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Ministers accused of watering down rules around abortion clinic buffer zones

The Guardian | Protest -

Campaigners could still be allowed to conduct silent prayers and approach women attending clinics in England and Wales

Ministers have been accused of watering down guidance around new buffer zones outside abortion clinics in England and Wales, after it emerged campaigners could still be allowed to conduct silent prayers and approach women attending clinics to discuss the issue.

New draft guidance published by the Home Office has caused alarm among people who campaigned for the 150-metre safe zones, due to be introduced in the spring.

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Russia protest: crowds clash with riot police as activist jailed – video

The Guardian | Protest -

Protesters in a small town in the central Bashkortostan region in Russia clashed with riot police on Wednesday after a court sentenced an eco-activist and campaigner for the protection of the Bashkir language to four years in prison for inciting hatred. Fail Alsynov was accused of making a racist comment in a speech to a village council meeting against gold-digging. He says his words were mistranslated

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From the archive, 1974: Centre Point taken at last

The Guardian | Protest -

19 January 1974: Last night, the empty tower block was illegally occupied by demonstrators concerned about the housing situation in London

Centre Point, Harry Hyams’s office block in London which has been empty since it was built 10 years ago, last night was occupied by about a hundred demonstrators in an impeccably organised operation which took seven months to plan.

The demonstrators intend to stay until 3 pm tomorrow, and are appealing for a vigil outside and a big rally to mark the end of the occupation. Late last night, after barricading the entrances with scaffolding, they were organising a routine which included security patrolling of the building and an hourly call to the security firm which normally guards it to inform them that everything was all right.

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Fifty years on, could we see another Centre Point-style housing protest?

The Guardian | Protest -

In January 1974, campaigners took over a large vacant tower block in central London to protest against the housing crisis. We hear from those who were there

One cold afternoon in January 1974, the future treasurer of the Labour party, Jack Dromey, donned the uniform of a Burns International Security Services guard and climbed the stairs to the glass doors of the Centre Point tower.

Dromey and his fellow undercover housing campaigner, Andy Carter, were the arrowhead of an audacious occupation of the central London block that had been left vacant for a decade by its speculative developer, Harry Hyams, becoming a symbol of the housing crisis under Edward Heath’s government.

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Jon Tinker obituary

The Guardian | Protest -

My former colleague Jon Tinker, who has died aged 83, was involved in the 1960s in Spies for Peace, a British group of anti-war activists. In 1963 they photographed and published top-secret government plans for maintaining control after a nuclear attack.

Jon disclosed his role to me shortly before he died. He admitted he did not have the derring-do to take part in the break-in into one of the secret bunkers intended to govern the country in the event of nuclear war, but he relished the subsequent cloak-and-dagger operation to write the pamphlet and news release that the government unsuccessfully tried to suppress.

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Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to be banned from organising in UK

The Guardian | Protest -

Group has been criticised by ministers over demonstrations held against Israeli strikes on Gaza

Hizb ut-Tahrir will be banned from organising in the UK following claims that the group is antisemitic, the home secretary has said.

The Islamist group, which is already banned in several countries including Germany and Indonesia, will no longer be allowed to recruit or hold protests and meetings across the UK.

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Land Underwater review – emotive record of Spanish villages destroyed by dam flood

The Guardian | Protest -

Documentary tells story of the destructive erasure and displacement caused by the dam’s construction – through the tapes of the activists who tried to stop it

In 2003 the Itoiz dam in Navarre, Spain, was completed and its reservoir filled in, submerging seven villages and three nature reserves in the process. Environmental group Solidari@s con Itoiz fought hard against this destructive ecological event. In addition to direct action including physically sabotaging the dam compound, the activists also closely monitored and filmed its construction. Created in clandestine circumstances, these hazy recordings emerge like a warning from the past in Maddi Barber’s spectral, enigmatic documentary.

