Sawt al Niswa | صوت النسوة - solidarity

Solidarity Letter with Nazra for Feminist Studies from Lebanon رسالة تضامن مع نظرة - لبنان

Sara AbuGhazal — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 15:12:04 +0000

Sawt al Niswa

English and Arabic Follows. This letter is open for signatures from Lebanon.

Dear Nazra for Feminist Studies,

Beirut, 23 MARCH 2016

Following the news of the investigation on Nazra in the case 173 of “civil society and foreign funds,” we find ourselves unable to digest the amount of intimidation and oppression that now fill the spaces between us.

We are sending this letter from Beirut to Nazra’s staff, members and friends in the feminist movement in Egypt to let you know that the feminist bridges of solidarity that we’ve built together are stronger than ever. We’ve known you as leaders in organizing, weaving webs of solidarity and sharing resources and skills within Egypt and across the region. In what seems to be a collective punishment of anyone who is calling for human rights, activists in Egypt have no time to catch their breath before a new threat or a new level of persecution attempts to shut their work or imprison them. We know that you are not surprised. You have been waiting for this to happen, but you never stopped doing your work, because you know, as we know, that your work is needed in Egypt and our region.

We refuse these efforts to intimidate you and silence your voice. The attack on Nazra and the feminist movement is an attack on all feminists and women’s rights everywhere and anywhere. We know this by heart, today and throughout history: if one of us is not free, then all of us aren’t free. We stand beside you and we encourage other feminist individuals, groups and organizations to take action and to express their solidarity, personally or publicly. Let’s exercise our diversity for the sake of solidarity:

Check out Nazra's work: www.nazra.org

Statements related to the case:

http://nazra.org/node/460

http://nazra.org/node/462

الزميلات في “نظرة” للدراسات النسوية،

بيروت، 23 مارس 2016

من خلال متابعتنا للأخبار المتلاحقة من مصر والمتعلقة بالقضية رقم 173 والمعروفة بقضية التمويل الأجنبي للجمعيات الأهلية، نجد أنفسنا غير قادرات على استيعاب عمق القهر والخوف اللذين يحتلان المسافة بيننا من القاهرة الى بيروت. نرسل هذه الرسالة الى فريق العمل وأعضاء “نظرة” كما لكل الصديقات في مصر وذلك تفعيلاً لجسور التضامن التي بنيناها سويا كنسويات والتي أصبحت اليوم أقوى وأمتن من أي وقت مضى.

نعرف “نظرة” كإحدى الرائدات في قيادة الحركة النسوية المصرية وفي تنظيم وحياكة خيوط التضامن الإقليمي والعربي ومن خلال مشاركة الموارد والمهارات النسوية للنجاة في مصر وخارجها. واليوم( وفي ما) يبدو أنه عقاب جماعي لكل من ينادي بحقوق الإنسان، نعيش في زمن لا يلبث فيه النشطاء والناشطات من التقاط أنفاسهم\ن قبل أن يفرض عليهم تهديد أو مستوى جديد من الملاحقات في محاولة لإسكاتهم\ن أو زجهم\ن في السجون. نعلم أن القضية 173 لم تفاجئكن، وكنتن تنظرن اللحظة السوداء هذه و لكن لم تتوقفن يوما بسبب الخوف او الثمن الغالي للحرية، فجميعنا نعلم أهمية عملكن في مصر وفي المنطقة العربية.

نحن نرفض كل الجهود لإخافتكن وإسكات أصواتكن. فالهجمة على “نظرة” والحركة النسوية والحقوقية في مصر، هي هجمة واستهداف لكل الحركات الحقوقية والنسوية أين ما كانت في العالم. والعبرة تقول: أن لم تكن واحدة منّا حرّة، فجميعنا لسنا أحراراً. نقف اليوم بجانبكن، ونشجع كل النسويات كأفراد ومجموعات ومنظّمات الى المبادرة في التعبير عن التضامن من خلال الأنشطة الموجهّة لكم في الخاص او في العلن. فلنستخدم تنوّعنا النسوي في خدمة التضامن.

المزيد عن “نظرة” :

www.nazra.org

بيانات “نظرة” المتعلقة بالقضية :

http://nazra.org/node/460

http://nazra.org/node/462

signatures:

Sawt al Niswa Collective مجموعة صوت النسوة

Lebanon Support مركز دعم لبنان

Radical Collective - مجموعة راديكال - الجامعة اللبنانية

Uprising of Women in the Arab Worldإنتفاضة المرأة في العالم العربي

Individuals :

Azza Baydoun- Reseacher

Farah Salka- Feminist Activist

Nadine Moawad - Feminist Activist

Najwa Sabra - Feminist Activist

Reine Nemr- Feminist Activist

Farah Olfat Kobaissy- Member of the Socialist Forum

Yasmine El Baramawy

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Sawt al' Niswa

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Statements & Press Releases

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Egyptian Revolution

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Solidarity Defeats the Impossible

Azadeh Faramarziha — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 06:33:20 +0000

Sawt al Niswa

Women have been struggling on a daily basis for equality and justice. They have been defying the impossible through daily practices of courage and defiance. Women in the MENA region are standing alone against all odds, surviving a deadly mixture of oppressive and patriarchal regimes, ISIS, occupation, war, violence, displacement and loss.

