SEMALKA, Syria/ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – Made homeless when Turkish shells slammed into his house in northern Syria, Kurdish day labourer Suleiman Mohamed and his family spent 10 days in desperate search of shelter nearby.
Now all they want is to reach neighbouring Iraq.
They are among at least 160,000 Syrian Kurds that the United Nations says fled their homes following the start of a Turkish assault on northeastern Syria. His hometown of Ras al-Ain was one of the targets hit in Turkish air strikes.
The advance began shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his forces were withdrawing from the area, giving Ankara more room to pursue its Syrian Kurdish militia enemies without the risk of clashing directly with the Americans.
Mohammed has been moving from town to town in the northeast, sleeping in schools packed with other displaced people. At one point he tried to rent a house before giving up and heading to the border with Iraq.
Some 5,000 have made it across the border in the past week, aid groups said on Monday. Many use smugglers paying up to $1,500 per family, some of those who made to camps on the Iraqi side of the border told Reuters last week.
A Michigan man reportedly “went from perfectly healthy to brain dead” in nine days after he contracted the rare, mosquito-borne virus Eastern equine encephalitis during an uptick in cases this year.
Officials in Kalamazoo County on September 6 said a resident infected with EEE, also known as “sleeping sickness,” had died. The family of Gregg McChesney, 64, identified him to News 8 as the victim and said he had been helping to install docks in a pond less than a month before he died on August 19.
“He was perfectly healthy, happy human being, and within a matter of nine days he went from perfectly healthy to brain dead,” McChesney’s younger brother, Mark McChesney, told News 8 on Tuesday. “All of a sudden he had a seizure, and next thing you know, he’s in the ER and he just never came out of it.”
Doctors confirmed several days after the elder McChesney’s passing that he had contracted EEE, News 8 reported. McChesney is among at least seven people who were infected with EEE in Michigan in July, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
Twenty-one people in six states have been diagnosed with EEE this year, and five people have died, the Associated Press reported. Those counts reflect an uptick from the annual average of seven EEE-related illnesses and three deaths.
A day at the racist museum
How should we deal with the irredeemably racist monuments to white supremacy that crowd our cities?
On a sweltering August day, when we received daily warnings from our city authorities about the dangerous heat coming our way, I took my younger children to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. My children wanted to see a spectacular show in its planetarium called “Dark Universe” and I was looking for a cool place to entertain their fancies.
Upon arriving, I remembered that to get in, we will have to navigate around a rather racist statue of Theodore Roosevelt, showing the late president on horseback flanked by an African-American and a Native American standing below on each side.
At least since the late 1990s this monument has been the subject of critical reflection in the US, marking the patent racial hierarchy it stages and celebrates. Following the removal of the Robert E Lee statue in New Orleans in 2017, all such monuments to the long history of racism in the US have become subjects of renewed examination.
This Roosevelt statue was also defaced by a group of activists in 2017. In July 2019, a special exhibition was opened at this very museum about its racist history.
As we stood in line to get ticket for the planetarium show, paramount on my mind was not just the racist evidence at the entrance of the museum but the vast universe awaiting us at one of its interior halls.
We were there to see a show celebrating “the pivotal discoveries that have led us to greater knowledge of the structure and history of the universe and our place in it – and to new frontiers for exploration.” Paradoxically, and making a mockery of that racist statue at the entrance, the narrator of the show is Neil deGrasse Tyson – a distinguished African-American astrophysicist.
I marvelled at the stars and listened to Tyson telling us of the expanding universe – and I remembered the Persian poet Sa’di. There is a story in his book Golestan (1258) in which an astronomer comes home and finds a young man in the compromising company of his wife. He gets angry and start screaming and hitting the man. A crowd gathers and people find out the reason for the commotion. Someone in the crowd turns to the astronomer and says: “What in the world could you know about the secrets of the heavens when you have no clue what is happening in your own home?”
The US today finds itself in a similar situation. It invests massively in space exploration and even plans for a space army, as Donald Trump has announced, and yet the terrors of the most recalcitrant barbarism on this Earth is still unfolding on its territory and along its borders. There is a vast and perhaps irreconcilable discrepancy between the expansive horizons of the unknown we wish to explore, and the shrinking history of the troubling truth we wish to forget.
