FREE MARYAM AL-KHAWAJA, ABDULHADI AL-KHAWAJA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS IN BAHRAIN!
PLEASE CIRCULATE AND ENDORSE
SEND PROTEST MESSAGES AND PICKET BAHRAINI EMBASSIES AND CONSULATES
(ADDRESSES, EMAILS, ETC. BELOW)
FREE MARYAM AL-KHAWAJA, ABDULHADI AL-KHAWAJA
AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS IN BAHRAIN!
A joint statement by the MENA Solidarity Network-US and the Syrian Revolution Support Bases, August 31, 2014
On August 26th, leading human right activist Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, serving a life sentence for peaceful advocacy of human rights in Bahrain, began an open-ended hunger strike. This follows a 110-day hunger strike two years ago. Due to the drugging and forced feeding of his last hunger strike, he will refuse to be taken to hospital or prison clinic or to receive IV treatment. The previous hunger strike left him in a severely weakened condition, and there are fears that he could succumb at any moment.
On August 27th, Abdulhadi phoned his family. His voice was weak and he told them that he was losing weight rapidly, and that his blood sugar levels and his blood pressure had dropped.
In that situation his daughter Maryam, a fellow human rights activist and co-director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights, sought to fly home to be with her father and family.
On arrival at the Bahrain airport, regime officers took away her Danish passport (she is a dual Danish/Bahraini citizen) and told her that her Bahraini citizenship had been revoked. She was thrown into prison and told she would come before a judge on Sunday, August 31st. A few hours later she was told that her case will be investigated for seven days, and that charges would be filed against her for:
1) The Wanted for Justice campaign (a very successful project which educated people around the world about regime members who were violators of human rights and perpetrators of detention, torture, murder and other crimes.)
2) Insulting the King
3) Assaulting a police-woman
Additionally, Maryam has been denied access to lawyers and her phone taken from her.
In response to these violations of her rights, Maryam launched a water-only hunger strike.
The initiators of this statement – the Middle East-North Africa Solidarity Network-US and the Syrian Revolution Support Bases – have been honored to have presentations by Maryam at our educational events and to benefit from her insights and inspiration. Our groups share Maryam’s sentiment that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and, like her, we have stood up for the rights of all victims of repression no matter the claims of the regime perpetrating it.
Those of our members in the U.S. feel a particular sense of responsibility to aid those jailed, beaten, tortured and killed in Bahrain, as that country hosts the base of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, the launching pad for any counterrevolutionary attacks the US may want to make anywhere in the region. That strategic value of Bahrain explains why Washington’s firm ally Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain to quell its uprising for freedom, justice and equality. But the masses of Bahrain have not stopped demonstrating for one day since the US-backed Saudi invasion despite daily regime attacks. We know also that Saudi capital, as part of Gulfwide capital, is ever more central to the region’s economy and thus to the US, which is yet more incentive for the US to turn a blind eye to human rights violations there.
600 other Bahraini political prisoners have been on hunger strike since August 20th to protest life-threatening conditions, insults, beatings, torture and more. (See http://bahrainrights.org/en/node/7018 )
PLEASE TAKE ACTION TODAY AND UNTIL MARYAM, ABDULHADI, AND ALL BAHRAIN’S POLITICAL PRISONERS ARE FREED!
For more information on Maryam and Abdulhadi, see:
http://bahrainrights.org/en/node/7024
http://bahrainrights.org/en/node/7021
http://bahrainrights.org/en/node/7013
Please immediately contact the following, with copies to your elected officials and State Department or Foreign Ministries:
Shaikh Hamad bin ‘Issa Al Khalifa
Office of His Majesty the King
P.O. Box 555
Rifa’a Palace, al-Manama, Bahrain
Fax: +973 1766 4587 (keep trying)
Shaikh Rashid bin ‘Abdullah Al Khalifa
Ministry of Interior
P.O. Box 13, al-Manama, Bahrain
Fax: +973 1723 2661
Twitter: @moi_Bahrain
Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs
Shaikh Khalid bin Ali bin Abdullah Al Khalifa
Ministry of Justice and Islamic Affairs
P. O. Box 450, al-Manama, Bahrain
Fax: +973 1753 1284
Email: minister@justice.gov.bh
Twitter: @Khaled_Bin_Ali
If your group can organize a picket, here is a list of Bahrain embassies around the world with locations, telephone numbers etc.
