“Baker’s brave defense of her community’s right to read is a testament to the vital role librarians play in upholding free speech and creative expression in the face of censorship.”
The Israeli far-right government has circumvented Israeli laws to facilitate the closure and ban of any journalistic institution that exposes the atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation army in Gaza. Extremist ministers are also pushing for the expansion of this law to include the occupied West Bank.
Do not expect anything other than possibly some empty words from the "world leaders" against these outrageous fascist rules in the "only democracy in the middle east".
Today in Writing History May 22, 1927: Author Peter Matthiessen was born. Matthiessen was an environmental activist and a CIA officer who wrote short stories, novels and nonfiction. He’s the only writer to have won the National Book award in both nonfiction, for The Snow Leopard (1979), and in fiction, for Shadow Country (2008). His story Travelin’ Man was made into the film The Young One (1960) by Luis Bunuel. Perhaps his most famous book was, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983), which tells the story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s war on the American Indian Movement. Peltier is still in prison (over 43 years so far) for a crime he most likely did not commit. The former governor of South Dakota, Bill Janklow, and David Price, an FBI agent who was at the Wounded Knee assault, both sued Viking Press for libel because of statements in the book. Both lawsuits threatened to undermine free speech and further stifle indigenous rights activism. Fortunately, both lawsuits were dismissed.
Today in Labor History July 1, 1766: François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, was tortured, beheaded and burnt on a pyre for reading Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique and, more importantly, for not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France. The articles in Voltaire’s work included critiques of the Catholic Church, as well as Judaism and Islam. The general public loved the book, which sold out quickly after its first, anonymous, printing. The religious authorities hated it and censored it in France and Switzerland. Charles Dickens reference the torture and murder of la Barre in his novel, Tale of Two Cities. Voltaire tried, unsuccessfully, to defend la Barre. His writings immediately after the arrest did help several other young Frenchman get acquitted for the same offenses.
Imagine the outcrywif this was published by a western media.
It's sickening to see ww are under such amazing censorship that ww can't even publish articles from Israeli media.
Re-publishing this would be a suicide by any European or American media, not just because of its content, but also the fact it portrays IDF as what they really are.
Today in Writing History May 21, 1703: The authorities imprisoned writer Daniel Defoe for seditious libel. Defoe was most famous for his novels Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, and Moll Flanders (1722). However, he also wrote political pamphlets, including The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which satirized how Tories handled religious dissenters by proposing that they all be exterminated. As a result, the authorities arrested and imprisoned him for seditious libel.
Today in Writing History May 9, 1946: Ayşe Nur Zarakolu, Turkish author and activist was born on this day. Along with her husband, she cofounded Belge publishing house. She published books on the Armenian Genocide and the human rights of Turkey’s Kurdish population. As a result, the government imprisoned her repeatedly. Amnesty International designated her a prison of conscience.
Today in Writing History May 7, 1867: Polish author Wladyslaw Reymont was born. His best-known work is the award-winning four-volume novel Chłopi (The Peasants), which won him the 1924 Nobel Prize in Literature. Also in 1924, he published his novel “Revolt,” about a rebellion of farm animals fighting for equality. However, the revolt quickly degenerates into bloody terror. It was a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution. Consequently, the Polish authorities banned it from 1945 to 1989. Reymont’s farm animal rebellion predated Orwell’s by 21 years.