"Why Misogynists Make Great Informants"

"In January 2009, activists in Austin, Texas, learned that one of their own, a white activist named Brandon Darby, had infiltrated groups protesting the Republican National Convention (RNC) as an FBI informant. Darby later admitted to wearing recording devices at planning meetings and during the convention. He testified on behalf of the government in the February 2009 trial of two Texas activists who were arrested at the RNC on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails, after Darby encouraged them to do so..."

A very interesting and important article from Make/Shift magazine. Read the full piece here.

Reposted from Feminazery...

21 April, 2010
Urgent abortion support appeal: help a teenage girl in Northern Ireland
As publicised by the wonderful Penny Red:

Whether it’s a shortage of mange tout at the supermarket or a friend stranded abroad, we’ve all been affected by the cloud of ash from Iceland. But imagine if you had only a few weeks to navigate your way to England for a safe and legal abortion.
This week, we’ve heard from a number of women who were due to travel to the UK this week for terminations, including a very young teen who is extremely close to the 24 week time limit for abortions in the UK. She had to miss her appointment earlier this week and is now coming next week by ferry and train – a roundtrip journey of more than 24 hours. Her mother solely supports her and her siblings with a part time job and now has to cover costs of £2,300 (procedure + money lost on cancelled flights + last minute ferry and train tickets).
Due to these extraordinary and extremely difficult circumstances, ASN has made a pledge to fund this young woman £500, much more than we usually commit to a single case. This is less than half of the costs she is facing. We would like to help more. If you would like to help cover more costs for her and women like her, please pledge to make a donation today.
You can do this by donating via PayPal (http://www.abortionsupport.org.uk/donate/), writing a cheque (email info@abortionsupport.org.uk for our postal address), or by making an online transfer (HSBC/Abortion Support Network/Sort Code: 40-11-18/Account Number: 64409302).
Please mark the donation “Iceland”.
Thank you in advance for any amount you can give – your donation will make a real difference to this family or to one of the other women who have had to re-purchase tickets to travel to England.

Moss Witch

I keep saying I've reached the end of my tether with the BBC - particularly with its repulsive and growing tendency to report the views of scum like Migration Watch and the Taxpayers' Alliance as if these loons are purveyors of reliable research data - but then Auntie keeps doing something to vaguely redeem itself. This time it's support for the National Short Story Awards, which I probably wouldn't have taken an awful lot of notice of if it wasn't for the presence of the marvellous Sara Maitland on the shortlist. And her story, Moss Witch, which touches on some very pertinent tensions between maintaining wild places vs studying them, can be downloaded here (beware, it's nearly half an hour long and the file is 26mb). Sara's three decades of writing seem to manage to touch on many of the Big Questions - gender, sex, nature, religion - with humour and breathtaking lightness and sadness. Personal favourites - novels Virgin Territory and Brittle Joys, and one of my current reads, A Book of Silence. There's something terrifically, terrifyingly wise about much of her writing, especially the last-named book, although it also makes me want to up sticks and become a hermit in the Sinai (if such a thing is possible. I suppose it is in the desert proper, albeit that's still peppered with landmines, but last time I was on Mount Sinai itself the experience was somewhat marred by a Belgian evangelical Christian accordionist who insisted on playing in the dawn with deeply unspiritual wheezings and blarings, despite the other people on the mountain trying to appreciate the heartbreaking wonder of the sun rising over the desert mountains.)

Gizza lift!

An appeal for help from News From Nowhere, the wonderful women's co-operative bookshop in Liverpool:

News From Nowhere’s lift has broken down and will cost £4000 to repair! This will be very hard for us to find from our regular income. The lift serves our 5-storey building and users include our tenants, elderly & disabled visitors to the 2nd floor Methodists and Liverpool Social Centre in the Basement.
We had a wonderful response to our Appeal earlier in the year – we raised £10,000 for our running costs, which has put us on a much more even keel. And the building is now fully tenanted which will help over the longer-term.
If you are one of those who supported us, THANK YOU! We don’t wish to impose on you further, but if you missed the boat or can pass this on to others, then this is your chance to support Liverpool’s Radical Bookshop.
We are looking for 40 people to loan us £100 each (anything larger or smaller also gratefully received)
This can be as an INTEREST-FREE CASH LOAN to be repaid over the next 2 years. (We can repay some, but not all, earlier.) Or as a CREDIT LOAN – to be reclaimed as books from December onwards – save now for those Xmas/Hanukkah/Solstice presents!
Many thanks from News From Nowhere Collective
96 Bold St, Liverpool, L1 4HY 0151 708 7270 nfn@newsfromnowhere.org.uk

P.S. The best support, of course, is to keep buying your books (& other goodies – world music CDs, DVDs, Cards, Calendars, Diaries, Crafts etc) from us!

