30 December 2019

TRUMP'S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON ANTI-SEMITISM: A CATEGORY MISTAKE


Trump’s Executive Order on Anti-Semitism: A Category Mistake




Photograph Source: Master Steve Rapport – CC BY 2.0

Trump and the Constitution


It is a pretty sure thing that President Donald Trump is ignorant of what is in the U.S. Constitution and, in any case, does not care much about what the document says. Take the idea of freedom of speech as set down in the First Amendment. Does he understand the importance of this amendment? Actually, it would seem that the only freedom of speech he finds sacrosanct is his own, expressed almost daily in angry, often rambling “tweets.” Those frequent missives hardly make the man a model of critical thinking and, as it turns out, for the price of some special interest’s political support, President Trump is willing to tell us all that we must believe the opposite of what is true. If we don’t, he will take away some federal benefit. Trump is by nature both authoritarian and simple-minded—not an unusual combination.

Confusing Categories

It was in this simplistic frame of mind that, on 12 December, President Trump issued an executive order directing the federal government to deny funds to universities and colleges that allow alleged anti-Semitic speech on campus. Well, the reader might respond, such an order is understandable because we know that anti-Semitism is a particularly vicious form of racism. And so it is. The mistake here is to assume that President Trump actually knows how to recognize genuine anti-Semitism, so as not to confuse this expression of bigotry with its opposite: the support of human, civil and political rights—in this case, those of the Palestinians. Now, the reader might ask, how could anyone confuse these two categories: on the one hand, the support of an oppressed people’s rights and, on the other, racist anti-Semitism? It helps if you are ignorant, amoral and opportunistic.

And so, with the encouragement of the Zionist lobby, a particularly powerful lobby dedicated solely to the interests of the Israeli state, President Trump, who is in fact ignorant, amoral and opportunistic, based this executive order on a logical fallacy—a category mistake. He identified protests against Israeli state behavior with anti-Semitic racism and declared that any university or college that allows the former (say, by permitting criticism of Israel for its violent suppression of Palestinian rights) is to be found guilty of the latter (anti-Semitism), and therefore is not to receive federal funds.

A Zionist Project

Working for the purposeful confusion of anti-Semitism and the support for Palestinian rights is a Zionist project. It should be emphasized that the Zionists who carry this project forward are not, like the president, ignorant or confused. They know what they are doing. And that is why this effort constitutes a tragedy of the highest order not only for the Palestinians, but for the Jewish people as well.

After World War II every sane individual knew that racism, particularly racism expressed through state power, was bad news. The consequences of such empowered bigotry was there to see across the world: Japanese behavior in China, Korea and Southeast Asia generally, along with German behavior throughout occupied Europe, constituted the worst examples. They resulted in the deaths of tens of millions—among them six million Jews. That is why as early as the late 1940s, an expansion of international law and the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights sought to make such behavior criminal, particularly when carried out as the policy of governments.

As it turned out, those resolutions constituted direct obstacles to the Zionist goal of a “Jewish state” in Palestine. The Zionist conquest of Palestine in the military campaigns of   1948 and 1967, was followed by the systematic narrowing or outright denial of the human, civil and political rights for Palestinians. In the case of Palestinians residing in Israel proper, the racist policies and practices were often obscured behind a facade of benign-sounding declarations that, more often than not, had little impact on minority rights. No such facade was adopted within the Occupied Territories. In this way racism became an essential tool for achieving Zionism’s goal of ethnic exclusivity.

So how do you rationalize this behavior? Even though Ashkenasi (that is, European) Jews have been one of the most persecuted groups in Western history, it was not hard for the Zionists to see their own racist behavior as necessary. Founding a state first and foremost for one group, in a territory already occupied by hundreds of thousands of “others,” easily led to discriminatory policies and practices. It also led to indoctrination of Israeli Jews and their diaspora supporters through the distortion of the history of conquest and colonial occupation. The inevitable resistance of the Palestinians, even when non-violent, became labeled as lawlessness at best and terrorism at worst. In this sense, Israeli society has mimicked not only the apartheid sentiments of South Africa, but also the culture that prevailed in the United States before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Exporting the Fallacy

Yet it was not enough for the Israelis to convince their own Jewish citizens that Zionist racism was righteous self-defense and support of Palestinian rights the equivalent of anti-Semitism. This logical fallacy had to be pushed on Israel’s primary ally, the United States. And, at least in the halls of power, this effort has been remarkably successful, probably because the Zionist lobby has a lot of money to help or hinder ambitious American politicians.

However, outside of those halls, the effort has been exposed for what it is: a dangerous reversal of categories that threatens to turn the clock back on much of the post-World War II progress in political, civil and human rights. As the growing popularity of the boycott Israel movement (BDS) has shown, American citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have an increasing ability to see the reality of the situation. A survey released in mid June 2017 by an organization known as the Brand Israel Group, “a coalition of volunteer advertising and marketing specialists” who consult for pro-Israel organizations, indicated that “approval of Israel among American college students dropped 27% between the group’s 2010 and 2016 surveys” while “Israel’s approval among all Americans dropped 14 points.” Brand Israel’s conclusion: in the future, the U.S. may “no longer believe that Israel shares their values.” This is the case not because of any big increase in anti-Semitism, but due to ever-growing evidence of Israeli racism.

One reaction to this increasing popular clarity of vision is President Trump’s executive order. If, in this case, colleges and universities do not enforce the Zionist logical fallacy, they loose federal money.

Conclusion

Governments do not have a very good reputation for telling their citizens the truth. For instance, just this month it was made known that the U.S. government and military misled the American people about the ability to achieve victory in the Afghan war—a conflict that has been going on for 18 years. The same thing occurred during the Vietnam War. However, it is one thing to withhold information, or downright lie about a situation, and another to urge a population to swallow the category contradictions Trump and the Zionists are peddling. There is something Orwellian about that. It is no mistake that it is the brightest of college students, those who are actually overcoming ignorance and practicing the art of thinking straight, who are most put off by this propagandistic tactic.

As for those Zionist students who claim that protests against Israeli policy and behavior on their campus make them feel uncomfortable, or even unsafe, they might try to learn something from those feelings. After all, it’s the closest they will ever come to the much more profound feelings of anxiety and danger that Palestinians feel every day, in their own homes, neighborhoods and campuses as well. So which category do all of us want to defend—the category of state-sponsored racism or the category of human, civil and political rights? Just be sure not to confuse one for the other.
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Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

29 December 2019

THE DECENT PROTESTER: A DOWN UNDER CREATION



From CounterPunch -  22 October 2019

By Binoy Kampmark

The Decent Protester, appropriately capitalised and revered is, from the outset, one who does not protest. It is an important point: to protest in the visage of such a person is an urge best left to inner fantasy and feeling. You come late to the scene: the best work and revolt has been done; the people who made the change are either dead, in prison, or ostracised. Modest changes might be made to the legal system, if at all.

To actually protest, by which is meant screaming, hollering, and disrupting, with the occasional sign of public indignation, is something of a betrayal. A betrayal to your comfortable station; a betrayal to your happy state of affairs. Show disgust, but keep it regular, modest and contained. Add a dash of bitters that amount to hypocrisy.

