Human Rights Activists

"I take issue with the Jewish Currents editorial, “Supporting the Black Lives Matter Platform, Its Slander of Israel Notwithstanding” (Autumn, 2016), in which the magazine unfortunately joined the pack of the hands-in-the-air-I’m–shocked-and-horrified Zionist groups that condemned the Movement for Black Lives — a very large coalition of which Black Lives Matter is one organization — for using the words “genocide” and “apartheid” in relation to Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people...Echoing Dr. Joy James, if the situation of the Palestinians under Israeli control is not genocide, what is it?"

"What propelled me into the civil rights movement in the first place as a young woman was the exhortation I had received from my secular Jewish progressive parents: that it is unethical to stand idly by while people are oppressed and suffering."

"For me, the events in Ferguson and the events halfway around the world are linked. I am not saying they are the same. I am not even saying there are many parallels, but there are some similar lessons."

"In 1969, Ella Baker, SNCC’s great mentor, pointed us in the direction of meaningful action when she said, “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed.” This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning – getting down to and understanding the root cause. Baker continued, “It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”"

"somehow or other we will all have to follow Miss Baker’s teaching: to look deeply, beyond the horror of the moment and our particular loyalties. Because once we understand that there are root causes, we will be able to make effective efforts to change them."

"BDS [Boycott Divestment Sanctions] is turning out to be very very strong, and obviously successful, more successful than we even thought...It’s not only in dollars and cents, but in the consciousness. The consciousness about BDS is totally different from two years ago. It’s now considered to be a serious way for people to register their feelings about the occupation."

"what, in my opinion, is the “root cause” of all the death and destruction in the Middle East? It isn’t Hamas, it isn’t who sent the rockets first, who killed which teenager first, and it isn’t who broke which ceasefire first. The underlying cause flows from the injustice of one group controlling the lives and future of another group. As long as Israel occupies Palestine, and as long as Palestinians resist (which, according to International human rights law, they have the right to do), confrontations and death will result. The root cause is the occupation, which itself flows from the previous dispossession of Palestinians from the land they inhabited for generations."

"Countering violent extremism should not be looked at as only putting an end to something negative; it’s also about empowering positive peace."

"“Peace is a public good, so everyone should have the right to enjoying, building, making, and shaping peace.”"

"And then once it hits home, you realize that, no, it's not. It's not necessarily something wrong with the people or the location or the country per se. It's actually something that anyone can suffer from, even those perhaps listening to us right now thinking that they will never live a war. I think no one knows. And that's why it is important for even ordinary people to to get interested in peace."

"Much more is needed. Including; facilitating a serious nation-wide dialogue that will include the voices of ordinary people, ppl affected by the multiple wars, women, and young people. This dialogue should be an official part of any formal political talks"

"Peacebuilding is not only about stopping violence, it is also about the prevention of violence. To do so, all groups, all voices and perspectives in the society have to be considered. Young people, particularly girls, in the Middle East and North Africa constitute a large percentage of the population, so their role in peacebuilding is very important."

"Together we build it."

"Today, at eighty-three, she is still a vigorous champion of human rights. Just last year I had a wonderful visit with her at her home in Boston, discussing our precious heritage of great American women."

"Alice Blackwell was an exception to me. I saw during my personal acquaintance with her that she was apt to embrace the whole world with her beautiful heart, her strong soul; to press it to her bosom, and never be tired of working for it. But she did too much for her human strength, and now she must rest a while."

"it is said that this movement is making no progress; that while the movements along other lines are largely succeeding, there has been no advance along this line. Twenty-five years ago, with insignificant exceptions, women could not vote anywhere. To-day they have school suffrage in twenty-three States, full suffrage in Wyoming, municipal suffrage in Kansas, and municipal suffrage for single women and widows in England, Scotland and most of the British provinces. The common sense of the world is slowly but surely working toward the enfranchisement of women."

"Translators, again-the most abused and patient lot of folk on earth-are helpful in making us better acquainted; though we hope the time will soon come when citizens of the twenty-one republics will no longer need translators. There is no reason for our not speaking each other's language. Among these translators we may mention Alice Stone Blackwell, Isaac Goldberg, the late Thomas Walsh..."

"For seventy years, the women leaders of this country have been asking the government to recognize this possibility. Every great woman who stands out in our history-Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, Mary Livermore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Jane Addams, Ella Flagg Young, Alice Stone Blackwell, Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt-all have asked the government to permit women to serve more effectively the national welfare. All have felt that the energy, the thought, and the suffering that was spent in trying to obtain permission to serve directly should as quickly as possible be turned to the actual service."

