Japanese Political Prisoner and struggler for Palestine, Fusako Shigenobu, will be released on May 28, 2022
Read more at:
https://email.samidoun.net/lists/?m=89&uid=9c1ffa9482f2da35fee1a84a2e9646c3&p=view&pi=ViewBrowserPlugin
Click here to read and share Fusako Shigenobu's biography:
https://samidoun.net/2022/05/japanese-political-prisoner-and-struggler-for-palestine-fusako-shigenobu-will-be-released-on-may-28-2022/
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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale
U.S. Air Force veteran, Daniel Everette Hale has recently completed his first year of a 45-month prison sentence for exposing the realities of U.S drone warfare. Daniel Hale is not a spy, a threat to society, or a bad faith actor. His revelations were not a threat to national security. If they were, the prosecution would be able to identify the harm caused directly from the information Hale made public. Our members of Congress can urge President Biden to commute Daniel's sentence! Either way, Daniel deserves to be free.
https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=16979
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Sign the petition:
https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/
If extradited to the United States, Julian Assange, father of two young British children, would face a sentence of 175 years in prison merely for receiving and publishing truthful information that revealed US war crimes.
UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled that "it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America".
Amnesty International states, “Were Julian Assange to be extradited or subjected to any other transfer to the USA, Britain would be in breach of its obligations under international law.”
Human Rights Watch says, “The only thing standing between an Assange prosecution and a major threat to global media freedom is Britain. It is urgent that it defend the principles at risk.”
The NUJ has stated that the “US charges against Assange pose a huge threat, one that could criminalise the critical work of investigative journalists & their ability to protect their sources”.
Julian will not survive extradition to the United States.
The UK is required under its international obligations to stop the extradition. Article 4 of the US-UK extradition treaty says: "Extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense."
The decision to either Free Assange or send him to his death is now squarely in the political domain. The UK must not send Julian to the country that conspired to murder him in London.
The United Kingdom can stop the extradition at any time. It must comply with Article 4 of the US-UK Extradition Treaty and Free Julian Assange.
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Laws are created to be followed
by the poor.
Laws are made by the rich
to bring some order to exploitation.
The poor are the only law abiders in history.
When the poor make laws
the rich will be no more.
—Roque Dalton Presente!
(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]
[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.
Poems:
http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/
About:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton
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“In His Defense” The People vs. Kevin Cooper
A film by Kenneth A. Carlson
Teaser is now streaming at:
https://www.carlsonfilms.com
Posted by: Death Penalty Focus Blog, January 10, 2022
https://deathpenalty.org/teaser-for-a-kevin-cooper-documentary-is-now-streaming/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=1c7299ab-018c-4780-9e9d-54cab2541fa0
“In his Defense,” a documentary on the Kevin Cooper case, is in the works right now, and California filmmaker Kenneth Carlson has released a teaser for it on CarlsonFilms.com
Just over seven months ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an independent investigation of Cooper’s death penalty case. At the time, he explained that, “In cases where the government seeks to impose the ultimate punishment of death, I need to be satisfied that all relevant evidence is carefully and fairly examined.”
That investigation is ongoing, with no word from any of the parties involved on its progress.
Cooper has been on death row since 1985 for the murder of four people in San Bernardino County in June 1983. Prosecutors said Cooper, who had escaped from a minimum-security prison and had been hiding out near the scene of the murder, killed Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 10-year-old Chris Hughes, a friend who was spending the night at the Ryen’s. The lone survivor of the attack, eight-year-old Josh Ryen, was severely injured but survived.
For over 36 years, Cooper has insisted he is innocent, and there are serious questions about evidence that was missing, tampered with, destroyed, possibly planted, or hidden from the defense. There were multiple murder weapons, raising questions about how one man could use all of them, killing four people and seriously wounding one, in the amount of time the coroner estimated the murders took place.
The teaser alone gives a good overview of the case, and helps explain why so many believe Cooper was wrongfully convicted.
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New Legal Filing in Mumia’s Case
The following statement was issued January 4, 2022, regarding new legal filings by attorneys for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Campaign to Bring Mumia Home
In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.”
With continued pressure from below, 2022 will be the year that forces the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office and the Philly Police Department to answer questions about why they framed imprisoned radio journalist and veteran Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal’s attorneys have filed a Pennsylvania Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petition focused entirely on the six boxes of case files that were found in a storage room of the DA’s office in late December 2018, after the case being heard before Judge Leon Tucker in the Court of Common Pleas concluded. (tinyurl.com/zkyva464)
The new evidence contained in the boxes is damning, and we need to expose it. It reveals a pattern of misconduct and abuse of authority by the prosecution, including bribery of the state’s two key witnesses, as well as racist exclusion in jury selection—a violation of the landmark Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky. The remedy for each or any of the claims in the petition is a new trial. The court may order a hearing on factual issues raised in the claims. If so, we won’t know for at least a month.
The new evidence includes a handwritten letter penned by Robert Chobert, the prosecution’s star witness. In it, Chobert demands to be paid money promised him by then-Prosecutor Joseph McGill. Other evidence includes notes written by McGill, prominently tracking the race of potential jurors for the purposes of excluding Black people from the jury, and letters and memoranda which reveal that the DA’s office sought to monitor, direct, and intervene in the outstanding prostitution charges against its other key witness Cynthia White.
Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed and convicted 40 years ago in 1982, during one of the most corrupt and racist periods in Philadelphia’s history—the era of cop-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo. It was a moment when the city’s police department, which worked intimately with the DA’s office, routinely engaged in homicidal violence against Black and Latinx detainees, corruption, bribery and tampering with evidence to obtain convictions.
In 1979, under pressure from civil rights activists, the Department of Justice filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the Philadelphia police department and detailed a culture of racist violence, widespread corruption and intimidation that targeted outspoken people like Mumia. Despite concurrent investigations by the FBI and Pennsylvania’s Attorney General and dozens of police convictions, the power and influence of the country’s largest police association, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) prevailed.
Now, more than 40 years later, we’re still living with the failure to uproot these abuses. Philadelphia continues to fear the powerful FOP, even though it endorses cruelty, racism, and multiple injustices. A culture of fear permeates the “city of brotherly love.”
The contents of these boxes shine light on decades of white supremacy and rampant lawlessness in U.S. courts and prisons. They also hold enormous promise for Mumia’s freedom and challenge us to choose Love, Not PHEAR. (lovenotphear.com/) Stay tuned.
—Workers World, January 4, 2022
https://www.workers.org/2022/01/60925/
Pa. Supreme Court denies widow’s appeal to remove Philly DA from Abu-Jamal case
Abu Jamal was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder of Faulkner in 1982. Over the past four decades, five of his appeals have been quashed.
In 1989, the state’s highest court affirmed Abu-Jamal’s death penalty conviction, and in 2012, he was re-sentenced to life in prison.
Abu-Jamal, 66, remains in prison. He can appeal to the state Supreme Court, or he can file a new appeal.
KYW Newsradio reached out to Abu-Jamal’s attorneys for comment. They shared this statement in full:
“Today, the Superior Court concluded that it lacked jurisdiction to consider issues raised by Mr. Abu-Jamal in prior appeals. Two years ago, the Court of Common Pleas ordered reconsideration of these appeals finding evidence of an appearance of judicial bias when the appeals were first decided. We are disappointed in the Superior Court’s decision and are considering our next steps.
“While this case was pending in the Superior Court, the Commonwealth revealed, for the first time, previously undisclosed evidence related to Mr. Abu-Jamal’s case. That evidence includes a letter indicating that the Commonwealth promised its principal witness against Mr. Abu-Jamal money in connection with his testimony. In today’s decision, the Superior Court made clear that it was not adjudicating the issues raised by this new evidence. This new evidence is critical to any fair determination of the issues raised in this case, and we look forward to presenting it in court.”
https://www.audacy.com/kywnewsradio/news/local/pennsylvania-superior-court-rejects-mumia-abu-jamal-appeal-ron-castille
Questions and comments may be sent to: info@freedomarchives.org
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Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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How long will he still be with us? How long will the genocide continue?
By Michael Moore
American Indian Movement leader, Leonard Peltier, at 77 years of age, came down with Covid-19 this weekend. Upon hearing this, I broke down and cried. An innocent man, locked up behind bars for 44 years, Peltier is now America’s longest-held political prisoner. He suffers in prison tonight even though James Reynolds, one of the key federal prosecutors who sent Peltier off to life in prison in 1977, has written to President Biden and confessed to his role in the lies, deceit, racism and fake evidence that together resulted in locking up our country’s most well-known Native American civil rights leader. Just as South Africa imprisoned for more than 27 years its leading voice for freedom, Nelson Mandela, so too have we done the same to a leading voice and freedom fighter for the indigenous people of America. That’s not just me saying this. That’s Amnesty International saying it. They placed him on their political prisoner list years ago and continue to demand his release.
