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THE ABSURD TIMES
Illustration: Surely you remember Trump saying "I love Wikileaks". He is now deep into loving the psychological torture of Assange.
Assange, Sisi, Israel v. the U.N., Iraq
By
Czar Donic
Perhaps there is a way to overcome this diversion after all. There is plenty of coverage on Mainstream Media to cover much of the foul nature of this administration. Besides, as Guliani says "I've go insurance".
The interviews themselves take up enough room for now. Perhaps I'll have some more comments at another time, but it is well to remember that all of these disasters come at the instigation of the U.S. and are made in the name of its people. The party itself has degenerated into a cult. Yes, it still fulfills the object of the wealthy, the one or two percent of the populace, but its members are afraid to speak up against the idiocies of the current administration because it is this cult, the slavish devotion, Trump's followers have that keep them from following a sane agenda.
This week Swedish prosecutors dropped an investigation into sexual assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, stemming from 2010. Assange, who has always denied the allegations, took refuge inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden on the charges. British authorities dragged him out of the Ecuadorian embassy in April and he has since been jailed in London's Belmarsh prison on charges related to skipping of bail in 2012, when he first entered the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden over the now-dropped sexual assault charges. The United States is still seeking Assange's extradition to the U.S., where he faces up to 175 years in prison on hacking charges and 17 counts of violating the World War I-era Espionage Act for his role in publishing U.S. classified military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. A full extradition hearing will take place in February. We speak with the co-editors of the new book "In Defense of Julian Assange": Tariq Ali, historian, activist, filmmaker, author and an editor of the New Left Review, and Margaret Ratner Kunstler, civil rights attorney in private practice.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at the case of Julian Assange. We're joined now by the co-editors of a new book. It's called In Defense of Julian Assange. It's a collection of essays by leading activists, journalists and whistleblowers who lay out the story of WikiLeaks and Assange and the need to defend attacks on journalism and the public's right to know. Tariq Ali joins us from London. Historian, activist, filmmaker, author, editor of New Left Review. And here in New York, civil rights attorney Margaret Kunstler is with us. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!.
Tariq, let's begin with you in London. You are not that far from the Belmarsh prison where Julian Assange has been held since April, since police went in and took him out of the Ecuadorian embassy where he had political asylum for over seven years. This past week, the Swedish government announced, I believe it's for the third time, that they have ended their sexual assault investigation into Julian Assange. He was never charged and he always denied the allegations. Can you talk about the significance of this development and then talk about what is happening with Julian Assange as he awaits whether Britain will agree to extradite him to the United States, where he faces well over a century in prison under the Espionage Act that is rarely invoked in this country, that World War I-era law? Tariq Ali?
TARIQ ALI: Amy, the situation in relation to the Swedes is quite peculiar. They have been at loggerheads amongst themselves as to whether to charge Julian with anything since this whole case began. When they first started off, the two female prosecutors disagreed. One said there is no case to answer; the other pushed for an investigation. She won out. But every time Assange offered them to interview him, come and question him in London, they refused to do so.
And many of us close to Julian and defending him right from the beginning felt that there was something fishy, that they didn't really have a case. And Julian, who gave us the whole account of his side of it, was absolutely convinced that the reason this was being done was to lock him up in the Swedish prison until the Americans were ready—the American government was ready to extradite him. He said there can be no other explanation.
And with the Swedes now dropping the case for the third time and saying it is more or less over—and one reason they give for being over, that the women concerned who made these allegations, it's a long time since they made them and, you know, they're confused, they can't remember—well, I will just point out that much literature on rape written by women and men says that the one thing a woman who has been raped never forgets is that particular event. She can forget many other things; she won't forget that. So the fact that the women who charged him are now not prepared to come forward is an indication that something was wrong from the beginning.
In any case, what this has done is that for the first time since April when Julian has been locked up in a top-security prison, Belmarsh, the liberal newspaper The Guardian has finally come out and defended him, using the fact that the charges have been dropped by the Swedes and said he should not be extradited, that it would be an outrage if he was. All he did was publish information which The Guardian published in its pages, The New York Times published, El País published, Repubblica published in Italy. So it would be a severe attack on civil liberties. So at long last, something is beginning to move on the mainstream front to defend Julian.
Now, basically, he should not be imprisoned at all. He was given a maximum sentence for not complying with the bail legalities. It's very rare for anyone who has done that to serve a full sentence. Anyway, that sentence was served ages ago. So why is he still being kept in a maximum security prison? It is a vindictive punishment by the English judicial system on the authority of the government, which obviously wants this, to satisfy and appease the United States, and to punish Julian. They want him to be in this state that he is, has been described by the United Nations rapporteur a few minutes ago on this program. And they want to demoralize and destroy him. Otherwise, he showed even if he has to be imprisoned, which I don't accept for a minute, he could be in an open prison where conditions are very different.
So the English judicial system is behaving like an authoritarian system. It has to be said. One shouldn't have any illusions about it. The judge, Lady Arbuthnot, who was supposed to be trying this case, is linked, we now know, to a whole number—her husband has got many, many dubious links to the American arms industry, et cetera. I don't want to go into that in detail. It will probably come out. But more importantly, just a few days ago, she gave bail to two people from Asia, South Asia, who are accused of murder in their own countries, of having killed people, and their extradition has been demanded. She quite happily, without a care in the world, gave them bail. So why keep Julian in prison and not grant him bail or move him to another prison? It is an appalling situation.
AMY GOODMAN: There is also the other news that came out, that you referenced. In September, the Spanish newspaper El País revealed the CIA worked with a Spanish private security company to spy on Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had political asylum for over seven years. Ecuador had hired the firm, called Undercover Global SL, ostensibly to protect the embassy, but the firm reportedly also secretly handed over audio and video to the CIA of meetings Assange had with his lawyers, journalists, doctors and visitors. The firm installed secret video cameras inside the embassy, placed microphones in the embassy's fire extinguishers in the women's bathroom. The head of the firm is now being investigated by Spain's National Court. Tariq?
TARIQ ALI: Yeah, this is going on. El País published a very strong report, and there was a lot of anger in Spain, not just from the usual suspects. People were extremely angry that a Spanish firm had carried out illegal surveillance of Julian Assange. Not that he was particularly surprised. None of us are. One expects this to happen. But it still is shocking that it can happen so easily.
