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Criminalizing Compassion in the War on Terror: Muslim Charities and the Case of Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir
“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But . . . the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” — Martin Luther King, Jr.1 “The truth […]
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Ted Haggard and the Church of the Down-Low
Come ye, O Light in the Loafer. Come ye, O Friend of Dorothy. Ye conservative homosexuals who looked to the Democrats and were rebuked by their lurid liberal election gains. Ye right-thinking rump-rangers who looked to the Republicans, only to be scorned as left-leaning “queers.” Ye passing-for-straight poofs who turned in despair to the preacher […]
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Storms over the Pacific
Australian Prime Minister John Howard should get a hostile reception at the Pacific Islands Forum this week. His in-your-face imperialism has provoked conflicts in three island nations. The Solomons and Papua New Guinea In the latest outrage, Aussie police have raided the office of Solomons PM Manasseh Sogavare. Meanwhile a key report on the […]
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Que(e)rying Islamophobia: Race, Sexuality and Imperialism
Thursday, October 19 Que(e)rying Islamophobia: Race, Sexuality and Imperialism Reza Abbasi, “Two Lovers” (ca. 1630) Discourses of race, gender and sexuality have always served an important ideological function within imperialist projects, and the current phase of American imperialism, characterized by the War on Terror, is no exception. Given the contemporary geo-political context, this imperialist project […]
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It’s Not Race or Class — It’s Race and Class: An Interview with Roderick Bush
WE ARE NOT WHAT WE SEEM: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century by Roderick D. BushBUY THIS BOOK Roderick Bush is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at St. John’s University in New York. He is the author of We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in […]
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Same-Sex Love in India: Open Letters against Section 377
To the Government of India, Members of the Judiciary, and All Citizens, To build a truly democratic and plural India, we must collectively fight against laws and policies that abuse human rights and limit fundamental freedoms. This is why we, concerned Indian citizens and people of Indian origin, support the overturning of Section 377 of […]
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A New Phase in the East Timor Crisis
A mass breakout from Dili’s Becora jail has opened a new phase in the East Timor crisis. On 30 August, Alfredo Reinaldo, a key figure in the rebellion which brought down the Alkatiri government, waltzed out the gate with 56 other prisoners. Until that happened, the tiny, impoverished country had seemed to be slowly […]
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Anti-Arab Racism, Islam, and the Left
Racism against Arabs and Muslims long preceded the 9-11 terrorist attacks and has much of its roots in Western imperialism in the Middle East, especially Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Yet, the escalation that we witness today can be traced to the war on terror launched after 9-11 by Bush and his neoconservative ideologues with the […]
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Repression in El Salvador: Interview with Daniel Morales, a Trade Union Leader
Young people in El Salvador protested last July 5th against a wave of price increases of electricity, public transportation, and gas. The protest ended in blood, and, as a consequence, 26 year-old trade union leader, Daniel Ernesto Morales Rivera, was beaten and thrown in jail. The following is an interview of his experience. JA: […]
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Game Show Theory: Race, Class, and Survivor
It was Jay Gould who once bragged that he could pay half the working class to kill the other half. In American labor history, that often meant fomenting and exploiting racism to divide and conquer. Apparently, CBS wants to give us a TV metaphor for it: it announced that the contestants on the upcoming season […]
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“The Immigrants’ Rights Movement Is in Good Hands”: An Interview with Nativo Lopez
I was at a conference titled Build the Left, Fight the Right this past June. The speakers and workshops at the conference ranged from the war in Iraq to the immigrant rights movement in the United States. One of the most interesting (and there were many) and hopeful (in terms of a brighter future for […]
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Building a Mass Strike Wave: Alternatives for a New Immigrant Workers Movement
What Happened on May Day? On May 1, 2006, the largest strike in US history took place, with over a million people on the streets in a powerful show of force. The May Day strike represented a culmination of waves of marches across the country demanding full, immediate legalization for all undocumented immigrants, workers’ rights […]
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Ordinary Citizens’ Complicity in Crimes against Humanity
With the exception of a couple years here and there, I grew up in Germany and attended German schools until I was 19 years old. History teachers at the time were obsessed with helping our generation grapple with the questions: how could the Germans have let it happen? How did so many get roped in […]
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700 Immigrant Rights Activists Form National Alliance, Set Protests for Labor Day Weekend and September 30
CHICAGO — Hundreds of immigrant activists and supporters met in Chicago August 11-13 in a national strategy convention of the legalization-for-all wing of the movement. The event was the largest of at least three national gatherings of immigration activists held over the summer, and the one that was directly based on the “Calendar Coalitions,” […]
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Proportionality, or “The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”
In the India Resource Center’s latest press release (“Kerala Throws Out Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Seven Other States Impose Ban, Others Expected to Follow,” 9 August 2006), reporting that the southern state of Kerala in India has just banned Coca Cola on account of the reckless way in which Coca Cola sells products contaminated with […]
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Open Letter to the LGBTIQ Community and WorldPride Participants
As LGBTIQ Muslims and allies, the Al-Fatiha Foundation is torn, but united in our boycott of WorldPride in Jerusalem. As a religious organization, Al-Fatiha embraces the great symbolism that WorldPride in Jerusalem represents: the bringing together of LGBTIQ people in a city regarded as holy by Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Yet, this WorldPride will not […]
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ASWAT and the World Pride Parade 2006 in Jerusalem
Parade to the WallWorld Pride under Occupation 2006 In Israel, religious groups are expressing opposition to the World Pride to be held in Jerusalem in August 2006. At the same time, international radical left wing groups are calling to boycott this parade as a general call of divestment from Israel on behalf of its crimes […]
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Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships
We, the undersigned — lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers — seek to offer friends and colleagues everywhere a new vision for securing governmental and private institutional recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families. In so doing, we hope […]
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Ten Questions for Movement Building
For five weeks in the late spring of 2006, we toured the eastern half of the United States to promote two books — Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005) and Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006) — and to get at […]
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Let Us Form the Broadest Possible Arab People’s Front
Dr. George Habash, Founder of the Arab Nationalists’ Movement and of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Calls for the Formation of the Broadest Possible Arab People’s Front in Support of the Lebanese and Palestinian Resistance Masses of our Glorious Arab Nation, Courageous Resistance Fighters in the fraternal land of Lebanon, Steadfast […]