Alternatives International

Shia in Saudi Arabia: A History of Discrimination, Oppression

Samia Constantin — 2016-08-01T17:12:21Z

The relationship between Saudi Sunni and Shia has always been characterized by conflict. Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia are a minority group that account for 10 to 15 percent of the population in a mainly Sunni country. The Shia communities in Saudi Arabia are mostly concentrated in the Eastern Province, where the population is estimated at 33 per cent.

Since the 1980s, the nature of the conflict transition from military confrontation to the Saudi Shia's movement for equal rights and affirmation of their culture. (Al Rasheed 1998). Saudi Shias are working establish their community in a Sunni society that punishes their religious expression, limits their political participation and civil liberties, and deprives them of economically prosperity (Al Rasheed 1998).

Discrimination embedded in Saudi domestic policy

The Sunni government has imposed multiple constraints on the Shia community. It is very difficult to obtain a license for a Shia mosque, and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs does not fund Shia clerics. Various Shia religious practices are often forbidden and punished, such as the celebration of Maulid Al-Nabi or Ashura. Shia religious expression has to fall within the limits of Sunni interpretation of Islam, and must be celebrated accordingly.

Saudi Shias are underrepresented in court rulings, government departments and agencies, administrations, public universities and schools, police departments, and in most Saudi industries. A glass ceiling exists for Shias in every sector of Saudi Arabia.

The Sunni and Shia conflict is embedded in Saudi Arabia's social and religious norms. The Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom analyzed multiple textbooks from the Saudi Ministry of Education used in Islamic studies for elementary and secondary students. The report concludes that the textbooks “promote an ideology of hatred toward people, including Muslims, who do not subscribe to the Wahhabi sect of Islam,” the foundation of the state's political and social ideology.

The Saudi government denies the validity of this report. Abdel al-Jubeir, a Saudi Embassy spokesman, told The Freedom House that “we have reviewed our educational curriculums. We have removed materials that are inciteful or intolerant towards people of other faiths.”

Ironically, Saudi Arabia calls on the international community to criminalize any act or symbolic discrimination against Islam. The government has called upon various Western Head of States, cartoonists, and journalists to curb any representation and mockery of Islam while continuing to systematically discriminate against fellow Muslims and other non-Muslims.

Shia denied Hajj pilgrimage

Both Sunni and Shia Muslims share the same five pillars of Islam, the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, Ramadan, the prayer, Chahada, and Zakat. However, Saudia Arabia has forbidden Shia Muslims to perform the sacred Hajj pilgrimage. Starting in 2015, Shia had to complete an application to perform the Hajj and identify themselves as Sunni or Shia. If individuals refused to identify, they were not allowed in Mecca. In 2016 and following the tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia, both countries have failed to negotiate an agreement regarding the pilgrimage of Shia Iranians to the Hajj in Mecca. The tension between Sunni and Shia has led to the politicization of the holiest cities for Muslims.

The 2016 Islamic pilgrimage was the target of a suicide bomber, killing four security officer in Medina. This attack took place after two other suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia; one near the US embassy in Jeddah, the other outside a Shia mosque in Qatif. Earlier that year, another attack targeted a Shia mosque in Al-Ahsa and killed four people, injuring 18 others. ISIL claimed responsibility for these attacks and has continued to target Shia communities across the Middle East.

Shia Crescent threatens Sunni power

Violence towards Shia Muslims across the Middle East has intensified since the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 — where 66 per cent of the population is Shia — and the 2010 Arab Spring.

The Iranian Revolution led to the creation of a strong Shia nation, influencing other Shia communities across the Middle East. In Iraq, the State of Law Coalition, a Shia political party, came to power and won a parliamentary majority in the face of Sunni political and military power. The Arab Spring further intensified conflicts between Sunni and Shia in countries like Syria, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. These victories have reinforced the Shia Crescent between Iran, Iraq, Alawite-dominated Syria, and the Shia group Hezbollah in Lebanon, and have also emphasized the presence of Shia minorities in Kuwait, Yemen, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

The Shia Crescent and Iran's growing political influence, however, threatened the statute of Saudi Arabia as the great power in the region and multiplied religious clashes within Saudi Arabia.

In 2009, the tension between Sunni and Shia communities intensified. The year was marked by conflict between Shia pilgrims and Saudi religious police in Medina, by arbitrary arrests of Shia protesters, arrests of religious leaders in Ahsa', and the closing of Shia communal space for payers in Khobar.

The Journal Global Security affirms that, from 2010 to 2015, around 27 Saudi Shia were killed and 200 were injured as a result of sectarian clashes. 2016 already witnessed multiple terrorist attacks on Shia communities around the Middle East, and the intensification of a Cold War between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Violence continues into 2016

In the first half of 2016, four Shia worshippers have been killed suicide bomb and gun attacks in eastern Saudi Arabia. Attacks the Imam Rida mosque wounded 18 people. Saudi Arabia has already executed 47 people, including Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Al-Nimr was the main figure of the opposition movement in the Saudi Easter Province and allied himself with Iran. In 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, Al-Nimr encouraged Shia protest in Saudi Arabia and demanded equal rights for Shia communities. Saudi security forces retaliated by shooting and killing over 25 young Shia protesters. His execution led to protests in Tehran, and harsher diplomatic tensions between the two countries after the Saudi Embassy was set on fire in Iran.

Shia communities are the first targets of attacks across the Middle East, and dozens are killed every month in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia has created a dangerous situation for Shia Muslim within its territory. But ISIL's recent attacks on Shia mosques is new territory for Saudi Arabia: whither the security measures protect Shia communities within the Saudi territory against foreign attacks? Amnesty International calls upon Saudi Arabia for the protection of their Shia minority: “the Saudi Arabian authorities must take immediate steps to protect the country's Shia Muslim minority from sectarian violence and put an end to decades of systematic discrimination”.

The Deputy Director at Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme reported to Amnesty International that “unless the Saudi Arabian authorities are transparent about the investigations they are carrying out into these atrocities, and unless they take serious and effective steps to end discrimination and advocacy of hatred against the Shia, it will fuel perceptions that they are looking the other way while sectarian tensions and violence against Shia intensify”.

Additional Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/05/sunni-shia-why-conflict-more-political-than-religious-sectarian-middle-east

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/04/sunni-shia-sectarianism-middle-east-islam

http://www.jstor.org/stable/195850?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/gulf/sa-shia.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/02/suadi-arabia-cleric-execution-unrest-predicted-shia-areas

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/07/saudi-official-calls-on-international-community-to-criminalize-criticism-of-islam

I Am Human

Yusur Al Bahrani — 2016-08-01T17:07:59Z

The aroma of hookah smoke pierces the air and finds its way to me as I walk down one of Amman's most traditional streets in Al-Balad, or Down Town. I follow a smell that leads me to stairs. After a long day, climbing a few stairs is not what I want to do. But I climb the crooked old stairs to find my destination: a café, the source of the good smell.

“Where would you like to sit?” the waiter asks me.

“I want a spot in the balcony where I can see people outside,” I answer.

He walks me to a nice spot. I sit on a chair facing the busy street and I order my favourite hot drink, sahlab, and hookah. I hear the noise and conversations of people: those in the café and walking in the street. The market is busy, it's the place where tourists and even Jordanians buy local products, especially dresses, jewelry and arts.

As I stare outside, I feel something is missing. There are no accessible spaces on this beautiful street. And the only way enter this café is to take the stairs. Amman has few accessible places and I haven't seen any of them yet. Throughout my visit, I hardly find a single person in a wheelchair. People with disabilities are marginalized and face immense challenges. Like in any other segment of the community, women and girls are the most affected by marginalization. But I met some of the warriors who are determined to fight back.

