STRANGE TIMES

The level of civil disobedience appears to have picked up if these women welcome being detained by Saudi police. October 26th was a day of defiance where ‘dozens’ drove in disobedience of bans against women driving. Since then protesters have requested anonymity due to fears of reprisals by the secret police.

from http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/01/world/meast/saudi-arabia-female-drivers-detained/
By Mohammed Jamjoom,
CNN December 1, 2013
(CNN) — Two of Saudi Arabia’s best-known female advocates for lifting the ban on women driving were detained on Friday after being caught behind the wheel in the country’s capital.

Aziza Al-Yousef, who was driving the car, and her passenger, Eman Al-Nafjan, tell CNN they were pulled over and spent a few hours at a police station in Riyadh until being released into the custody of their respective husbands.

Al-Nafjan, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent bloggers, and one of the organizers of the popular October 26 Women’s Driving Campaign, said she decided to go for a spin with Al-Yousef to attract more attention to her cause.

“We were looking for the police. We drove by the police station on purpose,” she explained, adding how she welcomed the detention.

Despite repeated attempts, CNN has been unable to reach Riyadh police for comment.

Al-Nafjan, who tweets as “Saudiwoman,” says she has grown tired of waiting for the Saudi government to allow women to drive.

Al-Yousef has driven before and was glad to get behind the wheel again on Friday but says she was not deliberately looking to be detained by the police.

“In a way it is good for the cause because you’ll the keep the issue in the mind of people,” said Al-Yousef. “However, some people might understand wrongly that we’re confronting the government and that might slow the process.”

Why Saudi Arabia can’t ban women from driving forever

Al-Yousef was initially concerned she and Al-Nafjan might go to jail, citing the presence of traffic police, regular police and secret police who were called to the scene. She says the mood of the police had lightened substantially by the time she and Al-Nafjan reached the station.

When her husband came for her, he was asked to sign a statement pledging Al-Yousef would not drive again.

Al-Yousef says her husband jokingly asked, “How can I do that? I can’t prevent her from driving. Only God can do that,” before signing. She was then released.

The issue of women driving is a particularly sensitive and controversial one in Saudi Arabia, the last country on Earth where females don’t have that right. In recent years, though, more women have challenged the government, urging officials to overturn the ban and taking to streets in remarkable displays of civil disobedience. Although women are not allowed to drive in the ultraconservative Kingdom, there is, in fact, no law barring them from doing so. But religious edicts are often interpreted to enforce the prohibition.

“We have tried all the legal channels,” explained Al-Nafjan. “The government keeps promising us that all we have to do is be patient and quiet, and we’ll eventually get the right to drive. Officials keep saying the women driving issue is one for Saudi society to decide. We wanted to prove that really isn’t the case and that the only people who really stop us is the police.”

In May 2011, Manal Al-Sharif was jailed for more than a week after posting a video of herself driving in Saudi Arabia online. She quickly became a hero to many and inspired dozens of women to drive throughout the streets of various cities in June of that year.

More recently, in September, a website for the October 26 Women’s Driving Campaign launched, and within a few weeks, tens of thousands had signed an online petition calling for an end to the driving ban for women in Saudi Arabia. As October 26 approached, numerous women filmed themselves driving in the conservative Kingdom and uploaded those clips to sites like YouTube.

Opinion: Give Saudi women the right to drive

In the weeks leading up to October 26, one Saudi cleric gave an interview in which he warned that Saudi women who drove risked damaging their ovaries. On October 24, the country’s Interior Ministry issued a statement telling women to stay off the streets.

Despite strong opposition by conservative quarters in the Kingdom, where a puritanical strain of Islam is practiced, October 26 saw dozens of women taking to the streets and driving. The campaign’s backers insist the movement is ongoing and has been a success thus far, while its critics say it has failed.

Last week, Al-Yousef had an audience with Saudi Arabia’s Interior Minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, via teleconference. She conveyed a message on behalf of the growing number of women and men calling for an end to the driving ban.

