This week's stories: Low-Income Schools Failing Because of Lack of
Funding...Resistance is Useful...Some Terrorists are More Equal Than
Others...the War on Terror Successfully Stamps Out Amateur
Photography...No Link Between Iraq and Al Qa*da...Family Driven Insane
By Immigration Detention...Quote of the week.
Some Victorian schools in poor areas can no longer afford basic programs
like physical education and art.
Carolyn Atkins from the Victorian Council of Social Services, said that
"core aspects of education are now being paid for by fund-raising" on
the part of schools themselves.
Mr Atkins said that schools in poor areas could only generate $4000 a
year through fund-raising, whereas schools in rich areas could generate
$40,000.
Victoria's shortage of teachers is set to worsen dramatically over the
next few years, according to a report by the State government. The
report predicts a shortfall of between 600 and 900 teachers each year to
2006.
Andrew Blair, of the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals
said that "if you have teachers who are teaching in hard-to-supply
teaching areas, on occassions you are less likely to be as scrupulous in
attending to quality issues, performance issues". Poorer areas and
rural areas are far less popular choices for teachers.
Data compiled by the principals' body shows that 7 percent of Australian
schools had already stopped offering some subjects or programs because
of a lack of teachers.
(Melbourne Times, January 29, and the Age, January 28).
A new British study has found that people who take part in strikes,
occupations and political demonstrations experience an improvement in
their well-being, which can help them overcome stress, pain, anxiety and
depression.
Researcher Dr John Drury said that "Collective actions, such as
protests, strikes, occupations and demonstrations, are less common in
the UK than they were perhaps 20 years ago," researcher Dr. John Drury
said in a statement.
"The take-home message from this research therefore might be that people
should get more involved in campaigns, struggles and social movements,
not only in the wider interest of social change but also for their own
personal good."
(Reuters, December 23).
American statesman and American secretary of state during the Vietnam
War, Henry Kissinger, visited Sydney where he met with the Prime
Minister and Foreign Minister.
Prime Minister John Howard, a long-standing admirer of the 72-year-old
Kissinger, took time out from holidays to meet him.
Mr Kissinger is accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes. He
organised a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
He also gave Indonesia a 'green light' to invade East Timor, leading
to an estimated 200,000 deaths. Mr Kissinger was also involved in the
overthrow of President Allende in Chile, an elected left wing politician
who was murdered and replaced with a right wing military dictatorship.
(www.sydney.indymedia.org website, January 20).
An American amateur photographer named Mike Maginnis has been arrested
and accused of being a terrorist - just for taking pictures of buildings
in an area where Vice President Cheney was residing.
Mike Maginnis says he carries his camera wherever he goes. Maginnis,
who works in information technology, frequently photographs such
subjects as corporate buildings and communications equipment.
As he was putting his camera away, Maginnis found himself confronted by
a Denver police officer who demanded that he hand over his film and camera.
When he refused to give it up, the officer pushed him to the ground and
arrested him.
After being brought to the District 1 police station on Decatur Street,
Maginnis was made to wait alone in an interrogation room. Two hours
later, a Secret Service agent arrived, who identified himself as Special
Agent "Willse."
The agent told Maginnis that his "suspicious activities" made him a
threat to national security, and that he would be charged as a terrorist
under the USA-PATRIOT act. The Secret Service agent tried to make
Maginnis admit that he was taking the photographs to analyze weaknesses
in the Vice President's security entourage and "cause terror and mayhem."
When Maginnis refused to admit to being any sort of terrorist, the
Secret Service agent called him a "raghead collaborator" and a "dirty
pinko faggot."
After approximately an hour of interrogation, Maginnis was allowed to
make a telephone call. Rather than contacting a lawyer, he called the
Denver Post and asked for the news desk. This was immediately overheard
by the desk sergeant, who hung up the phone and placed Maginnis in a
holding cell.
Three hours later, Maginnis was finally released, but with no explanation.
He received no copy of an arrest report, and no receipt for his
confiscated possessions. He was told that he would probably not get his
camera back, as it was being held as evidence.
Maginnis's lawyer contacted the Denver Police Department for an
explanation of the day's events, but the police denied ever having
Maginnis - or anyone matching his description - in custody.
(www.2600.com news website, December 5).
The claim that the Iraqi government is likely to work with Al Qaeda
appears to be untrue.
