Tag Archives: human rights

We are all Kelly Thomas

Kelly Thomas was a 37 year old homeless man who suffered from schizophrenia. On July 5, 2011, Thomas was brutally beaten to death by three police officers in Fullerton, California. Despite his repeated cries begging for mercy, calling out to God to save him and for his father, and apologizing to the officers over and over, they continued to beat him until he was completely unrecognizable and unconscious. This can clearly be seen in video and audio surveillance as well as through numerous testimonies of eye witnesses. Thomas never regained consciousness and succumbed to his injuries five days later in the hospital. Despite all of this, Thomas’s killers were acquitted.(1)

(A photo showing the head injuries Kelly Thomas sustained from the police assault. He was hospitalized, and died five days later having never regained consciousness. Source:KTLA)

Were this an isolated case, outrage at such behavior would most likely be projected primarily at the officers and their blatant violation of the role they play in society. But this is not an isolated case. Incidents of gross overreach of police power, malfeasance and excessive force, and extreme violence emerge daily. This, coupled with the burgeoning prison and surveillance industrial complex, which is increasingly becoming privatized, and an immoral and untenable “War on Drugs” which really amounts to a war on the poor and people of color, creates a situation that in most nations would raise the specter of a police state.(2) In reality, the officers in this case did not violate the conduct expected of them or the rule of law in their role as police officers. On the contrary, they fulfilled them.

In a spate of State and Federal Supreme Court cases the courts have come down almost unequivocally on the side of the police. In most states the police do not have any obligation to protect a citizen from harm.(3) At the federal level, the SCOTUS has enshrined the right of police departments to conduct strip searches for any arrest.(4) Statistically, there has been a sharp increase in the use of SWAT teams to address what most would consider to be non-violent drug offenses. When we consider the concurrent trend of police departments acquiring military equipment, including armored tanks, this increased use of SWAT as the preferred method of dealing with the public, as vile as it is, makes logical sense.(5)

Perhaps what is most troubling about the rise of police and state brutality is the seeming complacency of the public. The invasive practices of the TSA at airports, the codification of the NDAA indefinite detention of American citizens without the requirement of due process, or the Constitutional infringements by the NSA aside, it was the effective lockdown of a major US city following the Boston Marathon bombing that was most indicative of this. Tanks rolled freely down leafy, suburban streets while residents were marched at gunpoint down sidewalks with hands placed firmly on their heads. Yet despite the fact that the police had little to do with the capture of an injured, bleeding 19 year old, the media, politicians and many ordinary citizens normalized and even applauded the draconian measures taken.(6)

(Armored vehicles roll down a street in Boston. Source: Associated Press)

Cajoled by a lapdog, corporate media into accepting our situation as necessary, or even desirable, and marrying it to the government’s spurious, grossly inflated and unending, global “War on Terror,” the general public is chided as at best unpatriotic and, at worst, reckless anarchists or terrorist sympathizers should they object to the increasing incursions into civil rights and liberties. The attacks on 9/11 created an atmosphere which favors totalitarianism wherever the opaque concept of “security” is threatened. (7ab)

Cases like Kelly Thomas, or Keith Vidal, a teenager who also suffered from schizophrenia whom police fatally shot to death in front of his parents for carrying a screw driver(8), or the state troopers that fired several rounds into a minivan filled with children (9) beg us to look at this grave situation with unwavering urgency. The numerous men and women who have endured invasive body searches, including vaginal and anal probing, at routine traffic stops(10), or the countless dehumanizing “stop and frisk” incidents in cities across the country (11), or the scores of young people spirited away to prison from high school (12), or the violent, organized crackdowns on the Occupy movement (13) illustrate the rising tide of state animus against the public, and particularly any kind of behavior they view as anti-social, a threat to property or dissent. Unchecked power, unprecedented since the Civil Rights Era and the Anti-war protests in the 1970s, has created a state that is growing more belligerent by the day.