This regularity is something that ensures the continuation of police states, apartheid regimes, and vicious rulers. It also perpetuates the status quo in liberal democracies. The cleverness of this is the idea of permissible revolt: As long as you operate within the acceptable boundaries of protest, your conscience is given its balm, and the regime can continue to hum to the tune of the tolerable. It is a principle that states of all political hues adopt, though the degree of that adoption is sometimes moderated by bills of rights and the like.
When Henry D. Thoreau was arrested and found himself spending a night in a Concord prison in 1846 for refusing to pay his poll tax, he was making a broader statement about breaking rules, albeit from a selfish perspective. His objects of disaffection were slavery and the Mexican War. To the individual exists a conscience that should not bow to majoritarian wishes. If there is a law “of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another,” he writes in Civil Disobedience, “then, I say, break the law.” In Walden (1854), he elaborated on the point, claiming that no citizen “for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislation.”

This view has hardly gone unchallenged, suggesting that civil disobedience can be a slippery matter. Hannah Arendt cast more than a heavy stone at Thoreau in her own essay on the subject in The New Yorker in September 1970. Her proposal, instead, was the necessary need to institutionalise civil disobedience and render it a matter of recognised action, rather than individual abstention. Thoreau had, after all, suggested distance and the will of the individual, that it was “not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it…”

To that end, Arendt felt that “it would be an event of great significance to find a constitutional niche for civil disobedience – of no less significance, perhaps, than the event of the founding of the constitutio liberatis, nearly two hundred years ago.” But she resists, curiously enough, the idea of legalising it, favouring a political approach akin to treating the protester as a registered lobbyist or special interest group. “These minorities of opinion would thus be able to establish themselves as a power that is not only ‘seen from afar’ during demonstrations and other dramatizations of their viewpoint, but is always present and to be reckoned with in the daily business of government.”

Few countries better exemplify this dilemma than Australia, a country that has no formal constitutional protection of the right to protest yet insists on a collaborative model between protestor and state (protest permits, for instance, take precedence over any organic right; cooperating with police is encouraged, as laws are to be abided by). In some ways, an argument might well be made that civil disobedience, in anaemic form, has been institutionalised down under.
The result from brought forth in this coagulation is simple if compromising: the Decent Protester. Such a person is one very much at odds with the barebones definition of civil disobedience advanced by Robin Celikates, who describes it as “intentionally unlawful protest action, which is based on principles and aims at changing (as in preventing or enforcing) certain laws or political steps.” In other words, there can be no Australian Rosa Parks.

Each state has its own guidelines for the decent protester, offering a helpful hand for those braving a march or organising a gathering. An information booklet covering the right to protest in the Australian Capital Territory has a range of “guidelines”. It speaks of “many public places” in Canberra, the national capital, “where people can exercise their right to communicate their opinions and ideas through peaceful protests and demonstrations.” The authors of the booklet make the claim that Australian “democracy recognises this right which is subject to the general law and must be balanced against the rights and interests of others and of the community as a whole.”

The Commonwealth Attorney-General’s office gives the false impression that Australia has a clear right to peaceful assembly for people to meet and “engage in peaceful protest.” A list of international human rights treaties are suggested as relevant, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (articles 21 and 22) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (article 8(1)(a)). But being a party to a convention is not the same as incorporating it. Legislation needs to be passed and, for that reason, remains mediated through the organs of the state. The Fair Work Act 2009, for instance, protects freedom of association in the workplace but only in the context of being, or not being, members of industrial associations. Not exactly much to go on.

Other publications venture a much older right to protest, one that came to the Great Southern Land, paradoxically enough, with convict ships and manacles. “The origins of the common law right to assembly,” argues a briefing paper by Tom Gotsis for the NSW Parliamentary Research Service, “have been traced back 800 years to the signing of the Magna Carta.” This, in turn, finds modest recognition in state courts and the High Court of Australia, not least through the limited implied right of political communication. Ever eccentric in its conservatism, that right is not a private one to be exercised against the state, merely a control of hubristic parliaments who venture laws disproportionate to it. Not exactly a glorious, fit thing, is that implied right.

Such protest, measured, managed and tranquilised, makes the fundamental point that those who control the indignation control the argument. Much time has been spent in Australia embedding police within the protest structure, ensuring that order is maintained. Trains, buses and cars must still run on time. People need to get to work. Children need to be in school. The message is thereby defanged in the name of decency. It also means that genuine lawbreaking aimed at altering any policies will frowned upon as indecent. Good Australians would never do that.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

SANDERS AFTER CORBYN: THE JEWISH QUESTION


Sanders After Corbyn: The Jewish Question




Drawing By Nathaniel St. Clair

The hordes of Democratic Party pundits, anti-Trump Republicans, and former national security state functionaries who supply CNN and MSNBC with endless streams of jibber-jabber, along with their counterparts at The New York Times and Washington Post, are pulling out all the stops — trying to convince Democrats that only a “moderate” can defeat Donald Trump.

They speak for the dead center, and they are dead wrong.

They do have a ready audience, however; in part because apologists for the Democratic Party have been fairly successful at passing blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 onto everything other than her corporate and Wall Street friendly politics. Running against Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s politics epitomized moderation.

Alarmingly many potential Democratic voters just don’t get it. The Democratic Party’s leaders and publicists have seen to that; they peddle their snake oil well.

The hard truth, though, is that the “centrist” politics they promote helped get us to where we now are.

 Try convincing the targets of their propaganda operations otherwise, however; it isn’t easy.

That the next, long overdue recession continues to tarry does not help matters.

Neither has the election that the British Labor Party lost so ignominiously a few weeks ago. Its consequences will be dire — over there. Back here, they could be as inconsequential as elections in any of several economically or militarily more formidable US allies in Europe or the Far East. That would be not particularly consequential at all. But this will not be the case; they will matter a great deal.

UK elections matter more than those in other countries – in part because we have a longstanding “special relationship” with the Brits that we don’t have with, say, the French or the Germans or the Japanese, and because we are accustomed to thinking that “the English-speaking peoples” as Churchill called them — Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders — are somehow joined at the hip.

In the final analysis, though, if the UK under Boris Johnson diminishes itself further by leaving the EU, or even if it self-destructs by causing Scotland or Northern Ireland to break away, Americans will have little reason to take notice.

Corporate media, however, are doing all they can to make Americans notice enough to draw the wrong lesson from Labor’s electoral debacle. Their barely hidden objective is to convince potential Sanders or Warren voters in this Spring’s caucuses and primaries that promising “pie in the sky,” as they claim the Labor Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership did – in other words, promoting genuinely, not merely cosmetic, departures from the status quo — is an all but certain path to defeat.
Knowledgeable commentators who are not too blatantly in the thrall of Tory or Blairite ideology tell a different story. They explain how it was not Labor’s socialist (or social democratic) agenda that did the party in, but divisions within it over Brexit, and power struggles between the party’s left wing and its functional equivalents of mainstream Democrats. They tell us that Corbyn, a bona fide socialist and anti-imperialist, could have played his hand better, but that, in the end, he was defeated by circumstances largely beyond his control.

Brexit was the main culprit; it divided the Labor Party, just as it divided the UK generally. The ancien rĂ©gime’s defenders took take full advantage of the fallout from the Brexit vote, something Corbyn was unable to do.

Moderates, in and out of Labor’s ambit, had it in for Corbyn for many of the same reasons that their counterparts in the United States have it in for Sanders and Warren. The election gave them an opportunity to act on their class-interest based animosity.

