Woman fired for uninstalling app on company phone that tracked her 24 hrs a day
RT | May 11, 2015
A California woman has sued her former employer, which fired her shortly after she disabled a GPS tracking feature on her company iPhone. The app was used to monitor employees even on their personal time, the lawsuit alleged.
Myrna Arias has claimed that her boss, John Stubits, at money transfer service Intermex in Bakersfield boasted about monitoring employees’ locations while they were not on the job, according to the lawsuit filed in Kern County Superior Court.
Arias, a sales executive for the company, said she was “scolded” and subsequently fired — even though she “met all quotas during her time with Intermex — after she uninstalled Xora, a mandatory job-management app that was applied to company phones.
“After researching the app and speaking with a trainer from Xora, Plaintiff and her co-workers asked whether Intermex would be monitoring their movements while off duty,” the suit says.
“Stubits admitted that employees would be monitored while off duty and bragged that he knew how fast she was driving at specific moments ever since she installed the app on her phone. Plaintiff expressed that she had no problem with the app’s GPS function during work hours, but she objected to the monitoring of her location during non-work hours and complained to Stubits that this was an invasion of her privacy. She likened the app to a prisoner’s ankle bracelet and informed Stubits that his actions were illegal. Stubits replied that she should tolerate the illegal intrusion….”
The suit alleged invasion of privacy, retaliation, and unfair business practices, among other accusations.
“This intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person,” the lawsuit claimed.
Arias’ attorney told Ars Technica that the mandatory app was intrusive in its constant monitoring.
“The app had a ‘clock in/out’ feature which did not stop GPS monitoring, that function remained on,” Gail Glick said.
“This is the problem about which Ms. Arias complained. Management never made mention of mileage. They would tell her co-workers and her of their driving speed, roads taken, and time spent at customer locations. Her manager made it clear that he was using the program to continuously monitor her, during company as well as personal time.”
Arias is seeking damages in excess of $500,000. Intermex did not immediately respond to Ars Technica for comment.
Nilesat takes Yemen broadcaster al-Massirah off air
Press TV – May 11, 2015
Yemen’s Arabic broadcaster, al-Massirah, has been taken off the air by Egyptian satellite company Nilesat, while YouTube has removed the channel’s uploaded files showing the devastation caused by Saudi Arabia’s bombardment of the country.
The channel, which is affiliated to Yemen’s Ansarullah movement, said on its Twitter account that Nilesat suspended its transmission on Sunday evening.
Al-Massirah also tweeted that the suspension was a result of “Saudi-American pressure” on the satellite company.
Nilesat has not explained why it has blocked the channel.
The channel has been broadcasting the images of the victims of and the damage caused by the Saudi aggression against Yemen.
Video sharing website YouTube also removed the videos and images uploaded by al-Massirah that showed the humanitarian catastrophe in the impoverished Middle Eastern country.
Saudi Arabia started its military aggression against Yemen on March 26 – without a UN mandate – in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and to restore power to Yemen’s fugitive former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who is a staunch ally of Riyadh.
According to the latest UN figures, the Saudi military campaign has so far claimed the lives of over 1,400 people and injured close to 6,000 people, roughly half of whom have been civilians.
Saudi Arabia has been blocking the delivery of relief supplies to the war-stricken people of Yemen in defiance of calls by international aid groups.
US Government: Court cannot review wrongful executive secrecy
Reprieve | May 8, 2015
The Obama Administration today told a US appeal court that it had no right to challenge the wholesale suppression of video evidence of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay.
Lawyers for the Administration insisted that every single frame of video evidence – no matter how disturbing or unlawful- must remain an unchallengeable secret, beyond the review of judges or the public right of access.
The Administration further defended its absolute right to classify any information wrongfully — such as, hypothetically, censoring the Gettysburg address.
The federal hearing in Dhiab v Obama relates to a challenge by Guantánamo’s hunger strikers, whereby prisoners’ lawyers presented classified footage of a prisoner being violently removed from his cell and force-fed by the military authorities. On June 20, 2014, 16 media organizations sought the public release of the videos on First Amendment grounds. On October 3, Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the footage to be released, with appropriate redactions on national security grounds.
In defiance of this order, the Obama Administration failed to redact the tapes – a prerequisite to any release – and instead chose to appeal Judge Kessler’s decision.
