Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 177
August 22, 2014
What It’s Like To Be Gay In Uganda
Brandon Ambrosino interviews Nicholas Opiyo, a Ugandan attorney who helped overturn the country’s infamous anti-gay law. He describes the harassment Ugandan gays face:
You’re not going to see public flogging of gay people in the streets. That would be a rarity, and even if it occurs, because of the nature of our media, it’s not going to get reported widely. What, however, happens is persistent, consistent, daily discrimination of the smallest nature possible. The shopkeeper at the kiosk next to your house, the boda boda guy, they keep heckling at you. People keep telling your family and brothers about you. They tell your family they will not come to your burials. People sneering at you, saying negative things to you. People pointing at your back: you cannot go to public places without being pointed at.
There is also the blackmail and extortion by police and security forces.
If the police know that somebody is gay, they will deliberately frame a charge against you, arrest you, and give you a police bond. A police bond is temporary freedom while your case is being investigated. If they know you are gay, they keep extorting money from you in exchange for your freedom. They say, “Oh, we’ve got evidence against you. We’re going to take you to court, so give us money.”
That is what kills the spirits, the hearts, the minds of gay people in Uganda. The insane discrimination. The insane segregation, and the sense of exclusion that happens every single day in every single place for gay men and lesbian women in Uganda. Just going to the hospital and getting treatment. Going to buy lubricant — you might not even find a place to buy lubricant, to buy condoms. If you have a particular problem, you may never get treatment because of the fear that people are going to keep pointing at you [points], “That one. That one!”
That is what is killing gay people in our country.
The Ebola Outbreak Grows Worse
Julia Belluz flags an eye-opening chart on the growing severity of the Ebola crisis:
The situation is dire in West Point, a Liberian slum:
Tens of thousands of people are trapped in a slum in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, after officials put the neighborhood under strict quarantine to prevent the spread of Ebola. Clashes broke out on Wednesday, as riot police and soldiers attempted to barricade angry residents. Days earlier, locals had raided a holding center for suspected Ebola patients, pulling out mattresses covered in blood, which could spread the disease.
Per Liljas provides more details:
On Saturday, a health center was looted and Ebola patients sent running, after a rumor spread that infected people were being brought in from other parts of the country. Others refused to believe the disease existed. “There is no Ebola,” some protesters attacking the clinic shouted. “There is a high level of disbelief in the government in West Point,” Sanj Srikanthan, the International Rescue Committee’s emergency response director in Liberia, tells TIME. “The government has made a concerted effort to reach out to community leaders, youth groups and churches with the message that the only way to contain the disease is to understand it. But some people still believe Ebola is a conspiracy, and those people we need to reach.”
Raphael Frankfurter is unsurprised “that aggressive, opaque public health measures are met with suspicion, resistance, and anger”:
In public health, the emphasis on “harmful behaviors” arising from ignorance fails to acknowledge the complex socioeconomic factors and structural conditions that can lead to poor health.
In the wake of the first Ebola cases in Guinea, the Guinean government and later the Sierra Leonean government launched a massive campaign to persuade people not to hunt and consume bushmeat, which is thought to carry Ebola. Though well-intentioned, these campaigns did not adequately consider that malnutrition is widespread in rural West Africa, and villages in which the population heavily relies on bushmeat are often healthier—in our experience, they even have significantly lower rates of malnourishment. It wasn’t just an issue of people “not knowing” not to eat fruit bats and gorillas—bushmeat was their only source of protein. Continuing to eat it can be understood as a rational decision based on a risk assessment—malnutrition will likely always lead to more deaths in West Africa than an Ebola outbreak.
But I’ve also observed through four years of fieldwork in Sierra Leone that public health interventions that rely on the passive reception of “medical facts” by target communities and that hinge on getting “them” to think like “us,” are simply ineffective. To health workers, taking patients home to die in surrounded by their families, to be collectively buried and remembered in their villages might be considered “irrational” or “contributing to the spread of the disease.” But these practices also allow for a kind of solidarity and resilience in the face of capricious, cruel disease.
Liljas emphasizes the desperation of aid workers as they continue to battle the ebola outbreak in West Africa with limited support from overstretched international organizations:
[T]he biggest unmet need is for additional well-trained health workers. Professionals on the ground are exhausted, and several hundred have died in part because of a lack of training. MSF and other organizations are stretched to breaking point, some of them because of their involvement in other crises. USAID, for example, is responding to four humanitarian crises at the same time: South Sudan, Syria, Iraq and the Ebola outbreak. It must also weigh up whether to put people at risk.
