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Bündnis #Gegenberufsverbot – Fighting Against Fake Neutrality

Headscarf bans in public employment in Berlin by Miriam Aced


19/09/2020

Headscarf bans in public employment in Berlin

by Miriam Aced

Kamala Harris is No Feminist Hero

She is only the third woman ever to get nominated for the role. She is the first Asian-American woman and the first African-American woman to do so. And given Trump’s mishandling of Coronavirus, with over ,,196,000 dead, she might actually have a chance of becoming Vice-President of the United States of America. But while breaking […]


18/09/2020

She is only the third woman ever to get nominated for the role. She is the first Asian-American woman and the first African-American woman to do so. And given Trump’s mishandling of Coronavirus, with over ,,196,000 dead, she might actually have a chance of becoming Vice-President of the United States of America. But while breaking the glass ceiling is a personal triumph, despite what some pieces in ,,The Atlantic might suggest, Kamala Harris’ nomination as Joe Biden’s running mate is sadly no feminist victory.

Given her track record, there is no sign that Harris’ achievement will trickle down to benefit average working women in the US or around the world.

While Harris can be applauded for a handful of good policies, such as ,,supporting legislation together with Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey which would give $2000 a month to any American making up to $120,000 a year during the pandemic or being ,,a stark defender of abortion rights, she can be criticized for much more than she can be praised for. Her identity as a woman of color has certainly not stopped her from enabling destructive policies against,, black and brown communities, ,,immigrants and ,,sex workers. Like Hillary Clinton, Harris is no feminist hero, but simply a woman in a position of power. While there are many reasons to deem her a faux feminist, the glaringly obvious one is her disregard for the credible sexual assault allegations against her running mate.

Joe Biden has been accused of inappropriate touching by multiple women but the most harrowing story comes from a former employee of his, Tara Raede. Not only does Raede allege that ,,Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 while she worked for him, but she also explains how her life and career were ruined by him after she was fired. Her story was corroborated by Reade’s neighbor Lynda Lacasse who said in a ,,Democracy Now! interview that Reade told her about the incident in late 1995 or early 1996.

However, Harris has not offered her support to Tara Reade like she did to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanough, the man nominated to the Supreme Court by the Trump administration, of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. Harris not only explicitly told Dr. Ford that ,,she believed her, but also during her failed presidential run Harris said that ,,she believed Biden’s accusers too. However, more recently she has only ,,said that Tara Reade has “has a right to tell her story”. Harris even doubled down during ,,her VP nomination acceptance speech at the DNC and said “I know a predator when I see one”, implying that Vice-President Biden is not one.

Furthermore, Kamala Harris’s record as District Attorney of San Francisco (2004-2011) and as Attorney General of California (2011-2017) is not much better. During the Democratic ,,presidential debate in July 2019, Hawaian Senator Tulsi Gabbard pointed to a number of damaging things that Harris had done during her time as a prosecutor, such as putting over 1500 people in jail for low-level marijuana violations and keeping people in overcrowded prisons incarcerated longer than necessary so as to have greater access to cheap labor. Moreover, Harris has a troubling record of prosecuting parents for their children’s truancy i.e., punishing parents and guardians when their children have been absent from school without an approved reason. Many have criticized her for this part of her record, since these laws predominantly affected poor and working class parents.

“So the criticism of this law is that when children miss a lot of school, a lot of times, the reason for that is not totally under the parents’ control. Maybe the parent or family moves around a lot because the parent has lost a job. Maybe the child doesn’t feel safe in school,”

says ,,Huffpost,,’s Molly Redden.

But above all, Kamala Harris’ legislation on sex work has probably had the biggest impact internationally. During her Senatorial mandate, Harris co-sponsored the set of laws called ,,SESTA (,Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act,,)/FOSTA (,Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act,,). Their supposed goal was to stop sexual exploitation and human trafficking. However, it was through SESTA/FOSTA that Backpage got shut down. Backpage was a popular website through which sex workers from all over the world could cheaply advertise their services and most importantly could use to vet potential clients. Some have hailed Kamala Harris’ nomination as a feminist victory. But according to Cleo Constantine, the Democratic candidate for Vice-President is a woman responsible for legislation that continues to have destructive and even deadly effects on the lives of sex workers all over the world.

“Backpage allowed workers, especially marginalized workers, especially workers who worked on the street, to have a platform where they could advertise for a reasonable price. That meant that a lot of people didn’t need to work in brothels and didn’t need to work for pimps anymore,”

says co-host of the podcast ,,The Candid Companion and Berlin-based sex worker ,,Cleo Constantine in order to explain how Backpage actually gave more rather than less agency to sex workers.

In 2019, Senator Harris said publically that she had changed her position on sex work and that she now supports decriminalization. However, when ,,her words are examined more carefully, one understands that she actually believes that selling sexual services should be decriminalized while buying them should be illegal.

