Indigenous Children Gassed At The Border, Mocked At Football Games

I woke this morning intending to update readers on progress in pressuring Skowhegan Area High School to retire its racist team name/mascot, which some call Pretendians.

Yesterday I was contacted by three women: a news director at Maine Public Radio, an attorney from the Maine ACLU, and a leader of Suit Up Maine (formed to "promote equity and equality in civil rights, social justice, health care, the environment, education, the economy, and other areas that affect the lives of all people"). All three expressed interest in the school board meeting coming up on December 6. The facebook event to organize support for Native people in Maine calling for change has 161 people interested and 31 saying they plan to attend as of this morning.

Mockery of indigenous culture and history is commonplace in the U.S. right down to the present moment. Dehumanizing people is foundational to genocide as students of the Holocaust or ethnic cleansing in Rwanda know. Jewish people were compared with rats and referred to as vermin; Tutsi people were referred to as cockroaches. Then, they were slaughtered.

All hate crimes are preceded by hate language is what I told the school board at their November meeting. 

Which brings us to the gassing of asylum seekers -- many of whom are indigenous children -- at the U.S. border with Mexico.

A migrant family, part of a caravan of thousands traveling from Central America en route to the United States, runs away from tear gas in front of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Tijuana, Mexico.

(📷: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters) pic.twitter.com/pz7hkxsN9g

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 25, 2018

The demagogue with bad hair in the White House tweeted yesterday that many of those being gassed are "stone cold criminals." To say that he offered no evidence to support his claim would just be describing government by tweet as we have come to know it.

When the point is to demonize the Other who allegedly threatens our collective safety, empty threats are far more effective than facts.

The white supremacist culture of the U.S. has built an entire industry characterizing itself as the anti-Nazis. Most of that culture is war porn where beaches are stormed, buddies are glorified, and concentration camps are liberated by the "good guys" (that would be us). A zillion books and movies enshrine the national myth of violent "Christian" saviors. My friend Bruce Gagnon examined this myth yesterday in a blog post: "Was there an ideological contamination from the Nazis?"

Who now has the courage to speak up and say:

The U.S. imprisons thousands of children in concentration camps in Texas right now. 

The militarized U.S. Border Patrol is attacking children and their families fleeing violence in Central America that the U.S. creates and funds.

Brown citizens are being stripped of their passports even if they earned citizenship via enlistment in the U.S. military.

White militias are massing on the border with Mexico threatening refugees with further violence if they dare to apply for asylum in the U.S.

White supremacy is a disease. Mocking Native people and harming their children are symptoms of moral sickness. Claiming you do so in the name of Christ is ludicrous.

Silence is complicity in these crimes from here on out. 

There's a lot of historical precedent for that, too.

(Special thanks to Hope Savage for all the good meme shares.)

Hate Speech Poisoning Hearts And Minds #SynagogueShooting

I have to admit that the steady pulse of mass shootings in recent years has left me, probably most of us, somewhat numb. It's not that I don't care anymore just that I have horror fatigue from attending to so many acts of violence that I'm tempted to call senseless. But I guess they aren't because they're intended to keep the human beings of the U.S. permanently terrified, and it's working.

The attack by a heavily armed white man on a synagogue in Pittsburgh that resulted in 11 deaths of people who were killed because of being practicing Jews has terrified us yet again. 

Bend the Arc leaders are reading their open letter to Trump, who is in town today.

“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism.” pic.twitter.com/qurAtDtb6T

— julia reinstein 🚡 (@juliareinstein) October 30, 2018

Our white supremacist president and his Jewish son-in-law, dutifully accompanied by their wives, visited the Tree of Life Synagogue only to be greeted by thousands of protesters shouting "Words matter." This is a reference to, among other things, the president's claim that there were "very fine people" participating in the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia during the summer of 2017.

Many of us have been shuddering at the parallels to the rise of fascism in Eurasia during the 20th century. Shooting up a synagogue smacks of a pogrom, as did a white supremacist youth killing nine people at a black church in Charleston in 2013.


