It's time to boycott any company doing business in Xinjiang

From the Guardian:
Any western company doing business in Xinjiang should consider their supply chains tainted by forced labour drawn from internment camps. Hardly a drop in the ocean of the vast global economy, this involves companies such as Ikea, H&M, Volkswagen and Siemens.

This month, the United States banned the import of products made by a firm in Xinjiang over its use of forced labour. It also blacklisted 28 Chinese entities for their role in the repression of Uighurs and issued visa restrictions on key Chinese officials. Following suit, two major Australian companies have now also announced they are ending partnership with their cotton supplier in Xinjiang.

These are welcome steps but the United States and Australia are not the only countries with business interests in Xinjiang. It is time for a global blacklist on all goods produced or manufactured in Xinjiang.

The UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination has called Xinjiang a “no rights zone” amid the mass detention of several million ethnic and religious minorities.

China claims they are mostly “vocational training centres.” But encircled by barbed wire, surveillance cameras, and armed guards, in reality many are labour camps where Uyghur, Kazakh, and other minorities are forced to work for little or no pay.

Many foreign companies appear to be benefiting from this. By one estimate nearly half of Europe’s 150 largest companies have some presence in Xinjiang. The region accounts for 84% of Chinese cotton production, as pointed out in a recent CSIS study. China is the world’s largest cotton

exporter, accounting for 26% of global exports.

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And the concerns extend well beyond textiles and affect multiple supply chains. According to the Wall Street Journal, Adidas, Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, and Gap have or continue to source from Xinjiang. Volkswagen has had a manufacturing plant in Xinjiang since 2013, and in April 2019 its chief executive sparked condemnation when he claimed ignorance of China’s mass detention in Xinjiang.

Xinjiang is also a major source of tomato paste for many leading international brands.

But let’s return to the US ban, specifically on a company called Hetian Taida Apparel and Australian cotton imports.

In late 2018, the Associated Press revealed North Carolina-based Badger Sportswear was sourcing from a Hetian Taida factory inside an internment camp in Xinjiang. After revelations of forced labour, many universities pulled Badger merchandise and in January the company announced it was ending t

he partnership. But how did a major American apparel distributor end up in bed with forced labour in China? A Workers Rights Consortium report found Badger failed to perform a labour rights assessment and actually concealed the factory as a supplier. The company chose profit over human rights, and they have not been alone.

An Australian Broadcasting Corporation investigation this summer revealed six major retailers that sourced cotton from Xinjiang-based Litai Textiles and others. They included Australia’s largest global retailer, Cotton On Groups, Target Australia, and Swedish companies Ikea and H&M. Even though Cotton on Group and Target Australia announced they would stop sourcing cotton from Xinjiang, it is a classic case of too little, too late.

Further afield in other industries, German powerhouse Siemens shamefully maintains a technologies partnership with China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, a state-owned military contractor recently identified by Human Rights Watch as the firm behind a major surveillance tool contributing to mass detention in Xinjiang.

No More Business as Usual

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights calls on businesses to prevent and mitigate the actual and potential human rights abuses associated with their business practices. Because of the potential for gross human rights abuses of doing business in Xinjiang, all foreign companies there should end their business partnerships.

The only way forward is no more business as usual.

Governments and organisations from Australia to the European Union should take immediate steps alongside the US to impose a global blacklist on the import of all goods produced or manufactured in Xinjiang. This must include import restrictions, forbidding companies from doing business in Xinjiang, and banning Xinjiang-based entities from accessing their markets.

The global Magnitsky Act, for example, in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and a few other countries makes it easier to impose targeted financial and visa sanctions, which these governments should use against Chinese officials and corporate leaders responsible for abuses in Xinjiang.

Foreign companies that have done business in Xinjiang must undergo a

thorough and independent investigation to determine the extent to which they have benefited by forced labour or contributed to other gross human rights violations and face punitive measures, including financial penalties to contribute to material reparations for victims.

Global consumers can also hold companies accountable and should demand an end to all business partnerships in Xinjiang or look to boycotting their products.

• Michael Caster is a human rights advocate and researcher, author of The People’s Republic of the Disappeared, and co-founder of the human rights organisation Safeguard Defenders.

