Taxonomy

Hoodies, Hijabs, and Excommunication
Saturday, April 28, 2012 - 21:43

Hoodies,  Hijabs, and Excommunication
 
(updated with a postscript on May 3)
 
While open debate is far more useful to a movement than excommunication, the urge to cast people out—to construct an ideal community and then read deviants out of it—has always run strong among the pure—think the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Anne Hutchinson.  These thoughts are occasioned by my feeling that we stand at the beginning of a new political period and must not repeat the mistakes of the past.

On the weekend of April 13-14, I was at Duke University celebrating the acquisition of my papers by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s Studies at a conference called “Acting Across Borders: The Future of the Feminist 1970’s.” We had asked speakers—a diverse and international lot—to connect the stories of their lives with their politics, and the results felt as if a door were opening into a garden where we might find a new vision of women’s liberation for a new time.
 
One of the most moving speakers was Amber Hollibaugh, now co-chair of Queers for Economic Justice, who said, “The feminist movement saved my life and broke my heart,” describing a censorship campaign waged against her thirty years ago.  She was attacked both because of her radical sexual politics and her identity as a femme lesbian—her detractors said butch-femme relationships replicated patriarchal power relations and had to be stopped.  The conflict came to a head at the Barnard Conference on Sexuality in April, 1982, a pioneer attempt to explore the complexities of women’s sexual lives.  Because the speakers included not only butch-femme lesbians but also women who spoke about s/m and other erotic desires that some feminists considered kinky and dangerous, Women Against Pornography threw up a picket line around the event, holding signs that attacked Amber, Dorothy Allison, Joan Nestle, and Gayle Rubin by name as unacceptable deviants from women’s movement orthodoxy.  As a result of the publicity, Amber lost her job and left the feminist movement to help build an activist response to the exploding AIDS epidemic.
 
I came back from Duke to find a similar excommunication debate raging on the web. This time the target is a UK-based journalist who offended not by her sexuality but by daring to write about the veil. Here is the story:
 
The Feminist Wire is an online women's studies journal “founded by African American feminist scholars that is run collaboratively and with mutual respect and love by a diverse Collective that spans races, ethnicities, sexualities, class statuses, geographies, religions, and feminist perspectives.”  On April 13, they published an article by Adele Wilde-Blavatsky, a member of their collective, entitled “To Be Anti-Racist Is To Be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab Are Not Equals.”  The article argued against an equation being made between the hoodie worn by Trayvon Martin, a black youth shot by a Florida vigilante, and the hijab worn by Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi immigrant woman murdered in California; according to Arun Gupta, one theory she was murdered because she was an observant Muslim.  Said Wilde-Blavatsky: 
 
"What I take issue with here is the equating of the hoodie and the hijab as sources of ethnic identity and pride. The hijab, which is discriminatory and rooted in men's desire to control women's appearance and sexuality, is not a choice for the majority of women who wear it. The hoodie, on the other hand, is a choice for everyone who wears it."
 
Two days after posting Wilde-Blavatsky’s piece, The Feminist Wire published a blistering response signed by a group of 77 "feminist writers, activists and academics” under the title, “What it Means to be an Anti-Racist Feminist in the 21st Century.”  The letter accused Wilde-Blavatsky of white racism:
 
“Adele Wilde-Blavatsky attempts to address the important question of what it means to be an anti-racist feminist in the 21st century. Her article, however, serves to assert white feminist privilege and power by producing a reductive understanding of racial and gendered violence and by denying Muslim women their agency.... In writing this letter, we emphasize that our concern is not solely with Adele Wilde-Blavatsky's article but with the broader systemic issues revealed in the publication of a work that prevents us from challenging hierarchies of privilege and building solidarity.”

I found this letter astonishing. How could one little article by a comparatively obscure young writer “prevent” a group of 77 feminists, some of them extremely established academics, along with a phalanx of graduate students, from “challenging hierarchies of privilege?” Are they that easy to stop? Why did they think it necessary to come down so hard on Wilde-Blavatsky? Were they trying to make sure she never wrote anything again for the rest of her life? Or to make The Feminist Wire understand that it must not publish anything that controvenes the orthodoxy of identity politics?
 
After posting the group letter, The Feminist Wire threw open its pages to unmoderated comments, and a number were posted, some supportive of the original article, others extremely abusive. I wrote one myself, which said:
 
“To me, this heavy handed response smacks of a censorship campaign....Clearly this [the group letter] is meant to end the discussion. Why discuss anything with someone who is racism incarnate—as is shown by her ‘questioning of women's choice to wear the niqab.’ Are all women who question this choice racist by definition? What about women in Iran who risk jail for being ‘mal-hijab?’ What about Muslim women in Nigeria who want to wear their traditional head-wraps rather than the burquas being pushed by Saudi-financed mullahs? Do these women have agency? Or do women have agency only when they wear the veil?”
 
I believe mine was the last comment posted.
 
It takes courage for an editorial collective made up largely of feminist academics to publish a provocative article. It takes even more courage for such a collective to stand firm when attacked by senior people in their own field. On April 19, six days after its publication, the editors of The Feminist Wire removed the entire controversy from their pages. They also removed Wilde-Blavatsky from their editorial collective, and made a humble apology for their sins.
 
“Our intention is not to fan flames, or to point fingers, or to defend ourselves. We are human beings deeply engaged in feminist, anti-racist work, and sometimes we may call it wrong. We offer a sincere apology to readers who were hurt, angered, and offended by the author of the said article and her initial responses, and we have amongst ourselves spent countless hours in discussions about the issues raised.”
 
Clearly the story was supposed to end there. I asked the editorial collective for an interview and got a form letter response:
 
“Fortunately, we've progressed from the matter that you are writing about and are thus disinterested in speaking about it further.  We do urge you, however, to check back with us for our forthcoming forum on Muslim feminism(s).”
 
Because these documents have been removed from The Feminist Wire website, the Centre for Secular Space has reposted them under News. Go there for fuller documentation.
 

POSTSCRIPT, May 3:
 
I said above that I thought the editors of The Feminist Wire had taken down the documents in the controversy because they felt under political pressure.  Since writing that, I have exchanged emails and had a phone conversation with Tamura Lomax, founding editor of The Feminist Wire, who swears this was not the case. She says, rather, that they took down the documents because of threats of a lawsuit by Adele Wilde-Blavatsky, who was so upset by some of the comments made on the website that she sent a legal "cease and desist" order telling The Feminist Wire they had ten days to take down the offending comments.  Rather than take down part of the debate, they took it all down.
 
Lomax said that she too had sent an email asking Wilde-Blavatsky to "cease and desist" from what she felt were defamatory comments about The Feminist Wire and its processes, but that hers was just an email, not a legal document.
 
My own opinion is that 1) to anyone not a lawyer, there may not be too much difference between a "cease and desist" email and a "cease and desist" legal form downloaded from the web; 2) though I am no lawyer, I do not think either party defamed the other in a way that called for legal action and that, though some of the comments were abusive, the latitude for abusive comments on the web is very wide; 3) most of the time, issues of freedom of speech are better handled by more speech than by lawyers.
 
So is this a censorship case?  And, if so, who is censoring whom?
 
To my mind, the main censors here were the group of 77, who were exercising a method long known in leftwing circles as "censorship by public opinion," in which orthodoxy is enforced by making an example of some heretic, in order to convince others—including whoever published the heretic—to be more careful.
 
There are other issues of internal processes, hurt feelings, and the undue speed with which disputes get blown up by email and the web, that I won't get into but will be familiar to anyone who has ever been in a collective or written an email..
 
I have focused this blog on issues of censorship, rather than substantive issues about "the veil," or about what kind of person is allowed to write on such things.  I am not an academic feminist or postmodern theorist but an activist and writer, and confess that I get impatient with arguments based on "standpoint theory," which can easily become ad hominen attacks on a speaker.  My position is, you say what you have to say as clearly as you can, on race or religion or any other subject, and if you get it wrong, you take your lumps.
 
One last suggestion: The Feminist Wire could clear the slate and draw a line under this episode by reposting Wilde-Blavatsky's original essay, the group letter, and their own editorial response.  May not happen, but here's hoping.
 
 
 

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Announcing the First Annual Victor Berger Award for Socialist Sexism
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - 23:28

Announcing the First Annual Victor Berger Award for Socialist Sexism

            Happy International Women’s Day! To celebrate the occasion, this blog is inaugurating the annual Victor Berger Prize for Socialist Sexism! Hurrah!
 
            The award is named in honor of one of the founders of the US Socialist Party, the first socialist to be elected to the House of Representatives, and from my own home town, Milwaukee, at that. Victor Berger had his heroic side; along with other party leaders, he opposed US entry into World War I, for which he was indicted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 20 years.  Milwaukee re-elected him when he was under indictment and, when the Senate would not let him be seated and called a special election, elected him again. But he was not so good on what they called “the woman question.”
 
            This was in the period of a massive and increasingly cross-class movement for woman suffrage, supported by the Socialist Party, which had many active suffragists within its ranks. Victor Berger was not among them; he thought giving women the vote would retard the great working class victory to be brought about by voting for socialist politicians like himself. Even though the party platform supported women suffrage, he said in 1910:
 
            “...nobody will deny that the great majority of women of the present day...are illiberal, unprogressive and reactionary to a greater extent than the men of the same strata of society....it is asking a great deal of the proletariat when we are requested to delay the efficiency of our movement for generations on that account. And we surely ought not to lay such stress on this one point as to injure the progress of the general political and economic movement, which is bound to help the women as much as the men.” [Rising of the Women, p. 194]
 
            His point was seconded by Algie Simons, a fellow party leader, who warned that the US had “The meanest, shrewdest, sharpest, cleverest capitalist class the world had ever known. They know what they are doing when they organize the Woman’s Suffrage organization.”
 
