Contrary to their cajoling speeches the foreign policies of these leaders have encouraged the erection of these walls. Their political support and their citizens’ tax money had encouraged rogue Israel to violate international laws and to keep constructing its separation wall. The erection of the Baghdad concrete wall, similar to Berlin Wall, exposes the hollow rhetoric of Obama and Hillary

In 2004 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ruled the Israeli wall as a flagrant violation of international laws. Fourteen out of the fifteen judges in the ICJ voted against the Israeli wall. The sole backer of the wall was US judge Thomas Buerghenthal, who echoed the sentiments of then US president Bush and the presidential candidate John Kerry.

Occupational governments, who erect such walls, claim that walls are needed to ensure security. One should notice that these walls are built to divide countries and cities into halves, to separate members of same family in order to disintegrate their social structure, to separate people from their farmland in order to destroy their economy, and to separate people, who had shared same culture and history for thousands of years, in order to destroy a nation.

The separation walls are symbols that show how governments can separate and alienate people in order to create misunderstanding and hatred. History shows us how governments had divided same people; e.g., Germany was divided into east and west; Korea was divided into south and north; great India was divided into Pakistan, Kashmir, and India; Yugoslavia was divided into many segments such as Kosovo, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina; the Arab world was divided into 22 separate countries; and lately Iraq was divided into three separate segments: Kurdish, Shiites, and Sunnis.

The Israeli separation and imprisoning wall is a unique phenomenon and is unlike all other walls. It cuts down a whole country and extends from one end to its other end. In the West Bank the wall extends 730km and 8-9 meters high. This is five times longer and three times higher than the Berlin Wall. It has armed watchtowers with snipers every 400 meters, and a military buffer zone 30-100 meters wide in many areas. In other areas it consists of electric fences, trace paths, barbed wires, cameras and deep trenches. In yet other areas it cuts through the hearts of Palestinian towns separating families from their very neighbors.

While Berlin Wall was only in Berlin City, the Israeli wall is all over the West Bank of Palestine encircling many major cities such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tulkarem, Qalqiliya and Nablus. Some of these cities are completely surrounded by the wall on all directions with a single military checkpoint serving as the only exit/entrance gate to the city.

The whole Gaza Strip is surrounded with the wall on all three directions, while the fourth is faced with a sea patrolled by Israeli torpedo boats. The Gaza economical siege and the last December Israeli military onslaught demonstrate the devastating effects of the wall on the people.

Israel is building its separation wall not for security reasons as its leaders keep claiming. In reality it is an isolation wall erected with the hidden agenda of creating an atmosphere of silent “voluntary” transfer of Palestinians out of their communities. Its purpose is to imprison whole Palestinian communities in a large open prison within a wall disrupting peoples’ lives and separating them from their farm land, from schools, from hospitals, from jobs and from all the social services in the neighboring cities, thus exacerbating poverty and unemployment that would, Israelis hope, drive Palestinians out of their home towns to search for better livelihoods.

The wall is a massive land grab that has annexed 47% of the West Bank, which constitutes 22% of the whole Palestine proper leaving even smaller disconnected patches of land for the proposed Palestinian state. Its construction is a great crime against mother earth herself since Israel has razed the fertile layer of the confiscated farm land, and has uprooted hundreds of thousands of fruit trees especially one-thousand-years old olive trees. Many of these trees are protected under international cultural heritage laws.

The wall has also cut off all Palestinian cities from Jerusalem, the proposed capital of Palestinian state, and has destroyed the city’s historical and cultural characters. It has thus encroached on and violated Palestinians’ religious rights since they are cut off from their Christian and Islamic religious sites in the city.

Palestinians opposed the construction of the wall since its beginning in 2002. They have organized peaceful demonstrations and rallies against the wall. Weekly peaceful demonstrations are carried in the path of the wall, the most known are carried in the villages of Bi’lin and Ni’lin, where Palestinians are joined by many international and even Israeli peace activists. These demonstrations are usually faced violently by Israeli soldiers shooting live bullets, rubber-coated bullets, tear gas and sound grenades, arrests and savage beatings.

Palestinians had also taken the issue to the streets of major American and European cities leading to the establishment of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) with western peace activists, who expressed solidarity with the Palestinians verbally and actively. Many ISM members traveled to Palestine to help Palestinian farmers harvest their crops peacefully, to protect Palestinian homes from demolition, and to join in demonstrations against Israeli separation wall.

Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against mother earth, and violations of international laws have shocked even the average western citizen. An anti-Israeli apartheid movement has begun to take shape and is gaining momentum. Boycott campaigns against Israel have been launched worldwide. Israeli goods are being boycotted in many European countries. Academic and sports boycotts are also gaining ground. Divestment campaigns are spreading within university campuses, churches, city councils, and many other organizations.

In the 20th anniversary of the dismantling of Berlin Wall Palestinians, with the help of international peace activists, have planned ten days (Nov. 9-18) of demonstrations, meetings, discussion groups, and information centers to bring people’s attention to Israeli crimes and to the inhumane Israeli separation wall. Demonstrations against the wall are planned in many countries such as Argentina, Australia, Austria, Basque Country, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Quebec, Scotland, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States and Venezuela.

In the occupied West Bank Palestinians led demonstrations against the wall. In a symbolic gesture and despite Israeli tear gas and rubber bullets, Palestinians with international activists in the village of Ni’lin and Qalandia refugee camp had toppled down one of the concrete slabs of the wall.

It took twenty years to topple down the Berlin Wall. But with such Palestinian resolve and international support the Israeli separation wall would, definitely, take shorter time to fall.

The aim of Rebellion (Denmark), formed in 2004, is to challenge ‘terrorist legislation’, both in Denmark and internationally.

Terrorist legislation seeks to undermine progressive organisations, resistance movements, trade unions and solidarity movements throughout the world.

We appeal for support from all movements to:

- Defend the right of peoples to resist illegitimate government and foreign occupation!

- Defend the right of peoples to take up arms against oppression where all other means have been exhausted!

Rebellion (Denmark) is accused of the transferral of substantial funds to Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) as a challenge to terrorist legislation.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has for decades been a leader of the struggle of the Palestinian people, engaged in legitimate conflict with occupation forces. We support the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in its struggle for a secular state and democratic state for all. It can in no way be defined as a ‘terrorist organisation’.

FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) has for decades worked and fought for the democratic rights and the equality of the people. The present regime has with US support and in alliance with ‘death squads’, controlled by landowners and drug cartels, continues to persecute the leaders and members of trade unions, political activists, students and peasant organisations of Colombia. Several Latin American nations have negotiated peace by legalising insurgency groups, allowing them to participate in an open political process. The criminalisation of FARC is preventing a political solution in Columbia.

In Denmark, there is an increasing challenge to ‘terrorist legislation’, a growing defiance that Rebellion (Denmark) has striven to create and is itself a part of.

Close to us, the organisation Fighters + Lovers has challenged ‘terrorist’ legislation by selling T-shirts in support of FARC and PFLP. On September 18, 2008 the High Court overturned the non-guilty verdict of the Copenhagen City Court, sentencing five members to between 60 days and six months imprisonment. In March 2009 the Supreme Court revised imprisonment to conditional sentences, also expressing some doubt on the legislation itself.

Increasingly, the theme of terrorism, resistance and liberation movements has entered the debate.

Not least, the theme of the Danish resistance movement against occupation during the Second World War. At the time, they were defined as ‘terrorists’ by occupation forces and their Danish allies. The Horeserød-Stutthof Association, arising out of the resistance movement and following generations, has accelerated the debate. Since 2006 the Horeserød-Stutthof Association has repeatedly transferred financial support to FARC and PFLP, and informed the Ministry of Justice of the transferrals. As yet, the Ministry of Justice has not reacted, revealing hypocrisy in the present enforcement of ‘terrorist’ legislation.

An international group in the Timber Industry and Construction Workers’ Union (TIB) in Copenhagen has also transferred financial support to the resistance movement in Colombia. Here they refer to earlier experience: support for the liberation movements of Vietnam and South Africa, at the time a challenge to the dominant policies of governments. As yet, there has been no judicial reaction.

In the approaching case against Rebellion (Denmark) even an acquittal will not solve the issue. International ‘terrorist’ legislation will remain a global challenge to human rights. Nor will conviction change our aim: continuing support of the right to resistance and solidarity throughout the world.

Palestine and Colombia are the focus we have chosen. From Turkey to Kurdistan, from the Basque Country to the Philippines, there are many others who also could have been chosen. An important criterion for our choice is that liberation forces advance secular, democratic, and humanist goals together with their people.

Through present terrorist legislation, states have attempted to curb the freedom of expression and the political rights of their citizens. The right to extend moral and material support to resistance and liberation movements throughout the world is threatened. The civil and labour rights of citizens to wage legitimate struggles for welfare and democratic reform are also increasingly being curbed.

Rebellion (Denmark) appeals to all movements for democracy and international solidarity to join us in challenging national and supranational terrorist legislation and the so-called ‘global war on terror’.

Demonstrations at Danish Embassies demanding the acquittal of Rebellion (Denmark) in the coming court case would be welcome, as would letters of protest directed to the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Ministry of Justice
Slotsholmsgade 10
1216 Copenhagen K
Telefon: +45 / 72 26 84 00
Telefax +45 / 33 93 35 10

Email: jm@jm.dk

Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Asiatisk Plads 2
DK-1448 Copenhagen K
Telefon: +45/ 33 92 00 00
Telefax: +45/ 32 54 05 33

E-mail: um@um.dk

Investigative journalist Declan McCullagh revealed that the “change” administration’s legal eagles issued an order that required the “Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site ‘not to disclose the existence of this request’ unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.”

Kristina Clair, IndyMedia’s Linux administrator, told CBS she was shocked to have received the subpoena with its flawed demand not to disclose its contents.

The subpoena from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on. (Declan McCullagh, “Justice Dept. Asked for News Site’s Visitor Lists,” CBS News, November 10, 2009)

Talk about intrusive! While grand jury subpoenas of news organizations and journalists are not unprecedented, under long-standing guidelines these subpoenas are supposed to receive special handling given their sensitive nature, thus ensuring that even the appearance of prior restraint of a journalist’s ability to report the news is avoided.

In IndyMedia’s case however, DOJ’s ham-handed stipulation amounted to government meddling clearly prohibited by the First Amendment. Not that any of this seems to matter to an administration hell-bent on defending–and expanding–every illegal program of the previous regime.

McCullagh writes that one section of the guidelines state that “no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media” without “the express authorization of the attorney general,” in this case, the secret state’s newest “best friend forever” Eric Holder.

Indeed, these draconian writs must be “directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter.” The government’s demand however, for virtually every piece of information held by IndyMedia on their contributors and readers hardly qualifies as “limited” even in today’s bizarro world of “national security” driftnet surveillance and data mining.

When queried by CBS as to what criminal investigation prompted their draconian demand for IP addresses “and any other identifying information” on IndyMedia users, U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison emailed CBS with a curt reply: “We Have no comment.”

But before proceeding further, let’s be clear on one thing: since the 1970s, the federal grand jury system where the prosecutor reigns supreme, has been an instrument wielded by the secret state to target dissent and to ensnare left-wing government critics in open-ended “investigations” whose sole purpose is to harass if not prosecute alleged “troublemakers.”

As the late, great defender of civil liberties, Frank Donner, described in his landmark work on America’s political intelligence system, during the lawless rampage against the left launched by the Nixon administration:

A new attack [on dissent] would have to be secret, clothed with a more plausible justification than the [red-hunting congressional] committees’ claimed legislative purpose, and aimed inwardly at the group and its members.

The White House entrusted the grand jury offensive to the Internal Security Division (ISD) of the Department of Justice. This unit, which had languished during the post-McCarthy years, was now enlarged from a complement of six to sixty as part of a master plan to deploy all available resources against the new dissenters. …

The secrecy of the grand jury proceeding cloaks abuses. Although secrecy historically served to protect the independence of the grand jury by insulating it from the pressures of the Crown, there can be little doubt that in the Nixon years grand jury secrecy became an instrument of the very evil it was intended to prevent. (Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 355, 357)

Today, with antiwar groups, anarchists, socialists, animal rights and environmental activists clearly focused in the secret state’s cross hairs, one can speculate that the DOJ’s reticence to reveal what “crime” they were allegedly investigating in all probability related to information surreptitiously obtained by a paid informant or provocateur.

This hypothesis is all the more compelling when one considers that DOJ attorney’s threatened Clair with obstruction of justice if she disclosed the existence of the subpoena, claiming it “may endanger someone’s health” and would have a “human cost.”

But shortly after receiving the onerous warrant Clair’s shock turned to anger, and the sysadmin contacted the San Francisco-based civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who agreed to take on the government.

On November 9, EFF published a whitepaper outlining the shadowy nature of the secret state’s latest moves to subvert our constitutional rights. According to EFF’s senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston,

Secrecy surrounds law enforcement’s communications surveillance practices like a dense fog. Particularly shrouded in secrecy are government demands issued under 18 U.S.C. § 2703 of the Stored Communications Act or “SCA” that seek subscriber information or other user records from communications service providers. When the government wants such data from a phone company or online service provider, it can obtain a court order under the SCA demanding the information from the provider, along with a gag order preventing the provider from disclosing the existence of the government’s demand. More often, companies are simply served with subpoenas issued directly by prosecutors without any court involvement; these demands, too, are rarely made public. (”From EFF’s Secret Files: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 9, 2009)

Undeterred by the quickly broken promises of the Obama regime to “restore the rule of law,” like their Bushist predecessors, Obama’s Justice Department is the golden shield that hides from public view the high crimes and misdemeanors of America’s corporatist police state.

Readers of Antifascist Calling are urged to read EFF’s well-written analysis. It meticulously dissects the lawless behavior of administration attorneys who, without skipping a beat, attempted to brow-beat a news organization into submission, thus preventing them from doing what they do best: informing the public, not as court stenographers but, as the heroic Israeli journalist Amira Hass has averred by “monitoring the centers of power.”

Readers are also urged to read the government’s subpoena in its entirety, an exercise in overreaching and a clear violation of the state’s own guidelines governing the issuance of these onerous warrants.

Grand jury subpoenas are very easy for the government to get–they are issued directly by prosecutors without any direct court oversight. Therefore, the SCA limits what those subpoenas can obtain, in contrast to a search warrant or other court order. Under the SCA’s 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2), grand jury subpoenas can only be used to get basic subscriber-identifying information about a target–e.g., a particular user’s name, IP address, physical address or payment details–and certain types of telephone logs; any other records require a court order or a search warrant. …

However, with the Indymedia subpoena, the government departed from the text of the law and the Justice Department’s own sample subpoena by inserting this demand: “Please provide the following information pursuant to [18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2)]: All IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, including “IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information.”

In other words, the government was asking for the IP address of every one of indymedia.us’s thousands of visitors on that date–the IP address of every person who read any news story on the entire site. Not only did this request threaten every indymedia.us visitor’s First Amendment right to read the news anonymously (particularly considering that the government could easily obtain the name and address associated with each IP address via subpoenas to the ISPs that control those IP blocks), it plainly violated the SCA’s restrictions on what types of data the government could obtain using a subpoena. The subpoena was also patently overbroad, a clear fishing expedition: there’s no way that the identity of every Indymedia reader of every Indymedia story was relevant to the crime being investigated by the grand jury in Indiana, whatever that crime may be. (EFF, op. cit., emphasis in original)

CBS reported that EFF wrote a series of letters to the DOJ. The first detailed the flaws in the original subpoena while the second pointedly said that if the government needed to muzzle IndyMedia, it should apply for a formal gag order under the relevant section of federal law.

Hardly the sharpest knives in the drawer, DOJ higher-ups quickly caught on and realized that the group was about to challenge the law on First Amendment grounds. At that point, the state backed down and withdrew the subpoena. EFF wrote, “Obviously, that was a fight–and more importantly, a precedent–that the government wanted to avoid.”

The lesson here? When the state comes knocking, the first and best line of defense is to seek competent legal advice from the relevant civil liberties’ organization.

Handing over information that the government is not legally entitled to, or indeed, answering questions posed by federal investigators trained in subtle interview techniques without an attorney present can–and has–resulted in “obstruction of justice” or a “lying to federal government agents” indictment, a crime under Title 18, United States Code, § 1001. Silence is always an option.

A good place to start learning how to fight back against electronic spying practices is a working familiarity with EFF’s excellent handbook “Surveillance Self-Defense.”

Mike Whitney: November marks the 10th anniversary of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle. Can you explain why you went even though you knew you might be harassed, gassed, beaten or arrested?

Jeffrey St. Clair: I had no intention of being harassed, gassed, beaten, shot at or arrested. This was Seattle after all. The police don’t act that way in the Emerald City. I didn’t particularly want to go, but Cockburn couldn’t be budged from Petrolia. The Turtles and Teamsters theme turned me off. Many of the groups behind the “official” protest had prostrated themselves at the feet of the Clinton Administration for seven years as they hacked away at the foundations of the environmental, labor and human rights policies that had been in place since the Great Society without so much as a whimper of protest. It had all the hallmarks of another Potemkin protest by the politically neutered progressive bloc. But there were rumblings from the underground that a more impolite demonstration might erupt on the streets. I wanted to show up just in case. Besides, there was an exhibition of paintings by my favorite American artist Morris Graves showing in town. In the end, Graves had to wait.

MW: What groups participated in the demonstrations and was there a common-thread that tied them together?

JSC: The French philosopher Michel Foucault quipped, “It’s resistance that unites us.” So it was in Seattle. If there was a common thread that united Earth Firsters, anarchists, Longshoremen and even wheat farmers from the Great Plains it was resistance against the machinery of government, from the WTO to the Clinton administration to the Seattle Police Department. In the end, this strange melange included even the people of Seattle as they were indiscriminately brutalized by their own cops. The street protests were organized (if you can call it organized) by the Direct Action Network and the Ruckus Society, along with some independent operators such as the Black Bloc. But the over-reaction of the Seattle cops did more to swell the size and intensity of the protests than any of those groups. It was a unique convergence of forces and circumstances that created a one-of-a-kind spectacle that even the Situationists might have enjoyed.

MW: Most people have only heard the media’s version of the events (along with the endless footage of the attack on the Starbuck’s store) Can you explain what the media “got wrong” in their coverage?

JSC: You can’t expect the corporate media to critique global capitalism, can you? In the end, I didn’t think the media coverage of the Seattle demonstrations was that terrible. Of course, the media made no attempt to understand what was driving the protests, but that would have required them to get out on the streets and interview people as concussion grenades were exploding overhead–not something the business press, assembled for the WTO, was comfortable doing. The media certainly globalized the protests and made those street battles an inspiration to activists around the world. I don’t mind seeing those images of Starbucks and Niketown getting whacked. In the end, I think the media, particularly the Seattle media, turned against the cops–at least what I was able to watch in my cramped motel room at the King’s Inn. Give the Black Bloc their due. By smashing a few windows in advance of the WTO, they largely preempted any coverage of the phony labor/green parade and rally and got the cameras out on the streets where they belonged.

MW: 5 Days that Shook the World, the book that you co-authored with Alexander Cockburn and photographer Allan Sekula, is a classic of radical journalism. But I’m afraid it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Apart from the riveting storyline and the high-octane prose, there’s quite a bit of information here that would interest antiwar protesters and civil libertarians. It looks like many of the repressive measures that people associate with the Bush era, actually had took root during the Clinton administration; extralegal surveillance, preemptive arrest, and the rise of paramilitary-type law enforcement. What did Seattle teach you about repression in America?