On this International Women’s Day, we are celebrating our differences as women in the MENA region. We call for more solidarity between organizations, collectives and individuals to face the increasing violence festering in our communities and countries. We’ve been witnessing increased state militarisation and a continuous politicization of religious and sectarian discourse, while spaces for accountability and reflection are becoming less and less possible.

As a collective, we are struggling everyday to make our work relevant and sustainable amidst these local, regional and global changes. On this day, we remember those who have fought similar struggles in the past, and we salute those who are keeping feminism alive with courage and steadfastness. We wish to honor their memory and work by acknowledging their contribution to our political presence and existence.

We salute our sisters from Syria, Palestine, Yemen and Egypt fighting and surviving under dire conditions. We salute the struggle of migrant domestic workers and of the sudanese displaced communities and are humbled by the lessons of perseverance and resilience they brought into our lives. We salute our Kurdish sisters and their sacrifices fighting ISIS from one side and the Turkish regime from the other. We salute our African American sisters as they carry the weight of racism on their backs, teaching us to speak everyday about what matters. We honor their work and we are inspired by the knowledge they produce that has made our journey less lonely. We salute our sisters in Latin America and their struggle to survive in their indigenous lands. They have taught us how to be faithful to our vision and ideas. We salute women in feminist movements and all movements for social justice around the world, particularly in the Global South.

Today, and more than ever, our feminist commitments thrive to build bridges that further connect and bring us closer to each other. Today, and more than ever, we have faith that with solidarity we are able to defeat the impossible; with solidarity our interconnected realities will transform and change for the better.

Sawt al Niswa collective
Beirut, 8 March 2016

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Sawt al' Niswa

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Statements & Press Releases

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Activism

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Statement of Solidarity from the Middle East | #BlackLivesMatter

Lamia Moghnie — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 22:00:00 +0000

Sawt al Niswa

Statement of Solidarity

12/8/2014

We the undersigned groups and individuals in the Middle East and North Africa stand in solidarity with the ongoing protests across the U.S., led by Black communities, following the killing of Mike Brown by officer Darren Wilson and the decision by a Grand Jury that Wilson is innocent of any crime. Brown’s death is not the first, and has been followed by many other fatal shootings of people of color by U.S. police. We condemn this violence against Black communities and people of color in all its forms.

We stand in support of the grassroots movement to bring justice to communities of color facing police violence with the complicity of the judicial system. The militarization of the police and its destructive interventions in communities of color has pushed many activists/thinkers to highlight the links between U.S wars and occupations inside its borders, and outside it.

It is horrifying to live in a world where Black mothers have to teach their Black sons to avoid beingshot by the police for no reason, or for holding a toy gun, for asking for help, for wearing a hoodie; and for black women to be violently policed,harassed and murdered in their homes and in the streets. In the face of such crimes without impunity,in the face of colonization and multiple oppressions of indigenous peoples and communities of color, their anger is justified. We stand in solidarity with people resisting the U.S. white supremacist capitalist regime through boycotts, protests, civil disobedience, as well as through continuing processes of decolonization and resistance that are not as visible to us.

Such solidarity also necessitates that we acknowledge anti-Black racism in the Middle East and North African countries, the marginalization of Black Arabs, as well as the identification with whiteness by many Arabs, and the exploitation of Asian and African workers by the aggressive economies within the Gulf countries particularly, as well as across the Arab region. We remain engaged in changing our realities through fighting racism, classism and marginalization.

We the undersigned groups and individuals wish to honor the legacy of Black power and the civil rights movement in emancipation and equality, and its influence in supporting many of the national emancipation efforts within our region, and in reminding us that systems of oppression will always be dismantled. Black communities are not alone. Their lives matter, and their longing for justice must be granted by ending the constant violation based on gender, race and class.

We admire those individuals and groups mobilizing against injustice in U.S cities and streets, through individual and group initiatives; we salute their anger and their heroic determination in demanding justice and peace.