(NYPD officers assault protester at Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Source: Reuters)

The tragic case of Kelly Thomas illustrates how poverty, homelessness, under-employment and mental illness have become criminal offenses. Indeed, the gutting of social programs, including those services for the mentally ill, has seen a concurrent rise in state brutality toward the poor and the most vulnerable. And as the economy is perpetually poised for the next bubble to burst, the gap between the super rich and devastatingly poor grows, and climate change ravages an environment already fragile from excessive exploitation, the prison industry will undoubtedly gain more ground and the militarization of the police will most certainly expand.

If there is no public outcry and substantive change, the United States will end up looking more like one of the foreign dictatorships that it has for so long upheld and supported through overt and nefarious means, indistinguishable from it in its ruthlessness. Callous disregard and utter contempt for the very elements that make a society civil will be codified and enshrined. Because to a state with no restraint or respect for human life and no due process to speak of, we are all Kelly Thomas, and in the end we are bound to share his tragic fate.

(Photo credit: Reuters)

Kenn Orphan 2014

(photo on top is of Kelly Thomas. Source: CBSNEWS)

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/officers-acquitted-in-death-of-kelly-thomas/2014/01/14/3e660b24-7d24-11e3-95c6-0a7aa80874bc_story.html
2. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/american-society-police-state-criminalization-militarization
3. http://disinfo.com/2010/03/the-police-arent-legally-obligated-to-protect-you/
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/us/justices-approve-strip-searches-for-any-offense.html?pagewanted=all
5. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/swat-team-nation.html
6. http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/funkhouser/col-boston-marathon-bombing-police-appreciating-public-servants.html
7a. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/01/americas-police-state-marches-on-media-in-tow/
b. http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/spotlight-on-police-violence-fails-to-illuminate/
8. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine-francolini/candles-are-lit_b_4563593.html.
9. http://www.krqe.com/news/crime/state-cop-shoots-at-minivan-full-of-kids
10. http://www.alternet.org/border-agents-touched-vagina-and-anally-probed-fruitless-search-narcotics
11. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/02/bill-bratton-sworn-in_n_4533202.html
12. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-school-to-prison-pipeline-a-nationwide-problem-for-equal-rights-20131107
13. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy

Genocide in Full View

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“One of the world’s most persecuted minorities,” as the UN puts it, is being systematically murdered by a state that has been lauded for its acceptance of Western economic models, and for opening up to foreign investors. The country is Myanmar and the people being systematically murdered and ethnically cleansed are the Rohingya.
For many years the Rohingya Muslims of Southeast Asia have been brutalized, enslaved and denied citizenship in the nations they have been in for centuries. Many have been forced to flee for their lives to Bangladesh, India or Thailand, only to be turned away and sent back to face persecution and oppression. Today, their very existence is being threatened by powerful reactionary forces and the indifference of the world.

Extremist Buddhist factions backed and aided by the ruling military junta have launched violent attacks on villages, burning them to the ground, sometimes with the inhabitants still in them. Rape and torture are frequently employed tactics by these armed death squads that terrorize the Rohingya in an effort to ethnically cleanse the land. All the while the government of Myanmar, with the silent complicity of Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, has continued a steely silence in the face of their plight.

They all bear direct responsibility for these atrocities, as does the international elite who has been eyeing Myanmar for exploitation of its vast resources for some time. The Rohingya are an inconvenience to them since they stand in the way of enormous profit. Those who have survived the scorched earth policies of the junta often end up in squalid refugee camps scarred, broken and forgotten. Others have been forced out to sea on shabby boats turned away by country after country.

This slow genocide has been happening for years, but the US media has barely taken notice. Perhaps it is because they happen to be Muslim or because Myanmar is fast becoming the latest client state of the global capitalist economic order. The response of the international community might provide an answer to those questions.

The International Monetary Fund, an enduring bastion of colonial era thieves, has recently demanded reforms of the Myanmar government. But not for these crime against humanity. On the contrary. The reforms demanded are for the country’s financial institutions and they are designed to extract even more profit for the global elite from this resource rich country.

