Hart has the credentials to tackle the subject of Zionism (specifically, political Zionism: that a certain collection of non-native people has a, purportedly, God-given right to a particular piece of real estate that overrides the rights of Indigenous Palestinians) having worked for over three decades covering history unfolding in the Middle East. Much of his experience is first hand. The False Messiah is volume one of, what is planned to be, a three or four volume series Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews
Volume One: The False Messiah
By Alan Hart
Paperback: 337 pages
Publisher: Clarity Press (2009)
ISBN-10: 0932863647
ISBN-13: 9780932863645

Disseminating information that challenges the immensely influential Zionist bloc is difficult. Hart wrote, “… all in the UK were too frightened to publish this book out of fear of offending Zionism too much and being falsely accused of promoting anti-Semitism.” Here Hart exposes the absurd inversion of morality: Zionists accuse defenders of Palestinian human rights as being racist against the abuser of Palestinian human rights!

Hart identifies it as a smear tactic and a phony one since Arabs are Semites.

That the morality of Zionism is challengeable was keenly illustrated by an exchange between Hart and erstwhile Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Hart queried Meir on-air: “You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and even the whole world down with it?”

Meir’s prompt response: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

How do Zionists get away with crimes against humanity? Hart points to the suffering Zionists experienced in the WWII Holocaust. To this an obvious question arises: does victimization give the victims the right to victimize another people?

Paulo Freire in his opus Pedagogy of the Oppressed warned that oppression creates a recycling dynamic that dehumanizes not only the oppressed people but also the oppressor. Hart touches on this dynamic.

Zionism and Judaism

Hart has to cover a lot of ground.

He points out that Zionism is not Judaism. Hart describes Zionism as “brutal and cruel [behaviors], driven by self-righteousness of an extraordinary kind, without regard for international law and human rights conventions” which “makes a mockery of the moral values and ethical values of Judaism.”

Hart does not delve deeply into these moral and ethical values of Judaism, but he leaves this reader with the impression that Judaism is an principled faith. However, the laws and morality underlying many religions are often interpreted variously. The late Israel Shahak, a chemistry professor and social justice activist, in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years rued that classical Judaism had been subverted toward profit and Jewish supremacism. I submit that much as no people should be seen as a monolith neither should a religion be regarded as a monolith.

The Legitimacy of a Jewish Claim to the Holy Land

Hart reasons that there is no legitimacy to Israel’s claim to a “right to exist.” Moreover, the Jewish claim to the Holy Land does not hold up under scrutiny.

The bloodlines of the majority of Israeli Jews do not tie them with the Holy Land. Ashkenazim stem from eastern and central Europe and are converts to Judaism. Hart cites the work of Joseph Reinach, Alfred Lilienthal, Arthur Koestler, and Shlomo Sand in outlining this case. The refutation of Jewishness as an ethnicity is important because, quoting Sand, “…it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews” that allows Zionists to claim Israel as a Jewish state.

Furthermore, writes Hart, the Mizrahim (Semitic Jews indigenous to the Middle East) were strongly opposed to Zionism.

Hart focuses on two different sets of Jews: Haskala Jews who sought to make the place they lived their home and Zionist Jews who strive to separate Jews and Gentiles. Haskala Jews see themselves threatened by a backlash to crimes committed by Zionist Jews.

Early Zionism

Hart paints a picture of early Zionist history and the roles of early Zionist figures such as Zionism’s “founding father,” Theodr Herzl, key lobbyist, Chaim Weizmann, and the financier of Zionism, Lionel de Rothschild.

Hart details the collaboration of Britain with the Zionists from Arthur Balfour whose letter provided a pretext to dispossess Arabs. The chicanery was such that Britain reneged on its promise to recognize the sovereignty of its WWI Arab allies. Britain, writes Hart, laid the foundations for a Zionist takeover: “Without the British presence Zionism could not have entrenched itself in Palestine. On their own the Palestinians could have pushed the Zionists out.”

Britain went so far as to declare war on the Palestinians and assassinate Palestinian leaders.

All along the way, Zionist Jews were opposed by Haskala Jews who, as history shows, always lost out. After WWII, the Holocaust card was effective at backing down Haskala Jews.

Yet, Zionism has also flourished among Jews living abroad. Citing humanist Lilienthal: the migrating Jews carried a “nation complex” within them. According to Hart, this “made many of them susceptible to Zionism’s nationalist propaganda.”

Later, Zionists such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Vladimir Jabotinsky would terrorize the British out of Mandate Palestine. Hart sources Ralph Schoenman on the Koening Memorandum that made transparent the Zionists’s plans for terrorism against Palestinians: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”

Israel today, Hart notes, defines legitimate Palestinian resistance as terrorism. The author holds, “… all peoples have the right to use all means including violence to resist occupation.”

The US and Zionism

As Imperial Britain headed into decline, Imperial USA was ascending. The US would have a greater role in the Middle East.

Hart lauds US president Woodrow Wilson, “a real, towering statesman, a true giant among men.” Woodrow was apparently hamstrung on Palestine by his lobbying for the League of Nations. Hart blames “Imperial Britain-and-Zionism and their allies in [the US] Congress and the media; with … France” for screwing Wilson on Palestine.

Hart presents many “what if” scenarios. For example, he quotes British official John Hope Simpson: “Had the Jewish authorities been content with the original object of settlement in Palestine – a Jewish life without oppression and persecution in accordance with Jewish customs – the national home would have presented no difficulty.”

Or what if president Franklin Roosevelt had not died when he did? Hart speculates that Roosevelt would have rejected a Jewish state in Palestine.

Hart identifies influential Zionist agents in the White House, among others, David K. Niles. Although Truman is depicted as a president who grappled with the Zionist lobby, he had a vulnerability exploitable by Zionists.

Biting the Hand that Feeds

Ends would justify the means for Zionists. Even though Britain had set the stage for Jewish immigration to Palestine, even though Britain was at war with Nazi Germany — Zionists sought out a possible collaboration with Britain’s wartime enemy and an enemy to Jews. Hart sources Marxist writer Lenni Brenner who disclosed the Zionist negotiations with Nazi Germany. Zionists were dedicated to thwarting Jewish immigration to elsewhere than Palestine and were even willing to sacrifice Jewish lives to realize the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine.

And it was Jewish terrorism that forced Britain out of Palestine.

Zionism and Terrorism

The Zionist plan was to drive the British out, then drive the Palestinians out. Hart relates the strategy of the man who would become Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, for keeping all the land: creating facts-on-the-ground. The problem with this strategy is that if old facts-on-the-ground can be erased to establish new ones, what is to stop new facts-on-the-ground from being created again?

The methods for creating these facts-on-the-ground were incredibly gruesome. The massacre at Deir Yassin is a historical testament to Zionist war crimes – “in its own tiny way it was another holocaust.” The village was a “soft and easy target”; “the butchers of Deir Yassin” killed 254 victims, mainly the elderly, women, and children. One-hundred-and-forty-five women were killed, 35 of them pregnant. Many were raped before being killed.

Hart quotes Mordechai Nisan of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.” [emphasis added by Hart]

Abdul Khader, portrayed as a respected Palestinian resistance leader, died the day after the Deir Yassin Massacre. Gloom set in on the Palestinian side. Deir Yassin had its intended effect, sowing fear in the hearts of Palestinians, and the expulsion was underway.

Arab and International Complicity with Zionism

The Palestinians did not just have to deal with British treachery, they “were at the mercy of the Arab League” who at British insistence kept the Palestinians unarmed, much as the illegal sealing of Gaza’s borders today and control of the West Bank borders keeps Palestinians unarmed under brutal occupation and creeping dispossession.

Hart wonders: what if the Arab regimes of the time had sought an alliance with Stalin to defeat Zionism? He speculates that Truman might have had to stand up to Zionism.

Hart points out that the United Nations General Assembly, in defiance of its own charter which calls for respect for the principle of self-determination, would, aided by Zionist manipulation (disinformation, bribery, threats), decree an illegal partition of Mandate Palestine. Not only was the partition illegal, he argues, it was also unfair. Jews would receive 56.4 percent of the land while being 33 percent of the population and owning only 5.67 percent of the land. The valuable coastal and fertile areas were in Jewish hands while mountainous, infertile areas were left to the Palestinians. Hart calls it “a proposal for injustice on a massive scale.”

In the end, Truman capitulated to Zionism and recognized the partition. Truman had been subjected to “a political hit-squad of 26 pro-Zionist U.S. Senators” beholden to Jewish votes and money.

Truman’s secretary of state George Marshall resisted Zionism, putting “America’s national interests first and, to the limit of the possible within that context, doing what was legally and morally right.” Joining Marshall in opposition was US secretary of defense James Vincent Forrestal who might have been the most steadfast opponent of the corrupting influence of Jewish money on the Democratic Party had he not, according to Hart, died under suspicious circumstances. Nonetheless, the Zionists had access to a more influential actor on Truman.

Hart takes a sympathetic slant toward Truman, noting he had kept the Zionist lobby at bay until it discovered his Achilles heel: his good friend Eddie Jacobson, a non-Zionist Jew. Through Jacobson, Zionists could reach Truman.

It appears that Truman, although much irked by the selfishness of the Zionist lobby, bore much of the responsibility for opening the door to the influence of money from lobbyists. Grant F. Smith in his book America’s Defense Line supports this view: “The historical record reveals how Truman’s policy on the Palestine question became heavily influenced by his need for campaign contributions…” Smith credits Truman with starting a “competition to see who was more ‘pro-Israel’” among US presidential candidates. Smith presents evidence that Truman was swayed by “massive funds” for his 1948 presidential campaign raised with the help of arch-Zionist Abraham J. Feinberg.

The Brazilian pedagogue Freire theoretically described — without referring to it –what underlies the Zionist-Palestinian dynamic: that of the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire argued that oppression and the struggle of liberation from oppression are both oppressing. Oppression, he contends, is necrophilic. “Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation that oppresses them.’”

To overcome the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, the oppressed must see themselves as agents of change. Revolution requires solidarity, and this, said Freire, is achieved through love — affirmation of one’s humanity. The act of rebellion by the oppressed is a gesture of love. The desire to be human saves oppressors from their own dehumanization caused by oppressing other humans.

“It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors,” wrote Freire.

Many Haskala Jews believe that liberation for all Jews will come from Palestinians achieving their liberation.

This looks like the direction Hart is heading with his Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews series. Volume One: The False Messiah is an important reference on what has transpired in the lead up to and formation of the Jewish State by Zionists. He brings valuable first-hand perspective, such as what lay behind Meir’s statement that there were no Palestinian people.

Hart gives a human face to some of the historical protagonists, portraying them not merely as actors but delving into the character of the persons. It is as if Hart seeks to humanize some of the persons who capitulated to Zionism.

However, there is no reason that evil should always appear in the guise of a demon. Humans come in all shades. Evil acts are evil despite the appearance of the evil-doer. Yes, it is probably much easier to perpetrate evil acts in cherubic rather that demonic guise, but why play to such stereotypes?

Hart’s book is a good act, a brave act for someone from British state media. He says he has to live with himself, and it is obvious this book comes from a place of integrity. Volume One: The False Messiah augurs well for the rest of the series.

Obama is a man who has yet to shut down a global gulag, who has yet to end the warring in Iraq, who has yet to oversee the return of the elected president of Haiti (deposed by US, Canadian, and French forces), who stands unflinching on the coup d’etat in Honduras, who runs cover for Israeli massacres of Palestinians and Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions (i.e., supporting war crimes), who seeks to proliferate military bases in Columbia, who has ramped up the killing in Afghanistan, and who has overseen the spillover of war into Pakistan.

Is this the criteria that is deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjørn Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

So Nobel Prizes are being handed out for offering hope? Is this an effort to prod Obama along the road toward a peace-making presidency?

Didn’t Norway reward Yitzhak Shamir, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat Nobel Peace Prizes for giving the hope of peace in historical Palestine? Since then Israel has carried out many slaughters of the indigenous Palestinians. And yes, Palestinians have resisted with violence — sometimes lethal.

Wasn’t US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger co-awarded a 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a cease-fire in the US war on Vietnam? Hope was hung around a ceasefire destined to collapse. At least Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho had the integrity to refuse a prize where peace was based on the tokenism of hope.

There are many examples that contradict the notion that Nobel Prizes would spur the US nation toward peace. Yet the leaders of the most warring nation on the planet continue to be rewarded with peace prizes. It defies rationality.

Did Obama offer a mea culpa for US atrocities?

Did Obama seek justice for the perpetrators behind the killing of an estimated 1.3 million Iraqis based upon a concocted casus belli?

To his credit, Obama did something most unusual in acknowledging that the US was behind the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran? Did he offer an apology? Did he offer compensation?

Hoping for peace in a state based on the genocide, dispossession, and marginalization of its Original Peoples, a state whose economy was largely built through slavery, a state built through the expansionism of war with its neighbors, a state built through dominating its hemisphere through self-declared destiny, despite never managing the gumption to apologize for these past grave crimes seems rather dubious.

There are plenty of states deserving of censure. However, when one state with a long history of violence stands supremely powerful and claims itself to be a beacon onto all other states, that is where transformation must first occur in a world whose people long for a just peace.

That will require more than wishful thinking. It will require the audacity to mobilize the masses to a revolution for peace.

On 23 September, many western delegates walked out of the United Nations General Assembly chambers during Ahmadinejad’s speech. The United States accused Ahmadinejad of using “hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric.” Canada boycotted the address because, according to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, Ahmadinejad had said “absolutely repugnant” things about Israel. Neither country quoted what was repugnant or anti-Semitic.

A JTA article stated, “The lowlight, I suppose, would be this portion, where he attacks the ‘Zionist regime,’ accuses Jews of controlling the world and then blasts the United States, too.”²

From another JTA article:

Ahmadinejad spoke of “the elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,” during his speech to the UN, but otherwise didn’t mention his country’s nuclear program. Instead, he criticized Israel’s “inhuman policies in Palestine” and said the Jewish state had committed “genocide” in a speech that led to walkouts by numerous other countries in the General Assembly.³

First, Ahmadinejad never mentions the word “Jewish” in his speech. Second, the only time he uses the word “Jews” is when he talked about “prepar[ing] a conducive ground for all Palestinian populations, including Muslims, Christians and Jews to live together in peace and harmony…”

Third, as for “genocide,” Ahmadinejad said: “How can the crimes of the occupiers against defenseless women and children and destruction of their homes, farms, hospitals and schools be supported unconditionally by certain governments, and at the same time, the oppressed men and women be subject to genocide and heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.”

JTA does not deny the charges by Ahmadenejad.

There are plenty of Jews that acknowledge the “Jewish state” is committing “genocide.” There are plenty of Israeli academics who acknowledge the Nakba.⁴

The Goldstone report — as mitigating of Israeli war crimes as it may be in equating the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed — is further acknowledgment of Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians.⁵

JTA mentions an “apparent reference to Jews, ‘It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks, and establish a new form of slavery, and harm the reputation of other nations, even European nations and the U.S., to attain its racist ambitions.’”³

JTA conflates Zionism with Jewry. It is Zionism that is the enemy of Jews.⁶ It is Zionists who collaborated with Nazis during WWII.⁷ It is Zionists who practice racism. Ahmadinejad made an apparent reference to Zionists.

Without a doubt Zionism is rife in Israel,⁸ and it is much supported by Jews outside Israel, but there is also significant opposition to Zionism among Jews outside Israel. Humanity is diverse and so are Jews.

Double Standards in the West

The Iranian disclosure of a second uranium enrichment facility in Iran has raised the hackles of neoliberal politicians in the West.

Stephen Harper called it a “grave threat to international peace and security.”

At a G20 news conference in Pittsburgh, Harper said, “Iran, the combination of its abhorrent ideology and its interest in nuclear technology, combined with increasing evidence of its obvious disregard for international law and for its obligations, constitutes a grave threat to international peace and security.”

Since when is “interest in nuclear technology” a crime or something bad? To pursue nuclear technology is a right of all nations. Canada has a nuclear program; it enriches uranium. Does Canada mention its nuclear program in speeches to the United Nations? Does Israel mention its nuclear program?

As for “obvious disregard for international law,” is that unlike Israel with a string of condemnatory UN Security Council resolutions on record against it and numerous others vetoed by the US?⁹ Or is this not obvious disregard?

What is the “abhorrent ideology”? He couldn’t mean the pursuit of nuclear weapons because that would include the US, Britain, France, and Israel. And certainly Zionism is not an “abhorrent ideology” for Harper. He promised Israel would always have a “steadfast friend” in his government. Erstwhile Canadian prime minister Paul Martin once remarked, “Israel’s values are Canada’s values.”

US president Barack Obama stated that Iran must “be held accountable to international standards and international law.”

Are all states states to be held equally accountable by Obama? What about Israel? Will the state cited several times as a violator of international law by UN Security Council resolutions “be held accountable to international standards and international law”? Will Israel’s nuclear weapons be dismantled and its nuclear facilities subjected to IAEA inspection? Will the US — the aggressor of Iraq, frequent violator of international law, found guilty by the World Court in 1987 of terrorism — “be held accountable to international standards and international law”?¹⁰

Obama threatened, “When we find that diplomacy does not work, we will be in a much stronger position to, for example, apply sanctions that have bite.”

Diplomacy (if one can call it that) hasn’t worked for many decades in historical Palestine, and the only US sanctions are against the oppressed Palestinians for daring to resist dispossession and genocide. Conversely, the oppressor state receives billions in US “aid” and diplomatic cover in the UN.

Obama added, “I would love nothing more than to see Iran choose the responsible path.”

