Category Archives: Government Oppression

Hina Charania blew a kiss to the cloudless sky.

A moment earlier, cheers broke out at Government House in Victoria as 152 new Canadians from 33 countries were granted citizenship.

Charania, who is from Pakistan, said the kiss was a commemoration to God and to her late father.

I hope hes watching, she said. This means liberty. I feel free. I feel like I have a voice and Im heard.

Menghan Zhang, who came to Canada from China 13 years ago, was met by her friend Valerie Desmarais when she arrived at Government House for the special ceremony commemorating Canadas 150th birthday.

Her red blazer and cream dress were a perfect match for the red rose Desmarais pinned to her lapel.

Im just so happy for Menghan so I wanted to come and help her celebrate, said Desmarais.

Its been such a long journey, said Zhang.

But today is very special. Its the beginning of a new journey for sure. Im so in love with Canada. I love everything the people are friendly for sure, peaceful and nice environment.

Journalist David Bly was watching his wife receive her Canadian citizenship.

I look at the people who have fled violence and oppression and its quite touching, said Bly.

Nesrin Rashid Kadours husband Arif, who arrived in Canada from Syria four years ago, is one of many who fled violence.

Its a big deal, said Rashid Kadour, holding their son Nehad by the hand. Arifs just happy that he feels safe. He loves Canada so much. Were all very excited, especially the 150 celebration. Hes just happy to be part of it.

Jacqueline Dorgan arrived on her bike and looked at the rows of white chairs wrapped in bows of red bunting.

It just makes you cry, Dorgan said. Look at the mix of people, the diversity of people in those seats.

The ceremony began with First Nations song. It ended with 152 newly glowing hearts.

ldickson@timescolonist.com

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Glowing hearts in Canada Day citizenship ceremony at Government ... - Times Colonist

Amid the street parties, light shows and dance music of Tel Avivs annual White Night events, several African women heated coffee over coals and arranged colorful hand-sewn baskets on a table alongside posh Rothschild Boulevard.

They are members of the Kuchinate Collective, a group of women who fled their home countries in Africa to seek asylum in Israel. The group aims to economically empower the women by sewing and selling colorful cloth baskets, said Diddy Mymin Kahn, one of the founders of the collective. Creating art and connecting with each other and the public is also therapeutic for the women, many of whom suffered trauma before fleeing their countries and during their journey to Israel, Kahn said.

White Night in Tel Aviv, held on Thursday into the wee hours Friday morning, is an all-night, yearly event featuring street parties, art installations and music performances across the city, and was a good opportunity for the group to connect, Kahn said.

We want people to know us, we want people to meet asylum seekers. We want them to know about the plight of asylum seekers and we want to meet the public, Kahn said.

Kuchinate means to crochet in Tigrinya, the language spoken in Eritrea. Most of the women in the collective are from the East African nation as well as from South Sudan and Ethiopia. They fled violence, government oppression and genocide in their home countries to seek asylum in Israel.

It was hard in Eritrea. There are problems between Ethiopia and Eritrea. You have to go to the army, theres no democracy, said Abadit, a member of the collective from Eritrea who arrived in Israel seven years ago.

Israel is home to about 45,000 asylum seekers, almost all from Eritrea and South Sudan, according to ASSAF, the Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel. The vast majority of African migrants living in Israel claim asylum-seeker status, but the state has recognized almost none of their claims since they began arriving in the mid-2000s. Israel contends most of the migrants who are currently in Israel came seeking new economic opportunities, not because they were fleeing danger at home.

Kahn, originally from South Africa, co-founded the collective with South African artist Natasha Miller Gutman in 2011. Kahn is a clinical psychologist with a background in treating trauma. Many of the women experienced trauma before arriving in Israel, including the notorious torture camps in the Sinai where refugees were held for ransom and abused by Bedouin traffickers. The collective empowers the women financially, socially and psychologically, said Kahn, who manages the group with the Eritrean nun Sister Azezet Habtezghi Kidane, who Kahn calls the spiritual mother of the refugee community.

Passersby drink Ethiopian coffee prepared by members of the Kuchinate Collective during Tel Avivs annual White Night celebrations, June 29, 2017. (Luke Tress/Times of Israel)

It all came out of a desire to help the women that were in a state of survival, that came from a culturally very different milieu, where their understanding of what helps someone whose being a bad situation, that is to say, Western therapy, was not something that was very obvious to them, Kahn said.

The group started with five women and a small grant from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Now, over 90 women are involved.

Selling the hand-woven baskets also generates income for the women, many of whom are struggling financially, Abadit said, in Hebrew, while selling baskets at the event. She and her three children were once thrown out of their apartment when they could not come up with their rent money, she said.

There are people from Africa, they have problems, they have kids. Not everyone can work, said Abadit, who declined to give her last name out of privacy concerns and who said she earns about 500 to 600 NIS ($145-175) a month selling baskets. Its not enough but theres nothing we can do, she said.

