Wake Forest and Salem Students, organized by Muslim peers, came together to show solidarity with Trayvonn Martin and Shaima Al Awadhi. Students are calling on our community leaders to condemn hate crimes and make sure our community is a safe place for everyone.
Please re-post this picture to raise awareness about these atrocities! Let’s encourage other Universities & schools to create photographs such as this one!
March 24, 2012
Police are investigating the beating death of a 32-year-old Iraqi-American woman in suburban San Diego as a possible hate crime but stressed that they are also looking at other possible scenarios.
El Cajon Police Chief James Redman said Monday that investigators have evidence that includes a threatening note found near Shaima Alawadi’s body. Her daughter told a television station that it says: “Go back to your country, you terrorist.”
Redman declined to discuss the note’s contents, though he said that it has led police to regard the killing as a possible hate crime. The family has mentioned that there was a similar note from earlier, but police do not have a copy of it.
The chief said the victim died of severe head trauma but did not confirm the type of weapon. Redman said he was confident it was an isolated incident but would not say why. ”I want to stress there is other evidence in this case that we are looking at and the possibility this is a hate crime is just one aspect,” Redman said, adding that they have not drawn any conclusions. ”We don’t have tunnel vision on this case,” he said. “We’re looking at the big picture.”
Alawadi was taken off life support Saturday, three days after her teenage daughter found her unconscious in the dining room of the family’s El Cajon home in suburban San Diego.
On Monday, Iraq’s foreign minister said Alawadi’s body will be flown to Baghdad as lawmakers in her native country demanded a thorough investigation. The official declined further comment.
Alawadi’s father is Sayed Nabeel Alawadi, a Shiite cleric in Iraq, a Muslim leader in Michigan told the Detroit Free Press on Sunday. “Everybody is outraged,” Imam Husham Al-Husainy of the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Dearborn said. “This is too evil, too criminal.”
Reaction in Baghdad was muted, though some lawmakers pressed for answers. Government offices were closed, and newspapers were not printing this week for the diplomatic summit. ”We deplore this hideous crime that took place in a country calls itself the land of democracy, freedoms and freedom of religious. The parliament will take a serious position on this. Iraqi Foreign Affairs Ministry must now officially ask the U.S. Embassy and the Department of State for more details on this hideous crime,” said Aliyah Nisayef, an Iraqi female lawmaker.
Lawmaker Haider al-Mulla, a Shiite from the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya political party, also asked that the U.S. government step into the investigation. ”If the investigation reveals that the attack was a hatred crime, then U.S. authorities should take measures to protect all Iraqi refugees on American soil,” al-Mulla said.
The victim’s daughter, Fatima Al Himidi, told KUSI-TV in San Diego that her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron, and the note was next to her. Police said the family had found a similar, threatening note earlier this month but did not report it to authorities. Hanif Mohebi, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ San Diego chapter, said family members told him they dismissed the initial note as a prank.
Family members told Mohebi they arrived in the San Diego area in 1995, lived in Dearborn, Mich., from 2005 to 2008 and returned to San Diego. ”What I got from the family members was: ‘We came (to the United States) for a better life, for safety, to get away from violence, to be free,’” Mohebi said.
Hayder Al-Zayadi, a family friend, told the Free Press that Alawadi moved to the United States in 1993 with her family and was part of a wave of Shiite Muslim refugees who fled to Michigan after Saddam Hussein cracked down on an uprising in 1991. After living in Dearborn for a few years, she moved to the San Diego area in 1996, graduated from high school and became a housewife raising five children, Al-Zayadi said.
Al-Zayadi said Alawadi’s brothers worked for the U.S. Army, serving as cultural advisers to train soldiers who were going to be deployed to the Middle East. Another family friend told U-T San Diego that Alawadi’s husband had a similar job.
Flowers were set on the doorstep of the home Monday. One of the glass panels on a sliding back patio door was boarded up with wood. The backyard overlooks a middle school.
Neighbors said the family had moved in about two months ago. Friends and neighbors said Alawadi wore a hijab, the Islamic head scarf. Alvin Luckenbach, who lives next door, exchanged pleasantries with Alawadi and her husband. She recently apologized for her kids making noise playing basketball on Alawadi’s back patio. ”They were always nice,” Luckenbach said.
Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR’s Michigan chapter, said Alawadi’s death was a primary topic of conversation among speakers and attendees Sunday evening at the organization’s annual banquet in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. He and others compared her slaying to that of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Florida teen shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer and whose case has ignited racial tensions.
“Treyvon was black wearing a hoodie. Shaima was wearing a hijab,” Walid said. “It’s the same racist principle at play that killed both of these individuals.”
Others were more guarded. ”We don’t want to jump to any conclusions and say it’s a hate crime when there is still is a lot of investigation to be done,” said Edgar Hopida, spokesman for CAIR in San Diego.
El Cajon, east of San Diego, is home to one of the largest Iraqi communities in the United States, including Muslims and Chaldean Christians.
Wrong on so many levels…
Taken from: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/shampoo-ad-using-hitler-image-sparks-outrage-calls-152755213.html
March 26, 2012
A new Turkish shampoo commercial featuring video of Adolf Hitler declaring the hair rinse a product for “real men” has been met with formal complaints from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and others who say it is deeply offensive.
“We follow with sadness and regret the use of Hitler figure in the Biomen Men Shampoo advertisement, which was brought to the screen in recent days,” the Turkish Jewish Community said in a statement. ”It’s totally unacceptable to make use of Hitler, the most striking example of cruelty and savagery. … Using him in an advertisement for whatever reason is an unacceptable situation and could not be accepted by us at all. This is beyond all ethics as well as a huge insult to human rights.”
The ad has been running on Turkish television stations for about a week, AFP reports.
In the ad from shampoo maker “Biomen,” archived video of former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler is played in which he is seen yelling and gesturing wildly with his hands, while a fictional text translates his message across the screen. “If you are not wearing a woman’s dress, you should not use her shampoo either,” Hitler says in the ad. “Here it is, a real mens’ shampoo, Biomen.” The video then cuts to a picture of the shampoo bottle with the on-screen message, “Real men use Biomen.”
ADL National Director, and Holocaust survivor Abraham H. Foxman called the advertisement “disgusting” in a statement released by the group. ”The use of images of the violently anti-Semitic dictator who was responsible for the mass murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust to sell shampoo is a disgusting and deplorable marketing ploy,” Foxman said. “It is an insult to the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, those who survived, and those who fought to defeat the Nazis.
Hunger Games fever has taken over the world, and I guess I should not be surprised of the thoughts and sentiments expressed in the following article, but reading statements like “Kk, call me racist but when i found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad,” just made me so upset.
Taken from: http://jezebel.com/5896408/racist-hunger-games-fans-dont-care-how-much-money-the-movie-made
March 26, 2012
The good news? The Hunger Games made $155 million at the box office its opening weekend, making it the third-best debut in North American box office history. The bad news, however, reflects a level of idiocy that we weren’t really expecting.
As CNN reports, “Only Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and The Dark Knight — both sequels, with the strength of a franchise behind each — recorded bigger opening weekends.” Plus, unlike those two flicks, Hunger Games was written by a woman and stars a woman — a true lady-centric blockbuster franchise.
Now as you may know, Katniss, the main character in the book and film, was described as having “straight black hair” and “olive skin.” It’s a post-apocalyptic world, so she could be a mix of things, but some pictured a Native American. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jennifer Lawrence won the part and dyed her hair dark.
But when it came to the casting of Rue, Thresh, and Cinna, many audience members did not understand why there were black actors playing those parts. Cinna’s skin is not discussed in the book, so truthfully, though Lenny Kravitz was cast, a white, Asian or Latino actor could have played the part.
But. On page 45 of Suzanne Collins’s book, Katniss sees Rue for the first time:
…And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that’s she’s very like Prim in size and demeanor…
Later, she sees Thresh:
The boy tribute from District 11, Thresh, has the same dark skin as Rue, but the resemblance stops there. He’s one of the giants, probably six and half feet tall and built like an ox.
Dark skin. That is what the novelist, the creator of the series, specified. But there were plenty of audience members who were “shocked,” or confused, or just plain angry.
The tumblr Hunger Games Tweets has collected a smattering of Twitter postings, with the goal of exposing “Hunger Games fans on Twitter who dare to call themselves fans yet don’t know a damn thing about the books.” What people are saying is disappointing, sad, stomach-churning, and just plain racist.