JSC: The WTO protests exposed what many of us had been writing about for years: the militarization of policing in America. The images of cops dressed in black storm-trooper gear, firing concussion grenades, plastic bullets and tear gas at protesters, business people and shoppers on the streets of America’s most self-consciously progressive (and white) city revealed how thoroughly infected the nation’s police forces had become with these brutal tactics and anti-constitutional measures. Of course, none of this would have come as a surprise to the residents of South Central Los Angeles, where these tactics had been a daily fact of life since at least the tenure of Darryl Gates in the 1980s. But now the traumas of black America had shown up on the streets of one of America’s whitest cities. The Clinton administration had proved with lethal force it was more than willing to trample basic constitutional guarantees at Waco in the horrific and totally unjustified raid on the Branch Davidians, where more than 100 people were burned to death. Of course, at the time few progressives sympathized with Koresh and his followers and many of them defended the actions of the FBI and ATF, even after watching those women and kids go up in flames. It’s also worth noting that the Waco raid saw the Clinton administration trample the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited domestic operations by the US military.

It’s now been proved that the Delta Force had a hand in the Waco catastrophe. Again liberals were mute on this constitutional incursion by Clinton. Then after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Clinton pushed congress to pass the Counterterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was a precursor of the Patriot Act. This law widely expanding policing powers, set up the noxious Joint Terrorism Task Forces, where the FBI set up shop with local cops, and became to criminalize various kinds of dissent and protest. Seattle revealed the maturation of these tactics to middle-class and liberal America.

MW: The book takes a few jabs at liberals (like Medea Benjamin) and Big Labor who didn’t really lift a finger to disrupt the WTO meetings. How do explain the willingness of liberals and labor to roll over and let the corporations decide how they think the world should be divided up? Do you think the Iraq war protests would have been more successful had they used the tactics of WTO demonstrators rather than ambling sheep-like through city-centers waving signs and mooning for the cameras?

JSC: It’s no surprise that the big environmental groups and big labor didn’t try to disrupt the WTO meetings or even come to the aid of the street protesters as they were being brutalized by the cops. All they really wanted was a seat at the negotiating table, even if they knew they were going to get creamed in the negotiations. These groups barely stood up to Reagan and Bush I. They were silly putty in Clinton’s hands, willing to swallow, and at times, even defend every betrayal, from NAFTA and the destruction of welfare to logging in ancient forests. Medea Benjamin is a different story. She wanted to claim ownership of street protests but didn’t want to be tarred by elements that made her funders and friends in the media uncomfortable. Her defense of Niketown was outrageous, but entirely predictable. Witness her recent statements urging a limited, modified pull-out from Afghanistan. She thrives on media stunts, and in order to continue to be a quotable source (even by Bill O.) she needs to distance herself from the more radical elements, in this case, a few black kids helping themselves to some overpriced, sweatshop produced Nike footware liberated by the Black Bloc. It was a pathetic performance.

I don’t think the Seattle experience can or will be repeated. You can only take the ruling class off guard once every few decades. The greatest protest against the Iraq war was done by a single person: Cindy Sheehan and her lonely vigil outside Crawford, Texas. The failure was in the anti-war movement’s inability to capitalize on Cindy’s courageous stand. This illustrates–along with the failure to run the Bush crowd out of town after Katrina–of the deep institutional impotence of the American left, a paralysis that has become even more pronounced in the age of Obama.

MW: “Jeffrey St. Clair’s Seattle Diary” (chapter 2) is just a great read. Can you explain the mood of the crowd and the fear you must have felt when the helicopters were buzzing overhead and the small army of truncheon-wielding robocops were clearing the streets and dragging hundreds of protesters off to jail?

JSC: I wasn’t frightened. It was an altogether exhilarating experience. But then again I didn’t get hit in the head with a plastic bullet or locked up in a stifling bus for 20 hours. A little tear gas now and then is good for the soul.

MW: Here’s the final entry to your “Seattle Diary”:

I walked out on the street one last time. The acrid stench of CN gas still soured the morning air. As I turned to get into my car for the drive back to Portland, a black teenager grabbed my arm. “Hey, man, does this WTO deal come to town every year?” I knew how the kid felt. Along with the poison, the flash bombs and rubber bullets, there was an optimism, energy and camaraderie that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

What was achieved in Seattle that week in 1999?

JSC: It was an inspirational week. Seattle proved that after swallowing seven years of crap from a Democratic regime it was possible for some progressives to awaken from their hibernation and express in a direct and confrontational way their anger with their political masters. It showed that resistance is not only possible, but that it can also be fun. The movement is in repose once again. But, who knows, it make reawaken any time in the next seven years….

Notes on WTO demonstrations by Alexander Cockburn:

“As we wrote at the time, You can take state power by surprise over twenty or thirty years, and state power spends the next two or three decades making sure it won’t happen again. See May/June ‘68 in Paris. The next big anti-WTO rally after Seattle was in Washington DC and as JoAnn Wypijewski reported for CounterPunch after that rally, the Maryland/DC cops had orders to shoot to kill if necessary. You can chart the fanatic vigilance of the state by the near impossibility of demonstrating within eyeshot of Bush or Cheney. There were several instances of people in wheel chairs and a sign, awaiting the Royal Progress of W or C, being hauled off to distant wire pens, there to exercise their First Amendment rights. Jeffrey and I were at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in the summer of 2000 and the armed police presence was beyond belief, with squads of motor bike cops regularly roaring along the sidewalks. It took the arrival of a black president in the White House to persuade the police that it was okay to have a man with a revolver strapped to his leg to demonstrate at an Obama town hall meeting with a sign quoting Jefferson on the need to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.

Of course one’s tendency is to think that a hugely exciting event like the Seattle Days is the beginning of something — but alas, Seattle was more epilogue than overture. The organized left fell apart in the Clinton years and hasn’t effectively reconstituted itself since. In fact in the US the left as an energetic intellectual and political force is nearly dead, engorged by the Democratic Party. Of course there are those who fight on – like us here at CounterPunch, and the fact that we have a large and loyal audience across the world for our stuff encourages us to believe there’s life in the Old Mole still.”

The Bush era antiwar movement has ebbed and flowed a few times since it abruptly materialized just after 9/11 and then exploded into a massive force in the months leading up to President George W. Bush’s unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This was actually the high point of mass activism. A decline began with the invasion and the bipartisan congressional declaration of support for the new war, but the movement remained huge and mounted many large national and local demonstrations for years.

The Democratic victory in the 2006 Congressional election signaled a further erosion of peace activities because of the erroneous assumption that the new Congress would end the wars. Antiwar forces were hardly visible during the 2008 campaign, despite the mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan, because many efforts we focused on electing Sen. Barack Obama, whom many Democrats considered to be a peace candidate.

The low point was reached earlier this year — a remarkable development during two ongoing wars — about the time President Obama reignited the Afghan war by ordering another 21,000 troops to the battlefield.

The hard core of the movement has remained intact, but is relatively small. The national peace organizations and coalitions are still in place, though most have become less active as their numbers fell off and funding diminished. The left wing and the pacifist sector are engaged and active, now focused on ending the Afghan war, and there will be growth as Obama continues to escalate the war.

But the mass base of the movement that confronted the Bush Administration’s wars — the Democratic voters — are standing on the sidelines, unwilling to publicly criticize the president of their choice. This is despite the fact that opinion polls report a majority of the American people now oppose the Afghan war, including some 70% of Democrats.

Over the last year or so I’ve spoken to a number of local and national peace leaders and many rank-and-file activists about the drop in antiwar numbers. Everybody has felt the decline. As an organizer for the last 15 years in New York State’s Hudson Valley region I have witnessed it close up.

For example, seven years ago in October 2002 our group at the time organized an antiwar demonstration of 2,500 people at Academy Green Park in the small city of Kingston. On the same day several buses full of local activists traveled to Washington to attend the ANSWER Coalition’s big peace rally that drew up to 100,000 people. The war hadn’t even started. It was five months away. This was the beginning stages of the largest “preemptive” antiwar movement in U.S. history.

On Oct. 17 a couple of weeks ago in the same city park, with two wars in progress, 20 co-sponsoring groups and an excellent speaker list— our antiwar rally attracted 100 people. There was no Washington protest to draw crowds away, and the anticipated rain didn’t fall. We knew half the participants by name. There were antiwar actions in some 40 cities that day, but the ones we heard from all had much lower numbers than in the past. The Capital District movement to our north brought out between 200-250 people for a well publicized and organized Albany demonstration, but a couple of years ago they attracted a crowd of over 600.

Here’s one more example. Over the years my co-organizer Donna Goodman and I have arranged for 22 bus trips to bring Hudson Valley activists to distant peace rallies, mostly in Washington. We average between three and five buses. That’s roughly 150 to 250 people. Our biggest success was in January 2003, two months before the Iraq war, when we sent seven buses to DC to join an ANSWER protest that attracted a half-million people.

Six years later this March, as President Obama was expanding the war by deploying another 21,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, we managed to bring 37 people to a demonstration in Washington. Some 10,000 people showed up for a good rally and an exciting march. We were empowered by the rally and proud to have made the effort, but it was dismaying to see how our numbers had dwindled.

In our talks with people about the movement’s decline, the main emphasis always pointed to the fact that the constituency upon which our broad peace movement reposes was disintegrating. At issue is figuring out exactly why, and then how to help rebuild our forces.

The question of “why” isn’t difficult. Since over 85% of our 3,500 Activist Newsletter readers voted Democratic last November, we decided to talk to a number of them, in person and mainly via email, as well as to movement organizers and unwavering activists. The conclusion is that the Democratic voters who have stopped showing up do so for one or more of three reasons: (1) The big majority simply don’t want to publicly oppose a war waged by a Democratic president — especially when he is under strong attack by the Republicans. (2) Some think it is a “good” war. (3) Some believe peace demonstrations “don’t do any good,” and that we’re “just talking to ourselves.” Let’s examine this point by point.

We’ve encountered point number one before. Many Democratic voters were extremely reluctant to criticize President Lyndon Johnson during the first couple of years in which he widened the Vietnam war. But by the end of LBJ’s first full term many Democrats turned on him to the point that he decided not to run for reelection. He was responsible for the passage of progressive domestic legislation far beyond anything Obama will achieve, but his war policy destroyed him.

On the other hand, Democratic voters, with the liberals in the vanguard, stuck with President Bill Clinton during his unjust and illegal bombardment of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999. Clinton learned the big lesson from Vietnam: Launch a short war with few American deaths. He wisely did his dirty work in only three months. And while thousands of Yugoslavs were killed and much of the civilian infrastructure was wrecked, no American died because the war was conducted from the air beyond the reach of anti-aircraft fire. Now, of course, there are American drones assassinating people in western Pakistan. Sometimes they hit their target, sometimes a wedding party.

Bush served two terms despite his long imperialist wars, in part because he kept the U.S. deaths relatively low (the GI death toll in Vietnam was nearly 13 times greater). Bush was reelected in 2004 because the Democratic Party not only refused to oppose the war but candidate John Kerry kept telling the voters he would be much better at winning than blundering Bush. Given the choice between two pro-war candidates, the voters decided not to change war horses in mid-carnage.

There was an active antiwar movement during Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign but most peace people fell in line behind Kerry, as did United for Peace and Justice, the biggest coalition, and most moderate peace groups. ANSWER stood apart and picketed both political conventions, not just the Republican affair in New York. A week after Bush’s depressing reelection we called a local rally to get people up and running again. I opened by remarking that “98% of the American people just voted for war.” A woman in the front row interrupted, “No! We voted for Kerry!” Neither Kerry nor Obama (who made it clear in the campaign that he wanted to fight in Afghanistan) was a peace candidate, but most Democrats seemed to think they were.

The American peace movement has to win back the Democratic voters on the issue of ending the Afghan war, and bring them back into the streets to demand peace. Even if a majority of voters want an end to war, the ballot box is meaningless unless there is a candidate running on a genuine antiwar platform. We respect and support the antiwar members of Congress, such as our region’s Rep. Maurice Hinchey, but they are up against a large pro-war bipartisan majority and always get aced out. Put a million people in the streets on the same day and we’ll begin to get results; do it again and again, and maybe we’ll end a war.

This brings us to point two, the fact that some peace Democrats think the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is a good war. Government and mass media distortions have succeeding in confusing many people. The movement is partly responsible by focusing over the years almost exclusively on Iraq. Now that the Obama Administration is widening the Afghan war it is essential for the peace forces to increase their educational efforts.

We’re trying to do our part in this issue of the newsletter. The two-part article “The U.S. in Afghanistan” contains information that will be useful to our readers in assessing this war, particularly those who think it is just. The article on Afghan Women and the War is important because we’re all worried about their situation, which remains deplorable, but the women quoted in this article perceive two oppressors: the Taliban and the U.S.-NATO occupiers (Check out the CNN video link). Also, the Afghan war article by Bill Moyers (”Bring Back the Draft”) provokes some interesting thoughts.

I’ve heard point three regarding the alleged inefficacy of peace protests, and that we’re talking to ourselves, many times. The Vietnam era was filled with it, and yet — as the Vietnamese government will tell you, the peace struggle in the U.S. was an essential ingredient in ending the war and reunifying the country.

Many people think that because the mass media usually ignores our actions that what we do has no effect. Some say “we demonstrate and nothing happens.” I’ve often been told that all we do is speak to each other. Some say we’re so irrelevant the White House isn’t even listening. All this is wrong, and I’ll try to explain why.

It is important to understand that we are involved in a very long struggle for peace. We are trying to change the policies of history’s most powerful military state, which has been engaged in a hot or cold war, openly or clandestinely, without interruption since it entered World War II, 68 years ago. Many of Washington’s martial actions have been neither legal nor just. The mass media is a virtual adjunct of the government as far as foreign military policy is concerned. The U.S. is a militarist state and spends more money each year on wars past, present and future than the military budgets of every other country in the world combined. It has between 700 and 1,000 military bases circling the globe.

This is a tough nut to crack. Our side, the peace and justice side, often doesn’t win. And when we do win it sure doesn’t happen overnight. Of course the mass media ignores us, but that doesn’t invalidate our efforts. Sure, we often demonstrate and nothing happens. We’re up against big odds. It’s a matter of unceasing struggle, protest after protest, meeting after meeting, leaflet, after leaflet.

Mass demonstrations are essential. They are the collective expression of the opposition of the American people to the aggressive wars conducted in their name by their government, whether in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Yugoslavia and Nicaragua, or Vietnam and Haiti. Our mass protests are acts of public solidarity with the victims of unjust war, and help to strengthen their resistance. And mass protests in Washington, the seat of government and the Pentagon, are necessary to turn attention directly to the warmakers.

Frequently we do speak to ourselves, and it is important to do so. That’s why the great religions have been meeting once a week for thousands of years. It’s what keeps their movement together, and ours as well. In our own experience, we have found that under normal conditions, between 15% and 20% of the people at every rally or bus trip we organize have shown up for the first time, and many come back. At the beginning stages of new wars the proportion is much higher.

It’s untrue that the White House doesn’t listen because we’re irrelevant. All presidents make a show of indifference to our protests. But when we are of mass size they are supplied with detailed reports about the status of our forces. President Nixon made a big point of laughing off the peace movement, but if you read Robert Dallek’s “Nixon and Kissinger” for instance, you will understand he was obsessed with the antiwar movement and carefully calculated its impact.

It is essential for us to keep on protesting against aggressive wars or Washington will run riot with military adventurism. The only significant opposition to a bigger war in Afghanistan will come from that sector of the peace movement willing to confront the power in Washington regardless of who is president. And some members of Congress will speak up, too, and they are strengthened knowing our mass movement is out there.

I believe without doubt that in the cynical and conservative atmosphere choking our country today this movement remains our principal instrumentality against Washington’s unjust wars and imperialist escapades. Without this movement we have no voice! Let us make that voice ever louder as we rebuild the movement and go forward toward the attainment of peace.

It was the summer of 2006. I was in Crawford, Texas, home to Bush’s ranch and Camp Casey, the activist campout organized by Cindy Sheehan who lost her son in Iraq. It was the second year for Camp Casey. But this time, Bush had chosen to spend his holidays elsewhere, leaving us with more free time.

Fort Hood, the largest army base in the U.S., where most soldiers heading off to war pass through, is an hour and a half from Crawford. We decided to go there to give information to members of the military. With us were veterans of the war in Iraq and we had leaflets from the GI Rights Hotline, an organization that provides counseling to soldiers, including information on how to get out of the military.

We set up about a hundred meters from the entrance during evening rush hour as soldiers left the base. I expected to find myself in a hostile environment, but that’s not the way it turned out.

We had signs with a very simple message, “You don’t have to go.” It was enough to cause many soldiers to stop for more information, even in uniform, violating the military code and in sight of the guards at the entrance to the base. Some drove by in their cars and flashed us the peace sign. Others stopped just long enough to jot down the toll free number for the GI Rights Hotline written in large letters on the side of our van. Spouses, mothers and fathers of soldiers stopped to get material to take home.

Fort Hood has the highest suicide rate of all U.S. bases. Nidal M. Hasan, the soldier who killed his fellow troops, had spent six years, from 2003 to 2009, as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed military hospital in Washington treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress syndrome. He was soon set to deploy to Iraq.

Over three years have passed since I was at Fort Hood. At the time, the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. Now the Democrats have the majority. But I feel certain that if I were to go stand in front of the base with the same sign, the scene of three years ago would repeat itself.

Taking a page from America’s political police force, the FBI, the British state is beefing-up an ever-growing watch list of “domestic extremists.”

As we know, that trend has taken on a Kafkaesque life of its own here in the heimat. Secrecy News reports that during a Q&A last year with the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told the panel that each day between March 2008 and March 2009, “there were an average of more than 1,600 nominations for inclusion on the [Terrorist] watch list.”

With this in mind, The Guardian published a series of extraordinary reports that revealed the mass monitoring of legal political activities by British citizens by the secret state.

Investigative journalists Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor provided chilling details how police and corporate spies “are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.”

Are these activists part of a shadowy network of al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” or environmental saboteurs intent on bringing Britain to its knees by targeting critical infrastructure?

Hardly! According to The Guardian, a “hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor ‘domestic extremists’,” one that stores this information “on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.”

Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the ‘terrorism and allied matters’ committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). In total, it receives £9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100. (Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor, “Police in £9m scheme to log ‘domestic extremists’,” The Guardian, October 25, 2009)

That’s a lot of boodle to spy on antiwar activists, environmentalists, arms’ trade opponents and the state’s usual suspects–anarchists, socialists and labor militants.

As the journalists point out, the phrase “domestic extremism” is not a lawful term. In fact, the widespread use of the term is a demonstration of how powerful constituencies have perverted law, thus creating their own all-embracing interpretation of the role of protest in a democratic society.

Indeed, senior officers “describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups ‘that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process’.”

Needless to say, that covers a lot of ground and under these fast and loose standards, it is clear that police intelligence agencies and their political masters are seeking to criminalize long-established forms of citizen action such as demonstrations, sit-ins, public meetings and strikes.

Among the newspaper’s revelations we discover that the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), housed at a secret London office, is a giant database of “protest groups and protesters in the country.”

NPIOU’s brief is “to gather, assess, analyse and disseminate intelligence and information relating to criminal activities in the United Kingdom where there is a threat of crime or to public order which arises from domestic extremism or protest activity”.

Chock-a-block with information gathered by Special Branch officers, corporate spies and paid infiltrators attached to the Confidential Intelligence Unit, ACPO’s national coordinator Anton Setchell told the publication that intelligence collected in England and Wales is shunted to NPIOU which “can read across” all the forces’ intelligence and regurgitate what are called “coherent” assessments.

Additionally, Lewis, Evans and Taylor reported:

• Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras.