Interviews with members of Solidari@s con Itoiz, shot in intimate closeup, ache with a longing for places that no longer exist. Their vivid recollections are juxtaposed with present-day footage of the area, which is now devoid of human presence; all that remains are lonely tree trunks standing in deep pools of water. In this record of erasure and displacement, the activists’ tapes are a kind of historical witness – of the military oppression of protestors, the demolition of local houses, and more. In one clip an unseen activist asks her associate to take in the sight of a beautiful rainbow – this fleeting natural phenomenon paralleling the beauty of the landscape, itself shortly to vanish.

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Why Europe’s farmers are protesting – and the far right is taking note

The Guardian | Protest -

For some farmers already struggling, paying for more of their pollution is a step too far. Germany is the latest country to see anger boil over

The columns of tractors that have blocked roads in Germany, causing chaos in cities and headaches for commuters, are the latest wave in a growing tide of anger against efforts to protect Europe’s nature from the pollution pumped out by its farms.

In recent years, farmers in western Europe have fought with increasing ferocity against policies to protect the planet that they say cost too much. In the Netherlands, where the backlash has been strongest, a court ruling on nitrogen emissions in 2019 triggered furious and recurring protests over government efforts to close farms and cut the number of animals on them. In Belgium, similar fights led to convoys of tractors clogging the EU quarter of Brussels in March last year. In Ireland, which has seen smaller protests, dairy farmers angry at nitrogen restrictions marched with their cows to the offices of three government ministers last month.

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Thousands attend London rally in solidarity with Israel

The Guardian | Protest -

President of Israel in video address to Trafalgar Square demonstrators marking 100 days since deadly Hamas attack

Thousands of people have turned out in central London in solidarity with Israel on the 100th day since Hamas launched its deadly attack.

The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, thanked King Charles in a video message at the rally in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, mentioning Rishi Sunak and the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, as well.

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'Justice is lacking': pro-Palestine demonstrators gather in London – video

The Guardian | Protest -

Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in London on Saturday, said the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Some of the protesters also called for an end to airstrikes against Yemen, which were launched by a coalition led by the US earlier this week against Houthi targets. The metropolitan police deployed 1,700 officers to provide security for the march

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Thousands of pro-Palestine protesters march in London

The Guardian | Protest -

About 1,700 officers on duty in UK capital to police demonstration on day for action involving 30 countries

Thousands of people marched through central London on Saturday to show solidarity with Palestine and to reiterate calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Demonstrators met on Queen Victoria Street before making their way along Fleet Street towards Parliament Square. The protest, part of a global day of action, comes after the RAF and the US military carried out airstrikes against Houthi bases in Yemen.

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Hundreds of thousands expected at weekend protests in London after Yemen strikes

The Guardian | Protest -

Saturday’s march for Gaza ceasefire as part of global day of action will be followed by static rally for Israel on Sunday

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to gather in London over the weekend in protest against the war in Gaza as the conflict widens to Yemen.

On Saturday, protesters are expected to gather at Bank Junction at midday as part of a global day of action involving 30 countries, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign said.

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Why conspiracy theories are corrosive to social movements — and what to do about it

Waging Nonviolence -

This article Why conspiracy theories are corrosive to social movements — and what to do about it was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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“Be forewarned that this has left me very disillusioned, and I felt the same way as I felt when deconstructing Christianity,” said one TikTok creator, speaking into her phone camera. She was one of dozens, if not hundreds, of young people whose recent videos went viral after reading one particularly striking bit of agitprop: Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America.” The letter, which had been published by The Guardian until they deleted it, outlines a relatively straight-forward critique of American foreign policy, laced with extreme social conservatism and vast conspiracism. 

For the mostly Gen-Z readers, the letter was new, but it has been added to university syllabi and passed around the blogosphere for decades. The disillusionment these first-time readers were experiencing was presumably the reality that Bin Laden did not orchestrate 9/11 simply because he “hates our freedom,” but that Western powers have engaged in real crimes, with the U.S. as the primary culprit. But for anyone who knows their way around American history, Bin Laden’s critique is thin and obvious, and the diagnosis strays into familiar tropes.

