The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Uncategorised

Why we are Protesting for the Right to Religious Expression

A new ruling could result in headscarves being banned throughout the EU. This is a serious attack on the rights of Muslim Women. Interview with Asha Faria-Vare


30/07/2021

Hello Asha, thanks for talking to us. Could we start by you telling us a little about who you are.

Thanks for your interest in the demo! I am a British citizen from the Forest of Dean who has been living in Germany for about five years now. I’ve got a bit of an eclectic background: I’ve gone from being a trapeze artist in the circus, to being a Classical pianist, to running rap workshops in Palestinian refugee camps. Right now I’m studying my Masters in Kulturelle Musikwissenschaft in Göttingen but I also lead the UK team for a flight compensation company based here in Berlin. In terms of activism, I ran a gender equality blog when I was a teenager and also wrote and performed many a protest song (on my gee-tar) for all kinds of causes at all kinds of events. The upcoming demo will actually be my first time on the mic without a musical instrument.

On 15th July, the European Court of Justice passed a “neutrality” law banning certain clothing in the workplace. What exactly does the law say and who is affected?

So the decision passed by the European Court of Justice is not a law in itself, it clarifies questions about the interpretation of the EU Council’s existing framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation (Council Directive 2000/78/EC) and provides preliminary rulings in two cases brought before the court by Germany’s Federal Labour Court.

To summarise briefly, the court found that, while the existing EU framework prohibits both direct and indirect forms of discrimination, indirect religious discrimination may be justified under certain circumstances provided that there is a “genuine need” for the employer to prohibit visible forms of religious expression. Indirect discrimination, according to the court, occurs when all visible forms of religious expression are prohibited and no particular religion(s) are singled out. A genuine need might be “the wishes of customers” or, when it comes to education, the desire of parents to have their children supervised by people “who do not manifest their religion” while in contact with their children.

Regarding the two causes brought before the court, the court found the policy of one employer to prohibit large forms of religious expression impermissible as it targets specific religions and is therefore directly discriminatory. In the other case, the court found that the employer’s neutrality to be permissible insofar as it obliged people of all religions to refrain from wearing visible forms of religious expression. The court emphasised, however, that the employer must demonstrate a genuine need to implement such a policy, and must ensure that the prohibition in question is limited to what is strictly necessary according to the actual scale and severity of any adverse consequences the employer is seeking to avoid.

The decision of the court represents a major step backwards. While the original directive from the European Council talks of “apparently neutral” provisions, criterion or practices, the new decision fails to question whether or not neutrality policies are in fact neutral but rather broadly legitimises such policies provided that they are implemented by employers for “objective reasons”. That the so-called objective reasons named by the ECJ, such as customer complaints, are forms in which religious discrimination and racism is well-known to take, is suggestive of an intentional decision on the ECJ’s part to undermine the original intentions of the existing framework in favour of a distinctly right-wing interpretation.

In terms of who is affected, Muslim women who wear headscarves already bear the brunt of existing neutrality policies in Member States where legislation endorsing such policies already exists. Thus far, such policies have almost exclusively affected Muslim women; however, other religious minorities such as Orthodox Jews, Sikhs, and Hindus stand to be affected, particularly if member states, emboldened by the ECJ’s decision, begin to support such policies having previously taken a more tolerant approach towards religious practice and identity.

We’ve had a similar neutrality law in Berlin for just over 3 years now. How has that been going?

More trouble than it’s worth, I like to think. The State of Berlin first introduced its Neutrality Act in 2006 and has had difficulty implementing it ever since. It has at various times been ruled entirely unconstitutional, to some extent unconstitutional, and has seen multiple states of revision. In its initial stages, the Act, clearly targeted towards Germany’s growing Muslim population, excluded the prohibition of jewellery items such as crucifix pendants worn on necklaces. It was subsequently revised to include prohibitions on any visible form of religious expression and ultimately deemed constitutional under the condition that it is implemented in schools only when there is evidence of a “sufficiently concrete danger” to the school’s peace and state neutrality. In a city as diverse as Berlin, judges have generally taken a sceptical view towards the implementation of neutrality policies in schools as the implementation of such policies appears to pose a greater threat to peace than the absence of them, which makes a strong case for religious discrimination. Less diverse states, such as Nord Rhine-Westphalia, have had more success implementing neutrality acts.

The judgement says that it treats all religions equally. What’s wrong with that?

Of course all religions are not equally affected by the implementation of neutrality policies. For many Christians, the act of wearing a crucifix pendant is symbolic and removing it has no bearing on their religious practice. By contrast, many Muslims believe that covering the hair belongs to a broader concept of Hijab, or modesty, and is an obligatory requirement of the religion. This means that if a Muslim woman were to remove her headscarf, it would actively affect her ability to practice her religion. Muslim women are more likely to be forced out of the workplace as a result, which is extremely disheartening since they face enough difficulties accessing it on account of not only their religion but also their ethnicity and gender.

This is where the recent decision gets interesting: the ECJ acknowledges that religions for which visible forms of expression are religious precepts are more adversely affected by neutrality policies than others, it just doesn’t care. If we go back to the EU Council’s equal treatment framework, we find that it makes the same distinction between “direct” and “indirect” discrimination where discrimination is defined in terms of the action taken by the employer and not by the impact of these actions on employees. The adoption of this definition is less problematic here because both direct and indirect discrimination are ruled impermissible except under the strictest of circumstances. The framework allows member states to determine under which circumstances such discrimination might constitute a legitimate aim but, in light of the other provisions in the framework, it seems fairly obvious than any such circumstances should improve the situation of groups facing discrimination and certainly not legitimise harmful discrimination against them. In its totality, the equal treatment framework could and should be used as a tool for promoting religious tolerance.