And this firm and its bosses are under assault now, legal assault in Spain, and hopefully they will have to answer something or the other. That would make it clear what Julian—if anyone watches these things these people have filmed and recorded, all it would do if a neutral person watched them is to strengthen the case in defense of Julian Assange and say that he is basically what he is, a publisher and a journalist who publishes material that is sent to him, that he gets hold of, in order to do what? So that the public knows.
Because we live now in societies where governments either tell blatant lies or conceal stuff from their citizens who they feel are best treated as children. "Not in front of the children." Well, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the organization, broke with this and published everything. And incidentally, quite a lot of what they published showed that behind the scenes, quite a few American diplomats were aware of what was going on and actually telling their government in Washington, "This has gone too far" in relation to various things. So they come out quite well.
So it's not even the case that this material encouraged terrorism or any nonsense like that. It just provided any citizen anywhere in the world of a chance to have a look at what was really going on. And this has been Julian's aim in life, actually, more recently, obviously, to do this.
Amy, I think we should be in no doubt that the reason they're doing this—the British, the United States, et cetera—is to make it—it's a deterrent. It's to tell any other people who publish unauthorized material, "Look, this is what happens. Look what happened to Julian Assange. We locked him up. We tortured him. We want to lock him up for life." And the aim is to frighten people off. Of course it won't work. It never works. Because sooner or later, someone will get upset by witnessing an atrocity, someone working for the government, and it will come out again. This is never prearranged, if someone like Snowden gets angry and reveals the information. So even as a deterrent, which is what their aim is, it isn't going to work.
AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali, I wanted to go to one of the most explosive documents that WikiLeaks revealed. I'm going back to 2010 when WikiLeaks published the shocking U.S. military video showing the indiscriminate targeting and killing of civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters employees, a journalist and his driver. They were killed in the attack along with eight other people, and two children were injured. At least eight people were killed.
The video was made July 12th, 2007, by a U.S. military Apache helicopter gunship. The video was taken from the gunship. They are focusing with a target down on the ground and these two Reuters employees, the up-and-coming videographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was 22 years old, had a camera, as did his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40-year-old father of four. You hear the men, the soldiers laughing, calling back to base to see—they weren't rogue—if they could get permission to open fire, which was granted. It is a chilling video as they laugh and they curse and you see the men killed below.
So at that time, Julian Assange was in the United States when this was released, and we talked to him in a studio in Washington, D.C.—this is well before he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy; this was April 2010—about the video that they had called "Collateral Murder."
JULIAN ASSANGE: When we first got it, we were told that it was important and that it showed the killing of journalists, but we didn't have any other context. And we spent quite some months after breaking the decryption looking closely into this. And the more we looked, the more disturbing it became. This is a sequence which has a lot of detail. And I think in some ways, it covers most of the bad aspects of the aerial war in Iraq and what we must be able to infer is going on in Afghanistan. These are not bad apples. This is standard practice. You can hear it from the tones of the voices of the pilots that this is in fact another day at the office. These pilots evidently and gunners have evidently become so corrupted, morally corrupted by the war, that they are looking for excuses to kill.
AMY GOODMAN: So yes, that's Julian Assange in the United States after this video "Collateral Murder" was released. We are joined by Tariq Ali in London and Margaret Kunstler here in New York. Together, they co-edited the new book In Defense of Julian Assange. Margaret, you are a human rights lawyer. Talk about why you have released this book at this point and the significance of what we just saw, the video showing the killing—you know, Reuters, after Namir and Saeed were killed by the U.S. military, they demanded of the military to give them evidence of what had happened and the military did not release this video, even admit that they had it. This brings in Chelsea Manning—
MARGARET KUNSTLER: Yes, it does.
AMY GOODMAN: —and it brings in—who is in jail, still, although he is—this brings in Chelsea Manning who was let out of jail after seven years, but then now she's back in jail in another but related case.
MARGARET KUNSTLER: Well, it's closely related, in fact. And Chelsea Manning's release of that—sending that material to Julian Assange was prompted by the Reuters request for it. She had heard that Reuters was after it, so she looked for it. And she wanted to help and explain what happened. Then she was so shocked—
AMY GOODMAN: And she was an intelligence officer in Iraq.
MARGARET KUNSTLER: She was an intelligence officer in Iraq, and she was so shocked when she saw it that she couldn't help but send it on. Of course, she tried to send it on to other sources—to The New York Times and to other news places, but Julian took it and released it, as you can see.
AMY GOODMAN: So why you have edited this volume now, In Defense of Julian Assange?
MARGARET KUNSTLER: Well, there's been so much distraction from what the real—what is really at stake here, that we felt that if we put out enough information about what in fact was happening—the threat to Julian and the threat to the Constitution, the First Amendment in this country—that people would come back and understand it and get together and fight against this. Because that is the only way that this is going to come—that Julian will not be brought to this country, will not be jailed for the rest of his life and the First Amendment will still exist.
AMY GOODMAN: So explain what is happening. He is in jail right now. He faces 175 years in prison if he is extradited to the United States for espionage?
MARGARET KUNSTLER: That's correct. There are 17 charges that cover espionage in this indictment. This is the first time that a reporter has ever been charged with espionage. And that is because the press and reporters have always been held up as the most important and only way to reveal what is happening in government. So far—it has never happened before. The espionage charge is not meant to cover this kind of activity and the espionage charges in this indictment are in fact a violation of the First Amendment. Perhaps I could read—
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 10 seconds, but if you can—
MARGARET KUNSTLER: I'll try to read very quickly. This is from Hugo Black's concurrence in The New York Times case, in the Pentagon case. "In the First Amendment, the founding fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bear the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free press, unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government."
