Perhaps not given a worse record than his fiercest critics feared, worse than George Bush, across the board on both domestic and foreign policies, including:

– failing to deliver promised change;
– being the standard bearer for the corrupted political/business elite;
– governing like a crime boss in league with Wall Street;
– disdaining democratic rights, freedoms, and the rule of law;
– betraying working Americans;
– proposing social services cuts instead of increasing them when they’re most needed;
– denying budget-strapped states vitally needed aid;
– ignoring growing poverty, hunger, homelessness and despair;
– expanding militarism, imperial wars, and state-sponsored terrorism;
– violating human rights and civil liberties; and
– providing open-ended banker bailouts, an array of pro-business measures, and the greatest ever amounts of military spending at a time America has no enemies.

Will Net Neutrality fare better? As the last frontier of press freedom, it gives consumers access to any equipment, content, application and service, free from corporate control. Public interest groups want it preserved. Giant telecom and cable companies want control to:

– establish toll roads, or premium lanes;
– charge extra for speed and free and easy access;
– control content to stifle dissent and independent thought;
– co-opt this essential public space for profit; and
– subvert digital and political democracy.

Founded in 2002, “Free Press is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to reform the media (by) promot(ing) diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, quality journalism, and universal access to communication.”

It says Net Neutrality “means no discrimination (by) prevent(ing) Internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination.”

Giant providers want it privatized to “discriminate in favor of their own search engines (while) slowing down or blocking services by their competitors. (They’re) spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress” and the FCC to defeat Net Neutrality and jeopardize the Internet’s future.

Its loss will stifle innovation, limit competition, and control, restrict or prevent free access to information. “Consumer choice and the free market would be sacrificed to the interests of a few corporations.”

The Internet will resemble cable TV with providers deciding “which channels, content and applications are available,” and at what price.

At stake is whether digital democracy or corporate control will prevail. For media scholar Bob McChesney, it’s “a defining issue (at a) critical juncture (window of opportunity) to create a communication system that will be a powerful impetus (for) a more egalitarian, humane, sustainable, and creative (self-governing) society.”

Media reform activists agree that a corporate-free and open Internet must be defended at all costs. The stakes are that high. This battle must be won, but no law mandates it, and under George Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, several proposed ones were quashed.

HR 3458: The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009

Introduced on July 31, 2009, it’s “To amend the Communications Act of 1934 to establish a national broadband policy, safeguard consumer rights, spur investment and innovation, and for related purposes.” It was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for consideration.

On October 22, 2009, Senator John McCain (with no cosponsors) introduced S. 1836: A bill to prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from further regulating the Internet.” In other words, to prohibit Net Neutrality, an idea McCain calls a “government takeover.” It was referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation for consideration.

The Center for Responsive Politics and Sunshine Foundation found that from January 2007 – June 2009, McCain was the largest recipient of telecom and industry lobbyist contributions, getting $894,379, including amounts for his presidential campaign. During the same period, 244 members of Congress got $9.4 million, second only to what the pharmaceutical and health products industry gave, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

On October 23, 2009, a Federation of American Consumers and Travelers news release announced that:

“An aide to Sen. Byron L. Dorgan said the North Dakota Democrat will reintroduce his “Preserving Internet Freedom” bill, which he last sponsored in 2007.” The bill “is intended to support and help codify new net neutrality principles announced Sept. 21 by” the FCC.

FCC to Establish New Net Neutrality Rules

On September 21, an FCC press release headlined:

“FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Outlines Actions to Preserve the Free and Open Internet… in a speech today at The Brookings Institution.”

He called the Internet “an extraordinary platform for innovation, job creation, investment, and opportunity (that has) unleashed the potential entrepreneurs and enabled the launch and growth of small businesses across America. It is vital that we safeguard the free and open Internet.” The way forward will be debated pitting consumers against powerful industry groups wanting full control and the profit potential it holds. In the end, new rules will be crafted, hopefully to fulfill Obama’s promise, but so far with no assurance.

Previously, the FCC embraced four open Internet principles giving consumers access to:

– lawful Internet content;
– applications and services of their choice;
– legal devices not harmful to the network; and
– whatever network, application, service, and content providers they wish.

Two new ones are now proposed:

– preventing providers from discriminating against content or applications, “while allowing for reasonable network management;” and
– ensuring providers are transparent about their management practices.

On October 22, Genachowski affirmed the six principles (applying to all Internet accessing platforms) in announcing a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM),” stating:

With today’s Notice, we seek public input on draft rules to preserve an open Internet – the next step in an ongoing and longstanding effort at the Commission…. In examining the issue, the Commission has provided abundant opportunities for public participation, including through public hearings and requests for written comment, which have generated over 100,000 pages of input in approximately 40,000 filings from interested companies, organizations, and individuals.

“Throughout this extensive process, one point has attracted nearly unanimous support: The Internet’s openness, and the transparency of its protocols, have been critical to its success….Because of the historically open architecture of the Internet, it has been equally accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of its protocols,” including for commerce, speech and “an immense variety of content, applications, and services that have improved the lives of Americans….The Commission has a statutory responsibility to preserve and promote advanced communications that are accessible to all Americans and that serve national purposes.”

Up to now, the “Internet Policy Statement” helped preserve Internet openness, but it’s time “to build on past efforts and to provide greater clarity regarding the Commission’s approach to these issues through a notice-and-comment rulemaking… to help address emerging challenges to the open Internet.” Comments are sought on:

– the six principles in draft language;
– the need for “reasonable network management;”
– “managed” or “specialized” services;
– how and to what extent they should apply to “non-wireline forms of Internet access, including, but not limited to, terrestrial mobile wireless, unlicensed wireless, licensed fixed wireless, and satellite;” and
– enforcement procedures to ensure compliance.

A new FCC web site, openinternet.gov, was launched to encourage public input, with no assurance the agency or Congress will heed it.

Nonetheless, Free Press policy director, Ben Scott, said:

After years of hard work, we are pleased that the FCC has begun this crucially important rulemaking on Network Neutrality. A well-crafted Net Neutrality rule can assure that the open Internet continues to serve as a great force for economic innovation and democratic participation for all Americans. (The agency is taking) an important step toward securing the open Internet and a victory for the public interest and civil rights organizations, small businesses, Internet innovators, political leaders, and millions of people who have fought to get to this point…

“We welcome a new era at the FCC in which decisions made in the public interest withstand the cynical lobby of special interests from a few big phone and cable companies,” and those in Congress who support them like John McCain and the man Free Press calls the “Congressman from Comcast,” Robert Brady (D. PA), because of his “long-standing history of supporting (its) policies” to the detriment of consumers.

Potential FCC Net Neutrality Loophole

Free Press’ Tim Karr fears it may undermine Internet freedom if not addressed and corrected, and a group of six prominent law professors agree. They include:

– Jack Balkin, Yale Law School;
– John Blevins, South Texas College of Law;
– Jim Chen, University of Louisville School of Law where he’s also Dean;
– Larry Lessig, Harvard Law School;
– Barbara van Schewick, Stanford Law School; and
– Tim Wu, Columbia Law School.

They’ve all “spent many years devoted to research on the architecture of the Internet and its related policies (and) published widely on” Net Neutrality.

On November 2, they emailed Chairman Genachowski to “flag what (they) believe are two (serious) ambiguities in the Notice that (they) hope can be addressed early to provide a clearer foundation for comments:”

“Non-Discrimination”

For nearly a century, this has been a central concept in telecommunications law and policy. Nothing should be done to subvert it, so a clear definition is essential. So far, it’s “surprisingly narrow.”

“Reasonable Network Management”

It’s a significant ambiguity because what’s not reasonable is “key to the entire rule.”

The professors “seek to understand whether, by (NPRM’s) language, the Commission seeks comments on what the standard should be, or whether (it) proposes not to have one.”

They ask why “the FCC would not want to provide some guidance on the applicable standard for reasonable network management, lest… the exception swallow the rule,” and want clarification now to prevent it. Otherwise, these ambiguities will “provide generous opportunities to try to work around the Commission’s efforts in this area.” In other words, subvert Net Neutrality, not affirm it.

To be effective, FCC rules and congressional legislation must be unambiguous and strong with clear standards in the public interest, especially regarding content.

Free Press Policy Brief on the FCC’s Proposed Net Neutrality Rule

Free Press calls the NPRM “a very important step in the right direction,” but some elements need clarification to “preclude ISP’s from preventing their customers from sending and receiving lawful content, running lawful applications, or connecting lawful devices to the network.” Also to assure them free choice among network, applications, service, and content providers.

If properly crafted, new rules will establish a legal framework to require nondiscriminatory treatment of all Internet traffic under reasonable, fair network management standards. Yet significant ambiguities may subvert final ones because of loopholes that must be avoided.

So far, it appears that the FCC “is very committed to protecting the open Internet with rules that have meaning and teeth…. This is clearly a very good start (that) lays a good foundation for a final rule that will serve as an unassailable, yet appropriately flexible, firewall to protect and preserve the open Internet.” With precise clarification, established standards “once enacted will withstand scrutiny in the courts” and be a victory for digital democracy. But not easily against powerful interests determined to subvert it, so therein lies the struggle ahead.

Disturbing Implications of The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for Net Neutrality, Consumer Privacy, and Civil Liberties

Launched on October 23, 2007, America, the EU, Switzerland and Japan began negotiating a new intellectual property enforcement treaty, ACTA. Other nations as well, including Canada, Australia, Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Singapore, and the UAE. Ostensibly for counterfeit goods protection, critics say it’s more about Internet distribution and information technology rules to subvert Net Neutrality, privacy, and personal freedoms.

Powerful interests want stronger global intellectual property rights, and are pursuing them through the:

– WTO;
– World Customs Organization (WCO, “the only intergovernmental organisation exclusively focused on Customs matters);”
– the G 8;
– the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Advisory Committee on Enforcement: WIPO is a UN agency “dedicated to developing an accessible international intellectual property system which reward creativity, stimulates innovation and contributes to economic development…;” and
– the Intellectual Property Experts’ Group’s (IPR) protection and enforcement efforts to “achiev(e Pacific region) free and open trade and investment.”

So far, few details are known, yet ACTA is being secretly fast-tracked to completion.

Concerned Americans got some information through Freedom of Information (FOA) requests. Canadians also through Canada’s Access to Information Act (AIA).

Of concern are provisions endangering consumer privacy, civil liberties, legitimate commerce, restrictions on developing nations’ rights to choose their preferred policy options, and, pivotal for this article, a free and open Internet.

The US Trade Representative’s (USTR) Fact Sheet and 2008 “Special 301″ report shows an intent to create tougher intellectual property enforcement standards than under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). If successful, they’ll override national sovereignty, be binding on ACTA members, and give them enough power to enforce global compliance.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is “a not-for-profit association registered in twenty European countries, dedicated to the development of information goods for the public benefit, based on copyright, free competition, open standards.”

In 2008, Brussels rebuffed its request for ACTA documents saying: “the documents contain negotiating directives for the negotiation of the above mentioned agreement. These negotiations are still in progress. Disclosure of this information could impede the proper conduct of the negotiation.”

In appealing the ruling, FFII accused the EU of “a gross violation of the basic democratic principles (these nations are) supposed to stand for.” In a November 10, 2008 press release, it said: “The EU Council of Ministers refuses to release secret (ACTA) documents. (This) secrecy fuels concerns that the treaty may give patent trolls the means to extort companies, undermine access to low-cost generic medicines, lead to monitoring all citizens’ Internet communications and criminalize peer-to-peer electronic file sharing.”

In May 2008, Wikileaks obtained a leaked four-page document titled, “Discussion Paper on a Possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement,” saying:

“If adopted, (ACTA) would impose a strong, top-down enforcement regime, with new cooperation requirements upon (ISPs), including perfunctionary disclosure of customer information. The proposal also bans ‘anti-circumvention’ measures which may affect online anonymity systems and would likely outlaw multi-region CD/DVD players. The proposal also specifies a plan to encourage developing nations to accept the legal regime,” with perhaps consequences for those refusing.

The document covers:

– legal measures to encourage ISPs to cooperate with right holders to remove infringing content;
– material on anti-camcording laws; and
– network-level filtering to enforce a three-strikes-and-you’re out rule. That is, consumers found three times to have infringed copyrighted content will have their Internet connections terminated.

These provisions way exceed current treaty obligations by imposing binding copyright demands requiring:

– ISPs to police copyrighted material and deter unauthorized storage and transmission of alleged infringed content;
– terminate Internet access of alleged “repeat infringers” or be liable;
– remove alleged infringed material;
– enforce digital rights management (DRM) rules relating to systems that identify, track, authorize and restrict access to digital media – to protect and enforce copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property; and
– impose global US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) rules relating to intellectual property that will impose censorship, subvert free expression, and undermine innovation.

IP Justice is “an international civil liberties organization promoting balanced intellectual property laws and free expression.” It addressed ACTA as follows:

Its “text will be ‘locked’ and other countries who are later ‘invited’ to sign-on to the pact will not be able to re-negotiate its terms… few countries will have the muscle to refuse an ‘invitation’ to join, once the rules have been set by the select few conducting the negotiations.”

Other IP Justice concerns are over:

– secret negotiations;
– an undemocratic process;
– the exclusion of public interest groups;
– using questionable data,
– the burdens imposed on public and private interests;
– criminalizing ordinary consumer activity;
– free expression;
– privacy issues;
– due process rights;
– the need for flexibility to address technological change;
– anti-innovative and anti-competitive provisions;
– the claim that stronger consumer protections aren’t needed; and
– universally binding top-down rules overriding national sovereignty.

On April 6, 2009, the USTR released a summary of ACTA negotiations stating they’re to:

– “negotiate a new state-of-the art agreement to combat counterfeiting and piracy;” and
– help “governments around the world… more effectively combat the proliferation of counterfeit and pirated goods.”
– Also presented was a draft agenda for the November 4-6, 2009 Seoul, Korea negotiations to be followed by a press release similar to the post-July 5th Morocco round saying little more than “discussion focused on International Cooperation and Enforcement Practices and Institutional Issues” as well as others regarding “transparency.”

From what’s known, if ACTA measures are adopted, consider the implications. Consumer Internet communications and content will be monitored, threatening privacy, civil liberties, and a free and open Internet. In addition, new Net Neutrality rules and congressional legislation codifying them will be subverted by ACTA authority.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

This writer’s May 22 article said the following:

On April 1, two bills endangering a free and open Internet were introduced in the Senate:

– S. 773: Cybersecurity Act of 2009 “to ensure the continued free flow of commerce within the United States and with its global trading partners through secure cyber communications, to provide for the continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet communications for such purposes, to provide for the development of a cadre of information technology specialists to improve and maintain effective cybersecurity defenses against disruption, and for other purposes.”

S. 773 was referred to the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, but not yet voted on.

– S. 778: A bill to establish, within the Executive Office of the President, the Office of National Cybersecurity Advisor (aka czar). The bill was referred to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee where it remains.

Accompanying information said Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe introduced the legislation to address:

“our country’s unacceptable vulnerability to massive cyber crime, global cyber espionage, and cyber attacks that could cripple our critical infrastructure.”

We presently face cyber espionage threats, they said, as well as “another great vulnerability… to our private sector critical infrastructure — banking, utilities, air/rail/auto traffic control, telecommunications — from disruptive cyber attacks that could literally shut down our way of life.”

“This proposed legislation will bring new high-level governmental attention to develop a fully integrated, thoroughly coordinated, public-private partnership to our cyber security efforts in the 21st century” through what’s unstated – privacy violations by subverting a free and open Internet.

During a March Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing, Senator Rockefeller said that we’d all be better off if the Internet was never invented. His precise words were: “Would it have been better if we’d never have invented the Internet and had to use paper and pencil or whatever!” Left unsaid was that without a free and open Internet, few alternatives for getting real news and information would exist, at least with the ease and free accessibility computers provide.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Jennifer Granick expressed concern about “giving the federal government unprecedented power over the Internet without necessarily improving security in the ways that matter most. (These bills) should be opposed or radically amended.”

Here’s what they’ll do:

– federalize critical infrastructure security, including banks, telecommunications and energy, shifting power away from providers and users to Washington;
– give “the president unfettered authority to shut down Internet traffic in (whatever he calls) an emergency and disconnect critical infrastructure systems on national security grounds….;”
– potentially “cripple privacy and security in one fell swoop” through one provision (alone) empowering the Commerce Secretary to “have access to all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access….”

In other words, the Commerce Department will be empowered to access “all relevant data” — without privacy safeguards or judicial review. As a result, constitutionally protected privacy protections will be lost — ones guaranteed under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Privacy Protection Act, and financial privacy regulations.

Another provision mandates a feasibility study for an identity management and authentication program that would sidestep “appropriate civil liberties and privacy protections.”

At issue is what role should the federal government play in cybersecurity? How much power should it have? Can it dismiss constitutional protections, and what, in fact, can enhance cybersecurity without endangering our freedoms?

S. 773 and 778, as now written, “make matters worse by weakening existing privacy safeguards (without) address(ing) the real problems of security.”

Months later, S. 773 was secretly redrafted, but from what’s known, leaves it mostly unchanged. Like the original version, it gives the president carte blanche power “to decide which networks and systems, private or public, count as ‘critical infrastructure information systems or networks,” according to the EFF’s Richard Esguerra. It also lets him shut down the Internet in both versions of the bill.

The original one states:

“The President… may order the disconnection of any Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information systems or network in the interest of national security.”

The new bill says:

The President… in the event of an immediate threat (may) declare a cybersecurity emergency; and may, if the President finds it necessary for the national defense and security, and in coordination with relevant industry sectors, direct the national response to the cyber threat and the timely restoration of the affected critical infrastructure information system or network.

In other words, he can shut down the Internet and leave privacy, authority, and security effectiveness unresolved. According to EFF’s senior staff attorney, Lee Tien:

The language has changed but it doesn’t contain any real additional limits. It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version). The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There’s no provision for any administration process or review. That’s where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it.

Esguerra adds:

there is vague language about mapping federal and private networks; there is an unexplained scheme to certify cybersecurity professionals at the federal level; and the mandated implementation of a ‘cybersecurity strategy’ before the completion of a legal review that could protect against inadvertent privacy violations or inefficiency.

In late February, Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, told the House Intelligence Committee that the NSA, not DHS, should be in charge of cybersecurity even though it has a “trust handicap” to overcome because of its illegal spying:

“I think there is a great deal of distrust of the National Security Agency and the intelligence community in general playing a role outside of the very narrowly circumscribed role because of some of the history of the FISA issue in years past….” So Blair asked the committee’s leadership to find a way to instill public confidence.

On February 9, Obama appointed Melissa Hathaway to be Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils — in charge of a 60-day interagency cybersecurity review, now completed. On August 3, she resigned citing personal reasons, but people close to her said the president’s economic advisers marginalized her for favoring private sector regulatory options. As of late October, her position is still unfilled.

On April 21, NSA/Chief Central Security Service director, General Alexander, told RSA Conference security participants that “The NSA does not want to run cybersecurity for the government. We need partnerships with others. The DHS has a big part, you do, and our partners in academia. It’s one network and we all have to work together….The NSA can offer technology assistance to team members. That’s our role.”

Spying is its role with DHS enforcement. Cooperatively with the administration, they threaten our constitutional freedoms. Infringing them can’t be tolerated nor measures to subvert a free and open Internet.

Justice Department Targets Internet First Amendment Freedoms

On January 30, US Attorney Tim Morrison subpoenaed the Philadelphia-based Independent Media Center (IMC) to give an Indianapolis grand jury all IP address logs, times, and other ID information for June 25, 2008. In addition, under a gag order, its system administrator was prohibited from “disclos(ing) the existence (or contents) of this request” without Justice Department permission.

On November 9, EFF discussed the “Anatomy of a Bogus subpoena: How the Government Secretly Demanded the IP Address of Every Visitor to Political News Site Indymedia.us.”

According to senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston:

“Secrecy surrounds law enforcement’s communications surveillance practices like a dense fog. (Especially the) demands issued under 18 USC 2703 of the Stored Communications Act (SCA) that seek subscriber information or other user records from communications service providers.”

Court orders can require phone companies or online service providers to reveal them, “along with a gag order preventing (them) from disclosing the existence of the government’s demand. More often, companies are simply (subpoenaed) by prosecutors without any court involvement; these demands, too, are rarely made public.”

EFF called the gag order “Bogus (for) Demanding the Recipient’s Silence Without Any Legal Basis.” It’s “ready to provide assistance (whenever) government knocks on someone’s door with an unlawful, invalid, overbroad, free speech-threatening, privacy-invasive demand for your sensitive Internet data.” It represented IMC and prevailed, in part because the site doesn’t keep historic logs on its visitors.

On November 13, indymedia.us announced:

… we’ve managed, after nearly a year of legal action on our behalf by (EFF), to successfully fight back against a bogus (DOJ) subpoena request in conjunction with a grand jury investigation… not only did (we) object to this blatantly illegitimate and overly broad request, but, per accepted Indymedia best practices, we do not keep such logs in the first place, in order to maximally ensure the privacy of our site users. Also troubling was the (gag order prohibiting any discussion of) the legal issue with the broader network of collectives cooperating on the indymedia/us site.

EFF stresses that “the level of secrecy surrounding how the government uses its surveillance authority under the Stored Communications Act encourages abuses,” including a free and open Internet. What Jefferson understood by saying that:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

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

The watchdog groups IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor are believed to be stepping up their campaigns after the recent publication in a US newspaper of an Israeli professor’s call to boycott Israel.

Both groups have been alerting the universities’ external donors, mostly US Jews, to what they describe as “subversive” professors as a way to bring pressure to bear on university administrations to sanction faculty staff who are critical of Israeli policies.

“I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”

Last month, in what appeared to be a new tactic, IsraCampus placed a full-page advertisement in an official diary issued to students at Haifa University, urging them to visit its website to see a “rogues’ gallery” of 100 Israeli scholars the group deems an “academic fifth column”.

“The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us,” a senior Israeli lecturer said. “It’s a model of ‘policing’ faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US.”

Both Israel Academia Monitor, established in 2004, and the later IsraCampus, model themselves on Campus Watch, a US organisation founded by Daniel Pipes, an academic closely identified with the US neoconservative movement.

Campus Watch has been widely accused of intimidating US scholars who have expressed views critical of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. The organisation’s goal, according to critics, is to pressure US universities to avoid hiring left-wing lecturers or awarding them tenure.

The advertisement placed by IsraCampus, and seen by Haifa University students as they returned from their summer break, warned that a number of their professors “openly support terrorist attacks against Jews, initiate an international boycott of Israel, exploit their status in the classroom for anti-Israeli incitement and anti-Zionist brainwashing, collaborate with known anti-Semites … who publicly call for Israel’s destruction”.

Publication of the advert was supported by the head of Haifa’s student union, Felix Koritney: “Students who study here need to know who their lecturers are, and if there are lecturers who oppose the state of Israel it is important to publish their names.”

In a statement, Haifa University officials also defended the advertisement – after receiving a complaint from a student who called the advertisement incitement – justifying it on the grounds of “freedom of speech”.

IsraCampus is associated with Steven Plaut, an economics professor at Haifa University, who was reported to have paid for the advertisement. On the group’s site and on his personal blog, Mr Plaut has lambasted many Israeli left-wing academics.

IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have targeted professors for criticising the occupation, joining protests against Israel’s separation wall, signing petitions or attending conferences critical of Israel, defending the UN report of Judge Richard Goldstone on last winter’s attack on Gaza, or calling for a boycott of Israel.

Both groups have focused their efforts on the staff at Ben Gurion and Haifa universities, two regional campuses that have attracted more outspoken dissidents.

Ilan Pappe, a former history professor at Haifa University and the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, admitted he abandoned his academic career in Israel and relocated to the UK after a campaign of vilification.

But, according to Mr Newman, Ben Gurion University had become the groups’ “public enemy No 1” after publication by Neve Gordon, a colleague of Mr Newman, of an article in the Los Angeles Times calling for a boycott of Israel.

Despite having tenure, observers say, Mr Gordon has come under increasing pressure from the university to resign his position as chair of the university’s politics department over his published views.

Rivka Carmi, president of Ben Gurion University, issued a statement shortly after Mr Gordon’s article was printed, condemning his opinions as “morally repugnant” and warning that he was “welcome to search for a personal and professional home elsewhere”.

Dana Barnett, founder of Israel Academia Monitor, has launched a petition demanding that Mr Gordon be sacked from his position as chair, that his courses be treated as elective rather than compulsory for his students, and that he be denied travel and research funding.

Mr Newman said decisions about hiring and retaining staff at Ben Gurion were still being taken on academic grounds but that the monitoring groups were seeking to change that by calling for donor boycotts of universities seen to be harbouring anti-Zionist professors.

Yaakov Dayan, the Israeli consul in Los Angeles, sent a letter to Ben Gurion University after publication of Mr Gordon’s article, warning that private benefactors “were unanimous in threatening to withhold their donations to your institution”.

Although the universities are chiefly backed by government money, external donations account for about five per cent of their funding. With universities struggling with large debts, donations can be seen as leverage over the universities.

Mr Newman said the monitoring groups hoped to redirect donations to right-wing academic institutions and think tanks, such as the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem, whose founding president is the US neoconservative scholar Martin Kramer, and Ariel College, located in a West Bank settlement near Nablus.

On his website, Mr Plaut credited IsraCampus with forcing Tel Aviv University last week to investigate claims by one of its professors, Nira Hativa, that some right-wing students were afraid to speak out in class because of fears that they would be penalised by their lecturers.

Under questioning from the Haaretz newspaper, Ms Hativa admitted that her allegations were based only on “intuition and personal impressions”.

Both IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor have been incensed by the support offered to Mr Gordon’s call for a boycott of Israel by a small number of Israeli academics.

One such professor, Anat Matar, who teaches philosophy at Tel Aviv University, said the atmosphere both within the universities and more widely in Israeli society was changing rapidly and becoming increasingly “intolerant” of dissent. “We’ve become a little more fascistic as a society,” she said.

Mr Plaut has been at the centre of a libel battle with Mr Gordon since 2002 after he called him a “Judenrat wannabe” – a reference to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis.

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.

Gilad was recently here for the JZ Festival in Shanghai’s Pudong district and he also taught; I’m assuming, at the JZ school. I can imagine the experience. The JZ Festival went off without a hitch in a beautiful park in the Pudong New Zone. The JZ school is situated in the former French concession among old houses and tree lined lanes. Between the lanes, the Jazz and the skyscrapers of Pudong, it must have been an intoxicating week. But we are supposed to be dissidents and radicals and some parts of Gilad’s article are lazy and dangerous. We need perspective.

Gilad writes, “China is a financial miracle.”

I have lived in Shanghai for eight years and a large part of my life is given to the underground music scene. But before we get to the reality of that we have to address the big problem. The myth of the “economic miracle”. This is not specific to China. This is a global myth. Let us start with a reminder of the state of the global system. According to the World Bank development indicators for 2008, 80% of the world, or 5.15 billion people, live on less than ten dollars a day with 3.14 billion of those, or half the world’s population, living on less than two dollars fifty.² The top 20%, as we are all aware, is divided into the so called middle classes and the super rich.

China is a fair reflection of this global trend. The most recently touted indicator has been the internet usage stats.³ China recently approached the 300 million mark for internet users. Economic commentators foamed at the mouth and noted that was equal to the entire population of the USA. Of course, what it actually represents is the creation of a 20% middle class to go with it’s remaining billion people who are on or below the subsistence mark. Gilad also states, “It is a miracle because it somehow manages to restrain hard capitalism with a unique socially orientated system.” That is simply not true. It is purely hard capitalism. Period. There is no restraint, there is a free for all that is destroying the countryside and resulting in monthly riots across the land.⁴

In any region of the world, a system which enriches a minority of the people while plunging the rest downwards — while destroying their land rights and environment — should never be called a miracle. It should be called a disaster.

