Category Archives: Freedom

In the new dawn of a heady post-revolutionary era, Suzannah Mirghani returned in 2019 to the country of her birth for the first time in years. Her mission was to shoot a short film on Sudanese soil. It proved unexpectedly straightforward.

When the revolution happened, there was this exuberance, she says, from her Qatari home. When we came to make our film, we were given the green light. We were told: Anything you want.

Nobody harassed us. Nobody told us what to do. Nobody asked us for the script. I call this time in the history of Sudan the honeymoon, says Mirghani.

More than two and a half years after the toppling of the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir, Mirghani fears the honeymoon is over, at least for her. The turmoil into which Sudan has again been plunged means she feels unable to return safely.

On 31 October, as her film, Al-Sit, won the latest of many awards, Mirghani had to give an acceptance speech that was anything but celebratory.

Six days before, the military had seized power in a coup, detaining the civilian prime minister and bringing the countrys fragile transition to democracy to an abrupt halt.

In a video address from Qatar to the Africa in Motion film festival in Scotland, Mirghani said the only reason she and her crew had been able to make Al-Sit was the active encouragement given by the civilian-military partnership government. Now, she added, were in very serious danger of going back to the bad old days of military rule and stifling creative expression.

Since the coup, a lot has happened: huge pro-democracy protests thronged through Khartoum and other cities, with at least 40 demonstrators killed.

After almost a month, the prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, was released as part of a deal struck with the coup leader, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

But the protesters, who want the military out of politics for good, are not convinced, and even less so as security forces fire teargas into the crowds that continue to gather despite Hamdoks return. With the creative gains made after the revolution now hanging in the balance, Sudanese artists feel they have to speak out.

We artists will be the first to be targeted if the military government continues in power, writes Aamira*, a painter, in an email from Khartoum. We are demonstrating in the streets, facing guns, unarmed. There is nothing to fear any more.

In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Hamdok defended his decision to strike a deal with the military, saying it was essential to stop the bloodshed and preserve the achievements of the last few years.

It may not have been uppermost in his mind, but one of those achievements was the flowering of an artistic community that had long been harassed, censored and forced into the shadows. Assil Diab, a street artist, says: I painted Omar al-Bashir as the [face of] coronavirus in a stadium in Bahri during the daytime, which would have been just impossible; my whole family could have been killed two years ago.

Feeling compelled to return amid the revolutionary fervour, Diab returned to Sudan in 2019 and made her name painting the faces of the revolutions martyrs on the outside of their families homes, with a getaway car close by in case the notorious paramilitary Rapid Support Forces saw her.

For Mirghani, the absolute elation of the revolution yielded creative results. Al-Sit is the beautifully observed story of a Sudanese village girl whose parents want her to marry the sharp-suited son of a wealthy cotton trader in Qatar. To finally be able to express yourself, to say what you had wanted to say to these people for 30 years: its amazing.

My film is about womens rights. Its social commentary on arranged marriage. I dont think we could have said that a few years ago, says Mirghani.

The honeymoon was not without its challenges. The dictator was gone, but social and religious conservatism and a reluctance to champion the arts remained. Artistic freedom was patchy: in 2020, the renowned film-maker Hajooj Kuka and several others were detained during a theatre workshop.

Asim*, a documentary film-maker in Khartoum, says that, although in the capital the direct censorship of the Bashir era has eased, the rest of Sudan is not as relaxed. Its partially freedom and partially censorship, he says. It is a battle about 10% won.

Khalid Albaih, a political cartoonist based in Qatar, returned after the revolution to launch the Sudan Artist Fund (SAF), to provide budding creatives with money and mentors, and with an ambitious plan to create a public art and design library. He says: I thought: this is it. All doors were open and this is what we were going to do.

I took all my papers, and for the first time in 10 years Im in Sudan walking around, not scared of any police, or secret police, or anything. I went to every business owner in Sudan and everyone that can donate money to these causes. And I got nothing but rejection for a library and for an artists fund.

Finally, Albaih secured $7,000 (5,300) from CultuRunners, a cultural exchange organisation, and the SAF awarded its first grant of $500 in October just before the coup. It was incredible because the internet cut out [after the coup leaders imposed a nationwide online blackout] so the artist didnt even know he had won. We had to call him. It took two or three weeks to send the money to him, says Albaih.

The cartoonist knows there will not be any more funding for a while. Now everything is rocky. No one knows how things will go. Its going to be really hard for artists and these kinds of initiatives to move forward.

The coup, says Diab, left the creative community feeling disappointed and just broken down because we finally thought we were free and then this happened. She intends to apply for political asylum in the US, where she is studying, feeling she can be of better use to Sudan from overseas.

Those in the thick of it cannot afford to give up hope. Asim was at a protest in Khartoum against the post-coup deal last week and was teargassed the entire afternoon amid chants of no partnership, no negotiation, no legitimacy. He is realistic about future challenges but knows that people have made up their minds.

I feel like there is a grip on power and it will not end today; it will not end tomorrow. Whether those power-hungry authoritarians will roll with democratic transition and allow people to express their freedoms, allow journalists and film-makers to operate or not, that is something that is still [up in] the air, because you never know with the ever-changing dynamic of power in this country, he says.

The momentum towards democracy is undeniable, he says. I believe that is possible and I believe there is hope. The people will not stop asking for what they really want. [Will] that future come tomorrow? The day after? In two years? In five? We never know. But it seems like the consensus is that people agree it has to happen.

*Names have been changed to protect their identity

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Can artistic freedom survive in Sudan? The writings on the wall - The Guardian

Days after legally changing his name, Enes Kanter Freedom heard it announced while playing in an NBA game for the first time.

