NGO Accountability

I may dust off this blog for the Trump years, or may not. But this thread I think belongs here.

Here's a little manifesto from a long-time colleague Vladimir Klimenko. Since it's on open Facebook I'll copy it for my few hundred readers here. What follows is my own little manifesto.

How this plays out is anybody's guess right now. My own guess is that Trump will hang on for a bit. The non-Trumpian GOP leadership fears him, just as Germany and Italy's traditional conservatives feared opposing their strongmen in the '20s-'30s. His party, which itself increasingly reflects the Tea Party right, controls all levers of gov't. Trump will intimidate mainstream corporate media, which may well back down in the face of his threats. The opposition energy generated by the Women's March may block Trump sooner rather than later, but I suspect that some of this energy may falter in the absence of quick, substantial victories. Much of the currently visible opposition consists of older, whiter, more educated and affluent liberals who have something to lose. It remains to be seen how willing people will be to go head-to-head with a state that will be increasingly prone to arrest, blacklist, audit, and otherwise harass citizens.

In the immediate future the Admin will push hard and win some points, at least in the public eye. Its zig-zag policies will, initially, succeed in placating different constituencies. A new factory in the Rustbelt, a cancelled China contract here and there, a postponed mine closing in W. VA, a few more deportations and some spectacular bombing raid in the Middle East. Some much-touted miles of a so-called "wall." The stock market may climb for a bit more. But the global economy is sensitive to thoughtless, rash moves. This new round of protectionism, along with the unraveling of the EU, and Trump's own saber-rattling will not be good for the stock market. Nor will any serious Chinese displeasure. At some point we will see drastic moves in currencies, energy, trade, commodities. A eurozone illness will infect Wall St, which itself will be primed for a downturn due to what promises to be more unfettered financial speculation. And then there's the question of the streets.

Under Trump, the feds are 100% guaranteed to crack down on any replay of Standing Rock in order to send a message. Will we also see the rise of freelance enforcers, armed Trumpista militias in public, an American version of the early Weimar-era German Freikorps? What will happen when the bullyboys inevitably burn more crosses, spray-paint more swastikas, beat up more gay or trans kids, and humiliate more latinos on the streets? How long before another wave of police shootings sets off the next round of urban rioting, to be followed by massive unrest on college campuses? And how long before these, in turn, spark even larger, angrier mass protest marches around the country? And what happens if these are hijacked by violent anarchists (whose key players always include a healthy dosage of undercover cops & FBI) who turn street marches into orgies of vandalism? Increasing numbers of everyday Trump voters might get buyer's remorse.

This might fracture the unity between Trump & the GOP. By that time Trump will have committed a mountain's worth of ethics violations. Conservatives with a strong moral core will find it untenable to even pretend to support him any longer. But if threatened with impeachment, Trump may well go the extra mile: start an overseas conflict in order to turn around and accuse his critics of treason during wartime. It's all been done many times before, in the USA included.

This time, however, is different. In bygone years the White House was inhabited by flawed but at least professional, realistic politicians, not wannabe tyrants with delusions of grandeur. And none of that even touches the mother of all concerns: our planet's fragile natural balance will not wait for us to get our act together. Moral of the story: much depends on us. The question, as always, is how quickly an opposition can galvanize itself into an effective force. Protests are good, but they are not enough. Elections are key, but a) democracy itself is under siege and b) the Democratic Party is in desperate need of revitalization. We have a lot of serious work to do. And by "a lot," I mean hard, persistent work over time. This will not be a sprint. There will be no quick, easy, painless victories. Let's hope that violence is kept to a minimum, but I rule out nothing. The longer this sh*t storm goes on, the more likely it becomes that all options are on the table. Adelante!

And here's my answer:

I think the contours of this statement have some validity. I'll keep it and see if it comes true in 2 weeks or 2 months or 2 years. I don't think the marchers in NYC or DC are going to lead the vanguard. I think they aren't substantive and Trump can keep them distracted with non-essentials. The Standing Rock thing might be put down with the National Guard but maybe even by a determined bunch of local sheriffs and even people on the left are not going to go to the mat for violent asshole protesters even if Amy Goodman victimizes herself. Standing Rock is not going to be an Occupy in the winter.

California is where I would look for the real protest movement and real swells of resistance. Silicon Valley will not allow its maids and gardeners to be kept out of the state or not allowed to visit their families and not get back in. So they will use their main invention, social media, to create a groundswell of interest. I'd like to think the Catholic Church will lead the sanctuary movement as it did in the 1980s. Suddenly, we may see godless heathens in Silicon Valley who hate religious believers get churchy and appreciate why churches are needed for something like helping refugees and immigrants. Putin will try to confuse California with the Moscow-backed California secessionist movement. But hopefully the Catholics and the geeks will just ignore him and do the right think.

We are already seeing the spectacle of a tie-less former CIA and Goldman Sachs man being proffered as the best hope for keeping our liberties. And a fair number of white professionals on the Left Coast who don't like to get dirty at demonstrations may prefer that option and they may have more success than you or me. (Maybe I will send them $5 now that I don't have Hillary to send $5 to). I am still in my period of mourning over Hillary and I will not be sending my contribution to the ACLU, which I ceased when they backed Snowden. Nor re-opening my subscription to the New York Times, when they backed Snowden. If the left will throw Snowden under the bus, and connect the dots between the WikiLeaks that harmed Hillary's election and brought us Trump, starting even in 2010, and the WikiLeaks that brought us Snowden, I may hold my nose and overlook all their silly stuff and support them again. But no, tis not to be.

I'm afraid trying to make the environment the subject of what is basically just your rewarmed call for the usual socialism lite is just not going to work.Obama implied at his inauguration that he was going to heal the planet and prevent the waters from rising but it just meant green jobs for his pals and his cadre-org pal Van until he became too embarrassing like his preacher friend. Neither Manhattan or Fiji will go under water because Trump is in office for 4 years, and if ice caps melt it will not be due to our cows or gasoline but Russian drilling in the Arctic and China. So let's be grown-ups here and not push bullshit as an organizing tool. And I speak as someone who lives in a building the first four floors of which were under water in hurricane Sandy, and who spent 3 weeks in the dark losing my income. I don't have a problem "getting" climate change as do millions of others. But it's about the solution for it, and whether it is socialist or capitalist. That really is what it's about for those you imagine are "deniers". Heaven forfend that the left return to LABOUR, which used to be their obsession when I was a young woman, but which they jettisoned in favour of their insular identity politics and campus PC. Let some more conscientious members of the left return to WORKERS, and not get hung up on whether they are white or black workers. And let them bear down on Flint, if it is true Flint doesn't really still have clean water. Let them do this with a serious, credentialed black woman doctor who actually helped the children with lead poisoning, and not the idiotic Michael Moore.

The media needs to grow up and get out of its bubble in the worst way. Only relentless seriousness of purpose and documentation will win. Bullshit about sizes of crowds or sizes of hands will not cut it, they are dangerous and stupid distractions. The media that never covered the dramatic drop in Obama's own crowds in the second term is untrustworthy trying to compare the apples and oranges of a civic event — a woman's demonstration — with a state event — the inauguration of the party with the minority of members in the capital. Full stop. Lists of Spicer's lies and all this other listicle bullshit needs to stop in the worst way. No journalist worth his salt should be barking arrant nonsense about how we "can't" have Trump investigate his voter fraud claims because "this will cause more voter suppression". The left is completely untrustworthy on their voter suppression claims because they dropped them like a hot potato when they thought Hillary was winning and didn't even revive them after Trump won! So let Trump research, let him forget to find findings, let the press also research and remind him and stop this bullshit implying that people whose mail returns are disenfranchised or victims of racism. Be not afraid. If Trump's investigation really causes more "caging," report it. But if caging is true (and I don't believe in it) it already exists, and is not "caused" by Trump investigating it. Fear not.

Violent anarchists are not created by provocateurs from the FBI, Vladimir. When was the last time you went to a demonstration? I went to Occupy. I've been to all kinds of things. These people are assholes ALL on their own, trust me on that. Watch them. See what they say and do. They do not need the FBI to behave like assholes. They don't even need Putin to behave like assholes although Putin helps more than people realize on everything from animal rights extremists to vegans to opposers of fracking. An end to violence on the left starts with a repudiation of communism and socialism, which substitute ideology and "the means justifies the end" for due process and rights. Due process and rights are ALL that has ever brought lasting change to this country and that's why we need these groups that have become ridiculous parodies of themselves like Amnesty, stumping for Leonard Peltier (!) and Human Rights Watch stumping for Snowden (!) to give up this idiocy and start monitoring the real cases that will be coming. They are not credible. We will need a new widow of Lenin with these human rights groups, believe me.

