grew up there. Before that, Cambridge was the first city to elect an openly gay black man as mayor, Kenneth Reeves. What gives?
Aggravating Boston's racial turmoil, of course, are class divides. The Cambridge police force that arrested Skip Gates is charged with keeping the upscale enclave "safe" from some decidedly downscale neighborhoods nearby. Wealthy communities abutting poor ones often produce a class anxiety that borders on paranoia. Gates' white neighbor who failed to recognize him works at Harvard magazine. This "neighbor" so evidently suffers from said class anxiety, at least as much as racism. Such community anxiety - every "outsider" is a suspect - often demands "tough" policing, which curdles into abusive policing.
Poor Skip Gates. He likely experienced racial profiling.
Race in America
Are the Falsely Accused Required to be Polite to the Police?
Rich Rodgers
I hope we make the most of the national discussion and debate generated by the July 16th arrest of Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police.
If you've been under a rock for the past 10 days, here's the quick version: Gates returned to his house at noon after an overnight flight from China, with his driver, to find he couldn't get into his house. His white neighbor called the police and reported that two men were trying to break into the home. Crowley responds, and the police report is here. Gates tells his side of the story here.
While so much of the debate pretends that the key question is what Gates said to Crowley, it's actually not illegal to yell at a police officer in Massachusetts:
In several cases, the courts in Massachusetts have considered whether a person is guilty of disorderly conduct for verbally abusing a police officer. In Commonwealth v. Lopiano, a 2004 decision, an appeals court held it was not disorderly conduct for a person who angrily yelled at an officer that his civil rights were being violated. In Commonwealth v. Mallahan, a decision rendered last year, an appeals court held that a person who launched into an angry, profanity-laced tirade against a police officer in front of spectators could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.
So Massachusetts law clearly provides that Gates did not commit disorderly conduct.
So Gates appears to have been guilty of nothing illegal, but is there any doubt that he is being judged in the court of public opinion for his alleged statements to the officer? You can bet that a large percentage of white Americans find it easy to believe in the falsehood that Gates's verbal challenges or resistance justified his arrest. This belief--that this black man or anyone else is obligated to be submissive to police officers in speech--should be called out and rejected.
It's human nature for an employee to consider taking a customer's behavior into account when deciding what kind of service to give to them. Professionals do a good job of ignoring insults or slights, but no one is immune from the temptation. For police, though, the bar has to be higher. Too much rides on the outcome. To begin to change the dynamics at the heart of racial profiling and the distrust that many minorities feel toward the police, the training that officers receive has to meaningfully recognize the negative experiences that most minorities in our country share.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a NYT/CBS poll from July 2008 that asked this question:
“Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
66 percent of black men said yes, compared to 9 percent of white men. That's a shocking statistic, but to really try to absorb what this means, you have to think about what really happens on some of these stops.
Blow tells the story of being stopped in Louisiana when he was 18, the president of his college freshmen class, in a car with his friend Andre:
Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.
I was raised to treat police officers with respect, and have always figured it was in my interest to do so. I can think of three times when I was stopped for speeding and let go with a warning, and guessed that the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs' didn't hurt my cause. But being deferential has never implied for me that I needed to swallow a sense of profound injustice. I've never thought for a second that I was or might be threatened, arrested or even shot just because I'm a white guy. Our experiences are so different, we might as well be living in different countries.
It's clear that the experience of prejudice at the hands of the police is all too common for black men and other minorities in the United States. It's asking too much to insist that someone show respect to an institution that has treated them unfairly. It's asking someone to accept a diminished or tarnished standing in the eyes of an entity that has the power to take away their freedom or even their life. For that respect to come, it's going to have to continue to be earned.
It seems certain that submission or deference is sometimes used by police officers as a litmus test for whether they will make an arrest or issue a citation, even when the expectation of submission goes beyond the legal obligations of a citizen in interacting with a police officer. This emphasis on submission and compliance no doubt has some of its roots in attempting to ensure the safety of our police officers, who must be prepared for any possibility. But when race and ego are injected into the mix, an expectation of "submission or consequences" is unacceptable as standard operating procedure for police officers-- even, or perhaps especially, when people are upset and saying so.
Rich Rodgers
I hope we make the most of the national discussion and debate generated by the July 16th arrest of Harvard professor Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police.
If you've been under a rock for the past 10 days, here's the quick version: Gates returned to his house at noon after an overnight flight from China, with his driver, to find he couldn't get into his house. His white neighbor called the police and reported that two men were trying to break into the home. Crowley responds, and the police report is here. Gates tells his side of the story here.
While so much of the debate pretends that the key question is what Gates said to Crowley, it's actually not illegal to yell at a police officer in Massachusetts:
In several cases, the courts in Massachusetts have considered whether a person is guilty of disorderly conduct for verbally abusing a police officer. In Commonwealth v. Lopiano, a 2004 decision, an appeals court held it was not disorderly conduct for a person who angrily yelled at an officer that his civil rights were being violated. In Commonwealth v. Mallahan, a decision rendered last year, an appeals court held that a person who launched into an angry, profanity-laced tirade against a police officer in front of spectators could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.
So Massachusetts law clearly provides that Gates did not commit disorderly conduct.
So Gates appears to have been guilty of nothing illegal, but is there any doubt that he is being judged in the court of public opinion for his alleged statements to the officer? You can bet that a large percentage of white Americans find it easy to believe in the falsehood that Gates's verbal challenges or resistance justified his arrest. This belief--that this black man or anyone else is obligated to be submissive to police officers in speech--should be called out and rejected.