Israels government also recently instituted a tax on asylum seekers and their employers. The state deducts 20% of the workers salaries, and 16% from their employers. The workers can collect the money only if they leave the country. As an employer, the law applies to the collective, putting them in a desperate financial situation, Kahn said.

African migrants protest against the Deposit Law in Tel Aviv, June 10, 2017. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

Thursday nights events, with crowds of Israelis thronging the streets, provided an opportunity to make up for the lost income. White Night, a play on the Hebrew expression laila lavan, meaning a night with no sleep, and Tel Avivs epithet, the White City, is a night-long celebration across the city featuring events organized by the municipality, which invited the collective to participate and provided funding. It was part of a larger effort organized by south Tel Avivians, called Outlets, to connect the center of the city to their area with a trail of music performances, food, video and light installations leading from Rothschild Boulevard to the derelict area surrounding the Central Bus Station.

Kuchinate Collective members set up their table, stools and coffee pot on Betzalel Yafe Street, just off of luxurious Rothschild Boulevard, between the city center and the working class south Tel Aviv neighborhoods where the women live. The group served Ethiopian coffee in small ceramic cups and sold baskets to passersby. The Yatana Band, Eritreans from the nearby neighborhood of Neve Shaanan, played music next to the coffee circle.

Baskets handwoven by members of the Kuchinate Collective for sale during Tel Avivs White Night celebrations, June 29, 2017. (Luke Tress/Times of Israel)

Its normally kind of north Tel Avivian, Kahn said of White Night. It doesnt involve the periphery of Tel Aviv, south Tel Aviv. Its more centered in these more classy areas and the municipality wanted to bring a bit of south Tel Aviv here, the reality of south Tel Aviv here, she said.

Events like White Night and visits to the groups offices on Har Zion Street in south Tel Aviv can help change the public perception of asylum seekers in Israel, Kahn said.

Its making these people that are very often invisible in Israeli society visible and not just visible, but elevated in a kind of way, dignified, she said.

A member of the Kuchinate Collective prepares Ethiopian coffee during Tel Aviv's White Night celebrations, June 29, 2017. (Luke Tress/Times of Israel)

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WATCH: At Tel Aviv's White Night party, asylum seekers look to ... - The Times of Israel

The Rohingya are still being persecuted by their country. Although the government of Myanmar has taken a step back from most blatant and flagrant public persecutions, the unjust oppression of these people continues apace. Their schools are destroyed, they are slandered and denied from every corner. Now the far-right Hindu nationalists of India threaten them with death.

Three days ago, an alleged Rohingya paramilitary group attacked two Burmese villagers on two separate occasions. The government of Myanmar is on high alert. There is a chance that the national authorities will use this occasion to injure or kill many Rohingya under the cover of crackdown and reprisal. The government has a long history of using the actions of a few Rohingya to devastate the rest. As Reuters reminds us,

Rohingya insurgents attacked Myanmar border guard posts in October, provoking a military crackdown in which hundreds were killed, more than 1,000 houses burned down and some 75,000 Rohingya Muslims forced to flee to Bangladesh.

A BRIEF HISTORY

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in the country of Myanmar, formerly Burma. The country is liberalizing, but slowly. And the same authoritarian prejudices obtain. The hateful strain is still there. Bit by bit, the state has been stripping away rights from the Muslims of Myanmar. Until the rest of the world intervened, the Rohingya were well on their way to becoming entirely stateless in every senseas in, their right to live would be questioned too.

The Rohingya are considered illegal immigrants by the authorities of Myanmarthe offshoot of migrants who came into the nation in 1948 and 1971. Scholars and the Rohingya disagree, of course. There are 1.3 million of these people, mostly in the Rakhine state. 100,000 of them live in camps where they are kept by the authorities. Slave labor and execution are used under Burmese rule. In 2009, a UN spokeswoman described the Rohingya as probably the most friendless people in the world.

It is odd, that the government of Myanmar is so sure that the Rohingya are newcomers. After all, there have been Muslims in Rakhine since the 15th century. Which is more likely: that all the Rohingya lie, or that the government finds some explanations more convenient? Governments have even been known to dissemble, from time to time.

About that October attack on the police forts. What most commentators miss about the Rohingya is this was not an even contest. The officials say that Arsa, an armed Rohingya resistance movement, is a terrorist cell. Violence is never the answer, and it is not excused on behalf of the Rohingya, but what did the Burmese expect? Grind people down into the dirt, and some of them will act out unjustly. The Rohingya are mercilessly hassled under the sanction of law. Desperation is their lot. Myanmar is a Buddhist-majority country, and the monks and other leaders of that countryincluding the State Counselor herself, the much-celebrated Aung San Suu Kyiseem to delight in marginalizing them.