I am waiting for a movement that will bring accountability not only to the government but to the sectarian and extreme social movements in this country that keep bringing us things like Nixon or Reagan or Trump. I will wait in vain because I'm too old now to go on demonstrations. But you younger people need to make a movement that does not have Angela Davis, who advocated and used violence, on its platform. That does not have Elizabeth Warren, who advocates pardoning Ethel Rosenberg, who is not framed but guilty. That does not have Bill deBlasio, whose first act in office was to cave to animal rights extremists and focus on Central Park carriages instead of homeless human beings. You Russians in this thread have got to understand why these movements cannot have Angela Davis and Elizabeth Warren. You who hated on Hillary and banged on for Sanders, who was in YPSL, are part of why we have Trump and you need to own that. If you want to keep having leftist Soviet-style movements, go ahead. You will die screaming about neoliberalism and Hillary speaking to Goldman Sachs while we lose our freedoms.

 

Let me add here that I think Vladimir's predictions of more people rising up like Black Lives Matter because there will be more police shootings of blacks is not something I share.

It's not because I don't think there won't be any more police shootings, as sadly there will be. 

But I think the dynamics will change. I think Obama was useless or worse on this issue, and I think the leftism of his administration encouraged and tolerated worse extremism and sectarianism on the left. They saw there was an opportunity to "get in" and they pushed harder, became more violent and more extreme. The police killings are a dynamic that has worsened because of in fact killing of policemen, violent demonstrations that then spark a new round of police crackdowns spiralling upward.

But when there isn't the leftist in the White House and the dog-whistling to extremists, but a new-found resolve of law-enforcement everywhere as well as ordinary people like the store-owner roughed-up by the Ferguson police victim, we may not see these demonstrations as large or as violent or as persistent. I am going by the recollection of the 1960s moving into the 1970s and then the 1980s, with the change to Reagan and then Bush. This dynamic may repeat, I don't know. I could be wrong. But so could Vladimir.

Standing Rock could escalate and become more violent because not only Obama allowed it to be, but he signalled that the Army Corps of Engineers could become a politicized player. That's all changed now and the sectarians will not have backing and funding and political weight and we may see them dwindle away. I am definitely not convinced of the validity of the Standing Rock cause, because I read of all the studies and town meetings and re-routings that went into the pipeline issue and I'm not convinced it's the horror claimed by Democracy Now. To be sure, we just saw a pipeline spill in Canada and anything is possible. But I'm not convinced, and Amy Goodman using the trespassing-as-journalism gambit doesn't convince me. Maybe Standing Rock will be the Greenham Common of our age, but I just don't think violent extremist urban campers, in Occupy, or rural campers who trespass and damage property in Standing Rock, are going to get the masses swelling behind them. Give it up guys, it's a non-starter. Your zealotry and extremism on so many, many issues over the years (including on the Kremlin) just doesn't cut it.

Let me just point out another little thing to document for the record. I always ask the question of myself (and this is something we debate in our family now and then as a popular topic) as to whether the POTUS affects my daily life. Am I better off now than I was in 2008? The reality is, after 8 years of Obama, I'm actually worse off. That's the topic for another day, and yes, I got health care I didn't have before out of Obama — but health care that you can shut off in a day because it's stupid isn't a solution.

This week, suddenly I got a wad of letters from the IRS claiming I was in violation of my installment plan, I hadn't paid and was defaulted, and that now I had to pay the full amount, an impossibility. Since I had steadily paid on time and had records of payment, I was confident when I called the IRS it would be cleared up.

An IRS agent instantly told me that my account was paid up and the issue wasn't any actual default. They were a bit puzzled. One thing that puzzled them was the fact that I received these notices on the same date that they were dated, an impossibility as snail mail takes awhile to go from one state to another, maybe 3 or 4 days.

I spent literally hours on the phone trying to resolve this. At one point another agent told that over the phone, I could dictate to them all my income and budget information and it would be re-established. Normally you fill out a numbered form to do this, but I saw no reason not to do it on the phone. I was dropped from waiting on hold for 45 minutes at one point and will have to start again.

This is the second or third time this has happened to me. And one other really odd thing happened to me awhile ago — I suddenly received an big-ass notice from the IRS that I had gadzillion taxes to pay immediately, because I had huge 1099s. All my little $500 or $1000 checks from little freelance jobs were ballooned with extra zeros in this document to $50,000 or $100,000. It was bizarre. This isn't some clerical error. This is a malevolent force who sits at a computer and adds zeros to every document you have to create this insanity. This isn't the delivery in late January or early February, but another time period so it's even more bizarre.

Surely such an insanity would be instantly cleared up by an IRS agent who would look at the 1099s you and your employer ALREADY submitted in your return, right? They couldn't possibly believe such an insanity, right? That you went from earning peanuts to earning hundreds of thousands? But while puzzled, they could only demand that I re-collect new 1099s from each and ever employer — even they themselves ALREADY had them DIRECTLY from those employers. That was a huge chore and I did it but — weird, eh?

What this is, is harassment. And I don't think it's harassment from conservatives or alt-right or embryonic Trumpistas. Not then or now. I think it's Russians who have invaded this system like every other system and use it at their whim to harass people they don't like, in my case for my critical writings about Russia. Obviously, people will think this is a crazy conspiracy theory. That's why I document things like this and keep a watch on them. Now that I have 3 or 4 of them I really do have to wonder what's up. I have a meager income, a very modest life, no yachts or cars or fancy pension plans or any of those things. So when the IRS bears down on me, instead of, say, Donald Trump, it makes no sense.

 

Sarah Kendzior, a controversial publicity-seeking anthropologist often involved in highly-publicized provocations, who left academia recently after failing to get a tenure offer and who now writes for Al Jazeera and Registan, has made a hugely tendentiously, wrongful, and false accusation against a non-governmental organizations working at the UN.

She's taken this notice of a normal fund-raising event from the RFK Center that is publicly posted precisely because there is nothing sinister about it  — involving a nonprofit religious human rights organization at the UN, the Unitarian Universalists UN Office with is part of the NGO Committee on Human Rights, and converted it to some sinister "UN influence-buying operation". The charity auction says this:

Spend six weeks as a United Nations intern with Bruce Knotts and the UN Committee on Human Rights

That link leads here to further elaborate that the UN-NGO Committee on Human Rights — a nongovernmental body, not a UN body.

It's typical of the malevolence she and her colleagues, who include various former Department of Defense contractors and anonymous supporters of the regimes whom the DOD snuggles up with in the world, direct toward the human rights movement.

I've been chronicling this awful phenomenon and countering it for a year on my blog Different Stans, part of this "3dblogger" metaverse.

So let's get the facts straight?

Kendzior wildly and tendentiously starts tweeting about this claim that an NGO was auctioning off their internship yesterday by tweeting to Tom Friedman that while he was writing nobly of human rights at the UN, in fact, supposedly craven and venal UN officials were auctioning off internships.

She claims bidding for a "UN internship" is up to $22,000 for a six-week unpaid job — yet she fails to admit that this is not at the UN itself, is with a nonprofit, and is not "payment" for the internship — but an item in a charity ball whose overall purpose is to raise funds for a nonprofit for their year's work.

Despite Kendzior's repeated insinuations regarding UN bribery, there's nothing of the sort, because the official inter-governmental institution of the United Nations has nothing to do with this story at all. There isn't any internship auctioned off by the UN, that's insane. There is no such system, and she's simply ignorant about how the system of accreditation of *non-governmental organizations* work at the UN. (She's been in a university working on a PhD on Uzbekistan and the Internet for the last few years in St. Louis, MO.)

So her screeches about "the UN' and her retweets by those distrusting the UN are all wrong.

It's also important to understand the context here, too, as well — she and her colleagues Joshua Foust, for reasons opaque to me, at Registan have long had a jihad against unpaid internships, the system for advancing careers in the US. They do this in a sort of socialist labour organizing fashion, constantly raging about the unpaid toiling masses in…fancy think-tanks and universities and nonprofits where they and their friends work mainly in Washington, DC.

Internships are generally not paid. That's why they are called internships. In today's economy, people value the opportunity so much to get a real workplace on their resume that they will work unpaid — even when they are adults out of college. We can have a separate debate about this, but the insane obsession Kendzior and Foust have on the intern topic constantly seems like a provocation to me. What is their point? They themselves weren't picked for some intership and are getting revenge? They are fighting the good socialist struggle in America now? The problem is that people looking for internships aren't the ones making a fuss over this; these two overgrown academic/thinktankers who aren't in the market for interships themselves now, although they are now recently unemployed freelancers with only partial employment.

In any event, what this "auction" story is really about is an internship with a man I know well and with whom I have worked for years, a kind and caring soul, Bruce Knotts. That's why I'm furious to see this harridan, who has done so much harm to so many others who fall into her sights, whether me or some innocent mother blogging about her autistic son, now lash out at this unsuspecting victim.

Since Bruce fights for the cause of ending violence against women, the human rights effects of climate change, and other such issues, and works for the "progressive" Unitarian Universalist Church, I hardly see how the "progressive" Kendzior could ever be against him — and might not be if she weren't pursuing her various hign-profile jihads.

