by Deborah Grabien

First things first: I should say, up front, that this is not going to be a particularly unbiased look at the Occupy movement. As much as I would have liked this to be an exemplar of classic journalism – with the author’s opinion tidily tucked into the background in favor of impartiality – that’s not happening. What started out, conceptually at least, as a balanced overview has become an op-ed piece, with heavy emphasis on the “op”. I should also say, up front, that I’ve now taken part in Occupy San Francisco, so I’ve had the chance to see for myself.

Look what’s happening out in the street –

Got a revolution! Got to revolution!

To some degree, we are almost all in the same boat: the good ship 99%. We are the unemployed, who are being told that not only are the jobs thin on the ground, but that unregulated corporate America is free to discriminate by hanging signs above the door: No unemployed people need apply. Only lateral movement welcomed. We are the middle class who, with ten-plus years of greed-run governmental policy behind us, are the middle class no longer; we’re now the slave class, thanks to our elected officials and the insidious stupidity that is the legacy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. We are the homeowners forced to guard our doors against banks who mismanaged their assets and forced their own customer base into usurious interest rates and ruinous mortgages – and foreclosure.

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s an awful lot of us. 99% of the population, in fact. That makes us the majority. Hell, that makes us the super-majority.

Hey, I’m dancing down the street

Got a revolution! Got to revolution!

A couple of years ago, a collection of oversized dinosaur institutions admitted they were teetering at the edge of ruin. This had come about gradually, with help from previous political administrations, especially the most recent Republican one, George W. Bush and Friends; when The Powers That Be are big believers in sticking it to the working class and charging 32% interest on the lube they don’t bother to actually use, the fat cats do what they want. And when the Democratic congress cowers and abases itself before the Republican half of the equation, everyone loses. In this instance, what we lost was stability, and our futures. Not very surprising that we’d like a word with the people who lost it – except, of course, that they didn’t lose it. They stole it.

Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet!

Got a revolution! Got to revolution!

With Too Big To Fail entrenched as part of the American political and corporate mindset, certain things became inevitable. One was TARP: According to Pro Publica’s tracking list (http://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list), 926 banks and insurers were given $579,952,314,483 in taxpayer funds. Less than half of that – $277,810,865,263 – has been returned. And in fact, a ridiculous percentage of what was returned was raised by the recipient institutions using a technique that really does boggle the mind: They raised interest rates on their customer base – the same people who provided the government with the money to hand out to those institutions in the first place. They did it because they could; no one from Dick Cheney through Timothy Geithner was willing to impose regulations on these people. In the dimwitted greed-soaked world of Friedman Economics, the market regulates itself, and everyone else should just relax and back off – and, presumably, bend over and assume the position. Purest usury.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul is one thing. Robbing to Peter to pay Peter, whom you’ve already robbed, is in a class of ethical bankruptcy all by itself.

So, what have we got? We have a two-party system which seems, more and more, to be devoted to a common goal: creating a slave class that will rip each other’s throats out for the privilege of paying a 17% mortgage rate to Bank of America or AIG or Citicorp or one of the MAEs, while working a job that requires a name tag and a constant repetition of “you want fries with that?” We have a corporate power structure so bloated, so overweening, so unregulated, that it can wave its arms and sneer booga booga booga, nice little economy you’ve got here, shame if something HAPPENED to it, and a panic-stricken political structure will throw more money at it, with virtually no hope in hell of getting more than a dribble of it back.

In light of that farcically tragic situation, two things strike me as inevitable: the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I hate the Tea Party. I’ll be upfront about that. The people making the noise on their behalf are, without exception, a collection of jinglebrained ninnyhammers who, presumably, all think they can see Russia from Sarah Palin’s gun rack. Michele Bachman takes government funding to “pray away the gay”; the obviously-named Rand Paul thinks “Atlas Shrugged” is a how-to manual, rather than a bad novel. The Tea Partiers shriek about wanting government out of the lives of the people from one side of their mouths, while trying to control reproductive rights and other peoples’ marriages out the other. They rail about the bad results of deregulation, while howling about how terrible things are when Big Government regulates things. What inconsistency.

They’re also a political movement, with a political agenda. The second inevitability, Occupy Wall Street, is something else altogether. With respect to Vice President Joe Biden (who compared the two movements and who, as a core part of the problem, should probably just shut up now), Occupy Wall Street – which is now in cities across America and has spread to a similarly financially beleaguered Europe – may be exactly what we need to get it right.

I’m not going too deep into the core of the movement. If you rely on Fox News or a Scaife or Murdoch-owned print news media, you’re probably already calling me rude names. I don’t waste time on lost causes. But if you’ve been paying attention in the real world, you know that, from New York to Boise to Atlanta to Miami to Pocatello to Seattle and well beyond, the social movement called Occupy is on the march and on the rise.

Because yes, this is a social movement. It has no political agenda. In fact, I’ve been hoping that Occupy refuses any hint of a political touch, because that would be the wedge the 1% used to break it apart. The moment someone sticks a flag in the movement and claims it in the name of Smaller Government or the Obama Jobs Creation Bill or Get Out of Afghanistan, it’s in trouble. This is about the diversity of the 299 million parts that make up the whole of that 99%. This is one of those rare instances where the sum of the parts and the parts are equally matched. That also makes them equally vulnerable. Hold fast, guys. Don’t let the bastards wedge you into nonexistence.

I spent about seven hours on the ground with Occupy San Francisco, in front of the Fed building on Market and Main. Following OccupySF’s tweets, I read that they were in desperate need of clean socks and underwear; luckily, Walgreen’s had a huge bin of $1.99-for-four-pairs of socks, so I blew my mad money for the week and scored twenty pairs of socks. I loaded up a couple of bags and, with old friend and sister rabble rousing progressive Denise Dunne in tow, we headed downtown to see what was what.

The cops on duty that day seemed very nice, which surprised me. I was expecting flaming Gestapo types – the previous night, interim mayor Ed Lee had dispatched a small army of pissed-off cops to the site of the Fed building on market and Main. Supervisor John Avalos – who is getting my vote for mayor next month – negotiated; the cops promised to leave the Occupiers alone, and then both manhandled them and stole all their stuff on a ridiculous assortment of bullshit charges as soon as Avalos was gone.

This was a new shift of cops, and they were more sympathetic than I’d expected. The new crew had let the protesters know that DPW would be coming by sweep again, and the protesters were worried. I brought my car around and we bundled as much into it as would fit, and I went off to park until DPW had been and gone. Mostly, what I stored safely were their sleeping bags.

Many of us saw what happened during the New York marches: the video of the thuggish white-shirted NYPD cop bragging that his nightstick was going to get a workout, of him and a few like him charging into a crowd of citizens who were breaking no laws, is now viral and imprinted. But this is San Francisco, city of traditionally loopy lefty progressive politics, of beatniks and hippies and the nation’s first openly gay politician. There were no sneering swaggering uniformed button-popping lumps of self-importance, waving nightsticks at the people they’d sworn to serve and protect. Mind you, if the idiot officer handling the media liaison for SFPD is anything to go by, there are still a few bugs in the local system; the man was rude, pompous and left me wanting to reach through the phone and slap him. Still, that’s easier to deal with than armed jackbootery.

For the hours I was there, the cops were fine. They kept the protesters off the property actually owned by the Fed, and made sure they stayed on the public sidewalk; that way, the Fed couldn’t bitch. When the Occupiers were joined by an anti-war march and the numbers swelled by several hundred, the police motorcycle escort were efficient and utterly non-confrontational. To a man (I saw no women officers on duty), they ignored the two completely naked guys, holding up signs.

As an old 1960s Viet Nam asskicker, I had some thoughts on the protest. I couldn’t help thinking it would have been even more effective had the people in the Fed looked down into complete silence, and seen that sea of faces and upturned signs. I was impressed with the General Assembly the Occupiers use to communicate: Information is passed through a widening circle of people, all repeating it aloud to make sure everyone’s on the same page. I was also impressed with the number of MUNI drivers who took part, in their own way; the curbside was lined with Occupiers holding up signs asking people to honk if they support the 99%. There was quite a lot of horn action going on, and a heartening percentage of that came from public transport vehicles. They know exactly what’s happening to their pensions, and who’s responsible, it seems.

Denise and I were interviewed by two nice young men from the Academy of Art college, who were filming a documentary. Their stated hope was to get it before the rest of their school and out into the neural pathways of the internet, via youtube and beyond. We signed waivers and answered questions as to what we believed was happening, why we thought it was happening, how it differed from what we’d seen back in the bad old days of the Viet Nam war protests. That really brought it home to me; my daughter is 32 years old, and it’s just possible the parents of the kids who filmed us, asked us intelligent questions and then listened to, recorded and filmed our answers without interruption had not yet been born when Denise and I were going mano a mano with the ancestors of that thug in the white shirt in New York City. A Moment, really, as telling as it was poignant: I’m old.