“As women with disabilities, if we don't make our voices heard, no one is going to listen to us,” Asia Yaghi told me.

Yaghi enters the room, on her wheel chair. She drives every morning to the I am Human Society, which she leads, to advocate for the rights of people with disabilities. She introduces herself, filled with enthusiasm and passion despite her recent tragedy: she lost her family in a car accident. Her smile and laughter makes me unaware, or forgetful, of her grief. In a country where there are hardly any accessible places — offices, schools or even entertainment spots — Yaghi is determined to politically, socially and economically empower women with disabilities.

Yaghi is finely dressed, as usual, and she tells me about the awareness programs that her team are working on. I am Human asks street vendors to remove boxes thrown on the street pavement make the vendor and street more accessible. The group also makes employers in banks and public service buildings aware of how to turn their offices into accessible spaces for all. “We made them aware that we exist and we have to exist,” says Yaghi.
Layla Nabhan introduced me to Yaghi at an event. Nabhan is a leading active member at the I am Human Society and is currently pursuing Masters in Human Rights. During the event she greeted me, smiling.

“Would you like to meet Asia?” she asked while searching YouTube on my phone to show me videos of Yaghi hosting a show on national Ro'aya TV about the rights of disabled people in Jordan. During the event, people, especially women, surrounded Yaghi. I didn't get a chance to talk to her.

Yaghi and her team travel to several parts of Jordan and reach out to people in rural areas. They are determined to counter the mainstream ableism reinforced by stigma and taboos, especially around women and girls. Women and girls with disabilities face discrimination, even within their families.

Yaghi recalls a story that left an impact on her. One of the women in an awareness program complained about her daughter's hygiene, worrying she was less of a “lady” than other girls. Yaghi argues that some families do not treat the girls with disabilities in the same way as their other children, who have childbearing prospects. Later, that same family blames their daughter for not meeting societal expectations.

Yaghi now faces a challenge: political empowerment of disabled women. In a country with low political representation of women as elected parliamentarians and other positions, Yaghi is determined to make sure that women with disabilities have their voice heard. I am Human Society has provided training to its members, equipping women with the skills to be political leaders.

I met two of I am Human's members, who have been working with I am Human to run for elected office: Nabhan and Shireen Hussien. Hussein lip-reads while I ask her questions. She has a Master's in Education, and vows that if she is elected to be a parliamentarian, she will make the educational and learning systems more accessible for people with special needs. Nabhan to travel the world will and work on promoting “the independent living of women.”

“She is 30 or 40 years old and she still depends on her parents or brother. I will help women to live independently,” says Nabhan with a smile.

Putting words on paper and raising awareness are great steps towards I am Human's goal: smashing ableism that hinders women and men with disabilities from living their lives independently. However, in a country restricted by gender biased cultural norms and laws, ending discrimination against women with disabilities appears to be mission impossible. Despite that, women at I am Human Society are filled with the hope that one day they will be represented in the parliament.

Yaghi hopes her “optimism and love” will help her enact change in this world and lead others at I am Human Society to believe in themselves.

This Project was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Ottawa, Canada.

In Defence of Sympathy: VR, Empathy, and Real-World Storytelling

Chelsea Barnett — 2016-08-01T17:05:41Z

From July 15th to 17th, TIFF Bell Lightbox showcased a virtual reality (VR) exhibition entitled POP 02: VR + Empathy + Real-World Storytelling. It was the second in a three-part immersive media pop-up installation series, which culminates with a forth at Canada's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). POP 02 took as its locus VR's potentiality in the documentary genre.

“For POP 02 we were looking for projects and experiences that leveraged the power of VR to place viewers in the scene of an event or in the middle of a time, space and place to engage with them emotionally,” said Jody Sugrue, Director of Digital Studio at TIFF, in an email to Alternatives. My experience of the exhibition evoked a complicated emotionality indeed.

Within a matter of minutes, POP 02 transported me from the prosaic normalcies of a twelve-year-old Syrian refugee's daily routine in the Zaatari camp in Jordan in Gabo Arora and Chris Milk's “Clouds over Sidra” (2015), to a US penitentiary in the Guardian News & Media's “6x9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement” (2016) where I myself was the inmate faced with the psychological torment utilized by the contemporary prison industrial complex.

Next, I found myself in the separate living rooms of two grieving mothers palming a portrait of each respective dead child. The first home was along Canada's Highway 16 where nine indigenous women have gone missing or were found murdered in a 17 year period, an incidence explored in CBC Radio's The Current and Secret Location's world premiere of “Highway of Tears” (2016). The second in the Gaza Strip, where crumbling infrastructure reminds of the perilous existence of occupied Palestinian life in “My Mother's Wings” (2016) by Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz.

In both instances, I had to break the mothers' gaze to relieve my discomfort, turning instead to the domestic intimacies of their living quarters. Each time I looked away, I faced failure as the focus in the room wouldn't shift from the foreground to the background, or the wall began to warp as I swivelled in my lounge chair. I was instantly reminded that I was in a gallery, watching cinema, despite the absence of the screen.

I found my VR experience to be profoundly disturbing, but not in the way one might imagine. None of these stories were particularly new to me. Yet, what was revealed in the moments of formal rupture was a frightening voyeurism. For the first time, I was not engaging with these narratives for information, I was participating in them for entertainment.

When I asked Surgue about the decision to recall ‘empathy' in the titling of the exhibit, she explained that “one of the things that VR does really well is create an amplified sense of empathy. It takes the viewer into a space they might not ordinarily find themselves and creates a stronger connection that they can feel rather than simply reading it in a headline.” Although I agree with Surgue's evaluation of VR's affective potential, is all empathy inherently good? Why is it that I need more than a headline to register another's suffering? Why must I, the privileged gallery goer, directly experience a marginalized condition – beit displacement, incarceration, colonization, or annexation – to believe it worthy of change?

These questions alert us to some futuristic concerns of a now burgeoning cinematic form, which takes visual immersion as its mode of aestheticization. However, immersion is not new to the realm of politicized art practice. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles has built a career on submerging her audience within the traces of political struggle. In her piece “En el Aire” (2003), Margolles use humidifiers to vaporize the water used to wash the anonymous women's corpses claimed in the Mexican Cartel conflict, filling the gallery with a heavy residue of murder ignored. The marginalized bodies of these dead women literally become a part of the gallery goer as the women claimed by political corruption and inequity settle in the viewer's lungs and coalesce in dewy beads on the skin. Of Margolles work, Feminist media scholar and art critic Krista Lynes writes that “the intimate proximity of bodily fluids in the gallery space demands response and accountability across transnational dimensions of social life.” In their experience of visceral repulsion conjured by “En el Aire”, the (Western) viewer is made complicit and thus culpable for these women's deaths. It is here that the call to response and accountability in Margolles work differs from that of VR: where “En el Aire” implicates the gallery goer in the contested space of Mexico and its American border, the works presented at POP 02 offer a participatory immersion that promised a empathetic orientation exonerating any associative guilt, which paradoxically produces a distance between the viewer and those “out there” actually experiencing political conflict. Human rights violations are made palpable, and bleeding-heart lefties use their appreciate for the arts to feign belief that they understand.