Like George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president in 1972, Corbyn is an estimable figure whose candidacy was supported by large segments of his party’s base, but who was effectively undermined by his party’s establishment and by the media that serve it.

Does this bode ill for progressives on this side of the ocean? Are these latest British elections relevant at all?

Tip O’Neil, the Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987, famously declared: “all politics is local.” This is, at best, a gross exaggeration; politics, especially at the national level, is national too.

It can also be, or appear to be, international. Thus, Britain and the United States sometimes seem to march in tandem, Britain leading the way.

Margaret Thatcher begat Ronald Reagan, and New Labor begat Clintonism. More recently, the UK’s Brexit vote was followed by Trump’s election.

Sometimes, the far greater power, the United States, manages to take the lead. Thus, now that the dust from the Brexit vote has settled, the UK has a Trump of its own. Johnson is better educated than Trump, more worldly and smarter, but he is every bit as cartoonish and vile.

It is therefore understandable that Corbyn’s shellacking would be on peoples’ minds, especially at a time when, with nationalism and illiberalism everywhere on the rise, much of the world seems hellbent on taking a great leap backwards.

Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of this sad turn of events, but thanks in part to the bad example he sets, as president of what is still the world’s only superpower, authoritarian politics is taking hold the world over – in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, India, Hungary, Poland, and the Philippines, among others. Too bad for the people who live in those places that these are countries in which liberal norms are notoriously less secure than in the US or the UK.

If all politics really were local, illiberal backsliding could be more easily isolated, minimizing the harm. But politics is not nearly local enough. And since efforts to derail progressive initiatives in the United States have, if anything, intensified of late, and since it is widely believed that the British election is of at least some relevance to American leftists pondering how best to proceed, it is of paramount importance to learn whatever constructive lessons we can from what happened to Corbyn and the Labor Left.

Forces intent on maintaining the old regime in the UK besmirched Corbyn, preposterously but nevertheless with some success. If and when their American counterparts adapt their methods, it is urgent that their efforts be resisted with all the militance we can muster.

***
Of the many candidates still vying to be the Democrats’ nominee for president, the billionaires and the moderates ought to be ruled out from the get-go. This is not the place to rehearse the many reasons why; but see my last piece, “Enough Absurdity; Time to Get Smart.” It is different with Sanders and Warren. Either one would be OK, though, in my view, Sanders would be a whole lot better.

He is more authentically left-wing, more Corbyn-like, as it were. If, and only if, the emerging Democratic Left plays its cards right, being like Corbyn is the very opposite of a recipe for defeat.
A Sanders candidacy would wean workers away from the Trump fold – not by advancing kinder gentler versions of the neoliberal policies that made Trump inevitable, but by undoing the conditions that made Trump and Trumpism possible.

Doing so would have a salutary effect on the entire body politic, even in the short run. In the slightly longer run, a Sanders presidency would help roust that great sleeping giant, the American working class, from its soft-on-moderates slumber, setting it free it to resume its historic mission. For remaking the world in ways that are ecologically sound, just, and fit for human habitation, we cannot currently do better than that.

I have three misgivings, however. Even taken together, they do not, in my view, make Warren the better choice, but they are worth reflecting upon and dealing with.

The first is that the time is past due for a woman to be elected president. The main reason why this is important, I think, is so that we can get beyond the point where it is important.

Others, of course, would disagree; they think that electing a woman is important, perhaps even all important, in its own right.

That was certainly the view of many Clinton supporters in 2016. At this point, though, even many of them realize that, despite all their brouhaha about “the glass ceiling” three years ago, the country is, and long has been, “ready” for a woman president. It is finally dawning, even on those who want a woman elected most, that, as James Carville, Clintonite extraordinaire, might put it: “it’s the politics, stupid.”

By that measure, Warren is not at all bad; Sanders, however, is a whole lot better.

My second misgiving has to do with age. This is a problem for Biden too, of course, and also for Trump, though, in his case, all the valences change – enough to allow finding comfort in the thought that as long as there are strokes, all is not lost.

Both Sanders and Warren are in their seventies, but he is roughly two presidential terms older than she. Clearly, at this point, they both have all their marbles and then some. But, as the saying goes, old age is not for sissies; anything can happen.

It is surely of some relevance that, for doing what needs to be done and what they both want to do, eight years, much less four, are not nearly enough; and that, going by the odds, Warren has a better chance than Sanders of still being in top form in eight or even four years’ time.

Being older than Warren and younger than Sanders, and approaching the point where friends and acquaintances are at least as likely to be dead or out of commission as still in their prime, the pertinence of this consideration is something of which I cannot help but be aware, and upon which I can speak with some authority.

Being every bit as Chosen as Sanders, I have some authority on that too, and I also cannot help but be aware of the Jewish Question. Hence, my third misgiving: it is that nominating him might not be, as we say, good for the Jews.

Before Trump, I used to think that in the United States, being Jewish was of no political consequence whatever. How could it be when, for example, Sheldon Adelson, a character straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, could be all buddy buddy with some of the vilest Republican crackers in all creation, seemingly without objection or even notice from anybody?

Needless to say, it is perilous to be black or brown or Muslim in America; but Jews, it seemed, were safe. I was so sure of this that it didn’t even bother me that my fellow tribesman, Stephen Miller, Trump’s favorite hate monger, evidently thinks so too. It is practically axiomatic that anything that Miller believes is untrue.

It was different, of course, in places like Ukraine, the Democrats’ new favorite country, where old school fascism – and therefore classical anti-Semitism — though repressed within the Soviet Union, never quite expired.

Thus, when Communism imploded, it rose again there and elsewhere in eastern and central Europe, when, with the help of American meddlers, anti-Russian governments were established and took hold all along Russia’s borders.

But even with Steve Bannon and others of his ilk empowered during the Trump campaign, I never thought that anything like that could happen here – not, anyway, before Charlottesville.

Obviously, I was wrong. Long before the day of infamy when Trump and his trophy bride descended that gilded Trump Tower escalator, the Donald was busily kicking over rocks where the ancient demons had been lying dormant and out of sight.

Then, with him in the White House, those demons came back to life and flourished. And so, by now, we might as well be back in the 1930s, but for one salient difference: that there is a state of Israel now, and real anti-Semites love it. This doesn’t diminish the intensity of their hatred of Jews, but it does affect how they express it.

The Trump-induced resurrection of anti-Semitism coincides with and feeds into a developing crisis of legitimacy that threatens support for Israel and for Zionist politics generally. Trump did not bring this crisis on; it has been taking shape for decades. But by handing the most noxious Zionists the moral equivalent of a blank check, Trump and Jared Kushner, his settler-movement loving son-in-law, have effectively licensed them to act out in any way that they think will help their cause.

In enlightened secular circles, Jewish and otherwise, support for a culturally Jewish, Hebrew-speaking homeland for Jews, after centuries of persecution in Europe and especially after the Nazi genocide, continues to resonate.

Nevertheless, the idea that Israel can rightfully be an ethnocratic settler state no longer quite cuts it in the twenty-first century. Neither does the idea that the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine fulfills a “promise” that a God few still believe in made to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, characters who probably never existed at all, and who are almost certainly not direct ancestors of Jews alive today.

It doesn’t help either that what was once deemed “a light unto the nations” has become an international pariah state.

How could any right-thinking person, Gentile or Jew, not think of it that way – after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living within Israel proper, the imposition of an Apartheid regime over Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel during the Six Day War, and the increasing awareness of the fact that Palestinians living within Israel’s internationally recognized borders are, for all intents and purposes, second-class citizens?