There are certain things this movement needs, the main thing being bodies willing to put themselves out there, 24/7. I can’t do that – with multiple sclerosis, certain things are simply not negotiable, and the soma is the last voice in what we do. Old or not, though, I can hold a sign and make noise, and that is precisely what I did. I can use the internet, tweeting what I say and blogging, and that’s just what I’m doing. I can and will make as much noise as I can, because silence, here, is complicity. I don’t choose to continue my dignified and stately progress towards the grave unable to meet my own eye in the mirror every morning. So silence is not an option – nor, if you are one of the 99% or understand what is happening, should it be an option for you. The good ship 99% is finally arming itself, albeit not violently, and it must not be allowed to founder.

That’s one thing about most movements, the thing that kills them, the thing I dread most about this one: that the Occupiers will waver. We have drawn this line in the sand, and told the greed-mongers, the thieves, that we’re on to them and that we’re going to hold them accountable. We’ve announced it, on the rising tide of outrage and smashed hope: We are not going away.

So Occupy can’t go away. It can’t waver. It can’t let itself be disheartened, scared off by misguided cops protecting the very people who are stealing their futures. It can’t let itself be pushed back or defeated by the winter that’s coming; they will need sleeping bags and supplies to keep them going through the cold brutal nights on the street.

Because, if we waver, we’re all likely to discover first-hand what sleeping on the street in the winter is all about.

Deborah Grabien is the author of numerous published books and articles,  and editor at Plus One Press. Visit her website at:  http://deborahgrabien.com/

Quoted lyrics are all from the Jefferson Airplane song, “Volunteers of America”.

Film, I Am Not Moving uploaded by Corey Ogilvie, includes photography from Alex Mallis.

by Taher Medhat

In the 1946 Alfred Hitchcock film, “Notorious”, Cary Grant’s Nazi-infiltrating T.R. Devlin scours through a wine cellar belonging to the host of a party which is going on upstairs. As Grant searches for the evidence to implicate his dastardly Nazi host, the viewer is treated to a classically Hitchcockian device: The Ticking Clock. You see, Agent Devlin has a very narrow window of opportunity: as soon the champagne which flows about carelessly upstairs runs dry, the server of said beverage must doubtlessly run downstairs to (where else?) the very same wine cellar in which our hero sleuths about. And with that, the master sets the stage for suspense. A champagne bucket upstairs, an object previously thought by the viewer to be of complete innocuousness, becomes as deadly as a time bomb as it is slowly drained of bottles, signaling the imminent discovery of the protagonist.

The fact that this scene was rattling around my head as I watched Friday prayers drawing to a close on January 28^th, 2011, moments before one of the largest protests in Egyptian history was about to erupt, might seem slightly ludicrous, but for someone like me, a film student and an Egyptian by birth, the sequence of events which unfolded at Moustafa Mahmoud Mosque in the town of Mohandeseen, did so with such a sense of grand orchestration, that I couldn’t help think they would make Hitch himself crack a wry smile in his grave.

It began with a Facebook event invite that had a catchy title: “Anger Friday for Revolution Against Corruption, Injustice, Unemployment, and Torture.” Roughly eighty thousand people were classified as “attending”, but the replies of over one million Facebook users were still listed “awaited”. Perhaps that was because there were several virtual farms and cities that needed tending to, and this was no game. Tahrir Square was to be both the physical and symbolic center of the protest, an appropriate decision given that tahrir is Arabic for ‘liberation’. Unlike the previous protest which had taken place three days earlier, this one was planned from the very start to go nationwide. The atmosphere surrounding Moustafa Mahmoud Mosque, which was playing host to several journalists, Egyptian media personalities and eventually riot police, was electric. Around noon, just before the commencement of Friday prayers, soon-to-be protesters glanced around nervously, minding their p’s and q’s, just in case eavesdropping government agents were nearby, surreptitiously blending into the crowd. A handful of well-known Egyptian film stars and directors offered their two cents to anyone with a camera and microphone. I only caught snippets of their conversations; phrases along the lines of “Peaceful demonstration”, “The people want [x]” and “We’ve had enough of [y]” cropped up quite frequently. A few plainclothes policemen were loosely spread around the outskirts of the mosque; so few, in fact, that I became suspicious─ were these people drastically under prepared, or were they wearing an extremely well-crafted poker face? The cynic in me told me it was the latter, and unfortunately for and the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets during this time, my inner cynic is usually right.

For those of you unfamiliar with the peculiarities of the world’s fastest growing religion, prayer in Islam is a highly regimented affair. It’s a coordinated series of bows and prostrations mixed in with recitations of Quranic verses. More importantly though, at least for the purposes of the event in question, prayer ends with the Imam saying the phrase “The peace and mercy of Allah be upon you.” (Why this is important you’ll soon know.)

As prayer begins, I, along with several journalists and women, who are prohibited from praying with men in the mosque (the women, not the journalists, just to be clear), sit on a protracted ledge directly behind the worshipers. Some of them use their Egyptian flags as prayer mats, others pray on scarves, which they clearly intend to use as a safeguard against teargas later down the line. My train of thought is shaken by a tap to the arm; it’s one of my two companions, who motions for me to look in the indicated direction. There they are: dark-clad, single file, covering the entirety of the street behind us, riot shields and all. We don’t have much time to consider where the hell they came from for too long, because the worshipers, now standing, are preparing to go into their first prostration, in which they kneel down with their foreheads touching the ground. They do just that, and as they do, on either side of the men at prayer suddenly now stand an additional two, perfectly formed rows of riot police, having arrived at their posts by what I can only assume is some form of ancient sorcery. I do the math. One row on either side, one directly behind us, plus the front entrance of the mosque; we are quite literally boxed in.

It was at this point that I started thinking about Hitchcock’s Ticking Clock. Having attended Friday prayers as a child, as I assumed almost everyone else sitting outside the mosque had done at some point, I knew the precise moment at which they would end and, by extension, the point at which we would become fair game, so to speak, of the riot police. Judging by the look on my fellow, would-be protesters’ faces, they had had a very similar thought process leading to the same eventual conclusion, albeit perhaps not in the context of a mid-40’s Cary Grant film.

The surreal quality of the whole scene makes for a perfect juxtaposition of Hitchcock in my head ─ one more prayer verse recited, one less bottle of champagne ─ A ‘Ticking Clock’ playing to a live audience, who we simulate the inevitable chaos that is about to unfold. It’s the last bottle now, the final prayer position: on the knees, back straight. The riot police loom over us menacingly, their posture in sharp contrast with that of the worshipers, and twice as many. This all being a Hitchcockian set piece, I think that this is a paradigm of visual foreshadowing of the events that are about to take place. And then, the phrase I’d heard countless times before cuts through the air like a razor, and takes on a new meaning: “The peace and mercy of Allah be upon you.”

Adrenaline has an uncanny ability to play with one’s perception of time. At least, this was my initial assumption when I pondered the speed with which the events of the next couple of hours seemed to transpire. Upon watching the footage from Moustafa Mahmoud Mosque the following day, though, I saw that my version of events, their brevity of time between which they occurred, was surprisingly close to the truth. There was indeed just a split second between the Imam’s pronouncement of that key phrase, and a yell from somewhere behind me that was to be the rallying cry of the protest: “The people want the fall of the regime!”  And it was, to be sure, barely a heartbeat before every voice in the police-bordered square roared those eight words, releasing thirty years of rage along with them. And what came next was indeed like a choreographed Bollywood dance, the type where an unremarkable group in the street spontaneously breaks out into the kind of routine that should doubtlessly take weeks to perfect.

Suffice it to say that as surprised as the rest of us over our display of sequenced solidarity, the riot police had no choice but to let us loose onto the streets.  So we marched. For how long I can’t say, but dull moments were few and far between. First, and most apparent, were the people. Everyone in Egypt seems to know everyone else, an astounding feat in a country of roughly eighty million people. I suspect that many of my fellow demonstrators viewed the day’s events as a cheap alternative to the local nightclubs they would have otherwise had to pay an absurd cover charge to enter. In between the chanting, friends ran into friends and formed temporary parties which would inevitably become disbanded by way of teargas.

I fear the almost hypnotic, yet comic quality of the day’s chants will almost definitely not translate onto the page, but bear with me nonetheless. Egyptians, as it is well known throughout the Arab world, have adopted a sense of humor vastly superior to that of our neighbors. Fittingly, public events give prospective comedians a chance to test their mettle, a veritable stand-up open mic night. A Revolution Against Corruption, Injustice, Unemployment, and Torture™ might seem to many to have a certain incongruity with this concept, but then, you’d have had to have lived in Egypt to ‘get it.’

The chant went like this: “Susanne [our first lady], tell your man a bag of lentils costs ten pounds; and the land in my backyard is worth half a pound.” (The English translation, as I warned you, rather drains that of humor, but rest assured it was a crowd favorite.)

