Author: Carsten Agger

Endnu en familie splittes af udlændingereglerne

Klasse, Danmark! Denne gang er det pensionistægtepar, der ekspederes ud af landet, fordi de angiveligt har “større tilknytning” til USA end til Danmark.

Jorden kalder S og SF: Hvorfor har i ikke for længst, som noget af det allerførste i gjorde, afskaffet tilknytningskravet helt og aldeles?

I alle tilfælde ligger landet således, som vi læser i Jydske Vestkysten:

Den tidligere medinstruktør af blandt andet tv-serien M*A*S*H har et beløb svarende til fire millioner kroner ståede på to bankkonti i USA og i en amerikansk pensionsordning.

Martin Lowenheim bor i Oksbøl og er gift med Carol Jørgensen, der oprindelig er amerikaner, men blev dansk statsborger i 1988.

Begrundelsen for at udvise Martin Lowenheim er, at parret har større tilknytning til USA end til Danmark.

Ifølge Udlændingeservice skal den aldrende amerikaner altså udvises i morgen søndag den 8. januar, selv om han kan klare sig selv økonomisk.
Advokat Erik Astrup har anket den afgørelse til justitsminister Morten Bødskov (S), og Martin Lowenheim rejser ikke i morgen, som Udlændingeservice forlanger.

– Så vidt jeg kan se, er sagen ikke behandlet af Udlændingeservice. Der er tale om et standardbrev, siger Erik Astrup.

Han vil blandt andet slå på, at Martin Lowenheim er for syg til at klare en tur over Atlanten. Tv-manden har en dårlig bugspytkirtel, og han går dårligt, sidder helst i kørestol.

Åh Danmark, hvornår får vi et land, der ikke insisterer på at p***e på folk, bare fordi de ikke er født her i landet?

Lidt baggrund om den svenske “kopireligion” Kopimi

Fildeling og “piratkopiering” er nu anerkendt som religion i Sverige, med CTRL-C og CTRL-V som hellige symboler. Man må forstå, at juridiske indgreb mod The Pirate Bay fremover vil være at betragte som en krænkelse af religionsfriheden. Bag initiativet, der selvfølgelig skal betragtes som en slags spøg, ligger en elegant finte over for musik- og film-industriens “pirat”-bekæmpere:

In an interview in 2007 or 2008 (I believe, not sure about the date) the swedish lawyer for the MPAA, Monique Wasted, got a question about her views on the people advocating file sharing. Her answer was that “It’s just a few people, very loud. They’re a cult. They call themselves Kopimists.”

She called file sharers “a cult”. But she should know, because besides working for Hollywood she’s also been working as a swedish legal counsil for the church of Scientology. She has for instance helped them sue the swedish government over copyright infringement for putting their bible up as publicly viewable evidence in a court case.

It made me think that it might be benefits to look at what we do as a religious movement. One of the fun things working with The Pirate Bay has always been that we’ve started lots of fun crazy projects. Some work, some (most) fail. I started researching what kind of angle it would give us if we registered a religion.

When the Swedish state church was split from the government, a law about religions was passed to make it possible for anyone to get their religion accepted as long as they had some sort of organisation. The law states that the content of the religion itself is never tried, only that the organisation is there. The law is hence very wide and in order to not be abused for economical reasons, that part of the religion is a separate step, So you won’t get any money from the government (or tax benefits) without a lot of more bureaucracy. But that’s not interesting in this case.

The more interesting thing is that religions in general (I will not go into details here, it’s fun to find out for people in the end) are a bit more protected than political movements. In Sweden the law about freedom of religion is absolute – which means that no other law is higher. That means that laws that is designed to, for instance spy on you, might not be allowed if you commit yourself to your religious act.

In some religions (I don’t know about Kopimistsamfundet yet, maybe they can answer) there’s a Seal of Confession – which means that when you talk to a priest in the congregation, the priest have to keep what you say confidential. This is respected in some countries as law, where the courts can not make the priest testify against the individual. And some religions – at least the Mormons as far as I know – consider all members of the church to be a priest. This is probably the thing that I love the most with kopimism as a religion – we can have yet another form of P2P communication – Priest2priest. With no legal right for anyone to listen in to the conversation perhaps. This must be researched.