AMY GOODMAN: And those are the words of Justice Hugo Black. I want to thank you, Margaret Kunstler, and Tariq Ali, co-editors of the new book In Defense of Julian Assange. I'm Amy Goodman. Tonight, we'll be with Juan González at the People's Forum in New York.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
Egyptian security forces raided the office of Mada Masr, the country's last independent media outlet, and arrested three of its journalists this weekend. The raid began Sunday afternoon, when nine plainclothes security officers entered the Mada Masr office in Cairo, seizing phones and laptops and holding the staff in the building for more than three hours. They then arrested editor-in-chief Lina Attalah, managing editor Mohamed Hamama and reporter Rana Mamdouh. It came just a day after security forces arrested senior editor Shady Zalat at his home. All four journalists were released from detention Sunday night. The raid and arrests mark a sharp escalation in Egypt's attack on press freedom under Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who came to power after the 2013 overthrow of former President Mohamed Morsi. We go to Cairo where we're joined by Mada Masr reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous. He's also a Democracy Now! correspondent and was detained with his colleagues on Sunday.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. We begin today's show in Egypt, where security forces in plainclothes surrounded and raided the office of the country's last independent media outlet Sunday morning, detaining three journalists. The raid began Sunday afternoon when nine security officers entered the office of independent news outlet Mada Masr in Cairo, seizing phones and laptops and holding the staff in the building for more than three hours. They then arrested the editor-in-chief Lina Attalah, managing editor Mohamed Hamama and reporter Rana Mamdouh. It came just a day after security forces arrested senior editor Shady Zalat at his home. All four journalists were released from detention Sunday afternoon.
The raid and arrests mark a sharp escalation in Egypt's attack on press freedom under Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who came to power after the 2013 overthrow of former President Mohamed Morsi. While virtually all other independent news outlets have been silenced, Mada Masr has been described as Egypt's last bastion of press freedom and continues to publish investigative journalism. The raid came just days after Mada Masr published a report by Shady Zalat headlined President's eldest son, Mahmoud al-Sisi, sidelined from powerful intelligence position to diplomatic mission in Russia.
The article cited conversations with several government officials, including two members of Egypt's intelligence services. According to the piece, there was a general consensus that "Mahmoud al-Sisi's rising prominence as a decision maker, as well as the increasingly frequent mention of his name in international and regional media outlets, had significantly harmed the public image of the president and his family and constituted a threat to the stability of the administration." The article said the president "immediately welcomed" the idea of removing his son from the post.
More than 4,000 people have been arrested since anti-government protests broke out across Egypt in September, in the biggest wave of arrests since Sisi came to power. Several journalists were detained for reporting on the uprising. Reporters Without Borders calls Egypt one of the world's biggest prisons for journalists.
We now go to Cairo, where we're joined by Mada Masr reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who is also a Democracy Now! correspondent. He was one of those detained for hours during the raid yesterday but released as the editor-in-chief and two others were taken off to the prosecutor's office. They, too, eventually released. Sharif, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what happened on Sunday?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, this really all began Saturday morning when we got news at about 3:00 a.m. that plainclothes police officers had stormed into Shady's home. Shady Zalat. And just a slight correction—Shady did not write that article. We don't put bylines on those articles. It's by [inaudible], and he in fact wasn't the one who wrote it. But for some reason, they did target him. They came into his apartment, they took him away and we didn't know where he was. We immediately began putting the word out and trying to get as much coverage as possible, trying to put pressure on authorities to release him.
So for Saturday, the next day, this is the day of, we had decided to meet in the office at 1:30 and we were writing more press releases, getting the word out and working on Shady's case. And right at that time, at around 1:30, nine plainclothes security personnel entered the office by force. They moved in very quickly and aggressively. They spread throughout the office. Immediately, the first thing they did was take away everyone's phones and laptops. They were quite intimidating. When we asked who they were, they refused to answer and they became even more agitated at the question.
And at the time of the raid, there was about 16 Mada staff and freelancers in the office and they corralled us all in the newsroom. They made us initially stand against the wall. We weren't allowed to talk. Then one by one, they asked us to come out. There was a pile of laptops and phones that they had confiscated, and we had to identify our phone, our laptop and hand over our national ID card and they kind of set them in piles on a central table. They wrote down people's details. They asked some people to unlock their phones, unlock their laptops and they were looking through them before putting them on that table.
And then we sat in the newsroom kind of the entire time, for about three hours. Different officers periodically would take Lina Attalah, the chief editor, and question her as well as journalist Mohamed Hamama. He was taken a couple of times as well. They also questioned two foreign freelancers that freelance with Mada, an American and a British citizen, and two members of a France 24 TV crew that had come to do an interview with Lina about Shady's arrest.
And then at about 4:30, they asked Lina, Hamama and Rana to come from the newsroom into the hallway. The officers gathered their personal belongings from the table—their phones, their laptops and their backpacks. And this was really a horrible moment because we had to stand there in the newsroom and watch as they were being taken away not knowing what fates awaited them. And then the entire group left except one security agent stayed for several minutes to inform us that they were being taken to the prosecutor's office, which didn't turn out to be true. We asked him which prosecutor's office; he refused to say. When we asked him to identify himself or the security agency that he works for, he also refused.
And then the France 24 crew left with the French embassy officials and the two foreign freelancers were taken to their home so they could have—check on their passports. And they were eventually let go as well. So Lina and Mohamed Hamama and Rana were taken to a nearby police station. They were handcuffed to each other. They were put in a police truck which drove them to Sheikh Zayed, which is a neighborhood on the outskirts of Cairo. Then shortly afterwards, the vehicle just turned around and came back to the police station, which is next to the Mada Masr office. And around 6:15 p.m., they were all released. And shortly before that, just moments before that, and over a day and a half after he was kidnapped, essentially, from his home, Shady called our lawyer and said that he had been released on the Ring Road on the outskirts of Cairo.
And this was a real moment for us of joy, of almost disbelief, because as we were being held there for those three very long hours, a lot was going through our minds. We didn't know what was happening. Would we be taken and interrogated? Would we be imprisoned? If not all of us, then some of us? Then whom? It really felt like the end of Mada Masr. And at one point, Lina, the chief editor and the cofounder, she looked around at all of us standing in the office in the newsroom, in this office that's occupied by men with guns, and she said out loud, "Mada Masr, 2013 to 2019." And her eyes welled up.
