The abduction and murder of three Jewish teenage rabbinical seminary students – Gil-Ad Sha’ar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Frankel – in the occupied West Bank three weeks ago put Israeli society on fire. The Israeli government had seemingly known they were murdered from the start but kept insisting they were abducted and might still be alive, leading to an unprecedented terror campaign against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. Media photographs of ransacked houses and seemingly useless searches, among other things, in children bedrooms, stoked Israeli Jewish rage. It meant nothing that the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas condemned the abduction; as far as the most right wing Israeli government since the establishment of the state was concerned, Abbas and his political partners Hammas were to blame and there was no point in continuing the farcical ‘peace process’. Yet, even though many Israelis do not support the settlers, the abduction made headline news, focusing on ‘our boys’ who had to be released at all costs. When the dead bodies of the three young men were found, Israel was awash with a wave of grief, rage and hatred. Gangs of young right wing Israelis poured onto the streets of Jerusalem and other cities chanting ‘death to the Arabs’; a Facebook page calling to ‘kill all Arabs’ had thousands of ‘likes’ within minutes of being posted. And very soon after the bodies were discovered, a young Palestinian boy Mohammad Abu Khdeir was abducted and burnt alive in the Jerusalem suburb of Shuafat by a group of settlers. Continue reading “The Gaza massacre, 2014”
Author: Ronit Lentin
Ireland and its children: The septic tank of history
In 1975 a group of local boys in Tuam discovered a slab in the former ground of what was locally known as The Home – one of eight ‘mother-and-baby homes’ throughout Ireland, housing unwed pregnant women and run by nuns – and underneath it they found little skeletons. This discovery was not reported until the recent publication of a report by a local historian, Catherine Corless of 796 deaths of babies in the St Mary’s home between 1925 and 1961. There were some media exaggerations, particularly reports of ‘800 babies found dumped in a septic tank’ and used for medical experiments.
The reality is not as scandalous but not less horrific. Corless confirms that at least 200 babies were put in a working sewer tank, leading William River Pitt in an article titled ‘Men’s rights and the septic tank of history’ (Truthout, 8 June 2014) to call these deaths and the targeting of sexually active Irish women ‘the septic tank of history’.
Despite recent reports on child abuse, the mother-and-baby homes still await a public investigation. These homes – denoting a deep hatred of female sexuality and the visiting of the mothers’ ‘sins’ upon their hapless children – were aimed to hide these unwed mothers’ ‘shame’; the fathers, be they the women’s lovers, abusers or rapists, were never targeted. Many of the babies born in these ‘homes’ were sold for adoption to wealthy American Catholic childless couples. Many of the women laboured for the nuns in these homes or in Magdalene Laundries, whose horrible story has finally been told in recent years. Continue reading “Ireland and its children: The septic tank of history”
11 June – Remember the Citizenship Referendum?
Remember ‘citizenship tourism’? Remember ‘pregnant on arrival’? Remember when Dublin’s maternity hospitals were allegedly packed to the brim with ‘non national’ women arriving at the last minute to have citizen children? Remember the 1990 Fajujonu Supreme Court case, giving migrant parents a legal right to remain in Ireland to provide ‘care and company‘ to their citizen child? Remember the 2003 Lobe and Osayande Supreme Court appeal, ruling that ‘non-national‘ parents were no longer allowed to remain in Ireland to bring up their citizen child, privileging the State‘s right to deport and the ‘integrity of the asylum process‘ over citizen children‘s rights?
On June 11 a group of activists is marking the 2004 Citizenship Referendum in which the government of Ireland asked the electorate to put an end to birth right citizenship entitlement granted to all people born in Ireland since 1922 in favour of blood-based citizenship rights granted only to children born in Ireland one of whose parents is a citizen, or entitled to citizenship. Why are we doing this? Our main aim is to remind people of the Referendum and its effects: it was a sloppy piece of legislation, rushed through and using moral panic in relation to migrants ‘taking over’ and usurping Irish citizenship, the result of which was a two-tier citizenship and the creation of people with fewer rights than Irish citizens.
Continue reading “11 June – Remember the Citizenship Referendum?”
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