The lives of immigrants in Spain, the US, UK and pretty much everywhere else

Via Racewire

This week as I sat at home watching television, I felt I was watching Children of Men all over again. But it wasn’t a film. It was the nightly news on the Spanish language station.

The stories were about racism, deportations and human beings treated inhumanely. Today when I logged onto the major Spanish networks (Univision and Telemundo), these were the video stories:

In Spain, a man talking on his cell phone about hating immigrants spit in the face of an Ecuadorian woman and then kicked her in the face.

Also in Spain, cops attacked a Peruvian couple. One of them reportedly said, “Look at this immigrant piece of shit.” The attack was caught on a cell phone video camera.

On the border with Canada, Miguel Sanchez and his wife and 4 children (including a 3-month-old baby) said they’d left Arizona hoping to find a friendlier immigrant climate in Canada. An estimated 3,500 Mexicans are asking for political asylum in Canada.

In Oklahoma, where a bill has been introduced that would make it illegal for someone to give an undocumented immigrant a ride home, an immigrant man asked, “How can it be that an animal has more rights than an immigrant?”

Got no job? blame the immigrant. Bacteria filled hospitals? Blame the immigrant. Kids cant write? Blame the immigrants. Want a cheap and cheerful Granny minder? Get an immigrant!

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Immigration

Kym Platt sent me an article in the LA Times on blogger Field Negro. His blog is one of my regular reads and here he reveals himself as an attorney. I’ve noticed lately more and more bloggers are coming out or starting out with their real names. Maybe they have begun to realise the importance of what they have to say and the power of the media itself. What I really like about Field Negro aka Wayne Bennett is his no holds barred anti-racist stance.

“I am black, and what affects my race affects me,” says Bennett, who also works part-time in criminal defence. “I feel that I am exposing things that people, black and white, try to hide. In my own way I am trying to force an honest debate and open dialogue.”

I see some echoes of Malcolm X in his distinguishing between those in the massa’s house and those in the fields. But Bennett has gone a step further and invented a third category the “patio negro”. I love that phrase, makes me think of all those black footballers with the blondies in tow and we can add to that the new man on the block Lewis Hamilton. His examples are guess who?

He cites Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as a prime example. Tiger Woods, too. “You will be cheering like hell for him to beat all those old white men this weekend at Augusta,” Bennett wrote in April, “but. . . there is the white wife, the passionate obsession for being viewed as a color neutral icon, and all that white love.”

I was talking with a friend here in London a couple of weeks ago. She has been in London at university and is now working and was complaining about how difficult it was to find a male partner - she reckoned that at least 75% of young Black men at university and work were dating and would only date white women so for her she was pretty much left with little choice. Its not a case of her wanting to be in a relationship but just depressing to know that her brothers prefer to date white women rather than their sisters - and this in 2007.

I digress - check out Field Negro - he just won the readers’ choice for “Best Political/News Blog” in the Black Weblog Awards - and also is part of Afrosphere. Congrats and keep on blogging.

Tags:
Field Negro
Blogging
USA
Race

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) has published a disturbing story reporting that the US Government has been funding anti gay and lesbian groups in Uganda such as the Makerere University Community Church and the Ugandan Muslim Tabliqh Women’s Desk who have said they will form an “anti-gay squad to fight homosexuality.”

GLHRC’s investigation followed a series of distressing events in Uganda. At an August 16 press conference, Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG), a coalition of LGBT groups, launched Let us Live in Peace Campaign, calling for understanding and respect of sexual minorities. SMUG’s campaign was met with an increase in hate speech by religious groups. The primary instigator of the backlash was Pastor Martin Ssempa, leader of the Makerere University Community Church and spokesman for the Interfaith Family Culture Coalition Against Homosexuality in Uganda. Ssempa organized an August 21 rally in Kampala, the country’s largest city, at which more than one hundred demonstrators, including several government officials, demanded official action against LGBT people. Ssempa has called homosexual conduct, “a criminal act against the laws of nature,” and has said that, “there should be no rights granted to homosexuals in this country.”