She snorts at the prestigious RFK Center for Human Rights and Justice, a colleague of a number of UN-affiliated NGOs, although this organization, obviously founded by the Kennedy family, has a good reputation for helping human rights defenders in particular — the kind of human rights defenders which Kendzior is very selective about defending when it comes to Uzbekistan, for example.

Nonprofit organizations have to find funding. It is increasingly scarce since 9/11 and the recession and floods on the East Coast — it's very hard, even for those with connections, the competition is great.

Charity auctions are a time-honoured tradition. Everything from weekends for two, to fruit baskets to jewelry to art works to time with a prestigious person are auctioned off. In this culture, it is not perceived as some kind of craven "selling of access" but rather merely a way of providing some token of recognition to people who give money to the organization anyway. Instead of just making them fill out a check at the annual dinner, they add the "auction" aspect simply to make it a little more interesting and sometimes showcase their work.

The reality is neither the UU UN Office, nor RFK Center, have any need whatsoever to "auction off internships" because they get deluged with resumes anyway of people glad to work for these groups that do important work.

Trust me, the organizations that get interns to pay them a fee to provide a space — and I have heard of at least one that used to follow this practice — don't make an advertisement of it on websites with names of organizations and individuals. That's why this claim of Kendzior's is so outrageous.

And that's all that the RFK people have done here, is provided a chance for a donor to essentially pay for their organizational costs — entirely legitimate! — by funding this internship — which costs money to manage! Those griping about paying interns don't realize what a drain they are for the paid staff and how difficult it is to try to get the right mixture of skills to make someone be productive for a summer.

Naturally, in this culture you have the phenomenon of rich parents trying to find meaningful resume-builders for their rich kids. While the collectivists at Registan may sneer at this, it's how the reality of the nonprofit sector works. Hey, if you don't want to be dependent on the state for grants or jobs, like DOD contractors are, you have to tap the wealthy independent individuals in society to meet your costs.

Better that little Jennifer who is going to Harvard have six weeks in the summer with a real organization struggling with some of the world's most profound rape epidemics like the DRC — as Bruce's group is — and get some exposure to problems outside her world and the need for others to become involved in documenting, reporting and bringing them to the appropriate agencies and bodies in the UN (which can be a difficult task, as I know from having done it for some 15 years or so now.

This auction is support for the nonprofits; it is not related to somehow buying influence at the UN. NGOs have some access to the UN, but it is a very formalized process — they can merely observe some sessions of some bodies, and only in some cases can provide written reports about human rights violations, for example, in an effort to inform the ambassadors drafting resolutions and making fact-finding trips and spending development funds. Countries are hugely sensitive about NGOs and what little access they have — this kind of misguided harangue actually sets the cause of human rights groups back at the UN — merely to up the "street cred" of Sarah Kendzior on whatever street is that she needs cred for…

Kendzior may not know this — or may realize it all too well, depending on where her animus against human rights groups comes from — but right now Russia and other "like-minded" like Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan, Iran, etc. are now engaged in an onslaught against NGOs and the treaty bodies that use their reports, under the guise of "reform".

Let's hope that this vain provocateur, who has lashed out and harmed people before, will be forced to apologize this time and withdraw her incorrect rant. But of course, the damage is already done…

An important article by Mona Kareem — must read.

It brings to a head publicly many debates held privately in the human rights movement.

She's absolutely right that big international human rights groups are infatuated with the idea of "human rights defenders" (a new term that didn't exist 30 or even 20 years ago, when the term "activists" was usually used or sometimes "advocates").They bless some people with this term and then selectively work on human rights in a country largely through the prism of such colleagues; this is exasperating to people in, say, Uzbekistan, where Human Rights Watch tends to feature a dozen jailed or harassed "human rights defenders," and doesn't have the same way to publicize and feature some 5,000 devout Muslim prisoners tortured and beaten and held in jail for long periods for non-violent crimes of claimed "extremism" — without benefit of lawyers or due process. HRW itself struggles with how to get at these issues, but they, like others, fall back again and again to featuring "defenders".

I've followed this culture as it grew up and I realize how it got started: the need to have "counterparts" or people that were "like you". And over time, groups like Human Rights Watch began to obsess more about "defenders" — urban professionals well-travelled and English-speaking like themselves often — because they took care of other people and thus the violations of their rights took on a larger meaning as they were emblematic of the whole society. But the reality is, as Jules Feiffer once apparently said in a cartoon about the ACLU's work in the era of the Vietnam War, "you can't get good victims". You can't choose victims to publicize your case perfectly. People are complicated. They could be victims of press freedom suppression and also wife-beaters. Hence the concept of the more "clean" "defenders". Even so, it's a good concept that should be better articulated and preserved, even as efforts are made to work on the cases of those less popular and well known.

The Moscow Helsinki Watch group was formed in 1976 to monitor the human rights sections of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The concept became more widespread of monitors or defenders caring not just about their own free speech problems (like Sinyavsky and Danilel, authors jailed at the time) but concerned about others' rights (like Daniel's wife Larisa Bogoraz, a veteran defender who died a few years ago after a lifetime of championing many people's rights). The role of defender in the Soviet Union and Latin America existed long before the 1970s brought fascination with human rights, but the word was not always used — the person doing the work might be a scientist or priest or labour organizer or doctor. Helsinki Watch — which ultimately morphed into Human Rights Watch — was formed in 1978 to support these "watchers" and each year, some monitors from somewhere in the world would be celebrated at an annual dinner and thus supported.

Even earlier in the 1970s, the concept of "human rights defenders" was articulated by the International League for Human Rights, the oldest  all-purpose human rights organization registered at the UN in the 1940s. ILHR brought this term into circulation particularly at the UN, and focused particularly on lawyers harassed for their work, but also anyone who took up the role of defense of rights law. But it didn't become as popularized as the "watch" groups. The Lawyers Committe for Human Rights, originally a working committee of the ILHR which eventually evolved into the separate organization known as Human Rights First picked up the "defender" notion and initiated a number of year-round programs on this theme, selecting cases of people to help and feature.

Other groups began to follow suit and began to press for a "human rights defenders declaration" at the UN to try to protect people that the worst offenders among states like the Soviet Union, China, Iran and so on were always arresting. It was a torturous process of some five years but finally got passed in the year 2000 and then the term "human rights defenders" became more solidly used in the lexicon at least of international human rights bodies. A special rapporteur on human rights defenders is now appointed regularly to address such cases under the resolution.

But the question of "who is a human rights defender" is an age-old debate once began 40 years ago by Amnesty International when it conceived of the notion of the "prisoner of conscience" as someone who did not use or advocate violence. AI then defended people on that basis; human rights activists were those whose work did not involve the use or advocacy of violence.

This simple moral precept was thrown under the bus by Amnesty during "Gita-gate" when their gender advisor was dismissed for complaining about AI's turning of Islamists who advocated against women's rights and other civil liberties into heroes, with whom they appeared on platforms and went visiting to 10 Downing Street.

Amnesty has now thoroughly lost its way on this question, accepting discredited notions like "defensive jihad" that run counter to basic human rights.

So it's important to go back to the UN documents that were long negotiated on this subject.

First, there's Art. 30 in the UN Declaration of Human Rights:

"Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."

So if an Islamist wants to take away freedom of speech and belief or nonbelief, or women's rights from other people even as he pursues his own freedom of religion, he is engaging just in this very activity contrary to Art. 30. It's very important. It's too often overlooked.
 
Then there's the UN Human Rights Defenders' Resolution:

These help a lot to separate the wheat from the chaff.

You can always defend the civil rights of anyone, even a murderer, on human rights grounds of due process, fair trial, no use of torture, and so on.

But you don't convert the *victim* of human rights violations which you condemn into the *defender* of those rights. He may not be.

And if you are a defender of human rights yourself, you should not condone violence or the violation of any rights.

Kareem in part makes sense to me, but in part is confusing. With this discourse, she seems to want to say that Western "bourgeois" rights lingo is unacceptable to authentic third-world peoples. But these notions aren't "Western"; they are universal. As Kofi Annan once said, an African mother doesn't need to know which article of the Convention Against Torture was violated to understand her son has been tortured. Yet Kareem seems to advocate not calling things by their real names for the sake of somebody's sensibilities in the wings whom I can't quite understand. Oppressive theocratic states? Islamists who threaten human rights defenders?

What I find even more dangerous, is the way that NGOs in our region take
it for granted that they must follow western organizations in their
approaches. Local NGOs believe that, by abiding to this set of rules and
established rhetoric, their work will be more relevant. They do not
realize, however, the danger in following others in their dealings with
particular cases. Why do we need to call an Islamist a human rights
defender in order to demand his release? Why does ‘free speech’ need to
be our top priority? Why do western NGOs need to, for example, call
female circumcision a form of ‘torture’, to be able to criticize it? And
who approved the act of including such a variety of Arab detainees
under the umbrella of human rights, when our heritage consists of
social, religious, and political doctrines where the ideal of justice is
prevalent.

You don't need to call an Islamist a human rights defender to demand his release *if he was arrested unjustly and his universal human rights are violated*. But what are you saying here? That is someone from "our cause" is arrested, "the movement" must demand he be released? It depends on the charges and the crime — under universal notions, of course, not unfair notions. Violence and terrorist acts wouldn't be something that could be excused.