It's human nature for an employee to consider taking a customer's behavior into account when deciding what kind of service to give to them. Professionals do a good job of ignoring insults or slights, but no one is immune from the temptation. For police, though, the bar has to be higher. Too much rides on the outcome. To begin to change the dynamics at the heart of racial profiling and the distrust that many minorities feel toward the police, the training that officers receive has to meaningfully recognize the negative experiences that most minorities in our country share.
In his recent column in the New York Times, Charles Blow cites a NYT/CBS poll from July 2008 that asked this question:
“Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?”
66 percent of black men said yes, compared to 9 percent of white men. That's a shocking statistic, but to really try to absorb what this means, you have to think about what really happens on some of these stops.
Blow tells the story of being stopped in Louisiana when he was 18, the president of his college freshmen class, in a car with his friend Andre:
Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.
I was raised to treat police officers with respect, and have always figured it was in my interest to do so. I can think of three times when I was stopped for speeding and let go with a warning, and guessed that the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs' didn't hurt my cause. But being deferential has never implied for me that I needed to swallow a sense of profound injustice. I've never thought for a second that I was or might be threatened, arrested or even shot just because I'm a white guy. Our experiences are so different, we might as well be living in different countries.
It's clear that the experience of prejudice at the hands of the police is all too common for black men and other minorities in the United States. It's asking too much to insist that someone show respect to an institution that has treated them unfairly. It's asking someone to accept a diminished or tarnished standing in the eyes of an entity that has the power to take away their freedom or even their life. For that respect to come, it's going to have to continue to be earned.
It seems certain that submission or deference is sometimes used by police officers as a litmus test for whether they will make an arrest or issue a citation, even when the expectation of submission goes beyond the legal obligations of a citizen in interacting with a police officer. This emphasis on submission and compliance no doubt has some of its roots in attempting to ensure the safety of our police officers, who must be prepared for any possibility. But when race and ego are injected into the mix, an expectation of "submission or consequences" is unacceptable as standard operating procedure for police officers-- even, or perhaps especially, when people are upset and saying so.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
1.5 Billion for Pakistan from US
Subsidizing Pakistan
June 26, 2009
The New Yorker
The Senate yesterday passed by unanimous consent the Kerry-Lugar bill, as urged here and elsewhere. Here are some important passages of the bill, outlining U.S. policy and financial commitments:
SEC. 4. STATEMENT OF POLICY.
It is the policy of the United States—
(1) to support the consolidation of democracy, good governance, and rule of law in Pakistan;
(2) to support economic growth and development in order to promote stability and security across Pakistan;
(3) to affirm and build a sustained, long-term, multifaceted relationship with Pakistan;
(4) to further the sustainable economic development of Pakistan and the improvement of the living conditions of its citizens, including in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, by expanding United States bilateral engagement with the Government of Pakistan, especially in areas of direct interest and importance to the daily lives of the people of Pakistan;
(5) to work with Pakistan and the countries bordering Pakistan to facilitate peace in the region and harmonious relations between the countries of the region;
(6) to work with the Government of Pakistan to prevent any Pakistani territory from being used as a base or conduit for terrorist attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, or elsewhere in the world;
(7) to work in close cooperation with the Government of Pakistan to coordinate military, paramilitary, and police action against terrorist targets;
(8) to work with the Government of Pakistan to help bring peace, stability, and development to all regions of Pakistan, especially those in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas, including support for an effective counterinsurgency strategy;
(9) to expand people-to-people engagement between the United States and Pakistan, through increased educational, technical, and cultural exchanges and other methods; and;
(10) to encourage and promote public-private partnerships in Pakistan in order to bolster ongoing development efforts and strengthen economic prospects, especially with respect to opportunities to build civic responsibility and professional skills of the people of Pakistan.; and
(11) to encourage the development of local analytical capacity to measure progress on an integrated basis across the areas of donor country expenditure in Pakistan, and better hold the Government of Pakistan accountable for how the funds are being spent.
SEC. 5. AUTHORIZATION OF FUNDS.
(a) AUTHORIZATION.—There are authorized to be appropriated to the President, for the purposes of providing assistance to Pakistan under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2151 et seq.), the following amounts:
(1) For fiscal year 2009, up to $1,500,000,000.
(2) For fiscal year 2010, up to $1,500,000,000.
(3) For fiscal year 2011, up to $1,500,000,000.
(4) For fiscal year 2012, up to $1,500,000,000.
(5) For fiscal year 2013, up to $1,500,000,000.
There are at least three serious, interlocking threats to the United States emanating from Pakistan today: Direct attempts by Al Qaeda to attack the U.S. and Americans abroad; the possibility that Al Qaeda-influenced jihadists could acquire direct or indirect influence over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal; and the possibility that Pakistan-based jihadi groups could provoke a war between India and Pakistan. The only way to help mitigate these threats is to attempt to stabilize Pakistan, and then, in the longer term, construct a strategic partnership that breaks the patterns of the past and promotes normalization of ties between India and Pakistan. The best way for the U.S. to contribute to that daunting effort right now is to encourage and assist the Pakistani military as it tries to roll back the Taliban (which the Pakistan Army succored and created) while simultaneously attempting to strengthen Pakistan’s economy and its shaky power-sharing arrangements between the military and civilian politicians. These are the premises, essentially, that have produced Kerry-Lugar, and they explain the policy section’s emphasis on rebalancing U.S. engagement to address partnerships outside of the military realm.