One wonders if that is like the “responsible path” that the US took in aggressing Iraq on pretext of possessing weapons-of-mass-destruction and killing over a million people? Or is the “responsible path” the one Obama took in deciding to up the military ante in Afghanistan, thereby increasing the violence and killing?

British prime minister Gordon Brown said, “The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.”

One wonders: is that like the lines the imperialist British regime drew in the Middle East when it carved up the Arab world, breaking its promise to its World War I allies? Is it like how the British decided to give away Arab land to Occidental Jews without asking permission from the Oriental inhabitants of the land? It would seem that Britain has a far from marvelous history of drawing lines in the sand.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy charged that Iran’s enrichment facility is “a challenge made to the entire international community… We cannot let Iranian leaders gain time while the motors are running.”

Yet France is the country that helped Israel develop the Dimona nuclear facility and become a nuclear power.¹¹ What about the Israeli “challenge made to the entire international community”?

Furthermore, the US, Britain, and France have a responsibility under the NPT to dismantle their nuclear weaponry. So what moral weight do such pronouncements from western leaders have? Is there something about the US, Britain, France, Canada, and Israel (this bellwether of colonizing or colonized states) that gives them some superiority in rights over other states?

Moreover, what does this reveal about the western corporate media, which merely serve as mouthpieces for the state’s interests rather than scrutinizing concentrations of power?

Choosing the Responsible Path

The US and other nuclear-armed states could gain much legitimacy if they act henceforth to eliminate stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

CBC warned, “Beyond sanctions, the leaders’ options are limited and perilous. Military action by the United States or an ally such as Israel could set off a dangerous chain of events in the Islamic world.”¹²

Would that be, as Obama puts it, choosing “the responsible path”?

1. Western media purports the revelation is because the US and its allies were aware of its existence. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “U.S. and Allies Warn Iran Over Nuclear ‘Deception’,” New York Times, 25 September 2009.
2. Eric Fingerhut, “Ahmadinejad’s speech to the General Assembly,” JTA, 23 September 2009.
3. JTA Staff, “Ahmadinejad slams Israel as world powers turn up heat,” JTA, 24 September 2009.
4. For example, Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006). Does Pappe go far enough? See Kim Petersen, “Nakba: The Israeli Holocaust Denial,” Dissident Voice, 18 March 2007. Ethnic cleansing is argued to be genocide: Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter, “‘Ethnic cleansing’ bleaches the atrocities of genocide,” The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access, 18 May 2007. See also Kim Petersen, “Bleaching the Atrocities of Genocide,” Dissident Voice, 7 June 2007.
5. Richard Goldstone, “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” Human Rights Council, 15 September 2009.
6. See Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume One: The False Messiah (Clarity Press, 2009). I will write a review upcoming.
7. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal (1983).
8. Etgar Lefkovits, “Overwhelming Israeli support of Gaza op,” Jerusalem Post, 15 January 2009.
9. ”List of United Nations resolutions concerning Israel,” Wikipedia.
10. See Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer, and Diana G. Collier (Eds), International Justice and Impunity: The Case of the United States (Clarity Press, 2008). Review.
11. Peter Pry, Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984): 11.
12. ”Iranian nuclear revelation a grave threat: Harper,” CBC News, 25 September 2009.

Uri Avnery opposes the brutality inflicted on Palestinians. He campaigns for peace with Palestinians. But he also has a Zionist past. He is European born and fought for the terrorist Irgun in perpetration of a holocaust (Nakba) against Palestinans. He later renounced Irgun’s tactics. He is antiwar, but he is not anti-the fruits of war. He approves of a two state solution. In other words, Israeli Jews will keep the fruits of their dispossessing others — this while continuing to press for the return of what they were dispossessed.¹

Avnery advocates selective use of tactics against Zionism. This is apparent when it comes to an international boycott of Israel. Avnery states that no one is better qualified than South African archbishop Desmond Tutu to answer this question.²

What does Tutu say? He has called on the international community to treat Israel as it treated apartheid South Africa. Tutu supports the divestment campaign against Israel.³

Avnery’s fellow Israeli, Neve Gordon, agrees that it is time for a boycott.⁴ Avnery laments, “I am sorry that I cannot agree with him this time – neither about the similarity with South Africa nor about the efficacy of a boycott of Israel.”

Indeed, the apartheids — while in many respects similar — are also different. Gary Zaztman pointed to a key difference:

For all its serious and undoubted evils and the numerous crimes against humanity committed in its name, including physical slaughters, South African white-racist apartheid was not premised on committing genocide. Zionism, on the other hand, has been committed to dissolving the social, cultural, political and economic integrity of the Palestinian people, i.e., genocide, from the outset, at least as early as Theodor Herzl’s injunction in his diaries that the “transfer” of the Palestinian “penniless population” elsewhere be conducted “discreetly and circumspectly.”⁵

Boycotts as a Tactic against Racism

Avnery says Tutu told him: “The boycott was immensely important, much more than the armed struggle.”

But it was the revolutionary, Nelson Mandela, who refused to give up the right to armed struggle, who negotiated the dismantling of South African apartheid.⁶

Tutu also told Avnery, “The importance of the boycott was not only economic but also moral.”

Avnery writes, “It seems to me that Tutu’s answer emphasizes the huge difference between the South African reality at the time and ours today.”

So what is Avnery saying? First he states that Tutu is best qualified person to speak to the effectiveness of boycotting as a tool in the fight against racism, then he says Tutu has it wrong. So is Avnery saying, then, that he is best qualified to speak on the effectiveness of boycotts against racism?

Avnery fears that Israeli Jews will feel “the whole world is against us.”  

However, isn’t that, in a sense, what the purpose is: to show that the whole world is against Jewish racism against Palestinians? It must be emphasized that the world is not against Jews, as Israeli propaganda would choose to portray it. Although he doesn’t specifically state it, Avnery is using a version of the anti-Semitism smear: if you are against anything Israel does, then you are against Israelis. Hence, you are anti-Semitic. This grotesque perversion of morality and logic holds that to be against racism toward Palestinians makes one anti-Semitic.

Avnery admits, “In South Africa, the world-wide boycott helped in strengthening the majority and steeling [sic] it for the struggle. The impact of a boycott on Israel would be the exact opposite: it would push the large majority into the arms of the extreme right and create a fortress mentality against the ‘anti-Semitic world’. (The boycott would, of course, have a different impact on the Palestinians, but that is not the aim of those who advocate it.)”

Avnery merely states what is the current status quo. Israel is already hunkered down in an extreme right fortress mentality. The boycott is not the cause. Avnery fixates on the population dynamics. What is the relevance of majority and minority in Avnery’s reasoning? It would seem that Palestinians being in the minority – and the fact that the Palestinians support the boycott – to be even greater reason for international support of the boycott. Who and what is Avnery supporting: Palestinians from racism or Israeli Jews from the economic effects and moral stigma of an international boycott?

As for the aim of the boycott campaign: “to deny Israel the financial means to continue to kill Palestinians and occupy the lands.”⁷

Avnery raises “the Holocaust” arguing that Jewish suffering has imprinted itself deeply on the Jewish soul. That the Nazis rounded up Jews in concentration was a moral outrage. But what is the lesson of World War II? That suffering imposed on any identifiable group of people is evil and wrong, or that one group can appropriate a holocaust, make it their own, and use past suffering as a shield to inflict a holocaust on another people? Avnery argues that boycotting Jews will remind them of Nazism, but when Jews use Nazi-type techniques what should they be reminded of?

Avnery says it is okay to boycott of the product of the “settlements.” He draws a distinction between “settlers” (i.e., “colonisers”) and other Israeli Jews. How then does Avnery rationalize the fact that the “settlers” are in the West Bank?
 
Avnery asserts, “Those who call for a boycott act out of despair. And that is the root of the matter.” Indeed, despair is life for many Palestinians under occupation or in refugee camps.

Avnery states that an international boycott would be difficult to achieve, and the US would not be behind it. It was not easy to achieve against the apartheid regimes in South Africa either. Is that a reason not to try? Did not the US oppose a boycott of South Africa? Yes, it might take a long time. But times do change. The US (and its western allies’s) recalcitrance was steam rolled in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and elsewhere. Empires have risen and fallen throughout history.

Avnery finds that the tactic of boycotting is “an example of a faulty diagnosis leading to faulty treatment. To be precise: the mistaken assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resembles the South African experience leads to a mistaken choice of strategy.”

Avnery continues, “In South Africa there was total agreement between the two sides about the unity of the country. The struggle was about the regime. Both Whites and Blacks considered themselves South Africans and were determined to keep the country intact. The Whites did not want partition, and indeed could not want it, because their economy was based on the labor of the Blacks.”

Seems there is some faulty analysis going on. “Whites did not want partition”? How can Avnery state something so factually inaccurate? What were Venda, Lebowa, the Bantustans, if not sections of South Africa partitioned off by the White government? Furthermore, that Zionism is now no longer dependent on Palestinian labor does not mask that it at one time was dependent on such labor; Avnery is cherry picking in his argument. Denying Palestinians the right to work in historical Palestine is a tactic that evolved from Zionism.

Also, how is it that Avnery can argue against an international boycott of Israel when Israel maintains a crushing illegal embargo against Palestinians – a war crime? As long as Israel uses such a tactic, then resistance through boycott, certainly, is legitimate.

Avnery says Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have nothing in common. However, this same lack of commonality was true between White and Black South Africans as well. Nonetheless, I take exception with the thrust of such argumentation. It prepares the ground for racism. Israeli Jews, Palestinians, Black and White South Africans are all humans. They all eat, work, sleep, have dreams, have families. This should be reason enough to act humanely toward each other: love of humanity. It is entirely possible to embrace our shared humanity and respect diversity.

Avnery concludes, “In short: the two conflicts are fundamentally different. Therefore, the methods of struggle, too, must necessarily be different.”

This is logically flawed reasoning, much like the logical and moral flaw that being a victim of a genocide minimizes one’s own culpability in a subsequent genocide. One suspects that Avnery may well be the victim of a pained conscience and cognitive dissonance. I submit that the two “conflicts”⁸ are fundamentally similar. Fundamentally, colonial Israel and colonial South Africa share these hallmarks: a racially, culturally, spiritually, linguistically different group of outsiders through preponderant violence dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their homeland, and set up an apartheid system which humiliates the Indigenous peoples and privileges the occupiers.

Avnery focuses on certain “fundamentals” — which I submit are not fundamentals but nuances — that he considers different.

Avnery’s solution lies with “a comprehensive and detailed peace plan” from US president Barack Obama and “the full persuasive power of the United States” to lead to “a path of peace with Palestine.”

Avnery remembers well previous US-backed peace plans, like Oslo and the Roadmap. Why, then, does he cast his audacious hope on AIPAC appeaser Obama? Avnery hopes that Israeli Jews will realize that peace with Palestinians is the way? The peace activist touts a solution that has failed and been rejected many times. He rejects a solution that worked in South African because of the sensibilities of the oppressors.

But let us examine Avnery’s logic that fundamentally different “conflicts” demand different struggles.

Oppression is overthrown by struggle. Fundamentally different “conflicts” can succeed through similar struggles. As one example, revolutionaries overthrew an American-backed dictatorship in Cuba through armed struggle and Cuban revoluntionaries defeated South African forces in Angola through armed struggle.⁹

In his article’s finale, seemingly assured of his own argumentation over the person he deems the best qualified authority on boycotts as a tool to overcome apartheid, Avnery points to a prayer of Tutu’s – a prayer that would serve all of us well:

“Dear God, when I am wrong, please make me willing to see my mistake. And when I am right – please make me tolerable to live with.”

Hopefully, Avnery abides by such humbleness when he sees the error of his ways as well.

1. See Dinah Spritzer, “Last chance for Holocaust restitution?” JTA, 30 June 2009.
2. Uri Avnery, “Tutu’s Prayer,” Gush Shalom, 29 August 2009.
3. Desmond Tutu, “Israel: Time to Divest,” New Internationalist magazine, January/February 2003. Available online at Third World Traveler.
4. Neve Gordon, “Boycott Israel,” Los Angeles Times, 20 August 2009.
5. Gary Zatzman, “The Notion of the ‘Jewish State’ as an ‘Apartheid Regime’ is a Liberal-Zionist One,” Dissident Voice, 21 November 2005.
6. See Bill Keller, Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Kingfisher, 2008). Mandela wanted to pursue a peaceful, non-violent settlement, but when faced with the violence of state power he felt compelled to use violence as a method of struggle. Mandela did emphasize that this violence was not terrorism: 98.
7. ”Aim of the boycott campaign,” Boycott Israel Now.
8. The word “conflict” minimizes the atrocities wreaked on Palestinians and South Africans by their oppressors.
9. Isaac Saney contends that the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was the “turning point in the struggle against apartheid. ”Isaac Saney, “The Story of How Cuba Helped to Free Africa,” Morning Star, 4 November 2005. Available at Embajada de Cuba en Egipto.

One logical and ethical solution to the prodigious resources devoted to the “drug war” is the recognition of each person’s sovereignty over his own body. Consumption of drugs and whatever else is the decision of adult individuals in reasonable command of their mental faculties. Society (as it is presently constituted, the state) should monopolize drug sales. The state will save money fighting illegal drug sales and assure that unadulterated, untainted drugs are sold. The drugs can be sold with necessary information and warnings (ideally factually accurate information — neither disinformation nor propaganda) about the drugs, so that the individual is fully informed of the potentialities from drug consumption.

Others, however, choose to live by different principles or rules. In most societies, the ruling class arrogates the right to decide what is best for others and enforce this decision. This is the case in the US for drug use – even for the comparatively harmless marijuana plant.

Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert approached the right to use marijuana from a different tangent. They argue, in the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?, that because it is far safer than alcohol, marijuana for personal use should be legalized.

      Marijuana Is Safer
      So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?
      By Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert
      Paperback: 192 pages
      Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing (2009)
      ISBN-10: 1603581448
      ISBN-13: 978-1603581448

Study after study shows that alcohol is linked with violence: acts of aggression, assaults, rapes, and murders. Alcohol is toxic; marijuana is not toxic. In fact, marijuana is therapeutic for certain disorders – perhaps even having anti-cancer properties (as the writers note, the US government holds the anti-cancer patent). Alcohol may have some benefits for blood-thinning properties in moderated daily doses, but it is not a prescribed treatment. The writers, therefore, question why marijuana use, which does not promote violence, is so harshly punished and alcohol use is not.

Fox et al. cite the 1997 World Health Organization final report that held: “On existing patterns of use, cannabis [the psychoactive component in marijuana] poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol and tobacco in Western societies.”

Therefore, to treat drugs fairly (and alcohol is a drug) based upon “facts” established through unbiased and sound scientific studies, either alcohol must be prohibited or marijuana legalized. Marijuana Is Safer does not advocate a return to alcohol prohibition.

Alcohol consumption is largely accepted in society; marijuana use though widespread is usually done discreetly lest one risk being arrested.

The penalties that marijuana users face are many and severe. Fox et al. write, “Believe it or not, virtually no other criminal offenses – including violent crimes like rape or murder – trigger the same plethora of sanctions.”

Indeed, when US president Richard Nixon launched the official government war on drugs, “public enemy number one” was marijuana.

The Outcome of Marijuana Prohibition

The authors hold that the harsh legal enforcement of marijuana has artificially lowered marijuana use and led to increased alcohol consumption.

They identify at least one cause of marijuana prohibition as being racially motivated, an example being crazy Mexicans. This is a part of the onslaught of disinformation that surrounds the use of marijuana.

For this reason, the book includes a chapter tackling the myths and facts surrounding marijuana use, such as it leads to “harder” drug use, that marijuana is highly addictive, that it causes many traffic accidents (the writers do not recommend driving after toking), that it causes brain damage, etc.

There is probably a likelier cause for the maintenance of the prohibition against marijuana that the authors touched on: the alcohol industry has a hand in maintaining marijuana prohibition – protecting its profit margins from competition. Marijuana — “weed” — would be tough competition for alcohol.

Why Legalize Marijuana?

Society would benefit not just in increased safety but also economically. As one example, the book notes that “annual alcohol-related health care costs were forty-five times greater than marijuana-related health care costs!”

The authors contend that “modern marijuana prohibition is a ‘cure’ that is much worse than the disease”

“Why should we add another vice?”The authors argue, “The fact that alcohol causes so many problems in society is not a reason to keep pot illegal; rather it is the reason we must make it legal.” Marijuana is not adding a vice, but rather providing a “less harmful recreational alternative.”

The authors attempt to steer an honest assessment of marijuana compared to alcohol. While Marijuana Is Safer debunks many of the myths existing about marijuana use, it does not insist that driving under the influence of marijuana is safe; it does not insist that marijuana has no addictive properties. It cautions against young people “who lack the maturity” from using mind-altering drugs. It seems here that Fox et al. in, perhaps, a bid to appear impartial, strayed from evidential analysis.

Marijuana Is Safer does not posit foreknowledge of what changes will come about with the legalization of marijuana other than society will, assuredly, be safer. It seems this assurity is premised on people switching from alcohol to safer marijuana and neophyte recreational drug users choosing marijuana over alcohol.

Evidence does exist to support the premise that knowledge of the risks of drug taking does influence taking of the drug. There is a huge advertising industry based on the notion that how information is packaged and presented influences people. Nowadays, cigarette packages clearly indicate that smoking may cause lung cancer and other terrible diseases. Despite this some people continue to smoke. Yet, the numbers of smokers have declined and this is attributed to the increased knowledge of the dangers of smoking. The Canadian Cancer Society stated in 2002: “It’s clear that the advertisements work [to discourage smoking].” The CBC reported that the province of Nova Scotia had a youth (15-19 years) smoking rate of 31 percent in 2000 – when the warning ads on cigarette packages were introduced – and in 2007 the youth smoking rate had dropped to 12 percent.

