Paris sees second day of mass student protests over immigrant deportations

Published time: October 18, 2013, RT

Thousands of French teenagers protested for the second day over the public deportation of an Albanian-Kosovar girl and an Armenian student. The issue caused disruption in 50 schools across France.

Teenagers clashed with police, who used tear gas against the high-school students.

Students climbed bus stops and shouted demands for the interior minister Manuel Valls to leave office. According to France 24, one school became a scene of green garbage cans piled on top of each other, while above hung a banner with the words ‘Education in danger.’

The catalyst for the event was the expulsion of a 15-year-old Romani girl, a native of Kosovo. Leonarda Dibrani was forcefully taken off a school bus in front of her classmates while the group was on a trip earlier this month. The incident took place in the eastern town of Levier.   

Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn goes global with political ambitions

[Specializing on drawing from the resentment and powerlessness of Greek people suffering from the deepest crisis in memory — and directing that resentment at migrants — the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement is encouraged by the Greek bourgeoisie and reactionaries, to deflect blame from themselves, and to get one section of the people, drenched in xenophobic hysteria, to attack suffering migrant workers.  That they are increasingly shown to be directly connected with the police, only emphasizes that there is no bourgeois solution to such fascist forces, who will have to face justice from the people, not the state. — Frontlines ed.]

Golden Dawn party infiltrates Greece’s police, claims senior officer

Buoyed by its meteoric domestic success, the far right party is planning to expand ‘wherever there are Greeks’

Helena Smith in Athens

The Guardian, Monday 1 April 2013

Emboldened by its meteoric rise in Greece, the far-right Golden Dawn party is spreading its tentacles abroad, amid fears it is acting on its pledge to “create cells in every corner of the world”. The extremist group, which forged links with British neo-Nazis when it was founded in the 1980s, has begun opening offices in Germany, Australia, Canada and the US.

The international push follows successive polls that show Golden Dawn entrenching its position as Greece’s third, and fastest growing, political force. First catapulted into parliament with 18 MPs last year, the ultra-nationalists captured 11.5% support in a recent survey conducted by polling company Public Issue.

The group – whose logo resembles the swastika and whose members are prone to give Nazi salutes – has gone from strength to strength, promoting itself as the only force willing to take on the “rotten establishment”. Amid rumours of backing from wealthy shipowners, it has succeeded in opening party offices across Greece.

It is also concentrating on spreading internationally, with news last month that it had opened an office in Germany and planned to set up branches in Australia. The party’s spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris, said it had decided to establish cells “wherever there are Greeks”.

Greece: Crisis-driven scapegoating, explosive growth of migrant detention

[In a mounting wave of xenophobia and fascist gangs pressing amateurish ethnic cleansing attacks,  officials are rounding up thousands of migrants.  Here, the most recent sweeps of hundreds more. — Frontlines ed.]

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More than 400 migrants detained in latest sweep

The latest police sweep of undocumented immigrants in the capital led to 404 arrests, police said on Friday.

Authorities said six of the detainees were arrested because they were not in possession of the proper residence papers.

The sweep on Thursday included a search of four properties and was carried out as part of an ongoing crackdown on illegal immigration which has been code-named Xenios Zeus.

According to the police, 54,086 migrants have been briefly detained since the start of the sweep operation. Of these 3,994 were charged with being in the country illegally.

Source:  ekathimerini.com

Xenophoia Alert: “Anti-immigrant ‘Golden Dawn’ rises in Greece”

The rise of Greece’s Golden Dawn: Ultranationalist party raises fears as it builds a network of public aid reserved only for Greek citizens and is accused of violence against immigrants.

[Xenophobia is a most basic weapon against the working class when the capitalist and imperialist attacks are waged with great and desperate aggression.  The challenge to confront these malevolent movements, to expose their puppetmasters, and to defeat their attacks is a major challenge for the revolutionary proletariat, in Greece and everywhere. — Frontlines ed.]

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By Anthony Faiola, Washington Post,  October 20, 2012

ATHENS — At first glance, the shop on a nondescript street in this chaotic capital looks standard-issue military. Fatigues. Camouflage. Hunting gear. Deeper inside, the political message emerges. Black T-shirts emblazoned with modified swastikas — the symbol of the far-right Golden Dawn party — are on sale. A proudly displayed sticker carries a favorite party slogan: “Get the Stench out of Greece.”

By “stench,” the Golden Dawn — which won its first-ever seats in the Greek Parliament this spring and whose popularity has soared ever since — means immigrants, broadly defined as anyone not of Greek ancestry. In the country at the epicenter of Europe’s debt crisis, and where poverty and unemployment are spiking, the surplus shop doubles as one of the party’s dozens of new “help bureaus.” Hundreds of calls a day come in from desperate families seeking food, clothing and jobs, all of which the Golden Dawn is endeavoring to provide, with one major caveat: for Greeks only.