And it’s not just Amnesty leading the way. It’s the Pope who has demanded Leonard Peltier’s release. It’s the Dalai Lama, Jesse Jackson, and the President Pro-Tempore of the US Senate, Sen. Patrick Leahy. Before their deaths, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Bishop Desmond Tutu pleaded with the United States to free Leonard Peltier. A worldwide movement of millions have seen their demands fall on deaf ears.
And now the calls for Peltier to be granted clemency in DC have grown on Capitol Hill. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), the head of the Senate committee who oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has also demanded Peltier be given his freedom. Numerous House Democrats have also written to Biden.
The time has come for our President to act; the same President who appointed the first-ever Native American cabinet member last year and who halted the building of the Keystone pipeline across Native lands. Surely Mr. Biden is capable of an urgent act of compassion for Leonard Peltier — especially considering that the prosecutor who put him away in 1977 now says Peltier is innocent, and that his US Attorney’s office corrupted the evidence to make sure Peltier didn’t get a fair trial. Why is this victim of our judicial system still in prison? And now he is sick with Covid.
For months Peltier has begged to get a Covid booster shot. Prison officials refused. The fact that he now has COVID-19 is a form of torture. A shame hangs over all of us. Should he now die, are we all not complicit in taking his life?
President Biden, let Leonard Peltier go. This is a gross injustice. You can end it. Reach deep into your Catholic faith, read what the Pope has begged you to do, and then do the right thing.
For those of you reading this, will you join me right now in appealing to President Biden to free Leonard Peltier? His health is in deep decline, he is the voice of his people — a people we owe so much to for massacring and imprisoning them for hundreds of years.
The way we do mass incarceration in the US is abominable. And Leonard Peltier is not the only political prisoner we have locked up. We have millions of Black and brown and poor people tonight in prison or on parole and probation — in large part because they are Black and brown and poor. THAT is a political act on our part. Corporate criminals and Trump run free. The damage they have done to so many Americans and people around the world must be dealt with.
This larger issue is one we MUST take on. For today, please join me in contacting the following to show them how many millions of us demand that Leonard Peltier has suffered enough and should be free:
President Joe Biden
Phone: 202-456-1111
E-mail: At this link
https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland
Phone: 202-208-3100
E-mail: feedback@ios.doi.gov
Attorney General Merrick Garland
Phone: 202-514-2000
E-mail: At this link
https://www.justice.gov/doj/webform/your-message-department-justice
I’ll end with the final verse from the epic poem “American Names” by Stephen Vincent Benet:
I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
PS. Also — watch the brilliant 1992 documentary by Michael Apted and Robert Redford about the framing of Leonard Peltier— “Incident at Oglala”
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Union Membership—2021
Bureau of Labor Statistics
U.S. Department of Labor
For release 10:00 a.m. (ET) Thursday, January 20, 2022
Technical information:
(202) 691-6378 • cpsinfo@bls.gov • www.bls.gov/cps
Media contact:
(202) 691-5902 • PressOffice@bls.gov
In 2021, the number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions continued to decline (-241,000) to 14.0 million, and the percent who were members of unions—the union membership rate—was 10.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The rate is down from 10.8 percent in 2020—when the rate increased due to a disproportionately large decline in the total number of nonunion workers compared with the decline in the number of union members. The 2021 unionization rate is the same as the 2019 rate of 10.3 percent. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.
These data on union membership are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 eligible households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. For further information, see the Technical Note in this news release.
Highlights from the 2021 data:
• The union membership rate of public-sector workers (33.9 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.1 percent). (See table 3.)
• The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training, and library occupations (34.6 percent) and protective service occupations (33.3 percent). (See table 3.)
• Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.6 percent) than women (9.9 percent). The gap between union membership rates for men and women has narrowed considerably since 1983 (the earliest year for which comparable data are available), when rates for men and women were 24.7 percent and 14.6 percent, respectively. (See table 1.)
• Black workers remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.)
• Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 83 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($975 versus $1,169). (The comparisons of earnings in this news release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.) (See table 2.)
• Among states, Hawaii and New York continued to have the highest union membership rates (22.4 percent and 22.2 percent, respectively), while South Carolina and North Carolina continued to have the lowest (1.7 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively). (See table 5.)
Industry and Occupation of Union Members
In 2021, 7.0 million employees in the public sector belonged to unions, the same as in the private sector. (See table 3.)
Union membership decreased by 191,000 over the year in the public sector. The public-sector union membership rate declined by 0.9 percentage point in 2021 to 33.9 percent, following an increase of 1.2 percentage points in 2020. In 2021, the union membership rate continued to be highest in local government (40.2 percent), which employs many workers in heavily unionized occupations, such as police officers, firefighters, and teachers.
The number of union workers employed in the private sector changed little over the year. However, the number of private-sector nonunion workers increased in 2021. The private-sector unionization rate declined by 0.2 percentage point in 2021 to 6.1 percent, slightly lower than its 2019 rate of 6.2 percent. Industries with high unionization rates included utilities (19.7 percent), motion pictures and sound recording industries (17.3 percent), and transportation and warehousing (14.7 percent). Low unionization rates occurred in finance (1.2 percent), professional and technical services (1.2 percent), food services and drinking places (1.2 percent), and insurance (1.5 percent).
Among occupational groups, the highest unionization rates in 2021 were in education, training, and library occupations (34.6 percent) and protective service occupations (33.3 percent). Unionization rates were lowest in food preparation and serving related occupations (3.1 percent); sales and related occupations (3.3 percent); computer and mathematical occupations (3.7 percent); personal care and service occupations (3.9 percent); and farming, fishing, and forestry occupations (4.0 percent).
Selected Characteristics of Union Members
In 2021, the number of men who were union members, at 7.5 million, changed little, while the number of women who were union members declined by 182,000 to 6.5 million. The unionization rate for men decreased by 0.4 percentage point over the year to 10.6 percent. In 2021, women’s union membership rate declined by 0.6 percentage point to 9.9 percent. The 2021 decreases in union membership rates for men and women reflect increases in the total number of nonunion workers. The rate for men is below the 2019 rate (10.8 percent), while the rate for women is above the 2019 rate (9.7 percent). (See table 1.)
Among major race and ethnicity groups, Black workers continued to have a higher union membership rate in 2021 (11.5 percent) than White workers (10.3 percent), Asian workers (7.7 percent), and Hispanic workers (9.0 percent). The union membership rate declined by 0.4 percentage point for White workers, by 0.8 percentage point for Black workers, by 1.2 percentage points for Asian workers, and by 0.8 percentage point for Hispanic workers. The 2021 rates for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics are little or no different from 2019, while the rate for Asians is lower.
By age, workers ages 45 to 54 had the highest union membership rate in 2021, at 13.1 percent. Younger workers—those ages 16 to 24—had the lowest union membership rate, at 4.2 percent.
In 2021, the union membership rate for full-time workers (11.1 percent) continued to be considerably higher than that for part-time workers (6.1 percent).
Union Representation
In 2021, 15.8 million wage and salary workers were represented by a union, 137,000 less than in 2020. The percentage of workers represented by a union was 11.6 percent, down by 0.5 percentage point from 2020 but the same as in 2019. Workers represented by a union include both union members (14.0 million) and workers who report no union affiliation but whose jobs are covered by a union contract (1.8 million). (See table 1.)
Earnings
Among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $1,169 in 2021, while those who were not union members had median weekly earnings of $975. In addition to coverage by a collective bargaining agreement, these earnings differences reflect a variety of influences, including variations in the distributions of union members and nonunion employees by occupation, industry, age, firm size, or geographic region. (See tables 2 and 4.)
Union Membership by State
In 2021, 30 states and the District of Columbia had union membership rates below that of the U.S. average, 10.3 percent, while 20 states had rates above it. All states in both the East South Central and West South Central divisions had union membership rates below the national average, while all states in both the Middle Atlantic and Pacific divisions had rates above it. (See table 5 and chart 1.)
Ten states had union membership rates below 5.0 percent in 2021. South Carolina had the lowest rate (1.7 percent), followed by North Carolina (2.6 percent) and Utah (3.5 percent). Two states had union membership rates over 20.0 percent in 2021: Hawaii (22.4 percent) and New York (22.2 percent).