The reasoned logic of Marijuana is Safer is something all members of society should take time to question and consider. Who stands to benefit from the present policy against marijuana use? What are the benefits and costs to society from the present policy? Marijuana is Safer compellingly reveals the irrationality behind the selective drug prohibition policy, a policy which puts people in comparative danger.

The same critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we’re always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can’t have it both ways.

If these critics think that it’s appropriate for us to suddenly act in ways that in every other context they consider inappropriate, then I think what that indicates is that maybe there’s some hypocrisy involved in their approach to U.S.-Latin American relations that certainly is not going to guide my administration’s policies.

I agree with Obama that hypocrisy stinks, and it should not be a part of his administration – or any administration.

In the case of Honduras, Obama rejects calls for tougher sanctions. However, he has not shirked from continuing tough sanctions on, for example, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar.

Hypocrisy, as most people know, is when you say one thing and contradict it. Dictionary.com defines it, primarily, as “a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.”

Obama has presented himself as an opponent of hypocrisy. If, indeed, this is true, then one would expect that Obama does not reverse himself on stated policy, and, certainly, he should never break a promise … otherwise that would be hypocrisy about opposition to hypocrisy.

So when Obama stated, early on, that he opposed the war in Iraq it would be expected that he would not waver from such a belief, and, certainly, he would not engage in prolongation of a war or the aftermath occupation. But low-level warfare continues in Iraq as does the occupation.

In fact, as a Senator, Obama voted to approve every war appropriation the Bush administration put forward.

Nevertheless, to attract the antiwar vote, Obama said he would get US combat troops out of Iraq in 2009. Obama has since backtracked on this and is committed to keeping enough soldiers in Iraq for “counter-terrorism” measures.

Obama also courted the labor movement while campaigning. He promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. After the election, Obama reversed his stance on NAFTA. Further displeasing to Labor, Obama appears also to have stepped back from the card check provision in the Employee Free Choice Act.

The tragedy of opting for lesser evilism is that the people get evil.

What the plaque fails to mention is that the site where Cornwallis directed the colonists/settlers to erect Halifax was on the Mi’kmaq settlement of Jipugtug (anglicized to Chebucto).² The Mi’kmaq, considered themselves the sovereign power in Mi’kma’ki (the present day Maritimes),³ but Cornwallis did not recognize this sovereignty, and he did not consult the Mi’kmaq about his plans.

Halifax historians Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford, and David Sutherland wrote of Cornwallis’s attitude toward the Mi’kmaq: “That arrogance set in motion the train of events that led to tragic violence, the memories of which would long complicate race relations in colonial Nova Scotia.”⁴

What it did set in motion was the murder and dispossession of the Original Peoples of Mi’kma’ki, and one outcome was the eponymous honoring of the Cornwallis. Cornwallis has streets, schools, etc. named after him in the province.

Naming places and buildings after a person is common practice, but usually not when that person is an inciter of genocide. Principle 8 of Canadian Permanent Committee of Geographical Names states, “Personal names should not be used unless it is in the public interest to honor a person by applying such a name to the geographical feature. Names should be derived from persons who have significantly contributed to the features selected.”⁵

Author Daniel Paul wrote that Cornwallis and his council raised a “company of Volunteers” by offering a bounty on Mi’kmaq (women, children, infirm; it didn’t matter).⁶

The British had “unwavering resolve to dispossess the Mi’kmaq of everything and to subjugate them absolutely.”⁷ The Mi’kmaq were forced on to reserves too small to provide an adequate means of subsistence. This reduced the Mi’kmaq to a state of dependency, subordination, and internal colonization.⁸

Credentials of a Genocidaire

That Cornwallis is a genocidaire is apparent from the proclamation Cornwallis and his council issued on 1 October 1759. The proclamation set a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaq. One can read from the proclamation:

That, in order to secure the Province from further statements of the Indians, some effectual methods should be taken to pursue them to their haunts, and show them because of such actions, they shall not be secure within the Province…

That a reward of ten guineas be granted for every Micmac taken, or killed.⁹

In 1750, the bounty was raised from 10 to 50 guineas. Paul said this bounty is still in effect, having never been repealed by the federal government.

To reclaim this sordid history, the Rename Cornwallis Initiative is underway, drafted by school teacher Cheryl Leblanc-Weldon and Paul, to redesignate these landmarks named after a genocidaire. The petition reads, in part:

To: To the Governments of Canada, Great Britain, the province of Nova Scotia, and all its municipalities and school boards

… Professor Geoffrey Plank of the University of Cincinnati comments about their rational [sic] for approving such a barbarous course of action:

“If the Micmac chose to resist his expropriation of land, the governor intended to conduct a war unlike any that had been fought in Nova Scotia before. He outlined his thinking in an unambiguous letter to the Board of Trade. If there was to be a war, he did not want the war to end with a peace agreement. ‘It would be better to root the Micmac out of the peninsula decisively and forever.’ The war began soon after the governor made this statement.”

Therefore, we the undersigned, because we firmly believe that no person who attempted genocide should, under any circumstances, receive public honors, express support for changing the name of all public entities such as schools, streets, parks, etc. which currently honor the name of Edward Cornwallis, founder of the British colonial city of Halifax which is currently the capital city of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada.

We ask this be done as a move towards restoring justice to the Mi’kmaq First Nation People of Nova Scotia. Governor Cornwallis, as part of the machinery of colonization, attempting to destroy them completely, oversaw the infliction of terrible suffering and indignities on men, women and children of the Mi’kmaq Nation. Morally, no Nation that self-describes itself as civilized, can justify honoring such a man. His action demands that he be condemned by honorable caring citizens, not honored!

Opposition has arisen to the Rename Cornwallis Initiative. Joseph Bogle calls accusations of genocide against Cornwallis “a blatant lie.” He has started a counter petition to preserve the name of Cornwallis that has garnered 12 signatures (as of 12 August 2009).

LeBlanc-Weldon said, “I am pleased with the progress of our petition as it continues to grow on a daily basis. I think the fact that the counter petition only has 12 signatures pretty much shows that there is not a vocal opposition to our desire for change.”

Bogle’s accusation is counter to the colonial records.¹⁰

Governmental Inaction

The former Nova Scotia heritage minister Bill Dooks argued against the redesignation. Dooks said, “Changing a name does not change what happened. I cannot change the past.” No one asked Dooks to change past events. The designations are current, and that is the change being sought.

The new social democratic government in Nova Scotia also seems uninterested in the redesignation. David Denny, advisor to Heritage Minister Percy Paris, communicated in a statement: “This is not a matter under consideration or review by the new government at this time.”

Changing Names

Redesignation has been the historical practice in Canada; witness the renaming of Mt. Stalin in British Columbia to Mt. Peck and renaming the Ontario town of New Berlin to Kitchener (who is held by many to be a war criminal himself¹¹ ). Furthermore, many place names are reverting to their Indigenous names; for example, the Queen Charlotte Islands are now usually called Haida Gwaii, the Mackenzie River is Deh Cho, etc.

The renaming of landmarks, buildings, and institutions that honor the genocidaire Cornwallis should only be a beginning. The city of Amherst, “Nova Scotia” is named after British army officer Jeffery Amherst notorious for advocating biological warfare against Original Peoples.¹²

In front of the Halifax Public Library is a statue of the bulky mass of Winston Churchill — the man who advocated “spread[ing] a lively terror” with poison gas. His words reveal his racism: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… ”¹³

Racism, and indifference, by Nova Scotians also affect the Rename Cornwallis campaign. “In some cases it’s a racist thing. They say ‘[the Mi’kmaq] lost, too bad’… or ‘lots of people did things wrong, it was war, don’t judge it by today’s standards.’ Others say ‘it doesn’t affect my life,’ but when they find out about it they say ‘yeah, it should change,’” said Leblanc-Weldon.¹⁴

1. Jipugtug is the original designation by the indigenous Mi’kmaq people. Halifax is the colonial designation.
2. Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford, & David Sutherland, Halifax: The First 250 Years (Halifax: Formac Publishing, 1999): 8.
3. See map.
4. Fingard et al.: 13.
5. William B. Hamilton, The Macmillan Book of Canadian Place Names (Macmillan, 1978).
6. Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages: A Mi’kmaq Perspective on the Collision between European and Native American Civilizations (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Press, 2000): 109-113.
7. Paul: 115.
8. Harald E.L. Prins, The Mi’kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival (Harcourt Brace, 1996): 7.
9. ”A Monstrous crime, a day to remember in Canadian history,” Shunpiking: People of the Dawn (First Nations Supplement), 13 (49), Fall 2007: 14. See also Daniel N. Paul, “British Scalp Proclamations: 1749 and 1750,” www.danielnpaul.com.
10. “It is ironic Europeans who were responsible for diminishing Mi’kmaq life documented much of what they were destroying – in explorer’s logs, trade letters, missionary letters, colonial records, and so forth.” Prins: 4.
11. See “The crimes,” AngloBoer.com.
12. ”Jeffrey Amherst and Smallpox Blankets,” Native Web.
13. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Noonday Press, 1992).
14. Ben Sichel, “Renaming Cornwallis,” The Dominion, 17 July 2009.

The British Columbia capital, Victoria,¹ has only one local corporate newspaper. In the Sunday edition of the ever diminishing Times Colonist newspaper, there appeared an advertisement very much unlike the standard ad that attempts to persuade a person based on its slickness, celebrity worship, or appeal to prurient senses. The ad was a full-page letter on the back of the A section entitled in bold: “BC speak now or forever lose your fish!” It is a rationally based appeal and is replete with footnotes to peer-review science journals and annual reports.

Addressed to the people of BC, it begins, “I am no longer certain that you want wild salmon, because every level of government that you have elected seems against them.” The biologist Alexandra Morton, who has been waging a battle against the deleterious effects of salmon farming on the wild salmon population, questions why voters opt for a government unconcerned with the plight of the wild salmon. British Columbians, by dint of their voting preferences, might be viewed as oblivious to the destruction of their five native salmon stocks.

For three consecutive elections, British Columbians have voted the right-wing Liberal Party, a friend of salmon-farm corporations,² into political power in the westernmost Canadian province. These election victories have coincided with an upsurge in corporate salmon farming and catastrophic crashes of the wild salmon population.

Morton sees no mystery in the disappearance of the wild Pacific salmon: “The science is conclusive: where salmon farms exist, wild salmon and trout are in exceptionally sharp decline.”

She holds the government responsible because it has granted gatekeeper status to the fish farms in estuaries, exposing wild salmon runs that pass by to pathogens from the farms. In particular, sea lice have been implicated in the demise of juvenile wild salmon.³

Morton emphasizes that the problem is not just sea lice, and it is not just salmon that are threatened. She points out, for instance, that the “sheer numbers of IHN virus shed from farms over 100s of km from Bella Coola to Campbell River was an unprecedented threat to herring and salmon.”

Who Profits?

So why do government allow corporations to continue farming fish along wild salmon migration routes that imperil the wild fish?⁴

Morton follows the money. She further asks what money there is and for who?

Citing the BC Ministry of Environment, Morton writes that fish farms brought in $365 million in landed catch value in 2007. Wild salmon brought in $1.5 billion in tourism and $288 million in sports fishing. Sport fishing is mainly owned by British Columbians while salmon farms are mainly Norwegian-owned corporations. Citing Wilderness Tourism Association figures, full-time jobs provided by fish farms were 4,000 versus the 52,000 full-time jobs that wild salmon made possible.

The figures clearly point to the far greater economic importance of wild salmon over farmed salmon.

The evidence points to politicians colluding with the flow of money into the pockets of a few foreign corporatists against the economic well-being of many Indigenous and local people.

As Morton knows well, there are other corporatists who would like wild salmon to go away. Salmon do not just stand in the way of salmon-farming corporations:

Because wild salmon require functional habitat from the tops of mountains, down through richly forested watersheds, along the coastal shelf and out to sea, politicians can’t bear the consequence of taking a stand to protect them. They would say “no” to the loggers who want to take the most valuable trees now standing in the last thriving watersheds, “no” to those who scheme to dam, divert, and sell BC’s fresh water, “no” to miners wanting to dump tailings into the rivers, and most importantly, “no” to the oilmen greedily eyeing our coast. To these politicians, farm salmon means a salmon that means no habitat. It is a good deal for them.⁵

Corporate Contradiction

Sometimes making money can get in the way of having one’s fun.

The ex-Norwegian, now Cypriot, tycoon John Fredriksen, an avid fisherman, reached a conclusion that contradicts his 30% ownership in Marine Harvest, the world’s largest salmon-farming corporation: “I am worried for the wild salmon’s future. Fish farming should not be allowed in fjords with salmon rivers.”⁶ The world traveller Fredriksen seemed primarily concerned for his homeland’s Alta River: “Neither Iceland or Canada can measure up to Alta. Management of the river, with its exclusive and peaceful fishing spots, is special here.”⁷ Fredricksen also pointed to a global threat to wild salmon: “Sea lice, infectious diseases and genetic and ecological interactions of escaped farmed salmon with wild salmon are a serious threat to the future of both wild Atlantic and Pacific salmon.”⁸

Marine Harvest Canada’s communications director Ian Roberts — who once complained, “I believe people are starting to get a little weary of this type of Doomsday prophecy”⁹ — must have felt befuddled by Fredricksen’s Doomsday prophecy.

The Corporate Media, and Salmon Farming

On Friday, 31 July, actor William Shatner headlined the front page of the BC capital’s corporate newspaper with his appeal to remove the fish farms.¹⁰

Redolent with academic hubris, the TC quoted Brent Hargreaves, “a research scientist from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans who has studied sea lice for six years,” as questioning Shatner’s scientific knowledge to pronounce on wild salmon. Hargreaves also accuses Morton of “a big stretch” in attributing the demise of wild salmon to sea lice from fish farms. He claims there is no evidence that sea lice cause sockeye death.

I was surprised by this media slant. Why the focus on sockeye salmon when it was the Broughton Archipelago pink salmon collapse in 2002 that rang alarm bells, and sea lice were sited as the culprit.¹¹ It was pink and chum salmon that Hargreaves studied with his colleague Morton.

The writer of the article, Judith Lavoie, said that the editing had distorted the story, and that Hargreaves “was far less adamant than the story indicated – saying there is no evidence [for sea lice causing sockeye salmon deaths], but qualifying it with some of the studies on chums and pinks.”¹²

Morton replied, “Brent simply means there has been no science to prove that sockeye juveniles can be killed by sea lice. Adult salmon can be killed by sea lice, so it is only a matter of how many. Brent knows sea lice are a serious issue for wild salmon, but he can’t rock the boat. DFO policy is to support the expansion of fish farms and anyone who has a problem with that is sidelined.”¹³ ,¹⁴

Morton agreed she was extrapolating in saying that sockeye smolts — which grow for a year in freshwater and enter seawater fully scaled, as opposed to pinks and chums which go to sea right after hatching and have no scales — can be killed by sea lice. However, Morton says “that does not mean sockeye infested with lice will be fine and will survive and complete their life cycle. It remains, whenever I see a generation infected with lice as they go to sea… They don’t come back in healthy numbers.”¹³

Morton added,

Brent’s colleague Simon Jones says a .7g pink salmon can survive with 7.5 sea lice on it. My research and the European research found young salmon can survive with about 1 louse per gram of body weight. Who knows why the difference in findings, but one thing does jump out and that is in Jones’ work all the infected fish were sedated with a chemical early on in the experiment. Perhaps this killed all the lice or made them sluggish. I don’t know, but he does not even cite my published study nor address the difference. This is not good science, particularly because his findings are such an outlier.

In the same 2 August issue as Morton’s ad, the TC makes the case that “there is little hard information to go on” about the infestation of sea lice on wild salmon.¹⁵ Vancouver Island University professor Duane Barker, “an expert in fish diseases and parasites,” is quoted as saying: “recent research data indicates higher levels of sea lice on wild salmon caught in the open ocean away from farms.”

Morton noted that there are “tens of papers myself and others from here to Norway have published on extensive research on how this occurs and the impacts”:

Duane Barker is a making a political statement of little biological significance and it is very disappointing such a person was given 400,000 to study sea lice by the government. Sea lice biology occurs in the open ocean.  There has always been more lice there than in the inshore waters.  When wild salmon return to spawn, all their lice die of fresh water and so the inshore waters wash clean the parasite cycle is broken between generations.

Today, however the wild salmon infect the farm fish as they pass on their inbound migration. The farms allow the lice to reproduce all winter and infect the young salmon. It is irrelevant if there are more or less lice on them than in the open ocean…they are not at all prepared for any lice and what they are getting at the fish farms is killing them. Baker is very misguided saying there is “little hard information.” …

It is not in the public’s interest for people to be confusing [the] issue, but it is in the fish farmer’s interest. This is a variation on the theme talk and log.

No one is raising alarms about the number of lice on adult fish out in the open ocean.  Dr. Baker is talking about adult fish, but the concern is regarding the juveniles just as they leave the rivers and become infected.  Adult salmon frequently have 10 lice or more, but the very young salmon die of one or two.¹⁶

The salmon-farm mouthpieces defy believability.¹⁷ Does the corporate media deserve any trust¹⁸ or credibility?¹⁹ The TC is a part of the Canwest Global corporation, by no means a moral media beacon.²⁰ Just like the corporate fish farms, the corporate media’s primary motive is profit.

Whither Wild Slamon?

“Fundamentally,” fish farms are unconstitutional argues Morton “because they attempt to privatize ocean spaces and own schools of fish in the ocean.”

Morton offers many solutions. The sine qua non solution is simple, and it has been known for a long time: closed containment systems for fish farms. Writes Morton, “Feedlots belong in quarantine, because they break the natural laws that prevent disease epidemics.”

