Reposting this from 2012 about how the Obama administration made it legally impossible for the Department of Labor to ever re-raise the issue of child protective laws for children farmworkers in the US, most of whom are Latino. In many ways it can be said that Obama policies concerning immigrants & refugees set the stage for the Trump administration’s massive assaults on immigrant & refugee rights. At the same time as Obama was forcing little kids to work in dangerous situations without protections, he was also arresting & deporting more undocumented immigrants than any previous administration.

In a move breathtaking in its malignancy, the Obama administration just withdrew a proposal to the Department of Labor (DOL) to update safety laws for child farm workers. Contrary to popular misconception, child labor is not entirely illegal in the US. Outside of agriculture, children must be at least 16-years-old to work (14 & 15-year-olds can work as cashiers, grocery baggers, car washers). Children of any age are allowed to work on family farms without restrictions but in agribusiness, with an estimated 800,000 child workers, there are regulations for children under 16-years-old, though they are not monitored or enforced. In formulating the updates, extensive research was done on safety & health hazards for children on industrial farms. They are exposed to pesticides (often sprayed directly by planes as they work), snake & insect bites, razor-sharp tools & lack of safety equipment, dangerous farm machinery (without safety devices like seat belts or roll-over bars), extreme heat, chemicals & explosives, work at extreme heights in silos & grain storage facilities, work in manure pits (with E. coli contamination). Exploitation of child labor is rampant: age restrictions are ignored (as can be seen in this photo of a US cotton worker); children often work 10 or more hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week, & at the peak of harvest, daylight to dusk; they are paid less than the minimum wage; they are not provided with drinking water & toilets. As a result accidents are frequent, maiming common, deaths gruesome. Farmworker children have high incidences of pesticide-related respiratory & digestive diseases, headaches, burning eyes, as well as brain damage, & death. Long-term pesticide exposure in adults is associated with cancer, neurologic problems, & reproductive problems.

The racism of this decision by the Obama administration cannot be denied since 85% of crop workers in the US are Latino. Are these children of no value? The Labor Department said farmers & ranchers complained that the new regulations would negatively impact family-owned farms but since these farms were always specifically exempted from regulation we can be certain it was agribusiness interests who opposed safety protection for small children, which were anyway unlikely to be enforced. This cynicism at the expense of little kids says so much about the Obama administration. Ending the abomination of child labor has to be one of our most important commitments.

(Photo is child farmworker in US)

Apparently, some are lauding Iran’s flogging & secret execution of two 17-year-old cousins arrested when they were 15 on multiple rape charges. Rape is an odious & violent crime & our visceral response is to beat the crap out of the accused & hang them. But courts of law exist precisely to determine actual guilt & restrain vengeance from stooping to barbarism. According to Iranian rape law which is stacked against women, accused rapists can only be convicted on the testimony of multiple witnesses (four Muslim male witnesses or a greater number of male & female witnesses). Amnesty claims Mehdi Sohrabifar & Amin Sedaghat were found guilty in an ‘unfair trial’ but do not elaborate how the trial failed to meet standards of due process. Iranian authorities did not specify the method of execution but Iran commonly uses shooting, hanging, or stoning to death. There is no humane way to execute someone but hanging or stoning are certainly among the most barbaric. What is known is that when the boys were transferred from a juvenile detention center to a prison on April 24th, neither the boys nor their parents were informed that they were to be executed the next day. The families only learned they were executed when authorities gave them the bodies which had marks from being flogged.

