ALEF (Act for Human Rights) have put up new billboards in Lebanon Azebak Mesh Raha calling for the elimination of torture in detention centers. Jails, prisons, and other detention centers in Lebanon are notorious for their ill-treatment of detainees. Men and women – especially marginalized communities such as migrant workers, drug users, sex workers, LGBTs – regularly get tortured physically and verbally. It is also common practice for the police to torture confessions out of detained individuals.

Non-state actors such as political parties who rule with authority in their areas also use torture techniques to intimidate and control people. The Lebanese state should as well be held responsible for these violations of human rights. Check out this As Safir article for more stats from ALEF’s studies.

So check out their campaign and support it by spreading the Facebook page on your social networks.

Call to Bloggers

Bloggers who are interested in joining ALEF’s Torture Monitoring Unit can contact layal.samaha [at] alefliban.org and learn more about how they can become active in reporting torture in Lebanon. The unit holds regular trainings on how to identify torture, where it happens, how to document and report it, and other useful skills. Bloggers are an integral part of this unit alongside traditional media journalists.

Activists in Egypt launched a campaign to blog and tweet about sexual harassment on Monday, June 20. The team behind the Adventures of Salwa joined the campaign as well with a parallel blogging day in Lebanon. Please join this very important cause – you can make a difference by adding your voice to ours on June 20!

Bloggers

Put up a blog post on Monday with a personal story, an opinion, an illustration, a rant, a call to action – anything that raises awareness about sexual harassment in your city.

Tweeps & Facebookers

Help spread & share the blog posts using the hashtag #EndSH. Tweet and status your experiences and opinions too.

Useful Links

• Qaweme Harassment – a blog gathering reports of sexual harassment around Lebanon.
• Adventures of Salwa – the campaign against sexual harassment in Lebanon.
• New Video: Resist Harassment – raising awareness on everyday racist & sexist behavior on the streets of Beirut.

Photo by @joellehatem - click on it for the full album

Thank you to everyone who joined us yesterday at the demonstration to Protect Women from Family Violence!

Check out some of the press coverage today: Al Akhbar, Daily Star, L’Orient le Jour, AsSafir, Al Balad, Al Diyar, Al Moustaqbal, and Al Joumhouriya.

You can also check out the #protectwomen hashtag on twitter for the live updates.

I estimate that we must have been around 800 protesting yesterday – very diverse crowd. The presence of lots of political parties provoked mixed reactions from the feminists, some applauding their participation in the demo (which is a rarity in Lebanon) and others thought their presence was hypocritical and tainted what should have been a people’s march. I personally don’t like marching alongside any party for whatever cause because I dislike all of them, but I respect Kafa’s decision to involve them as partners in the campaign. If there’s any organization in Lebanon that can bring very different groups together at the same table, it’s Kafa, and that requires hard work and guts, so kudos to them.

It was a little disappointing to see that the largest coalition of our women’s movement could only bring together hundreds of people. We are a long way from becoming a mass movement. And certainly the worst thing about the march was the chant “Rfa3 eedak, koun rijjeil” (targetted at parliamentarians). Shou ossitna we still endorse the idea of “being a man?”

All in all, it was a successful demo and we’ll keep our eyes on the developments of the proposed law.

Here are the main characteristics of the new Civil Personal Status Law prepared by Dr. Augarite Younan and Dr. Walid Slaiby and presented to Parliament. It sounds so delicious, makes me want to get married I will write up some critiques of the new proposed law that different activists have raised soon. In the meantime, you can join the group on Facebook to support and learn more.

For more information visit www.chaml.org

The women’s committee of Dar Al Fatwa in the North of Lebanon have created this flyer bashing CEDAW and claiming that it is an attack on family values and on the psychological and physical particularities of women’s femininity.

If anything, they should be sued for horrible graphic design. Why do they have a suburban American-looking house that is being struck by lightning? Do we have such houses in Tripoli? Who’s being Western now, huh?

Also from Tripoli, posters calling for a demonstration today AGAINST the proposed bill to protect women from family violence.

I think this pubic battle between fundamentalist groups and the women’s movement in Lebanon is terrific. It could finally galvanize supporters to speak up and make themselves heard. And it brings out the opposition that we always knew existed but that didn’t take our efforts seriously before. See you at the demo on Sunday!

