The day after International Human Rights Day, India’s Supreme Court published its ruling on whether the country’s sodomy law, which had been overturned by the Delhi High Court and then appealed, was unconstitutional. I’ve been a lawyer, a judge and a member of parliament in the Netherlands and each of those roles led me to look at the decision in a different way, leaving me conflicted about who should get to decide what, the legislature or the judiciary.

But as a human rights defender since 2007, I have seen the suffering of LGBT people who are treated as second-class citizens in many countries in the world. I want to see an end to discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation. The legal discussion that has interested me so much now seems futile. The end result is what counts in the daily lives of LGBT people.

Unfortunately, the disappointing Supreme Court ruling on December 11 that same-sex conduct between consenting adults remains a criminal offense under section 377 of the Indian Penal Code is a major setback for the rights of LGBT people. And not just for people in India, but also for people in many other countries where homosexual conduct is criminalized and where court cases challenging the constitutionality of their sodomy laws are pending.

The 98-page decision ends with one short sentence: “Notwithstanding this verdict, the competent legislature shall be free to consider the desirability and propriety of deleting Section 377 IPC from the statute book or amend the same.”

I regret that India’s Supreme Court falls so short in protecting the human rights of LGBT people and that they threw their legal protection role over the fence onto the legislature’s turf.

The judge, lawmaker, and human rights defender in me are in agreement and urge the Indian legislature to show political leadership and do what it should have done in the first place: decriminalize same-sex sexual relations between consenting adults. Time is of the essence. We need firm action now.

December 13, 2013

Mirrored from Human Rights Watch

Related Video:

France24 reports::

“… the worst of winter is yet to come for 2.2 million refugees living outside Syria and millions more displaced inside the country.

A storm named Alexa is sweeping across Syria and Lebanon, bringing with it high winds and freezing temperatures – and marking the beginning of the third winter since the Syrian conflict began in March 2011…

Men filled bags with dirt to hold down tents and placed car tires and bricks atop the flimsy wooden structures to prevent the wind from tearing them apart.

In Lebanon, more that 835,000 refugees live in tented camps, unused buildings or with friends or family. The Lebanese government has decided not to house them in formal camps due to local sensitivities that they will stay permanently.

Reuters reports:

Meanwhile, Amnesty International has issued a report slamming the countries of the European Union for only being willing to take in 12,000 of the Syrian refugees.

Amnesty’s main points:

”

Only 10 EU member states offered resettlement or humanitarian admission places to refugees from Syria.

Germany is by far the most generous – pledging to take 10,000 refugees or 80 per cent of total EU pledges.

Excluding Germany, the remaining 27 EU member states have offered to take a mere 2,340 refugees from Syria.

France offered just 500 places or 0.02 per cent of the total number of people who have fled Syria.

Spain agreed to take just 30 or 0.001 per cent of refugees from Syria.
Eighteen EU member states – including the UK and Italy – offered no places at all.”

AFP has a video report:

Oxfam USA has a contribution page for Syrian refugees here

I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document.  By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and — in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular — the defense of a free press.

Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country.  He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him.  He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”  

Although a liberal, he worried about the looming size of government. When he mentioned that modern science might be creating “a Frankenstein,” I asked, “How so?”  He looked around his chambers and replied, “The very conversation we’re now having can be overheard. Science has done things that, as I understand it, makes it possible through these drapes and those windows to get something in here that takes down what we’re talking about.” 

That was long before the era of cyberspace and the maximum surveillance state that grows topsy-turvy with every administration.  How I wish he were here now — and still on the Court!

My interview with him was one of 12 episodes in that series on the Constitution.  Another concerned a case he had heard back in 1967.  It involved a teacher named Harry Keyishian who had been fired because he would not sign a New York State loyalty oath.  Justice Brennan ruled that the loyalty oath and other anti-subversive state statutes of that era violated First Amendment protections of academic freedom. 