I don't understand why Western activists *can't* call FGM "torture" — it is under universal international definitions. But if that somehow prevents action on the cause, call it what you will. Make that judgement yourself, however, don't browbeat internationals to lesson their own legitimate critiques. In some African countries, women's activists have to call rape clinics "family centers" or simply "community centers". It's not necessary to prove something with a name if that gets the job done; however, we can't pretend that rape is a matter that should just be "kept in the family" and not prosecuted, ultimately.

 Mona also urges international organizations to take up the cause of the violation of Islamists' rights:

What also needs to be mentioned, however, is how much propaganda is
directed against them from the Emirati media and in statements by state
officials. The attacks on the Islamists, inside and outside of prisons,
are oppressive and immoral; their families tell of denied prison visits,
torture cases, and, lately, of how their bank accounts are being frozen
just because they are relatives of Islamist detainees. Surely, this
point is not to justify the thinking of certain political Islamists, but
it is to highlight how state oppression becomes the deciding factor for
NGOs on whether to include Islamists under the umbrella of human
rights.

I don't think she has any trouble from AI or HRW there — they do this to the exclusion of even admitting that Islamists are a problem at all (see reports on Nigeria and the Middle East).

The real issue is whether local human rights activists are going to step up and defend Islamists tortured in prison and denied basic humane treatment, yet not call out their own oppressiveness regarding speech and women because they feel their very lives are threatened by those same extremists. What are we supposed to do about that?

I totally understand that this is too dangerous in many local situations. But then don't spread that oppression of your own local situation to the international movement. What I seem to take away from this discussion is: you international human rights activists should shut up, you should stop calling people who aren't defenders that because it's embarrassing — they aren't — but you shouldn't call out their bad behaviour anyway. That's not a proposition I can accept.

 

 

I've written about how I will not don a hoodie or hijab in a notion of "solidarity" for victims of racism — I don't think that's the human rights approach and I want to dissent from this latest liberal fad.

As for the Trayvon Martin case, I've been meaning to blog on this for a long time, but like many, I was held back by fear of political incorrectness. I hate that. It's terrible to feel you are silenced. I've waited to see how the case would play out — and most of all, I've waited for the news media to cover the other side. Not Zimmerman's side. The side of the victims of eight robberies by black men that formed the rationale for Zimmerman's wrongful action. Their existence and their reality doesn't make Zimmerman right whatsoever. He's wrong. But they count, too, and they are part of the story. Now, Reuters has finally reported this.

First of all, there's no doubt that George Zimmerman should get more than just some misdemeanor punishment. He was told by 911 not to engage with a person he thought was suspect, and he went after him anyway. He used deadly force on an unarmed man. It doesn't matter if Trayvon was taller or if he jumped him and cracked his head — a gun was not warranted in this situation, and Zimmerman provoked it, from all accounts.

Zimmerman had a history of assault, aggressiveness, and anger at criminals that made him completely unsuited to any "neighbourhood watch" role, and he went against their own rules of engagement. So there should be some kind of serious charge coming out of this and adequate sentencing. I'm all for justice in this case, and justice for the unarmed against the armed, and for yet another attempt to try to curb guns.

I won't be attending the million-hoodie march, however, and not only because I oppose identity politics as a solution for society's injustices but because I don't think the prevention of more George Zimmermans is about merely trying to get people to drop their stereotypes, as laudable as that is. I think it's much more about gun control and about getting at the root causes of the criminality of the underclass in the first place — and I don't think those root causes are mere unhappy childhoods even if poverty and lack of education and opportunity do play a role.

Why? Because my mother, a white liberal who taught in integrated inner-city schools until she was the last white teacher in an all-black school, was hit over the head by a black male student and robbed. I've been a victim of violent crime and theft by black males four times myself, and my son has been assaulted three times in his city schools by black males and a black female. That's why. I will never forget the night that I and a group of my white liberal friends thought we would do the right white liberal thing and talk in a friendly manner with a group of black males that suddenly came up to us at a bus stop and asked us if we knew when the bus was coming. We weren't prejudiced, we told ourselves, although are instincts were to run away fast. Instead, we went along with their ruse, despite our common sense, chatting with them, and the next thing I knew, one of the men was grabbing my purse as I started to board the bus, the bus driver took one look at the gang and drove away, and the next thing I knew after that, I was shoved up against a car and hit over the head because I ran after the robber.

In each and every case with my son's assaults in his horrible dysfunctional city high school, the person responsible was a young black man and in one case a black female. Most of the crimes in the city schools are committed by young black men. The ACLU prefers to view the findings of reports on this problem as racism and discrimination and overkill; I don't, from my multiple personal experiences. Nobody who has been through the horribly mismanaged and violent city school systems of New York will ever say the problem is racism. It's lousy educational theories rewarmed from the 1960s and 1970s that didn't even work then; it's poor supervision and poor teaching. To be sure, there is also white flight to private schools because of the heavy black violence in the schools, making their "integration" a total fiction.

But the problem isn't discrimination — black children are bussed far from their neighbourhoods into white neighbourhoods and even integrated schools with good reputations; there just aren't enough white parents willing to keep sending their kids to them due to the constant police presence and the metal detectors and the knife fights, and there just aren't enough black parents forced to keep sending their kids to city schools able to raise their voices above the din. Pull up the web sites of the city's school and see the appalling graduation rates — 40 percent or less in many. Some of them will mention the number of police visits; if they don't, ask them before you send your kid there — you will be shocked.

If anything, the problem is black principals and vice principals giving young black men a pass, as a management method. If they are forgiven again and again and kept in the ambit; the theory is that they won't escalate their violence. I've seen this time and again, in person. I've seen white principals do another thing — let black kids smoke pot and look the other way as a "management tool" as well, on the theory they are "quieter". This is all so awful, you have no idea.

Well, you say, just because you can point to eight cases of criminal assault and theft by black men involving your family, does that mean you have to distrust all black men? Of course not. My mother spent her career teaching black children in urban schools, and we were the only family in our white suburban tract that had black guests in our home in the 1960s. Did yours? My kids go to schools where they are in the very distinct white minority. Do yours? I live in a mixed neighbourhood of all races. Do you? I have black male neighbours who go to work or are retired and they are part of keeping the neighbourhood's kids in order — including my own, when they act up and do something wrong. Obviously, I'm not going to run away from my own neighbours I know by sight, but if I'm walking back home late at night and I see a kid in a hoodie and expensive sneakers follow me, I'll quicken my pace. And so will you, even if you're on your way home from the trendy million-hoodie march. Political correctness gets you absolutely nowhere in this town as I've discovered by being literally a liberal mugged by reality.

And so I can't see the deadly tragedy of Trayvon merely as a problem of racial hatred. Reuters finally reported what one black woman called "The Elephant in the Room"

A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men.

Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.

"Let's talk about the elephant in the room. I'm black, OK?" the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. "There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood," she said. "That's why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin."

There were eight robberies in Trayvon's neighbourhood, and they were all said to involve black males. How did they know that? Because of video cameras, and because the victims were confronted in some cases. This frustrated people in the community terribly, because the police hadn't come on one occasion, and weren't managing to catch the robbers. Enter George Zimmerman and his gun.

There is a problem of a minority of a minority committing a lot of crimes in this country, in your city, in your neighbourhood, and mine. This problem fills up the jails, and fills up the school detention halls, and many want to reach for "discrimination" as the answer and "don't punish" as an answer. But identity politics can't save this situation any more than it can save the hate crimes against Shaima or Trayvon. We need to firmly call out and address the black males who commit crimes just as we address the white males who commit crimes. That I call for both is is viewed as horribly racist and politically incorrect, but it shouldn't be, because the people harmed the most by violent black males are first and foremost black females and then other black males.

I feel we need to take on the perspective of the victim, and few are willing to do that for some reason when it comes to black male crime, even when the victims are other blacks. I have a vision of the hoodie marches, but across the street, I have a vision of a single file of brave black, white, Hispanic, and Asian men and women — and it will be mainly women — each quietly carrying a sign "I am Trayvon…but I am a victim of a crime committed by a black male, too. What can we all do about this?" Guns are not the answer; but suppressing the legitimate experiences of these victims isn't, either. They are part of the equation; validating their experience is what changes the situation.

There are lots of things we need to do to fix this situation — it is about better schools, better isolation of the violent from those who want to study, better alternative sentencing programs, a better bail system, better opportunities for jobs. A lot of these have been tried. A lot of these already partly work. But whatever you try and whatever you prescribe, you do not succeed if you can't tell the truth about the real problem — if you want to wish away the George Zimmerman problem by invoking racism, or the problem of too many black kids in detention in my kids' schools by saying they are victims of racism. Human rights solutions for me have always started with a factual report. It's not factual to say that the problem of my kids' schools or George Zimmerman's neighbourhood are only about "racism"; they are about the high incident of black male crime, too.