Signatures:

Sawtalniswa community - lebanon

Lebanon Socialist Forum - lebanon

Lebanon Anti Racism Movement - lebanon

Lebanon Radical Beirut- Lebanon

Revolutionary Left Movement - Syria

Beirut Walls - Lebanon

Sedighe Dolatabadi Women's Library, Iran

Red Zone - Anarchists from Greece and Syria

Individual signatures:

Delaram Ali

Elnaz Ansari

Amir Yaghoubali

Emad Borghei

Sawsan Abdulrahim

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Sawt al' Niswa

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Statements & Press Releases

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Activism

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What's Music Got To Do With It

Pascale Ghazaly — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 21:00:00 +0000

www.maxkeiseronfacebook.com

Maya Mikdashi

The arguments have become familiar. We want to enjoy life; music is not political; dancing should unify us, not divide us. We can’t keep being the sacrificial lamb of the Palestinian cause. Aren't you Lebanese? Are you an Islamist? Don’t you like rock and roll music, coca-cola, and dancing under the stars at open-air raves? Aren’t you for the freedom of expression? Are you (gasp) intolerant?

The questions that the debate whether we, in Lebanon, should join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel engenders have nothing to do with liking music, being fanatical, or censorship. The issue is not a band that played a concert in Tel Aviv, had a stopover in Cyprus, and continued on to Beirut. It is not that this same band performed the week the Israeli state attacked a flotilla of peace activists trying to break the criminal blockade of Gaza, an area of land that is home to over 1.3 million Palestinians and has been placed under siege for over three years. The question is not whether or not we can, or should, empathize with Palestinians living within a settler colony. The question is not if we have to be political. The question is: Can we afford not to be political? Can we absolve ourselves of responsibility towards each other as citizens and residents of Lebanon, as Arabs, or as human beings in the name of music and a good time? And if and when we do absolve ourselves of responsibility, what kind of politics are we engaging in? When we surrender politics to the politicians, what are we doing?

The political permeates every aspect of our lives. From the moment we wake up in particular neighborhoods in, for example, Beirut to the moment that our maid brings us our evening snack and puts our children to sleep, we are engaged in politics. This engagement continues as each of us drives in his or her car to locations that are close by, when we pass by the myriad unkempt children and disabled adults standing in highways selling their sadness, maneuver through a security checkpoint in a politician’s neighborhood, and as we sweat in long pants during the hot summer in a failed attempt to avert the unwanted verbal and physical advances of men on the Manara who know they are not accountable to anyone. Politics is about the struggle over life, how we live it, where we live it, who gets to live a livable life, and who gets to live. We are political because we are alive. Depoliticization is a political process, it is a tactic of a power that aims to separate the messiness of shared life into compartments such as “culture,” “government,” “economy,” “personal life,” “government,” and, my personal favorite, “civil society.” Once segregated into neat, independent packages, we are told that our “political” involvement begins, and ends, at the level of government. Depoliticization comes with neoliberalism, an ideology that masks its praxis being claims to be a “way of life.” The idea that Liberalism is a way of life or that it is simply “good values” has historically fueled capitalist expansion, colonialism, and the imperial notion that western history is at once the telos and the unfolding of world history. More recently, neoliberalism has been the ideology driving the perversion of human rights discourse to justify the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the banning of the headscarf in France, and the reinvigoration of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world.

One does not have to engage in an ideological analysis to see that art, and in this case, music, is anything but apolitical. When U2 announced that it would not play any concerts in apartheid South Africa, they were making a statement. When Elton John refused to heed to the boycott of South Africa and played concerts in that country, he was also making a statement. Playing a concert in an apartheid state is a statement. When international artists perform in Israel after a BDS campaign has been launched and after they have been asked to join it in solidarity with the oppressed, their performance lends legitimacy to a political regime that openly calls for the continued occupation of Palestinian lands, legal and infrastructural apartheid, and the expulsion of indigenous populations outside the state’s borders. Perhaps musicians who play venues in Israel today are ignorant about the political situation. But is ignorance an excuse? Today, people with access to information have to consistently choose to remain ignorant of current events. Furthermore, ignorance about structural oppression, ongoing settler colonialism, and apartheid, is a luxury of power that contributes to violence against those that are not powerful. Neutrality in the face of gross inequality and oppression is the most insidious form of partisanship towards the powerful. Every act of boycott is a statement against the status quo.

Lebanese event organizers who invite artists that perform in Israel are not breaking any laws. But they are making a statement as to the normalization of ties with Israel and they are not supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions initiative. People who want to attend these events are entitled to spend their leisure time however they want. But they too are making a statement as to the normalization of Lebanese ties with Israel and they, too, are choosing to not support the BDS campaign. If the choice for artists is between profiting monetarily from apartheid oppression and making a statement by not performing in Israel, for patrons, the choice is between allowing those who profit monetarily from apartheid to continue to profit monetarily from your own money. The calculations are simple. If enough people decide that they will not patronize performances by artists who also perform in apartheid Israel, either the event organizers will need to cater to this new reality or, imagine, we could actually force international artists to choose to either play in Lebanon or in Israel. Imagine Lebanon being “happening” enough to be a rival of Israel in terms of what is known as the “cultural scene” or the “summer circuit.” Imagine us being more effective than the hollow regimes that rule the Arab Middle East.