David Francis details how the virus is also endangering the region’s fragile economy:
The outbreak comes at an inopportune time for the region. Prior to the outbreak, the Nigerian economy was being celebrated as the largest in Africa, with a GDP of $510 billion, compared with second-place South Africa, with a GDP of $353 billion. Sierra Leone is attempting to draw foreign investment to its diamond industry and saw its GDP grow 20.1 percent from 2012 to 2013. In 2013, Guinea’s GDP grew a modest 2 percent.
All of these positives are now overshadowed by the bleak prediction of Ebola’s ramifications in the region. The World Bank estimates that Guinea’s GDP will shrink between 3.5 and 4.5 percent this year as Ebola roils the agricultural sector and discourages regional trade. Liberia’s finance minister, Amara Konneh, lowered the country’s GDP estimates by 5.9 percent because of the outbreak. Bismarck Rewane, CEO of the Financial Derivatives Company, a Lagos-based financial advisory and research firm that manages $18 million in assets, told CNBC Africa on Monday, Aug. 18, that Nigeria could lose at least $3.5 billion of its $510 billion GDP. Moody’s has already warned that the virus could hinder the region’s energy sector.
Should ISIS Be Censored? Ctd
We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you twitter.com/nytimes/status…—
dick costolo (@dickc) August 20, 2014
Glenn Greenwald is upset at Twitter for censoring the video of James Foley’s beheading:
Given the savagery of the Foley video, it’s easy in isolation to cheer for its banning on Twitter. But that’s always how censorship functions: it invariably starts with the suppression of viewpoints which are so widely hated that the emotional response they produce drowns out any consideration of the principle being endorsed. It’s tempting to support criminalization of, say, racist views as long as one focuses on one’s contempt for those views and ignores the serious dangers of vesting the state with the general power to create lists of prohibited ideas. That’s why free speech defenders such as the ACLU so often represent and defend racists and others with heinous views in free speech cases: because that’s where free speech erosions become legitimized in the first instance when endorsed or acquiesced to.
The question posed by Twitter’s announcement is not whether you think it’s a good idea for people to see the Foley video. Instead, the relevant question is whether you want Twitter, Facebook and Google executives exercising vast power over what can be seen and read.
Jay Caspian Kang joins the debate, coming down on the same side as Greenwald:
Twitter is not an editorial outfit; it’s odd to think that a company that allows thousands of other gruesome videos, including other ISIS beheadings, would suddenly step in. Twitter, for example, allows creepshot accounts, in which men secretly take photos of women in public. (The sharing of creepshot photos has been banned on Reddit because it tended to target underage girls.) Where, exactly, is the enforcement line? …
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have taken an outsize share of the information market, mostly by acting as facilitators. As presently constructed, the policies at each company about what do in these extraordinary situations are still in flux and under-formed. Having families fill out a form on a Web site about a beheading and chalking up the removal of the video to ill-defined company policy does not accurately reflect the power of the image, nor the power of social media. If Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube want to imagine their networks as something of a public square that can, at times, inspire revolutionary movements, they should come up with a more transparent and thoughtful way to deal with the extraordinary footage that is sure to come through their servers.
On the other hand, Emerson Brooking notes, ISIS’s social media propaganda ops are a key element of its war effort:
Social media has proven a powerful tool in the Islamic State’s military offensives. When IS advanced on Mosul beginning June 10, the Iraqi army collapsed immediately. An estimated 60,000 officers and soldiers fled in the first day of fighting. As IS has pushed both south and eastward, threatening to both encircle Baghdad and crush the semiautonomous Kurds, the rout has accelerated. More than 200,000 Iraqi minorities escaped ahead of IS’ early August offensive, abandoning their towns en masse. In total, some 500,000 civilians are thought to have sought refuge in Kurdish-controlled lands. While it is doubtful that more than a fraction of Iraq’s fleeing soldiers and civilians have seen the Islamic State’s postings, it only takes a small handful for the rumors to take hold.
Either way, though, Ben Makuch stresses how futile it is to try and banish ISIS from social media entirely:
I reached out to a Canadian fighter by the nom de guerre Abu Turaab al-Kanadi (“the Canadian”) on Monday, to see what the reaction was among online IS fighters. He’d been booted from Twitter, which I asked him about on Kik messenger. He was very blunt as to what solicited the hand of Twitter officials. “Probably the severed heads,” al-Kanadi said, adding that he was not offered any warning emails or an explanation from Twitter as to why his account was suspended. But al-Kanadi didn’t seem bothered: “It’s whatever. I made a new one.” … Banning Jihadists from Twitter already seems like an impossible feat, especially when at any moment there’s nothing stopping a banned fighter simply from recreating an account outside the auspices of Twitter officials. Unless you could somehow impose an internet black out on targeted regions of Iraq—even then, the Iraqi government did that with mixed results—it’s a near impossible task.
Is ISIS A Threat To Us?