People, the lobby AGAINST the protection of women from family violence is starting to speak out with strong statements issued this week by many groups and political parties. Check out this story in As-Safir:

حملة من أجل “تكريس قوانين الأحوال الشخصية” الحالية: “قانون مناهضة العنف الأسري” يهمّش الدين والأخلاق

and this one on New TV:

نعيم قاسم: لسنا مع قانون مدني للأحوال الشخصية بلبنان لانه يخالف الشرع

Religious groups are also lobbying AGAINST the lifting of reservations off the CEDAW, which is an international convention for the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women.

And so it is very important – now more than ever – to show that:

• We will NOT compromise on women’s human rights no matter what
• We believe in the protection of women from family violence as a basic right for women’s dignity and self-respect.
• We know from evidence that the lack of protection leads to the killing of women in many cases, in addition to their daily suffering from physical, emotional, economic and sexual violence.
• We reject the claim that “reconciliation” is the answer to family violence. When a wife or daughter is beaten, the perpetrator has crossed the line and “reconciliation” should NOT be the woman’s only option.
• We refuse to be pawns in the fighting and bickering of political parties and refuse to be used to further their propaganda and fundamentalist agendas.
• We stand as advocates for women’s human rights – men and women together – from all regions of Lebanon, all ages, all beliefs to say YES to a law that protects women from family violence.

Join us THIS SUNDAY to show your support in a demonstration at 11am from the Ministry of Interior to Riad el Solh in Beirut. Bring your friends and mothers and sisters to show that we will NOT BE SILENCED and we will NOT BE INTIMIDATED by anyone meen ma ken ykoun.

Many things you can do this year and resolve to do in 2011:

1. You can join the twitter campaigns on December 27 to promote justice for Gaza and remember the atrocities committed by Israel in December – January 2008.  The two campaigns are #Gaza2 and #BoycottIsrael.
2. Wear Red on Monday, December 27.
3. Join and support the BDS Movement – the most powerful and growing movement to delegitimize the apartheid state of Israel. There are simple things you can do like refuse to buy Motorola, Ahava, Veolia, and other products. And there are bigger things you can do by joining your local BDS groups and their campaigns to boycott, divest, and sanction.

Friends, it is once again time to use social media to get a message across to the world. A flotilla of boats carrying human rights activists is right now on its way to Gaza via international waters in order to break the Israeli siege and deliver aid to the people. Will they succeed in their mission? Will they make history? What can we do to support them?

Let’s trend #flotilla on twitter all day tomorrow, Sunday, May 30, by tweeting news, thoughts, and links about the Freedom Flotilla’s trajectory to Gaza. Once we trend it, millions of people will see the term and click on it to find out what it means and why it’s trending. We will also be providing moral support and sailing (twailing?) in solidarity with the brave activists risking their lives on board the flotilla. Here’s what you can do:

1. Be online on Sunday, May 30 starting 12pm Cairo time (5am New York time) and throughout the day. We want to get #flotilla trending by the early afternoon and keep it trending through the night.
2. Let us know you have joined us. Sign up here or tweet to @nmoawad or @justicentric.
3. Recruit fellow tweeps to join us.
4. Use Facebook to get the message across.
5. Get more information here: http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/cms/en/flotilla.aspx and here.
6. Follow all the tweets on the #flotilla here.

Group trending is a lot of fun & will connect you to so many wonderful new tweeps. So get on board; we need every tweet. When tweeting, take note to:

1. Hash #Flotilla only once (or else it doesn’t count).
2. Don’t use the automatic retweet button (or else your tweet doesn’t count).
3. Tweet often but not more than once or twice a minute (or else your account will get blocked).
4. Tweet useful information about the #flotilla and #Gaza. Our mission is to raise awareness, not simple to trend.

It’s very short notice but we can do it!

Labor Day is coming up, 3eed Al 3ommal, on May 1st, and we are recognizing on this day the illegal, outrageous, and unethical working conditions of migrant work in Lebanon – and across the Arab world. The campaign initiated by @simby is called Twenty-Four-Seven and it highlights the fact that domestic migrant workers in Lebanon work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Yes, they do. Can you imagine working with your boss 24/7? It is called slavery.