Cardinal Charles Maung Bo of Yangon has spoken of their plight:

I am not an expert in politics or international law, said Cardinal Bo. I am moved by human suffering The enormous suffering of the population of Rakhine is one of my great concerns. Cardinal Bo said that the government of Myanmar to move away from position that do not favor peace and to work with the international community to investigate the crimes reported by the UN in a truly independent manner that leads to justice.

RECENTLY

Pick any week, and theres some new incident displaying the indifference of Myanmar to its Muslim citizens. On the second of June, Myanmar charged three Muslim men for holding Ramadan prayers in the street. Forget for a moment the oddity of arresting people for practicing their religion. This happened because a larger crowd of about fifty Muslims were worshiping on a road in Yangon (formerly known as Rangoon). Why were they praying in the street? Why, because ultra-nationalist Buddhist mob shut down the local madrassah.

Two officers tried to stop AFP journalists from filming when they visited one of the madrasas on Friday. Its our mosque as well as our school. We dont know when it will be reopened, Khin Soe, a local resident in his 50s, said as he set off to pray in another part of town.

And these bigotries are not limited to Myanmar alone. India supports its share of nastiness. Thanks to Myanmars crimes, tens of thousands of Rohingya have fled abroad, citizens of nowhere. Many of them end in Bangladesh. Quite a few of them live India now. Some of these Rohingya took sanctuary in Jammu City five years ago. Most of them work as unskilled laborers. But the ruling government of India does not want them there. According to TRT World,

... circumstances turned unpleasant soon after the Hindu far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won Indias national elections in 2014 and formed the government in India, replacing a secular Congress Party. ... The citys trade union has echoed [a conservative politicians] demand and allegedly threatened to kill Rohingyas if they dont clear the area soon. Several billboards have sprung up across the city. Some of them read: Wake up Jammu. Rohingyas and Bangladeshis. Quit Jammu. And the others carry a rallying cry to unite and save the history, culture and identity of [the] Dogras.

Muhammad Younis, a Rohingya, is forty-one. He lives in a hut, and works as a construction worker in the city.

Witnessing this growing hostility, Younis is unable to sleep at night. There are 1,200 Rohingya families living in the city and they are feeling equally vulnerable. We are not living illegally here, Younis says. We have the UNHCR cards. How can these parties threaten us when we have gone through all the legal formalities?

The UN, according to Al-Jazeera, has appointed a three-member team to investigate alleged abuses by security forces against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. This is not enough. The UN acknowledges this:

Minorities all over the world are facing persecution. The situation of the Rohingya community in Myanmar is especially deplorable because they face the risk of a genocide, Indira Jaising, heading the UN mission, told Al Jazeera by telephone.

Awareness of their lot must be made public, and these facts must repeated over and over again. World Refugee Day was on June 20th. We must do better than merely recognizing their pain. The Rohingya are suffering, and their fate stands on the edge of a knife. A moment, a volatile impulse by the government, and they could be wiped away. We must do more, do better, and do it soon.

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The Oppression of the Rohingya in Burma Continues - Paste Magazine

On Independence Day, or the fourth of July, we celebrate the birth of the greatest nation in the world. We have parades, we cook out, we have firework displays and we enjoy the greatest of patriotic days. We must remember how God has blessed America. In our Independence Day celebration, we should thank God for all His Blessings that He provided so abundantly for us.

Thirteen British colonies fought for and won our Independence. In the late-1700s the thirteen Britishs colonies on the east coast of America rebelled from the British government because of oppression and lack of freedom. After the failure of trying to reconcile their difference, the thirteen colonies joined together and formally declared their independence from the British Crown on July 4th 1776. After several years of bloody conflict, the colonies won their independence in 1783. In 1787, the colonies established our U. S. Constitution that created a national government and established our basic rights.

The U. S. was founded on biblical principles. Many signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were Christians. The founding and the beginning of the U. S. was under divine providence and we should never forget this. The United States is the greatest country in the world because of its freedoms, opportunities and faith in God.

French writer and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, after visiting America in 1831, said I sought for the greatness of the United States in her commodious harbors, her ample rivers, her fertile fields, and boundless forestsand it was not there. I sought for it in her rich mines, her vast world commerce, her public school system, and in her institutions of higher learning and it was not there. I looked for it in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitutionand it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great!

America is great because of its generosity. When disasters occur across the world, America is there to help. When the world is threatened by tyrants, America is there to help. After many wars, America is there to help the people rebuilt their lives and country. America has been the protector of the world. Israel survival depends on the support of America. America has been a savior of the world by the divine providence of God.