Observer Woman

Makes me spit...
This is actually the title of a very funny blog which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have been updated since 2007. It catalogues some of the particularly nauseating drivel perpetrated by that smug, vacuous waste of ink, the Observer Woman supplement.
Even my mum, who can still tolerate the Guardian, thinks Observer Woman is terrible.
And then today (hence a blog post about blogs which haven't been live for 2 years), OA sent me a link to another highly entertaining piece taking apart a particularly dreadful sounding Observer Woman article, in which some especially self-satisfied Londonista hack manages, with no apparent irony, to include herself in an article about Beautiful People. Hannah Betts. You can't fucking believe some people.
My personal brush with Observer Woman was pitching an interview piece about a fairly major woman writer to them. I was expecting to get knocked back, but this was in the days when I thought I wanted to be published in a broadsheet and hadn't realised that they pay late, pay badly, and despite the kudos are just as much tomorrow's litter tray liner as any other publication. What I wasn't expecting was that their response to the idea - the interviewee in question wasn't just a fairly significant player in late 60s/early 70s feminism and a reasonbly big name in various literary genres, but also had interesting things to say about issues like Jewish perspective on Palestine and Israel - was 'we've got a piece on feminism coming out in a couple of months.'
So, the position of the women's supplement for what purports to be Britain's main centre-left Sunday paper is that 'feminism' - defined as anyone vaguely feminist, or just not about clothes, makeup, cooking or, of course 'beautiful people' - is something to be covered, oooh, about twice a year. I knew there was a reason I can't even bear to read the Observer, let alone hand over cold hard cash for it.

Marguerite Dabaie, graphic artist

Having said lots of nice things about Marc Roberts and Polyp on this, blog, it's nice to feel moved to flag up a female political cartoonist. So this is a quick link to the wonderful Marguerite Dabaie, a Palestinian Christian female graphic artist whose book I am trying to buy when Paypal decides to co-operate...

Judge in misogynist cretin shocker

So, a London taxi driver who raped AT LEAST 12 women and possibly up to 500, having drugged them, has finally been sentenced to an indeterminate length of time 'with a minimum of 8 years.' EIGHT YEARS!!! You are having a fucking larf. Surely having been stuck in Croydon has addled the old fart of a sentencing judge's mind (I was born and raised in Croydon, I know the horrors whereof I speak). You can get more than that for fraud or nicking stuff, if it's valuable and belonged to someone posh. And, of course, the police dragged their feet over the whole thing for months, having arrested him in 2007 and let him go. But then of course the police are good at that kind of thing - just look at Peter Sutcliffe and how many women would be alive today if proper attention had been paid to him. So if they're so shite at catching rapists and murderers, what exactly is it the British police do when they're not beating up protesters and killing newspaper sellers? Enquiring (taxpayer) minds would like to know.

Insomnia

Yep, it's 1am and I'm meant to be sleeping, but instead I'm being grimly amused as the Metropolitan Police re-implodes with trying to cover its arse as another video of coppers smacking people around at the G20 comes to light. With the stories I've been hearing from friends at the Climate Camp in London there must be a bunch more footage out there. Anyway, the actual film is here:



and Marc Roberts' usual genius take on things is here:



The Judi of Marc's cartoons is, by the way, named after the amazing Judi Bari, an environmentalist, feminist and labour campaigner who survived being blown up in an attempted stitch-up by the FBI, only to die of breast cancer in 1997. But she's a supremely inspiring example of the way that people with clear sight and integrity draw together the many oppressions which threaten our world, seeing the connections between the way that capitalist and imperialist forces work, rather than selecting single issues and exposing themselves to the 'divide and conquer' strategy by which states manage dissent.
And speaking of amazing women activists, I just wanted to flag up Sharyn's powerful writings from Gaza again. It may not be in the headlines, but the Israeli army is still killing and maiming people in Gaza, and still imposing the blockade which systematically and deliberately destroys the health care system, economy, polity, education and social life of an entire people. Sharyn's writings capture with humour and compassion the horror of the situation in Gaza and the dogged determination of people who seek only to carry on living their lives and raising their families with a bit of dignity. So I'll leave you with a little one of her vignettes from the last few days:

J insisted on driving us back to the village house, with his two little daughters, in the rickety trailer of a tiny tractor, one of the few working pieces of machinery recent attacks have left him. I kept being convinced I was about to tumble out.
“I’m too old for this sort of thing,” I said.
“I only got in because he winked!” replied E.
“As the actress said to the bishop,” I muttered, clinging on.