            In other words, feminism is a capitalist plot meant to divide the working class and hold back the revolution.
 
            Now that the Occupy movement has revived the spirit of the US left, I am pleased to announce that the spirit of Victor Berger and Algie Simons has also been revived and was manifest on Feb. 23 at an event on “The Future of the Occupation,” organized by Mark Crispin Miller of the NYU media studies department. Laurie Penny, a UK blogger who attended the event, wrote about it in the New Statesman, describing her dismay at seeing the Occupy movement represented only by white males over forty. She and other women raised this point from the floor and the ensuing discussion was captured on video: 
 
            The video is a treat, though I suspect you had to be there to really appreciate the dynamics and I wasn’t.  I have, however, been at hundreds of meetings with a similar lineup and heard all the usual excuses like “we asked a woman but she couldn’t make it;” and “No women are authorities on this subject.” Not to mention the old Victor Berger stuff about feminism being a capitalist tool to divide the working class—or the black masses, or the anti-imperialist struggle, or you name it—over and over and so on into the night.
 
            Mark Crispin Miller gives the old song a new twist. When asked why he hadn’t invited any speakers who were young, female or people of color, he at first said it was because he was sick—and indeed on the video his voice sounds scratchy; this must account for the body language of the other panelists; they were afraid they might be infected. Then, however, he goes on the offensive:
 
            “It's interesting to note that Ford and Rockefeller and the other foundations with strong CIA connections started giving grants in the early 70s to study race and gender. It was a sudden move towards identity politics by these organizations and the theory is that the reason they did this was to balkanise the left and to prevent it from pursuing any kind of a class or economic analysis. Without denying the justice of what you're saying, this is not an irrelevant theory. I don't think, anyway.”
 
            He later responded to Laurie Penny via email, citing an essay by one David Brandt, who a bit of digging reveals is chiefly famous for counter-spy research and also for trying repeatedly (and apparently successfully) to get his bio removed from Wikipedia. In a downloadable article called “The CIA and Cointelpro: In Defense of Paranoia,”  Brandt says: “One yearns for the good old days, when issues were big, women didn't want to be imperial spies, and idealism and ethical indignation were accepted from nonvictims.” No, he isn’t being ironic. That’s how he writes.
 
            Miller promotes a similar analysis on his own website: “the idea that the state would use race/gender issues as a way to neutralize the left will seem uncontroversial to those who’ve studied how the CIA dealt with the left in country after country from the Fifties through the Seventies and beyond. It’s not unlike their covert funding of innumerable socialists and liberals throughout Europe, South America and Africa in the Cold War’s heyday, or, more recently, their covert backing of Islamist groups to weaken leftist and pan-Arab forces in the Muslim world.” 
 
            It is for this reason that he has been awarded the first annual Victor Berger Prize for Socialist Sexism. Nominations are now open for next year’s award and can be made by posting a comment on this website.  
           

 

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Women's Enews: Human Rights Groups Blur Issues of Women Rights
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - 15:03

This account of the Open Letter to Human Rights Watch was published in Women's Enews on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012.
http://www.womensenews.org/story/equalitywomen%E2%80%99s-rights/120227/human-rights-groups-blur-issues-women-rights

Human Rights Groups Blur Issues of Women Rights
------------------------------

Women's rights groups are criticizing Kenneth Roth, executive director
of Human Rights Watch, for neglecting women's rights violations in an
apparent rush to defend political Islam.

(WOMENSENEWS)-- Salafi mobs have caned women in Tunisian cafes and Egyptian shops; attacked churches in Egypt; taken over whole villages
in Tunisia and shut down that country's Manouba University for two
months in an effort to exert social pressure on veiling.

And while "moderate Islamist" leaders say they will protect
the rights of women (if not gays), they have done very little to bring
these mobs under control.

In this context, the support given by Kenneth Roth, head of the major
U.S. organization Human Rights Watch, to Islamist parties is
disturbing to say the least and shows a wider problem in the attitude
of the human rights movement toward political Islam.

In his group's 2012 World Report, Roth wrote: "It is important to
nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam while
standing firm against repression in its name," but he failed to
call for the most basic guarantee of rights--the separation of
religion from the state.

His essay only once mentions the rights of women, gays, and religious
minorities, almost in passing: "Many Islamic parties have indeed
embraced disturbing positions that would subjugate the rights of women
and restrict religious, personal, and political freedoms. But so have
many of the autocratic regimes that the West props up."

Are we really going to set the bar that low? This is the voice of an
apologist, not a senior human rights advocate.

Roth's essay is just the latest example of a crisis within the human
rights movement, some of whose leaders have treated political
Islamists as partners and been willing to downplay systematic violence
and discrimination against women, gays and religious minorities.

Marieme Helie-Lucas is founder of Women Living Under Muslim Laws, the 20-year advocacy group with headquarters in London, Dakar, Senegal and Lahore, Pakistan. She suggested a group response to Roth.

Over a period of three weeks, with several women writing and others
offering suggestions, we produced an Open Letter to Roth, which serves
as a critique of his essay, signed by 17 global women's human rights
groups. Our letter is accompanied by a petition.

Group Response

This debate has a long history. The modern human rights movement began during the Cold War with a focus on political and civil rights violations committed by states.

During the 1990s, women's rights activists all over the
world--including Americans like Rhonda Copelon and Charlotte
Bunch--fought to transform this focus and build a movement. They
battled to give equal weight to economic, social and sexual rights and
to target violence against women and crimes committed by
"non-state actors"-- militias, paramilitary groups, religious fundamentalists, even fathers, brothers and husbands.

At the 1994 Vienna Conference on Human Rights, activists rallied a
groundswell of support for the idea that women's rights are human
rights.

In response, powerful organizations such Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch set up gender units.

But that does not mean that everyone in these organizations fully
grasped the new analysis.

Refocusing on State Abuse

When 9/11 came along, some fell back into focusing on state abuses.
During the Cold War, the normative human rights subject had been an
Eastern European writer in prison; now it became an accused jihadi in
Guantanamo. Inevitably, people defending accused jihadis tend to see
them simply as victims and do not look hard at fundamentalist ideas
and practices for fear of complicating the issue.

Even before 9/11, there were human rights scandals involving terror,
Islamic fundamentalism and gender.

During the Algerian civil war, both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch
vigorously defended the rights of Islamists attacked by the state, but
paid comparatively little attention to the rights of women,
intellectuals, and civilians who were terrorized, raped and killed by
these same Islamists. And a major scandal erupted in Amnesty
International in February, 2010, when Gita Sahgal, head of their
gender unit, was suspended after she publicly expressed concern about
the group's close alliance with Cageprisoners, an advocacy group for
pro-jihadi prisoners.

For a number of women's rights activists, Sahgal's suspension was the
last straw, showing the extent to which universality--the idea that
everyone's human rights are equally important--had been eroded by
treating jihadis as campaigning partners. The affair was a media
disaster for Amnesty; a global support petition for Sahgal drew 1,500
signatures; and a year later, a group of women's human rights
defenders formed a new think tank, the Centre for Secular Space,
headed by Sahgal. Its goals are to fight fundamentalism, strengthen
secular voices, and promote universality in human rights.

The Centre for Secular Space, based in London and New York, was just
one of many organizations involved in drafting the Open Letter,
including groups based in Bangladesh, Canada, France, Italy, Nigeria,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Senegal, Serbia, and the U.K.

Like the campaign to support Sahgal, the Open Letter to Kenneth Roth
has broken the unspoken taboo against public criticism of human rights
organizations by people who have been their partners. As such, it is
bound to be controversial. But women cannot defend universality
without challenging taboos.

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Raha Iranian Feminist Collective, "Solidarity and Its Discontents"
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 22:23

Raha, "Solidarity and Its Discontents"
 
I am cross-posting this blog by Rawa Iranian Feminist Collective, a group of Iranian and Iranian-American feminists living in NYC, because I think it's an important analysis. 
 
Raha's point about sanctions is key.  I have friends in both Zimbabwe and Iran so I know about the suffering, deteriorating health, and even starvation that sanctions visit on civilian populations.  To my mind, sanctions are one of the master's tools you can't use to bring down the master's house--not, at least, if you are working for a more just world social order.
 
In 1994, when I was still a novice at human rights work and was trying to help get Taslima Nasrin out of Bangladesh, I asked Hameeda Hossain, a senior Bangladeshi feminist, whether it would make sense to get the US to apply sanctions.  She was shocked.  "Absolutely not," she said, "why should the US be able to impose sanctions on Bangladesh when Bangladesh cannot impose sanctions on the US?  The US also does things that are wrong."  Her point was, that we have to work for a world of equality between nations at the same time we work for human rights, rather than asking the US to be judge of the world. 
 
But enough of me.  Here's "Solidarity and Its Discontents."

Solidarity and Its Discontents
by Raha Iranian Feminist Collective

While building solidarity between activists in the U.S. and Iran can be a powerful way of supporting social justice movements in Iran, progressives and leftists who want to express solidarity with Iranians are challenged by a complicated geopolitical terrain. The U.S. government shrilly decries Iran’s nuclear power program and expands a long-standing sanctions regime on the one hand, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes inflammatory proclamations and harshly suppresses Iranian protesters and dissidents on the other. Solidarity activists are often caught between a rock and a hard place, and many choose what they believe are the “lesser evil” politics. In the case of Iran, this has meant aligning with a repressive state leader under the guise of “anti-imperialism” and “populism,” or supporting “targeted” sanctions.
 