I tracked Keyishian down and interviewed him.  Justice Brennan watched that program and was fascinated to see the actual person behind the name on his decision.  The journalist Nat Hentoff, who followed Brennan’s work closely, wrote, “He may have seen hardly any of the litigants before him, but he searched for a sense of them in the cases that reached him.”  Watching the interview with Keyishian, he said, “It was the first time I had seen him.  Until then, I had no idea that he and the other teachers would have lost everything if the case had gone the other way.” 

Toward the end of his tenure, when he was writing an increasing number of dissents on the Rehnquist Court, Brennan was asked if he was getting discouraged. He smiled and said, “Look, pal, we’ve always known — the Framers knew — that liberty is a fragile thing.  You can’t give up.”  And he didn’t.

The Donor Class and Streams of Dark Money

The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate.  “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections.  Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.  

We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”

We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case. 

We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.

Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented,

“So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”

Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do.  Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.

Class Prerogatives

Listen!  That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract.

Ten years ago the Economist magazine — no friend of Marxism — warned: “The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”  And as a recent headline in the Columbia Journalism Review put it: “The line between democracy and a darker social order is thinner than you think.”

We are this close — this close! — to losing our democracy to the mercenary class. So close it’s as if we’re leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon waiting for a swift kick in the pants.

When Justice Brennan and I talked privately in his chambers before that interview almost 20 years ago, I asked him how he had come to his liberal sentiments.  “It was my neighborhood,” he said.  Born to Irish immigrants in 1906, as the harsh indignities of the Gilded Age brought hardship and deprivation to his kinfolk and neighbors, he saw “all kinds of suffering — people had to struggle.”  He never forgot those people or their struggles, and he believed it to be our collective responsibility to create a country where they would have a fair chance to a decent life.  “If you doubt it,” he said, “read the Preamble [to the Constitution].”

He then asked me how I had come to my philosophy about government (knowing that I had been in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations).  I don’t remember my exact words, but I reminded him that I had been born in the midst of the Great Depression to parents, one of whom had to drop out of school in the fourth grade, the other in the eighth, because they were needed in the fields to pick cotton to help support their families. 

Franklin Roosevelt, I recalled, had been president during the first 11 years of my life.  My father had listened to his radio “fireside chats” as if they were gospel; my brother went to college on the G.I. Bill; and I had been the beneficiary of public schools, public libraries, public parks, public roads, and two public universities.  How could I not think that what had been so good for me would be good for others, too? 

That was the essence of what I told Justice Brennan.  Now, I wish that I could talk to him again, because I failed to mention perhaps the most important lesson about democracy I ever learned. 

On my 16th birthday in 1950, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up.  It was a racially divided town — about 20,000 people, half of them white, half of them black — a place where you could grow up well-loved, well-taught, and well-churched, and still be unaware of the lives of others merely blocks away.  It was nonetheless a good place to be a cub reporter: small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something new every day.  I soon had a stroke of luck.  Some of the old-timers in the newsroom were on vacation or out sick, and I got assigned to report on what came to be known as the “Housewives’ Rebellion.”  Fifteen women in town (all white) decided not to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers (all black). 

They argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that — here’s my favorite part — “requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.”  They hired themselves a lawyer — none other than Martin Dies, Jr., the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the witch-hunting days of the 1930s and 1940s.  They went to court — and lost.  Social Security was constitutional, after all.  They held their noses and paid the tax.

The stories I helped report were picked up by the Associated Press and circulated nationwide.  One day, the managing editor, Spencer Jones, called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk.  Moving across the wire was a notice citing the reporters on our paper for the reporting we had done on the “rebellion.”  I spotted my name and was hooked.  In one way or another, after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government, I’ve been covering the class war ever since.

Those women in Marshall, Texas, were among its advance guard.  Not bad people, they were regulars at church, their children were my classmates, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town.  They were respectable and upstanding citizens all, so it took me a while to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary defiance.  It came to me one day, much later: they simply couldn’t see beyond their own prerogatives.  

Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations — fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind — they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like themselves.  The black women who washed and ironed their laundry, cooked their families’ meals,  cleaned their bathrooms, wiped their children’s bottoms, and made their husbands’ beds, these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show for their years of labor but the creases on their brows and the knots on their knuckles.  There would be nothing for them to live on but the modest return on their toil secured by the collaborative guarantee of a safety net.

The Unfinished Work of America

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy.  Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson.  Nor do I romanticize “the people.” You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites.  I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”

But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud.  That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.

Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter.  He said:

“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.”

And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to “the great task remaining.”  That “unfinished work,” as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.

Bill Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years in broadcast journalism.  He is currently host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company and president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which supports independent journalism.  He delivered these remarks (slightly adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal issues of democracy. This is his first TomDispatch piece. 

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story.

Copyright 2013 Bill Moyers

Mirrored from Tomdispatch.com

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Related video

America’s Gilded Capital

Update: December 7, 2013

The Sidi Gaber Minor Offenses Court on December 7 commuted the sentences for the 21 female Brotherhood protestors. The 14 young women received a 1 year suspended sentence, while the 7 girls were ordered to be released subject to the three months of probation.

(New York) – The conviction on November 27, 2013, of 21 peaceful pro-Morsy female protesters violates their right to freedom of assembly. Prosecutors should immediately drop the charges and withdraw their challenge of the women’s appeal, which the Sidi Gaber Minor Offenses Court in Alexandria will hear on December 7.

The convictions come amid a nationwide crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood supporters, including mass arrests of protesters demonstrating against the army’s ouster of Mohamed Morsy, and the authorities’ refusal to hold security forces accountable for killing protesters. Human Rights Watch’s review of the court’s judgment and evidence found that the defendants’ rights to a fair trial appear to have been violated by the failure to allow any witnesses to testify in their defense. There also appeared to be no credible evidence in the court’s ruling that any of the 21 were engaged individually in the alleged crimes.

“Egypt’s courts have sent a dangerous message that they will sentence Muslim Brotherhood supporters to long prison terms if they dare to protest,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director. “Prosecuting these young women for participating in a demonstration, while security forces who killed hundreds of protesters roam free, should shock our collective conscience.”

The Sidi Gaber Minor Offenses Court convicted the women and girls, all but three between the ages of 15 and 19, in a single four-hour hearing. They were charged with vandalism, thuggery, and rioting; illegal public gathering; and the use of weapons during an early morning protest on October 31 against Morsy’s ouster as president.

After refusing to allow the defendants’ lawyers to call any witnesses, the court sentenced each of the 14 women over age 18 to 11 years and one month in prison. The seven younger girls were sentenced to be held in a juvenile facility until they turn 18, at which point their cases will be re-evaluated. Six men accused of calling for the protest were sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison each.

In the early morning of October 31, about 200 activists in the “7 am movement,” closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, held their inaugural protest on the Alexandria waterfront, three supporters of the movement told Human Rights Watch. The movement included many students at Alexandria University and other nearby schools, who had taken minibuses from their homes to participate before class, the supporters said.

The mother of one of the convicted women, a 19-year-old student, told Human Rights Watch that her daughter and other protesters wanted to draw attention to classmates who had recently been arrested as a result of their political activism.

Demonstrators assembled in the eastern Sidi Bishr neighborhood of Alexandria and marched west, chanting against the police and military. As the procession turned onto Syria Street, past the Stanley Bridge, police dispersed protesters using teargas and water cannons. Human Rights Watch reviewed video footage that shows police chasing demonstrators after they dispersed and appearing to assault those they caught, then taking them away, apparently to detention.