To fulfill its promise of a Greece for Greeks alone, the party appears willing to go to great lengths. Its supporters — in some instances with the alleged cooperation of police — stand accused of unleashing a rash of violence since the party rose to national office, including the stabbings and beatings of immigrants, ransacking an immigrant community center, smashing market stalls and breaking the windows of immigrant-owned shops.

In a growing culture of US xenophobia, arrogance and ignorance, Sikhs killed in Wisconsin

Sikh Temple Massacre Suspect Wade Michael Page Was White Supremacist

[Neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page killed seven members of the Sikh religion in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin on August 5, 2012. He was later killed in a clash with local police at the scene. Photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos]

(CBS/AP) OAK CREEK, Wis., August 6, 2012 — Before he strode into a Sikh temple with a 9mm handgun and multiple magazines of ammunition, Wade Michael Page played in white supremacist heavy metal bands with names such as Definite Hate and End Apathy.

The bald, heavily tattooed bassist was a 40-year-old Army veteran who trained in psychological warfare before he was demoted and discharged more than a decade ago.

When the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee ended, six victims ranging in age from 39 to 84 years old lay dead. Three others were critically wounded, including Oak Creek Police Officer Lt. Brian Murphy.

A day after he killed six worshippers at the suburban Milwaukee temple, fragments of Page’s life emerged in public records and interviews. But his motive was still largely a mystery. He left no hate-filled manifesto, no angry blog or ranting Facebook entries to explain the attack.

Page, who was shot to death by police, joined the Army in 1992 and was discharged in 1998. He was described Monday by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “frustrated neo-Nazi” who had long been active in the obscure underworld of white supremacist music.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the nonprofit civil rights organization in Montgomery, Ala., said Page played in groups whose sometimes sinister-sounding names seemed to “reflect what he went out and actually did.” The music often talked about genocide against Jews and other minorities.

In a 2010 interview, Page told a white supremacist website that he became active in white-power music in 2000, when he left his native Colorado and started the band End Apathy in 2005.

Crisis breeds xenophobia in Greece as nationalists gain clout

Jul 11, 2012 by RussiaToday

Greece is in turmoil. Violent clashes have shaken the city of Agrinio in the west. Supporters of the far-right Golden Dawn party fought with anarchists, leaving cars and shop windows smashed, and one person injured. Golden Dawn’s influence is rising. It gained around 7 per cent of the vote in the recent general election. RT’s Jacob Greaves takes a look at xenophobia in today’s Greece.

The Feds are watching — badly

[US imperialist xenophobia translates into bizarre and concentrated cultural ignorance, especially when replicated by aggressive, repressive government bureaucracies.  The harm inflicted on targeted communities is beyond measure.  This investigative report from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, an alternative weekly newspaper, traces the details of some recent revelations. — Frontlines ed.]

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by Yael Chanoff and Natalie Orenstein, San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 26, 2012

The FBI’s modern snoop program is racist, xenophobic, misdirected, dangerous — and really, really stupid

Muslims, the Internet — what isn’t the government spying on?

So, you’re a law enforcement officer in training for participation on a local Joint Terrorism Task Force. Or a student at the United States Military Academy at West Point, involved in the counterterrorism training program developed in partnership with the FBI. Or you’re an FBI agent training up to deal with terrorist threats.

Get ready for FBI training in dealing with Arab and Muslim populations.

Take note that “Western cultural values” include “rational, straight line thinking” and a tendency to “identify problems and solve them through logical decision-making process” — while “Arab cultural values” are “emotional based” and “facts are colored by emotion and subjectivity.”

Be advised that Arabs have “no concept of privacy” and “no concept of ‘constructive criticism'” and that in Arab culture it is “acceptable to interrupt conversations to convey information or make requests.”

“Westerners think, act, then feel,” an FBI powerpoint briefing notes, while “Arabs feel, act, then think.”

Those are some of the most dramatic examples of racial profiling and outright racist stereotyping revealed in thousands of pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Bay Guardian, the ACLU of Northern California and the Asian Law Caucus.

The documents show a pattern of cultural insensitivity, sometimes bordering on the ridiculous, not only tolerated by promoted as official instructions by the FBI. The records also show a broad pattern of surveillance of people who have engaged in no criminal activity and aren’t even suspected of crimes, but have been targeted because of their race or religion.

Pieces of this story have come out over the past year as the ACLU has charged the FBI with racial profiling and Attorney General Eric Holder has insisted it’s not happening. And some of the documents — which are not always properly dated — may be a few years old.