A fundamental issue here is that use of the death penalty for those under 18 is strictly prohibited under international human rights law & is a violation of children’s rights. Ninety-seven children under the age of 18 were executed in Iran between 1990 & 2018. Between 85 & 90 children remain on death row in Iran. Iran has become the top executioner of children in the world despite being a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child & the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights which make Iran legally bound to treat anyone under the age of 18 as a child & ensure they are not subject to the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Beside failing children, the Iranian regime has failed to combat the epidemic of violence against women. Legislation to criminalize gender-based violence was approved by the Rouhani administration in May 2017 but Iran’s chief justice refuses to sign off on the bill. Women’s rights activists say stalling is a temporizing tactic to eventually eliminate provisions that expanded the definition of violence to include emotional abuse & restrictions on a women’s freedom of movement. Iranian law deters rape victims from reporting their assault because rape victims can face prosecution for adultery (punishable by execution), “indecency,” or “immoral behavior.” Marital rape is legal. Domestic violence is not a crime & criminal penalties for murder as a result of domestic violence or honor killings are lighter than penalties for other acts of murder. Under Iranian law, girls may be legally married at 13-years-old (compared to 15 for boys) or even younger if their fathers or grandfathers & a judge consent. There are over 40,000 registered marriages of children in Iran, including over 300 girls under the age of 14, with increasing numbers of girls married under the age of ten.

Kangaroo courts & the disturbing arbitrary character in which Iranian laws are administered regarding women make it possible for political dissidents to be accused of rape & given the death sentence. But in June 2018, the gang rape of 41 women & girls in Iranshahr province was covered up by the regime because some of the perpetrators had ties to Iranian security forces. Activists who tried to publicize that case on social media were harassed & arrested.

The Iranian regime systematically discriminates & enables violence against women & girls in a panoply of inequities: by harassing, arresting, fining, & flogging women for ‘crimes’ like appearing in public without covering their hair & bodies; by forcibly segregating women from men; disproportionately punishing women in the judicial system; arresting, interrogating, & imprisoning women’s rights activists; denying women opportunities; favoring men over women in family & other aspects of law.

(Photo is Iranian women’s protest in 2016 from Middle East Observer)

Whoever is behind making the film “Victoria & Abdul” should be hunted down, lined up against a wall, & pummeled with horse manure. It is a deplorable glorification of the British moochocracy, a whitewash of British colonialism in India, & a paean to toadyism on the part of Indian social climbers. It’s about the real-life friendship of an elderly cantankerous Victoria with an Indian servant who began ingratiating & inveighling himself into her affections by kissing her feet. It’s a creepy relationship because it’s rooted in inequality. Abdul is a young Indian Uncle Tom sucking up to a lonely, tyrannical octogenarian. It may have been a platonic relationship but it was certainly racist & libidinal in a deeply repressed way. Trying to find any beauty in this film is akin to those who try to find an inspiring love affair between Thomas Jefferson & his slave mistress Sally Hemings. The only redeeming thing about the movie, other than Judi Dench’s ability to portray an unpleasant imperious old woman, is Abdul’s fellow Indian servant Mohammed who expresses rebellion against British colonialism & abhorrence at Abdul groveling his way up the “stinky, creaking ladder of the shitty British Empire.”

Why are so many Muslims chiding other Muslims to introspection & self-criticism after the Sri Lanka terror attack? That falls right into the ‘war on terror’ narrative where all Muslims are responsible for every crime committed (or alleged to be committed) by a Muslim. Believe me, no one’s every demanded any Catholic apologize for the Inquisition, for the Christian missionaries accompanying colonial troops, or to the thousands of young children raped & molested by priests. There is no such thing as collective guilt by an entire religion, including Islam which has 1.5 billion devotees.

One should be highly skeptical about the constantly circulating reports that Israel routinely engages in organ harvesting of Palestinians. The entire system of organ trafficking–including traffickers, brokers, health professionals, recipients, suppliers–is mired in criminality & inequality, with the poor & marginalized subject to forcible removal or compelled by poverty to relinquish their internal organs for wealthy recipients. Israel plays a major role in the international organ trade (legal & illegal), along with India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Costa Rica, Colombia, Vietnam, Japan, Lebanon, Egypt, South Africa, Kosovo, Ecuador, Panama, China, Turkey Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Russia, & the US. This is a global problem reaching from Asia to Southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America to Europe to the US & is not specific to Zionist colonial policies against Palestinians.