In oral arguments today, the Administration defended its decision not to commence redactions, insisting that the judiciary must defer entirely to the executive on secrecy, and that not a single frame of the videos should ever be released to the public.
In response to the hypothetical question of whether a judge could challenge the manifestly wrongful classification of the text of the Gettysburg Address, the Administration replied that the judge could not — the court must simply trust the reasoning of the executive.
Reprieve argued that the Obama Administration was attempting to strip courts of the right to review their own records for a First Amendment public right of access, thereby eroding the separation of powers underpinning the US constitutional system.
Reprieve attorney Alka Pradhan said: “The Obama Administration made an audacious power grab today, insisting that no judge can ever review the executive’s addiction to hiding wrongdoing through secrecy. It is disturbing that such a tyrannical argument can be made by a former constitutional law professor. Today, it is the abuse of Guantanamo prisoners that is being wrongfully suppressed. Tomorrow, who knows?”
‘Father of internet’ speaks out against government demand for back doors in encryption
RT | May 5, 2015
Internet pioneer Vint Cerf said Monday that creating defects in encryption systems for law enforcement, often known as “back doors,” was “super, super risky” and not the “right answer.”
Cerf, recognized as a “father of the internet,” currently working at Google, told an audience at the National Press Club that he understood law enforcement’s desire to avoid being locked away from evidence that could be used to prevent crimes. He went on to say, however, that providing such access raises constitutional and legal questions.
“The Congress is forced now to struggle with that, and they’re going to have to listen to these various arguments about protection and safety on the one hand and preservation and privacy and confidentiality on the other,” Cerf said, as reported by The Hill.
The Obama administration has been trying to force companies like Google and Apple to create defects in encryption so the FBI and other government agencies can gain access to people’s information; this despite mounting criticism over the plan – a criticism that’s shared by Cerf.
“If you have a back door, somebody will find it, and that somebody may be a bad guy or bad guys, and they will intentionally abuse their access,” said Cerf.
“Creating this kind of technology is super, super-risky,” he added. “I don’t think that that’s the right answer.”
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed a program codenamed “Bullrun,” which showed that the government penetrated encryption securities through the use of “supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion.”
Since those disclosures, Silicon Valley industries have been working feverishly to adopt encryption technology beyond the reach of law enforcement agencies that haven’t first obtained a warrant, and to appease customers worried about their privacy. Law enforcement sees it differently, however.
“If this becomes the norm, I suggest to you that homicide cases could be stalled, suspects walked free, child exploitation not discovered and prosecuted,” FBI Director James Comey warned in October, reported The Hill.
For tech companies, though, it is not a question of creating “back doors” or “front doors” – it’s just a matter of secure technology and unsecure technology.
Last week, a bipartisan group of legislators attempted to add an amendment prohibiting the government from forcing companies to build back doors into their devices to a bill reforming the National Security Agency. Despite full support from House Judiciary Committee members, the measure was dropped over concerns it would sink the underlying bill.
Pennsylvania Court strikes down law aimed at keeping convicts out of public eye
RT | May 5, 2015
A federal court in Pennsylvania overturned the Revictimization Relief Act, which aimed to ban convicted criminals from speaking publicly.
The federal district court on Monday said the statute introduced by lawmakers violated the first amendment rights of one-time death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal and other prisoners. The law was introduced in response to Abu-Jamal’s [recorded] appearance at a Goddard College commencement address in Vermont in October 2014.
“The fact that certain plaintiffs have been convicted of infamous or violent crimes is largely irrelevant to our first amendment analysis. A past criminal offense does not extinguish the offender’s constitutional right to free expression,” Judge Christopher Conner wrote. “The First Amendment does not evanesce at the prison gate.”
Judge Conner wrote the law was unconstitutionally vague and over-broad. He worried that it would deter not only the speech of convicted criminals, but also people who redistribute speech such as producers quoting criminals in radio programs or newspapers publishing interviews with criminals. Conner said a law restricting expression based on content was “inherently suspect.”
Attorney Eli Segal and the American Civil Liberties Union, who brought suit against the law, told the Associated Press that the decision “says loud and clear that all of us in this commonwealth have the right to freedom of speech.”
