Posts Tagged ‘protest’
Koran burning triggers Afghan protests — anyone surprised?
About 2,000 Afghans protested outside the main US military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday over a report that foreign soldiers improperly disposed of copies of the Koran. US helicopters fired flares to try to break up as many as 2,000 demonstrators who massed outside several gates to the base, chanting anti-foreigner slogans and throwing stones.
Roshna Khalid, the provincial governor’s spokeswoman, said copies of the Muslim holy book had been burnt inside Bagram airbase, an hour’s drive north of the capital Kabul, citing accounts from local labourers.
“The labourers normally take the garbage outside and they found the remains of Korans” Khalid said. Nato’s top general in Afghanistan attempted to contain fury over the incident, which could be a public relations disaster for the US military as it tries to pacify the country ahead of the withdrawal of foreign combat troops in 2014.
“When we learned of these actions, we immediately intervened and stopped them. The materials recovered will be properly handled by appropriate religious authorities,” said general John Allen, head of the International Security Assistance Force ( ISAF). “This was NOT intentional in any way…”
Is this general an idiot? Is every officer in his command an obedient puppet idiot? Every military force in the West has a book to go by. And doing it “by the book” while stationed abroad is how you do it. Believe me – there already are rules and regulations governing everything from how and why the military acquired copies of the Koran – how they were used by the military – and what was appropriate when that use was completed.
Bagram also houses a prison for Afghans detained by US forces. The centre has caused resentment among Afghans because of reports of torture and ill-treatment of suspected Taliban prisoners, with president Hamid Karzai demanding the transfer of prisoners to Afghan security.
Winning the hearts and minds of Afghans is critical to US efforts to defeating the Taliban but critics say Western forces often fail to grasp Afghanistan’s religious and cultural sensitivities.
American-led forces often fail to grasp the religious and cultural sensitivities of anyone whose kin weren’t on the losing side of the American Civil War. Much less lands outside the territorial boundaries of the 50 states. It doesn’t have to be that way.
There is no shortage of bright, inquisitive, studious, able folks who have joined our military in recent decades. They’re dedicated to bringing our military and our politics into the 21st Century. They just don’t happen to be in charge of a whole helluva lot.
The Occupy Wall Street protest has about as much music as MTV
“Every successful movement has a soundtrack,” the songwriter Tom Morello told reporters after he had tried to fire up the crowd at the Occupy Wall Street Protest last week with a Woody Guthrie tune and one of his own labor songs.
Perhaps he is right, but the protesters in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan have yet to find an anthem. Nor is the rest of the country humming songs about hard times. So far, musicians living through the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression have filled the airwaves with songs about dancing, not the worries of working people.
Where have all the protest songs gone?
To be sure, a handful of songwriters are tackling the issue. Ry Cooder, the blues and rock guitarist known for his exploration of roots music, lambastes bankers and conservatives in his latest album, “Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down” (Nonesuch). Similarly, Mr. Morello, who began his career as the guitarist and chief ideologue for the band Rage Against the Machine, makes an unapologetic call for leftist revolution in his new album, “World Wide Rebel Songs” (New West Records)…
Yet none of these songs have been big hits, and none are likely to have the impact that a song like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” had in the early 1960s.
The scarcity of songs about the economic disaster stands in contrast to the flurry of pop songs in the mid-2000s blaming President George W. Bush’s foreign policy for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Antiwar songs came not only from stalwarts like R.E.M. and Neil Young but also from younger performers like Green Day, Bright Eyes and Pink…
“A Darth Vader-like president makes a great target,” Mr. Morello said. “One of the reasons the air has gone out of the balloon of protest songwriting is people hung their hopes on the Obama administration…”
The lack of a coherent message on the left has been evident at the Wall Street protest. “I have not heard a single song that sums up what we are trying to do here,” said Martían Hughes, a 24-year-old college student, after Mr. Morello’s performance. “Nor have I heard a single message.”
A couple of instant reactions to the article:
These are mostly middle-class kids griping about the availability of good jobs when they graduate from college. They will disappear from protests on the street as the economy very slowly improves – just as did their peers when the VietNam War ended and the draft dissolved. Educated self-interest is self-limiting for the middle-class declassé.
OTOH, serious protest in the statehouses and legislatures against Republican attempts to crush unions among state employees and teachers have lasted under a lot tougher circumstances than anything the collegiate crowd confronts. Those are families with mortgages to pay for and their own kids to try to send through college. They’re mommies and daddies whose own children have joined them on the picket line.
I’m afraid many of those sustained by the vague, generalized ennui and discomfort that sings about Occupying Wall Street – have parents who work down the street in one of the brokerage houses or are busy back home in Indiana selling life insurance. The occupiers will be around for what seems like a long time to TV talking heads. But, geeks who write games and sociology majors in Boston will find jobs – and vanish – before laid-off teachers do in Wisconsin.
A lovely autumn weekend on Wall Street with the NYPD
Same as it ever was.
