Rescind The Resolution!

Prince William County may rescind part of the Rule of Law Resolution! Frank Principi is taking the brave stand to defend immigrants in Virginia and is going to make a move to have part of the immigration resolution thrown out. If we are successful here we may be able to soon overturn the entire racist monstrosity!

Go to anti-bvbl for information about how to participate in this important effort!

Si se puede!

Dr. Al-Arian Placed in Punitive Detention

From the Immigrant Solidarity Network:

At 1 a.m. on Saturday, Dr. Sami Al-Arian was moved by
hostile prison guards from a regular holding cell at the Howard County
Detention Center in Jessup, Maryland, to the "Special Housing Unit."
The SHU is an extremely punitive and restrictive section of the prison
where inmates are placed in solitary confinement 23 hours a day,
usually in freezing temperatures. Prisoners are normally moved there
for violating prison rules. However, in the case of Dr. Al-Arian, he
has always been placed there without reason or any explanation. In the
SHU, prisoners are subjected to continuous, deafening alarm sounds and
have little contact with the outside world. With no medical
supervision, this is an extremely dangerous place for Dr. Al-Arian to
be during his hunger strike, which is on its 41st day. Dr. Al-Arian
was also held in solitary confinement for 37 months before and during
his trial. This was a deliberate attempt by the government to break
him down physically and psychologically and to prevent him from
preparing for his trial.

Amnesty International has written several letters decrying the prison
conditions of Dr. Al-Arian, calling his treatment "gratuitously
punitive" and "inconsistent with international standards for humane
treatment."

The Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace urges all conscientious
individuals and organizations to contact the Howard County Detention
Center and call for humane treatment of Dr. Al-Arian. We also call on
media outlets to cover these abuses, which so far have received no
attention.

TAKE ACTION

Call the Howard County Detention Center and ask that Dr. Al-Arian be
removed from the Special Housing Unit, where he does not belong, and
that the prison ensures he is given proper medical treatment during
his hunger strike. The number is (410) 313-5200.

Myths about our Undocumented Citizens

The undocumented are not our enemy:

Crime Rates Have Declined as Immigration Has Increased:

Even as the undocumented population has doubled to 12 million since 1994, the violent crime rate in the United States has declined 34.2 percent and the property crime rate has fallen 26.4 percent.

Cities with large immigrant populations such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami also have experienced declining crime rates during this period.

Immigrants Have Lower Incarceration Rates than Natives:

Among men age 18-39 (who comprise the vast majority of the prison population), the 3.5 percent incarceration rate of the native-born in 2000 was 5 times higher than the 0.7 percent incarceration rate of the foreign-born.

The foreign-born incarceration rate in 2000 was nearly two-and-a-half times less than the 1.7 percent rate for nativeborn non-Hispanic white men and almost 17 times less than the 11.6 percent rate for native-born black men.

Native-born Hispanic men were nearly 7 times more likely to be in prison than foreign-born Hispanic men in 2000, while the incarceration rate of native-born non-Hispanic white men was almost 3 times higher than that of foreign-born white men.

Foreign-born Mexicans had an incarceration rate of only 0.7 percent in 2000—more than 8 times lower than the 5.9 percent rate of native-born males of Mexican descent.

Foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men had an incarceration rate of 0.5 percent, compared to 3.0 percent of native-born males of Salvadoran and Guatemalan descent

And what did voting get you, exactly?

Seen what voting has done for us in Prince William County? Nothing but racist garbage.

These people have a better idea:

Members of the Northeast Anarchist Network have initiated a two-tiered campaign to discredit representative democracy and promote direct democracy and anarchy. Armed with centuries of failure of representative government, we will be creating and distributing propaganda that undermines the credibility and attacks the legitimacy of the U.S. political system, while at the same time introducing alternatives such as local autonomy and neighborhood assemblies, highlighting their successes in other parts of the world.

We welcome others to distribute this material as it is made available. Furthermore, we call upon anti-authoritarians to creatively and effectively target all upcoming speeches, caucuses, debates, votes, and everything else related to this electoral sock puppet show. We also encourage the planning of public events, forums, and community discussions to achieve the aims described above. Let's make our presence known!