Mehdi Hasan on Baghdadi's death - good riddance

Here is the link from MSNBC where Mehdi Hasan was interviewed to comment upon Baghdadi's death: https://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/mehdi-hasan-on-behalf-of-every-muslim-around-the-world-good-riddance-to-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-72137285969

To Be or Not To Be a Jewish State: That Is the Question

by Sheldon Richman Posted on October 26, 2019

Israel’s champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist that Israel is and always must be a Jewish state, by which most of them mean not religiously Jewish but of the “Jewish People” everywhere, including Jews who are citizens of other states and not looking for a new country. To be Jewish, according to the prevailing view, it is enough to have a Jewish mother (or to have been converted by an approved Orthodox rabbi). Belief in one supreme creator of the universe, in the Torah as the word of God, and in Jewish ritual need have nothing whatever to do with Jewishness. (We ignore here the many problems with this conception, such as: how can there be a secular Judaism?)

The definition of Jew has been bitterly controversial inside and outside of Israel since its founding. The point is, as anthropologist Roselle Tekiner wrote, “When the central task of a state is to import persons of a select religious/ethnic group – and to develop the country for their benefit alone – it is crucially important to be officially recognized as a bona fide member of that group.” (This is from the anthology Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, which is not online and is apparently out of print. But see Tekiner’s article, “Israel’s Two-Tiered Citizenship Law Bars Non-Jews From 93 Percent of Its Lands.”)

Second, Israel’s champions insist that Israel is a democracy – indeed, the only democracy in the Middle East. They vehemently object whenever someone demonstrates how Israel-as-the-state-of-the-Jewish-People must harm the 25 percent of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish, most of whom are Arabs.

Israeli law uniquely distinguishes citizenship from nationality. The nationality of an Israeli Arab citizen is “Arab” not Israeli, while the nationality of a Jewish citizen is “Jewish” not Israeli. Are citizens of any other country distinguished in law like that? The prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews is not the result of political bargaining with religious parties but of a desire to protect the Jewish people from impurity. These contortions are required by Israel’s self-declared status as something other than the land of all its citizens. Early Zionists said they wanted Palestine to be as Jewish as Britain is British and France is French – a flagrant category mistake that has had horrific consequences for the Palestinians.

The insistence by Israel’s supporters – that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic – thus is puzzling. What does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state if that status has no real consequences for non-Jews? If all it meant was that the Star of David was on the flag, we might hear far fewer objections to Israel. But of course it means much more.

To see what it means, one has to look beyond Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Basic Law (its de facto constitution), and specific statutes, which contain language that on its face forbids discrimination against non-Jews. We should know better than to take official documents at face value. What matters in any society is the “real constitution,” the principles that underlie commonly accepted behavior. The old Soviet Union’s constitution listed freedom of the press among the “rights” of Soviet citizens, and the U.S. Constitution says that only Congress may declare war and that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

More pertinent, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, wherein the British government “view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” also stated that “it [was] clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” We know how that worked out.

So what’s the story inside Israel? (I’m not talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel has occupied for 52 years and where Palestinians have no rights whatever.)

After doing an interview recently about my new book, Coming to Palestine, I was challenged by a listener over my statements that the Israeli government treats Arab and Jewish criminals differently depending on whether they shed “Jewish blood” or “Arab blood” (no such distinction actually exists) and that political parties can’t call for changing Israel from a Jewish state to a state of all its citizens.

Who is right?

Regarding criminal justice, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy shows anecdotally that Arab Israeli citizens who kill Jews can spend more time in prison than Israeli Jewish citizens who kill Arabs. “Arab blood is cheaper in Israel,” Levy wrote in 2014, “and Jewish blood is thicker.” He says things are the same today. Over the years, many articles have been published documenting this de facto, though not de jure, disparity. Indeed, Haaretz reported in 2011 that

Arab Israelis who have been charged with certain types of crime are more likely than their Jewish counterparts to be convicted, and once convicted they are more likely to be sent to prison, and for a longer time. These disparities were found in a recent statistical study commissioned by Israel’s Courts Administration and the Israel Bar Association…. The [unpublished preliminary] study is unique in that it is the first of its kind to be commissioned and funded in part by the courts administration, and in that it sought to examine claims by attorneys that Israeli judges deal more harshly with Arab criminals than with Jews.