Who are Americans? Americans come from all ethnicity groups. They love their country and support it. Americans use their freedoms to achieved great things and share it with other people. Americans have freedom to worship their God as they please. Americans appreciate their government of the people, by the people and for the people. Our freedoms are being challenged as never before. We have some who think that freedom is to do whatever you want without responsibility. We must turn back to our basic values; accountability, responsibility, treating our neighbors as we would like to be treated and returning to biblical guidelines.

Our freedoms are not free; it requires taking responsibility for our actions and speaking up for our American values. We must show respect for our country and appreciate the blood shed by so many to protect our freedoms. We must speak up and challenge those that try to degrade our country. Our freedoms and Gods blessings can only be achieved by following His guidelines. People of faith must Wake up and be active.

Huey P. ONeal, USAF-Ret.

West Monroe

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Letter: Remember what makes America great this July 4th - Bossier Press-Tribune Online

Express-News Editorial Board

Photo: Jerry Lara /San Antonio Express-News

Reimburse border cities for stepping in when feds couldnt

There is a dispute on whether the state can release federal funds to border cities as reimbursement for providing humanitarian aid during a 2014 crisis. Thats when Central American immigrants arrived unexpectedly and in large numbers to the Texas border.

The state says they cant under the rules as they understand them. The feds tell the Houston Chronicle it can, as does a member of Congress who should know.

Given that one item is not in dispute that these border cities provided this aid at local taxpayer expense we urge state officials to see it the cities (and, apparently, the federal governments) way.

Heres the issue: In 2014, Central Americans, fleeing violence and oppression in their countries, arrived in waves. They mostly gave themselves up to border authorities. Many were unaccompanied minors. The federal government was unprepared, so Rio Grande Valley cities provided transportation, food and other amenities. McAllen alone says it provided some $700,000 in out-of-pocket expenses.

McAllen Mayor Jim Darling told the Houston Chronicles Paul Cobler: Really, it was an extension of what the federal government would have provided if they had the facilities to be able to do it.

Thats absolutely correct. These cities to the tune of about $1 million did the federal governments job.

But Gov. Greg Abbotts office says it has been told by the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA that these expenses are not reimbursable from current federal appropriations. But FEMA tells the Houston Chronicle that the expenses can be reimbursed from current appropriations.

Obviously, someone is wrong.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, who has inserted language into appropriations bills to pave the way for the reimbursement, says it is Texas.

We put this language that allows the monies for southwest border states that get these Homeland Security dollars to do the reimbursement, he said. So, if they wanted to use it, they can definitely do that.

Some ascribe other motives to the governors office, which has made its mark weighing in against undocumented immigration. We prefer to view it as a misunderstanding.

But it is a misunderstanding that begs for clarity and immediate action.

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Reimburse border cities for stepping in when feds couldn't - mySanAntonio.com

As China prepares to celebrate its 20th year of recovered sovereignty over Hong Kongwhich until the 1997 handover had been a British colony for a century and a halfanother historic anniversary that falls this year is largely out of sight.

In 1967, Hong Kong saw its deadliest public disturbance ever, with riots and a spate of bombings that left 51 people dead and hundreds injured. The riots are skimmed over in school history books, and tucked away at the local Museum of History. Even more alarmingly, they appear to have all but disappeared from the governments archives, a discovery that film-maker Connie Lo said she made as she was researching her documentary on the riots, aptly called Vanished Archives.

All I could find were bits of yellowed old newspapers, that crumbled as you touched them, she says. But there was hardly any footage. At the end of her search, all she could lay her hands on were 9 sections of 21 seconds each, kept on different DVDs. Questions to the archivists went unanswered, she said, and nobody seemed to know the exact details of what footage had existed and what had been lost.

Growing increasingly intrigued by the scarcity, Lo decided to look in London. There she was luckier than in Hong Kong, but the difficulty in finding local historical government records of these watershed events 50 years ago made her strongly determined to find out more.

Lo set out to collect evidence of what had happened through interviews of eyewitnesses and participantsmost of whom were not willing to speak in front of the camera, she saysand started a four-year long chase to shed light on a very murky chapter of Hong Kongs past. It was an episode that brought blood to the streets of Hong Kong, as communists in China saw a chance in anger over labor and housing grievances to subvert the colonial government through local sympathizers. These included the media, such as the still existing Communist Party-financed newspaper Ta Kung Pao, pro-China trade unions, and leftist school and college students.

The local branch of the Chinese state-controlled news agency Xinhua functioned as the headquarters for many of those subversive activities, as they promoted Cultural Revolution-style struggle sessions and hung large character posters or dazibao, on their walls. Meanwhile, in Beijing, Red Guards burned down the British Embassy, in an attack against British colonialism in Asia and elsewhere.

When I asked why there was no archival record and no footage of the riots and all that had happened in 1967 here in Hong Kong, I was told that in 1997 some intern was transferring the data, and that while doing so the copy was botched, says Lo, with a puzzled look that doesnt entirely reveal how much of this explanation she believes. At the same time, the footage for the riots in 1956, which were inspired by right-wing elements, are all there. You have all the archives accessible, she says.

