April, 17 2009, 12:00am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
Obama in Latin America
President Obama is scheduled to be in Trinidad and Tobago today for the Summit of the Americas.
WASHINGTON
President Obama is scheduled to be in Trinidad and Tobago today for the Summit of the Americas.
MARIA LUISA MENDONCA
Mendonca, based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is director of the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights. She said today: "The expectation of grassroots movements in Latin America is to change the focus of the debate in multilateral spaces. Our governments tend to focus on access to markets and security issues. We want to deal with the root causes of the current economic, environmental, and food crises, by building international solidarity and hemispheric integration based on people-to-people ties."
GREG GRANDIN
Professor of history at New York University, Grandin is the author of "Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism." In a recent article, he wrote: "This week many will be watching to see if Barack Obama, in what will be his first real engagement with Latin America, is ready to reverse course at this summit as Roosevelt did more than three-quarters of a century ago."
Grandin added: "To the United States, Latin America has not just been a source of raw materials and markets, but a 'workshop,' a place where rising foreign-policy coalitions try out new ways to project U.S. power following periods of acute crisis. FDR did it, as did Reagan and the New Right when, in the 1980s, they used Central America to experiment with junking multilateralism, while remilitarizing and remoralizing foreign policy." https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175059
A nationwide consortium, the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) represents an unprecedented effort to bring other voices to the mass-media table often dominated by a few major think tanks. IPA works to broaden public discourse in mainstream media, while building communication with alternative media outlets and grassroots activists.
LATEST NEWS
Rachel Corrie 'Lives On in All of Us,' Say Palestinians 20 Years After IDF Killed Activist
One Palestinian journalist said the slain American activist "became a worldwide symbol of freedom and a source of inspiration for everyone who dreams of a world of justice and peace."
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Palestinian rights activists on Thursday remembered the life and legacy of Rachel Corrie, the American human rights defender who was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer on March 16, 2003 while trying to shield a Palestinian home from demolition in occupied Gaza.
"Rachel was 23 when she was killed. She could have satisfied her conscience by protesting against global injustice in a demonstration in America or by calling for a boycott of the aggressors," Palestinian journalist and activist Ahmed Abu Artema—who is from Rafah, where Corrie was killed—wrote for Mondoweiss.
"But her high sense of morality was not satisfied with these symbolic gestures," he added. "Her conscience would not rest without complete involvement, without standing side-by-side with us. That's why she came to Palestine."
Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian politician, scholar, and activist, called Corrie "an icon of resistance, freedom, and self-sacrifice."
"Palestine is forever grateful," she added. "Always in our hearts. Rest in love and peace."
Corrie, who hailed from Olympia, Washington, was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led group resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine through nonviolent direct action.
"No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing, and word-of-mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here," Corrie wrote to family and friends on February 7, 2003, adding that she had "very few words to describe" what she saw in Gaza.
"An 8-year-old child was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here," she said.
"I feel like I'm witnessing the systematic destruction of a people's ability to survive," Corrie told a reporter two days before she was killed.
On the afternoon of March 16, Corrie received an urgent call from ISM activists telling her to rush to the home of Samir Nasrallah, a pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children near the Egyptian border in Rafah. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops were in the process of destroying homes in the area and ISM activists feared the Nasrallah's residence was next, as it was one of the few houses left standing in the area.
Corrie hurried to the home, clad in a fluorescent orange jacket and carrying a megaphone. As the IDF's American-made Caterpillar D9R armored bulldozer approached Nasrallah's home, Corrie stood in its path and was fatally injured. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, where she died.
Corrie was not the last ISM activist to be killed or seriously wounded by Israeli forces. A month after her death, 21-year-old British student Tom Hurndall was shot in the head by an IDF sniper as he attempted to rescue Palestinian children from an Israeli tank that was firing in their direction. The shooting left Hurndall in a coma; he died nine months later in a London hospital.
IDF officials denied intentionally killing Corrie, despite court testimony from army officers that Corrie and other activists were legitimate military targets who were "doomed to death" for resisting Israeli occupation forces.
An IDF investigation concluded that Corrie had not been crushed to death by the bulldozer, despite an Israeli autopsy that concluded her death was caused by "pressure on the chest with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae of the dorsal spinal column and scapulas, and tear wounds in the right lung."
