Human rights, migrants and anti-racism

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Ronit Lentin

On September 9 the European parliament passed a resolution calling on Paris to ‘immediately suspend all expulsions of Roma’, saying the policy ‘amounted to discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity’. French Gendarmes were accused of compiling secret illegal lists of Roma and other travelling minorities in violation of French laws on ethnic profiling. In 2010 France deported 5,000 Romanians and Bulgarians (10,000 in 2009), and vows to continue deporting Roma, all EU citizens, even though the expulsions are against the constitution and break international human rights laws on discrimination and despite the European Commission’s announcement on 1 October that it would initiate legal action against France. Indeed France began fingerprinting departing Roma to prevent their return, proving the futility of invoking human rights law (Crumley, 2010). Continue reading “Human rights, migrants and anti-racism”

Asylum seekers are not ‘things’

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Ronit Lentin

mosney2In July 2010 the government of the Republic of Ireland began a review of its policies of dispersal and direct provision for asylum seekers. This may sound  positive  particularly in light of the criticism by the Free Legal Advice Centre (FLAC) in 2003, that the direct provision scheme is ‘gravely detrimental of the human rights of a group of people legally present in the country and to whom the government has moral and legal obligations under national and international law’, and recommendation that the scheme be ‘abandoned immediately’. Continue reading “Asylum seekers are not ‘things’”

To Gaza: When is self defence not self defence

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Ronit Lentin

rachel-corrieEveryone who saw the brutal treatment of the passengers of the freedom flotilla attempting to break the blockade of Gaza, and heard the Israeli propaganda machine claiming this was done in ‘self defence’ should understand that this self justification has a long history.

As an Israeli child, I grew up on myths of ‘self defence’ and of ‘the few against the many’, which were the building blocks of Israeli state and society from its very inception. Israeli literary scholar Nurit Gertz identifies three ‘ideological narratives’ aimed at conserving the hegemonic power relations. The first myth is the ‘few against the many’ narrative, according to which a Jewish ‘David’ was attacked by an Arab ‘Goliath’, the second is the struggle between the enlightened (Jewish) Europeans and the backwards (Arab) Orientals and the ensuing myth about Palestine being a ‘desert’ which the Zionists made ‘bloom’, and the third is the struggle between the isolated Jewish nation and an uncaring world, a narrative strengthened by the indifference of the world in face of the Nazi genocide. A fourth myth is that of Israel as European, and a fifth – perhaps the strongest myth – was the belief that all Israel’s wars and brutalities are fought in self defence. Continue reading “To Gaza: When is self defence not self defence”