To add to the sense that theres a willful denial of the past taking place, her documentary, completed earlier this year, hasnt obtained a commercial release in Hong Kong. As with the popular and lucrative dystopian feature film Ten Years, which left theaters even as interest in it was growing, and the documentary Raise the Umbrellas, theaters havent been keen on showing a political movie critical of the local and mainland authorities.

Even the Hong Kong Film Festival, while denying censorship, refused to screen the movie (link in Chinese). But as has happened for other films deemed too sensitive, Vanished Archives, too, is being successfully screened at packed privately rented venues, and show dates can be found on the movies Facebook page, which has 20,000 followers, or on its website.

As the Cultural Revolution was raging all over China, a labor strike against crushing conditions and the dismissals of some workers took place in front of a plastic flower factory owned by Li Ka-shing, now Hong Kongs richest man, in the Kowloon area. Days into the strike, it was hijacked by pro-Communist sympathizers. The next few weeks saw an all-out series of anti-British protests and bomb attacks that killed randomly. In one bombing, siblings aged 8 and 2 were among the dead, papers overseas reported.

The attacks only ended in late 1967, when Chinese premier Zhou Enlai finally condemned the violence, leaving the local leftists feeling stranded. From one day to the next, we were discarded, and made useless, says one of the riot participants interviewed by Lo.

After the riots, the British authorities decided to establish a series of measures to diminish social frictions, by implementing major reforms, like public housing and free education. In 1978, after the Cultural Revolution, as Deng Xiaoping took power in China and introduced his reformist policies, the role played by China in fomenting the riots was denounced as wrong.

Over the years, scholars have occasionally revisited that contested moment of history. In 2015, though, while Lo was working on her film, the issue of how to remember the riots provoked public outrage when people in Hong Kong found the police website was edited to make way for a new description of clashes, with communist militiamen changed to the more generic gunmen, for example. The revamped police story also omitted that it all had started from a labor dispute.

There is a clear attempt at whitewashing history in Hong Kong, says Ching Cheong, a veteran Hong Kong journalist who witnessed the events first hand. Ching adds that history is being rewritten because of Chinas sovereignty over Hong Kong and ever-increasing influence in the territory. After the handover, Hong Kong has been governed by administrations often filled with people considered close to Beijing. And this episode of local history isnt very flattering to the Party.

At the time, Hong Kong leftists were carrying out acts of urban terrorism with the support of the Chinese authorities, says Ching. Now, he said, They want to be seen as heroes.

Some of the more radical organizers of 1967 already have found redemption from Hong Kongs political elite. In 2001, Yeung Kwong, a trade unionist who was a leader of the riots, was awarded the Golden BauhiniaHong Kongs greatest official honorby then Hong Kong leader Tung Chee-hwa. On the eve of the ceremony, Yeung side-stepped a question about responsibility for the bombings, blaming the British governments oppression instead. In 2015 current chief executive Leung Chung-yin attended his funeral, together with a number of high officials from Hong Kong and the mainland.

Many leftists today are hoping to be exonerated for the violence they unleashed, says Lo, the film-maker. They know the direction the wind is blowing.

Only 20 years after the handover to China, history is proving once again one of the most contentious issues that shape Hong Kongs post-British identity. It provoked acute protests when the post office announced a plansince put on holdto delete the remaining British insignia from old post-boxes to avoid confusion. Its also spurred civic activism, with the formation of a number of concern groups, among them the Conservancy Association (which also launched the campaign to protect the post-boxes) and the Archives Action Group, which is concerned with the lack of an archives law in Hong Kong. Some of that activism has drawn criticism from the mainland Chinese officials, one of the organizers says.

We have been told we are not decolonized enough, says Peter Li, of the Conservancy Association.

Read Quartzs complete series on the 20th anniversary of the Hong Kong handover.

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China would prefer Hong Kong forget about another historic anniversary that falls this year - Quartz

Srinagar: Kashmiri separatists and another organisation United Jihad Council (UJC) based in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on Thursday called for protests after Friday's prayers against the US decision to declare Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin as a "global terrorist".

Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Reuters

Chairman of the Hurriyat Conference Syed Ali Shah Geelani, head of moderate Hurriyat Conference Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and JKLF chief Yasin Malik said protests will also be held against the "illegal and arbitrary" arrests and detention of the separatist leaders, activists and youth and raids being conducted across the valley.

"This unjustified move (of declaring Salahuddin as global terrorist) by the US government to appease the Government of India and their (US) silence regarding the oppression and human rights situation in Kashmir, is not acceptable to the people of Kashmir who will strongly protest against it across the valley post Friday prayers tomorrow," the separatists said in a statement.