If the picture I’ve painted so far seems incomplete and strangely devoid of violence, I’ll do my best not to disappoint. Our numbers grow as we continue through the streets, coming finally upon Ramses Square, a largely unremarkable place connected to Tahrir Street (not to be confused with the now famous square) through Galaa Bridge. Some of us don surgical masks loosely around our necks; but most do not think it necessary. We cycle through a series of chants and happen at this particular moment to be stressing the “peaceful” aspect of our peaceful protest by shouting “Silmiya!” (Peaceful). Imagine our surprise, then, when several heads in the crowd turn skywards, regarding with a sort of vague curiosity the eight or so canisters of tear gas being lobbed in our direction. Those of us with masks at the ready don’t quite suffer the full impact of the stuff. The rest…not so lucky.

The square becomes home to all manner of unpleasant symptoms; vomiting, fainting, floods of tears and mucus. The veteran protesters among us come to the rescue, providing supplies that would become all too familiar to us throughout the rest of the day: onions, soft drinks, and vinegar, which we had already learned were handy, home brewed defenses against the consequences of tear gas exposure.

Aside from its intended results, tear gas has two unfortunate side effects upon those it’s used against: rage and indignation. When one ceases coughing and wildly stumbling about, the same question always arises: “How could they? And to me, the bastards!” So, to be entirely accurate, it’s perhaps one part indignation to one part bruised ego.

Which all often works to the attackers’ advantage. All it really takes is one or two brave souls, caught in a frenzy of adrenaline, to wildly rush at a barricade, trusting that the crowd will follow. The crowd almost always does. Almost. “Almost”, among the many other lessons I took with me that day, is not a word to be taken lightly.

We rushed the bridge, my friends and I, along with a couple dozen others, in the hopes of pushing back our tear gas-dispensing foes. I know I speak for our entire group when I say our thought process went roughly like this:

“That’s strange, I thought there were more people behind me. Why are the rest all crammed on one side of the bridge?”

“Oh, the other side is full of riot police with batons.  I see…”

“Well, now, why is everyone in front of me putting their hands above their heads and ducking down slightly? Oh, it must be because of that advancing armored military carrier, mounted by a shotgun-wielding cop, who is now firing blindly into the crowd.”

“Is that what’s called ‘a pincer move’, when you suddenly get trapped and attacked from both sides? This newly fired round of tear gas is wildly unnecessary.”

We manage to emerge from the plume of smoke, having received a fair beating, and now initiating a new cycle of vomiting, fainting, running tears and mucus. Some of our number have been sprayed with non-lethal shotgun pellets.

But don’t let it be said that this was the extent of the police’s violence. Hundreds have had their lives taken by senseless, stupid brutality. At the time of writing, it is far from over. The Egyptian Army is attempting, with varying degrees of success, to fill the security void left by the police. As of this writing, looters, crooked cops, and escaped prisoners still roam the streets, defended against by hastily assembled neighborhood watches. (I guess you could say we’re in the Mad Max phase at the moment.)  Mubarak has announced his dedication to reform and has given his word that he will step down in this year’s election. Is it enough? Let me be the first Egyptian to say: I don’t care. I personally tire of local politics. Mubarak steps down, Mubarak grows a ponytail; absolutely irrelevant. Irreversible change has occurred in an unprecedented manner, and the people have shown that they clearly have no issue with taking a few days off work to speak their mind.  Or even to lose our lives. Our fear has vanished, seemingly overnight, and I take a certain pride in my fellow shabaab for accomplishing what earlier generations could not. ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ this, ‘ElBaradei’ that; the speculation is and will remain unceasing, but whoever inherits this mess can take it as read that Tahrir Square will always be open.

________________________________________________

Taher Medhat is an Egyptian film student who studied film at City College in San Francisco, and is currently living in Cairo. For more on Egypt, click here.

by Con Carylon

(Reporting from Toowoomba, Australia)

After about twenty years of drought, Australia is now having rain and lots of it. Our dams, which were at a disastrous 7% level, are now approaching 70%, with rain predicted for a couple of months yet. Some may even get to 100 percent capacity. Toowoomba sits on top of a mountain range, so floods are unknown here. Not so for many other Queenslanders who are situated in flat areas close to rivers. Many have to contend with houses under muddy water, and at last count at the time of this writing, nine have died trying to cross flooded streams.

It is always pleasing to see people pull together in the face of adversity. Political, religious and class differences are forgotten in these times, as well they should be. But why does it have to be restricted to times of adversity, one could ask? When the crisis has passed we’ll resume bickering among ourselves, no doubt. We are humans, after all.

There are those who see adversity as just another opportunity to further their own agenda. Federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott has assured us that he will be calling the government to account if they don’t handle the crisis according to his exacting standards, and announced with a flourish his plan to build dams around the country so that floods will be a thing of the past. At first glance this seems like a good idea. That is, until the NIMBYS (Not In My Backyard-erS) discovered that it is in their backyard that Tony plans to build his dam. Good luck with that. There are numerous other reasons why the proposal will never bear fruit, but appearance trumps substance, and that’s all that matters in politics, it seems. Is it any wonder that we become so cynical?

The opposite of cynicism is that during the flood crisis, thousands of people are donating money and  time to help with the State Emergency Service; and helping in a million other ways without receiving any recognition for their efforts.  Will Durant had something to say about this:

“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

So, here’s to the people on the banks. We too often forget the true heroes in this world.

posted by Nigel Voight

The above video is first person footage of the devastation wreaked by the Japanese tsunami. After viewing the video, if you wish to contribute, the instructions below are from The American Red Cross.

[From source: Red Cross]

The Red Cross is asking for help to aid Japan. If you are in The United States, you can help by texting REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation and support our disaster relief efforts to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami throughout the Pacific. if anyone has information about how others outside of the United States can help, please leave your information in the comments section and Harlots Sauce Radio will verify the information.

Below are some of the frequently asked questions about the Text REDCROSS mobile giving program:

Does the full $10 go to the Red Cross?
Your text donation will support will support our disaster relief efforts to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami throughout the Pacific. On those rare occasions when donations exceed American Red Cross expenses for a specific disaster, contributions are used to prepare for and serve victims of other disasters. mGive, the agency working to collect and process donations on behalf of the Red Cross, charges a $.25 fee per donation.

Will my wireless carrier charge me for text messaging to 90999?
When you text the word REDCROSS to 90999 you donate $10 to support our disaster relief efforts to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami throughout the Pacific. A onetime $10 donation will be added to your phone bill. Depending on your carrier agreement, message and data rates may apply. Your $10 donation will appear on your regular monthly phone bill.

How will people know that this texting program is legitimate?
To document your donation, after you send a text message you will receive a confirmation text that asks you to reply “YES” if you intend to give a $10 donation to support the Red Cross. A thank you text will follow.

How do I get a tax receipt for this donation?
Go to www.mgive.org/receipt and enter your mobile number. A PIN number will be sent via text to your phone and you will need to enter it on the site where requested. You will then be able to see confirmation of all donations you have made via the mobile phone number that was entered. You can print a receipt for your records that can also be treated as the official donation receipt for tax purposes.

Can people outside the US give using 90999?
Only US wireless subscribers can donate this way.

How quickly does the Red Cross receive the donations after the donor text messages the number?
Under normal circumstances, the $10 donation amount is added to a donor’s phone bill and it is sent to the Red Cross at the end of the billing and payment cycle, which can take 60-90 days.

What happens after a donor opts in to receive additional news from the Red Cross?
After your donation and acknowledgment, you will then receive one more text asking you to reply with YES if you want to receive text updates from the Red Cross. You do not need to reply to this message if you do not wish to receive updates.
Will anyone other than the Red Cross have access to the donor data from the 90999 program?
Only Mobile Accord/mGive Foundation, working under an agreement with the Red Cross, and the Red Cross have access to the donor information.

How do I stop receiving future Red Cross updates via text message?
You can opt-out from receiving additional text messages from the Red Cross by texting “Stop” to 90999. If you would like to follow our relief efforts you can connect with us on Twitter, follow us on Facebook or register at Red Cross.org to receive email messages.

How can I confirm that my text donation went through?
Go to www.mgive.org/receipt and enter your mobile number. If your donation did not go through (and you have not donated to any other campaigns), you will be told that no donations were found for that mobile number and you should try again.

I tried to text in the keyword but got a message back saying that the short code has expired. What does this mean?
This message means that you have premium text messaging (anything that will cost money) blocked on your phone. You will need to call your wireless carrier to have premium SMS enabled if you want to make a donation.

Can I donate more than $10?
Most wireless carriers will allow you to donate up to $30 to a specific keyword (like REDCROSS). If you wish to donate more than $30, please visit redcross.org or call 1-800-RED CROSS.

by Amber Burke

Just a few years ago, in August 2008, I was sitting at a party in the home of the Santos family.  Their home was full of love and laughter, and it was then that I was introduced to Luis Santos.  He was a beautiful boy; and I could see him becoming a handsome man in the future.  He was charming and quick to smile and laugh.  He interacted with his elderly relatives, parents, and cousins in a way that was thoughtful and considerate.  I spoke with him for quite a while that day, and he told me all about the goals had for himself, and what sounded like big plans for a really bright future I was both charmed and impressed by him.

Only a couple of months later, on October 5 of that same year, I was told that Luis had been murdered.  How could that be?  He wasn’t the kind of kid to look for trouble.  How on earth could something like that be true?