Mass violence is not the product of religion or culture. It is born of narratives of insecurity
Sci-Fi films like the Terminator series (in particular Terminator II – Judgment Day), or The Matrix trilogy, use morphing – a special-effects process in which someone or something changes shape or form – to present the viewer with alternative perspectives on the same reality. In the Terminator, the “cyborg” robot has the power to take the shape of humans – usually after killing them – of any age or gender. Once it takes the human form, characters within the film start responding to the violent attacks against “the monster” with horror. However, the viewers applaud these brutal attacks, and even demand more. The narrative demands it, after all, especially after the atrocities it perpetrates!
This illustration of the effect of narrative framing holds the key to understanding instances of mass violence, such as the recent series of mass shootings in the United States. The two young men who carried out the mass shootings on August 3 in El Paso, Texas and August 4 in Dayton, Ohio, were acting in a different movie from the one we are all watching. In their story, they were not opening fire on “innocent people”, but heroically responding to “an existential threat”.
The two episodes occurred within 14 hours of each other, and only a few days after a similar attack in California. This indicates a shared story that is gaining traction. While the Time magazine counted 250 other mass shootings in the US this year, the last three were somewhat different. They seem to have a clear political message, with racist and anti-immigrant undertones. The El Paso incident, in particular, appeared to copy the notorious July 2011 Oslo massacre by right-wing “terrorist” Anders Behring Breivik, who uploaded a rambling Islamophobic “manifesto” on the Internet before murdering 77 people. While the Oslo attacker ranted about a “Muslim threat” to European identity, his El Paso copy-cat was also believed to have uploaded a racist “manifesto” deploring the “Hispanic invasion” of Texas.
As expected, these atrocities raised serious questions and an anguished soul-searching. And as Americans of all walks of life tried to answer the vexing question “why?”, their divergent answers once again highlighted the deep divisions the country is currently facing. Liberals blamed lax gun laws and racist rhetoric promoted by US PresidentDonald Trump. Those on the right cited mental illness, suspect Internet and social media sites and violent video games.
This mirrored the contested explanations of the 9/11 attacks and more recent atrocities committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). As they tried to explain the reasons behind these atrocities, serious academics and analysts focused on complex political, economic, psychological and ideological factors feeding terrorism across regions and cultures. However, right-wing ideologues focused on Islamism (even Islam) as the main factor. These views are now dominant in Trump’s inner circle. It is interesting – and ironic – that the resulting Islamophobic narratives have fed populist right-wing rage in Europe and the US, contributing in turn to right-wing militancy and terrorism.
The research I conducted in collaboration with colleagues from around the world has proven both sets of explanations inadequate. Our study (published in Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities, 2015) was unique in that it included an unprecedented array of cases and cultural contexts (from Europe, Asia and Africa). We rejected the simplistic cultural-religious explanations because mass violence is perpetrated in many cultural contexts – Orthodox/Catholic/Protestant Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim – and the majority in all these groups (even among “Islamists”) opposes terrorism.
However, alternative explanations looked equally unconvincing. Terrorism and mass violence do not result automatically from economic deprivation, political injustice or religious or ethnic polarisation. Psychological explanations are particularly problematic. It cannot be convincingly argued that the millions who abruptly engaged in intense mass violence, such as in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, India, Darfur, and so forth, have all suddenly become “insane”, as it takes plenty of sustained rationality even to conduct genocide.
This is where our “narratives of insecurity” solution comes in. As in the case of the science fiction narratives cited above, “It is the story, stupid!” People do not just wake up and attack their life-long neighbours and friends because of insanity. Rather, they act within a shared story, emphasising a threat to their values or existence. Like cyborgs (or monsters in old fairy tales), the neighbours become part of a bigger story of aliens threatening our very existence. They take on the role of “invaders” threatening Europe’s (or America’s, India’s etc) cultural identity. It is interesting that al-Qaeda and ISIL fighters also peddle similar narratives about “Crusaders” threatening Muslim land and even Islam itself.