Morton is giving people a chance to make their collective voices heard. She believes people power can protect the wild salmon and is behind an online petition where people can register their vote for wild salmon. The logical choice is clear: a vote for the preservation of wild salmon is a vote for ourselves.

1. Victoria is the imperialist designation, the indigenous Songhees called it Camosack. British Columbia is also an imperialist designation, which some people trace back to Christopher Columbus. Kathy Pelta, Discovering Christopher Columbus: How History Is Invented (Lerner Publishing Group, 1991): 50. Delno C. West and August Kling, “Columbus and Columbia: A Brief Survey of the Early Creation of the Columbus Symbol in American History” Studies in Popular Culture, 1989, 12(2): 45-60.
2. The BC government has also offered BC wilderness — including salmon-bearing streams — for the profit of private interests. See Melissa Davis, “Deciphering the truth about the B.C. Energy Plan,” Georgia Strait, 20 April 2009.
3. Martin Krkošek, Mark A. Lewis, and John P. Volpe, “Transmission dynamics of parasitic sea lice from farm to wild salmon,” Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences, 7 April 2005, 272 (1564): 689-696.
4. See Kim Petersen, “Capitalism and an Impending Wild Salmon Apocalypse,” Dissident Voice, 22 December 2007.
5. Alexandra Morton, “Dying of Salmon Farming” in Stephen Hume, Alexandra Morton, Betty C. Keller, Rosella M. Leslie, Otto Langer, and Don Staniford, A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming, (Harbour Publishing, 2004): 235. This book is scathing indictment of the salmon-farming industry. See review.
6. ”Steng fjorden for oppdrett,” Altaposten, 19 June 2007. Jeg er bekymret for villaksens fremtid. Det burde ikke vært tillatt med oppdrett i fjorder der det finnes lakseførende elver.
7. ”Steng fjorden for oppdrett,” Altaposten, 19 June 2007. Verken Island eller Canada kan måle seg med Alta. Forvaltningen av elva, med eksklusivitet og ro ved fiskeplassene, er spesiell her.
8. Severin Carrell, “Fish billionaire in plea to save wild salmon,” Guardian, 29 September 2007.
9. Bjørn Erik Dahl and Agnar Berg, “Marine Harvest Canada boss attacks Science article writers [but not Frericksen],” Intrafish, 18 December 2007.
10. Judith Lavoie, “Shatner’s latest mission: remove fish farms,” Times Colonist, 31 July 2009.
11. See Kim Petersen, “The Great Auks, Wild Salmon, and Money,” Dissident Voice, 15 December 2004.
12. Personal communication, 4 August 2009.
13. Personal communication, 3 August 2009.
14. On the complicity of the DFO in the mismanagement and non-conservation of wild salmon, see Hume et al., A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming and Kim Petersen, “The Great Auks, Wild Salmon, and Money,” Dissident Voice, 15 December 2004.
15. “Professor wins grant to study sea lice,” Times Colonist, 2 August 2009: A6.
16. Personal communication, 2 August 2009.
17. Kim Petersen, “Farmageddon and the Spin-doctors,” Dissident Voice, 29 May 2003.
18. Kim Petersen, “Disinformation: A Crime Against Humanity and a Crime Against Peace,” Press Action, 17 February 2005.
19. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002).
20. David Beers, “Marc Edge on ‘Asper Nation,’” The Tyee, 13 November 2007. The associate professor of journalism at Sam Houston University makes the case that CanWest Global is “Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company” because of its ownership editorials that attempt to set the political agenda and influence democracy. On Canwest’s flagship newspaper, see Kim Petersen, “The Corporate Media and Critical Thinking in Education,” Dissident Voice, 20 August 2009.

Near the beginning of the film, we meet Angel Dillard, a statuesque wife, mother, songwriter, singer, farmer, and pro-life advocate. Dillard is a Christian woman raised to be a critical thinker, which led her to the Republican Party.

Dillard and her family attend the Baptist church services of senior pastor Terry Fox — an avowedly anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-ACLU, and anti-Islam minister. It would be contradictory to describe this individual as pro-life given that he applauds the pro-death penalty. Fox’s strident pulpit causes a split in the church, and Fox finds himself a new parish in a fledgling amusement park.

A contrasting character is the 73-year-old crusty, straight-talking, liberal and artist provocateur M.T. Liggett. Said Liggett, “Gay marriage!? Who gives a shit? It’s none of my business. Abortion; it’s the same thing …”

Two camps are clearly delineated. Liggett respects individual autonomy — that no group has the right to impose its standards of behavior on another group. On the other hand is the view expressed by Brittany Barden, a volunteer campaigner with the Republic Party, that the United States is “meant to be a Christian nation; that is what the founding fathers intended.”

Bob Lippoldt, a substitute teacher and pro-life advocate, frames the liberals as “anti-Christian.”

Yet, Julie Burkhart, a pro-choice advocate, said, “I believe in what Jesus had to say … but I’m not a Christian.”

The pro-life versus pro-choice battleground occupies a chunk of the film, including the six-week so-called Summer of Mercy when pro-choice advocates targeted abortion clinics. This morphed into a well-organized and successful political movement. The long-time Kansan Democratic representative (1977-1994) Dan Glickman was the electoral target of the pro-lifers, and he was defeated.

When Glickman voted for NAFTA, he alienated many workers. Glickman noted that he had fared worst in blue-collar Democratic districts.

Bespectacled Dale Swenson, a former Boeing worker described a schism in the Democratic Party between “working class Democrats” and “Democrats of the leisure class.”

Swenson reasoned, “There’s nothing left within the Democratic Party for me to vote for if they are going to keep targeting the working class. If I’m in the crosshairs of the Democratic Party, then I’m not any worse off in the Republican Party.”

Donn Teske is a cigar-chomping, struggling farmer, farmer union president, and father. He detests the Bush administration but distances himself from the Democratic Party. He calls himself a Populist without a party.

Teske laments the current dog-eat-dog competition among farmers: “I’ve had friends who said, ‘I can’t wait until he goes broke so I can get my hands on it [the farm].’”

The separation between the two camps is wide. Dawn Barden, Brittany’s mother, deplores secular universities for having an alleged prejudice against Christian students. Dawn Barden claims that 80 percent of Christians leave the faith after studying at a secular college. Unexplored is why. Is not the testing of faith and its affirmation part of being a Christian? Was not Abraham tested? Was not Job tested? Is steadfastness to the faith not at the root of being a Christian?

Frank Thomas explores the radical Kansan political roots. The now defunct Populist Party had its origin in Kansas. Thomas refers to the socialist colonies of the nineteenth century as “My Kansas.” He calls for Liberalism to return to its roots. The question unanswered is: who will represent these roots?

Who are the liberals today? Thomas did not call for the development or strengthening of a “third party” movement. Instead of a future vision of progressivism, the film eulogizes the passage of worker parties in Kansas.

Frank wrote in his book, “For us it is the Democrats that are the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood.”¹ Implied was that by voting for Democrats the economic interests of regular Kansans would be served. Confining our analysis to recent decades, however, shows that the Clinton presidency and the Obama presidency have not protected the average Americans’s economic interests.

I wondered how Frank could get it so wrong — especially after how he recognized and depicted the economically self-defeating habit of middle America to vote for Republicans? Frank knows that the Democrats abandoned much of their base.

The film depicts the Democrats as a house divided. Fox’s church was a house divided. Jesus’s – and subsequently Lincoln’s – admonition about division is undiscussed, but it hangs heavy in the film.

Thomas points out that many in the working class voted for Bush in 2004 and at the top of their agenda were moral issues – but Bush’s agenda was economic, as in tax reform (to benefit the wealthy).

The film ends with the electoral defeat of the Republicans in 2008. God had not blessed the Republicans and neither did God bless the theme park venture nor the investments of Fox and many parishioners.

The Democrats are, for the time being, resurgent. Recently, however, Obama and the Democrats compromised on their committment to workers on the Employee Free Choice Act.

For this writer, the Democrats are a part of the corporate political duopoly that serves capitalist interests that exploits the workers, the poor, the weak, and the victimized. Understanding this, I submit, is basic.

The film explored the Kansan historical flirtations with populism and socialism. It did not delve deeply into Democratic politics like the book. What’s the Matter with Kansas? explores what drives middle-class Kansans and why they vote as they do. It is an illuminating film insofar as the political duopoly goes. Notably absent from the film was discussion of prospects for a credible “third” party movement on the political scene.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? will have its world premiere at Film Society of Lincoln Center on 6 August, at which point the DVD will also be released.

1. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004):1.

Education is touted as field where the hardest working and most talented students will rise to the top. Examining this, Robbins with Joe Bishop wrote “Accountability Legerdemain and the Intensification of Inequality.” The writers questioned the supposed meritocracy within education by noting the inequality of conditions among students.

Robbins explores the inequality of conditions further in his book Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling (SUNY: 2008).¹ Robbins raises consciousness over the direction neoliberals and neoconservatives are steering education – a direction that further marginalizes and excludes the poor and people of color.

At the end of George Bush’s term, the economic devastation wrought by the Bush administration’s neoliberal policies grabbed headlines. The 2008 election saw a shift from George Bush, a president of expelling hope, to Barack Obama, a president who audaciously encourages hope. I interviewed Robbins by email about what this means for the policy of zero tolerance within education.

Kim Petersen: In your article “Accountability Legerdemain and the Intensification of Inequality,” you wrote of the illusion of a meritocracy and the unfairness of standardized tests. One solution you looked at was an educational handicapping index. Within this index was a proposed teacher quality index. I wonder how this could be objective? Do not teachers have different conditions under which they became teachers and under which they operate as teachers? So shouldn’t there also be a handicapping index in the determination of a teacher’s quality?

Christopher Robbins: My co-author and I provided the idea of a handicapping index as only a slight attempt at showing one type of mechanism by which the standardization process and the push for national outcomes could be made moderately fairer, given the wildly different community contexts in which schools operate, teachers (attempt to) teach, and students (attempt to) learn. Notice I said “fairer,” not “objective.” At some level, none of the processes and practices associated with “accountability” can be objective because the proposed or intended outcomes, and the motivations driving the definition of certain outcomes, that “accountability” processes are to meet are patently non-objective. These outcomes are defined largely by players outside of public schools, and these players–for instance, groups like the Business Roundtable, National School Boards Association, and the National Governors’ Association and other hardly social justice-minded groups that have come out in early support of national standards –have vested and more often than not concentrated interests in defining, solidifying, and legitimating outcomes that narrowly serve their interests in producing numerate and minimally literate workers who will be compliant, or in Foucault’s terms “docile,” having basic skills and dispositions amenable to being shaped and sharpened by employers. It is quite possible that teachers, students, parents, and their wider communities might have some interests in the definition and achievement of some outcomes that overlap with those preferred by the corporate or government communities. Yet, this is something we cannot really know since teachers, students, parents, or even researchers, who work with teachers, students, and parents, haven’t typically been prominent contributors to National Governors’ Association or Business Roundtable meetings. The increased emphases on technical, as opposed to critical, literacy and math, and the woefully inadequate, if not non-existent, emphasis put on civic education and the social sciences that have been attendant to No Child Left Behind (the current avatar of the accountability movement) were not incidental or “unintended” consequences of recent accountability efforts. Further, since these groups often operate on crass cost-efficiency models, outcomes and the processes involved in meeting them must be both easily manipulated and measurable in “objective” or “scientific” ways that rely on the least amount of labor as possible. It is costly and difficult to measure students’ interpretations of and engagement with political events or their ability to use “traditional” academic skills to address pressing community problems of interest to them. But beyond being costly and difficult to measure, these sorts of possible educational outcomes are simply anathema to the interests of the various groups that are behind the “accountability” movement. What’s more, as scholars as varied as Paul Street, Alex Molnar, Kenneth Saltman, and David Berliner and Bruce Biddle have pointed out in various ways, the accountability movement and the processes associated with it are really not about achieving objectivity and transparency in formal education; they are about controlling formal education for arbitrary ends, when they are not about undermining the public school system.

I realize that I have talked around your question. The simple answer is that producing a handicapping index for teacher quality and teacher training, much like the handicapping index for measuring student “achievement,” would not be objective. It could give the illusion of objectivity. Because of having apprehensions about the value of such a positivist understanding of objectivity and the potential mis/uses to which it could be put, we would be wary of applying this handicapping index to teacher quality. And, really, the larger points we were making in that short paper concerned two things: the civic purposes of public schools and the longstanding existence of social inequality. How can, and how does, “accountability” account for these things?

Yet, there is another issue involved here. My co-author and I also used the handicapping index example as a way to point to the absurdity and waste of these standardization attempts. To do standardization in even a remotely fair way would cost incredible amounts of money and take considerable amounts of intellectual and social energy, and this would achieve what? One of the effects of these processes would be the further delimiting or closing of educational and social possibilities. Paulo Freire, Roger Simon, and Henry Giroux have written eloquently and prolifically about education being about possibility. If education is not about the opening of self- and social possibilities and alternative ways of being in the world, then what is it about? In a different vein, John Dewey talked about democracy as being creative democracy, one that is continually unfinished, open to new questions, capable of responding to adversity and rapid change in ways that are fair and allow for people to have as much control as possible over the basic affairs that govern their everyday lives. He was also steadfast in his beliefs about pedagogical practices being produced and elaborated in ways that would allow for such a democracy to come into being by providing agents, or citizens, with opportunities to practice and develop the skills and produce relationships capable of supporting such a democracy. Such a view puts a high premium on capacious educational practices—inside and outside of schools. If most, if not all, of the outcomes of and questions about formal education are given, heteronomously, in advance, possibility is significantly reduced. If our energies and relationships are diverted to controlling, rather than opening, educational practices and getting lost in the euphoria of statistical orgies that will allegedly represent our efforts in “objective” ways, then defining, articulating, and working toward other possibilities will become extremely difficult.

KP: You wrote Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling while George Bush was president. In this book you wrote that a culture of punishment attendant to zero tolerance society was denying a section of American youth the right to an education, especially poor youth and youth of color. Now that Barack Obama, a president of color, sits in the Whitehouse, do you see any indications of change in the zero tolerance policy?

CR: Yes, I see the policy and its attendant practices possibly becoming further normalized. What with all the subterfuge about both his candidacy and presidency being evidence about the existence of colorblindness in the U.S., a racial state from top to bottom, people might have more reason to say, “Black kids are disproportionately kicked out of school because they are dangerous or disruptive. This is not about racism. We have a Black president after all, don’t we?” and then tautologically point to the exclusion rates as proof rather than have impetus to point to a racial logic built into the policy of zero tolerance, the culture of schooling, and the structure of U.S. society. When zero tolerance was passed as part of the Gun Free Schools Act (1994), government officials (and their constituents) readily supported it because it was seen as a response to an “urban” (read: Black) problem that was threatening suburban whites. We would do well to remember that more than 1 in 2 whites who voted casted their votes for someone other than Obama. Many of these people work in or for schools, or they have children in schools, or they sit on school boards. Why or how would Obama being president immediately or automatically change the ways these people interpret the behaviors of certain children and youth?

We would also do well to look at his appointment to the position of Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at a time when racial disproportionality in both school exclusions and the criminalization and militarization of schools in CPS did not decrease, but stayed the same or increased. As I pointed out in a footnote in my book, “zero tolerance” could be seen as the logic that underpinned Bush’s unprecedented foreign policy of pre-emptive strikes; under the current administration, warfare has increased, not decreased, in places that are coded as racially other, perpetuating a war that A. Sivanandan has defined as a “xeno-racist” war, a war that is framed and conducted in ways that vacillate between xenophobic and racist motivations and appeals. If we see evidence of “zero tolerance” at play in the highest reaches of foreign policy and obviously costly military affairs, why would we see a waning of zero tolerance at lower levels of society? What’s more, if we look at the issue of zero tolerance in wider terms, we might see connections between ongoing militarization and zero tolerance in public schools. Study after study shows that zero tolerance is most frequently applied to non-violent social behaviors in schools and districts that are, in policyspeak, “economically distressed.” Many authors point to larger class sizes, lack of curricular resources, and under-qualified teachers as factors involved in the disproportionate use of zero tolerance in schools serving communities marginalized by class and color. As we continue to allocate roughly ten times more to defense spending than we do to education spending, it becomes increasingly difficult to undo the underlying conditions that either inform disruptive behavior or encourage teachers and school officials to almost automatically resort to zero tolerance as the solution to the symptoms of deep social and economic problems in their schools and communities. Combine these factors with the renewal of NCLB and its hyper-focus on testing and “annual yearly progress,” something on which certain groups or types of students have been perceived as a drag, and we will continue to see the corrosive effects of zero tolerance in the disproportionate exclusion of poor students and students of color from public schools.

At the same time, there is much more to the picture. GFSA (1994) was/is defined in relatively inane ways. This, the federal version of zero tolerance, was/is defined in fairly straightforward terms that merely inscribed in law policies that most, if not all, schools had had in place for years: students cannot possess firearms, weapons (or drugs) in school or on school transports, without being met with exclusion. The problem is that because public schooling is defined as a states’ rights issue, states crafted policies that not only maintained, by legal fiat, the language of the federal policy, but they also expanded on the language. The process then occurred again at the district/school level, which was then only propounded by educational officials’ mis/comprehension of the local/state/federal policy and their varying interpretations of student behaviors. Zero tolerance is applied with almost as much zeal to weapons possession as it is to asthma inhalers, midriff shirts, and do-rags in many districts. So, on this level, Obama is really ancillary at best to efforts at reducing the power and pervasiveness of zero tolerance in public schools. Zero tolerance has become routinized in particular ways at the level of culture and everyday school politics. This is where work on zero tolerance needs to take place.