The House has passed a companion bill, but the differences between the two versions are apparently serious enough that it might not be possible to reconcile them in conference. One alternative would be to substitute a new bill in the House that is closer to Kerry-Lugar. Either way, this is work that needs to be finished quickly.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Encounter Killings - India and Pakistan
DANIEL PEPPER - a "free lance" journalist has a feature on Encounter Killings in the Maoist regions in India.
Mr. Pepper couldn't possibly have known that the same issue of the Times would ironically publish a report about innocent civilians being killed by the US across the border: "U.S. Missiles Hit Militants in Pakistan, Killing Eight"
Mr. Pepper couldn't possibly have known that the same issue of the Times would ironically publish a report about innocent civilians being killed by the US across the border: "U.S. Missiles Hit Militants in Pakistan, Killing Eight"
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Muslim Domestic Violence in America
From NPR (USA) (Audio)
Many were shocked by the beheading of Aasiyah Hassan, wife of a Muslim television executive in New York this week. Hassan's husband has been charged with second-degree murder.
Host Scott Simon talks with Robina Niaz, the founder and executive director of Turning Point, the first non-profit agency to address domestic abuse in New York City's Muslim population.
Apolgists for Islam claim this is not an Islamic act
Many were shocked by the beheading of Aasiyah Hassan, wife of a Muslim television executive in New York this week. Hassan's husband has been charged with second-degree murder.
Host Scott Simon talks with Robina Niaz, the founder and executive director of Turning Point, the first non-profit agency to address domestic abuse in New York City's Muslim population.
Apolgists for Islam claim this is not an Islamic act
Monday, February 9, 2009
links February 9, 2009
Bosnia chief Imam supports Wahhabis
February 8, 2009 – 8:39 pm
Bosnian MUslim chief Imam Mustafa Ceric has expressed his support for the growing Wahhabi brand of Islam in Bosnia and condemned those who are worried over the spread of this extremist islamic doctrine for “spreading islamophobia”.
“Those that are accusing us that their situation is bad because of Islam and the ‘new’ Muslims are joining the islamophobia that is us, Bosnian Muslims, old and new remind on the experience of the survived genocide,” said Ceric during the ISlamic prayer on Friday in the mosque in the eastern town of Sokolac.
[..]
Wahhabis have been reintroduced to Bosnia during the 1990s when Bosnian Muslims waged Jihad against Bosnian Christians and invited holy warriors from Middle East to Bosnia granting them citizenship and marrying them off with Bosnian Muslim women.
[..]
February 8, 2009
SERBIANNA
January 12,2009: Mullah Osman Musliu, chairman of the Islamic Community in Drenas in central Kosovo had been attacked and beaten by nine Wahhabi extremists
The Second Kosovo War Kosovo faces a new threat: Agents of the Saudi-financed, ultrafundamentalist Wahhabi Muslim sect have sparked open violence in Kosovo. This new conflict in ex-Yugoslavia comes after years of Wahhabi infiltration and provocation in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Muslim areas in Macedonia and South Serbia, where they have made significant gains, as well as in Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo.
--------------
Taleban execute Polish engineer on video
From Times Online UK
______________
The Sunday Times UK
January 18, 2009
Taliban’s punishment terrifies Pakistan
February 9, 2009
______________
US presses Sri Lanka to drop Anti-Conversion Bill
Daily Mirror (Sri Lanka)
Saturday, February 07, 2009
______________
Thomas Malancheruvilla Christian Preacher held for disrespecting national anthem
February 2009
Sindh Today
_______________
It was Christian fundamentalism, cynicism and hypocrisy that killed Lasantha Wickrematunga
_______________
Saudi Arabia says only mosques allowed
_______________
Mohammad Alam, 38,A Pakistani factory Worker in Japan is arrested in the stabbing death of a 23 year old russian woman.
February 8, 2009 – 8:39 pm
Bosnian MUslim chief Imam Mustafa Ceric has expressed his support for the growing Wahhabi brand of Islam in Bosnia and condemned those who are worried over the spread of this extremist islamic doctrine for “spreading islamophobia”.
“Those that are accusing us that their situation is bad because of Islam and the ‘new’ Muslims are joining the islamophobia that is us, Bosnian Muslims, old and new remind on the experience of the survived genocide,” said Ceric during the ISlamic prayer on Friday in the mosque in the eastern town of Sokolac.
[..]
Wahhabis have been reintroduced to Bosnia during the 1990s when Bosnian Muslims waged Jihad against Bosnian Christians and invited holy warriors from Middle East to Bosnia granting them citizenship and marrying them off with Bosnian Muslim women.
[..]
February 8, 2009
SERBIANNA
January 12,2009: Mullah Osman Musliu, chairman of the Islamic Community in Drenas in central Kosovo had been attacked and beaten by nine Wahhabi extremists
The Second Kosovo War Kosovo faces a new threat: Agents of the Saudi-financed, ultrafundamentalist Wahhabi Muslim sect have sparked open violence in Kosovo. This new conflict in ex-Yugoslavia comes after years of Wahhabi infiltration and provocation in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Muslim areas in Macedonia and South Serbia, where they have made significant gains, as well as in Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo.
