Tag: Native Americans

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Palestinians are Native Americans, not ‘Red Indians’: it’s time to liberate our language by Dr Ramzy Baroud

PLEASE TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW AND SEND YOUR LETTER TO THE UN OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL ADVISER ON THE PREVENTION OF GENOCIDE AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT PROSECUTOR.

 For this generation to succeed in reclaiming the struggle for justice, they must also reclaim a unifying discourse, not only to reconnect their own fragmented communities throughout historic Palestine, but also to re-establish solidarity lines of communication across the globe.

I say “re-establish”, because Palestine was a common denominator among many national and indigenous struggles in the Global South. This was not a random outcome. Throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, fierce wars of liberation were fought across continents, leading in most cases to the defeat of traditional colonial powers and, in the likes of Cuba, Vietnam and Algeria, to true decolonisation. With Palestine being a compounded case of western imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism, the Palestinian cause was embraced by numerous national struggles. It was, and remains, a raw example of western-supported ethnic cleansing, genocide, apartheid and hypocrisy, as well as awe-inspiring indigenous resistance.

Continue reading at https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20221114-palestinians-are-native-americans-not-red-indians-its-time-to-liberate-our-language/

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It’s time to decolonise Thanksgiving by Layla Darwish

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Our people can relate to the genocide committed against Native Americans who, like Palestinians, coveted their land until it was stolen from them. No group was more familiar with the fertile land in America than its indigenous people, who taught the white European colonists how to successfully harvest it. These colonialists in turn enslaved the Natives, and subsequently brought black slaves from West Africa to further “develop” the land and the country. This process is quite similar to the one where Jewish refugees (at first) came to Arab Palestine from Europe and were taught by indigenous Palestinians how to cultivate the land in the Mediterranean (something European Jews were not accustomed to). Palestinians enthusiastically welcomed Jewish refugees and helped them settle, until Palestinians were ultimately betrayed by the Zionist Movement. This resulted in genocide, with many Palestinian families murdered and led to the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes (and for many the forced migration from the region), and eventually the confiscation of Palestinian land which is still occurring today. This entire process in Palestine is a systematic colonisation as it was for the Native Americans.

Continue reading at https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20211119-its-time-to-decolonise-thanksgiving/

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From Turtle Island to Palestine: On the History of State-Sponsored Violence by Benay Blend

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

By recognizing that the current violence in America (and though she doesn’t say it Israel, too) is top-down, trickling downwards to genocide at home and then on to imperialist wars abroad, Dunbar-Ortiz suggests that a decolonized US (and perhaps Israel, too) might go on to a better future.

Continue reading at https://www.palestinechronicle.com/from-turtle-island-to-palestine-on-the-history-of-state-sponsored-violence/

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Defacing of Olympia mural highlights Native American-Palestinian solidarity by Rachel Corrie Foundation For Peace & Justice

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

The disavowal of founding violence is deeply embedded in the settler mindset in both the U.S. and Israel. Descendants of settlers strive to maintain this disavowal, laboring daily to forget that their/our presence in the place they/we call home is predicated on genocide, dispossession, and structural violence. For American settlers who support Israel, this disavowal is doubled. They run from their complicity in the U.S. colonial project while simultaneously perpetuating a false narrative of Israel as acting on redemption instead of displacement, on return instead of ethnic cleansing. It is difficult to ignore connections between the settler violence of the U.S. and Israel when these states openly collaborate to build identical surveillance systems and border walls, when Israeli settlers draw explicit comparison between their settler project and the U.S.’s genocidal concept of “Manifest Destiny,” or when one sees a map that directly ties the confiscation of land in one settler state to the confiscation of land in the other. The inability to reconcile one’s own role in settler violence, in either or both places, produces the kind of emotion that might induce someone to vandalize a solidarity mural near the top of its thirty-foot tall frame. In sum, this emotion also likely drove the perpetrator to act in honor of the hallmark of the settler mindset: simultaneous erasure and disavowal.