Since I’ve had a lot of things to do, projects to start, my church was never started. My working name for it was Church of Copying Kopimists (or short: C.O.C.K. just for the lulz). I told some friends about my idea and in the end they really liked it. This is one of the essential things with how the internet and kopimism works – if you don’t do it, someone else will. I didn’t have to do the work, since the idea that spread was good enough. After a year of iterations it actually worked.

Link: Kopimi as  religion

Ny mareridtslov vedtaget i USA

Amerikanere, der mistænkes for “terrorplaner” kan nu tilbageholdes af militæret på ubestemt tid (læs: for evigt) uden nogen sinde at komme for en domstol.

“Terrorplaner” er sat i gåseøjne, fordi nogle amerikanske regeringsagenturer faktisk er begyndt at opfatte Occupy Wall Street-aktivister som terrorister. Så velkommen til det nye USA, hvor alle statsborgere, om regeringen ikke bryder sig om, kan trylles bort til militært fangenskab for tid og evighed. Gad vide, hvor længe det tager, før den lamme danske regering med Thorning og Søvndal i spidsen finder ud af, at sådan en lov skal vi også have i Danmark?

Faklen.dk arkiveres

I 1996-2001 udkom et tidsskrift ved navn FAKLEN. Det vakte en del opsigt med en skarp kritik af den autoriserede bibeloversættelse fra 1992 og en humanistisk vinkel på højredrejningen og den udbredte racisme i Danmark, som på længere sigt ville underminere menneske- og borgerrettighederne og true retsstaten. Samtlige 21 numre var redigeret af Rune Engelbreth Larsen med hjælp fra et stort antal frivillige medarbejdere. Jeg bidrog selv med nogle få artikler og stod for dele af tidsskriftets hjemmeside fra 1998 og frem.

Mange rystede dengang på hovedet af disse forudsigelser (som historisk interesserede især kan genfinde i tidsskriftets faste sektion Samfundsudsigten), men under VKO-regeringen 2001-2011 blev denne hovedrysten desværre kun gjort alt for grundigt til skamme. Dette gælder ikke mindst under den “rædselsperiode” under Løkke (2009-2011), hvor Dansk Folkeparti nærmest kunne få, hvad de pegede på i form af pointsystemer, udvisninger, lømmelpakke og helt uhørte retspolitiske stramninger, endda med S og SF-stemmer. Med regeringsskiftet i september 2011 synes udviklingen at være på vej i en anden retning. Den meget faretruende udvikling 2001-2011 understreger desværre, at Faklens analyse kun var alt for præcis, og bladet selv en kun alt for nødvendig humanistisk stemme dengang i 1990erne.

I perioden 2001-2011 har hjemmesiden Faklen.dk fungeret dels som arkiv over tidsskriftet, dels som et “webtidsskrift”, der jævnligt har bragt humanistiske indlæg fra den offentlige debat og vægtige originale indlæg.

Men 15 år er længe nok, og Faklen havde selvfølgelig sin egentlige betydning i de fem år, det udkom som tidsskrift. Faklen.dk vil derfor fra i dag ikke længere blive opdateret, men vil fungere som et rent arkiv over perioden 1996-2011. Hvis du har lyst, står det dig frit for at gå på opdagelse i artiklerne fra det trykte tidsskrift, et udvalg af hjemmesidens artikler fra 2002-2006 samt alle dem fra 2007-2011. Hvis du har udenlandske venner, er du velkommen til at anbefale dem den engelske sektion.

Arkivet vil blive liggende som tidsdokument over perioden 1996-2011, men der vil ikke blive tilføjet nye artikler, som sidens introtekst nu forklarer:

Faklen.dk er et online-arkiv, der bevarer perspektiver og analyser, som har bidraget til humanistiske vinkler på kultur og politik i en turbulent politisk periode i Danmark fra 1996-2011.

Og mere er der vel ikke at sige. God fornøjelse, hvis du kommer den vej forbi.

Kristne præster samarbejder værdigt om forvaltningen af Fødselskirken i Betlehem

Med kosteskafte. De hellige mænds ophøjede debat varer et stykke tid, hvorefter de ca. 60 præster fra den græsk-ortodokse og armenske kirke fik hjælp til at løse deres problemer af det palæstinensiske politi.

“No one was arrested because all those involved were men of God,” udtaler politiinspektør Khaled al-Tamimi fra Betlehem Politi ifølge BBC. For en god kristen må det i disse dage være ekstra rart at vide, at kirken i Frelserens fødeby er i så gode hænder.