What certain Member States (such as Germany) have done is exploit the freedom to define “legitimate aims” under which an employer might impose a policy of neutrality in order to create discriminatory legislation such as Berlin’s Neutrality Act. As we have seen in Berlin, some legislators went overboard and then had to work backwards by making the discriminatory elements less explicit in order to pass the legislation off as constitutional. Of course the original intentions of this legislation, to ban headscarves, has never changed, it has just been repackaged, but the questions surrounding its legitimacy have remained. This is essentially how two German cases ended up being referred to the ECJ for clarification.

What I find sad, or perhaps frightening, is that the ECJ was presented with a major opportunity to make good on the equal treatment framework, and they chose not to. Given the rise in far-right extremism and attacks against Muslims, the ECJ could have decided to take member states in another direction, but they opted instead to lean into it. The equal treatment framework also highlights the intersectional nature of discrimination but the ECJ did not consider gender based discrimination anywhere in their judgement. I cannot help but question their motivation and wonder if the European Union currently feels so unstable that it is scapegoating the increasing population of immigrants from outside the EU to maintain its legitimacy.

So far, neutrality laws have stopped women wearing headscarves from teaching or practising law, but not from cleaning schools and courts. Are double standards at work here?

Oh absolutely, if the position is something that the dominant culture affords a higher status to, a higher value, we feel affronted when we find people who do not look like us in that position and actively oppose it, legislate against it even. That’s when you hear “immigrants are stealing our jobs”. When it comes to menial positions or positions we attribute less value to, we barely pay attention to whether or not the person working is wearing a headscarf or not. The lower position is in keeping with the lower status we afford the person and, since it doesn’t ruffle our feather, we passively accept it.

Many supporters of neutrality laws say that by banning headscarves, they are protecting women as the headscarf is a symbol of women’s oppression. Is it that simple?

I feel like I’m a good person to answer this because I once joined my school’s debate team specifically to argue that the headscarf is oppressive and I remember clearly why I felt that way. I come from a place where we have a history of women being forced to cover up, so showing some skin represented, in my opinion, freedom from oppression. It logically followed that any requirement for women to cover must mean that they are oppressed by men. Simple, right?

Wrong. I tried to ignore the Muslim women telling me that Islam gave rights to women, convinced as I was that they are victims of the patriarchy, but after a while I decided to look into it (moving to a Muslim country helped). Turns out they were right, Islam really did give rights to women, substantial rights too given how women had been treated in the Middle East until that point. It has hardly surprising then, that when the Prophet Muhammed’s (SAW) wives, elevated members of Islamic society, began to wear headscarves, other women followed suit. It was a mark of pride, of prestige even. Within this context, the concept of hijab, when revealed to Prophet Muhammed (SAW), was readily accepted. The headscarf is not only a religious requirement then (a requirement of Allah, not of a man – that’s important), but it might also be regarded as symbolic of a religion that improved the status of women as well as a cultural practice. In Western societies, where women’s bodies are extremely hypersexualised, the headscarf represents for some Muslim women a position in opposition to this form of misogyny, it represents bodily autonomy.

To be honest, the headscarf is so ubiquitous in Muslim countries that at some point it’s like how men tend to have short hair while women tend to grow their hair. Many societies visibly distinguish between genders but you wouldn’t tell a woman she’s oppressed because she’s got long hair. When I visited the West Bank, I discovered that there is a headscarf for every personality type. There’s so much room for expression that even if someone is following a cultural norm, religious or not, it does not necessarily mean they are suffering. On the contrary, it might represent an important part of their identity, it might be the thing that makes them feel good about going out into the world.

I would like to mention that there are certain governments that exploit religious concepts, such as hijab, to oppress women. As a result, some women see that headscarf as symbolic of violence. It is important to understand that it really is complex and there are multiple truths, there are any number of ways in which the headscarf might be perceived. What is important is that we do not assume we know better than the person who chooses to wear it.

Many on the Left are proud atheists. Should religious matters like this concern socialists?

Yes, we should be opposed to all forms of oppression regardless of our personal beliefs. Oppression is a system that will continue to succeed if we allow some groups to be oppressed by the state and not others. In this case, many issues intersect including racism and sexism so if the religious aspect alone is not enough to get you on board, perhaps you can find another reason to support the cause. I believe the ECJ’s decision represents a strategic positioning towards the right and I would urge anyone on the left not to overlook this move on account of any personal religious (or even anti-religious) beliefs.

What actions are you organising and do you have plans for the future? How can people support you?

I expect I’ll do some networking at the demo and maybe some more activities will come out of it, but I have nothing lined up for the moment. I am pretty flat out with work and university so I took a step back from activism… at least I thought I did… but then things like this happen and I just can’t help myself.

Questions by Phil Butland. If you want more information about further activities, you can contact Asha on afariavare01@qub.ac.uk . We will continue to provide coverage on theleftberlin.com.

