The Fetish of Staring at Iran’s Women

By HALEH ANVARI

The New York Times - JUNE 16, 2014

TEHRAN — I took a series of photographs of myself in 2007 that show me sitting on the toilet, weighing myself, and shaving my legs in the bath. I shot them as an angry response to an encounter with a gallery owner in London’s artsy Brick Lane. I had offered him photos of colorful chadors — an attempt to question the black chador as the icon of Iran by showing the world that Iranian women were more than this piece of black cloth. The gallery owner wasn’t impressed. “Do you have any photos of Iranian women in their private moments?” he asked.

As an Iranian with a reinforced sense of the private-public divide we navigate daily in our country, I found his curiosity offensive. So I shot my “Private Moments” in a sardonic spirit, to show that Iranian women are like all women around the world if you get past the visual hurdle of the hijab. But I never shared those, not just because I would never get a permit to show them publicly in Iran, but also because I am prepared to go only so far to prove a point. Call me old-fashioned.

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Não Vai Ter Copa Race, Class and the World Cup in Brazil

By MIKE LaSUSA

Counter Punch -  June 10, 2014

At 5pm local time on June 12, the national soccer teams of Brazil and Croatia will kick off the 2014 World Cup at the São Paulo Arena in Brazil’s largest city. The players will compete before a live crowd of tens of thousands and a televised audience of millions more.  At a total cost of roughly $11 billion - and at least eight workers’ lives – Brazil will host the most expensive World Cup in history. Though this is not to understate the scandalous unfolding atrocity in Qatar). Brazilians overwhelmingly supported bringing the event to their country when FIFA awarded them the honor in 2007 (no other nation in the Americas volunteered), but a recent poll from DataFolha indicates that a majority of citizens now oppose it.  Widespread anti-Cup protests have been roiling Brazil’s cities and social media networks for months. The demonstrators’ grievances range from public transportation fare hikes to inadequate wages, housing, education, security and healthcare, among other things. But as evidenced by their use of the slogan “Não vai ter Copa!” (“There will be no Cup!”), it is clear that they intend to use the lavish international spectacle both as a symbol of their concerns and a spotlight to shine on them.  On June 3, a group of anti-Cup activists inflated giant soccer balls in the capital city Brasilia. Protest organizer Antonio Carlos Costa told Agence France Presse, ”We want the Brazilian government to ask the nation’s forgiveness because it promised something it never delivered. It invested a fortune of public money in things that weren’t necessary.” A recent Pew poll found that 61% of respondents believed hosting the World Cup is a ”bad thing” “because it takes money away from public services.”

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Open Letter to Human Right Watch

350 Fifth Avenue, 34th floor New York, NY 10118-3299 USA To the Board of Directors

We must remember the words of the song by Florence Reece

“Which Side Are You On?”

We, the undersigned, represent organizations dedicated to the defense of human rights, the provision of adequate healthcare, housing, and nutrition for all the world’s people–the 99%, as stated in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. We are writing to protest a series of reports by Human Rights Watch, which demean, malign, and slander the Government of Venezuela while constantly describing it as “repressive”, “dictatorial”, etc.

In your February 21, 2014 article you stated,

Nicolas Maduro government’s immediate response to the violence on February 12 was to blame Lopez and other opposition leaders. Minister of Foreign Affairs Elías Jaua declared that Lopez was the ‘intellectual author’ of the killings, and a judge promptly ordered that Lopez be detained. The government has not made public any credible evidence to substantiate these allegations.

Shocking is an understatement to this accusation. Both Leopoldo Lopez and Marina Corina Machado went on national television and declared war against the democratically elected government of Nicolas Maduro in what was called, La Salida. Is an all-out call to violence on national television insufficient “credible evidence”?