Police arrested 22 people, according to the League for the Defense of Detainees in Alexandria, a group of lawyers associated with the Muslim Brotherhood formed after the military ouster of Morsy on July 3 to represent those arrested in the protests that followed. Although both men and women participated in the demonstration, 21 of those arrested were women and girls. Police released the only man among those detained the same day, the league said.

Eighteen of the women and girls are students between the ages of 15 and 19, according to the police report of the incident, which Human Rights Watch reviewed. A list protest organizers provided to Human Rights Watch indicated that two others are 22-year-olds who graduated this year, and the final detained woman is the mother of one of the 15-year-olds.

Two of the lawyers representing the convicted women and girls told Human Rights Watch that some of those convicted had not taken part in the demonstration, but had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The lawyers also said that prosecutors had prevented them from meeting with their clients before their initial interrogation by the prosecutor and that the court had refused to allow them to call witnesses to the stand during the trial.

Prosecutors hastily brought the case to trial on November 27, even as hundreds of others arrested in protests across Alexandria remain in pretrial detention. In its judgment, the court relied heavily on the accounts of police and national security officials to establish that there had been thuggery and rioting, but provided no direct evidence that any of the women and girls had themselves engaged in these acts. The accounts from the officials alleged that protesters had disrupted traffic and blocked roads based on instructions from the Brotherhood Guidance Council to cause chaos in the days before Morsy’s trial.

The court also charged the women and girls with violating Egypt’s draconian 1923 Public Assembly Law. The law infringes on freedom of association by enacting criminal penalties solely for participating in unannounced or unapproved demonstrations, Human Rights Watch said. Freedom of association is guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Egypt signed in 1982.

The judgment identified a single weapon it claims protesters carried: rocks. However, it provided no evidence that the accused women had themselves carried or thrown rocks.

To support the vandalism charge, the judgment identified a single damaged glass door and the testimony of three doormen about damages to other local shops and cars, although it did not provide any evidence or allege that any of the convicted women caused any of this damage.

“Putting aside the blatantly political nature of this prosecution, the authorities failed to meet even the most basic standards of evidence to prove these women and girls engaged in violence or thuggery,” Whitson said. “The lack of any evidence tying these women and girls to a crime only strengthens the impression that this was a sham prosecution.”

The harsh sentence starkly contrasts with the failure of judicial authorities to hold security officers responsible for killing protesters. In spite of the killings of more than 1,300 protesters in the past five months, security forces have only opened an investigation into a single incident – the deaths of 37 detainees en route to Abu Zaabel prison on August 18 – and have yet to establish a fact-finding committee to account for the killings of protesters.

Over the past three years, courts have convicted only a few police officers of crimes in connection with the killings of more than 2,000protesters by security forces. The police officers’ sentences have been comparatively lighter than sentences for protesters. The only officer charged in relation to the November 2011 protests on Mohammad Mahmoud Street that resulted in 45 protester deaths received a three-year sentence, even though video footage captured him shooting a protester in the eye.

The authorities have rounded up thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters after dispersing protests over the last four months. Many are still in pretrial detention facing charges similar the ones brought against the Alexandria women and girls. In one of the few other cases that has gone to trial, aCairo court on November 13 handed down 17-year sentences and 65,000 LE (US$9,440) fines to 12 students from al-Azhar University for charges stemming from involvement in protests and clashes on the campus.

In recent weeks, Egypt has further cracked down on the right of assembly, using a highly restrictive new protest law to violently dispersepeaceful demonstrations, including by college students,and to arrest high-profile activists.

“This prosecution fits into Egypt’s new normal – clamping down on protests, and criminalizing dissent,” Whitson said.

Mirrored from Human Rights Watch under their Creative Commons License.

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Related video:

Euronews reports on Egyptians’ reaction to the country’s new protest law under which the women discussed above were charged:

An unprecedented attempt to discover if British officials are complicit in the CIA drone campaign in Pakistan reached the Court of Appeal this week.