In 2021, about 30 percent of the 14.0 million union members lived in just two states (California at 2.5 million and New York at 1.7 million). However, these states accounted for about 17 percent of wage and salary employment nationally.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Impact on 2021 Union Members Data
Union membership data for 2021 continue to reflect the impact on the labor market of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Comparisons with union membership measures for 2020, including metrics such as the union membership rate and median usual weekly earnings, should be interpreted with caution. The onset of the pandemic in 2020 led to an increase in the unionization rate due to a disproportionately large decline in the number of nonunion workers compared with the decline in the number of union members. The decrease in the rate in 2021 reflects a large gain in the number of nonunion workers and a decrease in the number of union workers. More information on labor market developments in recent months is available at:
www.bls.gov/covid19/effects-of-covid-19-pandemic-and- response-on-the-employment-situation-news-release.htm.
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
- Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
- San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
- Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
Know Your Rights Materials
The NLG maintains a library of basic Know-Your-Rights guides.
- Know Your Rights During Covid-19
- You Have The Right To Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Encounters with Law Enforcement
- Operation Backfire: For Environmental and Animal Rights Activists
WEBINAR: Federal Repression of Activists & Their Lawyers: Legal & Ethical Strategies to Defend Our Movements: presented by NLG-NYC and NLG National Office
We also recommend the following resources:
Center for Constitutional Rights
Civil Liberties Defense Center
- Grand Juries: Slideshow
Grand Jury Resistance Project
Katya Komisaruk
Movement for Black Lives Legal Resources
Tilted Scales Collective
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By Charles M. Blow, May 22, 2022
Spartanburg, S.C.
WEDNESDAY WILL BE the second anniversary of the lurid street murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The killings of Black people had become almost banal in their incessancy and redundancy, but something about this one — captured during an advancing pandemic that had forced people apart and inside, watching the world through windows and screens — drew thousands of people out into the streets, where boarded-up storefronts produced the tempting tableau of a country strewn with canvases.
Some saw in the uprising the potential for revolution. They talked about the protests in the lofty language of a “racial reckoning,” an “inflection point,” a fresh start on America’s path to absolution from its original sin.
But flashes of guilt, outrage and shame often stir fleeting fealties, and the heavy gravitational pull of racial privileges and power can quickly draw mercurial allies back into the refuge of the status quo.
Some good came of the protests, to be sure. Some states and local municipalities passed or instituted police reforms. Money poured into Black Lives Matter, as well as other racial justice organizations and Black institutions. Individuals began personal journeys to become more egalitarian and more actively “antiracist.” And artists produced hundreds of murals and thousands of pieces of other street art that, for a time, transformed this country.
In the end, transformative national change proved to be an illusion. Inflation, a war in Ukraine, public safety, abortion and even a baby formula crisis have overtaken the zeitgeist. Support for Black Lives Matter has diminished. Federal police reform and federal voter protection both failed to pass the Senate. And the founders of Black Lives Matter have been drawn into controversies about how they handled its money.
I’ve learned not to expect much from America; it has a deep capacity for change but a shallow desire for it. I have embraced the “wise desire not to be betrayed by too much hoping,” as James Baldwin put it. But I worry about young people in all of this. It is their faith that’s most vulnerable to damage. They were the ones who most believed that change was not only possible but imminent, only to have America retreat and retrench.
Now not only are their allies reversing course on issues like police reform; the country is also facing a full backlash toward protest itself. Dozens of states have passed laws restricting the right to protest (just this week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida barred citizens from protesting outside private homes), and more than a dozen have now criminalized teaching full and accurate racial history.
The Great Erasure is underway, not so much an attempt to erase the uprising itself as an attempt to blunt its effects.
THERE IS NO EXAMPLE of this erasure more striking than the continual destruction, removal or slow vanishing of much of the street art produced in the wake of Floyd’s killing.
According to a database compiled by three professors at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota — Heather Shirey, David Todd Lawrence and Paul Lorah — there were once approximately 2,700 murals, graffiti, stickers, posters affixed to surfaces and light projections created in response to Floyd’s killing, mostly in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Shirey and Lawrence called it “the largest proliferation of street art around one idea or issue or event in history.” But many of those pieces have disappeared, sometimes because of exposure to traffic or the elements and sometimes because of deliberate attempts to erase them. Business owners quietly removed the graffitied planks from their storefronts. Some of the murals have been defaced.
For this project, my colleagues and I looked at 115 murals created after Floyd’s death and tried to determine how many had been maintained. (It is not a comprehensive list, although it is hard to imagine any such list could be.) Only 37 were fully intact. In cities from Oklahoma to California, few vestiges remain of what were once vibrant murals, painted on asphalt and walls.
Over the past two months, I talked to art historians, museum directors and curators, activists and artists who had created murals. The picture that emerges is of a group determined to preserve as much of the art as possible while understanding that it can’t all be saved, and an acknowledgement of the inherent, ephemeral nature of street art. This art was created in a moment, for a moment. Permanence was often not its central consideration. But to lose it would be to lose a cultural record of the time, a record of the profound significance and magnitude of what transpired: A generation of young people and young artists found their voice and used it, creating an arts movement that sits in the canon alongside the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s and the Harlem Renaissance. You might even say it mirrors on an enormous scale the Wall of Respect mural first painted in 1967 by the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture in Chicago.
What may have been different about this movement was the outlook of the generation that created it. Aaron Bryant, curator of photography, visual anthropology and contemporary history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, described it to me as a “sense of entitlement.” These activists and artists believe “they have an absolute right, and even a responsibility, to express themselves,” he told me. “They aren’t necessarily a generation that was raised to be silent.”
The art produced during and after the uprising was powerful, emotional and energetic, like a lightning storm. But like lightning, the illuminated contours of the way it split the sky soon dimmed and vanished.
The art tapped into something and provided a language for it. As Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, put it, “Some of the best art is created under situations of not only duress but of immediate response, and that is part and parcel with this sense of collective identity that I think many of us felt in that moment, and to see it visualized was really heartening.”
For me, it was transcendent. It brought a fresh, abounding energy to a standing tradition.
Murals as instruments of memorial have long been a feature of Black grief and remembrance. They are what Amaka Okechukwu, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at George Mason University, so eloquently describes as “gravestone murals” or “wake work” haunting the urban spaces where Black lives have been lost.
By no means are these murals the expression solely of African Americans. They can be found in many communities and in many cultures around the world, where the tradition of producing them is centuries old.
But in a way, Floyd’s murder globalized gravestone murals in service of a singular subject. Perhaps the most iconic of these murals were thoses with the words “Black Lives Matter” written in large block letters down the middle of streets. The first was painted by the District of Columbia and was so large that it was legible on satellite images.
People like Sarah Lewis, associate professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University, saw it as a powerful testament “symbolizing the precarity of black life in open terrain.” But activists soon pointed out that the politicians who supported the art often resisted policies designed to rectify the historic injustices Black Lives Matter had highlighted. When the District of Columbia painted its mural, the local Black Lives Matter chapter called it “a performative distraction from real policy changes” designed “to appease white liberals while ignoring our demands.” Mayor Muriel Bowser was “on the wrong side” of history, they said. “Black Lives Matter means defund the police.”
These tensions stretched beyond Washington.
In Minneapolis, at the intersection where Floyd was murdered — now called George Floyd Square — the George Floyd Global Memorial project has taken on the Herculean task of preserving all protest objects, items the group calls “offerings,” including art and murals, in the square. So far it has collected over 5,000 artifacts, preserved them with the help of art conservators and stored them in cardboard boxes in a small room in a community theater. The group has ambitions to one day build a museum to house it all. Some of the murals in George Floyd Square were being repainted when I visited this month, ahead of the observances of the second anniversary of Floyd’s murder. New ones have been added featuring other Black people killed elsewhere, some lost to community violence rather than state violence.
This level of ambition makes Minneapolis both the epicenter of the preservation efforts and an anomaly. Governments in cities across the country, like Tulsa, Okla. and Redwood City, Calif., have erased the murals, reflecting the reality that many lacked the true, sustained commitment to Black lives.
Further complicating the preservation efforts is the degree to which these pieces of art were politicalized from the moment of their creation: Murals were going up as Confederate monuments in cities like Montgomery, Ala., continued to come down. It fueled the fears held by white supremacists that white people and white culture would eventually be superseded.
In their zero-sum worldview, BLM’s pro-Blackness was inherently anti-white. President Donald Trump called a Black Lives Matter mural to be painted in front of Trump Tower in New York City a “symbol of hate.” Historical revisionists held fast to the lie that Confederate monuments were about history, rather than racism. The fight was over which art representing which points of view was more deserving of public display.
It’s perhaps also no coincidence that much of the artwork created after Floyd’s death is vanishing as the public embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement is waning. Polls last year by the Pew Research Center found that support for Black Lives Matter, which peaked in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death, had fallen back to its 2017 levels, pre-George Floyd. Black support had remained high; it was the support among white people that fell.
Activists chafe at the notion that the BLM movement itself is waning.