The genocide of the Rohingya people is one of the biggest catastrophes of our modern age. Their plight is synonymous with every other struggle against oppression and brutality. And the deafening silence of the world to their misery will not ever be forgotten. When we see them we should very well see ourselves. Because like the Rohingya we all stand in the way of the profit of the few and powerful. Their struggle is in every way our own.

Kenn Orphan 2014

Ecology of Hopelessness and Despair

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There has been a lot of coverage in the US media regarding the kidnapping of three Israeli teenage settlers who were abducted last week while hitchhiking outside of the occupied city of al-Khalīl (Hebron) in the West Bank. Of course this incident is nothing less than abhorrent and every person of conscience hopes that these boys will be returned safely to their families. But once again the egregious bias that the US media displays in covering incidents like this in Gaza and the West Bank is rearing its ugly head.

In contrast to the kidnap story, little to nothing was reported about the shooting deaths of two Palestinian teens last month, who were protesting on Nakba Day (the day Palestinians remember the “catastrophe” when they were driven from their homes by Zionist militias in 1948). In fact what little attention it did receive was orchestrated by officials in the Israeli government. Former ambassador Michael Oren was given a prime spot on CNN to throw out repugnant claims including one that suggested the killings were “staged” and that these boys may not even be dead. In fact, the boys were killed and another wounded. And, according to CCTV footage and eyewitness accounts, they appeared to pose no visible danger to anyone. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) immediately claimed that no live fire was used, only rubber bullets. But an autopsy done on one of the boys revealed that this claim was patently false.

Children have become the saddest casualty of the occupation on both sides of the Green Line. Both Israeli and Palestinian children have been maimed or killed by indiscriminate violence. But Palestinian children have suffered far more by the numbers and by the extent of the violence they are subjected to on a daily basis by IDF forces and illegal settlers. According to a recent UN report, Israel has incarcerated thousands of children in the past decade, some as young as 12 years of age, and placed them in a military tribunal system which subjects them to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.” Children have been ripped from their homes in late night raids by the IDF and taken to detention centers far from their families, usually for the offense of throwing stones at army tanks. The report also pointed out that “in no other country are children systematically tried by juvenile military courts that, by definition, fall short of providing the necessary guarantees to ensure respect for their rights.”

All people who care about justice and universal human rights hope for these kidnapped children to be returned safely to their families. But to report about this incident without context is both unjust and reckless. By many accounts Hebron is ground zero for the occupation. Settlers, with protection of the IDF, have been successful at making ordinary Palestinians’ lives a living hell. Scores of people along Shahuda Street, a once thriving thoroughfare in the city, have been literally sealed in their homes, their front doors having been welded shut by the IDF, with the only escape route being their rooftops. Intimidation and attacks from settlers have become the norm and this harassment is committed with impunity. Segregated roadways are enforced by military personnel, with settler roads being the more well maintained and widest. Palestinian children are routinely terrorized on their way to school, often having stones lobbed at them.

It is within this ecology of hopelessness and despair that this tragedy has emerged. It is the product of systemic bigotry, dehumanization and discrimination. It is the offspring of apartheid. And until the entire story is told, justice for all sides will continue to be submerged in a sea of oppressive jingoism and meaningless rhetoric.

Kenn Orphan 2014

(Photograph is of Palestinian children being detained by Israel Defense Forces in Hebron: Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA)

Why Facts Matter

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One of the most vile and surreptitious tactics being used by certain organizations and individuals on the far right of late has been to vilify the LGBTQ community by marrying the duel evils of Holocaust denial and blatant falsehoods. Conservative evangelical preacher Scott Lively, a pseudo-historian, and the notorious hate group the American Family Association have been at the forefront of such efforts. They have been advancing the lie that the Nazis and SS were in fact homosexuals bent on the destruction of civilization.

One must be in awe of such a feat of monumental duplicity especially when one considers that these same people profess an unshakeable belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible. But deceit is not too high a price to pay when you are advancing an agenda of hatred, demonization and cruelty.