• Police surveillance units known as Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and Evidence Gatherers, record footage and take photographs of campaigners as they enter and leave openly advertised public meetings. These images are entered on force-wide databases so that police can chronicle the campaigners’ political activities. The information is added to the central NPOIU.

• Surveillance officers are provided with “spotter cards” used to identify the faces of target individuals who police believe are at risk of becoming involved in domestic extremism. Targets include high-profile activists regularly seen taking part in protests. One spotter card, produced by the Met to monitor campaigners against an arms fair, includes a mugshot of the comedian Mark Thomas.

• NPOIU works in tandem with two other little-known Acpo branches, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Netcu), which advises thousands of companies on how to manage political campaigns, and the National Domestic Extremism Team, which pools intelligence gathered by investigations into protesters across the country. (The Guardian, op. cit.)

Why would British police target law-abiding citizens exercising their right to protest the depredations of the capitalist order?

Because they can! With a logic that only a policeman’s mother could love, Setchell told The Guardian: “Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police. Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once.”

And there you have it: Precrime washes up on Blighty’s fabled shores!

Merchants of Death and the Secret State: Best Friends Forever!

As if to underscore the point that the business of government in the UK, in the United States, indeed everywhere, is business, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) “helps police forces, companies, universities and other bodies that are on the receiving end of protest campaigns.”

Created by the Home Office in 2004, NETCU’s Superintendent Steve Pearl told The Guardian New Labour was “getting really pressurised by big business–pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks–that they were not able to go about their lawful business because of the extreme criminal behaviour of some people within the animal rights movement.”

But as with all things relating to “security,” once our minders get a taste of what can be gleaned by deploying new technologies, mission creep inevitably follows. Seamlessly traversing the narrow terrain between “animal rights’ extremism” and environmental campaigners, Pearl told the newspaper that the Green movement has now been brought “more on their radar.”

But greens and antiwar activists aren’t the only ones making an appearance in the “domestic extremist” database. What with enterprising capitalist grifters, pardon, defense corporations, making a killing on a planet-wide scale, it should come as no surprise that the scandal-tainted arms manufacturer, BAE, would be keen to get a handle on who might object to their grisly trade.

Indeed, one of the “domestic extremists” listed on the police spotter card as “target X” was in fact “an alleged infiltrator from the arms company BAE.”

According to The Guardian Martin Hogbin “was national co-ordinator for the Campaign against the Arms Trade. He was later accused of supplying information to a company linked to BAE’s security department, but denied the allegation.”

With billions of pounds at stake, Europe’s largest arms manufacturer continues to be caught-up in a decades’ long bribery scandal that spans continents.

And New Labour under Bush’s poodle, former Prime Minister Tony Blair and current PM Gordon Brown, have done everything in their power to suppress BAE’s prosecution by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office. As the World Socialist Web Site reported earlier this month:

Labour has operated a revolving door between powerful companies, financial consultants and Whitehall, under the guise of bringing entrepreneurial expertise into the civil service, giving the major companies enormous lobbying power. Following pressure from BAE, Rolls Royce and Airbus, the government put a stop to the Export Credit Guarantee Department’s attempts to introduce stronger anti-bribery measures. It took a judicial review to get them reinstated.

The late Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary, famously wrote in his memoirs, “I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10. Certainly I never knew No 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE.” (Jean Shaoul, “Britain: BAE Systems faces prosecution for bribery,” World Socialist Web Site, October 5, 2009)

That “revolving door” between the secret state, arms manufacturers and the police campaign against protest is spinning ever faster.

When campaigners from the Smash EDO activist group sought to shut down an arms factory near their home, they were in for a shock.

EDO, an American arms’ firm gobbled-up by defense and communications giant ITT Corp. in 2007, reportedly for $1.8 billion according to Washington Technology, pledged to “unite EDO’s business with its own sensing and surveillance capabilities.”

ITT Corp. ranked No. 11 on the publication’s 2009 “Top 100″ list of prime federal contractors with some $2.5 billion in total revenue.

ITT is a piece of work itself. According to Anthony Sampson’s book The Sovereign State of ITT, one of the first American businessmen to pay homage to Adolf Hitler after the Nazis’ 1933 seizure of power was none other than Sosthenses Behn, ITT’s powerful CEO.

During the 1970s, the firm funded the far-right newspaper El Mercurio, the CIA’s propaganda arm that was instrumental in the overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Documents published by The National Security Archive, revealed the close collaboration between ITT and the CIA “to rollback the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende.”

But that’s all in the past, right? Think again!

Smash EDO avers that “EDO’s military products include bomb racks, release clips and arming mechanisms for warplanes. They have contracts with the UK Ministry of ‘Defence’ and US arms giant Raytheon relating to the release mechanisms of the Paveway bomb system.” Needless to say, the firm’s “products” have been used in facilitating imperialist massacres of civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One can see why EDO and parent ITT would be keen on gagging protesters who object to war crimes.

The Guardian reports that the firm, with the assistance of “Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden (nicknamed TLC by activists) has been accused of gagging protesters’ right to demonstrate. The former Household Cavalry officer’s favourite legal weapon is the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act. Numerous companies have hired Lawson-Cruttenden and other City lawyers to injunct protesters under the act, a law originally introduced to protect vulnerable women from stalkers.”

Under British law, protesters who defy draconian high court injunctions can be jailed for up to five years if they break the terms of the court orders.

Lawson-Cruttenden, who claims to have influenced the drafting of the law, obtained an injunction against Smash EDO in 2005 after the attorney worked with Sussex police to frame a statement that would be beneficial to his client, EDO, which claimed the demonstrators had been “intimidating and harassing” company employees.

But as documents obtained by The Guardian show, Lawson-Cruttenden “developed extensive links with many of the police forces across England and Wales to assist with the policing of injunctions”.

Although a high court judge criticized the attorney for obtaining confidential police material, after being hired by EDO he “continued to acquire secret police papers even though the high court judge in the case had ruled that he was not entitled to them, as they were irrelevant.”

Undeterred however, Lawson-Cruttenden obtained assistance from “the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (Netcu) which targets ‘domestic extremists’. The head of Netcu, Superintendent Stephen Pearl, has testified for a number of firms which have obtained injunctions.”

The Guardian revealed that private emails “show that Inspector Nic Clay and Jim Sheldrake of Netcu gave Lawson-Cruttenden the names and contact details of officers at two other police forces as he was ‘keen’ to obtain statements about the activities of the campaigners at a third firm.”

Pearl denied that NETCU had provided assistance to EDO and told the newspaper: “Let me make this quite clear: Netcu, or me, were not involved in the EDO injunction in any way.”

When his mendacious statement was exposed by a close reading of the documents, in an obvious climb-down a NETCU spokesperson claimed there had been a “misunderstanding” and that the unit “had not given evidence for the injunction.” Translation: police had “only” leaked the information to a high-priced corporate attorney who did the dirty work.

The firm lost, the injunction was lifted and the company was forced to pay court costs for the Smash EDO protesters.

Despite this minor victory the secret state, fully in cahoots with giant multinational corporations responsible for the current capitalist economic meltdown, endless imperialist wars of conquest and accelerating environmental destruction will continue to index and target citizens who object to capitalism’s systemic criminality.

What is the one thing most needed right now if we are to win this race? October 24th showed us: a visible, growing, mass movement in the streets.

There are some who believed, and still do, that the key to the needed clean energy revolution was the election of Barack Obama. Although it is important to have a President who understands that climate change is happening and that action is needed to address it, it has become very clear over the last nine months of his time in office that this is not enough.

We can see that when we look at what has been happening in Congress and in the international negotiations leading up to the December 7-18 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. In both cases, the results so far have been very problematic.

In Congress, despite Democratic Party control of the White House and the House and Senate, a very weak piece of climate legislation was passed by the House in late June that doesn’t come close to being what is needed, and it is very possible, if not likely, that when a bill eventually reaches the floor of the U.S. Senate it will be even worse. The target for greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions reductions over the next 10 years, an absolutely critical period of time if we are to have any hope of avoiding world-wide catastrophe, is way too weak, and it is questionable if even this weak target would be met. It contains a huge percentage of problematic “offsets” that will likely allow U.S. corporate polluters to avoid or minimize actual reductions of emissions from their dirty coal plants or oil refineries for 15-20 years or more. Only 15% of the permits to emit ghg’s are auctioned, half of them being given directly to the fossil fuel industry, despite Obama’s call for a 100% auction of permits while campaigning for President. It strips the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate coal plants and other stationary sources of ghg’s. Its cap-and-trade framework allows Wall Street speculators to get into the huge new “carbon market” being created. It is nuclear power-friendly, and it projects giving the U.S. coal industry tens of billions of dollars for carbon capture and sequestration, an unsafe boondoggle that only dangerously postpones the critically-needed, dramatic shift to renewables, conservation and energy efficiency.

As far as the international negotiations, this is what Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, had to say about the most recent meetings in Bangkok, Thailand in early October: “Just two months before Copenhagen, the Bangkok climate negotiations did little to move the ball forward. Bold steps are clearly needed from the world’s leaders to break the deadlock in the negotiations, and time is running short. One key to a meaningful deal in Copenhagen is science-based emissions reduction commitments by industrialized countries… but the slow pace of climate and energy legislation in the Senate has left the United States unwilling to even get on the playing field. And the U.S. reluctance to accept legally binding emissions reduction commitments, together with a meaningful compliance regime, is threatening the entire negotiating process… The other key issue in these negotiations is greatly increasing funding for developing countries to deploy clean technologies, reduce deforestation, and adapt to the impacts of global warming. Here in Bangkok, the United States, European Union, Japan, and other industrialized countries once again failed to put forward a credible finance package. Most of the key developing countries have expressed willingness to take significant action to limit their emissions if such assistance is forthcoming, but they are not getting a serious response from the other side. If industrialized countries don’t start putting their climate finance cards on the table soon, there’s not going to be a card game in Copenhagen.”

Since 2002 I’ve been speaking, taking action and organizing in support of a clean energy revolution. During those seven years I’ve also been active with the peace movement in opposition to the Iraq war. I’ve been struck during that time by one major difference between these two movements when it comes to tactics.

The peace movement, up until the election of Obama, was repeatedly organizing mass demonstrations of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, in Washington, D.C. and many other places. In 2008, for example, 30,000 or so people demonstrated against the war in St. Paul, Minnesota on the day before the opening of the Republican Convention.

The vast majority of climate and environmental groups, on the other hand, have little experience with mass actions in the streets. This is especially true for the groups based in Washington, D.C. Instead, their work is all about lobbying members of Congress, trying to convince them of the correctness of their positions, developing position papers, getting their members around the country to send emails and make calls to Congressional offices, etc.

I do some of this myself. It’s not that these are bad things, when done in combination with a range of other tactics and activities. But when done in a way which deemphasizes grassroots organizing and “street heat,” it’s of very limited value. Indeed, it’s a waste of resources, because it’s just not going to get the job done.

Fortunately, there’s a new climate movement emerging that gets it when it comes to this issue of tactics. The 350.org network is a major component of it, as is the mushrooming anti-coal movement. In 2007 there were only eight anti-coal demonstrations and 33 people arrested in acts of civil disobedience, according to Source Watch, compared to 49 actions and 266 people arrested so far in 2009. There are the continuing, dramatic actions of Greenpeace and the actions organized by groups like Mountain Justice, Rising Tide, the Rainforest Action Network and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. There are the plans for another big international day of action on December 12th right in the middle of the Copenhagen conference, and some of the groups which mainly do lobbying are part of the coalitions calling for those actions.

Last Saturday, as I marched in the pouring rain with many hundreds of others down 16th St. to the White House, young people leading the march at one point began a chant I’ve heard at many other actions on other issues; “Ain’t no power like the power of the people, and the power of the people don’t stop!” Yes, and we can’t stop until we’ve forced, or changed, the governments of the world so that they act as is necessary if we’re to have a fighting chance for a future we can look forward to.

In a situation of negotiations between on the one hand the putschists and on the other hand the legitimate government and its allies in the Front, all this in the context of the presidential elections, what is the Micheletti de facto government attempting to do? Amongst other things, it is trying to divide the resistance forces and weaken the mass movement in the streets in order to gain time and legitimize itself through elections. However, all three forces, firstly the Front and its affiliate social and trade union organizations and followers in the street, secondly the two potential candidates for the presidential elections who are directly linked to the Front and thirdly the Zelaya government, have all further developed their unity with each other. Their combined tactics in this complicated situation constitute one of many examples exhibiting the rapidly growing political maturity and consciousness of all the components forming the resistance. All of these forces, far from succumbing to the usual imperialist tactics of divide and rule, are further unifying themselves. The resistance in the streets, the new political forces and the constitutional Zelaya government all complement each other.

From an exclusive October 5 telephone interview with Zelaya by some international media and reported by on-the-spot journalist Giorgio Trucchi, the following are excerpts:

Question: You have agreed to sign the San Jose Arias Plan or Agreement which does not envisage the main demand of the National Front Against the Coup, that is to begin a process to install a Constituent Assembly. Does this imply a concession by you? [The question is related to President Zelaya refraining from promoting the Constituent Assembly during the remainder of his mandate.]

Zelaya: The person who is going to sign the Plan is me as the elected representative of the Honduran people. The Plan has two components: my restitution in order to say No to coups d’etats; the Latin American presidents are interested in this so as to feel confident that the sovereignty of the people is going to be respected and that no military, economic and political elite can replace the will of the people.

The second component comprises the social processes and reforms and is related to timing….The Constituent [Assembly] is not a power of the President, neither of the de facto regime, nor any other group. It is a faculty of the Honduran people who, through a people’s consultation, can determine when they are going to do it. That is why the signing of the Arias Plan is consistent with my position in relation to the reforms that have to continue…. The decision to organize a Constituent [Assembly] belongs to the people who are sovereign…¹

In an October 14 interview with Front leader Juan Barahona and as reported by Telesur, in response to the question:

Another point where it will be difficult to reach an agreement is number 3, where it is proposed that President Zelaya concedes the promotion of a Constituent Assembly?

Barahona: President Zelaya has already said that he is ready to sign the Agreement of San Jose and renounce the Constituent Assembly during the period that will remain to end his mandate. We are going to respect this position of the President; however, we as the Resistance are never going to renounce the need to push for the Constituent [Assembly]…. There will be no elections if President Zelaya is not restored ….

I am very pessimistic [about the negotiations] and I do not have many expectations that it can reach a comprehensive agreement. The putschists are trying [since the beginning of the negotiations] to divide our delegation saying that there exists strong contradictions between the resistance and President Zelaya. We [the resistance] meet daily to refine strategy and seek common positions, but this disinformation campaign indicates that they want to make the dialogue fail and then place the responsibility on our shoulders. They have gone so far as to launch a campaign against myself personally saying that I am very tough [a hardliner] and therefore I am not fit for negotiations. In this sense, it is true that I am tough, because I will never be willing to renounce the rights of the people…²

In communiqué No. 28 of the National Front, dated October 13, it is stated:

…We withdrew our comrade Juan Barahoma from the so-called Guaymuras dialogue. Our comrade Barahona was acting as the representative of the National Front against the Coup in the delegation of President Zelaya in the said dialogue.

The delegation of the coup regime, in a typical act of intransigence to hinder the advance of the negotiation, tried to paralyze the dialogue by refusing to accept that our representative would sign accord No. 3 referring to the installation of the National Constitutional Assembly with reservations, since we wished in that reservation to have it recorded that our Front does not renounce nor will it renounce the struggle for this demand, which is the demand of the Honduran people. Conscious of the fact that this was a manoeuvre to cause a failure of the dialogue using any pretext, since signing with reservations was suggested by them in an earlier session, we decided not to lend ourselves to this and therefore we took this decision, leaving President Zelaya at liberty to substitute another representative that enjoys his trust. In that sense, the lawyer Rodil Rivera Rodil was delegated as part of the commission of President Zelaya in substitution for our representative.

The preceding signifies that the [National Front] left the Guaymuras dialogue and that we will keep fighting in the street for the demands that we have raised since the 28th of June; the return of constitutional order, the restitution of President Zelaya to his office, and the convening of a Constitutional Assembly.

We declare that we respect the decision of our president if he decides to sign the San Jose Accord, even with all its conditions, and we declare that we are in full harmony with him in regard to the demand that the coup perpetrators sign an accord by which they will abandon power, and the office of President of the Republic will be returned to him [Zelaya.]³

It was reported on October 19:

In a telephone message to a meeting of the National Front…[on October 18, Zelaya] called on it to keep up the peaceful struggle to restore democratic legality, broken by the June 28 military coup. ‘We will resist until the people obtain victory’… [and] stressed that the struggle will continue until we obtain a country with justice and equity, in a truly participatory democracy. The national directorate of the Front agreed [on October 18] and vowed to continue the peaceful resistance until the return to power of Zelaya and then go on to a national Constituent Assembly…⁴

There are two candidates for the presidential elections who are fully involved in the National Front:

César Ham of the Unificación Democrática (UD) party and trade union leader and independent candidate Carlos Reyes. Zelaya called on them both to take a stand against participating in the elections under the existing conditions which would lend legitimacy to the putschist electoral process.⁵

In an interview carried out by Giorgio Trucchi in Honduras with popular trade union leader and independent presidential candidate Carlos Reyes, the latter stated, as published on September 30:

“…If we the people´s and democratic candidates do not withdraw from this electoral process, we would be endorsing all that scaffolding [built-up by Micheletti] and weaken the resistance…”⁶

This position was confirmed on October 15 by one of the Front leaders Rafael Alegría who emphasised that Reyes will not be candidate under the current conditions in order to “…refrain from legitimizing coups d’etats or constitutional breakdowns…”⁷

On October 19, the UD party, the third most important of five political force amongst all tendencies in Honduras, announced that it is withdrawing from the elections taking into account that they are “unconstitutional without the restoration of the legitimate president, Manuel Zelaya…”⁸

This tendency developed even further on October 22. Even a section of the Liberal Party, a party to which the coup perpetrators are linked and one of the biggest political parties in Honduras, joined the protest against the elections. According to an interview accorded to Prensa Latina on October 22: “The Coordination of the Liberal Party against the Coup in Honduras confirmed that it will abstain from participating in the November 29 elections if there is no re-establishment of democracy in the country…. In order for the elections to be recognized by the people and the international community, the indispensable requirement is the return to constitutional order and of the legitimate President, Manuel Zelaya. The Coordination was created in the middle of August during a meeting with the participation of more than 5,000 Liberal Party delegates who rejected the break-down of legal democracy carried out by the military on June 28…”⁹

Despite all the pressures, on October 25, the National Front, through the voice of its Coordinator Juan Barahona declared that the Front met on October 24 and confirmed their position that “one of the agreements reached was to ratify that if President Zelaya is not returned to his position, there will be no elections on November 29 in the face of the rejection by the vast majority of the people…Barahona pointed out that the candidates running as independents, those from the UD, from the sections of the Liberal Party, as well as Innovación and Unidad Social Democrática parties opposed to the coup, have all anticipated their withdrawal from the elections if Zelaya is not restored…”¹⁰

According to a Prensa Latina report, in order to make sure that this orientation regarding the elections makes its point, on October 25 the Front met at the local neighbourhood base and then following the mandate received from this level, decided on October 25 that the 121st consecutive day of resistance will take place on October 26…” Of great political significance, in my view, is that the Front decided in favour of “the resistance carrying out a variety of initiatives in order to stop the military dictatorship from succeeding in its attempt to seek an appearance of legality through the elections.”¹¹

This constitutes one of the most important steps in the struggle since the coup; right from the beginning the Honduran oligarchy and those supporting them either directly or indirectly have been attempting to gain time, to stall until the elections take place and in this way “legitimize” the coup.