“Every off year we write Black Lives Matter’s obituary, and we eulogize it and we talk about the waning Black Lives Matter Movement,” Frank Leon Roberts, creator of the Black Lives Matter Syllabus, a public curriculum for teaching BLM in classrooms and communities, and newly appointed assistant professor of English and Black studies at Amherst College, told me.
“The movement actually is not waning,” he said. “The movement from its inception has operated in waves.” He predicts that “there will inevitably be another heinous event of police violence which will once again incite something in the people, and then we’ll be having this same conversation.”
But police killings have continued unabated. In fact, last year saw a record number of police shootings, the most since The Washington Post began keeping count in 2015. The police killed 1,055 people across the country in 2021. And yet, there were no nationwide protests.
In my life I have arrived at the conclusion that real liberation — equity, safety and “the pursuit of happiness” — is not rooted in feelings and personal evolutions. Only a change in the parameters of power — political, economic and cultural, who has it and who gets to exercise it, who is benefited by it and who is harmed by it — can transform this country.
Passions flare and subside; power endures. Like the art, broad-based, transracial interest and energy to support the Black Lives Matter movement are fading. I mourn the loss of that energy, but I also mourn the loss of the movement’s art from public space. In the streets it was both declaration and confrontation, brazen and assertive. It was forcefully in your face.
Now, even among the artifacts that can be or have been saved, the context will change from the urgency of in-situ to the sterility of institutions or the impersonal distance of digital space.
The art that once shouted and demanded and documented the movement is being culled and reduced to the dulcet-toned advocacy of a few heroic curators.
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By Melissa Murray, May 23, 2022
Ms. Murray is a professor of law at New York University
Alex Wong/Getty Images
The leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade has prompted a flurry of debate about the fate of other so-called unenumerated rights — rights that are not explicitly outlined in the Constitution — including the right to access contraception.
According to some commentators, claims that the right to contraception could be on the chopping block are little more than hyperbolic “catastrophizing” that cannot be taken seriously. Prominent constitutional law scholars also have insisted that such claims are little more than baseless fearmongering, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page insisted that liberal fears about overruling rights to contraception and same-sex marriage are little more than an “implausible parade of horribles.”
Such high-level minimizing is not surprising. To understand whether the right to access contraception, like the right to abortion, could be overturned, it’s necessary to pick up on clues in Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion.
Citing Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed and upheld Roe, Justice Alito wrote that abortion is different from other unenumerated rights in that it destroys a “potential life.”
In Justice Alito’s telling, what made Roe “egregiously wrong” was the fact that the right to abortion is not explicit in the Constitution’s text and is not “deeply rooted” in the history and traditions of the United States.
But the same could be said of other unenumerated rights, including, and especially, contraception. Nowhere does the Constitution speak of a right to contraception — the Constitution does not even explicitly mention women. And as many conservatives have noted, the American legal landscape was littered with prohibitions on contraception right up until the court invalidated Connecticut’s ban on contraception in 1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut.
Justice Alito himself has already set in motion the means for challenging the right to contraception. In 2014’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the family that owns the craft store company objected on religious grounds to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, which required employers to provide employees with insurance coverage for contraception. Specifically, Hobby Lobby balked at providing its employees with insurance plans that would cover IUDs and emergency contraceptives, like Plan B, based on the unsubstantiated claim that such contraceptives are abortifacients. The court, in an opinion written by Justice Alito, ruled for Hobby Lobby.
In a post-Roe America, it is easy to see how the right to contraception could be gutted by recasting some forms of contraception as abortifacients. For the last 10 years, this has been a standard move among abortion opponents.
The Susan B. Anthony List, a prominent anti-abortion group, has characterized emergency contraceptives as “abortion drugs.” Likewise, Americans United for Life, which drafts model anti-abortion legislation, maintains that IUDs and Plan B “can kill an embryo by blocking its ability to implant in the uterus.” Most recently, the Louisiana Legislature flirted with a bill that would classify abortion as a homicide, prompting concern that the legislation could have criminalized IUDs and emergency contraception.
As red states line up to prohibit — and even criminalize — abortion, the crucial question will be, What counts as an abortion?
Beyond that, the draft opinion in the pending abortion case provides a path for challenging the constitutionality of all contraception. In a footnote, Justice Alito highlights an argument linking abortion with eugenics. The argument is most closely associated with Justice Clarence Thomas, who in a 2019 concurrence argued that abortion restrictions could be the state’s attempt to prevent abortion from becoming “a tool of eugenic manipulation.” Justice Thomas’s argument hinged, in part, on the relationship between Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the modern birth control movement, and the eugenics movement.
Justice Alito’s decision to include that footnote in his draft opinion is puzzling — by the draft opinion’s logic, overruling Roe is a function of textualism and originalism, not eugenics. Perhaps it was merely a collegial nod to Justice Thomas, who has diligently husbanded the eugenics argument and seen it flourish in lower court rulings on abortion.
Or, more ominously, perhaps the footnote is intended to preserve — in the most important Supreme Court decision in a generation — the view that the modern birth control movement is irrevocably tainted by its past associations with eugenics and racial injustice. After all, the court has overruled past precedents in order to remedy a racial injustice.
As the draft opinion acknowledges, the court in Brown v. Board of Education overruled Plessy v. Ferguson in order to correct the injustices of Jim Crow. What better way to destabilize, and lay a foundation for overruling, the right to contraception than to foster and cultivate the notion that it originated in a racist effort to stamp out Black reproduction?
To quote Justice Antonin Scalia, “it takes real cheek” for Justice Alito to insist that the draft opinion’s logic can be confined to abortion and does not implicate any other rights. The document, if finalized, will not simply lay waste to almost 50 years’ worth of precedent — it will provide a blueprint for going even further. The devil, after all, is in the details.
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In a community already marked by segregation and poverty, Black students are mourning and demanding change.
By Lola Fadulu, May 23, 2022
Lola Fadulu has spent the past week on Buffalo’s East Side, interviewing more than two dozen children and their guardians.
Ruyvette Townsend leaned against a student’s desk early last week, trying not to cry.
Ms. Townsend, an attendance teacher at Leonardo da Vinci High School in Buffalo, looked at the rows of students seated in front of her: Some had their heads down, others were tense with anger, and many were shaking their heads.
“‘Who would drive that far to kill people?’” Ms. Townsend, 60, recalled one student asking. “‘Didn’t somebody see him coming?’”
Some of the students had shopped with their families at the Tops supermarket where 10 Black people were killed on May 14 in a racist mass shooting. Others had known several of the victims, and one student was there when the bodies were collected.
Some saw the live footage of the massacre and couldn’t get it out of their heads.
The mass shooting was the deadliest in the United States so far this year, and one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history. Federal data shows a recent spike in hate crimes against Black Americans.
Many Black families in Buffalo are fearful.
“I think the concern is because the schools are predominantly Black around this area,” said Denise Sweet, 48, a mother of two boys. “Who’s to say that another sharpshooter, when it’s all died down, might not start this all over again and enter school?”
School officials want Black families to trust that if any such threat were to arise on school buses or in classrooms, their children would be protected. Dr. Tonja Williams, the interim schools superintendent, said she was increasing security at schools and bolstering mental health support for students.
She grew up on Buffalo’s East Side and knew several of the victims.
“It’s a challenging time for all of us,” said Dr. Williams. “What we know is that, in our city, our schools are a safe haven.”
But parents and students aren’t feeling all that trusting. And some are wondering how a school system that has neglected its Black children for so long can be expected to help them cope with the tragedy.
Buffalo’s public school system is racially diverse, but its schools are still segregated. Many Black students are concentrated in schools with high rates of poverty, which tend to underperform, in part because they often have less experienced teachers and fewer rigorous courses.
“This district is not designed for African American children to succeed,” said Coleen Dove, 67, a retired principal who worked in the school system for 30 years.
‘It could just happen to me’
The day after the shooting, a preacher knelt in the street, praying, urging the community to remember that God was ultimately a good God.
Black children and their parents gathered around him, staring somberly at a tree with red balloons tied to its branches, tall prayer candles with images of Jesus Christ at its roots, and many, many flowers.
Simier Sweet, 13, Jaiden Sweet, 12, and their mother, Ms. Sweet, were among the onlookers. Simier, who attends a local charter school, said he was nervous about walking to the bus stop alone.
“I’m there by myself, like it could just happen to me,” said Simier. “It could happen on the bus, anywhere, me walking to my school.”
His concerns weren’t unwarranted. The suspect considered going to a school as part of his rampage and listed one Buffalo elementary school in particular as a target, according to his Discord chat logs. On Wednesday last week, officials said they were going to increase the police presence at Buffalo schools because of social media threats.
Teraia Harris, 15, a high school student, said she heard about the threats and asked her mother to pick her up early.
“This is supposed to be an institution of learning, where they are supposed to feel comfortable and feel safe,” said her mother, Tamara Martin, 43, who is a nurse.