--------------
Taleban execute Polish engineer on video
From Times Online UK
______________
The Sunday Times UK
January 18, 2009
Taliban’s punishment terrifies Pakistan
February 9, 2009
______________
US presses Sri Lanka to drop Anti-Conversion Bill
Daily Mirror (Sri Lanka)
Saturday, February 07, 2009
______________
Thomas Malancheruvilla Christian Preacher held for disrespecting national anthem
February 2009
Sindh Today
_______________
It was Christian fundamentalism, cynicism and hypocrisy that killed Lasantha Wickrematunga
_______________
Saudi Arabia says only mosques allowed
_______________
Mohammad Alam, 38,A Pakistani factory Worker in Japan is arrested in the stabbing death of a 23 year old russian woman.
Friday, January 30, 2009
US Surrenders Educational Institutions To Islamic Radicals
By Herb Denenberg,
The Bulletin
Friday, January 30, 2009
There’s growing evidence that America may be meeting its educational Waterloo and that our educational system is being captured by radical Islamists. As Robert Spencer put it so well in his classic book, The Stealth Jihad, radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs.
The radical Islamists have scored dramatic victories in determining what students are taught in America about Islam, and we don’t even seem to know what is happening. The radical Islamists have managed a massive penetration of our educational system that teaches everyone from the youngest students all the way up to students at our colleges and universities.
Here is what the radical Islamists are doing at all educational levels, according to Mr. Spencer:
“Of all the arenas in which the stealth jihad is advancing, one of the most crucial is in our schools, where stealth jihadists have found a welcoming environment among teachers deeply steeped in the credo of multiculturalism. With the mandate of ‘tolerance’ robbing many educators of their ability to evaluate non-Western cultures critically, teachers are highly susceptible to an organized campaign by U.S.-based Islami c organizations and their primary benefactors, Saudi Arabia, to present a view of Islam that whitewashes its violent history and intolerant religious imperatives.”
In other words, if you can’t evaluate other cultures and decide whether our culture is better, you’re hardly in a position to defend your own culture against the rising tide of its enemies, including the radical Islamists also known as islamofascists.
You can’t effectively defend your culture if you think all cultures are pretty much the same.
The radical Islamist have launched a two-pronged assault on our educational system at the pre-college level:
1. In Islamic academies in America, with teaching materials from Saudi Arabia and other sources, the academies indoctrinate unequivocal hatred toward non-Muslims, and deep suspicion of our Western values.
2. The opposite approach is taken in our mainstream schools. U.S.-based Islamic groups place lesson plans and other educational materials that are about the opposite of the antagonistic materials placed in Islamic academies. In the mainstream public schools this is what Mr. Spencer says takes place: Islamic instruction “presents a picture of Islam that is so pristine and peaceful that it sometimes crosses the boundary from mere pro-Muslim bias to outright Islamic proselytizing.
So the radical Islamists are not only indoctrinating young students but may well be on the road to converting them to Islam.
The findings of a study released in June 2008 by th e American Textbook Council, an independent national research organization that evaluates the quality of textbooks, finds where we are now with educational materials used in our schools. Mr. Spencer says here is what it found about what ten of the most widely used middle school and high school social studies textbooks teach. They “present an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security.” Mr. Spencer writes, “The report found that the books present highly tendentious constructions as undisputed truth, making common cause with West-hating multiculturalists to bowdlerize the presentation of Islam, denigrate or downplay Christianity and Western civilization, and transform many public school textbooks into proselytizing tracts.”
Incredible as that is, even more incredible is that this tendency has only intensified since 9/11.
California seventh graders use a text that defines jihad as follows: “Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs.”
Mr. Spencer writes, “It gives no idea that Muslims have ever viewed jihad as involving, in whole or part, warfare against unbelievers, or have ever waged war on that basis. Muhammad, meanwhile, far from exhorting his followers to subjugate unbelievers, ‘taught equality’ and was a prototypical compassionate liberal who instructs Muslims ‘to share their wealth and to care for the less fortunate in our society.’”
In other words, this is classic Orwellian inversion of the false into the true. What’s even worse, the Textbook Council found, “While seventh-grade textbooks describe Islam in glowing language, they portray Christianity in harsh light. Students encounter a startling contrast. Islam is featured as a model of interfaith tolerance; Christians wage wars of aggression and kill Jews. Islam provides models of harmony and civilization. Anti-Semitism, the Inquisition, and wars of religion bespot the Christian record.”
Mr. Spencer asks whether publicly-funded schools and even private schools should be allowed to teach doctrines that flatly contradict the Constitution, as Sharia does? Should our students be taught to remove all obstacles to the spread and dominance of Islam? Should students be indoctrinated with an anti-Christian and anti-American bias?
It’s time these questions are studied, discussed, and acted on by an informed citizenry. Otherwise, we stand to lose our culture and America, as we know it. We are in the process of surrendering our children and our nation to radical Islam and we seem to be unaware of what is happening.
If that’s not disheartening enough, I’ve told only half the story of what is going on in our educational system — only at the pre-college level. Our colleges and universities are also go ing down the tubes and are being turned into centers of anti-Americanism, indoctrination of students to favor Islam, and placing thought and debate on this subject in an ideological straitjacket favoring Islam.
Our colleges and universities have abandoned their function and are now in the business of radical Islamic propagandizing. Here is what universities are supposed to do, according to a University of California at Berkeley’s Academic Personnel Manual. This section was inserted by President Robert Gordon Sproul in 1934.
But don’t be encouraged by what has been called a ringing affirmation of the commitment of the university to education, not propaganda. The universities are now in the business of propaganda, of brain washing, and indoctrination. It is no accident that this ringing affirmation of the true function of the university has been removed from its academic manual, as of 2003:
“The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of facts.”