Freedom entered Wednesday night's home game against the 76ers midway through the first quarter, and received a loud ovation from the Boston crowd. He waved toward the seats in acknowledgement shortly after stepping onto the court.

Freedom has made headlines recently for his comments toward Lakers star LeBron James, saying he would like "educate" James on human rights violations in China.Freedom has been critical of James and Nike in the past for not speaking up about the the subject.

"Sure, I'd love to sit down and talk to him," Freedom told reporters on Tuesday, per ESPN. "I'm sure it's going to be a very uncomfortable conversation for him. I don't know if he's gonna want that. I'll make that really comfortable for him.

"I don't know if he's educated enough, but I'm here to educate him and I'm here to help him, because it's not about money. It's about morals, principles and values. It's about what you stand for. There are way bigger things than money. If LeBron stopped making money now, his grandkids and grandkids and grandkids can have the best life ever."

Freedom has also called out Nike and its co-founder, Phil Knight, on Instagram for what he called "slave labor camps" in China. He also tagged James and Michael Jordan in his post.

"Nike remains vocal about injustice here in America, but when it comes to China, Nike remains silent," said Kanter, in a post which featured the hashtags #HypocriteNike and #EndUyghurForcedLabor.

"You do not address police brutality in China, you do not speak about discrimination against the LGBTQ community, you do not say a word about the oppression of minorities in China, you are scared to speak up."

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Watch: Enes Freedom Checks Into Game for First Time Since Name Change - Sports Illustrated

Enshrining the right to abortion into New Jersey law is vitally important to protect women, given the risk that the U.S. Supreme Court may strike down Roe v. Wade. And to ensure this right is real, protecting insurance coverage for abortion is the other most important priority. Any bill that emerges in our state must contain those two crucial elements.

For now, though, lets examine some of the other, less popular provisions of the Reproductive Freedom Act, a bill sponsored by Sen. Loretta Weinberg thats expected to be heard in the Senate on Monday. These provisions may have to be sacrificed to ensure majority support for the core provisions, but that would be a shame, since each of them deserves support as well. Heres a look:

Abortions late in pregnancy

The bill would also codify this right, one that many people may not realize exists in New Jersey. They fear that women will seek out abortions late in pregnancy for cavalier reasons and that doctors will perform them.

That moral concern is understandable: There is a difference between a fertilized egg deliberately expelled by an I.U.D. and an abortion in the third trimester. At some point, the fetus does deserve protection, as the Supreme Court found in Roe. But the question is, who is best positioned to provide that protection state legislators, or a woman and her doctor?

Start with these facts: A small percentage of women get an abortion between weeks 21 and 24, for personal reasons. We dont know how many, exactly, and without better data, we wont know what were trying to regulate. But this much we do know: They say they would have preferred to have had the procedure sooner. And most say they struggled to find the money to pay for it.

These stories are heartbreaking, as they often choose to end the pregnancies due to horrible deformities that will cause their babies to suffer and die, or live in a vegetative state, or endanger a twin fetus. They wait to act because they dont want to abort until a lethal abnormality is absolutely confirmed. Imagine being forced to go through a painful delivery, then the agony of your babys death or having to make a premature choice to abort because of a lawmakers ban at a certain week.

And all evidence shows that abortion late in pregnancy is not something a woman would choose to do flippantly. In the first trimester, an abortion takes no more than five minutes and costs about $550. At 20 weeks, it costs about $2,500, a price that increases with each week. Its a two-day procedure that is agonizing for women like Lyndsay Werking-Yip, who had an abortion at 23 weeks to protect her baby girl with a severe brain deformity from a life of pain and suffering. She wears a locket with her ashes: My child was lovingly cared for until her last heartbeat.

Only 1 percent of abortions happen at or after 21 weeks, still well within the second trimester, and doctors set strict limits on when they will do them. It can cause a severe trauma to the patient, Dr. Kristyn Brandi, a New Jersey OBGYN who provides abortions in cases like this, told us. This is not something that should be in the political domain. Any time legislation tries to get into the weeds about these things, it doesnt really reflect what real care looks like.

Parsing the exact phrasing of laws intended to protect the right of women to have an abortion late in pregnancy is an impossible task. So New Jersey, and this bill, let the law be silent. They let women and their doctors handle it, and respect the fact that they are more concerned about the fetus than any politician could be.

For some, abortions are delayed because of the expense, or problems with access. About 75 percent of abortions are among low-income patients, many of whom must raise the funds themselves. Ensuring they can get early, affordable abortions and easy access to contraceptives, as other provisions of this bill would do, is an obvious solution.

Parental notification

About 20 years ago, New Jerseys Supreme Court struck down a law that would have required parental notification for young people seeking an abortion. Now this bill would codify that.

This is unpalatable to many parents. Having an abortion would be a major life decision for a kid, and theres no other such decision that parents are excluded from. Why should abortion be different?

Consider how this plays out in practice. The Womens Center in Cherry Hill, where provider Roxanne Sutocky works, also has two clinics in Pennsylvania, which does require parental permission. The overwhelming majority of young people who can safely involve their parents do, she says, because its the best way to get connected to a clinic, pay all the costs and get transportation.

The intent of a notification law is to ensure that a child faced with this decision gets parental input, guidance and love. But for young people for whom thats not possible, the law is a blunt instrument. It makes no exception when a parent is not available, perhaps because of incarceration, or for a young person living with another relative, or in a family in which its unsafe to expose a pregnancy because of abuse.

In Pennsylvania, young people must leave school, go to court and be seen in front of a judge to obtain the right to have an abortion independent of a parent. Can you imagine how daunting that is for a 14-year-old victim of rape or incest? Its a very burdensome process, could be extremely overwhelming and time consuming, causing unnecessary delays for people accessing care, Sutocky says.