The case is brought by Noor Khan, a Pakistani tribesman whose father was among over 40 civilians killed in a March 2011 drone strike.

Khan’s lawyers are attempting to get English courts to examine whether UK officials at GCHQ share information about targets in Pakistan with the CIA, and whether this could therefore make British spies complicit in murder or war crimes.

The case has been brought against the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, who is responsible for GCHQ.

The British government has consistently refused to confirm or deny whether it does share such intelligence.

Khan is represented by Leigh Day & Co and the case is backed by legal charity Reprieve. In March 2012 Khan launched judicial review proceedings, but after a two-day hearing in October 2012, High Court judges refused to order such a review.

At that stage, Lord Justice Moses ruled that the aim of the case was actually to try to stop US drone strikes. He said: ‘The claimant cannot demonstrate that his application will avoid, during the course of the hearing and in the judgment, giving a clear impression that it is the United States’ conduct in North Waziristan which is also on trial.’

f the court was forced to consider whether US drone strikes were legal it could ’imperil relations’ between the US and UK, Moses ruled.

But this week Khan’s lawyers argued against this decision before three senior judges in the Court of Appeal.

They argued they were not seeking to show ‘the actions of the United States or its agents are criminal’, adding that those who launch the strikes on Pakistan are beyond the jurisdiction of English courts. Khan’s barrister Martin Chamberlain QC said: ‘The criminality of agents of the United States is a matter for their law or Pakistan’s.’

Related story: High court rejects first UK challenge to CIA’s drone campaign

Chamberlain told the Court of Appeal that allowing the judicial review to proceed would not damage UK-US relations. A week before the High Court case, the government lodged an application to stop Khan’s claim being heard as it is ‘injurious to public interest’, using a document called a public interest immunity (PII) certificate. Before the case could continue, there would have to be a fresh hearing in which a court would appoint special advocates, hearing arguments for and against the application in secret.

Related story: GCHQ intel sharing for drone strikes may be ‘accessory to murder’

Chamberlain added that at present the facts around the UK involvement in US drone strikes, and US drone strikes themselves are not clear. But he argued that the fact that the government, in the form of the Foreign Secretary William Hague who is responsible for GCHQ, has lodged a PII suggests there are things Hague knows ‘that he does not wish to disclose’.

Barristers for Hague argued that if the case was to go ahead the court would be unable to avoid ‘examining the conduct and action’ of the US. This would ‘cut a swathe’ through UK intelligence-sharing with the US.

Related story: Evidence in British court contradicts CIA drone claims

Kat Craig, legal director of Reprieve, said: ‘Drones that killed Noor Khan’s father – and have killed hundreds more civilians in Pakistan – are the US’ weapon of choice in their illegal “war on terror”. The UK government is wilfully refusing to reveal whether and how they facilitate this secret war. Fear that our friends in the US will be annoyed is nothing like an acceptable excuse for continuing to keep these details under wraps.’

The judgment will be handed down at a future date.

Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

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Related video

Thousands Rally against US Drone Strikes in Pakistan (AFP) :

Crystal Night took place on the night between 9 and 10 November 1938. Across the whole of Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, a pogrom was held against Jews. Jewish synagogues, shops, homes and businesses were ransacked which led to the atrocity becoming known as Chrystal Night after the shards of broken glass. It marked the intensification of the persecution of the Jews in the run up to World War II.

We never want to allow one part of the population to be attacked again because another part of the population has started thinking that there is something wrong with them.

The violence that took place on Crystal Night did not happen by chance, it broke out after people’s minds had been primed for many years. The time had come in which the delusion that Jews were the cause of all society’s ills had been planted in the minds of enough people.

Today you can see something similar happening once again in Europe. The mechanism is identical. Racist prejudices about certain groups are brought into circulation, preferably about groups, which are recognizable, by their appearance one way or another. Many of the prejudices are suspiciously similar to what was said about the Jews, in particular allegations which put fear into people: that they have a scary religion, are unreliable and dangerous, want to take our jobs, are criminals and want to take over the world.

