August 31st, 2010
By: Rabbi Jack Bemporad, Center for Interreligious Understanding
Professor Marshall Breger, Catholic University of America
Suhail A. Khan, Institute for Global Engagement
The Very Reverend Dr. James A. Kowalski, Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
We are here as a single voice that comes from the three Abrahamic faiths, because we are seeing a new slogan ripple from downtown Manhattan across the US. Its timing particularly resonates as some of us have just returned from an unprecedented tour of concentration campsin Europe, where we stood side by side with a delegation of the most influential US Imams and Muslim leadership. Together, those of us who are Jewish and Muslim, came face-to-face with the unambiguous lesson that religious demonization can and does lead to unimaginable violence and horror.
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Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Antisemitism, Bullying, Civil Rights, Crimes Against Humanity, Democracy, Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Hate Speech, History, Holocaust Denial, Human Rights, Human Rights Abuses, Interfaith relations, RELIGION-BASED MURDERS, Righteous People of All Faiths, words that wound | No Comments »
August 27th, 2010
Remember the good old days when the worst the “in” crowd could do was whisper in the hall about who did what with whom? While the old idiom about sticks and stones is mostly untrue — words can hurt — at least the words would typically be forgotten within a few days as the next juicy bit of gossip developed.
These days, our kids are faced with situations that can not only damage their reputation among their peers while in school, but also have a serious impact on the rest of their lives.
• Know where your kids have social networking accounts
• Find out more about their online “friends”
• See photos posted by or tagged with your child
• Get alerted to posts that contain trigger words about drugs or violence
Thanks to mobile texting, blogs and social networking, the spread of information is so fast, easy and free that it makes telling gossip in the halls look downright archaic. Kids don’t have to wait for a story to pass from one person to another to another. They can tell one story to a thousand people with one click. And, instead of just whispering about who did what with whom, kids can now post photos or videos of the act — easily obtained with cell phone cameras and possibly manipulated with tools like PhotoShop.
read more here
Posted in Bullying | No Comments »
August 24th, 2010
(Aug. 23) — As many as 200 women were systematically gang-raped by Rwandan and Congolese rebels over a four-day period last month less than 20 miles from a U.N. peacekeeping base in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations and aid groups reported.
The Associated Press reported that four baby boys were also raped in the attacks that began in a key mining district on July 30. U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters today the rebels blocked a key road during the raping and looting spree.
The eastern Congo is known as the “rape capital of the world” where savage mobs use sexual violence to subdue the population and vie for control of the “conflict minerals” used to make cell phones and laptops around the world.
Posted in AFRICA, Congo, Corporate (ir)responsibility, GENDER HATE, GENOCIDE, Genocide Denial, Hate Crimes, Human Rights Abuses, Human Trafficking, Rwanda, Terrorisim, United Nations, War Crimes | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
Ali Younes
The firestorm that erupted against building a Muslim cultural center in downtown Manhattan is a political issue. The Bill of Rights and the constitutional arguments aside, this case is serving several groups as vehicle to score political victories in the upcoming mid-term congressional elections. For the Republican Party and the neocons and people like newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin the real issue is not the September 11 victims or their families and, of course, not the first amendment or freedom of religion in this country. The real issue is politics.
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Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Hate Speech, POLITICS, Racism, Stereotyping, United States | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
MICHAEL A. MCDONNELL and A. DIRK MOSES
Journal of Genocide Research (2005), 7(4), December, 501–529
That Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) was keenly interested in colonial genocides is
virtually unknown. Most commonly, and erroneously, he is understood as coining
the term genocide in the wake of the Holocaust of European Jewry in order to
reflect its features as a state-organized and ideologically-driven program of
mass murder. An inspection of his unpublished writings in New York and
Cincinnati reveals that this is a gross distortion of his thinking.
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Posted in BOOKS, GENOCIDE, History | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
By Amparo Pamela Fabe
Posted at 08/13/2010 4:28 PM | Updated as of 08/14/2010 3:28 AM
The Philippine government has recognized the intertwining linkages between human rights violations, poverty, exclusion, vulnerability and conflict.
A significant aspect of the solution is the vital role of human rights play in advancing social change; upholding a new state-society relations; breaking down the barriers faced by the poor in accessing services; and providing the basis for the integrity of the criminal justice systems needed for the emergence of a dynamic business environment.
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Posted in Human Rights | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
VOA News 12 August 2010
A leading international human rights group is calling on the United States and other countries to support a United Nations panel investigating alleged rights abuses during Sri Lanka’s civil war.
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Posted in Human Rights Abuses, Sri Lanka, United Nations | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
2010-08-10 01:48163
In October of 2004, Peruvian journalist Hugo Coya visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp known as the “final station.”
While there he wondered if any Peruvians were among the victims.
[Hugo Coya, Author, “Final Station”]:
“Well I found to my amazement and to my horror 22 people. Twenty-two people born in Peru who died in the Holocaust but were born here, who had gone to Europe and had fallen into the clutches of Nazism”.
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Posted in BOOKS, Holocaust survivors, Latin America, The Holocaust | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
Ron Corben | Bangkok 10 August 2010
The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Burma has met with human rights groups and former political prisoners during a visit to Thailand. The information he gathered from the meetings is expected to be part of a report to the United Nations.
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Posted in BURMA, Crimes Against Humanity, Human Rights Abuses, United Nations | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
Tablet August 8, 2010 – 9:00 pm
Hans Keilson is not entirely unknown in America. His most important book, the autobiographical novel The Death of the Adversary, was published here in 1962, and was named one of Time magazine’s best books of the year. Among psychologists, he is also known for his seminal research on the psychology of traumatized children, particularly Holocaust survivors.
But it is safe to say that Keilson’s name will mean nothing to most readers, and that the republication of The Death of the Adversary, accompanied by the first English translation of his 1947 novella,Comedy in a Minor Key, is effectively his second American debut. Considering that Keilson is 100 years old—he was born in Berlin in 1909, and has lived in the Netherlands since the Hitler era—this gives his books an uncanny, time-warp quality. Just as the Holocaust is slipping from living memory into history, he arrives bearing striking new testimony.
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Posted in BOOKS, Holocaust survivors | No Comments »