"I have no doubt that if women alone had made the laws, those laws would be just as one-sided as they are to-day, only in the opposite direction."

"Except where there is some very strong reason to the contrary, it is generally admitted that every man has a right to be consulted in regard to his own concerns. The laws which he has to obey and the taxes he has to pay are things that do most intimately concern him, and the only way of being directly consulted in regard to them, under our form of government, is through the ballot. Is there any very good reason why women should not be free to be consulted in this direct manner?"

"Honesty. I think all religions involve an element of self-delusion, and that’s no way to live your life. And freedom: the great thing about living in a secular society is that people have the ability to pursue their own religious or non-religious beliefs in their own ways, but not to compel others to follow them."

"It’s vital to speak up for humanism and rationalism in a world in which more and more people are falling into misinformation and prejudice. Obviously we can’t dismiss the positive role that religion plays in many people’s lives, but I am concerned that so often people are just picking up on lazy prejudices rather than trying to build consensus around ways forward. Humanism has a role to play in helping to ground debates in truth and pragmatism."

"[Review of Walter's book The New Feminism.] In its bid for sophisticated political adulthood, the new feminism also risks throwing out the most important legacy of women’s politics: the inquiry into personal life. Walter argues that these questions are now 'sorted', that women no longer need to justify themselves in terms of their private behaviour. And it may well be that what to wear and who to sleep with are, as Walter points out, rather passé as political issues, but that's not the end of the story. In my view, the matter of domestic democracy will become the site of renewed private/public struggles, partly because the question of who does what in the home is crucial to the question of who does what outside the home. Another factor to be considered is the growing number of women now employed by the professional classes to do their cleaning, childcare and ironing, often at wages well below any generally agreed national minimum. The old servant problem could come back to haunt the new middle class, itself caught in an ever-intensifying time crisis. Walter is optimistic about men in general – there is none of the male-baiting exhibited by the pop culture girls like Suzanne Moore or Julie Burchill – and particularly about their place in the home. Men, she believes, are ready and willing to take part in the 'unique poignancy' of domestic life. I would say that Walter was right to outlaw prescription in personal politics – there was something truly depressing about diktat feminism at its height – but description will surely remain the foundation of the most intelligent feminist writing."

"We did win some battles at Women for Refugee Women – we helped to end the immigration detention of children, and we won a time limit on the detention of pregnant women, for instance. But overall it’s horrible to see how governments have used migrants and refugees as a scapegoat for wider failures in society. It’s very hard right now to build empathy around what women who cross borders are going through. But change is urgently needed – we really need to build a transparent asylum process in which women who seek safety here can get a fair hearing. Right now one of the key issues for refugee women – and for many other people – is also the lack of decent affordable housing, so that even if they do get their refugee status women and children are so often struggling with homelessness or insecure housing. So this links into wider issues around getting our society working for everyone. I truly wish we could see more leadership from the current Labour government on fairness in society, as well as empathy towards those who cross borders."

"We can’t sit back and wait for someone else to do the work that is needed, we each have to get on and do what we can ourselves."

"I have been so struck by the number of women who have come up to me in the last few years saying that Living Dolls was the first feminist book they read and wanting to talk about it with me. It’s very good for a writer to hear that! But it’s also sad, because they always go on to say that they feel that little has changed. In fact, the rise of social media and online misogyny often makes life harder for young women, and there is worryingly a growing divide in attitudes between young women and young men. My new book, which I’m working on at the moment, explores the current backlash to women’s rights and how we need to rebuild feminism in the face of these growing threats."

"The trend in feminism over the past few years - spearheaded by Natasha Walter's New Feminism - has been to say that equal pay, equal opportunities and good childcare are all that matter; relationships, sexuality and appearance are no longer feminist issues. The result of this re-definition of feminism is that many more people can call themselves feminists - you'd have to be a pretty hoary old misogynist to believe that women don't deserve equal pay. And so, the eighties refrain of 'I'm not a feminist, but...' has been replaced with 'I'm a feminist if feminism means equal pay, but...' To be followed with something like '...not if it means I can't shave my legs.'"

"[On the promise of prominent women in the New Labour government elected in 1997.] I really felt that we were on an irresistible journey. There was still this big gap to close, but I felt that we wanted to close it, and it was possible to close it, and therefore we would. We were in a virtuous ­circle. And what I feel now is that policy changes are not enough, ­because the culture is still very resistant to change. The book's subtitle is The Return of Sexism, and while I don't really think sexism ever went away, it's stronger than it was. It's as though something crept in by the backdoor – and we turned around and it's everywhere, and you just think, 'OK, we've got to deal with this again."