http://embassy.goabroad.com/embassies-of/bahrain
Syrian Revolution Support Bases group: Solidarity with Gaza
Yasser Munif on Manbij and the Politics of Dignity; Left Forum 2014 talk
Begins at 9:32
Yasser looks at three revolutionary institutions and a general strike in Manbij, a liberated town which Yasser explains has resumed the process of decolonization interrupted by Syrian regimes
Leila Shroom’s presentation to Left Forum workshop
Left solidarity: Supporting grassroots movements in Syria
Network panels at the 2014 Left Forum
The Syrian Revolution: the Impact of Palestinian, Kurdish and Anti-imperialist politics
Arab Revolutions in Perspective
The Syrian Revolution: Grassroots movements and media coverage
Please sign and share this statement against repression in Egypt
http://egyptsolidaritycampaign.org/
Defend democratic rights in Egypt
TO:
President Adly Mansour
Prime Minister Hazem el Beblawi
WE, THE undersigned, condemn the Egyptian government’s arrest, detention and torture of activists exercising their right to legally and peacefully protest. Human rights groups, journalists’ associations, and other organizations have documented abuses by Egypt’s police and security forces, including the use of excessive force, mass arrests, and the torture and killing of those who dissent.
Since the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, one government after another has pledged to hold the state’s security apparatus accountable for its abuses of Egyptian citizens, and one government after another has failed to do so. The right to speak out and to peacefully assemble and protest is an essential component of a democratic society, and the Egyptian Revolution was broadly celebrated for achieving this most fundamental aspiration of the Egyptian people. But this aspiration has been thwarted by the military’s rehabilitation of the hated security laws as well as some of the same individuals who carried out these repressive laws before they were driven from public life by the 2011 revolution.
We call on all those who stand for such basic rights as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to protest to join us in demanding the immediate release of activists targeted by the Egyptian regime in the exercise of their democratic rights and an end to the government’s use of repression against all those who wish nothing more than the dignity of having their voices heard.
Statement Condemning Siege of Yarmouk and All Assad Brutality
Endorsed by the Network, please sign on:
An Analysis of Egypt’s Draft Constitution
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/16030/an-analysis-of-egypts-draft-constitution
Experts weight in on the possible impact on child labor and unionization.
Students Against Israeli Apartheid (University of Toronto, St George campus) Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian-Syrians and Denunciation of a Zionist Apologist
Please share and endorse
Students Against Israeli Apartheid (University of Toronto, St George campus) Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian-Syrians
and Denunciation of a Zionist Apologist
While Palestinians and Syrians need and continue to liberate themselves from the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the Syrian Golan, the Assad regime continues to launch military attacks and sieges including but not limited to the siege on the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk. While the Assad regime continually practices criminal violence against the bodies of Palestinian-Syrians and all the People of Syria, against our mothers, brothers, sisters, infants, fathers, families and communities, and as the People remain steadfast against such tyranny, certain organizers decide to invite Agnes-Mariam. While the Assadist collective punishment is not even limited to mass starvation, torture, sieges, knives, bombs and missiles, displacing millions and millions of Syrian refugees, perpetuating the Nakba for Palestinian-Syrians in particular, certain organizers decide to invite a Zionist apologist to deny the crimes of the regime, hence contributing to the crimes of the regime.
Agnes-Mariam is a veteran propaganda tool of the Assad regime. She has been denounced by “Syrian Christians for Peace” for claiming there had never been a single peaceful demonstration in Syria. “Syrian Christians for Peace” has also accused her of failing to disburse any of the money she raised in the name of their beleaguered community. They have asked “that she be excommunicated and prevented from speaking in the name of the Order of Carmelites.”
Mother Agnes is documented to have met with Mihrac Ural. Mihrac Ural is an Assadist paramilitary leader of the “National Defence Force” and a war criminal who has carried the massacres at Baniyas and Bayda. The massacres were documented by Human Rights Watch in a report titled “No One’s Left”, published September 13, 2013. The report says most of the killings took place after clashes between government troops and rebels had ended. At this point both regular government troops and National Defence Force militia “entered homes, separated men from women, rounded up the men of each neighbourhood in one spot, and executed them by shooting them at close range”, and, “in some cases, government and pro-government forces executed, or attempted to execute, entire families”.
What this shows us is that while Mariam Agnes claims to be a humanitarian, she exposes her affiliation with tyrants, war criminals and the massacres they commit by sitting and meeting with Mihrac Ural. Mariam Agnes’ performance of sympathy with the oppressed has all the credibility of statements of regret made by officials in the Israeli army after the massacres of Deir Yassin and Sabra and Shatila, which is none.