But none of it is ancient history: All of the material has been used by the FBI in the past few years, under the Obama administration.

This is the first complete report with the full details on a pattern of behavior that is, at the very least, disturbing — and in some parts, reminiscent of the notorious (and widely discredited) COINTELPRO program that sought to undermine and disrupt political groups in the 1960s.

The information suggests that the federal government is using methods that are not only imprecise and xenophobic but utterly ineffective in protecting the American public.

“This is the worst way to pursue security,” Hatem Bazian, professor of Near East Studies at UC Berkeley, told us.

CULTURAL STEREOTYPES

Dozens of documents attempt to describe “Arabs and Muslims” but other groups aren’t left out of the sweeping stereotyping and blatant racism and xenophobia that the FBI has used in its training guides. One training presentation is titled “The Chinese.” The materials give such tips as “informality is perceived as disrespectful.” The presentation warns “expect your gift (money) to be refused” but advises to give “a simple gift with significant meaning- tangerines or oranges (with stems/leaves.)” But “never give a clock as a gift! (death!)”

And if those in the training on “The Chinese” find themselves in “interactions with the opposite sex,” then “touching, too many compliments, may imply a romantic liaison is desired — be careful!”

The Hoodie & The Hijab — Our Common Struggle for Human Rights

March 25, 2012
Written by: RoyaAziz
http://www.dominionofnewyork.com/2012/03/25/the-hoodie-the-hijab-our-common-struggle-for-human-rights/#.T3XNj9WepRT

As a good friend prepares to put together a book on the topic of hijab in America I referred her to an incident during then-Senator Barack Obama’s televised presidential campaign rally in Detroit when two hijabis were barred from sitting behind him. The event occurred at a time when there was close scrutiny of Obama’s identity: the phonetic similarity to Osama, his very Arab middle name, Hussein, and, of course, the rumors that he was actually a practicing Muslim, not that there was anything wrong with that, to borrow the inappropriate disclaimer. Obama apologized to the women and vowed to fight discrimination of this sort. To many American Muslims it was perplexing because much of the racism directed at Obama at the time was being couched in anti-Muslim bias. At that moment he was not Obama the inspiring candidate, but Obama the typical American who showed his own anti-Muslim bias.

In the wake of 9/11, American Muslims took to Islamophobia with some borrowed humor: ‘driving while black’ became ‘flying while Muslim.’ And so, as it is with wearing a hoodie, wearing a hijab elicits similar prejudices, as Geraldo Rivera reminded us during his TV appearance last week. In the same commentary where he claims Trayvon Martin was killed because of his sweatshirt, Rivera cites Juan Williams’ comments about being scared when he sees Muslims in religious garb at the airport (one presumes hijab is among the articles of clothing that terrify Williams). Rivera writes that Williams was copping to his fears, but it was a cowardly cover — if a black man like Williams, whom Rivera pointedly refers to as “among America’s sharpest commentators” can say he’s scared of Muslim women, it should be valid for him to say that a black kid in a hoodie had it coming. The implications of his comparison are unsettling.

Abusive, Xenophobic Detentions, Inc.: A Lucrative Global Growth Industry

September 28, 2011

Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit

By NINA BERNSTEIN, New York Times

The men showed up in a small town in Australia’s outback early last year, offering top dollar for all available lodgings. Within days, their company, Serco, was flying in recruits from as far away as London, and busing them from trailers to work 12-hour shifts as guards in a remote camp where immigrants seeking asylum are indefinitely detained.

It was just a small part of a pattern on three continents where a handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns on immigration into a growing global industry.

Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.

Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.

Resistance to abusive detention is growing. Here, The Woomera Detention Center, in Australia, was the scene of a detainee breakout in 2002.

But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.

“They’re very good at the glossy brochure,” said Kaye Bernard, general secretary of the union of detention workers on the Australian territory of Christmas Island, where riots erupted this year between asylum seekers and guards. “On the ground, it’s almost laughable, the chaos and the inability to function.”

US: New government attacks on migrants target unionized workers with mass firings

US government's xenophobic anti-immigrant campaigns include ICE raids in working class communities and mass firings of workers, both unionized and unorganized

FIGHTING THE FIRINGS

By David Bacon,  In These Times web edition, 8/23/11

After years of ‘silent raids’ and federal workplace audits, unions and community allies are going on the offensive.

BERKELEY, CA — When the current wave of mass firings of immigrant workers started three years ago, they were called “silent raids” in the press.  The phrase sought to make firings seem more humane than the workplace raids of the Bush administration.  During Bush’s eight-year tenure, posses of black-uniformed immigration agents, waving submachine guns, invaded factories across the country and rounded up workers for deportations.