The separatist leaders expressed "deep regret and dismay over the complete silence by the US over the brutal oppression in Kashmir and failure to initiate any serious steps towards the resolution of the Kashmir dispute and for restoration of lasting peace and stability in the highly volatile region".

UJC, a conglomerate of over a dozen militant groups active in the valley, also called for protests after Friday prayers against the US government's decision against its chief.

In a statement issued here, the UJC said, "the people of Kashmir reject the US decision and will hold demonstrations tomorrow to convey a message to the outside world that their struggle will continue till the achievement of the goal."

Meanwhile, High Court Bar Association also denounced the US decision and said "Salahuddin is a symbol of resistance movement and the US decision will have no impact on the indigenous and legitimate struggle of the people of Kashmir."

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Syed Salahuddin declared global terrorist: Kashmiri separatists to protest against US move tomorrow - Firstpost

The Legal Resources Centre has welcomed a Constitutional Court judgment handed down on Thursday which held that the detention of alleged or suspected illegal foreigners without prompt judicial intervention was unconstitutional.

The LRC represented the People Against Poverty Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP) as a friend of the court.

The case involved the procedures and safeguards governing the detention of people suspected of being illegal foreigners under the Immigration Act. The High Court had declared sections 34(1)(b) and (d) of the Act constitutionally invalid. The Constitutional Court upheld the declarations of constitutional invalidity.

Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) had challenged these sections because the Act does not require that a detained person be automatically brought before a court within 48 hours in order for the court to confirm the lawfulness of their detention which is the case for other detained people.

The LHR also argued that while the Act envisages a warrant being obtained from a Magistrates Court for the continued detention of the suspected illegal foreigner the Department of Home Affairs interpreted this in a way that meant that the detained person did not have to appear in person before the Magistrate concerned.

PASSOP supported LHRs arguments challenging these sections of the Act.

"We are pleased that the court embraced the constitutional considerations. We welcome the judgment as a vindication of constitutional principles and human rights for everyone in South Africa including foreigners whose dignity and liberty must be respected by the state" the LRC said.

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Government gets rules for treatment of suspected illegal foreigners - Times LIVE

Im not an expert on American history and any examples in here may well be inaccurate and not strictly chronological, but they are used to illustrate an overall point of view. The fundamentals of the Constitution were to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Bill of Rights stipulated that Congress may not make rules to take away freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, the right to form peaceful assemblies, or to take away lives or freedom of property unfairly.

All of this was justifiable given the religious persecution and government oppression that the early colonists struggled to escape from. According to Kris Kristofferson, freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose. But I believe our unbridled freedom has lost us a lot, particularly as it relates to moral and ethical standards and concern for our fellow man.

So what have we done with this freedom?

We saw a land with enormous potential from sea to shining sea. We went west in a spirit of free enterprise. We cut down forests, tilled the soil and fenced the land to establish farms and ranches. We imported cheap Chinese labor to build our railroads. In the scramble to establish the biggest piece of the pie, we denied the American Indians their freedom and denied untold numbers of Africans their freedom. Our manifest destiny spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean and when the dust cleared, we had denied Mexico about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

Then, ironically, we imported cheap Mexican labor to cultivate our crops which they still do today for below minimum wages, while suffering the stigma of illegal immigrants. It took a civil war to grant African Americans a euphemism for freedom. The Native Americans still struggle to protect their sacred grounds and eke out an existence on barren reservations.

Gold in California and oil in Pennsylvania encouraged more free enterprise, more scrambling for the good life, and the rise of monolithic companies generating vast wealth for a privileged few. By the time anti-trust laws were established the damage was already done. Now we work for companies that continually reduce employee benefits and pensions to increase profits. We are encouraged to secure our futures by investing in 401ks that depend on ever increasing shareholder value that, paradoxically, depend to some extent on cutting more benefits and services. Demands to increase shareholder value encourage unscrupulous corporations and banks to sell bogus investments, derivatives and mortgages without underlying asset value.

The point is that we became so involved in our freedom of choice and entrepreneurial wealth creation that we are now all complicit in this mess by closing our eyes to the truths of inequality and the social consequences. Weve ignored the shifts in policy that continue to create a bigger and bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots. Weve watched as the government gave tax breaks to the rich, cut programs to the poor, and refused to raise the minimum wage. In 2015, 43.1 million people lived in poverty with the highest poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics. Approximately 15.3 million, or 21 percent, of all children under the age of 18 were in families living in poverty. We are the only country in the civilized world that does not provide universal healthcare to its people. Even communist Cuba provides free healthcare and education. We have created a vicious cycle in which the underprivileged, social injustice and the government deficit continue to grow while the middle class hangs on to its fast fading dreams of the good life. With a growing population and diminishing resources we continue to strive for an ever more elusive piece of the pie and create social unrest in the process. Is it any wonder that drugs and crime increase in impoverished inner cities and immigrant communities?