Protest Against New EU Ruling Which Allows Workplaces to Ban Visible Forms of Religious Expression: Saturday, 31st July, 1pm at Brandenburger Tor

Film Review – Judas and the Black Messiah

Finally released in Germany, this Black Panther film is well worth watching


29/07/2021

Image: Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton, still from “Judas and the Black Messiah,” fair use

 

Chicago, 1968. Martin Luther King has just been assassinated and cities are being burned down by Black activists recognising that non-violence can only take you so far. The war in Vietnam is intensifying and body bags are returning home in increasing numbers – particularly in poor black communities. There is a political vacuum waiting to be filled.

Enter the Black Panthers with a peculiar mixture of Maoism, armed self-defence and community organising. Armed men (and some women) patrolling the racist police may be getting all the news coverage, but it’s the schooling and free meals for kids that are winning the Panthers widespread support in the community. Added to this, under the local leadership of the charismatic Fred Hampton, they are successfully approaching gangs – including gangs of Latinos and Whites – proposing joint action against a common enemy.

Daniel Kaluuya is excellent at giving us a grasp of Hampton’s oratory. Politically radical, but with a strong sense of a liberationist preacher. From the call and response to the background of insistent drumming a la The Last Poets or Gil Scott-Heron, his style is compelling, making the committed feel that they are really part of something and persuading ditherers to get involved.

But the Panthers are up against something more than random arrests and police violence. FBI head J Edgar Hoover is worried about their ability to unite resistance against not just the government but the “American way of Life”, particularly under Hampton’s leadership. He deploys a series of spies to infiltrate the Panthers, and to foster a feeling of mutual distrust.

Just in passing – the main acting credits go elsewhere, and deservedly so – but it was a neat move to cast a highly prostheticized Martin Sheen as Hoover. Sheen is a left-liberal activist and usually cast as one of the nice guys. This gives the foul racism coming out of Hoover’s mouth even more impact. He wasn’t just a right-wing manipulator – he really believed in what he was doing.

Bill O’Neil (LaKeith Standfield) is recruited as one of Hoover’s spies. O’Neil is a petty criminal, who we see in an early scene entering a bar with a fake FBI ID trying to scam one of the drinkers out of his car. He is caught and, with a prison sentence hanging over him, is “encouraged” to infiltrate the Panthers, where he gradually rises to become local head of security while passing on information to his FBI handler.

Much of the film is about the conflict felt by O’Neil towards people for whom he starts to feel affection, and possibly – this is left unclear – empathy for their political ideas. O’Neil is a coward who is proud of his ability to escape detection – a sly smile after he convinces a colleague about his innocence speaks volumes. But at the end of the day, he’s just another Black man who the FBI is using to destroy his own community. And he probably knows this.

There is another article to be written about how this film is leagues better than Aaron Sorkin’s self-indulgent Trial of the Chicago 7, in which Hampton plays a supporting role. And maybe I’ll write that article one day. Let’s just say that it is a rare occasion to see a film which not only shows sympathy for (a strand of) revolutionary socialism, but one that is also well made and acted.

So let me get to the little thing that is slightly perturbing me. I’m not really sure what the film is trying to say about the relationship between radical leaders and organised resistance. It is clear about what Hampton thinks. When he’s about to be put in jail (again), the comrades offer him money to flee to Cuba or Algeria. He rejects the money, saying that its better spent building a hospital in the community. What we do is much more important than specific individuals.

And yet the rest of the film seems to be pleading something different. When Fred is jailed for the first time, membership and support for the Panthers goes down – despite Hoover worrying that jail could turn him into a martyr. There is an interesting discussion about the extent to which the growth of the Panthers in Chicago depended on Chairman Fred’s individual charisma or on what the party structures were able to achieve (I would sit on the fence on this one, mumbling that the relationship is somehow dialectical).

But that’s not what films should be doing anyway – even films as radical as this one. The fact that an Oscar winning Hollywood film could even provoke such a discussion about revolutionary leadership sets this aside from almost all the competition. Judas and the Black Messiah doesn’t solve all the problems of the world, but within 2 hours it has a pretty good go.

Open Letter to the British Left – Defend Trans Rights

This is no time for abstract debate. Unite to fight a serious – and dangerous – right wing attack


by Phil Butland and Anna Southern

Across the world, Trans rights are under attack. Right wing governments are introducing anti-Trans legislation and the religious and fascist right are gleefully adding Trans rights to their campaigns against women’s rights and gay rights. Antisemitic conspiracy theorists have added ‘transgender ideology’ to their hateful conspiracies about Jewish world domination.

Yet in the UK, a strange alliance of radical feminists, conservatives, and a portion of the Left are apparently in agreement. This UK phenomenon is based on the premise that Trans rights undermine or conflict with women’s rights. We will address this point later in this letter, but first a quick summary of the extent of the current offensive.

The Attacks on Trans Rights are worldwide …

  • In the United States, over 110 anti-Trans bills across 37 states have been proposed by Republican law-makers this year. The Republicans pushing the anti-Trans legislation are also, of course, against abortion rights, which means that they are simultaneously pushing anti-abortion legislation.

  • In Spain, the ultra-conservative Catholic group Hazte Oír instigated an anti-Trans bus campaign. The far right Vox party backs this campaign, which also has targeted abortion rights and attacked LGBT groups and women’s associations.

  • In Hungary, Victor Orban’s far-right government passed a law in 2020 ending legal recognition for Trans and intersex people, as part of a wider attack on LGBT rights in the country.

  • In Poland, attacks on LGBT rights have come hand in hand with attacks on women’s rights. ‘LGBT Ideology Free Zones’ and anti-LGBT ‘Family Charters’ have been set up in nearly 100 Polish regions, towns, and cities.