As I sat as Luis’s funeral, listening to his father sing, “Let it Be” to him, listening to Luis’s young cousin speak, I cried from my soul at this horrendous and senseless loss.  I cried for him, I cried for his parents, and I cried for a world in which such violence and evil should exist.  The pain and loss of all of those people in the packed, large church at his funeral was overwhelming. I didn’t even know how to begin to help his grieving parents.

I watched the news and internet for any new information that would shed some kind of understanding onto this senseless, violent act. As the facts of the case came to light, I listened in horror and frustration.  Luis and his friends had gone to a couple of college parties that they’d been invited to on that tragic Saturday night.  On the way out of the second party, they were accosted by a gang of boys and attacked.   Their attackers had previously tried to crash a fraternity party and had been kicked out, and it seemed that they were looking for retribution for being kicked out of the party.  Three of the Luis’s friends were stabbed, one was punched in the eye so hard that he required emergency eye surgery to repair the damage, and Luis was killed when he was stabbed through his heart.

I was shocked and horrified to learn the identity of one of his assailants. It was Esteban Nuñez, the son of a Former California State Assemblyman Speaker, Fabian Nuñez. Although he was not the one who actually wielded the blade that killed Luis, he was also carrying a knife that night, and stabbed two of the other boys; one of whom was seriously injured by stab wounds to the stomach and back.  In fact, the doctors said that one inch either way, and that boy too, would have been killed in the attack.  The boys in Luis’s group had no weapons on them.

Esteban Nuñez was not some poor street kid from a broken, impoverished home.   This was the child of a wealthy and powerful political figure in California, a representative elected to make and uphold the laws for our state. It didn’t make any sense that his son could be involved with something like this. In the weeks and months that followed, the evidence mounted that Esteban Nuñez was not such a nice boy; despite the wealth and privilege he enjoyed, or the glowing character references that the judge received from high ranking public officials, such as  the Mayor of Los Angeles. Before it was taken down, I saw  Esteban Nuñez’s Facebook page, where he displayed images of himself and his friends torturing cats, showing gang signs, using foul language, and being disrespectful to both women and authority. Furthermore, Esteban was quoted as saying that he would “get away with the murder” because “his father would fix it all for him.”  He’d previously told a police officer who had stopped him for speeding to, “go ahead and give him a ticket ─ did the officer know who his dad was?”

It became apparent as time went on, that he and his friends went out that Saturday night, driving all the way from Sacramento to San Diego, armed with knives, looking for a fight. As the case was heard, the defense pointed out that the attackers had tried to destroy the evidence of the attack by burning their clothes and getting rid of the murder weapons, and colluding in an attempt to throw police off their trail.  Only the closed-captioned TV cameras on the campus, and tips from the public, including one from a cousin of one of the assailants, brought them to the authority’s attention.

I also watched as the victim’s parents, Fred and Kathy Santos, along with their daughter, Brigida, carried themselves with grace and spoke with eloquence on behalf of their dead son and brother.  I watched them suffer financially, emotionally, and physically, with the publicity and the trial process, and   it was a sickening sight for anyone to witness.  I did the only thing I could, and that was to write on my personal blog about the situation.  Maybe it didn’t do anything truly helpful, but I received letters from Luis’s friends and relatives telling me that it gave them something.

That’s why, when Fred Santos announced that they were going to accept a plea bargain, in which the perpetrators would plead guilty to the lesser crime of manslaughter rather than stand trial for murder, I was shocked.  Why would the Santos family be satisfied with such a thing?  But, Fred explained that his wife and daughter were emotionally and physically worn down from the trial process, and to go through a jury trial would take another several years. Between the trials and automatic appeals processes, they had no certainty that the defendants would receive life sentences. They felt that justice would be served by the judge. They trusted the judicial system and prayed for a fair outcome.  It was also believed by their lawyers that the longer that the case was allowed to drag along, the more political power could be wielded by the other side. The Santos family was completely disheartened to hear that the Mayor of Los Angeles had publicly declared Esteban Nuñez innocent even before the courts heard any evidence in the case.

However, when the judge handed down his sentence, he stated that after listening to all of the evidence and reflecting on the heinous crime that had been committed, he had no choice but to inflict the maximum sentence for manslaughter.  The Santos family breathed a sigh of relief that the trial was now over, justice was served, and they could go back to mourning Luis in private.

On January 2, 2011, the news broke.  I could hardly believe my eyes when I caught sight of the headline: “Schwarzenegger Commutes Nuñez Sentence.”   I started to cry as I read the article with horror.  I couldn’t believe it was true.  I started searching the Internet, trying to find how this could have happened.  I later received a very sad email from Fred Santos, confirming the story.  He was both bewildered and heartbroken. In addition, the governor’s office not only did not contact the Santos family to let them know of the governor’s decision, they also didn’t contact the San Diego district attorney to get any information on the case.  The first the Santos family heard of this decision was from the media, when they asked them to comment.

Fred Santos learned that Fabian Nuñez was seen coming out of the governor’s office just a short time before the pardon was signed.  (Note: This is an unsubstantiated claim made by a reporter who was covering the case).  He was also an invited guest and attended the party for the Governor’s farewell on December 16, 2010.   He can be seen here singing for the Governor at his farewell roast: http://www.baycitizen.org/videos/fabian-Nuñez-sings-schwarzenegger-roast/ Fabian Nuñez was a known friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as someone who had helped Schwarzenegger in his personal business dealings.  One of these deals, relating to possible illegal gifting of state assets, is being reviewed and challenged in court by the new Governor, Jerry Brown.

Esteban Nuñez had only spent a few months in prison.  He had been out on bail during the whole trial process as his family could afford the one million dollar bail bond for him.  He was only taken into custody May 5, of 2010, to begin serving his sentence after pleading guilty to the reduced charges.

Nuñez accepted a plea bargain, knowing that he would not win in a jury trial, as the evidence against him was too overwhelming.

Therefore, my questions are, why would Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’d used his power to pardon so frugally throughout his administration, choose to intervene in this particular case, unless it was politically, financially, or personally motivated?  And why wait until the last minute, as he was leaving office, to do it?  Why would he not ask for the records from the district attorney to get an understanding of the case?  If he felt the sentence so harsh, why did he not do the same for the other boys who were involved in the death of Luis Santos?  Why single Nuñez out?

Yes, Esteban Nuñez may not have killed Luis Santos, but he tried to kill two of the other boys, and nearly succeeded in doing just that.  California law makes everyone involved in the same crime equally responsible. Esteban Nuñez was carrying a weapon, and used it on unarmed people who wished him no harm.  In the immediate aftermath, he attempted to cover up the crime. So, if not for the identity of Esteban’s father, what reason would Schwarzenegger have to believe that he deserved any leniency?  The reason he cited was that Esteban Nuñez had no prior record, but how many crimes does someone have to commit before murder should be punished to the full extent of the law?  When did it become less of a crime to murder someone just because you don’t have a previous record?

Everyone should be as outraged as I by this entire case.  The governor’s pardon wasn’t put in for political cronyism. So should this practice be allowed to continue, or should a bill be created which states that any official who has the power to pardon not be allowed to use that power within a certain period prior to leaving office. In that way, he or she would have to face the people and suffer the backlash of abuse of that power.

My heart is so heavy as I write this.  I decided to share my friendship with the Santos family, and my belief in the injustice that took place over the death of their son, because I believe that everyone should be aware of what I believe was and is a misuse of power that’s happening in our country. It nullifies our whole justice system and the power of a fair trial.  It highlights the fact that if you’re rich or well connected you can get away with murder.

It’s my hope that this story will touch every reader, and we will all choose not to vote for politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Fabian Nuñez in the future as they pursue their careers.  We may not be able to repeal Schwarzenegger’s decision in the courts, but we can send the message to all of our elected officials that we will not stand for any type of special favors and privilege for the wealthy, powerful and famous.

Apparently young Esteban was indeed correct; his father did fix it for him.

****

Editor’s note: Prior to the time of publication of this piece, Arnold Schwarzenegger had written a letter of apology to the Santo’s family, a letter which was seen as a political maneuver by Luis Santo’s parents.  It should be pointed out that although Nuñez did not kill Luis Santos, he was originally sentenced to 16 years for his role in the brawl ─ the same sentence given to Santos’ killer, Ryan Jett. Schwarzenegger commuted Nuñez’s sentence to six years, and Nuñez is now serving time at Mule Creek State Prison, where, The Los AngelesTimes reports, Fabian Nuñez is already working on his son’s behalf by giving gifts to prison employees.

Youthful civil disobedience will never be the same again. Thanks to their superior knowledge of modern technology, it will conquer. Think of it as the Ice Age Theory as opposed to the sudden Meteor Theory; a freeze which slowly but inevitably prevailed over the unsuspecting and unprepared Tyrannosaurus Rex. Used to being a force of terror, drunk on its own power, Mr. T. Rex just didn’t notice how chilly it was getting.  Today, we are the dinosaurs compared to those who not only simply utilize the convenience and entertainment value of Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone, but know how they work. On this premise, governments will rise or fall, revolutions will succeed or fail, based on the skills of either side’s best hackers.

Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the recent uprisings in Egypt, which overthrew the Mubarak government in only 18 days. Much has been written about the “whys” of the protests, and the “what happens now” after the protests, but little has been said about the “how”. And that’s because the fossils still think they’re in charge; the fossils in this case being old school dictatorships, and mainstream media. In their heyday, uprisings could be quickly quelled and protesters killed or jailed in any country that was not completely first world by the time the rest of us even heard about it. When we did learn of it, it was through the print and broadcast press, which was able to put its own spin upon it, aided of course, by whatever each of our individual country’s government did or did not want us to know.

However, the following is proof positive that this is no longer the case. Taken verbatim from my own Facebook feed are communications from several students, all under the age of 25, some of whom were based in The United States, some based in Egypt, and some based in Europe. These communications all took place, publicly, for the entire world to see and read, while the Egyptian rebellion was happening. Get your ear warmers and your mittens, on, Mr. T. Rex ─ it looks like it’s getting cold again:

From a 23-year-old male student based on the West Coast of the United States about his communication with an Egyptian friend:

“Just got off the phone with my friend _______.  I say ‘phone’ because halfway through our Skype conversation, the [Egyptian] government presumably pulled the plug on the last working network. He chuckles at the absurdity of it all, while showing me the taser he keeps on his person, one of the weapons against the looters directly outside his house. That is one of the last things he does in our pixilated, jittery exchange before he gets cut off.  So we used our cell phones after and he gives me the rundown of the events that took place when he and his mates marched in a peaceful protest. In short, he was tear-gassed, beaten with police batons, and narrowly avoided getting shot with a rubber bullet by a cop who was directly aiming at him. Most of this occurs after the police decide to cease firing warning shots, and instead begin shooting directly into the crowd at random. (For those who think rubber bullets can’t kill, try receiving one in the head). In a safe, regrouping area, many off-duty cops are actually sympathetic to the wheezing and beaten protesters and offer them onions and carbonated beverages to counteract the effects of the gas, which _________describes as one of the worst sensations he’s ever felt. …….He ends up spending the night at a friend’s across town from his worried parents’ house, as he can’t return home due to the curfew imposed.”

From the 21 year-old Egyptian student about whom the first student writes:

“So, tear gas is really. F*cking. Unpleasant. For that matter, so’s a police baton to the back. Who says the Egyptian government can’t teach its citizens anything? What they can’t seem to do, though, is recognize a peaceful protest when it comes marching down the streets, holding up signs and shouting “Silmiya!” (Peaceful). Also, they can’t quite grasp the concept of a nationwide communication blockage.”

Commentary to 21 year-old Egyptian from Facebook friends and family. (Names have been deleted and locations changed for privacy):

‘Canada’: Bro….I require a daily update (Can be short:P) on everyone’s well being, pleasssse. Texts don’t seem to be going through to mom or dad.

‘New York’: I tell all my friends about you and what you are doing. We are all very proud of you. You are in our prayers and please, please stay safe!

‘San Francisco’: It’s surreal to me that several weeks ago you were here in school, and now you’re having to guard your home with makeshift weapons. I take it firearms have been outlawed there?

Reply from Egyptian to the above:

@’San Francisco’ Yeah, it’s all quite surreal _______. Firearms have never been easy to get a hold of here, but the Army is urging everyone to protect their homes by any means possible.

@’Canada’   Sorry sis, internet was out for the past two days. Let’s talk tonight if you’re free.

From a Greek youth, informing the Egyptian protesters how to get past the internet lockdown imposed by the Egyptian government:

Egyptians, to get pass the internet blockages use the following IPs:
Twitter: “128.242.240.52″
Facebook: “69.63.189.34″
Google: “172.14.204.99″

And then, a notification from France:
A French ISP is offering free access to the telephone line +33 1 72 89 01 50 encoded ‘toto.’

From USA-based 23-year-old, reporting on Facebook again the next day:

“When he is at home at night, the neighborhood watch keeps the looters out, who have practically become an army of their own, assault rifles and all. However, contrary to a lot of what has been reported, many of the neighborhood watch are armed with guns of their own, aside from the makeshift, ‘household’ weapons they brandish, so the looters have yet to pose an actual threat as the ‘apartment complex militia’ are doing a great job holding them off.  _______ and his friends stay up all night by campfire outside their home turned trench, making the best out of the situation, immediately responsive to any potential threat via sound signals they’ve created to communicate with one another across long distances. The following are the important updates ______ gives me that need to be reported, as most of the media is doing a fairly half-assed and inconclusive job ─ ”

‘Mercenaries-for-hire have broken at least 25 convicts out of local prisons. One would think that, given the reports of the Muslim Brotherhood doing the same with a select few of their own, that there is some political motive behind this. However, many of these prisoners have proven to just be random, average criminals, some serving mere six month sentences. This being proven by the fact that a few of these guys have actually gone to police stations to turn themselves back in, stating that they were forced to break out and simply wish to serve the remainder of their sentence and avoid future prosecution. As a result, many speculate the mercenaries themselves have been hired by the government to commit the prison raids, all part of Mubarak and Co.’s strategy to let chaos ensue in order to prove that only they can restore order to the nation. Ironically, many of these mercenaries have been hired by citizens themselves to protect their respective neighborhoods. Apparently, ‘a gig’s a gig’ for these guys.’

“─ Many off-duty cops are looters themselves; _________ has seen this with his own eyes. Aside from this far from subtle display of gross hypocrisy, police have been setting their own vehicles on fire, framing the protesters and making a peaceful protest appear to be a violent one in order to have a ready excuse to use force.  Also, part of the death toll that isn’t being reported on in main stream media includes civilians killing looters.

On the plus side, there is an ‘army hotline’ ─ (the army, thus far, has still remained a symbol of peacekeeping in the eyes of most citizens) ─ for people to call for help if they capture and tie up a looter, which many have done. However, the common knowledge is that many thieves have simply been executed by those defending their families and property.”

From the 21-year old Egyptian:

“Sporadic gunfire nearby…curfew’s about four hours in. Got our own ragtag neighborhood watch standing outside the building (essentially a group of twenty-something’s with sticks, knives, knives taped on the end of sticks…you get the drift). They light campfires at night, just in case anyone thought this wasn’t enough like Mad Max. Do your worst, looters.”

From the 23-year old USA-based student:

“Tomorrow, February 1st, marks the one-week anniversary of the uprising, and a nationwide strike is planned. With the majority of the civilians protesting in even greater numbers than before, the reaction of the police and the resulting bloodshed in the past week can only indicate that the death toll tomorrow will undoubtedly skyrocket. My friend will be there; I certainly can’t blame him. This is a gruesome, horrendous, yet incredibly significant time in Egyptian history, and I cannot hate on anyone who would want to witness or take part. But the police do not distinguish between the rioter and the observer/historian, they just f*cking shoot anyone who’s there. All I can do is call him tomorrow and see how the day went, as any cliché wish of “be safe” is beyond pointless.”

From the 21-year-old Egyptian, in response to a friend based in New York’s questions about the politics behind the uprising and the Egyptian government’s tactics:

“So although Mubarak’s divide and conquer strategy is apparent to anyone with a TV or a router (or a pulse), it’s still a shade away from being fact. Unfortunately, that means that all the suggestions you made (embargo/UN) won’t fly, because there are all types of theories floating around about who’s behind all the chaos. …This whole shebang has only been happening for just over a week, remember, so it’ll take a lot more time and a lot more destruction for any kind of decisive international action. That being said, we’re quite a territorial and emotional people, and outside intervention would definitely stir up the more extremist elements of the country. People feel as if they have the power to change things for the first time, and having foreign intervention might stop the sectarian violence temporarily but it’ll only make people unite against a common enemy, which is never a good foundation for a new democracy…. Most Egyptians would rather keep the chaos going, at least for a while, or solve it themselves instead of having the U.S. lead any kind of peacekeeping effort.  Welcome to my world.”

Summary of situation immediately prior to the resignation of Mubarak by 23-year-old USA-based student:

“….The Muslim Brotherhood, Army of Islam, etc.,  seek to topple Mubarak for the complete opposite reasons of the civilian protesters, and that is an important distinction that I don’t think the media is focusing on enough. The average protester doesn’t want Mubarak out because he’s part of “the West” and a “US ally” and pro-negotiations with Israel and all that usual fundamentalist lingo; they want him out because his administration allowed the imprisonment of teenage protesters without trial, the police murder of Khaled Mohamed Saeed, government scandals, and for all around being a totalitarian, civil-rights violating douchebag. But a potential coup by the extremists would implement a ‘government’ that would make Mubarak’s Egypt seem like a utopia. I would rather see an imperialist U.S. puppet dictator put in than see Egypt be consumed and destroyed by a bunch of fanatic psychos as it was with Iran in the 70’s. But that’s one of the worse case scenarios, we just have to wait and see.”

From a friend in New York, to the Egyptian, after the fall of the Egyptian government:

So, what now?

