Motley Moose – Archive

Physicians for Human Rights, in partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, has published a report documenting the scope and long-term impact of rape and other sexual violence experienced by women who fled attacks on their villages in Darfur and are now refugees in neighboring Chad.

The report — titled “Nowhere To Turn: Failure To Protect, Support and Assure Justice for Darfuri Women” corroborates women’s accounts of rape and other crimes against humanity that they have experienced in Darfur, as well as rape and deprivations of basic needs in refugee camps in Chad. Based on interviews with female refugees living in Chad’s Farchana refugee camp, the report calls for “vigorous prosecution of rape as a war crime.”

Drawing courtesy Human Rights Watch, artist “Salah”, 13: “There were soldiers from Sudan, Janjaweed, and planes and bombs. I saw the Janjaweed take girls and women. The women were screaming. They seized them, they took them by force. The pretty ones were taken away…Girls were taken, small girls too, I think 5 and 7 and 14. Some came back after four or five hours…some we haven’t seen again.”  

(Originally from my updates at OC Progressive and cross-posted at C4O Democrats)

I had so many questions before last weekend. And honestly, I still don’t know exactly what lies ahead. However, I had many of my questions answered as I saw a glimpse of hope rising after the storm.

And yes, believe it or not, my questions were answered in Fresno!

In an article in The Washington Post this morning covering the arrest of  domestic Christian terrorist suspect (my term) Scott Roeder I found this paragraph:

As news of Roeder’s arrest traveled, Kansas City activist Regina Dinwiddie remembered the day a dozen years ago when Roeder hugged her in glee after trying to frighten an abortion provider by staring him down inside a Planned Parenthood clinic.

“He grabbed me and said, ‘I’ve read the Defensive Action Statement and I love what you’re doing,’ ” Dinwiddie said in a telephone interview. She was a signer of the 1990s statement, which declares that the use of force is justified.

I can’t deal with this shit.

“The American demand to prevent natural growth is unreasonable, and brings to mind pharaoh, who said, ‘Every son that is born you shall cast into the river,'” Science and Technology Minister Daniel Herschkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi) said.

“If there is a family that expands from one child to four or five, what should we tell them – to ship the children off to Petah Tikva?” Herschkowitz added. “This is an unacceptable demand, even if it comes from the Americans, and Israel should reject it decisively.”

Says another:

Interior Minister Eli Yishai said, “The American demand to freeze construction means expulsion for young people living in large locales. I hope the US administration understands that. If not, I don’t want to be an apocalyptic prophet saying we’re facing struggle and confrontation.”

He added that “the concessions they’re demanding of us are a security impediment we cannot tolerate.”

As Abraham Lincoln was serving his first term in the Illinois state legistlature, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker and historian wrote:

Scarcely have you descended on the soil of America when you find yourself in the midst of a sort of tumult; a confused clamor is raised on all sides; a thousand voices come to you at the same time, each of them expressing some social needs. Around you everything moves: here, the people of one neighborhood have gathered to learn if a church ought to be built; there, they are working on the choice of a representative; farther on the deputies of a district are going to town in all haste in order to decide about some local improvements; in another place, the farmers of a village abandon their furrows to go discuss the plan of a road or a school.

Corner Detail of a Turn-of-the-Century Log Cabin Recorded by the Author in Washington State.

Lincoln was one of the many ambitious souls drawn to politics in a young nation that had founded itself on the notion that the people could and should govern themselves. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana is generally credited with the first use of the phrase “grassroots and boots”, who said of the Progressive Party in 1912:

This party has come from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of people’s hard necessities.

While Beveridge coined the term, it’s clear from de Tocqueville’s observations of young America that the principles of grassroots organizing, wherein individuals are actively involved at the local level, are as old as America itself. These principles are alive and well today — they played a vital role in the election of President Obama, and brought many of us (myself included) more deeply into one of the modern machinations of grassroots involvement:  Blogging.