Author: mopress

By Greg Moses

This strange tale begins with an eye on the Abilene Reporter News of March 15, just checking to see what might be happening on the Texas Rolling Plains. And this is where we see a heated letter to the editor in which a local landlord is advised to move his holdings to Iraq. That way he won’t have to hear the word “Jesus” again.

Curious about what might have provoked such advice, we turned back the pages of the Abilene Reporter News to Feb. 17, where we found a letter from 80-year-old Seymour Beitscher who complained that the so-called Christian identity of Abilene can be offensive. “It is offensive when we, non-Christians, must endure any prayer ending in the name of Jesus Christ during a public affair,” wrote Beitscher, identifying himself as Jewish.

There have been two other letters responding to Beitscher. “This country is a Christian nation, founded on Christian beliefs,” says a correspondent on Feb. 28. Not so fast, says a reply on March 14, the principles of the USA are not Christian, but Judeo-Christian. “The founding fathers were primarily Deists, not Christians; there were even a number of Jewish individuals involved as well.”

Turning back the pages of the Abilene Reporter News just a little further we find a Jan. 28 column by former editor Terri Burke where she describes newsroom drama over the publication of a story and photo about a notorious “Ghetto Party” at Tarleton State University, in which white students mocked the MLK holiday by dressing up as Aunt Jemima, etc.

Describing her part in the debate, Burke wrote: “We, I said, have a chance to show Abilene and the surrounding area that even folks who call themselves a ‘Christian, loving, welcoming community,’ open their arms, really, only to a limited few.”

As you can see, Burke’s reference to “Christian, loving, welcoming community” is a citation of a phrase often heard around Abilene town, home of Abilene Christian College, etc. Beitscher’s complaint slightly misreads Burke, since the columnist and former editor never says “we” say such things. She says “folks” do.

Nevertheless, Beitscher makes clear that he had heard “we Christians” too often in Abilene circles, and his complaint can be read as advice to the would-be tolerant. Please be mindful that we are not all Christians.

Which brings us to the gumballs. We picked up the gumball reference from the website of “The Traditional Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” In preparation for their rally at the Stephenville courthouse Saturday, they urge you to view the popular gumball video by Roy Beck.

For anyone schooled in basic fallacies of manipulation, the Beck gumball video offers a classic demonstration of selective framing. But fallacies work well on audiences nevertheless, as the video is diligent to show.

Some stories we dislike from the pit of the stomach. Klan stories. Stories about student “ghetto parties”. Tedious analysis of right wing propaganda. We’d rather not choose to write about such things, so long as we can spend time on other things closer to hard-fought civil rights frontiers.

There are two reasons why we will now move on. First, we agree that there is some danger is adding more coverage to areas adequately documented already. Second, there is something too easy about slamming the Klan, even the Traditional Christian kind.

If we are to repay tribute to MLK, we will remember what he wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

If we don’t miss the point that King makes, it will not be the bigot or Klan of the Rolling Plains that angers us most, but the white moderate these days.

This morning’s editorial at the Dallas Morning News says: “Though not unanimous, the Teacher Voices agree with us in general on a bottom line: A three-year regimen of end-of-course tests makes more sense, in theory, for graduation than TAKS exams given partway through the 11th grade.”

But a link to sample Teacher Voices leaves us wondering where the agreement is. The agreement, as we read it, is teachers saying give us back our students, classrooms, and curricula. Let us do the teaching and testing. If the Dallas Morning News fails to match conclusions with available evidence, the flagship newspaper of Texas instructs us nevertheless that an elite agenda is on the table.
We have a longstanding suspicion of state-administered tests, because they were implemented about the same time that demographers were trumpeting the Hispanic shift. We think the agenda is driven more by an urge to homogenization than excellence. Would our vaunted elites demand a standardized test for admission to the rank of CEO? Nonsense.

Fact is the legislature picks on the people it can pick on. And teachers qualify for that. When it comes to tapping the wealth of Texas so that it can be put into teachers hands? That’s where you’ll find the real agreement these days: can’t do that, no way.

Or, to quote Teacher Voice Kirk Evans, “Put the emphasis where it matters most: in the lives of our students, our children. Give our children the help and support they need to be successful in any direction they choose for their lives. This would be an improvement!”

What is not an improvement is the state handing teachers final exams before the courses begin. That is a recipe for homogenization, not excellence, across the board.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / MakingPeaceBlog

“We are drawing attention to a humanitarian crisis,” says Penny Anderson, speaking from a Saturday morning protest outside the El Paso immigrant jail (March 17). She is the first person to take the cell phone being passed around by activist Amber Clark.