Some parents are simply keeping their children home; others are opting to drive them to school instead of allowing them to take the bus. Some children are seeking out counseling at school and finding it woefully inadequate.
Three of the people killed in the shooting were or had been school district staff: Pearl Young, 77, was a substitute teacher; Margus D. Morrison, 52, was a bus aide; and Aaron Salter Jr., 55, was a former substitute teacher.
“It takes a toll on these children,” said George Wilson, 35, who said one of his daughters was close with Katherine Massey, 72, their neighbor, who was also killed.
‘It’s going to be a long time before any of us really feel safe’
Standing at a memorial near the store’s parking lot, José Esquilin, 43, and Alice Castricone, 46, were debating whether to send their daughter, Avalynn Esquilin, 7, to school last Monday.
Avalynn stood nearby, with a piece of chalk in her hand, staring down at a message she had written with a heart underneath it: “RIP we love you, from all of us.”
“I just don’t know what’s going to go on because a lot of people are shooting and killing,” she said. Her parents decided to keep her home on Monday and Tuesday.
Dr. Williams sent a letter to staff and parents after the shooting that asked principals to begin the school day last Monday by giving students and staff members time to share what was on their minds. Counselors, psychologists and social workers were also available.
“It’s going to be a long time before any of us really feel safe,” said Dr. Williams. “When something this heinous happens there, you do question: Am I safe anywhere?”
Alicia Northington, 45, said her daughter, Solei Watson, 7, who attends a local charter school, recently found her crying and asked what was wrong.
“I haven’t really gotten into the racism part, because I think the biggest part is for her to know people are grieving,” said Ms. Northington, who has been dropping her daughter off instead of allowing her to take the bus.
But she said Solei had asked her repeatedly what the “white man” she heard about at school had to do with the shooting.
“She knows that it’s something with white and Black,” said Ms. Northington, adding: “I want to make sure that she knows that everything is not just white and Black. Something happened, someone individually did something.”
She said it was imperative that her daughter stay in school. “I also want her to know you have to keep moving through this, you can’t be afraid,” she said.
Older children are much more aware of the factors that led to the shooting, and some have been eager to talk about it.
Teraia, the high school student, said that she had been looking forward to discussing the massacre, thinking it would help her process what happened.
But when she brought it up with a teacher and classmates, she said, the teacher told her to visit a “mindfulness room,” which existed at the school before the shooting happened.
It wasn’t helpful, Teraia said, adding that the message seemed to be: “‘Live life and don’t be scared.’”
Myah Durham, 14, was also frustrated by the counseling provided at her charter school.
“It didn’t work for me,” she said, adding that she was told: “‘It’s going to be OK, nothing ever happened to Buffalo, just pray and keep your eye out when you’re walking, no headphones in your ears, be aware of your surroundings.’”
Myah said she had viewed white people differently since the shooting, unsure of who was racist, whom she could trust. Inside the classroom, she has had trouble focusing.
Heyward Patterson, 67, another shooting victim, was a deacon at her church. She recalled how he always greeted her with a hug.
Her mother, LeCandice Durham, has encouraged her to keep her head up.
“We’re going to change the narrative, that’s the plan,” said Ms. Durham, 36, as she stood near a memorial next to the supermarket on Tuesday evening while her three other children drew with chalk and chased each other around. “I don’t want Buffalo to be known as the place of the mass shooting.”
She added: “Are we still going to be the City of Good Neighbors? I believe we will.”
As she spoke, Myah gazed into the distance. Asked if she too felt hopeful, she shrugged: “I don’t have an answer,” she said.
An already burdened public school system
What made the East Side a target for the suspect — a high percentage of Black residents, living closely together — has made it a community for the people who live here. Many residents have lived in the area for decades. They greet each other by first name.
At the same time, living conditions for Black Buffalo residents, across measures of health, housing, income and education, have improved little and in some cases have declined over the last 30 years, according to a 2021 University at Buffalo report.
“The school doesn’t know how to accommodate for any of that,” said Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a professor of urban studies at the University at Buffalo.
Buffalo Public Schools were already struggling to serve Black students, education experts said. The district suspends them at especially high rates compared to other cities in New York.
The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has found substantial evidence of racial inequality, including in hiring and in the locations of new schools, and required the city to address it. But experts say little progress has been made.
Dr. Williams, the interim superintendent, said there was no denying that there was some segregation in the schools. But she said school choice, or allowing parents to decide where their children went to school, had kept it from being worse.
“Do we have things we can certainly improve upon? Absolutely,” she said, adding that she would continue listening.
Students at East Community High School reacted to the mass shooting in a number of ways last week, said Leah Rush, a family support specialist with Say Yes to Education Buffalo, a nonprofit organization that serves Buffalo schools, as she sat in her office in the school’s health clinic on Friday.
Some were withdrawn; others got angry or cried.
“The overall temperature is that kids feel burnout, and I would say a little bit hopeless for change,” said Ms. Rush, who has worked inside the school and conducted home visits for the past six years.
She said students were already worried for their safety, especially since some had lost friends to gun violence. “They’re struggling to identify ways to change this, due to the years of segregation and oppression,” she said.
Samuel L. Radford III, the co-chairman of We the Parents of Western New York, a parent advocacy group, said the city must harness “all the good will that’s coming into the community, all the energy,” and figure out how to “change things for the better, not just rhetoric.”
Some teens are paving the way. Na’Kya McCann, 18, a first-year college student, grew up on Buffalo’s East Side and coaches cheerleading for a group of Black girls age 6 and up. She has created her own space for the children she works with to talk about the shooting.
She said she wanted to teach them to love themselves, in spite of racism and hate.
Ms. McCann after practice on Wednesday asked if the young cheerleaders knew their lives were valuable. The group of girls and one boy seated in a circle around her nodded, some looking down into their laps.
“Yes, they don’t agree with us,” Ms. McCann said. “But at the end of the day, their negative energy doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
Troy Closson and Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.
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The Seventh Iteration of The Symposium on The Abolition of Foreign Military Bases was held May 4-6, 2022 In Guantanamo, Cuba, near the 125-yea- old U.S. Naval Base located a few miles from the city of Guantanamo.
The Naval Base is the site of the infamous U.S. military prison that, as of April 2022, still holds 37 men, most of whom have never been tried as their trial would reveal the torture to which the U.S. has subjected them. Eighteen of the 37 are approved for release if U.S. diplomats can arrange for countries to accept them. The Biden administration has released three prisoners so far including one who had been cleared for release in the final days of the Obama Administration but was kept imprisoned for four more years by the Trump administration. The prison was opened twenty years ago on January 11, 2002.
In the city of Guantanamo, around 100 persons from 25 countries attended the symposium that detailed U.S. military bases around the world. Presentations on the U.S. military presence or the impact of U.S. military policies on their countries were given by persons from Cuba, United States, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Barbados, Mexico, Italy, Philippines, Spain, and Greece.
The symposium was co-sponsored by the Cuban Movement for Peace (MOVPAZ) and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), the symposium.
Symposium declaration
In light of the challenges on peace and political and social stability in the region, participants endorsed the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace approved by the Heads of State and Government of the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) at its second Summit held in Havana in January 2014.
The summit declaration stated:
“This seminar took place amidst an ever more complex context, characterized by an increase in the aggressiveness and all kinds of interventionism by the U.S. imperialism, the European Union and NATO in their efforts to impose extreme dictates, by resorting to a media warfare, thus unleashing armed conflicts with varying intensities in different parts of the world while increasing controversies and tensions.
“To meet such nefarious purposes, foreign military bases and aggressive facilities of similar nature have been strengthened, for they are a fundamental component in this strategy, since they are instruments for direct and indirect interventions in the internal affairs of the countries where they are located as well as a permanent threat against neighboring nations.”
Ann Wright’s presentation to the Symposium on the U.S. Military in the Pacific
U.S. Army Colonel (Ret) and now peace activist Ann Wright was asked to speak to the symposium about current U.S. military bases and operations in the Pacific. Following is her speech on the U.S. military in the Pacific.
Presentation on U.S. Military Operations in the Western Pacific by Colonel Ann Wright, U.S. Army (Retired):
I want to give many thanks to the organizers of the VII International Seminar for Peace and the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases conference.
This is the third seminar I have been asked to speak at with my background of having been in the U.S. Army for nearly 30 years and retiring as a Colonel and also having been a U.S. diplomat for 16 years at U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. However, the main reason I am invited is because I resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq and I have been an outspoken critic of U.S. war and imperial policies since my resignation.
First, I want to apologize to the people of Cuba for the continuing illegal, inhumane and criminal blockade the U.S. government has placed on Cuba for the past 60 years!