Extending abortion coverage to undocumented residents

The governor already has money in the budget to cover this, under a state program that also provides birth control coverage and prenatal care for undocumented residents who have no other path to health coverage.

This bill would codify coverage for abortion too. If were funding for one pregnancy-related service as part of a long-established program, it makes sense to have parity to cover them all, so people are empowered with the full range of available options especially if cost is a determining factor.

Its not a huge investment for the state to make this expansion. Abortion care is the lowest cost option to provide, much more cost effective than forcing a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy.

Opponents argue this option would lure people to illegally cross the border into our state and embolden traffickers. Thats nonsensical. Youd have to pay a lot more than the cost of a $550 abortion to emigrate into New Jersey, so this benefit is marginal. And if a victim of trafficking needs an abortion, isnt it better that she relies on a trusted health care provider trained to recognize trafficking and provide help?

As the Legislature opens its debate on this, the priority must be to protect the core right to abortion and ensure that insurance covers it. But while these other provisions are less popular, a closer look shows they serve the public interest as well.

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These parts of the Reproductive Freedom Act arent popular. Heres why we support them | Editorial - nj.com

"Unfiltered" host Dan Bongino censured the left for their crime-causing policies and medical authoritarianism in his opening monologue Saturday.

TUCKER CARLSON: TYRANNY IS COMING UNLESS SOMEONE STOPS DEMOCRATS' COVID POWER GRAB

DAN BONGINO: We know [Biden administration officials] lie. They know we know they lie. And they don't care, they just continue to lie. COVID erupted all over the globe, folks, but the crime spreeswere strangely limited to where? To liberal cities. So what rational person would correlate crime with COVID knowing full well the only appropriate comparison is to compare exploding crime with liberalism. It's a near 100% correlation. And counting on liberal activist groups, by the way - who are supposedly in it for the little guy - to try and right this crime ship is a fool's errand. They don't care. If they really cared about Black lives, they'd be calling for more police, not less. But instead, what are they calling for? Well, they're humiliating and embarrassing themselves again, calling for boycotts of what they call White companies. How they measure that? Who knows, folks, I stopped asking questions of stupid people a long time ago.

While criminals are given a pass for rioting, the left still wants to take away, by the way, your sovereignty over your own body and your medical freedom too. I mean, why not? They don't really believe in any of that stuff. You ever notice how small parts of your personal freedom are evaporating and disappearing every single time there's a new variant? Government starts to whittle away our ability to make decisions about our own bodies.

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The left is to blame for rising crime and decreasing personal freedom: Bongino - Fox News

(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Protesters waving American flags and holding signs decrying mask and vaccine mandates gathered along the curb of 700 East in Liberty Park Saturday, making Salt Lake City one of dozens of cities around the world protesting public health-related restrictions, Sept. 18, 2021.

| Dec. 5, 2021, 1:00 p.m.

If the government ordered us all to stay home. If it told us we couldnt go to a restaurant or a bar or a theater. That school and work for most of us had to be done from home. Then one might say the government was taking away our rights.

If a mob of violent hooligans filling the streets made it too dangerous to leave our homes, or to go to restaurants or bars or theaters, or to school or the office, it wouldnt be government action taking away our freedom. But some of the fault would lie with government inaction.

And if one level of government wanted to arrest the members of the violent mob, making it possible for us to again go about our business unmolested, while another level stood up for the right to commit mayhem, then who would it be that was protecting our rights and who would it be that was denying them?

The Declaration of Independence is clear that the point of government is to secure these rights. Which means that, if we are to live freely, then the government must do things to create an environment where we may choose what to do and where to go. Thats everything from arresting criminals and repelling invasions to building roads we can travel on as we please to installing, and mandating the use of, clean water systems, sewage systems and other public health measures that included, until our world went nuts, mandated vaccinations for students, soldiers and sane people.

Claiming the right to move about in society during a pandemic without receiving the vaccinations that have been conjured up for us makes absolutely no sense. It is the moral equivalent of demanding the right to poop on the floor in the grocery store.

Actually, refusing the COVID-19 vaccination is probably worse than relieving yourself in the produce section, because nearly everyone would immediately avoid that aisle if not the whole store and dodge an obvious public health hazard. Those who dont get the jab dont so obviously stink, so we cant tell who to stay away from.

Yet we have a platoon of Utah Republicans who continue to fight against vaccination mandates.

Thursday, Utahs Sen. Mike Lee was threatening to shut down the government again unless he got a vote on a measure to defund President Joe Bidens workplace vaccination or testing mandates. He got the vote, and it blessedly failed, on a party-line 50-48 vote.

Lee absurdly calls his move to block workplace vaccination mandates an effort to give the American worker a chance. Right. A chance to get, or spread, a horrible disease, run up a huge hospital bill and die with a tube rammed down your windpipe. Lovely.

And we have the vision of state Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, who led the campaign in the Utah Legislature to declare the pandemic over not based on any scientific or medical reasoning, but because he was tired of it resigning his seat to take a legislative affairs job at the Utah Department of Health. Legislative affairs, Ray knows. Health? No so much.

And we have Republicans such as Gov. Spencer Cox, Attorney General Sean Reyes and Senate President Stuart Adams calling vaccination mandates an invasion of the right of individuals to make personal health care decisions.

In the midst of a global pandemic, being vaccinated is anything but a personal health care decision. It is a duty, a minimal expectation for anyone living in a civilized society.