This young woman considered the movie “ruined.”
This girl wants to know why they “made all the good characters black.” Good people cannot possibly be black. Black people are villainous. Duh.
“Stick to the book dude.” Read the book again, carefully this time, dude.
At least this person had the good sense to hate himself.
The actress Amandla Stenberg literally looks like a tiny angel, but this movie-goer equates blonde with innocence. A little black girl is not automatically innocent, no. Only a little white girl. Actually, only a blonde.
The posts go on and on and on. It’s not just a couple of tweets, it’s not just a coincidence. There’s an underlying rage, coming out as overt prejudice and plain old racism. Sternberg is called a “black bitch,” a “nigger” and one person writes that though he pictured Rue with “darker skin,” he “didn’t really take it all the way to black.” It’s as if that is the worst possible thing a person could be. As the person who runs the tumblr writes:
Here’s what scares me…
All these… people… read the Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was an image of Rue that they’d created in their minds. A girl that they knew they could love and adore and mourn at the thought of knowing that she’s been brutally killed.
And then the casting is revealed (or they go see the movie) and they’re shocked to see that Rue is black. Now… this is so much more than, “Oh, she’s bigger than I thought”. The reactions are all based on feelings of disgust.
These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was “some black girl” all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears, wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.
There are MAJOR TIE-INS to these reactions and the injustices that we see around the world today. I don’t even need to spell it out because I know that you’re all a smart bunch.
This is a BIG problem. Think of all the murdered children. Think of all the missing children that get NO SCREEN TIME on the news.
It is NOT a coincidence.
THIS is the purpose of my blog… and to also point out shitty reading comprehension. LOL
Inspiring and powerful images.
March 26, 2012
New York State Senator Eric Adams and his colleagues honored Trayvon Martin on Monday by wearing hoodies to the March 26, 2012 Senate legislative session in Albany.
The images below were uploaded to Facebook by Senator Eric Adams.
Taken from: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20581831,00.html
March 26, 2012
Should transgender women be allowed to compete in female beauty pageants?
That’s the question at the center of a heated scandal involving one Canadian pageant contestant. Jenna Talackova, 23, was born male but has identified as a female since age 4. She began hormone therapy at 14 and underwent gender reassignment surgery at 19.
On Friday, Talackova, a Vancouver resident, was booted from the Miss Universe Canada competition “because she did not meet the requirements to compete despite having stated otherwise on her entry form,” the organization said in a statement. “We do, however, respect her goals, determination and wish her the best.”
According to The Province newspaper, Talackova was selected among 65 finalists for the 2012 competition. She was removed from the competition despite there being no mention of rules regarding sex changes, The Province reports.
“I am very disappointed with the decision taken by the Miss Universe … organizers,” Talackova said in a statement released Monday. “However, I will look to turn this situation into a positive so that other people in a similar situation are not discriminated against in the future.”
In a 2010 interview for Thailand’s Miss International Queen, a pageant for transgendered women, Talackova was asked whether she regards herself as transgender or as a woman. “I regard myself as a woman … with a history,” she said.
But the head of the pageant says there are rules regarding a contestant’s gender at birth. The national director of Miss Universe Canada says that Talackova indicated on her registration form that she was born a female but later admitted that she was born a male, India Today reports. ”She feels like a real girl and she is a real girl. She didn’t expect people to question it,” Denis Davila told the publication. “She was hoping we could put her back in the competition, but the rules are very clear, and there’s no way we can go back on it.”
Reactions to Talackova’s story have been mixed. Detractors maintain that only natural-born women should be allowed to compete in traditional women’s beauty pageants. But the ousted beauty queen also has her supporters – more than 20,000 of them and counting. A change.org petition has netted 20,171 signatures in an effort to reverse the decision to disqualify Talackova from the the Donald Trump-owned pageant. Talackova is expected to release a statement this week after speaking with her lawyer.
In a statement Monday afternoon, the Miss Universe Organization said: “As with any competition, the Miss Universe pageant has rules which apply to all of its franchises around the world. Such rules include, but are not limited to citizenship, age, and marital status requirements. Additionally, the rules currently state that all contestants must be naturally born females. After review, organizers discovered that Jenna Talackova falsified her application and did not meet the necessary requirements to compete in the 2012 Miss Universe Canada pageant.”