Chuck Hagel thinks so:
The group “is as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen. They’re beyond just a terrorist group,” Hagel said in response to a question about whether the Islamic State posed a similar threat to the United States as al Qaeda did before Sept. 11, 2001. “They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They’re tremendously well-funded. This is beyond anything that we’ve seen,” Hagel said, adding that “the sophistication of terrorism and ideology married with resources now poses a whole new dynamic and a new paradigm of threats to this country.”
Hagel’s comments added to the mismatch between the Obama administration’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric and its current game plan for how to take on the group in Iraq and Syria, which so far involves limited airstrikes and some military assistance to the Kurdish and Iraqi forces fighting the militants. It has also requested from Congress $500 million to arm moderate rebel factions in Syria. But for now, the United States is not interested in an Iraqi offer to let U.S. fighter jets operate out of Iraqi air bases.
Retired Gen. John Allen seconds Hagel’s assessment, arguing that the US has the means to destroy ISIS and a moral and security-based obligation to do so:
IS must be destroyed and we must move quickly to pressure its entire “nervous system,” break it up, and destroy its pieces. As I said, the president was absolutely right to strike IS, to send advisors to Iraq, to arm the Kurds, to relieve the suffering of the poor benighted people of the region, to seek to rebuild functional and non-sectarian Iraqi Security Forces and to call for profound change in the political equation and relationships in Baghdad.
The whole questionable debate on American war weariness aside, the U.S. military is not war weary and is fully capable of attacking and reducing IS throughout the depth of its holdings, and we should do it now, but supported substantially by our traditional allies and partners, especially by those in the region who have the most to give – and the most to lose – if the Islamic State’s march continues. It’s their fight as much as ours, for the effects of IS terror will certainly spread in the region with IS seeking soft spots for exploitation.
Observing how the official rhetoric on ISIS has escalated, Eli Lake picks up on a choice of phrasing by Obama that he interprets as revealing:
In the aftermath of the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Obama vowed to bring the attackers to justice. This week Obama struck a different tone, saying: “When people harm Americans, anywhere, we do what’s necessary to see that justice is done.” The difference between bringing suspects to justice and seeing that justice is done is roughly the same as the difference between treating terrorism as a crime and as an act of war.
Even though special operations teams were dispatched to Libya after Benghazi to target the jihadists suspected of carrying it out, Obama chose to treat the attack, which cost the lives of four Americans, as a crime. It took until June of this year for the FBI in conjunction with U.S. special operations teams to capture one of the ringleaders of the attack and bring him to the United States to face trial. A different fate likely awaits the leaders of ISIS.
Larison is steaming, of course:
The good news so far is that the administration doesn’t appear to be taking its own rhetoric all that seriously, but the obvious danger is that it will trap itself into taking far more aggressive measures by grossly exaggerating the nature of the threat from ISIS in this way. The truth is that ISIS doesn’t pose an imminent threat to the U.S. and its allies, unless one empties the word imminent of all meaning. Hagel made the preposterous statement today that the group poses an “imminent threat to every interest we have.” That is simply a lie, and a remarkably stupid one at that, and it is the worst kind of fear-mongering. Administration officials are engaged in the most blatant threat inflation with these recent remarks, which is all the more strange since they claim not to favor the aggressive kind of policy that their irresponsible rhetoric supports.
If the group can be contained, as Gen. Dempsey states, then it can be contained indefinitely. If that is the case, then the threat that it poses is a much more manageable one than the other ridiculous claims from administration officials would suggest.
Allahpundit figures it’s only a matter of time before ISIS attempts an attack on American soil:
ISIS has every incentive to do it, too. Nothing would lift their prestige in the jihadiverse more than an attack on American soil. They have nothing to lose at this point by holding off either; quite rightly, we’re going to bomb them whether they do it or not. They have the motive and they most certainly have the means, flush with cash to pay traffickers handsomely for smuggling them across and well supplied with men who can melt into the U.S. population more easily than the average ISIS neckbeard. If you want to knock Perry for something, knock him for understating the threat: Why would ISIS send a jihadi to cross the border, where he might be caught, when they could put one with a British passport on a plane and have him waltz into the United States instead?
By engaging the jihadists in battle, Keating points out, the US creates that incentive:
ISIS and its predecessor organization, al-Qaida in Iraq, have long held hostile views toward the United States and its presence in the Middle East. It has issued threats against the U.S. before, including a promise to “raise the flag of Allah in the White House.” U.S. and European governments have also warned for some time that the large numbers of international fighters who have traveled to Syria to fight with ISIS could return with the means and know-how to carry out attacks in their home countries. So far there hasn’t been much evidence of this actually taking place. … This has arguably been to ISIS’s strategic benefit. It’s hard to believe the U.S. would have taken quite this long to send in the drones had there been evidence that ISIS was actively plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland or even U.S. facilities in the Middle East. Now, that’s obviously changed. With the U.S. bombing its forces in Iraq, there’s no benefit for ISIS in refraining from attacks against Americans.