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It was Plato who said that democracy would not work because, given a choice, the average person chooses what pleases him rather than what is good for him. I happen to believe in democracy but I think our two-party system creates a situation where the majority tends to get what is good for them but not necessarily good for society. We the people put these people in power and have watched as politicians strive to retain power by pandering to whatever is popular. As a social conscience develops in the majority we vote Democrat. As government spending and taxes are increased to pay for social programs we sense a reduction in our standard of living and government intrusion on our freedom of choice. So the majority turns to the Republicans for tax breaks and curtailment of government regulations. The results are good for the party in power but not necessarily good for society as a whole. Increasingly over the last decade, the polarization between the parties, the inability to compromise, and the vetoing of the opposing partys agenda, has lead to a legislative stalemate and an exacerbation of societal problems.

When I became a United States citizen in 2011, I had high hopes that under President Obama we would begin to see the social changes outlined in his book, The Audacity of Hope, come to fruition. Instead the intransigence of the Republican Party and its avowed intention to obstruct his agenda has lead us where we are today. Enter Donald J. Trump, who cashed in on the Washington stalemate by vowing to drain the swamp and make America great again. His ultra right-wing agenda might make a proportion of Americans richer and the country more powerful. But by declaring war on immigrants, curtailing the freedom of the press, criticizing the judiciary, appointing right-wing judges, creating cabinet posts for his family, and surrounding himself with not so veiled white supremacists, he has all the trappings of an autocrat and is disliked, or even hated, by a majority of the country. This will further exacerbate the already volatile situation existing with the underprivileged and we should be wary of some form of revolution.

Perhaps there is no simple solution but perhaps it is time to sacrifice some of our personal freedom for what is good for society. As Obama once stated to Oprah Winfrey, We are all connected as one people and our mutual obligations have to express themselves not only in our families, not only in our churches, synagogues, and mosques, but in our government, too. If we can come up with a bipartisan commission to investigate something as serious as the links between Trump campaign advisers and the Russian government, why cant we employ a bipartisan commission to resolve other issues of national importance like health care and the judiciary? Instead of endless partisan scrambling for votes and changing voting rules to suit the situation, we should recognize that only by true bipartisanship can we be sure that government is of the people, by the people and for all the people.

If we must retain a two-party system, why not get rid of the electoral college and appoint a Democrat and a Republican from each state in both the House and the Senate? Admittedly that would have the potential for more stalemate but if legislation is to get passed at least it would force an element of compromise. As for the president, election should be by a simple majority of voters.

Michael Carr/Vallejo

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Michael Carr: A government for the people - Vallejo Times Herald

Horrified by images of American students shouting down and physically attacking speakers on their campuses, some commentators have reasonably invoked memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The problem with that analogy is that it is simply lost on most readers, including most younger than middle age.

So what exactly was this Cultural Revolution thing anyway? The U.S. media does a wonderful job of recalling atrocities that they can associate with the Right, while far worse horrors stemming from the Left vanish into oblivion. In reality, not only does the Cultural Revolution demand to be remembered and commemorated, it also offers precious lessons about the nature of violence, and the perils of mob rule.

In 2019, Communist China will celebrate its seventieth anniversary, and in that short time it has been responsible for no fewer than three of the worst acts of mass carnage in human history. These include the mass murders of perceived class enemies in the immediate aftermath of the revolution (several million dead), and the government-caused and -manipulated famine of the late 1950s, which probably killed some 40 million. Only when set aside these epochal precedents does the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 seem like anything other than a unique cataclysm.

By the early 1960s, Chinas Communist elite hoped for an era of stability and growth, modeled on the then-apparently booming Soviet Union (remember, this was the immediate aftermath of Sputnik). The main obstacle to this scenario was the seventy year old leader Mao Zedong, whose apocalyptic visions held out hopes of revolutionary transformations almost overnight, of a near immediate move to perfect Communism. Mao himself loathed the post-Stalin regime in the Soviet Union, seeing it as a revisionist system little different from Western imperialism. In an ideal world, Mao would have been kicked upstairs to some symbolic role as national figurehead, but he proved a stubborn and resourceful foe. He outmaneuvered and defeated his revisionist Party rival Liu Shaoqi, who became a symbol of all that was reactionary, moderate, and imperialist. Brutally maltreated, Liu was hounded to death.

So far, the conflict was the bureaucratic backstabbing typical of Communist regimes, but Mao then escalated the affair to a totally different plane. From 1966 onwards, he deliberately incited and provoked mass movements to destroy the authority structures within China, within the Party itself, but also in all areas of government, education, and economic life. Mao held out a simple model, which perfectly prefigures modern campus theories of systematic oppression and intersectionality. Even in a Communist Chinese society, said Mao, there were privileged and underprivileged people, and those qualities were deeply rooted in ancestry and the legacies of history. Regardless of individual character or qualities, the child of a poor family was idealized as part of the masses that Communism was destined to liberate; the scion of a rich or middle class home was a class enemy.