"[In an article on Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman (1999).] Greer's fundamental conclusion is that the pursuit of equality is now doomed. Instead, women must pursue liberation. "Equality must be seen to be a poor substitute for liberation," she says. Is this a valid distinction? I believe that the pursuit of liberation - the peculiar, individual, often contradictory journey to find freedom from the lies and conventions around us - is something that each individual woman can take on for herself. And yet I believe that it is only possible to pursue that liberation if you are not ground down by an economic and political system that systematically discriminates against you. Inequality in Britain is not a side issue. Inequality locks women out of power, and condemns women to poverty. Inequality prevents women from being fairly rewarded for their work, from being able to speak out and be heard, from being able to bring up their children in dignity, from bringing those who rape and beat them to justice. The struggle for equality is not the struggle to reshape women in the pattern of men, since men's lives too must be revolutionised if equality is to be grasped. Feminism must transform society so that women feel that they can have an equal stake in it, at work and at home. Then indeed we will see the rise of the liberated woman."

"I was sitting on the floor of my study, with pieces of paper stacked up around me. I felt listless and overwhelmed by the history that I did not want to see. I went to talk to Clara [Walter's daughter]. She was lying on her bed, multitasking in teenage style – listening to music, messaging her friends, studying her homework. "Those forms," I said, wanting her to see what I saw when I looked into the files, the threat as well as the opportunity. "I can’t find my grandmother’s last address. It’s confusing..." I held out one of the many pages I had about the past. "I guess it would be this address, where my great-grandparents were living at the start of the war. I know they were sent to Theresienstadt but not until later. Then to Treblinka. They arrived in Treblinka on 28 September 1942."" My daughter looked at me, and I at her, as the significance of the date penetrated our minds. The previous day’s date. Exactly 75 years after my great-grandparents’ death in Treblinka, we are seeking to regain our German nationality. I left the page I was carrying on her bed and went downstairs to make dinner. The forms got put aside again."

"I fear that we are being set a trap and falling into it, by playing this role in a farce that we didn’t script. As many have said, there is a spiralling craziness about this government’s approach, where the actual aim is not to achieve any of the stated objectives but to ratchet up the sense of crisis. We know, and they know, and they know that we know, that one key aim of the Rwanda policy is not to solve any potential challenges caused by arrivals on small boats but to create a distraction from the government’s real challenges. The more polarised and furious the debate gets, the more successful is the distraction. And yet many of us continue to play our role. But we cannot do otherwise. Because, while this performative cruelty may be in part a game to the politicians who put it into practice, for the people who are actually affected by the policy, it is far from a game. The narrative that the Rwanda policy is just a dead cat, thrown on to the table to distract from Partygate and the cost of living crisis, ignores the real harm that the policy is doing and the worse harm that it would do if people stopped opposing it. Let’s not forget that the deportations last week were halted only because people continued to dig in their heels. Dogged individuals at charities supported refugees threatened with deportation day and night and lawyers worked tirelessly on their legal challenges. They all knew that this is no time to give up, because what may look like a farce to some is in fact a tragedy in the making. Nobody who has heard or read any of the interviews with the refugees threatened by removal to Rwanda can be left in any doubt that the cruelty is real."

"This fierce, impatient feminism needs to be recognised. I call it the new feminism because it looks very different from the feminism of previous generations. For a start, it can no longer be confined to any kind of ghetto. It is everywhere. In the Seventies, feminism could be identified with a clearly defined women’s liberation movement. It has since fragmented and splintered; but splinters of it are lodged in the hearts and minds of almost every woman in Britain. We should not be diverted by the fact that few women call themselves feminists into believing that feminist beliefs appeal only to a minority of women. In survey after survey the vast majority of women, especially young women, say that they would like to see more equality between the sexes at home and at work. I would also argue that feminism today is not just a middle-class movement. It is often taken for granted that modern feminism appeals only to middle-class professional women. As I researched my book and set up interviews with women from all kinds of backgrounds and in all kinds of occupations, I was struck by the fact that real anger at inequality, real desire for change, and a real sense of women’s growing potential, were being articulated by all the women I spoke to. I heard those ideas just as strongly, if not more strongly, from women who worked as cleaners in south London or as members of community groups in Glasgow as from lawyers or journalists or MPs. My sense that feminism cannot be seen as appealing only to middle-class women is backed up by survey information. For instance, one recent MORI poll showed that women in social groups D and E are more likely than AB women to say that feminism has been good for women."

