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.)

1% Attack, 99% Multiply: Mustafa Tamimi, Tear Gas Fatality

The violent suppression of a demonstration in the West Bank led to death by tear gas canister -- again. In the village of Nabi Saleh near Ramallah, Mustafa Tamimi was hit at point blank range in the face by an Israeli soldier shooting at him from within a tank. Canisters were raining down onto a group of perhaps fifty unarmed civilians marching with Palestinian flags and banners in orderly fashion before being attacked. It was on Friday, the 9th day of December, 2011 that Mustafa was hit, and he died at a nearby hospital.

The high points of this amazing video of the events: a terrible glimpse of his shattered face; the UN van that was begged but refused to help;  the sheer amount of tear gas that is fired at the crowd prior to the fatal shot; the crowds that materialize post injury, and the urgency of their chanting, turning grief to determination. Toward the end there is a long moment where protesters make a metal gate cry out against injustice, in a faceoff with an IDF sound machine that seems by comparison a weak mechanism wielded by cowardly bureaucrats.

Especially watch the refusal of fear by a young shero in a pink hoody who is pulled back protectively from the more exposed side of the gate, a girl who goes right on banging, and climbs right up on top of the gate to visually challenge the bullies hiding in tanks.

This young person, and the 20 year old Gazan who rescued his baby cousin from the rubble of her family home, will lodge in my memory of the news that reached me on the International Human Rights Day, 2011.

source: Mondoweiss Ruqaya Izzidien

Migdad Elzalaan responded to air strikes in northern Gaza City yesterday by running to his uncle's house.

According to the account in Mondoweiss:

The attack killed Elzalaan’s uncle and injured 13 of his family members. Israeli authorities claim to have targeted a nearby military base, but the only reported casualties were civilian...Migdad explained, “[My uncle] told me, ‘Look after our family, look after the children. Look after them,’ and then he died, right in my arms.”

You cannot evict an idea whose time has come, such as: Israel is no longer good for Jews.

Such as: Occupy Tear Gas Suppliers. Four days before Mustafa was hit, Egyptians protesting the use of the faux non-lethal weapon in Cairo lay down in front of a plant of the sinisterly bland Combined Systems, Inc. in Jamestown, PA

Such as: When the 1% Attack, the 99% Multiply