Since June 28, the Honduran people and all progressive forces including the Zelaya legitimate government have been developing their unity, political consciousness, organization and peaceful tactics with the immediate objective being the restitution of Zelaya followed by Constituent Assembly, the latter whether Zelaya is ever returned to power or not. The putschists have provoked a mass movement in the country to renew Honduras through a new constitution as the foundation. In fact the new foundation has already been built on a solid basis constituted of the people’s political consciousness and the innovative alternative organization.

For example, in an October 23 interview, Barahona declared that “Honduras completely changed, and we are going to inherit a very positive result of all this; an organization and an important experience. During these days of struggle the level of consciousness has risen far more than by means of a hundred courses on class struggle…”¹²

Honduras 2009 already has carved out its place in the most recent history of this small Central American country. It is bound to win, nothing can stop it.

Each country in the region has its historic moments which have proven to be watersheds in its respective history:

* Cuba, as the pioneer, is so rich in ground-breaking historical steps. Taking the most recent history, one can indicate the attack on Moncada in 1953 as the continuation of José Marti’s nineteenth century tradition, and its future development following the Granma landing in 1956, the Sierra Maestra war in 1957-1958, with decisive events such as Che’s historic 1958 action in Santa Clara which broke the back of the pro US-military dictatorship.

* Venezuela 1998 is now synonymous with the first electoral victory of Hugo Chávez, coming out of a long struggle by the leader and his movement, a year which changed the coursed not only of Venezuela, but affected all of South America. However, a coup d’etat organized by Washington and their allies in Caracas in 2002 turned into a disaster for the US and Venezuelan oligarchy when the political and organizational strength of the people of Venezuela exploded into a massive action. The secret to success, amongst other factors such as the support for the President from a section of the military, had as its basis mass participation as was explained to the author in a recent interview accorded by a Venezuelan participant who is now a Legislator.¹³ The columns of people coming from all over completely overwhelmed the coup perpetrators in Caracas. The political consciousness including the need for further organization took a leap forward in a just a couple of days.

* Bolivia 2005: Evo Morales as an indigenous trade union leader and his movement were hoisted to the head of the government in the wake of a massive and successfully organized involvement of a marginalized people; they discussed and acted upon election procedures and soon after a new Constituent Assembly as the basis of a new constitution.

* Nicaragua 2006, nourished from the tradition of the 1970s and 1980s but with a renewed political organization and tactics, Daniel Ortega broke through to victory in 2006.

* Ecuador 2006, the election of Rafael Correa as President proved to be the first step in a rapid succession of political events running into 2008 including a referendum on the need for a Constituent Assembly, the actual election of a Constituent Assembly and the successful referendum on a new modern constitution emerging out of the Constituent Assembly.

Honduras 2009 marks the watershed between the old and the new in this country which Zelaya attempted to remove from its position of being one of the poorest nations in South America, an economic and military colony of the USA. Honduras 2009 may continue into 2010, but the Honduran people will win, just as did the Cubans, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians and others.

1. Entrevista en exclusiva con el presidente Manuel Zelaya, en Tegucigalpa, Giorgio Trucchi, Rel-UITA, 5 October 2009
2. Telesur, 14 October 2009
3. voselsoberano.com,13 October 2009.
4. Raimundo López, enviado especial Prensa Latina, 19 October 2009.
5. Telesur, 17 October 2009
6. Giorgio Trucchi, Carlos Amorín, Rel-UITA, 30 September 2009.
7. Telsur, 15 October 2009.
8. Venezolano de televisión, 19 October 2009.
9. Raimundo López, enviado especial Prensa Latina, 22 October 2009.
10. Prensa Latina, 25 October 2009.
11. Raimundo López, enviado especial Prensa Latina, 26 October 2009.
12. tercerainformacion.com, 23 October 2009.
13. Lor Mogollón, Henrys, Deputy ,Yaracuy Province, in a private interview with the author, October 14, 2009, Montreal.

“A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours.”¹

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote above eloquently summarises the figment of reality entangled with modern Jewish nationalism and especially within the concept of Jewish identity. It obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land. While the brutality of the Israelis towards the Palestinians has already become rather common knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their ‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for many generations to come. Leave aside the megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into enclaves of deprivation and starvation, Israel has managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with nuclear and chemical waste.

The Invention of the Jewish People is a very serious study written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian. It is the most serious study of Jewish nationalism and by far, the most courageous elaboration on the Jewish historical narrative.

In his book, Sand manages to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never shared a common origin. Instead they are a colourful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

In case you follow Sand’s line of thinking and happen to ask yourself, ‘when was the Jewish People invented?’ Sand’s answer is rather simple. “At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people ‘retrospectively,’ out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people.”

Accordingly, the ‘Jewish people’ is a ‘made up’ notion consisting of a fictional and imaginary past with very little to back it up forensically, historically or textually. Furthermore, Sand — who elaborated on early sources of antiquity — comes to the conclusion that Jewish exile is also a myth, and that the present-day Palestinians are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs.

Astonishingly enough, in spite of the fact that Sand manages to dismantle the notion of ‘Jewish people,’ crush the notion of ‘Jewish collective past,’ and ridicule the Jewish chauvinist national impetus, his book is a best seller in Israel. This fact alone may suggest that those who call themselves ‘people of the book’ are now starting to learn about the misleading and devastating philosophies and ideologies that made them into what Khalid Amayreh and many others regard as the “Nazis of our time.”

Hitler Won After All

Rather often when asking a ‘secular’ ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew what it is that makes him into a Jew, a shallow overwhelmingly chewed answer would be thrown back at you: “It is Hitler who made me into a Jew.” Though the ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew, being an internationalist, would dismiss other people’s national inclinations, he insists upon maintaining his own right to ‘self determination’. However, it is not really he himself who stands at the core of this unique demand for national orientation, it is actually the devil, master-monster anti-Semite, namely Hitler. Apparently, the cosmopolitan Jew celebrates his nationalist entitlement as long as Hitler is there to be blamed.

As far as the secular cosmopolitan Jew is concerned, Hitler won after all. Sand manages to enhance this paradox. Insightfully he suggests that “while in the 19th century referring to Jews as an ‘alien racial identity’ would mark one as an anti-Semite, in the Jewish State this very philosophy is embedded mentally and intellectually.”² In Israel Jews celebrate their differentiation and unique conditions. Furthermore, says Sand, “There were times in Europe when one would be labelled as an anti-Semite for claiming that all Jews belong to a nation of an alien type. Nowadays, claiming that Jews have never been and still aren’t people or a nation, would tag one as a Jew hater.”²

It is indeed pretty puzzling that the only people who managed to maintain and sustain a racially orientated, expansionist and genocidal national identity that is not at all different from Nazi ethnic ideology are the Jews who were, amongst others, the leading targeted victims of the Nazi ideology and practice.

Nationalism In General and Jewish Nationalism In Particular

Louis-Ferdinand Celine mentioned that in the time of the Middle Ages in the moments between major wars, knights would charge a very high price for their readiness to die in the name of their kingdoms; in the 20th century youngsters have rushed to die en mass without demanding a thing in return. In order to understand this mass consciousness shift, we need an eloquent methodical model that would allow us to understand what nationalism is all about.

Like Karl Deutsch, Sand regards nationality as a phantasmic narrative. It is an established fact that anthropological and historical studies of the origins of different so-called ‘people’ and ‘nations’ lead towards the embarrassing crumbling of every ethnicity and ethnic identity. Hence, it is rather interesting to find out that Jews tend to take their own ethnic myth very seriously. The explanation may be simple, as Benjamin Beit Halachmi spotted years ago. Zionism was there to transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land registry.’ For that matter, the truth of the Bible or any other element of Jewish historical narrative has very little relevance as long as it doesn’t interfere with the Jewish national political cause or practice.

One could also surmise that the lack of clear ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from feeling an ethnic or national belonging. The fact that Jews are far from being what one can label as a People and that the Bible has very little historical truth in it, doesn’t really stop generations of Israelis and Jews from identifying themselves with King David or Terminator Samson. Evidently, the lack of an unambiguous ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from seeing themselves as part of a people. Similarly, it wouldn’t stop the nationalist Jew from feeling that he belongs to some greater abstract collective.

In the 1970’s, Shlomo Artzi, then a young Israeli singer who was bound to become Israel’s all-time greatest rock star, released a song that had become a smash hit in a matter of hours. Here are the first few lines:

   All of a sudden
   A man wakes up
   In the morning
   He feels he is people
   And he starts to walk
   And to everyone he comes across
   He says shalom

To a certain extent Artzi innocently expresses in his lyrics the suddenness and almost contingency involved in the transformation of the Jews into people. However, almost within the same breath, Artzi contributes towards the illusionist national myth of the peace-seeking nation. Artzi should have known by then that Jewish nationalism was a colonialist act at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Seemingly, nationalism, national belonging and Jewish nationalism in particular create a major intellectual task. Interestingly enough, the first to deal theoretically and methodically with issues having to do with nationalism were Marxist ideologists. Though Marx himself failed to address the issue adequately, early 20th century uprising of nationalist demands in eastern and central Europe caught Lenin and Stalin unprepared.

“Marxists’ contribution to the study of nationalism can be seen as the focus on the deep correlation between the rise of free economy and the evolvement of the national state.”³ In fact, Stalin was there to summarise the Marxist take on the subject. “The nation,” says Stalin, “is a solid collaboration between beings that was created historically and formed following four significant phenomena: the sharing of tongue, the sharing of territory, the sharing of economy and the sharing of psychic significance…”³

As one would expect, the Marxist materialist attempt to understand nationalism is lacking an adequate historical overview. Instead it would be reliant upon a class struggle. For some obvious reasons such a vision was popular amongst those who believe in ‘socialism of one nation’ amongst them we can consider the proponents of a leftist branch of Zionism.

For Sand, nationalism evolved due to the “ rapture created by modernity which split people from their immediate past”.⁴ The mobility created by urbanisation and industrialisation crushed the social hierarchic system as well as the continuum between past, present and future. Sand points out that before industrialisation, the feudal peasant didn’t necessarily feel the need for an historical narrative of empires and kingdoms. The feudal subject didn’t need an extensive abstract historical narrative of large collectives that had very little relevance to the immediate concrete existential need. “Without a perception of social progression, they did well with an imaginary religious tale that contained a mosaic of memory that lacked a real dimension of a forward moving time. The ‘end’ was the beginning and eternity bridged between life and death.”⁴

In the modern secular and urban world, ‘time’ had become the main life vessel which illustrated an imaginary symbolic meaning. Collective historical time had become the elementary ingredient of the personal and the intimate. The collective narrative shapes the personal meaning and what seems to be the ‘real.’ As much as some banal minds still insist that the ‘personal is political,’ it would be far more intelligible to argue that in practice, it is actually the other way around. Within the post-modern condition, the political is personal and the subject is spoken rather than speaking itself. Authenticity, for the matter, is a myth that reproduces itself in the form of symbolic identifier.

Sand’s reading of nationalism as a product of industrialisation, urbanisation and secularism, makes a lot of sense when bearing in mind Uri Slezkin’s suggestion that Jews are the ‘apostles of modernity,’ secularism and urbanisation. If Jews happened to find themselves at the hub of urbanisation and secularisation, it shouldn’t then take us by surprise that the Zionists were rather creative as much as others in inventing their own phantasmic collective imaginary tale. However, while insisting on their right to be ‘like other people’ Zionists have managed to transform their imagined collective past into a global, expansionist, merciless agenda as well as the biggest threat to world peace.

There Is No Jewish History

It is an established fact that not a single Jewish history text had been written between the 1st century and early 19th century. The fact that Judaism is based on a religious historical myth may have something to do with it. An adequate scrutiny of the Jewish past was never a primary concern within the Rabbinical tradition. One of the reasons is probably the lack of a need of such a methodical effort. For the Jew who lived during ancient times and the Middle Ages, there was enough in the Bible to answer most relevant questions having to do with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As Shlomo Sand puts it, “a secular chronological time was foreign to the ‘Diaspora time’ that was shaped by the anticipation for the coming of the Messiah.”

However, in the light of German secularisation, urbanisation, and emancipation, and due to the decreasing authority of the Rabbinical leaders, an emerging need of an alternative cause rose amongst the awakening Jewish intellectuals. The emancipated Jew wondered who he was, where he come from. He also started to speculate what his role might be within the rapidly opening European society.

In 1820, the German Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) published the first serious historical work on Jews, namely The History of the Israelites. Jost avoided the Biblical time, he preferred to start his journey with the Judea Kingdom, he also compiled an historical narrative of different Jewish communities around the world. Jost realised that the Jews of his time did not form an ethnic continuum. He grasped that Israelites from place to place were rather different. Hence, he thought there was nothing in the world that should stop Jews from total assimilation. Jost believed that within the spirit of enlightenment, both the Germans and the Jews would turn their back to the oppressive religious institution and would form a healthy nation based on a growing geographically orientated sense of belonging.

Though Jost was aware of the evolvement of European nationalism, his Jewish followers were rather unhappy with his liberal optimistic reading of the Jewish future. “From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a ‘kingdom’, expelled into ‘exile’, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.”

For the late Moses Hess, it was a racial struggle rather than a class struggle that would define the shape of Europe. Accordingly, suggests Hess, Jews better return and reflect on their cultural heritage and ethnic origin. For Hess, the conflict between Jews and Gentiles was the product of racial differentiation, hence, unavoidable.

The ideological path from Hess’s pseudo scientific racist orientation to Zionist historicism is rather obvious. If Jews are indeed an alien racial entity (as Hess, Jabotinsky and others believed), they better look for their natural homeland, and this homeland is no other than Eretz Yizrael. Cleary, Hess’s assumption regarding a racial continuum wasn’t scientifically approved. In order to maintain the emerging phantasmic narrative, an orchestrated denial mechanism had to be erected just to make sure that some embarrassing facts wouldn’t interfere with the emerging national creation.

Sand suggests that the denial mechanism was rather orchestrated and very well thought out. The Hebrew University decision in the 1930’s to split Jewish History and General History into two distinct departments was far more than just a matter of convenience. The logos behind the split is a glimpse into Jewish self-realisation. In the eyes of Jewish academics, the Jewish condition and Jewish psyche were unique and should be studied separately. Apparently, even within Jewish academia, a supreme status is reserved for the Jews, their history and their self-perception. As Sand insightfully unveils, within the Jewish Studies departments the researcher is scattering between the mythological and the scientific while the myth maintains its primacy. Yet, it often gets into a stalling dilemma by the ‘small devious facts.’

The New Israelite, the Bible, and Archaeology

In Palestine, the new Jews and later the Israelis were determined to recruit the Old Testament and to transform it into the amalgamate code of the future Jew. The ‘nationalisation’ of the Bible was there to plant in young Jews the idea that they are the direct followers of their great ancient ancestors. Bearing in mind the fact that nationalisation was largely a secular movement, the Bible was stripped of its spiritual and religious meaning. Instead, it was viewed as an historical text describing a real chain of events in the past. The Jews who had now managed to kill their God learned to believe in themselves. Massada, Samson and Bar Kochva became suicidal master narratives. In the light of their heroic ancestors, Jews learned to love themselves as much as they hate others, except that this time they possessed the military might to inflict real pain on their neighbours. More concerning was the fact that instead of a supernatural entity — namely God — who command them to invade the land and execute a genocide and to rob their ‘promised land’ of its indigenous inhabitants, within their national revival project it was them as themselves, Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weitzman, Ben Gurion, Sharon, Peres, Barak who decided to expel, destroy and kill. Instead of God, it was then the Jews killing in the name of Jewish people. They did it while Jewish symbols decorate their planes and tanks. They followed commands that where given in the newly restored language of their ancestors.

Surprisingly enough, Sand who is no doubt a striking scholar, fails to mention that the Zionist hijacking of the Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German Early Romanticism. However, as much as German philosophers, poets, architects and artists were ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not exactly Hellenism’s sons and daughters. The nationalist Jew took it one step further, he bound oneself into a phantasmic blood chain with his mythical ancestors, not before long he restored their ancient language. Rather than a sacred tongue, Hebrew had become a spoken language. German Early Romanticist never went that far.

German intellectuals during the 19th century were also fully aware of the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. For them, Athens stood for universal, the epic chapter of humanity and humanism. Jerusalem was, on the contrary, the grand chapter of tribal barbarism. Jerusalem was a representation of the banal, non-universal, monotheistic merciless God, the one who kills the elder and the infant. The Germanic Early Romantic era left us with Hegel, Nietzsche, Fichte and Heidegger and a just a few Jewish self-haters, leading amongst them, Otto Weininger. The Jerusalemite left us with not a single master ideological thinker. Some German Jewish second-rate scholars tried to preach Jerusalem in the Germanic exedra, amongst them were Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzveig and Ernst Bloch. They obviously failed to notice that it was the traces of Jerusalem in Christianity, which German Early Romanticists despised.

In their effort to resurrect ‘Jerusalem,’ archaeology was recruited to provide the Zionist epos with its necessary ‘scientific’ ground. Archaeology was there to unify the Biblical time with the moment of revival. Probably the most astonishing moment of this bizarre trend was the 1982 ‘military burial ceremony’ of the bones of Shimon Bar Kochva, a Jew rebel who died 2000 years earlier. Executed by the chief military Rabbi, a televised military burial was given to some sporadic bones found in a cave near the Dead Sea. In practice suspected remains of a 1st century Jew rebel was treated as an IDF casualty. Clearly, archaeology had a national role, it was recruited to cement the past and the present while leaving the Galut out.

Astonishingly enough, it didn’t take long before things turned the other way around. As archaeological research become more and more independent of the Zionist dogma, the embarrassing truth filtered out. It would be impossible to ground the truthfulness of the Biblical tale on forensic facts. If anything, archaeology refutes the historicity of the Biblical plot. Excavation revealed the embarrassing fact. The Bible is a collection of innovative fictitious literature.

As Sand points out, the Early Biblical story is soaked with Philistines, Aramaic and camels. Embarrassingly enough, as far as excavations are there to enlighten us, Philistine didn’t appear in the region before the 12th century BC, the Aramaic appears a century later and camels didn’t show their cheerful faces before the 8th century. These scientific facts lead Zionist researchers into some severe confusion. However, for non-Jewish scholars such as Thomas Thompson, it was rather clear that the Biblical is a “late collection of innovative literature written by a gifted theologian.”⁵ The Bible appears to be an ideological text that was there to serve a social and political cause.

Embarrassingly enough, not much was found in Sinai to prove the story of the legendary Egyptian Exodus, seemingly 3 million Hebraic men, women and children were marching in the desert for 40 years without leaving a thing behind. Not even a single matzo ball, very non-Jewish one may say.

The story of the Biblical resettlement and the genocide of the Canaanite which the contemporary Israelite imitates to such success is another myth. Jericho, the guarded city that was flattened to the sounds of horns and almighty supernatural intervention was just a tiny village during the 13th century BC.

As much as Israel regards itself as the resurrection of the monumental Kingdom of David and Salomon, excavation that took place in the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1970’s revealed that David’s kingdom was no more than a tiny tribal setting. Evidence that was referred by Yigal Yadin to King Solomon had been refuted later by forensic tests made with Carbon 14. The discomforting fact has been scientifically established. The Bible is a fictional tale, and not much there can ground any glorifying existence of Hebraic people in Palestine at any stage.

Who invented the Jews?

Quite early on in his text, Sand raises the crucial and probably the most relevant questions. Who are the Jews? Where did they come from? How is it that in different historical periods they appear in some very different and remote places?

Though most contemporary Jews are utterly convinced that their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites who happened to be exiled brutally by the Romans, truth must be said. Contemporary Jews have nothing to do with ancient Israelites, who have never been sent to exile because such an expulsion has never taken place. The Roman Exile is just another Jewish myth.

