What desperation does to people

Jesus.

Two gunmen took a group of schoolchildren and their teachers hostage in central Manila Wednesday morning, as police cordoned off an area near City Hall, authorities said.

“Our hostages are 32 kids and 2 teachers,” a sign in the bus window said. “We have 2 grenades, an Uzi and a .45-caliber pistol.”

The sign also said: “We want housing and schooling for 145 kids in a daycare center.” [Full story]

I guess if your government has continued to secretly murder or arrest the activists fighting for you, and other governments are pledging millions to catch one man while your children starve, and U.S. servicemen are raping native women and then being returned without punishment to the U.S. government so your military can train with their military, I guess maybe this might seem like your best or only option. I’m not condoning taking hostages, but I can see why maybe people would do it.

But children? When people are driven to take children hostage and threaten their lives, there’s something very broken there.

And I’m listening to the news anchors right now talking about a fancy car some movie star bought or crashed or something in L.A. No wonder most of the people in the U.S. are apathetic toward current events.

EDIT: The children were released; the man who took them hostage was the day care owner, and they were his students, apparently.

The owner of a daycare center gave himself up after taking a busload of his students hostage here today. He had driven them to Manila City Hall, where he railed against corruption in Philippine politics through a loudspeaker and criticized the government for failing to provide education for the poor.

Police said Armando Ducat Jr. and at least two other men were armed with hand grenades and other weapons when they took over the bus with 32 children and two teachers who were on their way to a field trip.

Later, after nearly 10 hours since the standoff began, the hostage-takers released the schoolchildren and the teachers unharmed.

One by one, the children — some of them holding up toys that Mr. Ducat had given to them earlier in the day — stepped out of the tourist bus.

They were calm, even playful, with some of the children chanting Mr. Ducat’s name, as they made their way to a government bus that was to take them to an undisclosed location.

Mr. Ducat and his unidentified cohorts turned over their grenades and guns to the police. Mr. Ducat had earlier said that he was ready to face charges.

…

In his conversation with Mr. Ducat inside the bus, which was picked up by a television network, (Senator Bong) Revilla told Mr. Ducat: “All right, I promise before the Filipino people and God, that I will be responsible for the education of these children.” [Full story]

I’m so relieved that this had a happy ending, and I feel guilty for it because in other places where people are driven to desperation by their living conditions and the oppressions they face it so often doesn’t.

Immigration updates

While New Bedford, Mass. has been getting a lot of attention due to the large number of immigrants arrested and the nursing mothers who were imprisoned and ripped away from their babies, it wasn’t the only place hit at the beginning of the month. More raids are finally coming to light.

For example, in San Rafael, Calif. ICE agents staged a pre-dawn raid in a primarily immigrant neighborhood and arrested people, dragging them out of their homes handcuffed and in underwear or pajamas. Sixty five were arrested and 23 deported. One of the people arrested was a seven-year-old boy, but he was released when it was discovered he was a U.S. citizen; other children were likely arrested.

it is clear that these ICE raids were aimed at terrorizing and attacking whole communities.

“For every one they picked up, 12 are not named on the warrant,” said Tom Wilson of the Canal Community Alliance (quoted in The Marin Independent Journal, 3/15/07). “That means it’s more about people not named in the warrant,” he said. “That’s really scary—that tells me they’re just using the warrant as a way to get in a door into a house.”

…

At Bahia Vista Elementary School, in the area where the San Rafael raids were concentrated, Principal Juan Rodriguez told local newspapers that two students were separated from their parents and 77 children did not show up on the day of the raids. Other schools reported similar rates of students not showing up for school. Those who did attend were too terrified to do much schoolwork. “How can the kids take tests?” Rodriguez asked. “All they can think right now is ‘will my parents be taken?’”

School administrators accompanied the children on the school bus ride home and walked them to their doors. One administrator said these children are “lots of little Anne Franks.” Teachers called this the “underground railroad. The Canal Alliance did grocery shopping for immigrants who were unable to go out, fearing that they would be picked up.

On the Friday following the raids, scores of Marin County residents were out in the Canal district at 5 a.m., holding candles and carrying cameras, in opposition to the raids. Many were people from the religious community. No raid happened that morning and the community got a sense that people were with them. According to one account of the morning vigils, available on the Canal Alliance website (canalalliance.org), “Trucks and cars carrying an assortment of humanity, mostly Latino, pulled up to corner stop signs and, seeing the crowd, broke into wide smiles—waving, gesturing thumbs up and honking. A pick-up packed with young workers shouted ‘Thank you!’ A young woman burst into tears.” [Full story]

As a writer at the Fresno Bee states:

President George Bush just returned from a trip to Latin America in which part of his mission was to convey the message that the United States is a compassionate country. But there is nothing compassionate about the way immigrants, mostly from Latin America, are being treated by immigration authorities.

…

The federal government defends its right to conduct raids, claiming that it is going after criminals and those who have been under order of deportation. But that is just not true. Most of the workers in the New Bedford factory did not fall under that category. As it turns out, they actually were victims of exploitation by the management of Michael Bianco Inc., which recruited them for cheap labor, made them pay high prices for their jobs and fined them for talking on the job or taking too long in the bathroom. [Full story]

Again, please spread INCITE!’s Know Your Rights in Case of an INS Raid around. Also, if anyone could translate this into Spanish and Urdu so I can distribute them around here, I’d be eternally grateful. My Spanish isn’t good enough and I don’t know a word of Urdu.