We drank tea, fielded the usual plans to get us married off to the locals to keep us firmly in the country, and then left for our next appointment, determined also to find L some crutches, because she can’t stand on either leg alone. Initial enquiries suggest this is something else there is a shortage of, especially since the war. The only option might be to buy her a pair, if we can even find any.

6th April: women workers

It's Monday and now I get my weekend, or in fact the nearest I've had to a break in several weeks.
The last two days have been sad and mad. I've spent them in the company of the amazing Salwa from KavLaOved, interviewing women who work in the Israeli settlements – in industrial zones like Barkan and Mishor Adumim, and in agricultural settlements in the vast swathe of stolen land that is the Jordan Valley.
These women are strong but the stories they have to tell are dreadful. Working condition s in the settlements are the kind of thing you're used to reading in scandalised Guardian reports from China and India. Terrible health and safety conditions, including exposure to pesticides, factories with no air conditioning in the roasting temperatures which are common here in summer, or no heating in the bitter cold of the hills in winter, and machinery with the safety guards taken off. Rates of pay a third of the Israeli minimum wage, which a court ruling says should apply in the settlements, and 12 or 14 hour days without proper overtime pay. Bullying and harassment by managers – both Israeli and from Palestinian middlemen and gangmasters. Uncompensated workplace injuries. The list goes on.
And, of course, these women also experience prejudice in their own communities. In the factories and agricultural packing houses around Jericho, at least women working outside the home is something well established in society, but in the tiny village in Salfit governorate to the north of the West Bank the women I met were the first amongst their neighbours to be employed, and they faced disapproval because of that. But all of them experienced discrimination for working in the settlements themselves, seen as somehow collaborating. The effects of this included many of them being regarded as unmarriageable, or only marrying too late to have children; one woman whose family's dire poverty meant that sometimes her children went without proper food for days said that despite this her daughters were considering quitting their settlement jobs for fear that they would never get husbands. But there is no work in the village, and mental health problems have stopped her husband working for over 20 years. So what are the household going to live on?
The women I met in Salfit are part of a legal case against their employers, an international bedding manufacturer called Royalife, which ships to Europe and the USA. So maybe the report I'll be writing for Women Working Worldwide can form part of some efforts to campaign for them to be reinstated (they were fired for continuing the legal case against their employers for their illegally low pay and poor safety conditions). But it's a difficult balance here; the boycott campaigners would obviously be saying that those products shouldn't be sold at all. But who else is going to bring these women jobs? The more time I spend here, the fewer ideas I have about what the answers might be.
And somehow it all seems all the worse for the heartbreaking beauty of the setting. The desert in the Jordan Valley is stunningly vast and mountainous and stark, while the hills of Salfit are covered with spring wildflowers and olive trees and should be the most serene and lovely place, if they weren't the backdrop to brutal extremist settlers and terrible poverty and military occupation and these labour abuses.

Moss Side graffiti

International Women's Day

A friend recently sent me this lovely and inspiring announcement from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, about a women's sport and cultural weekend being held to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8th. Despite my visceral horror of anything resembling organised games, this seems to me a much more uplifting representation of the spirit of IWD than the terrifyingly corporate 'Official' IWD site here, sponsored by huge international banks and corporations which I would would put money on, do bugger all for gender equality at any kind of grassroots level, however much they might top corporate indices for equality in their white, upper-middle-class Western offices. Who declared this site 'official' anyway? Forgive me if I'm sceptical.

All the men should leave now...

Today is the 19th anniversary of the shooting dead of 14 young women and injuring of 14 more people at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec. Marc Lepine shot the women because, he said, he was 'fighting feminism' and they were engineering students.
Women get beaten, raped and killed all over the world for asking for their right to be human beings, and it's usually done by men. I'm not arguing that men are intrinsically worse or more violent, but I am arguing that we've created societies that encourage them to be that way, and that now they are being challenged in their power some of them seem to find it legitimate to fight back in violent and horrible ways. It's also why it pisses me off that idiots like Fathers for Justice get so much coverage for their whingings about male rights; yes, there are a few men out there unjustly separated from their children, and there's an awful lot justly separated because statistically men are much more likely to be the ones beating their wives or partners and abusing their children. The press goes crazy when a Karen Matthews does something terrible to her child (at least the child is still alive...) but apparently men sitting in cars gassing themselves and their kids so their wives/mothers can't 'have them' attracts pretty brief comment nowadays. I don't see the Sun giving them front page spreads with 'pure evil' headlines...