KP: Do you see any change in the policy of color blindness?

CR: Unfortunately, my hopes in this regard are tempered. On the one hand, the image of a president of color in a racial state is promising. If anything, it is potential evidence of possible subterranean shifting at work in culture and politics. On the other hand, a president of color in a racial state is faced with practical political challenges. How does such a president advance progressive policy, which ostensibly would help communities of color, without being tagged for advancing the interests of his “race?” Just because the U.S. has a president of color, does that mean, despite the whiff of transformative interests found in his rhetoric, he or his administration is actually progressive? Did voters and do citizens have concrete, substantive evidence that this is the case, that this administration is explicitly concerned with addressing very significant problems that have been exacerbated by color blind discourse, problems like wildly disproportionate incarceration rates, drastically different infant mortality rates across racial lines, divergent employment rates, segregated schooling…?

Yet, we must be clear about how color blindness operates. Color blindness is a slippery and, in many ways now, a strong discourse. It is slippery, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has pointed out, because it operates in a “now you see it, now you don’t” way. A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Dissident Voice on the racial politics that ensued after Michael Richards’s (aka “Kramer’s”) racist outburst at the Laugh Factory, where he unleashed a tirade of racist vitriol reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. While such behavior is obviously reprehensible, it is not entirely unpredictable, even if it is currently infrequently seen in public spaces. However, the media’s response to this incident ignored all of the social, cultural, political, and economic evidence of a very color-conscious society and government. Somehow, the Katrina tragedy, only a year before Richards’s outburst, produced questions about whether race actually still mattered in the U.S. but, if one had taken the media’s response to Richards at face value, one would have been encouraged to think that racism was merely the aberration of a minority of deranged individuals rather than a deeply-rooted system of advantage and disadvantage built into the state, the market, and civil society. We continued to see this sort of slipperiness at play in the nomination of Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and in the confirmation hearing s that followed. After how many years of having predominantly white men sit on the court, who presumably were chosen because of their political and philosophical orientations which, in part, are the products of their cultural (and racial) capital, mainstream and reactionary media suddenly had concerns about racial ideology seeping into law because of Sotomayor’s ethnicity! So, strangely enough, this response was seen as “color blind” when pundits were obviously seeing “race” as a possible determining variable in Sotomayor’s potential deliberations. Many seemed so concerned with maintaining (the illusion of) color blindness that they felt it was necessary to focus debate about Sotomayor’s nomination on race. See, there is race, and we are concerned with it, but we’re really talking about law, not race. “Now you see it, now you don’t.”

Color blindness can be seen as a strong discourse because of the predominance it holds over public discourse on race. What’s the alternative to color blindness? Color consciousness? After almost a solid 30 years of being browbeaten with the idea that we are color blind, how fashionable or politically viable is it to be color conscious, even if some of the most pressing social, political, and economic problems in the U.S. are underpinned by racial politics? Just think, given contemporary discourse and politics surrounding race, how surreal it would seem if a candidate of any race were to run on a racial justice platform. And, when we refer back to the “concerns” about race involved in the nomination of Sotomayor, this is really a peculiar and disturbing discourse. The Supreme Court is seen as the penultimate symbol of justice in the U.S. The strength of color blind discourse in this case is its ability to frame color consciousness, one element of many involved in producing more justice in a racialized society, as something that is unfair, unjust or, seemingly in this case, worse—“un-American.”

KP: If the educational opportunities of some individuals or groups continue to be denied, what are the future ramifications for those denied and society?

CR: I recently had a conversation with a military official where this concern emerged in reference to the (disproportionate) militarization of poor and urban public schools through things like the JROTC. My concerns with exclusion, criminalization, and militarization in public schools are all informed by similar assumptions. Given the inordinate commercialization of society and the corporate stranglehold over information at this point in time, public schools, more than ever, need to be struggled over, as Ken Saltman and Henry Giroux argue, as “sites and stakes” in democracy and democratic public life. The vitality and future of democratic public life and political culture in the U.S. are seriously threatened when children and youth are denied opportunities to develop the skills, languages, and relationships central to democracy. This threat is only propounded when the skills, languages, relationships, and conditions for developing civic agency are so unevenly distributed among groups in society. I am not solipsistic about these ideas or ideals. Public schools never effectively or concertedly operated in the interests of a strong, creative, or radical democracy. However, they nonetheless always had a weak charge given to them to provide the basic skills required for participation in political processes. This was a charge given to public schools by Horace Mann, considered the founding architect of U.S. mass public schooling and hardly a radical. We can say with some certainty that Disney, TimeWarner/Aol, Viacom, NewsCorps, and GE/NBC won’t provide the ingredients fundamental to democracy. So, given the current institutional arrangements in society, where else beside in schools, operating in coordination with grassroots and advocacy groups, can concerned educators begin to develop the relationships, and struggle over the wider conditions, that make democracy possible?

We are already seeing the evidence of the disproportionate provision of educational opportunity. We can look to statistics on military enlistment rates and from what social classes enlistees came, how much education they had upon when enlisting, and their motivations for enlisting. We can also look at our massive prison-industrial complex, the indisputable world leader of such complexes. Our prison population nearly tripled between 1990 and 2002, largely as a consequence to the then newly crafted drug laws and sentencing policies, petty, non-violent crime, and laws surrounding social behaviors. A large percentage of people sentenced for crimes during this time period were un- or under-employed in the year before they were arrested for their alleged crimes. Many, too, had comparatively lower amounts of education. Clearly, all of the education in the world will not get people jobs if the jobs do not exist, but education is certainly helpful in allowing one to compete for existing jobs.

Further, various studies have pointed out that schooling plays at least an indirect role in various life chances, choices, and outcomes: where/if one will go to college, what fields one will pursue, one’s political orientation, and even people’s marriage choices or choices of life partners. Education also plays an indirect role in where one might live, which other recent studies have shown to be correlated with life expectancy. Unevenly allocating educational opportunity can only create uneven outcomes in these and various other areas. Such unevenness on these socio-economic indicators threatens democracy in a couple of ways. It reduces the range of choices and resources available to people, and it does so, as Pierre Bourdieu argued in the 1970s, through “objective” means and, being “objective,” make it very difficult for people to legitimately contest unequal outcomes, if they were to be so audacious to contest “objective” processes and practices in the first place. It also creates the conditions in which different groups of people are educated in fundamentally different ways, if at all, about civic life. It’s interesting to read Horace Mann’s “Report No. 12 to the Massachusetts School Board” from 1848 and see the consequences he predicted would result from failing to produce a coherent schooling system that focused on political education: the rich and poor inhabiting distinctly different social, political, and even moral universes; the installation of feudalism under a different name; seething, if not mass, social tension and possible unrest; inclination to resort to violence as opposed to politics; and a dysfunctional government, among many other things. Sadly, these imagined consequences hardly seem like rhetorical excess 160 years later.

KP: You see “a critical, educated hope” as a necessary “guiding force” toward “reconstituting the democratic legacy of public schooling and the promise of a democratic future.” Obama took the mantle of the presidential candidate of hope. Do you see a “critical, educated hope” present?

CR: Given the available evidence to date, I see a narrowly, that is, ideologically-driven, pragmatic hope, which is a contradiction of terms. Pragmatism alleges to be non-ideological. Its currently vogue version goes kind of like the following: Let’s take some of the evidence we can put our fingertips on (e.g., in the healthcare hearings in the Senate finance committee, no supporters of the single-payer option were invited to the table), look at the very immediate situation, see what tools we have at our disposal, apply those tools in the least “partisan” (which seems to translate into the most market-friendly) way, and hope they will get us through this or that situation, and we will come happily out on the other side as post-partisan and post-political drones. But, how is this not ideological, or how can it avoid becoming ideological? Isn’t it ideological to say we are moving beyond politics to being “practical” and “pragmatic?” Isn’t democratic politics a vehicle that can allow us to address “practical” but albeit sometimes complex and messy social and economic questions? More importantly, how is such a pusillanimously pragmatic hope not short-sighted? Doesn’t hope require social and political vision, something that allows us to imagine and practice into being a future that does not repeat the present, one that Ernst Bloch said would always be not-yet?

It also seems that questions and questioning would play central roles in a critical, educated hope. Questions, especially needling ones about things that we would prefer not to talk about or ones that others unremittingly try to convince us are “just the ways things are,” perform critical work in bringing a more humane future into being by drawing attention to strategic silences in political discourse and denaturalizing the socially produced phenomena that the powerful would wish to be seen as the consequences of the mere unfolding of the natural order. Questioning, as Cornelius Castoriadis and Zygmunt Bauman have argued, is central to not only hope but also justice: A democratic society is one that is able to continually question not only its existing institutions, but also the assumptions involved in the construction and maintenance of those institutions. A democratic society is one that never asks enough questions about justice, justice already produced, and justice that could be produced. In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, a democratic society is never “just enough.” A society that can no longer or that does not any longer question itself stops being a democratic society. Justice and hope seem to be connected, in this regard, by a culture of critical questioning. Our ability to produce more justice and hope for more justice relies, in part, on our capacities to question the basic values informing, and institutions legitimating, our social relationships.

In my estimation, I don’t see enough questioning, or at least appropriate questioning, by people properly situated, about the basic assumptions and relationships organizing our society, for there to be a critical, educated hope. Just think about the questions that have animated government responses to the financial meltdown. Politicians have made exhaustive attempts to repeatedly assure us (and their constituents in the business community) that government interventions are aimed to recuperate the “free market “ and the “enterprising spirit” that “so marks America,” as if these were the assurances many of us wanted to hear. See, these responses are the result of an inability to ask questions about given institutional arrangements; the only questions that could be publicly asked so far are of the following sort, “Given the existing crisis, how can we recuperate a free market order, or at least one that is favorable to concentrated corporate interest?” The assumption is that the “free market” philosophy and its attendant institutions were not the problem; it was the excesses of a few bad apples. We have heard this rationale before, haven’t we? Or, we can look at the limited public conversations and debates about contemporary education policy. These debates typically operate on the assumption that all that we have is all that can be achieved; we just need to do some tweaking or twittering here and there on accountability issues. When Duncan first announced interests in national standards, for instance, he obviously assumed that NCLB and the philosophy and sociology that drove it are generally sound; in his words, “There are some problems in the policy…”, not that the policy itself was/is a problem.

All of this, however, is not a rallying cry for hopelessness. I retain hope that people are more complex and complicated than politicians assume them to be. I also retain hope that people, being human, are unfinished, much like the circumstances in which they find themselves and, in part, help produce. The pedagogical question here, one that Paulo Freire asked a long time ago and others have asked since, is, how do we create conditions in which people can recognize their unfinished-ness and how can such a recognition be used to mobilize efforts to create and support social relationships and institutions that open us to a more democratic future rather than foreclose it from us, reduce social suffering rather than exacerbate it, expand justice rather than unevenly apply it.

1. See review

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life energy.

– Nikola Tesla, quoted in Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves from Work

Tesla’s quotation captures the reality of the working world for many people. People trudge off to work, do work, return home, recuperate, and go to work the next day. Most people will do this five days a week for most of the year.

Who likes having to work five days a week, having the days and hours of their week decided by someone else, receiving a few weeks in the year as a vacation time, or having to obey orders from a boss? This is the situation for the masses of people who are workers. Capitalist society is structured such that most people are either unemployed or wage slaves.

Pamela Satterwhite has written a book, Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves from Work, that seeks, as the title states, to free people from the wage slavery, job drudgery, and submission. At its core, Satterwhite reveals that freedom from work is achieving social justice: freedom from exploitation, racism, warring, etc.

The author asks questions: “Is survival at work the highest good? The goal, the objective? …to endure …in a job?”

Satterwhite likens workers to stressed caged animals and bosses to “masturbatory puppeteers” who get off on controlling the labor of others. This is inculcated in the public education system where students submit to teachers, who submit to their principals.

She derides submission to authority. She finds this to be unnatural.

Satterwhite refers to capitalists as podrunks (a term abbreviated from author Mark Crispin Miller’s pitiful-power-drunk few) and sometimes as vampires. They control the labor.

Satterwhite harkens to Friedrich Engels that labor is capital. Therefore, if people work together and share in the work, they create the wealth. Her solution is simple: a mass movement to end wage work. Solidarity and cooperation are crucial.

Satterwhite finds that most people are complicit in the system, caving in for some infinitesimal portion of political power (which she defines as “the ability to induce others to labor”). She relates one striking example of selling out in which English parents allowed their 7- to 11-year olds to become commercials selling products to other children.

She acknowledges that solidarity is difficult to maintain, being always under assault by the system, which is designed to wear people down and make them complicit.

Podrunks are Machiavellian; they oppress and wield racism to their ends. They seek to atomize and separate the workers. This is accomplished by instilling fear among them.

She argues that work can be worse than slavery. Slave owners had vested interests to care for their slaves. Podrunks can always hire new workers.

Satterwhite criticizes the illusion/con that work is a sharing of wealth. She says workers have three sources of power: the ancestors, the earth, and each other. She laments that most people don’t pay attention to the earth in them.

She analyses progress, that lofty term that is used to justify the system — the system that separates people into classes. They order and we obey. The orders, Satterwhite argues, compel people to carry out all kinds of morally repugnant work that leads to environmental destruction, mass killing, and genocide.

Nonetheless, Satterwhite argues, “Human solidarity will easily trump the politics of ‘divide and conquer’ when we decide to look at our ancestors’ stories unvarnished …”

Satterwhite calls force the podrunk’s mantra. Culture is a tool to confuse and demoralize people. Freedom, she holds, will come when people build their own cultures.

“Podrunks are organized. So must we be.” The people must grab control.

Many people call for a retooling of capitalism. Satterwhite says capitalism has to be ditched. She finds the notion of saving capitalism from itself silly. She focuses on the needs of the masses of people and not a system that enslaves the people and renders them soulless.

What to Do?

Satterwhite first seeks to answer the question: What do we want? Step-by-step planning is required, as well as solidarizing. She sees this being achieved through mutual aid and fellowship, Earthships (living in harmony with the environment), a product and services exchange, refusal of division work, and freeing children from coercive education.

She identifies the starting points as: boycotting big corporations, organizing via the internet, building bridges, claiming the commons, and the general strike.

Parecon is another take on gaining freedom from capitalist work drudgery and submission to podrunks. Forging a solidarity with pareconists would broaden and strengthen the movement against wage slavery.

Re parecon, Satterwhite responded by email: “There are many points on which [pareconist] Michael Albert and I agree. Where we differ, I think, is probably in our analysis of the problem.” Satterwhite continued, “I think that in order to be effective advocates and activists for our future freedom without bosses we have to premise our advocacy and action on correct analysis. When I read elaborate visions of our future freedom that are offered because they’re ‘rational,’…’make sense’…etc. I’m not convinced that that analysis has been done.”

One wonders what convincing evidence of analysis is — certainly not irrational and nonsensical visions. Important to both visions, however, is solidarity.

Satterwhite writes in a relaxed, colloquial style. A few times I found myself lost, wondering about quotations. Who is speaking? Nonetheless, the book is eminently readable.

Satterwhite has drawn upon a variety of sources from personal anecdotes, dreams, literature (Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, etc.), media (especially cinema), self-disclosure, economists (Karl Polanyi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Friedrich Engels, etc.) to the psychologist Erich Fromm, the scientist-inventor Nikola Tesla, other writers on topic of work like Jeremy Rifkind and Studs Terkel, and even Martin the Warrior mouse.

Satterwhite quotes often the writings of Barack Obama, and she goes easy on him because he “may well have concluded that the people aren’t ready to roll, and who could argue…” I would argue: because a person who runs for the presidency is, usually, a person who covets leadership (among other attributes such as fame, power, money, etc.), and it is a leader’s job to lead the people and not be led by them … otherwise that leader is merely a follower. (As an aside, I eschew leadership and followership. In a system with representative “leaders” and politicians, they should serve the informed masses of people and not impose on the people. However, that is another topic.)

Can freedom from work be achieved? Satterwhite points to the workers’s victory in the tiny Caribbean country of Guadeloupe following a 44-day general strike as a start. Does this sound promising?

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves from Work can be read online at The Nascence to End Work or you can request a free hard copy (a donation is appreciated). Pamela Satterwhite can be contacted at nas2endwork@gmail.com.

In the 1960s, the TV series Star Trek presented viewers a progressivist future wherein humans had overcome poverty, racism, and war. Some progressives even considered Star Trek to be a pareconist future.¹ This is, however, decidedly not the case as a starship is a hierarchical and not an egalitarian workplace.

Many of the episodes focused around ethical challenges that confronted space explorers of the twenty-third century. Viewers saw captain James Kirk and Mr. Spock grappling over whether to arm one side in a conflict against another side that were being armed by an enemy race (“A Private Little War”). In “A Taste of Armageddon,” Kirk advocated non-violence:

We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers; but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes: knowledge that we’re not going to kill […] today…

Episodes dealing with moral dilemmas continued into the twenty-fourth century. In Star Trek: Voyager’s “Death Wish,” captain Katherine Janeway is asked to consider an individual’s request for asylum so he may commit suicide. In “Scorpion,” weapons of mass destruction are abhorred.

Star Trek: Voyager’s “The 37s” explored solidarity. The crew of Voyager was given the choice of staying on a habitable planet, which appeared much like earth and had, in fact, been “seeded” with humans from Earth. The choice was an important one because if too many crew members elected to stay on the planet and start a new life, then the remaining crew that wished to return home might be insufficient in number to fly Voyager.

During the early voyages of the starship Enterprise, the episode “Bound” explored the issue of obedience on the most recent of the Star Trek TV runs: Star Trek: Enterprise.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s “The Way of the Warrior I” is an antiwar episode. The Klingon warrior Lt. Commander Worf stands by the principle: “Starfleet will not participate in an unprovoked invasion.”