  • In Japan, Trans people must be diagnosed with a mental disorder and be operated on and sterilised if they want to have their gender identity recognised. They must also be unmarried and have no children under 18. A Trans woman living in Japan is now suing the Japanese government for the right to be recognised as a woman. If she wins, she and her wife will make history as Japan’s first same sex married couple.

… and in the UK

In the UK, there has also been a recent surge in transphobic hate crimes. Between 2019 and 2020, transphobic hate crimes rose by 16%. Media coverage about Trans people is often toxic, with Trans people often depicted as aggressive, predatory, and unreasonable.

An atmosphere of moral panic has been whipped up. The UK Conservative government has postponed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) which would allow Trans people to self-identify their gender. There is hope though, as recent polls show that a majority of UK people, especially women, support Trans rights.

Recently, a UK woman named Maya Forstater won an appeal against an employment tribunal. The original tribunal took place after Forstater’s work contract was not renewed due to complaints about her online and workplace bullying, which included her repeatedly misgendering Trans people.

The initial tribunal had found that her anti-Trans beliefs were not protected by the Equality Act 2010, were a threat to the dignity of Trans people, and were not ‘worthy of respect in a democratic society’. The appeal found that her beliefs should have been protected and she will get a new tribunal.

The strange alliance of Trans exclusionary radical feminists, conservatives and ‘gender critical’ minority of UK leftists celebrated this victory. And yet Trans activist Laura Miles explains the real consequences of the ruling:

transphobes and gender critics will see this outcome as a political victory and a license to abuse and harass trans people at work, online and in the streets, as well as a step forward in their strategy of seeking every means possible to undermine trans rights and exclude trans people from social life.

It will undoubtedly make it more likely trans people will be subject to yet more hate speech by those defending their system of transphobic/trans-critical beliefs as being legally legitimate. The tribunal seems to have ignored the proven link between the expression of exclusionary views and exclusionary behaviour. Words have consequences.

So what is the disagreement?

Writing for Counterfire, Lindsey German put the case for what we’ll call the “fence sitting” position. Much of the statement is uncontroversial – the left is split on Trans rights (in Britain at least), and this split must be overcome through respectful discussion and joint activity against oppression. Moreover, oppression does affect working class people disproportionately and cannot be reduced to biology.

Other parts of the statement are less convincing. This is in part because of the nature of the statement. It is a plea for free discussion, which avoids spending too much time outlining what exactly the discussion is about. This is a legitimate method, but it almost inevitably means that some bones of contention are either ignored or misrepresented.

Let’s start with the statement that there is a ‘conflict’ between the rights of women and Trans people, which ‘has to be discussed and debated’. As the statement does not explain what this conflict is, further discussion and debate is somewhat difficult.

So, let us make a couple of assumptions based on what we have experienced from the current debate. Our assumptions are made in good faith. Should the plea for discussion and debate be about something else, then let’s talk about these specific issues rather than engaging in an abstract discussion about free speech.

Is it about toilets?

One of the main arguments used by “trans critical” people is that men could register as Trans in order to enter women’s toilets and harass women. This is an argument that originated with the right wing and is reminiscent of similar arguments used against gay men in the 1980s. It also has little to do with the reality of what is happening at the moment.

In countries such as Ireland which have introduced Self-ID years ago, we cannot find any evidence that men have been registering as Trans to smuggle themselves into toilets. Besides which, the Equality Act 2010, already gives Trans people in the UK the right to not be discriminated against. This explicitly includes access to toilets.

Similarly, the same act already contains the potential for exemptions for spaces such as prisons and women’s shelters, and admissions are already considered on a case-by-case basis.

How split is the Left on the issue?

A second weakness of the article is that the statement that ‘many’ of the left and Trans people ‘take different views’ is misleading. It gives a false impression that the Left and Trans people are split down the middle on the issue. Let’s be clear about this. The ‘gender critical’ faction represents a clear minority of the British Left and is effectively non-existent in most other countries.

None of this means that the Left should not discuss these issues, but nor does it mean that all views are equally valid. This would be a ‘postmodern idealist view’ rightly criticized elsewhere in the statement.

It is not too long ago that a significant proportion of the Left thought that being gay is a ‘bourgeois deviation’ and held some very sexist views on women. Even today, many Leftists support immigration controls on the basis that people born in ‘our’ country deserve more rights than those born elsewhere.

The fact that these ideas are sincerely held by people who take a good position on other issues does not make them right. Nor does it give people who hold these ideas the right to be invited to speak about them on every leftwing panel. While No Platform should indeed be only used against Fascists, this does not mean that our meetings should have to contain speakers telling ‘all sides of the story’, including ideas which we find repellent.

Who is splitting the movement?

This brings us to our final argument (for now). The article is quite correct to point out that ‘the trans debate on the left is in danger of turning people who should be potential supporters and allies into enemies’. But who exactly is splitting the movement?

The statement argues that claiming that ‘those who do not agree on questions of gender are transphobes, TERFs, bigots’ weakens the movement as a whole. This implies that the main splitters are Trans people reacting to Leftists who claim to support them while wilfully misgendering them, accusing Trans women of being potential rapists and insisting that Trans women are not women.