Fear is often the ultimate incentive to kill. Nevertheless, a far too large number of bystanders nowadays believe – many of them well-meaning people – that it won’t go that far. They insist that the people should be allowed to express all those negative qualifications, in the interests of freedom of speech. They are not aware that the spread of hate and fear always takes place surreptitiously. Hate and fear nestle bit-by-bit in the minds of people on the quiet and once this has been done, it is difficult to remove them.

There is no doubt that the processes of exclusion are in motion in Europe and here in the Netherlands and that a mass explosion of violence has become a possibility.

But we shouldn’t wait passively until that happens. There is still time to break down the dividing lines!

Exclusion does not always affect minorities. Majorities can also be excluded and discriminated against. That is what happened under Apartheid in South Africa and also in the colonial Dutch East Indies, where I was born. There, it was the large majority of Indonesians and Chinese who were excluded.
At my white primary school, there were no Indonesian children. And they were not to be found in the swimming pool either. I thought that was quite normal. And what is worse: I am quite certain that snippets of racist stereotypes, which justified their exclusion, had already settled in my mind: Indonesians just were stupid and lazy.

When I was seven years old, my colonial luxury life was literally turned upside down from one day to the next and I found myself belonging to an excluded minority over which negative ideas circulated. The Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies and put all whites behind barbed wire for many years. We suffered hunger, were covered with lice, there was no medicine and people died every day – children too. To keep us under control, the Japanese beat up the women and mothers while we were made to watch.

But it gradually dawned on me that there was no point in escaping: it was not just the visible dividing line of barbed wire that kept us captive; there was also an invisible one. The white color of our skin would betray us outside the Japanese internment camp straight away, among the Indonesians, Chinese and Japanese.

Ever since, I have been able to imagine vividly what that is like to be conspicuous in a majority, which holds prejudices against the minority you, are assigned to.

To all people here in Europe with a dark or so-called ‘colored’ skin, this feeling is a daily reality. They are asked where they come from whether the question is relevant or not. And in today’s deteriorating climate in which they are blamed for many social problems, it soon seems like they have to justify themselves.

People who have never experienced how it feels to belong to a visible minority have the greatest difficulty empathizing with them. That became painfully clear in the recent Black Pete debate, in which this blackface character that accompanies Saint Nicolas, (the Dutch Santa Claus) was accused of being an expression of racism.

Exclusion and persecution are inextricably connected to drawing dividing lines between different population groups. After all, this is what makes it clear who belongs and who doesn’t.
The Nazis designed complicated regulations to draw a dividing line between whom they would and would not murder. It depended on how many of your four grandparents were Jewish and how many were not. And if you were married to a non-Jew, you could escape persecution for a little while longer.
The Japanese also had difficulty knowing who to put into camps and who not to; people who were half-Indonesian/half-Dutch were usually not interned. But what about those who were quarter-Indonesian?

It was not just difficult for the German and Japanese fascists to draw a clear dividing line. It meant that victims were often forced to make desperate personal choices.

Almost no one knows that it was not just the Germans that differentiated between Jews and non-Jews, the Japanese did it too – encouraged by the Nazis, of course. That is why I am so very incredibly glad that the Jewish Historical Museum is preparing an exhibition over Jews in the Dutch East Indies, which opens next July.

I was interned with my mother, who was not Jewish and my sister and brother in a women’s camp. My father, who was Jewish, was far away in a men’s camp and we had no idea whether he had been forced to register whether he was Jewish or not. My mother was put before an inhuman choice. If she said that we, her children, were half-Jewish, she ran the risk of us being taken away and sent to a separate camp. I saw the panic in her eyes. But if she kept it secret and someone betrayed us – after all ‘Wertheim’ is a well-known Jewish name – there would be cruel punishments. She lied that she was Jewish herself, so that we were classified “fully Jewish” and were transported with her to the Jewish camp.