Steve Miskin, the spokesman for the Pennsylvania House GOP leadership told AP that Conner’s ruling “is woefully short of the fact. It begs the question: Did he even read the law?”
“The point of the law was to look out for victims,” he added.
The Revictimization Relief Act, passed by Pennsylvania lawmakers in October 2014, said a victim of a personal injury crime may bring a civil action against an offender to restrict them from conduct that could perpetuate the continuing effect of the crime on the victim, including conduct causing a temporary or permanent state of mental anguish.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, an American activist and journalist, was convicted in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Pennsylvania Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. He was on death row for 30 years before appeals converted his death penalty to life without parole. Abu-Jamal claims he is a victim of a racist justice system. The Faulkner family, public authorities, police organizations and self-described conservative groups have maintained that Abu-Jamal’s trial was fair, his guilt undeniable, and his death sentence appropriate.
Earlier this year, Tom Wolf, the Governor of Pennsylvania, offered the state’s 186 death row inmates temporary reprieves from execution, calling the system “error prone, expensive and anything but useful.”
Wolf said that if the state is going to “take the irrevocable step of executing a human being, its capital sentencing system must be infallible.” He said the system was riddled with flaws and studies had called into question the accuracy and fundamental fairness of Pennsylvania’s capital sentencing system. The studies suggested there were inherent biases indicating that a person is more likely to be charged with a capital offense and sentenced to death row if he is poor or part of a minority racial group; especially so if the victim of the crime was white.
Danish anti-Israeli settlements bus ads halted
RT | May 5, 2015
Photo from facebook.com/nejtaktilbsp
The Danish Palestinian Friendship Association said Monday it would expand its anti-settlement advertising campaign after Copenhagen bus operator Movia said it was dropping their ads from buses in the city.
The advertisements were put on 35 buses in the Danish capital and featured two women and the quote: “Our conscience is clean! We neither buy products from the Israeli settlements nor invest in the settlement industry.”
But Movia said they dropped them after four days because of the number of inquiries they received about what the Danish Palestinian Friendship Association stands for, AFP reports.
[We] “received a significant number of inquiries regarding the Danish Palestinian Friendship Association’s campaign against Israeli settlements.”
The company declined to comment but released a statement saying the ads were “unnecessarily offensive.”
Fathi El-Abed, the Chairman of the Danish Palestinian Friendship Association, however said that the ads were harmless.
“It’s a clear attempt to deny us our freedom of speech. There is nothing whatsoever about this campaign that is harmful, discriminatory or hateful in any way,” he told AFP.
He insisted that his organization would press on with a national advertising campaign on Israeli settlements.
El-Abed also said that his group was supported by people “who’ve never had anything to do with the Palestinian cause.”
Christian Juhl, a lawmaker from the Red-Green Alliance, said that he thought the decision by the bus company was “embarrassing.”
The decision by Movia is in stark contrast to their refusal last year to drop ads featuring bare breasts by a plastic surgery clinic after complaints by feminists.
In New York an arguably far more offensive ad campaign was allowed on buses after a judge overturned a ban in April from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).
The adverts were commissioned by the pro-Israeli American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and featured a masked man next to the caption “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah. That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?”
The adverts were a spoof of an earlier far less offensive campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which encouraged Twitter users to post messages with the hashtag MyJihad where they would right about their personal and peaceful achievements.
There were also ads showing a 1941 photo of a Muslim leader meeting Hitler, which appeared on buses in Philadelphia, which were also organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a pro-Israel group led by blogger Pamela Geller.
AFDI was also behind the contest in Texas on Sunday to award $10,000 for the best cartoon depiction of Muhammad, which ISIS attempted to attack.
The latest ads come after ads linking “Islamic Jew-hatred” with Adolf Hitler appeared in San Francisco In January and in Washington DC last year.
The campaign to boycott Israeli produce and companies operating in the areas of the West Bank, which have been occupied by Israeli settlers, began in 2005, although its effectiveness in stopping the settlement program and its impact on the Israeli economy has been questioned.
The issue of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank is one of the main stalling factors in the now dead Palestine-Israeli peace talks.
In an interview Sunday with the Financial Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jimmy Carter, former American President and peace activist, said the peace process was dead because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would never accept a Palestinian state.