At a time of unprecedented attacks on Trans rights, some sensitivity is required. We could add that the article is also weak on recognising and responding to the reality of oppression against Trans and non-binary people

The attacks of some Leftists on Trans self-identity seems to be at best an academic distraction from the main debate. At worst it involves people who claim to be socialists using the same language and arguments of the oppressor, enabling and providing left cover for what are objectively reactionary positions. Such paternalism is no basis on which we can build a movement of solidarity with victims of oppression.

Solidarity comes first

We stand in solidarity with our Trans sisters, brothers, and siblings around the world in their fight against oppression. We believe that women’s rights and Trans rights are not in conflict, but are under attack from a common oppressor. The framing of the Trans fight for liberation by some feminists and leftists as a fundamental clash with women’s rights has only served to divide us at a time when we need to be united against a serious right-wing threat.

As Laura Miles puts it, ‘Equal rights is not a finite cake where different oppressed groups have to fight each other for bigger slices. Austerity and racism affect all of us: there is a common class enemy. Socialists start from the notion that an injury to one is an injury to all’. Our ‘gender critical’ comrades would do well to remember it.

Anna Southern and Phil Butland are both British socialists based in Berlin. We are very grateful to Laura Miles for giving feedback on an early version of this article, and wholeheartedly recommend her book Transgender Resistance: Socialism and the Fight for Trans Liberation to anyone wanting to know more about the fight for Trans rights.

AUTHORS’ NOTE: this article has been amended since publication. Lindsey German objected to us saying that she represents the “left wing gender critical” position. As this is not the substance of our argument, this has been amended to the “fence-sitting” position

Europe and Germany Owe Us Some Answers About The Pegasus Project

If Hungary, India and Saudi Arabia passed the human rights test for NSO spyware, just how low was that bar


28/07/2021

Last week a consortium of journalism outlets and NGOs dropped a bomb of cross-border journalism. According to a leaked list of 50,000 names, at least ten of the world’s authoritarian regimes have been spying on their own citizens, using cutting edge surveillance software developed by an Israeli security firm called NSO Group.

The software, dubbed Pegasus, used malware to give governments practically unlimited access to a surveillance target’s phone, with new hacking techniques that left victims with practically no way of knowing they were being monitored.

Once it has wormed its way on to your phone, without you noticing, it can turn it into a 24-hour surveillance device. It can copy messages you send or receive, harvest your photos and record your calls. It might secretly film you through your phone’s camera, or activate the microphone to record your conversations. It can potentially pinpoint where you are, where you’ve been, and who you’ve met. (Guardian)

The ten countries are known for various degrees of human rights abuses, but the scale of unlawful surveillance was still stunning. (The countries: India, Hungary, Morocco, United Arab Emirates, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan and Mexico.)

The list of numbers belonged to dozens of freelance and legacy news journalists (including a journalist from Mexico who, was murdered under mysterious circumstances), activists, citizen investigators and even a, number of heads of state, including French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron and the King of Morocco.

India appears to be, one of the most prolific abusers, monitoring opposition party members like former Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, a member of the Supreme Court, a top virologist, journalists, activists and even members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party.

Saudi Arabia’s appearance on the list is not totally surprising, but the, reporting that Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancee was monitored using Pegasus software in the days leading up to his murder is chilling.

Nevertheless, for people living and organizing in Europe, the appearance of Hungary on the list must be the detail that raises the most questions. If Hungary could flagrantly violate the European privacy and human rights laws and get away with it, what does it say for the other countries in the EU? Will Fidesz finally face some consequences?

The consortium of reporters could only confirm Pegasus infection on phones that they could forensically examine themselves- meaning the actual scale of surveillance is still not clear.

Reporting is still coming out daily, but there are a few big questions that are especially relevant for journalists, activists and organizers.

How could NSO not know their product was being used for evil?

NSO Group has denied that they keep any kind of list like the massive leak that kicked off the Pegasus Project. In fact, they deny that they keep tabs on clients whatsoever, saying that they license software and then have no further insight to how their products are used. These denials make very little sense, for several reasons.

First, NSO claims that each client they license to is thoroughly vetted for human rights violations in cooperation with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Now, Israel is not exactly the standard bearer for human rights, but even so, the countries on the client list are infamous for harassing, imprisoning, and in one case, dismembering journalists. If Hungary, India and Saudi Arabia passed the human rights test, just how low was that bar?

Even so, they claim that they would stop selling to countries who abuse their software. But if they don’t monitor how their software is used, how exactly would they find out about such abuse? Were they relying on the very journalists being surveilled and harassed to discover abuse of their products?

Where did the NSO list come from?

“The list of 50,000 phone numbers has nothing to do with us.”

Founder and CEO of NSO Group (Haaretz)

NSO has denied making the list, or possessing any list like it. But who else would have had a global overview of each of their clients’ surveillance targets? In some cases, Pegasus Project journalists were able to compare a time-stamp of when people’s numbers were added to list with the attempt to infiltrate the phones, and showed they were within seconds of one another. Who could have access to information like that, other than someone who worked at NSO?

NSO has suggested the list might have been something governments used for “other purposes”, which is maddeningly vague, but again, makes no sense. If you had a surveillance “wish list” for one country, one might assume the leak somehow came from the Security Agency of that country. But having access to hundreds of government surveillance targets spread across the world is incredibly valuable intel.

And if they are lying about whether or not they monitor the use of their software, does that mean they ultimately had access to all the information accessed? And who might they have shared that information with?