As members of a feminist collective founded in part to support the massive post-election protests in Iran in 2009, while opposing all forms of US intervention, we take this opportunity to reflect on the meaning and practice of transnational solidarity between US-based activists and sections of Iranian society. In this article, we look at the remarkable situation in which both protests against and expressions of support for Ahmadinejad are articulated under the banner of support for the “Iranian people.” In particular, we examine the claims of critics of the Iranian regime who have advocated the use of “targeted sanctions” against human rights violators in the Iranian government as a method of solidarity. Despite their name, these sanctions trickle down to punish broader sections of the population. They also stand as a stunning example of American power and hypocrisy, since no country dare sanction the US for its illegal wars, torture practices and program of extrajudicial assassinations. We then assess the positions of some “anti-imperialist” activists who not only oppose war and sanctions on Iran but also defend Ahmadinejad as a populist president expressing the will of the majority of the Iranian people. In fact, Ahmadinejad’s aggressive neo-liberal economic policies represent a right-wing attack on living standards and on various social welfare provisions established after the revolution. And finally, we offer an alternative notion of and method for building international solidarity “from below,” one that offers a way out of “lesser evil” politics and turns the focus away from the state and onto those movement activists in the streets.
 
We hope the analysis that follows will provoke much needed discussion among a broad range of activists, journalists and scholars about how to rethink a practice of transnational solidarity that does not homogenize entire populations, cast struggling people outside the US as perpetual and helpless victims, or perpetuate unequal power relations between peoples and nations. Acts of solidarity that cross borders must be based on building relationships with activists in disparate locations, on an understanding of the different issues and conditions of struggle various movements face, and on exchanges of support among grassroots activists rather than governments, with each group committed to opposing oppression locally as well as globally.
 
The spectrum of protest
 
Numerous protests and actions took place over the week of Ahmadinejad’s UN visit in September 2010, with at least eight activist groups organizing protests on the day of his General Assembly address--all  claiming to speak in the interests of the Iranian people. However, despite some commonalities, these voices represented very different political approaches and agendas. Whether clearly articulated or not, one major fault line was on the question of the appropriate US and international role in relation to Iran, especially on the issues of sanctions and war. 
 
The protests gaining the most media attention were organized by a newly-formed coalition called Iran180 and by the Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI). Both take a hard line, pro-sanctions position on Iran. Iran180, launched by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, organized a press conference under the banner “human rights, not nuclear rights.” The PMOI on the other hand, held a large rally of reportedly 2000 participants from far and wide. The PMOI is an organization known for its militant opposition to the Iranian regime and its anti-democratic, cult-like structure; it has been largely discredited among Iranians and is also listed as a “terrorist” organization by the State Department. Speakers included former mayor Rudy Giuliani, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, and British Tory MP David Amess, all calling for a hard line on Iran and apparently positioning the PMOI as the legitimate diasporic alternative to the current Iranian leadership.
 
By contrast, Where Is My Vote-NY (WIMV), an organization formed to express solidarity with Iranian protests after the contested election in 2009. They mobilized around a platform that called for holding Ahmadinejad accountable but also took an explicit no war and no sanctions position, making them the only organization to do so. WIMV’s strong anti-sanctions stance has been controversial among some human rights activists in the US who have supported sanctions that are supposed to target individual Iranian human rights violators. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International pulled out of a WIMV-organized protest in September 2009 because they refused to endorse the WIMV platform. Below we size up the efficacy of “targeted” sanctions that claim to be in support of the human rights of Iranians.
 
The record of “targeted” sanctions
 
From 1990 until 2003, a United States-led United Nations coalition placed what amounted to crippling financial and trade sanctions on Iraq in an ostensible effort to weaken Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. Sanctions, we were told, amounted to a humane way of combating intransigent authoritarianism around the world while avoiding mass bloodshed. The results of that strategy should have shattered these illusions for good. The complete collapse of the Iraqi economy during thirteen years of sanctions coupled with the inability of ordinary Iraqi people to access banned items necessary for their day-to-day survival--such as ambulances and generators--led to over half a million Iraqi civilian deaths. Furthermore, the sanctions were an utter failure in their purported primary goal—thwarting the Hussein regime while avoiding full-scale war. Not only was Hussein not dislodged by the sanctions, but he also managed to consolidate power throughout the ‘90s while resorting to increasingly autocratic means of suppressing dissent. Finally, in March 2003, the United States and a small “coalition of the willing” began a full-scale military intervention in Iraq, which has shredded the fabric of Iraqi society and left a network of permanent US military bases--and Western oil companies--behind.
 
Despite the benefit of this hindsight, we are being told again to trust in the human rights agenda of a state-sponsored sanctions effort as an alternative to war, this time against the Islamic Republic of Iran. In fact, some form of sanctions against the Islamic Republic have been in place with little effect for over thirty years. But since President Barack Obama took office, the sanctions have been amped up to new heights. In June of 2010, a US-led United Nations coalition passed the fourth round of economic and trade sanctions against the Islamic Republic since 2006. The stated goal: limiting Iran’s nuclear program. Soon after, the European Union imposed its own set of economic sanctions. A month later, President Obama signed into law the most extensive sanctions regime Iran has ever seen with the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Accountability and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA).
 
It should not be surprising, given the United States’ historic attempts at controlling Iranian oil, that CISADA’s primary target is the management of the Iranian petroleum industry. These sanctions would penalize any foreign company that sells refined petroleum products to Iran, which are a necessity for Iran’s primary industry as well as for the everyday functioning of modern life. This winter, shortages of imported refined gasoline forced the Iranian government to convert petro-chemical plants into makeshift refineries that produce fuel loaded with dangerous particles. As a result, the capital city of Tehran has been plagued by unprecedented levels of pollution, shutting down schools and businesses for days at a time and leading to skyrocketing rates of respiratory illnesses and at least 3,641 pollution-related deaths.
 
Further, Iran’s ability to import and export vital goods has been profoundly curtailed because the most powerful Western-based freight insurance companies—many of which worked with Iran until these most recent sanctions—can no longer do business with any company based in the Islamic Republic. Without insurance coverage, most international ports refuse any Iranian ships entry because they are not covered for potential damages. The current round of U.S.-led sanctions have had the effect of cutting off more of Iranian businesses because foreign companies are simply unsure of whether or not their business is sanctioned. As a stipulation of the US, EU, and UN sanctions, no corporations or private individuals can do business with the majority of Iranian banks or industries. Parts and supplies for a great deal of machinery—and not only those potentially associated with nuclear industry—are denied entry into Iran; indeed, one of the deadly examples of the effects of these sanctions in recent years has been the spate of commercial Iranian aircrafts that have crashed due to faulty or out-of-date parts. These measures have already had disastrous effects on the Iranian economy and the health ordinary Iranian citizens, adding to historic levels of inflation, unemployment and pollution-related illness.
 
Despite mounting evidence warning against the humanitarian disaster of unilateral, state-engineered sanctions, many people outside of Iran are still compelled to support them as a diplomatic alternative to war. The operating principle behind such a belief is that these sanctions—unlike those wielded against Iraq, which limited all facets of the economic life of the nation—only target certain individuals, groups, and aspects of economic life. In the case of the Islamic Republic, the argument goes, these individuals and groups are directly linked to the state, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC--or Sepah Pasdaran) and the paramilitary Basij forces, which do indeed command much of the economic resources of the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately, the reality of even “targeted” sanctions is not nearly so rosy. To see why this strategy is almost certain to be a failure, we consider the recent example of Zimbabwe.
 
Since 2001, there has been a similar set of so-called “smart” sanctions in place against Zimbabwe in an effort to weaken President Robert Mugabe and to force him to join a coalition government with his principal political opponents. In the decade after the imposition of these sanctions, Zimbabwe has suffered enormously, experiencing one of the most cataclysmic instances of hyperinflation in history, skyrocketing unemployment rates, a startling lack of basic necessities, a rapidly growing income disparity, and the rise of a black market for goods that only an elite few can access. Indeed, the story in Zimbabwe is remarkably similar to that in Iraq: in both cases the authoritarian state only increased its power as a result of the economic stranglehold on the country due to its monopoly over all of the available wealth and resources in the nation. As the Iraqi and Zimbabwe cases demonstrate, sanctions are not an effective means to avoid war, nor do they inevitably undermine repressive and authoritarian states. Most importantly of all, they further immiserate the very people they claim to be helping.
 
Often, these failed examples are countered by one historic success story, namely, the divestment and sanctions movement against apartheid South Africa--a very compelling instance of international solidarity with a mass domestic opposition movement. Is this an apt analogy for the Iranian case? A crucial difference is that sanctions against South Africa came only after a divestment campaign led by South African activists, which succeeded in convincing a great deal of private capital to flee the country before US or UN involvement. As a tactic developed and deployed within South Africa, sanctions were not the result of power machinations between antagonistic states or a strategy that enhanced US global dominance.
 
Iran presents a very different situation. No member of any Iran-based opposition group—from leaders of the “green” movement, to activists in the women’s and student movement, to labor organizers—have called for or supported the US/UN/EU sanctions against the Islamic Republic. On the contrary, leaders from virtually all of these groups have vocally opposed the implementation of sanctions precisely because they have witnessed the Iranian state grow stronger, and the wellbeing of ordinary Iranians suffer, as a result. Imposing sanctions in the name of “human rights,” as the US did for the first time this fall, doesn’t alter these outcomes. The US government’s long record of either complicity with or silence regarding the treatment of dissidents in Iran--from the 1950s when it helped train the brutal SAVAK torture squads right through to the post-election crackdown in 2009--makes it nothing if not hypocritical on the issue of human rights in Iran.
 
The spectrum of support
 
In stark contrast to the range of groups protesting the Iranian president and the Islamic Republic’s policies, some 130 activists from anti-war, labor and anti-racist organizations took an altogether different approach in September 2010, attending a dinner with Ahmadinejad hosted by the Iranian Mission to the UN. According to one attendee, the goal of the dinner was to “share our hopes for peace and justice with the Iranian people through their president and his wife.” During two and half hours of speeches, activists embraced Ahmadinejad as an ally and partner in the global struggle for peace and, with few exceptions, ignored the fact that his administration is responsible for a brutal crackdown on dissent in Iran (click here for one notable exception).
 
