cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14241958
The Online Speech Given by Yanis Varoufakis After German Police Raid Palestine Congress [Brett Wilkins | Apr 12, 2024 | Common Dreams]
“Friends, we are here because vengeance is a lazy form of grief. We are here to promote not vengeance but peace and coexistence across Israel-Palestine.”
To be fair they kind of had to have expected this. They invited a speaker banned from political activity (Salman Abu Sittah, who’s quoted as saying he wished he could’ve participated in the Hamas attack - wtf?), so logically, the conference was forbidden too.
Edit: fix wording and format a bit
I would suggest to think long on subjects that concern freedom of speech and that push for pro-censorship policy, especially when it is being pushed by politicians, people with power, and/or influence.
Not only do they censor and make certain speech a crime, but they also keep going and start to censor your particular politicial ideology and policies, sooner than later.
I hope this makes you think more on this subject and its importance on society, as it has to me.
If you are interested in learning a different view on freedom of speech and concerns of the 1st amendment, on the USA side, check out Glenn Greenwald.
I do know he is controversial in certain politicial circles, but we can all learn from people that have experience in fields we may not be experts in.
Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, “No Place to Hide,” is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of exposés in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.
Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning.
For his 2013 NSA reporting, working with his source Edward Snowden, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win); and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was also awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. A film about the work Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras did with Snowden to report the NSA archive, “CitizenFour,” directed by Poitras, was awarded the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
In 2019, he received the Special Prize from the Vladimir Herzog Institute for his reporting on the Bolsonaro government and pervasive corruption inside the prosecutorial task force that led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva. The award is named after the Jewish immigrant journalist who was murdered during an interrogation by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1977. Several months after the reporting began, Lula was ordered released by the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the former President credited the exposés for his liberty. In early 2020, Brazilian prosecutors sought to prosecute Greenwald in connection with the reporting, but the charges were dismissed due to a Supreme Court ruling, based on the Constitutional right of a free press, that barred the Bolsonaro government from making good on its threats to retaliate against Greenwald.
After working as a journalist at Salon and The Guardian, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept in 2013 along with Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill, and co-founded The Intercept Brasil in 2016. He resigned from The Intercept in October, 2020, to return to independent journalism.
Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with his husband, Congressman David Miranda, their two children, and 26 rescue dogs. In 2017, Greenwald and Miranda created an animal shelter in Brazil — supported in part through public donations — designed to employ and help exit the streets homeless people who live on the streets with their pets.
