Tag: protesting
Israeli MIT students ‘terrified’ after anti-Israel rally chant calls for ‘one solution, intifada’
“Israeli students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they are “terrified” to be on campus after participants at a campus protest chanted “one solution, intifada, revolution” at a rally supporting the devastating Hamas terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Israelis in Israel.
MIT students Liyam Chitayat and Lior Alon told Fox News Digital in interviews that after they contacted MIT’s administration to report the calls to violence being chanted from the protest and for concern for their own safety, they’ve yet to receive a substantial response.
Chitayat, a 19-year-old pursuing a Ph.D. on a prestigious scholarship and who previously served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), describes the rally cry as a call for the murder of Jews and the demolition of Israel.
“Intifada is not a call for resistance. Intifada is the name of acts of bombing and killing civilians in Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s the name of taking civilian lives in terrorist attacks in Israel. That is what intifada means. That is how it’s defined,” she said.”
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“Alon argued that maybe 99% of the students calling for terrorism are just “stupid kids” who don’t know the weight that the phrase carries or what it means.
“But we only need one stupid person with a gun,” he said.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israeli-mit-students-terrified-anti-080029984.html
Iran’s months-long protest movement, explained
“the Islamic Republic, headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, executed 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari for the crime of “waging war against God,” or moharebeh in Farsi.
Shekari was the first prisoner to be executed due to the recent unrest, in what Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, head of the Norway-based organization Iran Human Rights, characterized as a “show trial without any due process.”
With Shekari’s execution — likely the first of dozens — the Iranian regime is reverting to a tried and tested playbook of executing political opponents and dissidents. But it’s not clear that the mass imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, and further possible state-sanctioned executions will deter the protesters who have for more than two months now defied crackdowns and curfews to call for an end to Khamenei’s regime.
It’s also not clear what success looks like for the protesters should they somehow manage to topple the regime that’s had an iron grip on the nation since the 1979 revolution — or how they would manage to do so in the first place.
The inciting spark for the now 11-week-long protests was the death of Mahsa Amini on September 16 while in the custody of Iran’s morality police. Amini, a 21-year old Kurdish woman, was arrested while in Tehran for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly; since her death, she has become a potent symbol of many Iranians’ contempt for the country’s oppressive theocracy.
The protests have gained momentum since they began in Amini’s hometown of Saqez, in Iranian Kurdistan, appearing in dozens of cities throughout the Islamic Republic despite the government’s efforts — including internet and mobile network disruptions, mass arrests, and civilian killings — to quash them.
There are some ways this protest echoes past movements, but there are also key differences — not just the longevity, but the degree of societal cohesion and solidarity, too. Women have led and become the public face of this movement — a particularly notable fact in 2022, given the ways that women have been repressed under the current regime.
All of that, however, doesn’t mean that this movement will bring down the Islamic Republic; decades of repression, a poor economic outlook, extremely limited opposition in the political establishment, plus the fact that the military and security service as well as the economic elite continue to throw their lot in with the regime make it difficult to imagine an alternative vision for the future of Iran.”
Are China’s lockdown protests the beginning of the end for Xi Jinping?
“So far, there’s no sign to suggest any significant damage to Xi’s position at the top of the Communist Party.
Nevertheless, it is the first major show of resistance from the public under Xi’s rule, and the grievances directed against the top of the Chinese government are too loud to be unheard.
Xi has made zero-COVID a personal political project. With the public now openly opposing the symbols of that policy — such as the strict PCR test requirements and mask regulations — he will no doubt be seen as personally liable for the public anger.
Ho-fung Hung, an academic at Johns Hopkins University specializing in China’s protest movements, says the government and society “are in the process of seeking a new equilibrium. There can be conflicts and instability in the process.”
Still, the timing could have been worse for Xi, if the protests had taken place before the 20th Communist Party congress last month, when he was confirmed in his position for a precedent-breaking third term.”