According to the U.S. Embassy in Uganda’s website, Makerere University Community Church received a grant under a program designed to provide funds for AIDS prevention, treatment and care programs in Africa. Mr. Ssempa and his coalition, which includes Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Evangelicals, have threatened the safety of Ugandan LGBT rights activists by posting their names, photos and addresses on a website (http://kobsrugby.com/demo/). With support from conservative organizations such as Family Watch International in the United States, Ssempa has launched attacks not only on homosexuals but on Uganda’s women’s rights and HIV activists as well…………Continue

The US has also supported Cameroon and Iran in preventing gay rights groups from having consultative status at the UN. At the same time that the US government is funding anti gay and lesbian organisations, it’s own State Department has issued a report on human rights giving details of abuses by some governments based on “sexual orientation and gender identity”. Not surprisingly the report failed to include the US government’s own human rights record in the report.

Tags:

LGBTI
Uganda
Homophobia
US Government

Tristen Taylor (Contrary to Authority) has published a series of correspondence on the banning of Desmond Tutu from St Thomas University including his own letter to the university:

Tutu’s Inquisition

To: DEHENNES@stthomas.edu, DJDEASE@stthomas.edu, MCDIENHART@stthomas.edu, SLALEXANDER@stthomas.edu, LCHALVERSON@stthomas.edu, ARCALLAGHAN@stthomas.edu, webmaster@stthomas.edu, gradcath@stthomas.edu, mgmt_center@stthomas.edu, CCIGIELSKI@stthomas.edu, RMHALL@stthomas.edu, VCTHOUIN@stthomas.edu, NHZINGALE@stthomas.edu

Date: 8th Oct. 2007

Dear Sirs,

I have to object in the strongest terms possible to Archbishop Tutu being refused permission to speak at your institution. Having, as a South African activist, worked with the Archbishop’s office for many years I can only hold the highest regard for his work both in South Africa and outside.

In particular, his efforts to eradicate the scourge of Southern Debt have been an inspiration for Africans across the continent. Despite serious illness, he has consistently stood up for moral truths and against exploitation.

In denying him access to speak, you are denying all Africans a voice. Perhaps the voice of the poor and dispossessed, made so by your country’s policies, is too uncomfortable for you to hear. It is your actions, on a daily basis through your government and your methods of consumption, that repress us. By not allowing Tutu to speak, you are hiding from the uncomfortable truth that the collective North is actively engaged in economic warfare against the South. You should be ashamed.

Or is it, perhaps, that you didn’t receive the notice that the Inquisition ended in 1834?

All the best,

Tristen Taylor
Former Jubilee South Africa Apartheid Debt Campaign Coordinator
Johannesburg, South Africa

Desmond Tutu
South Africa

“I am Jewish, and stifling debate and dissent [and] criticism of Israel is a disservice to all Jews, the state of Israel and the American people,” [Marv Davidov] said.
[source]

Mr Davidov was referring to the decision by St Thomas University in Minnesota not to invite Desmond Tutu. The reason the school gave was that Bishop Tutu “compares Jews in Israel to Hitler [and] in another section he questions Jewish faithfulness to God. (1)”

It is indeed a pity that those who made the decision to bar him from speaking at the school feel Israel cannot be criticised, or that people’s faith cannot be questioned.

A professor at the university who was pushing for the invitation to be accepted by the school has been “removed as director [of] the university’s justice and peace studies program. (2)” Someone was very strongly against inviting Tutu to the school, which says that Tutu “has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he’s said. (3)”

Please visit The Jewish Voice for Peace (4) and join the campaign to write to St Thomas’s president, Father Dease, about the injustice of this act, and demand the reinstatement of Professor Toffolo as head of the university’s justice and peace studies program.

The Jewish Voice for Peace further says that “the rumor of Tutu’s alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ is based entirely on a propaganda campaign waged by the extremist group, the Zionist Organization of America. Though he is outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s occupation regime, sometimes even bellicose, Tutu has never displayed anything other than deep concern for all peoples and his sympathy for Palestinians suffering under the yoke of occupation.”

See Tutu’s CV (5)