By erasing the screen, VR gives the illusion of empathy. But empathy is relational, empathy is mutual. When I sit with a grieving mother produced by the bulky headset I've donned, it is easy to believe that a relationality is there between us. However, true mutuality doesn't exist in the gallery. It can't exist until it manifests in my vote, my spending, and my activism. Sympathy gets a bad wrap; we're taught to conflate it with pity. But these two words are not synonyms. Sympathy is what's at stake when we can never truly understand the positionality of the other, but we are compassionate, we are trying to comprehend, and we are turning this thought into action. All hope is not lost for the ethical use of VR in documentary practice, but perhaps it's potential is merely sympathetic.

Following the precedent set by Margolles, TIFF too has announced programming for 2017 that forwards tactical immersion in Indigenous art practice. While POP 02 raised some productive queries, a recently announced VR exhibition entitled 2167 seems highly promising. As Canada celebrates its 150th colonial birthday, TIFF has teamed up with imagineNATIVE, Pinnguaq, and Initiative for Indigenous Futures to invite six Indigenous artists to create a VR project set 150 years into the future. Contrasted to the journalistic project “Highway of Tears” mentioned earlier, which posits the viewer as an empathetic character in the colonial violence that has resulted in the present epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, the Indigenous futurities of 2167 creates space to dislocate the centrality of the settler viewer in an immersive political imaginary of the future. Sympathetic viewing should not aim to explicate the other, rather it should challenge the viewer's conception of the self.

POP 03: VR + Experimental Film will be on display at TIFF Bell Lightbox from August 19 to 21, 2016, and check out the Toronto International Film Festival from September 8 to 18th for more POP VR. 2167 is scheduled to debut the the TIFF Bell Lightbox in June 2017 and at imagineNATIVE Film and Media Festival in October 2017.

WSF in Montreal and the Relevance of the Social Forum Process

Ronald Cameron — 2016-08-01T17:03:32Z

The first World Social Forum (WSF) to take place in a Northern Country will be held in few weeks in Montreal, from August 9 to 14. Most of the programming is now set on the eve of its holding. The commitment of civil society organizations and movements, from Quebec mostly, has led to a certain point of preparation that embodies the hopes of those involved for several months in more than twenty self-organized committees.

The preparation so far, even if some problems are to be solved, make possible to envisage a successful event from a content and diversity point of view, including through the establishment of autonomous spaces and self-organized committees1. However, it now appears crucial to work toward a better convergence, wishing to go beyond the exchanges and debate. Indeed, it is this aspect that critics have been raised from years ago, but nowadays, those appear with an increased intensity. Does the WSF in Montreal will demonstrate the relevance of the Social Forum Process?

The WSF in Montreal: a turning point for the future of the WSF

The WSF celebrates 15 years old of its process. All those years, the WSF has offered, to those who believe that "another world is possible," a momentum and space for exchanges and debates. The first edition was held in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the same timetable as the global meeting of the political and economic elites in Davos, Switzerland. Since the WSF is held every two years, and the next one will be far away from the period of the Davos gathering. It stands for the first time in North America in the middle of August.

During those 15 years, the WSF process was made through a very broad approach that the Charter of Principles has fixed the day after the first WSF. The Charter suggests the principle of open space for "the democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences". Also, the WSF aims to promote the "interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society". However, its useful function stops there, according to the Charter of Principles.

The broadest unity to counter neoliberal globalization

The WSF is born in Brazil, in a context marked by the rising of social struggles and popular support for the Workers' Party (WP). By supporting the WSF, Brazilian social movements, and the WP were designed to export the energy of the local mobilizations to the global level to better resist neoliberal globalization and avoid isolation. Meanwhile, the international context announced a weakening of national states and an increasing of the commodification of the planet, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was imperative to create the broadest possible front around the globalization of solidarity, to offer an alternative to neoliberal globalization.

Furthermore, breaking the centralist and directive practices which resulted in repulsive socialist caricatures, the WSF was the establishment of new relations of solidarity within and between social movements, independent from political parties. The experience of the Brazilian WP became the example of an approach from bottom up, while it was the political expression of movements.

The WSF as a process

Thus, the Charter of Principles defined the WSF as a process that unites all the groups and movements in opposition to neoliberal globalization, based on an open, non-partisan and non-deliberative. The WSF takes no position, to reject any approach that would force the recognition of an "only option for interrelation and action". As the WSF can not represent all of the civil society, it cannot claim to represent it or to take a position on behalf of it as such.

To ensure the broadest alliance possible, the formula, therefore, provides no conclusion under the Forum, but consensual consultations of social movements. The WSF final statements from fifteen years have almost followed this approach: it was not the statement of the forum, but a statement endorsed by the movements which have participated in it.

Profound questions about the future of the WSF

It is not from yesterday those issues are raised to challenge the impact and usefulness of the WSF. In the core of the critics, we found the opinion that the main international events such as the WSF has a little political impact and resumes the gathering to a space for debate without consequence. However, in recent weeks, a major international discussion has intensified on the future of the WSF.

Two political events have caused an increased polarizations in the International Council (IC) members: the question of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) of Israel and the requirements of solidarity with the Brazilian people against the coup undergoing nowadays. These two issues collide the neutrality approach established by the WSF Charter of the Principles. These two issues raised at the WSF Montreal International Seminar in April, exert an enormous pressure on the founding principles of the social forums.

BDS Campaign

First, the Montreal BDS Coalition, with strong support from several personalities and networks within the WSF IC, seeks for recognition of the legitimacy of its struggle from the WSF 2016 Organizing Collective. The BDS Coalition faces the interpretations of the Charter which avoid any decision or position from the WSF or the IC, although it opposes "any form of imperialism" to "any totalitarian design and the use of violence as a means of social control". However, for fifteen years, various social forums have continued to echo to the Solidarity with Palestinian People, particularly in the last two WSFs, which were held in Tunis, at the heart of the democratic upheaval in the Arab world.

However, the condemnation of the BDS Campaign by the new Canadian Government complicates things for the WSF 2016 Organizing Collective. The debate continues nowadays with a petition launched by the BDS Coalition outside the WSF framework, which has received hundreds of support from all regions of the world. This petition aims to persuade the WSF IC to amend its Charter to recognize the scope of the principles of the BDS Campaign, which would commit, then, the future organizing committees to explicitly and unequivocally make the WSF as a space free from Israeli Apartheid.

The parliamentary Coup d'État in Brazil

On the other hand, it is the Parliamentary Coup d'État in Brazil that caused the most intense exchanges between some IC members on the future of the Charter and the WSF. The political blow ousted the Brazilian WP, temporarily at this point, and set up a regime that wants to dismantle the social protections granted in the last period. A coalition of social movements and Brazilian civil society personalities, associated with the WSF, successfully appealed in support to the Brazilian people by members of the IC.

The call denounces the political crisis in which Brazil and Latin America are facing and it associates pressures on Latin America left governments as an attack to thwart the development of another world based on rejection neoliberal economic growth models. The statement is published with the support of most social movements and organizations that act in the work of the WSF.

The request for support from the IC members to the Brasilian Social Movements and also for the BDS Campaign has sparked an international debate which, for sure, will be back in Montreal. We now briefly describe the different approaches within the IC members, according to the nowadays debate.

The status quo point of view

The historical point of view, one might say, is opposed to any modification of the Charter and suggests the status quo, arguing a principle's opposition between space and movement. According to this position, any evolution of the Charter towards some mechanisms of stance or representation is rejected. The nature of the WSF as an unrepresentative process of a global civil society, which cannot be defined, make impossible such development for this point of view.

Moreover, this idea would bring a vertical methodology, similar to the one we could found in representative organizations, like political parties or trade unions, which are organizational models unlikely able to engage a genuine social change in today's political context. For this position, only an open space could be the future of the WSF, without any deliberative mechanism.