What would occur if U.S. citizens appeared on national television and made an all-out call to end President Obama’s second term? These people would have immediately been incarcerated, with or without charges, and the networks would have been shut-down for permitting it. Ironically, in Venezuela, the networks still continue their media distortion campaigns. And although Lopez should have been charged with terrorism because of the violence that has been unleashed on the country due to “La Salida”, he was only charged with inciting violence and so will be in jail for less than two years. Equally, It is outrageous that as a supposed defender of human rights, HRW has NEVER condemned the assassination of over 250 peasants who have been murdered by paramilitaries and mercenaries contracted by big-land owners in Venezuela. Do you not have sufficient “credible evidence” to denounce this? An evident attack rather than an objective evaluation is clearly seen by the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, when he stated in 2012 that Venezuela is “the most abusive” nation in Latin America; even though, Colombia, the neighboring country, is known to have some of the worst human rights violations in all of Latin America.

These sweeping condemnations of the Venezuelan government consists largely of unsubstantiated claims by political opponents, examples taken out of context, gross exaggerations, and illogical arguments; it is a total usurp of your ethical and fact-finding standards which state, “We are committed to maintaining high standards of accuracy and fairness, including by seeking out multiple perspectives to develop an in- depth, analytic understanding of events.”

At the same time, Human Rights Watch has chosen to ignore or belittle the great achievements of the Venezuelan government in the areas of education, nutrition, health care, political participation, employment, and many other spheres of activity which are fundamental to the effective exercise of human rights and democracy.

By consistently echoing U.S. State department charges while ignoring, minimizing, or justifying the violent activities of the Venezuelan opposition, Human Rights Watch is defying its mission statement, “Human Rights Watch is an independent, international organization that works as part of a vibrant movement to uphold human dignity and advance the cause of human rights for all.”

In other words, you have not condemned the opposition for the continual serious attacks on the human rights of all Venezuelan citizens: the guarimba violence by the opposition has killed over 47 people—including a young pregnant woman and caused over US$10 billion in damages.

Moreover, any Democratic Government in the world has the right and duty to protect its citizens and the government against violent protest. Objected evidence shows that the Venezuelan Government has allowed any and all peaceful protest to occur in 2014 and for the prior decade. What they cannot and will not allow is random or targeted violent attacks against individuals or property. Unfortunately, HRW’s reporting completely ignores the preplanned violence of many of the protests of the opposition and by doing this, you completely discredit any objectivity of your organization.

Not surprisingly, your biases are evidenced throughout the Americas: legitimizing the overthrow of democratically elected President Aristide in the 2004 coup in Haiti, the coup in 2009 in Honduras, when HRW did not denounce the killings, arbitrary detentions, physical assaults, or the attacks on the press, many of which have been thoroughly documented, including by the United States government, as revealed in Wikileaks documents.

In the case of Cuba HRW has never denounced that over 3000 Cubans have died in violent assaults and terrorist acts from counter-revolutionary Cuban-American exiles operating from US soil, against US formal law, but with the support or tolerance of US authorities since the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Economic sabotage and the impact of US sanctions have caused billions of dollars in physical damage to the Cuban economy. In the mid-1970s an official US Senate Report documented hundreds of assassination plots against Cuban leaders and even biological attacks against Cuban crops by CIA operatives. HRW NEVER has denounce the US hostility, aggression, and intervention which has not stopped for one second from President Dwight Eisenhower to President Barack Obama against Cuba.

Human Rights Watch's origins were in 1978 was as a propaganda arm of the US State Department's "Helsinki Watch," part of US-Soviet negotiations over bilateral relations. Since then it has become nominally independent, but its personnel and advisors regularly go back-and-forth between government-business-finance and the burgeoning "human rights" industry in the "West."

The "Advisory Committee" of HRW's "Americas Watch" in includes Myles Frechette, Washington's former Ambassador to Colombia, where right-wing paramilitaries carried out notorious massacres, not to speak of being linchpins of the cocaine industry, as well as Michael Shifter, who is a former director of the notoriously subversive National Endowment for Democracy, financed by the US government. Another stellar HRW operative has been Miguel Díaz, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst in the 1990s. Diaz sat on HRW advisory committee from 2003-11. He is now back at the art the State Department serving as “an interlocutor between the intelligence community and non-government experts.”

