Sam Husseini: Global Is Local, Civil Rights and the Genocide Convention
A theme of my congressional campaign is that global is local.
In my announcement video I connected imperial Israel not only to slaughter and aggressive war, but to illicit use of taxpayer dollars, cost of living increases, militarization of police, assaults on free speech, etc.
This congressional district lives in the shadow of official Washington and with this run, we’ve aimed to reverse that.
But the connections between the local and global go way back. susan abulhawa just reposted a piece noting “the often ignored influence of internationalism in the Civil Rights Movement.”
She writes: “The civil rights era laid bare America’s terrible underbelly - apartheid, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the many other iterations of white supremacist terror. It was perhaps the first visual exposé of America’s core on the world stage, and it cast a long shadow over the nation’s global reputation, made darker in contrast to the moral clarity of leading Black revolutionaries, from Malcolm X and Fred Hampton to Fannie Lou Hamer and Mohammad Ali.”
So you had substantial parts of the U.S. establishment back civil rights for the most pragmatic of reasons — segregation was becoming an embarrassment on the world stage during the Cold War.
abulhawa in her piece tracks the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s steps towards internationalism.
I had criticized him years ago for writing that “The Civil War was the most lethal war in American history. The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars—all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc.” Of course he should have written that more U.S. people died in those wars.
Another connection between the local and global came up while campaigning and talking about the Gaza genocide. The question of genocide against Black folks in the U.S. came up.
I recently found that there’s an interesting legal history to this.
When the Genocide Convention was being hammered out in 1947, U.S. officials wrote of their concern that “sporadic outbreaks against the Negro population of the United States may be brought to the attention of the United Nations.”
This apparently led to the U.S. not ratifying the Genocide Convention until 1986.
This was only accomplished after former Sen. William Proxmire gave over 3,000 speeches to get ratification of the treaty.
But the ratification was something of a hollow victory. There was a “compromise” which opened the door to criminality.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar and Sen. Jesse Helms agreed on a series of “reservations”.
As the LA Times reported in 1986: “The most controversial of the reservations would give the United States the right to exempt itself from World Court jurisdiction in any genocide cases that may be pressed against it.”
This reservation is why South Africa could institute proceedings against Israel and Nicaragua could do so against Germany — but no one can file against the U.S. government because the U.S. government doesn’t really recognize the judgements of the International Court of Justice on the Genocide Convention. And that is apparently because the U.S. government was concerned that the treaty could be invoked against them for killings of Black folks.
Thus, the aversion to international law — made brazenly by Trump recently against the ICC (which finally acted against Israel after many of us successfully pushed for the ICJ case) — is nothing new.
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