Despite its brutal tactics, Iran’s regime fails to contain mass protests
“The Iranian regime is struggling to crush a massive wave of nimble and durable protests, unlike any the Islamic Republic has faced in the past. The leaderless movement has grown in strength despite increasingly harsh crackdowns, relying on unprecedented solidarity between ethnic minorities, different religious groups, and men allied with protesting women.
The movement started in September after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an ethnic Kurd from Saqez in northwest Iran, who was arrested in Tehran by the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab incorrectly and who later died in police custody. Protests in Saqez quickly spread to Tehran and other cities throughout the country. Now in their third month, the protests show no signs of stopping, despite the shocking violence security forces have deployed against the demonstrators, including savage beatings, mass arrests, and indiscriminate killings of protesters, including children.”
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“more than 300 have been killed during the protests. That number includes roughly 50 children under 18, the New York Times’ Farnaz Fassihi reported last week. But casualties and arrests are difficult to track; social media and internet access have been severely curtailed, and foreign reporters can’t access the country. Thus far, five protesters are set to be executed for participating in the uprising.”
India’s farmers confronted Modi and won. What happens now?
“In a surprise reversal after more than a year of nonstop protests, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has agreed to repeal three controversial laws affecting the country’s agricultural industry.
The laws, which sparked a massive protest movement after they were passed in September 2020, were designed to modernize India’s agriculture industry — but India’s farmers and other critics said they would advantage corporations at farmers’ expense.
Modi’s decision to back down is a key victory for farmers, whose protests have centered on the Indian capital of New Delhi, and a sign of growing dissatisfaction with the increasingly Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which Modi leads.”
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“The laws promised to open the agriculture market to commercial buyers, as opposed to the current system of government markets purchasing farmers’ goods and effectively guaranteeing them a minimum income. But as Vox’s Jariel Arvin explained in December 2020, farmers feared this would subject them to the whims of the market and massive corporations, and make it harder to make a living.”
DeSantis asks protesters to stay out of Florida roads in reversal on anti-riot law
“DeSantis pushed the ‘anti-riot” bill in the aftermath of last year’s racial justice protests that spread across the nation — and even cited protesters blocking roads as a justification for the measure that includes extra penalties for people accused of participating in riots and violent protests.
But Democrats and other critics of the law — which is being challenged in federal court — accused DeSantis and other Republicans of supporting selective enforcement of the measure. They said the measure was designed to target Black protesters upset with police shootings. But now DeSantis and other GOP leaders are in a difficult position since they support the aims of many of the demonstrators backing Cuba in Miami and elsewhere.
This week, demonstrators blocked major roadways for hours in Miami-Dade County without any reports of arrests or citations. But the Tampa Bay Times reported on Wednesday that two demonstrators in Tampa were held in jail overnight without bail because of a provision in the new law.
On Tuesday, DeSantis sidestepped a question about whether authorities should arrest people blocking roads as part of protests in solidarity with Cuba. Those demonstrations popped up in several cities as Cuban Americans voice their support to Cuban protesters who are demanding an end to the authoritarian regime that has controlled the island nation for the past six decades.
On Thursday, the governor reversed course and said that authorities could not “tolerate” people blocking roads.
“It’s dangerous for you to be shutting down a thoroughfare,” DeSantis said during a press conference with Florida GOP Reps. María Salazar and Carlos Giménez calling on the Biden administration to help restore Internet access to Cuba. “You’re also putting other people in jeopardy. You don’t know if an emergency vehicle needs to get somewhere and then obviously it’s just disrespectful to make people stand in traffic.”
DeSantis repeated his assertion that his ‘anti-riot’ bill was meant to crackdown on violent protesters.”
State-level Republicans are making it easier to run over protesters
“In the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, Republican lawmakers are advancing a a number of new anti-protest measures at the state level — including multiple bills that specifically make it easier for drivers to run down protesters.
