Opinion

By Just Visit Western Sahara, May 26, 2022
https://worldbeyondwar.org/three-u-s-women-human-rights-defenders-depor…

Three US women heading to visit their friends in Boujdour, Western Sahara, were forcibly turned back on May 23rd, when they landed at Laayoune Airport. Twelve men and six women Moroccan agents physically overpowered them and placed them against their will on a plane back to Casablanca. During the scuffle, one of the women’s shirt and bra were pulled up to expose her breasts. In the cultural context of the passengers on the plane, this was a serious form of harassment and violence against women.

Wynd Kaufmyn said of her treatment by the Moroccan forces, “We refused to cooperate with their illegal actions. I repeatedly shouted out on the departing airplane that I wanted to go to Boujdour to visit Sultana Khaya, who has endured torture and rape at the hands of Moroccan agents.

Another terrorist slips into the classroom, into the news.

Does anyone understand this? Even if guns are easily, readily available, why, why, why? I find it impossible even to be angry — it’s hard to be angry under incomprehensible circumstances.

Instead, I find myself imagining George W. Bush giving a speech in which he condemns the latest horrific murders at . . . but instead of saying Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, he blurts out “Iraq.”

The Free Press is proud to announce that a cartoonist we publish, Clayton Jones of Virginia, is the 2022 winner of the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award in Editorial Cartooning. His work was awarded for its "unique style" which is "energetic" using "image and text to comment on larger issues." They stated that his cartoons hit on themes of human rights, imbalance of power and systemic racism. His work can be seen at freepress.org, columbusfreepress.com and our Facebook pages. 

"Winners of the 2022 RFK Journalism Awards were selected in student and professional categories from over 350 entries across print, broadcast, and new media categories, encapsulating some of the most exemplary reporting from the past year," PR Newswire reported.

Lost in the attention accorded to the flurry of right-wing Republican legislatures’ passing and governors’ signing blatantly partisan and extralegal redistricting bills—and, in a growing number of states, both state and federal courts ruling them unconstitutional—is “the great state of Ohio.” In North Carolina, for example, the State Supreme Court not only rule legislative redistricting unlawful, but instituted more constitutional maps. As I follow the incessant “shenanigans” (the much too soft and legally irrelevant word of the Columbus Dispatch [Editorial Board, “Our view: While your groceries go up”]) of the politically biased State Redistricting Commission. Not “shenanigans,” these are violations of the U.S. Constitution and state law. They constitute a unique and so far highly successful path of obfuscation and voter suppression.

The stage is set

Our first volume of the Ohio Migration Anthology, “Far From Their Eyes,” was a huge success! Check out some of our media coverage and pick up your copy here.

Last year the Columbus Free Press republished a chapter from the first volume of the incredible and harrowing survivor tale of Bol Aweng, who now lives in Hilliard. Aweng, an artist among other talents, is one of the “Lost Boys of the Sudan.”

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance is publishing Volume 2 in 2023. Learn more in our FAQs below and submit your contributions for consideration here. 

The deadline for submission is January 2, 2023. This is a competitive selection process, so read the guidance below to have the best chance of being chosen for Ohio Migration Anthology, Volume 2.

The real Founders of American society were not the 55 rich white male interlopers who staged a coup d’etat in 1787-9 … and whose misogynist progeny have always wanted to ban abortion.

Our true Original Founders were the Indigenous matriarchs who ran most of America for thousands of years before the first whites set foot here.

For tens of centuries they controlled their pregnancies by herbal means. The idea that any government (tribal or otherwise) could rule a woman’s uterus would evoke disbelief and contempt from men and women alike.

In fact most North American tribes were run by women. The chieftains were commonly male. But they were chosen and could be removed at will by the matriarchs, who ran the homes and gardens, raised the children and made the major decisions about the future of the tribe.

As one Indigenous matriarch has explained, the men were allowed to be chiefs because “it makes them feel important and it gives them something to do.”

There were indeed tribes where men dominated. For many white “Christian” historians, the idea that females ran any society remains impossible to comprehend.

Over half of young trans people have contemplated suicide. Now up to a third of us could lose the care that’s been proven to prevent it.

In states across the country, small-minded lawmakers are pushing cruel, vicious new bills targeting transgender children.

These bills threaten to ban everything from medical care to even acknowledging the existence of trans people in the classroom. Many threaten parents and medical providers with prosecution. And all of them put the lives of young trans people at risk.

If these laws had been passed when I was transitioning, I might not be alive today.

As a trans student in middle school, I was dehumanized. I endured harassment, abuse, and physical violence for which I was the one punished. Even worse, my school responded to my coming out with harmful new policies.

For example, I was banned from the bathrooms. Instead of using the girls’ room near my classrooms, I had to go down two flights of stairs, across an open courtyard, into another school building, and all the way to the end of another building to use the nurse’s office bathroom.

They’re coming for me!

Sounds like a horror movie on permanent rewind through the brain, through the soul. Catch your breath, buy a gun. What other choice do you have? It’s called, among other things, “white replacement theory” — but my sense is that the fear itself (fear of God-knows-what) comes first. When it finds a name, what a sense of relief that must be: knowing who the enemy is, where the enemy lives. Now you can go to war.

Killing ten people at a grocery store — killing fifty people at two mosques—isn’t murder. It’s healing.

I take a deep breath. Violence is situation normal, not just in the United States but across much of the planet. Often the violence is simply an abstraction, a.k.a., war, which is always, always necessary when we’re the ones who wage it, and the people we kill, including the children, are simply collateral damage. But war always comes home, where the victims are fully human . . . if they actually make the news.

There have been countless productions of William Shakespeare’s masterpiece King Lear, since it premiered circa 1606 at London’s Globe Theatre. The Bard reportedly wrote the lead role for his troupe’s top tragedian, Richard Burbage, but since then many stage and screen stalwarts have portrayed the title character, including Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellan, Al Pacino and but of course, Orson Welles. The first motion picture iteration was lensed by 1909, a 16-minute silent film starring William V. Ranous.

A variety of countries and ethnicities have tackled Lear. The veteran Soviet helmer Grigoriy Kozintsev’s (who co-directed the 1926 adaptation of Gogol’s novel The Overcoat, 1929’s Paris Commune drama The New Babylon and 1964’s Hamlet) final film was a version of Lear made in 1970. In 1974 African American actor James Earl Jones starred in a small screen version that was broadcast by PBS’ Great Performances series. In 2018 the TV movie The Yiddish King Lear was aired, and so on.

So what’s left to say about this oft-produced Shakespearian tragedy?

The assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, while she was covering an Israel Defense Force incursion in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, has sent shock waves throughout the world. Shireen was a well-known and respected reporter for Al-Jazeera. She and three other reporters were pinned down by Israeli snipers. She was wearing a helmet and press jacket that clearly identified her as a PRESS when Israeli forces shot her in the face. Another Palestinian journalist, Ali al-Samoudi, was shot in the back, but is reportedly in stable condition.