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For Immediate Release
June, 14 2016, 12:00pm EDT
Contact:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; David Zupan,(541) 484-9167
LGBT Activists Against Militarization and Surveillance--Interviews Available
See in the Guardian: "Omar Mateen's interest in gay men makes this no ordinary act of terrorism," by David Shariatmadari.
WASHINGTON
See in the Guardian: "Omar Mateen's interest in gay men makes this no ordinary act of terrorism," by David Shariatmadari.
Chelsea E. Manning, currently in prison for leaking information, including the "Collateral Murder" video to WikiLeaks, writes: "We must not let the Orlando nightclub terror further strangle our civil liberties."
YASMIN NAIR, (773) 784-3216, nairyasmin@gmail.com, @NairYasmin
Nair is a freelance writer, activist, academic, and commentator based in Chicago. She is the co-founder of the editorial collective Against Equality and a member of Gender JUST, a radical queer grassroots organization based in Chicago. She just appeared on The Real News segment: "Why is the Orlando Shooter Branded as a Muslim Instead of a Homophobe?"
EVAN GREER, (978) 852-6457, evangreer@gmail.com, @evan_greer
Greer is campaign director for Fight for the Future, which works for free expression on the internet. She said today: "More surveillance would not have stopped this horrific attack on our LGBTQ community. That's because mass government surveillance is not intended to keep us safe, it's intended to keep us in line. The population of queer people of color, predominantly latinxs, who were targeted by this attack, are already disproportionately endangered by corporate and government surveillance and the runaway systems of policing and incarceration that it enables. Politicians' and the media's focus on "radical Islam" as the root cause of this attack is nothing but thinly veiled racism. There are homophobic and transphobic attacks every day in the United States, many of them carried out by law enforcement and government officials themselves. I'm sickened by politicians who never cared about our lives or our safety until they saw an opportunity to advance their Islamophobic, imperialist agenda."
MATTILDA B. SYCAMORE, (206) 325-5029, nobodypasses@gmail.com, @mbsycamore
Sycamore's books include The End of San Francisco and Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
She wrote on her Facebook page: "Sometimes I wake up, and I glance at the news, and there's something so horrifying that I cannot stop crying. I mean today. When I saw that at least 50 people have been killed in a mass shooting at a gay bar in Orlando, and at least 53 more have been hospitalized. Watching the video of a guy talking about using his bandanna to plug a bullet hole in someone's neck, and how he had never seen so much blood in his life. ... We should not allow anyone, gay, or straight (or queer) to justify even more Islamophobia, serving as cover for U.S. military aggression around the world and oppression here in the U.S."
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.
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