U.S Consulate Blocks Award-Winning Journalist from Coming to Chicago

[Better Believe It]

-Didn't George Dubya engage in that sort of censorship? BBI-



U.S Consulate Blocks Award-Winning Journalist from Coming to Chicago
By Matthew Rothschild
March 19, 2010

Mohammed Omer was one of two winners of the 2007 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. That prize goes “to a journalist whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment propaganda.”

The unpalatable truth Omer told was about life in Gaza. “He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time,” his citation read. “He is the voice of the voiceless.”

Now he himself is voiceless in the United States, since “the U.S. consulate in the Netherlands has put an extended hold” on his visa application, says Sarah Macaraeg of Haymarket Books. Omer, a Palestinian, now lives in the Netherlands.

Omer was to speak on April 5th at the Newberry Library in Chicago at an event sponsored by Haymarket Books and funded by the Lannan Foundation. The topic: “Reflections on Life and War in Gaza.”

More than a dozen religious and nonprofit groups cooperated in the planning of Omer’s Chicago visit, including the American Friends Service Committee, the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago--Peace and Justice Committee, the Islamic Medical Association of Northwestern, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Middle East Task Force of Chicago Presbytery.

While in the United States, Omer was also planning on visiting Houston and Santa Fe.

Haymarket Books is asking supporters to contact the U.S. consulate in the Netherlands and demand the approval of Omer’s visa. The consulate can be reached at [e-mail].

http://www.progressive.org/mc031910.html

[Echo In Light]

1. k/r

[madrchsod]

2. why is our government afraid of ideas?

why is one man so powerful that his voice can not be heard in this country?


this not the change i voted for.

[Echo In Light]

3. .

[tom_paine]

4. Because we are no longer a democartic-republic, we are an Inverted Totalitarianism

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080515_chalmers_johnson_on_our_managed_democracy/

[struggle4progress]

5. You're may be seeing an effect from eight years of Bush: many agencies were packed with ideologues

[madrchsod]

6. i think you maybe right...

it`s like one of those houses on "hoarders"...8 yrs of shit takes time to remove

[Freddie Stubbs]

7. The Consul General in Amsterdam, Julie Ruterbosies, is an Obama appointee