Al-Yousef was told the matter was now in the hands of Saudi King Abdullah, considered a cautious reformer.

“I think it might have been a good thing,” said Al-Yousef. “Before the government had said the driving issue was a societal issue. But now that is not an issue anymore. The good thing is now we know clearly that society is not the decision maker.”

Al-Yousef added: “We are trying to find a way to reach the King now. We have a letter signed by 3,000-plus people asking for permission to allow women to drive, and we want to find a way to get that letter to the King.”

Al-Nafjan, who was detained before for the very same offense, says she will continue pushing the envelope, even if that gets her into legal hot water.

“I wouldn’t mind if they prosecuted me,” she says. “I think it will further the cause. It’s good publicity for the cause — to be prosecuted for being a passenger in a car driven by a woman. You can’t get more medieval.”

The demand for an international No Fly Zone over Syria has been raised by protestors there. Yesterday, another 29 people were killed for taking to the streets to protest against the dictatorial Assad regime and for democracy. The toll in Syria stands at around 3,000 dead, since the people’s movement began its current phase in late January this year. Local coordinating committees exist in many parts of Syria and these grass-roots organisations organise the protests, which are invariably met with violent suppression by the state, including the use of snipers.

I don’t know enough about the circumstances to have an opinion about the No Fly Zone. My impression has been that the regime uses ground troops to suppress resistance. I’m not aware of any Gaddafi-style strafing from the air. But what I do like is the people’s call for international support of a practical military nature, not just ‘moral support’.

The protestors know how the NFZ was effective in helping to bring down Gaddafi’s regime, and they know it involved an invasion of Libyan sovereignty (air space) and an effective naval blockade on the part of the British Navy. I’d be surprised if they are not aware, too, that the NFZ over Libya involved much more than mere protecting the people from the Libyan Air Force, though that was its pretext. The US and NATO used the NFZ (read: more than a hundred Tomahawk missiles) to destroy the Gaddafi regime’s facilities and forces on the ground. And the French went further with direct hardware assistance to the rebels, including air-drops of assault rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades and launchers. A NFZ over Syria would make sense if used in that way: namely, to weaken the military capabilities of the regime on the ground (especially its tanks) and demoralize it. And, of course, military hardware should be supplied to the Free Syria Army, which consists at this stage of regular Army defectors. As in any democratic revolution, the people need to defeat the regime militarily.

The Syrian protestors’ call for a No Fly Zone is essentially a call for international support of a military interventionist nature on the part of foreign governments to weaken the Assad regime militarily and support the people’s democratic aspirations.

In Syria, as in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc., you do not see the protestors burning the US flag but rather seeking, and supporting, imperialist intervention when it serves their (the peoples) strategic objective.

Since the victory in Iraq, those who prefer to leave oppressed people to their own devices, even if it means massacre and the likelihood of regional conflagration, have been unable to mobilize anything resembling an “anti-war” mass movement. Some of the prominent activists who opposed the Iraq War even supported the No Fly Zone over Libya. (Yes, ‘the times they are a-changin’). And the anti-war mass movement against the Iraq War collapsed in a heap as soon as millions of Iraqis went to the polls to actually vote for a parliament and government of their choice – much to the anger, fear and chagrin of just about every dictator in the region.

Those sections – or sects – of what passes for the Left who advocated defence of Libya against US imperialism couldn’t mobilize anyone other than themselves. At this site, we called for a NFZ over Libya immediately after the first strafing took place there.

Now, with Syrians demanding a NFZ, does anyone have enough knowledge of the situation there to know whether that is the best way to go?

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/28/world/meast/syria-unrest/

Seven hundred arrested in Wall Street protest. I went to the Occupy Wall Street site with hope but quickly became disillusioned. Leadership is hard but for a movement to promote itself as “leaderless” is sad and to hear people in the video clips argue the case for no leadership is torture.