It is also dangerous to freely mix ideas of state or government with people or culture. I love to live here and my experiences on the underground rock scene and with local artists have been amazing. However, a little reading or asking around the subject will reveal that writing, music and art has a glass ceiling that is directly imposed by state censorship. For every Jazz Festival that goes on there are a slew of cancelled events.⁵ During the Olympics, the entire music scene was forcibly shut down for a month by the police.⁶ The underground is allowed to exist, as long as it doesn’t try to go public. I might also mention that no word gets published in print media without being first read by the Xinhua Agency.

I love living in China and Shanghai. The people are great and the issues I bring up are not only relevant to China. I myself don’t like ‘China Bashing’ and the countless lazy stereotypes that appear in journalism about this complex country. However, Shanghai is the glossy facade for the rest of the country and it’s our job as radicals to always keep our perspective.

1. ”Autumn in Shanghai” by Gilad Atzmon
2. ”Global Issues Poverty Facts.”
3. ”China has close to 300 million internet users AFP.”
4. ”58,000 mass incidents in China in first quarter as unrest grows to largest ever recorded.”
5. ”Modern Sky Festival 2009” from China Music Radar.
6. ”The Clampdown” from China Music Radar.

ABC’s Peter Jennings called him “a journalist’s journalist.” The New York Times featured his death on its front page (usually reserved for the rich and powerful) in a Peter Flint obituary titled, “IF Stone, Iconoclast of Journalism, Is Dead at 81.” A quintessential muckraker, he described him as “the independent, radical pamphleteer of American journalism hailed by his admirers for his scholarship, wit and lucidity” over a career spanning 67 years.

He quoted Stone saying:

“I tried to bring the instincts of a scholar to the service of journalism; to take nothing for granted; to turn journalism into literature; to provide radical analysis with a conscientious concern for accuracy, and in studying the current scene to do my very best to preserve human values and free institutions.” In the spirit of author Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), he “comfort(ed) the afflicted and afflict(ed) the comfortable,” in a way few others matched or kept doing for so long.

In a 1987 interview, he deplored what he called the ascendancy of “right-wing kooks (and) the ugly spirit (of Reagan’s not so subtle message that) you should go get yours and run.” Late in life he learned classical Greek to be able to read untranslated works and write The Trials of Socrates after more than a decade of study. He criticized the accepted Plato view that he died for exhorting his fellow Athenians to be virtuous. According to Stone, he was seen as a security threat at a time Athenian democracy was imperiled.

In Izzy on Izzy, he called himself an “anachronism… an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise, subject to neither mortgage or broker, factor or patron… standing alone, without organizational or party backing, beholden to no one but my good readers.”

They were many, loyal, and included Ralph Nader who called him “the modern Tom Paine — as independent and incorruptible as they come (as) journalism’s Gibraltar and its unwavering conscience.”

Stone called himself “a newspaperman all my life,” publishing a paper (the Progress) at age 14, working for a country weekly, and then as correspondent for two city dailies (the Haddonfield Press and Camden Courier-Post). Beginning as a high school sophomore, he did this into his third year of college (at the University of Pennsylvania), then quit because “the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me.” At the same time, he worked afternoons and evenings at the Philadelphia Inquirer “doing combination rewrite and copy desk (work), so I was already an experienced newspaperman making $40 a week — big pay in 1928.” He did everything “except run a linotype machine.”

In the 1920s as a teenager, he became radicalized, mostly from reading Jack London, Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin (a noted Russian anarchist and early communism advocate), and Karl Marx. He joined the Socialist Party and was elected to its New Jersey State Committee “before I was old enough to vote.” He did publicity for Norman Thomas (1894-1968) in the 1928 presidential campaign, but then “drifted away from left-wing politics because of the sectarianism of the left.”

He also believed that party affiliation was incompatible with independent journalism, and he wanted to be “free to help the unjustly treated, to defend everyone’s civil liberty, and to work for social reform without concern for leftist infighting.”

Remembering them “with affection,” he praised his employers for never forcing him to compromise his conscience, even as an anonymous editorial writer. From 1932-1939, that was his job for the Philadelphia Record and New York Post, both strongly pro-New Deal papers at the time. In 1940, he came to Washington as The Nation’s editor and remained until his death, working as reporter and columnist for PM, the New York Star, New York Post and New York Compass.

In the 1950s, during the Cold War and McCarthy era, no daily paper (or The Nation) ran his byline, so when the Compass closed in 1952, he launched his own four-page IF Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and wrote:

“Early Soviet novels used a vivid phrase, ‘former people,’ about the remnants of the dispossessed ruling class. On the inhospitable streets of Washington these days, your editor often feels like one of the ‘former people.’ ”

Earlier from its 1946 inception until 1949, he was a regular on Meet the Press, first on radio, then TV. No longer, nor was he seen again on national television for another 18 years because his muckraking threatened the powerful.

It’s never easy starting out on your own, but Stone succeeded by what he called “a piggy-back launching” from the PM, Star, and Compass mailing lists as well as people who had bought his books. From them, he got 5,000 subscribers at $5 each. During McCarthy’s heyday, he got a second-class mailing permit, and was on his way after “working in Washington for 12 years as correspondent for a succession of liberal and radical papers.”

Biographer Myra MacPherson (from All Governments Lie!) said he “went from a young iconoclast in the 1930s to an icon during the Vietnam War. In the fifties, he spoke to mere handfuls who dared surface to protest Cold War loyalty oaths and witch-hunts. A decade later, he spoke to half a million who massed for anti-Vietnam War rallies. (Deservedly) He became world famous.”

Earlier, he supported Progressive Party nominee Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election campaign, civil liberties for everyone, including communists, and advocated for peace and co-existence with the Soviets. He fought the loyalty purge, FBI, House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Pat McCarran’s virulent anti-communism as Senate Judiciary Committee and Internal Security Subcommittee chairmen, and Joe McCarthy.

He wrote the first article against the Smith Act for its 1940 use against Trotskyites and other leftists with suspected subversive leanings.

His idea was to make the Weekly radical by providing information readers could check out on their own. He “tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible.” He wanted every issue to provide facts and opinions unavailable elsewhere in the press. He felt like “a guerilla warrior, swooping down in a surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry.”

Unlike beat reporters for major dailies or wire services, he was immune to the pressures they faced. He said Washington has lots of news. If information on some are blocked, go get others because “The bureaucracies put out so much that they cannot help letting the truth slip from the time to time.” And by asking tough questions, a whole lot can be learned that as an independent can be published freely without fear of employer retribution.

It’s why no bureaucracy likes independent journalism, especially radical muckrakers digging out the most sensitive material it wants suppressed. The fault Stone found with most newspapers wasn’t the absence of dissent. It was the absence of real news, the timidity of journalists to write it, and the power owners held over them.

“Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling.” Most newspaper owners are businessmen, not journalists. “The news is something which fills spaces left over by advertisers.”

Most publishers aren’t just hostile to dissent, they suspect any opinions likely to antagonize readers, consumers, and mainly advertisers. As a result, most newspapers “stand for nothing. They carry prefabricated news, prefabricated opinion, and prefabricated cartoons.” Even the best papers are timid. They don’t question the Cold War, arms race, or stand up for civil liberties and the rule of law. Only a few “maverick” dailies are around making it “easy for a one-man four-page Washington paper to find news the others ignore, and of course opinion they would rarely express.”

Journalism was a “crusade” for Stone. What Jefferson symbolized for him was being “rediscovered in a socialist society as a necessity for good government.” During the height of the McCarthy era, he felt like a pariah but believed he stood for and was preserving the best of America’s traditions. It inspired what he did to the end.

DD Guttenplan’s American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone

Guttenplan described him as a journalistic “irritant to power for his uncanny ability to seize on the most inconvenient truths and for his vociferous opposition to the existing order.” After becoming radicalized, he was brash, forthright, anti-fascist, pro-labor, a supporter of New Deal politics, and a passionate activist for the oppressed, disadvantaged, and social justice.

In his preface, Guttenplan described the fateful December 12, 1949 moment when Stone went from prominence to a non-person in American politics and his profession. It was during an interchange with the AMA’s Dr. Morris Fishbein on Meet the Press, an ardent foe of universal single-payer health insurance he denounced as “socialistic.” Quoting Stone, Guttenplan wrote:

“Dr. Fishbein, let’s get nice and rough. In view of his advocacy of compulsory health insurance, do you regard Mr. Harry Truman as a card-carrying communist, or just a deluded fellow-traveler?”

After that, he slowly vanished, was never again on Meet the Press, couldn’t get his passport renewed after a year in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Compass, and when it closed in 1952 was blacklisted as a reporter. As he put it at age 40: “I feel for the moment like a ghost.” And as Guttenplan wrote:

“For some time he live(d) in a kind of internal exile (sitting) in (a) Washington, DC… rented office waiting for the phone to ring (and) after three years (getting no) visitor apart from building maintenance workers and the mailman… (so he gave) up the office… work(ed) from home,” and launched the IF Stone Weekly as a platform to produce radical commentaries for his readers… “slowly, almost imperceptibly, his audience return(ed)” to its final year 1971 peak 70,000 circulation level.

According to Guttenplan, Stone “rode into battle not as a paladin of the powerless or a gadfly, but as an insider, a confidential agent of the (left-wing) ‘party within a party’ that served” progressive politics in the 1930s. He later broke with Harry Truman and supported Wallace. The FBI followed him everywhere, investigated him for five years, and accumulated 6,000 pages in his file, threefold its size for Al Capone. His phone was tapped and his mail intercepted on suspicion he was a Soviet spy, that was, of course, untrue.

By 1970, he was invited in from the cold and given a special George Polk Award in journalism. He got honorary degrees from American University, Brown, Colby, and others, including a baccalaureate and doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania where he dropped out before graduating.

His numerous awards included:

• Newspaper Guild of New York Honors Page One Must for his book, Underground to Palestine — written before his views about Israel changed after the 1967 war;
• The Eleanor Roosevelt Award;
• the National Press Club Journalists’ Journalist Award
• ACLU Award;
• the Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award of the Association for Education In Journalism & Mass Communications;
• Columbia University Journalism Award; and
• on March 5, 2008, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced an annual IF Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence award and an IF Stone Workshop on Strengthening Journalistic Independence.

In his name, the annual Izzy Award is presented to “an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created outside traditional corporate structures.”

Three of Stone’s great quotes were:

One of several versions of his saying, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins….”

“You’ve really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.” Not Stone. His honor and integrity weren’t for sale.

In a June 19-25, 2009 Counterspin interview, Guttenplan said Stone was never ideologically rigid, and would always change his views in light of new information. He:

never pretended to be a liberal. He was an unashamed radical, and in a way, the most important way in which he matters is he shows us, he reminds us what’s possible. He reminds us what the left can do. He reminds us what our country can do. He reminds us what our government can do if we keep on its back and we make sure it delivers on its promises.

And he showed how good journalism can make a difference, the kind so lacking then and now with no IF Stone around to write it.

He “challenged power by using power’s own record against itself.” And after his hearing failed, he relied increasingly on documents to prove what he famously said:

“All governments lie, but the truth still slips out from time to time,” and it’s up to good journalists to find and report it. Stone did, what the powerful wanted suppressed in his Weekly and numerous books, including (a treasured signed used copy this writer owns of) his Hidden History of the Korean War.

Published in 1952, Monthly Review co-founders Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote in the preface:

“This book….paints a very different picture of the Korean War — one, in fact, which is at variance with the official version at almost every point.” Stone’s investigations into official discrepancies led him “to a full-scale reassessment of the whole” war.

First published, in part, in the Compass and two articles in France’s L’Observateur, its publisher, Claude Bourdet explained in his article titled, “The Korean Mystery: Fight Against a Phantom?”

If Stone’s thesis corresponds to reality (and it did), we are in the presence of the greatest swindle in the whole of military history… not a question of a harmless fraud but of a terrible maneuver in which deception is being consciously utilized to block peace at a time when it is possible.

Stone called it international aggression. So did Huberman and Sweezy writing in August 1951 (14 months into the war):

“….we have come to the conclusion that (South Korean president) Syngman Rhee deliberately provoked the North Koreans in the hope that they would retaliate by crossing the parallel in force. The northerners (who wanted a unified Korea, not war) fell neatly into the trap.” Truman was the instigator who took full advantage when they did, as Stone believed in writing:

we said we were going to Korea to go back to the status quo before the war but when the American armies reached the 38th parallel they didn’t stop, they kept going, so there must be something else. We must have another agenda here and what might that agenda be?

The same one, he later learned, we had in Vietnam that made him outspoken against it. He was the only journalist asked to speak at the first nationwide November 15, 1969 “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam War,” that half a million to Washington one month after a global event was held.

He matched his anti-war spirit with his support for the disadvantaged, the oppressed, social equity, and above all accuracy and truth, and used his journalism as a “crusade” to produce it. He wrote:

“I was heartened by the thought that I was preserving and carrying forward the best in America’s traditions, that in my humble way I stood in a line that reached back to Jefferson. These are the origins and the preconceptions, the hopes and the aspirations” behind all his writings and the legacy that’s now ours.

On June 17, 1989, he died of heart failure in Cambridge, MA and is buried there at Mount Auburn Cemetery, leaving behind his wife, Esther, of 60 years, and three children, Celia, Jeremy and Christopher. He once told his wife that “if (he) lived long enough (he’d) graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if (he) lasted long enough, from a character to public institution.” He omitted a legend, a committed radical, consummate independent, and ideological hero symbolizing what Public Affairs’ Peter Osnos called his “stubborn tenacity, ferocious independence, and extraordinary will” in pursuing truth.

Or as Guttenplan ended his book:

“IF Stone wrote not to create a sensation, or to promote himself (or his ‘brand’), but to change the world. We read and work – and wait.”

The campaign is especially strong on university campuses where many voices have been raised in support of human rights for the Palestinians.

One such example is the attempt to suppress the Public Interest Research Group, founded by Ralph Nader, at the University of Ottawa for their support for Palestinian human rights.

Similar anti-Palestinian campaigns have occurred at many universities in Canada including the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario and York University.

An attack against a student group that was sympathetic to the Palestinians occurred at the University of Western Ontario in 1982. The student group was refused official recognition because of its support for the Palestinians and for sponsoring Palestinian and Arab speakers. After this refusal a complaint was made to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

After a long battle, and with the support of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and its General Counsel Alan Borovoy, and a supportive editorial in The Globe & Mail, the Ontario Human Rights Commission compelled the University Students Council at the University of Western Ontario to issue a statement of regret and to ratify the student group. The refusal was deemed discriminatory against Palestinians and persons associated with Palestinians.¹

Despite this successful legal precedent at Western Ontario there have been many attacks against individuals and groups across Canada and the United States because of their support for human rights for Palestinians. Over the last few years there is a concerted attempt to suppress discussion of the Palestinian issue in North America.

There also is a campaign to punish those individuals who have spoken out in support of the Palestinians by cutting funding and by denying them tenure and even getting them terminated from their positions of employment.

Two well-known examples of firings are the campaigns that targeted Jewish professors’ Norman Finkelstein (author of many books on Israel and Zionism including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict (Verso Press, New York, 1995) and Joel Kovel (author of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (Pluto Press: London, 2007)) for their attacks on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

Another tactic is to smear such individuals who have supported the Palestinians with allegations of anti-Semitism. One such individual was Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu. A few complaints from the Jewish community led to the Noble Prize winner being banned from speaking on campus by the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Tutu was attacked because of statements he made criticizing Israeli policy toward the Palestinians that some Jewish individuals said were “anti Semitic.”

Marv Davidov, an adjunct professor with the Justice and Peace Studies program at the University of St. Thomas said:

As a Jew who experienced real anti-Semitism as a child, I’m deeply disturbed that a man like Tutu could be labeled anti-Semitic and silenced like this,…

I deeply resent the Israeli lobby trying to silence any criticism of its policy. It does a great disservice to Israel and to all Jews.

After provoking a strong backlash against the decision, and a campaign lead by Jewish Voice for Peace in support of the Arch Bishop which produced more than 6,000 letters of protest, the University rescinded the ban.

Professor Bill Robinson was also a target of a similar campaign about alleged anti Semitism to get him fired at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Ultimately the University administration defended Robinson’s academic freedom and the right to express his opinions in his global politics class. Robinson, who is Jewish, distributed an email prepared by a pro-Palestinian Jewish activist that compared the Israeli attack on Gaza to the Nazi attack on the Warsaw Ghetto. In response to this attack on Professor Robinson, more than 100 UCSB faculty members signed a petition asking the university to dismiss the charges against him. In addition, 16 university department chairs wrote letters to the University authorities asking them to dismiss the case against Robinson.

Sir Gerald Kaufman, one of the founders of Independent Jewish Voices in Britain, also used his position as a Member of Parliament in London, England to criticize Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Members of Kaufman’s family perished at the hands of the Nazis and in the Holocaust. As one of the U.K.’s harshest critics of Israeli policies, Kaufman routinely compared the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.²

This campaign to silence critics of Israel and to demonize supporters of the Palestinians is most disturbing and a violation of free speech, academic freedom and violation of Palestinian human rights.

It is also a violation of basic democratic rights when a government does it. For example, the recent cuts to the Canadian Arab Federation’s funding by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. The punitive action taken by Minister Kenney is a denial of the fundamental freedoms and rights which are guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Charter guarantees the right of free speech and freedom of conscience and protects the individual and organizations from government sanction.

This campaign is also an attack on the numerous dissenting Jews who support human rights for the Palestinians.

Canadian Jewish groups like Not in Our Name (NION) and Jewish Independent Voices (Canada) and their support for the Palestinians and their criticism of the “Jewish State” are simply ignored. For political purposes, they simply do not exist.

The mainstream media also rarely covers these alternative Jewish perspectives. However, there are rare exceptions and sometimes views critical of Zionism are published in the mainstream North American press. Here is one notable example:

“It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with “the concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept.” For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to “push the hand of God”; and Marxist Jews — my grandparents among them — tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered.

Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else’s. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel’s actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse.

The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.”³)

Most of the rest of the World has a much more critical view of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and supports the right of Palestinians to self determination.

For example in one vote at the United Nations, held on December 19, 2006 on the Israeli Palestinian issue, the tally was 176 to five in favor of the Palestinians.

The countries that supported Israel were the United States, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Micronesia.

Five countries abstained. They were: Australia, Canada, Central African Republic, Nauru and Vanuatu.

The entire rest of the World voted in favor of the right of Palestinians to self-determination. However, to read the mainstream North American press you almost never hear of these one-sided votes.

All human beings are entitled to basic human rights. However, the well documented human rights violations of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, by respected organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The International Red Cross, the United Nations, and even by Israeli organizations such as B’Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and by many Israeli journalists, are attacked and buried under a barrage of criticism that they are biased, are unfair for singling out the Jewish State or are even anti-Semitic.

My own record as a lawyer representing refugee claims for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories made against Israel, is 28 positives to one negative or a 96.5% success rate.

However, in the eyes of the supporters of Israel this does not mean that there are serious human rights problems in the Occupied Territories.

Israel can do no wrong. It is the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada that is “anti-Semitic” and the Jewish members of the IRB who rendered positive decisions on Palestinian refugee claims made against Israel are “self-hating Jews.”

A Palestinian is simply an inhabitant or citizen of Palestine. There are Jewish, Christian, Muslim and non-believers who are Palestinian. The indigenous Palestinian Jews were opposed to the European Jewish settlers who were flooding into Palestine with the support of Great Britain. A Palestinian is simply a national designation like that of being Canadian or American.

There is no racial, ethnic or religious criteria for being a Palestinian. Only by right of birth, naturalization and descent that one becomes a Palestinian, just like in most other countries.

The Jewish State’s citizenship and Immigration process are unique in the World. To qualify as a “Jew” in “the Jewish state” one must meet a racial or ethnic criteria or in the alternative, a religious criterion.

The Jewish Law of Return grants almost immediate citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the World. Palestinians who were born in the country and forcibly expelled are, for the most part, forbidden to return.

The Zionist state of Israel defines itself as “Jewish” and structures itself to advance the interests of Jews at the expense of non-Jews and especially against the indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinian population.

In March 1919 United States Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to President Woodrow Wilson as he was departing for the Paris Peace Conference.

The petition was signed by 31 prominent American Jews. The signatories included Henry Morgenthau, Sr., ex-ambassador to Turkey; Simon W. Rosendale, ex-attorney general of New York; Mayor L. H. Kampner of Galveston, Texas; E. M. Baker, from Cleveland and president of the Stock Exchange; R. H. Macy’s Jesse I. Straus; New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs; and Judge M. C. Sloss of San Francisco. Part of the petition read:

…we protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World’s Peace Conference to establish. Whether the Jews be regarded as a “race” or as a “religion,” it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.

There is much controversy over what is Zionism and how to define the “Jewish State.” As Akiva Orr writes,

The Zionist movement and its State- ISRAEL, do not represent the Jewish people. They never did.

They represent a particular trend within the Jewish people, namely- the nationalist trend. To find out whether Israel is a Jewish State or a Zionist State one need only ask any religious Orthodox Jew anywhere. His answer will be unambiguous: a Jewish State must be ruled by Jewish religious law- “ Halakha”. Israel is not ruled by “Halakha” laws, but by secular laws. Therefore Israel is not a Jewish State. The fact that it provides refuge to Jews does not make it a Jewish State . . . Zionism and Judaism are different entities. They have contradictory qualities.⁴

The argument is often made that criticism of Israel, or more appropriately the self described “Jewish State,” the meaning of which is not defined, is anti-Semitic. The fact that many Jews have criticized Israel and Zionism is deemed irrelevant. These Jewish critics are attacked as “self-hating Jews.”

There is no rational basis for the argument that criticism of the State of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is anti-Semitic. The logic for this view is obviously flawed.

For example it makes no sense to accuse an individual who criticizes Apartheid South Africa’s racist policies toward the blacks as evidence of racism toward Whites.

Or that criticism of the Nazi policy toward the Jews should not be allowed because it is evidence of racism against Germans.

Similarly, if you criticize American policy toward the Iraq war and torture at Abu Ghraib Prison or the Jim Crow laws that institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the southern states, then you are racist against Americans. This argument is obviously absurd and should not even need a response.

To quote one American Jewish academic on the comparison of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the racist Jim Crow laws in the United States: “I grew up as a white girl in the Jim Crow South and I have spent my adult life in the study of racism; what I see when I go to Palestine is Jim Crow on steroids.”⁵

It is a basic right to evaluate and to criticize a political ideology or political movement and to review and even criticize a state’s policies.

The argument should be evaluated on the merits and the truthfulness of the facts presented. It is also a right to present alternative facts and to have a debate.

However, when one side wants to avoid debate, divert the discussion or suppress the topic and launches personal attacks against their opponents, it is almost a certain proof that they are hiding some uncomfortable truths.

Dr. Joel Beinin in an article, “Silencing critics not way to Middle East peace,” published in the San Francisco Chronicle, on February 4, 2007, discussed the campaign to silence critics of Israeli policy.

Beinin is a professor of History at Stanford University and is Jewish. He is active with Jewish Voice for Peace. Here is what Beinin had to say about the campaign to attack critics of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

“Why discredit, defame and silence those with opposing viewpoints? I believe it is because the Zionist lobby knows it cannot win based on facts.

An honest discussion can only lead to one conclusion: The status quo in which Israel declares it alone has rights and intends to impose its will on the weaker Palestinians, stripping them permanently of their land, resources and rights, cannot lead to a lasting peace.

We need an open debate and the freedom to discuss uncomfortable facts and explore the full range of policy options. Only then can we adopt a foreign policy that serves American interests and one that could actually bring a just peace to Palestinians and Israelis.”

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as well as the massacres, rapes and illegal confiscation of Palestinian property, is well documented by Israeli historians. These include Simcha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Benny Morris, The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-1949, (Cambridge University Press: New York, 1987); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins, (Olive Branch Press: New York, 1993); and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oneworld Publications: Oxford, 2006).

There are many more Israeli authorities that confirm the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1947-1949 and again in 1967. In fact it is still going on today in what some Israelis call the “slow motion ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians.⁶

If the Palestinians, or their supporters, complain about the well-documented facts surrounding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, losing their property to which they had legal title to, losing their personal belongings and even their bank accounts, having 531 villages destroyed, losing their country and their right to a citizenship, and then not being allowed to return to their homes in contravention of international law; or complain about discriminatory policies of the Jewish National Fund or the discrimination involved in the Jewish Law of Return; or complain about the house demolitions, the more than 600 Israeli military check points in the West Bank, the 42 years of military Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the program of targeted assassinations, the well-documented cases of torture; and the imprisonment of more than 11,000 Palestinians including women and children, many held without charge under what is called Administrative Detention, or the recent slaughter in Gaza, that these complaints and to expose these facts is anti-Semitic!

The view that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, or its actions, is pure and simple racism against Palestinians. The Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims have many legitimate reasons to criticize the policies and actions of “the Jewish State.” A state that aggressively, and repeatedly, attacks its neighbours and is slowly but systematically ethnically cleansing its non-Jewish population is not above criticism.

No state is above criticism. You should be very afraid of a political ideology that you must accept without question.

There is also much to criticize in the Arab world but it would be absurd to say that one cannot criticize the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for its treatment of women or its human rights record, because it is racist against Arabs or is anti-Muslim. A person who made such an argument would be laughed at. No one would take them or the argument seriously.

Yet this allegation of anti-Semitism is a frequent smear tactic that has been used against individuals who have publicly supported Palestinian human rights.

These individuals include former US President Jimmy Carter, Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, Arnold Toynbee, George Orwell and many, many others who have expressed public support for the Palestinians. Most of the strongest critics of Zionism and Israel’s policies are Jewish.

The only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet when Great Britain first threw its weight behind Zionism in 1917, Sir Edwin Montagu, was adamantly opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. He attacked the Balfour Declaration and Zionism because he believed they were anti-Semitic. Montagu argued that Zionism and anti-Semitism were based on the same premise, namely that Jews and non-Jews could not co-exist.

Ironically, people like me who want Jews to remain in our society, be an important part of our community and be safe from discrimination and racism are diametrically opposed to the Zionist goal of ingathering all of the Jews to Palestine.

Zionists want to “save the Jews” because they are not safe in the diaspora and face the threat of persecution due to the intractable anti-Semitism that exists in non-Jewish societies. To quote one Zionist commentator,

The Law [of Return] and the Clause and, for that matter Zionism and the Jewish State are necessary so long as the threat to our people continues; so long, in other words, as Diaspora exists…..So the Law of Return continues to be necessary for Jewish survival, to serve its essential function in Zionist theory and practice. The Law defines Israel’s Zionist mission, our state as protector and refuge for threatened Diaspora Jewry.⁷

Without the history of Christian anti-Semitism that has existed in Europe and the centuries of persecution of the European Jewish community political Zionism would be considered a deranged and absurd political philosophy. Without anti-Semitism, Zionism has no legitimacy.

Sir Edwin Montagu was also afraid that a Jewish state would undermine the safety of Jews in other countries. It appears that this fear was realized in that the safety of the Arab Jewish community was undermined, to a large extent deliberately, so that they would be forced to immigrate to Palestine to strengthen the Jewish presence there.

Montagu’s opposition to Zionism and the Balfour Declaration was supported by the leading representative bodies of Anglo-Jewry at the time, the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, and in particular, by three prominent British Jews Claude Montefiore, David Alexander and Lucien Wolf.

Many Jews are anti-Zionist and opposed the settlement of Jews in Palestine.

In fact, historically Zionism was not supported by the majority of Jews. In the process of creating the state of Israel the political Zionists destroyed Palestine and ethnically cleansed more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages in order to create a demographic Jewish majority in their newly created “Jewish state.”

There is a very respected and honored Jewish tradition of opposition to injustice and human rights violations. There is no monolithic position for Jews when it comes to Israel and the Palestinian issue.