The underprivileged poor peasants, workers, and students had an absolute right and duty to challenge and overthrow the powerful and the class enemies, not just as individuals, but in every aspect of the society and culture they ruled. In this struggle, there could be no restraint or limitation, no ethics or morality, beyond what served the good of the ultimate historical end, of perfect Communism. In a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the oppressed need observe neither rules nor legality. Even to suggest such a constraint was bourgeois heresy.

What this all meant in practice is that over the following years, millions of uneducated and furious young thugs sought to destroy every form of authority structure or tradition in China. To understand the targets, it helps to think of the movement as a systematic inversion of Confucian values, which preached reverence to authority figures at all levels. In full blown Maoism, in contrast, all those figures were to be crushed and extirpated. Bureaucrats and Party officials were humiliated, beaten or killed, as was anyone associated (however implausibly) with The Past, or high culture, or foreign influence. Pianists and artists had their hands broken. Professors and teachers were special targets for vilification and violence, as the educational system altogether collapsed.

Anarchistic mobs replaced all authority with popular committees that inevitably became local juntas, each seeking to outdo the other in degrees of sadism. Some class enemies were beaten to death, others buried alive or mutilated. In parts of Guangxi province, the radicals pursued enemies beyond the grave, through a system of mass ritual cannibalism. Compared to such horrors, it seems almost trivial to record the mass destruction of books and manuscripts, artistic objects and cultural artifacts, historic sites and buildings. The radicals were seeking nothing less than the annihilation of Chinese culture. Within a few months of the coming of Revolution, local committees had degenerated into rival gangs and private armies, each claiming true ideological purity, and each at violent odds with the other. Such struggles tore apart cities and neighborhoods, villages and provincial towns.

Outside the military and that is a crucial exception the Chinese state ceased to function. The scale of the resulting anarchy is suggested by the controversy over the actual number of fatalities resulting from the crisis. Some say one million deaths over the full decade, some say ten million, with many estimates between those two extremes. Government was so absent that literally nobody in authority was available to count those few million missing bodies. China became a textbook example of the Hobbesian state of Nature and a reasonable facsimile of Hell on Earth. Only gradually, during the early 1970s, were the Chinese armed forces able to intervene, sending the radicals off en masse into rural exile.

Chinas agony ended only after the death of the monster Mao, in 1976, and the trial of his leading associates. From 1979, the country re-entered the civilized world under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, who is today lionized as a great reformer. That portrayal is correct but we should never forget that as an architect of the earlier Great Famine, Deng had almost as much blood on his hands as did Mao himself.

So extreme was the violence of the Cultural Revolution that we might reasonably ask whether any parallels exist with the contemporary U.S. However ghastly the suppression of free speech at Middlebury College and elsewhere, however unacceptable the rioting in Berkeley, nobody has as yet lost his life in the current wave of protests. But in so many ways, the analogies are there. As in the Cultural Revolution, American radicals are positing the existence of historically oppressed classes, races and social groups, who rebel against the unjust hegemony of others. In both cases, genetics is a critical means of identifying the two competing sides, the Children of Light and Children of Darkness. If you belong to a particular race, class or group, you hold privilege, whether you want to or not. Consistently, the radicals demonize their enemies, invoking every historical insult at their disposal, no matter how inapplicable: Berkeleys would- be revolutionaries describe themselves as Antifas, Anti-Fascists, as if any of their targets vaguely fit any conceivable definition of fascism.

For the oppressed and underprivileged, or those who arrogate those titles to themselves, resistance is a moral imperative, and only the oppressed can decide what means are necessary and appropriate in the struggle for liberation. The enemy, the oppressors, the hegemons, have no rights whatever, and certainly no right of speech. There can be no dialogue between truth and error. Violence is necessary and justified, and always framed in terms of self-defense against acts of oppression, current or historic.

Presently, our own neo-Cultural Revolutionaries are limited in what they can achieve, because even the most inept campus police forces enforce some restraints. If you want to see what those radicals could do, were those limitations ever removed, then you need only look at China half a century ago. And if anyone ever tells you what a wonderful system Communism could be were it not for the bureaucracies that smothered the effervescent will of an insurgent people, then just point them to that same awful era of Chinese history.

If, meanwhile, you want to ensure that nothing like the Cultural Revolution could ever occur again, then look to values of universally applicable human rights, which extend to all people, all classes. And above all, support the impartial rule of law and legality. The Cultural Revolution may be the best argument ever formulated for the value of classical theories of liberalism.

Philip Jenkins teaches at Baylor University. He is the author of Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World (forthcoming Fall 2017).

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So You Want a Cultural Revolution? - The American Conservative