When I engage in an act of boycott against DJ Tiesto, I am also making a statement that I refuse to entrust the entire arena of politics, and the question of Lebanon’s relationship with Israel, to politicians that I know are corrupt, sectarian, and inefficient. I am making a statement that I refuse to normalize ties with a state that has invaded my country three times in the years that I have been alive, displaced over a million of my fellow citizens and destroyed tens of thousands of their homes as recently as 2006, and denies the right of return to over 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. I do not have a gun. I do not have a political party. I have a choice; to allow artists who break the boycott to profit from me or not. I make that choice because I cannot accept the logic that my life, or a Palestinian life, is worth less than an Israeli life. I make that choice because I refuse racism and the violence that it licenses.

My decision to boycott musicians who do not adhere to the BDS campaign is not because I am anti- Israel or because I am pro-Palestine. You can blame Palestinians for all of Lebanon’s problems and still take a stance against apartheid. If you are against the logic of racism and its articulation as settler colonialism, then you are also against apartheid. Apartheid is a technology of rule that has been operationalized in many different countries in different historical contexts, and will continue to be operationalized as long as it continues to be normalized. We should be demanding that artists refuse to be complicit in this system. Boycotts work. Today, sixteen years after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, we should not expect less of the world. And we definitely should not expect less of ourselves.

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Sawt al' Niswa

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Opinions

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Activism

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Voices (Aswat) of Anger and Solidarity

Azadeh Faramarziha — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:40:12 +0000

Sawt al Niswa

Guest Contributor

On May 31, Israel massacred 10 international activists and injured nearly 30 on international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. About 650 international activists, from 44 countries around the world, were heading towards Gaza Strip carrying humanitarian aid including scooters for disabled people, medicine, toys, and basic foods. The Free Gaza flotilla’s mission was to break the four years of Israeli blockade and siege on Gaza Strip. The prolonged siege has resulted in a severe humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip and the long-term consequences of this siege are yet to be fully captured or realized. Everyday children, elderly, or people with various illnesses die from lack of basic health-care, medicine, or malnutrition. In December and January of 2008-2009 Israel committed a massive bombardment on Gaza resulting in nearly 1,500 killed and some thousands injured. Earlier in 2006, before and after the Israeli offense in Lebanon, Israel was also involved in more killing of Gaza civilians.

We thus understand from Israeli Army actions, government communications and mainstream global media, that Palestinian, Lebanese, and currently International bodies are all “disposable” and “killable” without any regret. While many people worldwide mourn the death of their family members, loved ones and/or colleagues, the majority of Israelis choose to uncritically accept the official government and arm line that Israel was the victim of a “terrorist” attack by peace activists.

Aswat, Palestinian queer women group, condemns the Israeli military attacks on the Freedom Gaza flotilla and call people all over the world to exercise their right to protest the apartheid regime in Israel and elsewhere.

As Palestinians we feel that targeting supporters for our families, friends, and fellows in Gaza is targeting our struggle for abolishing racism, inequalities or violence.

As queer women we strongly feel repulsed by the masculine military attacks on unarmed activists who could not escape these attacks while on boats in the middle of the sea. As women we are also disgusted by the sexist, chauvinist and racist language used by Israeli Knesset Members against MK Haneen Zoabi in the Israeli Knesset describing her as a “traitor” and “Trojan horse”. Ms. Haneen Zoabi was in the ship when the Israeli Army attacked and she witnessed the killing of activists and was heard in television shouting in Hebrew and English to the Israeli Army that “we are civilians” and “we have killed and injured people” on the ship. Ms. Haneen Zoabi was also told in the Knesset Assembly by MK Yohana Palsner to “go back to Gaza and see how they treat unmarried 38 year old women”. This language is not only racist towards Gazan women and men, but also sexist by highlighting the fact that she is an unmarried woman as if this is the sole aspect of Ms. Zoabi’s identity or life. As women who reject to be told what to do and how to do it, we find MK Palsner’s humiliating and disrespectful speech to be the very cause of our resistance to patriarchy, heteronormativity, homophobia or sexism.

Aswat sends condolences to the families who lost their loved ones in the massacre and wishes those who were injured full recovery. We also send a message of solidarity to the people in the Gaza Strip, to international activists who were in the Freedom Gaza flotilla and to all the protestors worldwide mobilizing in the streets or online against the Israeli Army and government and their propaganda campaign.

Aswat

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Opinions

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