Because the raids in New Bedford, San Rafael, and elsewhere were not unique and they won’t be the last. ICE is just getting started.

We know this because the New Bedford raid was part of a frighteningly ambitious plan laid out by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 — and it hasn’t received nearly enough scrutiny.

The plan is called Endgame, and its details are available online on our group’s website (www.aclum.org/endgame.pdf). It’s a 10-year campaign to track down and deport all the immigrants to the United States who are living and working here without proper documentation, by the year 2012.

Let’s be clear: This means expelling roughly 12 million people.

We’ve seen Endgame at work already in other parts of the country, with ICE conducting more and bigger raids. In December, for example, the agency raided Swift & Company slaughterhouses in six states, arresting about 1,300 workers and deporting roughly half of them.

Already, on any given day, ICE holds approximately 26,000 people in detention. And on March 6, we got a chance to see Endgame at work on a large scale here in Massachusetts. We saw the human cost of an operation directed at 361 people. [Full story]

There are some more events going down to protest ICE’s immigration raids.

- Immigrants’ Day
Brockton, Mass.
March 29 at 5:15-7:30 p.m.
M.I.R.A. Coalition

- Immigration Forum and César Chávez Day Celebration
St Patrick’s Church in Watsonville, Calif.
March 30 at 7 p.m.
Migra Watch

- Planning Meeting for Interfaith Summit
Notre Dame Education Center, South Boston, Mass.
March 30, 10-11:30 a.m.
M.I.R.A. Coalition

- Interfaith Summit for Immigrant Justice
State House, Boston, Mass.
April 12, 10 a.m.
M.I.R.A. Coalition

And don’t forget to find out whether your local immigrants’ rights organization will be rallying on May Day. The National Immigrant Solidarity Network has put out a call for APIA mobilization to Washington, D.C. on April 30 and May first to demonstrate for passage of the DREAM Act, so if you’re in the area, head over. If you’re not, write your Senators and Congressional reps.

If you can’t make any of the immigration rallies, newly-formed blog Stop Hurting Children — Stop the Raids has called for help in contacting the House and Senate leadership to protest the raids. Contact information can be found here: We Need Your Help.

EDIT: And one more thing to be pissed about: Foreign Fugitives on the Loose but Families Detained in Immigrant Detention Aren’t Charged with Crimes via Latina Lista.

Women still face violence, no thanks to high fashion

I blogged last week about the “danger gap” between men and women, and how surreal it is that so many men just don’t get the safety issues women face.

The news this week has reinforced this to a ridiculous extent. Getting the most coverage is the murder of Natasha Ramen, which has been blogged about at Rachel’s Tavern and The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum, among other places. Natasha’s rapist first made threatening phone calls and threatened her husband’s family, and then waited outside of her home and slit her throat when she left one day to keep her from testifying against him for rape.

Her case is, sadly, far from the only one this week.

• A German judge rejected a divorce plea from a Muslim woman whose husband has been beating her. Her reasoning? The Koran sanctions wife-beating, so she should have known better. [Source; The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum] (This reminds me of the case in Los Angeles where a judge told a woman seeking a restraining order against her abusive husband to leave the courtroom or face deportation.)
• Samira Bari’s husband ripped her eyes out after she demanded a divorce and refused to have sex with him. His lawyers blame it on arranged marriages. [Source]
• Blogger Kathy Sierra has received sexualized death threats that have her afraid to leave her home. [Source; Feministe]
• LaVena Johnson, who had recently been tested for STDs, was found dead in what the military deemed a suicide. She supposedly shot herself in the left temple with an M-14; there is no gunshot residue to confirm this and the bullet is missing; she had quite obviously been beaten and may have been raped, and a bloody trail led from her tent. Additionally, her debit card is missing. It appears in photos as if someone tried to set her body on fire, oddly and frighteningly reminiscent of the rape of Abeer Hamza. Her family is currently fighting to get her death investigated as a murder rather than a suicide. [Source 1; Source 2; The Silence of Our Friends; Shakespeare's Sister; Deep Confusion] (The “women’s war” — sexual assault of women soldiers overseas by their fellow soldiers — has been blogged about in many places, including here.)
• Also making the rounds in the blogosphere is the case of the Somali and Ethiopian refugees whom smugglers forced off of a boat into shark-infested waters. While this is a disgusting and horrifying treatment of human life in and of itself, the survivors also reported that several women were raped on the passage. [Source]. This is something often faced by female refugees and border-crossers in many countries, including the U.S.
• Not to mention the countless women in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Darfur and other places where violent conflicts are being waged, who face the threat of being raped by occupiers or enemies; as well as the countless women who are raped, beaten, and murdered in the U.S. and elsewhere every day and never make the media.

So, given all of the above, and given that this is just a brief sampling of the sexual violence women are subjected to on a daily basis …

… who the HELL thought combining violence and fashion would be an awesome idea? And why is the trend taking off?

Even America’s Next Top Model has jumped on the trend, with last week’s episode featuring the models posing as murdered women.

For the record, stuff like the photos behind the cut, which portray the rape, beating or murder of women as sexy and fashionable? Not cool.

(Photos may be triggering.)