“I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land” says Sand in a Haaretz interview, “but to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”

Indeed, in the light of Sand’s simple insight, the idea of Jewish exile is amusing. The thought of Roman Imperial navy was working 24/7 schlepping Moishe’le and Yanka’le to Cordova and Toledo may help Jews to feel important as well as schleppable, but common sense would suggest that the Roman armada had far more important things to do.

However, far more interesting is the logical outcome: If the people of Israel were not expelled, then the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah must be the Palestinians.

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years” says Sand. “But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.’”

In his book Sand takes it further and suggests that until the First Arab Uprising (1929) the so-called leftist Zionist leaders tended to believe that the Palestinian peasants who are actually ‘Jews by origin’ would assimilate within the emerging Hebraic culture and would eventually join the Zionist movement. Ber Borochov believed that “a falach (Palestinian Peasant), dresses as a Jew, and behaves as a working class Jew, won’t be at all different from the Jew”. This very idea reappeared in Ben Gurion’s and Ben-Zvi’s text in 1918. Both Zionist leaders realised that Palestinian culture was soaked with Biblical traces, linguistically, as well as geographically (names of villages, towns, rivers and mountains). Both Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi regarded, at least at that early stage, the indigenous Palestinians as ethnic relatives who were holding close to the land and potential brothers. They as well regarded Islam as a friendly ‘democratic religion’. Clearly, after 1936 both Ben-Zvi and Ben Gurion toned down their ‘multicultural’ enthusiasm. As far as Ben Gurion is concerned, ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seemed to be far more appealing.

One may wonder, if the Palestinians are the real Jews, who are those who insist upon calling themselves Jews?

Sand’s answer is rather simple, yet it makes a lot of sense. “The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others.”

Clearly, monotheist religions, being less tolerant than polytheist ones have within them an expanding impetus. Judaic expansionism in its early days was not just similar to Christianity but it was Judaic expansionism that planted the ‘spreading out’ seeds in early Christian thought and practice.

“The Hasmoneans,” says Sand, “were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. It was this tradition of conversions that prepared the ground for the subsequent, widespread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the 4th century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions — pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.”

The Jews of Spain, whom we believed to be blood related to the Early Israelites seem to be converted Berbers. “I asked myself,” says Sand, “how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina’s Jewish Berber Kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism.”

As one would expect, Sand approves the largely accepted assumption that the Judaicised Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, which he calls the Yiddish Nation. When asked how come they happen to speak Yiddish, which is largely regarded as a German medieval dialect, he answers, “the Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the east, and thus they adopted German words.”

In his book Sand manages to produce a detailed account of the Khazarian saga in Jewish history. He explains what lead the Khazarian kingdom towards conversion. Bearing in mind that Jewish nationalism is, for the most part, lead by a Khazarian elite, we may have to expand our intimate knowledge of this very unique yet influential political group. The translation of Sand’s work into foreign languages is an immediate must.

What Next?

Professor Sand leaves us with the inevitable conclusion. Contemporary Jews do not have a common origin and their Semitic origin is a myth. Jews have no origin in Palestine whatsoever and therefore, their act of so-called ‘return’ to their ‘promised land’ must be realised as an invasion executed by a tribal-ideological clan.

However, though Jews do not constitute any racial continuum, they for some reason happen to be racially orientated. As we may notice, many Jews still see mixed marriage as the ultimate threat. Furthermore, in spite of modernisation and secularisation, the vast majority of those who identify as secular Jews still succumb to blood ritual (circumcision) a unique religious procedure which involves no less than blood sucking by a Mohel.

As far as Sand is concerned, Israel should become “a state of its citizens.” Like Sand, I myself believe in the same futuristic utopian vision. However, unlike Sand, I do grasp that the Jewish state and its supportive lobbies must be ideologically defeated. Brotherhood and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and have no room within the concept of Jewish national revival. As dramatic as it may sound, a process of de-judaification must take place before Israelis can adopt any universal modern notion of civil life.

Sand is no doubt a major intellectual, probably the most advanced leftist Israeli thinker. He represents the highest form of thought a secular Israeli can achieve before flipping over or even defecting to the Palestinian side (something that happened to just a few, me included). Haaretz interviewer Ofri Ilani said about Sand that unlike other ‘new historians’ who have tried to undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography, “Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of years.” This is indeed the case, unlike the ‘new historians’ who ‘unveil’ a truth that is known to every Palestinian toddler; i.e., the truth of being ethnically cleansed; Sand erects a body of work and thought that is aiming at the understanding of the meaning of Jewish nationalism and Jewish identity. This is indeed the true essence of scholarship. Rather than collecting some sporadic historical fragments, Sand searches for the meaning of history. Rather than a ‘new historian’ who searches for a new fragment, he is a real historian motivated by a humanist task. Most crucially, unlike some of the Jewish historians who happen to contribute to the so-called left discourse, Sand’s credibility and success is grounded on his argument rather than his family background. He avoids peppering his argument with his holocaust survivor relatives. Reading Sand’s ferocious argument, one may have to admit that Zionism in all its faults has managed to erect within itself a proud and autonomous dissident discourse that is far more eloquent and brutal than the entire anti-Zionist movement around the world.

If Sand is correct, and I myself am convinced by the strength of his argument, then Jews are not a race but rather a collective of very many people who are largely hijacked by a late phantasmic national movement. If Jews are not a race, do not form a racial continuum and have nothing to do with Semitism, then ‘anti-Semitism’ is, categorically, an empty signifier. It obviously refers to a signifier that doesn’t exist. In other words, our criticism of Jewish nationalism, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power can only be realised as a legitimate critique of ideology and practice.

Once again I may say it, we are not and never been against Jews (the people) nor we are against Judaism (the religion). Yet, we are against a collective philosophy with some clear global interests. Some would like to call it Zionism but I prefer not to. Zionism is a vague signifier that is far too narrow to capture the complexity of Jewish nationalism, its brutality, ideology and practice. Jewish nationalism is a spirit and a spirit doesn’t have clear boundaries. In fact, none of us know exactly where Jewishness stops and where Zionism starts as much as we do not know where Israeli interests stop and where the Neocon’s interests start.

As far as the Palestinian cause is concerned, the message is rather devastating. Our Palestinian brothers and sisters are at the forefront of a struggle against a very devastating philosophy. Yet, it is clearly not just the Israelis whom they fight with rather a fierce pragmatic philosophy that initiates global conflicts on some gigantic scale. It is a tribal practice that seeks influence within corridors of power and super powers in particular. The American Jewish Committee is pushing for a war against Iran. Just to be on the safe side David Abrahams, a ‘Labour Friend of Israel’ donates money to the Labour Party by proxy. More or less at the same time two million Iraqis die in an illegal war designed by one called Wolfowitz. While all the above is taking place, millions of Palestinians are starved in concentration camps and Gaza is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. As it all happens, ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews and Jews in the left (Chomsky included) insist upon dismantling the eloquent criticism of AIPAC, Jewish lobbying and Jewish power posed by Mearsheimer and Walt.

Is it just Israel? Is it really Zionism? Or shall we admit that it is something far greater than we are entitled even to contemplate within the intellectual boundaries we imposed upon ourselves? As things stand, we lack the intellectual courage to confront the Jewish national project and its many messengers around the world. However, since it is all a matter of consciousness-shift, things are going to change soon. In fact, this very text is there to prove that they are changing already.

To stand by the Palestinians is to save the world, but in order to do so we have to be courageous enough to stand up and admit that it is not merely a political battle. It is not just Israel, its army or its leadership, it isn’t even Dershowitz, Foxman, and their silencing leagues. It is actually a war against a cancerous spirit that hijacked the West and, at least momentarily, diverted it from its humanist inclination and Athenian aspirations. To fight a spirit is far more difficult than fighting people, just because one may have to first fight its traces within oneself. If we want to fight Jerusalem, we may have to first confront Jerusalem within. We may have to stand in front of the mirror, look around us. We may have to trace for empathy in ourselves in case there is anything left.

1. When And How The Jewish People Was Invented Shlomo Sand, Resling 2008, p 11.
2. Sand, p 31.
3. p 42.
4. p 62.
5. p 117.

Last week, the Times blasted California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for downgrading a scheduled Pollan lecture because it received pressure from David E. Wood, a university donor who happens to be chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co.

“Agribusiness gets plenty of opportunities to preach its point of view at agriculture schools such as Cal Poly, where the likes of Monsanto and Cargill fund research,” the Times wrote, calling the 800-acre Harris Ranch, near Coalinga, whose “smell assaults passersby long before the panorama of thousands of cattle packed atop layers of their own manure,”–”Cowschwitz.” Ouch.

And agribusiness has the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal with.

The land grant, ag-based university, in the middle of dairyland, clearly doesn’t remember its roots. It gave Pollan’s In Defense of Food, another anti-agbiz screed according to industry, free to all incoming freshmen as part of its common book read program where everyone reads the same book, Go Big Read, in August.

“I have not seen the students this excited about something in years,” Irwin Goodman, horticulture professor and vice dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences told the Associated Press as the James Beard Award-winning book was discussed in French and political science classes and included in an exhibit on the history of food.

Protesting farmers who came to hear Pollan speak at the university’s 17,000-seat Kohl Center in September wearing matching green T-shirts which said “In Defense of Farming: Eat Food. Be Healthy. Thank Farmers.” were clearly outnumbered. So were bumper stickers reading No Food; No Farms and Don’t Criticize Farmers With Your Mouth Full in the parking lot.

Students get all their facts from writers like Pollan, the farmers, who were bussed in by Madison-based feed company Vita Plus, told the Capital Times. They have never visited a farm for first-hand knowledge of food production and don’t know what they’re talking about.

But efforts to open farms to the public are not always successful.

This month United Egg Producers’ “Opening the Barn Doors” media tour at Morning Fresh Farms in northern Colorado, for example, only confirmed the size of today’s egg farm that make humane conditions impossible (36 barns; 23,000 birds each, 23 million dozen eggs a year) and raised further questions about environmental blight by showing the press wearing white HazMat suits to enter the barns. (See: You want us to eat WHAT?)

Last month the American Egg Board rolled out a kid-focused “The Good Egg” campaign which includes sponsorship of Sesame Street, a Cookie Monster product placement and a feel good virtual tour to soften public opinion about egg farms. But nowhere does the campaign address the daily grinding up of newborn males even as they hatch at the hatcheries which supply egg farms to provide the industry with only females–a practice that United Egg Producers confirms is routine. Does the Cookie Monster know about that?

Nor can all that crowding and all those chemicals be good for you, Pollan has written and many studies suggest.

But agribusiness is also combating last year’s American Institute for Cancer Research and World Cancer Research Fund study that found the link between processed meats and colon cancer so strong, the organizations advised consumers to change their eating habits.

Trent Loos, an outspoken columnist with the agbiz weekly, Feedstuffs, says nitrosamines, found in processed or cured meat and widely believed carcinogenic, may actually be good for you, preventing and treating “cardiovascular and other diseases associated with nitric oxide insufficiency in the diet.”

“Nitric oxide is an important signaling molecule in the human body to regulate numerous physiological functions including blood flow to tissues and organs,” write Loos of research conducted by Dr. Nathan Bryan at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Texas, Houston. “The regular intake of nitrite-containing food appears to ensure that blood and tissue levels of nitrite and nitric oxide pools in the body are maintained at adequate levels.”

Some of the ag press has even picked up the theory–but don’t expect a Pollan book called In Defense of Nitrites anytime soon.

The leadership of the Democratic Party is on the verge of passing health insurance reform. The centerpiece of the “reform” is requiring Americans to buy overpriced insurance from private corporations. But, it is evident that many in the Democratic voting base see the insurance industry as the problem – not the solution – and are getting angry about a new law that will force people to buy from corporations they don’t trust.

Just a few weeks ago the Mobilization for Health Care for All was announced. The Mobilization focuses on the denial of doctor-recommended care by the insurance industry. Sit-ins were planned at health insurance companies with demands that insurance corporations stop the denials. The Mobilization sought 100 people willing to sit-in at insurance corporations and risk arrest as people sat in at lunch counters two generations ago.

The response has been explosive, nearly 800 have signed up to risk arrest and thousands have signed up to join the protests. In the last 20 days 78 people have been arrested protesting the real death panels – the private insurance industry – who according to a California study deny doctor recommended care 20% of the time.

The Mobilization hoped to have “patients not profits sit-ins” in three cities last week, and instead it had them in nine cities. On the next Mobilization day, October 28th, there is likely to be twice as many cities protesting the insurance industry – just as Congress considers forcing Americans to buy insurance. This may be developing into the largest campaign of non-violent civil resistance since the Civil Rights era.

Many of the protesters supported Obama and were active in Democratic campaigns. Does the Democratic Party think that people willing to risk arrest against the corruption of the insurance industry will support Democratic candidates with time, money and votes who force them to buy insurance from these corporations?

These are protests the Democratic Party should not ignore. At the Washington, DC mobilization one woman, Linda from Annapolis, spoke to president Obama, said she had helped him get elected in part because he promised real change in health care. She still wants him to come through but reminded him – “we elected you, we can un-elect you.” Linda reflects the view of many Democratic Party activists who are angry at the pro-insurance bill being pushed by Congressional leaders.

As people come to understand the reform bill, which began as health “care” reform but devolved into health “insurance” reform, the anger will grow – not just from the right, but from the Democratic voting base who voted for the hope of real reform, not more of the corporate-dominated Washington, DC non-solutions to problems Americans face every day.

Indeed, Americans of all stripes will be angry. At the Washington, DC mobilization police allowed the sit-in to occur, despite it being illegal, and refused to arrest the participants. We later found out that the police had to make wage concessions to keep their health care. And, when I was arrested protesting the Senate Finance Committee hearing dominated by the insurance industry, one officer told me about his mother who had lost her job, was too young for Medicare and could not afford COBRA payments. The abuse of insurance affects all Americans and they will not be happy being forced to feed corporate gluttonous greed.

Why will Americans hate this “reform?”

First, this unnecessarily complex plan will not achieve any of the goals originally set. It will not cover all Americans, indeed tens of millions will be left without insurance ten years after it is enacted. And, it will not control costs as the insurance industry has said that their already too expensive premiums will increase by 111% in the next decade under “reform.”

Second, few Americans will benefit from the plan. In fact, the greatest beneficiary will be the insurance industry and other health care profiteers. Every ten million people forced to buy insurance by the government will give the industry $100 billion in new revenue – at current insurance rates. With 50 million uninsured that is potentially hundreds of billions in new revenue. In other words, the corporations that are the root of the problem will get rich off of the income of working Americans. This at a time when American salaries are stagnating, debts are high, costs are going up and there is constant fear of unemployment and bankruptcy. Further, those who have insurance but do not like their insurance plans will not be given any choice under the “reform.” They will be stuck with their current, overpriced insurance with rising premiums, co-pays and out of pocket expenses. This is a recipe for populist rebellion, but it does not stop there.

The plan does not create affordable health care. Families earning $90,000 will find themselves paying 20% of their income on health insurance. And, the subsidies for poor and working Americans will be insufficient. The leading source of increased poverty is America’s working poor. How can these working families afford to buy insurance – even if they are forced to by the government – when they cannot even put food on the table? Americans will ask – why are struggling workers being forced to pay the $10 million salaries of insurance executives?

By the time most of this plan takes effect in 2013, the year after the next presidential election, insurance premiums will have increased by 20% to 25%. During the election year, Americans will be looking toward 2013 and seeing increased insurance costs and realizing they will be forced to buy overpriced insurance at the threat of increased taxes. Because of the lack of cost controls and the increased insurance requirements, e.g., like requiring acceptance of people with pre-existing conditions and putting no limits on lifetime benefits, the insurance industry will be increasing rates even more quickly. The failure of “reform” will become evident before it takes effect.

The increased costs of health insurance will affect all businesses small and large. In a “recovery” that is already not producing jobs, these costs will ensure a jobless recovery. The failure to create jobs will be a rallying cry against the Obama economic and health care plans. Democrats should be concerned because Americans traditionally vote based on their wallet more than any other issue.

In fact, bottom line business people and others who can do the math, realize that the U.S. spends double per person than dozens of better rated health care systems in Europe and Asia. If the U.S. merely adopted any of these plans (almost all variations on single payer) we would save $4,000 per person EVERY YEAR. That is a savings of $1.2 trillion every year – a huge recurring stimulus with savings flowing to businesses and others who pay some or all of their health insurance. Quickly thereafter goods made domestically would be competitive again, companies would have faith in a better future and hire employees again, and America would break the stranglehold of corporate-government. None of this will happen under the Democratic “reform” because the waste, fraud and abuse of the insurance industry will continue.

During the next four years the Republicans will use the Democratic “reform” as a political punching bag. The plans to cut Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars based on increased efficiency will frighten senior citizens. The bureaucracy being put in place by the “reform” will be evident to all. The complexity of the law will include federal rules on what employer-based insurance plans are “qualified.” All Americans will see new income tax forms for the individual mandate and to determine income eligibility for insurance subsidies. The new federal insurance bureaucracy will be ridiculed by the Republicans.

Labor unions will see good health insurance coverage they fought years to get for their members disappearing as taxes on their plans go into effect. These high taxes are likely to cause employers to cut back on the derisively labeled “Cadillac” plans, which are really the kinds of health coverage all Americans should have. The result: more people will be uninsured by employers and forced to buy health insurance on their own, or more working Americans will find themselves joining the large pool of tens of millions of Americans who are underinsured. Reform will make the problems worse for these Americans.

The problem of insurance companies denying care recommended by a doctor is likely to get worse under “reform.” A recent study in California found that insurance company denials can occur in up to 40% of cases with some insurance companies. Congress could fix the problem by giving consumers the power to sue insurance companies for denial of care. But, despite lobbying by consumer advocates, they refused to do so. The industry has few ways to control costs so experts predict that there will be increases in denial of care. “There are going to be a lot of denials,” said insurance industry analyst Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance executive, told the Los Angeles Times. Denial of care is the issue the Mobilization for Health Care is protesting.

During the four years it takes to put the “reform” into place, more than 100,000 Americans will die each year from preventable illness. That is the current rate of annual preventable deaths, something the U.S. leads all developed nations in, and it will not slow when Obama signs the pro-insurance reform bill. Will the Congress close its eyes and watch 400,000 Americans die during Obama’s first term? Or, will it do the obvious and open up Medicare to all during this period of transition? The Democrats paymasters in the insurance industry will urge them to quietly let Americans die so people do not experience that Medicare, America’s single payer system, works.

And, those who were shut out of the process of developing real health care reform – the majority of Americans who favor a single payer, improved “Medicare for All,” national health system – will keep organizing. The Mobilization for Health Care for All, will be one of example of many. Those shut out will fight back and keep pointing out how simple and efficient the reform could have been. How the Democrats could have reduced bureaucracy instead of increased it, helped the economy rather than hurt it and made sure every dollar went to health care rather than 31% of spending going to insurance industry profits and the bureaucracy the insurance industry creates. The already popular single payer system, which Obama himself used to support, will become even more popular. The control of the Democratic Party by big business interests will become evermore evident and “reform” will be understood as a multi-hundred billon dollar corporate giveaway.

The Democrats, like generals so often do, are fighting the last war. The Clinton experienced taught them that failure to pass health care reform cost them elections. The Obama administration experience will teach them that passing legislation that is only good for the insurance industry will cost them elections and could cost Obama a second term. A bad bill will be worse than no bill, will be the new lesson.

Americans voted for Obama who said in 2005 that the country would get single payer when the Democrats won back the House, Senate and Presidency. They even prefer the Obama of the presidential campaign who promised health care for all and opposed insurance mandates. They want the Obama they supported to return and put their interests ahead of insurance company profits.