My article “Jewish Criticism of Zionism” which lists more than 160 Jewish critics of Zionism. This article lists many prominent Jewish intellectuals that are extremely critical of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. There is a long distinguished line of Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

This list includes Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Isaac Asimov, I.F. Stone, Norton Mezvinsky, Alfred Lilienthal, Silvain Levi, Eric Rouleau, Tony Judt, Sara Roy, Ronnie Kasrils, Eric Hobsbawn, Saul Landau, Noam Chomsky, Hans Kohen, Eric Fromm, Bruno Kreisky, Pierre Mendes France, Richard Falk, Harold Pinter (the Nobel prize winner for Literature), Philip Roth, Michael Selzer, Don Peretz, Immanuel Wallerstein, Rabbi Michael Lerner, actor Ed Asner and many other leading Jewish intellectuals and religious figures.

Isaac Asimov was one of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century and wrote on many topics. He expressed his views about Zionism in a number of pieces. One example is found in the second volume of his autobiography In Joy Still Felt. There he tells of having dinner in 1959 with some friends and his wife. Asimov wrote:

As usual, I found myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist and of not particularly valuing my Jewish heritage…. I just think it is more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.

Asimov also commented on Zionism in a chapter titled “Anti-Semitism” in I. Asimov, his third autobiographical volume.

There, Asimov discussed how he was distressed by the capability of the historically oppressed (such as the Jews) to in turn become oppressors if given the chance.

Asimov wrote: “Right now, there is an influx of Soviet Jews into Israel. They are fleeing because they expect religious persecution. Yet at the instant their feet touched Israeli soil, they became extreme Israeli nationalists with no pity for the Palestinians. From persecuted to persecutors in the blinking of an eye.”

Tens of thousands of religious Jews today are adamantly opposed to Zionism including the orthodox Neturei Karta and the Satmar sects. Rabbi Yisroel Weiss is the international spokesman for Neturei Karta. Hundreds of thousands of religious Jews in Israel reject the secular political movement of Zionism which created “the Jewish State.”

There is an important book written by Dr. Yakov M. Rabkin, a professor of History at the University of Montreal. It is titled A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, (Zed Books: London, 2006). This book examines Jewish religious opposition to Zionism and details the long history of religious opposition to Zionism as a political movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rabkin describes present day Jewish religious anti-Zionism as follows:

… the rejection of Zionism in the name of the Torah, in the name of Jewish tradition. Such rejection is all the more significant in that it can in no way be described as anti-Semitic, recent attempts to conflate any expression of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism notwithstanding.

At first glance this seems to be a paradox.

After all, the public almost automatically associates Jews and Israel. The press continues to refer to “the Jewish State.” Israeli politicians often speak “in the name of the Jewish people.”

Yet the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel has caused one of the greatest schisms in Jewish history.

An overwhelming majority of those who defend and interpret the traditions of Judaism have, from the beginning, opposed what was to become a vision for a new society, a new concept of being Jewish, a program of massive immigration to the Holy land and the use of force to establish political hegemony there.⁸

Israel’s founders were in fact atheists who wanted to transform Judaism from being a religion into a secular national movement based on race or ethnicity. This explains why Jewish religious leaders were strongly opposed to secular Zionism. Theodore Herzl was seen as an anti-Semite due to his hostility to religious Jews.

In 1943, a group of 92 Reform rabbis, and many other prominent American Jews, created the American Council for Judaism with the express intent of combating Zionism.

Included in the Council’s leadership were Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore; Lessing J. Rosenwald, the former chairman of the Sears, Roebuck & Company, who became president of the Council; Rabbi Elmer Berger who became its executive director; Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times; and Sidney Wallach of the American Jewish Committee.

An example of their views on Zionism is Palestine, a pamphlet published by the American Council for Judaism, 1944, p.7 [American Council for Judaism Records (1942-1968), American Jewish Archives. Cincinnati, OH] which stated as follows: “… the concept of a theocratic state is long past. It is an anachronism. The concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept — is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful global war in which we are involved.”

The American Council for Judaism was founded to expressly oppose Zionism.

It was created in response to a 1942 Zionist Conference in the US, which proposed the formation of a Jewish army in Palestine before the state was founded.

The Council send letters to various governments and officials expressing their objection to such a notion as a ‘religious’ state, especially since they believed that: “that Jewish nationalism tends to confuse our fellowman about our place and function in society and diverts our own attention from our historic role to live as a religious community wherever we may dwell.”⁹

Membership in the Council grew to more than 15,000. Its members were highly articulate and greatly angered the Zionist leadership, who wanted the American Jewish community to present a united front on the Palestine question.

The book Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism 1942-1948, by Thomas A. Kolsky, (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990) is a history of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism during the period just before the creation of the “Jewish State.”

After Israel’s spectacular success in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, however, a change in the policy towards Zionism occurred in the American Council for Judaism.

Anti-Zionist Jewish author Alfred Lilienthal has suggested that “Zionist infiltration” succeeded in “neutralizing” the Council. A separate organization was subsequently established in 1969 called American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ).

The new group, which was based in New York, continued the original anti-Zionist tradition of the American Council for Judaism. Rabbi Elmer Berger served as president of AJAZ and also editor of its publication the AJAZ Report until shortly before his death in 1996.

The American Council for Judaism is still in existence but has softened its strict anti-Zionist position but today it is non-Zionist and highly critical of the “Jewish State’s” policies toward the Palestinians.

Their publications frequently carry anti-Zionist Jewish criticism. Allan C. Brownfeld is the Editor of Issues, their quarterly newsletter and also editor of their Special Interest Report. Stephen L. Naman is President of the Council.

Adam Shatz, the literary editor of The Nation magazine, has edited a book titled Prophet’s Outcast. The book contains essays written by 24 prominent Jewish scholars and intellectuals which are very critical of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.¹⁰

Another important book is The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin. It contains articles very critical of Israel’s policies, written by 27 prominent Israelis.

The Forward was written by a prominent Israeli author and journalist Tom Segev. The Introduction is written by Anthony Lewis, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who worked at The New York Times between 1969 and 2001. Lewis is now the James Madison Visiting Professor at Columbia University.

There are many Israeli critics of Zionism and anti-Zionist Jews in Israel where the conflict with the Palestinians is most apparent. These include Avraham Burg, former head of the World Jewish Agency and former Speaker of the Knesset; Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education; Yossi Sarid a former Knesset member and past leader of Meretz; Uri Avnery former Knesset member and leader of Gush Shalom; the late Israel Shahak former Chair of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights; former General and Knessett Member Mattityahu Peled; Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem; Jeff Halper head of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions; Felica Langer, a well known human rights lawyer; Michael Warschawski, co-founder of the Alternative Information Center; University of Oxford historian Avi Shalim; Eitan Bronstein Chair of Zochrot, which means “Remember,” and works to remind Israelis about the Nakba or Palestinian catastrophe; the late linguist and journalist Tanya Reinhart; New Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe; Uri Davis, author of Israel: An Apartheid State (London: Zed Books, 1987); Tikva Honig-Parnass, editor of Between the Lines; and journalists Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, A.B. Yehoshua, Yitzhak Laor, Akiva Eldar, Meron Rapoport, B. Michael, and Gideon Spiro to name only a few of the many Israelis who are anti-Zionist, non-Zionist or extremely critical of Zionism and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

There was an interesting book review published in Haaretz, on February 29, 2008, written by Tom Segev. It was a review of a book titled, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (published by Resling in Hebrew). It is authored by Israeli historian Shlomo Zand (also spelled Sand). Prof. Zand teaches history at Tel Aviv University. The book became a best seller in Israel. Segev writes:

… in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened — hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It’s all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.

This information and arguments have been around for a long time but it is interesting to see them published in one of Israel’s leading daily newspapers and presented in a book written by an Israeli historian. Here is how Segev summarizes the arguments in Zand’s book:

According to Zand, the Romans did not generally exile whole nations, and most of the Jews were permitted to remain in the country. The number of those exiled was at most tens of thousands. When the country was conquered by the Arabs, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.

If the majority of the Jews were not exiled, how is it that so many of them reached almost every country on earth? Zand says they emigrated of their own volition or, if they were among those exiled to Babylon, remained there because they chose to. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jewish religion tried to induce members of other faiths to become Jews, which explains how there came to be millions of Jews in the world. As the Book of Esther, for example, notes, “And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them.”

Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become Jews.

The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.

We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers.

According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.¹¹

It is somewhat ironic that issues and subjects that relate to the Palestinians and Zionism that are virtually taboo in North America are openly discussed in Israel.

These same subjects are much more openly discussed in Europe and in the rest of the World.¹²

Here is what noted financier, George Soros, writing in the New York Review of Books, on April 12, 2007, had to say on this the lack of debate in the United States on the Palestinian issue:

The current policy is not even questioned in the United States. While other problem areas of the Middle East are freely discussed, criticism of our policies toward Israel is very muted indeed. The debate in Israel about Israeli policy is much more open and vigorous than in the United States. This is all the more remarkable because Palestine is the issue that more than any other currently divides the United States from Europe.

The Jerusalem Post wrote:

… For an example of the type of discussion that goes on in Israel is the following statement made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: “For sixty years there has been discrimination against Arabs in Israel. This discrimination is deep-seated and intolerable.” Olmert made this statement while addressing a meeting of the Knesset committee that was investigating the lack of integration of Arab citizens in public service.¹³

Another example is the current Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin (from the right-wing Likud Party) who called for a fundamental change in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. He urged the founding of a “true partnership” between the two sectors, based on mutual respect, absolute equality and the addressing of “the special needs and unique character of each of the sides.”

The Speaker was reported to say all this in an address to be delivered at the president’s residence in Jerusalem on August 3rd, 2009. Quoting from Rivlin’s prepared speech which was released to the media:

The establishment of Israel was accompanied by much pain and suffering and a real trauma for the Palestinians (in large part due to the shortsightedness of the Palestinian leadership). Many of Israel’s Arabs, which see themselves as part of the Palestinian population, feel the pain of their brothers across the green line – a pain they feel the state of Israel is responsible for.

Many of them,” Rivlin says, “encounter racism and arrogance from Israel’s Jews; the inequality in the allocation of state funds also does not contribute to any extra love.¹⁴

Can you ever imagine a top American or Canadian politician making statements like these, or a leading Canadian or American newspaper publishing an article like this one? If they did make statements like these what would be the reaction?

However, Rivlin still tried to focus the blame on the Palestinian leadership for the problems and does not fully acknowledge Israel’s part in the expulsions. These expulsions and massacres started before the official declaration of Israel’s Independence on May 14, 1948. According to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe, there were expulsions of the Palestinians from 30 villages after the War had ended in 1949.

Rivlin also does not address the land seizures from Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes but remained in Israel.

These individuals were considered Israeli citizens, but still lost all of their property. These individuals are called “present Absentees,” an Orwellian phrase if there ever was one.

Here is how one Israeli academic, Gabriel Piterberg, describes the phrase and how it relates to Israel: “How the founding myths of Israel dictated conceptual removal of Palestinians, during and after physical removal. The invention of ‘retroactive transfer’ and ‘present absentees’ as the glacial euphemisms of ethnic cleansing.”¹⁵

Nor does Rivlin acknowledge that most of the Zionist leadership wanted all of Palestine without its Arab population and this wish “miraculously” came true. Palestinian leadership, inept as it was, cannot be blamed for everything.

Another important book on this topic is Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives published by the Jewish Voice for Peace. It contains articles written by eight Jewish American writers. One of the articles is written by Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkley.

Her article is on the question of whether criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Her answer and article is titled: “No, Its Not Anti-Semitic.”¹⁶

Another book that examines Jewish criticism of Zionism and Israel’s policies is Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon (Grove Press: New York, 2003).

Kushner is an award winning playwright and Solomon a staff writer at The Village Voice and a professor at Baruch College-City of New York. This book contains a collection of 53 prominent American Jewish writers’ critical analysis of Zionism and Israel’s policies. This list includes such distinguished writers as Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Marc Ellis, Naomi Klein (actually a Canadian) and Rabbi Arthur Waskow among many others.

Another important book on Jewish criticism of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (Verso: London, 2008). It is edited by four prominent British academics, Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum. This book contains the highly critical writings of 27 Jewish academics and thinkers on the issues of the Occupation, Israel and Zionism.

There are a number of other anthologies and collections of writings from anti-Zionist Jews. These include Zionism Reconsidered, edited by Michael Selzer, (The MacMillian Company: London, 1970); Zionism: The dream and the reality: A Jewish Critique, Gary V. Smith ed. (Barnes & Noble Books: New York, 1974); Jewish Critics of Zionism and The Stifling and Smearing of a Dissenter, by Moshe Menuhin, (Association of Arab University Graduates, 1976); Judaism or Zionism, EAFORD & AJAZ (American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism) eds., (Zed Books: London, 1986); The End of Zionism and the Liberation of the Jewish People, Eibie Weizfeld ed. (Clarity Press: Atlanta, 1989); Radicals, Rabbis, and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jews against the occupation, edited by Seth Faber (Common Courage Press, Monroe ME, 2005).

Faber’s book contains a series of interviews with leading American dissident Jews’ Noam Chomsky, Steve Quester, Joel Kovel, Norton Mezvinsky, Ora Wise, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis, Adam Shapiro, Daniel Boyarin, Rabbi David Weiss, and includes a speech and an essay by Marc Ellis.

Mordecai Richler, the late esteemed Canadian author, wrote an article entitled “Israel marks 50th anniversary out of favor with many Jews,” Toronto Star, February 15, 1998. Many other Canadian Jews are opposed to Zionism or are critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Many Canadian Jews were against the war on Gaza. These dissenters include academics and writers Judy Rebick, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Rick Salutin, Bernard Avishai, Howard Skutel, Yakov Rabkin, Klaus Herrmann, Janet Weinroth, Judith Weisman, Michael Neumann, Alan Sears, Gabor Mate, Judy and Larry Haiven, Michael Mandel, Ursula Franklin, Abbie Bakan, Mordecai Briemberg, Eibie Weizfeld, Zalman Amit, Rabbi Reuben Slonim, pianist Anton Kuerti, Ralph Benmergui broadcaster and producer and Judy Deutsch head of Science for Peace to name but a few.

The Jewish Outlook Society, headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, publishes Outlook. They describe their magazine as, “An Independent, secular Jewish publication with a socialist-humanist perspective.” Carl Rosenberg is the Editor and Sylvia Friedman is the Managing Editor. Harold Berson is in charge of circulation. They have over 40 Jewish individuals, primarily living in Canada, who serve in various capacities with the organization and their publication.

Outlook takes a critical view of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and frequently publishes Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives.

Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) (Canada) currently has more than 100 members. Dylan Penner, Sid Shniad and Diana Ralph serves as coordinators for IJV. The Steering Committee is composed of 24 Canadian Jewish activists including Fabienne Presentey, Sandra Ruch, Andy Leher and Harry Shannon. The IJV is a member-led organization, with chapters in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax.

Here is what Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) said, in their February 19, 2009 Press Release, about Stephen Harper Conservative government’s position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Minister Jason Kenney’s cutting off funding for English Second Language training programs run by the Canadian Arab Federation:

We believe that Mr. Kenny [sic] and his Conservative government is threatening CAF’s funding because CAF stands for justice for Palestinian people and because it expresses principled criticism of oppressive Israeli policies.

As Jews, we affirm that criticizing Israeli policies is NOT anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism refers to hostility and/or prejudice against Jews. Like any other government, Israel has obligations under international law.

To responsibly raise critical concerns about the discriminatory, illegal, and brutal policies of another government is an ethical imperative, which our government should support.

However, the Conservative government has gone further than any previous Canadian administration in endorsing illegal and brutal Israeli assaults on Palestinian and Lebanese people.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged complete allegiance with Israel and labels as “anti-Semitic” any criticism of Israeli actions (including the Gaza massacre, house demolitions, use of illegal phosphorous and DIME weapons against civilians, etc.).

As Jews, we believe this is a dishonest smoke-screen, a ploy to discredit principled calls for humanity, justice, and compliance with international law.

There are hundreds, and probably thousands, of Jewish critics of Zionism and of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians who have published articles or written books on the subject. Yet many Zionists, and their supporters, claim that there is a monolithic Jewish position in support of Zionism, Israel and the occupation of Palestinian land.

This claim of near universal Jewish support for the Zionist state and its actions toward the Palestinians is so far from the truth that it is laughable.

One has only to open your eyes and review the written record to see that there is no Jewish consensus on these issues and a great deal of criticism and outright opposition to Zionism exists in Jewish intellectual and religious circles, both in the past and today.

Israel’s supporters shamelessly use the argument that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic no matter what Israel does. This argument is almost entirely false and politically motivated. Not to tell the truth, or to suppress discussion, about what is going on in Palestine is racist and a crime against the Palestinian people and a crime of silence and indifference not unlike the one committed against Jews in the Second World War.

To quote George Soros on the use of anti-Semitism, a tactic he described “the most insidious argument,” to silence the political debate on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

… Any politician who dares to expose AIPAC’s influence would incur its wrath; so very few can be expected to do so. It is up to the American Jewish community itself to rein in the organization that claims to represent it.

But this is not possible without first disposing of the most insidious argument put forward by the defenders of the current policies: that the critics of Israel’s policies of occupation, control, and repression on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and Gaza engender anti-Semitism.

The opposite is the case. One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs. Demolishing the wall of silence that has protected AIPAC would help lay them to rest. A debate within the Jewish community, instead of fomenting anti-Semitism, would only help diminish it.

Billionaire George Soros can hardly be considered a leftist. He is also Jewish.

Here is what Ben Ehrenreich, the author of the novel The Suitors, wrote in the Los Angeles Times on the issue of criticism of Zionism being anti-Semitic.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an “epidemic” more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel’s apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can’t be said.

It’s not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, “turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground.

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.”³

There is clearly a wide range of opinion on Zionism that exists within the Jewish community. This fact needs to be recognized. We also need to reject specious arguments and reject false allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. We need to fight for freedom of speech, academic freedom, critical inquiry and democratic debate, at all universities and colleges, in the media, in the halls of political power and all across North America. Individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves questions about Zionism and the Palestinians based on open debate, the facts and informed opinion not on suppression of debate, intimidation and censorship.

1. See “The Palestinian Question at the University: The Case of Western Ontario,” American-Arab Affairs, Summer 1987, pp. 87-98.
2. See for example, “We Cannot Allow These Murders to Go Unpunished: We can demand these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes,” by Gerald Kaufman, The Independent, April 12, 2006.
3. “Zionism is the problem: The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace,” by Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2009.
4. See Occupation Magazine, 25 July, 2009.
5. “A Jewish state — or Jewish values?,” by Tema Okun, Mondoweiss, 21 July, 2009).
6. For example, see “Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing,” By Uri Avnery, CounterPunch, 7 October 2003.
7. “Hands off the Law of Return!,” David Turner, Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2007.
8. Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Zed Books: London 2006), p. 2.
9. America Council for Judaism, Series A. Correspondence, Subseries 1: General, 1942-1953.
10. Ed Corrigan, “Jewish Criticism of Zionism,” Middle East Policy, Winter 1990-91.
11. “An Invention Called ‘The Jewish People,’” By Tom Segev, Ha’aretz, February 29, 2008.
12. For example see, “New Israeli Scholars Face up to Israel’s Origins,” by Eric Rouleau and “Are the Jews an Invented People?” by Eric Rouleau, Le Monde diplomatique, 10 May, 2008; and “A crisis in Judaism: For many Jews today, Israel is not a normal state – it is a cause or ideal, and therein lies the problem,” Brian Klug, Guardian, 15 January, 2009; “Israel’s war crimes,” Richard Falk, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, 3 March 2009; “Israel’s Lies,” Henry Siegman, London Review of Books, 29 January, 2009.
13. See “PM slams ‘discrimination’ against Arabs,” By Elie Leshem and Jpost.com Staff, Jerusalem Post, Nov 12, 2008.
14. See “Knesset Speaker: Establishment of Israel caused Arabs real trauma,” Haaretz Service, Haaretz, 3 August 2009.
15. See “Erasures,” Gabriel Piterberg, New Left Review, July-August 2001.
16. Edward C. Corrigan, “Book Review of Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives,” Middle East Policy Council, Volume XIII, Spring 2006, Number 1.

According to its website, the Group of 20 was created in the late 1990s as a response to the financial crisis that hit the capitalist world during that period. It was convened under the notion that so-called emerging economies should be provided a greater say in the control of the capitalist world that was then dominated by the Group of 7 (G-7( which in turn is dominated by Washington and London.) In other words, the primary purpose of the G-20 is to coordinate plans among capitalist nations that will ensure the continued existence of capitalism and, more precisely, the continued domination of that system by Western economies, especially Washington. In the current economic climate, the G-20 sees its role as one that requires “send(ing) a strong signal that it is prepared to take whatever further actions are necessary to stabilise the financial system and to provide further macroeconomic support. At the same time, the G-20 must commit to maintaining open trade and investment, to avoid a retreat to protectionism, and direct necessary additional support to emerging markets and developing countries.” In short, the G-20 must do whatever it takes to keep the current system of free trade and financial speculation going, no matter what the cost to the working and poor people on the planet.

It is quite fitting that this summit is taking place in Pittsburgh. If there is one US city that epitomizes the failure of late-twentieth century capitalism to provide for its working people, then Pittsburgh certainly fits the bill. If there is one US city that demonstrates capitalism’s need to pursue cheap labor in order to maximize profits, Pittsburgh certainly fits the bill. If there is one US city that forecasts the future of regular people under the domain of capitalism’s latest stage–a stage that has taken decent-paying unionized jobs away and replaced them with lower paying service positions for those lucky enough to have another job, Pittsburgh fits the bill. Like Richard Fox, a resident and shop owner in Pittsburgh who supports the intention of many of the protests, wrote to me in an email: “When the steel industry died, easily 1/2 of the city’s population as well as huge numbers of citizens of small mill towns (remember “the deer hunter” settings?) simply picked up and left. South or southwest. In some ways, the city has never recovered from the loss. When I was growing up here, the mills stretched, literally, for miles on both sides of the Monongahela river. employing tens of thousands. Three shifts all day everyday. It was quite a sight. Chicago the city of the big shoulders, had nothing on us…. How do you re-build a local economy and infrastructure after that sort of disaster? It is appropriate to mention something about the development of Pittsburgh as an important center for medical arts and the computer/hi-tech industry, but that fact in no way refutes or undermines the argument that the city was devastated by the loss of tens of thousands of industrial jobs. The balance between blue collar and professional jobs has swung in favor of the latter with predictable results. ” Those predictable results Fox refers to include not only a disparity in income but also in education and other social factors.

As any astute working person can tell you, the fate of Pittsburgh is slowly becoming the fate of hundreds, if not thousands, of other towns and cities around the world. The total domination of the capitalist giants of Wall Street in collusion with the sycophantic politicians in Washington and other capitols has drained the financial life from municipalities and their citizens at an astonishingly rapid rate. Behind the statistics showing rising unemployment and mortgage foreclosures lies the breakup of families in the western nations, while in the developing nations, the most recent crisis of the capitalist system means an even further deepening of the health and other human crises already in existence. In another metaphor for the greater economic havoc wreaked upon the world’s working and poor, those good-paying union jobs at the steel mils also impacted the African-American community in Pittsburgh. Such jobs were held by black men and women, too. Not only did this create stability and hope in that community, it also ensured a cultural vibrancy. Since the removal of those jobs from Pittsburgh, it has arguably been the communities of color that have been hurt the most.

This reality is repeated on a considerably larger scale throughout the world in the wake of the globalization of modern capital. Yet, the leaders of the capitalist world, as represented by the G-20 and other such organizations, prescribe more of the same. If it wasn’t clear before it should be now–these organizations are not interested in the welfare of those they consider their subjects. They exist only to ensure the continued existence of their profit making machine. Furthermore, they will do whatever it takes to ensure that that machine continues to run.

This is why it is necessary to protest the Pittsburgh Summit. The protests will begin several days before the summit itself. Much of the legal and organizing work for the week of protests is being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. According to a press release from the Center dated August 16, 2009, there will be a mass march on September 25, 2009 that is endorsed by all of the organizations planning to protest in Pittsburgh that week. As Jessica Banner of the Center’s Antiwar Committee eloquently stated: “Anyone who has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food has been directly affected by policies set by the G20 and should join us on Sept. 25th.”

Several tent cities are being planned, among them a Music Camp beginning September 18th that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street and another encampment that will begin September 20th with a National March for Jobs on September 20th. This march and tent city is being facilitated by the Bail Out the People Movement (BOTM) and is but one part of the organization’s plans for the week. According to a spokesperson for the Pittsburgh branch of the BOTM, there is a struggle brewing over the permits which are being denied for sites in the downtown area. This is but one of the actions awaiting permits. According to the city of Pittsburgh, no permits have been issued yet because the city is waiting for the Secret Service to determine the so-called security perimeter it considers its right to impose whenever officials under Secret Service protection are present. Protest organizers have told the press that they hope they will get the necessary permits and continue to insure the public that there are no plans for violence among any of the protest groups.

There is also a women’s tent city being planned, a People’s Summit featuring speakers and debate regarding the nature of the G-20 and popular alternatives to these types of organizations, a direct action on the afternoon of the summit, a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert. Although the city continues to debate whether or not to grant these exercises in democracy permits, they have notified the public that there will be 4000 extra police on hand during the G-20 meeting. It seems that, once again, the state wants to portray ordinary citizens who are planning to peacefully assemble as potential criminals. We must not allow that to happen. If you can be in Pittsburgh while the capitalists are gathering hoping to determine the future according to their needs (which are not usually the same as ours), please be there. If you are a citizen who believes in the First Amendment, heed the suggestion of Anne Peterman of the Global Justice Ecology Project and call the White House to encourage Barack Obama to “tell the Secret Service to obey the Constitution and respect the First Amendment-protected rights of protesters.” (White House phone number is 202-456-1111). If you live or work in Pittsburgh, encourage the city council and other officials to grant the permits being requested. Most importantly, if you support the purpose of the protests let the organizers know, especially if you live in the Pittsburgh region. If you can afford the time, please attend.

On July 7, Denver Chief Judge Larry Naves vacated—threw out—the verdict and issued a ruling that gave CU everything they wanted. Professor Churchill is not to be reinstated, and he is not entitled to lost earnings or a financial settlement. This ruling by Naves is as ludicrous as it is utterly baseless; it represents a decision to crudely step in to ensure that CU prevails, in spite of the truth.

Background to a Witch-hunt

This case began in early 2005 when Ward Churchill became the target of a highly orchestrated, nationwide right-wing political witch-hunt after an essay he’d written shortly after 9/11 came to light. The attack on Churchill became the focal point of a major assault on critical thinking and dissenting scholars in academia that continues to this day. A chilling message spread to faculty across campuses to “watch out!”—criticism of past or present U.S. crimes could threaten your reputation, your job, even your career.

Faculty, students and others stepped out to oppose the demand for Churchill to be fired, seeing it as a key battlefront in the growing push by powerful right wing forces to use this controversy to bring sweeping changes to university life, and intimidate and silence other progressive and radical scholars. University faculty wrote letters and op-ed pieces for newspapers and magazines, and circulated statements signed by hundreds and hundreds of professors in support of Churchill. A full page ad appeared in the New York Review of Books signed by many well known public intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, Derrick Bell, Rashid Khalidi, Mahmood Mamdani, Irene Gendzier, and others calling on CU to stop their push to fire him.

The university first tried to fire Churchill for the content of his essay, but then decided it would be wiser to switch gears and go after him another way. They combined several mainly old complaints about aspects of Churchill’s scholarship, and even solicited another; formed a faculty committee to investigate headed by a former prosecutor known at the time to be biased against Churchill, and used the committee’s findings of alleged research misconduct to fire him.