“These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people,” wrote Bin Laden, who blamed Jews for just about every violation. “You are the nation that permits usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions … the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants…”

The piece does what populist, conspiracy tracts have always done: It takes real instances of oppression and spins them into an easily digestible, and false, narrative so that those making sense of the horrors can point fingers. While not a particularly novel take, Bin Laden’s references to Palestine made it relevant today, and if you have never encountered any deconstruction of America’s foreign policy, it may shock you.

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But the idea that the letter offers a biting critique misunderstands the purpose of dissent: Opposition to the current state of the world is not synonymous with fighting for a liberatory future. And the inability to parse out this reality has revealed instability across a radical left that often clamors after any ally in the struggle against systemic injustice. Without safeguards and clarity on the mission, nearly any voice against the status quo can be mistaken for a friend — including those who want to replace it with something even more deadly or whose analysis relies on conspiracy theories.

Revolts from below

History is a staccato of uprisings and revolts, nearly instinctual rejections of various systems of peonage and slavery. The question about uprisings is not if they will happen, but what form they will take. The conditions that bring about struggle, such as the exploitations that inspired peasant uprisings across feudal Europe or the explosive growth of the labor movement around the turn of the 20th century, are always legitimate, but not every expression of resistance is valid. The same labor movement that fought for the weekend also stood against non-white immigration and, at times, went on strike to “protect” white workers from integration. 

Experiencing a crisis does not immediately grant someone special insight into the causes of their conditions, and there is a long history of communities turning their anger on marginalized people rather than the powerful.

This is endemic to fascism’s rise. In countries where economic deprivation and crisis were explosive, many succumbed to revolutionary impulses that promised to address society’s failures while also validating the worst impulses established by colonialism and white supremacy. 

The culture of conspiracy theory can exist on the left when political acumen is not valued and rebellion of any type is understood as a net positive.

As French-Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell chronicled, fascist movements actually emerged out of a dissenting socialist trend: They wanted to destroy the system so badly that they cared little for the mechanism or outcome of that destruction. These “national syndicalists” replaced class as the historical change agent with “nation,” thus redirecting the dramatic anger the masses held towards their stagnating societies away from a class struggle and onto a racialized, authoritarian nightmare. They certainly wanted revolution, just not the type the left typically desires.

Undirected populism tends to reproduce our society’s bigotries and biases. For the West, antisemitism was a primary folk narrative to explain dislocation and alienation: “It was the Jews who were responsible for widening inequality and political disenfranchisement.” This belief has deep roots in Christian empire. And when modernity emerged and people were looking to explain new systems of abstraction, many turned to older antisemitic theories and simply secularized them. As European colonialism spread across the globe, it also exported many of its ideas, which explains why antisemitic conspiracy theories are found far from antisemitism’s Christian origins. 

During populist uprisings, it’s common for antisemitism to replace grounded political analysis. These ideas are often not the result of intentional misdirection by antisemites, but present because antisemitism remains a part of the Western populist imagination. Marxist scholar Moishe Postone called this “structural antisemitism” because the complicated way that capitalism works often confuses the public as to where the center of power lies, and what kind of figures should be seen as uniquely pernicious. The same principle works for most forms of scapegoating, such as when economic conflict is channeled into anti-immigrant xenophobia.

Previous Coverage
  • How the left is reclaiming the fight against antisemitism
  • This culture of conspiracy theory and blame-setting is endemic to the political right, which needs to channel working-class anger away from those in power and onto a marginalized community as a patsy. Since the right is not interested in challenging the wealthy or petitioning the powerful, they redirect disaffection onto a mirage.

    This dynamic can also exist on the left when political acumen is not valued and rebellion of any type is understood as a net positive. The left has changed dramatically over the past 30 years, moving into more spontaneous formations like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and mass antifascist actions. This has created a vacuum where movements need support, training and political development. Communities now organize more horizontally, and there is no turning back the clock on this development, at least in the near term. But when these movements lack any clear plan to achieve liberation, activists can also misread the issue, relying on conspiracism instead of analysis and finding friends where none exist.

