Muslims mourn the Queen under Prevent's watchful eye - 0 views
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while offering condolences is part of the Islamic faith, a question remains as to what motivates both the need to issue these statements as well as the urgency with which they were thrust into the public domain. For British Muslims, as we know, citizenship has always been conditional. And now, counter-terror and anti-extremism measures such as Prevent work hard to ensure that Muslims stay in line. So an occasion such as the Queen’s death isn’t an opportunity for sincere reflection or honesty – rather it serves as a test of loyalty.
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maybe the effect of Prevent’s surveillance and thought-criminalisation is so insidious that Muslims have internalised it, causing them to believe unquestioningly that these are their true feelings
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There are, no doubt, British Muslims who feel anger over the romanticisation of the Queen and the whitewashing of her reign. There are British Muslims who would like to see the monarchy abolished, not least because it is a fundamental symbol of inequality in this country. And there are British Muslims whose grief is reserved for their grandparents who lived, and died, under the boot of British colonialism.
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Why are many Hongkongers paying tribute to Queen Elizabeth? · Global Voices - 0 views
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Hong Kong was under British colonial rule for more than 150 years, from 1841 after the First Opium War between Britain and Qing Dynasty until July 1, 1997, when the city’s sovereignty was handed over to the People's Republic of China. The news about the death of the 96-year-old Queen triggered strong emotional reactions on Hong Kong social media over the weekend. September 12 was a public holiday to celebrate the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, but instead, thousands of Hongkongers flocked to offer flowers and place condolence messages outside the British Consulate-General.
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Some pro-Beijingers were upset about Hongkongers’ praise of the late British Queen, accusing them of whitewashing the repressive nature of the city’s colonial history.
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after the 1967 riots, the colonial government stopped using the Sedition Law to repress government critics, and it fell into obscurity. Ironically, in the aftermath of the 2019 anti-China extradition protests, the colonial relic was resurrected to punish dissents in Hong Kong, as exemplified in the sedition charges of Stand News staff members in 2021. The most recent case is the sentencing of five to 19-month imprisonment for a set of children’s book
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More than Genocide - Boston Review - 0 views
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Mass state violence against civilians is not a glitch in the international system; it is baked into statehood itself. The natural right of self-defense plays a foundational role in the self-conception of Western states in particular, the formation of which is inseparable from imperial expansion. Since the Spanish conquest of the Americas starting in the sixteenth century, settlers justified their reprisals against indigenous resistance as defensive “self-preservation.” If they felt their survival was imperiled, colonizers engaged in massive retaliation against “native” peoples, including noncombatants. The “doctrine of double effect” assured them that killing innocents was permissible as a side effect of carrying out a moral end, like self-defense.
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By the nineteenth century, the Christianizing mission had been augmented by a civilizing one of the “savage” natives. More recently, this colonial ideology has manifested itself in the project of “bringing democracy to the Arab world,” with Israel designated as the “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the proverbial “villa in the jungle.”
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Without imperial possessions and the lucrative trade in sugar and other commodities predicated on the Atlantic slave trade, European states would not have generated the surpluses necessary to pay for their military establishments and the bureaucratic apparatuses required to sustain them. And while European powers and settlers in their colonies did not set out to exterminate the peoples they conquered, they killed any who resisted, claiming that their hands were forced.
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'Yes, He Would': Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes - POLITICO - 0 views
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“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”
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Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”
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This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin
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