Human Rights Activists

"Those who are called revolutionaries and rebels, that is to say those who have escaped this conditioning, driven by the will to live, to reflect, to understand each other and to explore life and its."

"It is a cry of alarm that I run to save the innocence of children, threatened by madness and anger. And it is at school and at the mosque that they are formatted to become criminals! Because in my country and beyond, the main suppliers of terrorists are mosques."

"There is no difference between the radicals who kill in the name of Allah and the pretended moderates who applaud and find them extenuating circumstances. The mistake in France is that the media use the term "extremist" to refer to jihadists who massacre and terrorize civilians and call "moderate" all others. Yet those who believe in sharia and dream of applying it, who reject gender equality, who impose Islam and its symbols in everyday life, who demand the separation of men and women in the public space who introduce religion to school through halal meat, who demand the veil, who want to adapt society to their ideology, who applaud the execution of renegades and want to Islamize through preaching are all extremists, even they have not - or not yet - carried the weapons. In fact, all Muslims who meet these criteria must be considered radicals. (p. 151)"

"In the West, the Muslims exploit Islam for political reasons. Current issues, relating inter alia to scarf, veil and burqa attest. Nothing in the Qur'an requires the wearing of these scarves, but Muslims use it to prove their existence and to impose a common identity and recognizable to the entire community. This demand for clothing also allows extremist organizations to fight the liberalism of atheists and progressive movements. By imposing the veil, they want to distinguish Muslim women from European women, impious by definition, and prove that all the identity of these women resides in Islam, that their identity is Islam. It is obviously nonsense: the being is not defined by his religion. The scarf thus becomes a symbol through which they aspire to impose Islam in the countries that host them by demanding from them rights, on their terms. But Western laxity is problematic. The West, which has millions of Muslims from elsewhere and grants them citizenship, tolerates that some of them live in ghettos and demand respect for their own rules, even before integrating and respecting the laws. from their host country. The example of the Muslims in Britain is flagrant. They want to fight the ungodly, enforce the rules of Ramadan, prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol, forbid indigenous Christians to eat in public during the month of fasting, establish sharia law and declare jihad in Hyde Park!"

"Some Muslims now use the term Islamophobia instead of simply talking about racism against the Arabs. It is a very convenient, but quite wrong, way to believe that there is a specific stigma of Islam ... To fight the fight against fanaticism and to free Muslims, it would be necessary to first, that the media cease to serve as a support and platform for radicals and stop relaying these false accusations of Islamophobia."

"The building of a Palestinian state will only be possible if the mentality of the people evolves and accepts the idea of complementarity between the two states ... A brewing between the two societies is essential in order to help the Palestinians to catch up in the matter modernity compared to their Israeli neighbors."

"Like all exclusive ideologies, such as Marxism or eugenics, Islam wants to be the sole holder of the truth and the embodiment of its salvation. His hegemony, dogmatism and tyranny make Islam an eradicating movement. Those among non-Muslims who strive to seek a moderate Islam demonstrate their ignorance of the very nature of this religion. Muslims who defend an allegedly temperate Islam also ignore the foundations of their faith or are duplicitous and hypocritical. They hide their bloodthirsty history to present it in a better light. As a result, we can not speak of moderate Muslims. (pp. 154-155)"

"The world has so much suffering in it already—choosing to be vegetarian is one thing you can do to reduce the suffering on a daily basis."

"I believe we should extend our care and concern to all living creatures with whom we share this planet. ... [Animals] give me a window into a world that is different from our own, but every bit as meaningful. ... I can’t imagine what life would be like without animals. They bring me happiness and a sense of calm and peace."

"That the U.N. Human Rights Council chose to honor an apologist for genocide perpetrators only underscores the inverted morality of this Orwellian body. Just when we thought the council had already reached rock bottom, today it found a way to sink even deeper."

"Congress ought to ensure that U.S. delegates continue to vigorously oppose the special agenda item targeting Israel; the one-sided resolutions; the council experts who subject Israel to irrational degrees of scrutiny and criticism; and the disproportionate amount of emergency special sessions that target Israel."

"People in many Western countries with troops in Afghanistan may be alarmed to note that, after all the blood and treasure expended there to help that country build a democracy, it continues to vote with Iran in opposing the Western-led effort to denounce the Islamic Republic for ­– in the words of one of the resolution’s sponsors – a ‘continued deterioration’ in Iran’s human rights record."

"Of course it’s commendable that the UN would – albeit by a stunted majority – again pass resolutions that highlight gross human rights violations in North Korea, Burma and the Iran,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch."