The Montreal 2016 WSF Organizing Collective borrows the organizational model for the Montreal WSF from this point of view. It also shares a will to limit the space for the social organizations they have held in the past in organizing similar events in Quebec and Canada. For the Collective, the legitimacy of the forum is based on the gathering in a single assembly all individuals and movements involved, without any distinct status.

Little room is made to have the social organizations and movements playing their strategic function. If there is one thing could be done, from the historical point of view, is the abolition of the IC, to make sure that does not exist any supreme authority with a particular status.

In practice, for this historical standing position, the transformation of society is only possible by the multiplication of initiatives, without consideration to organizational needs and requirements to concentre the energy of the individuals mobilized through social and citizenship movements. Paradoxically, this tendency to atomize the actors in the WSF in Montreal occurs in capitalist societies whose level of organization of individuals is highest.

Moreover, in Montreal as elsewhere, the ability of spontaneous movements to last through time, often brings them to evolve towards defense organization or political party. This phenomenon is particularly remarkable in the recent history of Spanish Indignatos and Podemos.

The new international context

For others, the international environment has changed, and the polarization of conflicts is not sufficient to resume the WSF process to only spaces for exchange and debate. However, starting from the same observation, different sensitivities can be identified.

An abolitionist point of view, one might say, is based on the decline of the context and the weakening of the relevance of the WSF in the unification of resistance and social change movements. It merely proposes the abolition of the WSF. Calling a critic un-accommodating balance sheet of the WSF 15 years, this approach combines the about-face progressive governments and silence of some movements about the neoliberal policies in some countries and the setbacks in building an anti-systemic alternative.

For this point of view, as the shrinking of the Montreal WSF will be confirmed, the time of the funeral came. The 2016 event could then arrange the funeral while initiating a profound reflection. Paradoxically, this approach aims to provoke a renaissance based on a new global dynamics centered on social mobilization.

However, a more common position wishes to renovate and to upgrade the WSF to sustain it and to make it functional, not only the global gathering but also its main body, the IC, subject to all criticism. Sharing several assessments with the previous abolitionist position, it differs based on the enormous assets of the WSF from fifteen years that he wants to protect and make it alive, taking into account the requirements of the new political situation.

The broad gathering strategy is being exhausted; it is now important to restore the process to give it a second life. Thus, various proposals have been announced. The first is the creation of Parallel Proceedings Stance, a sort of court on the state of democracy in different parts of the world. The first meeting could take place in Montreal to treat the case of Brazil. The result of the work of this body would involve the WSF as an International Rally.

Other proposals were also announced in the wake of the previous, the change in the composition of the IC, from rotating elective office in limited time. Fundraising would establish a functional secretariat. Thematic commissions, including one related to the Court type, could also be implemented

A consensus is widely shared among nearly all those points of view; it is the "cleaning" of the IC to ensure real representation for individuals serving on the IC.

How to renovate the WSF?

If several calls for amending the Charter and take into account the new requirements of the political situation, the denial of self-proclaim must remain a primary foundation of any renovation process of the WSF and the IC. The independence of the organizations and movements requires that the WSF 2.0 cannot claim to represent the whole international civil society.

However, does the WSF can evolve towards a kind of international round table to allow a more sustained political action? It concerns the political action of social organizations and movements, and not from a stand of political parties. We all know that political action of social and citizenship movements is the one that initiates the real social transformation. Does the mandate of the WSF could be the one to encourage its implementation and to compromise to do so, taking into account from the context the requirement to take a political position?

How to establish a more active political unity, without forcing organizations and movements to delegate their engagement to some external mechanism? We have to remember that the literature abounds to link the establishment of a global political power to an interventionist instance, even totalitarian. So could we recognize that the WSF or a designated body could characterize some findings and let the social movements the ability to translate into an action plan for their own?

Toward a World Assembly of Social Movements

Moreover, the future of the World Social Forum is also dependent on the active participation of social movements and networks to make those gatherings something that serves the struggles and mobilizations. WSF's transformation into a global assembly of social movements could be a move towards a kind of international roundtable on an independent political action of the movements. The primary WSF concerns could be less on singular activities from the organizations and movements, but more on their consultation.

If the WSF has a future, is to become the backbone of movements and networks that, in turn, mobilize individuals. The centrality of organizations and movements in any WSF process should be valued and entails full recognition. It is a prerequisite to avoid more fragmentation.

Finally, remember that the international level is not a political space of social conquests, as are States and some regional political spaces. It primarily provides event space and a sounding board for struggles at local and regional level. It is in taking account of this reality that the WSF evolution could find a clean common ground in the broadest consensus.

Contribute to the success of the WSF 2016

The conclusion of the event currently remains the main issue to solve. It is now accepted that we should "give more space to the conclusions of the convergence assemblies." Beyond the various action plans, the proposal to hold a convergence space remains the most likely prospect to promote joint movements and their action plan, a major challenge of this first WSF in the North in the current political and historical context.

It is in the perspective of maximizing the movements convergence that energy must be invested in the final stretch of the WSF preparations. Underlying this approach is the idea that convergence can only be achieved by the articulation of multiple challenges and not by either a single issue or a single priority or on a list of actions without a better-shared vision.

Article was written before the Babel's decision about the translation

June 17, 2016

Turkey Between Two Fascisms

Jooneed Khan — 2016-08-01T16:59:18Z

In Turkey, where the attempted coup failed and arms went silent after 24 hours of clashes and killings, civilian fascism has won over military fascism – even as both competed to project each camp as “the better protector of Democracy”!

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, elected in 2014 and whose AKP party swept back to power with 52% of the votes last November, repeated through the crisis that he and his government represented democratic legitimacy and blamed the putschist “treason” on “a handful of military people” close to his Islamist rival Fethullah Gülen, living in self-exile in the US.

In a country where the military sees itself as the guardian of Kemalist legitimacy and has often seized power by coups d'État in the past, the putsch leaders this time accused Erdogan and his team of violating the constitution, perverting democracy, expanding and deepening corruption, putting “internal and regional peace” at risk, and rushing towards authoritarianism.

Restoring the Death Penalty

Back in power in Ankara yesterday from his base in Istanbul, where he was mayor once and where he stayed throughout the crisis, Erdogan quickly told the coup participants, 2800 of whom were behind bars, that he would “make them pay dearly for their treason” – a threat he has effectively implemented against critical journalists, political rivals and dissenters, and the Kurdish minority fighting for its human and national rights.

He called for the extradition of Gülen from theUSand of eight coup participants fromGreecewhere they landed in a military helicopter. He made of the Gülen issue a test ofUSfriendship – with theUSkeeping a nuclear arsenal atTurkey's Incirlik Air Base.Turkey's borders were closed to prevent further escapes. And he pledged to restore the death penalty – abolished in 2002 to prepareTurkey's entry into the EU. And deep purges are under way in all sectors of public life, army included.

He called the coup attempt “a gift from Heaven” – a statement which led many to opine Erdogan had staged the coup himself for his own political ends. Gülen quickly told The Guardian at hisPennsylvaniaretreat he too suspected Erdogan to have staged the coup. He said he was opposed to coups, having suffered personally at the hands of the military. “Turkeycannot go back on Democracy”, he added grandly.