The Holocaust has had to become Israel’s legitimization myth – not in the sense that it didn’t happen, obviously it did, but in the way that Zionists have come to use it to justify subsequent wrong-doing.

There is, after all, only so much legitimacy that can be squeezed out of the horrific suffering of European Jews during the Nazi period, especially inasmuch as the World War II era is rapidly becoming an historical memory of no more immediate relevance to current thinking than, say, the Civil War period or World War I.

It doesn’t help either, with memories of Apartheid South Africa still in peoples’ minds, that Israel’s vaunted democracy has always been a Herrenvolk affair, a democracy for a master race, or that the Herrenvolk is again becoming a minority in the land it rules – not quite to the same extent that white South Africans were when they were running the show there, but to a considerable extent even so.

For decades, it was comparatively easy, psychologically, for liberal Zionists to live with the contradictory notion of a state that is both Jewish and democratic, when they know full well that whatever else a democratic state may be, it is a state of its people, of an undifferentiated citizenry, not of a particular religious or national group.

This contradiction has become increasingly difficult to gloss over in recent years. It is especially troubling that the Israeli occupation of the territories it seized more than half a century ago, in the Six Day War. is still going on, and that there is no end in sight.

Israel’s defenders have been trying for decades to confound anti-Zionism and all but the mildest criticisms of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism. Fortunately, but also remarkably in view of all the effort they have expended, they have had only limited success.

Lately, though, determined to restore the waning legitimacy of the Zionist idea, they have intensified their efforts, doing all they can to turn what had been a comparatively harmless logical howler, calling two very different things one and the same, into a pernicious ideological fetish.

And so now, they call even longstanding opponents of racism in all its forms anti-Semites. In Corbyn’s case, the charge, leveled straightforwardly, would be too implausible for anyone expecting to be taken seriously to claim. His enemies therefore charged with something slightly different – being soft on anti-Semitism within the party he leads.

Of course, the anti-Semitism his detractors had in mind was not anti-Semitism at all, but anti-Zionism. Inasmuch as Corbyn has been an anti-imperialist solidarity activist his entire life, and therefore a proponent of justice for Palestinians, this “charge” actually does have some basis in fact. The facts in question, however, are grounds for praise, not condemnation.

To be sure, anti-Zionism can and sometimes does morph into genuine anti-Semitism. If anything like that actually went on in Labor Party circles, it ought to have been dealt with aggressively and expeditiously by the party’s leader. Thus, if Corbyn was guilty of anything, it was of not handling such situations as aggressively or as promptly as he should have.

This is not at all the same thing as condoning them. Even in a world of “alternative facts,” that charge cannot be sustained.

Nobody really knows how much, if at all, the smear campaign directed at Corbyn contributed to Labor’s defeat; this is not the sort of thing that can be measured precisely or in uncontroversial ways. It very likely did do some harm, however. To the extent that it did, British Zionists have a lot to answer for.

Because they do, because their efforts on behalf of Boris Johnson – a bona fide racist, Islamophobe, and anti-Semite — succeeded at least somewhat, we can predict, with considerable confidence, that if Democrats run Sanders, a comparable smear campaign will be attempted against him.

It will be a case of “monkey see, monkey do.” And it will encourage real anti-Semites to strut their stuff in ways that will likely give even Stephen Miller cause for concern.

If Warren shows that she too has a decency streak and a backbone, she could be a potential victim as well. Unlike, say, Biden or Cory Booker or, for that matter, any of the other moderates, including the Boy Wonder, Mayor Pete, Warren may have it in her to do the right thing.

Up to this point, however, she has given Zionists little cause to after her. To her credit, she has resisted AIPAC’s advances. But so far, her politics has seemed to stop at the water’s edge.

Sanders is a different story. He is no Corbyn, but he has spoken out in solidarity with Palestinians, even when he could have more easily remained silent.

It is not hard to find reasons to fault his positions on Israel-Palestine over the years but, this side of “the squad” and a few others, he is as good as any Democrat at the national level gets.

Of equal or greater importance, he is helping, as he did with socialism, to change the national conversation – not as much as it needs to be changed, but to an extent that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago.

As it becomes increasingly difficult for corporate media to treat the Sanders campaign as if it weren’t happening, we should therefore expect that, before long, we will soon be hearing a lot about “self-hating Jews” and other nonsense that not long ago seemed, like anti-Semitism itself, to have gone extinct, but that has now revived as defenders and beneficiaries of the old order feel increasingly anxious and insecure.

This is what must be fought against — this time, though, with more boldness and strategic acumen than Corbyn and his allies were able to muster.

Evading the problem, say by nominating someone not Jewish – someone other than Sanders — is no way to deal with it; far better to bring the problem to a head and then to confront it head on.

At this point, evasion may not even be an option. Had Sanders been the candidate in 2016, before the Trump effect fully took hold, being a Jewish socialist would probably have been a good deal less disabling than having a Kenyan father was for Obama in 2008.

But that was then; the consequences of Trumpian rule are an unavoidable fact of life now. There is no turning the other cheek, no taking refuge in noxious Zionist nostrums; fighting back is the only way to deal with the real anti-Semitism Trump and Kushner and the others have let loose upon the fragile body politic of America today. It is the only way to deal with all things Trumpian.

Anti-anti-Semites, in this historical moment, therefore have a twofold task: first to assure that Democrats nominate a candidate who is worthy of being a target of a smear campaign, and then to see to it that he (or maybe she) not only prevails over it, but also exposes it for the reactionary nonsense it is.

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ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

27 December 2019

BETHLEHEM IS SCARRED BY BRUTAL ISRAELI OCCUPATION, WHILE THE WORLD ACQUIESES


Bethlehem is Scarred by Brutal Israeli Occupation, While the World Acquieses

O little town of Bethlehem,
How miserable  we see thee lie!
Above thy 28 ft. concrete separation wall of hatred,
Palestinians cower in fear and sleepless nights.
The silent stars are witness
to thy dark and somber streets
Where the light shineth not,
And the everlasting darkness of occupation
Hangs heavy on the oppressed and occupied.
Nazi-like Zionist hatred and violence of the past 71 years
Kill hope and instill fear in every Palestinian’s heart.
And nothing but arrests, theft, torture and killings
Are fears that meet thee every single minute
Of every single day, and every single night.
Some seven weeks back I attended a colloquium presentation delivered by a member of the religion faculty at the university where I taught for 42 years. Known for his scholarship and excellent teaching skills, the presenter was reporting on the results of a trip he undertook last summer to study innovative techniques on the teaching of biblical Hebrew. Prior to his trip to Occupied Palestine, I shared a CP column I’d written summarizing Ilan PappĂ©’s tome under the title The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (71 Years Later Zionist Terrorism Is Alive and Well, April 19, 2019, CP) and another scholarly article about Israel’s brutal violation of human rights, its theft and desecration of Christian monuments and churches, and its outright hatred and demonization of Palestinians in general, and Christian Palestinians in particular.