Vaccines might well have ended the threat of COVID-19 well before we got to the point of having to learn to spell, or pronounce, omicron. If compliance hereabouts were 90% instead of Utahs current 60%, not only would our bodies be much less likely to become ill, or fill up all the ICU beds, we would have much less concern that another variant wave might to close our schools or stores again.

Vaccination mandates work. Businesses that have instituted them have reported high levels of compliance, often after a lot of public grumbling. New York City, once the epicenter of coronavirus deaths, has reopened theaters and restaurants and not come to regret it due to vaccinations being required for anyone entering those venues. Germany is poised to do the same.

I have heard the argument that attacking people who are reluctant to get the jab can be counterproductive, as well as just mean, as it only stiffens some peoples objecting spines. And theres truth in that.

But for those with the bully pulpit, opposing vaccine mandates is not an attempt to expand our freedoms. It is a way of undermining everyones right to go about our business without fear.

Enough.

George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.

George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, was very happy to show his vaccination card the other night at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, where he enjoyed the absurdist The French Dispatch.

gpyle@sltrib.com

Twitter, @debatestate

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Utah Republicans have some weird ideas of what 'freedom' is, George Pyle writes - Salt Lake Tribune

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for.

Because of their national spirit, Edmund Burke cautioned Parliament in his 1775 Speech on Conciliation, the Americans opposition to taxation without representation required an unusual degree of care and calmness. The growth of the population and the colonies outsized commercial contribution to the British empire by themselves counseled every reasonable effort to compromise. But beyond these exigencies, according to Burke, the temper and character of the American people were decisive in the search for a prudent resolution to the dispute: This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes.

The spirit of liberty in America shined brightly in the generation that produced the Declaration of Independence, prevailed in the Revolutionary War, and ratified the Constitution under which the United States grew to be a multi-religious, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic rights-protecting democracy and world power. More than two centuries later, the formal constitutional protections of religious liberty, free speech, press freedom, and the rights to peaceably assemble and to petition the government remain in place.

At the same time, established institutions threaten the culture of freedom. Schools, from K-12 through universities, tend to conflate indoctrination and education. Leading media outlets often favor the promulgation of progressive narratives over the accurate reporting of stories. Big Tech social-media platforms reward the vehement and the snide while censoring facts and perspectives that conflict with their workforces political sensibilities. And, not least, an overweening federal bureaucracy has made a priority of implementing fashionable theories about the supposed moral imperative to discriminate based on race to achieve social justice.

Particularly in such perilous times, one would think that a crucial task of American conservatism a conservatism rooted in the nations founding principles and constitutional traditions is to remind fellow citizens of the blessings of liberty under law. Yet many conservatives join the left in blaming the nations travails on the principles of individual freedom and the institutions of limited government.

Some of the best-known intellectuals associated with National Conservatism lead the right-wing disparagement of the modern tradition of freedom. [A] project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, according to its website, National Conservatism is a movement of public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing. Set aside the peculiarity of self-proclaimed admirers of Edmund Burke building a transnational movement around an abstraction the idea of the nation. More concerning is the tendency of the movements leaders to besmirch the dedication to basic rights and fundamental freedoms that is woven into the fabric of Americas unique national traditions.

In his plenary address last month at the movements conference in Orlando, Edmund Burke Foundation Chairman Yoram Hazony stressed that the United States stands at a crossroads because of the success of the neo-Marxist cultural revolution which has taken over many, maybe most, of the liberal institutions that form the backbone of liberal hegemony in the United States since after World War II. To counter the neo-Marxists, Hazony contends, conservatives must overcome the distinction between the public and the private.

In the 1950s and 1960s, in Hazonys telling, American conservatism followed William F. Buckley Jr. in embracing, under the name fusionism, the split between those two spheres. We are going to support freedom economic, social freedom, individual liberties everywhere we can almost across the boards, the fusionists reasoned, according to Hazony, while relegating to the private sphere traditionalism, nation, God, scripture, the traditional family.

Hazony conceded (without saying how or pondering the implications) that fusionism contributed to victory in the Cold War, but he concluded that it was also a failure. Fusionism didnt work because there is no real separation between the public and the private. The proof in Hazonys eyes is that public liberalism spills over and corrupts private conservatism. To reverse the nations precipitous decline, he asserts, American conservatism must reinfuse the public sphere, and particularly the schools, with God and scripture.

Hazony, however, mistakes an imperfect separation of public and private for no real separation. And he erroneously implies that the separation was invented in the 1950s by conservatives though it is bound up with the natural-rights thinking that partly constitutes Americas unique national traditions. Indeed, the separation between public and private also stems from the Christian teaching, espoused by James Madison in his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, that the exercise of political authority over religion undercuts true piety.

Hazonys attack on the distinction between public and private involves a variation on a familiar critique of liberal democracy and a common ambition to employ the organs of the state to promote the true and comprehensive vision of human flourishing. Strangely enough, the classic version of Hazonys discontents with the modern tradition of freedom was put forward in 1843 by Karl Marx in part 1 of On the Jewish Question.

The young Marx contrasted political emancipation, rooted in liberal democracys separation of public and private, with human emancipation, which, to achieve the common good, merges public and private. Political emancipation, Marx maintained, fosters false consciousness by swamping the private sphere with the public concern for rights and freedom: At home, citizens dispose of their earnings as they please instead of combating the evils of capitalism; in their places of worship, individuals and their families serve God as they see fit, rather than opposing religion as a snare and a delusion. Only erasure of the distinction between public and private, argues Marx, can overcome such false consciousness and bring about human emancipation.