Abandonments and Betrayals

Interesting parallel: after Russia intervened decisively to back up the Assad régime against Daesh/ISIS inSyria, Erdogan accused theUSof leavingTurkeyin the lurch – one reason perhaps of his rapprochement with Putin. Similarly, Daesh/ISIS turned againstTurkeyand other NATO countries, includingFrance, for their betrayal of the cause of the “Levant Caliphate” afterRussiastepped in…

The official toll of the coup attempt rose yesterday to 265 killed and 1.400 wounded. Rescued by the courageous mobilization of his supporters, predominantly young males, in the streets ofIstanbulandAnkara, Erdogan is set to re-launch his agendas of president-dictator-sultan on the Saudi model and of neo-ottoman expansionism inCentral Asiaand the Arab countries. He is only 35-40 MPs short of the majority needed to pass his supreme-presidency constitutional reform – but his triumph over the true-false coup gives him a free hand to push for one-man rule, with a cowed and tamed military in tow.

Neo-Con warmongers who run the US/EU/NATO Empire's military combine, and who are charting a warpath againstRussiafor the post-Obama administration, would have applauded to see the back of Erdogan after he reconciled with Putin and began looking East towardsEurasia. But the coup attempt was too amateurish and improvised to have been a NATO Hawk operation, according to many observers. This does not preclude that NATO political Doves may have colluded in Erdogan's “coup” mise-en-scène…

Eclipse of the Turkish Left

In all of this brown and grey theatre, the Turkish Left is conspicuously absent. The Left these days is in alliance with the Kurds in the People's Democracy Party (HDP). But from the June to the November 2015 parliamentary elections, the HDP lost more than half of its MPs (dropping from 80 to 30), while the AKP regained its absolute majority with 325 of the 550 seats in Parliament.

This bad drama of desperation has eclipsed, momentarily one hopes, theTurkeyof writers like Nazim Hikmet, Yasar Kemal, Sabahattin Ali, Elif Shafak, of film-makers like Yilmaz Güney, Semih Kaplanoglu, Nuri Bilgi Ceyhan, Orhan Eskikoy, or even of political leaders like Bulent Ecevit.Turkeyis polarized not just between civilians and the military, but also between secularists and islamists. The 99% versus the 1% polarization seems late in coming. The Turkish Left continues to smoulder under the ashes.

Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/turkey-between-two-fascisms/5536430

The Way Out of This Crisis is not Declaring State of Emergency, but Democracy

Peoples' Democratic Party — 2016-08-01T16:56:50Z

Five days after the coup attempt on 15th of July, the NSC and Council of Ministers declared a state of emergency in the country. This step shows the coup attempt might have been blocked, but the desire to rule the country with coup-like, authoritative mentality is not.

In this period Turkey will be ruled by Decree-laws against the constitution, the Council of Ministers will be chaired by the President, the jurisdiction of governors will be increased, and vital universal and democratic human rights will be violated while the Turkish Presidential System will be imposed without restraint. Thus, the coup attempt has become a tool and opportunity for the government to purge all opposition and limit democratic rights and freedom.

The road to arbitrary rule, unlawful behavior, feeding on violence, polarizing politics, marginalization inciting tension and hatred, insecure conditions and consolidated power has been chosen. A democratic solution regarding the destructive coup was not considered, society has been forced to choose between a coup or an undemocratic government. We absolutely deny these choices.

The ruling party has chosen to exploit the hatred of the masses for political gain. The historic opportunity to take steps against the coup with social consensus by democratic measures was not taken. We find this cheap, pragmatic and stillborn approach of celebrating the state of emergency unacceptable. AKP's efforts to become the absolute power and reinforce one-man-rule by declaring a state of emergency will lead our country to a more painful course.

The main responsibility belongs to the forces of democracy and peace under the increasingly worsening conditions in Turkey. To develop the common attitude of these forces, invigorate the fight and to defend democracy together is what we need to do today.

We call upon all institutions defending peace and labor, unions, chambers of all professions, CSOs, democratic mass organizations, political parties and structures, women and youth organizations, all citizens with conscience to stand against this dark and serious time in our country, to be in solidarity for our peoples' safety and freedom, for the democratic future of our society.

Our immediate need is democracy and freedom. The way out of the coup, the conflicted state and current chaos is not a more authoritarian one-man-rule, but more democracy.

Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP)
Central Executive Board
21th July, 2016

Posted on 21/07/2016 | https://hdpenglish.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/the-way-out-of-this-crisis-is-not-declaring-state-o

Why Brexit May Be Palestine's Gain

Ilan Pappe — 2016-08-01T16:54:48Z

The British referendum on membership in the European Union on 23 June has exposed deep layers of racism and xenophobia in the United Kingdom and raises serious concerns about the welfare of minorities and immigrants in the country. Verbal violence and the murder of a politician who devoted her life to justice and peace – including in Palestine – are the terrifying manifestations of the ugly face of the referendum.

And yet if we think of the wider implications of the vote, with a view to evaluating the outcome's relevance to Palestine, the results are less of a disaster and open new vistas for our struggle for peace and justice in Palestine.

There are three reasons why those deeply involved in the struggle should regard the decision as an opportune moment to advance Palestinian freedom and not be depressed as are colleagues in the London bubble – and beyond – who have been overwrought following the decision.

The first reason is quite mundane but important. Britain, as an EU member, was one of Israel's main advocatesin the discussions of the organization's policy towards Palestine. More often than not, Britain blocked initiatives backing Palestinian rights and helped shield Israel from accountability. Its voice in those institutions will not be missed.

Secondly, we have to appreciate that the xenophobic, anti-immigrant and ugly mood was not the only impulse leading people to vote leave. It is not the first time, and will probably not be the last, that extreme right-wing factions have successfully channeled working class anger away from the ruling classes and towards more vulnerable groups of workers: immigrants and refugees.

The vote was also motivated by a justified sense of neglect felt acutely by the disenfranchised society beyond London and other major cities. Ever since the 1970s, the British political elite, Labour and Conservative alike, has failed to represent faithfully the underprivileged northeast and northwest regions of England. The referendum was a democratic chance for them to demand better following the destruction of the welfare state by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

Disempowered sections of Western society have demanded a more democratic representation of their will ever since the financial crisis in 2008, as the Arab world has since 2011. In both cases, democratic voices have yet to prevail: either the powers that be regained their previous dominance or non-democratic forces exploited the upheaval to strengthen their hold over society. This is an ongoing historical process that is only in its early stages.

The demand for transparency from political and economic elites – and a respect for the people's own agenda and wishes – unfortunately, at times, manifests itself as a racist call for anti-immigration policies. But it also has positive aspects. Brexit was a protest vote against political cynicism and the dishonesty of politics as much as it was about immigration and patriotism. The coincidence of the publication of the Chilcot Report with the Brexit vote shows that dishonesty and lack of regard for what people really want or need does not refer to social and economic issues alone.

People are also enraged when the government pursues criminal and immoral policies in the Middle East. The road from admonishing the Blair government for its Iraq policy to rejecting the outgoing Prime Minister David Cameron's policy in Palestine may be shorter than previously realized.

Such a public impulse for change creates opportunities for politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labour Party and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party in the United States. Tragically, it also contributes to phenomena such as Donald Trump in the US and Nigel Farage in the UK.

In fact, the demand for a different kind of a democracy is more than an impulse, it is a zeitgeist. This new spirit pushed people to occupy Wall Street and Tahrir Square in 2011 and, in March this year, it led a million workers and students to occupy Place de la République in Paris on nights dubbed “Nuit Debout” (for Palestinians it translated as Leilat al-Sumud).

The French soccer team's success in reaching the Euro 2016 final this summer was hailed as grim compensation for the horrors of terrorism. But it will not help the workers and students of France. They and other victims of the neoliberal capitalist system will continue to assert their right to demand a more fundamental solution for poverty, unemployment and austerity.