Rather than listening to the millions of Iranians who protested unfair elections and political repression, these activists heard only the siren song of Ahmadinejad’s “anti-imperialist” stance, his vehement criticism of Israel and his statements about US government complicity with the September 11th attacks. Their credibility as consistent supporters of social justice has been shipwrecked in the process. Many of these groups are numerically small organizations with histories of denying atrocities carried out by heads of state that oppose US domination.[1] But some attendees are national figures, such as former US Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, who has been a beacon of principled opposition to neo-liberalism and the “war on terror.” While it is important not to lump all of the groups and individuals together as sharing the same set of political ideologies or organizing strategies, we need to investigate the reasons that these activists showed up to express support for the current Iranian regime. Below we take up the most common reasons attendees expressed for standing with the regime--that it has populist economic policies benefiting workers and the poor, is anti-imperialist and pro-Palestine.
 
Do Ahmadinejad’s policies support Iranian workers and the poor?
 
One of the most bewildering misrepresentations of Ahmadinejad outside Iran has been around his economic policies, which are often represented by the US left as populist or even pro-working class. In reality, the extent and the speed of privatization in Iran under Ahmadinejad has been unprecedented, and disastrous, for the majority of the Iranian people. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s report on the Iranian state’s neo-liberal policies glows with approval, confirming once again that the Fund has no problem supporting undemocratic attacks on the living standards of ordinary people. Privatization in Iran has happened under government/military control. State-affiliated actors, mainly Sepah, have bought a huge share of the country’s economic institutions and contracts--from small companies all the way to the largest national corporations such as telecommunications, oil and gas. Recently, despite vast opposition even from the parliament, the government annulled gasoline and food subsidies that have been in place for decades. Gas prices quadruped, while the price of bread tripled, almost overnight. This is an attack on workers and the poor of historic proportions that had been in the works for many years but was delayed due to fear of a popular backlash. It was only under conditions of extreme militarization and suppression of dissent that Ahmadinejad’s administration could finally implement this plan. Arguing that subsidies should go only to those the regime decides are deserving, the government will now be able to use this massive budget to reward supporters and/or buy loyalty. The massive unregulated import of foreign products, especially from China, has made it impossible for agricultural and industrial domestic producers to survive. Import venues are mainly controlled by the government and Sepah, which profit enormously from their monopolies. These hasty and haphazard developments have severely destabilized Iran’s economy in the past few years, leading to rocketing inflation (25-30%) and growing poverty. Unemployment is very high; no official statistics are available but rough estimates are around 30%, creating fertile ground for recruitment into the state’s military and police apparatus (similar to the “poverty draft” in the United States).
 
Is the Ahmadinejad administration anti-imperialist?
 
The 1978–79 revolution was one of the most inspiring popular uprisings against imperialism and homegrown despotism the world has seen, successfully wresting Iran away from US control over Iranian oilfields and ending its role as a watchdog for US interests in the region. Denunciations of American imperialism were a unifying rallying cry and formed a key pillar of revolutionary ideology. However, in the more that thirty years since, the Iranian government has, like all nations, ruthlessly pursued its interests on the world stage. Despite its anti-American/anti-imperialist rhetoric, Iran cannot survive without capital investment from and trade with other “imperial” nations, without integration into a world market that is ordered according to the relative military and economic strength of various states. Witness the large oil, gas, and development contracts granted to Russia and China, and the way that these countries, as well as France and Germany, have cashed in on the Iranian consumer goods market. The Islamic government has even cut deals with the US, such as during the infamous Iran-Contra episode, when it served its interests. US opposition to Iran’s nuclear program, and multiple rounds of sanctions, should be understood as part of the American effort to re-exert control over this geo-politically strategic country and re-enter the race for Iranian energy resources and markets from which it has been shut out.
 
Iran’s foreign policy cannot and should not be reduced to one individual’s inflammatory speeches. In fact, the same Ahmadinejad who grabs western media headlines by criticizing the US is the first Iranian president to send a letter directly to a US president requesting a new era of diplomacy, something unthinkable under previous administrations. Diplomacy, to be clear, carries with it the goal of re-entering a direct relationship with the so-called “Great Satan.” Far from acting as an outpost of anti-imperialism, the Ahmadinejad administration is maneuvering to cut the best deal possible and to renegotiation its place in the global hierarchy of nations. Given its massive oil and gas resources and strategic location, Iran would likely be playing a far more significant and powerful role if not for decades of isolation, sanctions and hostility from the US. It is in the Iranian governments interests to break this stranglehold. Its strategy is to play all cards possible in extending its regional influence in smaller and weaker countries, such as Lebanon and the occupied territories of Palestine. As Mohammad Khazaee, the Iranian ambassador to the UN told the New York Times, Iran is a regional “heavyweight” and deserves to be treated as such.
 
The Iranian government’s support for Palestinians also scores it major points with many leftists in the US and around the world. Again, it is crucial to see through the rhetoric and examine the more complex aims and effects of Iran’s policies. While the Iranian government does send material aid to Palestinians suffering under Israeli blockades and in refugee camps in Lebanon, they have also manipulated the situation quite cynically for purposes that have nothing to do with Palestinian liberation. Using money to buy support from Palestinians, and financing and arming the Hezbollah army in Lebanon, are crucial ways the Islamic Republic exerts its influence in the region.
 
There is no mechanism for Palestinians or Lebanese people, who are impacted by Iran’s actions, to have any say in how Iran intervenes in their struggles, even when the results are harmful. For instance, Ahmadinejad’s holocaust denials undermine the credibility of Palestinian efforts to oppose Israeli apartheid by reinforcing the false equation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. At the 2001 UN conference against racism in Durban, South Africa, an anti-Zionist coalition emerged and got a hearing. But at the 2009 conference in Geneva, Ahmadinejad’s speech on the first day overshadowed the whole conference and undermined any possible critique of Israel, creating a serious set back for the anti-Zionist movement.
 
Relentless state propaganda about Palestine coming from an unpopular regime has tragically resulted in the Iranian people’s alienation from the Palestinian’s struggle for freedom. Leaving aside the hypocrisy of Ahmadinejad claiming to care about the rights of Palestinians while trampling on those of his own citizens, the policy of sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians while impoverishing Iranians has produced massive domestic resentment. In an article on The Electronic Intifada, Khashayar Safavi attempted to link the pro-democracy Iranian opposition to broader questions of justice in the region. “We are not traitors, nor pro-American, nor Zionist ‘agents,’” he wrote, responding to Ahmadinejad’s verbal attacks on the movement, “[W]e merely want the same freedom to live, to exist and to resist as we demand for the Palestinians and for the Lebanese.” Unfortunately, sections of the US left support the self-determination of Palestinians while undermining that of Iranians by supporting Ahmadinejad’s government. We now look at some of the key problems of Ahmadinejad’s government, exposing the high cost of aligning with repressive state leaders.
 
Harsh realities for labor and other social justice organizing in Iran
 
Currently no form of independent organizing, political or economic, is tolerated in Iran. Attempts at organizing workers and labor unions have been particularly subject to violent repression. The crushing of the bus drivers’ union, one of the rare attempts at independent unionizing in the last few decades, is one of the better-known examples. The story of Mansour Osanloo, one of the main organizers of the syndicate, illustrates the incredible pressure and cruelty labor organizers and their families experience at the hands of the regime. In June 2010, his pregnant daughter-in-law was attacked and beaten up by pro-regime thugs while getting on subway. They took her with them by force and after hours of torture, left her under a bridge in Tehran. She was in dire health and had a miscarriage. These unofficial security forcescontinued to harass her at home in order to put psychological pressure on Osanloo, who is still in prison and is not yielding to the government’s demands to stop organizing. Currently, even conservative judiciary officials are complaining about violations of their authority by parallel security and military forces who arrest people, conduct interrogations and carry out torture, pressure judges to issue harsh sentences, and are implicated in the suspicious murders of dissidents. (In the past few months, not only political dissidents, but even physicians who have witnessed some of the tortures or consequences of them, have been murdered.) 
 
No opposition parties are allowed to function. No independent media--no newspapers magazines, radio or television stations--can survive, other than websites that must constantly battle government censorship. The prisons are full of journalists and activists from across Iranian society. Conditions in Iran’s prisons are gruesome. Prisoners are deprived of any rights or a fair trial, a violation of Iranian law. After the election protests, killing, murder and rape of protesters and prisoners caused a scandal, which resulted in the closing of the notorious Kahrizak prison. Executions continue, however, as the government has meted out hundreds of death sentences in the last year. Iran has the second highest number of executions among all countries and the highest number per capita. In January 2011, executions soared to a rate of one every eight hours.
 
The women’s movement has been another major target of repression in the past few years. Dozens of activists have been arrested and imprisoned for conducting peaceful campaigns for legal equality; many have been forced to flee the country and many more are continually harassed and threatened. Women collecting signatures on a petition demanding the right to divorce and to child custody are often unfairly accused of “disturbing public order,” “threatening national security,” and “insulting religious values.” Ahmadinejad’s government employs a wide range of patriarchal discourses and policies designed to roll back even small gains achieved by women.
 
Ahmadinejad’s anti-immigrant positions and policies are the harshest of any administration in the past few decades. The largest forced return of Afghan immigrants happened under his government, ripping families apart and forcing thousands across the border (with many deaths reported in winter due to severe cold). Marriage between Iranians and Afghan immigrants is not allowed and Afghan children do not have any rights, not even to attend school. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s government has been repressive toward different ethnic groups in Iran, particularly Kurds. It is promoting a militarist Shia-Islamist-nationalist agenda and escalating Shia-Sunni divisions.
 