Mariam Agnes spoke on March 21st 2013 at an event organized by the France-Israel committee, where she repeated sectarian islamophobic racism and Zionist apologetics appealing to the Zionist-organized event. Mariam Agnes is an islamophobic racist who portrays the situation in Syria as one of faithful Christians being attacked by “Barborous” muslims who are “without faith or law”. Her islamophobia is also explicitly zionist because she claims that Israel “must be the recourse for the protection of faith and of believers” and that “Israel must remain a light for people of faith of the world, an example that for her she accepts to follow without reservation”.
Moreover, Mariam Agnes spoke in defence of the “democratic character” of Israel, and praised Israel’s “inclusion” of Arab minorities in “Parliament and in the Supreme Court and in all spheres of society”. Mariam Agnes’ Zionist apologetics normalize Israeli colonialism in the Golan and Palestine. They are an insult to the Syrian refugees displaced from the Golan who still await their right of return and have been targeted and massacred by the regime. Just as they are also an insult to the victims of Zionism. The Occupied Golan is under the hegemony of Israeli apartheid, and as such the apartheid analysis and the BDS movement are accountable to the Golan and its people, just as they are to Palestine and its people. Despite this, some people who call themselves anti-war and “anti imperialist”, and who claim to be allies of the Palestinian people and supporters of the BDS movement and the apartheid analysis are shamefully bringing and promoting her, presenting a defender of oppression to speak on behalf the oppressed.
The actions of the organizers who will stoop to endorsing someone who repeats Zionist discourse and affiliates with war criminals are beyond divisive and threaten harm to the Palestine solidarity movement. Palestine is more than land, Palestine is also the People including the exiled, ethnically cleansed Palestinians living and exiled once more from Syria. For the organizers who say they want “Freedom for Palestine” and at the same time bring a Zionist apologist for the Assad regime, the word “Freedom” is misused to mean replacing one oppressor with another. Because crimes committed against Palestinians in Syria are crimes committed against Palestine, because we all should take a stand against oppression and not retreat into inaction, we in the student movement opposing Israeli Apartheid, along with the brave and steadfast people of Syria and Palestine, oppose all oppressors. We are both anti-colonial and against state tyranny, and we recognize that Assad’s forces are the dominant, but not the only, perpetuators of killing inside Syria. Among our other solidarity duties, we must and will organize to break the sieges and stop Assad from using mass starvation, checkpoints, torture, detention, killing and all forms of collective punishment as methods of pacifying the Syrian and Palestinian people’s undying desire for dignity and social justice.
We denounce the organizing of the Mariam Agnes events. We demand that the organizers repudiate their support for a Zionist apologist and for someone who affiliates with the war criminal Mihrac Ural, and that they affirm the analysis of Israeli Apartheid in the Golan and Palestine. We demand they affirm the right of return for refugees of the Golan, and that they oppose Israeli colonialism in the Golan including but not limited to the construction of Israeli settlements and theft of Syrian natural resources including oil, gas and water. We demand the organizers acknowledge and oppose the war crimes committed by the Assad regime against Palestinian-Syrians.
*all quotations are translated from Josiane Sberro’s summery of Mariam Agnes’ talk “Situation des Chrétiens en Syrie, quel message pour Israël et pour la France ?” which took place on march 21st 2013. Sberro’s article is entitled “France-Israël reçoit Mère Agnès-Mariam de la Croix” and was published March 25th 2013 on http://www.france-israel.org
Students Against Israeli Apartheid – University of Toronto, St George Campus
Endorsers thus far:
Students for Justice in Palestine – Ryerson University
Students Against Israeli Apartheid – York University
Yarmouk Local Coordinating Committee – the Syrian Revolution- Yarmouk Palestinian Refugee Camp, Syria
Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) – York University
Syria Solidarity Collective – Toronto
Appendix:
Blog Post in English explaining Mariam-Agnes’ Zionist apologetics:http://northernsong.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/mother-agnes-a-zionist-apologist-for-the-assad-regime/
Article in French by Josiane Sberro describing Mariam Agnes’ talk for the France-Israel organization: https://www.france-israel.org/articles.ahd?idart=5012
Haaretz article in English by Gideon Levy in which Levy says that Mariam Anges told him “she loved Israel and that the Jews should serve as a light unto the nations.” http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.544616
Syrian Christians for Peace statement on Mother Agnes: http://www.inewsarabia.com/485/Syrian-Christians-for-Peace-‘Mother’-Agnus-is-an-Assad-agent-in-the-clothes-of-a-nun.htm
History and objectives of the France-Israel organization (in French): https://www.france-israel.org/page.ahd?idrub=5
Human Rights Watch Report “No One’s Left” http://www.hrw.org/reports/2013/09/13/no-one-s-left-0
MENA Solidarity Network US 