NSO employees apparently earn upwards of $30,000 per month, meaning they have strong incentives not to undermine their employer. Could the leak come from someone the data was shared with? Or was someone able spy on the spyware firm?

Who else was using NSO technology?

NSO is ,just one of many such spyware firms, so the fact that certain governments were not on the list does NOT mean they weren’t using similar types of spytech. In addition, the Pegasus Project only revealed ten of NSO’s clients, when there are reported to be around 40. So who else is illegally spying on their citizens, or has the power to do so?

EU Commission head, Ursula Van der Leyen, responded to the reporting with verbal condemnation:

“What we could read so far, and this has to be verified, but if it is the case, it is completely unacceptable. Against any kind of rules we have in the European Union.”

Nevertheless, the government of Hungary has suggested that some of their European Union allies employ similar tactics:

Have you asked the same questions of the governments of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Germany or France? In the case you have, how long did it take for them to reply and how did they respond? Was there any intelligence service to help you formulate the questions? (WaPo)

It could be a tactic to distract and deflect. But Germany has ,used controversial spyware in the past (albeit, possibly lawfully), and it defies belief that some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world do not have access to such spytech, simply because they weren’t on the Pegasus Project list. How could Hungary possess technology that, say, the UK or Germany would not?

Is Germany boycotting Israeli products?

Which leads to our final question: If Germany was not using Israel-based NSO’s brand of spyware, but that of a different country, is it because they knew it was being misused by authoritarian regimes? And if that’s the case, weren’t they basically boycotting Israeli products over human rights concerns?

Inquiring minds and ice cream companies would love to know.

Genoa G8 – 2001-21

Michelangelo Severgnini shares his experience of Italian police brutality


26/07/2021

At the time of the march
many do not know
that the enemy is marching at their head.
The voice that commands them
is the voice of their enemy.
And he who speaks of the enemy
is himself the enemy.

Bertold Brecht, ‘The Enemy’.

I was only 26 years old

I was 26 years old. I believed that this world could be fixed. I believed I was on the right side. And I believed I was clear about who my enemies were.

Only a few months earlier, in January, George W. Bush had taken office in the White House for his first term as President of the United States. That day I was in San Francisco, taking part in a huge demonstration protesting, to no avail, against the fraudulent way in which the Republicans had snatched victory from Al Gore by winning Florida only a couple of months earlier.

In Italy, too, things had not gone as hoped. Silvio Berlusconi had just been elected Prime Minister, winning the election with the centre-right. And it seemed unprecedented. Since the early elections of 1996, which ended Berlusconi’s first experience in government prematurely, we had thought that such a person would never again govern Italy. Even less so people like Umberto Bossi or Gianfranco Fini.

[Editor’s note: the right winger Silvio Berlusconi was elected Italian president in May 2021 as part of a coalition which included Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord and Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance. Both were far right parties in which Nazis were active]

In previous years, I had travelled a lot in the former Yugoslavia. I had been to Bosnia several times. I had set up twinning projects. In December 1998, I was in Kosovo, working as a non-violent barrier between the Yugoslav army and the Albanian rebels of the KLA, in villages in the countryside that had been the scene of massacres.

I came back with many contacts. When the bombing started a few months later, I called them on the phone, recorded the conversations and broadcast them on the radio.

When Bush and Berlusconi, only a few months later – both having won their elections – met in Genoa, I didn’t like the direction the world was taking.

But the left in Italy had deserved that defeat, throwing away its own identity, its own sense of history.

That’s why there had to be another left. A left that might not have had full representation in parliament, but which was alive and made up of the stories and sensibilities of those who did not want to bend to the new principles of the world emerging from the collapse of the Soviet Union. After all, only 12 years had passed. There was still time and a way to change course. There had to be. I was only 26 years old. That’s why I went to Genoa.

Video-Activist

A few months earlier I found myself almost by chance becoming a video-activist (that’s what we called ourselves then). The digital video camera, one of the first, was not even mine. At the Bicocca University in Milan there was a Visual Sociology Laboratory, one of the first in Italy. I had stumbled into it by chance and found myself with a video camera in my hand.

“Do you want to come and film the G8? We’ll need to film everything we can”.

And so it was that I found myself collecting a ‘pass’ for the ‘red zone’ at the beginning of that week, as early as 16 July. A handful of us had been chosen to get official accreditation and freedom of movement in the city.

To our amazement and bewilderment, we discovered what they meant by “red zone”. Several-metre-high railings resting on concrete blocks marked off the port area and the centre of Genoa. While they militarised Genoa, we militarised ourselves in our own way.

We too, in some way, saw ours as a militancy, a struggle, a battle. But the ‘media centre’ was our headquarters, and our weapons were the video cameras. Independent information. “Become your media’ was our philosophy.

But it wasn’t just reporting, it was also documenting. Yes, because in those days, under the patronage of the “Genoa Social Forum“, various initiatives and peaceful demonstrations of great importance were held. Nothing happened with regard to public order. Everything took place without tension, indeed, with a certain euphoria – given the importance of the event and the joy of seeing so many people, realities, organizations, gathered from all over the world to join the struggle.

Of course, there were helicopters flying overhead at low altitude, plainclothes agents on street corners who in turn filmed the marches. There was always a horizon of cops and trucks somewhere. There were also urban legends that popped up just to keep you on your guard. But more than one of us wondered if they hadn’t needlessly spent all that money on militarising the city.