Given these realities, how is it that large parts of the US left can support Ahmadinejad? We now look at the confusions that make such a position possible.
 
US left support for Ahmadinejad
 
Despite the many differences between the individuals and groups represented at that dinner with Ahmadinejad a few months ago, what the overwhelming majority of them have in common is a mistaken idea of what it means to be anti-imperialist or anti-war. The sycophantic speeches at the dinner can be understood as an enactment of the old adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” There are two problems with this approach. The first is that it equates governments with entire populations, the very mistake the activists at that dinner are always saying we shouldn’t make when it comes to US society. The second problem is that support for Ahmadinejad means siding with the regime that crushed a democratic people’s movement in Iran. This position pits US-based activists who want to stop a war with Iran against the democratic aspirations and struggles of millions of Iranians. 
 
Part of the confusion may stem from a distorted notion of what it means to speak from inside “the belly of the beast.” In other words, the argument goes, those of us in the United States have a foremost responsibility to oppose the actual and threatened atrocities of our own government, not to sit in hypocritical judgment over other, lesser state powers. But in the case of the vicious crackdown on all forms of dissent inside Iran, not judging is, in practice, silent complicity. If anti-imperialism means the right to only criticize the US government, we end up with a politics that is, ironically, so US-centric as to undermine the possibility of international solidarity with people who have to simultaneously stand up to their own dictatorial governments and to the behemoth of US power. The fact that the US is the global superpower, and therefore the most dangerous nation-state, does not somehow nullify the oppressive actions of other governments. China, for example, is increasingly participating in economic imperialism across Asia and Africa, exploiting natural resources and labor forces well beyond its borders. There is more than one source of oppression, and even imperialism, in the world. The necessity to hold “our” government accountable in the US must not preclude a crucial imperative of solidarity--the ability to understand the context of other people’s struggles, to stand in their shoes.
 
If any of the activists defending Ahmadinejad would honestly attempt to do this, they might have some disturbing realizations. For example, if those same individuals or groups tried to speak out and organize in Iran for their current political agendas--against government targeting of activists, against ballooning military budgets, against media censorship, against the death penalty, against a rigged electoral system, for labors rights, women’s rights, the rights of sexual minorities and to free political prisoners--they would themselves be in jail or worse. 
 
Given that these are the issues that guide the work of these leftists in the US, we must ask: don’t the Iranian people also deserve the right to fight for a progressive agenda of their choosing without execution, imprisonment and torture? As we demand rights for activists here, don’t we have to support those same rights for activists in Iran?
 
Solidarity: concrete and from below
 
In the tangle of conflicting messages about who speaks for the “people of Iran”--a diverse population with a range of views and interests--what has been sorely lacking in the US is a broad-based progressive/left position on Iran that supports democratization, judicial transparency, political rights, economic justice, social freedoms and self-determination.
 
There is no contradiction between opposing every instance of US meddling in Iran--and every other country--and supporting the popular, democratic struggles of ordinary Iranians against dictatorship. Effective international solidarity requires that the two go hand in hand, for example, by linking the struggles of political prisoners in Iran and with those of political prisoners in the US, not by counterposing them. Iranian dissidents, like dissidents in the US, see their own government as their main enemy. The fact that Iranian activists also have to deal with sanctions and threats of military action from the US only makes their work and their lives more difficult. The US and Iranian governments are, of course, not equal in their global reach, but both stand in the way of popular democracy and human liberation. US-based activists must not undermine the brave and endangered work of Iranian opposition groups by supporting the regime that is ruthlessly trying to crush them.
 
We are calling for a rethinking of what internationalism and international solidarity means from the vantage point of activists working in the US. Internationalism has to start from below, from the differently articulated aspirations of mass movements against state militarism, dictatorship, economic crisis, gender, sexual, religious, class and ethnic oppression, in Iran, in the US and all over the world. For activists in the US, this means being against sanctions on Iran, whether they are in the name of “human rights” or the nuclear issue. It means refusing to cast the US as the land of progress and freedom while Iran is demonized as backward and oppressive. Solidarity is not charity or pity; it flows from an understanding of mutual--though far from identical--struggle. It means consistent opposition to human rights violations in the US, to the rampant sexism and homophobia that lead to violence and destroy people’s lives right here. But we don’t have to hide another state’s brutality behind our complaints about conditions in America. We have to be just as clear in condemning state crimes against activists, journalists and others in Iran, just as critical of the Iranian versions of neo-liberalism and oligarchy, of attacks on trade unions, women and students, as we are of the US versions.
 
For solidarity to be effective, it must be concrete. US-based activists need to educate ourselves about Iran’s historic and contemporary social movements and, as much as possible, build relationships with those involved in various opposition groups and activities in Iran so that our support is thoughtful, appropriate to the context and, ideally, in response to specific requests initiated from within Iran. It is our hope that these struggles may be increasingly linked as social justice activists in the US and Iran find productive ways of working together, as well as in our different contexts and locations, towards the similar goals of greater democracy and human liberation.

[1] For example, Workers World, ANSWER and several other groups who share the same political tradition have historically supported Soviet crackdowns against popular uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Chinese state’s massacre of unarmed protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the ethnic cleansings carried out by ultra-nationalist Milosevic throughout the 1990s.

 

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The Human Side of “Human Rights”
Sunday, February 12, 2012 - 17:06

The Human Side of "Human Rights"
 
Though I have been doing international human rights work for the last twenty years, I have no degree in law or international affairs; I started as a writer and feminist acting in solidarity with women who faced forms of gender-based censorship ranging from intimidation and trashing to death threats. As founding chair of the International PEN Women Writers Committee and, later, President of Women’s WORLD, I learned how to organize international campaigns, put out urgent action appeals, and help people seeking asylum, but this skill-set was largely self-acquired, because the professional human rights workers I asked for help were often too busy to share their knowledge.  

Since I come out of a movement-building culture in which sharing skills is an obligation, this way of looking at things was quite foreign to me. In addition, the most urgent crises always seemed to happen on weekends or national holidays when staff people were not available, so I began to get an attitude, and decided that professional human rights workers were people who had proper jobs with health insurance and didn’t work weekends.
 
In the past week, I attended a high-level conference on the UN human rights system, and also was part of an international group of feminists working on an Open Letter and petition to Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch. These experiences made me re-evaluate my attitude, and realize that, while there are clearly conflicts between a professional and movement style of human rights work, there are also issues of personality and common humanity.
 
The conference was organized by the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights to examine the office of the UN High Commissioner, and involved a range of participants, from academics and staff at major human rights organizations, to legal experts who had risked their lives and reputations pro bono on fact-finding missions, to people who had spent years in the UN system and were trying to figure out how to make it work better. They talked about the kind of institutional backup needed in a crisis, which they often couldn’t get because the human rights apparatus at the UN is so grossly under-funded compared to development or humanitarian aid. But despite their institutional focus, most speakers had a clear grasp of the nitty gritty. I believe it was Vitit Muntarbhorn, a UN Special Rapporteur on human rights crises in the Ivory Coast and North Korea who had also led a UN investigation into the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography, who said, “to put it very simply, in the end what we are trying to prevent is cruelty.” 
 
Not everyone working on human rights has such a firm grasp of the “human” side. A case in point is Kenneth Roth’s introduction to Human Right’s Watch’s 2012 report, titled "Time to Abandon the Autocrats and Embrace Rights." Roth is Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. Looking at the Middle East and North Africa from on high, as if he were in a position to orchestrate world diplomacy, he argues that states must overcome their reluctance to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood because the new governments are preferable to the military dictators the West supported in the past. 
 
In response, an international group has written an Open Letter to Kenneth Roth, linked to a petition. The letter, which is signed by a number of women’s human rights organizations and activists, begins:
 
“Dear Kenneth Roth, In your Introduction to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2012, ‘Time to Abandon  the Autocrats and Embrace Rights,’ you urge support for the newly elected governments that have brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Tunisia and Egypt.  In your desire to ‘constructively engage’ with the new governments, you ask states to stop supporting autocrats.But you are not a state; you are the head of an international human rights organization whose role is to report on human rights violations, an honorable and necessary task which your essay largely neglects.
 
“You say, ‘It is important to nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam while standing firm against repression in its name,’ but you fail to call for the most basic guarantee of rights—the separation of religion from the state.  Salafi mobs have caned women in Tunisian cafes and Egyptian shops; attacked churches in Egypt; taken over whole villages in Tunisia and shut down Manouba University for two months in an effort to exert social pressure on veiling. And while ‘moderate Islamist’ leaders say they will protect the rights of women (if not gays), they have done very little to bring these mobs under control.  You, however, are so unconcerned with the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities that you mention them only once, as follows: ‘Many Islamic parties have indeed embraced disturbing positions that would subjugate the rights of women and restrict religious, personal, and political freedoms. But so have many of the autocratic regimes that the West props up.’ Are we really going to set the bar that low?  This is the voice of an apologist, not a senior human rights advocate....”
 
For the rest of the Open Letter, please go to the website of the Centre for Secular Space—and don’t forget to sign the petition.
 
 

 

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Happy Birthday, UDHR!
Saturday, December 10, 2011 - 20:30
            Today is the 63rd birthday of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Happy birthday, honey! What an opportunity for people in the US to get to know you better.
 
            Occupy Wall Street, please meet Article 23: "Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."
 
            And all you folks who've lost your jobs to outsourcing or your homes to foreclosure, meet Article 25: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
 
            People in the US government also need to get to know the UDHR better, not to mention our own Constitution. This week the Senate passed a secret National Defense Authorization Act —according to the ACLU, which is campaigning against it, the NDAA will authorize the President to have the military lock up anybody, including US citizens, indefinitely, without trial, here and anywhere in the world. The Senate passed this bill despite opposition from the Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, Director of the FBI, and Director of Counterintelligence, among others. Don't our Senators know that Article 9 of the UDHR says "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile?"
 