From the Egyptian in reply to the friend in New York:

And there you have it. Unless all governments and/or Rupert Murdoch decide to outlaw cell phones, computers, and independent media outlets, this is the future. Rest assured that whatever does happen in Egypt next, the youth around the world will be watching, and reporting.

________________________________________________________________

by Taher Medhat

In the 1946 Alfred Hitchcock film, “Notorious”, Cary Grant’s Nazi-infiltrating T.R. Devlin scours through a wine cellar belonging to the host of a party which is going on upstairs. As Grant searches for the evidence to implicate his dastardly Nazi host, the viewer is treated to a classically Hitchcockian device: The Ticking Clock. You see, Agent Devlin has a very narrow window of opportunity: as soon the champagne which flows about carelessly upstairs runs dry, the server of said beverage must doubtlessly run downstairs to (where else?) the very same wine cellar in which our hero sleuths about. And with that, the master sets the stage for suspense. A champagne bucket upstairs, an object previously thought by the viewer to be of complete innocuousness, becomes as deadly as a time bomb as it is slowly drained of bottles, signaling the imminent discovery of the protagonist.

The fact that this scene was rattling around my head as I watched Friday prayers drawing to a close on January 28^th, 2011, moments before one of the largest protests in Egyptian history was about to erupt, might seem slightly ludicrous, but for someone like me, a film student and an Egyptian by birth, the sequence of events which unfolded at Moustafa Mahmoud Mosque in the town of Mohandeseen, did so with such a sense of grand orchestration, that I couldn’t help think they would make Hitch himself crack a wry smile in his grave.

It began with a Facebook event invite that had a catchy title: “Anger Friday for Revolution Against Corruption, Injustice, Unemployment, and Torture.” Roughly eighty thousand people were classified as “attending”, but the replies of over one million Facebook users were still listed “awaited”. Perhaps that was because there were several virtual farms and cities that needed tending to, and this was no game. Tahrir Square was to be both the physical and symbolic center of the protest, an appropriate decision given that tahrir is Arabic for ‘liberation’. Unlike the previous protest which had taken place three days earlier, this one was planned from the very start to go nationwide. The atmosphere surrounding Moustafa Mahmoud Mosque, which was playing host to several journalists, Egyptian media personalities and eventually riot police, was electric. Around noon, just before the commencement of Friday prayers, soon-to-be protesters glanced around nervously, minding their p’s and q’s, just in case eavesdropping government agents were nearby, surreptitiously blending into the crowd. A handful of well-known Egyptian film stars and directors offered their two cents to anyone with a camera and microphone. I only caught snippets of their conversations; phrases along the lines of “Peaceful demonstration”, “The people want [x]” and “We’ve had enough of [y]” cropped up quite frequently. A few plainclothes policemen were loosely spread around the outskirts of the mosque; so few, in fact, that I became suspicious─ were these people drastically underprepared, or were they wearing an extremely well-crafted poker face? The cynic in me told me it was the latter, and unfortunately for and the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets during this time, my inner cynic is usually right.

For those of you unfamiliar with the peculiarities of the world’s fastest growing religion, prayer in Islam is a highly regimented affair. It’s a coordinated series of bows and prostrations mixed in with recitations of Quranic verses. More importantly though, at least for the purposes of the event in question, prayer ends with the Imam saying the phrase “The peace and mercy of Allah be upon you.” (Why this is important you’ll soon know.)

As prayer begins, I, along with several journalists and women, who are prohibited from praying with men in the mosque (the women, not the journalists, just to be clear), sit on a protracted ledge directly behind the worshipers. Some of them use their Egyptian flags as prayer mats, others pray on scarves, which they clearly intend to use as a safeguard against teargas later down the line. My train of thought is shaken by a tap to the arm; it’s one of my two companions, who motions for me to look in the indicated direction. There they are: dark-clad, single file, covering the entirety of the street behind us, riot shields and all. We don’t have much time to consider where the hell they came from for too long, because the worshipers, now standing, are preparing to go into their first prostration, in which they kneel down with their foreheads touching the ground. They do just that, and as they do, on either side of the men at prayer suddenly now stand an additional two, perfectly formed rows of riot police, having arrived at their posts by what I can only assume is some form of ancient sorcery. I do the math. One row on either side, one directly behind us, plus the front entrance of the mosque; we are quite literally boxed in.

It was at this point that I started thinking about Hitchcock’s Ticking Clock. Having attended Friday prayers as a child, as I assumed almost everyone else sitting outside the mosque had done at some point, I knew the precise moment at which they would end and, by extension, the point at which we would become fair game, so to speak, of the riot police. Judging by the look on my fellow, would-be protestors’ faces, they had had a very similar thought process leading to the same eventual conclusion, albeit perhaps not in the context of a mid-40’s Cary Grant film.

The surreal quality of the whole scene makes for a perfect juxtaposition of Hitchcock in my head ─ one more prayer verse recited, one less bottle of champagne ─ A ‘Ticking Clock’ playing to a live audience, who we simulate the inevitable chaos that is about to unfold. It’s the last bottle now, the final prayer position: on the knees, back straight. The riot police loom over us menacingly, their posture in sharp contrast with that of the worshipers, and twice as many. This all being a Hitchcockian set piece, I think that this is a paradigm of visual foreshadowing of the events that are about to take place. And then, the phrase I’d heard countless times before cuts through the air like a razor, and takes on a new meaning: “The peace and mercy of Allah be upon you.”

Adrenaline has an uncanny ability to play with one’s perception of time. At least, this was my initial assumption when I pondered the speed with which the events of the next couple of hours seemed to transpire. Upon watching the footage from Moustafa Mahmoud Mosque the following day, though, I saw that my version of events, their brevity of time between which they occurred, was surprisingly close to the truth. There was indeed just a split second between the Imam’s pronouncement of that key phrase, and a yell from somewhere behind me that was to be the rallying cry of the protest: “The people want the fall of the regime!”  And it was, to be sure, barely a heartbeat before every voice in the police-bordered square roared those eight words, releasing thirty years of rage along with them. And what came next was indeed like a choreographed Bollywood dance, the type where an unremarkable group in the street spontaneously breaks out into the kind of routine that should doubtlessly take weeks to perfect.

Suffice it to say that as surprised as the rest of us over our display of sequenced solidarity, the riot police had no choice but to let us loose onto the streets.  So we marched. For how long I can’t say, but dull moments were few and far between. First, and most apparent, were the people. Everyone in Egypt seems to know everyone else, an astounding feat in a country of roughly eighty million people. I suspect that many of my fellow demonstrators viewed the day’s events as a cheap alternative to the local nightclubs they would have otherwise had to pay an absurd cover charge to enter. In between the chanting, friends ran into friends and formed temporary parties which would inevitably become disbanded by way of teargas.

I fear the almost hypnotic, yet comic quality of the day’s chants will almost definitely not translate onto the page, but bear with me nonetheless. Egyptians, as it is well known throughout the Arab world, have adopted a sense of humor vastly superior to that of our neighbors. Fittingly, public events give prospective comedians a chance to test their mettle, a veritable stand-up open mic night. A Revolution Against Corruption, Injustice, Unemployment, and Torture™ might seem to many to have a certain incongruity with this concept, but then, you’d have had to have lived in Egypt to ‘get it.’

The chant went like this: “Susanne [our first lady], tell your man a bag of lentils costs ten pounds; and the land in my backyard is worth half a pound.” (The English translation, as I warned you, rather drains that of humor, but rest assured it was a crowd favorite.)

If the picture I’ve painted so far seems incomplete and strangely devoid of violence, I’ll do my best not to disappoint. Our numbers grow as we continue through the streets, coming finally upon Ramses Square, a largely unremarkable place connected to Tahrir Street (not to be confused with the now famous square) through Galaa Bridge. Some of us don surgical masks loosely around our necks; but most do not think it necessary. We cycle through a series of chants and happen at this particular moment to be stressing the “peaceful” aspect of our peaceful protest by shouting “Silmiya!” (Peaceful). Imagine our surprise, then, when several heads in the crowd turn skywards, regarding with a sort of vague curiosity the eight or so canisters of tear gas being lobbed in our direction. Those of us with masks at the ready don’t quite suffer the full impact of the stuff. The rest…not so lucky.

The square becomes home to all manner of unpleasant symptoms; vomiting, fainting, floods of tears and mucus. The veteran protestors among us come to the rescue, providing supplies that would become all too familiar to us throughout the rest of the day: onions, soft drinks, and vinegar, which we had already learned were handy, homebrewed defenses against the consequences of tear gas exposure.

Aside from its intended results, tear gas has two unfortunate side effects upon those it’s used against: rage and indignation. When one ceases coughing and wildly stumbling about, the same question always arises: “How could they? And to me, the bastards!” So, to be entirely accurate, it’s perhaps one part indignation to one part bruised ego.

Which all often works to the attackers’ advantage. All it really takes is one or two brave souls, caught in a frenzy of adrenaline, to wildly rush at a barricade, trusting that the crowd will follow. The crowd almost always does. Almost. “Almost”, among the many other lessons I took with me that day, is not a word to be taken lightly.