A project by The New York Times Magazine pushes to re-frame history.
Four hundred years ago this month the first enslaved Africans arrived in The New World only to be sold to colonists living in what would become the US state of Virginia. To commemorate this pivotal historical event, New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones created “The 1619 Project”.
The cornerstone of the series is an essay by Hannah-Jones re-framing US history and making the assertion that “the year 1619 is as foundational to the American story as 1776 … black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘founding fathers.’”
The New York Times has also teamed up with the Pulitzer Center to encourage teachers to add the project to their curriculums.
While there has been overwhelming support for the series, it has also been subject to criticism. Former history professor and Republican party congressman Newt Gingrich tweeted, “a 1619 history of slavery project is great. Insisting that slavery is THE defining reality of America is simply factually wrong”.
On this episode of The Stream we’ll dive into The 1619 Project and ask our panel would the US even be a democracy if not for the efforts of black Americans.
Calls for action after Belgian striker targeted with ‘monkey’ chants as he scored a winning penalty kick at Cagliari.
Inter Milan’s Romelu Lukaku was subjected to racist abuse as he scored a second-half penalty to earn his side a 2-1 victory at Cagliari in Italy‘s Serie A.
The 26-year-old Belgian striker appeared to be the target of “monkey” chants from the home crowd at the Sardegna Arena as he prepared to take the decisive kick on Sunday.
Lukaku sent goalkeeper Robin Olsen the wrong way with 20 minutes remaining to mark his second goal in as many matches for his new club. The former Manchester United striker turned to glare at the home fans responsible for the taunts.
It was the second racist incident at the Sardegna Arena this year.
Inter coach Antonio Conte called for respect at the post-match news conference.
“I need to be honest with you. I was so focused in the game, so I did not listen [to] any chants against Lukaku,” he said on Sunday.
“However, as it happened so many other times, I think in Italy we need to improve a lot. We need to have more education and to have more respect with the people who are working,” he added.
“In other countries you support the team, you don’t insult the opposition like this. There must be the maximum respect.”
Former Juventus forward Moise Kean, who now plays for United Kingdom’s Everton, was also on the receiving end of racial abuse by Cagliari fans at the same stadium last season.
The 19-year-old was also subjected to racist “monkey” chants in April as he scored in Cagliari for his former team. Serie A did not take action over the incident, saying the “certainly reprehensible” chants had “limited” relevance.
Support brave women journalists and human rights defenders working in conflict zones by funding the RAW in WAR Anna Politkovskaya Award 2019!
On 5 October RAW in WAR honours the Anna Politkovskaya Award winners Svetlana Alexievich (2015 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature from Belarus) and Binalakshmi Nepram (a writer and women’s rights activist from Manipur in India) during a live ceremony at LSO St. Luke’s (Barbican) in London
Anna lived a life of courage and truth-telling in the face of grave danger, just like her friend and the first recipient of the Anna Politkovskaya Award, Natalia Estemirova, a Chechen human rights activist and freelance journalist.
15 July 2019 marked the anniversary of the murder of Natalia, who worked in Chechnya for the human rights organization, Memorial. In a ceremony held in 2007, the Women Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, on behalf of RAW in WAR, presented the first annual Anna Politkovskaya Award to Natalia Estemirova, for her courage in seeking and telling the truth about the torture, disappearance and murder of civilians in the war in Chechnya. 10 Years on no one has been brought to justice for the murder of Natalia.
As we remember Natalia Estemirova, and all that she stood for, we are gravely concerned for the safety of yet another woman human rights defender whose life is in danger. Since May 2019, Gulalai Ismail, a courageous Pakistani women’s rights defender and a 2017 Anna Politkovskaya Award winner, has been forced into hiding. On the 10th anniversary of Natalia’s murder, women journalists and human rights defenders, winners of the Anna Politkovskaya Award and women Nobel Peace Laureates, called together for justice for Natalia in a special joint letter in the Washington Post. They also called on the world’s leaders to demand safety for Gulalai and the charges against her to be dropped and to do everything in their power to protect journalists and human rights defenders who, like Gulalai Ismail, work in areas of war and conflict, and who speak out on behalf of the victims.