Secular nationalists, such as Saddam Hussein, are traditionally rivals
with fundamentalists.
During the Iraqui invasion of Kuwait, Osama b1n Laden offered to help
the Saudi government remove Iraq from Kuwait, so that the Saudi
government didn't have to involve the US. Saddam Hussein has responded
by supressing fundamentalist groups in Iraq.
("Counterspin: Pro-War Mythology", by Scott Burchill, lecturer in
International Relations at Deakin University, January 14).
A women has literally been driven insane, and her husband been made
suicidal, by their stay in immigration detention.
The woman, held in Baxter immigration detention centre, has not spoken a
word since April last year, according to a psychiatrist, her friends and
family.
Doctors say the 35-year-old Jordanian-born woman - who has been in
detention for nearly two years and has had two babies in that time - is
suffering a "life-threatening psychiatric illness".
Her husband has tried to commit suicide and her three-year-old son is
showing signs of "social and emotional dysfunction", they say.
The woman, Samira Abou-Afeefa, is married to a 31-year-old Iraqi,
Mohammed Al-Mosawi.
The pair fled Iraq with their eldest son and arrived in Australia in
April 2001.
The family has lived in various detention centres, beginning with
Woomera, interspersed with stays in psychiatric wards where the woman
has been admitted.
She has also spent time in hospitals, where Mrs Abou-Afeefa has given
birth - the first time, she claims, after she was forcibly induced.
The experiences of detention, said psychiatrist Sarah Mares, has left
the mother of three "profoundly physically and psychiatrically unwell".
Dr Mares said yesterday the case was illustrative of the "gradual
destruction of the family and the family members" as a result of the
detention system.
A group of South Australians has been offering to house and financially
support the family for over six months. A spokesman said that "...
Samira's deterioration, her mutism, her refusal to eat, her phobias, her
depression, her withdrawal are all directly related to continuing
detention."
Friends of the family say the husband was handcuffed and guards sat on
the woman, covering the mouths of her children to muffle their screams,
while forcibly removing her to hospital and then to psychiatric
hospital. She was returned to Baxter on New Year's Eve.
Mr Al-Mosawi said he wanted his wife to be the "same before coming in
Australia". He wanted "Samira walking, talking, smile, same any woman".
A spokesman for the Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock - said the best
treatment the woman could receive was in the detention centre. He also
implied that the family were 'troublemakers', saying that they had
"presented very significant management problems for a long time in
detention".
(Sydney Morning Herald, January 15).
Quote of the week:
(I thought this entire article was worth 'quoting')
Does Tony Blair Have Any Idea What The Flies Are Like That Feed Off The
Dead?
By Robert Fisk
On the road to Basra, ITV was filming wild dogs as they tore at the
corpses of the Iraqi dead. Every few seconds a ravenous beast would rip
off a decaying arm and make off with it over the desert in front of us,
dead fingers trailing through the sand, the remains of the burned
military sleeve flapping in the wind.
"Just for the record," the cameraman said to me. Of course. Because ITV
would never show such footage. The things we see - the filth and
obscenity of corpses - cannot be shown. First because it is not
"appropriate" to depict such reality on breakfast-time TV. Second
because, if what we saw was shown on television, no one would ever again
agree to support a war.
That of course was in 1991. The "highway of death," they called it -
there was actually a parallel and much worse "highway of death" 10 miles
to the east, courtesy of the US Air Force and the RAF, but no one turned
up to film it - and the only true picture of the horrors we saw was the
photograph of the shriveled, carbonized Iraqi soldier in his truck. This
was an iconic illustration of a kind because it did represent what we
had seen, when it was eventually published.
For Iraqi casualties to appear on television during that Gulf War -
there was another one between 1980 and 1988, and a third is in the
offing - it was necessary for them to have died with care, to have
fallen romantically on their backs, one hand over a ruined face. Like
those World War I paintings of the British dead on the Somme, Iraqis had
to die benignly and without obvious wounds, without any kind of squalor,
without a trace of shit or mucus or congealed blood, if they wanted to
make it on to the morning news programs.
I rage at this contrivance. At Qaa in 1996, when the Israelis had
shelled Lebanese refugees at the UN compound for 17 minutes, killing 106
civilians, more than half of them children, I came across a young woman
holding in her arms a middle-aged man. He was dead. "My father, my
father," she kept crying, cradling his face. One of his arms and one of
his legs was missing - the Israelis used proximity shells which cause
amputation wounds - but when that scene reached television screens in
Europe and America, the camera was close up on the girl and the dead
man's face. The amputations were not to be seen. The cause of death had
been erased in the interests of good taste. It was as if the old man had
died of tiredness, just turned his head upon his daughter's shoulder to
die in peace.