Note that government discrimination against non-Jews across the spectrum of issues is not usually written into the law, although it may be. Mostly flagrantly, discrimination is legally applied to the “right of return.” People defined as Jews, no matter where they were born or live, can become Israeli citizens/nationals virtually on arrival, while Arabs driven from their ancestral homes in 1947-48 and 1967 may not go back, much less become full-rights citizens/nationals. Put concretely, I, an atheist born in Philadelphia to Jewish parents born in Philadelphia (with roots likely in the vicinity of the Black Sea), can “return” [sic] to Israel and become an Israeli citizen at once, while my friend Raouf Halaby, a naturalized American citizen born to Arab Christian parents in west Jerusalem three years before Israel was founded, may not. The only difference is that my mother was Jewish, making me, a Spinozist, a Jewish national in Israel’s eyes, and Raouf’s mother was not.

Regarding restrictions on political parties, the Basic Law: The Knesset states:

A candidates’ list [party] shall not participate in elections to the Knesset, and a person shall not be a candidate for election to the Knesset, if the objects or actions of the list or the actions of the person, expressly or by implication, include…:

1. negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;…

Before proceeding, let us note a conundrum. The issue I’m raising here is whether a state be both Jewish and democratic. The root of the word democracy is demos, people. So if the raison d’être of Israel is the welfare of only some of its citizens and millions of certain others who are citizens and residents of other countries, how can Israel be a real democracy? Strictly speaking, considering that word and, the law’s language legitimizes a party that “negat[es] the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish … state” but not as a democratic state. Would the Israeli election authorities accept that distinction? I don’t think so.

In the past the Israeli Supreme Court has reversed government bans on a party’s or candidate’s inclusion in an election. Particular cases will revolve around the exact wording of a party’s mission statement or candidate’s platform, and legal language is subject to endless, unpredictable, and political interpretation. But, regardless, the government has the power to ban at its disposal, and future Supreme Courts may not be so liberal. So the threat of a ban always looms. Incidentally, a party or candidate that engages in “incitement to racism” is also ineligible to participate in elections, yet this provision has yet to be applied to Jewish parties and politicians, such as Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu, that routinely spout racist rhetoric.

Israel’s champions also deny that Arab Israelis – citizens, mind you – have grossly inferior access to land, most of which is owned by a “public” authority and the Jewish National Fund (very little is privately owned); building and village permits; public utilities; education; roads; and other government-controlled services and resources. The Israeli government has carried out programs in the Galilee and Negev, known as Judaization, from which Arab Israelis, especially Bedouins, have been cleared to make way for Jewish Israelis. Such restrictions inside Israel have the stink of apartheid.

In his book Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Ben White documents that the Israeli government allocates resources – unsurprisingly – just as one would expect, considering that Israel by its founding doctrine is not the land of all of its citizens but only of some. This doctrine was reinforced last year in the Nation-State Law, which declares that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

So, as Israel’s champions say, all Israeli citizens are indeed equal. It’s just that some – those whose nationality is “Jewish” – are more equal than others – those whose nationality is “Arab” or anything else but “Jewish.”

----------

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute, senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society.

Beirut is Burning: Why I Don’t Blame the Rioters

by Robert Fisk

I thought the days when I kicked burning tyres off roads had ended. I used to clear the road in Belfast in 1972. Then, often, I did the same in Beirut.

But there I was yesterday, as my faithful driver Selim waited patiently for me to shake hands with the local militiaman and explain why I wanted to get to Damour (about 12 miles south of Beirut) and wave my little Lebanese press card in his face, slowly using my best brown shoes to push his burning tyres off the highway.

They were hot. Just to look at the flames made my eyes hurt.

That’s what burning tyres are supposed to do, of course. And the Lebanese drivers, backed up behind us like rabbits, turned round and went home.

Well, we got through. And drove and drove and drove, and laughed that we had done so. But this was a very serious matter. The army stayed away; the police advised motorists to go home. Law and order – you remember those old words? – were less important than the lawful right of way. But, for several hours, Selim and I exercised our own right of way.

For the most part, the men lighting these fires belonged to the Amal Movement, the Shia group controlled by Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament. Or so they told me, and I did not argue about it.

This tells it own story. Some were very poor, and looked it, and I don’t really blame them for their actions. Lebanon has never been a very rich nation – save for their Sunni merchants and Christian bankers – and these were the people who did not have enough to eat. For days, they had been protesting their fate. The Lebanese pound had fallen, the price of food had rocketed – all true, I promise you – and they protested.