In Zimmerman's case, he was indulging in "guilt by association" — on the heels of eight robberies by black men. Sure, he could have done the correct white liberal thing and not chased someone he thought he was suspicious. Had he not engaged in guilt by association, Trayvon would be alive today!

But there really were those eight cases. His response isn't right but it is in a context Reuters has finally reported — and should have started with on week one, when those same facts were known, rather than wait for the Rev. Al Sharpton to incite everyone. It starts with a climate where it is seen as impolitic even to mention the fact of the prior situation. Trying to write off school crime, when there are appalling cases where kids have thrown chairs out of a window, and hit and injured a pregnant women (in our neighbourhood), or thrown a shopping cart off a parking lot ramp and put a woman into a coma and caused her permanent disability in the Bronx — and so many more crimes — it's not fair to the victims to keep up this pretense.

The Village Voice has a very interesting piece on the "broken" bail system. I'm here to say this system is broken for whites as well as blacks. There is so much wrong with it at every level. It starts with families not even getting information about where to go to get a bail bond (lawyers and court personnel are prohibited from recommending them), and too-strict requirements and massive amounts of personal data required to get bail bonds — which aren't free, and are costly with non-refundable fees. The system should be totally reformed, so that it works another way instead of like a loan: anyone who can produce a driver's license and leave a deposit of $100 or $250 or $500 in cash depending on whether the bond is $500, $2000 or $3000, or a valid credit card with that charge, should be able to take their relatives home in non-violent cases. Neighbourhood assistance groups that put up bail for people should be legalized.

The bail-bond system exists for people with relatives or friends with W-2 jobs, plenty of resources and a good deal of cash up front, and a good credit record. Many people who wind up in jail don't have those things. As the Voice reported, if you can keep people out of jail, you can keep them out of jail period in most cases.

The system of every single case structured as plea-bargaining also has to be reviewed. It was never intended to be used so often — it is clearly used in order to move the overload of cases through the system. So often people are needlessly over-criminalized because they simply agree to a lesser charge just to get the prolonged and bureaucratic experience over with. Let's not pretend they shouldn't be detained and this is all about "stop and frisk" — I've been down to 100 Centre Street numerous times and seen case after case of domestic violence.  I've personally witnessed police dream up a greater charge to slap on a detainee, knowing full well that they will be in a system where it will be pled down to a lesser offense — and they do that so that they get "something," because so many violent criminals are let go. I do not believe drug legalization is the answer (see above about the deliberate dumbing down of our youth), but there are reforms that could be made. Alternative sentencing programs are often also a joke — too many warehousing programs that are hard to get to with too much make-work. Educational classes teaching basic life skills and sessions one-on-one with social workers and therapists would probably have a better impact.

We need justice for Trayvon, but wearing hoodies isn't the answer. Justice must be served, and to prevent the spiral of violence, justice has to be available for the eight victims of robberies in George Zimmerman's neighbourhood, too. Moreover, the reasons that contribute to black male crime have to be addressed, and this starts with an accurate and frank reporting by experts and the media, and an end to pretending that if we talk about the "elephant in the room" as the black neighbour of Zimmerman did, we should fear retaliation.

 

 

 

 

"Million-hoodie march" in Union Square, New York City, March 21, 2012. Photo by cisc1970.

In my neighbourhood and other venues across the nation, people are holding hoodie marches in solidarity with Trayvon, the young man killed by a neighbourhood watchman. Sure, it's a great thing to see so many young people — black, white, male, female — turn out in solidarity with a victim of injustice.

And now we're being remonstrated for only caring about this case of a black man wrongly suspected and then killed, and urged to add to our list of concerns  the symbolism of the hijab, for the sake of Shaima Al Awadi, a woman in a hijab killed in her own home after a series of nasty threatening notes. Some people are holding hijab wear-ins out of solidarity with Shaima.

A blogger named Hesham A. Hassaballa on the interesting religious website I mentioned on my Russian blog regarding other recent cases of religious intolerance wrote this post: Respect the Hoodie, But Don't Forget the Headscarf:

We are Trayvon Martin. But we are also Shaima Al Awadi, and in light of two horrific murders, we should don the hoodie and the headscarf in respect.

Actually, no. I won't be doing that, Hesham. And it's not out of disrespect to these victims. It's for several other reasons, chiefly this one: we don't have to use identity politics, we don't have to use peer-pressured or even coerced empathy, in order to have all human rights for all. We have to have justice, by the light of universal human rights — and identity politics doesn't help us with that.

This is a different approach than one counselled by the politically-correct crowd and all the "movements" that make endless identity parsings and endless (but awfully selective) demands for "solidarity". I'm all for solidarity. Solidarity is what saved Andrei Sannikov, as I blogged the other day. Solidarity is what you must use in the face of grave injustices.

But solidarity doesn't have to take the form of emphasis of identities; in the case of Sannikov, solidarity was moral support, urging of the government to abide by its universal human rights, and urging of the European Union and Russian, the chief actors in the drama of Belarus, to put pressure on the government until it releases political prisoners.

There's another reason: neither of these cases have yet come to trial, and there is a notion of "innocent until proven guilty" even for obviously problematic people. We don't know all the facts in the case of Shaima as the New York Times reports and the police are not yet calling it a hate crime, although it sure looks like one. Arun Gupta's report indicates that one theory of the case is an "honour killing," but this gets discounted in the rush to cover the overall issue of anti-Muslim hate crimes by Gupta, who is the co-editor of Occupy Wall Street Journal, and a person with a mission — and a distinct bias. We know a lot more about George Zimmerman, but we haven't heard the arguments of the defense at trial yet.

Meredith Tax, a feminist writer and women's rights activist, has written an interesting blog about a feminist named Adele Wilde-Blavatsky who urged us not to equate the hoodie with the hijab. The hoodie is donned by the individual at will, she reasons, and is not required by a person's community and culture. The hijab, by contrast, is demanded by some fundamentalist cultures, and the woman donning it may feel coerced. For her bravery, Wilde-Blavatsky found herself drummed out of her feminist editorial collective.

This is of course endlessly debated — just how much that coercion takes place, and just how much latitude women have to chose, and just how much "structural violence" there is in the "patriarchal society" and all that.

One might posit — I'll bet there are some doing that! — that the hoodie is just as much of a peer-pressure garb for a certain sub-culture as the hijab is for some Muslim communities — indeed, it is such a cultural marker that Geraldo urged that young black men stop wearing hoodies if they didn't want to be taken for gangsters — a call that was met with widespread derision.

I'm a defender of human rights and feminism, although I don't like the extreme identity-politics feminism rooted in Marxism. Marxism stresses classes and identities because it advocates revolutionary change and discards the rule of law, which it views as bourgeois. I don't view it that way. The rule of law is above individuals, groups, and states, and that's what we all need to ensure human rights and tolerance of dissent and differences.

Meredith vividly describes how the extreme feminists protested and blocked other feminists whose views they didn't like (such as the femmes in a butch-femme relationship), and how they excommunicated a feminist from the fold and kicked her off an editorial board over these issues. My God, that's never warranted.

The headscarf issue has really heated up with articles like Mona Eltahawy's piece in Foreign Policy. She is evidently among the Middle Eastern feminists who believes the headscarf/hijab/burquas are all coercive and should all be resisted.

But human rights activists, if they are true to their notions of civil liberties, have to concede that there might be women who want to don headscarves or even burquas freely, and that this is their right. Certainly we hear certain women leaders insist on this freedom in the Muslim world. I have heard Muslim women explain it to me as "a comfort level" where they want the right to feel covered. I have also heard Afghan women activists explain that the Taliban, however, has taken an original scriptural notion of wearing modest clothing so as not to appear provocative and has escalated this to a fully-covered body.

So what I think has to be done here is to challenge just how voluntary the headscarf or the hijab is, and resist efforts to "normalize it" — which start with Western women refusing to be forced to put on headscarves just because they visit a country like Iran, even if they merely visit a mosque to meet with a religious figure in his office (this sort of thing has in fact been urged at times by overeager foreign service bureaucrats in some countries).

Here's how I know that at least some women want to have headscarves at least, and even the hijab. Because I see them in the United States among new immigrants. Ironically, since 9/11, I've seen far more Muslim men with beards and Muslim women with headscarves for a simple reason, I think: they are refugees from Islamic countries where the systems are so oppressive, and personal freedom and small business so unprotected, that they wish to flee. So despite 9/11, despite the  increased levels of hate crimes against Muslims now (actually, the FBI statistics illustrate that Jews remain the group most targeted with hate crimes), they still want to emigrate here because their homelands have grown worse since 9/11. It's also a case of some rebellious youth of more secularized Muslim parents deciding to become more conservative as a form of defiance against the US culture and government, from which they feel alienated (this is a far more serious problem in France and other European countries, but I see it here, too).

How do you address these issues fairly?

Now, let's take my children's public high schools. They have rules that are very simple: no headgear. That means no hoodies, hats, caps, doo-rags, scarves. Period. Nothing on the head.