The verdict confirmed Churchill’s contention that this investigation of his scholarship, under a microscope, should not have taken place, and was for the sole purpose of finding a pretext to fire him for his scholarship and political views. Prominent scholars—such as Noam Chomsky and Stanley Fish—have made the point that no researcher’s work could stand up to this kind of scrutiny.

“Quasi-judicial Immunity”

The court ruling, in large part lifted word-for-word from the motion by CU’s attorneys, accepts CU’s claim that the Regents hold “quasi-judicial immunity,” as a matter of law. In essence this means that the school’s governing board can do practically anything, including fire faculty members for speech they find offensive, and the faculty have no remedy, as long as the university’s formal procedures are followed in firing them. (Find all of the court papers here.)

By making this ruling after the verdict has been reached, Naves is openly granting “quasi-judicial immunity” to a body whose members are known to have publicly denounced the “litigant” before trial; admitted being subjected to pressure to get rid of Churchill; and were found to have taken unconstitutional action in order to punish the exercise of First Amendment-protected speech. What does it mean for a powerful body to be given this kind of immunity for highly political decisions over the lives and careers of university faculty and scholars, including tenured faculty? This, and some of the points that follow, are taken from a letter opposing the ruling that is being circulated in the academic community by the Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia network.

Brian Leiter, philosopher and legal scholar, currently John Wilson Professor of Law at the U. of Chicago, described the decision as having “possibly catastrophic implications” in his on-line Report (Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports), titled: “Attention State University Faculty in Colorado: You Have Almost No Remedy if the Regents Violate your First Amendment Rights.” But the impact of this ruling, if it is allowed to stand, will be felt by faculty far beyond Colorado.

The judge provides numerous different, conflicting arguments for his decision, no doubt hoping to make it unlikely to be overturned on appeal. That’s why, having first thrown out the jury’s verdict, Naves then goes on to invoke it. He claims that the jury’s $1 damage award compels him to deny reinstatement. “If I am required to enter an order that is ‘consistent with the jury’s findings,’ I cannot order a remedy that ‘disregards the jury’s implicit finding’ that Professor Churchill has suffered no actual damages that an award of reinstatement would prospectively remedy.” This argument is completely baseless. The jury’s verdict that Churchill was fired in violation of his protected speech—which can only rightfully be remedied by returning him to his job—is in no way mitigated by the amount of the damage award. The argument that the amount of damages determines whether a constitutional violation should be remedied is absurd.

As it turns out, the judge’s attempt to interpret the jury’s findings is also contradicted by one of the jurors, who has written an affidavit filed with Churchill’s response to the ruling. In it, the juror explains, “It was difficult for us to put a value on Churchill’s emotional distress, and in the end, we listened to Churchill’s testimony that the case was not about the money and hoped that the Judge would give him his job back or give him some compensation.”

In search of yet another argument for overturning the meaning of the verdict, the ruling claims: “The jury determined only that the University did not prove that a majority of the Regents would have voted to dismiss Professor Churchill in the absence of his political speech. That is a very different question than whether Professor Churchill engaged in academic misconduct…” The judge argues that despite the verdict, Churchill committed such serious academic misconduct that it would be wrong and harmful to the university to reinstate him. As Churchill’s attorney David Lane’s Reconsideration motion puts it, how can there be no evidence of academic misconduct serious enough to justify Churchill’s firing, but there is sufficient academic misconduct in the court’s mind to deny reinstatement?

At trial, the jurors heard testimony by experts in American Indian Studies and Indian Law highly critical of the findings of the faculty investigative committee, as well as by witnesses for the university, and that was a critical part of the basis for their conclusions. Again, as the juror’s affidavit states:

A majority of the Jurors thought that the academic misconduct charges were not valid. We felt that the procedures afforded to Churchill by the University of Colorado, before his termination, were biased. In fact, during our deliberations, we listed every witness that testified at trial, and determined that the majority of the University of Colorado’s witnesses were biased and dishonest.

Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law School professor and frequent national media commentator, called the refusal to reinstate Churchill “bizarre.” He blasted Naves’ final argument that puts the blame for refusing reinstatement on Ward Churchill’s statements showing “hostility to the university”:

The university opposed the reinstatement on the ground that, if he returned, the relationship ‘would not be an amicable one.’ That was obvious from the jury verdict. However, that is like using the bias as a defense. First, the University is found to have improperly terminated Churchill due to its hatred for his views but then successfully blocks reinstatement due to its hatred of his views.

There is a great deal at stake for academia and for society overall right now in upholding and defending this verdict, and deepening its lessons. An ugly, high-stakes public witch-hunt by dangerous, reactionary, and powerful forces, aimed at spreading a repressive chill over the universities, has been dragged into the light, and dealt a setback. But these forces, far from retreating, are regrouping, and trying to turn the meaning of this verdict on its head. This absurd, twisted and clearly unjust decision by Denver Chief Judge Naves only contributes to those objectives, and it must be opposed. And at the same time, the debate we called for in that article is needed more than ever, with those within and outside academia who, in spite of the verdict, are still taken in by a distorted view of what the case is about.

As the fall term approaches, faculty and students, and everyone concerned with the defense of the unfettered search for the truth, intellectual ferment, and dissent, need to step forward on campuses around the country and develop plans for how to call out, build opposition to, and to delegitimize, this ruling, calling meetings and rallies, writing letters to newspapers and to CU and the Colorado court, taking out ads, and more. And broader segments of society need to join with them.

The challenge to administrators, faculty, and especially students is to stand up to this assault. And broader segments of society must join with them. We must continue to defend those like Ward Churchill when they are singled out for attack, and, more generally, defend the ability of professors to hold dissenting and radical views. It is vitally important that the new generation of students step forward to defend an unfettered search for the truth, intellectual ferment, and dissent. One way or another, this struggle over the university and intellectual life will have profound repercussions on what U.S. society will be like, and on the prospects for bringing a whole new society into being.

They will take evil and call it good. They will take the lie and call it truth.
– Isaiah

The unexamined life is not worth living.
–Socrates

War is always finally about betrayal.
– Chris Hedges

A static universe isn’t physically self-consistent. The sun can’t shine forever.
– James Peebles, Physics Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

Do I dare
disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
– T.S. Eliot

On July 11th, author William Blum e-mailed me a Washington Post article about Ken Meyercord. Fredrick Kunkle, a Post staff writer, described Meyercord as a 65-year old with a “high tech job at Freddie Mac, a local public-access cable television show … and a long history of writing about what he says are ‘myths’ of the Holocaust.” Meyercord, the article continued, hoped to win “an at-large seat on the board of the Reston Citizens Association, a quasi-government body … for the community of 60,000, which is not officially a municipality.” Reston is basically a D.C. suburb in Virginia.

I’d met Meyercord a few months before at a political celebration in downtown D.C. The party’s sponsors were elated over Obama’s inauguration. More cynical than most of those there, I’d latched onto Blum’s coat-tails for the invite—providing chauffeur services in my old van. I met Medea Benjamin, Meyercord and his Palestinian wife, Samira, and a few other interesting people. Nobody I met or overheard struck me as radical or dangerous. Some—not those I’ve mentioned here—struck me as naïve for believing that one election would change the direction of our latter-day Empire.

A few months later, friend Blum and I were at Eduardo Galeano’s reading at Politics and Prose, also in D.C.. We ran into Meyercord there and we decided to get some Chinese food nearby. Meyercord told me about his TV show then, but most of the conversation had more to do with Peking duck than with the sweet and sour business of contemporary, imperial politics.

Meyercord probably mentioned that he was running in the Reston election. A Maryland resident, unable to vote in Virginia, absorbed in my personal problems then, all of that sailed over my head. Conversation was mostly convivial; no one was trying to proselytize; and, in fact, nobody could have. Blum is 75 and he’s seen it all; I’m 63 and I’ve seen enough.

Four days after reading the first article on Meyercord, I was e-mailed another, also by Fredrick Kunkle at the Post. Under the headline, “Write-in Effort Blocks ‘Revisionist,” I learned: “A last-minute campaign to prevent a self-described Holocaust revisionist from serving on a civic body in Reston has succeeded with a landslide. … Ken Meyercord, who had been running unopposed for an at-large seat on the Reston Citizens Association’s 13-member volunteer board, received only 23 votes after his provocative views on Jews created a backlash.” Debra Steppel, who organized the write-in campaign, called it a “fabulous result.”

Mr. Kunkle wrote that Meyercord was “gracious in conceding,” and that he had congratulated Ms. Steppel for her efforts, although he thought her “misinformed.” Further, the article noted that Meyercord and his wife had lived in Reston since 1977, and that, in “writings and interviews,” he had expressed doubt that Nazi Germany had a “mission to annihilate European Jews, a plan known as the Final Solution.” Meyercord had also denied that Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews, and he had “expressed skepticism that the number of Holocaust victims reached 6 million.”

By now, my interest was more than piqued, and I asked Meyercord to send me some of his writing. As a half-Jew with Zionists, anti-Zionists and the indifferent, ignorant and uniformed within my own extended family; as a fan of Paine and Thoreau, Martin Buber, Rilke and Hesse; as a man vitally interested in my world and human psychology, I wanted to know more about this tempest in a teapot in Reston and how it might relate to our confused, violent and pernicious modern macro world.

Perusing Meyercord’s work, I found him to be more apologetic than inflammatory. In “In Search of a Holocaust Denier,” he writes, “What I would like to offer here is a rationale—a plea, really—for investigating all aspects of the holocaust story in an atmosphere free of rancor, intolerance, and intimidation. I believe we can learn from history and that it will be a better world if we do. Of course, to learn from history, we have to have an accurate understanding of what happened. …”

Meyercord describes how the “goose-stepping … siegheiling” Nazis endlessly portrayed by Hollywood and the other media provided little insight into “how a man like Hitler could have risen to power in one of the most sophisticated countries on earth.” He deplores the fact that we have learned so little from the Nazi era, noting that the Foreign Minister of Israel [Avigdor Lieberman] has advocated the deportation of all Palestinians from Eretz [Greater] Israel. Those who have challenged holocaust orthodoxy have found themselves exiled to an academic wilderness—a la Norman Finkelstein in the U.S.—or imprisoned—like David Irving in Austria! And, in that same reasonable, almost apologetic mode, he asks, “Wouldn’t it be better to dispel the myths surrounding the holocaust now, while anti-Semitism is a neglibible factor in American society, than at some future date when hard times lead desperate, angry Americans to look around for a scapegoat?”

So much for the overview of Meyercord’s approach. He’s not some glib-tongued salesman for neo-Nazism. His argumentation is tightly reasoned and far less fiery and provocative than, say, Limbaugh’s, O’Reilly’s, Hannity’s or Coulter’s. He directs his readers (and directed me in a short phone interview of him) to two websites for further exploration of the issues.

Meyercord describes himself as a “revisionist,” not a holocaust denier. He notes: “What causes revisionists to be misrepresented and slandered by the believers is their denial of three constituent parts of the holocaust story:

   1. That there was a plan to exterminate the Jews, aka, “The Final Solution.”
   2. That gas chambers were used in the execution of that plan; and
   3. That no less than six million Jews died as a result.

He offers his own refutations of the predominant “holocaust story” and directs us to others for more detail.

The question I have to ask now is: How is this relevant to our post-9/11 world?

It is relevant because past is prelude, and those who don’t learn the lessons of the past, as Santayana said … well, you know the rest.

It’s relevant because we would rather kill each other to defend the sanctity of our myths—religious, ideological, nationalistic/patriotic—than smash the idols of our perceptions—and misperceptions.

It’s relevant because a thoughtful man’s views of history or religious dogma is irrelevant to the performance of his duties and responsibilities as a citizen in a local civic organization.

It is relevant because every tin-pot dictator who appears on the scene—a Noriega, a Saddam Hussein—who loses the favor of the U.S. imperial regime; and every populist leader—an Ahmadinejead, a Hugo Chavez, a Fidel Castro—is inevitably compared to Hitler and threatened with regime change, or having his country “wiped off the map,” or has, in fact, been invaded. Hitler has become the gold standard of evil—and that incubus colors every other form of evil. We have personalized and incarnated evil, ignorance and brutality, and exonerated the institutions, the social forms and mechanisms of control, the psychologies and hysterias still very much with us today.

It is relevant because most Americans don’t know squat about Zionism or the role that Jewish nationalism played in the run-up to World War I, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the disastrous Versailles treaty, the Balfour Declaration, etc. (Meyercord, in fact, does not touch on any of this in his writing or in his interviews with me or with Fred Kunkle at the Post.)

It is relevant because whether 6 million Jews died or 1 million died—there still is no justification for the expropriation of another people’s land, resources, country. (My mother taught me as a child, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”)

Meyercord’s little dust-up in a D.C. suburb leaves us with three big ponderables:

   1. A question of censorship
   2. A moral question
   3. The historical record

Ms. Steppel’s write-in campaign, and the voters of Reston, attempted to censor Meyercord’s words and beliefs. They did not vote on the man’s competence, his willingness and ability to serve his local community. They voted against his convictions, at which he had arrived after carefully examining the evidence, his life and the promptings of his conscience. He lived for six months in Beirut, traveled in Israel, has had a long, fulfilling marriage to a Palestinian woman. They raised two children who attended Reston’s public schools. No doubt his unique experiences have enriched his perspective. How does censorship and expurgation serve the public interest? In our intertwined world, are we not all safer reaching out, trying to understand “the other”?

The moral question has too often reduced itself to “my suffering is better than your suffering.” Suffering employed this way has little or nothing to do with morality, much to do with religious dogma. It is suffering as justification—for outrageous reparations (against Germans, for example, no more guilty for World War I than Brits, the French, the Americans, the Russians). It is suffering employed as the ultimate rationale for “man’s inhumanity to man,” “nature red in tooth and claw,” etc. It is suffering memorialized as stasis (James Peebles here: “a static universe isn’t physically self-consistent”). It is suffering as rationalization for continuing the empires of destruction, wreaking havoc and revenge on more innocents, continuing the whole ghastly process (“They will take evil and call it good. They will take the lie and call it the truth.”)

As for the historical record, it has always been a rather murky affair. In my entire lifetime, God has never spoken to me once out of the Whirlwind, and I have been waiting for 46 years to find out what really happened on November 22, 1963. Einstein said God doesn’t play dice with the Universe, and Bohr told Einstein to stop telling God what to do! God may not play dice, but He/She/It certainly keeps His/Her/Its cards close to His/Her/Its chest/bosom/ineffable mystery.

Which means I’ve got to keep digging. I have to keep disturbing the universe, checking my notes and revising my memes because in an expanding universe I don’t participate in cosmological events, but I can play my ant-like role in the evolution of awareness and consciousness. “War is finally about betrayal,” as Hedges succinctly and profoundly writes, and I need to know why and how a species that has evolved so magnificently in its technology has, when it comes to interacting with other sentient beings, stymied itself in the Age of Iron and Sky Gods. What gives? What mystery here?

Six million victims or one innocent victim—what compels us to slaughter the innocents under Herod, to crucify Christ for our sins, to burn John Hus for impiety? How shall we employ numbers to justify brutality? Did the death of 20 million Russians in the Great Patriotic War justify the rape of 2 million German women by Russian troops when the Third Reich collapsed? The ghost voices of tens of millions of native peoples of the Americas rise up and cry for justice. What reparations can we pay them? Millions of Africans, lost in the “Middle Passage” of the slave trips, sweated to death among the sugar canes of the Caribbean and the cotton and tobacco plantations of the New (old!) World—what memorials shall we build for them, what is their due?

How do we make equivalences? I suffered, my family suffered, my people suffered … therefore, I have the right to. … What? Wreak vengeance? Upon the innocents?

Probably it is too much to hope for forgiveness—either given or gotten. Humans are not, generally, constituted that way. Except for a few saints we’ve usually managed to crucify upside down, boil in oil, or murder with a thousand cuts.

But we may, possibly, hope for clarity, breaking the cycle of wrong for wrong, by excavating the truths, the hidden causes, penetrating the whirlwind of confusion and setting the record straight–because in this melange of pulsating life called Earth, it’s looking more and more like we’d better all pull on the oars together or we’re all going down together. And it looks more and more like Eugene Debs, who said so much well, said this one perfectly: “While there is one soul in prison, I am not free.”

What else but to know the true history of the human mind and heart—to extricate ourselves, to beam the searchlights in terra incognita, confront our demons, shake our wings loose from the chrysalis of so much ignorance, blood-lust, power-lusting, arrogance, fear, greed and stupidity?

Despite that DoD officials removed the offensive section from their educational resources at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies. Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960’s by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi’s Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, “How dare they try to intimidate us!”)

This sort of happening in mind, the treatment of Nobel Peace Award winner Aung San Sui Kyi in Myanmar is not necessarily all that different than the response that she’d receive in the USA and, while it’s commendable that American spokespersons publicly object to her most recent arrest, they, certainly, might seem to be a bunch of hypocrites. This is due to the fact that a number of Nobel Peace Award recipients, such as American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), have had difficulties of their own on American soil.

For example, “AFSC’s work, always open and resolutely nonviolent, has been under government surveillance for decades. The Service Committee secured nearly 1,700 pages of files from the FBI under a Freedom of Information request in 1976. These files show that the FBI kept files on AFSC that dated back to 1921. Ten other federal agencies kept files on AFSC, including the CIA, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, Secret Service, and the State Department. The CIA has intercepted overseas mail and cables in the 1950s, and some AFSC offices (and even its staff’s homes) have been infiltrated and burglarized in the late 1960s into the 1970s.”

In relation, AFSC associate general secretary for justice and human rights, Joyce Miller, asked, “How can we speak of spreading democracy in Iraq while dismantling it here at home?” She further remarked, “Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society. It should not be equated with crime.”

Add to the AFSC problems, those pertaining to Nobel Peace Award recipient Nelson Mandela, who only a year ago had the designation “terrorist” removed from his name, under protest by the State Department, so that he no longer suffered travel restrictions from the US government. Yet his travel curtailment was not nearly as awful as was Ramzy Baroud’s blockage. He, the editor of Palestine Chronicle, had his US passport seized by a consular officer at an overseas American Embassy. [3] Similarly, Senator Edward Kennedy was, also, flagged by the US no-fly list.

Then again, Ted Kennedy received much less harassment than did Nobel Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire after her flight from Guatemala had been directed to Ireland through Houston:

She was probably tired and ready to get back to Belfast, where her attempts to bring about an end to The Troubles in 1976 made her at 32 the youngest Nobel Peace Prize-winner ever. Since then, she’s been given the Pacem in Terris Award by Pope John Paul II, and the United Nations selected her (along with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Jordan’s Queen Noor and a dozen or so other fellow Nobel Laureates) as an honorary board member of the International Coalition for the Decade.

Unfortunately for Maguire, her flight back home to Northern Ireland was routed through Houston, where none of that meant diddly. Federal Customs officials were far less interested in any of that than they were in a box on the back of the transit form she filled out on her flight.

“They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war,” Maguire said later in a statement. ‘They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form admitting to criminal activities.

Maguire was detained for two hours — grilled once, fingerprinted, photographed, and grilled again. She missed her flight home. She was only released after an organization she helped found — the Nobel Women’s Initiative — started kicking up a fuss.

On can add to her troubles countless other ones wherein human rights and environmental supporters have been repeatedly hassled for no other reason than that they’re holding views that don’t jive with positions at any number of U.S. government institutions. One needn’t return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions. For example, Stephen Lendman, a peace advocate and writer in his seventies with a permanent knee injury that delimits travel, has been repeatedly investigated by the FBI.

At the same time, he is joined by myriad others such as assorted activists in Maryland whose names were put on federal terrorist lists by state police who infiltrated their groups. As such, their perfectly legal activities, freedom of speech and right to unhindered assembly have been criminalized.

Simultaneously, there’s a certain inescapable irony and disingenuous quality presented by the Western government heads who are harshly critical of the Iran crackdown on dissenting citizens while they, themselves, condone similar ironfisted policies in their own lands. Their two-faced position is barely hidden beneath the surface of their mock concern for the well-being of Iranian protesters as they urge their own and allied troops into battle, show little (if any) sincere remorse over the slaughter of masses of civilians that happen in the process and make sure that demonstrators at home are disregarded, denigrated or preemptively rounded up as happened at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Then again, one might find himself in pretty good company if he were singled out as unpatriotic and treacherous for holding viewpoints or undertaking actions that go contrary to the perspectives that a certain hawkish and totalitarian segment of society holds. All the same, every method conceivable might be used to hunt down the offenders and, when taken to the extreme, render their seemingly provocative positions ineffectual by any means possible, including imprisonment and murder.

Anyone who doubts this to be the case needs only to remember about what happened to people like Howard Fast, the slain Freedom Riders Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, the thirteen shot students at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guardsman fired sixty-seven rounds over a thirteen second period, and scores of others who have stood against mainstream policies.

Meanwhile, stigmatizing dissidents is a fairly common practice. As such, “There are 1.1 million people on the [U.S.] Terrorist Watch List and there is a 35 percent error rate, minimum, for that list,” according to ACLU’s Michael German. [6] Furthermore, the overzealous and aggressive surveillance tactics used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to check the public’s e-mails, telephone calls and other communications are the same ones as were in use during George W. Bush’s administration. Likewise, the amount of spying on personal exchanges is as high as it ever was.

In relation to recent claims by Justice Department and national security officials that the overcollection was unintentional, House representative, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey and Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, commented, “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.” Additionally, the act of tracking e-mailed transmissions and other interactions has seemed in violation of federal law according to lawyers at the Justice Department. Regardless, the practice continues.

At the same time, the decision to designate social activists as troublemakers, while singling them out for intimidation, threats and investigations, carries serious legal and political implications in democratic societies. The further measure of subjecting them to the sorts of difficulties that Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ramzy Baroud, AFSC members and innumerable others have endured is clearly based in xenophobic, paranoid and despotic thinking. It embodies the kind of authoritarian mentality and oppressive activities that one finds in the worst types of tyrannical regimes.

As Harry S. Truman suggested, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” Due to this fear, are we, then, to all conform with lock step in perverse obedience to the State’s dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s vision: “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

At the same time, however, the noxious weeds of the new McCarthyism have begun to bear bitter fruit around the country. Reports are coming in, not just about the better-known cases of harassment and firing of Norman Finkelstein (denied tenure at DePaul and banned from a speaking engagement at Clark College) or Joel Kovel (recently fired from his position as the Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies at Bard College). Many readers will know the horrific case of Sami al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor jailed for five years without basis or charges for the suspicion of ties to terrorism.

Fewer people will know the names of four other targets of the Right’s attack: Margo Ramlal-Nankoe, William Robinson, Nagesh Rao, and Loretta Capeheart. All four face harassment, threats, or potential removal from their jobs at their universities because they have criticized Israel, defended multiculturalism, and stood up as organized employees in defense of their rights as workers.

This rash of cases comes, not coincidentally, during an upsurge in college activism, from counter-recruitment demonstrations to the student occupation at New School, from the struggle for gay civil rights to the demand to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. University campuses have always been spaces for young activists and critical scholars to demand change.

This is why the Right is still holding on by its teeth to the flag of academic freedom. In a recent attack on me in the Wall Street Journal (whose editors clearly know who benefits from policing the academy), right-wing attack dog David Horowitz condemned the recent protest of his lecture at the University of Texas. Horowitz railed against me and other protesters as “little fascists.” He claimed, in a bit of over-the-top self-aggrandizing melodrama, that because of his fear of people like me, he traveled with a bodyguard named Floyd. (The only physical assault Horowitz ever “faced,” so to speak, involved a cream pie.)

In his lecture, he spouted offensive nonsense: for example, that racism and sexism are not barriers to achievement, that renowned critical race scholars Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson are “buffoons” and third-rate intellects, that gender is entirely biological (and therefore so is women’s inferiority at math), that Sami al-Arian is a terrorist, that support for Palestine is anti-Semitic, and so on.

He also used the podium to attack me as an alleged indoctrinator of students. I rose during discussion to make the point that my activism is separate from my teaching and that he should respect students (about whom he is ostensibly so concerned) enough to know that they can think for themselves. This intervention was met with a diatribe, along with the accusation that my appearing so reasonable is a consequence of my skill at manipulation and deceit.

The protest and Horowitz’s column have garnered opprobrium from both hard conservatives and liberals, who argue that confronting Horowitz and those of his ilk is a futile violation of decorum and the affront to the principle of free speech. If Joe McCarthy rose from the dead chanting “I have here a list”—or in Horowitz’s case, three books and an Internet hit list—would they shout him down before or after he ruined hundreds of people’s lives and careers?

Those targeted by Horowitz, it seems, are expected to listen politely to his lies and distortions. However, left unchecked, the chilling climate that Horowitz and others have wrought results in real damage to the lives and careers of talented scholars and conscientious teachers.

His state-by-state campaign for his Orwellian-named “Academic Bill of Rights” has prompted numbers of universities—most recently the College of DuPage—to adopt vaguely-worded and potentially repressive codes of conduct that could be deployed arbitrarily against faculty who teach from their own philosophical perspective or bring political matters into classrooms, even when relevant. AAUP President Cary Nelson called the decision “a disaster for education in a democratic society.”

Why, as the ground shifts under the Right and the country moves to the Left, are we seeing this proliferation of attacks on academic freedom? It could be that the Right sees the campuses as places where they can retrench. And, because state budgets are in crisis, administrators of state universities see expendable targets in area studies (women’s studies, labor studies, Middle-Eastern Studies, Latin-American Studies, African-American studies, and the like), roundly condemned by Horowitz as non-scholarly indoctrination factories. In reality, these are the programs fought for and won during the 1960s and 1970s that opened up universities to the voices of the marginalized.

The coming to fruition of a decades-long assault on academic freedom (in the name of academic freedom) is the context for the repression faced by critical and activist faculty today. Faculty who have spoken out against cuts in area studies, in defense of minorities and activists on campus, or as part of their union or other organization are particularly at risk today, as are critics of the state of Israel.

Opposition to scholars who expose and critique the treatment of Palestinians by Israel has been front and center in the cases against Professors Margo Ramlal-Nankoe and William Robinson.

Margo Ramlal-Nankoe is an assistant professor seeking tenure in Ithaca College’s Sociology Department. Her tenure process became became a struggle when a small number of influential faculty and administrators began campaigning against her. She became a target of their negative campaign because she spoke out against sexual harassment within her department and challenged students and community members to think critically about US and Israeli policy in the Middle East. Ithaca College’s Board of Trustees has denied Professor Ramlal-Nankoe tenure and she is scheduled to be fired on May 12th.

A tenured professor in her department revealed racism behind their decision as well: “We had little or no expectations of her; she is after all a woman of color,” he wrote to the Sociology Tenure and Promotion Committee at Ithaca College in 2005.

Despite the campaign being waged against her, Professor Ramlal-Nankoe’s tenure review file is full of glowing letters from her students and colleagues. The Chair of the Sociology Tenure and Promotion Committee summarized the content of the numerous letters of support Professor Ramlal-Nankoe received from her students: “Most students tell us that working with Dr. Ramlal-Nankoe has transformed their views, their life, and/or their plans for the future.” The letters of support Professor Ramlal-Nankoe received from her peers also note her excellence. A typical faculty letter states that Professor Ramlal-Nankoe provides a, “superior example of pedagogy and of the teaching of traditional sociology.”

With the evidence of such support, Professor Ramlal-Nankoe has concluded, “I believe the underlying basis for the violations against me stem from a discriminatory bias towards me, especially in regards to my political views on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Violations of human rights and the subjected condition of the population in this area of the Middle East have long been a matter of concern in my teachings and other work. Faculty reactions to my involvement in activist organizations, such as Students for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine and Ithaca Finger Lakes Interfaith Committee for a Just Peace in the Israel/Palestine Conflict, have been extremely negative and problematic, both inside and outside of the Sociology Department.”