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Drumhead,” a struggle takes place over protecting human rights in the face of fear.

There is little difference in the substance of the current film Star Trek and the previous film Nemesis. The disappointing Nemesis was directed by Stuart Baird who, like Abrams, was unfamiliar with the Star Trek universe. Nemesis was an action-adventure good guys-bad guys flic with a villain from the Romulan Empire, but it did raise the specter of cloning technology gone awry.

The latest Star Trek is a story of vengeance, of mass murder by the Romulan Nero who searches the stars for Mr. Spock in a spaceship that looks like an agglomeration of bull kelp. The film was replete with typical musical flourishes designed to add oomph, but these were so overbearing that this viewer was irritated and distracted from the on-screen action. The storyline even warped to the extent that Vulcan children revealed racism toward the mixed-blooded Spock — a highly illogical behavior.

So why the absence of a progressivist theme in Star Trek?

Is it just applying a successful money-making formula to draw in fans? Probably.

Has Star Trek departed from its early progressivist visions? With sufficient hype — and, after years of dormancy, Star Trek was ripe for hyping — the storyline of phasers firing, photon torpedoes launching, weapons-of-mass-destruction destroying, and planets exploding is a formulaic box-office draw. Nonetheless, one movie review lamented the “mere 3 explosions, [as] an unconscionably low amount for such a big movie.”²

Writing and producing a script that appeals to the moviegoer’s intelligence is much more challenging but maybe less lucrative, and it is profit that keeps Hollywood movies being made — not critical accolades.

As a movie franchise, it appears that Star Trek has gone fully for fast-paced thrills to please moviegoers. The numbers indicate the film is a box-office success and has guaranteed a second movie with the same crew.

There is talk also of a Star Trek TV series being revived as well.

Action films that keep the viewer in perpetual suspense are highly entertaining, but some viewers yearn for more. This writer hopes that any future TV series will preserve the dynamism but also engage its audience with episodes exploring, for example, the depths of humanity, moral dilemmas surrounding the Prime Directive and cherished principles of the Federation, and progress toward egalitarianism in the future. In this way, Star Trek might recapture the progressivist attraction of the earlier series and appeal to the sanguinity of many viewers.

1. Matt Grinder, “Unofficial Economics of Star Trek.”
2. Kyle Buchanan, “Summer Movie Explosion Preview Spectacular!” Movie Line, 13 April 2009.

Obama said, “North Korea’s nuclear ballistic missile programs pose a great threat to the peace and security of the world and I strongly condemn their reckless action.”

If indeed what Obama says is true, then what of the US’s nuclear ballistic missiles? They must also “pose a great threat to the peace and security of the world.” Russia certainly claims that it feels threatened by US ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe.¹ Does Obama also “strongly condemn” “reckless action” on the part of the US, or does Obama propose US exceptionalism? It does not take special critical thinking ability to detect the hypocrisy.

Obama: “North Korea’s actions endanger the people of Northeast Asia, they are a blatant violation of international law, and they contradict North Korea’s own prior commitments.”

North Korea’s actions were to develop a nuclear deterrent against US aggression. If such actions are a violation of international law, then what were the 1,054 nuclear tests by the US? If nuclear missiles endanger the people of Northeast Asia — and never minding the fact that the US had nuclear missiles stationed in South Korea for years — then what should one infer about the presence of US nuclear submarines that ply waters near North Korea ? And what of using Japanese territory for nuclear command?² What do the proximal US nuclear weapons represent for Northeast Asia?

And “blatant violations of international law”? In Nicaragua v. United States, the World Court found the US guilty of what amounts to terrorism. The US was ordered to cease its illegal activities and “to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua by the breaches of obligations under customary international law.” The US ignored the judgement.

Further, what does the ongoing occupation of Iraq represent? Does Obama wish to argue that the aggression-cum-occupation was legal? Do the military violations of Pakistani territory respect legality? When the US-Canada-France deposed of elected Haitian president Jean Betrand Aristide, did that represent legality? Etc.

Obama: “Now, the United States and the international community must take action in response. The record is clear: North Korea has previously committed to abandoning its nuclear program.”

One assumes that Obama is referring solely to abandoning a nuclear weapons program. But does not the NPT commit the US among other signatory nuclear powers to abandoning nuclear weapons programs? Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) states:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

Obama: “Instead of following through on that commitment it has chosen to ignore that commitment.”

Does that mean that the US has not ignored its commitment under the NPT for good faith negotiations to abandon nuclear weapons?

Obama: “These actions have also flown in the face of United Nations resolutions.”

How steadfast is the US in its concern about UN resolutions? After all, its most favored client state Israel is the most prolific violator of UN resolutions. Or do UN resolutions only matter when applied to US enemies and not US client states?

Obama: “As a result North Korea is not only deepening its own isolation, it’s also inviting stronger international pressure — that’s evident overnight, as Russia and China, as well as our traditional allies of South Korea and Japan, have all come to the same conclusion: North Korea will not find security and respect through threats and illegal weapons.”

Threats? Who is North Korea threatening? North Korea has sought a peace treaty with the United States. The US is rejectionist on this matter. The US sets, as a pre-condition, North Korean disarmament (of course the US does not have to disarm). In a sane world, this cannot be considered as a genuine commitment to peace (or fairness).

Obama: “We will work with our friends and our allies to stand up to this behavior and we will redouble our efforts toward a more robust international nonproliferation regime that all countries have responsibilities to meet.”

So when will the US dismantle its nuclear weapons along with other nuclear weapon states?

Obama is much more articulate than Bush. But glibness must not excuse the substance of the person. Obama’s decisions to inflame Afghanistan and Pakistan, his continued US military occupation of Iraq, and his subservience to the Zionist occupation of Palestine reveal him not to be a man of peace.

Obama guised himself as a man bringing hope to the people. False prophets are many; the people must beware of the futility of holding on to false hope. Citizens have an obligation, at least to themselves, to critically contemplate the words of their leaders. Obama’s words may distract from his actions, but they are not difficult to comprehend.

1. ”Ballistic missiles in E. Europe threaten Russia – chief of staff,” RIA Novosti, 24 May 2006.
2. ”U.S. Nuclear Command And Control Operations In Japan,” the Nautilus Institute, 19 July 1999.

[E]ducation, a linchpin in the climb to the top, is a function of wealth, not the other way around.
– Christopher Robbins

On 5 November 2003, 107 mainly Black students arriving in the early morning at Goose Creek High School in Stratford, South Carolina were in for a surprise. Seventeen police officers with guns in hand and an unleashed search-and-sniff dog descended upon the students The officers slammed and locked doors, and — aided by school personnel — blocked the hallways. The officers forced students to the ground, cuffed others, “and performed dubious search and seizure for 40 minutes.” Nothing was found — “not even cigarettes.” A school spokesperson said it was just “coincidence” that later arriving mainly White students watched the events.

This scene described in Christopher Robbins’s book, Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling, exemplifies the policy of zero tolerance that pervades much of American public schooling.

Eastern Michigan University professor Robbins tells the reader that zero tolerance grew out of Navy punishment of substance abuse by its members. In public schools it punishes violent and non-violent behaviors similarly. The professor points out that zero tolerance seeks to weed out and publicly punish trouble-making students and “instill fear in the rest of the group while maintaining a fragile institutional consensus by hiding the social and structural conditions of the behavior.”

Robbins argues that zero tolerance scathes all youth both academically and socially. But the obvious targets are non-White youth. One way zero tolerance does this, writes Robbins, is “shift[ing] the concerns from structural issues to those of behaviors allegedly endemic to poor, urban African American and Latino youth, legitimating the general loss of educational opportunity that results from iniquitous funding schemes.”

Racism, charges Robbins, undergirds zero tolerance, which creates a link between public schools and the juvenile and criminal justice system. Although Black youth represent a significantly higher proportion of the incarcerated population, statistics indicate that they do not account for a significantly higher rate of reported violence.

Robbins states that zero tolerance ignores the conditions that plague many youth, such as poverty. This is not surprising since right-wing ideologies underlie zero tolerance: neoliberalism with its appeal to the market and neoconservatism with its appeal to patriotism and militarism.

Writes Robbins,

Zero tolerance is not simply the effect of possibly ignorant adults who misunderstand the data on youth violence; it is not simply the social policy of ill-spirited adults who carelessly toe the line of pejorative media representations of youth; it is not simply another devastating practice of top-down corporate models of school governance. When democracy and the threat of neoliberalism—the authority of the economic and its cultural politics—are used in analyzing zero tolerance, the policy is seen as all of these things, together, as a symptom of the whole way of life in the United States at this point in history.

Eliminating violence from schools is, purportedly, a zero tolerance objective. However, Robbins questions what is violence. He cites Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire who held that violence, at its core, was the prevention of a person or group’s learning experience and hindrance of social interaction: a denial of humanity. Zero tolerance is violence charges Robbins because it dehumanizes the Other.

Robbins also delineates two curricula at play in zero tolerance: the hidden curriculum and the not-so-hidden curriculum. Educator Henry Giroux defined the hidden curriculum as implicit codes of conduct understood by students through the rules of the structure of education and its system. Writes Robbins, “In its most extreme forms, the hidden curriculum works as a push-out mechanism for unwanted students.”

The not-so-hidden curriculum operates to suspend or eliminate citizenship, and it threatens the destruction of the preconditions for all students to learn.

To effect this change a shift has taken place emphasizing the hiring of security officers in schools, the purchase of invasive monitoring devices, and implementation of invasive procedures — such as locker and body searches.

The upshot, says Robbins, is “that schools have become more effective at eliminating the prospects of citizenship rather than enhancing the conditions fundamental to the construction and process of democratization.”

Schools have also undergone a militarization through such programs as the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and the Troops-to-Teachers. Poor schools, in particular, are targeted by military recruiters.

Another concept that Robbins challenges is that of color blindness, that inequality among races can exist in the absence of racism. Through such postulation, color blindness neglects the conditions that led to race-based inequalities. It ignores slavery, loss of language and culture, crimes inflicted on people of color, ghettoization, incarceration, etc. Robbins holds that “color blindness attempts to erase, from public discourse and decision-making, the social relationships and economic conditions that make individual acts of racism possible in the first place.”

Neoconservatism and neoliberalism lead to increasing militarization, incarceration, widening income and wealth disparity. For neoliberalism, “zero tolerance is a primary weapon in the low-intensity warfare of social exclusion inflicted on students and youth of color.” Robbins connects zero tolerance to a democratic deficiency, social isolation, and even to the War of Terror.

Robbins calls for people to exert their democratic rights, a reprioritization of public funding. He also calls for “hope, a critical, educated hope, must be the guiding force and binding element between the related projects of reconstituting the democratic legacy of public schooling and the promise of a democratic future.”

Youth represent the future. Zero tolerance, however, calls to mind George Orwell’s dystopic future of “a boot stomping on a human face forever.” Just as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four warned of an ugly future, Robbins’s Expelling Hope warns that zero tolerance is here now.

Robbins appeals to the reader’s intelligence. An important and informative book, Expelling Hope is backed by plentiful statistics and references to relevant literature. Moreover, Expelling Hope has an important message; it calls upon conscience: to struggle for all members of society because we all lose when any one among us is harmed.

In the case of Palestine/Israel, the Zionist-owned or -controlled media will attempt to control the discourse. The Lobby and Zionist media have controlled discourse most effectively. To assure future control, the message reaching the next generation must also be controlled.

In Toronto, one alternative public school, TheStudentsSchool (TSS), studies the occupation of Palestine and the war crimes committed in perpetuating the occupation. That was too much for the manifestly Zionist National Post newspaper.³ An indignant article was published, and an investigation of TSS teacher John Morton was launched.

Barbara Kay, whose disinformation I have covered before,⁴ is zealously vigilant against education about the Zionist occupation – something she views in a bizarre reversal.

Kay uses George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a metaphor: teachers are “pigs” and high school students are “newborn puppies.”⁵ Kay charges that TSS is indoctrinating the high school students.

Some of Morton’s colleagues within the Toronto District School Board (TSDB) reacted “with dismay” at his possible censure from “a misleading and possibly libelous article which appeared in the National Post.” Morton’s colleagues labeled Kay’s Animal Farm analogy “preposterous” and “the opposite of what is alleged to be happening at TSS and other schools – i.e. repression of open discussion and debate of the Israel-Palestine conflict…”

The TSDB communique argued that making students critically aware was a moral imperative:

For teachers and school administrators to ignore this situation, especially as conflict in the region assumes proportions of a humanitarian crisis, would be pedagogically unsound, morally irresponsible and contrary to principles of inclusive curriculum and the TDSB’s Equity and Foundations Statement. Moreover, as citizens of a state that is a signatory to the Fourth Geneva Conventions, we have the obligation to educate our students about International Law and how to think critically about states which are in violation of it.

Indoctrination?

Kay advocates debating “both sides of the story.” This is reasonable. However, long after facts have been established, the demand for “balanced reporting” becomes disingenuous and is, itself, a bias. For what is meant by “balance”? Does balance mean that when confronted by 100 verifiable facts of war crimes that 100 specious and mendacious factoids from the perspective of the war criminals must be presented? What does the application of critical thought hold for a universal balancing of views?

I took Kay up on her penchant for discussion and emailed her asking for clarification/substantiation of eight points.⁶ First, I questioned whether Kay was implying that high school learners lacked sufficient critical thinking ability, and I asked what evidence she had that the learners were indoctrinated and that their critically thinking was being suppressed?

She went off on another tangent:

*Implying* that high school students have not yet mastered critical thinking? My dear, most adults with university degrees in my opinion have not mastered the art of critical thinking, for critical thinking is not so much a matter of basic IQ as it is exposure to a wide variety of *objective* facts, a wide variety of opinion around those facts and a great deal of practice in analysis and interpretation – not to mention a certain historical referential depth that no high school student can be expected to have.

Critical thinking might well be an underutilized skill. But my query was not about whether high school students had “mastered critical thinking.” I asked whether she denied that students have “critical thinking ability.”⁷

Kay took extreme exception to students being presented the film Occupation 101⁸ in a room without any adults present:

It is the role of a high school to prepare its students to think critically, which involves exposure to thinking, not memorizing. The school in question is shutting down critical thinking and presenting one side of a story as though it were settled fact, which is not the case at all. The story they are being fed is being presented by advocates and activists in a political cause, not by history teachers. That is why I call it indoctrination and it is indoctrination by any definition of the word.

Indoctrination according to Dictionary.com: “to instruct in a doctrine, principle, ideology, etc., esp. to imbue with a specific partisan or biased belief or point of view.” Critical here is “biased belief or point of view.” Facts are not partisan or biased, and hence, the presentation of facts is not indoctrination. Ergo, to label something as indoctrination requires that the critic refute the facts, thereby exposing them as biased beliefs or falsehoods. Kay did not do this, and she ignored my invitation to refute the facts. Kay merely asserts. Abraham Lincoln compellingly argued that “assertion” is an inexcusable falsehood: “I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.”⁹

Kay states, “Gaza is not occupied – Israel left in 2004 – and you make no mention of the provocations that caused this war.”

As for Gaza not being occupied, that is semantics. When a country’s airspace, borders, and coast are controlled and blockaded by another entity (a UN official called the blockade “devastating” for Palestinians¹⁰), then I submit that it is equally or more sinister than an occupation; it is a siege.

Kay evaded each question that I posed in our “discussion”; instead she resorted to personalized attacks:

If you knew anything of the history of the area, and of the five wars – all started by the Arab states – and of the terrorism that predated the Occupation against Israel, perhaps we could have a discussion. But your ignorance and bias and hostility are set in stone. And that is precisely why it is dangerous for young students to be listening to people like you, and not to be presented with an alternate view.

In Kay’s worldview, it is an “Occupation against Israel”!

Orwell on Democracy and Censorship in Animal Farm

Kay rails against any depiction of Israel as the aggressor without presenting the Zionist viewpoint,¹¹ saying this endangers democracy and must, therefore, be stopped. The absurdity of Kay’s position is easily revealed by an analogy which would require that each time Nazi World War II atrocities are mentioned that a Nazi viewpoint must be presented for balance.¹²

Kay advocates a veiled censorship: young learners can be presented information that is disputed by another group as long as the disputing group can present its information. As I have argued, this is fine when each side substantiates its facts. However, facts must not be balanced with factoids.

While Animal Farm does depict the dangers of indoctrination, Kay has missed much of the point of Orwell’s novel. In the intended preface to Animal Farm — itself subject to censorship — Orwell argued against the suppression of uncomfortable truths: the silencing of unpopular ideas and inconvenient facts by “censorship that can be enforced by pressure groups.”¹³

Orwell wrote,

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

Orwell argued for freedom of speech; he did not advocate any fettering of speech with provisos to balance “the truth.”

Orwell held it to be a fact that “intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.”

Kay concluded her article, “George Orwell said it with puppies and pigs, but the message was the same: HAIA, whose reach is extending into other high schools as I write, is dangerous to democracy and must be stopped.”

Is this really Orwell’s message of danger to democracy? He wrote,

[T]here is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.

I submit that Kay has twisted the thought of Orwell and the evidence for her claims is either non-existent, mendacious, or wrapped in ad hominem. Readers are invited to critically contemplate and draw their own conclusions.