            It is ironic how few Americans actually know the UHDR when so many in the international hipousie think human rights is a US imperialist plot. In fact, as Gita Sahgal, Director of the Centre for Secular Space, points out in her guest blog below, published today in openDemocracy, far from springing full blown out of the forehead of Eleanor Roosevelt, many of the best ideas in the UDHR came from what in my youth was called the Third World.
 
Who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
 
 
On the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we might consider whether the idea of human rights with their firm assertions, their belief in the ‘rule of law,’ and their globalised vision remain relevant in the world. The idea that there are absolute standards has come under attack from both the left and the right. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre , author of 'After Virtue', said, Natural rights and self evident truths proclaimed in the American declaration of independence are tantamount to belief in witches and unicorns. While from the left, in ‘Human Rights and Empire’, Costas Douzinas has called human rights the political philosophy of cosmopolitanism and argued that human rights now codify and ‘constitutionalise ‘ the normative sources of Empire.
 
Those fighting the attempts by the Bush administration to tear up human rights prohibitions on torture, would be surprised to see themselves as empire builders. The only weapons they had were the Constitutions of their countries and the human rights system, with its unequivocal rejection of torture. While recent developments in human rights may certainly be used to justify foreign military interventions on humanitarian grounds, a vast body of human rights law also limits the abusive power of the state and protects the freedom of the individual. But are these freedoms ones that are derived from ‘the West’ and therefore limited in their application?  States affiliated to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) certainly seem to think so. In the 1980s and 90s Islamic states drafted the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, as an alternative declaration.
 
The idea that different peoples were endowed with separate rights would have seemed absurd in the middle of the twentieth century to those struggling against colonial oppression or trying to build new nations. The barbarity unleashed on the world by a global war, was certainly in the minds of delegates. But so too was the yearning to build a better world within the nation-state, as well as limiting foreign aggression and war.  ‘It was imperative that the peoples of the world should recognize the existence of a code of civilized behavior which would apply not only in international relations but also in domestic affairs', said Begum Shaista Ikramullah, a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan  and a delegate of the UN in 1948.
 
Susan Waltz is one of the scholars who has done much to recover stories such as the role of Begum Ikramullah and others in  the forgotten history of the drafting of the UDHR. Her work shows how mistaken many assumptions are about this foundational document. Eleanor Roosevelt is  often seen as the single author of the Declaration, since she chaired the drafting Committee. Civil and political rights are seen as classical ‘Western' concerns, whilst social and economic rights are thought to have been advocated for by the Soviet bloc.
 
In fact, as Waltz shows, Roosevelt supplied neither the text nor the substantive ideas that shaped the UDHR. Ricardo Alfaro, former President of Panama, proposed the idea and first draft of such a Declaration, which was taken up by many others including public intellectuals such as HG Wells. While early drafts were worked on by Rene Cassin of France, along with many US lawyers, each clause was voted on by member states, and many suggestions came from drafters from small and newly de-colonised states. The Latin American states promoted  social and economic rights, while the Soviet Union concentrated on racial discrimination – a convenient way of bashing the US, as well as colonial states.
 
The  desire for emancipation of all, emphasising that rights applied to everyone everywhere, emerged as a major concern. Significant additions were made by newly de-colonised states regarding, slavery, discrimination, the rights of women and the right to national self determination.
 
Two of the most important drafters were Hansa Mehta of India, and Charles Malik of Lebanon, who was Committee Rapporteur. Hansa Mehta, an extraordinary activist and brave member of the Constituent Assembly in India, was responsible for the wording of the Article I ‘All human beings are equal in dignity and rights,’ arguing that if the word men was used, it would not be regarded as inclusive but rather taken to exclude women. She was the key figure who ensured gender equality in the document.
 
Yugoslavia proposed that human rights should apply to the peoples of non-self governing and trust territories. Carlos Romulo of the Philippines argued that full rights should be given to the colonies. Article 2, thereby ensures non-discrimination (a standard clause that came to be adopted in all treaties) on the grounds  of race, class property, social origin and so on; but it also ensures that subject peoples were also endowed with rights. ‘no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.’
 
Political differences were very evident. But the arguments were not necessarily divisions between blocs. There were political divisions among Muslims on religion and marriage, two very contentious areas. Saudi Arabia objected to Article 16 on the right to choice in marriage. Begum Ikramullah opposed the Saudi view making a speech against child marriage. She accepted equal rights in marriage on the grounds that equal did not necessarily mean the same. Egypt’s Wahid Rafaat accepted the language on marriage, noting that marriage limitations based on race (as in the US) were more shocking to his country than limitations based on religion or nationality. The clause on marriage, in short, was fought for by a range of opinion to form an egalitarian and adult basis for marriage which was absent then from most countries whether eastern or western.
 
The clause on being able to exercise freedom of religion was supported by a number of Muslim delegates. The Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Zafrallah Khan, quoted the Qur'an ‘Let him who chooses believe, believe and him who chooses to disbelieve, disbelieve.’ He believed that the right to change religion was consistent with Islam. Moahammed Habib from India, supported the statement as consistent with the Constitution of India. However, Saudi Arabia objected to it, and eventually abstained from voting on the Declaration itself. No-one voted against the Declaration, although Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the Soviet bloc abstained, with 50 countries voting for it.
 
Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, member of the drafting sub-Committee, wrote: “I perceived clearly that I was participating in a truly significant historic event in which a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing—which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality.  In the Great Hall…there was an atmosphere of genuine solidarity and brotherhood among men and women from all latitudes, the like of which I have not seen again in any international setting.”

 

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Petition to Support the Afghan Women's Network
Friday, December 2, 2011 - 17:08

I have been working on women’s human rights for many years, most recently with the Centre for Secular Space, a new global think tank formed to oppose religious extremism, strengthen secular voices, and ensure that the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities don’t disappear from view in the rush to make peace with Islamic fundamentalists. Ever since stories started appearing about Karzai wanting to negotiate with the Taliban and the US backing him up, we have been worrying about what would happen to Afghan women.  The Afghan Women's Network has developed a terrific demilitarization program but nobody here seems to have heard about it, while some of the men in the US State Dept. consider women’s rights a "pet rock" to be discarded when serious negotiations begin. I wrote a blog about this, but what good is a blog? 

 
Seeing Peace Unveiled on PBS and hearing that Afghan women were being excluded from the Bonn conference, which begins Dec. 5, sharpened my sense that something awful was about to happen. So I wrote another blog. It felt about as effective as putting a message in a bottle. But by this time, a lot of other people were taking initiative; pressure mounted; emails started flying; and the global network Women Living Under Muslim Laws put out a very strong statement denouncing “the ethical incoherence of States that engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan under the fallacious pretext to protect ‘poor oppressed Muslim women living under the burqa’, and now prevent them from participating as full-fledged citizens in the peace process in their country, all while engaging with their oppressors,” and calling for women and progressive forces everywhere to use “all possible media avenues in support of Afghan women’s claim to full participation in the negotiations.”
 
The next day, thirteen women were suddenly included in the Afghan delegation to Bonn. Two days later, the Afghan Women’s Network sent out an update saying that, as a result of concerted domestic and international pressure, the official delegation was now 31% female. However, these women were added at the last minute and had not been consulted about what would happen at the Bonn conference. In addition, fifteen women have been added to the Peace Council, but these women  were handpicked by government people, including warlords. In short, “real meaningful participation of women at all levels is still very minimal.”  
 
By then the Bonn meeting was just a week away. There wasn’t enough time to pull together a big coalition of women’s and human rights groups, or to get a list of celebrity signatures that might impress the State Dept. But at least we could do a global petition. Ariane Brunet in Montreal and I worked on the text; we got input from others in our network; and the petition went up late Tuesday night. It is now starting to reach international listserves. If we get enough signatures, maybe we can convince our governments to actually listen to the Afghan women’s demands. Please sign, link on FB, tweet, and forward to your friends!
 
 

 

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Afghan Women Excluded
Monday, November 21, 2011 - 23:08

Afghan Women Excluded

 
On December 5, less than two weeks from now, the second conference on Afghanistan will convene in Bonn, ten years after the first one installed the Karzai government. It will include all the usual suspects—Afghan governmental bodies, foreign governments, and representatives of Afghan civil society—with one big exception. Despite some pressure—who can say how much?—from the State Department, and the clear and cogent demands put forth by the Afghan Women’s Network, no Afghan women’s groups or representatives have been invited. As Human Rights Watch points out, 
 
“The Afghan government’s key donors and facilitators of the conference, including Germany and the United States, do not appear to have made women’s rights a priority for the meeting.” This is despite Hillary’s promise not to abandon Afghan women, and the fact that support from the German Greens—who are members of the government—helped build the Afghan Women’s Network.
  
When you consider that the Taliban’s treatment of women was a pretext for this war, these facts are staggering, if not surprising. The recent broadcast of “Peace Unveiled” on PBS’s Women, War & Peace series shows the kind of opposition Afghan women activists are up against and how unreliable US support for them appears. It’s an important program and series, very much worth watching, and all the episodes can be viewed online. 
 
Despite all the talk about UN resolution 1325, people in the US, even most feminists, have not focused on this problem. I wrote a blog last July saying how important it was to support the demands of the Afghan Women’s Network. To my surprise, I was asked if I wanted the war to go on forever—as if the only two choices were between endless war or betraying Afghan women.
 
To accept this is to accept the idea that the only meaningful form of US action is military. President Karzai (who changes his tune frequently) has been all over the papers saying how much he wants a continued alliance with the US, meaning we should keep giving him lots of money. Are we to put no conditions on this aid, let human rights go out the window, and, in the name of respecting cultural differences, keep financing a corrupt regime with an attitude towards women and gays barely different from the Taliban’s?
  