August 21, 2014
Face Of The Day
A model wears a Phoenix costume during the 13th annual Jember Fashion Carnival on August 21, 2014 in Jember, Indonesia. This year the carnival’s theme is ‘Triangle, Dynamic in Harmony’ and consists of ten parades: Mahabharata, Tambora, Phoenix, Pine Forest, Apache, Borobudur, Flying Kite, Wild Deers, Stalagmite, and Chemistry. The street carnival is claimed to be one of the biggest in the world and comprises more than 850 performers parading along 3.6 km of road, which is treated like a catwalk. Photo by Robertus Pudyanto/Getty Images.
“No. No. No.” Ctd
A reader writes:
Like many others, I was simply floored by the post in which a woman bravely details her experience of being raped and dealing with its aftereffects. (I’d call her a “rape survivor,” but I hate the term. That’s not all we are.) Never before has someone, even the two therapists I have seen since my rape – not even novelists, and I’ve read a few – crystallized those feelings, that experience, that shame, so powerfully and so accurately. It was all the things I’ve wanted to say for years but for which I’d never been able to find the exact right words. And then there they were.
A college friend who was also raped forwarded me the story. It came with the subject line “oh my God.”
I was raped my freshman year of college, within two weeks of having arrived at my school. Initially, I didn’t tell anyone what happened. I just couldn’t. I had just started. I just wanted to be a normal student like everyone else. And that’s what I tried to be, even though I barely stayed above water. That is until I noticed how differently my friend was behaving when she returned from her junior year abroad. I recognized her symptoms immediately because they were the same symptoms I had been feeling and suffering from for the past few years. So I flat-out asked her if something had happened while she was abroad. She told me that yes, something did happen. We then confided in each other and spent our senior year trying to help each other feel a little bit less alone. We even gave ourselves the name “the rape sisters.”
That was years ago, and we have both since moved on. But you never move past. It’s always there. Whether it’s how you can never go into that deep wonderful sleep again the same way you used to, or the way someone brushes up against you in public, there’s always something to trigger that memory that never leaves.
I wish I knew who this author was so that I could give her a hug and tell her thank you. I wish they would hand her story out to incoming freshmen at every college and university in the country and make them read it. It is quite simply the best account of what rape does to a woman’s heart, mind, and soul that I have ever read.
And thank you for posting it. Stories like that, like ours, need to be told.
Another reader adds:
One thing that really brought home the reality of rape and assault to me was the Unbreakable Project. Survivors write down the words their rapists used and (sometimes) pose with them.
The Twice-Displaced Palestinians
Alice Su highlights the peculiar predicament of Palestinian Syrians, who unlike other displaced people looking to flee the civil war don’t have the right to seek refuge in neighboring countries:
Amid the millions of refugees from Syria flooding into neighboring countries like Lebanon and Jordan, a minority group is being quietly denied entry, detained, deported, and pushed out in any way possible: Palestinians. They are refugees who literally have nowhere to go.
In recent months, Jordanian and Lebanese authorities have acknowledged that Palestinians from Syria are not welcome to asylum in the same way that other Syrian refugees are. Jordan and Lebanon have respectively been barring Palestinians from entry since January and August 2013, in contrast with the treatment of some 600,000 Syrian nationals in Jordan and 1.5 million in Lebanon, according to Human Rights Watch. The organization has also documented forcible deportations of Palestinians—women and children included—from both countries.
I touched on this issue last week, and I’m glad to see it’s getting some more press. This is another example of the many ways Palestinians suffer for having no state of their own and no genuine acceptance in the countries where so many of them ended up after being displaced in the 1948 and 1967 wars.
I’m somewhat agnostic on how best to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (more on that later), but the severe impact of Palestinian statelessness on the lives and welfare of Palestinian refugees and their descendants is—or at least ought to be—beyond dispute. Israel is the primary agent of this problem, but it’s worth remembering that most Arab states have not exactly been kind to the Palestinians either.
It’s also an example of how the Palestinian experience in the Arab Middle East since 1948 replicates with eerie similarity the experience of the Jews in Europe in the bad old days. Imagine living your entire life in a country where the majority of people look pretty much the same as you do but consider you foreign, undeserving of the rights of citizenship, and somehow a threat to them for reasons they can’t really articulate. Imagine being in perpetual danger of expulsion or worse at the whim of an autocrat or a populist mob, and having no place to go where you know you will be safe from that danger. One would think that two peoples having both been through such a harrowing experience would be able to find more common ground than they do, but perhaps the fearful worldview engendered by that trauma overrides whatever perspective it might provide.
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