In October 2013 HRW's "Americas Watch" announced that Joel Motley, managing director at Public Capital Advisors, and Hassan Elmasry, managing partner at Independent Franchise Partners, would be elevated to the Board, two investment bankers, to the Human Rights Watch Board. Motley was a former aide to the late US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a notorious supporter of the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon and hero to conservatives who were alarmed by the growing movement for Black rights in the United States.

In 1981, following the triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution and the collapse of the US-backed Somoza family dictatorship, HRW's was founded. Washington was anxious that the Sandinista triumph would not extend to El Salvador and Guatemala where revolutionary guerrilla wars were advancing against murderous US-backed regimes.

The Reagan Administration launched a bloody "contra" war against Nicaragua and stepped up its support to the military "death-squad" regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. HRW's "Americas Watch" was a propaganda arm of these renewed US counter-revolutionary policies. They pretended to be "balanced" but mainly aimed at discrediting the revolutionary forces and, as is standard policy, downplayed social and economic injustices and inequality.

The above demonstrates that Human Rights Watch disgracefully supports violent demonstrators who are attempting to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected government and that HRW is simply another puppet of U.S. terrorism abroad.

Due to the fact that you choose not to denounce the human rights violations perpetrated on all Venezuelans, we ask for the resignation of Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, an end to your political anti-democratic agenda in Venezuela. For an institution such as yours to regain validity and to maintain honesty, credibility, and independence-- you need to close your revolving door to the U.S. government.

We ask that you defend all people’s human rights, and not lie, distort the truth, or manipulate to protect the 1%. And once and for all, take a stand: are you on the side of politics, or on the side of human rights?


Sincerely,

Fred Magdoff
Monthly Review Foundation
Soil Scientist / Writer

Amy B. Demarest
Vermont

Diane Hirsch-Garcia
Union Organizer
LA California

Fr. Luis Barrios
Co-Executive Director, IFCO-Pastor for Peace

Luis Barrios, Ph.D., BCFE
*Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice & Member of Ph.D. faculties in critical social/personality psychology, Graduate Center-City University of New York

Brian Tokar
Institute for Social Ecology
Vermont University

Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator.Alliance for Global Justice.

Claudia Chaufan, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Health Policy / Sociology
University of California, San Francisco

Frederick B. Mills, Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and Professor of Philosophy at Bowie State University

Stephen Bartlett Food sovereignty organizer. Coordinates a volunteer agricultural collective and educational programs in Louisville, Kentucky.

Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

Diana Bohn
Nicaragua Center for Community Action (NICCA)
Berkeley, CA
Diana Bohn
NICCA Co-Coordinator

Bert Hestroffer
Teamsters Local #142
Gary, Indiana

Rosa Peñate
1509 Alabama St San Francisco CA 94110

Shirley Pate
Washington, DC

On anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe

Is Europe's Islamophobia following the path of 19th century anti-Semitism? 

By Sara R Farris     

Dr Sara R Farris is an Assistant Professor in Sociology in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Al-Jazeera - 05 Jun 2014

In 1844, Karl Marx published a short but dense text entitled "On the Jewish Question". It was a critical review of two essays by the-then famous philosopher Bruno Bauer, who had argued against equal rights for Jews if granted on religious grounds. If Jews wanted to be considered full citizens - Bauer maintained echoing the widespread opinion of the time - Jews would have to abandon their religion and embrace Enlightenment. According to this logic, there was no room for religious demands in a secular society.   As Bauer's position suggests, anti-Jewish racism in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, was justified mainly on cultural and religious grounds. Jews were discriminated and regarded with suspicion because they were considered an alien "nation within the nation". In fact, it was not until the second half of the 19th century and the rise of "social Darwinism" that "racial anti-Semitism", framed in biological terms, appeared on the political scene and Jews were openly discriminated against on the basis of their alleged genetic inferiority.  The question we might want to ask ourselves today is whether contemporary Europe is confronting a Muslim question similar to the Jewish question 170 years ago. Is European antipathy towards Muslims comparable to that first stage of hatred towards Jews, a hatred that culminated in one of the darkest pages of human history?