Second, I want to apologize for the illegal naval base that the U.S. has had at Guantanamo Bay for almost 120 years and that has been the scene of horrors of criminal acts committed on the 776 prisoners the U.S. has held there since January 2002. Thirty-seven men still are held including a man that is cleared for release but is still there. He was 17 when he was sold to the U.S. for a ransom, and he is now 37.
Finally, and very importantly, I want to apologize to Fernando Gonzalez Llort, now the President of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People’s (ICAP), who is one of the Cuban Five who were wrongly imprisoned for ten years by the United States.
For each symposium, I have focused on a different part to the world. Today I will speak about the U.S. Military in the Western Pacific.
U.S. continues its military build-up in the Western Pacific
With the world’s attention on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. continues its dangerous build-up of military forces in the Western Pacific.
Pacific hot spot – Taiwan
Taiwan is a hot spot in the Pacific and for the world. Despite the 40-year agreement on the “One China Policy,” the U.S. sells weapons to Taiwan and has U.S. military trainers on the island.
Recent highly problematic visits to Taiwan by senior U.S. diplomats and Congressional members are done to purposefully anger China and elicit a military response, similar to the military exercises that the U.S. and NATO have done on the border of Russia.
On April 15, a delegation of seven U.S. Senators led by the chair of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations committee arrived in Taiwan following a steadily increasing high level of U.S. diplomatic visits over the past four months.
There are only 13 nations that continue to recognize Taiwan instead of the People’s Republic of China and four are in the Pacific: Palau, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and Nauru. The PRC lobbies these countries hard to switch and the U.S. lobbies the countries to keep recognizing Taiwan although officially the U.S. itself does not recognize Taiwan.
In Hawai’i, the headquarters of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command that covers one-half the earth’s surface has 120 military bases in Japan with 53,000 military plus military families and 73 military bases in South Korea with 26,000 military plus families, six military bases on Australia, five military bases on Guam and 20 military bases in Hawai’i.
The Indo-Pacific command has coordinated numerous “freedom of navigation” armadas of U.S., UK, French, Indian and Australian warships sailing through China’s front yard, the South and East China Seas. Many of the armadas have had aircraft carriers and up to ten other ships, submarines, and aircraft for each aircraft carrier.
China has responded to the ships passing between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland and to the restless visits of U.S. diplomats with air armadas of up to fifty aircraft that fly to the edge of Taiwan’s air defense zone. The U.S. continues to provide military equipment and military trainers to Taiwan.
Rim of the Pacific largest naval war maneuvers in the world
In July and August 2022, the U.S. will host the largest naval war maneuver in the world with Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) returning in full force after a modified version in 2020 due to COVID. In 2022, 27 countries are scheduled to participate with 25,000 personnel, 41 ships, four submarines, more than 170 aircraft and will include anti-submarine warfare exercises, amphibious operations, humanitarian assistance training, missile shots and ground forces drills.
In other areas of the Pacific, the Australian military hosted the Talisman Sabre war maneuvers in 2021 with over 17,000 ground forces primarily from the U.S. (8,300) and Australia (8,000) but a few others from Japan, Canada, South Korea, UK, and New Zealand practiced maritime, land, air, information and cyber, and space warfare.
Darwin, Australia continues to host a six-month rotation of 2200 U.S. Marines that began ten years ago in 2012 and the U.S. military is spending $324 million to upgrade airfields, aircraft maintenance facilities aircraft parking areas, living, and working accommodation, messes, gyms, and training ranges.
Darwin will also be the site of a $270-million-dollar, 60-million-gallon jet fuel storage facility as the U.S. military moves large supplies to fuel closer to a potential war zone. A complicating factor is that a Chinese company now holds the lease on the Darwin port into which U.S. military fuel will be brought for transfer to the storage tanks.
The 80-year-old, massive 250-million-gallon underground jet fuel storage facility in Hawai’i will be finally closed due to public outrage after another huge fuel leak in November 2021 contaminated the drinking water of almost 100,000 persons in the Honolulu area, mostly military families and military facilities and jeopardizing the drinking water of the entire island.
The U.S. territory of Guam has suffered a continued increase in U.S. military units, bases, and equipment. Camp Blaz on Guam is the newest U.S. Marine base in the world and was opened in 2019.
Guam is the home base of six assassin Reaper drones assigned to the U.S. Marines as well as missile “defense” systems. U.S. Marines on Hawai’i were also provided six assassin drones as a part of their mission reorientation from heavy tanks to light mobile forces to fight “an enemy” on small islands of the Pacific.
Guam’s nuclear submarine base is continually busy as U.S. nuclear submarines lurk off China and North Korea. One U.S. nuclear submarine ran into an “unmarked” submarine mountain in 2020 and had major damage, that Chinese media eagerly reported.
The Navy now has five submarines homeported in Guam—up from two the service had based there as of November 2021.
In February 2022, four B-52 bombers and more than 220 airmen flew from Louisiana to Guam, joining thousands of U.S., Japanese and Australian service members on the island for the annual Cope North exercise which the U.S. Air Force states is for “training is focused on disaster relief and aerial combat.” About 2,500 U.S. service members and 1,000 personnel from the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force and the Royal Australian Air Force were in the Cope North war preparation maneuvers.
One-hundred-and-thirty aircraft involved in Cope North flew out of Guam and the islands of Rota, Saipan and Tinian in the Northern Marian Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia.
The U.S. military with 13,232 aircraft has almost three times more planes than Russia (4,143) and four times more than China (3,260.)
In the only positive demilitarization development in the Pacific, due to citizen activism, the U.S. military has scaled back military training on the small islands of Pagan and Tinian in the Northern Marianas islands near Guam and eliminated an artillery firing range on Tinian. However, large scale training and bombing continues at the Pohakuloa bombing range on the Big Island of Hawai’i with aircraft flying from the continental U.S. to drop bombs and return to the U.S.
The U.S. builds more military bases in the Pacific as China increases its non-military influence
In 2021, the Federated States of Micronesia agreed that the U.S. could build a military base on one of its 600 islands. The Republic of Palau is among several Pacific countries designated by the Pentagon as the possible site of a new military base. The U.S. plans to build a $197-million tactical radar system for Palau, which hosted U.S. military training exercises in 2021. In addition to its close U.S. ties, Palau is one of Taiwan’s four allies in the Pacific. Palau has refused to stop its recognition of Taiwan which prompted China to effectively ban Chinese tourists from visiting the island in 2018.
Both Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia have hosted U.S. military civil action teams over the past twenty years that have lived in small military compounds.
The U.S. continues its large military missile tracking base in the Marshall Islands for missile shot from Vandenburg Air Base in California. The U.S. is also responsible for the massive nuclear waste facility known as the Cactus Dome which is leaking toxic nuclear waste into the ocean from the debris of the 67 nuclear tests the U.S. conducted in the 1960s. Thousands of Marshall Islanders and their descendants still suffer from nuclear radiation from those tests.
China, which sees Taiwan as part of its territory in its “One China” policy, has tried to win over Taipei’s allies in the Pacific, persuading the Solomon Islands and Kiribati to switch sides in 2019.
On April 19, 2022, China and the Solomon Islands announced they had signed a new security agreement in which China could send military personnel, police, and other forces to the Solomon Islands “to assist in maintaining social order” and other missions. The security pact also would allow Chinese warships to use ports in the Solomon Islands to refuel and replenish supplies. The U.S. sent a high-level diplomatic delegation to the Solomon Islands to express its concern that China could send military forces to the South Pacific nation and destabilize the region. In response to the security pact, the U.S. will also discuss plans to reopen an embassy in the capital, Honiara, as it tries to increase its presence in the strategically important country amid growing concerns about Chinese influence. The embassy has been closed since 1993.
The island nation of Kiribati, about 2,500 miles southwest of Hawai’i, joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative to upgrade its infrastructure, including modernizing what was once a World War II-era U.S. military air base.
No peace on the Korean Peninsula
With its 73 U.S. bases in South Korea and 26,000 military personnel plus military families living in South Korea, the Biden administration continues to respond to North Korean missile tests with military maneuvers instead of diplomacy.
In mid-April 2022, the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group operated in waters off the Korean peninsula, amid tensions over North Korea’s missile launches and concerns that it could soon resume testing nuclear weapons. In early March North Korea conducted a full test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) for the first time since 2017. This is first time since 2017 that a U.S. carrier group has sailed in the waters between South Korea and Japan.
While Moon Jae-In, the outgoing President of South Korea exchanged letters with North Korean head of state Kim Jung Un on April 22, 2022, advisers to South Korea’s president-elect Yoon Suk-yeol are asking for redeployment of U.S. strategic assets, such as aircraft carriers, nuclear bombers, and submarines, to the Korean peninsula during talks held on a visit to Washington in early April.