So we really thought it was over. But what we didn't realize was that standing there, that outside the door, there was a group of friends, lawyers, civil society groups and the representatives of a couple of embassies that were there. They had heard the news. They came. They refused to leave when security agents told them to. And we didn't realize that statements and articles in major newspapers were being published, that calls were being made. And really this solidarity worked. And I think it's this pressure is what finally got everyone released because this doesn't happen in Egypt these days. If you get taken in, if you are arrested, you rarely come out anytime soon. So it was I think a moment of victory and a moment of celebration.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, did they take your phone and computer, make you unlock it?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: They took—they confiscated it, but I wasn't one of the people who was asked to unlock the phone and laptop, no.
AMY GOODMAN: And when they asked people to do that, did they start to go through their phones and laptops?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Yes. We couldn't tell what they're going through because we're all in the room, but one person came out, had to put their thumb, and it unlocked it and they were scrolling through something on the phone. We don't know what. Messages. I mean typically, what has been happening, at least—September 20th, there was kind of small but significant protests against Sisi calling for his ouster and that was followed by really a massive crackdown, an unprecedented crackdown, the widest arrest sweeps since Sisi came to office, with 4,000 people being arrested, including activists, lawyers, university professors, political figures. I think at least eight journalists, additional journalists, have been arrested since then.
And there was also this attempt to strong-arm their way into any private conversations. So if you're walking down the street, you look a certain way, maybe you're a young man or woman, they just come up to you, take your phone, make you unlock it and go through your Facebook, go through your WhatsApp message. And there is really no kind of denying and refusing them. I mean, you can try, and some people have, but most people will unlock their phones. And so they're going through these messages to see if there's any political content, and doing that to average citizens. That was right after the September 20th protest. It has kind of calmed down now.
When they're going through phones at someone at Mada's office, I'm not sure what they're looking for. I'm sure they realize that we're journalists and there must be political content on the phones, but it's hard to know.
AMY GOODMAN: Reporters Without Borders calls Egypt one of the world's biggest prisons for journalists. And you have, what, 4,000 people arrested since the antigovernment protests broke out across Egypt in September. Can you talk about the overall climate to operate? And also what does the words "Mada Masr" mean in Arabic?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: The climate is increasingly hostile. The last couple of months, it is hard to describe what it has been like working here since September 20th. It takes a toll. You're publishing and you don't know what will come. You go to the office; you don't know if you're going to be raided. You're worried that your colleagues who are more visible will be targeted for arrest. You go home not knowing if you're going to wake up there in the morning. This is the kind of atmosphere that you're working in.
And when they arrested Shady from his home in the early morning of Saturday, it hit very hard. And then the next day they raided the office. And Lina said journalists have no protection other than the integrity of their work and the value that others place in it. And we saw that value on huge display after Shady's arrest, after the raid on her office, with all these people coming out, physically outside of the building and also making calls around the world. And that's what happened with Shady, Lina, and Hamama. They got out. And it's really very rare here that this happens.
I also have to thank you personally, Amy, and Jeremy Scahill, my family, for all the work you did also in getting the word out while we were detained in the office. It was this kind of stuff that was invaluable for us. But, you know, we are the lucky ones. There are—I don't know the exact figure, but I think close to 30 now journalists who are in prison. Egypt is one of the top jailers of journalists in the world.
They have rearrested Alaa Abd El-Fattah after he spent five years in prison and was going to—and then had another five years of what they called probation where he had to submit himself to a police station at 6:00 p.m. every day and would only get out at 6:00 a.m. and then one of those days they just took him from the police station. He is now in a maximum security two wing of Tora Prison where he never sees the sun. He is never outside. He is not allowed any reading materials. So they've really escalated on this. The canteen is closed so he eats this kind of horrible food.
And he's just one of many. They arrested his lawyer when his lawyer was coming to the prosecutor's office to do his lawyerly work. They have arrested university professors that have before been untouched and political figures that were never before arrested. There are people dying in prison. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh is a former presidential candidate, has had a couple of heart attacks in prison. The conditions are very bad. There's a lot of medical negligence. The former president did die in prison, Mohamed Morsi. He died in court, but as a result of his imprisonment and what human rights groups have documented as medical negligence.
So it is a very hostile environment to work in. But again, even though this was a dark moment, I think for us and for Mada and for independent journalism in Egypt, really the response and the solidarity was incredible, and I really believe it is the only reason we got out. That this was too damaging to authorities, it was too damaging to their reputation, it was too much of a political cost for them and they just released us. And I think we were waiting in those hours—they were trying to make a decision and they decided to let us go.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play a clip of President Trump praising the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the two leaders met during the U.N. General Assembly here in New York.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's an honor to be with my friend, the president of Egypt. And he is a real leader. He has done some things that are absolutely amazing in a short period of time. When he took over, not so long ago, it was in turmoil. And it's not in turmoil now. So I just want to say we have a long-term great relationship. It's better than ever before. We're doing a lot of trading.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Trump praising the Egyptian president in September at the U.N. General Assembly. He also recently referred to Egyptian President Sisi as "my favorite dictator." Sharif Abdel Kouddous, your response?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Those comments came as this massive crackdown was happening. It really—I think it was the day after September 20th, or it may have been on September 20th.. As I've said before, U.S. policy has not actually changed that much. It is not a Trump problem; it's a U.S.-Egypt relationship problem that has supported various different governments over decades. And Republican and Democratic administrations have done so.
But the rhetoric does matter in this case, also. When it's happening and he says he's doing a great job, that really does give a green light for this. And we've seen—but I think it's no secret; there's a lot of documentation of what's happening in Egypt, and both the United States and Europe have I think decided that this is a political cost—this is not a political cost for them. They don't care. And that they are more focused on issues of migration and making sure that Egypt is not letting people cross the Mediterranean to Europe. And there has been a huge uptick in weapons sales to Egypt from countries like Germany, France, Russia.