No one knows the exact number of gay men who were interred in concentration camps, but it is estimated at being between 10 and 15’000. The death rate was among the highest of any other group after Jews. By many accounts, gays suffered more abuse than any other victims in the camps at the hands of the SS guards, and often by other concentration camp prisoners. They were beaten, forced to work to death in a program called “Extermination through Work”, and suffered through cruel scientific experiments that often resulted in their deaths. Following the liberation of the camps many of these men suffered the further indignity in being imprisoned by the Allied governments that prevailed in the war. And it took decades before there was any official recognition of gay Holocaust victims and survivors.

All of this is historical fact, so it is a curious thing to see a group that identifies itself as morally righteous spread vicious lies about a marginalized and oppressed group of people. But facts are of no use to those with an agenda of repression. Facts are dangerous and ultimately fatal to the ideology of bigotry. So people of conscience must make every effort to expose the lies when they surface, lest they be allowed to fester. Today, these same individuals and groups are spreading their cancerous deception to places like Russia, Uganda and Nigeria, and it is having a disastrous effect.

This is why facts matter. They matter because justice and humanity matter.

Kenn Orphan 2014

(photo is of a group of gay prisoners at Buchenwald and is courtesy of the Jewish Virtual Library)

The United States Has Everything to do with It

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I have often heard it said in this country that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has “nothing to do with us.” Such statements reveal a troubling ignorance that so many Americans have in regard to this and other foreign policy issues. In fact the United States has everything to do with it.

It is the US which has inserted itself into the conflict as being the only foreign agent that can “broker” a peace deal. It is the US that has shut out or suppressed the UN from having any effective voice. It is the US that has emboldened hardliners in Israel to run rip shod over any reasonable and fair settlement by continually declaring itself as an unequivocal supporter of Israel regardless of its human rights abuses and incredible intransigence. It is the US which shapes the language used to describe the issues, the problems and any of the solutions. It is the US which has reinforced a decades long system of apartheid, complete with home demolitions, walls and checkpoints that carve up Palestinian land into what amounts to South African style Bantustans.

The US has looked the other way as Israel built a separate system of justice for Israeli citizens and Palestinians, one more fairer than the other. It has ignored the illegality of the Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and ignored the increasing racist rhetoric and violence emerging from them. It has whitewashed or downplayed a brutal and oppressive military occupation and the indefinite detention and torture of children. And it has justified the creation of the world’s biggest open air prison in Gaza, where punishment is meted out collectively on a captive population through bombings, the use of white phosphorus, indiscriminate shooting of farmers and fishermen, home demolitions and a draconian economic blockade that limits and restricts food, medicine and construction materials.

John Kerry recently expressed a sentiment that, aside from the circus-like histrionics of the US media and both Democratic and Republican politicians, is shared by many prominent Israelis, Palestinians and one former US president. When he said that Israel was on a course toward apartheid he was only incorrect in making such a claim as a potential future. True to form, Kerry capitulated to the “pro-Israel no matter what” fanatics and apologized. But the facts remain. An institutionalized ethnocracy has been allowed to flourish. As in apartheid South Africa, this kind of system grows like a cancer. And it eventually effects all aspects of civil life in society.

Insidiously, the US has perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to suit its own foreign policy objectives as a colonial foothold in the Middle-east. It has continued to support an untenable system because doing so is more advantageous to its neoliberal interests in the entire region. And the recent, momentous failure in the so-called “peace process” should make it clear to everyone, as tensions are at an all time high, that the US has proven itself incapable of being an effective and fair mediator. For the sake of everyone, it is more than past the time for it to remove itself as the sole arbiter of peace.

Kenn Orphan 2014

(Photo: Palestinian child sobbing atop the ruins of his family’s home that was demolished by Israeli bulldozers in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina/AFP )

An Eternal Rebuke

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Often a photograph can convey the emotions and sorrow of life far more poignantly and powerfully than any words can. In this award winning photograph, entitled “Last Touch” by Adem Hadei of the Associated Press, an Iraqi mother embraces her young son fatally shot in Baqouba in 2007. The attention span of the corporate media is egregiously short, much more so with the established political class. They have all moved on from Iraq just as they have done so with Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Indonesia, Libya and every other nation that had the grave misfortune of being the recipient of American “liberation and democracy.”