As far as I was concerned, the event could have ended there. They were locked up like thieves in a cage inside the ‘red zone’ and we were free outside to meet, talk to each other and imagine what was then called ‘the other possible world’.

Via Torina was a perfect movie set

I didn’t take any instructions that morning. I didn’t even have time to have breakfast in the red zone. Too much tension in the air, too much chaos, too many people everywhere. I started walking back and forth on Corso Torino with my small video camera in my bag. I was trying to breathe the air, to understand the movements, the intentions. To understand who was who.

A Carabinieri truck was set on fire at the end of Corso Torino, at the corner of Via Tolemaide. From this street, the “White Suits” would have come down, on Corso Torino they would have had to pass. Probably, the clashes would have taken place there, because there is more space on the corso than on all the other surrounding streets. More space, not for the clashes, but for the video cameras, for which would have been easier to film. Or continue towards Piazza Verdi.

[Editor’s note: The White suits / White overalls or Tute Bianche was a group of Italian anti-globalisation activists who went to the front of demos in padded suits and white suits to protect demonstrators from police violence. Some accused them of escalating violence]

The iron cages of the red zone were not far away now. Corso Torino and Piazza Verdi were an excellent place to negotiate and play a symbolic invasion of the red zone.

But something in the air was not right. The policemen were not there to act as extras in a theatre. I could tell from their speeches, as I walked past different departments, with my pass clearly visible on my chest, whistling.

I could tell by the excessive number of exaggerated people I had not seen in the previous days. I could tell by the use of some guerrilla techniques that I had never actually seen used in those years: cars set on fire, rods to break shop windows and ATMs, violence not only against the symbols of power, but against anything they liked.

Not that I was scared. A few years earlier, in the mountains of Kosovo, I had been in the middle of a real war, a volunteer in a civilian nonviolent intervention force. I had seen death, gunfire, bombs. But I wondered how it would end.

It wasn’t the violence itself that frightened me. It was seeing the total military unpreparedness of the protesters. In Kosovo, on one side was the regular army, but on the other side were heavily armed guerrillas.

Here there were units in riot gear, armed as in war on one side. On the other side were students, workers, families. Totally unprepared for the fight. In fact, many of them completely uninterested in the clash.

Except for the “White Suits” otherwise known, not without a sense of crypto-irony, as the ‘Disobedients‘. They needed the clash. They had proclaimed it. They had to play the role of the naughty children.

But someone deprived them of this role, overpowered them, forcing them to bring the threshold of confrontation where the square would not hold.

In short, they acted as bait.

The Disobedients

When the charge in Via Tolemaide had not yet started, Corso Torino and its side streets were already a battlefield. Scattered from other scuffles and secondary charges people had poured in to find some respite. The first tear gas was thrown into the small side streets, you couldn’t breathe in there. Even the policemen. Not only could we no longer breathe, but it was even difficult to see us now. Yet I had breathed in tear gas in the previous two years. These gases were different, stingier, more caustic, more toxic.

I tried to squeeze through a few alleyways, knowing that the march on Via Tolemaide was still a long way off. It was already surreal. The first policemen had come down too hard. Not with beatings yet but with tear gas. They were nervous, their hands had slipped. Everyone, policeman or demonstrator, was running in every direction. Turn a corner and out of the fog could emerge a policeman fleeing from a group of protesters. Turn another corner and you would come across a group of policemen harassing a protester who had fallen behind.

And it all had yet to begin. Because it all started at 2.53 p.m. on Friday 20 July 2001, that cursed day.

The dynamics have been reconstructed and are now known.

“Nooo!… They charged the white suits, damn it! They were supposed to go to Piazza Giusti, not towards Tolemaide… They charged the white suits who were supposed to get to Piazza Verdi.” So says an excited officer in a service communication recorded in those minutes.

What had happened then?

At 2.30 p.m., the operations centre of the Police Headquarters had requested an intervention by the Alfa Company of the Ccir (Contingent of containment and decisive intervention) of the Third Battalion of the Lombardy Carabinieri: “Please, you must go quickly, however, to Piazza Giusti, where there is a group of a thousand anarchists who are destroying everything. You can get there by going straight along corso… where you are now, until you get to the crossroads with corso Torino, turn left and go straight. But you have to do it immediately because another march is coming down Corso Gastaldi”.

Once at the crossroads between corso Torino and via Tolemaide (which later changed its name to corso Gastaldi) the unit got lost, got confused, forgot the objective for which they had been asked to intervene and charged the ‘White Suits’.

Real life

From a military and square management point of view, the story begins and ends here. A recently converted department of the Carabinieri, full of ex-soldiers from the war in Somalia, after getting lost (after all, they were used to the open spaces of the Somali desert, not the narrow streets of the city), unleashed against the wrong protestors and started doing what only they knew how to do: slaughtering people.

And the ‘White Suits’, who had made themselves picturesque Plexiglas protectors for the occasion, great for stage photos, were swept away as in a macabre comic strip. The railway wall on the right for those descending with the march reduced the escape routes.

From that minute, 14.53, until the shot that killed Carlo Giuliani in Piazza Alimonda, not far away, at 17.27 minutes, the collapse of a generation was manifested.

2 hours 35 minutes of all against all, of ignorant madness, of blind nonsense, of blood, tears, blows, anger, frustration, gratuitous violence.