Neoliberalism has devastated whole communities in the West and in the larger world. The multinational and military-industrial complex's connections with oppressive regimes in the Arab world and Israel help squelch any genuine attempt for democracy and reconciliation in the region. The same repressive policies that helped the regimes in the Arab world clamp down on the Arab Spring have aided for years the settler colonial project in Palestine.

Concerted action against neoliberalism and the repressive Israeli occupation necessitates a network of solidarity including trade unions, student activists, anti-war and disarmament coalitions, victims of police brutality and groups fighting for the rights of the underprivileged and marginalized. The struggle for Palestine epitomizes the overall struggle for social and moral justice. It is not distracted by false political crises or distractions that remind us of the gladiators' games in the declining Roman empire.

For all this attention, in Europe and the US, official positions on Palestine are as far as possible from public sentiment supporting equal rights. Any process that narrows the gap on Palestine between the electorate and the official political position, despite all the dangers mentioned earlier, is much better than the status quo.

A more democratized Britain harbors opportunities as well as dangers and requires all of us to take a nuanced look at reality. Democratic improvements can lead to a more honest reflection of the strong pro-Palestinian sentiment that exists here in the UK, including among the underprivileged parts of our society. Consequently, democratic change can be better for many Palestinians and for the Palestine solidarity movement, but can still be a nightmare for an immigrant facing expulsion or a child facing an increase in racism.

Finally, the vote is just the beginning of a process set in motion by the 2008 financial crisis. Any attempt at this moment to conclude that Brexit – which frankly nobody fully comprehends – is the end of the road would be premature.

Even at this early stage, we can say with certainty that countries such as Palestine – notwithstanding the despair, helplessness and imbalance of power faced there – can only benefit from earthquakes. Business as usual is the worse thing for Palestine.

In this respect, the potential for Palestine lies in the positions of two generational groups which stood out in the Brexit affair: the young generation of 18 to 24 and the older generation in their 70s and 80s. These two generational groups are deeply involved in activism for Palestine in the West. We know them and see them in our meetings, activities and advocacy. They are a powerful combination already rattling the neoliberal castles of comfort.

Their joint efforts help explain why young people chose a septuagenarian socialist as presidential hopeful in the US and a slightly younger socialist to head Labour in the UK. What unites them is a disgust towards the establishment's economic, social and foreign policies. The publication of the Chilcot report and throughout the years leaks from Wikileaks and other sources, point out how dishonesty in social and economic policies is echoed in foreign policies of invasion, crypto-diplomacy and old imperial policies of divide and rule.

Their vote in the Brexit referendum is not the critical issue: identifying the political potential is. Although those aged 18 to 24 in Britain voted overwhelmingly to remain, a large number of this age group did not vote at all. Only a touch over one-third of the younger generation voted. Furthermore, almost 40 percent of the elderly voted to remain and anecdotal reports indicate many among this age group declared their confusion and changed their opinions after the referendum. So the impulse was not only to say something clear about the EU, but to voice a democratic protest against establishments that run their lives, whether in Westminster or Brussels.

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, was accused of not working wholeheartedly for the Remain campaign. This is true. He reflected the reluctance and confusion of the non-xenophobic electorate; namely “Remain” or “Leave” is not the crucial political agenda facing Britain. The real referendum has to be, and still will be, about social, economic and moral justice.

The younger generation and the elderly are our main electorate for Palestine. They are not easily fooled by neoliberal manufacturing of political crises that in the case of Prime Minister Cameron was caused mainly by his wish to win the last election.

The call from below for more transparent, moral and democratic policies can only enhance the cause of Palestine. Israel feared, and worked against, the democratic impulse that engulfed the Arab world in 2011. A similar impulse in Europe and the US is our only hope for narrowing the gap between popular pro-Palestinian perceptions and official American and European policies on the ground. It is through the wider public that we will be able to challenge criminal Israeli policies in Palestine.

(The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.)

Source: http://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/NewsDetail/index/6/8268/Why-Brexit-May-Be-Palestines-Gain

War of the Worlds

Sukumar Muralidharan — 2016-08-01T16:52:56Z

The IS claim of a new caliphate would be laughable but for troubling resonances with Turkey's ambitions

A killer truck ploughed through a festive crowd in the French Riviera town of Nice on the national holiday of July 14, at just the time when Donald Trump was on the other bank of the Atlantic, in the last stages of picking a running mate for November's US presidential election. His choice fell finally on a nondescript mid-western state governor who brought evangelical heft to his ticket, but little value to the blank slate of his foreign policy expertise.

Verbal aggression being his stock response to challenging situations, Trump reacted to Nice by calling for a formal declaration of war on the Islamic State (IS), which was reflexively blamed for the heinous crime. The IS for its part was eager to own responsibility, though there is sufficient ambiguity about its command structures to suggest that it mostly wakes up after the fact to the terror potential of events.

The atrocity in Nice has yet again raised that question about when a deranged criminal's act crosses the terrorism threshold. Attributions to the IS are loosely based upon a directive going back two years from somebody claiming the mantle of its spokesman, demanding that every westerner at any time or place, should be dealt with severely, with a full range of options — from suicide bombing, to stabbing to defenestration — being advised for the ritual slaying.

In terms of public knowledge, this psychopathic rant of uncertain attribution is the basis on which the world is invited down a pathway to unending war. Nobody is aware of the wisdom secreted in the vaults of the world's intelligence agencies. These would probably hold definitive information on the nurturance of the IS by western allies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, anxious to retrieve a situation that was slipping out of control after the disaster of the US invasion of Iraq.

Uncertainties over the parentage of the IS do not seem to cast a shadow over the blame it draws for every atrocity of the new world disorder. As the French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian put it, it was immaterial what organisational input IS had in the mass murder at Nice, since the “terrorist spirit” the group inspired was sufficient. The ample gaps in this narrative, presumably, are easily filled in by old-fashioned racism.

What would a formal declaration of war add to the authorisation granted in 2001 during the George W Bush presidency, which he and his successor have used to enlarge the footprint of the war to places that had nothing to do with the event that triggered it all? Very little, but Trump's hyperbole — after years of buyers' remorse following Bush — stirred up war lust yet again and drew a “me too” response from rival Hillary Clinton.

The war that Bush summoned the world to was one without territorial locus, since terrorism was an intent that could exist anywhere. Trump's call for war dignifies a shapeless militia with a territorial identity, making its fantasy of a “caliphate” something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This comes at just the time the IS was for the first time facing the possibility of being uprooted from its redoubts in Syria and Iraq. Forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad have, with supporting Russian airpower, mounted a fierce assault on IS positions in Raqqa province in recent weeks. Along another frontline, the US has mobilised its clients in Syria to turn their fire away from the Assad regime and take on the IS.

There is little coordination between the two, though Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and US secretary of state John Kerry agreed at a recent meeting that this would in principle be a good thing. At the minimum, military coordination would require the two sides to align their currently discordant strategic objectives.

If coordination between the US and Russia becomes a reality, the space available for third party ambitions would rapidly close. With objectives deeply at odds with both the US and Russia, Turkey would likely be squeezed out.

Turkey has, in other ways, been the perfect illustration of how vassal states step out of the shadow to assert their own ambitions when the power of the imperial overlord is fraying. For president Recep Tayyib Erdogan, the effort to recreate a Turkish sultanate as the centenary of its demise approaches, runs alongside a ruthless drive towards untrammelled power at home.

