Watch the film "Never Come Back" tonight, broadcast on OMNI-1 TV at 9 p.m. in Ontario and 10 p.m. in B.C.
Discrimination
Premiere of new film about the Roma people
The film "Never Come Back" premieres in Ottawa on Wednesday, April 11.
Related rabble.ca story:
Let's make September 11 a day without war
The ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States should serve as a moment to reflect on tolerance. It should be a day of peace. Yet the rising anti-Muslim fervour here, together with the continuing U.S. military occupation of Iraq and the escalating war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan), all fuel the belief that the U.S. really is at war with Islam.
September 11, 2001, united the world against terrorism. Everyone, it seemed, was with the United States, standing in solidarity with the victims, with the families who lost loved ones. The day will be remembered for generations to come, for the notorious act of coordinated mass murder. But that was not the first Sept. 11 to be associated with terror:
The marginalization of Muslims in America
Salman Hamdani died on Sept. 11, 2001. The 23-year-old research assistant at Rockefeller University had a degree in biochemistry. He was also a trained emergency medical technician and a cadet with the New York Police Department. But he never made it to work that day. Hamdani, a Muslim-American, was among that day's first responders. He raced to Ground Zero to save others. His selfless act cost him his life.
New film tells about the Roma or 'gypsies' Canada wants to keep out
They call them "gypsies," "gitanes," "tziganes," "ciganes," "nomadi" -- and sometimes such nasty epithets as thieves, pickpockets, vagrants and "inadaptables" (a favourite term in the Czech Republic).
They are the Roma, Europe's perennially unwelcome minority.
They are shunned just about everywhere on the continent, whether in Hungary or Spain, the Balkans or Iberia, the Mediterranean or Scandinavia.
Historians and anthropologists say they migrated from Rajasthan, in India, more than a thousand years ago.
In India, the Roma had been itinerant musicians, performers, merchants -- and sometimes slaves -- and they carried on some of those traditional occupations in their new lands.
Unpacking the knapsack of race privilege
This article, first published in 1999, was taken from rabble.ca's vaults in time for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21.
It's several weeks after Black History Month; have you checked your racial awareness recently?
My own awareness received a sharp and exhilarating little jolt when I read an article by Dr. Peggy McIntosh in a journal published by the National Association of Women and the Law.
Black in Latin America
A few years ago a group of us went on a visit to "Ile de Gorée" -- the island was a sunlit 20-minute ferry ride off the coast of Dakar, Senegal. When reaching the shore, my first impression was that we had reached a tropical oasis: brightly coloured pink, brown and yellow buildings, children running along the dock, and vendors selling carved, rotund, wooden hippos. Within a 15-minute walk we came to a church and the guide informed us in elegant French, "In 1992 Pope John Paul II came here and asked for forgiveness."