The strategy of the “White Suits” failed miserably. Because although it presented itself as a military strategy, it was actually a precarious balance above madness. The operative centre of the Questura (Police Headquarters) put its own, much of its own, into it. But it is stupid to complain of having been burned when one wanted to play with fire. That was the horizon of an immature and childish generation, that of the game, of fiction, of acquired privileges, also in the antagonist mode.

Those leaders and ringleaders were allowed to defend themselves behind the so-called “disproportionate reaction of the forces of law and order”. They thought they were going to a film set, but they found real life. One of us found death.

The raid on the Diaz school

The story of those days cannot end here. Because that equally sad day, 21 July, had not yet said it all. In fact, an even worse surprise awaited us.

We all returned to the “Media Centre” in the “Pascoli” school. People were dismantling: computers, printers, video cameras, telephones, everything was being stored and taken away.

For the Italians, there were special trains that would take people home. “What, so soon?” There was perhaps a need to stay together one more evening to try to understand together how everything could have gone so wrong.

But there were the special trains, better to go. There would be time over the next few weeks to see each other again and talk.

But I slept in the camper van and had come from Milan on my motorbike. It was decided to stay an extra night and leave the following morning after a few hours’ sleep.

I started phoning from the Milanese classroom, which was now empty. I spent perhaps hours on the phone, because I wanted to be as far away from that place as possible in my mind. I was there, alone in that classroom, while the whole school building had emptied out in the meantime.

When I heard the policemen shouting from the courtyard, I realised that I had lost all sense of time. It had long since gone dark outside the windows. It was just after midnight. I left the person I was talking to on the phone for a moment and looked out of the window on the side of the school. I could see the entrance gate from there. I saw several dozen policemen in riot gear with helmets, shields and truncheons. I went back to the phone and put off the call until a better time.

I paralysed myself in the middle of the classroom. I tried to think back. It had been a while since I had heard any more noise in the building. Was I the last person left inside? I thought back. There were only two possibilities that came to my mind: to stay in the classroom and wait for the cops to come up and then present myself with my hands up and try to prove that I was innocent, or to throw myself out of the second-floor window? I thought about it for just a couple of seconds and I was already standing with my knee on the windowsill ready to throw myself from the second floor. I had a glimpse of a nice flowerbed in the dark where I would hide when I landed, who knows in what state, on the lawn of the schoolyard.

Until a cry came from the school corridor. A girl hurriedly shouted: “Everyone in the Gap radio room!”. I asked myself: “Everyone who?”. So I wasn’t alone.

I put off jumping out of the window and followed the girl into the corridor. We hurriedly erected a barricade on the stairway with the school desks. And then we ran with others to the classroom where ‘Radio Gap‘, the movement’s radio station – the only ones still operating in Genoa, was still broadcasting live.

After a few minutes the police broke into the classroom. There is a famous audio of the live broadcast of those minutes:

“It’s a Chilean scene, they are breaking down our door, they are breaking down our door… I don’t know if you can hear it….

– They’re trying to break down our door on the second floor… Well, hands up, passive resistance, guys: a live eviction. Radio Gap is being evicted. Let’s stay calm…

– Sit down… guys, calm, sit down and raise your hands… We will continue to denounce what this criminal state and fascist police are doing…

– Here they are, they entered… the policemen entered the radio…

– …who entered the radio station, truncheons in hand and helmets on their heads… at this moment they are signalling to stay down…

…with batons in hand and riot helmets… the repression live on Radio Gap”.

 

I was inside the classroom at the time, along with about twenty other guys and some radio editors.

The policemen were surprised, stunned, to realise that their action was being recorded and they were being smeared live in real time. They stood with their truncheons in the air: “Ah, well, we just wanted to check your documents”, they said, frightened of being denounced for an action whose premises were as shaky as its legality.

We remained under guard for about an hour, however, without being able to leave the courtroom.

As soon as it became clear that we would not be harmed, we rushed to the classroom windows, which inevitably overlooked the “Diaz” school, just a few dozen metres away.

That’s where the “Mexican butchery“, as it became known, was taking place. Fifteen uninterrupted minutes in which dozens of policemen beat to a pulp, as everyone knows, about a hundred demonstrators.

The blitz had been launched on both schools. The “Pascoli” school, our school, was by then empty, except for those like me, who in the end saved themselves by taking refuge in the Gap radio room.

The ‘Diaz‘ school, on the other hand, was full of young, defenceless boys and girls, mostly foreigners, who would have left the next day. They had been unable to take advantage of the special trains with which the Italian State had already brought the Italian demonstrators home.

Those 15 minutes were a living nightmare for our ears.

Many of us went mad, tearing our hair out and throwing ourselves on the floor. Some tried to jump out of the window. The helplessness was killing us, the frustration of not being able to do anything, of feeling we had escaped in the middle of a butchery.

I managed to pull out my video camera and took some of the few images that capture those minutes of the blitz. You can easily recognise them, they are the ones with the black mask at the top and bottom of the screen.

When, after an hour, the time it took to evacuate the wounded from the Diaz school, the policemen let us out of the classroom, the barricade in front of the “Diaz” school was also removed. I was among the very first to enter the now deserted school.

I saw it with my own eyes and my video camera, the “Mexican butchery”: the puddles of blood on the ground, the smears of blood on the walls, the clumped locks on the radiators, the soiled backpacks, the sleeping bags, the notebooks, the clothes thrown everywhere.

I was not impressed. I had already seen worse.

I was offended.

All this had happened in my country.

This is an extract from an article which was originally published in Italian in L’Antidiplomatico. Reproduced with permission