Could the Obama administration perhaps show a little principle here? A little backbone?
  
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon posted an article today in Foreign Policy called “Afghan women are not ‘pet rocks’” (referring to a dismissive remark by a State Department official). I am cross-posting it below and hope you will forward this and link to it widely because there has been so little media attention to this. Let’s try to generate some pressure here.
 
Afghan women are not "pet rocks"
By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Monday, November 21, 2011
 
Afghan women have long fought for a say in their country's future, but that fight has grown more urgent in the run-up to the Bonn Conference, a gathering charged with laying out a plan for Afghanistan for 2014 and beyond.
  
So far, women's battle to win a substantive role at Bonn - and any other peace talks that may come to the capital - has gained little traction either at home or abroad.  And in the US, those backing women say they face an uphill fight convincing the Obama Administration to speak out more about the need for women's participation.
  
Afghan women leaders have issued press releases and formal position papers in the run-up to December's meeting demanding that civil society makes up 30 percent of Afghanistan's delegation to the Bonn Conference, with women accounting for half of that group.    
 
The Afghan government has not yet announced its official delegation, but so far one man and one woman from civil society have been invited to Bonn, with the woman getting three minutes to address the plenary.  Of the sixteen women attending a separate civil society forum, only one will have access to the official conference, according to the Institute for Inclusive Security, which recently brought Afghan women leaders to Washington to press their case on the Hill and with the Obama Administration.
  
"We would like to have strong participation in these processes, we would like to know what is being discussed, what is put on the table," says Orzala Ashraf, a peace activist and founder of an Afghan NGO for women and children. "We would like to ensure that these bargaining chips (in any peace process) are not women's rights or our achievements of the past ten years."
  
With the U.S. and its NATO allies focused on extricating themselves from Afghanistan, the task of laying out the path ahead has assumed extreme urgency for Afghans. "It is of high importance for women's groups and civil society to make sure their voices are included in any road map," says Ashraf, "in any direction that Afghanistan is going to take." 
But whether those voices will be heard remains an open question.  
 
As Human Rights Watch noted, "The Afghan government and its international backers say that women's rights are one of their ‘red lines' as they plan for the withdrawal of international forces. If this is the case, why are Afghan women struggling to get a seat at the table in Bonn?"
  
Those in Washington attribute part of the reason to a White House inner circle that sees the role of women as far removed from the issue of Afghan security.  As the Washington Post famously noted earlier this year, women are seen as "pet rocks in our rucksack" that are "taking us down."
  
"These guys don't get it," said a senior administration official who has argued that women's participation is crucial for Afghanistan's stability, as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell did in 2002. "Ten years on we still have to make the case that women are additive."
  
As I've written in these pages, it is far from the situation of a decade ago when leaders across Washington fanned out before the cameras to speak about the importance of supporting Afghan women. After five years of Taliban rule, in which women were denied the rights to work and education and to leave their homes, the international community offered its arrival in 2001 as a new start.  
  
Secretary of State Clinton helped women leaders win a speaking role at last year's Kabul Conference and has promised women that "we will not abandon you," but with her departure imminent and 2014 looming, talk of a Taliban return is surging.  
 
Fears of what the Taliban's ascendance would mean for women have only grown stronger with news of the stoning death of a woman and her daughter in Ghazni Province.  Assassinations of leading human rights supporters and police officials and attacks on girls schools have skyrocketed in recent years - even as talk of a peace deal with the Taliban has come to be viewed in NATO capitals as the best option for ending the war.
  
Some American advocates for women say any talk of Taliban negotiations is misplaced, especially given the recent assassination of former President and head of the High Peace Council, Burhanuddin Rabbani.
  
"We don't think anybody should be negotiating with the Taliban," says Esther Hyneman of Women for Afghan Women, which runs family centers and safe homes for abused women across Afghanistan.  "If the Taliban wanted a role in the government, why don't they run for parliament in a democratic election? They don't want a role in the Afghan government -- they want the Afghan government."
  
Women's group leaders say that just like in the 1990s, when they lobbied to stop the Clinton Administration from recognizing the Taliban government, they will not stand by quietly while women half a world away are denied their constitutionally guaranteed rights to work and education. They note that Afghan women are making progress for themselves, pointing to the rising number of girls attending school, as well as female midwives, police officers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, civil society activists, parliamentarians and educators as evidence.
  
"We will keep the pressure on and support women in any way we can," says Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which helped to lead the fight against Washington's recognition of the Taliban in 1996.  "There is now a huge network of non-profit organizations within Afghanistan and we are talking to them and they are taking the lead.  What we can do is continue to put pressure on the U.S. government not to agree to anything that omits half the population."
  
Yet some wonder just how committed the White House is to supporting women's participation in their country. The President has not spoken often about Afghanistan - and far less about the country's women.
  
"Perhaps the tremendous unpopularity of the war puts [President Obama] in an awkward position," says activist Mavis Leno, wife of talk show host Jay Leno and one of the women who put the issue on America's map -- and in PEOPLE Magazine in 1998 -- after the Taliban came to power in 1996. "I don't think he is doing as much as he could."
  
Hyneman goes further:
 
 "I am at my wit's end at the lack of discussion by the media, by our government, by our president on the issue of women's rights in Afghanistan." Of Obama, Hyneman says, "I am appalled that he has not mentioned Afghan women's rights since his speech on withdrawing US troops."
 
Women's activists say they are watching closely to see exactly what the Afghan government -- with support from the United States -- agrees to in any peace deal.
  
"I just don't understand why the fate of these women has to be considered as special pleading," Leno says.  "Are we just going to stand back and see this happen again? Women were making it a little way up the hill; can we at least make sure that they don't slide back down again?"
  
They say they share Americans' desire to end the country's longest war, but that a peace that leaves
women out will not last.
 
"We are in favor of peace, but this is not the road to peace, it is the road to bloodshed and subjugation and civil war, a repeat of the years past," Hyneman says. "Everyone will be sitting in front of their TV sets wringing their hands as we see women brutalized.”
 
 

 

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Secular Space
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - 15:02

Three weeks ago, I was on a panel at John Jay College’s Center for International Human Rights, organized by the Centre for Secular Space, a new thinktank formed to “oppose fundamentalism, strengthen secular voices, and promote universality in human rights.”  One way to do this is to provide information that is hard to find elsewhere.  On this occasion, Ariane Brunet, a Canadian human rights expert, galvanized the room by saying that the revolution in Tunisia actually began with a strike by women garment workers ten years ago; these workers subsequently played a leading role in the protests that led up to the exit of dictator Ben Ali in January, 2011.

This is not the story one hears in the US press, where the emphasis has been on the rise of the “moderate Islamist” party Ennadha, which won a plurality of 42% in the recent election for a constituent assembly and has formed a governing coalition with two liberal parties. Rachid Ghanouchi, the leader of Ennadha, has become the darling not only of the US State Department and the New York Times but of leftwing thinkers at the Guardian and the Institute for Policy Studies, where Rob Prince wrote recently:
 
"Although there have been concerns circulating among neoconservative circles and the French ruling class that the stunning Ennahda victory suggests some kind of Sharia state just around the corner in Tunisia, the response in the United States and Europe has been mostly positive…. Claims that Ennahda is some reincarnation of the Afghan Taliban or a Tunisian version of the Saudi Wahhabist movement are so far off the mark as to be ludicrous. While of course there will be political differences between Ennahda and its more secular coalition partners, there will be no Taliban-style Sharia in Tunisia, nor are the gains that Tunisian women have enjoyed since 1956 likely to be seriously eroded."
 

Despite this hopeful appraisal, and the fact that Ghannouchi is criticized by more authoritarian Islamists, many Tunisians say Ghannouchi speaks out of both sides of his mouth. 

"The party ran an unveiled woman as an election candidate, vowed not to touch laws banning polygamy and ensuring equal rights in divorce and inheritance that some say are at odds with Islamic Sharia, and presented a programme differing little from that of secularists…. Yet Tunisian commentator Rachid Khechana said many in Ennahda give different messages in their own communities.  'They use different rhetoric in the rural areas where it's more conservative: rhetoric about stopping culture from outside, corruption of youth and defending Islam,' he said. 'In the mosque, they tell their believers they should not fear what they hear them saying on TV.'" 

 
Please note that the fashionable new term “moderate Islamist” does not necessarily imply moderation on issues like women’s and gay rights; it merely implies a willingness to achieve a strict Islamic state through elections and social pressure rather than violence. But social pressure can be extremely coercive.  According to Tunisian student leader Halel Sayeh:  “Nous avons déjà vu à l’œuvre cette pression sociale qui a poussé d’innombrables femmes à opter pour le hijab, de peur d’être mal perçues dans leur milieu social fraichement radicalisé.” [We have already seen the work of this social pressure, which has pushed innumerable women to opt for the hijab, for fear of being considered immoral in their newly-radicalized social environment.]

Certainly Islamists—whether Ennadha members or less “moderate” salafis—have been on the rampage in Tunis. Ariane Brunet laid out a sequence of troubling events: a mob attack on the Grande Synagogue de Tunis, and assaults on unveiled women (most women in Tunis are unveiled) and women sitting in cafes, who were beaten with sticks by Islamist mobs. Then there was the violent censorship of Nadia el Fani’s film Laïcité Inch’Allah (Secularism, God Willing), including death threats against the director, destruction of the movie theatre where it played, and a physical attack on the theatre’s director. Last month an Islamist mob made a similar attack on a cable TV station that showed the Arabic language version of Marjane Satrapi’s animated film Persepolis, in which a little girl has imaginary conversations with God, who is drawn as a bearded man. The home of the owner of the station was also attacked. Although Ennadha disclaimed responsibility for these mobs, it opposed the showing of Persepolis and Ghannouchi clearly supported the idea of mob censorship in an interview, saying the masses wanted to express their indignation. 
 