Amerikansk veteran fra Fallujah: Vi var fjenden

Vi var angriberne, og det vi gjorde, var forkert og bygget på løgne, skriver U.S. Marine Ross Caputi i The Guardian:

It has been seven years since the end of the second siege of Fallujah – the US assault that left the city in ruins, killed thousands of civilians, and displaced hundreds of thousands more; the assault that poisoned a generation, plaguing the people who live there with cancers and their children with birth defects.

It has been seven years and the lies that justified the assault still perpetuate false beliefs about what we did.

I know, because I am one of those American veterans. In the eyes of many of the people I “served” with, the people of Fallujah remain dehumanised and their resistance fighters are still believed to be terrorists. But unlike most of my counterparts, I understand that I was the aggressor, and that the resistance fighters in Fallujah were defending their city.

It is also the seventh anniversary of the deaths of two close friends of mine, Travis Desiato and Bradley Faircloth, who were killed in the siege. Their deaths were not heroic or glorious. Their deaths were tragic, but not unjust.

How can I begrudge the resistance in Fallujah for killing my friends, when I know that I would have done the same thing if I were in their place? How can I blame them when we were the aggressors?

It could have been me instead of Travis or Brad. I carried a radio on my back that dropped the bombs that killed civilians and reduced Fallujah to rubble. If I were a Fallujan, I would have killed anyone like me. I would have had no choice. The fate of my city and my family would have depended on it. I would have killed the foreign invaders.

Travis and Brad are both victims and perpetrators. They were killed and they killed others because of a political agenda in which they were just pawns. They were the iron fist of American empire, and an expendable loss in the eyes of their leaders.

I do not see any contradiction in feeling sympathy for the dead US Marines and soldiers and at the same time feeling sympathy for the Fallujans who fell to their guns. The contradiction lies in believing that we were liberators, when in fact we oppressed the freedoms and wishes of Fallujans. The contradiction lies in believing that we were heroes, when the definition of “hero” bares no relation to our actions in Fallujah.

What we did to Fallujah cannot be undone, and I see no point in attacking the people in my former unit. What I want to attack are the lies and false beliefs. I want to destroy the prejudices that prevented us from putting ourselves in the other’s shoes and asking ourselves what we would have done if a foreign army invaded our country and laid siege to our city.

Læs endelig det hele.

Egypten: ‘We are in the shit. The Dark Days’

Sandmonkey, også kendt under sit rigtige navn Mahmoud Salem, er et af de mennesker, der bedst forstår dynamikken i det oprør, der har præget Egypten det sidste års tid. Han har blogget mod diktaturet i mere end et halvt årti, og har i samme periode været aktivt involveret i politisk modstandsarbejde, for ikke at tale om efterspurgt af Mubaraks hemmelige politi. Ved det nys overståede valg stillede han op til parlamentet, men tabte.

Sandmonkey er ikke optimist, i modsætning til Hossam Al-Hamalawy, som vi citerede forleden, og som er det på længere sigt. Mahmoud mener, at den egyptiske revolution er inde i en mørk, makaber fase, som kuldslår og lammer de aktivister, der kæmper for et bedre land. Folk har begået fejl, der er svindlet med valget, og militæret er ikke sene til at udnytte situationen:

My helplessness reached its peak when my friend S. came over two nights ago, and she was not alright. Fighting to release the thousands that are getting military tried over the months has been a draining crusade for her, and it only got worse the moment she got involved in trying to ensure that the death reports of those killed in Mohamed Mahmoud do not get forged, which meant she had to be at the Zeinhom morgue the night those bodies would come in, surrounded by wailing families and crying loved ones, seeing dead bodies after dead body come in, and almost getting arrested by the authorities that didn’t want her stopping the cover-up. She told me after wards that she now sees those dead bodies everywhere, and she can’t escape them. But that night, 2 nights ago, she had just come back from Tahrir, where a man , standing inches away from her, ended up getting set on fire due to an exploding Molotov cocktail. She could see the fire engulf him, the smell of burnt flesh and hair, his agonizing screams for help. She was silent. Very calm and silent. She was sitting next to me and I couldn’t reach her, and all I could do is hold her without being able to tell her that things will be alright. Because..how? How will they be alright exactly?

