Obama Calls for Civil Tone in Abortion Debate

John Gress/Reuters

President Obama with Richard Notebaert, chairman of the board of trustees at Notre Dame, after delivering his commencement address on Sunday. More Photos >

Anger and Fear Fuel May Day Europe Protests

In Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, a demonstrator stood between a pair of anarchist flags.
















Some Iraqis celebrated May Day with a march organized by the Iraqi Communist Party.

PINK WAR Un manifestante disfrazado de soldado imperial de la Guerra de las Galaxias se encara con policías durante una manifestación en el exterior del Banco de Inglaterra, un día antes de la cumbre del G20

A demonstrator disguised as an imperial soldier of the War of the Galaxies faces police during a demonstration outside the Bank of England, one day before the G20 summit.

Can the police believe what they are seeing?

Anarchists Organize

Antiglobalization activists and environmental campaigners marched in London on Saturday, as a series of protests began in the run-up to the G-20 summit.







I love this picture. The placard's website is campaigncc.org: Campaign against climate change. The one on the left with a hood and hiding her face is holding up a red banner. The guy with the glasses and knit hat seems to be having fun. But it is the dude who does not cover his head or face, is wearing what looks to be a dog collar loosely around his neck, has a pierced nose, pierced ear, and pierced lip who calls to me: he is committed and passionate, and unafraid to say it.

As Rachel Maddow asked on her show last night, isn't it an oxymoron that anarchists organize?

On the Barricades – and Loving It

A new generation of protesters find a cause: Palestinians in Gaza, and a new enemy: Israel. And a new generation of troglodytes objects. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

On the evening of Feb. 19, 24 hours after some 70 students forcibly occupied a cafeteria inside New York University's Kimmel Student Center, a kaffiyeh-draped crowd gathered at Washington Square Park to show its solidarity. There were all the telltale signs of elite student struggle: homemade banners about democracy; radical 'zines about the prison-industrial complex tucked into jacket pockets; cigarettes and coffee; a letter of support from Noam Chomsky; and the requisite Palestinian flag. NYU's "feminist ninjas" came out in the afternoon to show their support by going topless. (Better than to let the mild February weather go to waste.)

Chomsky is still at it, denouncing imperialism every chance he gets.

Also among the NYU crowd were students who had shlepped from the University of Rochester, where, earlier this month, they occupied buildings on that upstate New York campus to demonstrate solidarity with Gaza. At Rochester, nine hours of occupation by Students for a Democratic Society led the university administration to capitulate to their demands. The university will now send school supplies and humanitarian aid to Gaza, and will host a forum to disclose any university investments in Israel.

There is more, and the writer of this piece disdanis that, too.

Take Back NYU!'s grab bag of no fewer than 13 demands reveals the obsessions of today's campus leftists: the establishment of a student-elected, socially responsible investment committee (first order of business: "an in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of the Palestinian territories"); donations to the Islamic University of Gaza; a tuition freeze; and, for good measure, public access to the university library.

Their naive idealism is reminiscent of my own generation, and the writer's attitude and tone also reminds me of the "establishment" back then.

By last Friday morning, the 18 students still barricaded in the cafeteria were approached by university administrators and NYU public-safety officers. No demands would be met, and the students would face suspension. The singular theme of the interaction, captured on video by a student negotiator, is not the protesters' passion for any cause, but their desire for martyrdom – in the face of no real threat.

Helen Suzman, Relentless Challenger of Apartheid System, dies at 91

Helen Suzman with Nelson Mandela at his Soweto home in February, 1990.

Quite a striking picture. Mandela was released from Robben Island prison in February 1990.

The Johannesburg Times has a video of her talking of meeting Mandela.

Helen Suzman, the internationally renowned anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority, died in Johannesburg early on Thursday, a family member said. She was 91.

For decades, Mrs. Suzman was among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to racial rule. As the liberal Progressive Party’s lone representative in the all-white Parliament for 13 years until the mid-1970s, a period when many of apartheid’s most repressive features were being devised, she used her parliamentary immunity to speak out when other avenues of protest were harshly suppressed.
Surely it took courage to be a lone voice against apartheid.

While she challenged apartheid at a time of violent protests among the black majority, she advocated peaceful change. More controversially, she differed sharply with more radical campaigners inside and outside South Africa who were supportive of economic sanctions to press the country’s white rulers toward reform, saying sanctions would hurt poor blacks more than whites.

Again, a lone, courageous, voice. It became orthodoxy to support sanctions against South Africa, and to have opposed them would have earned one shunning.

To Mrs. Suzman’s frustration, this led some of her critics to say she was unwittingly helping to prolong apartheid. This was a variation on a critique she had long endured, and to some extent accepted — that by engaging in what was largely a charade of parliamentary politics in apartheid South Africa, she became complicit, however unwillingly, in the larger deceits of apartheid, which would ultimately be ended not by a small band of white dissenters, but by the more powerful forces of the black freedom struggle and external political pressure.