    War conspiracies

    The confusion about how to challenge power — and the battle between conspiracy theory and a real mapping of power — has shown up in countless social movements, including some fringe cases in the movement for a ceasefire in Gaza. For example, in a Nov. 27 testimony before the Oakland City Council’s hearing on a proposed ceasefire resolution, one person said that “Israel murdered its own people on Oct. 7.”

    This unfounded proposition, which has shown up in other news outlets and commentary on the war, was that many, if not most, of the Israelis were actually killed by the IDF. It often comes with different implications, such as the idea that the IDF was catastrophically careless and then blamed Hamas or that it was a false flag attack to justify the bombing of Gaza.

    It is clear that some casualties on Oct. 7, including those from a tank attack and possibly from helicopter fire near the rave, could have happened as a result of reckless IDF behavior, but there seems to be little evidence that this is a particularly sizable portion of those killed. 

    However, ostensibly socialist news outlets like Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone have focused heavily on trying to undermine the claims of Hamas atrocities, assigning Jewish casualties to Israeli Defense Forces. The suggestion from much of this discourse is that the killing of Israelis was either mostly by the IDF or that Hamas killings were largely manufactured, thus displacing any concern that may emerge about what was done. 

    This framing creates multiple problems, such as hinging opposition to the assault on Gaza on who is responsible for Israeli deaths — or the callous denial of Jewish victimhood — rather than Israel’s disproportionate use of violence. This shifts the messaging away from challenging Israel’s genocidal assault on its own terms and turns it into a convoluted debate about shadowy military orders and hidden directives. 

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    Despite being one of the most well documented attacks in recent history, many seem to think that acknowledging Hamas violence will undermine their justifiable charges of genocide against Israel. But that is not the case. Being critical of Hamas’ brutal attack on Oct. 7 does nothing to undermine the movement against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. But any introduction of falsehoods simply fractures a movement’s global vision of justice.

    When this happens, it can help even more wild conspiracy theories to circulate, such as a popular TikTok video — seen by over 300,000 accounts before being plucked from the platform — claiming the Hamas attack was created by the media. 

    Once conspiracy theories enter the fray they often cross-populate with seemingly unrelated topics, as well. This has led to allegations of connections between Israel’s bombing campaign and the war in Ukraine both being seen as possibly the machinations of a new world order. 

    Given the IDF’s history of duplicity and denial of war crimes, there are reasons why distrust should be endemic. As Israel enacts one of the most brutal, one-sided assaults in the country’s history — the biggest displacement since the nakba — there are reasons that people are motivated to reframe the narrative away from the Western media’s complicity in Israel’s killings. Watching news outlets spin Israel’s violence as self-defense can be maddening, so it’s understandable why people would want to use any possible narrative to puncture their framing.

    But Israel has also chosen to conduct its indiscriminate violence in plain sight. No conspiracy theory is required. If we are unable to see where the conflict comes from — to understand the historical, economic and political forces involved — conspiracism becomes an easy way to explain something that demands an intense amount of context. 

    Previous Coverage
  • How the far right is trying to manipulate the crisis in Gaza
  • The conspiracy theories and misinformation have been as extreme in the other direction as well. False claims circulated about Hamas, such as the untrue allegation that militants had “beheaded babies,” that a baby was “cooked in an oven” or that Gazan suffering and casualties have been exaggerated. There is also an emerging far-right conspiracy theory in Israel that it was the pro-democracy protesters who staged the attack as a false flag. 

    It is exactly these types of claims that create even more distrust among those witnessing the violence, making it harder for people to find clear reporting to believe and facts to depend on. All of this has become even more severe as AI generated images and “deep fakes” give us a window into what the future of online conspiracy holds for us. The extensive misinformation has been used to mask, or even justify, Israel’s emerging genocide in Gaza. This is clearly verifiable and does not require extrapolation beyond the evidence. 