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Book Review: Health and Human Rights by Thérèse Murphy

Is it sensible for human rights to make use of measurement tools such as indicators? Is the ‘cost’ of human rights an argument that can and should be used by proponents of human rights? In this book Thérèse Murphy aims to chart the history of the linkage between health and human rights. Kate Donald finds that this is an enlightening read that suggests some interesting avenues for human rights practice. Recommended for human rights activists and researchers.

Health and Human Rights. Thérèse Murphy. Hart Publishing. August 2013.

Thérèse Murphy’s contribution to Hart’s Human Rights Law in Perspective series examines the different – and often fascinating – ways that health and human rights have intersected in law, advocacy, and practice. Engaging and very readable, it is a thought-provoking collection for human rights advocates and health activists, although it is unlikely to be a useful resource for newcomers to human rights law. Despite some strange omissions (the universal health care movement is barely mentioned), Murphy certainly succeeds in illuminating some fascinating conundrums within health and human rights, discussing for example how patient autonomy and patient choice – a seemingly unequivocal good – has led to troubling outcomes such as direct-to-consumer marketing by pharmaceuticals.
After an introduction and a chapter focused on the history of health and human rights, Murphy presents four chapters exploring different trends, methods and case studies that illustrate potential avenues and challenges for the field. Most enlightening are the middle two chapters, the first of which focuses on the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa. TAC was at the vanguard of the health and human rights movement and widely known for securing (at least in theory) access to anti-retrovirals for poor South Africans, first against the callow profiteering of the pharmaceuticals and then against the AIDS-denying South African state. Murphy’s analysis skilfully explores the wider impacts of the TAC’s triumph on the broader health environment in South Africa and on health rights work globally, including for example the accusations that it skewed attention and resources away from other devastating diseases.

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The Supreme Court won’t intervene in the James Risen case. What’s next?

By Mark Berman       

The Washington Post - June 2, 2014

The Supreme Court declined to step in Monday on behalf of James Risen, a New York Times reporter and author who faces potential jail time for not identifying a source.
So what does this mean for Risen’s case? Will the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter be sent to prison? What does he have to say about the decision? And how does this fit into the Obama administration’s war on leaks? Here’s a primer on what is going on, where things stand and what could happen next.
Who is James Risen?
Risen is a reporter for the New York Times who writes about national security issues. In 2006, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories about the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping program.  He continues to write about national security, and published a front-page story Sunday about how the National Security Agency is intercepting massive numbers of images shared to social media platforms to use in facial recognition programs. (This story, written with Laura Poitras, was based on documents obtained by Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor who leaked a trove of classified information to journalists.)
Why is he facing jail time in the first place? 
Risen is the author of the 2006 book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.” A chapter of that book detailed a CIA plan to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. Prosecutors believe that Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative charged with leaking classified information, gave Risen information that was used for this chapter.

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Verso Five Book Plan: Human Rights

By Colin Beckett / 02 June 2014 

Verso Book

In this new blog series we bring you recommended reading lists as selected by our authors.

Samuel Moyn is the author of Human Rights and the Uses of History, out June 17th from Verso. Against the popular mythologies of human rights, Moyn's widely acclaimed The Last Utopia located the birth of human rights discourse in the decade following 1968. In Human Rights and the Uses of History, he takes aim at rival conceptions, especially those that serve to justify humanitarian intervention. Below he lists five essential books on the subject. 

Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History
I started out writing about where human rights came from thanks to Lynn Hunt’s already classic book. I found it as problematic as it is stimulating —as you can read in the first chapter of Human Rights and the Uses of History — but Hunt’s study remains the inaugural work of a new field of historical scholarship, and is still unsurpassed in importance. Other books like Robin Blackburn’s American Crucible have followed it in many ways, extending its story to antislavery and beyond, while a burgeoning set of inquiries into the rise of photography and other media takes up Hunt’s master theme of how empathy humanized the world.

Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815-1914
At the time of the Kosovo bombings, and the failure to intervene in Bosnia and Rwanda before then, it was common to say that humanitarian intervention was a rude interruption in international affairs, which had supposedly always been committed to sacrosanct borders. That myth has now been destroyed by a series of historians, starting with Gary Bass, whose Freedom’s Battle I take up in the new book too. Unlike the rosy treatment that humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth century can sometimes attract, the truth is that it was never separable from the tangle of empires of the age. At stake most often were the prerogatives of Christian powers as they answered the famous “Eastern Question,” as Davide Rodogno shows in his balanced and penetrating study of how the Ottomans fared under Western eyes — and the stigma of Western humanitarianism.

Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty, eds., The Meanings of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Human Rights 
History has provided space for affirmative and critical accounts of human rights, as my book discusses, but today much of the energy seems to be passing into philosophy, with precisely the same division of opinion. For most of modern times, mainstream Anglo-American thinkers disdained human rights as outworn metaphysics, but today the reverse is increasingly the case: the pendulum seems to have swung to swing from undue contempt to herdlike enthusiasm. This new collection of critical essays offers a tonic of resistance to that trend, collecting the thinking of leading interdisciplinary critics of the Anglo-American mainstream. In their different ways, they want philosophy to remain the critique of the popular morality that Socrates originally made it — even in our age of human rights.

Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s
This brilliant new book offers the new “revisionist” history of human rights at its very best. Keys shows why neither the civil rights movement (focused on the home front) nor the antiwar movement (intent on stopping a conflict abroad rather than merely humanizing the fight) were so different than the human rights surge of a decade later. Demonstrating the importance of incipient neoconservatives, Keys also replaces my own portrait of human rights in the American 1970s as an episode of guilt with a subversive but convincing picture of the origins of liberal foreign policy. Human rights were not so much about acknowledging sin, Keys shows, as washing it clean. George McGovern had counseled expiation, and gone down to crushing electoral defeat, where Jimmy Carter’s more uplifting message a few years later allowed America to stand tall after Vietnam and return to the geopolitical fray with new moral credentials. As James Mann has shown in The Obamians, it is now in the DNA of the Democratic Party to avoid McGovern’s error, making Keys’s book surpassingly relevant even today, under the current presidency.

Eric A. Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law
International lawyers were long alone in their interest in human rights. Nowadays they are taking an “empirical turn,” to investigate whether the law the world has built to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights has made any difference in the end. In contrast to a more sanguine account by Beth Simmons, in this new book Eric Posner brings acid skepticism to that project of evaluation. If you worry, as I do, that human rights have caused an undue distraction for progressives, in part because they are responsible for so little if any change, Posner’s conservative skepticism is worth careful meditation.

California inmates on contraband watch accuse officials of human rights abuse

• Authorities say procedure is essential to prevent smuggling
• Prisoners chained and shackled in empty cell for days on end
• 'This is torture, no matter how you look at it'       

Shane Bauer in Oakland

theguardian.com, Monday 2 June 2014

In 2009, California High Desert state prison inmate Michael Bloom was put in a small cage and told to strip naked. Two correctional officers put his boxers on backwards and taped them to his body, wrapping the tape around his waist and thighs numerous times.
Then they put a second pair of underwear on him, facing the front, and taped those to his body. They dressed him in a jumpsuit and wound tape around his ankles, waist, thighs, and biceps. Then they put another jumpsuit on him, backwards, and taped it the same way. His legs were chained to one another at the ankles and his wrists were shackled to a chain around his waist.
Thirty-three year old Bloom, imprisoned in 2007 for assault with a firearm and first-degree robbery, was then put in a cell, empty of everything but a metal bed. A correctional officer sat directly in front of his door and watched him constantly. At night, he was brought a thin mattress, but the bright lights were left on. He wasn’t given a blanket or anything to cover his eyes. He remained shackled as he tried to sleep. His chains dug into his back and wrists.

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