I further submit that Kay and the National Post feigned a desire for both sides of an “issue” to be presented. The Zionist media is concurrently attempting to silence university professors. Dennis Rancourt, a tenured full professor and highly recognized physics professor at the University of Ottawa, is being hounded — purportedly for his “political views about the Palestine-Israel conflict” — by the CanWest Global Communications Corporation (owner of the National Post) through its Ottawa Citizen newspaper and a recently appointed pro-Zionist university president, Allan Rock.¹⁴

Education and Conscience

We live in a world ravaged by the scourge of war, a world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where socialism is a taboo word, where corporations have the rights of persons, and when the capitalists run their corporations into the ground, the masses are expected to acquiesce to socialism for the capitalists.

It is in the powerful nations, often built through the dispossession of the land and resources belonging to the Indigenous peoples, that capitalists, their corporations, and their private banks have grow topsy-turvy gargantuan, enriching themselves off war, looting resources, and by immiserating the workers until the workers could no longer buy what the companies made; consequently, the greed of the companies spelled their own downfall.

But what could keep such a system charging along head on until its own predictable doom? Why would the people not solidarize, withdraw their labor, demonstrate in the streets, and refuse to be killers and cannon fodder for the government’s military? I submit that the answer lies largely in the controlled worldview presented to the masses via the corporate media.

Propaganda and disinformation are mighty tools. It is said that information is power, so if one controls information, then one would, according to the aphorism, be powerful. The media are a preponderant source of information. There is an inherent bias in that the corporate media have the money to dominant the presentation and propagation of information in the world.

There is also another adage which holds that power corrupts, absolute power corrupting absolutely. Thus the masses are presented a worldview that conforms to the parameters set by the capitalists and their desire for money, control of information, and power – which, ultimately, will lead to the greater corruption of capitalists and their eventual downfall (unless or until bailed out by socialism).

How to escape the onslaught of propaganda and disinformation? Certainly not by censorship; because who will be entrusted with the responsibility to censor? It is necessary that people be empowered to think for themselves, to be open-minded and sufficiently skeptical to information presented to them, to research, discuss, analyze, and draw conclusions – what is commonly referred to as critical thinking.

Consequently, unfettered critical thinking is not something one would expect to be encouraged within a capitalist society, and certainly it wouldn’t be expected in the corporate media except as a mere buzzword or ethereal concept, something designed not to draw too much serious attention.

The Foremost Task of Education

What should be taught in society’s schools? In a statement to a Brooklyn church minister on 20 November 1950, the renown physicist Albert Einstein put forward his thought:

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Our morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education.¹⁵

The ways of the past have not eliminated inequality, poverty, racism, and warring. It seems obvious that a new direction is called for.

Within the education system, social justice entered the high school curriculum last September in the province of British Columbia. Opening the doors to social justice issues and inviting critical thinking pose powerful challenges to the old power structure.¹⁶ A better way lies in exposing (not indoctrinating) young minds to the ethical paucity of capitalism; the alternatives of anarchism, socialism, and communism; the ravages wrought by imperialism, colonialism, and Zionism – including arguments for and against. Preparing learners for critical thinking is crucial, but critical thinking alone is insufficient. Learners must be exposed to issues of life, morality, and social justice and be encouraged to analyze, draw their own conclusions, and defend them. When the ground is prepared, a potential arises for an increasingly enlightened and sophisticated younger generation. The world needs a generation that can organize, plan, demand, and build a better society where social justice has meaning beyond academic discourse – where social justice might become a reality.

1. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Available at The Complete Works of George-Orwell.
2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964): 7.
3. The National Post even deigned to publish a story wherein the Simon Wiesenthal Center evoked the WWII Holocaust for the fraudulent news of Iran requiring labeling of its Jewish citizens. See “Iran eyes badges for Jews,” National Post, 19 May 2006. Removed from the Post site, but available online at Free Republic.
4. See Kim Petersen, “Defining Racism,” Dissident Voice, 26 November 2007 and Kim Petersen and BJ Sabri, “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism,” Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, & 12Dissident Voice, December 2007-January 2008.
5. Barbara Kay, “Barbara Kay: Teaching hate at Toronto’s alternative school puppy mill,” National Post, 4 March 2009.
6. Kay, to her credit responded to this writer, neither John Morton nor anyone from with TSDB responded.
7. The entirety of the email correspondence is readable here.
8. Occupation 101 is highly recommended and viewable online.
9. Roy P. Basler (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1946): 187. Limited availability online.
10. Reuters, “UN to Israel: Ease ‘devastating’ Gaza blockade,” Haaretz, 3 April 2009
11. This is fine because the Israeli viewpoint often corroborates the abuses of the Jewish state that Kay denies. For example, see Amos Harel, “Testimonies on IDF misconduct in Gaza keep rolling in,” Haaretz, 22 March 2009.
12. Kay, however, poses on the issue of balance in education as she knows well — or should — that it does not exist within the corporate media. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have meticulously documented this in their Propaganda Model. See Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002).
13. See George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” (Proposed Preface to Animal Farm).
14. See “Statement by Dennis Rancourt Regarding His Dismissal by the University of Ottawa,” Academic Freedom, 10 April 2009.
15. Heklen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Albert Einstein — The Human Side: New Glimpses from His Archives (Princeton University Press, 1979): 83. It should also be noted that the editors in their book make the argument that Einstein was a Zionist. It is debatable.
16. One school board in southern BC sought to censor the teaching of the Social Justice course in its district causing demonstrations by the students. Catherine Rolfsen, “Gay-friendly course halted by Abbotsford school board,” Vancouver Sun, 21 September 2008.

Jewish Israeli forces recently committed multiple war crimes, killing over 1300 Gazans, wounding more than 5450 Gazans, destroying homes, hospitals, schools, and societal infrastructure, and creating over 85,000 refugees out of a population of 1.5 million. I am unaware of any tennis player from any nation speaking out against this slaughter.

While many of the world’s governments actually sided with the massacre of humans by Israeli Jews, a few states did deplore the Israeli aggression: Malaysia, Mauritania, Qatar, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Turkey among them.

There is growing activism, led by unions and progressivists, calling for boycotts of the Jewish state.³ Academic boycotts are also called for.⁴ Why should sports not be a part of the boycott?

At the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, 26 nations boycotted the inclusion of Aotearoa (New Zealand) for maintaining sporting relations with the the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa.⁵

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided that segregation on a state’s Olympic teams was wrong. South Africa was expelled by the IOC in 1970.

It is a widely held view that Israel is an apartheid state. A distinction has been made between South African apartheid and Israeli apartheid, in that the latter is more insidious, being premised on committing genocide.⁶ The recent slaughter in Gaza is but another demonstration of the genocidal intent of the Zionists.

The Palestinian Sports Foundation, Atlas, accused apartheid-state Israel of targeting Palestinian athletes, a violation of the IOC Charter.⁷

Tennis Principles

Tennis was not so stringent against sporting links with apartheid regimes. It did ban South Africa from international play in 1970 Davis Cup, which re-instated South Africa won in 1974, after India refused to play it in the final. South Africa was again barred from team competition, but individual South Africans were allowed to play on the pro tours.

The WTO chairman voiced concern about fair treatment for Peer.

Peer said in a statement to the AP, “I am very disappointed that I have been prevented from playing in the Dubai tournament. I think a red line has been crossed here that could harm the purity of the sport and other sports. I have always believed that politics and sports should not be mixed.”

Unfortunately, Peer is, indeed, a victim here. Nonetheless, one wonders what Peer believes about human rights for Palestinians, victims of her country’s government’s racist policies. What does she think about the fact that Israeli Jews are living on land that they violently dispossessed the indigenous Palestinians of? What does she think of the red line that Israeli Jews crossed when they invaded and slaughtered Gazans?

What has priority: that a person is not barred from playing a game or that Palestinians are not barred from living in peace and dignity? Does justice for Peer, the individual, take precedence over the fate of an entire people? Peer has an opportunity, few people are so meaningfully presented in life, to sacrifice her love of playing tennis to bring attention to the plight of an oppressed people. Her silence about the plight of Gazans and her right to play tennis speak loudly.

Peer was given no reason for the visa rejection. AP speculated that it was connected to “anti-Israel sentiments” in the UAE, “particularly after last month’s three-week war between Israel and Islamic militants in Gaza.” The bias in the AP’s reporting is palpable. According to the AP, it was not antiwar sentiments or pro-Palestinian sentiments. The situation was framed as stemming from “anti-Israel sentiments.” It would be quite something to read about AP reports on “anti-Palestinian sentiments” or “anti-Lebanese sentiments” or “anti-Arabic sentiments” in Israel. The slaughter is described as a war, and it is between “Israel” — a state — and “Islamic militants in Gaza.” It is not a “war” between “Jewish militants” and “Islamic militants.” It would not do to acknowledge Palestine as a state; that is reserved for the apartheid state that was spawned in the Holocaust it wreaked on Palestinians: the Nakba.

The WTO’s Scott enounced, “Sports and politics should not mix and the fundamental principles upon which the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour are founded include open and fair competition to all, regardless of nationality, creed, race, religion, etc.”

“That’s not just a principle that our Tour is founded upon, but I think it is the underlying spirit of international sports in general and therefore I think the ramifications of what happened here ripple well beyond tennis.”

Whenever someone invokes fundamental principles, a lofty, moral stance is conjured. At face value these tennis principles sound fine. But how lofty are these tennis principles? They do not specifically appear in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), all 30 of whose articles the Jewish State, arguably, fails to fulfill.

What is a fundamental principle that favors the tennis playing rights of a woman while a people are slaughtered, even though she is not the slaughterer or that athletes from a nation that is a serial violator of international laws, practices open racism, carries out slow-motion genocide, and commits wanton violations of human rights with impunity are prevented from playing to stop the war crimes?

What takes precedence? Sports are not played in a vacuum. Sports are tightly twined with patriotic sentiments.⁸

The WTA, in consultation with Peer, decided to continue with the tournament to avoid hurting the other players already in Dubai.

It is an often heard refrain that silence equals complicity. Scott said, “She [Peer] didn’t want to see her fellow players harmed the same way she was being harmed.” If only these same sentiments were openly expressed for the long-suffering Palestinian victims of Israel’s war crimes.

1. This principle of not mixing sports and politics does not seem to hold for baseball and US politics. See Kim Petersen, “When It is Okay and Not Okay to Lie to Congress,” Dissident Voice, 11 February 2009.
2. John Leicester, “Dubai tournament risks sanctions over visa denial,” Yahoo, 16 February 2009.
3. ”South Africa: Dock workers solidarity with Gaza,” Green Left, 6 February 2009. “CUPE in Ontario votes to boycott Israel,” CBC News, 27 May 2006.
4. Andy Beckett and Ewen MacAskill, “British academic boycott of Israel gathers pace,” Guardian, 12 December 2002.
5. ”African nations boycott costly Montreal Games,” CBC Sports, 30 July 2008.
6. See Gary Zatzman, “The Notion of the ‘Jewish State’ as an ‘Apartheid Regime’ is a Liberal-Zionist One,” Dissident Voice, 21 November 2005.
7. Saed Bannoura, “Report: Israeli attacks on Palestinian athletes violate Olympic Charter,” IMEMC News, 6 October 2008.
8. See Kim Petersen, “Sports as War,” Dissident Voice, 11 March 2004.

Tajeda’s alleged lies about the steroid usage did not result in one person, and certainly not 1.3+ million people, being killed.

Tajeda’s alleged lie was not a pretext to enable launching an assault on human beings. Moreover, his alleged steroid usage did not result in widespread destruction of another country’s economic infrastructure, hospitals, centers of worship, schools, the ransacking of a country’s historical artifacts, the littering of a country with depleted uranium. It did not result in war crimes being committed with glaring impunity. It did not result in the erasure of habeas corpus, the humiliation and torture of captives, and setting up of gulags around the world. Tajeda did not occupy another person’s land.

Apparently, nowadays when the president and vice-president and their coterie lie to Congress, then everything is kosher.

Unsportsmanlike and deceitful though it is, there is something perverse in considering a lie about seeking an unfair advantage over opponents in a game that causes no direct harm to anyone else a greater crime than the willful destruction of a nation state and its people. That is the logical conclusion flowing from the action against Tajeda and the inaction against George W. Bush and his neocon and Zionist collaborators.

The lies of George W. Bush, a former substance abuser himself, have been exposed. The Downing Street Memos provide sterling evidence that the intelligence and facts were fixed around the administration’s desire to invade Iraq. The alleged existence of weapons-of-mass destruction was just a pretext. Bush’s lies resulted in the excess mortality of over 1.3 million Iraqis, yet he managed to serve out two terms without being brought up for impeachment.

Congress’s double standards in the seeking of justice are manifest. The outstanding crimes of George Bush and his administration stand as a test of Congress and now for president Barack Obama.

What are Obama’s principles? Is justice worth seeking? Does justice apply to everyone?

For justice applied unequally is a denial of justice.

In her book, Wage Theft in America, labor activist Kim Bobo illuminates on a crisis, the immensity of which is probably largely unknown. The crisis is one of wage theft in the United States. Wage theft is the non-payment of money legally owed to workers. However, as Bobo posits, it is not only workers that suffer from wage theft; society as a whole suffers. Scrupulous employers who pay workers what they are legally entitled are competitively disadvantaged by derelict employers, and this has a knock-on effect in the employment world.

Many of the wage thieves are large, well-known corporations. Wal-Mart and McDonald’s are among them, but also federal, state, and local governments are implicated, as well as small businesses. Appendix A in Wage Theft in America lists numerous companies forced to settle with workers deprived of wages.

Wage theft includes workers are not being paid or only being paid partially, being denied overtime pay, being hit with illegal deductions. Bobo states that deductions may not bring a worker below minimum wage.

Although wage theft also affects middle-class workers, Bobo is most concerned with wage theft from poorly paid workers who are already struggling. The wage theft is widespread, and Bobo examines the plight of workers in construction, garment factories, nursing homes, farming, poultry, and restaurants. In particular, Bobo singles out day laborers who she describes as “among the poorest of the poor … routinely being cheated out of wages.”

Wage theft is either intentional by employers or happens through lack of a system to guard against wage theft. Bobo cites:

• Paying for fewer hours than those worked
• Paychecks that bounce
• Not paying overtime
• Paying by day or job
• Making workers pay for a job
• Paying below the prevailing wage
• Illegal deductions from paychecks
• Stealing tips from workers
• Not paying workers at all
• Not paying last paychecks
• Misclassifying workers as “independent contractors.”

Bobo writes that millions of workers are not paid overtime who have earned it; one artifice in this fraud is misclassification of workers as “exempt” from receiving overtime pay. Bobo relates the case of cook Jose who worked 80 hours a week in two different restaurants owned by the same boss who paid him separately 40 hours twice to avoid overtime. Jose recovered $6701 in unpaid overtime with the help of Madison Worker Rights Center.

Bobo tells of a Chicago car wash that charged workers merely for the right to dry cars with rags and collect hoped-for tips.

Misclassifying workers leads to many problems, such as workplace safety, the owner skipping on paying payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, Worker’s compensation coverage, overtime pay, and the owner denying worker’s compensation.

Bobo cites a 2007 IRS report that estimated 15 percent of 3.4 million workers were misclassified as independent contractors. As Bobo makes plain, wage theft is widespread; it debilitates both workers and society.

Wage Theft in America does not only point out the crisis of wage theft, it seeks to answer why it occurs, why labor law does not prevent it, and how to stop it.

Bobo considers causes for wage theft as societal contexts (globalization, hidden unemployment, etc.) and challenges (greed, racism, and sexism), untoward business practices, and lack of pushback forces.

This reviewer finds that wage theft is symptomatic of an inherent malignancy in capitalism, something that Bobo does not address, concentrating instead on how wage theft can be stopped within the system.

Bobo finds that there is a “hodge-podge” of laws. They are difficult to understand, and when the needed legal protections for workers exist, there is often an unwillingness to enforce such laws; Bobo points to Florida’s non-enforcement of minimum wage laws as one example.

How to stomp out wage theft? Bobo keys on the importance of labor unions. She provides many facts and rationales to back this conclusion. She also compellingly deconstructs — what turn out to be feeble — objections to unions. Worker solidarity and the attempts to solidarize, according to Bobo, must be protected. “When unions represent most workers in an industry, wage theft is virtually eliminated.”

Bobo emphasizes the importance of solidarity not just among workers but also of workers with workers centers (which include societal- and faith-based centers).

Bobo describes a case emphasizing strength through solidarity. Francisco was fired from Outdoors Excapes, a landscaping firm, and was denied his overtime wages due. Francisco went to the Workers Interfaith Network (WIN) in the Twin Cities with his “carefully kept” records of work. WIN wrote the employer requesting pay within 24 hours or else default wages would start to accumulate. First the employer ignored the letter; a follow-up call also proved unfruitful. WIN next moved the problem from Francisco to the group level. Unsurprisingly, there were other employees missing pay who wished to collect. Upon hearing about this, the employer sent a check to Francisco but without default pay. The outstanding pay of the other workers was unmentioned. This was insufficient for Francisco. The group of workers began sending letters to the clients, and copies to the employer, informing of the workers’s non-payment.

The outcome was that the workers recouped over $40,000 in overtime wages, and most importantly, the owner now pays overtime to all workers.

If solidarity is the strength of workers, then unethical management/ownership would seek to divide and weaken workers. Bobo emphatically shows that “common self-interest” is to the benefit of all workers.

Bobo recognizes the role that the Department of Labor (DOL) can play for workers. She says that with community forces, it is “the best hope for many workers in low-wage jobs.” However, the DOL finds itself vastly understaffed and politically marginalized.

Bobo concludes, “Workers deserve strong leaders fighting on their behalf. Wage theft requires strong leadership. Leadership matters.”