It has been a rocky pathway, with blowback from military adventures in Syria and Iraq often blurring into provocations staged by Turkish intelligence and security agencies to discredit the president's domestic political opponents. With civil war reignited within his borders, Erdogan has sent his army to occupy a vast swathe of Iraq's Kurdistan provinces to pre-empt any possible cross-border consolidation of Kurdish might.

Turkey has been rattled by the alignment of Syria's Kurd forces with the US in the battle against the IS. It has retaliated by providing transit rights for IS oil shipments from areas it controls in Iraq. Yet Erdogan is now finding it virtually impossible, even with his formidable political skills, to manage this strategic tangle.

The army uprising of July 15 was indication that Turkey's fragile institutions could buckle under pressure. Erdogan reacted with a mass purge and arrests that have shaken the country's armed forces and judiciary. Turkey's modern day sultan remains as ruthlessly focused on his personal aggrandisement as ever. The strategic quagmire he has taken the country into, could well prove his nemesis.

(Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in Gurgaon)

(This article was published on July 22, 2016)

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Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/war-of-the-worlds/article8881924.ece

“You Can Have Your Weak Nominee If You Wish”

Saib Bilaval — 2016-08-01T16:50:27Z

Ultimately, what the Sanders endorsement has proved is what the candidate was arguing from the beginning – that it was not Sanders and his campaign that was holding Hillary Clinton's poll numbers back. By ceasing to lobby for the nomination and supporting Hillary Clinton, with terrible poll numbers for the former Secretary of State, and the pressure of a Green Party upsurge, Bernie Sanders has made his case for the Democratic candidacy even stronger.

The public at large was served with a Bernie Sanders endorsement of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States of America. Initially, there was much dismay among Sanders supporters, with some early responses expressing outrage at his “betrayal”. Most of his backers felt that he should have not endorsed her till at least the convention if he did not get the nomination; others felt that he should have run as an independent candidate or team up with the Green Party's Jill Stein. After agonizing for months over why in the world Sanders wasn't interested in the Vice Presidential spot, the corporate-run mainstream media explained that Sanders was backing out as Hillary Clinton had offered him several concessions on policy issues. In the next few days, with the bizarreness of the moment over, a clearer picture emerged.

The endorsement speech Sanders made was nearly identical to his stump speech, only that he attributed all the ideas and promises as Hillary Clinton's and not just his. He listed off the accomplishments of his campaign in terms of votes, delegates, state victories, political participation and ideological shifts nationally – with Hillary Clinton nodding her head uncomfortably, beside him. Some of the Clinton promises that Sanders listed out were concessions that had not even been agreed to publicly by the Clinton camp yet. After getting over with the aforementioned, Sanders declared that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, and then he pledged to defeat Donald Trump, sharply attacking the presumptive Republican nominee. It took several hours for people to realize that Sanders hadn't officially conceded – something the mainstream papers and TV news pundits have still not bothered to mention.

While Sanders had endorsed Secretary Clinton and relinquished his Secret Service protections – he has not dropped out of the race or freed his delegates. He will still be going to the Philadelphia convention with his 1900 delegates to continue to push for the issues that his campaign had been about. Sanders is yet to win the platform fight to include indexing to inflation for the minimum wage, a ban on fracking, for single-payer healthcare, to overturn the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), to recognize the plight of the Palestinian people, to get big money out of politics, and to close the revolving door between lobbying and Congress.

The fight is also yet to begin on the Rules Committee for the Convention, through which Sanders will seek to open the primary process to Independents (since primaries are taxpayer funded), to abolish superdelegates (party leaders who have a free vote at the Convention and in deciding the nominee), and to oust the current DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Further, the multiple massive pro-Sanders protest rallies that were planned for the convention are still on schedule, and Sanders continues to fundraise for his national delegates and for current progressive candidates running for office at the local, state and national level.

After endorsing, Sanders has quickly detached himself from the influence of the Democratic Party and has shown his independent streak and commitment to the issues by setting up the foundation of successor organisations to his campaign – one which will fundraise and organize on policy issues, another which will help progressive candidates run for office, and one that will encourage grassroots participation by ordinary citizens. The discontent with politics as usual will prove these organisations as formidable challengers to centrist Democrats and will empower the Left in the years to come.

The day after he endorsed Hillary, Sanders addressed the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), an immigrants' rights organization, for 25 minutes and didn't mention Hillary Clinton even once. Sanders has clearly left the Democratic Party behind, if it seeks to obstruct his agenda. He also seeks to weaken union bosses (some of whom were responsible for the victory of the TPP lobby on the platform committee) and big donor-based think tanks and NGOs.

Celebrated activist and former Presidential candidate Ralph Nader made a sharp observation that by endorsing Hillary while proclaiming her progressive promises, Sanders sets her up for a scenario of political betrayal. Sanders' endorsement speech sounded very much like his stump speech, only that he attributed the ideas not to himself but to the presumptive nominee – a standard she will now be forced to set herself against from the Presidency, if not from the Convention onwards.

Recent polling shows us that the Sanders endorsement has not had a positive impact on Hillary Clinton's standing, nationally. Hillary's lead over Trump in the polls has not expanded as expected after the endorsement, in fact it has decreased, symptomatic of the widespread anti-establishment anger. Clinton and Donald Trump are now neck and neck nationally with 40 points each, in a CBS news poll which had showed Clinton leading by 6 points last month.

She is losing to Donald Trump in the crucial swing states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania in a Quinnipiac University poll – despite outspending him 40 to 1. In a Rasmussen poll, she is losing to Trump nationally by 7 points – and this is despite all the self-inflicted injuries he has dealt to his candidacy throughout the year. The American people have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. It is unlikely that anyone would discover her merits in the coming months. This is all despite the Obama endorsement, despite the endorsement from Vice President Joe Biden, from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the late but wholehearted blessings of progressive maverick Senator Elizabeth Warren, and finally despite the endorsement from Sanders himself. Establishment or even progressive blessings to the establishment candidate do not seem to influence voters one bit.

Trump is scoring better on the economy (52-41 points), foreign trade (47-46 points), is even with Clinton on terrorism and national security (46-46 points), and, unbelievably, islosing on illegal immigration to Clinton (45-48 points), according to NYTimes/CBS. Hillary is the only Democrat that Trump can defeat in the election and Donald Trump is the only Republican that Hillary can defeat. Sanders, on the other hand, has been defeating Donald Trump by double digit landslides up to 20 points since September 2015.

Donald Trump is leading Hillary Clinton 40-28 among Independents (who comprise at least 42% of the electorate), in a NYTimes/CBS poll. According to polling by YikYak, nearly half of Sanders' millennial supporters (48 percent) are backing a third party option, compared to 39% for Hillary. It is worth noting that these numbers are from after the Sanders endorsement and not before.

Since FBI Director James Comey's press conference, Hillary's favorables have fallen to 28% and unfavorables gone up to 56% - the latter exceeding even Donald Trump. After the email scandal, voters just do not trust her. 67% of voters say she is not honest or trustworthy, up from 62% last month, according to a NYTimes/CBS poll.

Green Party candidate Jill Stein has seen a triple digit percent increase in social media following since Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton. The same has been the case with her donations. A large number of the donations are in sums of $27, indicating the role of Sanders supporters. Major Sanders backers such as the superstar intellectual Cornel West have chosen to publicly throw their support behind Stein rather than Clinton, given the urgency of the climate, racial and economic crises America is facing today.