These rules were designed primarily to deal — in these mainly all black and Hispanic public high schools — with gang warfare. They want to eliminate totally the ability of boys in particular to flaunt their gang signs and gain recruitments and a greater sense of identity. The high school principals have all found that if they eliminate headgear, they get at a lot of the problem of flashing those signs.

They also want to be able to identify the kids who cause fights in lunchrooms, steal from other students or local merchants, and so on. So no  hoodies, which, in combination with sunglasses, become very much cloaking of identity. No baseball caps, which more often than not are flipped off or thrown around and start fights where kids feel they've been "dissed". No doo-rags, those big clothes wrapped all over the head, or the skin-tight form of cap, or big scarves wrapped all around.

Now, does that mean that a Jewish boy can't wear a yarmulke? No, of course he can wear a small skull cap. For one, it's a religious item. For two, it doesn't cloak his identity.

Can a Sikh wear a head turban? There don't seem to be that many Sikhs, I've never seen them in the half a dozen city schools I've dealt with regularly from "left behind" failing schools to better schools. I've seen almost no Jewish kids in yarmulkes either, but they would be tolerated.

Now, you wonder, what about a Muslim girl in a headscarf?

The principals don't seem to have had an opportunity to test their "no headgear" policy on that one. If it was described as a religious head-dress, they would probably let it pass, especially for the pragmatic reason that it isn't girls getting into fights in the lunchroom, but boys. I'm not sure how they are dealing with this because it's not a widespread issue and never has become one. And if it became a demand, they would respond to it likely as a religious exception. After all, the purpose of the "no headgear" rule is to prevent gang warfare, create an atmosphere of discipline and help in identification.

I do know how the New York School of Dentistry, Hunter College and other colleges I can see in my area deal with headscarves: they simply allow them. Why not? If they are trim and in some cases pinned, they don't get in the way of equipment and there is no reason not to allow them at all.

The same for Fedex, Staples, and other big chain stores in New York City — there are Muslim women in headscarves along with their store uniforms, and the management doesn't care. (Although Hertz Rent-a-Car in other states took on the demand for multiple breaks for prayer and insisted when confronted with a lawsuit that they fit into the state-mandated 15-minute breaks.)

As for BDSM, which is increasingly now referenced as a "choice" especially with all the attention given to the new book 50 Shades of Gray, here, I will challenge the effort of BDSM to normalize itself and inflict its values on the public commons. Coercion and slavery are not only immoral, they are illegal. Efforts by BDSM supporters to get the European Court of Human Rights to accept the notion that enslavement and beatings in the BDSM sub-culture were "voluntary" and therefore should be decriminalized simply failed. The ECHR wasn't buying it. The voluntary nature doesn't change the nature of the assault — the bodily harm. Slavery isn't something they can sanction in the name of culture.

I've had a huge amount of experience debating this issue and dealing with it directly in the virtual online community of Second Life. And I have a rule for my own customers and I urge it on others: while you can concede people's privacy in their own homes, i.e. on their own servers, in their own private space, they cannot inflict their "norms" on the public commons. So no whipping and chaining people on the public square and in public meetings. And no telling me I'm intolerant because I don't want coercion and slavery to spread as a cultural "value". It's not a cultural value. It is a sub-culture to be tolerated as a private matter.

I'm reminded of an Ingush colleague I once had who was dismayed at the way the Chechen rebels seemed to suddenly get religion by the second Chechen war and demand that women stay out of the marketplace and don headscarves. Good Western liberal that I was, I hesitantly asked whether this wasn't in fact a cultural norm that they could understandably expect.

"It's not culture, but absence of culture," she said of their opportunism and misuse of religion to gain power.

 

 

Women's rights advocates have launched a compelling and eloquent challenge to Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch.

My response — while it sits in a moderator's queue:

The chief problem of Human Rights Watch in this and other matters related to the Middle East is that it sees itself as the sole honest arbiter of what constitutes compliance with human rights. Yet it does so in a highly politicized manner, not recognizing the essential *political* act of picking and chosing cases and priorities, and engaging with or rejecting this or that regime.

Human rights are universal and this universality dictates that all countries be equally subject to scrutiny, and that none with a "better" system get a pass. But human rights groups would do better to *go where the violations are* instead of endlessly balancing the saddle bags — which in the case  of HRW has often meant especially focusing on Israel because it can (Arab societies were closed to investigators) and because it thought it could have more of an effect (Israel was responsive to human rights criticism).

This sort of political judgement always made for controversy, and it's no different now with the Arab Spring in countries where HRW was not as active as it was on Israel in recent years, and where now in similar political fashion, it decides that now it has to bless seemingly "better" Islamic regimes that it believes will be "rights-respecting." HRW (where I worked for 10 years in the 1980s and 1990s) used to stick to monitoring states' compliance with internationally-recognized human rights norms, not decide which countries were "better" at human rights. That job of comparison was left to Freedom House, and yet Freedom House — whose staff are on trial now in Egypt! — are hardly awarding any early prizes for "rights-respecting" to the Egyptian government.

HRW's exercise in wishing thinking might be more persuasive if the examples it gave weren't so outrageous. Algeria — as if the Islamist Salvation Front was going to maintain a liberal democracy and there'd ever be another free election, and as if there weren't thousands of victims of terrorist groups as well as the Algerian state, as the women activists who signed the appeal to HRW have eloquently testified. And Hamas — declared by the US as a terrorist group. In an oppressive nation where a terrorist group is in charge, can you really speak of democratic elections? Even if you can, can you ensure truly democratic results going forward?

Democracy in the UN system has never been seen as merely a literalist majoritarian exercise, that didn't bring with it the obligation to protect minorities and indeed all human rights. HRW has never really grabbed ahold of the most important article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 30: "Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."

That means that freedom of religion doesn't trump women's rights; it means freedom of expression doesn't trump freedom from discrimination, and so on. Indeed, determining that balance among rights is a political exercise and justly so, but HRW has never recognized it as such, nor recognized such judgement as a legitimate exercise for states.

And speaking of states, among the most compelling statements of the women who signed this call to conscience is the statement to Kenneth Roth, "You are not a state." It becomes increasingly hard for large and well-endowed non-governmental non-state actors to recall this in a world where they can amplify themselves not only with the huge mindshare of the establishment press, but with new social media. Even so, citizens must ask them urgently why they are willing to forego "all human rights for all" in a quest for political correctness by their own "progressive" lights.

First, let's be clear.

Waterboarding is torture.

It's torture under the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT), by which the
U.S. is bound; it's torture under U.S. law. It's also been declared
torture by President Obama in a policy banning it.

Under the CAT, there are no exceptions or excuses for torture —
saying that it "was only used those three times" or "only used for the
greater purpose of getting intelligence about terrorists' plans" does
not excuse it.

All of these points stand — yet the selective and tendentious use of them in an attack on the liberal media by leftwing pundits both undermines their own credibility as universalists and opens up disturbing prospects for just what they intend to do to replace the liberal media.

There's a frenzy of progressives making the most outrageous attacks on the New York Times' Bill Keller, and by extension, the whole liberal media establishment.

A 20-page study of the use of waterboarding over a century pushes toward a conclusion: that the media deliberately shifted its use of the term "torture" to describe attempts to simulate drowning of victims in subservience to Dick Cheney's interpretation of this practice during the Bush Administration. As Andrew Sullivan notes:

"But it is not an opinion that waterboarding is torture; it is a fact,
recognized by everyone on the planet as such – and by the NYT in its
news pages as such – for centuries. What we have here is an admission that the NYT did change its own established position to
accommodate the Cheneyite right."

No, we don't have anything of the sort.

In fact, the recognition that waterboarding is torture, even if it ought to be universal, is far from acknowledged by "everybody on the planet" — Sullivan has an endearing way of assuming his liberal networks are "everybody". To see this isn't the case one can look at the yahoos on Yahoo AP story comments — or go further. One can look all around the world — at many countries where waterboarding is routinely practiced, and without any public outcry; to complain would be to risk winding up as one of the waterboarded.

Obviously, when the Times wrote about torture in other countries, they found it to be a more loathsome phenomenon than they found it to be when practiced by their own government — a natural if myopic human instinct, whether the progressives find it so or not, and one that was based on a pragmatic feel for the *degree* to which the practice was harmful. The Harvard study in fact shows that newspaper writers referred to the torture of blacks on the South in the U.S. with this term, so the bloggers' scolding of the Times over the "Cheney gap" doesn't quite work. Writers like Andrew Sullivan take the shift to mean "liberal editors pulled their punches because they had caved to Bush." But they could also simply be persuaded in their news judgement that *this form* of the practice wasn't as bad. That's a harder conclusion to draw — and it would force bloggers to use reason and logic rather than harassment to convince us that waterboarding is indeed torture.

The problem isn't just a disagreement about severity or intensity and what you call it, however. The charge being made by Andrew Sullivan as well as the progressive new media influencers like Dan Gillmor is that the U.S. mainstream media ("old media") deliberately refrained from using the word "torture" to describe this practice, and did so because it was "subservient" to the Bush Administration.

