You are currently browsing Angus Johnston’s articles.
In recent days, Julian Assange has been making the media rounds to give his account of the events that have led him to be investigated for rape and sexual misconduct. Assange’s two accusers have been silent throughout this wave of media attention, but one of them — the woman known as Ms. A — gave an interview to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet last August, telling her own version of the story.
A few details from the Aftonbladet article have been reported in the English-language press, most notably Ms. A’s statement that she does not fear Assange or consider him violent — a statement that reads quite differently in its original context than it does in some second-hand accounts. Other aspects of her account have, however, received virtually no attention.
The interview Ms. A gave Aftonbladet is consistent with the version of events contained in the Swedish police reports that leaked last month, but includes more detail on several important elements of the story, particularly regarding the aftermath of the alleged assaults and her own perspective on Assange’s actions.
There’s nothing particularly explosive here, but the interview does address some questions that have been asked repeatedly in the press and on the blogs, and it’s worth reviewing for that reason:
- Ms. A told Aftonbladet that although she considered herself to have been sexually assaulted by Assange, she did not go to the police on her own behalf. Rather, she accompanied Ms. W — who had decided independently to make a police complaint — to offer support and corroborating testimony.
- She characterized both her encounter with Assange and Ms. W’s as ones in which consensual sexual relations became abusive, and attributed the alleged assaults to his inability to accept no for an answer.
- She stated that she did not regard Assange as a violent person, and that she did not — at the time that she spoke to the reporter — feel fearful or threatened by him. At the same time, however, she characterized Assange’s attitude toward women as warped and described his actions toward her as sexual assault.
- She denied that her actions and Ms. W’s had been orchestrated by any government or other outside agent.
The Aftonbladet article has never, to my knowledge, been translated into English. This summary is based on a Google translation, with a few ambiguous passages clarified by a Swedish-language speaker. I of course welcome corrections and additions.
Update | A full translation of the Aftonbladet article is now available here.
Wow.
So last week someone leaked an extraordinary letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. A group of three dozen top administrators at the University of California, writing to the UC Board of Regents, claimed that they were owed millions in new pension benefits, and threatened legal action against the university if they didn’t get them.
The dispute arose out of an obscure provision of federal tax policy that capped the administrators’ pensions. The group claim that the Regents promised in 1999 to boost their benefits if the IRS granted a waiver — that waiver was granted in 2007, but the Regents haven’t acted.
In ordinary times such a disagreement would go unnoticed by the wider public, but these are no ordinary times. California’s state government is in full meltdown, and the UC system is seeing huge budget cuts, slashing staff, and raising tuition to astronomical levels. To raise pensions by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the system’s highest-paid executives — the provision only applies to those making salaries above $245,000 — would be both a fiscal and a public relations disaster.
So it’s not surprising that UC hadn’t acted on the request. It’s not even surprising that they’ve rejected it again today. What is surprising is the language they’ve used in doing so.
The public statement, released jointly today by Board of Regents Chairman Russell Gould and UC President Mark Yudof, says that the Board’s action a decade ago wasn’t “self-executing” — that it gave the Regents permission to raise pensions on the group, but didn’t obligate them to do so. Given the state of UC’s finances, it would be imprudent to do so now. And here’s the kicker:
Months ago, the Board retained counsel to assist the University in the event this position should need to be defended in the courts. While those who signed the letter are without question highly valued employees, we must disagree with them on this particular issue.
Translation: We’re lawyered up. Do what you gotta do.
“Fuck Hamas,” it begins. “Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA!” The Gaza Youth Manifesto for Change, published three weeks ago, is an angry indictment of (nearly) all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and it’s been getting a huge amount of attention on the internet and beyond.
The anonymous authors of the manifesto — eight secular Gaza college students, they say, three women and five men — are fed up:
We are youth with heavy hearts. We carry in ourselves a heaviness so immense that it makes it difficult to us to enjoy the sunset. How to enjoy it when dark clouds paint the horizon and bleak memories run past our eyes every time we close them? We smile in order to hide the pain. We laugh in order to forget the war. We hope in order not to commit suicide here and now. During the war we got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the face of the earth. During the last years Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. We are a generation of young people used to face missiles, carrying what seems to be a impossible mission of living a normal and healthy life, and only barely tolerated by a massive organization that has spread in our society as a malicious cancer disease, causing mayhem and effectively killing all living cells, thoughts and dreams on its way as well as paralyzing people with its terror regime. Not to mention the prison we live in, a prison sustained by a so-called democratic country.
…
We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want!