Professor Ramlal-Nankoe’s supporters have established a Facebook page for her case. Please write in protest to President@ithaca.edu.

Professor William I. Robinson, a tenured Sociology and Global Studies full professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been attacked by the Anti-Defamation League and two of his former students. In January of this year, he forwarded an email condemning the Israeli attacks on Gaza. The email was an optional read for students.

Within a week, the ADL wrote him a letter charging him without basis with anti-Semitism and sundry violations of the Faculty Code of Conduct. The Academic Senate Charges Officer then notified him that two of the students in the class to which he circulated the email had filed complaints against him. Acting for all intents like a co-complainant of the students, the Officer fabricated additional charges not raised by the students.

The complaints rest upon the assumptions are that any critique of Israel is evidence of anti-Semitism and that the Israeli-Palestinian issue should not be discussed in a class on globalization. These are nonsensical; a critique of Israel does not impugn Jewish people or Judaism, and of course the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a matter of concern for everyone interested in economic and political globalization. Proceeding with these charges serves only to sanction politically motivated attacks on academic freedom, including the freedom to criticize Israel. This case alongside others may chill those who wish to present controversial and critical subjects.

The charges have reached the Committee on Committees, which is now in the process of convening a committee to assess the complaints.

The campaign for Professor Robinson urges readers to 1) email the UCSB Chancellor and responsible authorities on campus to register your protest, and 2) sign the petition. Information and links are here. Contact the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB at cdaf.ucsb@gmail.com.

Multicultural curriculum and diversity are at issue in the case of Nagesh Rao, an assistant professor and post-colonial scholar of English at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), a public liberal arts institution. The English department’s personnel committee rejected his tenure application and recommended that he be denied reappointment. Those close to the case believe that there are multiple political factors involved in dismissing a fine teacher and researcher who was meeting all stated requirements for promotion.

Since arriving at TCNJ four years ago, Professor Rao, who has a Ph.D. from Brown University, has taught courses that exposed students to world literatures and postcolonial studies. His students have consistently appreciated his classes for exposing them to knowledges that they would not otherwise have encountered. He is much respected and loved by his students for challenging them to think in new and different ways.

Similarly, Professor Rao’s publication record has matched or exceeded the output of previous, successful applicants for tenure in his department. He arrived at TCNJ with an established record of publication and has since published two articles in peer-reviewed journals, edited a book of interviews with the late Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and developed a promising book proposal. His review letter the previous year praised his accomplishments and put him on track towards tenure if he published another article in the following year. He did so. Yet, the English Department’s Personnel Committee voted unanimously to deny tenure to Professor Rao.

The background for this decision is a dispute inside of the English department over the status of a multicultural literature course in the curriculum. Professor Rao chaired a group of faculty defending the course in a deeply divided department. The TCNJ student body is significantly diverse, but this diversity is not represented fully in the curriculum. Also troubling is the fact that Professor Rao is one of the few people of color on the Department of English faculty, and the only South Asian in a state with a significant South Asian population. The fate of the multicultural literature course, along with his career, hangs in the balance of this politically-charged dispute.

Professor Rao seeks the appointment of a new, independent, and transparent committee to review his case. There is a petition in support of Professor Rao. For more information.

If conservative administrators can’t get away with openly firing critics of Israel and defenders of multiculturalism, they have another tactic at their disposal. Some university leaders are attacking outspoken faculty on the grounds that university employees have no free speech rights when it comes to criticizing their own institutions.

This approach epitomizes Northeastern Illinois University’s harassment of justice studies Professor Loretta Capeheart, who has been targeted by her administration for her outspokenness for workers’ rights in a 2004 faculty strike, her activism against the Iraq war, her defense of student protesters, and her arguments for increased representation of minority scholars at NEIU. In retaliation, she was denied merited awards and an appointment to chair of her department—a position to which she was elected. NEIU Vice President Melvin Terrell publicly defamed Professor Capeheart, accusing her, without grounds, of stalking a student.

Professor Capeheart is suing Terrell for defamation, alongside NEIU’s President and Provost for retaliation and violation of her constitutional right to free speech. Incredibly, the administrators’ response argues that Professor Capeheart, as a state employee, may not sue the University or its officials, contravene their positions, question their conduct, or speak as a faculty member on matters of public concern.

Unfortunately, the administration has frightening legal precedent, according to the AAUP. The Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos held that state employees are not afforded first amendment protection if they are speaking on subjects relevant to their professional duties. When UC Irvine professor Juan Hong angered University administrators by opposing the replacement of tenure-track faculty by term lecturers, he was denied a merit salary increase. The Court ruled against Hong, citing Garcetti.

In March, the U.S. District Court Judge of the Northern Illinois District agreed to hear Loretta’s case, despite the university’s arguments that it was “futile” for her to claim any right to free speech. She awaits this hearing.

Supporters of Professor Capeheart ask that readers sign the petition supporting her. Please include your email in your signature comments for updates on the case.

From the 1964 free speech movement to today’s anti-occupation organizations, campuses have always been places where struggles for justice break out. This potential might explain why, losing ground in politics and the economy, the Right seeks to maintain its grip on outspoken faculty and students. David Horowitz, Laura Ingraham, the Association of College Trustees and Alumni, and the like have played their assigned roles in fostering a new McCarthyism that has given rise to a series of witch-hunts against both prominent and emerging critical scholars and activists.

We cannot allow Zionism, racism, the attack on area studies and multiculturalism, or the violation of labor rights on our campuses to stand. We must call to account the administrations of Ithaca College, UCSB, The College of New Jersey, and Northeastern Illinois University. Professors Ramlal-Nankoe, Robinson, Rao, and Capeheart need your support. Their cases represent only a few of the many breaches of academic freedom coming to light in this moment. And we must fight on each and every one.

One thing I kind of admired or respected was that, even though the world may disagree with what Ward Churchill said, even though it was very painful to people, I do respect that he can stand up for what he believes in… He never issued an apology because he doesn’t feel one was needed.

– Juror Bethany Newill, at the Denver Post, 4/4/09.

On April 2, a jury in Denver rendered its verdict in the case of Ward Churchill. The jury agreed with former University of Colorado (CU) professor Ward Churchill—and the many distinguished scholars in his field of Native American studies who testified on his behalf—that he was fired in July, 2007 not for faulty scholarship but in retaliation for a controversial essay he wrote after 9/11. There’s been extensive and continuing coverage in the major media of the decision’s impact. And this is an indication of the significance and great stakes for the battle to defend dissent and critical thinking in academia, and ultimately in society. The essence of the case from the very beginning was the political persecution by a major university of a controversial professor, scholar, and activist—that’s what the jury confirmed. The jury’s verdict is a significant setback for forces hell-bent on suppressing and stifling dissent and critical thinking on campuses.

The jury also awarded $1 in damages. Five out of the six jurors argued to pay Ward Churchill more in damages, but the jury as a whole could not agree. A juror who spoke to the press later explained their decision: “…it wasn’t a slap in his face or anything like that when we didn’t give him any money. It’s just that David Lane (Churchill’s attorney) kept saying this wasn’t about the money, and in the end, we took his word for that.”¹ Professor Churchill said: “What was asked for—and what was delivered—was justice.”

Witch-hunt on Trial

There were two elements the jury had to determine in rendering its verdict: did the majority of the Board of Regents of CU fire Professor Churchill principally because of his post-9/11 essay? And even if they did, was Churchill correct that he would not have been fired for other reasons—that is the alleged research misconduct?

Ward Churchill was a tenured professor of American Indian Studies and Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at CU-Boulder (2002-2005). In January 2005, his invitation to speak at Hamilton College in upstate New York suddenly became the target of right wing forces, the governors of New York and Colorado, and radio and TV figures like Bill O’Reilly, because of a sharply worded essay Churchill had written three years earlier, right after 9/11. This essay was critical of the U.S. role in the world and included a formulation about how those people who worked as functionaries for the large corporations with offices in the World Trade Center were “little Eichmanns”—a reference to the functionaries of the Nazi regime.

The speech was cancelled, and numerous politicians, including the governor of Colorado, called for Churchill to be fired. After first launching an investigation of all of Churchill’s writings to find a reason to fire him, the university changed gears, put together a collection of mainly old complaints about aspects of his large body of work, and formed a faculty committee (IC) to investigate. In July 2007, Churchill was fired by the university Regents, who pointed to the IC’s findings of “serious research misconduct,” though the IC had only recommended suspension.

Among the “heavy-hitters” behind Professor Churchill’s firing who were called as witnesses was former Republican governor Bill Owens. Juror Bethany Newill described the testimony this way: “We’d seen depositions of previous testimony, and we found that a lot of them contradicted themselves.” In speaking of Governor Owens she said: “He had gone on the Bill O’Reilly show and mentioned threatening the budget” [that he might cut CU’s state funding if they didn’t get rid of Churchill]; “On the stand, he said that wasn’t what he was doing, but that was clearly what I saw.”

There was remarkable testimony by Betsy Hoffman, who’d been president of the University of Colorado from 2000 until resigning in March of 2005, shortly after the controversy broke out. One observer at the trial described Dr. Hoffman’s testimony where she described a conversation she had “with the Governor [Owens] where she said he told her to fire Ward Churchill ‘tomorrow,’ that his tone was ‘threatening,’ and that if she didn’t he would ‘unleash his plan.’”²

Churchill’s attorney, David Lane, asked Dr. Hoffman about the comparison of the treatment of Professor Churchill to neo-McCarthyism that she’d made in a speech to a faculty committee less than a week before resigning:

“She said that the list of the 101 Worst Professors in the Country by David Horowitz³ was an example of this type of targeting, and pointed out that list included Mr. Churchill and some ‘very highly regarded academics, like Derrick Bell, who were espousing controversial left-wing views.’

“Dr. Hoffman… began researching where some of the criticism of Mr. Churchill was coming from. She found a website for ACTA, an organization the Colorado Chapter of which Governor Owens and Senator Hank Brown had been founding members. The organization encouraged members to ‘take a very active role in reducing the left-wing bias in universities.’ Once ACTA became involved in an ‘all out assault’ on CU and Mr. Churchill during February 2005, Dr. Hoffman assumed that the action was part of the ‘plan’ ‘unleashed’ by Governor Owens….

“Mr. Lane asked if she saw a link between the 9/11 essay becoming publicized and ACTA working in concert with the right-wing media to paint Mr. Churchill as an example of ‘what’s wrong with academia in this country’ and Dr. Hoffman indicated that this was her impression at the time… ‘It was an all-out assault on Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado, and me,’ she testified.”² (emphasis added)

The jury concluded political motivations were principal among the majority of Regents in the decision to fire Churchill. The question remained; would Professor Churchill have been fired for research misconduct anyway?

Experts in American Indian Studies and Indian Law Testify

Many scholars, experts in Professor Churchill’s field of American Indian Studies testified on his behalf, disagreeing with most of the IC’s findings and conclusions. Professor Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, had only met Churchill in 2007, but was familiar with his scholarship and held it in high regard. He said his reaction to the IC report, as elaborated in his extensive recent essay, “Framing Ward Churchill: The Political Construction of Research Misconduct,”⁴ was that the charges were “fundamentally baseless and motivated by the political circumstances surrounding the 9/11 essay.” He then went on to challenge each of the committee’s findings.

Dr. Barbara Alice Mann, an eminent historian, teacher and writer at the University of Toledo, is a Native American and author of nine books. Her latest, The Gift of Disease, includes a chapter on the 1837 smallpox epidemic that destroyed the Mandan Indians of the Great Plains. Dr. Mann’s testimony contradicted the IC’s report—saying there was indeed a “reasonable basis” for Churchill’s claim that the smallpox epidemic was a result of blankets taken from an infirmary in St. Louis, and the claim that army doctors at Fort Clark told the infected Indians to scatter.

This is just a glimpse of how fundamentally flawed, how politically motivated, and how damaging to historical scholarship and the search for the truth this whole investigation was. Research by Revolution reveals that in November of 2006, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at CU-Boulder had written the university, saying out of Churchill’s more than twenty books and hundreds of articles, chapters, speeches, and electronic communications, the committee investigating Churchill’s work studied six pages of his writings. The IC offered no evidence that they were even familiar with the bulk of Churchill’s work, yet they made claims from a tiny sample of evidence that he “deliberately” engaged in research misconduct; that there was a “pattern” of such misconduct, and that he “has repeatedly plagiarized, as well as fabricated and falsified information to support his views on American Indian history.” Nevertheless, their findings have been used to destroy Churchill’s reputation as a scholar, and to delegitimize basic verdicts about the genocide of the native peoples.

After weeks spent listening to testimony about Churchill’s scholarship, juror Newill concluded: “I definitely saw where [the university] was coming from on a few of them,” but in other instances, “I thought they had really weak arguments. To me, it just seemed like the charges were trumped up. And even if all of those things were true, we didn’t feel that was the reason for termination.”²

In a New York Times essay on April 5, 2009, Stanley Fish, a highly recognized professor in the U.S., wrote that the accusations that the committee investigated “are the kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical opponents. It’s part of the game. But in most cases, after you’ve trashed the guy’s work in a book or a review, you don’t get to fire him.” Fish then observed, like many other scholars, “…if the standards for dismissal adopted by the Churchill committee were generally in force, hardly any of us professors would have jobs.” He added, “There is… a disconnect in the report between its often nuanced considerations of the questions raised in and by Churchill’s work, and the conclusion, announced in a parody of a judicial verdict, that he has committed crimes worthy of dismissal, if not of flogging.”⁵

The battle to defeat the political persecution of Ward Churchill is far from over. CU has a month to appeal the verdict; and it is up to the judge to decide whether CU will be ordered to pay Churchill’s attorneys’ fees, to award Churchill his lost wages, and to require the university to give Churchill his job back, which has been at the heart of his demands from the beginning. CU officials are expressing strong opposition to his returning to campus.

Beyond that, there is also a great deal at stake for academia and for society overall right now in upholding and defending this verdict, and deepening its lessons. An ugly, high-stakes public witch-hunt by dangerous, reactionary, and powerful forces, aimed at spreading a repressive chill over the universities, has been dragged into the light, and dealt a setback. But these forces, far from retreating, are regrouping, and trying to turn the meaning of this verdict on its head.

To them, Professor Churchill remains the “poster-boy for academic irresponsibility in both substance and style,” as the Chairman of the conservative National Association of Scholars put it in “NAS Regrets Ward Churchill Verdict.” John Leo, senior fellow at the ruling class think tank the Manhattan Institute, calls Churchill’s scholarship “hideous and embarrassing,” blaming the university for hiring, “for diversity reasons, an unprepared, erratic, ideologue with no sense of fairness and no academic credentials…” And Ann Neal, president of ACTA, says “shock, hurt, and even anger are surely natural reactions to the recent jury determination,” but promises that “ACTA is here to help” all those trustees strongly motivated to respond.

With stakes so high, a robust debate is called for with those within and outside academia that have accepted these twisted distortions, now discredited by the Denver verdict. Roger W. Bowen, who was head of the AAUP when the Churchill attack was in full swing, practically brags in the Wall Street Journal that he did nothing in response to requests for assistance from “his [Churchill’s] loyal spouse, Natsu Taylor Saito.” Bowen says, “When Churchill invokes ‘academic freedom’ as a protection for scholarly fraud, he dishonors a noble tradition that appropriately defends honest scholars who bravely challenge conventional wisdom.”⁶ What is this other than continuing to cling to the same distortions coming from the likes of academic hit man David Horowitz; ACTA; William Bennett and company.

In a supplement to Revolution Issue #81, “Warning: The Nazification of the American University” we wrote that powerful, right wing forces in this country have set out to transform university administrations into instruments of coercive enforcement and control over faculty and students—intimidating, threatening, and “cleaning house” of dissident thinkers when called on to do so, while leaving scholars under attack to fend for themselves. These right wing forces attacking the university are “out to turn the university into a zone of uncontested indoctrination, where severe limits would be placed on permissible discourse—in terms of professors speaking out, writing, or encouraging engagement over controversial issues in the classroom, etc.; and in terms of restricting and gutting programs like African American studies, women’s studies, etc., that challenge and refute the official narratives and explanations of U.S. history and present-day inequality and global lopsidedness.”

And further: “The overall objective of this attack on dissent and critical thinking is to change the university as we have known it: in its internal life and functioning and in its effects on society. If this reactionary program wins out, the university will be turning out students who will have had little, if any, opportunity to think critically, into a society qualitatively more severely repressive than anything seen in this country’s history.”

The challenge to administrators, faculty, and especially students is to stand up to this assault. And broader segments of society must join with them. We must continue to defend those like Ward Churchill when they are singled out for attack, and, more generally, defend the ability of professors to hold dissenting and radical views. It is vitally important that the new generation of students step forward to defend an unfettered search for the truth, intellectual ferment, and dissent. One way or another, this struggle over the university and intellectual life will have profound repercussions on what U.S. society will be like, and on the prospects for bringing a whole new society into being.

1. Michael Roberts, “Juror Bethany Newill talks about the Ward Churchill trial,” Denver Westword, 4/3/09.
2. From a blog of law school observers of the trial, theracetothebottom.org.
3. Referring to the book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
4. In Carvalho, Edward J. and David B. Downing, eds., Works and Days: Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University 51/52.26 (Spring/Fall 2008).
5. Stanley Fish, New York Times, 4/5/09.
6. “Freedom, but for Honest Research,” Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2009.

Galloway’s talk, “Resisting War from Gaza to Kandahar,” sponsored by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, would have provided Canadians with a first hand account of conditions in Gaza following Israel’s invasion and destruction of that walled in strip of Palestinian land during the three week war from December 27 to January 18, 2009. Galloway is one of a handful of foreigners to see the devastation that others could glimpse only from You Tube videos made available through Al Jazeera news service. All western journalists were banned from Gaza by Israel’s IDF. Galloway led a convoy of trucks from England to Gaza carrying relief provisions for the people. The convoy entered Gaza just over a week ago.

Contrary to the CJC contention that the banning should be seen as a security measure under section 34 (1) of the immigration act, a close reading of the act would suggest that Galloway cannot be perceived as a person (c) “engaging in terrorism” or in (e) “acts of violence that would or might endanger the lives or safety of persons in Canada,” but rather an individual, by virtue of his recent experience in Gaza, who would be upholding the intent of Canada’s Criminal Code, Sections 318-320. Canada’s Criminal Code, passed in 1970, builds upon the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1966, the conventions of which support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as defined by the Charter of the United Nations.

According to the Nizkor Project “The premise underlying Canada’s anti-hate laws is that in a democratic society, identifiable groups must be protected against racism, including its verbal manifestations, in order not to limit their basic freedoms and thereby their full participation in Canadian society.” Nizkor asserts that the catalyst for this legislation might well have been the experience of Nazism, “that unchecked racism and hate propaganda could lead even a highly educated, cultured and democratic society to justify the most heinous crimes against humanity.”

How does this code apply to Galloway’s “Resisting War from Gaza to Kandahar”? The answer would appear to be in the importance of his eye witness account of the conditions in Gaza resulting from the invasion and his investigation of those conditions from Gazans, NGOs, and newspaper reports made available since the attacks. Multiple human rights organizations including B’tselem out of Jerusalem, the PCHR in Palestine and Human Rights International have brought varying allegations of Israeli war crimes before the International Court and the United Nations, crimes of disproportionate force in a civilian enclave where escape was impossible, crimes against civilians intentionally executed especially of women and children, crimes against international law for the use of banned weapons like white phosphorous, and crimes against the Geneva Conventions through the use of children as human shields. Additionally, the United Nations envoy for human rights activities in Palestine, Richard Falk, has brought forth a report that details Israeli war crimes suggesting that the fact that the people of Gaza could not escape made the invasion even more of a crime since it meant that civilians had no recourse from the weaponry of this massive military incursion into the densely populated cities of Gaza.

Now to the actual sections of the Criminal Code as they are applicable here. Section 318: Advocating Genocide and Section 319: Defining Genocide. “The criminal act of ‘advocating genocide’ is defined as supporting or arguing for the killing of members of an ‘identifiable group’ – persons distinguished by their colour, race, religion or ethnic origin. The intention would be the destruction of members of the targeted group. Any person who promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence, and liable to imprisonment…” Section 319 defines genocide as “any acts committed with intent to destroy an identifiable group – such as killing members of the group, or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.”

Given the knowledge that Galloway brings regarding “criminal acts committed with intent to destroy an identifiable group – such as killing members of the group, or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the groups physical destruction,” because that identifiable group is distinguished by their colour, race, religion and ethnic origin, it would appear that Galloway has a responsibility to bring such awareness, no doubt recognized by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, before the Canadian people to protect members of that group who reside in Canada.

In short, the CJC and the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith, along with other Jewish organizations that have supported the Israeli invasion of Gaza, including the Harper government, would appear to be guilty of promoting “unchecked racism and hate propaganda” that could “justify the most heinous crimes against humanity.” Clearly these organizations and the government of Canada realize the avowed intent of Avigdor Lieberman, a self- promoted Zionist and a member of Olmert’s government that executed the “war” in Gaza and now a member of Netanyahu’s new government, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, including if necessary the use of the atomic bomb on them. It would appear that the Harper government and the Jewish Canadian organizations support Israeli governments that, in Lieberman’s words, want to “execute Israeli Arabs that are members of the Knesset,” or “Destroy the foundation of all the [Palestinian] authority’s military infrastructure … not leave one stone on another. Destroy everything.” Civilian targets included. Bomb all Palestinian commercial centers including banks and gas stations.

Ironically, it is not the Canadian Jews that are in danger by Galloway’s appearance because he is a “terrorist” and a security risk against the Jews as potential victims, but the fact that he brings information that identifies the Zionist party of the Israeli government, particularly in the form of Lieberman’s racist party, Israel Beytenu, as terrorists intent on destroying Palestinians. Hence the real danger in Canada exists for the Palestinian people living there not the Jews. Indeed, one might argue that it is the responsibility of the Canadian Government to support Galloway’s efforts to enlighten the Canadian people to the dangers inherent in the actions of the CJC and the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith of Canada that forced the Canadian immigration authorities to ban Galloway.

According to the Canadian Council on Human Rights, Section 319 (3), an individual cannot be convicted of breaking the Criminal Code if the statements or information provided can be established as true, are relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which is for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds it is able to be believed as true and is expressed in good faith and intended to point out … matters tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada.” Quite obviously, the information George Galloway brings about the intent of the Israeli government as noted above is true and is of importance to the safety of Canadian citizens of Palestinian descent, since groups supportive of the genocidal acts committed by that government as alleged, recorded and advanced by respected Human Rights organizations before the proper world authorities, wants to prevent the citizens of Canada from hearing such information; they are the guilty parties not George Galloway.

It should be clear from the evidence presented here that a disturbing picture of an Israeli government emerges, one intent on the destruction of the Palestinian people as stated by members of that government and by the polls taken in Israel of Jewish support for the invasion, 94%, that a concerted effort to commit genocide against an identifiable group, the Palestinians, because of “race, ethnicity, and religion,” by “promoting the killing of members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, ” is occurring, all actions condemned by Canada’s Council on Human Rights through its Criminal Code as defined in sections 318-319.

Alykhan Velshi, Jason Kenney’s spokesman, “said that the act (immigration act 34) was designed to protect Canadians from people who fund, support or engage in terrorism.” This article makes clear that those who “fund, support or engage in terrorism” are those who convinced Kenny to ban Galloway. He could provide Canadians with accurate, recent, detailed information related to the intended destruction of the people of Gaza and their livelihood. He can provide pictures and testaments from NGOs and the people of Gaza about the actions of the IDF as they launched missiles from the sea, from the air and from tanks on the surrounded civilians of Gaza, how they used illegal chemical weapons on children and women, how they intentionally destroyed United Nations schools housing children and mothers knowing some or all would be victims of that action, how they leveled with white phosphorous the humanitarian store house of the United Nations so that the people could not have food and water, how they maintained the locked gates so that no one could leave and no needed medical and food supplies could enter, and how even the soldiers of the IDF have now reported on the intentional killing of children and women.

This information is vital to the Canadian people if only to provide the truth that their government wants to suppress, if only to mark indelibly who the real terrorists are in Canada that want them, like their neighbors to the south, to be ignorant of that truth.

Ron Jacobs: Hello Tariq. To begin, can you give the readers an idea of what is transpiring in Pakistan? In your description, can you identify the parties and prominent individuals involved?

Farooq Tariq: What is transpiring in Pakistan is mass power. A real sense of victory after the restoration of the chief justice Iftikhar Choudry is one of the main features of this movement. It will be difficult for any government in the future here in Pakistan not to implement what was promised. The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was forced to accept a demand only and only with the emergence of mass power in the streets.

It is a victory of the people against the traditional power brokers of Pakistan. It is a victory of hope against cynicism. There were many saying that Iftikhar Choudry would never be reinstated because President Zardari will never change his mind. The sheer expression of mass uprising frightened all the major actors of the movement. They rushed to accept the initial demand of restoration even before the long march reached Islamabad. Had it (the long march) not been called off by the lawyers’ leaders after the acceptance of the first demand, the list of demands would (probably) have been expanded from the political to the economic area. This movement showed that the people of Pakistan can make a difference. Pakistan has changed and changed for ever.

The Long March of the lawyer’s movement proved that a consistent struggle and militant actions can be fruitful. The tactics and strategy of the lawyers movement were a combination of the united mass action of political parties and civil society organizations and a successful propaganda campaign through the electronic and print media. Had the lawyers movement gone alone, they could not have won the battle. The main political parties that were in the forefront of this struggle are Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz, Tehreek Insaaf, Jamaat Islami, Pukhtoonkhawa Mili Awami Party, Awami Tehreek, National Party, Labour Party Pakistan, Khaksar Tehreek, Baluchistan National Party, Sindh Taraqi Pasand Party, National Workers Party, Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party and a majority of Pakistan social organizations. Of these Jamaat Islami is a religious party and rest are Left, liberal and progressive parties.

Anyhow, the most consistent political parties that were part of the lawyers movement since it started on 9 March 2007 are Tehreek Insaf of Imran Khan, an emerging party of the middle classes, Jamaat Islami, a religious fundamentalist party and the Labour Party of Pakistan (LPP), a socialist party. The rest of the parties were of and are part of the movement. The most prominent figures of the lawyers movement were Ali Ahmad Kurd, president Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), and three SCBA presidents including Aitezaz Ahsan, Hamid Khan and Munir A Malik. They were all arrested but stood firm. From the political parties, Imran Khan, a former Pakistan cricket team captain has emerged as the most popular personality of the movement. His party was not very well known or active by movement standards , but because of the participation of Tehreek Insaaf (Justice Party) in this movement, it has become a household name in Pakistan.

From the Left parties, Labour Party Pakistan has gained to some extent. Also, the LPP is now better nationally known with a very militant position. The party that got the most advantage from this movement is the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PMLN). It won the February election arguing for the reinstatement of the top judges. It used clever tactics after the elections. It left the Alliance at the Center with PPP on this question. The PMLN leaders and the Sharif brothers made very radical speeches before and during the long march. The party (PMLN) was ready to take risks and loose the provincial government in Punjab on the issue. If there was an election today, this right wing bourgeoisie party would have a national land slide victory.

RJ: Does your party (the Labour Party of Pakistan) support any of the figures involved? If so why? If not, why?

FT: LPP supported the leaders of the lawyer’s movement all the time but with a critical attitude. Our literature produced during the movement helped to expand the nature of the movement. Our first poster read, “on the footsteps of the lawyers, till the end of dictatorship”. We linked the restoration of the judges with the end of military dictatorship. We saw the potential of this movement to expand on a national level from the very beginning. We supported them because the nature of the movement was very progressive. It was not a religious movement of any kind although the religious parties tried to take it over. However, the demand of an independent judiciary could never be termed as an Islamic demand.