While during his eloquent presentation my former colleague made repeated references to Israel, at no time did he mention Palestine, Palestinians, occupation, wall of separation, Apartheid, Jews only highways (on which he traveled), midnight arrests, the destruction of entire Palestinian neighborhoods, the blight of Israeli-Jews-only settlements (subsidized by U.S. taxpayers) on the once-beautiful (now raped) Palestinian landscape that used to be accentuated with rolling hills and quaint valleys dotted with lush green olive groves, vineyards, and verdant fruit orchards that have given way to ugly manufactured homes and heavily armed enclaves inhabited by machinegun-toting, ultra-religious fanatics who gun down Palestinians just for the fun of it, blow up their homes, and cut down hundred-year old olive trees.

And, while these criminals release their pent up hatred in orgies of  stone-throwing, vandalism, and assassinations prescribed by their rabbis in demented expiatory religious and nationalistic rituals akin to ISIL’s orgies of killings, the Israel Defense Forces, “the most humane army in the world,” stand by ready to protect, support and cheer the marauders. The spectacle always ends in the same manner: the settlers are absolved of their crimes, and the Palestinians are arrested for threatening Israel’s security.

I fear that my former colleague, like millions of travelers (especially the ignorant Evangelical types) to that coveted and fought-over land of the prophets and the birthplace of the Prince of Peace, drank the cool aide reeled out by Israel’s ministry of Hazbara, the world’s foremost Orwellian organ of manufactured facts whose central theme is: Jews Good, Palestinians Bad; Jews victims, Palestinians perpetrators; because of the Holocaust, the world owes us, and must condone what we’re doing to Palestinians; those who criticize our racist policies are outright anti-Semites; we are God’s Chosen (and that includes Trump), therefore we can do no wrong.

Never mind that the Palestinians are also Semites and can also trace their lineage to Abraham; and, because Palestinians are treated  as children of a lesser God, they are personae non gratae and fair game in the chess game played by Israel and her subordinate pimps in the U.S. and Europe.

During the Q & A session following  his presentation,  my colleague stated that  – of all the holy sites he visited – his visit to Bethlehem was the most disappointing – and only because (somehow)  the much celebrated Little Town of Bethlehem lacked the religious/spiritual reverence/charm with which it has been traditionally associated. I fear that because much of today’s biblical narratives are a concocted mish mash that evolved over centuries in different climes,  each succeeding culture augmented its own storyline by interlacing pagan  practices with Christian ones. Hence the blending of the original corpus into myriad European Christmas stories and traditions that resulted in written narratives, rich musical and dramatic performances,  and dazzling canvases. With the advent of film and the television,  America’s 20th century contribution added an abundance of splendor and pageantry.

And thus it was that in late 18th and 19th century Europe exploiting this celebration of the birth of The Prince of Peace became a motive to ching ching the occasion in what has become for this generation Black Friday and Black Saturday spending bacchanalia to celebrate the billions of dollars going into the pockets of the rich and greedy while giving the rest of us the satisfaction of obtaining made-in-China consumer goods.

And somehow the meaning of Christmas drifts into the calendar.

On Sunday, December 23, 2019, the Beirut, Lebanon-based The Daily Star, reported the following:
BETHLEHEM, Palestine: With Christmas looming, Banksy’s latest Bethlehem offering appeared Saturday in the Israeli-occupied West Bank: A manger scene juxtaposed with a miniature version of Israel’s separation barrier, seemingly pierced by a mortar shell.

Dubbed the “Scar of Bethlehem,” the work shows the baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph backlit through damaged concrete, chiseled pockmarks exploding out from a gaping hole in four directions, approximating the Christmas Star.

The work is installed at Banksy’s Walled-Off Hotel, where all rooms overlook a section of the concrete barrier Israel built to cut off the occupied West Bank from Israeli territory.

“Love” and “peace” are tagged in English and French, respectively, on the installation’s concrete blocks, while three large wrapped presents are at the forefront of the scene.
“It is a nativity,” hotel manager Wissam Salsaa told AFP after the piece was installed. “Banksy has his own contribution to Christmas.”

“It is a great way to bring up the story of Bethlehem,” he continued, “the Christmas story, in a different way – to make people think more” of how Palestinians live in Bethlehem.

Salsaa calls the Israeli wall a “scar” that should induce “shame in anyone who supported” its construction.

The manger scene and hotel, which opened two years ago, are far from Banksy’s only West Bank imprint. In 2007, he painted a number of artworks in Bethlehem, including a young girl frisking an Israeli soldier pinned up against a wall.

In 2005, he sprayed nine stenciled images at different locations along the 8-meter-high separation barrier. They included a ladder on the wall, a little girl carried away by balloons and a window opening onto a peaceful mountain landscape.

“Banksy is trying to be a voice for those that cannot speak,” Salsaa said. He “is creating a new model of resistance  through art.”
The biblical narrative informs us that at the time of Christ’s birth Palestine was an extension of Augustus’ massive empire. Palestina/Falasteen was sandwiched between Egypt and Syria; the first served as Rome’s breadbasket, and the second as Rome’s eastern line of defense and the last stop of the ancient Silk Road and one of the conduits that fed the insatiable Roman treasury to maintain its stranglehold on its expansive Pax Romana Empire. Ironic it is that American, British, and European hegemonic interest in that same region are no different from Rome’s. And since 1917, the Brits, French, and later the Americans have been drawing and redrawing the boundaries of the oil-rich Near East; and “What we say, goes” is the new Anglo-Franco-Americana Pax Oleum Petra.

Utilizing the Jewish King Herod as a friendly client and puppet, the Romans gave him a free hand. And as long as he collected taxes to help enrich Rome’s coffers, Herod’s heavy handed rule was viewed benignly by Rome. Perceiving the birth of the promised Messiah/King as a threat to his rule, Herod  ordered the killing of all male infants in Bethlehem and environs.

It is fair to say that if one compared living conditions in Palestine and the occupied West Bank and Gaza during the time of Jesus’ birth to current living conditions of Palestinians all across the Holy Land, one would be shocked at the shrieking and howling of anguished cries of a nation robbed of its birthright, dignity and freedom.

Back to the Q & A session. In an agonizingly hushed, if not slightly quivering voice, I intoned the following comment to my colleague who, to use the metaphor, could not see the forest for the trees: “Is it possible that because you had to go through the monstrous fortress-like concrete wall to enter Bethlehem  a negative tone was set for you?”  I followed with the following plea: “I am saddened that you didn’t even mention Palestine or Palestinians – at all. Please do not relegate the Palestinians into the trash bin of anonymity.”  My former colleague magnanimously owned up to having made no mention of Palestine/Palestinians. I so wish he’d admitted that he, like most Evangelicals, was guilty of committing the sin of denial, denial that Israelis and Evangelicals are complicit in this heinous crime of denial.

All of this is to say the following: the Jewish King Herod had no qualms about butchering all infant males in the land where the lamenting and screaming of prophets and innocents are today’s   wailing and crying of 8 million  anguished Edward Munchian Palestinian “Screamers.”

Modern day Herods such Zionist Netanyahu and all his ilk share the same killing and maiming instincts of hatred and brutality as their Hitler and Mussolini prototypes. Deeply embedded in their psyches is a disregard for human life.  In a November 2019 aerial assault on besieged Gaza and to rally support for his reelection bid at the prime ministry, Netanyahu bragged about the  three-day killing spree of 37 Gaza civilians that included 13 members of a single family,  four children under the age 4, and two expectant mothers whose fetuses never took their first breath. And where are the anti-abortion Christians, Catholics and Evangelicals – alike?  Like their 17th and 18th century European counterparts, those masters who produced thousands of canvases to memorialize Herod’s Killing of the Innocents, Palestinian artists have produced tens of thousands of art works depicting Israel’s 71 years of endless brutalities. Yet, while the former artists’ compositions grace museum walls across the world, rarely does one see a work depicting Israeli carnage.