Israel is involved up to its eyeballs in illegal & criminal organ trafficking so it would be surprising if Palestinians were not among their victims. Haaretz has often addressed the issue from the point of view of bioethics since even legal organ trafficking involves considerable issues of morality. But anti-Semites promenading as anti-Zionists reveal a deplorable lack of investigative integrity when they base their allegations against Israel on an August 2009 article in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet by a writer named Donald Boström. The article claimed without a shred of evidence that Israeli soldiers harvested organs from dead Palestinians. It isn’t just highly unlikely but ludicrous to claim that soldiers untrained in medical procedures would remove kidneys or other organs from Palestinians that they just executed. By its own admission, Israeli forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Israeli soldiers, Israeli Jews, immigrant workers, & Palestinians, without the permission of their families. But, as in other countries, a spotlight on the grotesque nature of organ trafficking caused Israel to make laws governing its practices. Given the criminality involved in organ harvesting, it is certainly conceivable that Israel continues to harvest organs of Palestinians but one cannot make such allegations without irrefutable documentation.

Following the 2009 article in Aftonbladet, others formed a chorus denouncing Israel for organ harvesting Palestinians so that it is now accepted fact. The chorus includes Assadist Stephen Lendman who never met a conspiracy–from 9/11 to the war in Syria–that he didn’t think Mossad & Zionists weren’t behind; Alison Weir from If Americans Knew who ran with the allegations in Aftonbladet without even the semblance of investigation. Weir is a regular attendee at the Iran conference of fascists, holocaust deniers, other anti-Semites, 9/11 truthers & other conspiracy whack jobs so she may have an inability to distinguish fact from hate mongering. State Russian media RT also joined the chorus denouncing Israeli organ harvesting of Palestinians but since they regularly report that White Helmet rescue workers are terrorists engaged in organ trafficking, they are hardly a reputable source.

The struggle against Israeli colonialism & apartheid does not require fabrications or invention of atrocities. The facts of genocide against Palestinians speak loudly enough.

Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, so admired & promoted by Assadists & fascists, did not call Trump “the prostitute of Saudi Arabia” because she has a principled opposition to the war in Yemen but because she is a rabid, hateful Islamophobe who identifies all Muslims with the oppressive politics of the Saudi ruling family. If she had paid attention to the Yemeni Arab Spring, she would have seen it was led by thousands of women wearing niqab & this would have roused her hatred for Yemenis, not her opposition to bombing them. At heart, she has no principles & no genuine opposition to war. That’s the nature of an opportunist, making her the perfect candidate for Assadists & fascists.

“Multiple people gunned down at the synagogue in San Diego.
The Muslim community stands by our Jewish brothers and sisters against the hate being perpetrated against them.”

–Reena Paracha

“I just read the manifesto of the deranged white supremacist who confessed to attempting to burn down a mosque before shooting up a synagogue in California. He was clearly addressing a larger organized group and advocating lone wolf operations.

His rabid manifesto calls on others to sacrifice themselves to save the European bloodline from *evil Jewish bankers taking over the world*. He also refered to his hatred of Blacks and Muslims.

Many references were given to Minecraft and gaming platforms as a communication hub for these groups to plan attacks.

Anyone giving credit that Jews are behind all the evil doing in the world are also giving credit to these psychopaths.”

–Patty McCormick

“So Kanhaiyah, of “freedom within india, not from india” fame, is the fresh saviour hero of indian left liberal politics, in Kashmir this can only be seen as another confirmation of the consensus of Indian political class to continue the military occupation in Kashmir. So their declarations of solidarity with Kashmiri struggle for freedom ring hollow, as usual. But the fact remains that Kashmiris have and will continue to fight this occupation till it ends. Azaadi from India. Inshallah.”

–Mir Laieeq