Read more:
‘Islamic Jew-hatred’ ads with Hitler appear on Philly buses
NYC judge lets through anti-Palestinian ‘killing Jews’ ad as ‘freedom of speech’
In unusual break with tradition, no Labor Day celebrations in Egypt this year
Mada Masr | May 1, 2015
For the first time in living memory, Egypt is not celebrating Labor Day.
The only official commemoration took place on Monday, April 27 behind closed doors at Cairo’s Police Academy in the presence of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, governmental officials and state-appointed leaders from the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF).
This commemoration, which was not televised, is reported to have involved 10 workers who received honorary medals. It is the first time ever that the president of Egypt has not delivered a Labor Day address.
During Monday’s commemoration, Gebali al-Maraghi, chief of the state-controlled ETUF, presented Sisi with a declaration from his federation vowing that its members would reject strikes and refrain from protests, sit-ins or other industrial actions.
ETUF leaders called instead for dialogue and collective bargaining between workers, the state and employers, according to the state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram.
The Cabinet also announced that there would not be a working day off, as this year the official holiday coincides with the weekend.
This comes during the same week in which a judicial decree was issued by the Supreme Administrative Court dictating that public sector employees who partake in strikes will be forced into early retirement. The judges who issued this decree, which cannot be appealed, claimed that a military decree issued in 2011 and Sharia law both prohibit labor strikes.
A statement was issued by a host of Egyptian human rights organizations on Labor Day in which they denounced the aforementioned judicial decree as violating Article 15 of the 2014 Constitution, as well as international rights conventions to which Egypt is party.
“We are witnessing the worst Labor Day in Egyptian history this year,” commented Ali Fattouh, an independent union organizer and bus driver employed at Cairo’s Public Transport Authority.
Fattouh argued that the government is pushing back on workers’ rights and the organizational freedoms of unions, while Egypt’s largest independent labor federation — the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (ETIFU) — “is falling in line with the government’s dictates, denouncing workers’ right to strike while championing the policies of the ruling regime.”
Like Fattouh, many other independent unionists, labor rights organizations and leftist groupings are not celebrating Labor Day this year, as they believe there is nothing to celebrate in 2015.
Since their emergence in the 2011 uprising until 2013, independent labor federations had celebrated Labor Day in Tahrir Square. However, they were only capable of organizing small rallies involving just a few hundred workers, revealing the inability of these independent federations to mobilize their ranks.
Following the military led regime change on July 3, 2013, Tahrir Square was made off-limits for workers’ rallies, and in 2014 independent unionists celebrated Labor Day indoors.
Workers at the state-owned petroleum services company Petrotrade issued a statement on Thursday declaring, “We are not celebrating Labor Day this year, as there is no cause for celebration.”
“This is the fifth Labor Day since the January 25 revolution, and yet none of the revolution’s demands have been achieved, nor has social justice been realized,” the statement added.
Despite government pledges since 2011, neither a new labor law nor a new trade union law has been issued to replace the repressive and outdated laws regulating workers rights, the Petrotrade workers continued.
The statement argued that Egypt is suffering from a counter-revolution, indicated by the fact that a host of striking workers and independent unionists have been subjected to punitive measures nationwide, including disciplinary hearings, relocations, lay-offs, prosecution and trials.
Dozens of workers across the country are presently being prosecuted for instigating strikes and labor unrest, as well as incurring losses for industries with their work stoppages.
Fattouh explained that he and 31 of his co-workers at the Public Transport Authority are standing two separate trials on May 15 and June 13 before the State Council Court on charges of instigating strikes in the years 2012 and 2013.
“We are being sent to court, and possibly to jail, simply for exercising our right to organize a peaceful strike at our workplaces,” said Fattouh.
“When you have a court of law outlawing the right to strike, which is clearly safeguarded by international conventions and domestic legislation, what is there left to celebrate on Labor Day?” he argued.
But Maraghi is quoted in Al-Ahram as declaring that “Egypt is currently blessed with a climate of freedom and democracy,” and “that the ETUF is the only legitimate representative for all of Egypt’s workers, regardless of their political tendencies.”
Maraghi concluded by singing Sisi’s praises, while claiming: “there is no room for politicization of the union movement.”
Yet even Ibrahim Eissa, a TV anchor on the show 25/30, which broadcasts on the privately owned ONtv channel, criticized Sisi’s labor commemoration this year.