The hawks in Washington never cease their circling above, salivating for another nation to ruthlessly invade, rape and plunder for profit. But the embrace of this mother and her dying child serve as an eternal rebuke of such follies. Our feckless and soulless leaders be damned. They cannot ever erase the human capacity for selflessness and compassion. Their songs of war are hollow husks of bitterness compared to the chorus of mothers who call us all to look at the faces of their sons and daughters, slain on far flung fields everywhere by the callous whims of imperialism. And their light will far outshine the lust for power and avarice that drive men to madness and endless wars of conquest.

Kenn Orphan 2014

(Photo courtesy of the Associated Press and Picture of the Year International)

The World Bank’s Plan for Water

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The World Bank, perhaps the best example of a “front man” for today’s corporate, capitalistic, economic policies, eagerly promotes and defends the gospel of neoliberal capitalism, which Wikipedia defines as: “privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.” But however it is spun, it is essentially organized crime with an official seal. It takes poor nations, previously colonized, exploited, and enslaved, and says “here, take this impossible loan to pull yourselves out of the impoverishment we imposed on you for centuries, and in return we will allow multinational corporations to take your resources and enslave your people in low wage, sweat shops.”

And water is its next project.

Echoing mission statements of multi-national, mega-corporations, it recently declared that water should be privatized. In other words: owned. Shelter, food, air and water are essential to life. Shelter and food have already been privatized around the planet. Air is still out of reach although they are polluting it as fast as the other three. But water is what they are eying now.

(Coca Cola extracts huge quantities of water in India, often robbing poor communities of their only access. Photo credit: Oxfam)

Water sources around the world are being consumed and polluted by industry at a staggering rate, and communities that suffer from this exploitation seldom have any legal recourse against the offending companies. From Michigan to India to Africa, huge corporations like Coca~Cola and Nestle have bought up aquifers, wells and springs, and have sold back the water they extract in huge quantities to already impoverished communities at a highly inflated rate.

(Boys transport water jugs in South Sudan. Photo credit: Geoff Pugh/Oxfam)

The impact of water, or the lack of it, often spawns or exacerbate conflicts. Syria has suffered for years with an intractable drought; and many attribute the civil war that has claimed thousands of lives to this crisis. If water continues to be privatized we will undoubtedly see this tragedy repeated the world over as poor or disenfranchised populations are forced to relocate to urban areas or neighboring countries. Add to this the other dire ramifications of climate change, and the dust bowl conditions it induces, and the privatization of water becomes just one more banal cruelty inflicted on the poor.

(an Iraqi farmer sits by a trickling stream in Dayala province. Photo:Reuters)

Recent events in Detroit attest to the reality that this battle for human life and dignity is not merely a “third world problem.” Water rights are being assaulted everywhere. In this once thriving American city, it has become a tool of social control. The city has “shut-off” water to thousands of residents due to their inability to afford the exorbitant cost. It has effectively informed the public that it’s “right to life” is only viable insofar as their ability to pay for it. The part that racism plays in all of this is troubling too, as most of the communities targeted are disproportionately people of color. This is all unfolding in the richest nation on the planet; yet the situation has deteriorated so much that the United Nations has been called in to investigate.

The world over, ruthless profiteers have been trying to convince the public that it is natural to attach a dollar sign to everything, including water. For example the former CEO and now-Chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, of Nestle was quoted as saying “access to water is not a public right.” Under their scheme, they aim to own all rights to it, and only the wealthiest will be able to pay the extortionate cost assigned to it.

(A protestor in Detroit, Michigan. Photo credit: Occupy.com)

Whether it is Detroit, Michigan or Nagpur, India, access to clean water should be understood as a fundamental human right. But, like so many other rights, it is being systematically stripped away from us by corporations, industry and their henchmen at the World Bank. All things considered there is one certainty, this issue is destined to become a defining feature of the 21st century, and, perhaps, the most important struggle against this new age of tyranny.