Among the prisoners in the nearby 800-bed jail are about one hundred women flown in from New Bedford, Massachusetts following an immigration raid at a manufacturing shop. Immigration authorities have reported that 116 of the women, believed to be mostly from Guatemala, were brought here to the El Paso Service Processing Center (EPC) on Montana Street. Another 90 were reportedly taken to another immigrant jail in Texas.

“We have heard horror stories of women rounded up at work in Massachusetts and sent to jail in Texas without being given a chance to say goodbye to their families–children coming home from school and not knowing where their mothers were,” says Anderson who is president of the El Paso Borderlands Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW).

Word of the raid reached the Borderlands Chapter from NOW national offices, explains Anderson. And several news reports have followed the response of Massachusetts officials. Last Saturday, Massachusetts social workers visited both jails in Texas and managed to get nine mothers released on humanitarian grounds.

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy visited New Bedford and described the situation as Katrina-like, with family members missing and nobody knowing where they were or if they were okay. The response of Massachusetts state workers and elected officials is an embarrassing contrast to the silence and inactivity that has accompanied news of Texas families rounded up by immigration authorities in recent years.

On Montana Street in El Paso Saturday morning, 20 protesters drew most of the local media, along with honks of support from passing cars, says Anderson. “The larger picture shows that current immigration system is broken,” she says. “The Bush administration claims to be pro family, but when they allow this to happen, it shows they are tearing families apart.”

Joining the protest is Kathy Staudt of the Coalition against Violence toward Women and Families at the US-Mexico Border (CAV). “We see this as part the structural problem of violence against women,” she says. “Many of the families affected by the immigration raid in Massachusetts were in the US for five or ten years working at the factory. All of a sudden there was this raid. Women were sent away. And people were frantic to find out what happened to them.”

CAV was formed in 2001 to address the issue of femicide in Juarez, where 370 women were killed between 2000 and 2003. “They think in Mexico there has been some limited institutional response to the issue, but many killers remain on the loose,” says Staudt. “And Mexico is only recently taking violence against women as a serious issue at the national level.”

Staudt says the problem of stopping violence against women in Mexico is made more difficult by a widespread distrust of police, because of a feeling that police are corrupt and can act with impunity.

As Staudt speaks we think of 20-year-old Suzi Hazahza and her sister Mirvat, two immigrant women rounded up with their family at gunpoint by Dallas immigration authorities in early November, 2006, now serving hard time at the Rolling Plains prison in Haskell, Texas, for the crime of allegedly missing an appointment—an appointment they claim not to have known about.

“There is a whole structure of violence and lack of respect for women that transcends borders,” says Staudt. It is a structure that the militarized posture of border enforcement will only continue to make worse.

Next at the cell phone is John Boucher of El Paso’s Annunciation House. “We are a house of hospitality,” he explains. “We work with undocumented immigrants in the area and with student groups in the USA. We have Catholic origins. I’m just a volunteer.”

For Boucher, the treatment of Massachusetts workers is connected to what he sees closer to the border, “from the economic policies that force people to be displaced, continued in our country by a lack of acknowledgement that people who work cheap subsidize our lives.” Boucher sees fewer undocumented workers crossing the border these days, but he sees evidence that “people are being forced into more desperate situations.”

As the border is militarized, migrants are relying on paid help to get across. “Coyotes and smugglers are in the family reunification business, too,” explains Boucher. “And their involvement makes crossing the border more dangerous for everyone.”

With her cell phone returned, Amber Clark promises to email photos and media links.

“The treatment of the factory workers differs sharply from the treatment of the factory owner who had abused undocumented workers for years by underpaying and overworking them while reaping profits from lucrative government contracts,” says a press release circulated by Clark. “The factory owner is free on bail and was allowed to take a trip to Puerto Rico.”

If an image of corrupt and arbitrary law enforcement is not actually what immigration authorities are trying to convey by their recent activities in Texas and Massachusetts, you’d be hard pressed to say why.

The following photo and caption were previously posted in the announcement section.–gm

Suzi, Mirvat, and their Father Radi Hazahza at Home
Homeland Security officials say that regardless of prison conditions the family deserves six full months in prison for failure to appear for an appointment. The family says they never received notice that an appointment had been scheduled.

See Suzi’s case featured at TexasKaos, with a succinct polemic by XicanoPwr of what this case is really about–it’s about the untimely death of the American consciene, looking for a Spring resurrection.

Or go to XicanoPwr.com and get the full workover.–gm