I will not state that leadership does not matter; a good and strong leader could attain meaningful improvements in the workplace and worker remuneration. However, I will depart from the überemphasis Bobo seems to put on leadership. Overemphasizing the importance of leadership is dangerous. It ignores the old refrain cautioning people not to put all their eggs in one basket. It is easier for management to corrupt one leader than the bulk of the working masses. Relying on a bad or weak leader could sink the masses. Bobo has already pointed to the power of unions, worker solidarity, and solidarity with other societal groups. The emphasis should remain squarely focused on worker solidarity and not on leadership.

Bobo calls for a carrot-and-stick approach. She criticizes the lack of deterrence from weak penalties for wage-theft violations and the need to strengthen such penalties. She also calls for rewarding good employers publicly to set the standard.

To further empower workers, Bobo calls for more education and provision of information. For instance, Bobo writes of the DOL’s recalcitrance at posting information on unclaimed back wages, and the need to better promote such information.

Since everyone in society is impacted by wage theft, Bobo calls upon consumers to direct their purchases toward ethical companies, for workers to also inform themselves, and for people to be active and vigilant in fighting wage theft.

Wage Theft in America has a message that goes beyond workers and beyond America. Solidarity is the key for workers. Solidarity is also the key for a better society. It is only through solidarizing and forming mass movements that class society and all its entrenched unfairness, wars, and injustices will be toppled.

The criminality of Israel includes:

• massacres of civilians¹ and families;²
• interfering with medical personnel;³
• targeting and killing UN staff⁴ to continue the Israeli policy of starving the Gazans;⁵⁶
• humiliating UN personnel;⁷
• targeting of schools,⁸⁹ mosques,¹⁰ hospitals¹¹, homes and shelters;¹² and
• crackdowns on domestic dissent.¹³

Corporate Media Complicity and Gore

A tired editorial eye revealed the complicity of the corporate media in the crimes of Israel. At first, CBS ran a headline that read: “Airstrikes hit Gaza schools, dozens killed.” The headline was later softened to: “Israel OK’s Gaza ‘Humanitarian Corridor’: Amid Increasing Carnage, Israel Agrees To Suspend Attacks In Certain Areas To Allow People To Get Vital Supplies,” shifting the focus away from Israel as a killing machine and recasting it as humanitarian.

The original version of the story reported, “John Ging, head of Gaza operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said three U.N. schools have been hit in the last 24 hours and the ‘indications are that these strikes originated from Israeli weapons.’” The article also featured a photo of a Palestinian child with a blood-drenched face. The quotation from Ging identifying Israel as the perpetrator and the graphic photo were deleted from the later version online.

Screen shot of original story at CBS

A headline and story featuring Israeli atrocities in contemporary corporate America media is rare indeed. So it was not a surprise when the incriminating headline, quotations, and photo were removed.

The Telegraph reported, “Growing evidence … of the bloodiest single incident of the Gaza conflict [sic] when around 70 corpses were found by a Palestinian paramedic near a bombed-out house.”

The account related that Israeli soldiers “had ordered about 100 members of the [al Samouni] clan to gather in a single house … around dawn on Sunday. At 6.35am on Monday the house was repeatedly shelled with appalling loss of civilian life.”

Shame

Horror and outrage characterize these vile, premeditated murders. But there is another indelible trait exposed: shamelessness — in particular, the shamelessness that reveals the cowardice among Israeli “warriors.”¹⁴
The shame is so intense that Jews abroad are seeking to estrange themselves from Israeli Jews.

Pianist Anton Kuerti said, “Israel’s behavior makes me ashamed of being a Jew, and Canada’s servile support of the United States’ position¹⁵ that it is all Hamas’s fault makes me ashamed of being a Canadian.”¹⁶

Indeed. While the Canadian government has been standing solidly behind Israel during the slaughter, it realizes that people in Gaza are in danger and seeks to have Canadians there repatriated to safety.¹⁷

Dissidents with Montreal-based Palestinian and Jewish Unity expressed outrage at “Israel’s latest assault on the Palestinian people and by the Canadian government’s refusal to condemn these massacres.”

CTV said, “They are deeply concerned that Canadians are hearing the views of pro-Israel groups who are being represented as the only voice of Jewish Canadians. The protesters have occupied the consulate to send a clear statement that many Jewish-Canadians do not support Israel’s violence and apartheid policies.”¹⁸ It is difficult to discern what the primary motivation for these Jewish-Canadians is. Is it to dissociate themselves from the shame of being stigmatized by the murder spree being waged by Israeli Jews or is it to deplore the war crimes against Palestinians — or could it be both?

Jewish Media Focuses on Its Own Manufactured Victimhood

The wanton killing by Israeli forces seems to have incited vehemence directed at Jews outside Israel.¹⁹²⁰²¹

The JTA focused on the beating of a single Jewish girl, which is absolutely deplorable, but it hides and propagandizes over the genocide of Palestinians. The contrast in the value placed on Jewish life versus non-Jewish life is stark.

The Audacity of Valor

W (World Wide Weekly), a culture and current events program on MBC (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation) in Korea, showed a video depicting the courage of an unarmed woman using her body to prevent Israeli soldiers from shooting at Palestinian children. That adult men would raise weapons against an unarmed woman and rock-throwing children betrays the cowardice of the soldiers.

The Korean announcer states: “Sometimes Palestinians’s thirst for freedom leads to intense confrontation. Armed soldiers attack. The Palestinians defy them with stones and run away. They are the targets of Israeli soldiers. Rubber bullets with high killing power sometimes threaten lives. But then, a girl’s voice cries out, “Stop, stop, stop.”

This she shouts as she places her body in front of a soldier to prevent him from a getting a line of fire on the children.

She tries to reason with the soldier, asking him if he understands. “You are shooting at kids.” She offers the simple way for the soldiers out from the situation: “Just pull back.”

The Korean announcer comments, “One Palestinian woman blocks the muzzle of the gun. Her action surprises the soldiers. She resolves to stop the Israeli gunfire even with her unarmed body.”

“What are you shooting at? Why are you shooting at them?” the courageous woman asks as the soldier tries to position himself above her. She raises her arms.

In the background other soldiers begin shooting. The woman flinches at the sound of gunfire, but she holds her ground. World View News Service identifies the woman as Huwaida Arraf. Arraf is a Palestinian-American who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement in Jerusalem. Since she is a Palestinian-American activist, she probably knows of American solidarity activist Rachel Corrie and her fate, further boosting the valorous credentials of Arraf.

The Korean announcer says, “Despite her last ditch effort in throwing her body before the guns, even a slight peace is hard to come by. This is the cold reality of this land.”

Apart from ill-gotten booty, those who wield preponderant power are in a no-win situation. There is no gain from using violence on someone smaller or weaker. If clever, the powerful counterpart will withdraw, status still intact. To use violence on the weak and lose would make one a laughingstock. To use violence and beat the weaker counterpart would expose oneself, at best, to be a bully and a coward — and worse, a craven war criminal.

1. “Doctor Decries Israeli Attacks,” YouTube, 5 January 2009. Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert tells of the bombing of a market place and an apartment house with children playing on the roof. He said 50 percent of the casualties are women and children. He called this “hell” “an all-out war against the Palestinian population, and we can poof that with the numbers… They are bombing one-and-a-half million people in a cage.”
2. Tim Butcher, “Gaza medics describe horror of strike which killed 70,” Telegraph, 8 January 2009.
3. Frank Jordans, “Red Cross: Israel delayed access to Gaza wounded,” Yahoo, 8 January 2009. “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded,” the international Red Cross said. “Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.” Craig Whitlock and Reyham Abdel Kareem, “100 Survivors Rescued in Gaza From Ruins Blocked by Israelis,” Washington Post, January 2009.
4. Shashank Bengali, “Israeli troops kill U.N. truck driver at Gaza crossing,” Miami Herald, 9 January 2009. It is reported, “Israeli soldiers opened fire Thursday on a truck attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the beleaguered Gaza Strip, killing one United Nations-contracted driver and seriously wounding another, U.N. officials said.”
5. “UN halts aid to Gaza, citing Israeli attacks on staff,” CBC News, 8 January 2009.
6. Reuters, “Red Cross: Israel breaking int’l law, letting children starve in Gaza,” Haaretz, 8 January 2009.
7. “Days After Calling Israeli Blockade of Gaza ‘A Crime Against Humanity,’ UN Human Rights Investigator Richard Falk Detained, Expelled from Israel,” Democracy Now!, 17 December 2008.
8. “UK Sky News video: Israeli bombing of UN Gaza schools Jan609,” YouTube, 7 January 2009.
9. “Airstrikes Hit Gaza Schools, Dozens Killed” CBS News, 6 January 2009.
10. AFP correspondents in Gaza City, “Deaths as missile hits praying crowd,” The Australian, 4 January 2009.
11. Ma’an news, “Gaza hospitals under fire,” Uruknet, 5 January 2009.
12. “Israel ’shelled civilian shelter,’” BBC News, 9 January 2009.
13. “Israeli intel targets Israeli protesters,” the Real News, 9 January 2009. The enormity of the massacres has led to fissures in Israeli Jews’s solidarity.
14. Zionism aside, some Israeli Defense Force members do draw a line and refuse to carry out acts that violate their conscience. Robert Hirschfield, “An Israeli Refuseniks Good Fight,” In These Times, 6 April 2007.
15. “US Senate supports Israel war on Gaza,” Press TV, 9 January 2009.
16. Jordana Huber, “Canadian Jews condemn Gaza attack,” Canwest News Service, 8 January 2009.
17. Canadian Press, “Canadians evacuated from Gaza,” Yahoo, 8 January 2009.
18. “Police arrest 8 protesters at Israeli consulate,” CTV.ca, 7 January 2009.
19. “Jewish girl beaten in Paris over Gaza,” JTA, 7 January 2009.
20. DPA, “Israeli tennis star Shahar Peer faces Gaza protest while playing in New Zealand,” Haaretz, 8 January 2009. Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer’s participation in a tournament in Auckland, Aoteaoroa was protested.
21. Allon Sinai, “Shocked Bnei Hasharon players return home after Ankara scare,” Jerusalem Post, 8 January 2009. Israeli basketball players felt threatened in Ankara, Turkey.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni demonized the Palestinian movement: “Hamas is a terrorist organization and nobody is immune.”

Complicitly, the Whitehouse blamed Hamas, as did Canada’s government. Government officials in the US, Canada, and Europe spoke the same lame phrase, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” as if the slaughter being carried out by a world military power against a starving population could be construed as some kind of defense. Israel, the world’s most frequently cited violator of international law, a racist state, an occupation state built through violence and slow-motion genocide is being acknowledged as having the right to defend its criminality. This is preposterous; there is no right of an occupation regime to defend its occupation. Palestine, however, has a right to resist occupation!

Israeli writer Gideon Levy called Israel’s actions a war crime, but he also blames Hamas: “In its foolishness, Hamas brought this on itself and on its people, but this does not excuse Israel’s overreaction.”¹

Hamas chooses to stand and resist occupation rather than getting down on its knees to Israel. It seems for Levy that resistance is foolish.

Levy implied that Israel had a right to react — just it went too far. Thus, Levy depicted Israel as the reactor and Hamas as the provocateur. This is false.² Levy attempts to present Israel as blameless for Hamas’s firing of rockets — as if all the violent crimes he reported against Palestinians had never happened before the rockets from Gaza.

What the critics of Hamas are alleging — without showing evidence — is that Hamas (or any Palestinian, for that matter) is behind the launching of rickety rockets from Gaza. However, even if Hamas is behind the launching of the rockets, so what!? Hamas, is the elected representative of Palestinians. Palestinians have the legal right to self-determination. They have the moral right to resist occupation. However, the right to resist must also be recognized as a legal right.³ It is absurd to argue that there is no legal right to resist the illegal act of occupation — a prima facie denial of the right to self-determination. History bears this out. Did the early Americans not claim a right to resist British colonialism?⁴ Did the Europeans not have a right to launch guerrilla attacks on the Nazi occupation regimes? Why does Levy deny this right to Palestinians?

Whether the tactics of Palestinian resistance are in their best interests is debatable. Nonetheless, the Jewish state has never been at a loss to conjure pretexts for its criminal acts.

Demonizing Hamas

In a recent article,⁵ I took exception to Levy demonizing Hamas. As a “benign” or moderate Israeli voice, Levy, wittingly or unwittingly, fortified a pretext for the destruction heaped on Gaza.

One writer supportive of Palestinian rights rejected criticism of Levy’s writing. Paulo de Rooij wrote, “This portrayal of Gideon Levy is rather unfair, it fails to appreciate Levy’s courage, …”⁶

De Rooij sets up a hoop: before you analyze and criticize the content of someone’s writing, you must first acknowledge any courage. No, I did not say Levy was courageous but neither did I say he was cowardly. I made no portrayal of Levy. I focused only on what he wrote. When someone writes for public readership, one can usually expect that there will be some who disagree, and some people will express their disagreement. For these purposes, there are widely accepted guidelines for appropriate and rationale discourse.

De Rooij says that the article “fails to understand his value in the Israeli context, and it attacks one of the more benign Israeli personalities.”

Yes, Levy goes against the grain in Israel in that he reports that Palestinians are human and that they suffer. Israelis know about Palestinian suffering, and it certainly causes no massive outpouring of shame or sympathy for their Palestinian victims.

De Rooij often writes about language and how it is twisted in usage, yet he claims the article “attacks” Levy, although nowhere in the article have I criticized Levy the person; I have only dealt with the content of what he wrote. To criticize the written word is not to attack the person.

The writer suggests, “Maybe attacking some of the pernicious zionists would have been more fruitful.”

I submit that the more pernicious Zionists are obvious and do not need exposing; I am, however, concerned about those media types who come across as progressives and yet write Zionist propaganda. I took issue with Levy’s maligning of Hamas. He demonizes Hamas. Is this fair? Should Levy of the occupying Jewish state be criticizing resistance to the occupation?

The critic writes, “Despite the fact that Levy does exhibit some contradictions, he has rendered the Palestinian victims a great service. Primarily because of Levy’s (and Hass’) reporting, Israelis cannot say ‘we did not know’. Is it just because of some of his contradictions that anyone should urge readers to shunt his writings?”

Who suggested Levy’s writings should be shunted?

He argues, “Yes, Levy exhibits some contradictions — most of us do so too — but it is simply absurd to abuse someone who should be clearly considered to be on ‘our’ side.”

Clearly? Who decides what is “our” side? I submit that there are clear principles involved: (1) dispossession of an Indigenous people or other legitimate settlers is a crime against humanity, in its worst form – a genocide; (2) the occupation of the territory of an Indigenous people and legitimate settlers is criminal, and (3) the victims of dispossession and occupation have the right to resist and reclaim their territory and liberate themselves from their occupiers.

Levy fails on (1) and (3). If the dispossession of Palestinians from their territory was wrong in 1967, then why was it right in 1948? Why does Levy deny the inalienable right to resist dispossession, occupation, humiliation, and violence? Is this the side of social justice activists?

De Rooij alleges “abuse” against Levy in the article. If so, then he should point out an instance of such abuse.

He delves further into what appears to be innuendo. The nature of innuendo is that it is murky. He talks about activist posers, about “hurdles,” about “idiocy,” and about hoop jumping. I never imagined that calling for adherence to international law might be equated with requiring someone to jump a hoop, and if antiwar activists, if social justice activists can’t call for simple adherence to the norms of international law, then what can they ask for? Talk? Talk is important, but isn’t that what Oslo and the Roadmap were? Where did that get the Palestinians?

He agrees that Levy has contradictions, and I agree that Levy also does fine reporting. It is not the fine reporting that I am at odds with. I am concerned with the Zionist-serving writing of Levy that defies Palestinian aspirations. To wit, Palestinians voted overwhelmingly for Hamas. By demonizing Hamas in his writing, Levy gives succor to the Israeli extremists strangling Gaza, even though he does not agree with the criminal methods. Militant Israelis could point to his writings and say that even Levy is against Hamas. How benign is that? How does that help Palestinians?

It appears that de Rooij’s attack is based on his contention that the writings of certain people are above criticism. I am obviously not one of them. This is fine because I reject the notion that the writings of anyone are beyond logical analysis, rebuttal, and criticism.

Progressivism is grounded in principles. When progressivist writers waver on principles, when they surrender to lesser evilism of a sort, the danger of the slippery slope presents itself. The equality of people(s) is a fundamental principle. All writers are equals. Every writer’s word must be open to scrutiny and questioning — and where the writing is suspect, it must be open to challenge.

Although progressives may have disagreements, in the end, what is important is solidarity for the rights of the oppressed. Palestinians are being slaughtered again. Palestinians have the same rights as all other peoples have, and these rights must be upheld. Among these rights must be the right to resist all forms of oppression.

1. Gideon Levy, “The neighborhood bully strikes again,” Haaretz, 27 December 2008. How accurate is his characterization of the Jewish state — “neighborhood bully”? Would calling the Nazi state a “neighborhood bully” have been appropriate?
2. Israel violated the cease-fire on 4 November. This allowed it to escalate the situation to its present massacres. “Israel Breaches Gaza Ceasefire: Invades, Kills 7, Seizes Many,” From Occupied Palestine, With Love, 5 November 2008.
3. Diakonia, a Swedish church-based sustainable development organization, recognizes the right to resist with non-violent means, but finds that under international humanitarian law there is no explicit mention of the right of an occupied people to resist an occupation. Ingela Karlsson, “Resistance to Israeli occupation – a right?” Diakonia, 24 October 2006.
4. Of course, resisting British colonialism did not give Americans the right to dispossess the Indigenous peoples of the land.
5. Kim Petersen, “Talk Is Cheap, Human Life Is Not: Justice and Freedom for Palestinians Now!” Dissident Voice, 22 December 22 2008.
6. Paul de Rooij, “Commentary on Talk Is Cheap, Human Life Is Not,” Palestine: Information with Provenance.