On the other hand, the We are the 99 percent blog format is great. Each blog post is from a person describing their situation, how they are being screwed by the system. Read some of these stories. The format is simple, effective, hard hitting. The capitalist system is broken for a growing number.

This page from the Occupy Wall Street site outlines various “demands”, from Day 5, brainstormed like confetti without any analysis or overall direction. At the end we were told: “Our use of the one demand is a rhetorical device. This is NOT an official list of demands“. In the paragraph immediately preceding this obsfuscation we were further enlightened: “We speak as one”. I read this a few days ago. On revisiting the page now I notice that some of the contradiction has been removed.

This Spiked article, Is this Monty Python’s Occupy Wall Street?, lampoons the whole thing as ridiculous (subtitle: “The surreal protests in New York’s financial district will certainly leave the system shaking. With laughter”). And certainly some aspects of the protest are ridiculous. For example, the reluctance to use megaphones or microphones apparently because they represent hierarchy. People speak and those that hear them repeat their words so that those further away can hear. There is always a new creative twist to dysfunctional ultra democracy.

Following the 700 arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge there was more publicity and some trade unions, such as the Transport Workers Union, joined in the protest. Can “Occupy Wall Street” become a movement? Hippies at one extreme, disciplined trade unions at the other. But of course similar alliances were formed in the anti-Vietnam war protests. The protest is spreading.

The lack of correlation between The Tea Party / Republicans and Occupy Wall Street / Democrats is an interesting one. Given the underlying reality that The Democrats are in bed with Wall Street then they can’t really incorporate this protest into their agenda so it is an embarrassment to them. In one sense the protest represents an end to the dream that formerly iconic progressive Obama can fix America. (Why Occupy Wall Street and Democrats aren’t natural allies)

It is becoming obvious that the system is broken, that the crisis is only beginning. Hence, despite the non leadership this remains a protest that has attracted widespread support, including sympathy from the media. One Guardian reporter concluded:

This city is chocka-block with Job’s comforters who purport to share the protesters’ disgust with high finance and unjust wealth distribution – and then bash them for their lack of focus. But the protesters understand something they do not: there is no Mubarak to be toppled, a single source of injustice that can be stamped out if only we all band together. There is only a diffuse political and economic system in which they – and, if you believe the slogan, 99% of us – are net losers; and before it can be redressed, it must first be exposed
– Occupy Wall Street: more than the sum of its demands

This is a beginning. The transition from no leadership as a virtue to the real need to figure out how the system is broken and whether it is even possible to fix it is underway.

Right-wing conservative columnist, Andrew Bolt, has perplexed some of his followers by putting on his site a youtube clip of Woody Guthrie singing “This Land is your Land”. Another right-wing site, Just Grounds Community , has commented on those conservatives who do not have the knowledge of history or the “empathy” to understand why and how Guthrie supported socialism and sympathized with communism during the 1930s. I’m not precisely sure where JGC is coming from but they certainly make sense in their understanding that Woody Guthrie would not have been impressed with the pseudo-left of today – “the two bit hustlers… the present day chancers and fuzzy thinkers who would claim his endorsement”.

I sometimes wonder how many people identify with the right – the libertarian right in particular – because what passes for ‘the left’ is so appallingly unworthy of support.

Continue reading ‘This website kills fascists!’

The California Aggie Twitter account, from the student newspaper at the University of California’s Davis campus in Sacramento, is reporting live news from a protest by University students. The account has already included reports of beatings and taser use,  tear gas, and bean bag pellets.

The protests are part of a wider day of action against likely cuts and fee rises in US universities.

UPDATE:

A YouTube video from a local news station reporting on the protest can be seen here, and more live details on the UC Davis protest can be seen using the Twitter Search site

1009 AM AEST

The same Twitter account says the protest disbanded about 9 minutes ago, 4PM California time.