French police pre-emptively arrest Mugabe protestors
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miscellaneous |
news report 
Thursday February 20, 2003 17:53
by Phuq Hedd
Guardian, Feb 20 2003
"It is a virtual police state in Paris. The police have told us that no further protest will be tolerated."
Britain (which has been complicit in the murder of Iraqis for a long time) has expressed concern that Mugabe has been invited into France for a meeting of African heads of state.
One of the arrested protestors is a Briton (Peter Tatchell) who has been campaigning against Mugabe on the basis of the UN Convention against Torture.
The protestors were detained for two hours after they emerged from a Metro station.
Comments (3 of 3)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3In related repression-of-free-speech news a high-school student in Deerborn, Michigan was sent home for wearing a t-shirt (picture of G.W.Bush with caption "International Terrorist").
Although "Brett" was complimented by other students and teachers his principal told him to either go home or turn the t-shirt inside out. She quoted from a dissenting opinion (in US Supreme Court decisions a vote is taken and the yes/no sides write formal summaries of their opinions) which questioned the right of Vietnam era students to wear black armbands to class.
A local Arab-American group backed the principal on the grounds that her action would reduce "tension". The ACLU is taking up Brett's case and he is interviewed on the Feb 20th edition of DemocracyNOW! at http://www.democracynow.org/ (RealPlayer is needed to hear the stream).
This case is very similar to that of an earlier one of Katie Sierra, a 15 year old student who was suspended for wearing a homemade anti-war t-shirt during the assault on Afghanistan http://www.infoshop.org/interviews/katie_sierra.html
Yesterday a visiting Greek professor of Mathematics who has made explicit anti-American statements was shackled upon entry to the United States when he came to deliver a paper to a conference. The FBI attempted to interview him, but he refused and left. http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20030218.html
(this also is a DemocracyNOW!) story.
It is worth bearing in mind incidents like these when one considers the USA as a "bastion of Free Speech" and interesting to notice the parallels between the behaviour of the repressive state apparatus of France and the USA. Hmmm, what do these supposedly at loggerheads entities have in common?
Dearborn, Michigan,-HQ of the Ford Motor Co. is notorious for its racism. It was here that Henry Ford published his anti-Jewish diatribes, and a few years ago, Dearborn tried to keep blacks out by banning non-residents from city parks. But there is a very large Arab population there who are, apparently, afraid of rocking the boat.
who can blame those in the eye of the storm for being scared of rocking the boat?
then again, keeping quiet never worked as a way of staying alive in the long term.
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