Eissa argued that Labor Day should be celebrated on May 1, as is the national and international tradition. “Labor Day should be commemorated in a factory, company or workplace,” he added, asking Sisi, “Oh president, if you celebrate Labor Day at the Police Academy, then where are you going to celebrate Egypt’s National Police Day?”
Saudi warplanes target main TV station in Yemen
Press TV – April 30, 2015
Saudi Warplanes have reportedly targeted the bureau of a major TV station in Yemen as Riyadh’s illegal aggression continues to take its toll on civilians.
According to reports on Thursday, Saudi fighter jets targeted the office of the al-Masirah TV, a major broadcasting service run by the Ansarullah Houthi movement.
The TV channel is regarded as the main source of information on Saudi Arabia’s aggression against Yemen, providing up-to-date coverage of the attacks and concomitant fatalities across the impoverished Arab country.
Meanwhile, Saudi warplanes continued to target several cities and areas in Yemen with the latest airstrikes targeting Salif air defense camp in Hudaydah, west of Yemen.
Elsewhere, in eastern Ma’rib province, Saudi warplanes launched air raids on an anti aircraft battalion. The presidential palace in Ta’izz was also pounded.
Earlier in the day, Saudi fighter jets bombarded different regions north of the capital Sana’a, while areas in the northern province of Sa’ada also came under attack.
Riyadh launched its airstrikes against Yemen on March 26 without a United Nations mandate. Saudi Arabia aims to undermine the Houthis and restore power to fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, who is a staunch ally of Riyadh.
The regime’s warplanes have repeatedly targeted residential areas across the country.
On April 21, Riyadh announced the end of the first phase of its unlawful military operations, which claimed the lives of nearly 1,000 people; but airstrikes have continued with Saudi bombers targeting different areas across the country in a new phase.
Official Yemeni reports say nearly 250 women and children have been killed so far.
Civil Liberty Violations Seen in NYPD Interrogations of Demonstrators
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | April 30, 2015
The New York City Police Department is back to doing something it was told by the courts decades ago to stop: interrogating demonstrators about their political behavior.
At least a dozen people protesting the decision not to prosecute the police who killed Eric Garner were detained by the NYPD. They later told The New York Times that they were questioned about their political associations and other matters related to their involvement in street protests.
The interrogations could have a chilling effect on Americans lawfully exercising their right to protest and may also put the department in violation of a 1985 consent decree that came out of a federal court case, Handschu v. Special Services Division (pdf), which was supposed to end investigations of political activity.
The recent NYPD actions aren’t the first time it has skirted the legalities of the Handschu settlement. In 2003, the department was rebuked after its Intelligence Division detectives collected information from antiwar protestors such as their school, their membership in organizations and their involvement in past protests.
The Times’ Colin Moynihan wrote that “some civil liberties lawyers say the recent questioning appeared to be substantially similar to the questioning in 2003,” with detectives focusing on political involvement, not criminal behavior.
“When the police investigate political affiliations and political activities, that poses a serious threat to First Amendment rights,” Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the Times. “The NYPD should stop this immediately.”
To Learn More:
Questioning of Garner Protesters in New York Renews Concerns about Police Practices (by Colin Moynihan, New York Times )
Chicago Police Accused of Running Secret Interrogation Center (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Supreme Court Rules a Suspect’s Silence during Police Interrogation Can be Used against Him (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov )
Baltimore and the Human Right to Resistance: Rejecting the framework of the Oppressor
By Ajamu Baraka | Black Agenda Report | April 29, 2015
Anti-Black racism, always just beneath the surface of polite racial discourse in the U.S., has exploded in reaction to the resistance of black youth to another brutal murder by the agents of this racist, settler-colonialist state. With the resistance, the focus shifted from the brutal murder of Freddie Gray and the systematic state violence that historically has been deployed to control and contain the black population in the colonized urban zones of North America, to the forms of resistance by African Americans to the trauma of ongoing state violence.
The narrative being advanced by corporate media spokespeople gives the impression that the resistance has no rational basis. The impression being established is that this is just another manifestation of the irrationality of non-European people – in particular, Black people – and how they are prone to violence. This is the classic colonial projection employed by all white supremacist settler states, from the U.S., to South Africa and Israel.