Israel’s daily war on Palestinians, and especially  on Palestinian  children, is rarely transmitted to an increasingly apathetic world and, if one were to even hint at it, one is immediately charged with the spurious anti-Semitic assault, including, most recently,  prosecution.

To state that Israel is guilty as charged is to state the truth, no matter how inconvenient that truth may be.

This Christmas, like all the Christmas of the last 71 years, Christian Palestinians are denied access to their holy shrines. Allison Weir’s online blog (If Americans Knew) recently stated that Palestinians are “under siege … [as] Israel announces it will not allow Gaza’s Christians to visit Bethlehem and Jerusalem to celebrate Christmas.”  (12/19/2019). Furthermore, the lucky few Christian Palestinians who are given permission to visit the holy shrines have to go through excruciating hours on end of successive check points during which they are strip searched, insulted, and humiliated. Lucky is the Palestinian child whose Christmas gift is not stolen by Israeli soldiers; the theft, of course, is always a matter of  Israeli  national security.

Ironic it is that while the Christian Palestinians, who can trace their ancestry to the early Christian church, are denied access to their places of worship, hundreds of thousands of foreign pilgrims are given the royal treatment as they are led around, much like obedient sheep, by Israeli tour guides who indulge in Zionist hasbara while diluting actual historical facts about the role played by Christian and Muslim Palestinians in preserving, maintaining, and protecting the Holy sites that continue to be desecrated by Israel. These modern day Crusaders are no different from their barbarian European counterparts.

On 12/5/2019 Allison Weir reported that “It feels like Palestinians are constantly dying … 43 in November. 526 since Trump’s Jerusalem announcement … 111 of them children … 22 women, 6 Palestinians with special needs … [and] 13 prisoners … killed in Israeli jails … ‘Where in the world is the world?’   asked one Palestinian   whose family was blown to pieces and whose house was demolished.”

Much as Herod hated infants, Zionists hate Palestinian children. Palestinian schools are destroyed; their schools’ playground equipment is either stolen or destroyed;   tear gas and firebombs are lobbed into their schools and homes; children as young as 4 years old have been arrested, detained and held (sans parental visitation) for days at a time. And finally, as proof of Israel’s inhumanity and brazen disregard for common decency, Allison Weir reports that  “Right now, many Palestinian children from Gaza lie in West Bank hospitals, facing painful [prolonged cancer] treatment or surgery. One in five are there without a mother or father [emphasis hers] because Israel denied both parents’ permission to travel with the sick child.” (12/182019).

Oh how Goya-esque Zionism and its proponents have gotten to be? Dear Kafka, had you lived to see raw Zionist brutality, you would have been shamefully mortified and embarrassed of your tribe’s barbaric behavior. You would have also shamed the Netanyahus, Trumps, Salmans, Modis, Johnsons, Asads, Putins, Balsonaroses, Sissis and Aung Suus of this world. You would have no doubt decried the fact that instead of Wise Men and Women heading to Bethlehem carrying precious gifts, the world is led by self-centered, racist, and woefully flawed characters better known as Modern Day Merchants of Death wreaking havoc in all the hamlets and Beit Lahems of our modern world.

***

In spite of all the human misery brought about due to Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist fanaticism, the story of the birth of the Christ King is a story of the triumph of love over hatred, hope over despair, giving instead of receiving, humility over pride,  inclusivity over exclusion, kindness to the stranger instead of incarcerating him, choosing life over death, choosing peace over war, feeding the needy instead of taking away his sparse meal, sheltering the homeless instead of housing him in  mangy cardboard boxes, and, like the Good Samaritan, healing the sick, wounded, and the down and out across the globe.

Here is wishing everyone a Joyous and Merry Christmas Day.

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Raouf J. Halaby is a Professor Emeritus of English and Art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener, and a peace activist. halabys7181@outlook.com

26 December 2019

MEDICAL OPINION, TORTURE AND JULIAN ASSANGE


Medical Opinion, Torture and Julian Assange



On November 27 this year, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, delivered an address to the German Bundestag outlining his approach to understanding the mental health of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. These comprised two parts, the initial stage covering his diplomatic asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, the second dealing with his formal detention in the United Kingdom at the hands of the UK legal and judicial system. The conclusion was a recapitulation of previous findings: that Assange has been subjected to a prolonged, state-sponsored effort in torture, nothing less than a targeting of his being.
Melzer’s address is an expansive portrait of incremental inter-state torment that led to Assange’s confinement “in a highly controlled environment within the Ecuadorean embassy for more than six years.” There was the eventually justified fear that he would be sought by the United States in extradition proceedings. The Swedish authorities threw in their muddled lot between 2010 and 2019, attempting to nab Assange for rape claims despite “not being able to produce enough evidence for an indictment, and which now, after almost a decade, has been silently closed for the third time based on precisely that recognition.”

Then came the British contribution, consisting of encouragement to the Swedes by the Crown Prosecution Service that the investigation should not be closed, inspiring them not to get “cold feet”. (The cold feet eventually came.) The Ecuadorean contribution completed the four-piece set, with the coming to power of a pro-Washington LenĂ­n Moreno. Embassy personnel in London were encouraged to make conditions that less pleasant; surveillance operations were conducted on Assange’s guests and meetings.

Melzer, along with a medical team, attended to Assange on May 9, 2019 in Belmarsh, finding a man with “all the symptoms that are typical of persons having been exposed to psychological torture for a prolonged period of time.” There was little doubt, in Melzer’s mind, that symptoms “already measurable physically, neurologically and cognitively”, had been shown.

These calls went unheeded. Melzer, in early November, accused the UK authorities of showing “outright contempt for Mr Assange’s rights and integrity.” Despite warnings issued by the rapporteur, “the UK has not undertaken any measures of investigation, prevention and redress required under international law.” Melzer’s prognosis was bleak. “Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.”

This point has been restated by Dr. Stephen Frost, a chief figure of the dedicated outfit calling itself Doctors for Assange. “We repeat that it is impossible to assess adequately let alone treat Mr Assange in Belmarsh prison and that he must as a matter of urgency be moved to a university teaching hospital. When will the UK government listen to us?”

The medical degrading of Assange has assumed ever greater importance, suggesting unwavering state complicity. On November 22, over 65 notable medical doctors sent the UK Home Secretary a note based on Melzer’s November 1 findings and Assange’s state at the October 21 case management hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court. “It is our opinion that Mr Assange requires urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health. Any medical treatment indicated should be administered in a properly equipped and expertly staffed university teaching hospital (tertiary care).”

In a second open letter to the UK Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice dated December 4, the Doctors for Assange collective warned that the UK’s “refusal to take the required measures to protect Mr Assange’s rights, health and dignity appears [to] be reckless at best and deliberate at worst and, in both cases, unlawfully and unnecessarily exposes Mr Assange to potentially irreversible risks.”

The same grounds were reiterated in a December 16 letter to Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, with a curt reminder that she had “an undeniable legal obligation to protect your citizen against the abuse of his fundamental rights, stemming from US efforts to extradite Mr Assange for journalism and publishing that exposed US war crimes.” In the event that Payne took no action on the matter, “people would want to know what you […] did to prevent his death.”