This stampede of bloggy moral outrage is being directed mainly at Bill Keller, because he decided to stand up to the charges, both through the Times' ombudsman and in his own words. He explained that the Times doesn't justify the practice, but because it's a contentious topic, the Times refrains itself from characterizing the practice, but has various sources speak using various terms, i.e. human rights activists are quoted as saying "it's torture"; Bush Administration officials are quoted as saying its a "harsh interrogation technique".

Not content with pluralism on a subject where they view themselves as having assumed the moral high ground, Scott Horton and others find this the worst sort of moral depravity, and are likening the euphemistic language of the Times to an Orwellian propagandistic act in service of a sinister American regime.

I cry foul on this, because I think you have to save the term "Orwellian" in its context for the regimes of the Soviet Union and the Nazi and their latter-day equivalents, and not the U.S. — a country that despite the past president's despicable authorization of this torturous practice, was able to elect a subsequent president who has outlawed the practice.

Look, ask this man, whether he would rather be in a Chinese prison or an
American prison right now.

Bill Keller may not be a paragon of virtue, but in his professional role, he represents a mainstream liberal consensus regarding how the news should be reported — which is *pluralistically*.

That's what's most offensive to the hard left and the progressives, who want to ascribe — force upon — the media a social justice role, have it articulate only one truth, and have it lead society as a moral force instead of merely a reporting force in which readers are allowed to draw conclusions on their own after sifting through different facts and opinions.

Bill Keller is no Orwellian; it's atrocious to use this kind of hyperbolic and malicious language about someone who is managing a platform for debate, not playing the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. He appears to believe sincerely that he hasn't injected partisan spirit into this management; his critics claim that by choosing not to use the term "torture" in the editorial voice of the Times, he has already chosen a side, and already committed a grave immoral act.

I'd prefer that the Times use the term "torture" as a factual and legal term — but then, I'd also like Reuters to man up and use "terrorist" about people who blow other people into smithereens instead of calling them "militants".

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There are a great number of people who will have many more informed — and obsessed — opinions on the Gaza flotilla than I do, but even so, I have a few questions. The flotilla was led by the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani
Yardim Vakfi, which some have claimed has ties to terrorists.

I'm concerned about the groups that call themselves peace and solidarity groups, however, who say they do not use terrorism, and who may use direct action, but generally don't directly use *violent* direct action. I have a question for them.

Is this a new theory of "direct action," which you wrap in humanitarian action in order to make the cause more appealing and distract from any violence or provoking of violence with the humanitarian mission?

If so, I have considerable moral queasiness about the mixing of humanitarian action with direct action, which is violent action, or non-violent action designed to provoke the use of force by authorities for the sake of a cause. I also question the extremist notion of "direct action" in the first place, for this cause or any cause — it comes out of the theories of Marx and Lenin about revolutionary struggle, and advocates a theory that "the end justifies the means" which I find unacceptable. There is a long history of *non-violent* direct action in the United States, but this idea of wrapping in a humanitarian mantle the calculated actions that will produce a use of force strikes me as a recent — and immoral — innovation (I tend to think "direct action" itself is immoral, given its calculated "ends justifies the means" credo, but I'd likely find disagreement there, as many people think "direct action" can be justified if the cause is urgent enough).

Humanitarian groups spend a great deal of time distinguishing their errand of mercy from the operations of state combatants and the causes of armed militants. They are non-violent in their credo. There is disagreement, of course, as some non-governmental organizations, often those that get government aid, are willing to take armed escorts.

And human rights groups generally refrain from using or advocating violence regarding their own movement or other social movements, but this consensus, once espoused by Amnesty International's definition of "prisoners of conscience," is breaking down. We saw with Amnesty International's conflict with its gender adviser (who ultimately resigned) the appearance of a notion of "defensive jihad", i.e. militant Islamists could use violence in opposing what they saw as overwhelming force. There's a discussion to be had about the difference between that notion of "defensive jihad" and the always-disputed definition of terrorism, but these flotilla participants were not invoking any concept of "defensive jihad" when they went out (that we know of).

It's important to note as well that outside these more radical "solidarity" groups driven by different ideologies than universal human rights, that by and large, there is a sense among NGOs, that you do not mix military action with humanitarian and human rights action. No major organized humanitarian organization was involved in this Gaza flotilla, possibly because they may have wished to avoid appearing with an action that planned a violent confrontation. There were no CARE packages on this ship.

The various European, Turkish and other leaders of this operation make it very clear that the humanitarian mission — bringing tons of food, construction supplies, and wheel-chairs — was in fact a kind of cover for their overwhelming purpose which was to demonstrably break the military blockade imposed by the state of Israel on the Occupied Territories.

In a statement quoted by Associated Press of Greta Berlin of Free Gaza, an organizer of the action, says:

"What we're trying to do is open a sea lane between Gaza and the rest of
the world," Greta Berlin said in Cyprus. "We're not trying to be a
humanitarian mission. We're trying to say to the world, 'You have no
right to imprison a million and a half Palestinians.'"

Since when do unarmed people's movements open up sea lanes? That's an act that usually you can only accomplish by war, not by "non-violent direct action".

I'll set aside the arguments that people in Gaza are "imprisoned" or, as is often said rhetorically, "in an open-air prison"; whatever truth might be found about those *results* the *path for how they got in this predicament* is being wilfully ignored with rhetorical statements like Berlin's: they got there due to a blockade that was in response to Hamas' use of terrorism and shooting of missiles into Israeli territory. 

Berlin isn't trying to make an argument for a new form of direct action that uses humanitarian missions, however. She is explicit here that in fact she's not really on a humanitarian mission, although she has chosen the symbol of a boat laden with humanitarian assistance as the prop for her direct action. She appears not to be morally troubled by this mixture of political direct action and the humanitarian mission; I am. If you don't want aid to be politicized — and it is the belief of these activists that Palestinians are not receiving sufficient food, and that it is deliberately withheld for political reasons — then don't exploit an aid mission for political ends yourself.

The entire feel of this action for me was something like people going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. That is, they didn't exactly take up guns explicitly, but they felt they were nobly going off to fight a cause, where they knew they'd more than likely face gunfire and arrest. Tapes have emerged that appear to show even training with the use of weapons and a planned violent response. What was really the intent, and how informed were the leaders of the intents of all the participants?

The expectations of the leaders of the flotilla, unlike the expectations of those now dead, is easy to find on the Internet:

At commondreams.org you can read the missive of Ann Wright, one of the participants before the ship set sail. Here's the headline: 

"Breaking the Israeli Siege of Gaza May Lead to an Attack at Sea, Detention Camps and Deportation".

Reading how calculated the staging of this incident was, you have to wonder at a lot of the commentary that indicates shock or surprise of the response they got from Israel. Here's what Ann Wright tells us *before* the trip about how she believes events will unfold:

In
less than 48 hours, the Israeli Navy will probably fire U.S. made
ammunition and rockets in international waters over the bows of two
U.S. flagged boats and one Greek boat with U.S. citizens aboard as well
as citizens from 13 other countries and over the bows of the Turkish
600 passenger ship. 

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Amnesty International staffer Gita Sahgal says that a former prisoner from Guantanamo, Begg whose case was taken up by AI had advocated jihad as a personal obligation to fight war and supported fundamentalists who denied women's rights. This undermined Amnesty's work upholding universality and the rule of law.

I was asked to sign a petition on behalf of a suspended Amnesty International staff person, Gita Sahgal, who had complained internally in her organization about what she saw as a troubling tendency not to distinguish between the need to defend someone's civil rights, as part of the organization's mandate, and the requirement to disassociate the organization from a victim's own views, which may be antithetical to human rights. The Amnesty leadership explained that she was suspended during the controversy so that it was clear that she did not speak on behalf of the organization, while they investigated the issue.

In this case, the victim involved, Moazzam Begg, an inmate in Guantanamo released to the UK,  formed an organization Cageprisoners to raise ongoing concerns about Guantanamo. The AI staffer felt that the former prisoner held views counter to human rights, as can be seen in the video above. As one petition leader Meredith Tax has pointed out, in Begg's own book, he discusses his combat in the war in Afghanistan and his belief that Afghanistan is better off under the Taliban.

Says the petition:

We come from communities that recognize and appreciate the work of Amnesty International in defending human rights and women’s rights around the world. Many of us work closely with Amnesty International in their campaigns at various levels.

We believe that Gita Sahgal has raised a fundamental point of principle which is “about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination”

Gita went to the Sunday Times with the story; that seems to be the AI gender expert's greatest offense to some, ostensibly putting the discussion into a polarized political space where the organization — and by extension the international human rights movement — could be attacked and undermined.

I read through the materials and decided to sign the petition for a number of reasons. I realized that doing so might bring charges of "breaking the 11th commandment" ("thou shalt never criticize a fellow NGO or victim of human rights abuse") but increasingly, I think this must be done and more space created for vigorous debate on the ethical and moral dimensions of an issue all too often seen in purely legalistic terms — the violation of Art. 30:  "Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein."