That way lies authoritarianism and worse. Yet in the name of the common good, natcons, as they call themselves, advocate the concerted use of government to direct culture, mold families, teach the virtues, and empower religious faith. After all, they argue, law and public policy inevitably shape souls which is true. Yet the natcons often overlook the great difference between, on the one hand, government that arrogates to itself the right and responsibility to dictate morality and supervise human flourishing, and, on the other, government that maintains an expansive domain in which citizens and their communities retain the right, and shoulder the responsibility, to cultivate morality and promote human flourishing.

The natcons problem is not that they take Americas unique national traditions seriously but their failure to take those traditions seriously enough. In the American constitutional tradition, the common good consists in the first place in maintaining a political order that protects all citizens rights equally. That political order provides a wide democratic space to advance the public interest by, say, rescuing education, elevating culture, putting immigration under law, and reforming trade policy.

The natcons have rightly sounded the alarm about woke ideology and have illuminated the follies committed in freedoms name, permitted under its watch, and encouraged by its uneasy relation with authority. But in their zeal to remoralize American life, they foster contempt for Americas distinctive national traditions, which are rooted in individual liberty and limited government. These provide the only sturdy foundation on which Americans of diverse faiths, political perspectives, and moral sensibilities can come together to address the countrys daunting challenges.

I pardon something to the spirit of liberty, Burke told Parliament in 1775 in the effort to prudently resolve the conflict with the American colonies. So should conservatives today.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on Twitter @BerkowitzPeter.

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Freedom, Conservatism, and the Common Good - RealClearPolitics

Athens, Greece Press freedom is increasingly under threat in Greece, according to journalists, NGOs and observers who are concerned by recent events including the alleged monitoring of reporters, what they call a vague law banning fake news and the bullying of a Dutch reporter who challenged the prime minister.

Among those affected is Stavros Malichudis, a Greek journalist who believes he is the subject of surveillance by the Greek National Intelligence Service.

Malichudis says he discovered he was being monitored after the Greek daily Efimerida ton Syntakton (Newspaper of the Editors) published on November 14 leaked documents from a security services source on how COVID conspiracy theorists were being watched.

The article also focused on the surveillance of those involved in the migration field, including journalists. Malichudis, who works for Agence France Presse (AFP) and the Greek magazine Solomon, was named.

Malichudis was allegedly put under surveillance after working on an article about a 12-year-old Syrian boy in a refugee camp on Kos island whose artwork had appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde.

In Greece, we like to condemn other countries when it comes to press freedom but never look at our own case, Malichudis told Al Jazeera. Since the issue of my monitoring became known, I have had messages of support by journalists from media from all parts of the spectrum. But most Greek media didnt even do a news story on this, he said.

Its intrusive, its scary and I think its the tip of the iceberg.

Rights groups told Al Jazeera that Malichudis story is part of a worrying degradation of press freedom in the country.

On November 17, it was reported that Dutch journalist Ingeborg Beugel had temporarily left Greece after being attacked online, accused of spreading Turkish propaganda, and physically assaulted.

Beugel had questioned Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in a heated exchange at a press conference in Athens on November 9, accusing him of lying about pushbacks of asylum seekers, which have been widely documented by European NGOs.

People on social media wrote I should drown together with the refugees, that I deserve to be tarred and feathered. Many of the comments are very sexist. I cannot read it any more, Beugel said.

Pavol Szalai, who heads the European Union and Balkans desk for Reporters Without Borders, said:Press freedom in Greece has taken a dangerous turn in recent weeks. Especially journalists working on migration, which is an issue of national and European public interest, have been increasingly threatened.

Szalai said that Beugel had endured a well-orchestrated discreditation campaign on social networks and in pro-government media, but also a physical attack that forced her to plan leaving the country.

Beugel claims that after her exchange with the PM, a man threw a stone at her in a dark street, striking her forehead.

Szalai urged Greek authorities to condemn the attacks on Beugel, saying that a journalist having to flee a European country for safety reasons is by itself a terrifying testimony of the climate for journalists in Greece, but it will also have long-lasting consequences on press freedom there.

The monitoring of Malichudis was also extremely worrying, he said.

In a democracy, it is inadmissible to spy on journalists who only do their work. We have called on the intelligence service to provide clarity on this outrageous breach of confidentiality of journalistic sources.

Further, a new Greek amendment banning fake news has stirred fears about its potentially far-reaching power.

The law adopted on November 11, which updated an existing criminal code, makes sharing fake news a criminal offence and states that any citizen who shares false information which is capable of causing concern or fear to the public or undermining public confidence in the national economy, the countrys defence capacity or public health, could face fines or a prison sentence of up to three months.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said there was a serious risk that the provision could be used to punish media professionals, civil society, and anybody who criticises or takes issue with government policies, creating a chilling effect on free speech and media freedom.

HRWs Greece researcher, Eva Coss, told Al Jazeera: The Greek government accuses its critics of bias, politically motivated criticism, Turkish propaganda, or factual error, but the truth is simpler: the state of the rule of law and human rights in Greece are failing.

In Greece, you now risk jail for speaking out on important issues of public interest, if the government claims its false. Civil society working on migrant rights is under attack, and the state of press freedom is at its worst. Clearly, Greece has taken the wrong direction on rights.

In response to questions from Al Jazeera regarding press freedom and the alleged harassment of journalists, a government spokesperson categorically denied monitoring the press.

Please allow me to reiterate that Greece fully adheres to the values of democratic society and rule of law, especially pluralism and the freedom of the press. Accordingly, it is self-evident that there is no surveillance of journalists in Greece, the spokesperson said.

Looking ahead, Szalai says he starts every new week fearing the kind of violation of press freedom the Greek media will suffer The Greek government must show willingness to protect journalists and take concrete measures to improve press freedom.

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Press freedom in Greece under increased threat: Journalists, NGOs - Aljazeera.com

The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or onbangordailynews.com.