What goes on at our colleges and universities can be communicated in a case study of Professor Omid Safi, who should be called Propagandist for Radical Islam Safi. One of his assignments given students called for critical reports on Islamophobes, neo-cons, Western triumphalists, etc. included on a long list that named some of our greatest scholars and most distinguished authors such as Bernard Lewis, considered the West’s greatest authority on Islam, Samuel Huntington, Alan Bloom, Leo Strauss, Bat Yeor, Patricia Crone, William Bennett, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and many others.
Notice that Professor Safi labeled these people as Islamophobes or some other pejorative term to put them in the worst possible light. This is not teaching, but indoctrination, brain washing, and propagandizing. It is certainly not conducive to freedom of thought.
Would students evaluate these people on their own merits knowing that the professor is harshly condemning their work? Would a student say Bernard Lewis is a great scholar and his work represents some of the most important scholarship on Islam?
This is not a list of people to be evaluated on their merits. It is the professor’s enemies list and students are likely to write accordingly. You don’t get an A by proving your professor is a fool even if he is.
Professor Safi has abandoned all the traditional professorial ideal of pursuit of the truth, and is in the business of propaganda and thought control. He should have been fired immediately. So what happened?
He was teaching at Colgate, but his propagandizing soon meant he had a position at a more prestigious university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Yes, our universities have come to that – academic promotions for propagandizing professors who have abandoned all the principles on which university education should be based.
Mr. Spencer says Professor Safi may not be a stealth jihadist, but he is certainly serving the cause of the stealth jihadists: “Professors who prevent their students from learning about Islam in an objective manner, and those like Safi who place an ideological straightjacket on their students, are performing a valuable service for the stealth jihad.
For in this manner Professor Safi signaled to students that any investigation of Islamic supemacism, violent or non-violent, would be classed as ‘Islamophobia,’ ‘unrepentant Orientalism,’ ‘Western triumphalism,’ and even ‘neo-conservatism’ — all the worst epithets in today’s academy.”
Professor Safi is all too typical of the propaganda professors and political agitators who have taken over many university departments and who are facilitating the programs of the stealth jihadists.
Professor Safi joined a whole team of like-minded people at the University of North Carolina. The school was in the news in 2002 when incoming freshmen were assigned a book on the Quran that focused only on passages that suggest relative tolerance and mutual coexistence between Muslims and nonbelievers. However, the doctrines of jihad and dhimmitude (second-class citizenship for nonbelievers), which mainstream Islamic scholars say supersede the more tolerant passages are not included in the book. So the passages that have proven so oppressive and even fatal to Christians Jews, and other non-Muslims throughout history are not in the book.
A North Carolina professor produced that sanitized version of the Quran. Another wrote a book, which said any criticism of Islam, was based on Jungian projection, i.e., the critics are projecting their negative characteristics onto others. Mr. Spencer asks whether 9/11 and a long list of other Islamic atrocities were somehow imaginary and merely projected onto the Islamists by critics.
The distorted thinking at the University of North Carolina is also illustrated by an experience Mr. Spencer had after speaking there on the threat of the stealth jihad. A University of North Carolina professor wrote a paper on Mr. Spencer’s appearance. That professor did not and perhaps could not challenge what Mr. Spencer said on the merits. So he said Mr. Spencer’s books were published by conservative publishing companies and were non-scholarly.
This shows how universities such as North Carolina have become propaganda mills, not true universities. The professor could not discuss Mr. Spencer’s ideas on the merits. He could only point out that they were published by a company that may be on the wrong side of the ideological fence.
North Carolina makes a perfect case study for another reason. That’s because on March 3, 2006, a 22-year old Iranian student drove his SUV onto the North Carolina campus and tried to kill people. He did injure nine people. After the incident, the student was pleased with himself and said he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.”
In a letter, he explained why he set out to murder the residents of Chapel Hill “by running them over with my automobile and stabbing them with a knife if the opportunities are presented to me by Allah.” In the letter he says he is just “a servant of Allah.” He justifies his acts by saying in the Koran “Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women … After extensive contemplation and reflection, I have made the decision to exercise the right of violent retaliation that Allah has given me to the fullest extent to which I am capable at present.”
He said further, “Allah’s commandments are never to be questioned and all of Allah’s commandments must be obeyed. Those who violate Allah’s commandments and purposefully follow human fabrication and falsehood as their religion will burn in fire for eternity in accordance with Allah’s will.”
Mr. Spencer says this tragedy might have been averted if the North Carolina professors would have stopped denying the jihadist ideology and the Islamic supremacism found in the Koran and elsewhere, and called on local Muslim groups “to develop comprehensive programs teaching against the jihadist ideology and Islamic supremacism.” If the North Carolina professors had acted as professors instead of propagandists for jihadists the tragedy might have been prevented.
To understand how this is all happening, Mr. Spencer says follow the money. Saudis and others have been pouring Islamic money into our colleges and universities to buy up professors and departments to propagate their propaganda lines. Elite institutions, such as Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown have demonstrated they are for sale, and have been sold to these anti-American, pro-jihadist forces. Our universities have become intellectual houses of prostitution for sale to any high bidder.
For more details on what is going on, you should read Mr. Spencer’s book, Stealth Jihad. You will be shocked to the core, and also be shocked into realizing it is late in the game, and we better act now if we want to protect our nation, our culture, our freedoms, and our security.
