Month: Apr 2012

More Gays and Lesbians killed and tortured, as Police join in.

Dozens of bodies bludgeoned to death pop up in Baghdad’s dusty streets like the remains of a wreckage on a beach. They are the corpses of homosexuals and followers of the ‘emo’ fashion who dare to break with the strict canons of the Shia orthodoxy in power.

“They crushed his head with a concrete block. His name was Saif Asmar and he was a close friend of mine; tomorrow it could be me”.

Ruby (fake name) can hardly cope with his anger and fear as he holds a photo of his friend, barely recognisable after the brutal murder. Since the beginning of the year, death squads have been targeting gay men as well as those who dress in a distinctive Western-influenced style called ‘emo’.

Ruby talks about a surge in the attacks since Feb. 6 that, according to unofficial sources, has led to the killing of more than 80 homosexuals.

“That day they killed Ahmad Arusa in Sadr City and four other people in Geyara – two Shia neighbourhoods in eastern Baghdad. Earrings, nose rings, tattoos…all those are synonymous with either being homosexual, worshipping the devil or both things at a time,” says this young man who left home a month ago after he was threatened.

 POLICE JOIN IN GAY WITCH HUNT
Colonel Mushtaq Taleb Muhammadawi, director of the community police of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, stated on 6 February that they had observed the so-called Satanists and emos. He added that the police have an official approval to eliminate emo people because of their ‘notorious effects’ on the community.
The colonel declared to Iraq News Network that: ‘Research and reports on the emo phenomenon has been conducted and shared with the Ministry of Interior which officially approves the measures to eliminate them.

‘The Ministries of Education and Interior are taking this issue seriously and we have an action plan to “eradicate them”. I will be leading the project myself and we have the necessary permits to access all schools in the capital,’ added the colonel, thus possibly indicating at the very least Iraqi state complicity with the massacres.
Speaking with Gay Middle East and Gay Star News, 'O', a university student from Baghdad, explained that emo youth are wrongly perceived as gays who worship satan and are also labeled "vampire groups" falsely believed to suck blood from each other’s wrists in their satanic gatherings.O stated: ‘There is no religion that would dictate the killing of those who look different. Even if we credit the ridiculous assumption that emos might be worshiping Satan, the Quran says “you have your religion and I have mine”. There are so many myths around them. They are being killed for being perceived as too feminine and gay.’

It wasn’t a letter on a wall but an email that made Madi (also fake name) run away from her family five weeks back.

“They threatened to tell my family that I am a lesbian if I didn’t leave the country immediately,” recalls this 26-year-old woman in an interview with IPS at an undisclosed location in Baghdad. Apparently, Madi’s fears were far from being groundless.

“Many lesbians die in Iraq at the hands of older brothers. It is yet another ‘honour killing’, a ‘domestic matter’ over which the government will never conduct any investigation.”

London-based NGO Iraqi LGBT estimates that more than 720 gays have been killed in Iraq by extremist militias in the past six years. Madi says she’s lost many close friends.

“Moqtada al-Sadr’s militiamen and Iraqi Security Forces are the most aggressive against us, especially since a fatwa (a ruling in Islamic law) released four years ago said that homosexuals ‘should be executed in the most severe way.’”

Madi says many have been dismembered or burnt alive. She says doctors know the nature of such crimes by the state in which the bodies arrive. IPS has confirmed such claims with doctors who preferred to remain anonymous.

The Americans have come and gone, leaving half a million dead and their companies in the Oilfields. Under Sadaam  at least there were basic services, education and jobs, and the police controlled religious fanatics. This is the middle ages. this is predator capitalism gone mad.

EMO movement targetted

Emo, short for emotional or emocore is a US originated hardcore punk-rock music that appeared in the 80s attracting mostly teenagers. According to a report by a local LGBTQ activist the first murder occurred on 6 February in Sadr City district in Baghdad, the last was reported on 7 March of two female victims in their 20s from Shaab district of Baghdad.