Today, when I listen to the threats of US President George W. Bush
against Iraq and the shrill moralistic warnings of British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, I wonder what they know of this terrible reality.
Does George, who declined to serve his county in Vietnam, have any idea
what these corpses smell like? Does Tony have the slightest conception
of what the flies are like, the big bluebottles that feed on the dead,
and then come to settle on our faces and our notepads? Soldiers know. I
remember one British officer asking to use the BBC's satellite phone
just after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991. He was talking to his
family in England and I watched him carefully. "I have seen some
terrible things," he said. And then he broke down, weeping and shaking
and holding the phone dangling in his hand over the transmission set.
Did his family have the slightest idea what he was talking about? They
would not have understood by watching television.
Thus can we face the prospect of war. Our glorious, patriotic population
- albeit only about 20 percent in support of this particular Iraqi folly
- has been protected from the realities of violent death. But I am much
struck by the number of letters in my postbag from veterans of World War
II, men and women, all against this new Iraqi war, with an inalienable
memory of torn limbs and suffering.
I remember once a wounded man in Iran, a piece of steel in his forehead,
howling like an animal - which is, of course, what we all are - before
he died; and the Palestinian boy who simply collapsed in front of me
when an Israeli soldier shot him dead, quite deliberately, coldly,
murderously, for throwing a stone; and the Israeli with a chair leg
sticking out of her stomach outside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem
after a Palestinian bomber had decided to execute the families inside;
and the heaps of Iraqi dead at the Battle of Dezful in the Iran-Iraq
war; and the young man showing me the thick black trail of his
daughter's blood outside Algiers where armed men had cut her throat.
But George Bush and Tony Blair and Dick Cheney and Jack Straw and all
the other little warriors who are bamboozling us into war will not have
to think of these vile images. For them it's about surgical strikes,
collateral damage and all the other examples of war's linguistic
mendacity. We are going to have a just war; we are going to liberate the
people of Iraq - some of whom we will obviously kill - and we are going
to give them democracy and protect their oil wealth and stage war crimes
trials and we are going to be ever so moral, and we are going to watch
our defense "experts" on TV with their bloodless sandpits and their
awesome knowledge of weapons which rip off heads.
Come to think of it, I recall the head of an Albanian refugee, chopped
neatly off when the Americans, ever so accidentally, bombed a refugee
convoy in Kosovo in 1999 which they thought was a Serb military unit.
His head lay in the long grass, bearded, eyes open, severed as if by a
Tudor executioner. Months later, I learned his name and talked to the
girl who was hit by the severed head during the US air strike and who
laid the head reverently in the grass where I found it. NATO, of course,
did not apologize to the family. Nor to the girl. No one says sorry
after war. No one acknowledges the truth of it. No one shows you what we
see. Which is how our leaders and our betters persuade us - still - to
go to war.
(The Independent (UK), January 26).
anarchist news service
write to James, PO Box 503, Newtown NSW 2042
or email [EMAIL PROTECTED]
contact us to get ATNTF emailed directly to you.
If you like All the News That Fits, forward it on.
www.angry.at/politicians - new anarchist website with fliers for
download, contacts etc.
www.angry.at/racists - Anarchist/anti-racist music site with free mp3s,
Real Audio, Real Video, internet radio, band interviews etc. Also
includes the text of 'Escape', an anarchist novel -
www.geocities.com/skipnewborn/novel.doc
www.dolearmy.org - information for unemployed people.
www.activate.8m.com - anarchist magazine aimed at teenagers.
All the News That Fits appears in the Anarchist Age Weekly Review
(www.vicnet.net.au/~anarchist - PO Box 20 Parkville VIC 3052) and The
Ham (www.theham.cat.org.au), as well as Melbourne Indymedia
(www.melbourne.indymedia.org).
Media outlets mentioned in All the News That Fits are sources - items
are not direct quotes from news media. Background information may have
been gathered from sources in addition to media outlets cited. Where no
source is cited, the information has been gathered from direct sources.
--
--
Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/
Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop
Sub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink
Unsub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