I’m glad Lawrence differentiated between most cops and the prick-bastards who get off on attacking a peaceful demonstration. Cops who act out their hatred of people who are “different” – because of color or education or that they have the gumption to dissent – are not different in the least from the cowards who join lynch mobs. Excepting their immunity from prosecution.
Though I have obvious reasons to remember a few coppers who beat and attacked demonstrators – scars 
– I always smile remembering the state troopers assigned to follow the car I was in in a southern border state on the way to a sit-in in 1959 who pulled alongside to offer directions to the town while we were gazing blankly at a road map by the side of the road.
Singaporeans’ culinary anti-immigration protest – sort of
Stanley Wong, Florence Leow eat curry with friends including Liang Meizi from China
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
It takes a lot to start a mass campaign with political overtones in Singapore, but there’s no better catalyst than food. Tens of thousands of people in the Southeast Asian city-state said they would cook or eat curry on Sunday in a protest highlighting growing anger over increased immigration.
The campaign began after an immigrant family from China complained about the smell of curry from a Singaporean Indian neighbor’s home and local officials brought about a compromise.
A Facebook page devoted to the row after reports were published in a local newspaper has drawn over 57,600 members, many of who said they were cooking curry on Sunday in a show of solidarity with the Indian family.
“Because we live in Singapore and Singapore is such a cramped place, neighbors should understand each others’ culture,” said Stanley Wong, a 37-year old accountant who helped organized the Facebook page…
“The case could create problems with the integration of foreign nationals,” said Florence Leow, a freelance writer in her 40s who also was one of the organizers of the event. “Through this event we hope to cook and share a pot of curry and get to appreciate and embrace our culture.”
The influx of immigrants is a sensitive subject in Singapore, where only about two-thirds of the people are citizens. Many Singaporeans say the city-state’s relatively easy immigration policies are attracting too many foreigners, making it more difficult to find jobs and pushing up prices of homes.
The Facebook page for the curry cook-in has about 4 times as many followers as the four candidates in the coming presidential election. Most folks who’ve commented about the event – at least those I bumped into while choosing which reporting to source as a link – feel what’s important is getting to know each other’s cultures more than anything else.
Which is probably the best way to get about it. At least it’s not as heated an issue in Singapore as it is, here in the States. Being an old geezer with both sides of my family having been immigrants to the US and only one side wanting to come to North America in the first place – my heartfelt memories are of easy access and working to get along. I kind of forget how much political crap has filled the intervening years – making it costly and much more difficult for an ordinary workingclass family to become citizens of this land.
My Italian grandfather’s naturalization papers are one of the items permanently on my desk. The Scots-Canadian contingent came here when even less seemed to be required. They all fit into a society concerned with growing the economy and industries nationwide – instead of being run as a fiefdom for corporate thugs who only cared about the highest possible profits from whatever country they set up shop in – that year.
Library clears its shelves to protest threatened closure
The library at Stony Stratford, on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, looks like the aftermath of a crime, its shell-shocked staff presiding over an expanse of emptied shelves. Only a few days ago they held 16,000 volumes.
Now, after a campaign on Facebook, there are none. Every library user was urged to pick their full entitlement of 15 books, take them away and keep them for a week. The idea was to empty the shelves by closing time on Saturday: in fact with 24 hours to go, the last sad bundle of self-help and practical mechanics books was stamped out. Robert Gifford, chair of Stony Stratford town council, planned to collect his books when he got home from work in London, but left it too late.
The empty shelves, as the library users want to demonstrate, represent the gaping void in their community if Milton Keynes council gets its way. Stony Stratford, an ancient Buckinghamshire market town famous only for its claim that the two pubs, the Cock and the Bull, are the origin of the phrase “a cock and bull story”, was one of the communities incorporated in the new town in 1967. The Liberal Democrat council, made a unitary authority in 1997, now faces budget cuts of £25m and is consulting on closing at least two of 10 outlying branch libraries.
Stony Stratford council got wind in December and wrote to all 6,000 residents – not entirely disinterestedly, as the council meets in the library, like many other groups in the town. “In theory the closure is only out for consultation,” Gifford said, “but if we sit back it will be too late. One man stopped me in the street and said, ‘The library is the one place where you find five-year-olds and 90-year-olds together, and it’s where young people learn to be proper citizens’. It’s crazy even to consider closing it.”
Beancounters never think of the support such services provide to the future of a community. I’ve written a number of times of the value and direction provided to my life by weekly visits to our neighborhood Carnegie Library. It was a regular part of Saturday recreation for my mother and sister and me.
Learning became recreation.
Milton Keynes Council should support libraries and independent learning – not work at spoiling the process for others.
Niqabitches in anti-burka ban protest
Two French female students have made a film of the pair of them strolling through the streets of Paris in a niqab, bare legs and mini-shorts as a critique of France’s recently passed law.
Calling themselves the “Niqabitches,” the veiled ladies can be seen strutting past prime ministerial offices and various government ministries with a black veil leaving only their eyes visible, but with their long legs naked bar black high heels.