Moral panic has been stirred up by militias about emo youth for the last year, alleging they are adulterers, Satanists, vampires and sexually depraved.

  MORE INFO HERE http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/100-killed-iraq-gay-and-emo-massacre090312

HELP TAKE ACTION HERE http://www.iglhrc.org/cgi-bin/iowa/article/pressroom/pressrelease/1499.html

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Migrant stories from Fortress Italy

63 Libyan migrants 'left to die' 
The Council of Europe found that a "catalogue of errors" by Nato and coastguards resulted in the deaths of 63 refugees sailing in a small boat from Libya last May.

Only nine people on board survived after the craft drifted in open seas for two weeks. Two Nato ships nearby failed to respond to distress calls, and no country launched a rescue mission, the council said. It concluded there were many opportunities to rescue the survivors.

It’s spring, and while most of us are already organising our summer holidays, some people have very different journeys in mind. In Northern Africa, migrants from all over the continent try to reach the Sicilian coast by any means. Crowds of men, women and children leave in little boats at the mercy of the sea, without knowing whether they’ll get to the other side alive. A few days ago an inflatable boat with more than 50 people on board was rescued in the Sicilian Channel just before sinking due to a broken engine. It was coming from Lybia, and it’s not the only one. Another boat was rescued south of the island of Lampedusa – renamed “The New Alcatraz” for its infamous detention centre. The Maltese authorities hadn’t done anything about it because it carried “illegal immigrants”. Many more boats have been sighted, some rescued, some left to their destiny: a story so common we’ve got used to it.

For those who make it to Sicily hoping to build a new life, hell begins: most of them get locked up in detention centres, waiting to be identified by the Italian authorities, and in most cases, eventually deported back to their countries of origin. The conditions people endure in detention centres can be compared to those of Nazi concentration camps. In one centre, the local authorities decided to bury 5 people in a mass grave with no marker.

Recently, a Tunisian man who was to be deported threw himself from the deck of the boat in Palermo’s docks and ended up in hospital with serious injuries. The newspapers talked of a “tragic accident”, deliberately blind to the truth: he preferred to die rather than to be taken back to his country. In the local detention centre in Pozzallo, a group of Tunisian migrants who had been informed of their imminent deportation, started a hunger strike and other protests against the guards of the centre. They were immediately moved to a different centre and then deported anyway. The newspapers are full of stories like these, that people read as if they were soap operas, without realising the protagonists of these stories are real people, flesh and bone like us.

In the meantime, a little the boat that NATI 'forgot'.beacon of hope sparkles for people born in Italy from migrant parents. Two Bosnian brothers had been locked up in a detention centre in Modena to pay for the “mistakes” made by their parents: they’d lost their job and consequently their permit. The children, then still minors, had become “illegal” and had eventually been locked up with their parents.

The brothers were finally released a few weeks ago, after the judge decided that children of migrants, who are born in Italy, cannot be imprisoned in detention centres. The sentence didn’t go unnoticed by right-wing parties: Maroni, from the Northern League, defined it a “crazy decision”, and Bertolini, from Berlusconi’s People of Freedom, painted the justice system as a tool in the hands of the lefties, accusing the judge of bypassing the decisions made by the Parliament.

This sentence is but a grain of sand, but it’s a beginning, a domino that didn’t fall as planned. While some politicians keep referring to people locked up in detention centres as “guests”, we will keep calling these centres what they really are: concentration camps.

Inspiration for this article: here http://www.infoaut.org/and herehttp://www.infoaut.orgAn ever interesting blog to read about migration in the Mediterranean is Fortress Europe http://fortresseurope.blogspot.co.uk/ (now available in several languages).

Reblogged with thanks from http://italycalling.wordpress.com

 

 

Fossil Fools Awards 2012 + save planet campaign

by Jeff Mann, Energy Action Coalition

TransCanada CEO Russ Girling wins Top Fossil Fool of the 1% award (Fossil Fools Day 2012)http://www.wearepowershift.org/

The votes are in, the ballots are counted, and we are excited to announce the winners of this year’s Fossil Fools Day awards!