Simply expanding and improving Medicare so it covers all Americans is the only way to avert this populist revolt. Will the Democratic leadership recognize this and change course or will they steer themselves into a disaster in order to satisfy their big donors in the insurance industry? There is a single payer bill, HR 676, in the House that will be voted on when Rep. Weiner introduces it on the House Floor. Let’s hope for the sake of all Americans that the Democratic Party leadership wakes up and puts the necessities of the American people before the profits of their donors. They still have time.

Like an acquaintance of mine who helped organize the Moratorium in College Park, MD wrote in an email yesterday: who today wouldn’t take massive liberal anti war demos? Indeed. Reports this morning (October 15, 2009) from Washington indicate that Barack Obama is going to send 45,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. At this point it is not clear if this is the entire number or if it is just the number of combat forces. As the Washington Post revealed earlier in the week of October 11th, 2009, when Washington sent some 20,000 troops into Afghanistan earlier this year it did not announce that another 13,000 support troops were also sent over. If this ratio holds true that would mean that there would be closer to 70,000 more US troops in Afghanistan by the time this latest escalation is completed. These numbers would put the total amount of troops involved in the occupier’s forces euphemistically called the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) very close to 200,000.

200,000 heavily armed invaders on the ground. Untold numbers flying planes and dropping bombs. More sitting in bunkers in the North American desert launching drones aptly named Predator that kill fighters and civilians alike without an ounce of moral hesitation. An unknown number of mercenaries working under the title of contractor. Yet, there is barely a peep from the people of the nations whose men and women wage this pointless and immoral war. With the exception of a few protesters in DC and other big cities and a few thousand college students on twenty six college campuses around the United States, recent calls for protests against the war in Afghanistan and the continued occupation of Iraq went unheeded. The sight of young men and women in military camouflage and crewcuts wearing ISAF patches is becoming overly familiar to travelers in US airports. Yet, there is hardly a peep. The sight of parents crying on the television while their children are buried in caskets covered with the red, white and blue is not uncommon. If the news reports are true and at least 45,000 soldiers are preparing for their assignment to Afghanistan, these displays designed to inspire more such deaths will increase in frequency. All the while families tell themselves their children died for something like freedom when most of us know deep inside that no one but those who send them over there really know why the US military is even over there. When we the people are honest with ourselves we know it has to do with empire and conceit, but those reasons do o not make us feel good.

And there’s barely a peep. Liberals and rightwingers in Congress line up behind the Obama who lines up behind the Pentagon and the industry of war. With the exception of a very few, the consensus is that the death and destruction must continue. The comfort of the empire’s citizens must not be disturbed. It can not be said enough, the time to speak up is now. The orgy of death is set to increase. One can not add 50,000 more troops whose job is to kill and expect anything else.

Three Israel-related events this year have stayed in the headlines, reflecting the importance of Israel in Canadian political and cultural life.

First, Canadian Ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was recently honoured at Canada Park — built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law — as one of hundreds of donors who helped establish the park on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. Just north of Jerusalem, it was founded in the early 1970s following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war. It is hugely popular for walks and picnics with the Israeli public, who are by and large unaware that they are in Palestinian territory that is officially a closed military zone. Former Israeli parliamentarian Uri Avnery has described the park’s creation as an act of complicity in “ethnic cleansing” and Canada’s involvement as “cover to a war crime”. About 5,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area during the war. A plaque bearing Allen’s name is attached to a stone wall constructed from the rubble of Palestinian homes razed by the Israeli army. The Jewish National Fund, treated as a charity for tax purposes, establishes and manages such parks on behalf of Jewish people worldwide. Canada Park is believed to be the only example, outside East Jerusalem, of the JNF becoming directly involved in managing land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Then there is the wildly popular exhibition, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World,” at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a joint project with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), funded by the Toronto Tanenbaum family dynasty who coincidentally were instrumental in the creation of Canada Park. This exhibition provided a fitting gala premier for the museum’s ultra-modern wing designed by Israeli-American Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind, whose parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, also designed the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany, and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The Dead Sea Scrolls, regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and including what is purported to be the oldest known version of the Old Testament (150BC-70CE), were found by a Bedouin shepherd in caves near Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and later by the Palestine Archaeological Museum (also known as the Rockefeller Museum) in a joint expedition with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the Ecole Biblique Française between 1947-1956. The Scrolls were displayed at the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem until 1967, when they were seized and relocated to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Since 1967, additional (illegal) excavations and findings by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) took place in Qumran and the surrounding area, and artefacts continue to be (illegally) appropriated by Israel, under the auspices of the IAA.

Under international law and in accordance with Canada’s and Israel’s obligations as signatories to the 1954 UNESCO protocol for the “Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict”, Israel is not entitled to these artefacts. The repatriation of the Scrolls and millions of other artefacts to Palestine remains a key issue for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East. In 2005, Canada signed other UNESCO conventions and protocols specifically aimed at preventing the removal and the exhibition of illegally removed artefacts from occupied territories, and adopted domestic Canadian legislation — the Cultural Property Export and Import Act — which makes it a criminal offense to import cultural property in violation of the conventions. The ROM, for its own part, is a member of the Canadian Museums Association whose Ethics Guidelines states that “museums must guard against any direct or indirect participation in the illicit traffic in cultural and natural objects that are: stolen, illegally imported or exported from another state, including those that are occupied or war-stricken.” The 1954 Convention clearly requires Canada to “take into custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory” and “return, at the close of hostilities, to the competent authorities of the territory previously occupied, cultural property which is in its territory.”

Israel not only continues to illegally excavate in occupied Palestinian territory but dismisses international law altogether (despite its UNESCO pledges), using archeology and discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls to reinforce the Zionist national narrative and the colonial project upon which the state was founded. Supposedly a science removed from political, religious, or ideological bias, archeology under the IAA is the very antithesis of this, being rooted in Biblical mythology. Artefacts like the Scrolls are, according to Amos Elon, “almost titles of real estate, like deeds of possession to a contested country”. Like British, French, and German imperialist functionaries before them, Israeli archeologists sift through the many layers of historical evidence in search of what will prove their belief that they are indeed God’s Chosen People, ignoring or rather destroying the intervening layers and interpreting finds to suit their needs. The thousands of years of non-Jewish Arab civilisation don’t matter. Historian Keith Whitelam says in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, the modern state of Israel has “cast its shadow of influence backwards to claim previous periods as its ‘prehistory’.” The IAA is just as much a steamroller, flattening indigenous Palestine, as the Israeli Defence Forces, in their policy of archeological apartheid. Committee Against Israeli Apapartheid (CAIA) activist Ali Mustafa writes that Israeli archeology is explicitly categorised by the IAA as either Jewish/Israeli or Arab/Muslim in a process whereby ancient artefacts that supposedly belong to the Biblical era are actively sought after, while supposedly encouraging Palestinians to do the same concerning later Islamic periods. Following the Oslo peace process, Israel claimed it was prepared to assign jurisdiction of all “Arab” and “Muslim” archeological sites in the West Bank over to the PA; however, the offer was flatly refused, and the PA instead demanded control over all sites, as well as an immediate return of artefacts seized since 1967. The logic is simple: conflate all Palestinian history as Islamic (openly disregarding Christian and secular influences), and apply these reductive and simplistic binary terms to all artefacts ignoring the region’s shared past and overlapping cultural heritage. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the Scrolls should be seized by ROM and the Canadian government under their international obligations and held or handed over to UNESCO until their ownership is determined, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation concluded in June that “the museum feels the scrolls are legally held and both the federal and provincial government have expressed their support of the exhibition.”

The third event is the Toronto International Film Festival’s “City to city Spotlight on Tel Aviv”, in cooperation with the Israeli Embassy and the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation. Along with the ROM exhibition, this PR scheme was to be the centre- piece of Israeli Consul Gissin’s special Canadian “Brand Israel” campaign, dreamed up in 2008 on his arrival in Toronto, using the same mass marketing techniques of “The Israel Project”, launched in 2002 in the US, to present a more “benign” vision of Israel to the Canadian public. The Israel Project uses “grassroots” encounter groups to hone their propaganda efforts. Canadian partners in the Project’s Canadian spin-off included Sidney Greenberg of Astral Mediaand David Asper of Canwest Global Communications, arguably the most powerful media magnates in Canada, who are funding a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel.

“Brand Israel” is intended to take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. In The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, Frank Luntz explains: “Americans want a team to cheer for. Let the public know GOOD things about Israel … The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ’security’, and ‘peace’”. Fleshing out how to rebrand Israeli atrocities, Gissin made it clear that his mission was to “make Israel relevant” to Canadians and use Toronto as a test market for the Israel brand during his term. The lessons learned from Toronto would inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said. Official Brand Israel logos and advertising can be found across Toronto in bus shelters, on billboards, on radio and TV. Gissin said the ad blitz would be “an attack on all the senses.” The idea was to see “how to introduce a brand into Toronto” with emphasis on “grassroots” exposure, to promote Tel Aviv as a city of peace, untouched by the wars Israel has waged since 1948, despite the fact that many Palestinian communities were destroyed and Jaffa annexed to make way for the emergence of modern-day Tel Aviv.

But all is not well in the Land of Nod. The Canadian government regularly opines it is assiduously monitoring anti-Semitism despite the absence of anti-Jewish sentiment and despite the pro- Jewish nature of the media in this most laid-back, multicultural of nations. But Canadian “grassroots” are not limited to pro-Israeli marketing groups. Despite mainstream media subservience to Canada’s vigorous and large pro-Israeli lobby, some people have had enough. Zionist propaganda efforts in this “so friendly” country have increasingly met with resistance, and all the Israeli consuls in the world cannot undo the damage that Israeli war crimes have done and continue to do, as the siege in Gaza and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements continue.

There are now strong citizen groups fighting Canada’s official support of every Israeli government whim. There are many Jewish anti-Zionist groups, such as Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voices for Peace, Not in Our Name, Women in Solidarity with Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAZ). Nonspecific Jewish groups include Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Palestine House, Canada Palestine Association, and the above-mentioned CAIA, which has grown rapidly with centres in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Anti-Zionist activists have been holding vigils regularly at the Toronto Israeli Consulate for eight years now. They are organising the sixth Anti-Apartheid Week to be held soon on more than 25 university campuses across the country, and demonstrations and fundraising events on behalf of Palestinians are held regularly. IJAZ has launched a campaign “Divest from Israel: Support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel”, which includes stickering Israeli products in stores, requesting stores to de-shelve Israeli products, targetting businesses, organisations or government officials that support Israel, “organise a public tachlit service, a ritual that symbolises the casting away of our misdeeds, to spiritually divest from Zionist narratives and mythology and to atone for the ways that we have fallen short in countering them.”

Allen’s support for Canada Park, implicitly condoning Israel’s ruthless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, has landed him in hot water. He had to deny any personal contribution to Canada Park, an External Affairs spokesperson insisting that he had not made a personal donation and that his name had been included as a benefactor when his parents gave their contribution. Uri Davis, an Israeli scholar and human rights activist who has co-authored a book on the JNF calls Canada Park “a crime against humanity that has been financed by and implicates not only the Canadian government but every taxpayer in Canada.” Canada Park is particularly sensitive for Israel because it lies outside the country’s internationally-recognised borders. The Palestinian inhabitants’ expulsion, Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Remembering), said, was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing of villagers who put up no resistance.”We have photographs of the Israeli army carrying out the expulsions,” he tells tourists, holding up a series of laminated cards. According to Zochrot, 86 Palestinian villages lie buried underneath JNF parks. Zochrot activists regularly select a destroyed village, taking Palestinian refugees with them as they place a handmade sign detailing the village’s name in Arabic and Hebrew. Within days, the signs are removed. Bronstein said he believes signs erected by official bodies may have a greater impact in opening Israeli minds. “In a recent newspaper interview, a senior JNF official admitted that it would be hard to stop our campaign,” he said. “Slowly we believe Israelis can be made to appreciate that their state exists at the expense of another people. Only then are Israelis likely to be ready to think about making peace.”

With Zochrot’s efforts in mind, Uri Davis joined in an application to the Canadian tax authorities to overturn the JNF’s charitable status and said attempts to rename Canada Park “Ayalon Park” over the past decade suggested that the Canadian authorities were already concerned about the prospect of the country’s involvement in the park coming under scrutiny. In April, before the ROM exhibition opened, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and executives at the ROM were sent letters of protest from senior officials of the Palestinian Authority, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas, declaring that the scrolls were in fact illegally seized by Israel following its occupation and annexation of the West Bank in 1967 and calling for their repatriation. The ROM exhibition inspired a campaign of protest led by the CJPME trying to get ROM officials to adjust the display of the artifacts to reflect the fact that the Scrolls were confiscated from East Jerusalem during Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, to use “West Bank (Israeli-occupied)” and East and West Jerusalem with 1948 Armistice borders on maps. CJPME’s Thomas Woodley said, “We would like there to be a balanced narrative. The ROM is presenting the scrolls entirely from the Israeli perspective. There’s no discussion about what happened between their discovery and their exhibition today.”

ROM met with CJPME members and initially agreed to make changes and even distribute an additional leaflet to be inserted into the museum’s brochure. Friday pickets were held throughout the summer to inform the public about the theft of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, a visit by Al-Ahram Weekly to the exhibition revealed that no such changes were made, and the history of their discovery in Jordan and seizure in 1967 was finessed. ROM’s PR spokesperson Marilynn Friedman declined to answer questions about why ROM reneged on promises to accommodate CJPME’s concerns.Woodley said ROM director Thorsell was receptive, and assumes that the IAA vetoed any changes that would detract from the Zionist narrative. Tens of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are being respectfully shepherded through subterranean, darkened halls, and left with the impression that the ancient “Israelis” inhabited the kingdom of “Judea”, that their “descendants” heroically prevented the “pillaging of the Scrolls by Bedouin” and are the rightful owners. The mythical kingdoms of 10th-3rd century BC Palestine — for which there is no conclusive evidence — are carefully delineated and explained in commentaries as if they are actual history. A dazzling success story for the most part for Gissin’s “Brand Israel”.

The dust-up, however, continues to provide a platform for activists to educate Canadians and empowers demonstrators at the nearby Israeli consulate. It has provided a 6-month platform for re-rebranding Israel as the centre of 21st-century apartheid. And no amount of slick PR can undo the fact that merely by continuing to exist, despite all odds, Palestinians endure as testimony to the injustice of “The Israel Project” in all its manifestations. Palestinians only have survival itself as proof of the crimes committed against them, choosing to maintain traditional dress, religious faith (both Christian and Islamic), and the historical memory of the Nakba as their most meaningful and durable expressions of resistance. Though former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir notoriously declared that “there is no such thing as Palestinians,” Palestinian academic Edward Said more accurately explained that, “In the case of a political identity that’s being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration.” The battle being waged over the Scrolls is not so much about any particular ethnic, religious, or even cultural-based claim, but more importantly a means of opposing Zionist colonial discourse.

Finally, TIFF’s cozying up to the Israeli propaganda machine blew up into a global scandal, as a spontaneous movement of protest among a few filmmakers turned into an international incident, bringing 1,500 signatures from prominent Israeli public figures and the likes of Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Guy Maddin, Walter Bernstein, and Harry Belafonte to the now historic “Toronto Declaration”. Leading Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, the catalyst for the declaration, refused to screen his latest film Covered in protest. Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla withdrew his feature film debut Heliopolis, as did Ahmed Maher (The Traveller). The protesters were denounced in the mainstream media, called “opportunists, hypocrites, fascists, censors, storm- troopers, apartheid-supporters, intolerant totalitarians, a mob of homophobic anti-Semitic terrorist regime supporters” acting “effectively [as] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s local fifth column” by Canadian film producer Robert Lantos. Yet the protest overshadowed the festival itself and was a godsend for educating the wider public, which could not help but hear about the unprecedented protest, despite mainstream media indifference or hostility. Greyson condemned the opportunism of TIFF for its complicity with the Israeli consulate’s “Brand Israel” campaign. “I’m reminded of last year, when the opening night party for Passchendaele featured real soldiers posing on a Canadian Armed Forces tank. Many of us were disturbed by this uncritical collaboration with the Canadian army, currently fighting in Afghanistan. So I have to ask: who is politicising TIFF? Why hasn’t TIFF explicitly explained and repudiated the perceived Brand Israel connection, beyond vague disavowals? What’s the extent of Israeli sponsorship, beyond airfare, receptions, and the Mayor’s presence? Why an exclusive programme of Israeli state-sponsored features, when shorts could have provided critical alternative voices?”

Opponents of Greyson wrote to York University, demanding that he be investigated, fired, even deported. In a delightful irony, the popular 2nd Toronto Palestinian Film Festival opened just a few weeks after TIFF closed. “It feels like the days of the first anti-apartheid struggle back in the 1970s,” enthused one activist. BDS is already a buzzword among politically-aware Canadians. Of course, there was much momentum back then from the successful anti-Vietnam War movement, the Zionist control of mainstream was less stifling, and there was much stronger political awareness in those Cold War years. But the anti-apartheid movement eventually brought everyone on board, even the notorious Margaret Thatcher, who seeing the writing on the wall, joined in. This anti-apartheid struggle phase two is picking up steam, even among Israel’s best friends. In presenting the Toronto Declaration, Greyson explained that he had just returned from South Africa, where he visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, dedicated to the memory of the 1976 Soweto massacre, where over 500 school children and anti-apartheid activists were killed by security forces. Among other things, the museum documents how this event became a turning point for the world, “a line in the sand, a moment when we ostriches finally woke up and expressed our outrage against South Africa’s apartheid regime. During my visit to the museum, the 2008 words of former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni echoed in my head: ‘Israel practices a brutal form of apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.’” Greyson was overwhelmed by the outpouring of protest at TIFF and predicted that “Gaza represents a similar turning point to Soweto, a similar line in the sand. A moment when it’s imperative to speak out against the outrages of the Occupation.”

The process of globalization was the result of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ conditions and class coalitions embedded in the social structure of both the imperial and ‘recipient’ or targeted countries. The expansion of capital was neither a linear process or continual expansion (accumulation) nor of sustained collaboration by the targeted countries. Crises in the imperial centers and regime transformations in collaborator regimes affected the flow of capital, trade, rules and regulations.

One of the unintended consequences of the ascendancy of global ruling classes was the rise of large scale and tumultuous social movements, especially in Latin America, which challenged the rulers, ideology and institutions sustaining the global empire.

The relations between imperial globalization and social movements are complex, changing and subject to reversals or advances. This study, with its focus on Latin America, addresses several hypotheses exploring the relation of globalization and social movement over a thirty-five year period: from the onset of the free market doctrine which is the motor force of globalization (1975) to the present 2010. This time frame provides us with a sufficient period to observe the long term operations of global capital and the historical trajectories of social movements. By including Latin America as a whole, we incorporate an entire continent and lessen the possibility of idiosyncratic developments specific to a single country.

Our inquiry is guided by a specific set of hypothesis that will be tested through a historical analysis of global economic tendencies and the trajectory of social movements. We will proceed by providing a brief overview of the dynamics of globalization and the growth of social movements in Latin America and then proceed to specify our key hypothesis regarding the relationships between globalization and social movements.

Globalization: Class, State and Economy

The onset of a new and dynamic phase of imperial capital expansion, which we will call globalization, owes a great deal to the favorable political outcome of the capital – labor struggle on a world scale. The defeat and retreat of the working class in the West, particularly in the US and England, and the self-destruction of the Communist regimes of the East laid the groundwork for an aggressive global crusade against leftwing regimes and movements in the Third World, especially in Latin America. The ‘rollback’ of the working class movements was particularly vicious and successful in Latin America, where the major part of the continent experienced the onset of military dictatorship, which dismantled the national constraints on capitalist flows and trade tariffs.