"We have publications, and we need to use case studies of where we are winning, to speak out in international Climate Change gatherings to tell these stories."

"My message to you, in the midst of all of this loss and in the shadow of fault and blame is that I’m angry. I’m angry that it took a storm of this magnitude to open the eyes of all those who would laugh and academically rebut the assertion of continued racial inequality. There are those who would suggest that people like being poor, that people wanted to stay in the path of the hurricane. We can look to the media and the hue of those who are accused of looting versus those who were accused of commandeering to see there are tangible injustices in this society today."

"We must reframe our understanding of the problem. Climate change is not the problem; climate change is the most horrible symptom of an economic system that has been built for a few to extract every precious value out of this planet and its people. To survive this next phase of our human existence, we will need to restructure our social and economic systems to develop our collective resilience. We must transform from a disposable, individual society into one that sees our collective long-term humanity, or else we will not make it. We must acknowledge that the only way you're going to survive is for us to figure out how to reach a shared liberation together."

"I’m angry that the people of this country still choose not to acknowledge that social injustice happens on a daily basis in daily actions of everyone who lives here. But most of all, I’m angry that my family, my friends, my neighbors, after three weeks and two hurricanes, still have to wonder, when is this country going to look at us at human beings. The people of the Gulf Coast should no longer be referred to as those people. We are your people. We are citizens of this country. We need your support, and we need your help, and we deserve that. On behalf of those who have lost everything, the Pichon family in Slidell, Louisiana, would like to say to you and to the President of the United States, we need action today. I’m hopeful that today we will choose action instead of indifference. I implore you to care enough about inequality in this country, rather than turn your head away from the injustices not just in the Gulf Coast, but in Appalachia, in D.C. and southeast."

"we know that if the victims of the original sins of this country can get together and form a united front, we can actually change this country."

"We are not a people who are energized by hatred. I come from people who are energized by joy."

"Climate gentrification that happens in anticipation of sea-level rise is what we're seeing in places like Miami, where communities that were kept from the waterfront are now being priced out of the high ground, where they were placed originally, as people move away from the Coasts. And climate migration is just one small part, but it's going to have ripple effects in both coastal cities and cities in the interior."

"She’s a gem."

"The real moment of noticing that change was Katrina...our vye, our old people...the first words out of their mouths were, the water has never been this high...And that is when I started learning about the loss of our barrier islands due to oil and gas drilling."

"I work at the community level to make sure that Black folks and poor folks and Native folks are part of this climate movement."

"It was a crack in the universe to come home and see the destruction of Katrina, and it was in that moment that I said I was never leaving home again. You see that kind of destruction, and your life will change whether you want it to or not. That was my moment of career change. I was going to have to take a much different advocacy role - not standing in front of a court, pointing to particular pieces of law but instead standing in front of my community and convince them of what I knew deep in my heart, which was that climate change was going to come after all of us and that it was going to take what we love the most, which is where we're from."

"a constant reality of Gulf South life that may be invisible to many outsiders is the centrality of the military to our economy and culture. We must honor the historic significance of the military in Gulf South communities while transitioning investment away from the military and toward job creation in regenerative local economies."

"To survive this next phase of our human existence, we will need to restructure our social and economic systems from root to branch. We must transform from a disposable individual society into a society that grasps our collective long-term humanity-or else we will not make it. The task is not easy. All of this requires us to recognize a power greater than ourselves, and a life longer than the ones we will live. It requires us to believe in things we cannot see. And it requires us to believe in each other. Let's figure out how to reach a shared liberation together."

"the FEMA regulations aren't meant for the most vulnerable communities. The disaster process of this country are meant for the middle class...it sounds strange, right?...except the truth of it is that all of the laws in this country are meant for the middle class at best. There is a large swath of people who are never included."

"Policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions must also clean up the toxic lands left behind by oil and gas, with the same financial support and urgency. In this cleanup, and in every other aspect of the fair and just transition, the costs and burden must be paid by the industries that have polluted communities and deliberately deceived the public about the threat their operations pose to our climate."

"our coastal location and low-lying land also makes the Gulf South ground zero for this nation's climate disasters."

"We must subsidize healthy crops and farm biodiversity instead of monocultures. Our food system must be rooted in principles of community-based agroecology and food sovereignty."

"Our work proves that media depictions of the Green New Deal as a program for liberal elites could not be further from the truth. Here on the third coast, poor black, white, brown, and native people, small businesses, neighborhood associations, and regular folks from all walks of life are ready for a Green New Deal, and we know the same is true of people all across this country."