    When we include unprovable claims or assume extraordinary covert means beyond those verifiable in normal statecraft, we undermine our own analysis and allow for latent falsehoods and bigotries to replace grounded outrage. Those on the left can also frame any resistance to imperialism — even by far-right political and racist theocratic political movements — as allies simply by virtue of their attack on the imperial antagonist. 

    Avoiding this dangerous dynamic requires the left to build a vision and set of principles, an insight about the kind of world we want to fashion once we usher away the institutions that are propping up the unacceptable status quo. Simply picking the least objectionable side in a conflict between despotic powers or empowering anyone who can strike a blow to the halls of power is not enough. 

    Establishing this consistency requires the left to return to political arguments, reading groups, liberation schools, teach-ins and serious debate hashed out in late night meetings. This is what will move the justifiable instinct that something is wrong to an accurate diagnosis that begs workable action. Without a clear picture of how our world has failed, any demagogue can capture the energy of the disaffected by offering a solution that creates even more profound problems. Our mission is not to simply destroy the old world. It’s to build a new and more just one in its place.

    This article Why conspiracy theories are corrosive to social movements — and what to do about it was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

    Thousands protest in Yemen after US and UK strikes on Houthi targets – video

    The Guardian | Protest -

    Drone video shows thousands of people marching in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, to protest after the US and the UK launched strikes on targets in several of the country's cities overnight in retaliation against Houthi forces for attacks on Red Sea shipping.

    The commander of US aerial operations in the Middle East said 60 targets at 16 separate locations had been hit using more than 100 precision-guided munitions. The Houthis said five of their fighters had been killed in a total of 73 airstrikes, and that they would retaliate and continue their attacks on shipping, which they describe as a demonstration of support for Palestinians in their conflict with Israel

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    Jewish students sue Harvard over charges of antisemitism

    The Guardian | Protest -

    Plaintiffs accuse the university of tolerating harassment, assault and intimidation of Jewish students

    Several Jewish students have filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of becoming “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment”.

    The lawsuit filed earlier this week mirrors others submitted since the 7 October Hamas attack on southern Israel, including legal action against the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University and the University of Pennsylvania.

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    ‘To fight with my camera, to kill apartheid’: Peter Magubane – a life in pictures

    The Guardian | Protest -

    Born in Johannesburg in 1932, Peter Magubane documented the brutality of apartheid and suffered from banning orders, solitary confinement and beatings as a result. From teaching himself as a boy with a Brownie camera, he went on to work for the influential magazine Drum and became Nelson Mandela’s official photographer. He died on New Year’s Day aged 91. We take a look at Magubane’s remarkable career

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    Human rights in decline globally as leaders fail to uphold laws, report warns

    The Guardian | Protest -

    Human Rights Watch’s annual report highlights politicians’ double standards and ‘transactional diplomacy’ amid escalating crises

    Human rights across the world are in a parlous state as leaders shun their obligations to uphold international law, according to the annual report of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

    In its 2024 world report, HRW warns grimly of escalating human rights crises around the globe, with wartime atrocities increasing, suppression of human rights defenders on the rise, and universal human rights principles and laws being attacked and undermined by governments.

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    Papua New Guinea capital rocked by violent riots as police strike over pay

    The Guardian | Protest -

    Governor blames looting on ‘opportunists’ as officers are redeployed to Port Moresby from regional areas

    People have been killed and shops and businesses set on fire in the capital of Papua New Guinea after police went on strike over pay, according to the local governor.

    Property in Port Moresby had been looted by “opportunists” after events “spiralled out of control”, the governor of the National Capital District, Powes Parkop, said in a radio broadcast.

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    Only outside pressure can stop Israel’s war crimes | Naomi Klein

    The Guardian | Protest -

    In 2005, Palestinians called on the world to boycott Israel until it complied with international law. What if we had listened?

    Exactly 15 years ago this week, I published an article in the Guardian. It began like this:

    It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on ‘people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era’. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

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