Kenn Orphan 2014

(Photo at top: Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Nestle. Credit: AP)

“Remember me to the negroes…”

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This past year I had the pleasure of traveling through the rolling and verdant hills of Tennessee; and while I was there I visited one of the many plantations that dot the American South. Noble magnolia trees encapsulated the grand brick and white columned building. Statues and fountains festooned its grounds. It was a vision of pastoral beauty and deep traditions.

In touring the inside of the main house our guide regaled us with stories of the old south and of its enduring legacy. Period furniture laced the halls and reception rooms of the main floor and portrait paintings of the white family who originally owned and ran this plantation were carefully hung above each of the many fireplaces.

Then our guide, a polite white woman with a genteel, southern accent, took us to the back of the house. There, in a small room off the kitchen, were black and white photographs of the family and their slaves. In a fashion typical of the time, there was the mistress of the house sitting piously and upright, with hands folded neatly on her lap. Beside her stood her husband, handsome, stoic and dressed in Confederate finery. In the foreground sat two white children, and in the back, an old, black lady in a sullen grey and white dress stood holding a white infant, presumably the child of the master and mistress of the plantation. It was her face I will never forget.

She stood there with a face that was carved from sorrow and hopeless resignation. I could not help but wonder if she herself was forced to give up her own children. In her eyes all of the horrors of the African slave trade were revealed. The beatings, the rapes, the dehumanization, the murders and the abject violence visited upon millions of people, within an economic system of unprecedented exploitation spanning 400 years, stared out at me from that portrait of a land owning, respected southern family.

But our guide did not seem interested in this part of the story. She gave some begrudging attention to my questions about this woman and the other slaves who lived out their lives being treated as property and livestock. At one point, perhaps as a nod to my inquiries, she told of us of a letter the master sent to his wife when he was off fighting in the war. I sat there and listened to her incredulously as she said that he had asked his wife to “remember me to the negroes.” She explained, with pride, that this demonstrated that he cared about their slaves, implying they had a good life there in bondage and forced servitude. I thought, could someone in this day and age seriously have such an utterly sanitized and romanticized vision of this horrific past?
She went on to tell us of how the plantation is currently rented out for weddings and other elegant affairs, presumably without the benefit of forced labor. I was reminded of other halls of cruelty, exploitation and murder, of the concentration camps in Germany or the internment camps created for Japanese citizens during the second World War. Would these places be suitable for well heeled events too?

Surrounded by the opulence of European art and architecture, under the shade of giant magnolia trees, I left there feeling bereft of my humanity.

To be fair, not all plantations in the south paint such rosy and romanticized pictures of slavery. In Florida, I visited just such a plantation. There among the ubiquitous Spanish moss laden trees, far from the main house, stood rows of slave quarters. They had not been restored, but this was for a reason. This plantation did not wish to portray slavery from the glossy and overtly racist Margaret Mitchell point of view. Here the slave quarters stood starkly as sentries, guarding the sacred history of the voiceless slave. The main house was empty of furniture. This was appropriate. No glory or opulence could shield its dark history of pain. The gift store, unlike the one in the Tennessee plantation which was filled with local jams and jellies, was filled with books about slavery, many written by former slaves.
This is the history that needs to be told. It is a history that demands that these plantations be treated as they should, as vestiges to horror and shame. Without emphasis on this hideous brutality the south, and the rest of the nation for that matter, will continue to churn out a persistent racism of the Paula Deen variety. A racism that underpins institutional persecution and justifies the ongoing state violence being perpetrated on black and brown bodies. A racism lost in the fantasy of the happy slave and the honorable slave owner. None such kind ever truly existed except in the minds of the powerful. These plantations should be reviled for the atrocities they housed, not revered in a romanticized mythology. They should be visited with sorrow and solemn remembrance, not with novel, fleeting interest. The ugly and persistent maw of racism deserves this kind of attention and justice.

And the haunting eyes of that nameless slave in a portrait in a plantation in Tennessee should see nothing less.

Kenn Orphan 2013

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