Freedom of religion. Freedom of the press. Two of Americas most cherished constitutional rights enshrined in the First Amendment, protecting them from political interference.

Lets add a healthy dose of government involvement.

That is what is presently percolating in Washington. This coming week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear argumentsabout Maines so-called Blaine Amendment. Meanwhile, the Democrats Build Back Better bill proposes a $1.7 billion tax creditfor local news outlets.

The Blaine Amendments are a vestige of a bigoted time in our nations history. Their inspiration, Maines own James G. Blaine, was Speaker of the House in Washington, a U.S. senator, secretary of state and failed presidential candidate.

The laws passed in numerous states prohibited the expenditure of government funds on any religious educational institution. They arose during a time of heated anti-Catholicism and survive on the books today.

That is why they are in court.

Maine has some unique aspects compared with other states in the Union. We have a tradition of town academies, which are private institutions to which towns pay tuition in lieu of providing a high school. Think Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield or Thornton Academy in Saco.

Other municipalities are school choice towns. They do not have schools of their own, so they let families choose where their students can go. For example, Raymond is one. Ninth graders from that town could attend Windham, or Waynflete, or Westbrook.

But they could not go to Catholic schools like St. Dominics or Cheverus (full disclosure: Im a class of 02 graduate and now serve on the board of trustees). Because of Maines Blaine Amendment.

Turn to the other part of the First Amendment: freedom of the press.

It is no secret that local news outlets are facing dire financial straits. The revenue streams of newspapers most notably print advertising have been upended by the internet. However, journalists, administrative staff and others who work for them still (rightly) want to be paid. Making it all work is a challenge.

That is why Democrats have included local news tax credits in the Build Back Better bill.

If passed, it would be a massive change in the fabric of our nation. After all, the entire reason freedom of the press is enshrined in the Constitution is to empower news organizations to hold the government accountable, even if they fail miserably, like the CNN-Chris Cuomo debacle. It is hard for a journalist to ask tough questions when their paycheck relies on tax credits.

Further, the IRS has inappropriately targeted disfavored groups in the past. If a journalist hits a little too close to home, it isnt hard to imagine their employer being randomly selected for an invasive audit.

Both the Blaine Amendment and Build Back Better deal with government policy directly impacting the funding of organizations that are constitutionally protected from government interference.

In the case of the Blaine Amendment, religious schools are singled out for a prohibition on fundsthat are otherwise generally-available to other private schools.

With the local news tax credits, news organizations are singled out for special, positive treatment from the taxman.

It is probably time for the Blaine Amendments to be removed from the books. Government cannot discriminate against religion. And as long as dollars are permitted to flow to private schools from a school choice town, they should flow equally at the students election.

The local news tax credits are a bit different. News organizations are businesses, and they should participate in generally available business programs. But having Washington kite checks changes the dynamic precipitously.

So instead of tax credits, Mainers who value local news like the august Bangor Daily News should show that value with a subscription. And give reporters the ability to keep a close eye on Augusta. There is a lot going on; some of it is even worth hearing about.

Thank goodness for the First Amendment.

More articles from the BDN

Read more from the original source:

Freedom of religion, and the press, in the spotlight in Washington - Bangor Daily News

Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as freedom-loving Americans. Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.

This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.

The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after Kings speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that ones own freedom depended on everyone elses. This wasnt an organic response. Rather, conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests. That effort can be seen in the role played by one of the most overlooked yet powerful forces in 20th-century America: the nations Realtors.

In 1963, California, with half of the countrys Realtors, passed a fair-housing law to limit housing discrimination. Realtors decided to fight back. They asked voters to approve a state constitutional amendment, Proposition 14, prohibiting the state and any municipality from ever limiting residential discrimination in any way.

Realtors had big incentives for maintaining segregation. Having invented it in the early 1900s as a marketing tool for selling homes, they had made segregation central to their business practices. They created racial covenants to exclude members of minority groups from new developments, existing neighborhoods, and entire cities and shaped federal redlining maps, all premised on the idea that anyone selling to minority families was destroying the future of all the neighbors. Any broker who did so was therefore destroying his future business. Despite the Supreme Court outlawing court enforcement of racial covenants in 1948, Realtors used racial steeringsuch as lying to minority prospective buyers that a home had just been sold and controlling newspaper real-estate listingsso effectively that by the early 60s, Black Americans were excluded from 98 percent of new homes and 95 percent of neighborhoods.

Read: The unfulfilled promise of fair housing

But in asking voters to constitutionally authorize residential discrimination in Proposition 14, Realtors had a fundamental problem. How, at the height of the civil-rights movement, could they publicly campaign for sanctioning discrimination in California? No states constitution, even in the Deep South, had such a provision. No prominent politiciannot Barry Goldwater, not Ronald Reaganwould support the Realtors for fear of seeming racist.

Victory would depend, realized Spike Wilson, the president of the California Real Estate Association, on convincing the large majority of white voterswho did not want to see themselves as racially prejudiced in any waythat the Realtors were campaigning not for discrimination but for American freedom. Realtors would need to secretly and systematically redefine American freedom as the freedom to discriminateto challenge the idea at the heart of the civil-rights movement itself.

The first step was inventing what became known as color-blind freedom to justify discrimination. Per Wilsons request, the national Realtors organization created a secret action kit to oppose fair housing everywhere. The kits detailed scripts instructed Realtors to focus on freedom and avoid discussion of emotionally charged subjects, such as inferiority of races. This kit, weighing a pound and a half and distributed to the local real-estate board in every American city, provided form speeches, Q&As, and press releases for their cause. Freedom, the kit explained, meant each owners right to discriminate, and Realtors were in favor of freedom for all: the equal rights of all owners to choose whom to sell to. Realtors claimed that they, unlike civil-rights advocates, were color-blind.