“Silent raids,” by contrast, have relied on cooperation between employers and immigration officials.  The Department of Homeland Security identifies workers it says have no legal immigration status.  Employers then fire them. The silence, then, is the absence of the armed men in black.  Paraphrasing Woody Guthrie, they used to rob workers of their jobs with a gun.  Now they do it with a fountain pen.

In the Belly of the Beast: How the Middle East events affect us

Nina Farnia on how the Middle East events affect us

In a program in Oakland, California in February 2011 — sponsored by The Committee to Stop FBI Repression — Nina Farnia spoke about the relationship of events in the Middle East to people in the US — people of Middle East origin and descent, and US solidarity activists.

For more information on government repression of Middle Eastern people and of international solidarity activists, see stopfbi.net

This is a video from Collision Course Video Productions of San Francisco.

France: Anti-Xenophobic protests of mass Roma deportations

http://www.euronews.net

A week of protests in France has begun with a march in Paris in support of the Roma. An estimated 12,000, led by Roma, turned out in Paris. It was one of over 130 such demonstrations in towns and cities throughout France as protesters voiced their anger at Nicolas Sargozy’s policy which critics see as an attempt by him to revive his popularity ahead of elections in 2012.

Thousands of members of the nomadic group have been sent back to Eastern Europe in recent weeks after the French authorities intensified repatriations.

The government says it is a crackdown on crime – but there is been widespread criticism, including from the EU and UN.

South Africa: Mass Deportation of Zimbabweans to begin again

South Africa anti-xenophobia protest, 2008

Monday, September 06, 2010

By IRIN

South Africa will resume the deportation of undocumented Zimbabweans on 1 January 2011, ending its 17-month moratorium, the Cabinet announced on 1 September.

“After the 31st of December [2010] all undocumented Zimbabweans will be treated like all others and their deportation will resume,” said a statement issued after the Cabinet met.

In April 2009 the government placed a moratorium on deportations, introduced a 90-day visa on demand for passport holders, and was on the cusp of issuing Zimbabweans with a special permit allowing them to work and reside in South Africa for between 6 months and 3 years.

The Forced Migration Studies Programme (FMSP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (FMSP) estimates that between 1 million and 1.5 million Zimbabweans are living in South Africa.

France’s crackdown on Romas continues, hundreds deported

Agence France-Presse

Paris, August 27, 2010

France today deported hundreds more Roma in defiance of growing domestic and international criticism of its crackdown on travelling minorities. Two specially chartered planes carrying Roma men, women and children left Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport and Lyon in east-central France and touched down

in Bucharest mid-afternoon. “The police told us we could choose between leaving now, on our own accord, or be expelled by force later,” said one young Roma man, who declined to be identified. “So we agreed to leave.”

“For three months I could find no job, so I decided to come back to Romania,” another man arriving in Bucharest, Ion Stancu, 52, told AFP. “But, my God, what will I do for a living now, with eight grandsons to feed?” he added, tears in his eyes. Amid a country-wide crackdown that began this month after Gypsies attacked a police station, police in the northern French city of Lille also moved in at dawn to dismantle a Roma tent camp set up under an overhead railway line.

World Cup, ‘Resource Curse’ and Xenophobia Threats

[Rather than fostering an internationalist culture and sportsmanlike spirit, the World Cup has long been notorious for breeding some of the ugliest forms of nationalist hatred.  This year, the World Cup is taking place in South Africa, where some of the harshest anti-immigrant hostility  had led to many murders in 2008, and there are signs that the displacement of shrinking economic resources from the World Cup budget may open yet another wave of xenophobia.]

Patrick Bond

2010-07-01, Pambazuka

Added to the raft of problems soccer-loving cynics have predicted will plague South Africa as a result of the World Cup is the threat of ‘another dose of xenophobia’ from both state and society, writes Patrick Bond. Allowing immigrants to be blamed for crime and joblessness, says Bond, is a ‘scapegoat’ strategy for the government’s failure to address root causes of the social stress, from mass unemployment and housing shortages, to ‘South Africa’s regional geopolitical interests which create more refugees than prosperity.’

Soccer-loving cynics have long predicted problems now growing worse here in South Africa because of World Cup hosting duties:

– Loss of large chunks of government’s sovereignty to the world soccer body Fifa

– Rapidly worsening income inequality
– Future economic calamities as debt payments come due
– Dramatic increases in greenhouse gas emissions (more than twice Germany’s in 2006) and
– Humiliation and despondency as the country’s soccer team Bafana Bafana (ranked #90 going into the games) became the first host to expire before the competition’s second round.

Soon, it seems, we may also add to this list a problem that terrifies progressives here and everywhere: Another dose of xenophobia from both state and society.