One must note the mass educational role Sanders has had in politicizing the American population on the real issues – climate change, poverty, the criminal justice system, the pharma lobby, the military industrial complex, the fossil fuel lobby, campaign finance reform, universal healthcare, free college tuition, infrastructure spending, evenhandedness on Israel-Palestine, against military adventurism, and on the role of Wall street in the rigged economy.

For nearly a year, he schooled his supporters to back ideas, not people – to devalue endorsements. His opponent was endorsed by nearly every Democratic mayor, governor, representative and senator and yet Sanders won 23 states running against the entire establishment. I would argue that there is not a single Sanders supporter who got swayed by his endorsement speech, who would not have anyway come round to voting for Hillary in November - endorsement or not. The Sanders supporters who had decided to vote for Jill Stein or Donald Trump continue to do so – because their support for Sanders was in itself a rejection of Hillary Clinton and establishment politicians. The Sanders movement is not about a leader – Sanders himself is important as a candidate who never sold out, as a vessel for progressive change – but not the endgame for progressives. Sanders has taught the electorate to expect more from the Democratic Party than the crumbs they had been offered for decades. For example, Obama ran to the left of Clinton on guns, but Clinton ran to the left of him on healthcare, in 2008. One aimed to be the first African American President, the other aimed to be the first female President. That is where the differences ended. Sanders, on the other hand, stood for an altogether different type of politics, qualitatively (the vision and issues) and quantitatively (millions of small donors, independent volunteers, huge rallies and grassroots support).

It is also worth acknowledging that the likelihood of Sanders supporters switching to Clinton was also entirely dependent on their perception of the primary process as fair – the Democratic National Committee really bungled that. From limiting the debates to just 6 (Obama-Clinton had 22 in 2008), blocking Sanders' access to his own campaign data, voter suppression and state convention steamrolling in Nevada (among other things) wounded party unity immensely. Recent news - that Sanders was under immense pressure to unconditionally endorse Hillary Clinton, and that he was booed by House Democrats (Congressmen) for not dropping out - further alienated voters who see Sanders as the only issue-oriented politician not compromised by the corrupting influence of corporate money. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, Hillary Clinton is enjoying the support of 12% fewer Sanders supporters as of last month (down from 53% to 41%).

The policy gains made by Sanders in the Democratic platform ($15/hr minimum wage, abolition of the death penalty, breaking up the big banks, reinstating a modern Glass-Steagall Act), and the planks recently taken up by Clinton (free tuition in college for some categories of people, and the public option in health insurance) can be seen as victories, but they do not go far enough in tackling the needs of poor and working people. These “concessions” do not seem to have moved Clinton's poll numbers upwards either. Historically, the Democratic platform has remained what it is – a piece of paper - with most Presidents choosing to govern pragmatically in the post-FDR era. This shows that most voters don't trust Hillary Clinton on her promises but do trust Sanders on his.

Having won 46% of the Democratic electorate running against the establishment, the Sanders bloc is possibly the most powerful intra-party insurgent bloc in the Democratic Party (perhaps stronger than the factions that oversaw the divides over prohibition and over the Civil Rights Act) in history. The battle at the 1968 convention battle between Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy involved a battle between state party insiders and national leaders at a time when most states did not vote in the presidential primary. Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson both reneged on their promises and joined the very wars they had vowed to not enter (WWI and Vietnam, respectively).

Any sort of grassroots insurgency that involves more that 15% of the base should worry any political party and make it drastically change its ways. Sanders winning 30% of the delegates should still have been more significant than if Obama had as the underdog beaten Clinton 80-20 in 2008 (he didn't, they were neck and neck), because both were establishment candidates. But Sanders won 46% without the help of the party and against its interests – this does not include the Independents who back him 70-30 against either Clinton or Trump, or the voters who were unable to register in time for the primaries, or the rigging and voter suppression in various states such as New York, California, the South, Florida, Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.

Ultimately, what the Sanders endorsement has proved is what the candidate was arguing from the beginning – that it was not Sanders and his campaign that was holding Hillary Clinton's poll numbers back. Given common sense, the Democratic Party and its leaders ought to realize that their presumptive nominee is damaged goods and a weak candidate. According to a recent report in The Hill titled “Democrats ‘Freaked Out' About Polls In Meeting With Clinton”, the message seems to have gotten home.

The media whitewashing and underplaying may deny but cannot disprove the reality of a mass movement within and outside the party that is refusing to die down. By ceasing to lobby for the nomination and supporting Hillary Clinton, with terrible poll numbers for the former Secretary of State, and the pressure of a Green Party upsurge, Bernie Sanders has made his case for the Democratic candidacy even stronger.

The ball is now in the court of the Democratic Party leadership: would they rather nominate Hillary Clinton, stay in the grip of big donors and stand a chance of losing to Trump under a wave of anti-establishment anger; or would they rather go left, embrace the ordinary people and win the election with Sanders? He has effectively handed them a time bomb, one that will lead to either a progressive takeover of the party in the near future, or a mass exodus – depending on when it explodes. Sanders will fight for progressive change regardless – as a Senator, or an activist, an organizer, or even as a President. It's still not too late.

The author is a research scholar in modern history at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Source: http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/you-can-have-your-weak-nominee-if-you-wish-the-sanders-endorsement-backfires-on-hillary-clinton-empowers-sanders-in-one-masterstroke/

A March For Our Rivers And Against Pipelines

Benoit Renaud — 2016-08-01T16:43:53Z

Stop oléoduc Outaouais (Outaouais against the pipeline) is organizing a march to protect our rivers and the climate, starting on August 14, in Saint-André d'Argenteuil, a small town approximately 80km from downtown Montreal.

The Energy East project is the most ambitious pipeline project in North America. Its goal is to bring oil from the Tar Sands of Alberta to global markets by way of a port in New Brunswick. The Trans Canada Corporation is hoping to have it authorized by the Canadian government by 2018, in order to start using it to transport 1.1 barrels of oil every day by 2020 and until 2060.

This project is clearly contrary to the commitments made by the Canadian government at the Paris conference on climate change. A conservative estimate is that it would generate as much green house gas as 7 million additional cars on our roads. Its 4400 km route also threatens the drinking water of millions of people.

Contrary to the incessant propaganda produced by the Trans Canada communications team, this project would in no way reduce the transport of oil by train or ship. The Tar Sands industry is hoping to expand its total production threefold over the next few years and to bring that product to markets by all means necessary.

The current Liberal government of Canada is clearly leaning towards approval, and is trying to build “social acceptability” through “consultations” and the rhetoric of carbon protectionism (reducing our dependence on foreign oil). But opposition is very strong, especially among First Nations and in many communities where the pipeline would pass.

There is a vibrant grassroots movement all over Québec fighting against this type of project, including natural gas fracking and drilling for oil in the Golf of Saint-Laurence. A new local group formed this spring in the Outaouais region of Québec (the city of Gatineau and surrounding areas) to oppose the Energy East pipeline specifically.

For the march, participants will walk 122 km over seven days (or part of it), going along the Québec side of the Outaouais (or Ottawa) river and ending at the Canadian Parliament in the city of Ottawa on the afternoon of August 20th.

We hope that some of the people attending the World Social Forum will participate in the launch of the march, from 9 to 10 am on August 14th in Saint-André d'Argenteuil. We are still working out transportation from Montreal, but it should be available. If you are interested in this event or want to know more about it, please contact us by writing at stopoleoduc.outaouais@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @StopOleoducO. Please visit our webpage www.stopoleoduc.org/outaouais/, especially if you want to participate in the march itself. There you will find a registration form and other practical information.

Hope to see you at the WSF and at the launch of the march!

Benoit Renaud is the Spokesperson for Stop oléoduc Outaouais