We supported them (the movement) because it was producing an anti-militarist political tendency among a significant section of the middle class and was producing a new layer of young political activists who were not religious fundamentalist. We helped the movement and the movement helped the Left ideas to grow in both the political and organizational arenas. Those who were associated with the lawyers movement got a national identity and were heard everywhere.

RJ: Do the events occurring in Pakistan open an avenue for the Left? Will the PPP cease to exist as a party or will it return closer to its leftist roots?

FT: It is a very complex political situation. The ideas of religious fundamentalism have a natural ally here. That ally is the presence of the NATO forces in Afghanistan. The objective situation is very favorable for the right wing ideas to grow. The nature of the Pakistan state is another help to them. (After all) It is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and not a people’s republic. Yet, the ideas of the Left are growing as well. Our help from the international scene comes from the development of Left governments in Latin America and social movements in the advanced capitalist countries.

Internally, we are growing because of our tactics of helping and developing the mass movements of the workers, peasant women and the lawyers. The association with the movement is a key to our recent growth. Over 5000 have joined the Labour Party during our “peoples contact movement (drive)” in December and January 2009. Incidentally, our best growth was in North West Frontier Province, where over 2000 have joined during this time.

But our most stable basis is still the trade unions and peasant organizations. We have not left our work in this class base to join the lawyer’s movement. It was possible for our comrades in Faisalabad, the third largest city of Pakistan, to lead over 100,000 against the shortages of electricity in January 2009. Twenty of them were arrested on 14 March 2009 and we had given a call for a general strike on 16 March, the day lawyers won. I was told by the comrade that the call has been supported by the traders as well. It would have been a total success if the lawyer’s movement would have continued on the day (March 16). The success of the lawyer’s movement has opened a new avenue for the growth of Left ideas. For the first time, we are witnessing the educated youth joining our party. Earlier, we were a handful of comrades within the party who had university degrees.

The PPP is the main loser of this whole episode. It has politically moved much towards the right since it came in power a year ago. It has tried to implement the neo-liberal agenda that was initiated by General Musharraf. It is seen as a party allowing the American imperialists to attack Pakistan directly without any state resistance. It failed to implement the promises of reinstatement of the judges despite written agreements three times. The leader Asif Zardari is probably the most hated politician among the mainstream leaders. He is seen as a liar, deceiver, swindler, trickster, charlatan, quack and cheater. A day after the reinstatement of the top judges, he made a statement that he wanted to reinstate the judges. This was after he was seen as the main hurdle in the path of reinstatement.

The PPP is distributing sweets all over Pakistan after the reinstatement claiming that they have fulfilled the promise of Benazir Bhutto. Yet for over eight months, their entire leadership was arguing that Benazir Bhutto never promised to reinstate them. They were saying that Iftikhar Choudry is a politicized judge. Their argument was that he should take a new oath like some other judges have taken. They were making a point that Iftikhar Choudry is just one person. They were using all sorts of arguments against the judges in all the television and print media debates. Yet only a day later (after the reinstatement), they wanted the Pakistani people to believe that it was the PPP who had reinstated and fulfilled a promise of Benazir Bhutto. They believe the memory of the people is very short. They believe that we should forget our jails, arrests, tortures, ungrounded life, the barricades in the road to stop the long march and whatever else. The PPP leaders have become real hypocrites.

The party is not finished but is losing its support rapidly. It will remain as a major party unless another party replaces them with a revolutionary programme. The PMLN can never replace the PPP. It can win an election for the time being but it can never have the permanent support of the people because the nature of PMLN is almost the same as PPP. Both are right wing bourgeoisie parties with populist appeal at some times.

There is no possibility of the PPP taking a Left route. The reason is very simple, PPP leadership from top to bottom is committed to power and to (certain) people. They have proved again and again that they will serve the interests of the ruling class and imperialism and are not for the (majority of) the people. They have even abandoned the gesture of leftist ideas. It will remain in the political scene as a party of the capitalists and feudalists. All the time it is losing support. Benazir Bhutto’s death gave it a breathing space but that is lost already.

RJ: What about the conflicts in Swat and other parts of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP)? How are they affected by what occurs in Islamabad?

FT: In Swat, the government signed a surrender pact with the religious fundamentalists. Under their pressure, so-called Sharia courts have been established and the normal judicial structure has ceased to exist at present. It is a victory of the extreme religious fundamentalists in the area. They now control at least major parts of NWFP including the Malakanad division. There is a peace in Swat at present at the cost of abandoning all sort of normal democratic institutions and ideas. The public girls schools are now open with a totally different character. They have become the public Madrassa. The girls have to read what the student girls are reading in (mosque-run) Madrassa.

The Islamabad answer to all this is to accept the Predator drone attacks by the Americans. On one side, they are signing surrender agreements with religious forces and on the other side (they are) helping American imperialism to fashion their air attacks. This entire situation is paving the way for the growth of extreme religious ideas in all parts of the NWFP. The government of the Awami National Party is unable to mobilize the mass support they had enjoyed only one year earlier on the question of peace in the region. The religious fanatics got less than three percent of the votes in the February 2009 general elections as compared to 15 percent in 2002. The Islamabad government seems paralyzed in this situation. They are waiting for miracles to happen. They are still acting like it is “business as usual”. There is no thought out strategy by Islamabad to handle the conflict with religious forces.

RJ: From your perspective, what role do you think Washington is playing in the struggle between the forces represented by Mr. Zardari and Mr. Sharif?

FT: Washington is trying to bring them together and asking them to resolve their conflicts. The American ambassador in Pakistan is very busy between Raiwind, the residence of Nawaz Sharif, and Islamabad. They are asking both sides to come together to fight effectively the “war on terror”. They always frighten both of them as to the consequences of the conflict between them. The best option (as Washington sees it, would be) that the both should form an alliance at (the) center and in other areas. Nawaz Sharif has been saying all the time that he was forced to go for the Long March. It was not his choice. He did not want the masses to come on the roads but the sheer bull-headedness of Zardari forced them to this situation. The feudal ego of Zardari has meant that the Sharif brothers are out of power for the time being. A day after the success of the movement, Nawaz Sharif told his supporters to behave and that he respects Zardari and Gilani of the PPP. His brother Shahbaz Sharif told a television that those who make a mistake in the morning and then come back home in the evening must be forgiven.

RJ: The last time I spoke with you (November 2007), I asked the following questions. I am hoping you can respond to them with your country’s history since that time in mind: What, in your opinion, is the cause of the unrest in Pakistan? How much of a role do religious extremists play? How much of a role does the Army play?

FT: There are multiple reasons for the constant unrest in Pakistan. The foremost reason is the inability of the ruling classes in Pakistan to solve all the basic problems faced by the masses. There exists a feudalistic relationship and land is not distributed to peasants. This brings a very feudal culture and atmosphere in Pakistan. Both the main bourgeois parties, PPP and PMLN, do not speak about it anymore. The major parts of the main leadership in both parties are from the feudal class. They use the ownership of land for political purposes and to win the elections. Sixty-one years of independence have brought no real independence for the majority of the people. This is the real crisis of leadership in Pakistan. Both main parties rely on the military generals. Even in this (most recent) crisis over the days from 12-16 March 2009, the army chief was mediating between the president, prime minister and the Nawaz brothers. The Nawaz brothers (said they) were very thankful to the “positive” role of the army chief.

The failure of reformist parties like the PPP paved the way for the growth of religious extremism. The extremists were and are supported by a major section of the army. It is a very complex relationship between the rich, the army and religious extremists. It changes and adjusts all the time. 9/11 made an indispensable difference to this relationship. The fact is that the support of the ruling class for religious extremism is not open as was the case in the past, but the presence of the American forces in the region has given a real momentum for the growth of the religious fundamentalists.

The military is out of power in public but not in real terms. No military general has faced any truth commission after their unconstitutional rule. General Musharraf was given a guard of honor when he resigned on 17 August 2008. He still lives in an army house and enjoys all the privileges. The military power in the budget allocated to “defense”, is a defense of the ruling class in real terms. Over 30 percent of national income goes to defense budget. The whole society is militarized. (There are) a lot of weapons everywhere and it is not decreasing.

RJ: Mr. Sharif was quoted after the crackdown by Pakistani police failed to stop the protests earlier this week as saying what happened was the “beginning of a revolution.” Is this true? If so, would it be a revolution for the majority of the Pakistani people or merely the elites who seem to take turns ruling the country?

FT: Mr. Sharif has used the words of revolution, rebellion and upsurge several times after his government dissolved in Punjab and governor rule was imposed. He told a gathering that he is flying a flag of revolution and to side with him. His brother Shahbaz Sharif has recited Jalib and Faiz Ahmad Fiaz several times in public– both poets are known for their revolutionary poems all over Pakistan. The word revolution to Nawaz Sharif means nothing and only comes out of his mouth when he is in the opposition. The revolution means for them, their power and that is it. The Nawaz brothers economic priorities are absolutely the same as those of the PPP. They both are for the neo-liberal agenda and both are happy to work with American imperialism.

The covert and overt interventionist actions of the U.S. to overthrow democratically elected governments, to crush national liberation struggles, and to prop-up brutal despotic regimes across the world exposes the complete bankruptcy of the U.S. claim that it is an ardent champion of “freedom” and “democracy”. The U.S. exploits in this regard have been well documented by veteran journalist William Blum in his books titled Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common Courage Press, Monroe, USA, 2003 & 2005). Allusions to “freedom” and “democracy” provide a convenient cover for vested interests in the U.S. to corner USA’s national wealth and for advancing the imperialistic goals of the same sections abroad!

Since WW-II alone, the U.S. has time and again covertly or militarily intervened and unlawfully overthrown democratically elected governments in Iran (1953); Guatemala (1954, 1963 and 1968); Congo (1960); Dominican Republic (1965); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); Chile (1973); Granada (1983); and in Haiti (2004). The U.S. (with or without its British/Zionist ally) has also time and again attempted to crush national liberation struggles and progressive movements in Greece (1947-49), Palestine (1948-2009), Philippines (1948-54), Malaysia (1948-55), Puerto Rico (1950), Korea (1950-53), Kenya (1952-59), Egypt (1956 and 1967), Lebanon (1958, 1982 and 2006), Vietnam (1960-75), Cuba (1961), Cambodia (1969-75), Laos (1971-73), Angola (1976-92), Afghanistan (1978-1990), Nicaragua (1981-90), Venezuela (2004), and in several other countries at various times.

Furthermore, the US has consistently backed and aided the world’s most brutal dictatorships: Gen. Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930-61), Salazar in Portugal (1932-68), the monarchy in Saudi Arabia (1932-2009), Gen. Franco in Spain (1936-75), the Samozas in Nicaragua (1937-79), the racists in South Africa (1948-1990), the Zionists in Israel (1948-2009), the junta in South Korea (1948-87), Gen. Batista in Cuba (1952-1959), the Shah in Iran (1953-79), Gen. Rojas Pinilla in Colombia (1954-58), Gen. Stroessner in Paraguay (1954-1989), the junta in South Vietnam (1954-75), the Duvaliers in Haiti (1957-86), Gen. Suharto in Indonesia (1965-1998), Marcos in the Philippines (1966-86), the junta in Greece (1967-1973), Gen. Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990), and several other despotic regimes.

The defeat suffered by the U.S. military in Vietnam in 1975 and the collapse of Portuguese imperialism the same year, drove the U.S. to complete desperation; they could not conceive of anything else but of adopting terror as a strategy to contain national liberation movements. This strategy for furthering U.S. imperialist interests, which did not entail loss of American lives, has been well described by Prof. Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University, New York, in his book titled Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, New York, 2004). Summarising the points he has made in his book, Prof. Mamdani in an interview to New York based e-journal AsiaSource on 05 May 2004 stated as follows:

Terror emerges as a strategy of the US after defeat in Vietnam, when it is on the verge of losing the Cold War. The strategy comes to a head with the Reagan administration, which throws overboard the language of “peaceful coexistence”, now demanding an agenda to “rollback” the Soviet Union…. Ronald Reagan ideologized proxy war in a religious idiom. Reagan ideologized the Cold War as a war against “evil”, against the “Evil Empire.”…. you cannot convert evil, you have to eliminate evil. In that titanic battle, any alliance is justified…. It was under the American protective umbrella that apartheid South Africa created Africa’s first genuine terrorist movement: Renamo in Mozambique, which was genuinely terrorist in the sense that it was not interested in fighting the military, its focus was on targeting civilians as a way of demonstrating that an independent African government was incapable of protecting its citizens.

The U.S. adopted the same strategy in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. According to Prof. Mamdani:

Whereas the US was an understudy in Mozambique, its embrace of terror became direct and brazen after the Sandinista Revolution of 1979. In Nicaragua, the US created a terrorist movement called Contras, more or less as apartheid South Africa had created Renamo in Mozambique, also from scratch. The lessons it learnt from southern Africa and Central America were put into practice in Afghanistan in the concluding phase of the Cold War.

There was also a direct link between undeclared/proxy wars and the drug trade. As Prof. Mamdani puts it:

The reason was simple: if you don’t declare war, you don’t have access to public funds to wage it. The search for funds to wage an undeclared war time and again led the CIA into an embrace of the underworld, particularly the drug lords. The Afghan war exemplified the extreme development of two tendencies: one, the ideologization of war in a religious idiom, and two, its privatization.

As a result, as Prof. Mamdani points out:

The war in Afghanistan was justified as a global jihad. To wage it, the CIA recruited volunteers globally; Muslims everywhere, in the US, in Britain, all over the world, were invited to participate in this global war. The CIA was busy creating cells everywhere, the nuclei of the same cells they are busy trying to smash today as a network of terror…. The Islamist network was both global and private. What we are reaping today is the whirlwind.¹

Under the guise of spreading “freedom” and “democracy,” the U.S. establishment consciously chose to arm and fund in Afghanistan the most anti-democratic, anti-women, and ultra-conservative elements of society, who were projected as “jihadies” fighting for a just cause, in order to contain what the U.S. called “Soviet expansionism.” With the demise of the Soviet Union, which committed hara-kiri, the U.S. establishment has found a readymade “enemy” in the “jihadies” who have now chosen to bite the hand that fed them. Thus, the very forces, which are instrumental in aiding and abetting terrorism the world over, are today purportedly waging war against those very same terrorist networks. It is so obvious that without an omnipresent and everlasting “enemy”, the U.S. leadership will be hard put to divert attention away from the social crises at home and to justify the existence of a huge military establishment with its worldwide network of military bases and a questionable military alliance in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Curiously enough, while seemingly waging the never-ending war against terror abroad, there has been a concurrent curtailment of “freedom” and “democratic rights” at home.

Onslaught on Civil Rights

When universal suffrage was beginning to become a reality and the moment it appeared that all hindrances to the exercise of democratic rights by all U.S. citizens were being practically removed, the 9/11 attack and its aftermath provided the requisite justification for enacting the USA PATRIOT Act. The “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001″ is anything but a “patriotic” initiative as it was being made out. Incidentally, the PATRIOT Act was already in the pipeline before 9/11, which raises questions regarding the real motives behind its enactment!

The adverse impact of the PATRIOT Act across the U.S. has been well documented and analysed by Dr. Walter M. Brasch, professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, in his book titled America’s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government’s Violation Of Constitutional And Civil Rights. In the preface to the book, Dr. Brasch points out that:

In the Bush–Cheney era, dissent is not tolerated; jingoism is encouraged…. In Columbia, South Carolina, a fifty-four-year-old man was arrested for carrying a sign, “No More War for Oil”…. On Independence Day, 2004, at an official presidential appearance, two people were arrested when they refused to turn their T-shirts inside out so an anti-Bush message didn’t appear. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, a woman was ordered to remove a small metal peace button from her lapel. In Hamilton, New Jersey, where Laura Bush was rallying the faithful to support the war in Iraq, a mother whose son was killed in Iraq was escorted out because she wore a T-shirt that declared, “President Bush You Killed My Son,” and had the audacity to ask what the Republicans believed was a hostile question. Outside the auditorium, while talking with a reporter, she was ordered to leave, didn’t do so, and then was handcuffed and arrested on defiant trespass charges. In Medford, Oregon, three peaceful women were thrown out of a campaign rally, and then threatened with arrests. Their offense? They wore T-shirts that said, “Protect Our Civil Liberties.” Their cases are just a few of thousands throughout the country.

Furthermore, according to Dr. Brasch:

Throughout the country, libraries have put up signs warning that the FBI, under authority of the PATRIOT Act, may seize library records to determine reading habits of patrons. The congressional authority extends to bookstores, physicians’ offices, grocery stores, Internet service providers, and virtually any business or organization that has personal data of customers.

Essentially, what this meant was that:

Enforcement of the PATRIOT Act butts against the protections of six amendments to the Constitution: the First (freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances), Fourth (freedom from unreasonable searches), Fifth (right against self-incrimination and due process), Sixth (due process, the right to counsel, a speedy trial, and the right to a fair and public trial by an impartial jury), Eighth (reasonable bail and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment), and Fourteenth (equal protection guarantee for both citizens and non-citizens).²

Later, in an interview to Monthly Review on 22 July 2005, Dr. Brasch stated that:

…this administration has repeatedly used 9/11 to justify even greater restrictions upon Constitutional rights, while making it appear it is doing its best to protect Americans from terrorists…. Under the way the current administration can enforce the PATRIOT Act, Americans are all considered guilty until proven innocent.

According to Dr. Brasch, among dozens of national organizations that uncover abuses and fight for the preservation of U.S. constitutional and civil rights are the following: American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; American Civil Liberties Union; American Library Association; Bill of Rights Defense Committee; Center for Constitutional Rights; Center for Democracy and Technology; Electronic Frontier Foundation; Electronic Privacy Information Center; Free Congress Foundation; Free Expression Policy Project; National Coalition to Repeal the Patriot Act; Open the Government, and People for the American Way; all of which have challenged how the PATRIOT Act is being enforced.

Immediately after the enactment of the PATRIOT Act, President Bush, on 13 November 2001, issued what is known as Military Order No.1. In response to this Order, Michael Ratner, a human rights attorney and the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in an article titled “November 13, 2001: Coup D’etat in America” stated that:

…it is a day, as they say, that should live in infamy. On that date in 2001, two months after 9/11, President Bush issued Military Order Number 1. … the President claimed the authority to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest any non-citizen (it was later extended to citizens) anywhere in the world including the United States whom the President believed was involved in international terrorism and hold them forever without any charges, proceedings or trial…. This order embodies within it the violations of fundamental rights we are facing today: indefinite detention without trial, Guantanamo, secret sites, special trials and disappearances…. Let’s also repeat: this was a military order in a society and country that was still or purported to be under civilian rule. This order more then any other single document embodies our lost liberties.³

Gregory T. Nojeim, a Senior Counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology (Washington D.C.) brought these disturbing developments to the notice of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on 01 October 2008. In a deposition titled “Restoring the Rule of Law”, he expressed his concern that:

Privacy, one of our most fundamental rights, recently has been dramatically eroded as a result not only of policy failures stemming from the response to September 11, but also because our privacy laws and policies have not kept pace with advances in technology…. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, laws and policies have been adopted that unnecessarily weaken privacy rights and other constitutional liberties. The government has adopted data mining techniques, expanded electronic surveillance, and launched new identification programs without adequate safeguards for the rights of Americans.

Towards a Police State

Already several concerned individuals have been expressing the fear that attempts were being made to slowly turn the U.S. into a police state. Certain foreign observers too have commented on the unexpected turn of events. One of the first foreigners to make an adverse comment about the disturbing development that was taking place in the U.S. was a German diplomat, Jürgen Chrobog, who was the German Ambassador to the U.S. from 1995 to 2001 and later State Secretary in the Federal Foreign Office. According to a news report titled “Envoy dubs US a police state,” which was published in The Times (London) on 06 May 2003, Mr. Chrobog “was reported to have told Foreign Ministry colleagues that America was turning into a ‘police state.’”

Among the first in the U.S. to raise the question “Is America Becoming a Police State?” was Ron Paul a conservative Congressman from Texas, who later became the fourth placed candidate in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. In his column “Texas Straight Talk” on 20 December 2004, Mr. Paul pointed out that:

The question is no longer rhetorical. We are not yet living in a total police state, but it is fast approaching…. The atmosphere since 2001 has permitted Congress to create whole new departments and agencies that purport to make us safer – always at the expense of our liberty…. Unfortunately, the new intelligence bill passed by Congress two weeks ago moves us closer to an encroaching police state…. Those who believe a police state can’t happen here are poor students of history.

An overview of the major legislations that have been enacted post 9/11 and which impinge on the democratic rights of U.S. citizens was brought out in 2007 in an article by Stephen Lendman titled “Police State America.” According to Lendman, a research associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (Montreal):

’Police state America’ has been in the works a long time, and it now may be near the boiling point…. The nation is at war and laws are in place that end constitutional protections, militarize the country, repress dissent, and our government is empowered to crush freedom and defend privilege from beneficial social change it won’t tolerate. It’s the price of imperial arrogance we the people are paying, and that won’t end until the spirit of resistance gets aroused enough to stop it in our own self-defense.

While few articles of this kind ever get published in the mainstream print media or are referred to in the audio-visual media, a whole lot of such articles are circulating over the Internet. Numerous books have also been written regarding the unprecedented growth of authoritarianism under the Bush Administration. These include the following:

Elaine Cassel, (Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, 2004). It has been reviewed as follows: “Offering sharp critiques of the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts, Cassel argues that Bush and Ashcroft have dangerously curtailed Americans’ freedom of speech and religion, their right to a fair trial, and their protection from torture and unreasonable search and seizure. She astutely criticizes the “continued expansion of the word terrorism,” which now encompasses, she says, “any opponent of government policy.” –Publishers Weekly, New York.

C. William Michaels, No Greater Threat: America After September 11 and the Rise of a National Security State (Algora, New York, 2005), which has been reviewed as follows: “In this very important study, C. W. Michaels gives us a unique guide and commentary, based on meticulous research, to the ominous growth of the national security state. His analysis of the USA PATRIOT Act is immensely useful and a wake up call for all Americans concerned with defending our civil liberties.” –Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States.

Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2007), which has been reviewed as follows: according to Conason: “…fascism can indeed take root and blossom in the U.S. if Americans aren’t more vigilant about freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Although we are not facing full-blown fascism, Conason sees a “gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule” for the first time since the Nixon administration. He explores how and why… an increasingly secretive Bush administration usurp the power of the legislature and disregard provisions of the Constitution by stoking fear of terrorism.” –BOOKLIST, the review journal of the American Library Association.

Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, USA, 2007), which has been reviewed as follows: “You will be shocked and disturbed by this book. Most Americans reject outright any comparison of post 9/11 America with the fascism and totalitarianism of Nazi Germany or Pinochet’s Chile. Sadly, the parallels and similarities, what Wolf calls the ‘echoes’ between those societies and America today, are all too compelling.” –Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York.

Naomi Wolf is a noted feminist writer and lately a supporter of President Barak Obama. In an article titled “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps,” which was published in the Guardian (London) on 24 April 2007, Naomi Wolf wrote:

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise. Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

These ominous changes have taken place in the U.S., especially in the last eight years. At the beginning of this essay, a reference was made to the unsavoury incident that Bela Malik et al. had to endure. However, it is now evident that the manner in which pressure was brought to bear on Bela Malik and her friends on 02 March 2006 in New Delhi in order to prevent them from expressing their anger at the ongoing war in Iraq during the visit of Laura Bush to a South Delhi Orphanage was nothing unique. Ever since 9/11, Bela Malik’s counterparts in the U.S. have had to endure far worse abuses due to the enactment of a series of legislations, which intrude into privacy in an unprecedented manner and thereby considerably interfere with exercise of constitutional rights. In the light of the realities of the situation as explained above, tall claims of the U.S. being the “world’s oldest democracy” and about its purported commitment to promotion of “freedom” and “human rights” are not only rather farfetched but also are an indication of the extent to which the Bush Administration had indulged in doublespeak. However, the myths created by the establishment tended to get credence because the mainstream print and audio-visual media, which are controlled by a few media conglomerates, widely propagate such myths as truths.

Media and Democracy

Largely due to the self-cultivated image, there is a popular misconception that news and views purveyed by the mass media is based on independent, objective and enlightened reportage. As one journalist recalls:

For more than a century, objectivity has been the dominant professional norm of the news media. It has at its heart the noble aim of presenting indisputable facts upon which everyone in society can agree, and build upon towards the goal of a better society… The uncorrupted ideal of objectivity, in the sense of reporters driving to dig out verified facts and present them fully and fairly, is indispensable in journalism…. During the 20th century, the ideal of objectivity in news coverage went from strength to strength… We think of objectivity as meaning neutral. But also balanced. Impartial. Non-partisan. Neutral. Accurate. Verified. Fair. Factual. Unemotional. Detached. Scientific. Reasoned. Unbiased.⁴

With such an exalted image of the media, at least at subconscious level, many people often form their opinions based on reports that appear in the print and audio-visual media. However, in reality, many a time the mainstream media tends to peddle partial truths, or even outright falsehood, as the whole truth – especially such news and views that are politically and socially sensitive. This is primarily because, as the saying goes, ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’! The fact is that a handful of media conglomerates control much of the global mass media; the exercise of monopoly control in the U.S. is even greater. The media oligarchs, who in turn hold definite political and social biases, invariably decide the content and form of the news and views that are broadcast. Propagation of politically and socially biased news and views, thus, have adverse impact on the collective consciousness.

Strong reaction against this negative trend arose in the 1970s. As Ulla Carlsson, Director, NORDICOM (The Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research, Göteborg University, Sweden) has pointed out:

Global flows of news and information were the subject of intense debate in international fora in the 1970s. News gathering and reporting has been controversial, both within nations and between nations…. The United Nations, and UNESCO in particular, were the prime arenas where these issues were thrashed out…. The issue of a new international information order is bound up with ideas about the role of communication in the development of societies, on the one hand, and the relations between developed and developing countries, on the other.⁵

Therefore, acceding to the demand of the non-aligned countries for a new international information order, UNESCO appointed a commission known as The International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems in 1977 to study all manner of problems of communication in the world. Sean MacBride, former Minister for External Affairs of Ireland and the then Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, officiated as Chair of the 16-member Commission. The Commission’s final report titled “Many Voices, One World. Communication and Society, Today and Tomorrow. Towards a New, More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order,” was submitted to UNESCO in 1980. The Report is popularly known as the MacBride Report.

According to Dr. Carlsson:

The Commission report stresses that it is not only about developing countries, but about the whole of humanity, because unless the necessary changes are made in all parts of the world, it will not be possible to attain freedom, reciprocity or independence in the exchange of information worldwide. The Commission confirmed the persistence of imbalances in news and information flows between countries and marked inequalities in the distribution of communication resources…. For the first time ever, a UNESCO document plainly stated that a few transnational companies controlled the international information system and that their control posed a threat to the cultural integrity and national independence of many countries.

Dr. Carlsson further added that:

The commercialization of information is harshly criticized, as is the expansion of advertising markets. The Commission stressed the importance of the social function of information. An important theme in the report throughout is, for that matter, an emphasis on the societal roles of information and the need for democratization of communication flows…. These demands [for the 4 Ds – Development, Democratization, Decolonization and Demonopolization] call for measures not only in the developing countries but, perhaps even more so, in the developed countries…. A lot of emphasis is put on the right to communicate, defined as ‘the right to be informed, the right to inform, the right to privacy, the right to participate in public communication’ at all levels – ‘international, national, local and individual’…. There was also a hint of the idea that the causes of underdevelopment might be found in the developed and the developing countries alike.⁵

The governments of USA and UK were furious with the MacBride Report. This was because the attack on media monopoly was construed as a direct attack on the interests of the wealthy classes.

One of the first to expose the extent of corporate control over the mass media in the U.S. was Ben Haig Bagdikian, who taught journalism and subsequently served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. His book titled The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, Boston, 1983) warned about the adverse effects of corporate ownership in the media. The work has been updated six times (through 2000) before being rewritten and renamed The New Media Monopoly in 2004. During this period, according to the publishers, “the number of corporations controlling most of America’s daily newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, book publishers, and movie companies has dwindled from fifty to ten to five.”