For flyers and other materials for this campaign, see Anti-Elections Materials under Resources/Documents

Racism and zionism - familiar refrains...

Israel sits on land that was originally Palestinian but Zionist movements in Europe and the United States claimed that the "land was given to them by God" and their belief that their race possessed some "natural superiority". European Americans prayed to "god and country" and taught their future generations to pray homage to the gangsters, outlaws and thieves who stole the country from Indian nations in god's name. The European idea that they possessed a "God given superiority" not only had brought them into conflict with the Palestinian people, but also North American Indian Nations in the 1800s.

In contrast, European-Americans and Europeans began their westward expansion of North America under the banner of manifest destiny. A belief that they had a "divinely inspired mission" to expand. European-American expansion meant the theft and occupation of Native American Indian lands. A big part of William Henry Harrison´s responsibility, who as the Territorial Governor of Indiana, was to obtain title to American Indian lands so that white settlement could expand in the area, asked the Indiana legislature: "Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined, by the Creator, to give support to a large population, and to be the sea of civilization, of science, and true religion?" Isn't this the Zionist attitude toward Palestine?

The United States continued the European practice of recognizing only limited land rights of Native American Indians who they regarded as "savages" who stood in the way of Euro-American expansion. The same mentality has prevailed with Israel people in their dealings with the Palestinian people.

In the time of Manifest Destiny, this idea was clear and simple, "Indian Removal". The "Indian wars" between Native Indian Nations and White American armies, which are now well recorded, ended in more then 300 treaties that won some tribes large sections of land, but today these lands have all but melted away into the hands of European Americans.

European-American's believed that Native American Indians were "destined to melt and vanish before the advancing waves of Anglo-American power..." but the large land sessions won by the Tribes through treaty in fact allowed future generations to survive, even as their lands continued to be lost through one passage after another of Congressional Acts that swindled tribes out of millions of acres of land. Today Native lands have become checker boarded with European-American ownership and continue to be subject to Congressional Acts to defraud Native people of even more land and the natural resources.

The Palestinian people continue to struggle through various groups like Hamas in self defense of their sovereignty and to keep their remaining lands. So too, has North American Indian people continued to struggle to keep what is left of their lands and recover stolen lands. The more things change...

Speaking Truth To Power

Prince William County would benefit by having someone like Professor Falk speak the truth about racism and neoliberalism, just as Falk spoke of the nazi tendencies of the Zionists.

"Professor Falk said he drew the comparison between the treatment of Palestinians with the Nazi record of collective atrocity, because of what he described as the massive Israeli punishment directed at the entire population of Gaza.

He said he understood that it was a provocative thing to say, but at the time, last summer, he had wanted to shake the American public from its torpor.

"If this kind of situation had existed for instance in the manner in which China was dealing with Tibet or the Sudanese government was dealing with Darfur, I think there would be no reluctance to make that comparison," he said.

That reluctance was, he argued, based on the particular historical sensitivity of the Jewish people, and Israel's ability to avoid having their policies held up to international law and morality."

That is what antibvbl is doing now. I suggest you visit them.

Those pesky papers...

This sound familiar to anyone in Prince William County?

When the Arab-Israeli conflict broke out, Palestinians who were working or studying in Lebanon were not permitted by the Israeli authorities and ensuing border changes to return to their homeland.

Other undocumented Palestinian refugees are former PLO fighters who lost any legal status when the PLO was forced out of Beirut in 1982.

Finally, when some Palestinian refugees, due to recurrent Arab-Israeli conflicts, were exiled for a second time from their initial country of asylum, their original registration files with UNRWA did not follow them to Lebanon, and they lost their "official" form of identification. They are thus not registered as refugees in Lebanon.

Not only do non-ID Palestinians share the same abysmal conditions facing the remainder of refugees, but the fact that they have no proper identification breeds additional burdens that they must nevertheless face.

A report by Cynthia Petrigh of DRC states that these refugees are also "unable to move outside the camps for fear of being arrested. They cannot travel, own property, register marriages, graduate from high school, or enroll in either private or public higher education. They find it difficult to access UNRWA services and cannot afford to pay for healthcare."

Source: Zawya.com