The most recent example of such a law came Wednesday, when Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a new law that effectively allows drivers to hit people with a car in a specific set of circumstances.
Under the new law, an Oklahoma driver will no longer be liable for striking — or even killing — a person if the driver is “fleeing from a riot … under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.”
The measure also creates new penalties for protesters who obstruct streets or vehicle traffic, including hefty fines of up to $5,000 and as much as a year in jail.”
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“If the recent spate of anti-protest measures in Florida, Iowa, and Oklahoma is disturbing on its face, however, context does little to make it better. There is a specific history in the US of the far right using cars as weapons, and it’s not hard to see how bills like the one that is now law in Oklahoma might only make things worse.
The most notable example is from August 2017: Heyer, 32, was struck and killed and at least 19 others were injured when neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. rammed a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville. Fields has since been sentenced to life in prison.
But it’s more than that single incident. According to Ari Weil, the deputy research director for the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, there were at least 72 incidents of cars driving into protesters over a relatively short span in 2020, from May 27 through July 7.
Examples aren’t hard to find. There’s even a Wikipedia page specifically dedicated to “vehicle-ramming incidents during George Floyd protests.” And as Weil explained in an interview with Vox’s Alex Ward last year, “there’s an online environment that for years has been celebrating and encouraging these types of horrendous attacks.”
“What’s particularly worrisome is where those memes spread,” Weil told Vox. “I know of at least four cases where law enforcement officers were sharing these in Facebook groups. [Fields] shared these memes twice in two months before his attack, and other planners of the Unite the Right rally shared these, too.””
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“Even more concerning, it’s not always just random people driving through protests. In several cases, police have also used their cars as weapons against protesters. In Detroit last June, an officer drove his police SUV through a crowd, sending protesters flying; two New York police officers did likewise at a Black Lives Matter protest in May 2020.”
Two weeks after a coup, hundreds of thousands of people are protesting in Myanmar
https://www.vox.com/2021/2/14/22282818/myanmar-protests-military-coup-arrest-suu-kyi
Judge Orders Federal Officers in Portland To Stop Harassing and Assaulting Journalists and Legal Observers
“The ACLU’s complaint, filed on behalf of the Portland Mercury, eight journalists, and two observers working with the ACLU, alleges that federal agents stationed at the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse have joined local police in violating those principles. On July 12, for instance, federal officers shot photographer Mathieu Lewis-Rolland 10 times with “impact munitions” that left “severe lacerations, welts, and bruises all over his upper body.” According to the Geneva Guidelines on Less-Lethal Weapons and Related Equipment in Law Enforcement, such projectiles “should generally only be used in direct fire against the lower body of a violent individual when a substantial risk exists of immediate serious injury to either a law enforcement official or a member of the public.”
The complaint alleges many similar abuses by Portland police, including the gratuitous use of tear gas and rubber bullets, unprovoked beatings, unlawful arrests, and other interference with activities protected by the First Amendment. The ACLU says the plaintiffs who have suffered such abuse were clearly identified as journalists or legal observers.
The lawsuit also complains that Portland police have routinely violated Simon’s June 9 order barring them from using tear gas at the protests except when “the lives or safety of the public or the police are at risk.” Simon said tear gas should not be used simply “to disperse crowds where there is no or little risk of injury.” Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who is also the police commissioner, got a taste of his own medicine on Wednesday night, when he was gassed by federal officers while vainly trying to show protesters that he was united with them in opposing the Trump administration’s response to the demonstrations.
The protests in Portland have been happening every day since May 28, three days after a Minneapolis police officer suffocated George Floyd. The federal officers, who according to an internal memo have not been trained in controlling riots or mass demonstrations, were deployed by the Trump administration this month, ostensibly to protect the courthouse and other federal property. But as Nancy Rommelman notes, the federal presence seems to have inflamed the situation, provoking the vandalism and assaults on the courthouse that the administration now cites to justify its involvement.”