So this week, I, along with many friends, will be blogging and tweeting to raise awareness about migrant work. I thought I would start with an honest attempt to deconstruct my own racism and think about how I, Nadine, really view race. Often, activists are quick to adopt causes just because someone they admire said so, or because the theory of it sounds logical and in line with their politics. But we cannot deal with issues in others, my friends, until we have deconstructed them in ourselves. And so, I, while claiming to be active on the rights of domestic workers in Lebanon, still have a long way to go to undo all the racism (blatant and invisible) embedded in my head. I will start this process of deconstruction by writing out things I have done that I consider racist. Here is the first story:

The nawateer (concierges) of the building where my parents live are a couple from Sri Lanka. I have bumped into the woman hundreds of times over the past few years, and when I do, I smile and say hello and she does the same. Earlier this month, I was passing through the building and saw her a little far away and wanted to call her to ask her something about the electricity. That’s when it occurred to me that I don’t know what her name is. I tired to search my memory as I was sure I must know her name, having known her for many years, but there it was: no name. I didn’t bother, all these years, to even ask or learn what her name was. I felt so ashamed of myself. Is it even possible to look at or treat someone as an equal human being if you never learn their name? If they have no name to you? No. Think of how offended people get when you can’t remember their name. It is insulting.

But it is a widespread practice in Lebanon. We call migrant women by their nationality “Sri Lankiyyi!” or by their country “Sri Lanka!” or by a nickname “Saki” instead of “Sakthipriyah,” for example. One common practice is to call migrant women by a different name all together, such as “Mary,” because their real names are difficult to pronounce for Arabs. Well, we can exert just a tiny bit of effort to learn to pronounce Sinhala or Tagalog or Nepalese names instead of ripping people of their individual identities and lumping them all into the same person: the migrant woman. Otherwise, we are perpetuating racism.

But I am not one to talk before I go to my parents’ house and find the woman who takes care of the building and apologize to her for not knowing her name and ask her what it is and tell her it is a beautiful name and write in on my hand until I learn to pronounce it properly and then use it when I say hello to her.

Maybe that is a first step in deconstructing my own racism towards migrants. I will write more about it this week as we campaign around #24seven. I urge you all to do the same. Let us talk about our own racism, even those of us who think we are progressive activists.

Some of the banners from the 2009 Women's Day Protest for Migrant Rights. The purple one reads: "My name is Lata, not 'Sri Lankan'"

I thought “Tweet and Blog” was too long, so I made it Twog Ok, so Simba Russeau and her fellow activists on migrant rights are organizing some events in Lebanon to raise awareness in the lead up to Labor Day. Migrants from South Asia, South-East Asia, and Africa come to Lebanon to work and often find themselves toiling under inhuman conditions without the possibility of an exit. It is, without a doubt, modern day slavery. And although there is more and more talk around it in the region, we have done little on the ground to fight the oppressive system.

And so, this Labor Day 2010, as we celebrate our right to a day off from being such hard workers, let us work to raise awareness about migrant rights in our Arab countries by blogging and tweeting. Here’s what you can do:

1. Tweet thoughts, ideas, links to articles, and information about migrant rights intensively the week of April 24 – May 1st. Use the #migrantrights hashtag. We are not trying to trend, but we are trying to raise lots of awareness and get conversations going.
2. Write up a blog post during the week and publicize the link on your Facebook and social networks. Send a link to simbarusseau@gmail.com who will be aggregating all blogs for the week.
3. Recruit your friends to do the same.
4. Think of more creative ideas like a Facebook action, shared profile pic, twibbon, etc.. and post them here in the comments or send to Simba directly.
5. Anyone who’d like to design a badge for this campaign is very welcome.

Also, here are some ideas I had for blog posts, so that we make sure that they are not all the same:

• Interview a migrant worker. Ask him/her about their journey here and their work here.
• Interview a migrant worker on camera. Post his/her interview on YouTube.
• Analyze the problem with migrant labor from a political or social perspective. Focus on either the gender aspect, the class struggle, or our inherent racism, to cite a few examples.
• Talk about the situation in your country in particular.. what is it like for Sudanese workers in Egypt? Egyptian workers in Lebanon? Sri Lankan women in Dubai? Nepalese women in Jordan?
• Propose solutions. Write up brainstorming posts where you think of campaigns, projects, events, programs, organizations that can work on ending the injustice.
• Elaborate on the feminist analysis of migrant worker rights: household work as unpaid work, gender dynamics in the household, violence from women against other women, domestic violence & violence against domestic workers, sexual assault on migrant women, trafficking of migrant women, violence against women within the migrant communities, and other examples.
• Celebrate the culture of a non-Arab country from which many migrate to Arab states. I can think of Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Philippines (but that might be just from a Lebanese experience). Post a tribute  by raising your friends and followers’ awareness about the richness of these cultures, histories, languages, and music.

If you’re interested in helping to organize, get in touch and I will add you to a google ground we’ve just created for Twog organizers.