Free Radikal

Posts Tagged ‘woman’

In July 2004 a badly decomposed body, described by the media as that of ‘a black non-national woman’ was discovered in a black plastic bag on a river bank in Co Kilkenny. Because she arrived as an asylum seeker in 2000, and, like all asylum seekers, had been fingerprinted, Gardai identified her through the finger printing data base at the Garda National Immigration Bureau as that of the 25 year old married mother of two Paiche Onyemaechi. She turned out to be the daughter of the Malawian chief justice and a lap dancer and prostitute. Because her body was found without a head by a local Kilkenny woman walking her dog, it did not take long for media representations to describe Paiche Onyemaechi as a ‘headless hooker’. Read the rest of this entry »

When Fatma Kassem submitted her PhD proposal, Yigal Ronen, the director of the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies in Ben Gurion University required her to make a series of changes. Unless she removed the term ‘Nakba’, the discussion of the Hebreicisation of place names, the term ‘first generation since the Nakba’ (‘first generation’ apparently refers only to the Holocaust), and eliminated the claim that life stories convey broader socio-cultural understandings – she would be unable to pursue her PhD. Under the guise of scientific truth, Ronen – and the university – not only doubted Kassem’s competence as a researcher, but also humiliated her as a [Palestinian] citizen of Israel, questioning her right to name her world in her own words.

Ironically, BGU is home to several radical Israeli (Jewish) scholars, including Neve Gordon, Uri Ram, and Kassem’s supervisor Lev Grinberg. It is also home to the  ‘new historian’ Benny Morris, whose  studies of the 1948 Nakba exposed the atrocities (though not the deliberate Zionist Plan D, detailed later by scholars such as Ilan Pappe, to ethnically cleanse Palestine). The anti-Zionist Pappe was forced out of Haifa University into exile in Exeter, where he continues to produce politically-committed scholarship about Israel-Palestine. However, the Zionist Morris, despite his important revelations, refutes ethnic cleansing or the existence of a Zionist plan to evict the Arab population, and has repeatedly said that he regrets the Nakba was not more complete; had Ben Gurion, he wrote in 2008, ‘carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations’. Read the rest of this entry »

At the AkiDwA (African Women’s Network) AGM on 22 November 2008, African asylum seekers living in direct provision hostels - AKA Ireland’s holding camps - spoke about the real cost of the recent budget cuts, as their children are prevented from attending school regularly because the school bus has been discontinued. The women, who live on an allowance of €19.10 per week (an allowance not raised since 2001), cannot afford to pay the bus fare. And anyway, the children have to take three buses at times to get to school and are often late. How about that commitment to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’ made at the Irish Declaration of Independence, when these children are prevented from accessing education?

Other women living in these holding camps spoke about being denied their clothing allowance because they looked too well dressed. Even though they buy all their clothes in charity shops, they are at the mercy of welfare officers who decide how well dressed they should be. Other women spoke about being denied access to education while awaiting a decision on their asylum application.

Whatever about the (now defunct) ‘Celtic Tiger’, at this economic downturn time, the people most seriously affected by the budget cuts are these women and their families, the real ‘hidden Ireland’.