In Ben Bagdikian’s analysis:

It is a handful of large media conglomerates that create the daily and nightly news world for a majority of Americans…. Our picture of reality does not burst upon us in one splendid revelation. It accumulates day by day and year by year in mostly unspectacular fragments from the world scene, produced mainly by the mass media. Our view of the real world is dynamic, cumulative, and self-correcting as long as there is a pattern of even-handedness in deciding which fragments are important. But when one important category of the fragments is filtered out, or included only vaguely, our view of the social-political world is deficient.

Another important publication on the subject was by Edward S. Herman (Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) & Noam Chomsky (Professor, Department of Linguistics & Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) titled Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon Books, New York, 1988). This seminal work is an attempt to show that:

contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order…. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

Prof. Noam Chomsky followed it up with a work titled Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Seven Stories Press, New York, 1997 & 2003). In this book, Prof. Chomsky

…reveals how falsification of history, suppression of information, and the promotion of vapid, empty concepts have become standard operating procedure for the leaders of the United States–both Democrats and Republicans–in their efforts to prevent citizens from raising awkward questions about U.S. policy.

Robert W. McChesney (Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois) is also a major contributor to the debate with his work titled Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (Seven Stories Press, New York, 1997). As Prof. McChesney points out:

… private control over media and communication is not a neutral or necessarily a benevolent proposition. The commercial basis of U.S. media has negative implications for the exercise of political democracy: it encourages a weak political culture that makes depoliticization, apathy and selfishness rational choices for the citizenry, and it permits the business and commercial interests that actually rule U.S. society to have inordinate influence over media content…. The right-wing assault on journalism and public broadcasting is not an isolated or exceptional phenomenon. It is part and parcel of a wholesale attack on all those institutions that possess some autonomy from the market and the rule of capital.

Thus, according to Prof. McChesney:

… so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible, across the board. The biggest problem facing all who challenge the prerogatives of corporate rule is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are never exposed to anything remotely close to a reasoned, coherent, consistent, democratic socialist, pro-labor, or even old-fashioned New Deal Democratic perspective. This is why, in the end, media reform is inexorably intertwined with broader social and political reform. They rise or fall together.

The present challenges facing the media were discussed at the third National Media Reform Conference in Minneapolis during 06-08 June 2008, “an event that brought together thousands of people dedicated to making America’s media system more democratic, diverse and accountable”. One of the keynote addresses were delivered by veteran journalist, Bill Moyers, a former White House Press Secretary in the Johnson Administration from 1965-67, a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award in 2006, and currently the host of a weekly public affairs series entitled Bill Moyers Journal on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). In a scathing attack on corporate media he noted that:

…our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders…

Referring to the war in Iraq he said:

…this Administration – with the complicity of the dominant media – conducted a political propaganda campaign, using erroneous and misleading intelligence to deceive Americans into supporting an unprovoked attack on another country… Sadly, the Fourth Estate became the Fifth Column of democracy, colluding with the powers-that-be in a “culture of deception”… that subverts the thing most necessary to freedom – the truth.

Moyers was equally appalled by the continued existence of poverty in the midst of plenty in the U.S. Expressing his concern in this regard, he said:

Extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a truly just society. Capitalism will breed great inequality that is destructive unless tempered by an intuition for equality which is the heart of democracy. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people who have neither power nor privilege, you can no longer claim to have a representative government.

In Moyers view, many such critical issues escape the attention of the larger public because of media consolidation. According to him:

As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and broadcast outlets, news organizations are folded into entertainment divisions. The “news hole” in the print media shrinks to make room for ads, celebrities, nonsense, and propaganda, and the news we need to know slips from sight.

In short, the powerful role being played by the media in shaping public opinion cannot be overstated; the more and more it goes under monopoly control, the public is likely to have less and less access to the truth!

Conclusion

The analysis of the claim that the U.S. is the “world’s oldest democracy” has necessitated examination of various historical aspects from the formation of USA to the role of slavery, to the fate of American Indians, to the abolition movement, to the expansion of franchise, to the disenfranchising laws, to the civil rights movement, and to the voting rights act. It also necessitated analyses of the nature of the U.S. Constitution, the iniquitous development, the role of U.S. imperialism, the onslaught on civil rights, the threat of emergence of a police state, and the nature & role of the media in the U.S. All the evidences from the analyses negate the dubious claims of the U.S. establishment regarding its commitment to “freedom” and “democracy.”

As far as the current state of electoral laws and processes are concerned, the inferences drawn by Alexander Keysser from his analysis of the history of voting rights in the U.S. are especially noteworthy. According to him:

At the opening of the twenty-first century (and the new millennium), nearly all adult citizens of the United States are legally entitled to vote…. That it took so long for universal suffrage to be achieved reflects elements of our history that fit uneasily into the official portrait of the United States as the standard bearer of democracy and representative institutions. One such element…is that the right to vote has never been formally enshrined in our nation’s constitutional order.⁶

The range of choices offered to the public has been kept narrow, in part through the increasing institutionalization of the two-party system: rules governing ballot access limit the ability of dissident parties to mount national campaigns…. As a result, the voices of the more privileged are heard more loudly in the halls of governance, and the ideal of democracy – that all voices be heard equally – is consistently undermined.⁷

In addition, the role of money in elections is enormous. Campaigns, waged largely on television, have become extraordinarily expensive, and candidates who cannot raise larger war chests are doomed to failure…. Indeed, if current trends continue, the actual casting of ballots may be in danger of becoming a pro forma ritual designed to ratify the selection of candidates who have already won the fund raising contests…. No political system can claim to be democratic without universal suffrage, but a broad franchise alone cannot guarantee to each citizen an equal voice in politics and governance. The arrangements and institutions that surround the conduct of election… all can promote or vitiate the equality of political rights…. The current debate over campaign financing and the use of soft money can be viewed as the latest battle in the two-centuries war over the democratization of politics in the United States; at the movement, antidemocratic forces are winning that battle, and in so doing, are undercutting the achievements of universal suffrage.⁸

Keyssar’s warning eight years ago, that “antidemocratic forces are … undercutting the achievements of universal suffrage,” appears to be almost prophetic! Ever since the ascendancy of George W. Bush as the U.S. President in January 2001, through the highly disputed and controversial presidential election of 2000,⁹ there has been systematic erosion of civil rights in the U.S. The concerted attempt to curtail civil rights of U.S. citizens is an indication of the panic reaction from the side of the U.S. establishment, which is scared of the broadening of franchise and of the likely increased participation of the citizens at large in the decision-making processes. The spectre of “terrorism” is a convenient excuse to clampdown on all anti-establishment protests and to ensure that the restrictions neatly remain in place throughout the never-ending war against “terror”! At the same time, the U.S. establishment is compelled to repeatedly proclaim its adherence to laudatory precepts of “freedom” and “democracy” in order to conceal not only its authoritarian pursuits but also the fact about the widening economic disparities between the elite and the mass of U.S. citizens. There was also a forlorn hope that the self-proclamation of being the “world’s oldest democracy” would somehow cover-up the sins the U.S. committed in the past and is committing in the present both at home and abroad.

The real nature of democracy in the U.S. cannot be understood without reference to the observations made by those like:

(a) Prof. Charles Beard regarding the elitist nature of the U.S. Constitution;
(b) Prof. Alexander Keyssar regarding the history of the right to vote;
(c) Prof. Henry Call, Prof. Gar Alperovitz, and the Working Group on Extreme Inequality regarding the iniquitous economic system;
(d) Journalist William Blum and Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, who have documented the misdeeds of U.S. imperialism and debunked the U.S. claim of spreading “freedom” and “democracy” abroad;
(e) Dr.Gordon Lafer regarding absence of democratic rights for nearly 88 per cent of the 138 million workforce at their work place;
(f) Prof. Walter M. Brasch and attorneys Michael Ratner & Gregory T. Nojeim, who have raised concerns about erosion of civil rights;
(g) Congressman Ron Paul, researcher Stephen Lendman, Prof. Elaine Cassel, attorney C. William Michaels, journalist Joe Conason, and writer Naomi Wolf, who had raised alarm about the dangerous drift towards a police state; and
(h) Journalist Ben Bagdikian, Prof. Edward S. Herman, Prof. Noam Chomsky, Prof. Robert W. McChesney, and journalist Bill Moyers, who have exposed the disastrous effects of media monopoly that has resulted in the discarding of objectivity, accuracy and fairness in the dissemination of information.

It is a disturbing sign that despite the Bush Administration’s frightening legacy, nearly 60 million voters, or over 45 per cent of those who cast their ballot in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, voted for the Republican Party! While the bulk of the 69 million voters, or nearly 53 per cent, who voted for Barak Obama may have cast their ballots with the ardent hope that President Bush’s authoritarian legacy would be dismantled, it is not very clear whether the Democratic Party is predisposed towards fulfilling that earnest expectation. It also remains to be seen whether Barak Obama, in his new role as President of the U.S., has the will to uphold the cause of civil rights (to which he was purportedly committed) and world peace or he would succumb to pressure and end up remaining a prisoner of his circumstances.

Hopefully, the various democratic institutions that were arduously built with determination to seek justice for all – during the long period of the abolitionist movement, the suffragette movement, the working-class movement and the civil rights movement – should be able to withstand the onslaught and succeed in dismantling the authoritarian and iniquitous structures erected before and during the hideous Bush era. Democratic right is not merely a right to vote once every few years. Fair access to nation’s material wealth; right to education, information, communication and association (including at the work place); and non-discrimination of any kind – by way of creed, language, colour, caste, region, ethnicity or gender – are all integral for nurturing a democratic society and in giving meaning to the notion of freedom.

1. Also see: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, (Lawrence Hill Books, New York, 2003); & Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott, Professor of English, University of California, & Jonathan Marshall, Economics Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991).
2. Walter M. Brasch, America’s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government’s Violation Of Constitutional And Civil Rights (Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2005).
3. 13 November 2007 [CCR is the lead attorneys for those imprisoned without rights at Guantánamo for the last seven years.]
4. Doug McGill, “The Fading Mystique of An Objective Press,” The McGill Report, 24 October 2004.
5. Ulla Carlsson, “The Rise and Fall of NWICO [New World Information and Communication Order] – and Then?” EURICOM Colloquium, Venice, 5-7 May 2003.
6. Alexander Keysser, The Right to Vote – The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, Basic Books, New York, 2000, p. 316-317.
7. Keyssar, p. 320-322.
8. Keyssar, p. 322-323.
9. The 2004 presidential election too was disputed; in fact, there have been outright accusations of electoral fraud both during the 2000 as well as the 2004 elections. Mark Crispin Miller (Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University), in his books titled Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election (Basic Books, New York, 2005) and Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 (Ig Publishing, Brooklyn, 2008), has analysed the issue in detail. Despite attempts by sections of the judiciary, the Democratic Party and as well as the mainstream print and audio-visual media to underplay the magnitude and ramifications of the electoral fraud committed by the Republican Party, concerned citizens have tried to expose the fraud through other available means. [The need for reforms in electoral laws and electoral processes are concerns, which are still hotly debated in the U.S. One such issue is the disenfranchisement of detainees awaiting trial and ex-felons. This problem has both racial and class dimensions as well since those in the said categories are disproportionately non-whites and from the working class and the poor. The magnitude of the problem is huge considering that there are over 2 million ex-felons and nearly 1.5 felons on probation, apart from another 2 million, who are currently in prisons and jails.]

Cuba marked 50 years of revolution, January 1, 2009. The island-nation has survived the longest and harshest imperialist blockade and thousands of violent actions against its existence. Several thousands of people have been murdered or rendered crippled by sabotage and even bacteriological warfare—not to mention innumerable attempts on the lives of Fidel Castro and other leaders.

The Communist party and state strategy for survival has focused on unity: unity in decision-making, unity of leadership, and unity in the media. This strategy has enabled the state to resist United States and allied efforts to smash it. However, this strategy has prevented leaders and the state bureaucracy from believing that it can afford the “luxury”of allowing significant active participation on the part of the population to discuss and decide what the nation’s politics and economy ought to be. Nor do the media question decisions taken.

When questioned about the wisdom of this control, the state either ignores the question or responds with examples of how the US intelligence apparatuses intervene in other countries’ processes when not in US interests. Suffice it here to note the successful subversive interventions in media organs during Allende’s term in Chile, and in Nicaragua during the first Sandinista government from 1979-1990. Currently, US counter-intelligence and media apparatuses align with the national oligarchy in Venezuela endeavoring to overthrow Hugo Chavez and stop any advance toward socialism.

Cuba’s communist leadership has always asserted that broad exercise of freedom of expression can place the nation’s very sovereignty in peril. While there is some truth to this historically, strict state control of the media and other channels of information and debate cripple the ability of the common man and woman from acquiring adequate information and ideas necessary for them to become empowered. This has led most people to become disbelievers of state propaganda and the media. They hunger for more and open information.

Cuban historian and professor of the University of Oriente, Frank Josué Solar, recently wrote:

“It is not a question of luxury, an alternative which one can choose or not: worker democracy is a condition sin qua non for the normal unfolding of a socialist economy. Without this it is deformed, and finally perishes.”¹

For the first time in decades, the state has allowed open critique of policies from the left. Handfuls of students, professors and professionals at the University of Havana and at Cujae University are meeting to discuss socialism’s future.

A group of university students, professors and professionals formed the Bolshevik Workshop to pay homage to the Russian revolution, at the 90th year anniversary in November 2007, and to discuss its trajectory and collapse. Some 500 people assembled at the University of Havana. Much of the discussion revolved around the degradation of the Soviets, the state´s total seizure of power and its control over decision-making—all which led to a passive populace, which did not resist the collapse.

Many participants concluded as did Frank Josué in his article: “What failed in the Soviet Union was not the planned economy model but a type of bueaucratic management, which converted into an absolute brake upon all of its potential development. Just as the human body requires oxygen, this economic organization requires a collective direction by the working class for its functioning.”

One of the workshop organizers, Ariel Dacal Díaz, a professor of law, delivered a paper on the subject.²

At this assembly, and at a subsequent workshop, participants viewed the need to revitalize revolutionary Marxism, also in Cuba. The university administration sought to curtail the movement and refused to allow large meetings. In this context, the administration also banned the department of philosophy’s magazine, Critical Thinking (Pensamiento Crítico). An article, which analysed the fall of the USSR to revisionism, was not well viewed.

The dozen coordinators of the workshop did not hold public meetings again in 2008 but did create a lively website. They propose to “contribute to the empowerment of persons and groups in their practice as citizen-subjects within the Cuban revolution as a process and with socialism as its project.”

The website has hundreds of essays and articles by readers and past and current theoreticians and leading activists such as: Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Che…Stalin is viewed as having thwarted a true socialist direction based on workers’ power.

At the end of January this year, the coordinators organized another workshop by the name: “To live the revolution 50 years after the triumph.” They now meet monthly at the Ministry of Culture’s Center of Juan Marinello, close to Revolutionary Square. The Ministry´s Antonio Gramsci Department and the Superior Institute of Art are cosponsors. The meeting hall allotted can hold just under 100 persons. It was full at the initial workshop where the theme was: the historic sovietization of Cuba and what remains today. This lay the basis for the following workshop—“The political system of the revolution: participation, popular subject and citizenship”—which I attended.

In its announcement folder, the coordinators wrote: “This workshop seeks to contribute to revitalize and analyze the place of citizenry participation in the political system, its forms of expression concerning sovereignty, the necessity of a political and legal culture consistent with social protagonism at the moment to create, control, limit and enjoy the political and the law.”

Specific topics were: how does socialism reformulate the concept of citizenship; mechanism’s of actual popular participation; how to contribute to empowerment. All this within the context of, “We make our revolution.”

After a brief introduction, the 80-90 participants broke into four groups to discuss what experiences they had with active participation and with forced participation, and how they felt as subject-citizens. (My participation was mainly as an observer since I do not currently live and work in Cuba, which I did from 1987 to 1996.)

Most people chose to express negative experiences, which had left them feeling frustrated, impotent and not as active citizens. When a philosophy student said that he did not feel represented in the political decision-making process most within our circle nodded in affirmation. Another student said that it was possible “to participate but ‘they’ make the decisions”. A young woman student spoke enthusiastically about this workshop initiative, which allowed her to feel as an active subject, “hoping it can lead to making a difference for the society.” A Colombia studying here said he felt more as a subject in Cuba than in Colombia but hoped for greater active participation.

An older woman, who classified herself as an ordinary worker, said she felt isolated. “’They’ don’t give me a chance to participate in any real sense. ‘They’ don’t take our commentaries seriously, so I feel like a crazy old woman.” During a break, she said she believed the revolution has stood still since the mid-60s. A couple of older professional men, remembering those activist days when peasants and militia still carried weapons to defend the nation—which they did at the Bay of Pigs invasion and against counter-revolutionary groups infiltrated and financed by the CIA (Operation Mongoose)—believed the revolution died after that.

The walls were covered with handwritten quotations by Bertolt Brecht, Roque Dalton, Silivo Rodriguez and others. On one wall were posted words by Paulo Freire: “If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed.”

Summaries of each group’s discussion were read during the last plenary session. The experiences and sentiments were similar. Bureaucratic mechanism’s of control were outlined and criticized during the discussion period. Much of state propaganda—“everything is marching well”—was considered false. People rejected the constantly repeated institutionalized excuse—imperialism´s blockade—for the multitude of problems and inefficiencies, and that the blockade impedes debate. An internal blockade exists, said many.

There was ample self-critique as well. We must overcome self-censorship. We must not yield to the fear of losing what we may have or hope to obtain, such as a better position, and thereby remain silent in face of unfairness or wrong decisions. One young man said each of us should find ways to improve our own behavior. For example, we must stop throwing wastes and trash anywhere we feel like it. We should intervene in all our surroundings with a positive spirit that we can make change, that we can make “them” listen to us, because we are the producers, the people for whom the political structure serves. An older professor suggested we invite bureaucrats to meet with us, “because they are Cubans too and we could learn from one another”.

A young professor of law, Julio Antonio Fernández, gave a brief talk about where the land lay. He brushstroked revolutionary political and legal history. He defended the constitution of 1976 as a revolutionary one, and one legalizing an active citizenry for socialism, one that establishes popular control of all mechanisms for sovereignty. The audience was so attentative a pin could be heard to drop.

“We do not seek to regress to before the revolution: we must be designers and controllers…What is most important now is a critique of current state organisms and not the possible creation of ideal institutions.”

He continued—my paraphrases. If a dominating regime is necessary how can it act without alienating the people? How can we democratize power?

We have formal rights of control, Fernández said. We need to actualize them. The law is not that of the state but that of and for the people. Citizenry duty must be restored. He also spoke against continuing discrimination both of race and gender. The individual and the collective must recognize and confront these ills.

“The danger of imperialism is real and we must find forms to act taking this reality into account,” he concluded.

Following his well received analysis, the body was asked for comments, especially concerning the question of how one can participate in a revolutionary manner. One-fourth of the audience made comments and offered ideas to further the revolutionary process, and some called for action.

Several people, young and old, said that the workshop process and its ideas should go public. There must be ways of involving workers, vital producers. Some said that while laws protect the right to associate and to organize associations, and no law prohibits strikes, the reality is something different. No one dare try to organize strikes, and many who petition for permission to organize associations are ignored or denied their right.

An older lawyer said he was still waiting, now ten years, for a reply from the Ministry of Justice to his several petitions to organize a harmless, social association of descendants of Slavic people in Cuba. A sociology professor said that while some professions were allowed to form associations, those in sociology—a study prohibited in Cuba for three decades, which the government reinstated in the mid-90s—were not. Yet no reason was given.

A history professor said it was necessary to define what socialism really is and what it should be. Among other things, socialism must be personal as well as collective. One must feel that he/she is a decision-maker. Without that sense, what occurred in Russia and Eastern Europe could well occur in Cuba.

“Participation leads to solutions and that is liberating,” he concluded.

Another person said that Internet is a liberating tool and must be made available to all. That will be technologically possible—perhaps economically too—when the Venezuelan undersea cable reaches Cuba later this year. The question is: will the state allow access to all?

One participant raised doubts about whether a dominating state power was any longer a necessity, especially one in which many leaders retain power positions for many years, even decades.

A young female student said she felt stimulated by these worshops and was optimistic that positive changes could be made. Several youths echoed her sentiment. The last speaker, a Brazilian student, said that it was most important that the group not degenerate into sectarianism as do so many left groups around the world.

The next workshop, open to all, will take place on March 27. Its theme will be: state property, social property and the socialization of production within Cuba´s socialist revolution.

1. “Cuba, y el debate del socialism del siglo XXI,” published by the Fundación de Estudios Socialista Federico Engels, www.marxist.com
2. See In Defense of Marxism. See also Walter Lippmann’s yahoo site Cuba/News for the English version.

Writers Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle stand convicted of violating modern British laws against “stirring up racial and religious hatred” for publishing, among other things, an allegedly anti-Semitic comic book called “Tales of the Holohoax” and a pamphlet called “Don’t Be Sheeple”.

As the irrepressible creators of a pugnacious web site called Heretical…com, Shepard and Whittle (who writes under the pen name, ‘Luke O’Farrell’) have published scores of taboo-busing manifestos, cultural critiques and satires, as well as numerous scientific papers and ‘general interest’ material. But it all came to a crashing end last year under the boot heel of a British court. What’s worse, their prickly commentary was about to earn them a multi-year stint in an English jail.

Outraged at what they consider politically based persecution, the two dissenters chose instead to seek political asylum in America. Then the US Dept. of Homeland Security stepped in.

The most recent chapter of their political odyssey began on July 14, 2008, when Sheppard and Whittle (dubbed the ‘Heretical Two’) delivered themselves to US authorities at Los Angeles International Airport upon their arrival from Europe. But instead of sanctuary they received a one-way ticket to the Santa Ana jail; this, despite the fact that they entered the US legally and the contents of their published works violate no US law. In fact, the server headquarters of their web site, Heretical.com, is located in California. Despite this, an American judge presiding over their asylum case has refused to grant them bail.

Sheppard and Whittle remain in police custody under the watchful eye of the US Dept. of Homeland Security.

‘News Blackout’ Spells Invisibility

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has shown persistent indifference to this noteworthy First Amendment brawl, even though the case’s legal implications are newsworthy, perplexing and perhaps even precedent setting,

But why would the mainstream media play a passively hostile role towards these Free Speech activists? Why? Because the Heretical Two qualify as exemplars of Britain’s ‘far right’, a movement that’s antagonistic towards many modern conventions concerning race, sexuality, feminism, third world immigration and Israel’s elevated status in the West.

Indeed, the political agenda of Europe’s far right generally stands in direct opposition to the multi-cultural transformation of Europe and North America that’s been in progress for the past half century. Many rightists contend that influential jurists and financiers, as well as major players in news, publishing and entertainment have advanced these cultural changes, often covertly. With this in mind, the mystery behind the mainstream media’s news blackout regarding the Heretical Two becomes a lot easier to understand.

Bruce Leichty, Sheppard and Whittle’s former immigration attorney, had this to say about the bizarre British edict that prompted the Heretical Two to take flight: “Under this novel application of [British] law, American citizens, or indeed citizens of any nation, are rendered subject to arrest and prosecution by the British authorities if anything they post on the world wide web is deemed in breach of British laws governing the discussion of race and religion.” These extra-national laws pose a direct challenge to America’s First Amendment rights. Similar laws are already in place throughout parts of Europe with more expected via the EU.

Meanwhile, Sheppard and Whittle languish in an American jail, unseen and unknown. This undermines their quest for freedom since publicity is vital to raising funds to sustain their legal battle. But the Heretical Two are not alone. In Europe, other dissidents are being targeted. Still others, like Holocaust skeptics Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf, remain behind bars.

One recent target, a conservative Catholic Bishop named Richard Williamson has come under intense pressure for remarks he made about the official Holocaust story on Swedish TV. This is how it’s playing out in the mainstream news:

Jews Tell Vatican: Holocaust Denial is a Crime

By Philip Pullella (2/9/09)

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – World Jewish leaders told Vatican officials that denying the Holocaust was “not an opinion but a crime” when they met on Monday to discuss a bishop they accuse of being anti-Semitic.

The meetings, the first since the controversy over Bishop Richard Williamson, who denies the extent of the Holocaust, began last month, took place three days before Pope Benedict is due to address a group of American Jewish leaders.

Williamson told Swedish television in an interview broadcast in January: “I believe there were no gas chambers.” He said no more than 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million accepted by most historians.

“Today we strongly reaffirmed that the denial of the Shoah is not an opinion, but a crime,” said Richard Prasquier, president of the French Jewish umbrella organization CRIF, using the Hebrew word for Holocaust.

The headline and narrative are fairly typical of the news-bites that frame this unique kind of dispute. In this instance, the reader finds the accused Bishop alone, stigmatized and denounced by numerous authoritative sources and even a court. The Jewish perspective is given overwhelming prominence. Nowhere in the article are there any defenders of Williamson’s position. The vital issues of Free Speech and political liberty are altogether absent. Case closed.

In most any other context, the attempt by government to impose criminal penalties for mere utterances would be questioned–if not deplored–in the article itself. But arguments involving the Holocaust and Jewish sensitivities are treated in the mainstream media with unique partisanship.

The London Times (Online edition, 2/9/09) proclaims:

British Diplomat Arrested Over “Anti-Semitic’ Rant

“Allegations that a senior British diplomat launched into an anti-Semitic rant in a London gym while watching TV footage from Gaza will not upset the “treadmill of diplomacy”, the Israeli Ambassador to London said today.

In a curiously tongue-in-cheek response to a case that has provoked concern within the Jewish community in Britain, Ron Prosor added that the tirade did not reflect “the health and fitness of our relations”.

The diplomat, 47-year-old Rowan Laxton, allegedly shouted “f***ing Israelis, f***ing Jews” while watching television reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza last month.

He is also alleged to have said that Israeli soldiers should be “wiped off the face of the Earth” during the rant at the London Business School gym near Regents Park on January 27. The tirade reportedly continued even after other gym users asked him to stop.

After a complaint from a member of the public, Mr. Laxton was arrested for inciting religious hatred – which can carry a seven-year prison term – and bailed to reappear at a central London police station at the end of March.”

When the dust settles, the curious reader is left with this unanswered question: What’s worse: using the F-word in the same sentence as the word ‘Jew’?—or a military invasion upon a civilian population by a nuclear-ready, foreign power? The London Times’ coverage suggests that it’s the offensive language rather than the slaughter of civilians that is the greater sin. On this vital question, the writers in the editorial section at the same newspaper are silent.

Meanwhile, Mr. Laxton is facing serious jail time for his verbal outburst.

Ethnic ‘Overrepresentation’: So What?

Have Big Media and Big Government joined forces to advance an ethnic agenda? It’s looking that way. Writing in the LA times (12/19/08) columnist Joel Stein adds humor and realism to the stunning reality of ethnic monopoly in Big Media/Entertainment. He writes:

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.

Stein clears the air. And he’s even funny about it. But the impact of ethnic activism in media and government must be assessed, and critically—without the threat of reprisal. Stein expresses bemused sympathy for Hollywood’s ethnic outsiders (plain old white folks) explaining:

The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

But concentrated ethnic power with a global agenda can become very un-funny indeed. Just ask the Heretical Two. Or the people of Gaza. When wealth, talent, religion and government merge, there can be many, many causalities.

Defendant Whittle, in the meantime, warns about federal legislation here in the US that poses a danger to traditional American liberties. “[House] bill HR-1955”, he notes, “is ready to begin pushing the US down the same slope as the UK and European Union”. Though this bill finally stalled in the Senate, it received overwhelmingly support by both political parties in the House.