So this is a relationship that we have. So again, it is a continuation of things but the rhetoric really, I think, gave the president and Egyptian authorities a green light to do what they wanted, and what they wanted was to arrest thousands of people.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, what does "Mada Masr" mean?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, it's a play on different words, but it can mean kind of the Jewel of Egypt, but that's not really what it—I think what it was meant to mean. But it can also mean kind of content of Egypt. It's a little hard to explain in English, to be honest. But it is really the last place that is doing this kind of professional, critical, adversarial journalism. And I have only been working there for a year or so, but it has been around since 2013 and it has done critical work. We will continue to do work there because I think we can.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, we tip our hats to you and your colleagues' bravery. We thank you so much for continuing to do that work. Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Democracy Now! correspondent, reporter with Mada Masr, independent media outlet in Cairo. Please, be safe.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
The Israeli government deported the director of Human Rights Watch's Israel and Palestine office, Omar Shakir, on Monday. The organization said the move places Israel in an "ugly club" of authoritarian regimes. Israel has accused Shakir of supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a nonviolent global campaign aiming to pressure Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. A 2017 Israeli law bans foreigners from Israel if they publicly support the BDS movement. Omar Shakir joins us from Stockholm to discuss his recent deportation and his plans to address the European Parliament regarding Israel's systematic repression of Palestinians. "The Israeli government, for two and a half years now, has been trying to bar Human Rights Watch's access to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory," he says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I'm Juan González. Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. The Israeli government deported the head of Human Rights Watch's Israel and Palestine office, Omar Shakir, on Monday. The organization said the move places Israel in an ugly club of authoritarian regimes. Israel has accused Shakir of supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a nonviolent global campaign aiming to pressure Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. A 2017 Israeli law bans foreigners from Israel if they publicly support the BDS movement. This is Omar Shakir speaking on Monday.
OMAR SHAKIR: If the Israeli government can deport somebody documenting rights abuse without facing consequence, how can we ever stop rights abuse? … We believe in the right to free expression including the right of all people to call for boycotts or to oppose boycotts as a part of legitimate free expression.
AMY GOODMAN: The executive director of the human rights group B'Tselem, Hagai El-Ad, tweeted in response to Shakir's deportation "International (and Israeli) human rights NGOs have much broader leeway, as we enjoy so many more privileges and protections compared to Palestinian colleagues. But in targeting @HRW, Israel aims to deliver a chilling effect across this entire spectrum," he wrote.
Well, for more, we go now to Stockholm, Sweden, to speak with Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch. He was just deported and is now traveling around Europe to raise awareness about the Israeli human rights abuses. Omar Shakir, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain what happened and how long you have been in Israel and Palestine and what Israel did.
OMAR SHAKIR: Thank you, Amy, for having me. The Israeli government for two and a half years now has been trying to bar Human Rights Watch's access to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. It began actually with the denial for the organization to hire a foreign employee. When we went public with that effort, they quickly reversed and gave me a work permit but almost immediately began investigating my status, and a year and a half ago, the revoked that work permit. We challenged that decision in court. It was upheld up to the Israeli Supreme Court, and yesterday I was deported over my human rights advocacy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about that Supreme Court decision? What was the basis for it?
OMAR SHAKIR: The Israeli Supreme Court essentially interpreted the 2017 law that you mentioned earlier that instructs the Interior Ministry to deny entry to boycott supporters to apply to rudimentary, basic human rights advocacy. The Supreme Court in essence said that if you challenge the legality of Israel's settlements, which is a war crime under international law which has been established over many decades, you in essence are attacking the legitimacy of the state of Israel, and as a result, you are harming Israel, posing a threat to the country and that the state is legitimate to deny you entry and therefore deport you.
So not only is Israel, which calls itself a democracy, deporting a human rights defender based on their peaceful advocacy, but actually they are even going a step further and acknowledging that they're doing it with the court's stamp of approval over human rights work based on international norms.
Human Rights Watch has never taken a position on BDS. What we rather do is call on businesses, as we do across the world, to respect human rights. And decades of research has led us to conclude that businesses which operate in the illegal settlements invariably contribute to that illegality and to rights abuse, and we have asked for them to stop doing that, which is of course different than a more general boycott call or even a boycott call specific to those companies or to Israel proper, which we have never done.
AMY GOODMAN: So give the example—for example, Airbnb—what did you call for for them?
OMAR SHAKIR: Sure. So a year ago, we released a report that documented the way in which Airbnb's listings in illegal settlements invariably contributed to rights abuse. They were renting properties on land stolen from Palestinians who themselves were not allowed to stay there. This is land in which Israeli settlers received permits to build, where Palestinians are denied those permits. They also are operating on land in some cases where we were able to establish is privately owned by Palestinians who themselves can't rent there or benefit from that rental.
So we called on Airbnb to delist in settlements. We did not call for a boycott of Airbnb. We did not call for Airbnb to stop doing business inside Israel proper. We were holding Airbnb to the standards under the U.N. guiding principle, the same things we do whether it be dealing with cotton-picking in Uzbekistan or tech companies in China. We call on all companies to respect international law, which is different than calling for them to boycott Israel, much less calling on consumers to boycott that company.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Has what happened to you, this deportation, happened previously to any Human Rights Watch researchers? And if so, were these countries democracies as Israel claims to be?
OMAR SHAKIR: So this is the first time that a country that self-proclaims itself to be a democracy deports a Human Rights Watch staff member. In barring access to our staff, Israel is joining the ranks of countries like Venezuela, like Egypt, like Iran that have barred access to Human Rights Watch staff members.
Human Rights Watch has been documenting human rights abuses in Israel and in Palestine for nearly three decades now, and while Israel has restricted our access to the occupied Gaza Strip, we have had unfettered access for this time to Israel and the West Bank. This is the first time they have deported us. It is the first time anyone that had legal status in the country has been deported under this 2017 law. And of course they are doing so in a way that is aimed to send a chilling message to other rights organizations.
AMY GOODMAN: Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth criticized Israel's decision to expel you, Omar Shakir.
KENNETH ROTH: It's about Human Rights Watch. There is no point replacing Omar because our next researcher would have the exact same problem that Omar did.
If Israel can pick our researcher, if Israel can preclude certain topics, imagine what other governments will do? China will say, "You cannot monitor Xinjiang." Saudi Arabia will say, "You've got to leave Yemen alone."
AMY GOODMAN: If you could take that from there, Omar Shakir, and what you're planning to do right now?
