Ghosts of apartheid
As you watch and read tributes to Nelson Mandela tonight in the American news media, keep these facts in mind. The anti-apartheid leader, who was released from South African prison after 27 years in 1990, was formally considered a terrorist by the United States government throughout the 1970s and '80s, along with his political party, the African National Congress. Ronald Reagan called him a terrorist. So did Margaret Thatcher. It was actually the CIA that arrested him in 1962, then turning him over to South African authorities. Mandela was on the U.S. Terrorist Watch List until 2008.It is still the case that when ANC members apply for visas in the U.S., they are flagged for questioning and need a waiver to be allowed into the country. In 2007, Barbara Masekela, South Africa's ambassador to the U.S. from '02 to '06, was denied a visa to visit her ailing cousin and didn't get a waiver until after the cousin had died.
The United States continues to support the apartheid government of Israel. Palestinians are herded into ghetto-ized communities, or "urban townships," evoking ghosts of South Africa. They are segregated in housing, residency, water policy, urban planning, education, and taxation. Israel has seized increasingly-larger sections of the Gaza Strip, and still subject that area to a naval blockade. Bans on family unification in certain areas, along with the revoking of residential rights and forced exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, is designed to tamper the growth of the Palestinian population that might otherwise threaten the Jewish majority in the state. A Jewish national (as defined by Israeli law) living in Memphis, Tennessee, who has never visited Israel, has more rights of citizenship and enjoys more state protections in Israel than a Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent living in Bethlehem whose family lineage in that city dates back centuries.
Why do Americans always view the crimes and moral failures of their racist imperial government to be ghosts of the past?
posted by CM @ 8:58 PM
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