Civil Courage Report - September 2024
Vol. 2, no.8
Amanda Jones, the Making of a Civil Courage Giant
Amanda Jones might have remained a wonderfully helpful and unnoticed middle school librarian had she not stood up against removing books from library shelves, in July 2022. Instead, she has been pushed onto the front lines of the culture wars in the United States, attacked by invading forces at her library for her articulate, reasoned defense of her work.
While fighting back, Jones has had to curtail her public appearances (at church and the grocery store) in the face of death threats and verbal slurs, while publishing an acclaimed book about her battles. She continues to be pilloried as “the town pariah,” the object of hate and defamation, while becoming nationally known as a spokesperson for maintaining library services and the right to read.
“While book challenges are often done with the best intentions, and in the name of age appropriateness, they often target marginalized communities such as BIPOC and the LBGTQ community,” she commented publicly two years ago at a Public Library Board of Control Meeting. “All members of our community deserve to be seen, have access to information, and see themselves, in our PUBLIC library collection. Censoring and relocating books and displays is harmful to our community but will be extremely harmful to our most vulnerable—our children. According to the Trevor Project, ‘LGBTQ youth are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.’”
This put her in the cross hairs of a self-appointed tribunal led by ‘Citizens for a New Louisiana.’ Their sanctions for unfounded assaults (indoctrination, promoting pornography) follow the playbook of others pushing book bans: character assassination with associated intimidation of anyone without the tremendous courage necessary to walk in her shoes. Who knows what other civil courage exemplars might be birthed by censorship and smear campaigns?
“If I had the ability to indoctrinate children,” Jones wrote, "I would indoctrinate them to be kind to one another, return their library books on time, and stop putting their chicken nuggets from the cafeteria in the book-return box.”
Remember the Brave Women of Iran
Many of the outstanding acts of civil courage these days come from Iran and Afghanistan, where regimes have declared wars of subjugation on women of their own lands. Pushed from the news by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and abandoned by governments and NGOs, Iranian women have stood up to ruthless brutality since the 1979 revolution subjugated them to husbands and the state. Many women are caught in a balancing act that avoids acquiescence on one hand and torture and death on the other, living a double life.
Two years ago, Teheran forced a bloody end to massive, women-led street protests after the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman. Mahsa Amini. She died after torture by the Morality Police for wearing her hijab the wrong way. To sustain its rule, Teheran arrested 22,000 protesters, killed 500, and executed ten, while blocking commonly used social media networks (Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, Twitter, TikTok).
“There’s no longer a strong presence of people on the streets,” one Iranian woman said. “But in our hearts the regime has been completely destroyed,” devoid of real authority. Many women continue their protest by refusing to wear the head scarf, or posting a photo without wearing it, a crime tortured with 74 lashes, which is even less terrible than another sentence, prolonged solitary confinement in an utterly dark cell less than 3.5 x 5 feet. Imprisoned for speaking out are 27 journalists.
A young Iranian rap musician, Toomaj Salehi, widely acclaimed for voicing popular outrage over the death of Amini for "dancing with her hair in the wind," was sentenced to death for “spreading corruption on the Earth” before Iran’s Supreme Court overturned that ruling, probably prodded by international criticism and even action in the U.S. House of Representatives. Recently, in the United States, police intercepted a murder-for-hire plan to assassinate an Iranian woman in exile, Masih Alinejad, an activist for human rights
Meanwhile, so many women now walk the streets in defiance of the hijab law that on the recent instructions of Ali Khamenei, Iran's highest authority, the morality police has stepped up the forceful arrest of women. But the regime is perhaps leading a double life as well, if perhaps only in words. This month, on the second anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, the newly elected president Massud Pezeschkian promised that women would no longer be harassed about the hijab.
Is there a population of persons in the West as astonishingly selfless and brave as Iranian women? “Oppression is the norm in a society as long as it lacks a role-model who breaks the taboo,” says photojournalist Forough Alaei who has documented Iranians who like Amini have refused oppression merely because they are women.
Women of Resistance: SOE Agents, Gendered Persecution, and Civil Courage
By Danielle Wirsansky (Member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors)
Last month, I had the privilege of presenting my research on the gendered persecution of women agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British intelligence agency that operated during WWII, at the prestigious 15th Dialogform/2nd International Women in the Holocaust Conference, held at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial. The conference brought together scholars from across the globe to share their work on women’s experiences during the Holocaust, and my focus was on how the women agents of the SOE’s F Section endured horrific treatment in concentration camps as both spies and women resisting Nazi oppression. It was a unique opportunity to shine a light on the intersection of gender and civil courage in the darkest of times.
Beyond presenting my research, I was fortunate to tour Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps, where many people, including agents of the SOE were imprisoned, tortured, and, tragically, executed. These camps, known for their brutality, became the final battleground for these agents, whose steadfast courage under pressure was a powerful testament to their resistance. Walking through these sites brought an even deeper connection to the stories I’ve studied—seeing firsthand the places where so many brave agents fought their silent battles strengthened my understanding of their civil courage.
Both the SOE agents and the women of the Rosenstrasse Protest share a profound legacy of resistance and bravery in the face of terror. Whether fighting covertly behind enemy lines or openly in the streets of Berlin, these women exemplified civil courage at its finest. It is their courage and determination to stand against tyranny, despite the overwhelming risks, that continues to inspire and inform our mission today at the Rosenstrasse Foundation.
Hitler’s September, 1935 Nuremberg Laws
September 15 marked the 89th anniversary of the Nazis’ 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. A German Jew was defined as anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents while only those “mixed race” children of Jewish-Gentile couples who were members of a Jewish Community or who had married a Jew were to be “counted” as a Jew. This definition, straying from Nazi ideology that every drop of Jewish blood had to be purged from the ‘Aryan’ people, showed that in a clash between the Nazi ideology of race and that of political expediency, Hitler could side with a temporal compromise in racial ideology. Three years later, observing the resistance of intermarried couples to regime’s promises and pressures should they divorce, Hitler secretly privileged just one portion of ‘racially’ intermarried German Jews. Those intermarried Jews who were not “privileged” would wear the yellow star identifying them as targeted for deportation and death, while those Hitler identified as privileged would be exempted from wearing the yellow star. Because their non-Jewish partners refused to separate from them, the great majority of German Jews who survived were intermarried, included “non-privileged” as well as “privileged.”
"What if more Germans had 'acted from the heart.' as the women of the Rosenstrasse did? What can their story teach us about how to deal with today's challenges? How can we learn to begin to act from the heart?”
- C. Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (2009, 2nd edition, 2016)
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