It did require outside pressure and black activism, but her lonely voice had some importance, without a doubt.

Diminutive, elegant and indefatigable, Mrs. Suzman confronted the forbidding Afrikaner prime ministers — Hendrik F. Verwoerd, John Vorster and P. W. Botha — who became synonymous with apartheid’s repression of the black and mixed-race populations. She was dismissive of the death threats she received by telephone and in the mail, and undaunted in her showdowns with the men she described as apartheid’s leading “bullies,” who in turn dismissed her as a “dangerous subversive” and a “sickly humanist.”

Sickly humanist; quite a badge of honor.

Shouts of “Go back to Moscow!” greeted her when she rose in Parliament, and, on at least one occasion, “Go back to Israel!” — a reference to her antecedents as the daughter of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. After the 1976 Soweto riots, Mr. Vorster mocked her for beating with what he called her “pretty little pink hands” against apartheid, while secure in the knowledge, as he claimed, that she and other white opponents could continue to enjoy the privileged lives apartheid guaranteed without fear that their demands for an end to the racial laws would succeed.

Always the Jewish angle is available to anti-Semites who need a line of attack.

When a government minister once accused her of embarrassing South Africa with her parliamentary questions, she replied, “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.”

Her home and office telephones were constantly tapped, an intrusion she liked to counter by blowing an ear-splitting whistle into the mouthpiece.

She did have spunk, clearly.

But perhaps because of her parliamentary immunity, a feature of their showpiece democracy that apartheid leaders guarded with care, she was never detained or subjected to one of the stifling “banning orders” that apartheid leaders used to curb dissent by prohibiting people from attending political meetings, speaking in public or even leaving their homes.

And she kept getting elected to parliament.

Her opposition to economic sanctions made her a contentious figure among some apartheid opponents, including protesters on American college campuses, like Brandeis and Harvard, where she received honorary degrees. “I understand the moral abhorrence and pleasure it gives you when you demonstrate,” she told a New York audience in 1986. “But I don’t see how wrecking the economy of the country will ensure a more stable and just society.”

We can be so smug in our self-righteousness.

She rarely faced such criticism from South Africa’s best-known black leaders. Mr. Mandela spoke with affection of her visits to the Robben Island prison in the chilly Atlantic waters off Cape Town, where he was serving a life sentence imposed in 1964 and where he remained until he was moved to a mainland prison nearly 20 years later. Using her parliamentary visiting rights, she made her first trip in 1967 and returned frequently. “It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard,” Mr. Mandela recalled in an interview when he was released in 1990 after serving 27 years. “She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells.”

Amazing.

But while no longer in Parliament in her final years, she remained an acerbic critic of what she viewed as official wrongdoing, now by the country’s new black rulers. Only recently, she joined other prominent South Africans in demanding a fresh inquiry into dubious government arms contracts in the 1990s, some involving the president of the African National Congress, Jacob Zuma.

Consistent.

She ran for Parliament in Johannesburg’s upscale Houghton district and remained the district’s legislator from 1953 to 1989. She began as a member of the United Party, which had been usurped in 1949, after decades as South Africa’s governing party, by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. It was the Nationalists, under Mr. Verwoerd, who codified and extended the existing racial laws, creating apartheid.








Helen Suzman in 1975.

Chinese Special Armed Police Guard Olympic Torch Relay

The level and intensity of the protests surprised me. On reflection, I understand the passion of the protesters. Tibet has a place in the heart of many, because of its Buddhism and of the Dalai Lama. The justice of China having overtaken it is questionable, at least.

As the Beijing Olympic torch procession has fought its way through crowds of protesters in London and Paris on its way to today's leg in San Francisco, a squad of blue-clad Chinese men has guarded the flame, at times shoving people away who tried to get too close.

Men in blue-and-white tracksuits protected the Olympic torch in London Sunday, as police scuffled with protestors.
International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said in an interview Tuesday that he did not know who the men in blue are. British police would say only that they are "torch attendants whose role was to protect the torch." Lord Sebastian Coe, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and chairman of London's Olympic organizing committee, called them "thugs."

First, a bureaucratic evasion; then police obfuscation; finally, the truth. Imagine allowing an escort of armed police on sovereign soil.

The security men appear to be members of the Beijing Olympic Games Sacred Flame Protection unit, a detachment of personnel from China's People's Armed Police. The paramilitary People's Armed Police force has wide-ranging duties, from protecting diplomatic missions to maintaining internal security. Units of the People's Armed Police were deployed to forcibly quell violent unrest last month in Tibet. A person familiar with security arrangements in London said: "We received 12 guys, and we were told these guys would be the inner circle." The person said that British police were not made aware that the Chinese men were members of the People's Armed Police. A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in London also said he was "unaware" of who made up the security team.

A person familiar? A police source, perhaps.

The mystery around the identities of the Chinese guards has received a lot of attention in the British media. Tuesday's political cartoon in The Times of London has one track-suited Chinese guard outside Number 10 Downing Street, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown looking at his usual police guard in a beaten up heap.