…

I haven’t written in two months. Two months I have spent running for parliament, stopping my campaign to run around all the field hospitals in Mohamed Mahmoud and ensuring they are well supplied, to losing the election and heading to Suez to lead another one, one that I managed to “win”. The things I have seen, on the street, I do not wish on anyone. One day I will write about that experience, but not today. Today, allow me to take you into my fragmented mind a bit. I have been silent, I have been tied up by advisors over what you can and cannot say during an election. This is over. The elections, for me, are over.

…

One of the biggest mistakes of this revolution, and there are plenty to go around, was that we allowed its political aspects to overshadow the cultural and social aspects. We have unleashed a torrent of art, music and creativity, and we don’t celebrate or enjoy it, or even promote it. We have brought the people to a point where they were ready to change. To change who they are and how they act, and we ignored that and instead focused all of our energies in a mismanaged battle over the political direction of this country. We clashed with the military, and we forgot the people, and we let that small window that shows up maybe every 100 years where a nation is willing to change, to evolve, to go to waste.

…

The parliamentary elections are fraudulent. I am not saying this because I lost- I lost fair and square- but because it’s the truth. The fraud happened on the hands of the election workers and the Judges. People in my campaign were offered Ballot boxes, employees and judges in polling stations were instructing people who to vote for and giving unstamped ballots to Christians in polling stations where they are heavily present to invalidate their votes, and the Egyptian bloc has about half a ton of correct ballots- ones that showed people voting for them- found being thrown in the streets in Heliopolis, Ghamra, Shubra, Zaitoun, Alexandria, Suez and many other districts. The amount of reports of fraud and legal injunctions submitted against these elections are enough to bring it all down and have it done all over again. Hell, a simple request for a vote recount would be enough to expose the fraud, since the ballots were thrown in the street.

…

What you see as a campaign manager is very different than what you see as a candidate, especially when you are a campaign manager in Suez. To make a long story short, in the 10 days we were there, this is what went down: We had one of our campaign workers fall victim to a hit and run “accident”, a campaign operative getting arrested by the military police at a polling station for filming the army promoting the Salafi Nour Party (with a big banner carrying the Noor Party slogan being placed on the side of an Army Truck) and his film confiscated of course, our campaign headquarters got attacked with molotov cocktails by thugs sent by a “moderate” islamist centrist party (hint: It’s not ElAdl) , the hotel we were staying in got repeatedly attacked by thugs till 3 am, with the army platoon leader protecting the Hotel informing me that if I don’t resolve the situation, he will “deal violently” with those outside and inside the hotel, the Leader of the 3rd Egyptian Army calling us looking for me, the Chief of Security for Suez doing the same thing, Lawyers and thugs working for a semi-leftist party filed police reports against us claiming we hired them and owed them money when we didn’t, and the other campaign manager finally going to deal with the situation, ends up getting arrested, and the two campaign members that were with him were left outside under the mercy of groups of thugs, and we managed by the grace of god get them all out unharmed and we escape Suez while Trucks filled with guys with guns going around Suez looking for us.

…

Why would the military be “helping” the Salafi Noor Party get votes? Well, mainly because they invented them. It was a match made possible by State-Security, who probably alerted the military of how reliable were the salafis in their previous “cooperation” to scare the living shit out of the population into submission and supporting the regime. Remember the All Saints church attack, the one that happened this New Year? Remember the documents proving that our very own State Security had arranged it to take place to force the Coptic population to support Mubarak? Yeah, it’s kind of like that. Only on a higher level.

Ovenstående er kun uddrag af en deprimerende fortælling om, hvor Egypten måske også er på vej hen. Som om nogen vidste det. Men læs endelig det hele, hvis du interesserer dig for udviklingen i Egypten (og dermed hele den arabiske verden) i disse år.

Link: Underneath (via Beirut Spring)

Meanwhile, in Egypt

Militæret slår til på Tahrir-pladsen.

Advarsel: Stærke billeder af vold mod ubevæbnede demonstranter.

Via Beirut Spring, som skriver:

Egyptian soldiers beating up female protestor
- That’s not how you build a country -

People defending the violent action of the army in Egypt against protesters always ask us to look at the “big picture”. They ask for patience for the democratic process to take hold, and for a civilian authority to eventually reign in the soldiers.

But when I see videos like this (which I ask all of you to spread as wide as you can), in which soldiers so viciously hit demonstrators and defile their women, I see what the big picture really is: It’s about human dignity and the value of every single egyptian life. That was the whole point of the revolution and the Arab spring.