Three-hundred-and-fifty-six organizations in the U.S. and South Korea have called for the suspension of the very dangerous and provocative war drills the U.S. and South Korea militaries conduct.
Conclusion
While global attention is focused on the horrific war and destruction of Ukraine by Russia, the western Pacific continues to be a very dangerous place for global peace with the U.S. using military war exercises to inflame the hot spots of North Korea and Taiwan.
Stop All Wars!!!
—Popular Resistance, May 24, 2022
https://popularresistance.org/guantanamo-cuba-vii-symposium-on-the-abolition-of-foreign-military-bases/
“A World of Peace and Social Justice Is Necessary”
Final Declaration: VII International Seminar for Peace and For the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases
Guantánamo, May 4 – 5, 2022
Delegates from 25 countries gathered in the province of Guantánamo, Cuba, from May 4 to 5, at the invitation of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples and the World Peace Council, to celebrate the Seventh International Seminar for Peace and For the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases.
The seminar was attended by 84 delegates and guests from Argentina, Germany, Barbados, Brazil, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, United States, Spain, the Philippines, Greece, Guyana, Mexico, United Kingdom, Puerto Rico, Palestine, Syria, Sierra Leone, Sweden, Switzerland, Venezuela, and Norway. Also in attendance were the main leaders of the World Peace Council (WPC) and its member organizations as well as personalities, fighters for peace, antiwar activists, and friends in solidarity with Cuba.
This seminar took place amidst an ever more complex context, characterized by an increase in the aggressiveness and all kinds of interventionism by the U.S. imperialism, the European Union and NATO in their efforts to impose extreme dictates, by resorting to a media warfare, thus unleashing armed conflicts with varying intensities in different parts of the world while increasing controversies and tensions.
To meet such nefarious purposes, foreign military bases and aggressive facilities of similar nature have been strengthened, for they are a fundamental component in this strategy, since they are instruments for direct and indirect interventions in the internal affairs of the countries where they are located as well as a permanent threat against neighboring nations.
The participants endorsed the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace approved by the Heads of State and Government of the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) at its second Summit held in Havana in January 2014.
Emphasis was made on the validity of the aforementioned Proclamation in the light of the challenges that are lingering upon peace and political and social stability in the region.
Taking into account all of the above, this Seventh International Seminar calls on all peace-loving and progressive forces to multiply the actions and initiatives against imperialism and its warmongering and interventionist policies, which continue to seriously endanger the destiny and the future of all humanity.
Likewise, the fighters for peace, gathered in Guantánamo, committed to:
· Denounce the aggressive and interventionist policies of the current U.S. administration and its NATO allies, which intend to dominate the world with the support of the current broad network of military bases, facilities, and enclaves; as well as the risk posed by the incorporation of new members to that belligerent organization.
· Continue to advise all peoples of the world about the dangers of a global nuclear war of incalculable consequences for humanity and remain permanently mobilized.
· Strengthen the demand for the closure of all foreign military bases, facilities and enclaves and the immediate withdrawal of foreign occupation troops in those countries where they have been deployed, for they are an instrument of the hegemonic policy of imperialism and the international financial capital.
· Call for actions and initiatives every year on or around February 23, marking the “International Day of Action against Foreign Military Bases” in all countries against these military facilities.
· Continue to demand the return of the territory illegally occupied by the U.S. Guantánamo Naval Base to its legitimate owner.
· Call for the lifting of the criminal economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the government of the United States and strongly reject the full implementation of the Helms-Burton Act, whose purpose is to asphyxiate the heroic people of Cuba.
· Expand the dissemination of the content of the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, given its relevance and validity in the Latin American and Caribbean political context.
· Strengthen the struggle against terrorism in all its forms and continue denouncing the link that exists between that scourge and imperialism.
· Multiply the actions of the international campaign for a world of peace, without nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons and make such actions be felt at foreign military bases and facilities.
· Denounce the actions against the environment and the health of the populations where foreign military bases are located.
· Continue expressing the broadest solidarity with the countries and peoples under occupation and colonial domain in the Caribbean, South America, Africa and the Middle East; and where there is a foreign military presence, like in Puerto Rico, the Malvinas, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, Syria, Palestine and Western Sahara.
· Denounce the current establishment of a new military base in the province of Neuquén in Argentina.
· Maintain and strengthen the denunciation of the interventionist actions of the U.S. imperialism and the European Union as well as the counterrevolutionary oligarchy in Venezuela, aimed at stopping and destroying the Bolivarian Revolution, which is also a clear threat to peace in the region.
· Express our support to the people of the United States, who struggle for peace and reject the expansion of the military bases and interventionist actions of that government.
· Denounce the imperialist actions against Nicaragua and strengthen solidarity with its people.
· Express solidarity with the people of Colombia and call for the implementation of the Peace Agreements, the respect for life and the observance of human rights.
· Express solidarity with the people of Puerto Rico, the indigenous populations and ethnic minorities in the United States in the light of the violations of their human rights by the U.S. government.
· Increase denunciations of the threats of the use of nuclear weapons, which will only be conducive to a generalized war of global dimensions.
· Reject the disinformation campaigns launched from the United States and the European Union.
· Ratify that this new war in Europe reveals the destabilizing nature of NATO, whose aggressive presence must be confronted. Human life should be respected, and a solution should be found based on a constructive and respectful dialogue among the parties involved.
Instead of encouraging the use of force and continuing to send financial assistance that is worth millions, and state-of-the-art military equipment, all parties have the responsibility to contribute to find a solution in the interest of world peace, in accordance with International Law and the UN Charter.
We, the pacifist, progressive, anti-imperialist, antimilitarist and anti-interventionist organizations reiterate our condemnation of the interference in the internal affairs of nations, the imperial reordering of the planet under the designs of imperialism and NATO and the militarism that threatens the human species and places us at the threshold of a new world confrontation.
We likewise express our solidarity with the Cuban people, who continue to make a great effort to achieve a more just, prosperous, democratic, and sustainable socialist society. We also convey fraternal greetings and express our recognition to the people of Guantánamo and its authorities for the warm welcome and the facilities granted for the successful celebration of this event.
All participants agreed to disseminate and follow up on this Declaration, which should become a point of reference to continue strengthening the work in favor of peace and against foreign military bases.
Guantánamo, Cuba, May 5, 2022
Karl Marx 204th birthday anniversary
—Popular Resistance, May 24, 2022
https://popularresistance.org/final-declaration-vii-international-seminar-for-peace-and-for-the-abolition-of-foreign-military-bases/
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By Thomas Fuller, May 25, 2022
The repetition of horror numbs the mind: Only 11 days ago there was Buffalo, with a man driven by racism gunning down 10 people at a supermarket. The next day another angry man walked into a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, Calif., and killed one person and wounded five others. And now, Uvalde, Texas — a repeat of what was once thought unfathomable: the killing of at least 19 elementary school children in second, third and fourth grades.
“I guess it’s something in society we know will happen again, over and over,” said Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, died in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.
The misery mounts, and yet nothing changes, leaving Americans with little more to do than keep lists, mental spreadsheets of death that treat events like Uvalde as just another morbid tally with superlatives like “second-deadliest shooting in an elementary school.”
Each event evokes some atrocity from the past, the exact details of each shooting growing more indistinct by the year: The latest death toll of 21 at Robb Elementary School in Texas surpasses the shooting in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, when 17 people were killed. It falls short of the deadliest school shooting — when 26 people were killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.
These are the mathematics of American gun massacres.
All three school shootings — Newtown, Parkland and now Uvalde — have eclipsed Columbine in 1999, when such events still had the power to shock the nation.
The reasons for the violence are familiar and incontrovertible. The United States has many more guns than citizens, about 400 million firearms, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the nonpartisan Small Arms Survey, and 331 million people.
For more than a decade now, semiautomatic handguns, purchased for personal protection, outsell rifles, which have been typically used in hunting.
And the coronavirus pandemic stirred an even greater gun-buying craze. Annual domestic gun production increased from 3.9 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2020, according to a report released this month by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A vast majority of those firearms stayed in the United States.
The toll of the violence, especially on children, has only grown. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of gun deaths of children 14 and younger rose by roughly 50 percent from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020.
Last year, more than 1,500 children and teenagers younger than 18 were killed in homicides and accidental shootings, compared with about 1,380 in 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a database tracking gun deaths.
Many details about the Uvalde shooting have yet to be made public, including the weapons used by the gunman — an 18-year-old man who died at the scene, the authorities said — and how he obtained them. But the emotional turmoil of the killings was sadly familiar.
“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” President Biden said on Tuesday night after returning from a trip to Asia. “Why do we keep letting this happen?”
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a young legislator when the children were killed in Sandy Hook, exhorted his fellow senators to action on Tuesday. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” he said on the Senate floor.
