Subscribei wonder how many more rights a muslim woman has in germany than in egypt.Regardless of the answer to that question, it should be unacceptable that a woman was murdered in cold blood and her husband killed while trying to defender her in a court of law while trying to defend herself from false charges of terrorism based on her religious clothing.
I understand there is a very difficult and sometimes xenophobic discourse in Europe about 'immigrants', but I wouldn't take either dancestoblue or the murderer of this woman to be necessarily representative of it as neither of them are European.Dancestoblue's attitudes could be common in Europe despite the fact that dancestoblue is not European. And the killer could be influenced by political rhetoric in the place where he lives even if he wasn't born there.
But I don't see any reason to consider Germany as exceptional in this case, or that this murder and its reporting represents 'hidden racism' in Germany, as though everybody else in the West were free from the insidious hate of the last decade.I don't consider Germany exceptional. It blows my mind a little bit, though, that anyone would think that just because hatred and bigotry wasn't exceptional, that meant that it didn't need to be addressed.
Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.How rich your great-grandfather was is a very good predictor of how rich you will be, in this country. We can't expect the consequences of slavery to just disappear, when the long term economic consequences will take a significant number of generations to dissipate. Not to mention, of course, the economic and social impact of continued racism. Also of note, in the above mentioned study, is that rates of class mobility are even lower for black Americans then they are for the population as a whole.
Her husband, also an Egyptian, was severely wounded when he rushed to her aid. Already severely wounded due to the stabbing, he was shot purposely in the leg by a German policeman, according to the Dresden state's attorney's office. [According to the report,] the officer had rushed to help, misunderstood the situation and, in the face of the melee, mixed up victim and attacker. —Süddeutsche ZeitungBut don't let that stop anyone from claiming that the policeman is a racist.
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with ''vagrancy.'' Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.Like the song says, Look away, look away....
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner--fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses--Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North--U.S. Steel Corporation--the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12--one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily ''task'' was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama--even a child of slaves--could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.
Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.
Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S. Steel’s production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.
Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.
Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside five miles from the bustling downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor, these were sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel. Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the place. No paths led to it...
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b) where is the security. a person shouldn't be allowed to confront a witness at all, let alone confront her and then have enough time to deliver 18 distinct wounds.
yes, i realize the issue here is racism and xenophobia and hatred, but this shouldn't have been allowed to happen and never would have happened in a court with proper security.
Even her husband Elvi Ali Okaz could do nothing as the 28-year-old Russian stock controller who was being sued for insult and abuse took the life of his pregnant wife. As Okaz ran to save her, he too was brought down, shot by a police officer who mistook him for the attacker. He is now in intensive care in a Dresden hospital.
i mean. what the hell, german cops?
posted by billysumday at 6:09 AM on July 11 [24 favorites]