It’s powerful writing, drawing on traditions of non-sectarian youth organizing — because young people often lack strong personal commitments to existing institutions, their organizing often operates outside of, and critical of, such structures.
But is the manifesto too good to be true? I wondered myself, the first time I read it. Edward Teller, a blogger at Firedoglake is wondering too, noting the international funders behind the Sharek Youth Forum, whose suppression by Hamas the manifesto condemns. Is the document genuine, Teller asks, or is its publication yet another chess move by one of the forces it’s ostensibly opposed to?
The Guardian ran an article on the manifesto over the weekend, interviewing several of its authors in Gaza. “The group,” the paper said, “is currently investing most of its time and energy in debating new strategies to pursue a web-based platform for change.”
Interesting. I’m eager to see how this story develops.
Update | I asked GYBO, via their Facebook page, if they had a response to the Firedoglake story, but they deleted my post from their wall. I’ve just emailed them to ask the question again, and will update if I receive any response.
Wednesday Update | I apparently owe GYBO an apology. As they noted on their new blog this morning, Facebook restricted their ability to post on their page yesterday. As part of that restriction, they say, posts to their wall on which they commented were automatically deleted by Facebook itself. If this is true — and I have no reason to doubt it — then my previous update was in error. Sorry.
GYBO hasn’t yet replied directly to the questions about their funding and affiliations raised at Firedoglake, but another post at their blog yesterday provided a bit more detail about their political perspective and goals. I’m still interested in hearing their response to the Firedoglake stuff, and I intend to ask them again via Twitter today, but I do want to make something clearer than I did yesterday.
When I borrowed Edward Teller’s formulation of the question of GYBO’s identity — “is the document genuine … or is its publication yet another chess move by one of the forces it’s ostensibly opposed to?” — I gave that particular analysis more weight than I intended. The reality is that the question of GYBO’s “genuineness” and that of the group’s affiliations are two separate questions. Whether GYBO is affiliated with funders outside of Gaza, or affiliated with people who are affiliated with such funders, is a separate question from that of what its goals and motivations are.
The folks at GYBO — or some of them, at least — got the impression yesterday that I was hostile to their project. That’s a mistaken impression, but the responsibility for the mistake is mostly mine, not theirs. Again, apologies.
Arizona’s new ethnic studies law, House Bill 2281, takes effect this week, and the internets are full of chatter.
The law, the brainchild of outgoing AZ Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, has gotten a huge amount of attention, but its actual effect is still very much in doubt. We’re going to be hearing a lot more about this law in the coming months, so here’s a quick primer.
Let’s start with what the law doesn’t do. First, it doesn’t have any effect on college or university teaching — it’s aimed solely at K-12 education.
Second, despite the claims of folks ranging from Jezebel to Mother Jones, it’s not an “ethnic studies ban.” Instead, it’s a ban on four kinds of teaching — programs that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” those that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” those that “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” and those that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”
If that list seems weird to you — if it seems like a right-winger’s fantasy of what ethnic studies are, rather than a description of any course or program you’ve ever been involved with — you’re not alone. Tom Horne crafted this law as a weapon to use against the ethnic studies program in the Tucson Unified School District, but the TUSD says — most recently in a resolution passed just last week — that they’re in full compliance with the law.
Indeed, the law itself bends over backwards to make clear that it’s not aimed at ethnic studies as a whole. It explicitly provides for the continued teaching of “courses or classes that include the history of any ethnic group,” including those which “include the discussion of controversial aspects of history.”
So what’s going on?
What’s going on is that Tom Horne has been on a public crusade against TUSD’s ethnic studies programs for years, and this bill is the fruit of that campaign.
Horne leaves office as schools superintendent today. (He was elected state Attorney General in November.) This morning he formally declared the TUSD Mexican-American Studies program in violation of HB2281.
The District now has sixty days to show the new superintendent that it’s in compliance with the law, though Horne contends that mere changes to the program won’t have that effect. “The violations are deeply rooted in the program itself,” he wrote this morning, “and partial adjustments will not constitute compliance” — they must jettison the program completely.
It’s not clear whether the incoming superintendent, John Huppenthal, shares that view. For their part, the TUSD intends to contest this ruling with Huppenthal, and possibly in the courts. If they’re found in violation the penalty would be a ten percent reduction in state support — a cut that Tucson’s superintendent says “would cripple the district, quite frankly.”
I’ll have more on Horne’s specific findings, and the district’s response, in a follow-up post.
“Whatever you want to do, just do it. Don’t worry about making a damn fool of yourself. Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.”
–Gloria Steinem
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments