Tagged: repression

Happy birthday, OWS! NYPD tries to keep us down, but we’re rising all around!

FROM PALESTINE TO NYC
CHECKPOINTS = TOOL OF SUPPRESSION

 Fast Facts about checkpoints in the West Bank:

  • 522 roadblocks and checkpoints obstruct Palestinian movement in the West Bank, compared to 503 in July 2010.
  • So far in 2011, an additional 495 ad-hoc ‘flying’ checkpoints obstructed movement around the West Bank each month (on average), compared to 351 in the past two years.
  • 200,000 people from 70 villages are forced to use detours between two to five times longer than the direct route to their closest city due to movement restrictions.
  • One or more of the main entrances are blocked to Palestinian traffic in ten out of eleven major West Bank cities.
  • Palestinians holding West Bank IDs require entry permits to enter East Jerusalem and are limited to using four of the 16 checkpoints along the Barrier.
  • 62 percent of the Barrier is completed, with 80 percent of the Barrier route built inside the West Bank, with highly limited access to areas behind the Barrier.
  • Four of the five roads into the Jordan Valley are not accessible to most Palestinian vehicles.
  • Almost 80 percent of land in the Jordan Valley is off-limits to Palestinians, with the land designated for Israeli settlements, ‘firing zones’ and ‘nature reserves.’
  • 122 closure obstacles shut off the Old City of Hebron from the rest of the city.
  • Palestinian access to their private land around 55 Israeli settlements is highly restricted.

This information is from the September 2011 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report “Movement and Access in the West Bank.”

 IDF, NYPD – Enforcing Inequality! 

Join us at the Free University for Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine: The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement to End Israeli Apartheid

Where: Free University at Madison Square Park, pool area

When: Saturday, September 22, 12 pm to 2 pm

What: Discussion of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights. Members of Global Justice will elucidate how and why this global call from Palestinian civil society groups fits within the parameters of the Occupy movement. Representatives from local Palestine solidarity groups will give an overview of the BDS movement—its goals, history, strategies, and analysis. And finally local activists working on specific boycott and divestment campaigns will highlight their successes and challenges. Please bring your questions and concerns and join us for this important discussion.

Madison Square Park is located between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and 23rd and 26th Streets.

For more information about the Free University, visit freeuniversitynyc.org.


July 10: Why Egypt Matters – Important Report Back from Egypt

Please join OWS Global Justice at
the Coalition to Defend the Egyptian Revolution–NYC’s upcoming event

WHY EGYPT MATTERS:
IMPORTANT REPORT BACK FROM EGYPT
U.S. Lawyers and Activists Return from
Fact-Finding Mission to Egypt
Join us for: An updated analysis on one of
the most important people’s movements of our time.
Followed by: A Strategy Session: Building a Global Solidarity Movement
Tuesday July 10th, 7:00 pm, 33 West 14th St., Manhattan
     U.S. activists, lawyers, and scholars recently took part in a fact-finding mission to Egypt aimed at studying Egypt’s ongoing revolution, investigating the role and responsibility of the U.S. government and corporations in human rights abuses against the Egyptian people, and documenting the ways in which more than thirty years of U.S. military and economic intervention has violated Egypt’s popular sovereignty and locked the country in a web of international debt. Please join us for an important report back and strategy session discussing future solidarity work.
     Recent decrees reinforcing the power of the military regime, escalations in violence against protesters, increased arbitrary detentions, military trials, and further restrictions on worker’s rights to organize, all indicate that the Egyptian revolution is under threat. The U.S. government and corporations have played and continue to play a pivotal role in maintaining a repressive regime in Egypt. Now more than ever, it is vital that we in the United States hold the U.S. government alongside corporations accountable for their complicity in the crimes committed by Egypt’s repressive regime.
           In every way, Egypt’s fight is our fight. Egyptians are the 99%, fighting for social, political and economic justice. The same 1% that arms the Egyptian dictatorship commits systematic violence in this country against the Occupy movement; antiwar and solidarity activists; and Arabs, Muslims, and other communities of color.
           We ask you to join us in mobilizing to defend our Egyptian brothers and sisters as we build towards a long-term, international campaign to defend their revolution and the global revolution for dignity, freedom and social justice.
Sponsored by: Coalition to Defend the Egyptian Revolution — NYC
Facebook event page:
For more information: 

National Lawyers Guild Delegation Returns from Egypt with Evidence of Systematic Human Rights Abuses, Calls for Transparency and Accountability from U.S. Government

June 28, 2012
Contact: Azadeh Shahshahani, President-Elect, (212) 679-5100, ext. 15

This April, the National Lawyers Guild sent a delegation of U.S. lawyers, activists, and scholars to study Egypt’s ongoing revolution. In particular, the delegation investigated the role and responsibility of the U.S. government and American corporations in human rights abuses. It also documented how 30 years of U.S. military and economic intervention has violated Egypt’s popular sovereignty and locked the country in a web of debt.

The delegation met with a broad range of activists, including human rights advocates, youth leaders, Islamists, leftist intellectuals, and trade unionists. Delegates also met with many civil society organizations that provide vital legal and social services to poor and working class Egyptians who have been targeted by the state for their activism.

Through these meetings, the delegation gained important evidence of human rights abuses. The evidence implicates the military, the police, and state security forces in violent attacks on protesters, unlawful detention of activists, and the widespread use of torture, actions in which U.S. agencies have also been complicit.

Continue reading on the National Lawyers Guild website.

No More Tears! – Land Day Arabic edition of our tear gas comic

Palestinian Land Day was initiated in 1976 after Israeli forces shot and killed six Palestinian citizens of Israel and injured many more in an attempt to crush (with tear gas, among other weapons) popular protest against the ongoing theft of Palestinian-owned land. On Land Day 2012, also the global day of action for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), the Global Justice working group is pleased to share the War Resisters League’s Arabic translation of our tear gas comic, with a special preface for Land Day.