I was not surprised, yet there was something new and surprising about this. All this week, the mountains of Lebanon have burnt. Their great glory of pine trees and wonderful mountainsides have blossomed with flames. The government’s three anti-fire helicopters lay rotting at Beirut international airport – the government did not maintain them – and it needed Greece, Cyprus and Jordan to send its aircraft to quench the burning hills. My own apartment on the Beirut seafront stank of smoke. On Wednesday night, God visited Lebanon – he does come here occasionally, I have decided – and drenched the country in rain and tempest. On Thursday morning, my balcony was covered in sand and ash.

But there is something far more serious going on here. The physical rage of Lebanese people is not just a militia outburst. It’s not because ordinary people are hungry – and they are – but because an unjust system (ever more taxes, ever higher prices) is making it impossible to work to bring home money and food.

Let me ask just one small question. On the corniche seafront where I live – the Avenue de Paris, as the French mandate decided it should be called in the 1920s – almost every apartment block is empty. Save for those who share the small bloc where I live, there is nothing but darkness. You can drive downtown from here, for miles to the centre of Beirut, and you will not find a light. These buildings are owned as investments – by Iraqis, for the most part, but also by Syrians and Saudis – and no one lives there.

In a country where the poor of the Beqaa Valley and the refugees from Syria and the Palestinian refugees (of whom of course we no longer speak, since they are the wreckage of the Israeli state) exist in shacks, these mighty sentinels of cash stand triumphant: empty, rich and shameful.

So I fear we shall have more burning tyres on the road.

The peculiar case of Japan vis-à-vis the Rohingya tragedy

By Habib Siddiqui

Recently Myanmar’s de facto leader Suu Kyi met the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo.

"With regard to the alleged human rights violations in Rakhine State, it is indispensable that the Myanmar government and military take appropriate measures promptly," Abe was quoted by the Japanese Foreign Ministry as telling Suu Kyi in their meeting.

There is nothing ‘alleged’ any more about Myanmar’s genocidal crimes and intent against the Rohingya people. But mindful of Myanmar’s ugly face-saving position trying to evade any responsibility for its horrendous crimes and its willful abhorrence for the ‘R’ (Rohingya) term, Abe was understandably diplomatic in his choice of words when hosting Suu Kyi. But how long can his government continue to please an evil, murderous, genocidal, criminal regime that feels neither remorse for its scorched-earth genocidal campaign nor is willing to change its course?

Since 2017, nearly a million Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh in search of safety. Despite being the children of the first settlers to Arakan (renamed Rakhine state) the Rohingyas are considered stateless people in Buddhist Myanmar where for more than half a century they have faced genocidal pogroms, unfathomed discrimination and unparalleled persecution. Each and every one of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) are denied to them. Before the current crisis unfolded, they were already recognized as the most persecuted people of our time.

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar in their September 2019 report directly placed responsibility for the genocide on the state of Myanmar, and said that not only does Myanmar continue to commit these crimes, but it still has “genocidal intent” towards the Rohingya.

While tens of thousands of Rohingyas were killed in Suu Kyi’s Myanmar and perhaps even a larger number raped in one of the most calculated genocidal pogroms of our time in the full view of the world community, forcing exodus of so many survivors to seek refuge in Bangladesh – their repatriation to their ancestral land in Arakan remains a challenge. The world community has done virtually nothing to ensure their safe return in UN-monitored safe zone with their citizenship rights and dignity intact as free citizens of Myanmar.

The regional politics have brought the situation to a standstill, because China and Japan have become some of the strongest protectors of Myanmar, defending the government from both economic and diplomatic retaliation. Nor is the role of Modi’s government in India helpful either. Of course, one can understand such rogue attitudes from two of the global upstarts that have proven to be guilty of creating their own version of the Rohingya crisis with the minority Uighur and Kashmiri (and who knows, in the coming days, add to that list - the Assamese) Muslims who today face extinction – political, social, economical and cultural.

Since its birth, Burma (later named Myanmar) has been a highly racist and fascist state. Its government had changed but its basic incoherence to evolve into a modern state – that is respectful of its diverse religious, ethnic and racial groups – has remained the same. Suu Kyi inherited a criminal regime and now leads another criminal regime! She remains a remorseless mass murderer and has mastered the art of political doublespeak.