A prayer vigil at Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church By Nomader - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Only this moment I learned that two senior citizens in Louisville, Kentucky were gunned down by a white supremacist who had tried to enter a black church prior to the crime. RIP Vickie Lee Jones and Maurice Stallard.

Yesterday I received a video shared in Facebook messenger, allegedly by my husband. The video featured a ranting white man armed with what appeared to be an AK-47 or some such assault rifle. His threats against black women and children and his how-to instructions about mowing them down -- preferably from behind -- were not something I would ever willingly consume, so I turned the video off rather quickly. I practice mental hygiene and limit my exposure to hate speech and ugly ideas at the same time as I take note of their existence and continue to struggle against their acceptance.

I contacted my husband. He had never seen the video and certainly never shared it with me. He changed his Facebook password right away as he had evidently been hacked. I reported the video as hate speech to the Facebook censors, not that I believe they are usually working on the side of truth and righteousness. Also blocked the account of the nasty white man, a self-styled bishop of I can only imagine what God-forsaken church. 

Why don't I leave Facebook and its white supremacists and other haters altogether? Because Facebook is where I see things like a Jewish friend sharing these details about the victims on a post where I had named them. She wrote:

Zichronam livracha, may their memories be a blessing. 

Joyce Fienberg, 75, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center for more than 25 years. People would just always open up to her in a very easy way. She was an ideal observer. 

Richard Gottfried, 65, shared a dentistry practice with his wife, where they both volunteered with Catholic Charities' dental clinic.

Rose Mallinger, 97, Holocaust survivor. She always offered a friendly greeting, a hug and a smile. 

Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, a primary care physician who always wore a bowtie that made people smile and made his patients more at ease. 

Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54, brothers and supporters of ACHIEVA, a Pittsburgh nonprofit that provides support for people with disabilities. Cecil's laugh was infectious. David was so kind and had such a gentle spirit. 

Bernice and Sylvan Simon, 84 and 86, married. They were loving and giving and kind, gracious and dignified. They wanted to give back to people. 

Daniel Stein, 71, always willing to help anybody. He had a very dry sense of humor. 

Melvin Wax, 88, such a kind, kind person. He was a bit hard of hearing, and unfailingly attended Friday, Saturday, and Sunday services, filling in at nearly every role if someone didn't show up.  

Irving Younger, 69, a youth football and baseball coach. He was an usher at his synagogue, and he never missed a day.

Silver lining in the cloud of my days of terror: yesterday a former colleague contacted me. He teaches science at the high school where I used to teach an elective called "The Holocaust and Other Genocides." A student had mentioned wanting to know more about The Holocaust, which is not taught as a separate course anymore at a school with a dwindling population. (In a district where I called out a co-worker for an anti-Semitic slur at a school board meeting after the superintendent and the directors on the board failed to do so.)



Jewish refugees in Hamburg, Germany board the S.S. St. Louis, which would be turned back from the U.S. and Cuba, and return many to their deaths in concentration camps during The Holocaust. Public Domain, Link

Of course I shared a bunch of resources with my former colleague and I'm sure he'll pass them along. It's always chilling to realize how many young people know nothing about the historic genocide that the U.S. stood by and let happen in Europe in the 1940's. While turning away Jewish refugees by the boatload.

Photo from "Comfort Women Statue In San Francisco Vandalized As Tensions Rise" AsAmNews.com

Kind of like how many people know nothing about the sexual enslavement of 250,000 women and girls as young as 14 by the Japanese Imperial Army around the same time in history. The euphemistically termed "comfort women" struggle for recognition while the current Japanese government -- which recently changed Japan's post-war constitution in order to legalize building up its military again -- vandalizes memorials and cuts off sister cities who dare to speak the historical truth.

Information is power. Words do matter. Hate speech ALWAYS precedes hateful acts of violence.

From Mondoweiss: "Young Jews hold sit-in at Republican club that hosted ‘Proud Boys’ to demand renunciation of white nationalism"

Postscript: Don't let violent racist Zionists confuse you. Their hate language and hate crimes against Palestinians deserve condemnation. And calling Israel out on its crimes does not make me or anyone else anti-Semitic.