I think it's important to point out that this is not a global Skokie, exactly. It's not a case of wavering in "Defending My Enemy" as some are seeing it or standing up for all civil rights, even when the victims of suppression of civil rights are odious and their speech or assemblies are unpleasant and hateful. It's not about "getting it" that if we don't defend rights for all, our rights are undermined too. It's about imagining if you had to campaign further to get these rights, and not only to go to Washington to speak on a platform with that KKK member whose march permit you urged to be issued, or even went to Moscow with him them in your delegation. It's not just about speech, it's about the moral consequences of solidarity with people whose own rights are violated, who are not only talking about violating other people's rights, but violating them too.

The debate has taken the form of asking whether you can "share a platform" with a jihadist for the principle of denouncing the use of torture but it must be seen in broader terms. It's about building a global movement for human rights affirming universality of all human rights for all as distinguished from building an internationalist movement for social justice. They are different.

"NOT USE OR ADVOCATE VIOLENCE"

There was a mantra that used to be repeated constantly by Amnesty International itself 20 and even 10 years ago, that in order to obtain prisoner of conscience (POC) status, a prisoner "could not use or advocate violence". In fact, this mantra has now fallen by the wayside at AI and other groups; the very institution of the POC has also largely been retired at AI, with only some strategic cases emblematic of larger issues kept, and the old networks of defending massive numbers of prisoners all over the world with this status has been dismantled, in favour of a different organizing principle around thematic campaigns.

In fact, so far gone is the old constraints against the idea "not to use or advocate violence" that in defending Amnesty's position on Gita's case and the partnership with Begg, Claudio Cordone says casually:

Now, Moazzam Begg and others in his group Cageprisoners also hold other views which they have clearly stated, for example on whether one should talk to the Taleban or on the role of jihad in self-defence. Are such views antithetical to human rights? Our answer is no, even if we may disagree with them – and indeed those of us working to close Guantánamo have a range of beliefs about religion, secularism, armed struggle, peace and negotiations. I am afraid that the rest of what we have heard against Moazzam Begg include many distortions, innuendos, and “guilt by association” to which he has responded for himself.

Naturally, this has caused a storm of criticism and protest as well as defensive re-interpretation. [UPDATE: The letter also disappeared from its original page on an Indonesian human rights group's site, which I and others linked to, so I've updated the link to archive.org where you can still find it, and have saved a PDF if you want to request it.]

What I think Claudio is saying is that *Begg's right to speak of jihad in self-defense* isn't itself a violation of human rights (in the U.S. we would say it is not yet "incitement to imminent violence"). But…since when did Amnesty International members develop a "range of views" about armed struggle? That doesn't sound like the Amnesty I remember from college days or even 15 years ago when we so intensively worked on POCs from Latin America to the Soviet Union — when there was a clear-cut mandate for the Prisoner of Conscience as a person who "did not use or advocate violence" that would never have been undone in the Secretariat by having staffers who "have a range of beliefs about…armed struggle".

That means a hugely important educational tool as well as transformative method in social movement organization, a by-product of the AI chapters' work, has been lost. In the old days, you could tell groups in another country that they had to be careful not to include anyone who had used or advocated violence in their lists of "political prisoners" or Amnesty could not accept their case — it was a kind of "EU accession" process for political prisoners all over the world to make that grade — and for civic groups organizing to start to *make the distinction between non-violence and violent struggle and which form of struggle gained international solidarity, and which did not*. That didn't mean that you couldn't do anything about people who suffered from lack of due process or were tortured or sentenced to the death penalty but had used or advocated violence — all of those single issues and the cases that illustrated them could still be invoked under the other human rights parts of Amnesty's mandate — but at that time, not in the personalized way that a POC could.

[UPDATE: Those who were upset about Amnesty lending its platform to Begg and ruining its credibility felt vindicated when he was arrested in the UK on terrorism charges — this, after being released from Guantanamo and permitted to return to the UK and remain at large for some years. He was charged with making contact with ISIS in Syria and helping terrorists. Then the case fell apart again, and he was freed again, though his ties to extremist movements do not appear to be disputed, nor his views. There are many, many articles by and about Begg online — go and Google them.  It is a complicated case with many issues so let's try to keep a focus here. The pertinent larger issue is not whether Begg is a victim of human rights violation by the US and UK — he is. He has been compensated officially as such. The issue isn't that he has secretly aided ISIS — his elaborate and nuanced story is on the record and his libel cases back this up. There is voluminous discussion about the horrors of Guantanamo, America's war on terror and rampant human rights violations. It's more difficult to find any clear statement affirming women's rights and non-violence as a value for social movements. As with many topics in our time, there is reluctance to even discuss this because any criticism leads to accusations that you are soft on states' harming of human rights in their quest for terrorists who at times seem dubious. He and his organization sue those who misrepresent them. And here I'd point you again to a post I did at that time, Islamist Extremists Might Be Human Rights Victims; They Aren't Human Rights Defenders, citing an essay by Mona Kareem. The issue is whether he represents non-violence as a cause — he does not. And whether Amnesty is consistent and clear in its upholding of non-violence as the gold standard — it is not.]

The concept of not using or advocating violence is a very good one to have in any movement, specifically devoted to human rights or to political change, but it was one in which the international movement has began to suffer some moral backsliding with the Kosovo independence movement and the intifada in Palestine among other social struggles. I have written about Durban where there was a shocking disregard for the ethical problem posed by groups that justified armed struggle or violent direct action in the belief that their justice cause was so imperative that some slack had to be cut them in the struggle, and the issue of their violence not pressed.

In Durban, international NGOs were pointedly reminded that Amnesty hadn't taken up Nelson Mandela's case back in the day because the ANC had accepted violence as a means of struggle, and that failure to solidarize in this fashion with Mandela has cost the Northern human rights groups their credibility. Put into a guilt-inducing difficult position of this sort, Westerners had a hard time being able to stand firm, look a black African colleague squarely in the eye, and continue to say: "But violence is wrong". The still, small voices of some who kept saying this anyway were drowned out in a louder, more raucous message coming from some social groups of this type: "but structural violence is built into international financial and econonomic systems" or "neoliberal policies are a form of violence" — a decidedly Marxist  and extremist point of view denying qualitative differences between countries with the rule of law and without it, and in any event, an analysis that led you away from the struggle for universality and human rights, and toward political struggle and armed insurrection.

When groups claimed to see violence everywhere in every structure, it became harder to admit that its presence in the midst of their own social movements was wrong, too. When an ill-advised World Bank program to build a dam could be theorized into a hysterical rant about "structuralized violence," a man with a gun even committing armed insurrection or terrorist acts could be theorized up into merely acting in "self-defense". It also became harder for people to see how they could solve social justice problems by human rights alone. Therefore the violence of this or that group, compared to abuses of large systems like "globalization" or "transnational corporations" seemed trivial indeed to such extreme thinkers. That Gandhi or Marin Luther King, Jr. or the Dalai Lama or even Nelson Mandela himself after he was released from prison did not speak in these terms but urged their followers to refrain from violence was not seen as the inspiring model of civic action it once was.

Today, in the absence of a new generation of moral giants like those figures, the work of parsing rights and incitement to violence falls to Amnesty staffers, in an environment of states' "war on terror". Yet somehow, even in an age when anybody can become a newspaper or a television station out of their mobile phone and i-pad, we aren't creating the substrate of an ethical, peaceful international citizens' movement that fosters a climate where violence is not acceptable, and where the patient work "by human rights alone" rather than armed struggle is embraced.

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A court case that doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention found that Saudi Arabia, and four of its princes, cannot be held liable in the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, "even if they were aware that charitable donations to Muslim groups would be funnelled to Al Qaeda," the NY Sun reported, citing AP.

The case hinged on the principles of "sovereign immunity" and also the difficulty in showing that the princes knowingly intended to harm American residents.

"The bottom line is it’s a difficult proof level to say someone gave money intending it to be used in a terrorist attack in the United States as opposed to merely giving it to anti-American groups and foreseeing it," AP quoted a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Justin Timothy Green. Yet he added that Al Aeda couldn’t have made these attacks if they didn’t have these kinds of resources to train and equip terrorists.

Understandably, this is a route the relatives of victims of 9/11 have taken to try to get some accountability for their losses; now it is closed off.

It wasn’t just a matter of the difficulty of determining which money went for which activity. Said the judges of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals:

"Even if the four princes were reckless in monitoring how their donations were spent, or could and did foresee that recipients of their donations would attack targets in the United States, that would be insufficient."

I’d love to hear more about the law that went into this decision, but the take-home is this: let’s say a foundation in the U.S. gives a grant to a Palestinian group that is later found to fund a suicide-bombing attack. From what I gather, it will not be possible to take the foundation to court for this act, even if intentional, although the act could remain counter to the foundation’s charter, or perhaps even be grounds to challenge its tax-exempt status — I don’t know. I look forward to finding out more about this.