“Harris is actually a Nordic model feminist,” Cleo clarified in regards to what Harris’ actual position on sex work is. “As someone who has worked under the Nordic Model, it is scary and certainly not safer because it just puts pressure on clients to not see sex workers, which makes us more desperate and more likely to see more dangerous clients.”

“What I find really insidious about Kamala Harris is that she was cheering when SESTA/FOSTA was passed even though a lot of sex workers said this is going to get us killed. I think it’s very bittersweet for US sex workers now since they have to choose between a Trump/Pence and Biden/Harris ticket. Kamala Harris has blood on her hands. Many sex workers not only lost huge portions of their income, but were killed because of legislation that made it much harder for them to vet their clients,”

Cleo added.

Cleo’s account further shows that Harris’ policies have already negatively impacted people all over the world. Unfortunately, self-described “top cop” Kamala Harris has successfully used her blackness and minority status in order to create the aesthetics of a progressive veneer while simultaneously pushing for brutal policies on many fronts. In a time when the media increasingly pays attention to so-called “identity politics”, politicians with minority statuses can sometimes be valorized even when they are destructive. That is precisely the case with Kamala Harris, a career prosecutor and politician who is neither progressive nor a feminist: She is simply a woman in a position of power that seeks to gain even more power. Just like a lot of male politicians.

There is certainly an argument to be made about voting for Biden and Harris in the face of four more years of an administration that has not only let thousands die from a deadly pandemic, but has recently been discovered to be doing ,,hysterectomies to women detainees at ICE detention centers. In the face of such overtly eugenicist practices, it is difficult to judge anyone for voting for “the lesser of two evils”. And yet, we must remember that under the Obama-Biden administration, as a government agency, ICE was not only alive and well, but ,,more people were actually deported during such a centrist Democratic rule than even during Trump.

This is not about making an argument to not vote for Biden and Harris, but rather that electoral politics are unlikely to save the most vulnerable. A Biden-Harris victory will only take us so far. Thus, we must look beyond electoralism and look to grassroots leaders and movements — like #BlackLivesMatter — so as to push for a truly inclusive feminism and liberatory world for all.

Perhaps this idea is best summed up with a striking sentence found in Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser’s Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto: “We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling while leaving the vast majority [of women] to clean up the shards.” (Cinzia Aruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, (London, New York: Verso, 2019), 13.)

Photo Gallery – Berlin LINKE Internationals Summer Camp 2020

September 12-13, Naturfreundehaus Hermsdorf Photos by Antony Hamilton


15/09/2020

September 12-13, Naturfreundehaus Hermsdorf

Photos by Antony Hamilton

On Normalization and the Meeting of Palestinian Movements

by The One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) in Historic Palestine   (The following is an unofficial translation of the Arabic original declaration. With the translation I expanded some terms to make them understandable to the foreign reader. Thanks to all the people that helped with this translation.) On September 3rd, the leaders of different Palestinian […]


12/09/2020

by The One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) in Historic Palestine

 

(The following is an unofficial translation of the Arabic original declaration. With the translation I expanded some terms to make them understandable to the foreign reader. Thanks to all the people that helped with this translation.)

On September 3rd, the leaders of different Palestinian movements, overcoming deep divisions, met in Beirut and Ramallah. This followed the invitation of the President of the Palestinian Authority, to discuss a common response to the ‘Normalization Agreement‘, between the United Arab Emirates and Israel. What made this meeting possible is the American-Israeli imperialist alliance’s total and aggressive denial of the Palestinian people’s basic rights. The imperialist alliance’s cynical approach removed any remaining illusions about a settlement to the conflict. Such illusions became prevalent after the Oslo Accords, and even existed before.

The imperialist powers are violating international law and humanitarian and ethical standards, and have disappointed all those who gambled on them. With “The Deal of the Century” the USA is repeating the injustices of the British 1917 ‘Balfour Declaration’, by giving the Zionists Palestinian land over which they do not have any rights.

Now they drag corrupt and blood-stained Arab dictatorships into this rogue alliance. Those Arab regimes go beyond normalization to become accomplices in the aggression against the Palestinian people. The Palestinians are exposed to the most heinous crimes by the colonial Western regimes, through their proxy in the region.

All of this forced the Palestinian leadership to choose between two clear options: Surrender or Resistance. As for the Palestinian people, they continue resisting. This resistance has continued for more than a century, against the Western-Zionist plot to uproot and replace them by foreign settlers and form a bridgehead for European colonization in the heart of the Arab region.

The meeting of the factions was an important step towards the national unity yearned for by our Palestinian people. This ever since the disastrous division (between Gaza and the West Bank) in 2007. During this period, Israel waged three atrocious wars and committed numerous crimes against humanity; imposed a blockade on two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; intensified its settlement and “Judaization” activities and the killings in the West Bank and Jerusalem; in addition to enforcing colonialist oppression of a million and a half of our people in the Galilee, the Triangle Region and the Naqab. And then, of course, we should not forget the plight of the millions of refugees who were displaced and uprooted from their homeland. Their right of return Israel continues to deny, thus embodying the brutality of Zionism and the lack of justice and ethics of the so-called international community.