OMAR SHAKIR: Absolutely. I mean, Human Rights Watch, for us this is a principled issue. We're not going to let any government have a veto power on what issues that we work on or what we cover. So our message is quite simple. We will continue the work with me at the helm directing the research from one of our regional offices starting just across the river in Jordan. One of our regional offices, I should mention, that does not censor our work the way that Israel does, despite our criticism. So we're going to continue to work on the same issues, with the same intensity and the same vigor.
And in fact, I think this sort of decision really pushed us to redouble our efforts, because a government that has no qualms about deporting a representative of one of the world's largest human rights organizations certainly has no problem doubling down on the rights abuse that we were documenting in the first place. A half century-long occupation defined by institutional discrimination and systematic rights abuse, and including what is happening in the Gaza Strip. A decade-long plus closure that includes a generalized ban on travel—nobody in, nobody out outside of exceptional circumstances.
So while this decision certainly has been difficult on a personal level—Israel-Palestine has been my home for the last two and a half years—I think about those that are not able to travel at all. Not just the people of Gaza, but my colleague at Amnesty International who just a few weeks ago was issued a ban to leave the occupied West Bank to Jordan, and previously to Jerusalem, on undisclosed security grounds, what appears to be another attempt to stifle the work of human rights organizations.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to that issue of the Amnesty researcher. In October, Israel issued a travel ban against Laith Abu Zeyad, a Palestinian campaigner for Amnesty. Israel prevented him from departing from the West Bank for Jordan where he was planning to attend a relative's funeral. Israel also denied entry to Congressmembers Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, later granting permission for Congressmember Tlaib to visit her family in the occupied West Bank on humanitarian grounds, but she rejected the offer, which included the condition she not promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Israel has also issued a series of travel bans against Omar Barghouti, the founder of BDS movement, and Shawan Jabarin, the director of the Palestinian rights organization Al-Haq. Can you comment on these?
OMAR SHAKIR: Absolutely. This decision is coming amid a context in which there is a systematic assault on human rights organizations. And there is a reason why the Israeli government is doing this. They are trying to silence the messenger instead of dealing with the core human rights issues that are taking place on the ground. But the reality is that these efforts are failing. These efforts have only shined a light on the very issues that Israel is trying to cover up.
But of course what is happening to me must be noted is small compared to what Palestinians face. In addition to Laith's travel ban that you mentioned, in recent months, we have seen Addameer, a Palestinian prisoner rights organization, have their office raided by the army. We have seen a field researcher with B'Tselem who was detained while doing field work.
And of course if this is the way that human rights organizations are being dealt with, think about the millions of Palestinians in year 53 of an ugly occupation in which they regularly face excessive use of force, home demolitions, movement restrictions that are discriminatory, not to mention not having the most basic civil and political rights. A 50-year-old Palestinian today in the West Bank has never had the right to free expression, the right to free assembly, the right to free association. They have been living under a brutal military rule that the Israeli government wants the world to forget about, but we won't forget about it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Both the European Union and the United Nations have condemned this action by Israel, but of course Israel routinely ignores such condemnation from those international bodies. What about the United States government? Where is it right now on this and could it have potentially an impact in terms of these kinds of actions of Israel against human rights advocates?
OMAR SHAKIR: The United States has never used its leverage to actually rein in Israeli rights abuse, but what we've seen under the Trump administration is a shift to green-lighting Israeli abuses and really being complicit in them. In my case, of course the U.S. Embassy attended each one of my court hearings up to the U.S. Supreme Court on a working level. We had a regular conversation. The State Department did make a statement over the summer indicating their support for free expression and their concern about the case, and such.
But obviously, we didn't see the same kind of strong principled position in protecting the work of civil society groups that we saw from a range of other governments around the world including the European Union but also Germany, France, many others, as well as civil society groups, not only Palestinian-Israeli, but international, including groups—Jewish-American organizations.
So the reality here is the United States, whether it be on settlements with the declaration about Pompeo recently, whether it be on Palestinian refugees or whether it be on protection of human rights defenders, the increasing relationship between the Netanyahu and Trump administrations only highlights their isolation. Because in every other case, the world has stood around the principled issue. The world sees through my deportation and sees it for what it is—an attack on the human rights movement.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, in a sharp reversal to more than 40 years of U.S. policy, the Trump administration announced earlier this month that it no longer views Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to be a violation of international law. In 1978, the State Department issued a legal opinion stating settlements were "inconsistent with international law," and every U.S. administration, Democratic and Republican, has upheld that. In 2016, a U.N. resolution declared the settlements a flagrant violation of international law. But now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced a reversal in the U.S. position. Israel's embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has now been indicted, welcomed Pompeo's announcement as a historic day for Israel. I wanted to play the clip of Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat condemning the U.S. decision.
SAEB EREKAT: Israeli colonial settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem, are not only illegal under international law, they are war crimes.
Once the Trump administration decide to undermine international law, once they become an administration that is pro-Israel occupation, pro-Israel war crimes, this constitute a major threat to international peace and security.
AMY GOODMAN: So that's Saeb Erekat, Palestinian negotiator. Omar Shakir, your final response?
OMAR SHAKIR: Look, I think the U.S. declaration is a sign of their weakness and their irrelevance. The reality is Trump cannot change decades of established international law that settlements are war crime by decree as much as he may want to. This is not a controversial point. Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention makes clear that transfer of one's civilian population to territory acquired by war is impermissible.
And it's quite clear that Israel wants to have its cake and eat it too. On one hand, it wants to say that settlements in the west are not illegal and in some cases even saying that the West Bank is not occupied. But on the other hand, they don't want to give Palestinians the human rights that they would deserve, including the right to have full political rights in that kind of arrangement.
What we're facing is the increasingly clear reality today. Between the river and the sea, so in the land of Israel and Palestine, you have about 13 million people, about half of whom are Israeli-Jewish and half of whom are Palestinian. And Palestinians are treated fundamentally unequally, with different sets of inferior rights, whether they're in Gaza, the West Bank or in Israel proper. That reality has become increasingly transparent and the world needs to take action to stop that.
If anything is clear, the fact that international outrage did not stop my deportation should make critically clear that the only way we're going to be able to stop these abuses from continuing is going to be action and heightened action from the international community. I will continue to do this in my role at Human Rights Watch and will continue to do it with our Israeli-Palestinian partners.