The IDF called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident" while blaming the ISM activists for their own harm because by "placing themselves in a combat zone."
Efforts in the United States by Corrie's family, activist groups, and U.S. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) to achieve accountability and justice for Corrie bore no fruit.
While Corrie once wrote that she felt protected by "the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed U.S. citizen," there were no such difficulties, just as there were no repercussions after Israeli warplanes killed 34 American sailors and wounded 173 others during a 1967 attack on the USS Liberty—an attack numerous top U.S. officials believe was deliberate.
In 2012, an Israeli court ruled against Corrie's parents, who had sued the IDF, with the judge claiming the activist's death was the "result of an accident she brought upon herself."
Former U.S. President Jimmy Cartercondemned the ruling as a confirmation of the "climate of impunity which facilitates Israeli human rights violations."
"Rachel's case was cast aside by Israel's colonial courts. But Rachel won," Abu Artema wrote Thursday. "She became a worldwide symbol of freedom and a source of inspiration for everyone who dreams of a world of justice and peace."
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Le Mondeexplained.
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Socialist Party chief Olivier Faure also criticized the approach, saying that "when a president has no majority in the country, no majority in the National Assembly, he must withdraw his bill."
Fabien Roussel, head of the French Communist Party, declared that "this government is not worthy of our Fifth Republic, of French democracy. Until the very end, Parliament has been ridiculed, humiliated."
MP Rachel Keke of the leftist party La France Insoumise stressed that "what the government is doing makes people sick of politics. It should improve people's lives, not destroy them."
Former French presidential candidate and MP Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who launched La France Insoumise, tweeted: "It is a spectacular failure and a collapse of the presidential minority. United unions call for continued action. This is what we are going to focus on."
French trade unions have led national demonstrations and strikes against the overhaul since January. While protesters were oscillating "between rage and resignation" earlier this week, they filled the streets of Paris on Thursday, and "the leader of the CFDT labor union, Laurent Berger, announced there would be new protest dates," according to Le Monde.
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In a sign of a major shift in U.S. public perception that's largely generational, U.S. Democrats favor Palestinians by an 11-point margin. A decade ago, the gap was 36% in favor of Israelis.
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Gallup poll results revealed Thursday that while, for the first time, more U.S. Democratic voters now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, left-leaning respondents also "want solutions that respect Israel's needs as well."
According to the survey of 1,008 U.S. adults, 49% of Democrats said they sympathize more with Palestinians, while 38% favored Israelis and 13% chose neither side or said they sympathize equally with both. A decade ago, 55% of Democrats sympathized more with Israelis, while only 19% said they had more sympathy for Palestinians.
Republican respondents overwhelmingly continue to favor Israelis, with 78% saying they sympathize with them, compared with just 11% for Palestinians. Independents backed Israelis by 17 percentage points, 49%-32%.
Gallup noted:
Aside from partisan differences, Gallup continues to see generational distinctions in how U.S. adults view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Net sympathy toward Israel—the percentage sympathizing more with the Israelis than the Palestinians—is solidly positive among older generations, including baby boomers (+46 points), Generation X (+32), and the silent generation (+31). By contrast, millennials are now evenly divided, with 42% sympathizing more with the Palestinians and 40% with the Israelis, yielding a -2 net-Israel sympathy score.
There are too few adult members of Generation Z (aged 18 to 22) in the recent poll to report, but the limited available data suggest their views on this question are similar to millennials'.
"Today's attitudes reflect an 11-percentage-point increase over the past year in Democrats' sympathy with the Palestinians," Gallup said. "At the same time, the percentages sympathizing more with the Israelis (38%) and those not favoring a side (13%) have dipped to new lows."
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The rise to power of far-right Israeli politicians and parties—who are escalating policies of apartheid and Jewish supremacy at the expense of Palestinian lives, land, and liberty—and the increasingly vocal opposition by congressional Democrats to Israeli crimes including apartheid, illegal occupation, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonization have played a role in the shift as well.
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The poll was published on the 20th anniversary of the killing of Rachel Corrie, an American volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement who was crushed to death by a Caterpillar bulldozer supplied by the U.S. to the Israeli military while trying to shield Palestinian homes from demolition.
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