The key to color-blind freedom was what was left out. Wilson drafted a Property Owners Bill of Rights that Realtors advertised in newspapers nationwide, emphasizing owners absolute right to dispose of their propertynever mentioning anyones right to buy or rent a home in the first place. The right to be treated equally, to not be discriminated against, to choose where to live, was not part of American freedom but a special privilege. Wilson therefore claimed that militant minorities have organized and vocalized for equal rights until equal rights have become special privileges. Color-blind freedom meant that government must be oblivious to, must forever allow, organized private discrimination.

Realtors thus made government the enemy, not minority groups. Am I anti-Negro? By God, I am not. I am their champion, Wilson insisted at a meeting of apartment owners, the Los Angeles Times reported. By making state bureaucrats the enemy, Realtors could be on the side of the underdog, the individual owner. Proposition 14, Realtors claimed, was not about race but about the rights of the individual.

This idea of absolute individual rights was at the heart of how Realtors redefined American freedom. Freedom of choice was blazoned on L.A. freeway billboards. To discriminate simply means to choose, Realtors insisted. Freedom of choice required the right to discriminate.

This became Wilsons most important argument to millions of Californians who did not want to see themselves as racially biased. To be in favor of Proposition 14, to limit where millions of fellow Americans could live, did not mean that you were prejudiced but that you believed in individual freedom.

Calling the Realtors campaign Gettysburg1964! in the monthly magazine California Real Estate, Wilson cited Abraham Lincoln: We are involved in a great battle for liberty and freedom. We have prepared a final resting place for the drive to destroy individual freedom.

King recognized the danger of the Realtors ideology. Rushing from ongoing civil-rights conflicts in the South, he warned at a freedom rally in Fresno, a few miles from Wilsons office, If this initiative passes, it will defeat all we have been struggling to win. Kings terms evoked his speech at the March on Washington, but he was now defending shared freedom not against southern diehards but against northern salesmen promoting color-blind freedom of choice.

Proposition 14s sweeping passage stunned politicians in both parties. The Realtors victory was overwhelming, with 65 percent of the total votes in favor, including 75 percent of the white vote and 80 percent of the white union vote. Two years later, in 1966, when the California Supreme Court ruled Proposition 14 unconstitutional, Reagan, running for governor, adopted the Realtors cause and their message as his own: If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.

Read: The racist housing policy that made your neighborhood

Reagan and other conservatives saw that the Realtors had zeroed in on something extremely powerfulsomething whose full force would not be limited to housing segregation but could be used on virtually any issue.

The timing was crucial. At the very moment when liberalism seemed most dominanton the same 1964 ballot where Lyndon B. Johnson had crushed Goldwater by the largest landslide in historyRealtors had shown how conservatives could succeed. If this idea of freedom could triumph in California, it could work anywhere.

The Realtors themselves ultimately lost their war against fair housing when Congress passed a fair-housing bill, weakened by the shadow of Proposition 14, days after Kings assassination in 1968. Realtor organizations today distance themselves from their past role in segregation. Dave Walsh, the president of the California Association of Realtors (the modern-day incarnation of the California Real Estate Association) acknowledged by email the sad truth that real estate agents, REALTOR associations, real estate developers, government officials, and others developed and supported systems and policies designed to exclude people of color, especially Blacks, from many neighborhoods and homeownership opportunities. He added that Realtors today must own the fact that in the past, we advocated for rights that supported discrimination. But though Realtors have disavowed their past arguments, the vision of freedom they created has had lasting effects on American politics as a whole.

This vision of freedom proved so enduring because it solved three structural problems for American conservatism.

First, Realtors used the language of individual freedom, of libertarianism, to justify its seeming opposite, community conformity. Here was a way to unite the two separate and competing strands of conservatism, to link libertarians and social conservatives in defense of American freedomand create the way many, if not most, Americans understand freedom today.

Thus, the more disparate the issues on which this idea of freedom was invokedabortion, guns, public schools, gender rights, campaign finance, climate changethe more powerful the message became. The conservative movements ability to grow and thrive depended not on an adventitious alliance but on a unifying idea: freedom of choice.

Second, by defining as freedom what government seemed to be taking away from ordinary Americans, Realtors helped create a polarizing, transcendent view of what was at stake in our politics. As one homeowner described Proposition 14 in a Sacramento Bee letter to the editor, We are fighting for our rights, and this, voters, is the only way we can do it. It appears to be our last chance. This picture of government taking away your rights would provide a compelling reason, far beyond economics, for millions of union members, Catholics, and white Americans who had long been part of Franklin D. Roosevelts coalition to see, in issue after issue, why they should define themselves as conservatives.

Timeliest of all, the Realtors redefinition of freedom offered a common ideology for something new in modern America: a national conservative political party. First proposed by southern racists in 1948 to protect Jim Crow, it would have white southerners abandon the national Democratic Party in return for a pledge from pro-business northern Republicans to protect local racial customs. This proposed party, devoted to limiting federal regulation of business and civil rights, could dominate American politics and push it to the right for generations to come.

Such party, when it finally emerged after Goldwaters defeat, needed a publicly acceptable ideology that could work in both the North and the South. The Realtors color-blind freedom, which had proved so successful in California, could unite southerners, working-class northern Democrats, and conservative and moderate Republicans in a new national majority partyone very different from the Republican Party whose congressmen had voted 80 percent in favor of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Read: The only thing integrating America

Over time, the internal dynamics of a national conservative party would only push it further and further toward those who most ardently embraced the Realtors vision of freedom as the only meaning of American freedom. This dynamic has produced todays Republican Party.