Mr. Spencer says some of our first steps is to discard the politically correct orthodoxy that values “tolerance” of non-Western cultures above any objective search for truth.”
He says we are so far gone in the blindness of political correctness that “The mere suggestion that the jihadists’ hatred for us is rooted in the Qur’an [Koran] and other fundamental Islamic texts is simply not tolerated in academia. As a result, many American citizens as well as policy makers continue to cast about in vain for a way to satisfy our enemies’ grievances.” One such deluded policymaker is Barrack Hussein Obama who wants to talk to Iran and sweet talk them out of their firmly engraved objectives and ideologies.
Unless he is the Messiah the mainstream media claim he is, I can assure him his talking cure for terrorism and genocide is a waste of time and will simply give Iran more time to build a nuclear bomb.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
The Bulletin
Friday, January 30, 2009
There’s growing evidence that America may be meeting its educational Waterloo and that our educational system is being captured by radical Islamists. As Robert Spencer put it so well in his classic book, The Stealth Jihad, radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs.
The radical Islamists have scored dramatic victories in determining what students are taught in America about Islam, and we don’t even seem to know what is happening. The radical Islamists have managed a massive penetration of our educational system that teaches everyone from the youngest students all the way up to students at our colleges and universities.
Here is what the radical Islamists are doing at all educational levels, according to Mr. Spencer:
“Of all the arenas in which the stealth jihad is advancing, one of the most crucial is in our schools, where stealth jihadists have found a welcoming environment among teachers deeply steeped in the credo of multiculturalism. With the mandate of ‘tolerance’ robbing many educators of their ability to evaluate non-Western cultures critically, teachers are highly susceptible to an organized campaign by U.S.-based Islami c organizations and their primary benefactors, Saudi Arabia, to present a view of Islam that whitewashes its violent history and intolerant religious imperatives.”
In other words, if you can’t evaluate other cultures and decide whether our culture is better, you’re hardly in a position to defend your own culture against the rising tide of its enemies, including the radical Islamists also known as islamofascists.
You can’t effectively defend your culture if you think all cultures are pretty much the same.
The radical Islamist have launched a two-pronged assault on our educational system at the pre-college level:
1. In Islamic academies in America, with teaching materials from Saudi Arabia and other sources, the academies indoctrinate unequivocal hatred toward non-Muslims, and deep suspicion of our Western values.
2. The opposite approach is taken in our mainstream schools. U.S.-based Islamic groups place lesson plans and other educational materials that are about the opposite of the antagonistic materials placed in Islamic academies. In the mainstream public schools this is what Mr. Spencer says takes place: Islamic instruction “presents a picture of Islam that is so pristine and peaceful that it sometimes crosses the boundary from mere pro-Muslim bias to outright Islamic proselytizing.
So the radical Islamists are not only indoctrinating young students but may well be on the road to converting them to Islam.
The findings of a study released in June 2008 by th e American Textbook Council, an independent national research organization that evaluates the quality of textbooks, finds where we are now with educational materials used in our schools. Mr. Spencer says here is what it found about what ten of the most widely used middle school and high school social studies textbooks teach. They “present an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security.” Mr. Spencer writes, “The report found that the books present highly tendentious constructions as undisputed truth, making common cause with West-hating multiculturalists to bowdlerize the presentation of Islam, denigrate or downplay Christianity and Western civilization, and transform many public school textbooks into proselytizing tracts.”
Incredible as that is, even more incredible is that this tendency has only intensified since 9/11.
California seventh graders use a text that defines jihad as follows: “Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs.”
Mr. Spencer writes, “It gives no idea that Muslims have ever viewed jihad as involving, in whole or part, warfare against unbelievers, or have ever waged war on that basis. Muhammad, meanwhile, far from exhorting his followers to subjugate unbelievers, ‘taught equality’ and was a prototypical compassionate liberal who instructs Muslims ‘to share their wealth and to care for the less fortunate in our society.’”
In other words, this is classic Orwellian inversion of the false into the true. What’s even worse, the Textbook Council found, “While seventh-grade textbooks describe Islam in glowing language, they portray Christianity in harsh light. Students encounter a startling contrast. Islam is featured as a model of interfaith tolerance; Christians wage wars of aggression and kill Jews. Islam provides models of harmony and civilization. Anti-Semitism, the Inquisition, and wars of religion bespot the Christian record.”
Mr. Spencer asks whether publicly-funded schools and even private schools should be allowed to teach doctrines that flatly contradict the Constitution, as Sharia does? Should our students be taught to remove all obstacles to the spread and dominance of Islam? Should students be indoctrinated with an anti-Christian and anti-American bias?
It’s time these questions are studied, discussed, and acted on by an informed citizenry. Otherwise, we stand to lose our culture and America, as we know it. We are in the process of surrendering our children and our nation to radical Islam and we seem to be unaware of what is happening.
If that’s not disheartening enough, I’ve told only half the story of what is going on in our educational system — only at the pre-college level. Our colleges and universities are also go ing down the tubes and are being turned into centers of anti-Americanism, indoctrination of students to favor Islam, and placing thought and debate on this subject in an ideological straitjacket favoring Islam.
Our colleges and universities have abandoned their function and are now in the business of radical Islamic propagandizing. Here is what universities are supposed to do, according to a University of California at Berkeley’s Academic Personnel Manual. This section was inserted by President Robert Gordon Sproul in 1934.