The accompanying narrative is that any kind of resistance that does not fit the narrow definition of “non-violent” resistance is illegitimate violence and, therefore, counter-productive because – “violence doesn’t accomplish anything.” Not only does this position falsely equate resistance to oppression as being morally equivalent to the violence of the oppressor, it also attempts to erase the role of violence as being fundamental to the U.S. colonial project.
The history of colonial conquest saw the U.S. settler state shoot and murder its’ way across the land mass of what became the U.S. in the process of stealing indigenous land to expand the racist White republic from “sea to shining sea.” And the marginalization of the role of violence certainly does not reflect the values of the Obama administration that dutifully implements the bi-partisan dictates of the U.S. strategy of full spectrum dominance that privileges military power and oppressive violence to protect and advance U.S. global supremacy. The destruction of Libya; the re-invasion of Iraq; the civil war in Syria; Obama’s continued war in Afghanistan; the pathological assault by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza and the U.S. supported attack on Yemen by the Saudi dictatorship, are just a few of the horrific consequences of this criminal doctrine.
Race and oppressive violence has always been at the center of the racist colonial project that is the U.S. It is only when the oppressed resist — when we decide, like Malcolm X said, that we must fight for our human rights — that we are counseled to be like Dr. King, including by war mongers like Barack Obama. However, resistance to oppression is a right that the oppressed claim for themselves. It does not matter if it is sanctioned by the oppressor state, because that state has no legitimacy.
No rational person exalts violence and the loss of life. But violence is structured into the everyday institutional practices of all oppressive societies. It is the deliberate de-humanization of the person in order to turn them into a ‘thing’ — a process Dr. King called “thing-afication.” It is a necessary process for the oppressor in order to more effectively control and exploit. Resistance, informed by the conscious understanding of the equal humanity of all people, reverses this process of de-humanization. Struggle and resistance are the highest expressions of the collective demand for people-centered human rights – human rights defined and in the service of the people and not governments and middle-class lawyers.
That resistance may look chaotic at this point – spontaneous resistance almost always looks like that. But since the internal logic of neoliberal capital is incapable of resolving the contradiction that it created, expect more repression and more resistance that will eventually take a higher form of organization and permanence. In the meantime, we are watching to see who aligns with us or the racist state.
The contradictions of the colonial/capitalist system in its current expression of neoliberalism have obstructed the creation of decent, humane societies in which all people are valued and have democratic and human rights. What we are witnessing in the U.S. is a confirmation that neoliberal capitalism has created what Chris Hedges called “sacrificial zones” in which large numbers of black and Latino people have been confined and written off as disposable by the system. It is in those zones that we find the escalation of repressive violence by the militarized police forces. And it is in those zones where the people are deciding to fight back and take control of their communities and lives.
These are defining times for all those who give verbal support to anti-racist struggles and transformative politics. For many of our young white comrades, people of color and even some black ones who were too young to have lived through the last period of intensified struggle in the 1960s and ‘70s and have not understood the centrality of African American resistance to the historical social struggles in the U.S., it may be a little disconcerting to see the emergence of resistance that is not dependent on and validated by white folks or anyone else.”
The repression will continue, and so will the resistance. The fact that the resistance emerged in a so-called black city provides some complications, but those are rich and welcoming because they provide an opportunity to highlight one of the defining elements that will serve as a line of demarcation in the African American community – the issue of class. We are going to see a vicious ideological assault by the black middle class, probably led by their champion – Barack Obama – over the next few days. Yet the events over the last year are making it more difficult for these middle-class forces to distort and confuse the issue of their class collaboration with the white supremacist capitalist/colonialist patriarchy. The battle lines are being drawn; the only question that people must ask themselves is which side they’ll be on.
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From the Archives
The Balfour Declaration – A Century of Jewish Power
By Gilad Atzmon | May 17, 2017
This year, Palestinians and their supporters mark the 100th anniversary of The Balfour Declaration, a written statement from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
For Palestinians, The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of their plight: a century of ethnic cleansing at the hands of European newcomers who claim Palestine as their historic home. Yet, for some reason, supporters of the Palestinians are desperate to suppress discussion of the motivation for the Balfour Declaration – how and why did it come about? … continue
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