Continue reading at https://mondoweiss.net/2020/08/defacing-of-olympia-mural-highlights-native-american-palestinian-solidarity/

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From Cultural Commodification to Annexation in Occupied Palestine and Indigenous North America by Benay Blend

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Annexation, then, is nothing new. “Hundreds of Indigenous nations were consumed by [a] process of relentless westward expansion,” explain historians Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux) and Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz. “This is a core feature of settler colonialism,” they continue, “not just the elimination of the Native, but also the naturalization of unnatural settler states built on the annexation of Indigenous land and the genocide of Indigenous people,” a process that could explain, too, Israel’s 72-year Occupation of the land and Indigenous people of Palestine.

Continue reading at https://www.palestinechronicle.com/from-cultural-commodification-to-annexation-in-occupied-palestine-and-indigenous-north-america/

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Our History Is the Future with Nick Estes by Daniel Deniver

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

There is a demographic fear that the white majority is going to be replaced in this country and that groups such as mine, or scholars such as myself, are actively advocating for the replacement of the white race. And these fears of white genocide are completely fabricated. What it does say, because it does important political work, is it says that settler colonialism is fundamentally a demographic project.  The problems that Israel is facing right now, and why it’s implementing things such as the Jewish nation-state laws, is because it faces a demographic issue. And it sees its challenge as a demographic issue. It has to replace, it has to bolster its population of non-Arabs, primarily European Jewish citizens, to effectively replace Arab Palestinians and Arab people. That includes not just Muslims, but it includes Christians, and Arab Jews themselves.

Continue reading at https://www.thedigradio.com/transcripts/transcript-our-history-is-the-future-with-nick-estes/

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Why I Accused Israel of Cultural Genocide by James Zogby

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

It was, therefore, not “who invented hummus” that caused me to react. Rather, it was Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian land, eradication of their presence, and now the effort to be the sole claimants of their culture that prompted my response to Ray’s “Israeli food” tweet. This was cultural appropriation by conquest… And so what troubled me then, and still troubles me, are the parallels with the Native American experience. Their land had been taken, their history and rights were denied, and now their culture was claimed by the very people who dispossessed them. This according to Article 8 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is termed “genocide”.

Continue reading at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-i-accused-israel-of-cultural-genocide_us_5a4feffce4b0cd114bdb3311

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Thirsty for Justice: How Israel Deprives the Palestinians of Access to Water by Zak Witus

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Water is one of the key components of life as we know it. If we allow our country to continue to green light Israel’s dehydration of the Palestinians, we will be aiding and abetting all further deaths and illnesses that befall the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories as a result. Worse, if present trends continue, we will be responsible for yet another genocide against an Indigenous people.

Unlike past generations, many of us now recognize and regret how our nation nearly exterminated the Native people of North America. But what good is this retrospective shame if we don’t act to prevent our country from exterminating another Native people, the Palestinians? The reality is, if we do nothing, the US, through our ally Israel, will surely repeat these darkest chapters of US history. We can’t let that happen.

Continue reading at http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42699-thirsty-for-justice-how-israel-deprives-the-palestinians-of-access-to-water

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Israel’s Genocide Towards Palestinian Arabs by Jerome Irwin

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

SO, the ultimate questions that always have to be answered about the ethnic-cleaning, genocidal actions of whatever conquering, imperialistic power begins with asking,

“When does all the ethnic-cleansing turn into genocide? How many must die to qualify the difference? Who decides? How arbitrary are such distinctions?”

Continue reading at http://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-genocide-towards-palestinian-arabs/5591341

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Palestinians join Standing Rock Sioux to protest Dakota Access Pipeline by Nadya Raja Tannous

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

As Native communities face an ongoing genocide and continue to resist the imperialist settler-colonial regime of the United States, Palestinians are too experiencing a genocide and ethnocide within our homelands from the settler-colonial state of Israel… When protectors at Standing Rock asked me about what Palestinians experience in our own fight against settler-colonialism, oppression, and greed, I answered sometimes through the language of statistics. Yet, more often, I told them narratives of genocide, exile, delegimitzation, broken promises, and resounding resilience.

Continue reading at http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/palestinians-standing-pipeline.html/