But don’t be encouraged by what has been called a ringing affirmation of the commitment of the university to education, not propaganda. The universities are now in the business of propaganda, of brain washing, and indoctrination. It is no accident that this ringing affirmation of the true function of the university has been removed from its academic manual, as of 2003:
“The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of facts.”
What goes on at our colleges and universities can be communicated in a case study of Professor Omid Safi, who should be called Propagandist for Radical Islam Safi. One of his assignments given students called for critical reports on Islamophobes, neo-cons, Western triumphalists, etc. included on a long list that named some of our greatest scholars and most distinguished authors such as Bernard Lewis, considered the West’s greatest authority on Islam, Samuel Huntington, Alan Bloom, Leo Strauss, Bat Yeor, Patricia Crone, William Bennett, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and many others.
Notice that Professor Safi labeled these people as Islamophobes or some other pejorative term to put them in the worst possible light. This is not teaching, but indoctrination, brain washing, and propagandizing. It is certainly not conducive to freedom of thought.
Would students evaluate these people on their own merits knowing that the professor is harshly condemning their work? Would a student say Bernard Lewis is a great scholar and his work represents some of the most important scholarship on Islam?
This is not a list of people to be evaluated on their merits. It is the professor’s enemies list and students are likely to write accordingly. You don’t get an A by proving your professor is a fool even if he is.
Professor Safi has abandoned all the traditional professorial ideal of pursuit of the truth, and is in the business of propaganda and thought control. He should have been fired immediately. So what happened?
He was teaching at Colgate, but his propagandizing soon meant he had a position at a more prestigious university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Yes, our universities have come to that – academic promotions for propagandizing professors who have abandoned all the principles on which university education should be based.
Mr. Spencer says Professor Safi may not be a stealth jihadist, but he is certainly serving the cause of the stealth jihadists: “Professors who prevent their students from learning about Islam in an objective manner, and those like Safi who place an ideological straightjacket on their students, are performing a valuable service for the stealth jihad.
For in this manner Professor Safi signaled to students that any investigation of Islamic supemacism, violent or non-violent, would be classed as ‘Islamophobia,’ ‘unrepentant Orientalism,’ ‘Western triumphalism,’ and even ‘neo-conservatism’ — all the worst epithets in today’s academy.”
Professor Safi is all too typical of the propaganda professors and political agitators who have taken over many university departments and who are facilitating the programs of the stealth jihadists.
Professor Safi joined a whole team of like-minded people at the University of North Carolina. The school was in the news in 2002 when incoming freshmen were assigned a book on the Quran that focused only on passages that suggest relative tolerance and mutual coexistence between Muslims and nonbelievers. However, the doctrines of jihad and dhimmitude (second-class citizenship for nonbelievers), which mainstream Islamic scholars say supersede the more tolerant passages are not included in the book. So the passages that have proven so oppressive and even fatal to Christians Jews, and other non-Muslims throughout history are not in the book.
A North Carolina professor produced that sanitized version of the Quran. Another wrote a book, which said any criticism of Islam, was based on Jungian projection, i.e., the critics are projecting their negative characteristics onto others. Mr. Spencer asks whether 9/11 and a long list of other Islamic atrocities were somehow imaginary and merely projected onto the Islamists by critics.
The distorted thinking at the University of North Carolina is also illustrated by an experience Mr. Spencer had after speaking there on the threat of the stealth jihad. A University of North Carolina professor wrote a paper on Mr. Spencer’s appearance. That professor did not and perhaps could not challenge what Mr. Spencer said on the merits. So he said Mr. Spencer’s books were published by conservative publishing companies and were non-scholarly.
This shows how universities such as North Carolina have become propaganda mills, not true universities. The professor could not discuss Mr. Spencer’s ideas on the merits. He could only point out that they were published by a company that may be on the wrong side of the ideological fence.
North Carolina makes a perfect case study for another reason. That’s because on March 3, 2006, a 22-year old Iranian student drove his SUV onto the North Carolina campus and tried to kill people. He did injure nine people. After the incident, the student was pleased with himself and said he was “thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah.”
In a letter, he explained why he set out to murder the residents of Chapel Hill “by running them over with my automobile and stabbing them with a knife if the opportunities are presented to me by Allah.” In the letter he says he is just “a servant of Allah.” He justifies his acts by saying in the Koran “Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women … After extensive contemplation and reflection, I have made the decision to exercise the right of violent retaliation that Allah has given me to the fullest extent to which I am capable at present.”
He said further, “Allah’s commandments are never to be questioned and all of Allah’s commandments must be obeyed. Those who violate Allah’s commandments and purposefully follow human fabrication and falsehood as their religion will burn in fire for eternity in accordance with Allah’s will.”
Mr. Spencer says this tragedy might have been averted if the North Carolina professors would have stopped denying the jihadist ideology and the Islamic supremacism found in the Koran and elsewhere, and called on local Muslim groups “to develop comprehensive programs teaching against the jihadist ideology and Islamic supremacism.” If the North Carolina professors had acted as professors instead of propagandists for jihadists the tragedy might have been prevented.
To understand how this is all happening, Mr. Spencer says follow the money. Saudis and others have been pouring Islamic money into our colleges and universities to buy up professors and departments to propagate their propaganda lines. Elite institutions, such as Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown have demonstrated they are for sale, and have been sold to these anti-American, pro-jihadist forces. Our universities have become intellectual houses of prostitution for sale to any high bidder.