And now, the moment you have been waiting for: taking home top honors for Biggest Fossil Fool of the 1% is [envelope, please]… TransCanada CEO Russ Girling!
http://www.wearepowershift.org/blogs/transcanada-ceo-russ-girling-takes-home-award-top-fossil-fool
Russ Girling wins this prize for his starring role in the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline project. This is his first Fossil Fools nomination. We tried to contact Mr. Girling to congratulate him on his victory, but were informed he was busy poisoning communities across the continent, so we are accepting this award on his behalf.

Share the trophy on Facebook to congratulate Russ Girling and Transcanada!http://on.fb.me/FossilFoolAwards



It was a close vote, and the runners up will not go away empty handed. We are proud to award “Top Fossil Fool in a Supporting Role” to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan for his performance as #1 financier of the U.S. coal industry, and “Top Special Effects” goes to Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, for the flaming tap water and earthquakes caused by his advocacy for shale gas fracking.

Now that we’ve chosen the Top Fossil Fools, it’s time to take action!

In the month of April we will launch creative nationwide actions and online campaigns to expose these Fossil Fools to the the world. These corporate polluters are some of the biggest in the world, so we’re going to need a lot of people to come together to take them on.

Sign up here and share this with a friend to ask them to join you in action!http://www.wearepowershift.org/fossilfools

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Occupy make fare free subway in NY

Occupy Wall Street Affiliates Chain Subway Gates Open For Fare Strike

Village Voice  A group calling itself the “Rank and File Initiative” claimed credit yesterday for opening up more than 20 subway stations throughout the city for free entry.

Chaining open emergency gates at stations on the F, L, R, Q, 3, and 6 lines during rush hour yesterday morning, the anonymous activists posted signs designed to resemble MTA service-change announcements that read “Free Entry, No Fare. Please Enter Through The Service Gate.”

This morning before rush hour, teams of activists, many from Occupy Wall Street, in conjunction with rank and file workers from the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Amalgamated Transit Union, opened up more than 20 stations across the city for free entry. As of 10:30 AM, the majority remain open. No property was damaged. Teams have chained open service gates and taped up turnstiles in a coordinated response to escalating service cuts, fare hikes, racist policing, assaults on transit workers’ working conditions and livelihoods — and the profiteering of the super-rich by way of a system they’ve rigged in their favor.

The release cites Albany’s chronic underfunding of public transit, which has led the MTA to borrow heavily just to maintain its operating budget — debt which must be serviced in part with transit fares that have gone up 50 percent over the last decade.

“This means Wall Street bondholders receive a huge share of what we put into the system through the Metrocards we buy and the taxes we pay,” the press statement reads. “More than $2 billion a year goes to debt service, and this number is expected to rise every year. If trends continue, by 2018 more than one out of every five dollars of MTA revenue will head to a banker’s pockets.”

Last night we spoke with a representative of the Rank And File Initiative, who wished to remain anonymous. He told us that teams set out in the early hours of yesterday morning, disguising their identities, to lock open gates at roughly 25 stations.

“It was three or four people to each station, so you can do the math of how many people were directly involved,” he said. Not every team was successful — one dispatched to a Bronx subway station had to abort their mission — “But everyone came safely back without getting caught, which was our first priority.”

A press release claiming credit for the action said it was carried out by activists affiliated with Occupy Wall Street, as well as by rank-and-file members of Transit Workers Union Local 100, which is currently in negotiations with the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Occupy’s public face is beginning to show itself more and more as spring carries on. The lack of a physical occupation site made it difficult for the movement to wage a public relations campaign, but it was never hibernating. Occupiers were hard at work, canvassing in low-income outer-borough neighborhoods, organizing Town Squares, preparing for their spring offensive, dealing with internal trauma and organizational difficulties, and waging policy reform initiatives like Occupy the SEC. These signs point to growing, not waning movement, and suggest that the American Autumn may become an entire year of consistent critique and political action.

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