It was worse than the camp we had come from, but not as bad by far as what was happening to Jews, Sinti and Roma, handicapped and homosexuals at that time in Europe. There almost all of my Jewish family on my father’s side was killed. And my grandparents committed suicide the day that the Netherlands capitulated to the German army.

Some people think half-Jewish does not exist, you are either a Jew or you are not one; you have to choose which group you belong to. You automatically do not belong to the other group. But I want to belong with Jews and with non-Jews. I no longer want to be set apart, not by anyone. And I think that applies to many people, because it is not good for anyone to have to cut yourself off from parts of your origin or even to have to hide it.

Today in Europe, there are large numbers of people who are half-Moroccan, quarter or three-quarters or half-Turkish, or quarter-Roma, Sinti, Indonesian, Mexican, Chinese, Antillean, Surinamese or Polish, or whatever. And we can be sure that their number is going to increase by a lot in the future!
Let’s make sure they all feel as much at home here as all other people. Just as much at home as all the migrants who are fully Moroccans, fully Turks, fully Antillean, Surinamese and Polish etc. And of course just as much at home as all the people who have been here for generations, wherever they came from originally and whenever that was!

Let’s not play into the hands of those who would have use set parts of the population apart in Europe for the sole purpose of discriminating against them, by drawing dividing lines between them. The more intermediate forms there are which cannot be classified because they are all mixed up together, the more difficult it will be to release racist prejudices on defined population groups.

And that way there will never be another Crystal Night.

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We know that women have always been an easy target for politicians around the world. But there is no other country like Erdogan’s “New Turkey” where the political agenda is constantly shaped by discussions around the female body.

Fort the last 11 years, it has been a common practice for the Prime Minister to consider it his duty to comment on people’s private life. But especially since the protests in June, his real aspirations to create – in his own words – “a pious generation” became more evident. Of course, part of this job was finding ways to keep women at home.

First it was how many children a woman should have. According to the PM, three was the ideal number but it could get even more “ideal”. Then he talked of abortion as “murder” although it has never been a taboo or even an issue in Turkey. Erdogan’s fans were also busy acknowledging his “heroic” words. Last Ramadan, a self-appointed religious philosopher said on State TV that pregnant women in the street were an ugly sight and they should stay at home until the baby bump melts away.

“The public was distracted from the real problems that they face”

Just recently, the PM said that his government was receiving huge numbers of complaints regarding student houses where male and female college students live together. And he emphasized his determination to act officially “to protect moral values in our society.” Following this statement, the issue of “girls and boys living together” was the dominating subject of discussion on every TV debate. Once again, the public was distracted from the real problems that they face, such as unemployment, a deteriorating education and a failing social security system.

What a coincidence that this latest comment of our “conservative-democrat” PM comes right after the ban on wearing headscarf in public places was defied in the parliament. While the opposition remains reactionless in an attempt to “rob AKP of their favourite leverage”, the mere fact that the four MPs wearing headscarf are women in their 40s, that they had never covered their hair before and began to do so only at the command of their party chief must show how ready Turkish women still are to be dictated on their lifestyles.

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The ruling party’s effort to use the headscarf issue in order to garner more votes in the upcoming local elections is clear. As always, it’s not really about democracy or freedom. It’s about reshaping the Turkish society with the facade of conservatism. It’s about drawing more and more women away from public life. It’s about controlling people by branding them as on our or as on the opposite side.

The sad and scary thing is the willingness of Turkish women to be subordinated and let others decide for them. Maybe it’s because they never have fought for their rights as women in the West did. But I really hope that they come to realise and appreciate the importance of a secular democracy for women’s rights before they themselves have to take up a campaign to be able to drive, too.   

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Mirrored with permission from Your Middle East

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Related video:

DeutscheWelle English report Turkish women and politics from a couple of years ago