The bill, HR-1955, was named the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” by its liberal (and Jewish) sponsor, Jane Harman (D-CA). It contained numerous provisions criminalizing, among other things, “hate speech”, which is liberal code for selectively targeting fiery political expression. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) is expected to sponsor a similar bill later this year. Other bills now under consideration in the House (HR-256 and HR-262) also seek to broaden and enhance ‘hate speech’ penalties.

But as America’s Zionized conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran push forward, larger problems surely loom. Nevertheless, eliminating politically incorrect speech remains high on the agenda of both political parties. With help from advisors linked to the ADL, lawmakers are now drafting legislation designed to circumvent Free Speech guarantees enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

Pro-Zionist Personality Syndrome?

The pro-Zionist personality that’s been on the forefront of condemning dissent was put under the microscope recently by blogger/activist Karin Friedmann, who observes:

Jews in America are socially empowered to go way beyond the learned trauma of the Jewish experience that results in typical reactionary behavior. They actually participate in group behavior that is deliberately manipulative and abusive — aimed at punishing activists who stand up for human equality and justice. Over the years, US Jews have become increasingly nutty not only due to current events but due to the internet “alerts” coming to them from Jewish lobbyists, who solidify their brains in this self-righteous fantasy world where Hamas is a terrorist organization, where Israel has some kind of right to kill and rob non-Jews.

So we are dealing with not only dangerous reactions based on past trauma — actually learned trauma based on a glorified and fictionalized past — but American Jews are actually being trained since childhood to interact with non-Jews in a deceitful and arrogant manner, in coordination with each other, to emotionally destroy Gentiles and Israel critics, in addition to wrecking their careers and interfering with their social relationships. This is actually deliberate, wicked, planned behavior motivated by a narcissistic self-righteous fury.

The pro-Zionist personality is so commonplace that it’s now considered normal. But when far right dissenters (often smeared as white supremacists) gather publicly to lawfully and non-violently advance their own worldview, they are typically set upon by even larger numbers of left wing ‘counter-demonstrators’. There’s hate speech aplenty during these rare encounters, only it usually comes from the so-called anti-fascists.

I recall attending a rally for Pat Buchanan when he ran for President a decade or more ago. At an otherwise peaceful assemblage of Middle Americans who came to hear Buchanan’s speech, was a raucous band of protesters with signs that read “Stop Fascism” and “No Nazis Allowed.” Why aren’t inflammatory insults like these considered a form of hate speech?

A similar left/right confrontation of this kind happened recently in Germany. When a group of rightists publicly assembled to commemorate the Allied annihilation of Dresden at the end of WWII, hundreds of self-described ‘anti-fascists’ showed up in an attempt to disrupt the ceremony. Many were arrested. Significantly, when the shoe is on the other foot, many self-proclaimed anti-fascists show a remarkable disregard for civil liberties.

But if we step back and take a broader look, a case can be made that hate speech is in fact far more widespread than commonly recognized. Stranger still, it doesn’t involve the usual suspects. To find it, simply pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV. Right there you’ll find intellectuals, pundits and political leaders using language like “All [military] options are on the table” (in regards to Iran, for instance) as they softly threaten mass-murder against sovereign peoples whose governments are either insufficiently democratic, determined to develop nuclear energy, or embody some form of nebulous threat to Zio-America.

At the very least, language utilizing the implied threat of massive and pre-emptive State violence surely amounts to diplomatic terrorism. Yet this Mafioso-style diplomacy is routinely used by the US against any and all of Israel’s regional foes. Obviously, making the world safe for Zionism is a never-ending job. And if Israel’s latest government has its way, there will necessarily be still more systematic cruelty and more ethnic cleansing. After all, how else can the Israelis finally rid themselves of those unwanted, indigenous Gentiles? Making Israel’s interminable and ugly enterprise appear defensive and ‘democratic’ will surely require a lot of creative thinking.

Truly, the extreme unpleasantness of Israel’s ongoing campaign against native Arabs—sixty years and counting–goes a long way towards explaining why, throughout American mass media, there’s an increasing reliance upon drawing from one tragic event among the countless wars, invasions and annihilations that, for the past century, has scarred all of humanity. Unfortunately, today’s Zionist Jews absolutely need the Holocaust in order to justify and explain away Israel’s relentless brutality. Without it, America’s multi-racial civilization would view Zionist Israel for what it is: a political enterprise that’s inherently discriminatory.

But instead, due in no small part to intensifying media exposure, the Holocaust story looms as large—or greater—than any episode in modern history. In America today, denying the existence of God is a trifle compared to expressing skepticism about the How and Why and How Many died at the hands of Nazis. By contrast, comparable (or greater) alleged crimes by Stalin around the same era are systematically ignored. This is surely because those extraneous details detract from what’s now become America’s dominant narrative.

The Holocaust story today symbolizes the unique and enduring propensity for unprovoked cruelty by Gentiles (anti-Semitism) towards an innocent, less numerous (but greater) people. It also serves to remind Jews that only their unity, determination and vigilance can possibly save them from the lurking evil found within the hearts of countless non-Jews.

Finally, the Holocaust narrative deliberately creates and preserves enormous levels of guilt among Gentiles. This in turn induces them to yield before Jewish demands. As any dispossessed Palestinian will explain, the political payoff for Zionists is unparalleled.

Opposing views about The Holocaust (and Jewish history) now define the outer limits of Free Speech in the Western World. Without the courageous sacrifice by a handful of dissidents, this might never change.

Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle can be contacted by mail at:

Simon Sheppard 08-6404
C/O Santa Ana Jail
Box 22003
Santa Ana, CA, USA 92701

Stephen Whittle 08-6408
C/O Santa Ana Jail
Box 22003
Santa Ana, CA, USA 92701

For information about making a financial donation to help free the Heretical Two, please contact Paul Ballard who is heading up their Legal Defense Fund.

Contributions can also be sent to the Fund in the UK addressed as follows: Croydon Preservation Society, P. O. Box 301, Carshalton, Surrey, SM5 4QW, United Kingdom.

But what does Holocaust denial really mean? Begin with the word Holocaust. The Holocaust² (spelled with a capital H) refers to the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II. It is supposed to be the German’s “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem. Much of the systematic extermination was to have taken place in concentration camps by shooting, gassing, and burning alive innocent Jewish victims of the Third Reich.

People like Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, and Bishop Williamson who do not believe this account and who dare to say so in public are reviled as bigots, anti-Semites, racists, and worse. Their alternate historical scenarios are not termed simply revisionist, but are demeaned as Holocaust denial. Rudolf and Zundel were shipped to Germany where they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to three and five years, respectively. Williamson may not be far behind.

Politicians deride Holocaust revisionist papers and conferences as “beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptable behavior.”³ Non-Zionist Jews who participate in such revisionism, like Rabbi Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta, are denounced as “self-haters” and are shunned and spat upon. Even Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors and who wrote the book, The Holocaust Industry, has been branded a Holocaust denier.

But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily harm? For most Holocaust revisionists or deniers if you prefer, their arguments boil down to three simple contentions:

1. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was intended to be ethnic cleansing, not extermination.
2. There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich.
3. There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the 55 million who died in WWII.

Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned? More importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or even partially true, and that they are despised because they contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, museums, and docu-dramas?

Is it sacrilegious to ask, “If Hitler was intent on extermination, how did Elie Wiesel, his father, and two of his sisters survive the worst period of incarceration at Auschwitz?” Wiesel claims that people were thrown alive into burning pits, yet even the Israeli-trained guides at Auschwitz refute this claim.

Is it really “beyond international discourse” to question the efficacy and the forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers? If other myths, like making soap from human fat, have been dismissed as Allied war propaganda, why is it “unacceptable behavior” to ask if the gas chamber at Dachau was not reconstructed by the Americans because no other homicidal gas chamber could be found and used as evidence at the Nuremburg trials?

For more than fifty years Jewish scholars have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to document each Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust. The Nazis were German, obsessed with paperwork and recordkeeping. Yet only 3 million names have been collected and many of them died of natural causes. So why is it heresy to doubt that fewer than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Second World War?

“Holocaust Denial” might be no more eccentric or no more criminal than claiming the earth is flat, except that the Holocaust itself has been used as the sword and shield in the quest to build a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, where even today over half the population is not Jewish.

The Holocaust narrative allows Yad Vashem, the finest Holocaust museum in the world, to repeat the mantra of “Never Forget” while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. It allows Elie Wiesel to boast of having worked for these same terrorists (as a journalist, not a fighter) while refusing to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the war crimes his employer committed. It makes Jews the ultimate victim no matter how they dispossess or dehumanize or ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinian people.

The Holocaust story eliminates any comparison of Ketziot or Gaza to the concentration camps they indeed are. It memorializes the resistance of Jews in the ghettos of Europe while steadfastly denying any comparison with the resistance of Palestinians in Hebron and throughout the West Bank. It allows claims that this year’s Hanukah Massacre in Gaza, with a kill ratio of 100 to one, was a “proportionate response” to Palestinian resistance to unending occupation.

The Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel in what the Jewish scholar, Marc Ellis, has called the ecumenical deal: you Christians look the other way while we bludgeon the Palestinians and build our Jewish state and we won’t remind you that Hitler was a good Catholic, a confirmed “soldier of Christ,” long before he was a bad Nazi.

The Holocaust narrative of systematic, industrialized extermination was an important neo-conservative tool to drive the United States into Iraq. The same neo-con ideologues, like Norman Podoretz, routinely compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler and Nazism with Islamofascism with the intent of driving us into Iran. The title of the recent Israeli conference at Yad Vashem made this crystal clear: “Holocaust Denial: Paving the Way to Genocide.”

“Remember the Holocaust” will be the battle cry of the next great clash of good (Judeo/Christian values) and evil (radical Islamic aggression) and those who question it must be demonized if not burned at the stake.

1. Associated Press, “EU approves criminal measures against Holocaust denial,” Haaretz, 19 April 2007.
2. Holocaust. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005.
3. Statements of Senator Hillary Clinton.

Back at the University of Rochester representatives of the occupying students and the university administration signed a Joint Statement of Understanding.

The approximate wording of the statement is:

1. University of Rochester will commit to provide any surplus goods or supplies that could assist the devastated University of Gaza.

2. University of Rochester will commit resources and information to assist fundraising for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

3. University of Rochester will commit to reach out to Palestinian students in order to provide them scholarships to the University of Rochester

4. University of Rochester will commit to organize open forum to discuss why the University invests in weapons manufactures and discuss the process of the University moving toward a more socially responsible, transparent, and democratically controlled investment policy.

I got in touch with three of the organizers/participants via email and recorded the following online exchange. –Ron Jacobs

Ron Jacobs: Please introduce yourself? Are you a student? Do you have a major?

Adriano Contreras: My name is Adriano Contreras. I’m a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where I study both Sociology and Video Production.

Kyle Brown: My name’s Kyle Brown. I graduated in 2004 with a BA in Sociology. For the past four years I’ve been working as a residential mental health and drug addiction counselor.

Ryan Acuff: My name is Ryan Acuff, a member of University of Rochester Students for a Democratic Society (UR-SDS). I’m a graduate student in psychology and a part-time instructor at the university.

RJ: Can you tell us what happened at UR on February 6th?

Adriano: Well, Students for a Democratic Society at UR (SDS-UR) handed their administration four demands the day before they planned to occupy the Goergen Building. The sit-in, inspired by 20 other universities in the UK, took a stand against the Israeli siege on Gaza. SDS invited other activists groups, community members and allies to participate in the sit-in.

I don’t think anyone would have thought that 9 hours later everything would be over. There was a whole schedule planned for the first evening of the occupation. There was a discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, SDS’s demands, and we were to have guest speakers. The administration however, realized the seriousness of the occupiers and sent the Dean of Student Affairs to be their negotiator multiple times that day.

Ryan and Kyle can better explain more of what happened that day, I spent most of that time blogging from inside the occupation.

Ryan: On February 6th, we took direct action for peace and in solidarity with the Palestinians by peacefully occupying a building at the University of Rochester. Beginning at 3:00pm, UR-SDS claimed and occupied the adjacent atrium and auditorium of Goergen Hall (the Biomedical Engineering Building) and declared them a liberated community space—an autonomous zone democratically run by the occupiers until our demands were met. The action was organized by University Rochester Students for a Democratic Society (UR-SDS) but U of R post-docs, faculty members, and staff also occupied along with numerous community members. We came to raise awareness about the dire situation in Palestine and the United States role in the conflict. In addition, we were there to occupy this space until our demands of the administration for divestment, humanitarian aid, educational aid, and scholarships for Palestinian students were met. Also, (let me clarify) despite what the administration said, we did not “reserve” the auditorium and the online calendar still says that it remains unreserved at that time.

Kyle: (LIke Ryan and Adriano said) SDS at UR organized an occupation of Goergen Atrium and Auditorium on campus in solidarity with Gaza. Beforehand, they had presented the administration with an official letter demanding that UR divest from corporations that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and to provide direct aid to the people of Gaza. This wasn’t an occupation like the illegal sit-down strikes of 1930’s because the campus administration allowed SDS to reserve the building in the interest of “peaceful dialogue”. They also provided the Dean of Student Affairs for negotiation of the demands.

As the day went on, the Dean informed the organizers that UR students would be punished if not out of the building by midnight. So we decided to call for as many campus and community members to mobilize around that time as possible to put as much pressure on the Dean as possible to deliver on our demands.

The Dean agreed to negotiate at 10pm and we had maybe 75 people in the building for support. Through the negotiations, the Dean agreed to the following plan of action: that the administration organize a public forum with UR investors, SDS and the community on the university’s investment policy and its investment in Israel; that UR commit resources and provide any needed information for a campus-wide fund drive for Palestine; that UR work to assess needs in Gaza and donate surplus supplies to universities, such as computers and books; and that UR commit to reaching out to Palestinians with international student scholarships.

Feb 6th was a day of education, debate and mobilization. It was a concrete show of solidarity with the people of Gaza and protest against Israel’s occupation. It was a concrete demonstration of real democratic decision-making and flexibility.

RJ: What particular event spurred you to get personally involved in this issue and the occupation?

Ryan: (For me) the unspeakable events of the recent US-Israeli war on Gaza were very difficult for me witness. Especially knowing how complicit the United States was in the massacres. On January 23rd a message about a series of student occupations of English universities in solidarity with Palestine was floated on the northeast SDS listerv. On Saturday January 24th UR-SDS called an emergency meeting to discuss bringing the occupation movement across the Atlantic. Our discussions bore out a resolve to do the same in the United States.

Kyle: After September 11th, I was already organizing against the US invasion of Afghanistan and Israel began using Bush’s “war on terror” rhetoric to extend it’s occupation of Palestine. I became dedicated to ending the occupation of Palestine when I attended a national demonstration in DC in solidarity with the Al Aqsa Intifada. It was amazing to be marching in the streets with Arabs and Muslims chanting “Free Free Palestine!” Through and after that demonstration, I started exploring US funding for Israel and came to the understanding that Israel plays a crucial role as watch dog in the Middle East for US imperialism. I’ve been an anti-imperialist ever since, so when I heard that UR was organizing an occupation on campus I dove into organizing head first.

Adriano: I’ve been involved with the Campus Antiwar Network, a national democratic student anti-war organization, for over 2 years now. When I began my activism it was really all about figuring out the political reasons for why being in Iraq and Afghanistan was wrong, aside from the moral gut feelings I had. The answers I found were imperialism, geopolitics, and profit. With that understanding I became firmly anti-war.

The chapter of CAN at my school had done an educational meeting around the issue of Palestine a week or so prior to Israel’s assault. While home in New York City, I participated in two demonstrations that were overwhelmingly Arab. Unlike anti-war demonstrations which have remained largely free of an Arab presence, the demonstrations around Gaza filled the streets with people whom after 9/11 feared to speak out against the wave of anti-Arab sentiment.

When we returned from Christmas break the political landscape of the anti-war movement had begun to shift. Israel’s true colors were shown clearly to the entire world. Despite its claims to the right of self-defense, the slaughter of over 1300 Palestinians was unjustifiable and people took notice. I took part in the national demonstration on January 10 and it was an amazing experience. CAN and the Muslim Students Association marched together for the first time ever. The people most directly affected by the so-called “War on Terror” were out in big numbers.

Organizing at school had taken on a different character. People wanted to talk and organize around Palestine, even though we had things organized already around the occupation of Afghanistan. When I spoke with Ryan Acuff about SDS’s plans at UR, he mentioned the sit-in. The CAN chapter at RIT got on board with it.

RJ: Is this part of a larger movement? Would you call it a coordinated movement or spontaneous?

Ryan: Our occupation is part of the larger occupation that began on January 13th in London when students from the School of Oriental and Asians Studies occupied a building on campus. This exploded into an occupation movement that has swept over 20 schools in England and Scotland and has now begun in the United States. Oh yeah, and all the occupations have been spontaneous in that each one ha has inspired the others, but none coordinated by a higher body.

Adriano:What is happening in the UK is spreading like wildfire. There have been 23 university occupations so far and some of them are still occupied. Certain demands have been won and its really a testament to the power of organized struggle and protest. The UR occupation was inspired by the UK. Globally, I think it’s something that’ll catch on. Like I said, the world has now seen Israel’s true colors. The siege, the blockade, and the history of oppression have exposed the ideology of the Israeli state.

In the United States, we’re going to begin to see more occupations of this nature. We’ll see similar campaigns to the ones that ended South African apartheid. Presently, South African dockworkers are refusing to import Israeli goods. Already a national call has been put out by the Campus Antiwar Network to figure out and propose a plan of action that includes the help of SDS UR members and students from the UK.

Kyle: There are a number of events that set the stage for the UR action. First, the election of Obama has given ordinary people across the country hope that things can change after eight long years living under the Bush regime. The urgency for change has never been felt more strongly as we are spiraling into the worst recession/depression since the 1930’s. After Obama was elected, the Republic Windows and Doors workers in Chicago won severance pay and health insurance owed to them by occupying their factory when their bosses announced the plant was closing. Not too long after, students at the New School of Social Research in NYC occupied a building to prevent it from closing and directly noted inspiration from the Republic workers. Israel invaded Gaza over the holiday and sparked a series of campus occupations in Britain. The demands of the UR students almost exactly mirror the demands of the Britain students. So I think there is a real context to what we did. I see the UR action as the next stage in the anti-war movement–a new movement of occupations in this country and internationally.

I think this also needs to be viewed in the context of the broader antiwar movement. This has the potential to breath new life into the antiwar movement and set the stage for the national antiwar demonstration called in DC for March 21st which is the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

RJ: What is the intention of the movement?

Kyle: Simply put, we want justice for the people of Palestine. The US funds Israel’s occupation of Palestine with billions of dollars in addition to direct military aid. This means that the US government is directly responsible for bombs dropped on schools, bulldozers razing communities, and F16s terrorizing Gaza. It’s amazing to learn that so many institutions of higher learning–both UR and RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) invest and research for corporations that directly profit from the occupation of Palestine. Our intention is to end the occupation of Palestine by standing in solidarity with the people of Gaza and building a movement capable of forcing the US government from divesting from Israel.

Ryan: Although many of the schools have slightly different demands, the movement seeks to take direct action to express our solidarity with the people of Gaza, highlight our countries’ and universities’ complicity in the atrocities in the Gaza strip, and make our universities’ relationship to Gaza one of supporting people and peace, not war. Members of UR-SDS also hope our action will help inspire other occupations or sit-ins in the United States, given that our culpability as Americans is dramatically larger than even the British in blocking peace and supporting oppression of the Palestinians.

Adriano: The movement has taken on boycott, divestment, and sanctions. The demands of the UK and UR occupations represent that. The effectiveness however of the movement will largely depend on how well coordinated it is on a national level. Locally we can act, make demands, and win but if we remain isolated it’ll be harder for these actions to catch on. The movement needs to be a player on the national scene in order to tackle organizations like AIPAC but also get to the root of the problem, which is United State tax dollars invested in imperialism in the Middle East. The movement has to bring to light the fact that Israel is the US’s proxy in that region. Why else would it have the second largest fleet of F16s, the highest amount of our foreign aid, and nuclear weaponry?

RJ: What has been the response of other members of the campus community? What about alumni?

Kyle: Adriano and Ryan are on the campuses (I’ll take the next question though!)

Adriano:At RIT, we’ve had a significantly larger attendance at our meetings around Palestine. It hasn’t completely translated into activism, but people are searching for answers and perspectives from the Palestinian side. So there is a potential to mobilize people around this.

Ryan: The response from other members of the campus community has been mostly positive. People seem excited to have these kinds of actions at the University of Rochester. Although the U of R has a history of activism its been a few years since students have taken direct action for a cause. Given that we have a large Jewish population on campus, there are some members of the community that see any support of the Palestinians or condemnation of Israeli state policy as a direct threat to their identity as a Jew. The best we can do in these cases is continue the dialogue to clear up misunderstandings. All alumni I’ve communicated with have been extremely excited about our actions. We’ve even had graduates from 1970s send us e-mails of support.

RJ: In the broader sense, what kind of impact do you see (or hope to see) the movement against the Israeli occupation of the Territories on university and college campuses having on the US and British public?

Ryan: We hope these actions on college campuses help open the discussions on the US-Palestinian-Israeli conflict and help the voices of the Palestinians be heard. One of the only ways the horrific polices of the U.S. in Israel-Palestine can continue is if people don’t know the extent the U.S. suppressing peace and democracy. We hope if the student create enough of stir, then we can create a climate where Obama will have to fulfill his promises of change and actually bring an expedient end to the occupation and facilitate peace and justice in Palestine.

Kyle: Consciousness is shifting around the question of Palestine. I was amazed to learn that over 40% of people in the US were against Israel’s latest attack on Gaza. This is amazing given how pro-Israel the US mainstream media has been. There is never a voice for Palestinians. The only question US reporters would ask Palestinians during Israel’s latest invasion was, “Do you blame Hamas for this?”
That being said, it seems like people are aching to take up this issue but up until this point have been under confident that anything can be done. The amazing thing about our action is that we won in just 9 hours an agreement for a plan of action from the Dean that provides concrete organizing for the movement in weeks ahead. This is giving confidence to community members and fellow activists across the country that we can fight and win.

I think people are also nervous about being labeled an anti-Semite when organizing and taking a stand against Zionism. We have to education people on the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. It is helpful just to point out that there are anti-Zionist Jews organizing in Israel today. We can and should fight against racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism all at the same time.

Adriano: If the movement grows, if it is coordinated, we could expose university investments and fight for socially responsible endowments. The struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine could potentially expose the “war on terror” on a big scale. The possibilities are numerous especially in this period of economic crises and endless war. On the flip-side Obama has brought hope to many and promises of change. If we educate ourselves, take action, and push Obama for more than what he’s promised than we can expect some serious victories.

RJ: Similar actions at campuses around other issues like sweatshops have received a certain amount of positive press when they were undertaken, only to have the administration and trustees negate the agreements that were made. How does a group prevent this, while simultaneously keeping interest in the issue alive on campus and in the surrounding community?

Adriano: This was brought up during the occupation by some people and the answer was unanimous… we’d occupy again. For UR, the biggest employer in Rochester, NY, it’s crucial for them to maintain a favorable reputation. They won’t completely brush off our demands because they know what we’re willing to do now to have our voices heard. During the occupation there was a huge effort made to contact local press and media outlets.

Maintaining interest in the issue has much to do with winning something along the way. The victory at UR was just a first step to get the administration to comply with our demands. If people invest time and energy into organizing and never win anything it becomes demoralizing. If we win, people build confidence and it give activism a whole new meaning.

Kyle: We won the agreement/plan of action through mobilization of students and community members. The agreement was signed in person and in front of all the participants of the occupation because we demanded that the negotiations happen in the auditorium in front of everyone. The agreement should continue to be publicized as far and wide as possible, not only on UR campus but throughout the community and onto every campus across the country. This will play a key role in holding the administration accountable.

We need to continue galvanizing new students and community members with educational panel discussions and teach-ins where we can learn the history of Zionism, the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, campus complicity, the politics of the Palestinian resistance and the role of US imperialism in it all. And we need groups like SDS, CAN, and all activists organizing to hold the Dean accountable to what he agreed but also to push it further. If the administration negates the agreement in anyway, we occupy with more numbers and we stay until they meet our demands.

Ryan: We hope these actions on college campuses help open the discussions on the US-Palestinian-Israeli conflict and help the voices of the Palestinians be heard. One of the only ways the horrific polices of the U.S. in Israel-Palestine can continue is if people don’t know the extend the U.S. suppressing peace and democracy. (Specifically) our big follow up event we have planned is an open forum on the universities investment policies and a discussion of the process of moving towards more socially responsible, transparent, and Democratic investment policy. The more people we can bring into the process the more authoritarian institutions will begin to break down. The more we work to empower and inform people on these issues and the more they will start demanding more power and reform of the institution. We are also planning an editorial in investment for the next issue of the Campus Times along with an open forum to discuss the US-Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In addition, if the university breaks the agreements or simply refuses to move forward we are prepared to take direct action again, this time will more people and in a more dramatic fashion. Justice will be served.

RJ: Since it appears that one of the goals of these actions is to make connections between college investments and the occupation of Palestine (and to make people consider their own complicity, let’s take that a step further: do you think people make the connection between US tax dollars and Israel’s occupation?

Adriano: Right now especially, people are making these connections! Bailout for the banks, none for the working class. $3 billion per year for Israel and no money for universal healthcare coverage. Unemployment is rising and wages have less buying power. If people haven’t made the connection between tax dollars and Israel, they will. It is only a matter of time before people realize the hypocrisy of the system. However not everyone will come to these conclusions alone. We need to be there alongside those people to get them organized to fight back and win the divestment campaigns and reforms we need.

Kyle: I don’t think people make the connection yet. This is a connection the movement will have to make clear. Over three billion dollars in government money goes to fund Israel every year. What could $3 billion a year do for the 47 million people without health insurance in this country? What could $3 billion a year do for our schools that are crumbling under the weight of budget deficits from state to state across this country? What about the workers at Kodak that have lost their jobs as Kodak has laid off more than 50% of their Rochester workforce in the past 30 years (UR has now become the largest employer in Rochester)? It should be our job to make the connections and reach beyond our campuses to win solidarity in the community and labor movement.

Ryan: I think people are beginning to see this connection. UR-SDS pointed this out in our editorial in the campus paper last week. The more people can see we individually our complicit in these atrocities, the more willing people are going to be to take action.

RJ: I know there is a national conference going on around this issue. What do you see as the goals of that conference?

Ryan: Currently there is national conference call organized by the Campus Anti-war Network planned for next Monday to discuss spreading the occupation movement across the U.S. I believe the goals are for other schools to learn about our actions and possibly enact something similar at their school. People are feeling that the time has come to escalate our actions.

Kyle: (Like Ryan said) There is a national conference call this Monday. We will be giving a report on the UR action. Also, someone will be giving a report from the New School occupation. Hopefully, we can get someone on from the occupations in Britain. We want students to organize on every campus across the US. But there must also be coordination between these campuses because it’s going to take a coordinated, democratic, nationwide movement to win divestment from Israel. Hopefully the call will inspire students. Students should “think big” and organize to win concrete gains. (If you are talking about another conference, let me know! I should be there!) (I was referring to the conference call-Ron)

RJ: Anything else?

Adriano: I run a website called The Sitch. Its a site for activist news, political commentary and analysis. On there you’ll find coverage of the UR occupation, as it happened, including videos and images.

Kyle: Yes. The immigrant rights movement in 2006 took up the slogan “Yes we can!” Obama adopted this for his presidential campaign in 2008. Coming out of the UR action, I was thinking to myself: “Yes we did.” It feels great to finally win something. I want people across the country to feel the same way so we can raise our hopes even higher and fight for more!

Ryan: Thanks for your interest in our action. We hope to spread the word far and wide to help inspire similar actions for peace and Palestine and fight oppression in all forms.