We rushed the bridge, my friends and I, along with a couple dozen others, in the hopes of pushing back our tear gas-dispensing foes. I know I speak for our entire group when I say our thought process went roughly like this:

“That’s strange, I thought there were more people behind me. Why are the rest all crammed on one side of the bridge?”

“Oh, the other side is full of riot police with batons.  I see…”

“Well, now, why is everyone in front of me putting their hands above their heads and ducking down slightly? Oh, it must be because of that advancing armored military carrier, mounted by a shotgun-wielding cop, who is now firing blindly into the crowd.”

“Is that what’s called ‘a pincer move’, when you suddenly get trapped and attacked from both sides? This newly fired round of tear gas is wildly unnecessary.”

We manage to emerge from the plume of smoke, having received a fair beating, and now initiating a new cycle of vomiting, fainting, running tears and mucus. Some of our number have been sprayed with non-lethal shotgun pellets.

But don’t let it be said that this was the extent of the police’s violence. Hundreds have had their lives taken by senseless, stupid brutality. At the time of writing, it is far from over. The Egyptian Army is attempting, with varying degrees of success, to fill the security void left by the police. As of this writing, looters, crooked cops, and escaped prisoners still roam the streets, defended against by hastily assembled neighborhood watches. (I guess you could say we’re in the Mad Max phase at the moment.)  Mubarak has announced his dedication to reform and has given his word that he will step down in this year’s election. Is it enough? Let me be the first Egyptian to say: I don’t care. I personally tire of local politics. Mubarak steps down, Mubarak grows a ponytail; absolutely irrelevant. Irreversible change has occurred in an unprecedented manner, and the people have shown that they clearly have no issue with taking a few days off work to speak their mind.  Or even to lose our lives. Our fear has vanished, seemingly overnight, and I take a certain pride in my fellow shabaab for accomplishing what earlier generations could not. ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ this, ‘ElBaradei’ that; the speculation is and will remain unceasing, but whoever inherits this mess can take it as read that Tahrir Square will always be open.

Taher Medhat is an Egyptian film student who studied film at City College in San Francisco, and is currently living in Cairo. For more on Egypt, click here.

by Vicola England

Once again the issue of Islam in Britain has raised its head, this time courtesy of the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester in case you were wondering. The Bishop has announced that Islamic extremists have turned parts of Britain into ‘no-go areas’ for those who don’t follow Mohammad, stating that ‘those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live and work there’. And do you know what? He’s absolutely right, although perhaps not for the reasons he thinks. The Bishop believes it’s because non-Muslims will find hostility from the Muslim community. And it’s true that the more radicalised may be hostile–but simply saying that antagonism from the community is the reason only scratches the surface of a far more complex problem in Britain today.

Venture into some of the more ‘financially inconvenienced’ former mill towns in the North or Brixton and the less affluent bits of London and the Midlands, and you’re going to find division staring you in the face. Oldham, in the North West, is a town whose main claim to fame is being the home of the ‘Oldham Riots’ of 2001 which saw 500 Asian youths, a similar number of white youths and 100 armed police engage in a full-scale riot complete with petrol bombs, overturned cars and smashed windows aplenty. Oldham has secondary schools that are so segregated you can find 99% white or 99% Asian pupils. It definitely has areas where non-Muslims will feel hostility, but this works both ways; there are no-go areas for Muslims too. Bradford and Rochdale are similar. What do these towns have in common? Little money, high levels of unemployment, massive reliance on state benefits, poor educational performance and traditional ‘working class’ ethics. If you believe the papers you’d think it was the end of days, but it’s not even new. Less affluent areas have always attracted immigrant populations that gathered together in common areas to keep their identity and community going, from the Irish potato famine that saw refugees sailing from the Emerald Isle to set up enclaves in poor areas of New York, Liverpool and London, enclaves that would brawl with the locals, to the Jamaicans who headed for London in the 60s and were greeted by such friendly gestures as signs in boarding house windows saying ‘No Blacks, No Irish’.

There are a few major difference between the immigrants of old and the recent wave of Muslim immigrants, the biggest of which are the intensity of resentment and fear. People were afraid of the Jamaicans when they arrived, mainly because a lot of them had never seen a coloured person before and it’s human nature to fear the unknown. But the fear today is different and, more importantly, is being fed in a completely new way, thanks to the press.

A quick look at recent headlines from one of the UK’s favourite tabloids, the Daily Mail (nick-named ‘The Daily Wail’ and ‘The Daily Heil’, which gives you some idea of which way it leans) shows that the press are not exactly on the side of our Muslim brethren: 13^th May – ‘Catholic schoolgirl who refused headscarf for mosque trip labelled a truant’, 9^th Feb – ‘Christian teacher “forced out” after complaining Muslim pupils praised 9/11 hijackers as heroes’, 30^th April – ‘Muslim daubs war memorial with “Islam will dominate the world” but walks free after CPS says he was NOT racially motivated’, 12^th April – ‘Muslim nurses CAN cover up but Christian colleagues can’t wear crucifixes’ (covering up is a contravention of the hospital’s policy on infection control which requires arms to be bare so skin can be cleaned and the risk of cross-contamination reduced).

The Daily Mail has a circulation of over 2m papers and 2 million visitors to its website daily. That’s a lot of people getting their information about the Muslim community from this less than neutral source. And it’s not alone; the tabloids have long ago figured out that there’s money to be made from feeding anti-Muslim feelings. These headlines foster the belief that there’s one rule for Muslims and another for the general populace, a belief that one tiny glance through history can tell us is very bad news indeed.

It’s not solely the fault of the papers, though. There are prominent Muslims fanning the flames too. Take the ever-delightful Anjem Choudary, a lawyer by training so not a man who needs to be out of work; however, Mr Choudary has announced that it is every Muslim’s duty to bleed as much money out of the British benefits system as possible. To give him his due, he is a man who practices what he preaches. Choudary brings in a tax free £25,740 a year; if he were paying tax it would be the equivalent of a £32,500 salary. The national average salary (before tax) is £25,800 and the after-tax cash a private fighting in Afghanistan will see is £13,430, half of what Mr Choudary receives for sitting on his backside preaching hate against the West. Given that it’s the Choudarys who hit the headlines rather than the mild mannered Muslim shopkeeper, factory worker or taxi driver who works long hours for minimum wage, it’s no wonder resentment is simmering away in poorer areas where people haven’t a hope of earning £32k a year. Though of course it isn’t just Muslims making their living from the benefits system: look at the mother of ‘kidnapped’ Shannon Matthews, Karen, who reputedly had 7 children from 5 different men because each time you have another, the amount you receive in benefits rises accordingly. And she’s far from unique.

Fear of Muslims among the non-Muslim community is easy to understand – they gather in groups, they dress differently, they often speak a different language so we’ve no idea whether they are talking about jihad or last night’s Coronation Street. The tabloids are telling us that they want us ALL to become Muslim and if we don’t then we’re going to be blown up in a holy war, plus the last government did its best to convince us that Muslim fanatics were so dangerous that we needed to relinquish civil liberties and rights to privacy which had survived a civil war, Hitler and the IRA. A glance through the anti-terrorism legislation brought in since 9/11 could lead the more cynical reader to conclude that Muslims have been a very useful tool indeed in allowing the government to gain more control than is healthy over its populace and their rights to protest.

Certainly in some respects the wider Muslim community does need to do more. It needs to be educating and controlling its youths. The fact is that a section of Britain does have a negative image of the Muslim community, and so trying to arrange marches through Wootten Bassett, the town where the bodies of dead British soldiers are repatriated, to chant about how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are murderers is not going to convince anyone that you aren’t trouble. Somali elders in the UK have a particularly tough time ahead if they’re going to convince the world that they come in peace, for the simple reason that a number of their youths don’t. Somali gangs are probably the most feared gangs in London because of their violence and ruthlessness, social workers are reluctant to work with them, and the turf wars they engage in are utterly brutal. However, why anyone expects any kid who’s grown up in Mogadishu living in a tribal system to arrive in London and magically become a hedge fund manager in a 3 bedroom semi-detached is a mystery. Logically, if violence and living on your wits is all you’ve ever known then it’s what you’re going to continue doing. Which is not to say that the problem doesn’t need addressing—it does—but it’s fair to say it’s not going to be solved by locking up the perpetrators while letting in more and more young Somali men.

So how do we heal Britain’s fractured communities and bring racial peace to the streets? Who knows? Find the answer to that one and you’ll make your fortune. What can be deduced, however, is that no one group can fix this; it’s going to take cooperation from the authorities, the police, the Muslim community, the indigenous community and the press. Most of all it’s going to take time. And the Bishop of Rochester needn’t be too afraid that ‘the influence of Christianity is in decline’ just yet; the current British population contains 42.6 million Christians and 2.4 million Muslims. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to be fitting Canterbury Cathedral for a dome and loudspeakers to call the faithful to prayer anytime soon.

by Patricia V. Davis

The spring I turned twenty-two, I was desperately trying to recover from a ravaging love affair that had changed me from a girl who was somewhat confident for her age and mostly happy, to one who was completely demoralized. It was not only the relationship itself, but the reactions to the demise of the relationship by friends and family who I thought I knew that made me lose all trust in my perceptions of people.