I am confident that I will be back to Israel and Palestine one day. And when that day comes, I believe it will be a day in which human rights and equality is the baseline for all people that live in the land, not what it is now, exclusive to only one population.
AMY GOODMAN: Omar Shakir, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch who was just deported from Israel, speaking to us from Stockholm, Sweden, where we will be broadcasting next week.
When we come back, more than 340 people in Iraq have been killed since nationwide antigovernment protests began in October. We will speak with the Iraqi poet, novelist, scholar Sinan Antoon. Stay with us.
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n Iraq, more than 340 people have died since anti-government protests began in early October. More than 15,000 Iraqis have been injured. Tires were set on fire Monday and main roads and bridges were blocked in the cities of Basra and Nassiriya. Over the weekend, security forces opened fire on civilians in Baghdad and other cities. Demonstrators are protesting corruption and lack of jobs and basic services, including clean water and electricity. In Baghdad, many university students are taking part in the demonstrations. To talk more about the protests in Iraq we are joined by the Iraqi poet, novelist, translator, and scholar Sinan Antoon. He was born and raised in Baghdad and his most recent novel is titled, "The Book of Collateral Damage." "What's really important is the reclaiming of Iraqi identity and a new sense of Iraqi nationalism that transcends the sectarian discourse that was institutionalized by the United States in 2003," Antoon says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Iraq where more than 340 people have died since anti-government protests began in early October. More than 15,000 Iraqis have been injured. On Monday, tires were set on fire and main roads and bridges were blocked in the cities of Basra and Nasiriyah. Over the weekend, security forces opened fire on civilians in Baghdad and other cities. The demonstrators are protesting corruption and lack of jobs and basic services, including clean water and electricity. Falah Hassan took part in the protests in Basra.
FALAH HASSAN: [translated] Our protests are peaceful. We are taking to the streets to take our rights back. We will never surrender, neither today, tomorrow nor even after one year. By doing so, the authorities make themselves tired. The security forces are our sons, our cousins and our brothers. Why do they hit us? Whenever they get out of their vehicles, they open fire on us.
AMY GOODMAN: In Baghdad, many university students are taking part in the demonstrations.
PROTESTER: [translated] When we are protesting, we don't aim to dirty or destroy streets. Our goal is to achieve our demands and to live in a homeland with peace and security. God willing and with the determination of our brothers, the protesters, we will achieve our aspirations. We are university students. We left college and joined the protesters. God willing, we will have success.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the protests in Iraq, we are joined by the Iraqi poet, novelist, translator, scholar Sinan Antoon. He was born and raised in Baghdad, now an associate professor at New York University, here in the city. His most recent novel, The Book of Collateral Damage. Sinan, it's great to have you with us. Three-hundred forty Iraqi protesters dead right now since the protests have just recently begun. Can you talk about the situation there, talk about the level of violence and also talk about what are the demands? What caused this latest round of protests?
SINAN ANTOON: This started out in October, on the first day of October. And unlike previous waves of protests, on October 1st, they were very spontaneous and mostly from the working class, impoverished neighborhoods in Baghdad. And the unprecedented lethal response of the regime by killing many of these peaceful protesters fueled the anger of so many other Iraqis who then came out in bigger waves, especially on the 25th of October.
And what started out as a protest from a certain class and group of people has become now really widespread in that so many different sectors have joined these protests. It is unprecedented in the modern history of Iraq that so many people from so many different backgrounds come together for this set of demands. And it is basically the culmination of 16 years of corruption and inefficiency and failure on the part of the political class to deliver anything. Basic services, as you mentioned.
And so the demands now are that the dissolution of the parliament, that there should be a new election law, that there should be a new constitution that is drafted. These are the demands. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the regime has not really responded except with violence and death. It doesn't seem to understand the level of seriousness. It is also a huge gap in so many ways between the political elite ensconced in the Green Zone, living their luxurious life, and the rest of Iraqi society, which lives outside.
It is also a generational gap. Iraq is a very young population and the great majority of these protesters are people who were born in the 1990s and who have only seen the corruption and the failure of this political elite, even its inability to protect its citizens and what happened with ISIS occupation and so on and so forth.
But what's really important is the reclaiming of the Iraqi identity and a new sense of Iraqi nationalism that transcends the sectarian discourse that was institutionalized by the United States in 2003 and that so many of these political parties used to maintain their power over large sectors of society. So, so many Iraqis, despite the death and the pain, so many Iraqis are really hopeful to see the creativity and the resilience of these protesters, and what they are doing all across Iraq in these sites where they are trying to reinvent the meaning of the country, but also in their ability to, for example, in Tahrir Square, to transform—this place which has been the buildings and the tunnel and the square that is so important symbolically was completely ignored, and they have managed to clean up the place and to use art, to cover the walls with graffiti that represents unity and hope, to start a cinema inside Tahrir Square.
The main slogan that started these protests was "we want to homeland," which is very simple yet it's very powerful, which reflects that the political class and the system that was installed after the occupation has failed to give citizens any sense of meaning or to deliver any services. Sadly, as the time goes by, the regime's forces and the militias continue to kill these peaceful demonstrators.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You mentioned the efforts of the young protesters to go beyond the ethnic and religious divisions that have been exploited by the political class now, whether it is Sunni or Shiite or Kurdish or Israeli. The United States also has emphasized for so long, first the threat of Saddam Hussein, then ISIS, and of course always of Iran, as Iran being the great threat behind the problems besetting the Iraqi people. Could you talk about the impact of this continued U.S. effort to demonize particular groups in the world of the Iraqi population?
SINAN ANTOON: Iran has so much influence inside Iraq and has infiltrated so many of the institutions and backed so many of these militias, but all of that is a product of the U.S. occupation and invasion of Iraq. So while Iran is one of the targets of these protesters, but it is important to remember that a lot of the signs and the placards that the protesters have in Tahrir square and everywhere say no to any foreign intervention. So they say no to Iran, no to Turkey, no to Israel, and no to the United States.
But of course, the United States, because of its geopolitical interests and its ongoing confrontation with Iran and so many countries, focuses only on this one dimension, which is Iran. No one denies that Iran backs many of these parties in Iraq financially and otherwise and has infiltrated, as I've said, Iraqi society in so many ways. But of course there are all of these other dimensions. And sadly, mainstream media in this country and even in Europe, is very myopic and only sees in these protests that they are against Iran and they are a threat to Iran and its influences, of the regime of course.