In the addendum to the open letter, further to reiterating the precarious state of Assange’s health and medical status as a torture victim, the doctors elaborate on the circular cruelty facing the publisher. An individual deemed “a victim of psychological torture cannot be adequately medically treated while continuing to be held under the very conditions constituting psychological torture, as is currently the case for Julian Assange.” Appropriate medical treatment was hardly possible through a prison hospital ward.

A lesson in understanding mental torture is also proffered. “Contrary to popular misconception, the injuries caused by psychological torture are real and extremely serious. The term psychological torture is not a synonym for mere hardship, suffering or distress.”

At Assange’s case management hearing on December 19, restrictions on medical opinion were again implemented; psychiatrist Marco Chiesa and psychologist David Morgan were prevented from attending. Both had been signatories to the spray of open letters. According to Morgan, he had hoped to “provide some observations about Julian Assange’s health, psychologically, and with my colleagues, physically.” Instead, it transpired that access was denied, according to psychologist Lissa Johnson, “despite members of the public offering to give up seats for them.”

Cold-shouldering expert opinion can be counted as one of the weapons of the state in punishing whistleblowers and publishers. The State has always made it a bureaucratic imperative to sift the undesirable evidence from the apologetic message. Accepting Assange’s condition would be tantamount to admission on the part of UK authorities, urged on by the United States, that intolerable, potentially martyring treatment, has been meted out to a publisher.

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

24 December 2019

CORBYN TRAGEDY - THE UK LABOUR PARTY IS ITS OWN WORST ENEMY

Before starting on the problems confronted by Jeremy Corbyn, it may be a good idea to start with what is wrong with much of most countries around the world.

After the second world war and after the Nazis and the USSR decimated the Jewish populations of Europe, the zionists fought to build a so-called Jewish state in Palestine and with their so-called success the Zionists occupied much of Palestine and have decimated the Palestinians with a slow genocide which has continued from the late 1940s to today when we are about to enter 2020.

As a consequence of Israeli apartheid and police state actions, they have brutally suppressed the Palestinins living in the Gaza strip and West Bank of Palestine and the Israelis are occupying more and more of Palestinian territory until they will eventually occupy the whole of Palestine.

There are many of us around the world who are Jewish and are ant-zionists.

One of the international ploys used by the Israeli government is to equate anti-zionism with anti-semitism, and there has been a marked increase everywhere with actions perpetrated by ultra right wing groups who are fascists or semi-fascists and whose actions are not very different from groups around Europe and elsewhere, such as South Africa 70 or 80 years ago. They are using the worst possible ploys to spread anti-semitic actions everywhere.

Now we come back to the UK and the recent election which saw Jeremy Corbyn defeated and Boris Johnson elected.

It has been a well-known fact that ever since Corbyn was elected to head the Labour Party in the UK, forces have been at play to paint him as an anti-semite and to paint much of the Labour Party as anti-semitic.

There are groups within the Labour Party who have sub-groups which are supporters of zionist Israel and have stated that Corbyn, because he has supported the Palestinians, is therefore anti-semitic and will make difficulties for the Jews of the UK.

The reality of course is that most of the Tory Party and many in the Labour Party are anti-semitic and were doing everything in their power to destroy Corbyn, whose policies in general were being too left-wing for the conservatives throughout the UK.

As a consequence of the above, the Labour Party destroyed itself back to Blairism and decimated Labour in the UK parliament.

20 December 2019

BDS = BOYCOTT DIVESTMENT SANCTIONS

Boycott, Divestment,Sanctions - BDS - these were amongst the most useful tools in bringing down the South African apartheid police state in 1994.

South Africa saw the installation of that country's first black president in 1994 after a few hundred years of apartheid, and unfortunately much of South Africa's governance has gone downhill since Mandela retired in 1999.

Corruption, mismanagement, managerial appointment inadequacies, and ineptness, many of South Africa's problems in the year 2020 will have been because of unsatisfactory mis-direction. With all its problems, the country's post-apartheid constitution is one of the most progressive in the western world, and gives hope for the country to be able to progress beyond the disasters of the past 20 years.

So many other parts of the world have disastrous governments, or dictators or corrupt politicians that BDS could well be applied to them to help bring about change. Israel's apartheid military control over Palestine and the Palestinians has seen the Palestinians endeavours to obtain help from the rest of the world with BDS as their most useful tool to date.

Now contemplate if BDS were used against 3 of those who are Israel's greatest supporters in maintaining the illegal occupation of Palestine by the Israelis - the UK, the USA and Australia - or to put it another way - Boris, Donald, Scott, or BDS.

David Everett (1770-1813) wrote:

"Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow (Lines written for a School Declamation)"

This is how to bring about change in countries around the world.

17 December 2019

CENSORSHIP IN AUSTRALIA - KAFKA DOWN UNDER: THE THREAT TO WHISTLEBLOWERS AND PRESS FREEDOM IN AUSTRALIA


Kafka Down Under: the Threat to Whistleblowers and Press Freedom in Australia


It was the head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre who finally admitted before an Australian Parliament committee that she had unilaterally directed and pressured CyberCon to drop myself and an academic research professor (an Australian citizen) from the University of Melbourne as speakers.

I viewed the extraordinary pressure exerted by the Australian Cyber Security Centre to block me as an already-accepted speaker — a week before the start of a high visibility public interest conference on cybersecurity — as a most alarming and Orwellian development and a distinct form of brazen censorship for the express purpose of outright silencing me.

The head of the ACSC misled the committee when she said the reason she wanted my talk canned was because of a proposal for me to participate on a panel with Edward Snowden that never went forward.

It appears she dissembled and used the apparent floating of the idea of a proposed Edward Snowden panel (for which I had NO prior knowledge whatsoever) as a convenient foil and cover to justify and excuse the barring of me as a speaker from CyberCon with the very heavy hand of her “higher authority” as the head of the ACSC over the conference organizers (Australian Information Security Association).

In addition, the reason she gave before the committee is not the reason given to me when I formally followed up with the AISA organizers.

On 29 September (4 days before I departed the United States), I received an e-mail message to contact the Board Director for AISA “as a matter of urgency.”
In a subsequent phone call from the same AISA Board Director, I was told that I was no longer a speaker on the conference agenda, but I could still attend the conference as a delegate and that they (AISA) would honor the flight and accommodations arranged for me many months early.

I followed up formally and asked for the specific reason I was dropped as a speaker from CyberCon. I was informed on 7 October, in an e-mail from the Board Director of AISA, that “AISA works with a conference partner in respect of CyberCon. Our conference partner has determined your presentation is incongruent with the conference.”

Furthermore, this egregious canning of me as a speaker fed right into the current debate in Australia about press freedom and whistleblowing laws because their public interest disclosure process (their legal way for public servants to blow the whistle) has been described as “impenetrable” by their Federal Court.

The current debate in Australia regarding press freedom and whistleblowing laws strikes at the heart of any country claiming it is a democracy.

The recent raids by the Australian government against major media outlets and whistleblowers have broken open the tension — between openness and transparency versus secrecy and closed-door government too often hiding itself (and its actions) away from accountability and the public interest.

Something has to give. The debate centers on the public interest knowing what the government is doing behind closed doors and often in secret in the name of — and under the veil and banner of — national security.