And so, I stopped caring about anything at all. I was walking, eating, breathing, but I wasn’t really living. On I went like that for a while, truly believing that was how I was going to exist for the rest of my days. Until that one day, when I opened my dresser drawer and noticed the engagement ring I’d taken off blinking out at me. I looked at it for a moment, then picked it up, put in it my handbag, left the house, took the subway to Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue Diamond Exchange, and sold that ring to a jeweler for two thousand dollars. Then I promptly spent the entire two grand to buy a tour of continental Europe, the “If-it’s-Tuesday-this-must-be Belgium” kind.

My first holiday abroad, and I was going alone.

It was in Rome, the third city on the tour, that it happened, just as we’ve all seen it happen in the vintage black and white films starring Audrey Hepburn. I was already recovering myself, brave enough to book the trip, brave enough to travel by myself, braver still to venture out of my hotel room sans tour guide and group to see the sights. I’d only walked a block when a young man drove by in a convertible and looked over at me. He had everything ─ the good looks, the fancy car, and the sense of romantic adventure that sanctioned his cutting off a taxi and driving up onto the sidewalk next to me with the finesse and casualness I now know is an inherent trait passed down only to Italian motorists. But as this was my first visit to Italy, I watched dumbfounded as he got out of his car, leaving the door wide open, and strode over. Then he just stood in front of me and stared.

After a few moments of that, he said, “Signorina, my name is ‘Paolo.’ You are so beautiful. Will you please, please, please go out with me tonight?”

I should have said no. That would have been wisest, but he was looking at me with such enchantment and hope that I heard myself agree to spend an evening in an unfamiliar city with a stranger who, depending on how you viewed it, was either a very bad or a very good driver.

When he picked me up at my hotel later as promised, he’d brought his car, and sitting in it was another young man who introduced himself as “Giorgio, Paolo’s friend”. Apparently, Paolo, who didn’t speak English, had noticed my poor Italian and recognized that there would be a language impediment. So he’d brought along a translator. Giorgio did speak English very well, and seemed quite happy to serve as liaison for his friend and his friend’s foreign date.

It never occurred to me for one moment that I was at risk. Despite my recent disillusionments, I was still ridiculously naïve, and they seemed like perfectly nice young men with nothing more on their minds than spending an evening with a girl who, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, they both found intriguing.

Here’s the point: I was exactly correct. After we left the hotel, the first thing we did was zig zag through narrow, stone-paved streets to get to an out-of the way trattoria where we shared a pizza that tasted as though it has been made for the gods. After which, they took me to the Tivoli Gardens, where Paolo bubbled explanations for what we were seeing, and Giorgio translated whatever I couldn’t catch. Our last stop for the evening was the Fontana di Trevi, the famous fountain in which one throws a coin in wish and promise to return to Rome. Typically tourist, I held up my camera and asked if I could take a photo of them in front of it, but Giorgio insisted that the photo be of Paolo and me. Just as the flash went off, Paolo leaned over and kissed me, just one simple, boyish kiss on my cheek, caught in that photo, for me to remember forever.

“So, nothing happened?” is what I was asked dubiously by my seat mates the next morning, as our coach sped off to Venice, the next city on our route.

‘Yes, something happened,’ is what I wanted to say, ‘my faith in human nature and in men has been restored.’ All in one evening, and at the glorious fountain I will always believe is as magic as it’s purported to be.

I recount this factual but somewhat sappy ‘woman’s magazine story’ if you will, for one reason only, and that reason is: Joran van der Sloot

Joran van der Sloot, with the gleeful assistance of every major newspaper and television station has horrified young women and their mothers into believing that every stranger ─ indeed, every foreigner ─ who has a penis can and will use it as a weapon against females. As the mother of five sons, and as the (formerly) young girl whose disillusioned spirit was cared for so tenderly that time in Rome so long ago, I resent that depiction so much I want to spit.

Just once, I’d like to see Larry King or Nancy Grace interview a ‘Paolo’ and ask him about his dealings with women, like this, “Tell us, Paolo ─ you had a vulnerable girl who stupidly put herself at your mercy ─ why didn’t you take advantage of that by drugging her, raping her, beating her to death, and then throwing her in the Tiber? No one would have known – you could have gotten away with it – so why didn’t you do it? Why don’t you share the foreign man’s purported image of American women as ‘sluts’? What were the ideals and morals you were raised with by your parents that have made you like and respect females so much? Tell us. And most significantly, tell us about your relationship with your mother. She must be quite an extraordinary woman.”

The mother. Yes. The mother in this sordid tale who’s being most blogged about, most talked about, is Beth Holloway ─ in vague, but insinuating enough terms that she was feckless in allowing her daughter Natalee to go on a high school graduation trip to Aruba.

Parents of teens, please help me out here ─ can you not just picture how that conversation went?

Beth: Jug, honey, do you think we should let Natalee go on that trip?

Twitty: Yes. No. I don’t know. Whatever you think, hon.

Beth: She’s such a good girl, graduated with honors, member of the National Honor Society, and now going to attend the University of Alabama on a full scholarship. I hate to be the only parent to say ‘no.’ She’d never forgive me.

And she’d be right about that, wouldn’t she, parents who have teens and young adult children? Our sons are all in their early to late 20’s by now, yet they still gripe about stuff we didn’t allow them to do in high school that other kids got to do. And you know what? – They’ll keep right on griping…until they have kids of their own.

So Beth Holloway bet on the very good odds that Natalee would run into a Paolo and Giorgio instead of a Joran, Deepak, and Satish. She lost that bet. And being blonde, white, rich, attractive, intelligent, and ramrod persistent, television, magazines, radio stations and newspapers will make her pay for losing by subtly painting her as unsympathetically as possible ─ her divorce from Natalee’s father, her plastic surgeries, her rumored affair with John Ramsey ─ because, let’s face it, television, magazines, radio stations and newspapers only like to ‘buddy up’ to blondes when said blondes are Anna Nicole Smith, or on the other end of that spectrum, Ann Coulter.

Yet from my perspective, the mom who seems to have gotten a ‘free pass’ from the media regarding even a consideration of maternal incompetence is Anita van der Sloot, who insisted in an email to her son’s ex-girlfriend that he “was being set up.” Then again, also from my perspective, the only way she could not be deemed incompetent at this point is if she took a gun and shot the creature that sprang from her womb. And while she’s at it, I’d love to see her blow away every single sensationalist news outlet that has paid and keeps paying her monster of a son for interviews; interviews in which he lies over and over again, interviews that have been so lucrative for him that he has lived off of them for the past five years, since Natalee Holloway’s murder, enough to go gambling in Peru where he was able to murder yet again.

I am sickened by all of this, but most of all I am sickened by a media that we have allowed to morph into our ‘dysfunctional parent’ ─ a xenophobic, ethnocentric, small-minded parent with a self-serving agenda, to whom we have given our full consent to emotionally blackmail us into believing that all foreigners are terrorists, all American women are despised by said foreigners and therefore in danger whenever they travel abroad, (so best to stay home, provincial and pregnant); psychopaths ‘deserve’ to be heard, and a bright, promising 18-year-old girl, with the assistance of a mother who loves her, somehow colluded in her own brutalization by accepting a date with a handsome stranger.

by Natasha J. Stillman

Imagine one day, you turned on your usual radio station and there was no music – no songs, no instrumentals, not even a single commercial jingle. What would you think? What would you do? Sure, we’ve heard of songs being banned from radio play over the decades (from Billie Holiday’s “Love for Sale” to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”). And, certainly we all know when lyrics have been bleeped or “altered”. However, very few of us have experienced a radio ban of almost all music.

Last month, the Islamist insurgent group, Hisbul-Islam, which is one of two in control of much of southern and central Somalia, issued an order for all music broadcasts to be banned because they believe that such broadcasts violate Islamic principles. (The other group, al-Shabaab, closed down relay stations in five of Somalia’s southern cities including the capital of Mogadishu.) Currently, the Somali people can only hear approved music on the government-controlled station and from a Kenya-based, UN-funded radio station.

Somalia hasn’t had a stable government since 1991, when dictator Siad Barre was ejected from power. Decades of infighting between clan warlords and the famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people have eroded the country to the point where the weak transitional government is at the mercy of groups like Hibul-Islam and al-Shabaab. Somali Islamic groups have attempted to ban football, movies, bras, salons, and love songs, all in the name of their radical views of Islam.

In lieu of music, some stations are broadcasting poems, spoken texts, birdsong, vehicle noise, and even gunfire. But music is sorely missed by the people, as it would be by any of us. In a country so beset by social and political unrest, one would imagine that music, at least, might soothe its souls. Music is a huge and vital component of many cultures. Somalia’s is no exception. One can only assume that harmony is not what these Islamic groups have in mind in a country that needs all it can get right now.