And that's true. But Iraqis want to reclaim a country and they want sovereignty and they are against all types of interventions. And Iraq, since 2003, feel that the state is very weak in a way. And we have Turkish trips in Iraq, in the north. We have American troops. And so the protesters are really very conscientious of all of this and they really have a deep understanding, at least judging from what they say when they appear on the media, of that the interest of Iraq and the Iraqis come first and sovereignty is very important. Of course, it is not going to be taken back overnight, but they realize that the Iranian regime is not the only threat and not the only sponsor of certain forces inside Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: I'd like to turn to Vice President Mike Pence who made a surprise visit to Iraq this weekend.
VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: With regard to our conversations with Prime Minister Mahdi, we spoke about the unrest that has been taking place in recent weeks here in Iraq. He assured me that they were working to avoid violence or the kind of repression that we see taking place even as we speak in Iran. And he pledged to me they would work to protect and respect peaceful protesters as a part of the democratic process here in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: So that's Vice President Pence in that surprise visit. Your response to what he said about Iraq, about the protests? And also, President Trump said he is pulling troops out of the area when he was talking about Syria, and then turns out he was putting them into Iraq.
SINAN ANTOON: Look, this is the language that a lot of these protests are also going out against. Pence calls it the democratic process. And this is the real hoax, actually, in Iraq, since 2003—Using the term "democratic process." What has this democratic process brought to Iraqis? $650 billion has disappeared from the coffers. This is a very rich country.
And Pence calls it unrest. And it's not really unrest. These are peaceful protesters that are being killed. So this language is meaningless. Neither Pence nor Trump has any credibility in Iraq or in the region, nor does the U.S. administration. I mean, it has a very long established history of supporting dictators and dictatorships, and rehabilitating. I mean, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia is just one example. So of course, the U.S. is in a way in collusion with the Iraqi regime.
So none of this really matters to the protesters on the ground. They are resilient and they're going to wait and try to snatch whatever is possible. But I want to say that irrespective of what happens, I think the new language that these protesters have reclaimed and the new sense of belonging is going to go on and they're not going to give up on their demands no matter what the regional and the international response is. But there are always calls to save the Iraqi people, but most of these protesters realize that, in a way, they are alone. There is symbolic support internationally, but they know that neither the U.S. government nor any of the regional regimes are on their side.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You mentioned a couple of times the changes since 2003, obviously of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The protesters now, the young protesters, were basically children at the time of that invasion. But the question of how the elders of Iraq, the older population judged the difference between the society they had under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, yet it was a modern and relatively well-off population, compared to what the situation that has existed for the past 16 years?
SINAN ANTOON: It wasn't a well-off population. I think the problem—I know one of the many negative and disastrous effects of U.S. occupation and installing this new regime is to push people to sometimes make these comparisons. I don't think 2003 is the actual break, even though I use it myself. But we have to remember that in 1991, the first Gulf War after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, is really the moment when, to quote Jim Baker, back then he said, "We will return you to the preindustrial age." So the degradation of Iraqi society in terms of its institutions and its infrastructure started out in 1991.
And then we had the sanctions for so many years that really also further destroyed—it continued the war by other means, killing one million, driving three million out of the country. But what matters is to look at what 2003 had done. It was Act III in a very long process of dismantling the Iraqi state, irrespective of Saddam Hussein. Destroying social fabric, destroying—not allowing the regime even to rebuild the country. That's what really matters.
But I should say that the majority of these protesters, they are unencumbered by all of these old questions, and they really don't care much about comparisons between pre-2003 and post-2003. They want to live a good life in accordance with the resources that the country has. They know that the country is very rich in resources. They are well aware through social media, through their access to information, that this political class is a group of crooks. They know because there are so many scandals and there are numbers and figures. And that's what they really want, actually. It's about the future; it's not about the past. What vision does this political class have for the country? Nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: Sinan Antoon, talk about the role of women in these protests.
SINAN ANTOON: Yes. Women in Iraqi society have a long history that many people don't know. The first woman minister in the entire region was actually in Iraq in 1959. So what's great about this wave of protest is that, as I said, so many people from all backgrounds are participating. And women from various generations, from various backgrounds, are participating in the protests, are there not only in supportive roles, but really spearheading all of the efforts to stand, to defend the spots in these squares, and a sense of volunteerism and a sense of coming together.
So I am usually a pessimist, but what is really making me more optimistic about this is that it's really changing also the relationships between people of different backgrounds and making people come together for the country. So everywhere you look, you see women on the ground. You see women at the forefront. You see a change in the sense of people fighting against authority and against patriarchy.
There are so many moving scenes. There was a scene of a young boy who was taken inside a police car for raising an Iraqi flag, and schoolgirls from nine or ten years old crowded around the police car and started protesting and chanting and forced the police to release this boy. So this is the new sense of empowerment that people feel, whether men or women, people of different generations, which is really amazing.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also that there are very few of the—any of the political parties or regular organizations involved. To a large degree, is it a leaderless uprising?
SINAN ANTOON: I mean, it is a leaderless uprising. And of course there have been attempts to hijack and infiltrate, and they are ongoing as we speak, but once again, the protesters have shown a sense of awareness in that. For example, when the regime asked them to present a list of figures to negotiate with, they sent the names of the martyrs, the people who have died, saying, "These are our leaders." It is very poetic but it's very powerful, which it means that unless they are held accountable for the crimes they have committed, there will be no negotiation.
Of course, this is a sense of strength, not having a leadership, but it's also of course tricky, because sooner or later, there have to emerge a certain structure and a leadership to be able to translate these demands and to go on. But we don't know yet.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Sinan Antoon, so much for being with us. Poet, novelist, translator, scholar, born and raised in Baghdad, now here in New York and an associate professor at New York University. His most recent novel, The Book of Collateral Damage. When we come back, we look at the life and legacy of Toni Morrison. Last week literary, luminary, social leaders from around the country gathered in New York at Cathedral of St. John the Divine to honor her, including Oprah Winfrey. Stay with us.
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The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