Republican politicians now view every issue through this single lens: that American freedom means placing ones own absolute rights over those of others. To go against that credo, to view freedom as belonging to the country itself and, as such, to everyone equally, threatens the partys most basic tenet.

This idea of freedom is based on a technique that the Realtors perfected. They identified a single, narrow, obscure right, an owners right to choose a buyerwhich Realtors themselves had restricted for decades with racial covenantsas American freedom itself. Elevating as absolute a right rarely mentioned before, so government cannot limit it or protect the rights of others, became the model for the conservative movement. The concept can be and has been used regarding virtually any issue.

Everything that is not one of these carefully selected rights becomes, by definition, a privilege that government cannot protect, no matter how fundamental. Since January 6, two-thirds of Republicansmore than 40 percent of all Americansnow see voting not as a basic right, an essential part of our freedom, but as a privilege for those who deserve it.

This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of otherswithout directly saying so. By defining freedom as they did, Realtors did not have to say that it belonged more to some Americans than others. But it didand it has ever since.

See the rest here:

How Americas Realtors Repurposed Freedom to Defend Segregation - The Atlantic

Negative freedom (also known as liberal freedom) is freedom from interference. There can be a master (a king, central authority, government, etc.), but as long as the master is benign and does not interfere, you are considered free.

To secure negative freedom, you need positive freedoms, but not for the same reasons as liberal thinkers have understood them. Defining freedom solely in the liberal sense brings out the traps that can be used arbitrarily. To overcome this predicament, Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit offer a third alternative conception of freedom: freedom as non-domination.

In a recent conversation with Lex Fridman, Human Rights Foundation Chief Strategy Officer Alex Gladstein defined freedom (and Bitcoin freedom) as dichotomies: negative and positive. This duality was introduced by Isaiah Berlin, following Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Benjamin Constant. Gladstein named speech, press, assembly, belief, participation in government, privacy and property as negative liberties. On the other hand, positive liberties are the rights to work, housing, water and vacation.

Because Gladstein's definition relies on the dichotomy that Berlin proposed in his seminal essay, Two Concepts Of Liberty, he unfairly marked positive freedoms as entitlements, like those granted in Cuba, Venezuela and the Soviet Union. Again, similar to Berlin's attack on positive liberties, Gladstein used an adversarial tone on positive freedoms. This argument is only valid if we endorse the binary definitions of negative and positive freedoms based on Berlin's work.

In a nutshell, the negative conception of liberty refers to the absence of something, e.g., interference, hindrances, barriers or constraints. Negative (liberal) freedom is simply freedom as non-interference. On the other hand, the positive conception of liberty refers to the presence of something. In this sense, the presence of something refers to an outside force that can exert influence over control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization (Carter, 2016).

In particular, Berlin defines two conceptions of liberty by providing the questions for which answers lead to the definition of each concept. In his words, the negative conception of liberty is an answer to the question, "What is the area within which the subject a person or group of persons is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?"

In contrast, the positive conception tries to answer the question of, "What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?"

However, at some point, a third alternative arose (proposed by Skinner and Pettit), which was seen as freedom from dependence or domination, and became known as the "republican" conception of freedom.

Bitcoin freedom has been predominantly defined as negative freedom. The most common value of Bitcoin is its freedom from a central authority. Hence, the core value of Bitcoin freedom lies on the foundation cemented by liberal freedom as non-interference.

I have argued elsewhere that Bitcoin freedom offers a more comprehensive approach than liberal freedom. Pettit and Skinner independently excavated a third conception of freedom. This "new" version traced back to the writings of ancient Republican Rome. They introduced it as the freedom from domination (Pettit) or dependence (Skinner). I believe this new conception of freedom defines Bitcoin freedom more adequately.

Freedom as non-domination is a negative concept because it offers the absence of something. While the liberal conception of freedom valued the absence of interference, Pettit claims that his approach as the absence of domination provides a broader meaning. Domination, for Pettit, is simply an interference on an arbitrary basis. So, Pettit's definition of freedom broadens concerning the liberal conception by eliminating some forms of interference. To put it differently, if an interference is not injected on an arbitrary basis, then it is not exerting domination. Such a definition allows for freedom within a framework of non-arbitrary laws.

Freedom as non-domination is also a positive concept because it relies on active citizenship. However, the essence of active citizenship (positive freedom) differentiates it from Berlin's demonization. Berlin refers to positive freedoms as civic humanists understand them. Republican thinkers valued active citizenship immensely due to its pivotal role in securing freedom.

Unlike defendants of civic humanists, such as Hans Baron (1955), John Greville Agard Pocock (1975), Hannah Arendt (1993) and Iseult Honohan (2002), republican thinkers regarded civic citizenship as a consequential ideal. In other words, participating in political activity was understood by republican thinkers to be instrumental in securing freedom. On the other hand, civic humanists valued political participation as an end without any additional "required" purpose. The difference between the two approaches is critical because this distinction established the new idea of non-dominating interference (non-arbitrary interference) within the concept of republican freedom.

Bitcoin freedom is not liberal freedom because it offers more than just the absence of central authority and its interference. Security and ownership of data/value by administering the mechanisms of a trustless, transparent and decentralized system are the fundamental positive freedoms of Bitcoin. Furthermore, the availability of participating in the governance of the Bitcoin blockchain without any permission is another core positive freedom of Bitcoin. If we define Bitcoin freedom just as in the liberal sense (non-interference), we leave out the other half (positive freedoms), which helps secure the former.

This is a guest post by Burak Tama. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Read the rest here:

Bitcoin Is Not Just About Freedom From Interference, It Requires Active Participation - Bitcoin Magazine