During her meeting with Abe, Suu Kyi expressed her intention to address the ‘Rakhine’ issue "correctly" and take necessary steps. Abe pledged Japan's support. It is worth noting that despite Myanmar’s genocidal crimes, the Japanese government remains one of its major donors. Last year, Abe promised an aid package of 7.73 billion USD to Suu Kyi as Japan competed for regional influence with China, which remains Myanmar’s biggest trading partner. It is worth recalling that Japan maintained economic support for the country throughout the Western sanctions of 2003, fostering a good relationship with the criminal government.

How long can Japan evade its own culpability for birthing the Rohingya crisis? Its blood-stained connection is rather very deep and old.

After all, imperial Japan had played a dreadful role during the second world war (1939-45) after occupying British-Burma. Its occupation  (1942-45) led to the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims all across Burma, let alone the Indian community that hitherto formed the backbone of the economy and government – providing the majority of the employees in the service of the British colonial administration in Rangoon (today’s Yangon). Nearly half a million survivors fled to the British-ruled Bengal and Bihar in India in a harrowing journey (called the ‘Road to Death’) of nearly 300 miles on foot through jungle, mountain and swamp with perhaps tens of thousands dying on their retreat from Burma. It is said that 70 to 80 percent of those who reached British-ruled India were afflicted with diseases such as dysentery, smallpox, malaria or cholera, with 30% "desperately so".

Panglong, a Chinese Muslim town in British Burma, was entirely destroyed by the Japanese invaders in their invasion of Burma. [The Hui Muslim Ma Guanggui became the leader of the Hui Panglong self-defense guard created by Su, who was sent by the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China.] The Japanese burned Panglong, driving out the over 200 Hui households out as refugees who settled in Yunnan and Kokang.

The Rohingyas of the Arakan in Burma were particularly affected when the Rakhine Buddhists and Burmese fascists of the Burma Independence Army, aided by the Japanese occupation forces, conducted horrendous crimes of obliterating their existence in the southern part of the Arakan state. They faced extinction, rape and pillage as a result of Buddhist-fascist-Japanese-instigated riots in Akyab (today’s Sittwe) and many other towns in Arakan. The surviving Rohingyas fled to the north in what would later be known as the Mayu Frontier region. They fought on the side of the British forces against the fascist Japanese occupation forces and their Burmese and Rakhine Buddhist allies.

Sadly, the British colonial government [as it has done in many of its former colonies] betrayed the Rohingya people soon after Japan had lost the great war. In spite of their cultural and religious ties with Bengal, the Rohingya majority territory in the northern Arakan state was made part of the newly independent Union of Burma. And the rest is history!

As is quite evident now, Myanmar has no desire to take the Rohingya refugees back. Worse still, the remaining 600,000 Rohingyas that are inside Myanmar are at serious risk of genocide; they face daily persecution and are more vulnerable today as a religious and ethnic minority than any time before. It is both unsafe and impossible for the refugees in Bangladesh to return to their homes in Myanmar. And while there have been sanctions from the United States against some Burmese generals and troops, no major changes have occurred.

As hinted above, much of the problems that divide the major communities in the Arakan – Rakhine and Rohingya – go back to those tragic years of the Japanese occupation of Burma.

Some 70 years on, it is sad to see that Japan continues to provide financial incentives and aids to the Burmese governments, in spite of the latter’s incessant crimes against the ethnic Rohingya and other minorities. It is simply inexcusable!

So, while one may appreciate Prime Minister Abe's call to redress the Rohingya issue, it does not absolve his government of providing a lifeline to the murderous regime that is guilty of genocide. One cannot but also question the wisdom of Abe’s government that continues to fatten a savage beast that has proven to be genocidal. What Suu Kyi’s government needs is a big stick and not economic aid that only energizes its murderous instinct and boosts its savagery. Its leadership needs to be brought to the Hague for its genocidal crimes against the Rohingya people.

It is really sad to observe the criminal silence of our generation with the Rohingya genocide some 70 years after the UDHR was adopted in the United Nations General Assembly. The extermination of an entire ethnic group continues silently, and debates and negotiations progress while villages and towns burn. Economic interests should not shield horrific crimes, and the Rohingya are suffering for the world’s inaction.

Shame on Japan, China and India for shielding Myanmar’s murderous regime! And, shame on us all for our inexcusable silence and failure to stop genocidal crimes!