One test of the “moderate Islamists” of Ennadha will be whether they are willing to use the police powers of the new coalition government to secure human rights. Will they defend freedom of expression if that free expression offends some Muslims? Will they insist that the police protect unveiled women, transsexuals, and Christians who are attacked by Islamist mobs? We shall see.
 
Meanwhile, in the US we too are having problems with the interface between religious extremism and human rights. Yesterday, citizens of Mississippi voted on a “personhood” amendment to the state constitution declaring a fertilized egg a legal human being. This would have criminalized not only abortion, but any form of birth control that prevents a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, including the IUD and the morning after pill. As Susan Jacoby says, “Make no mistake about it: Proposition 26 is entirely about the determination of far-right religious institutions to make their brand of faith the legal standard for all matters involving sex, reproduction and women’s (though not men’s) bodies.” The amendment was defeated but its supporters will continue to pursue this goal.
 
Then there is the publicly funded bus company that serves a community of Hasidic Jews in Kiriat Joel, Monroe County, New York. According to the Jewish Weekly Forward, buses to Kiriat Joel have a curtain stretched down the center aisle, with men sitting on one side and women on the other, so that the men will not be distracted by the sight of a female ankle.  Never mind the fact that segregation on public transportation is illegal.  
 
Twenty, even ten, years ago, I would not have believed it possible that sex segregation would be permitted on a publicly funded bus line in New York. But in the US as elsewhere, secular space is being nibbled away, bite after bite, by extremist religious movements and government complicity with them. The consequences of this nibbling are particularly dreadful for women, gays, and religious minorities. Ennadha may be committed to equality for women, but try telling that to the Tunis transsexual whose neighbor just grew a beard and started going to the mosque and is now threatening to kill her.  
 
To fight the imposition of far right religious views, a number of us, scattered around the globe, have started the Centre for Secular Space. You can read our principles on our website; and you can write to us there. As yet we have no office and no paid staff, but some of the smartest and bravest women in the world are behind this initiative, so do follow our website, which will soon add interactive features and seek comments.
 
Secularism does not mean that everybody has to be an atheist. It means that government, including public education and transportation, must be free of control by religious authority; and that the state should defend religious freedom while opposing religious discrimination and coercion. States that cop out on this job will need to hear from all of us.
 
 
 
 
 

 

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Vision and Demands
Monday, October 3, 2011 - 20:21

 

            I just moved and have been too blitzed  to get down to Wall Street yet. I’ll head downtown when I get my strength back but it sounds like the kids are doing fine on their own.
 
            Some would disagree with this assessment. They fault Occupy Wall Street for not having concrete demands and a strategy; its website forum  holds many such complaints, and responses. The American Prospect website posted another such criticism. I had to laugh when I read it, because the tone reminded me so much of early days in the Boston women’s liberation movement, when we formed Bread and Roses and the boys kept saying our plans were too amorphous.
 
            “What’s your strategy?” they said. “What are your demands?” They explained that revolutionaries actually need not one set of demands but TWO—a set of “immediate demands” around which we would mobilize the masses, and another of “transitional demands” for when we were on the verge of seizing power. 
 
            But we were thinking more about vision than demands. Our vision was of a non-hierarchical society where people would share wealth and knowledge and be able to develop into their best selves without being held back by poverty, racism, sexism, and constant wars. But since everybody said we had to have demands, we came up with a list, which we put on a leaflet for the first Boston International Women’s Day march held in decades, on March 8, 1970. The list was so long we had to use legal size paper. Here it is:
 
 
THE ECONOMY
 
            Women must be enabled to participate in the economy on a basis of equality with men. We believe that the nature of work in our system is demeaning to human beings, and we do not want merely to upgrade women into the alienated jobs that men now hold. However we refuse to do the low-grade, low-paid, and service work any more. Such jobs may be shared by men and women, as must housework be shared, and be recognized as legitimate work that deserves pay. We take it to be our right:
 
1. That all persons, including children, be assured a personal income commensurate with the cost of living and independent of their family status.
 
2. That all employers immediately be required to comply with the law of the land and pay equal wages for equal work.
 
3. An end to sex discrimination by job definition, which evades the law by defining all desirable jobs in such a way that only men can fill them. Secretarial and executive tasks should be shared between men and women; responsibility should be shared between doctor and nurse.
 
4. That all employers give priority to the hiring and promotion of women, with preferential hiring to women of races and classes that have been discriminated against. No men must be laid off to comply with this demand.
 
5. Childcare by men and women, during work hours, provided free by the employers, and controlled by workers and the community.
 
6. An end to discrimination against part-time or temporary workers, who are mostly female or minors; for example, equal fringe benefits and employment opportunities.
 
7. Maternity leave for both men and women, with guaranteed return and no loss of pay or seniority.
 
CONTROL OF OUR BODIES
 
            Women should be able to control their own bodies, to have children if and when they want to, and to refrain from having children if they want to. This ultimately means an end to all laws governing birth control and abortion, with the exception of legal standards of health and safety. It also means that if proper health care is to be equally available to all women, we must have free medical care for all people. We consider these to be our right:
 
1. Abortion, birth control devices, and pregnancy tests to be provided on demand to women of all ages, under safe conditions, at no cost.
 
2. Prenatal, maternity and postnatal care to be provided to all women at no cost. Women should be able to determine the manner and place in which they give birth.
 
3. Drastic increases in government funding of birth control research; research priorities to be determined by women, since it is their health which is at stake.
 
4. Higher safety standards for drug company research and regulation of their profits. An end to drug company imperialism in the form of testing unsafe drugs on third world women, and then charging exorbitant prices for them. No testing of dangerous drugs on mental patients, prisoners, or others whose lives are not their own.
 
5. Free, available and complete information about women’s bodies, available to them as a right in all institutions.
 
6. An end to the double standard which puts prostitutes in jail and lets their clients go free.
 
7. An end to all forms of environmental abuses; particularly an immediate halt to those which have their most disastrous effects on women and children, such as Strontium 90 and DDT poisoning which poisons mother’s milk.
 
8. While we think population control is essential, it must not be substituted for a sharing of the world’s resources between rich and poor countries. Therefore, we want an end to the kind of population control, on the national and international levels, which concentrates on controlling the population of people of color.
 
THE FAMILY
 
            The family unit should not be seen as the only economically and socially acceptable unit of society. Central to the liberation of women is the provision of alternatives to the present pattern of child-rearing and housekeeping, which results in each mother’s veering virtually the entire responsibility for her children and her home. Such alternatives would go far towards eliminating the untenable choice most women must make between bearing children and developing independent work. We therefore demand:
 
1. Free, community controlled 24 hour child-care centers, staffed equally by paid men and women, young and old.
 
2. Alternative forms of good, reasonably priced ho using, including provisions for cooperative childcare, communal cooking, etc., for all people.
 
3. The establishment of a personal income for all persons, independent of familial status, commensurate with the cost of living.
 
            The state should not interfere in personal relationships. In this context we demand the abolition of all laws regulating marriage and divorce; the abolition of all laws regulating sexual behavior between consenting persons; the abolition of all laws regulating living arrangements, for instance, laws against cohabitation; and an end to the legal concept of illegitimacy. Children should have a choice of living arrangements with relatives, non-related adults, other children, and any combination of these possibilities. This means civil liberties for minors; they must not be legally penalized or prosecuted by their parents for choosing to live with other people, exercising their sexuality, or doing other things that offend their parents’ sense of propriety. Any number of adults should be able to make legal contracts between themselves, other than marriage ceremonies, that will concern mutual responsibilities for each other and for children.
 
EDUCATION AND CULTURE
 
            The educational system and the media in our country perpetuate undemocratic myths about the nature of women, working people, and black, brown, red and yellow people. They also deny these groups any knowledge of their own history. The media and educational system must be redesigned by the people whom they oppress, to express the past and to meet their needs for development in an atmosphere free from psychological oppression. With respect to women, these things are necessary:
 
1. An end to sexual tracking at all levels of the educational system. By this we mean not only courses specifically designed for each sex, but also the subtler forms of tracking, such as encouraging boys to be smart and girls to be ladylike.
 
2. That all courses be thoroughly revamped by women to end the perpetuation of male supremacist myths.
 
3. That the facts about sex inequality be added as a topic to all school curricula, and that new courses be developed by women in their culture and history.
 
4. That vocational counseling in high schools and colleges be totally redesigned so as not to channel women into low status, low potential occupations.
 
5. That trade schools, vocational schools, colleges and graduate schools admit one-half women, with preferential treatment of women from races and classes that have been discriminated against.
 
6. An end to advertising which exploits women’s bodies to sell products.
 
7. An end to sex-role stereotyping in the media.
 
 
            Our list left some things out, notably gay rights (Stonewall was the year before) but a lot of it still looks pretty good.  Since we never did anything with it, there is no way to measure our impact quantitatively or in terms of how many of our demands were achieved; our goal was a revolution in consciousness. One of our project groups went on to become the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, famed for Our Bodies, Ourselves, now celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Bread and Roses itself lasted only four years but we were trying to build a movement, not an institution, and we stayed active in the movement; many of us went on to do pioneer writing, labor organizing, academic, media, and global solidarity work.
 
            I think—I hope—the kids on Wall Street are at the beginning of a movement, as we were then. They too have come up with a list of demands (or rather, complaints) which appears to have been modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Like our Bread and Roses list, it should be seen as a vision statement, not an electoral program. As such, it’s quite terrific.  I hope Occupy Wall Street will be able to hold onto its democratic process and vision and not get pushed into somebody else’s programmatic mode.  As the movement develops, it will find its own shape. 

 

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