This is not about some long elaborate process in which eventually the rulers will learn to respect the civilians. This is about once and for all establishing the primacy of the citizen as the sole source of power and legitimacy in the country.

Tåregas og tortur i Bahrain

Nicholas Kristof, som jeg omtalte i mit sidste indlæg om anholdelsen af Zainab Alkhawaja, opsummerer situationen i Bahrain de seneste uger med to små billeder – det ene netop af Alkhawaja:

[Obama] should also  understand the systematic, violent repression here, the kind that apparently killed a 14-year-old boy, Ali al-Sheikh, and continues to torment his family.Ali grew up here in Sitra, a collection of poor villages far from the gleaming bank towers of Bahrain’s skyline. Almost every day pro-democracy protests still bubble up in Sitra, and even when they are completely peaceful they are crushed with a barrage of American-made tear gas.

People here admire much about America and welcomed me into their homes, but there is also anger that the tear gas shells that they sweep off the streets each morning are made by a Pennsylvania company, NonLethal Technologies. It is a private company that declined to comment, but the American government grants it a license for these exports — and every shell fired undermines our image.

In August, Ali joined one of the protests. A policeman fired a shell at Ali from less than 15 feet away, according to the account of the family and human-rights groups. The shell apparently hit the boy in the back of the neck, and he died almost immediately, a couple of minutes’ walk from his home.

The government claims that the bruise was “inconsistent” with a blow from a tear gas grenade. Frankly, I’ve seen the Bahrain authorities lie so much that I don’t credit their denial. (….)

The police have continued to persecute Ali’s family. For starters, riot policemen fired tear gas at the boy’s funeral, villagers say.The police summoned Jawad for interrogation, most recently this month. He fears he will be fired from his job in the Ministry of Electricity.

Mourners regularly leave flowers and photos of Ali on his grave, which is in a vacant lot near the home. Perhaps because some messages call him a martyr, the riot police come regularly and smash the pictures and throw away the flowers. The family has not purchased a headstone yet, for fear that the police will destroy it.

The repression is ubiquitous. Consider Zainab al-Khawaja, 28, whose husband and father are both in prison and have been tortured for pro-democracy activities, according to human rights reports. Police officers have threatened to cut off Khawaja’s tongue, she told me, and they broke her father’s heart by falsely telling him that she had been shipped to Saudi Arabia to be raped and tortured. She braved the risks by talking to me about this last week — before she was arrested too.

Khawaja earned her college degree in Wisconsin. She was sitting peacefully protesting in a traffic circle when the police attacked her. First they fired tear gas grenades next to her, and then handcuffed her and dragged her away — sometimes slapping and hitting her as video cameras rolled. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights says that she was beaten more at the police station.

Khawaja is tough as nails, and when we walked alongside demonstrations together, she seemed unbothered by tear gas that left me blinded and coughing. But she worried about her 2-year-old daughter, Jude. And one time as we were driving back from visiting a family whose baby had just died, possibly because so much tear gas had been fired in the neighborhood, Khawaja began crying. “I think I’m losing it,” she said. “It all just gets to me.”

Mine fremhævelser. Mahmood Al-Yousif har et længere blogindlæg, hvor han gør opmærksom på, at myndighederne i Bahrain fortsat torterer og myrder ganske ustraffet, som Kristofs historie om Ali desværrre siger alt om:

Maybe if you have a few atoms of humanity left in you, it might help you remove that veil off your conscience and see things for what they are:

This incident – amongst hundreds of others currently being meted out to the majority of villages in this country – should be independently investigated and the officers implicated and their masters who are doing nothing to stop this must be made to account for their actions and be punished. The government who oversees this situation should be summarily dismissed of course and with haste. Nothing else would do if that illusive “new page” is to become a reality.

Hvorfor greb man ind med bombning af Libyen for at standse overgrebene, mens for eksempel den amerikanske regering ikke lægger det mindste pres på Bahrain? Vel, en af forskellene er, at undertrykkelsen i Bahrain set i forhold til landets indbyggertal er værre end i Libyen. En anden er, at vestmagterne i stedet valgte at sætte kiggerten for det blinde øjne, da Bahrains kongefamilie diskret indkaldte forstærkninger i form af nogle tusinde soldater fra Saudi-Arabien, der kunne bistå i opgøret med de fredelige demonstranter. Money talks.