Within this new global framework of imperial empire builders and authoritarian collaborator regimes, several factors enhanced global economic expansion.

   1. Technological innovations, especially information technologies accelerated the flows of capital and commodities.
   2. Large scale accumulation of capital in the imperial states, a relative decline in rates of profits and the growing role of finance capital spurred the drive for overseas investments, speculation and buyouts of privatized firms.
   3. Intensified competition between the US-EU-Asia drove MNC to seek advantages by securing banks, resources; market shares within Latin America.
   4. The rise of pro-western rightist dictatorships provided exceptionally favorable socio-economic conditions for buyouts and acquisitions of local enterprises and resources, extraordinary returns on financial speculation and minimum opposition from repressed trade unions and nationalist and leftist parties.

As a consequence of these structural changes, free-market doctrines and neo-liberal policies were put in practice resulting in bilateral free trade agreements (NAFTA),and deregulation of the economies. The growth of speculative activity took root and prospered, at the same time that social safety nets was dismantled.

After over two decades of highly polarized development and mediocre growth the neo-liberal economies stagnated and went into crises: commodity prices fell, the financial bubbles burst, large scale banking swindles impoverished middle class depositors, investors were defrauded, leading to a virtual economic collapse and mass unemployment. By the beginning years of the new millennium, Latin America faced a systemic crisis in which neo-liberal regimes were overthrown, social movements were in ascent and economic bankruptcies were multiplying. Center-left parties and coalitions were elected and moved to implement ameliorative measures which lessened the impact of the crises. Stimulus packages were passed to revive the economies. The vertical rise of agro-mineral prices in world market facilitated economic recovery which lasted till the onset of the world recession of 2008.

Social Movements

Growing out of the polarized growth, intensified exploitation of labor and displacement of peasants and farm workers, endemic to free market policies, social unrest spread in rural areas, especially among the landless rural workers, peasants and Indian communities. A new generation of militant leaders emerged, with a capacity to link local grievances to national and international structural policies. By the early 1990s mass movements took hold and launched a series of mass campaigns and mobilizations which spread to the cities and engaged the growing mass of unemployed urban workers, public sector employees and impoverished downwardly mobile middle class business people and professionals.

The crises precipitated large scale uprisings led by the new social movements, demanding systemic changes but settling for the election of center-left regimes. The first decade of the 21st century witnesses the ebb and flow of movement activity eventually settling into varying niches in the new order presided over by the center-left regimes.

Key Hypothesis

The expansion of ‘globalization’ or the imperial centered development model was accompanied by the growth of mass social movements. This raises the fundamental question of the relationship between the two processes. We set out several hypotheses to explore the relationship.

   1. The greater the deregulations of the economy leads to the acceleration of globalization and spurs the growth of the social movements.
   2. The crises and breakdown of deregulated globalization leads to a greater role and radicalism of the social movements up to and including social upheavals overthrowing incumbent regimes.
   3. The stronger the regulatory regime controlling the globalizing process the lesser the impact of the crises, the more moderate the activities of the social movements and the less likely a popular rebellion.
   4. The weaker the social safety net in time of crises the bigger the social movements and the more radical their demands. Conversely, the stronger the social safety net in time of crises the slower the growth of the social movements and the more reformist their demands.
   5. Depressed world commodity prices are more likely to engender radical social movements than periods of buoyant prices.

By combining our four principle variables into a single hypothesis on the relation of globalization and social movements, we come up with the following two propositions.

The optimal conditions for radical mass social movements occur when an economy is highly deregulated, in times of financial crises and productive recession, when commodity prices are depressed in the context of a weak social safety net.

Conversely, radical mass social movements are less likely to emerge under a highly regulated economy with a strong social safety net when world commodity prices are rising and the economy is buoyant.

Testing the Hypothesis: Latin America 1980-2010

Between 1980-1990, Latin America experienced a period of moderate growth and stable world prices for its commodities. This was a period of major dismantling of state regulations of the economy and weakening of the social safety net. Yet there were not major social uprisings nor mass social movements, except in Chile between 1985-1986, which ended with a US backed political pact between the Pinochet dictatorships and the Socialist-Christian Democratic parties and their subsequent ascent to government in 1990.

During the first half of the 1990’s world commodity prices declined to historic lows, the social safety net continued to deteriorate; capitalist profits soared in an orgy of privatizations and foreign takeovers, while overall growth stagnated. Social movements grew, mass mobilization, extended from the countryside to the cities but few popular rebellions occurred.

The period between the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s (roughly 1999-2003) experienced a major socio-economic and political crisis, including economic and financial crises in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay. After over twenty years of free market policies accompanying the globalization process, the social safety net was in tatters. Commodity prices remained low and financial deregulation deepened the vulnerability of the economies to the US recession.

Between 2000-2005, neo-liberal regimes were overthrown or replaced in Argentina (3 regimes in 2 weeks) 2001-2002, Bolivia (2003, 2005) Ecuador (2000, 2005), Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela (coup regime 2002 lasted 48 hours). Social movements grew precipitously throughout the region and their demands radicalized, including fundamental structural changes. The Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) led massive land occupation movements throughout the country. Worker, peasant, Indian uprisings in Bolivia ousted two incumbent electoral regimes. In Ecuador, Indian-urban movements in coalitions overthrew an incumbent neo-liberal regime in 2000 and a broad based urban citizens movement ousted a corrupt neo-liberal regime in 2005. In Argentina, a popular rebellion led by unemployed workers impoverished middle class neighborhood organizations ousted neo-liberal presidents and dominated politics throughout 2001-2003. In Venezuela a mass popular mobilization with military allies ousted the US backed business – military junta of April 2002 and restored President Chavez to power.

The period between 2003-2008 witnessed a sharp rise in commodity prices to record levels; the ascent of center-left regimes was accompanied by capital controls and the partial restoration of the social safety net, rapid economic recovery and relatively high growth. Social movements receded, their demands focused on immediate reforms, mobilizations were more infrequent and some of their key leaders were co-opted.

The period between 2008-2010 witnessed a sharp decline of growth, reflecting the impact of the world recession and the decline of commodity prices. While most countries entered a recession, the financial system did not experience a collapse comparable to the earlier period (2000-2002), in part because of the capital controls in place since the earlier part of the decade. While unemployment grew and poverty levels increased, the improved social net ameliorated the impact of the recession. The social movements increased their activity and experienced mild growth but with few if any direct challenges to state power, at least during the first two years of an ongoing crises.

Conclusion

Our historical survey demonstrates that single factors such as implantation of neo-liberal changes and deepening globalization in and of themselves do not lead to the growth of massive, radical social movements: witness the period of 1980-1990. Nor do low commodity prices a weak social safety net and declining state revenues provoke popular uprisings and radical mass social movements. Likewise an economic crises, such as the recession of 2008-2010 has not led to a resurgence of mass radical social movements and popular rebellions.

Only when a combination of internal factors, such as a weak social safety net and a deregulated economy and an external crises such as a global recession and declining world commodity prices do we have optional conditions for the growth of dynamic mass radical social movements.

Writers who focus or start from a ‘world system’ or other ‘globalist’ perspectives’ in attempting to address the rise of social movements as a function of the ‘operations’ of the market fail to take account of the internal political and social struggles and the resultant state social polices as determining factors.

We should note that social movement rebellions do not suddenly occur because all of the contingencies are in place. The social upheavals at the end of the nineties and early half years of the new millennium had a decade of gestation: organizing, accumulating social forces, creating alliances with institutional dissidents – like radical church people – and developing leaders and cadres. Economic crises, at best, were “trigger” events which severely discredited the ruling class, undermined the dominant ‘globalization’ ideology, and allowed the movements to make a qualitative leap from protest to political rebellion and regime change.

Finally though, it is not central to this paper, we should note that while social movements at their height were able to oust incumbent neo-liberal regimes, they were not able to take political power and revolutionize society: to their upheavals allowed center-left politicians to come to power. Ironically, once in power they passed sufficient social economic reforms to fend off the re-radicalization of the movements when the world economic crises struck again at the end of the first decade of this century.

We were students, teachers, activists, and community members. We were Muslims, Jews, Christians, Palestinians, and allies. We were many, many more than the war criminal and his Mossad protectors. And we were powerful, more powerful than his security checkpoints and his electronically amplified lies. We strapped red tape to our bodies and stashed fake-bloodied clothes in our packs. Those of us who had the required documents, who had student IDs from New Orleans’ universities, passed through the checkpoints while our barred friends and allies gathered outside, armed with truths painted on posterboard and voices amplified by our growing numbers. With less than two weeks’ notice, we had formed a broad coalition that planned a multi-phased action to reclaim the same campus that is home to TIPAC (the Tulane-Israel Public Affairs Committee), that hosted Ann Coulter for “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” in 2007, and that was now inviting Ehud Olmert for a brief respite during his flight from international and Israeli courts. As Tulane University constructed a safe-haven and solicited interviews and meetings on behalf of its delinquent guest, dozens of our neighbors began to organize. And scores more responded to the call for action.

Tulane has long been an unwelcoming environment to our broader community, as well as to Muslim and Arab students. The culture of the white Northeastern American upper class dominates the campus, creating a space that vehemently reinforces a racist and elitist status quo and virulently quells dissent. Olmert’s strategists and local friends had chosen the city’s most Zionist and “secure” nonreligious institution for his visit, and many activists questioned the wisdom of challenging a hostile student body and a sometimes even more hostile private police force. Tulane voices have been almost entirely absent in a great many community dialogues and meetings about Palestine solidarity work, and the prospect of initiating a campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions on Tulane’s campus has always seemed laughable. But New Orleans is a city where so many feel linked to the Palestinian struggle through shared themes like the experience of diaspora, the right of return, and near-daily racist violence and oppression by police and military authorities. There is no space in our city where Israeli war criminals will not be challenged.

Tulane was as hostile an environment as we expected. Hundreds of Tulane students showed up to hear Olmert speak, and many laughed and applauded when he made jokes about the comments of overwhelmed Palestinians who threw up their hands in exasperation at his lies and walked out of the building. Many of our own group were only kept silent by the red tape we’d hidden on our bodies and then used to cover our mouths when Olmert first walked onto the stage. Scrawled on the tape were words that enumerated some of Olmert’s administration’s crimes, such as “human shields,” “illegal settlements,” “white phosphorous,” and “occupation.” We breathed deep and sat through an onslaught of racist lies about our Palestinian friends and family, until Olmert began to talk about the mistake Israel had made in “withdrawing” from Gaza. Then, one by one, our jaws aching from biting down on our testimonials of what we have seen with our own eyes and what our families and friends continue to suffer, we rose from our seats throughout the auditorium, slowly made our way to the aisle, and walked out.

Olmert’s audience, which for a moment became our own, gasped and whispered as more than twenty people stood, staring daggers at Olmert and his Mossad agents speaking into their sleeves, and then trailed down the aisles to the auditorium’s exit. Some of us cried, others shook with rage, but we all celebrated our action, small but fluid, and impenetrable by Olmert’s snide remarks and Mossad’s hidden weapons.

As we left the auditorium we heard the chants of our friends, and breathed freely for what felt like the first time in over an hour. The hostility had been palpable inside the auditorium, but our friends cried out to us and embraced us, and their numbers had easily tripled since we’d last seen them. They’d been shouting for two hours now, competing with calls of “Heil Hitler” and “Palestinians are Nazis” from students passing by. A Muslim woman in hijab had been hit with plates of food thrown from an adjacent third floor balcony while campus police looked on. Within twenty minutes we’d set up the next phase of our action: Four people dressed in bloodied clothes laid down on the ground in front of the auditorium, and we placed cardboard grave markers with the numbers of massacred Palestinians and Lebanese around them. As students began to flow out of the auditorium, we handed out fliers detailing Olmert’s war crimes and tried to prevent passers by from spitting on our friends on the ground. We were mostly successful, and managed to keep a student from urinating on one of the participants.

We were not at all surprised by the hostility we faced, but we were surprised by the positive responses of far more Tulane students than we expected. Members of Tulane Amnesty International, Tulane American Socialist Students United, and individual undergraduate and graduate students printed fliers, spread the word, and were an unmistakable presence in every phase of the actions. A day that we had dreaded and actions we had hated having to plan had resulted in a broadening of our local Palestine solidarity network into a community we had dismissed for too long. Our new friends and allies at Tulane know first-hand how much they are up against in an institution that is between one-quarter and one-third Jewish and regularly equates Zionism with Judaism, but they are aching to take up the challenge. They are Muslims, Palestinians, Jews, and allies. They are freshman, upperclassmen, and graduate students. On October 13th, they joined students from the General Union of Palestine Students and Amnesty International of University of New Orleans, as well as students from Loyola University, in standing up to hundreds of aggressive classmates, taping their mouths shut to announce their presence and their intentions. Suddenly the challenges we face in our local solidarity work seem more surmountable. The despicable war criminal inadvertently gave one gift to New Orleans during his visit: He gave the beginnings of Tulane’s Palestine solidarity movement an unforgettable debut.

The Obama Administration objected to the move by Israel that discriminates against American citizens of Palestinian origin. However, there has been no protest from Ottawa even though Time magazine and the Israeli daily Haaretz ran lengthy articles focusing on a Palestinian Canadian businessmen harmed by this new policy. A few weeks ago the Globe and Mail reported that “Although some of the most high-profile cases of individuals being turned away involve Canadian citizens, the Harper government has, so far, made no protest.”

This silence bolsters claims by some commentators that under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, Canada has become (at least diplomatically) the most pro-Israel country in the world. Israeli officials concur. After meeting Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, four other Conservative ministers and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in July 2009, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has openly called for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, commented:

“It’s hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days. Members both of the coalition and the opposition are loyal friends to us, both with regard to their worldview and their estimation of the situation in everything related to the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Somalia. No other country in the world has demonstrated such full understanding of us.”

Two days after Harper won a minority government in January 2006, Hamas won Canadian-monitored and facilitated legislative elections. Quickly after assuming power Harper made Canada the first country (after Israel) to cut its assistance to the Palestinian Authority. The aid cutoff, which was designed to sow division within Palestinian society, had devastating social effects.

Ostensibly, the aid cutoff was due to Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel. Yet, Canada has not severed relations with Likud-led Israeli governments, which do not recognize the Palestinians’ right to a state. Harper explained, “Future assistance to any new Palestinian government will be reviewed against that government’s commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations.” But support for Israel was never made contingent on “nonviolence” or an end to settlement construction.

In March 2007, Palestinian political factions representing more than 90 percent of the Palestinian Legislative Council established a unity government. Still, the Conservatives shunned the new government all the while claiming to speak regularly (like the Israelis) with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. When the unity government’s Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti traveled to Ottawa on a global peace tour, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay refused to meet him. Barghouti, who represents a secular party, explained at the time, “I think the Canadian government is the only government that is taking such a position, except for Israel.” Barghouti had already met the foreign ministers of Sweden and Norway, the Secretary-general of the United Nations and then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

However, once Hamas officials were ousted from the Palestinian Authority (PA), Ottawa restarted diplomatic relations and financial support. “The Government of Canada welcomes the leadership of President Abbas and Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad in establishing a government that Canada and the rest of the international community can work with,” explained MacKay after the unity government’s collapse in mid-2007 and the appointment of a new government in Ramallah. “In light of the new Palestinian government’s commitment to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, and in recognition of the opportunity for a renewal of peace efforts, Canada will provide assistance to the new Palestinian government.”

With Palestinian society divided and a more compliant authority in control of the West Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency contributed $8 million “in direct support to the new government.” Part of this aid was directed towards creating a Palestinian police force “to ensure that the PA maintains control of the West Bank against Hamas,” as Canadian ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was quoted by the Canadian Jewish News. US Lt. General Keith Dayton, in charge of organizing the Palestinian force, never admitted that he was strengthening Fatah against Hamas but to justify his program Dayton argued that Iran and Syria funded and armed Hamas. Bolstering Fatah to counteract the growing strength of Hamas was the impetus for Dayton’s mission. However, the broader aim is to build a force to patrol Israel’s occupation, a fact Dayton does little to dispel.

In January 2007, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay offered an immediate $1.2 million for Dayton’s mission. A fifth of Dayton’s initial staff was comprised of Canadians, and during a press conference with MacKay in Jerusalem Condoleezza Rice said Dayton “has a Canadian counterpart with whom he works very closely.” Two years later, Dayton’s military training force in the West Bank reportedly included nine Canadians, 16 Americans, three Brits and one Turk.

In June 2008, a Harper government press release announced, “Canada is a strong supporter of Palestinian security system reform, particularly through our contribution to the mission of Lt. General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator, and to the European Union Police Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support.”

Canada’s contribution to the Dayton mission was part of a $300 million “aid” package that began in December 2007. According to the government agency Public Safety Canada, “a significant component [of the $300 million will be] devoted to security, including policing and public order capacity-building. This five year commitment will go towards the creation of a democratic, accountable, and viable Palestinian state that lives in peace and security alongside Israel.”

But does anything close to a “viable Palestinian state” exist? Is Israel allowing it to be created? Growing Jewish-only settlements, Israeli bypass roads and the apartheid barrier all make a Palestinian state far from realistic in the short to medium term. Yet Canadian officials act as if Israel is working toward a Palestinian state.

In Gaza, Israel’s occupation has turned into a blockade. For 27 months, Israel has reduced food and medicine from entering the tiny coastal territory to a fraction of what is needed by the besieged population. Yet, the Harper government has refused any criticism of the siege. Canada was the only country at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to vote against a January 2008 resolution that called for “urgent international action to put an immediate end to Israel’s siege of Gaza.” It was adopted by 30 votes with 15 abstentions.

Instead, the Conservative government has been quick to congratulate Israel for any small pause in its blockade. In January 2009 International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda proclaimed that “We commend Israel’s decision to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance [to Gaza] through a temporary ceasefire.” A day after Oda’s announcement, Israeli forces fired on a UN convoy during a ceasefire, killing a Palestinian aid worker. There was no follow-up statement from Oda condemning Israel’s actions.

Compared to Ottawa’s cheerleading, most of the world was hostile to Israel’s attacks on Gaza last winter. In solidarity with Gaza, Venezuela expelled Israel’s ambassador at the start of the bombardment and then broke off all diplomatic relations two weeks later. Israel didn’t need to worry since Ottawa was prepared to help out. “Israel’s interests in Caracas will now be represented by the Canadian Embassy,” explained the Jerusalem Post (Ottawa had been “doing this for Israel in Cuba” since 1973). In August 2009, the Canadian embassy in Caracas also began providing visas to Venezuelans traveling to Israel.

For defining Canadian policy as “we support Israel no matter what it does,” B’Nai Brith International bestowed Harper with its Presidential Gold Medallion for Humanitarianism. The first ever Canadian to receive the award, Harper joined former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, and US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman. For its part, the Canadian Jewish Congress gave Harper its “prestigious Saul Hayes Human Rights award, named for a former CJC executive director, the first time it’s been given to a sitting PM.”

Despite the government’s strident support for Israel, grassroots opposition to that country’s policy has never been greater. Recent protests against the Toronto International Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv were a major setback to Israeli public relations efforts. The festival embarrassment followed massive demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza, when many cities across the country witnessed their largest ever Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.

Alongside displays of opposition to specific Israeli policy, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is growing. Many social groups such as Independent Jewish Voices and Quebec’s most active student Federation, ASSE, have joined the BDS movement, as have a number of unions, including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario), the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the teachers Federation in Quebec. Social movements in Canada have never been more critical of Israel.

Take the case of Elliot Madison. The 41-year-old anarchist was arrested in Pittsburgh September 24 at the height of G20 protests.

Madison, a social worker and volunteer with The People’s Law Collective in New York City, was busted by a combined task force led by the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and Pittsburgh’s “finest.” The activist was charged with “hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime,” according to The New York Times.

Did the cops uncover a secret anarchist weapons’ cache? Were Madison and codefendant, Michael Wallschlaeger, a producer with the radio talk show “This Week in Radical History” for the A-Infos Radio Project, about to detonate a “weapon of mass destruction” during last month’s capitalist conclave that witnessed the obscene spectacle of our masters avidly conspiring to impoverish billions of the planet’s inhabitants?

Hardly! In fact, Madison and Wallschlaeger’s “crime” was to set up a communications center in a hotel room that alerted demonstrators to movements by the police, who after all, had viciously attacked protesters–and anyone else nearby–with heavy batons, tear gas and a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a so-called “non-lethal” weapon.

Kitted-out with police scanners, computers and cell phones, the intrepid activists used a Twitter account to assist protesters eager to elude a thrashing by some 5,000 heavily armed camo-clad cops who had sealed-off downtown Pittsburgh to keep the area safe–from the First Amendment.

National Lawyers Guild on-scene legal observers reported an “unwarranted display and use of force by police in residential neighborhoods, often far from any protest activity.” According to the civil liberties’ watchdog group:

Police deployed chemical irritants, including CS gas, and long-range acoustic devices (LRAD) in residential neighborhoods on narrow streets where families and small children were exposed. Scores of riot police formed barricades at many intersections throughout neighborhoods miles away from the downtown area and the David Lawrence Convention Center. Outside the Courtyard Marriott in Shadyside, police deployed smoke bombs in the absence of protest activity, forcing bystanders and hotel residents to flee the area.

Later, while some protests were ending, riot-clad officers surrounded an area at the University of Pittsburgh, creating an ominous spectacle that some described as akin to Kent State. Guild legal observers witnessed police chasing and arresting many uninvolved students.

Among other questionable tactics, officers from dozens of law enforcement agencies lacked easily-identifiable badges, impeding citizens’ ability to register complaints. (National Lawyers Guild, “National Lawyers Guild Observes Improper Use of Force by Law Enforcement at the G-20,” Press Release, September 25, 2009)

The Times reported that after his arrest the FBI raided the home that Madison shared with his wife, Elena, and conducted an exhaustive 16-hour search of the premises seizing computers, books and a poster (horror of horrors!) of the old mole himself, Karl Marx.

Criminalizing the First Amendment

“Anyone can tweet, but the truth is, sometimes speech can be criminal,” John Burkoff, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

By that standard, anyone who has the temerity to question the legitimacy of a system that drives millions into poverty, wages preemptive war to secure (steal) other people’s resources, destroys the environment or uses “speech” to oppose said crimes against humanity–and cheekily urges others to do the same–is, by definition, guilty, in “new normal” America.

Witold Walczak however, the legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union told the Post-Gazette, “investigating the government and broadcasting information about it would seem to be a constitutionally protected communication.”

The ACLU director elaborated, “If the police want to communicate privately, there are certainly ways to do that, and police radios are not one of those. How can it be a crime? It’s not a secure communication.”

The good professor had another take on the matter and told the Post-Gazette, “Were they sending it to people simply to protest, or to commit further crimes?”

“Further crimes”? What crime? Oh yes, legally protesting the depredations of the capitalist system, that crime!

That such a statement can be uttered by a purported legal expert is rather rich with unintended irony. Burkhoff’s maneuver to cast the best possible light on repressive police operations is all the more absurd given the fact that none other than the Obama administration’s State Department had stepped-in and pressured Twitter to forego a service upgrade, and downtime, just scant months earlier.

But context as they say, is everything. Champions of other people’s freedom (particularly when they are geopolitical rivals), the State Department intervened and told the instant messaging service in no uncertain terms that Iranian protesters relied on Twitter to monitor police movements in Tehran and other cities as protests over disputed elections took center stage in the Islamic Republic.

The New York Times reported back in June that the U.S. State Department “e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.”

According to Reuters, “Confirmation that the U.S. government had contacted Twitter came as the Obama administration sought to avoid suggestions it was meddling in Iran’s internal affairs as the Islamic Republic battled to control deadly street protests over the election result.”

Twitter said in a blog post it had delayed the firm’s planned upgrade because of its role as an “important communication tool in Iran.”

A day earlier, President Obama had said he believed “people’s voices should be heard and not suppressed”–in Iran.

Message to the American people: Official enemy: Twitter good! Official friend (grifting multinational corporations and the criminals who do their bidding in Washington): Twitter bad! How’s that for an imaginative interpretation of the “new media paradigm”!

“Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not”

Echoing the execrable logic of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, America’s premier political police force, the FBI, executed a search warrant on Madison that authorized agents to look “for violations of federal rioting laws,” according to the Times.

Madison’s attorney, Martin Stolar, told the Times that “he and a friend were part of a communications network among people protesting the G-20.” Denouncing the raid, Stolar averred that “there’s absolutely nothing that he’s done that should subject him to any criminal liability.”

On October 2, Stolar argued in Federal District Court in Brooklyn “that the warrant was vague and overly broad. Judge Dora L. Irizarry ordered the authorities to stop examining the seized materials until Oct. 16, pending further orders,” the Times reported.

This is not the first time however, that the secret state has sought to curtail text messaging by activists during large-scale demonstrations.

In 2008, as a result of the heavy repression of legal protests–and subsequent lawsuits by victims–during the far-right Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004, lawyers representing N.Y.’s “finest” demanded that M.I.T. graduate student Tad Hirsch and the Institute of Applied Autonomy, the inventors of TXTmob, turn over all “text messages sent via TXTmob during the convention, the date and time of the messages, information about people who sent and received messages, and lists of people who used the service,” The New York Times reported last year.

The FBI however, already possess the technological ability to hack into Wi-fi and computer networks as Wired revealed in April, citing internal Bureau documents released to the magazine under a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to a follow-up story by the publication, the Bureau’s Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit, CEAU, has deployed software called a computer and internet protocol address verifier, or CIPAV, that is “designed to infiltrate a target’s computer and gather a wide range of information, which it secretly sends to an FBI server in eastern Virginia.”

Antifascist Calling reported in 2008, that when a whistleblower, security consultant Babak Pasdar, stepped forward and blew the lid off the Bureau’s massive telecommunications’ surveillance network, the agency’s so-called “Quantico circuit” in Virginia, he revealed that major wireless providers, including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, had handed the state “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless networks, including billing records and customer data “transmitted wirelessly.”

According to Pasdar’s sworn affidavit, Verizon provided the FBI with with real-time access to who is speaking to whom, the time and duration of each call as well as the locations of those so targeted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the San Francisco-based civil liberties’ watchdog group, has posted Madison’s motion and his attorney’s supporting declaration on their web site. It makes for very interesting reading indeed! According to the search warrant obtained by FBI Special Agent Edward J. Heslin from the U.S. District Court, the FBI were allowed to seize:

Computers, hard-drives, floppy discs and other media used to store computer-accessible information, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, electronic storage devices and related peripherals, black masks and clothing, maps, correspondence and other documents, financial records, notes, ledgers, receipts, papers, photographs, telephone and address books, identification documents, indicia of residency and other documents and records that constitute evidence of the commission of rioting crimes or that are designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws, including any of the above items that are maintained within other closed or locked containers, including safes and other containers that may be further secured by key locks (or combination locks) of various kinds. (Honorable Viktor V. Pohorelsky, Magistrate Judge to FBI Special Agent Edward J. Heslin, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, Search Warrant, Case Number M-09-962, September 26, 2009)

Madison’s attorney, Martin Stolar averred that “a number of documents and other properties” seized by the FBI have “nothing to do with the governments investigation into what the search warrant characterizes as violations of ‘federal rioting laws’.”

According to Stolar “the seized items include political writings, notes, political associates and ideas, materials protected by the attorney-client and social work privileges, as well as property belonging to other persons residing in the premises which have no connection to any pending or contemplated criminal investigation.” Stolar declared that “the illegality of the search is in the overbreadth of the seizures and the vagueness of the term ‘federal rioting laws’.”

In other words, driftnet surveillance of American citizens is the norm for our secret state minders; an unambiguous sign of America’s slide into an extra-constitutional police state.

Fusion Centers: Leading the Charge

While Madison and Wallschlaeger’s arrest came as a result of actions undertaken by the Pennsylvania State Police, one cannot rule out that (a) informants had tipped off the cops to the pair’s activities, (b) CEAU had penetrated protest organizer’s computer net and therefore, were well aware of what the duo were up to, or (c) through some combination of the above, the FBI and presumably, their local fusion center allies, alerted PSP who then conducted the raid and shut the anarchist’s communications center down.

Federal Computer Week noted September 30, that the Department of Homeland Security “is establishing a new office to coordinate its intelligence-sharing efforts in state and local intelligence fusion centers,” and that the secret state’s new “Joint Fusion Center Program Management Office will be part of DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis.”

Among other things, the publication revealed that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said the new office will:

• Develop ways to assess threats and trends by gathering, analyzing and sharing local and national information and intelligence through fusion centers.

• Coordinate with state, local and tribal law enforcement leaders to ensure that DHS is providing the correct resources to fusion centers.

• Promote a sense of common mission and purpose at fusion centers through training and other support. (Ben Bain, “DHS established new office for intelligence-sharing centers,” Federal Computer Week, September 30, 2009)

Since Bushist–and now, Obama–securocrats designated fusion centers “a central node for the federal government’s efforts for sharing terrorism-related information with state and local officials,” the federal government has pumped some $327 million in taxpayer-funded largesse into these spooky “public-private partnerships.”

In Pennsylvania for example, the Criminal Intelligence Center (PaCIC), is described by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) as a “component of the Pennsylvania State Police.”

Washington Post investigative journalist Robert O’Harrow Jr., the author of No Place to Hide, revealed that “Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver’s license photos” and have “subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.”

One can only wonder whether these or other intrusive surveillance tools, including the CEAU’s CIPAV software were deployed against Madison and Wallschlaeger prior to their Pittsburgh arrest.

But gathering information on fusion centers is often an exercise in Kafkaesque futility. Investigative journalist G.W. Schulz reported that when the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) attempted to obtain information from the Colorado Information Analysis Center on that state’s fusion center, they ran into a brick wall.

CIAC spokesperson Lance Clem refused to release what should be public documents to CIR claiming that releasing the records would be “contrary to the public interest” and “not only would compromise [the] security and investigative practices of numerous law enforcement agencies but would also violate confidentiality agreements that have been made with private partner organizations and federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.”

As of this writing, it cannot be determined with any certainty what role the Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center played in repressing G20 protests. However, if past fusion center practices in Denver and St. Paul during last year’s Democratic and Republican National Conventions are any guide, their management of pre-G20 intelligence along with their federal partners, was in all probability considerable.

One lesson that can be gleaned however, from the federal witch hunt targeting activists Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger, is that dissent in post-9/11 America, as during the COINTELPRO-era of the 1960s and ’70s, has been criminalized.

Activists in the Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) of Olympia, Wash., recently exposed an infiltrator employed by the Army. His exploits are proof that the government fears a strong antiwar movement.

Since 2006, PMR has inspired antiwar forces nationally with seven major direct action disruptions of military shipments at Washington ports. Its very effectiveness is what made it a government target. So now, Olympia activists are teaching the lessons learned about movement defense to a new generation.

And that’s as it should be. Militants can assume spies are around, and must learn to build the movement despite such obstacles.

Dirty deeds

John J. Towery, alias “John Jacob,” works on the Fort Lewis Army base near Olympia in “force protection.” He claimed to be a civilian computer technician and for two years got close to several activists in Olympia PMR, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

He passed information not only to his bosses at Ft. Lewis and the national military intelligence hub in New Jersey, but also to local police, the state patrol, FBI, Homeland Security, Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE), and others.

He became an email list-serve administrator — violating the privacy of everyone on the list. He sowed dissention among activists, and tried to sabotage blockades of war equipment at the Olympia port.

Such spying is illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, but this prohibition doesn’t stop military brass from doing it anyway. In the 1970s, the Army similarly spied on the anti-Vietnam War G.I. coffeehouse movement, including Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women, which were active in it.

Patty Imani, a founder of Olympia PMR, observes that it wouldn’t have been surprising to learn the FBI was involved. “Their dirty deeds are well known.”

The FBI has repeatedly attacked antiwar, people of color, labor and left movements. They have disrupted organizations, framed or entrapped activists for crimes, and even carried out political assassinations. These outrages reached their height in the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) of the 1960s and ’70s.

History shows that one end goal of infiltration is to find — or concoct — evidence for a grand jury to wield against the movement. The grand jury meets in secret and has extraordinary investigative powers that originated with the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. A grand jury indictment is required for federal criminal charges, but juries typically act as a government rubber stamp.

Mark Cook, a former political prisoner and Black Panther, spoke to student activists in Olympia about lessons he learned in the struggle. He heard about the security leaks they were experiencing before the spy was discovered, and says he saw all the same things before he went to jail. “They monitor free speech and build a ’sociogram’ (pattern) of who people associate with.” Despite being illegal, government spying is a constant that activists should expect. Cook says, “No matter how old you are, they follow you.”

Movement self-defense

Those who worked closest with Towery unmasked him. One activist made a public records request to the city of Olympia on behalf of the IWW for any communications between Olympia police and the military, on anarchists, SDS or the IWW. He received hundreds of documents.

One email with John J. Towery’s name popped up. Not knowing him, several people researched and discovered Towery was their “friend” John Jacob.

From these revelations, Patty Imani emphasizes the importance of building Olympia PMR’s defenses. She notes that Towery avoided more seasoned activists, who grew suspicious of him due to his divisive behavior. He gained the trust of a few people in key positions.

Giving him charge of the PMR email list was not a democratic decision by the group. Imani says, “If we are truly building a movement, we need to be inclusive and have democratic decision-making structures. Then we won’t be as vulnerable.”

Imani points to self-reliance as another important defense against infiltrators. Towery persuaded some contacts that his insider status was essential to PMR. But figuring out the Army’s plans can be done other ways, such as by following the media.

Here are some other lessons this writer learned during the Vietnam G.I. coffeehouse movement: act in such a way that grand juries have no ammunition; stand up to disrupters — whether they are agents or not; know the full background of anyone who has access to mailing lists or is trusted with information gathering and transmission!

The Army is supposedly “looking into the matter,” but don’t hold your breath. Better to learn from experience, expect government interference, and build the fight for social change in spite of it.

There one of us, Max Obuszewski, spoke over the gate speaker system with barely visible guardhouse personnel in an attempt to deliver a letter to President Obama (a blown-up copy of which we also carried with us and which we had all signed) requesting to meet regarding our opposition to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Several weeks before the NCNR had sent the original of that letter to the President, but had received no response.

After a few minutes of conversation between Max and the disembodied voice from the guard shack, we got nowhere. We then did a die-in there on the sidewalk in front of the pedestrian and vehicle entrances to the White House. One by one, after we each made a brief unscripted statement about why we were there, we lay down motionless and silent for the next fifty minutes. My own statement was along the lines of I was “dying” because of concern that the US was losing its soul due to its brutal invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and its complicity in last winter’s Israeli invasion of Gaza.

From about 12:40 to 1:30 pm, we lay “dead,” but undisturbed (except for the extremely loud nearby construction machinery on Pennsylvania Ave). Police stood guard and established a yellow “crime scene” tape cordon around us. No police addressed us or ordered us to move.

For about two hours thereafter our group remained on the sidewalk along the iron fence in front of the gates and the guard shack. Our demeanor was neither raucous nor threatening; it was rather like that of folks waiting for an appointment. There was no chanting. During those two hours Max and maybe two or three others had several brief and seemingly courteous conversations with various higher-ranking police officers. The officers sought to cajole us into leaving the area.

One whom I heard speak encouraged us to leave, seeking our cooperation since, he claimed, his arrest resources were stretched thin. Although we couldn’t see them, dozens of other demonstrators were being arrested back in the postcard zone. The officer said we wouldn’t be arrested even if we stayed there all night. (Given the intense noise from the machinery it was very difficult to hear the police or Max’ report backs, or even to discuss our options.)

Outside the “crime scene” tape perimeter and standing on Pennsylvania Ave, about eight or ten of our supporters were keeping an eye on the situation. Some took photos or provided us with plastic bottles of water. At one point an officer confiscated a bottle that had been tossed to us. At times we were prevented from speaking to supporters across the crime scene tape. But at other times the incommunicado wasn’t enforced.

We could see various organized movements of groups of police and police vehicles including a couple of vans – presumably to take us to jail. For a time about a dozen bicycle police lined up in front of us across the northern perimeter of the “crime scene” by the curb on Pennsylvania Ave. preventing further communication with our supporters.

A couple of times police officers passed through us and into the White House grounds. Although we often sat or stood around both the pedestrian and vehicle gates, we didn’t impede anyone’s coming and going.

A force of maybe 20 policemen assembled on the broad sidewalk to the west of us just outside the “crime scene” tape. Some held plastic handcuffs. When it appeared that arrest was imminent, we all stood in a circle, held hands and sung two or three songs. But no arrest occurred. We resumed our informal clustering around the gates. After awhile those police left the area and were replaced by another uniformed group. These had Secret Service badges.

One of our group reported that he overheard an officer say we were about to be “pushed” out of the area. Several of our group then reclined on the sidewalk. Soon the Secret Service approached, and with no explanation or warning, began grabbing and pushing us west along the sidewalk beyond the crime scene perimeter. I was both grabbed and pushed. If I hadn’t been nimble, I would have had to trample those reclining on the pavement.

Some of those on the ground were dragged away. I heard a small older woman who was being manhandled tell the officer that she had a bad leg. Nonetheless he continued pushing her. A few minutes later I saw that she was wearing an Ace bandage around her knee. While a few of our group didn’t get to their feet, none of us physically resisted or defended ourselves in the face of this unprovoked assault.

Reflections

I would urge that the October 5 Action legal team vigorously pursue a formal complaint. Over the years I have been arrested various times for nonviolent anti-war protests in the White House postcard zone. Yet I have never encountered police violence there. This Secret Service violence is a menacing precedent – one that best be nipped in the bud.

The Secret Service needs to learn it can’t impair or endanger U.S. citizens exercising our Constitutional right of assembly and our right to petition the government regarding grievances. At no time did I hear an order – whether from the city police, the park police or the Secret Service — to leave the vicinity. The Secret Service gave us no warning before they began their assault. I don’t recall hearing them say anything before they got physical.

The Secret Service might claim we were resisting arrest or that we were ignoring a lawful order to move. But that would be false. There needs to be clearly understood, court-enforced guidelines to prevent law enforcement agencies using violence against peaceful citizens. Rogue behavior must not be tolerated. Law enforcement agencies need to learn that they above all must respect the law.

The rough stuff risked injury and fomented disorder. Fortunately for everyone involved and despite rather severe provocation, everyone in our group maintained his or her commitment to nonviolence.

The authorities seemed reluctant to arrest us: perhaps they had orders to minimize arrests so as to limit the national and international publicity regarding the extent to which U.S. citizens oppose the recurring U.S. invasions of Middle Eastern nations.

1. Prior to our affinity groups’ leaving the “postcard” zone, a dozen or so mounted police deployed themselves along the iron fence between the zone and the White House grounds. Entering from the west they herded demonstrators away from the fence and toward Pennsylvania Ave. Without provocation, and as I was conforming to their order to move, a passing mounted policeman kicked me just below my rib cage. I wasn’t injured, but I understand that if a citizen even so much as touched a DC policeman, s/he could be charged with a felony.