For more details on what is going on, you should read Mr. Spencer’s book, Stealth Jihad. You will be shocked to the core, and also be shocked into realizing it is late in the game, and we better act now if we want to protect our nation, our culture, our freedoms, and our security.
Mr. Spencer says some of our first steps is to discard the politically correct orthodoxy that values “tolerance” of non-Western cultures above any objective search for truth.”
He says we are so far gone in the blindness of political correctness that “The mere suggestion that the jihadists’ hatred for us is rooted in the Qur’an [Koran] and other fundamental Islamic texts is simply not tolerated in academia. As a result, many American citizens as well as policy makers continue to cast about in vain for a way to satisfy our enemies’ grievances.” One such deluded policymaker is Barrack Hussein Obama who wants to talk to Iran and sweet talk them out of their firmly engraved objectives and ideologies.
Unless he is the Messiah the mainstream media claim he is, I can assure him his talking cure for terrorism and genocide is a waste of time and will simply give Iran more time to build a nuclear bomb.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.
Rules of the Game
January 30, 2009
Editorial
New York Times
President George W. Bush, and his aides, could hardly wait to get rid of all those tiresome arms-control treaties when they took office. They tore up the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty to make way for a still largely pie-in-the-sky missile defense system. They opposed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and never made a serious effort to win a ban on the production of fissile material (the core of a nuclear weapon).
Mr. Bush grudgingly signed his one and only arms-reduction treaty with the Russians in 2002. That means that today — 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, with thousands ready to launch within minutes.
The bad news, of course, didn’t stop there.
While Mr. Bush and his team were ridiculing treaties and arms control negotiations as “old think,” North Korea tested a nuclear device, Iran has been working overtime to produce nuclear fuel (usable for a reactor or a bomb) and many other countries are weighing whether they need to get into the nuclear game.
President Obama pledged to address these dangers when he was campaigning. In her recent confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton argued that this country’s best hope of doing that is to restore treaties and a rules-based system. Now they have to translate that lofty intent into urgent action.
The first challenge is Russia, the only other country besides the United States with enough weapons to blow up the planet. The administration can start by negotiating a follow-on to the 1991 Start Treaty, which is set to expire in December. The pact contains the only rules for verifying any nuclear agreement, and it provides an opportunity for making even deeper cuts.
The two sides could easily go to 1,000 weapons each in this next round, down from the 1,700 to 2,200 deployed weapons agreed on in the 2002 Moscow treaty. Without any negotiations, the two can immediately take their weapons off hair-trigger alert.
We applaud the administration’s pledge to work for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and to revive negotiations on a fissile material production ban. Neither will be easy to achieve, but both are essential if Mr. Obama is serious about reining in a frightening new world of ever-expanding nuclear appetites.
During the campaign, Mr. Obama opposed plans to build a new nuclear warhead. He was right. There is no military or scientific need. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is a strong advocate of the program. Mr. Obama should resist. If the United States is going to have any credibility in arguing that others must restrain their nuclear ambitions, it must restrain its own.
Mr. Bush repeatedly warned about the dangers of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. He was right. But he never put in place the strategy needed to ensure that that never happens. And he weakened some of this country’s most fundamental defenses, including its credibility.
President Obama must do better. He can start by restoring the rules of the game.
Editorial
New York Times
President George W. Bush, and his aides, could hardly wait to get rid of all those tiresome arms-control treaties when they took office. They tore up the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty to make way for a still largely pie-in-the-sky missile defense system. They opposed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and never made a serious effort to win a ban on the production of fissile material (the core of a nuclear weapon).
Mr. Bush grudgingly signed his one and only arms-reduction treaty with the Russians in 2002. That means that today — 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, with thousands ready to launch within minutes.
The bad news, of course, didn’t stop there.
While Mr. Bush and his team were ridiculing treaties and arms control negotiations as “old think,” North Korea tested a nuclear device, Iran has been working overtime to produce nuclear fuel (usable for a reactor or a bomb) and many other countries are weighing whether they need to get into the nuclear game.
President Obama pledged to address these dangers when he was campaigning. In her recent confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton argued that this country’s best hope of doing that is to restore treaties and a rules-based system. Now they have to translate that lofty intent into urgent action.
The first challenge is Russia, the only other country besides the United States with enough weapons to blow up the planet. The administration can start by negotiating a follow-on to the 1991 Start Treaty, which is set to expire in December. The pact contains the only rules for verifying any nuclear agreement, and it provides an opportunity for making even deeper cuts.
The two sides could easily go to 1,000 weapons each in this next round, down from the 1,700 to 2,200 deployed weapons agreed on in the 2002 Moscow treaty. Without any negotiations, the two can immediately take their weapons off hair-trigger alert.
We applaud the administration’s pledge to work for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and to revive negotiations on a fissile material production ban. Neither will be easy to achieve, but both are essential if Mr. Obama is serious about reining in a frightening new world of ever-expanding nuclear appetites.
During the campaign, Mr. Obama opposed plans to build a new nuclear warhead. He was right. There is no military or scientific need. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is a strong advocate of the program. Mr. Obama should resist. If the United States is going to have any credibility in arguing that others must restrain their nuclear ambitions, it must restrain its own.
Mr. Bush repeatedly warned about the dangers of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. He was right. But he never put in place the strategy needed to ensure that that never happens. And he weakened some of this country’s most fundamental defenses, including its credibility.
President Obama must do better. He can start by restoring the rules of the game.
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