National unity, based on a comprehensive, emancipatory vision and a correct resistance strategy, is an essential condition for joint work and a precursor to defeating oppression and achieving freedom and justice. It is also an essential condition to restore and enhance popular Arab support, and to mobilize for our cause all advocates of freedom around the world. Ours is a just cause, that should concern all the peoples of the world, especially the oppressed, of which the Palestinian people is a part, who are struggling to achieve freedom, justice and human dignity.

The question remains: does the movements’ meeting, and its resulting statement and decisions, constitute a real turning point in the march of the Palestinian people, and redefine the way towards freedom and independence? The current leaders bear the responsibility for the division and failure to rebuild the Palestinian national movement and to achieve liberation – they were responsible for the national, political and moral devastation that all this has entailed. Are they qualified, capable, and even willing to break with the era of fatal illusions? Is it possible to move and advance the national liberation project towards a new era of true liberation struggle without the youth and without the participation of new leaderships? Our people ask these questions, people from all the layers of society: workers, peasants, intellectuals, detainees and many others.

Accordingly, the ‘One Democratic State Campaign in Historic Palestine‘ asserts that, in order to fulfil the purpose of the meeting, the following conditions should be provided:

First, we should start from the fact that the Palestinian people, wherever they are, all 13 million, are one people; and that Palestine includes all the land located between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, not merely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Second, affirming the right of return of Palestinian refugees whom the Zionist movement expelled from Palestine and seized their properties, pursued them in their places of refuge, waged wars on them and assassinated some of their leaders. It is a natural and sacred right, recognized by an international decision since 1948.

Third, liberating the ‘Palestine Liberation Organization’, which has become subordinated to the ‘Palestinian Authority’ and its “security coordination” with the occupation. It should be liberated from the grip of bureaucracy and the restrictions of the Oslo Accords. It should be rebuilt on democratic foundations to represent all components and communities of the Palestinian people, wherever they are, including the Palestinians of 1948, and based on a program of return and liberation.

Fourth, the withdrawal of the PLO’s recognition of Israel. Israel which has continued expanding its colonial settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem and imposed a siege on the Gaza Strip. Israel ignores all international laws that prohibit settlements in the occupied territories and criminalize the existing apartheid system. Israel adopted the so-called “Nationality Law” – a blatant colonial apartheid law – to grant false legitimacy to its colonization of all of historic Palestine. Israel has unambiguously stated – together with its patron the United States – that the country located between the river and the sea belongs to the Zionist movement. According to them the Palestinian people have no right to their homeland. A homeland which the Palestinians have not left for thousands of years, except under the pressure of the colonialist Zionist movement and its crimes of ethnic cleansing perpetrated in 1948, and still being perpetrated against the Palestinians – even the holders of its citizenship.

Fifth, responding to this colonial expansion and the new “Balfour Declaration” by stating that the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination applies to all of historic Palestine. This means reviving the PLO’s program, represented by the return and liberation of Palestine from Zionism, its colonial regime and apartheid. The ‘One Democratic State Campaign in all of Historic Palestine’ revives this solution. But in a modern form, in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews can live in a human, democratic, egalitarian system, after dismantling the Israeli colonial apartheid regime, in the context of the removal of colonialism from the entire Arab region. The one state project is not merely a vision, but a resistance project, in which participate also Jewish anti-Zionists who oppose the system of colonialist settlement and its crimes.

Sixth, holding elections for the Palestinian National Council, with the participation of all the Palestinian people, without exception. The limitation of the elections for the Legislative Council and the Palestinian presidency to the West Bank and Gaza Strip cements the Oslo Accords. But they divide and fragment the Palestinian people and erases the universal Palestinian identity. It keeps the majority of the Palestinian people, especially those in 1948 areas and the refugees, outside the scope of representation, the conflict, the national unity project and the right to self-determination. Further, this exclusion prevents the participation of all Palestinians, without exception, in the Palestinian struggle for the right to self-determination.

Seventh, cancelling all the punitive measures taken by the Palestinian Authority against our people in the Gaza Strip since March 2017, and compensating them for all their dues. It is completely unacceptable to talk of national unity and reconciliation between the movements while, at the same time, imposing sanctions on a key component of our noble people.

Eighth, the adoption of the Palestinian boycott movement in a practical and clear way as a pioneering means of struggle. Acting resolutely against all forms of normalization with apartheid Israel, primarily through the abolition of security coordination with the occupation and the dissolution of the so-called Committee for Interaction with Israeli Society.

Ninth, the formation of a broad, popular front that adopts an effective popular resistance strategy, from all aspects, including the struggle in the streets, cultural, social and economic resistance. This front would establish a path towards a new, free society that is capable of steadfastness and cohesion while it achieves its interim goals, then its ultimate goal of dismantling the colonialist apartheid system and the establishment of the democratic state in all of historic Palestine.

This English translation first appeared on the Free Haifa Website. Reproduced with permission