"But though there’ll be an additional resolution on Syrian human rights violations on Tuesday, we regret that the General Assembly continues to overlook a host of other pressing human rights situations, not least in China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.”"

"If in the past, you didnt cry out when thousands of protestors were killed and injured by Turkey, Egypt and Libya, when more victims than ever were hanged by Iran, women and children in Afghanistan were bombed, whole communities were massacred in South Sudan, 1800 Palestinians were starved and murdered by Assad in Syria, hundreds in Pakistan were killed by jihadist terrorist attacks, 10,000 Iraqis were killed by terrorists, villagers were slaughtered in Nigeria, but you ONLY cry out for Gaza, then you are NOT Pro- Human Rights, you are only Anti-Israel."

"In this year’s session, the U.N. General Assembly adopted 20 politically motivated resolutions targeting Israel—and only six resolutions criticizing the rest of the world combined. There were three on Syria, one on Iran, one on North Korea, and one on Crimea. Not a single resolution was introduced to address the victims of gross human rights abuse in, for example, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, China, Cuba, the Philippines, Pakistan, Vietnam or Zimbabwe."

"People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end. (p27)"

"Since the Seattle surprise, it's become standard practice to erect a miniature police state around any globalization summit, and these rights free zones seem to prefigure what corporate globalization promises. (p46)"

"Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. (p17)"

"...hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. (p5)"

"Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters. (p12)"

"I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good (p61)"

"Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. (p4)"

"Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still."

"The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview—but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty, and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than a few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturalists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out, and it is no surprise that they had trouble wearing this cultural certainty so full of holes."

"This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else's field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn't stop in any of them on its long route."

"Writing is lonely, it’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place. (p64)"

"Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train."

"What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local."

"A couple of years ago, a friend wrote to urge me to focus on the lyrical end of my writing rather than activism and I wrote back, “What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated, and studied too, right now.” I could have added that they themselves become forms of resistance; the two are not necessarily separate practices. (p68)"

"(Whose writing today most inspires you?) Rebecca Solnit is a clarion voice of reason."

"As Rebecca Solnit vividly documents in her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, it is precisely when humanitarian crises hit that these other, neglected values leap to the fore, whether it's the incredible displays of international generosity after a massive earthquake or tsunami, or the way New Yorkers gathered to spontaneously meet and comfort one another after the 9/11 attacks."

"The books I write often feel like the books I wanted to read, but they didn't exist, so I brought them into being."

"I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine."

"L.A. Kauffman: I am curious to hear what things are making you most hopeful right now, what things in the landscape you are really fixing on as signs of hope. Rebecca Solnit: Two things that always come up for me: one is that half the people under 18 in this country are not white. And you see how awesome, like, the Parkland students are, and that this rising generation kind of gets the connections between economics and race and gender. They are not nearly as homophobic as anyone who ever came before them, and a lot of them actually think very fluidly about their own gender and who they are attracted to. So, and that is coupled with the fact—and this is something I have written about, because it does not feel widely enough understood—the Republicans could not have won any of the last many national elections except through massive voter suppression."

"Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them."

"(Which writers—novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets—working today do you admire most?) Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Ocean Vuong, Louise Erdrich, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Elena Ferrante, Ariel Dorfman, Bill McKibben, Jamaica Kincaid, Maria Popova, Annie Dillard, Arundhati Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alicia Garza, Fanny Howe, Nick Flynn, Lidia Yuknavitch, Greg Sarris, Elizabeth Kolbert, Jane Mayer, Jelani Cobb, Ronan Farrow, Valeria Luiselli, Eyal Press, Gustavo Esteva, Robert Hass, Mike Davis, Rob Macfarlane, Richard Holmes, Masha Gessen, Zeynep Tufekci, Rebecca Traister, Dahlia Lithwick, Soraya Chemaly, David Corn, Garance Burke, A. C. Thompson."

"This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) To recognize a pattern and a meaning and an order in the world you didn't quite see before is exhilarating, and sometimes even exalting, and there is a moral beauty in the actions people perform out of generosity and courage that stirs and fortifies me—it's why I read and write about political activism and public life."

"what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform—the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular, and sexuality in general, while deregulating everything else—is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go."

"I also read poetry—from Pablo Neruda to Warsan Shire—fairly regularly, and it keeps my sense of what words can do wide open and my sense of beauty awake."

"Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and living species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by its true name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality."

"Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. (p35)"

"The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. (p71)"

"Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving. (p35)"

"The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas. (p91)"

"We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender. (p21)"

"There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators. (p30)"

"Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. (p153)"

"Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. (p9)"