Bemused passers-by can be seen gawping at the pair or asking to take photographs in the clip.
At one stage in the film, the two women approach the entrance to the ministry of immigration and national identity, only to be told by a policeman to go elsewhere. However, a policewoman also present is delighted by their clothes. “I love your outfit, is it to do with the new law?” she asks. “Yes, we want to de-dramatise the situation,” one girl replies. “It’s brilliant. Can I take a photo?” asks the policewoman, who will soon be required to fine public niqab wearers…
“To put a simple burka on would have been too simple. So we asked ourselves: ‘how would the authorities react when faced with women wearing a burka and mini-shorts?,” asked the students, one of whom is a Muslim…
“To dictate what we wear appears to have become the role of the State (as if they didn’t have other fish to fry …).”
We’re going through the opposite government morass here in Santa Fe. The question of public nudity – even as a form of protest – tied up city government for debate and ponderous discussion for days after a recent demonstration of nude and semi-nude bicyclists.
The prurient-minded among the citizenry – which generally means one or another flavor of Christian – required a means of arresting folks engaging in public nudity for any reason whatsoever. Because it turned out the city didn’t have sufficient laws on the books to bust the bicyclists.
No doubt there will be prayers of praise at the Cathedral this Sunday for the final passage of a torturous ordnance that can hauled out next year for the world nude bicyclists’ protest. Or better yet – to bust some performance artist who poses in front of a tourist from Texas.
Moms hold nurse-in at Arizona McDonalds
Dozens of Valley moms converged Saturday on a McDonald’s in Phoenix to breastfeed their infants in protest of a woman who was asked to leave the establishment for doing the same.
An assistant manager of the McDonald’s at 51st Avenue and Cactus Road asked Clarissa Bradford and her children to leave when Bradford began nursing her 6-month-old child on Aug. 11.
Although the restaurant this week issued an apology saying it would never happen again, demonstrators were upset at public reaction to the story and wanted to respond to critics who say mothers shouldn’t breastfeed in public…
A restaurant employee stood outside the entrance, shooing members of the media away. Starchman and another woman, Alisa Ilardo, came out to speak with reporters. They estimated there were about 100 people in the restaurant at the time, mostly mothers with infant children.
There was no sign of resistance from restaurant employees, Starchman said, characterizing the atmosphere as relaxed with most of the women using the time to have casual conversation. Once inside, a few of them even bought food, she said.
Alisa Ilardo said the group was not upset with McDonald’s, but they wanted to make a statement.
“It was just someone’s bad judgment, but we need to keep people from treating moms like this,” she said.
Right on!
Publicity hound pastor resorts to amplified bullhorn to protest demon mascot
The pastor is either afraid of this mascot, or he seeks publicity.
Gee, which do you think it is? Hmmm…
A pastor protesting the Warner Robins High School Demons mascot was arrested picketing outside the school Thursday for the second time this week.
[Pastor Donald] Crosby was arrested Monday outside the school and charged with disorderly conduct and picketing without a permit, both misdemeanors, after he refused to comply with officers’ requests to leave, Pugh said. He was released on a $650 bond.
Thursday, Crosby had a permit to picket. However, the city’s separate noise ordinance prohibits the use of the bullhorn while on a public street, sidewalk, city park or other public place, City Attorney Jim Elliott said.
“You can go out there, but you can’t be heard,” said Crosby, who opposes the mascot because, he says, demons represent evil…
Crosby was among at least 30 people picketing, Pugh said. She said police did not have a problem with the number of people picketing and that the other picketers continued after Crosby’s arrest.
According to the Warner Robins police report, officer Steve Edward Warmack arrived at the high school shortly after 7 a.m. to find about 30 to 40 people picketing the mascot at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and South Davis Drive, which the report noted was outside of the area designated by the permit…
Crosby was using an “amplified bullhorn to shout across the street” at the principal and about 50 students who were standing outside of the school, the report said.
What do you do in a world in which the church is crumbling beneath its own uselessness, and you can’t help but remember the glory days?
Pic of the Day
Protestors in Uganda’s capitol go “fishing” in potholes
Har!
Photographers protest over abusive use of UK terror law
Photographers fed up with being stopped and searched by British police under the country’s terrorism laws gathered in London to protest against the practice.
Waving placards with the message, “I am a photographer, not a terrorist,” about 2,000 photographers called for more leniency from the British police.
The slogan is the name of a group set up to campaign against certain sections of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which was designed to give police greater powers to fight terrorism.
Photographers say they have been unduly targeted by Section 44 of the Act, which allow officers to stop and search people, regardless of whether they have reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing…
A small number of police watched the protest Saturday in London’s Trafalgar Square, but they maintained a low profile…
Britain’s terrorism laws were dealt a blow last week when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that stop-and-search powers under Section 44 of the Act were a breach of human rights.
The British government is appealing the decision, saying the powers are an important tool in the fight against terrorism.
British coppers probably had dozens of their own photographers – taking pictures of the photographers.
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