These were questions with typical answers: not much of anything on the federal level. Republicans, often appealing to the Second Amendment, have blocked efforts to add stiffer background checks for gun purchasers every time another major mass shooting jostles the nation’s conscience. Still, within hours of the shooting in Uvalde, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, moved to clear the way to force votes in the coming days on legislation that would strengthen background checks.
In the meantime states like Texas have forged ahead with some of the least-restrictive gun laws in the United States, priding itself as a state with responsible gun owners — more than a million — even with its recent history of mass shootings.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed a wide-ranging law in 2021 that ended the requirement for Texans to obtain a license to carry handguns, allowing virtually anyone over the age of 21 to carry one. The landmark law made the state one of the largest to adopt a “constitutional carry” law that basically eliminates most restrictions on the ability to carry handguns.
Mr. Abbott described it as “the strongest Second Amendment legislation in Texas history.”
Mass shootings have become so common in the United States that only a small fraction rise to attract widespread attention beyond the communities directly affected. On the same weekend as the Buffalo killings, more than a dozen people were wounded by gunfire in downtown Milwaukee, near the arena where an N.B.A. playoff game ended hours earlier, the authorities said.
Two weeks earlier, the owner and two employees of the Broadway Inn Express motel in Biloxi, Miss., were fatally shot, and another person was also shot dead during a carjacking.
Less than four weeks before that, a barrage of gunfire in Sacramento killed six people and wounded 12 in a shooting that the authorities said involved at least five gunmen.
On Monday, the F.B.I. released data showing a rapidly escalating pattern of public shootings in the United States.
The bureau identified 61 “active shooter” attacks in 2021 that killed 103 people and injured 130 others. That was the highest annual total since 2017, when 143 people were killed, and hundreds more were wounded, numbers inflated by the sniper attack on the Las Vegas Strip.
The 2021 total represented a 52 percent increase from the tally of such shootings in 2020, and a 97 percent increase from 2017, according to the F.B.I.’s Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021 report.
In Uvalde, Rey Chapa has a nephew who was at the school during the shooting but was not injured.
“This is just evil,” Mr. Chapa said in an interview, using an expletive. He was waiting to hear back from family and friends about the conditions of other children and scrolling through Facebook for updates. “I’m afraid I’m going to know a lot of these kids that were killed.”
Contributing reporting was Emily Cochrane, Catie Edmondson, Christine Hauser, Eduardo Medina, Sarah Mervosh, Alexandra E. Petri, Michael D. Shear, Glenn Thrush and Elizabeth Williamson.
My NYT Comment:
I was born August 10, 1945. The U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima August 6 and Nagasaki August 9 that same year. As a child I grew up playing "cowboys and Indians" with toy cowboy cap-guns and toy Indian bows-and-arrows. Our nation was built on the massacre of Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people. This nation's wars are never-ending. Police murders are never-ending. Our children are trained to use violence to solve problems. Pow! Bang! Kaboom! How are children to learn other ways to solve problems if our government is, as Martin Luther King suggested, "the biggest purveyor of violence in the world!" The police have license to kill a car thief—clearly placing the worth of the car over the worth of a life—or the worth of a counterfeit $20.00 bill over the life of George Floyd. That's because our society is based upon protecting the private profits of the few over the lives of those who toil to produce those profits for their employers/enslavers. And toy guns, Superheroes, and violent video games are designed to preserve and reinforce this violence—as if there is no other way to live. Providing for human needs and wants instead of private profits, police, and war, is the only way to end violence for good! In the meantime, BAN AUTOMATIC WEAPONS! —Bonnie Weinstein
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By Diana Buttu, May 25, 2022
Ms. Buttu is a political analyst and a former legal adviser to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Palestinian negotiators.
Bullet holes on a tree and a makeshift memorial mark where the Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed in the West Bank city of Jenin in May. Credit...Majdi Mohammed/Associated Press
I first met the pioneering Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh more than two decades ago. She was in the early days of her career at Al Jazeera, and I was at the start of my stint as a legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
As a newcomer to the occupied West Bank, I was in awe of Shireen’s steeliness while reporting on Israel’s invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in 2002. On May 11, 2022, she was killed while covering an Israeli military raid in the city. Her producer was also wounded. Both were clearly identified as journalists, wearing body armor boldly marked “press” for all to see. The evidence to date points to her being shot by an Israeli soldier, most likely a sniper. Israel said it had identified the soldier’s gun that might have killed her.
The State Department has said that any investigation into her killing should be thorough, comprehensive and transparent and end with “full accountability and those responsible for her death being held responsible for their actions.”
But that accountability will be hard to come by. Israel’s actions in the aftermath of Shireen’s killing demonstrate how the military by and large tries to evade accountability, especially when Palestinian civilians, including journalists, are killed.
Indeed, Israel’s military announced it will not open an immediate criminal probe into Shireen’s death, though an “operational inquiry” would continue.
For that inquiry, Israeli investigators have asked the Palestinian Authority to hand over the bullet that killed Shireen, claiming that they would not be able to reach a definitive answer without this cooperation. Palestinian officials have refused, and it’s not hard to see why. As Palestinian officials and human rights groups have noted, Israel has a long track record of failing to adequately investigate itself.
Moreover, any investigation into the killing of Shireen must put it in the proper light: Israel has had a contentious relationship with some of its foreign journalists. In 2017 it tried to shut down the offices of Shireen’s employer, Al Jazeera, and just a year ago it bombed the offices of The Associated Press and Al Jazeera in Gaza City, destroying a 12-story building in a densely populated urban area. The military claimed that it was targeting Hamas military intelligence. But press-freedom groups accused Israel of trying to obstruct journalists, and A.P.’s president and C.E.O. at the time said there was no indication of any Hamas activity in the building.
A complaint filed at the International Criminal Court by the International Federation of Journalists and two Palestinian organizations two weeks before Shireen was killed accused Israel of systematically targeting Palestinian journalists working in the occupied territories. The Committee to Protect Journalists has confirmed the killing of 19 journalists in the occupied territories since 1992, 15 of whom were Palestinians. (Other organizations’ numbers are higher; the complaint to the I.C.C. says that at least 46 journalists have been killed since 2000, not including Shireen.)
But even when Israel agrees to conduct an investigation, it often seems the outcome is all but predetermined. After an uproar over the Israeli military’s open-fire policy during protests in Gaza in 2018 and 2019, which resulted in the deaths of more than 200 mostly unarmed Palestinians, Israel opened investigations into the deaths. In a review of the investigations, B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights criticized the inquiries, saying that such investigations “are part of Israel’s whitewashing mechanism, and their main purpose remains to silence external criticism, so that Israel can continue to implement its policy unchanged.”
Just last month Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a request by human rights organizations to reopen an investigation into the killing of four children playing on a beach in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike during the 2014 war, upholding a decision that had deemed it a “tragic accident.” Yet again, no one was punished.
Only in rare instances do Israeli troops face imprisonment. Take the case of Elor Azaria, a soldier who was captured on video shooting an incapacitated Palestinian assailant in the head as he lay on the ground in Hebron in 2016. Despite visual evidence that he shot a defenseless human being, Mr. Azaria served only nine months in prison. Some Israeli cabinet members welcomed his release, and a few said his record should be wiped clean.
When Shireen was killed, there was an immediate uproar. Her colleagues and other witnesses came forward to say that Israeli soldiers had shot her and her producer. Israeli officials were quick to deflect blame. On the day of the attack, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett repeated claims that Shireen might have been shot by a Palestinian — an assertion quickly debunked by B’Tselem. An army spokesman even made the chilling claim that Shireen and her colleague were “armed with cameras.” Only belatedly did Israel acknowledge that she may have been hit by Israeli fire.
Two days after she was killed, Shireen was buried in East Jerusalem. During the funeral procession, Israeli police beat mourners and pallbearers, nearly causing them to drop her coffin. Police seized the Palestinian flag from it and her hearse.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the United States was “deeply troubled” by the images. In a recent letter, 57 U.S. lawmakers have demanded that the State Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation begin an investigation into Shireen’s death. In response, Michael Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said that Israeli troops “would never intentionally target members of the press.” This appears to be an attempt to absolve Israel of any wrongdoing.
The United States and the rest of the international community must ensure that there is full accountability for her death. For too long, Israeli political and military leaders have fostered an environment in which Israeli soldiers apparently consider the lives of Palestinians disposable. The very least that I, others who loved her and those who care about justice and fundamental human decency can do is demand that those responsible be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
I last saw Shireen a few days before she filmed her last report. Our final conversation was quick; she expressed condolences for the death of my father and said we should meet in person when I was next in Ramallah. I promised to do so. Instead, I walked in her funeral procession.
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By Globe Staff, May 25, 2022