The dramatic 21 October Right to Know campaign — with the redacted front pages on all major newspapers in Australia as I woke up in Melbourne before returning to the United States that very day — demonstrates beyond the shadows of secrecy, censorship and press suppression that sunshine is the best antidote for a healthy and robust democracy increasingly held hostage by the national security state.

Efforts from on high seek to justify the actions of that national security state under the color of public safety for more and more autocratic powers — while stoking fear and hyping the danger to society — yet going after whistleblowers who disclose actions that clearly rise to the level of wrongdoing, violations of law, coverup and endangering public safety, health and the general welfare.

What is happening in Australia is most concerning to me as fundamental democratic values and principles are increasingly under direct attack around the world from the rise of increasing autocratic tendencies and raw executive authorities bypassing, ignoring and even undermining the rule of law under the exception of national security and government fiat.

Australian public interest disclosure laws are also a mixed bag — a conflicted patchwork with huge carve-outs for national security and immigration. Nor do they adequately protect a whistleblower from reprisal, retaliation or retribution.

It is quite clear that not all disclosures (even when done in the public interest) are protected by law in Australia, and the whistleblower is in danger of exposure as a result.

At the federal level, whistleblowers face career suicide for public interest disclosures. And if deemed by the government to be unauthorized disclosures, those disclosures are even considered criminal.

As it happened, my removal as a speaker from CyberCon is the first time I was ever censored anywhere.

The trend lines of increased secrecy around the world by governments does not bode well for societies at large. History is not kind.

What I do see improving is public-interest concern regarding just how far government can or should go. People are discussing what society sacrifices in the name of secrecy and national security when too often the mantra is the ends justifies the means — and government says to just trust us, while secret power is too often unaccountable, even to itself.

The price I paid as a whistleblower was very high. I just about lost it all and came close to losing my liberty and freedom. I was declared indigent by the court, am still in severe debt, have no pension as my career and personal life were turned inside-out and upside-down because the government treated me as a traitor for my whistleblowing on the mass domestic surveillance program that violated the U.S. Constitution. I also exposed 9/11 intelligence failures and subsequent coverup plus massive multibillion-dollar fraud, waste and abuse. The government then turned me into an insider threat and Enemy of the State and prosecuted me as a criminal for allegedly violating the U.S. Espionage Act.

If it is left up to the government to determine what are state secrets, then the government is perversely incentivized to declare as state secrets any disclosures made in the press it does not like. This thinking can only lead to more prosecutions of publishers to protect the State. In the absence of meaningful oversight of the secret side of government, how does the public trust its own government to operate and function in the public interest and not for special or private interests?

But then again, if the press is not doing its job holding government and the public sector to account, why should they be surprised when the public holds even the media in lower regard?

Government should earn the public’s trust and not take it for granted or abuse that trust. The heart of democracy rests on a civil society that it is not undermined by the very government that represents it.

Once the pillars of democracy are eroded away, it is quite difficult to restore them. The misuse of the concept of national security — as the primary grounds to suppress democracy, the press and the voices of whistleblowers speaking truth to and about power — increases authoritarian tendencies in even democratic governments.

The real danger to civil society in Australia is that these same tendencies give rise to extralegal autocratic behavior and state control over the institutions of democratic governance under the blanket of national security with the excuse of protecting the state.

As I continue with this work as chair of the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign, I’m mindful that my efforts are only possible because of support from so many concerned people.

Thomas Drake is an NSA whistleblower who chairs the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign.

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16 December 2019

ANTI-WAR ARTWORKS REMOVED IN CENSORSHIP ROW



Anti-war artworks removed in censorship row

An internationally renowned Australian artist whose anti-war works were removed from a gallery has accused conservative politicians of misrepresenting his art and stoking outrage.

What Nationals MP George Christensen slammed as an attack on the reputation of Australia's armed forces amounted to fair political comment on the emotional cost of war, Sydney artist Abdul Abdullah says.


Abdul Abdullah in his St Leonards studio.
Abdul Abdullah in his St Leonards studio.Credit:Sam Mooy

His works were pulled from a Queensland gallery show intended to examine difficult truths around racism, violence, and discrimination.

The works featured tapestries of an anonymous soldier overlaid with a smiley face, part of a national touring exhibition of works by nine notable Australian artists.

''In a strange way, it's the voices who rail against political correctness that seem to be the first to want to have politically correct speech  - in their minds - from an artist who comes from a background which they see as violent or threatening," Abdullah said.


"I wonder if I had a different name or a different religion whether this would have been news at all."

Mr Christensen and former NRL player turned councillor, Martin Bella, led calls for the removal of the two works, For we are young and free and All Let us Rejoice, from a council-run gallery. They were joined by the local RSL which said they feared for the mental health of local servicemen and women.
A spokeswoman for Mr Christensen directed the Herald to an October statement in which the member for Dawson said he was all for free speech and freedom of expression but taxpayers and ratepayers should not subsidise political messages that attacked soldiers. Clr Bella did not respond to questions put by the Herald.


For we are young and free' by Abdul Abdullah, which was pulled down from a Queensland art gallery because they were deemed to be an attack on soldiers.
For we are young and free' by Abdul Abdullah, which was pulled down from a Queensland art gallery because they were deemed to be an attack on soldiers. Credit:Ă„bdul Abdullah
Tensions got so heated that extra gallery security was needed, the artist received hate mail and poppies were dropped at the gallery entrance.

The tapestries bear Abdullah's signature style of an emoji, cartoonish character or motif over a traditionally painted backdrop. This year the artist was a finalist for the Sulman and Wynne prizes for paintings with similar imagery.

"The smiley face is an emoji I've used in a few different series of works where I've talked about the difference between a person's lived experience and the perception of them and what they project - the difference between how we feel and how we seem," Abdullah said from his studio in St Leonards.
"In the case of these images of the soldiers, there's the dark experience of war and all the turmoil they've experienced but in every case where I've met a soldier they've said they've always had to put on a brave face."

Mr Christensen took issue with the artist's description of soldiers as surrogates
involved in "'illiberal, destructive actions in other places'' and that those coming across Australian soldiers in action would see them as an ''existential threat''.
The MP said it was particularly affronting to veterans that the exhibition would have run during Remembrance Day.

After initially defending the artist's right to freedom of expression, Mackay Mayor Greg Williamson announced the work's removal. He declined to respond to the Herald.

Abdullah said he was never asked to explain his intent and he'd be the last person to disrespect servicemen. Two of his great grandfathers fought in Belgium and France in World War I. One grandfather fought in Papua New Guinea in World War II, the other with the British Navy in a submarine torpedoed in the Indian Ocean.
"What’s happened here is so unfair," said Esther Anatolitis, executive director of the National Association of Visual Artists. "It’s deeply unfair to the veterans and veterans’ groups who’ve been misled on work they never saw by an artist they never met."

Following its opening in Noosa Regional Gallery on Friday, the exhibition Violent Salt is scheduled to travel to Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, but those dates are also in doubt with the mayor Paul Antonio telling local media he did not want Abdullah's works displayed. Staff at Noosa Regional Gallery elected to add kids labels to the interpretation of the touring exhibition including one for Abdullah’s works, and a sign at the entrance with a Lifeline number.
Independent curators Yhonnie Scarce and Claire Watson said that they were surprised and disappointed that Abdullah’s embroideries were taken down from the exhibition in Mackay without consulting with them or the artist.

Censorship of the work, they said, and particularly "hostile remarks" leveled towards Abdullah, only demonstrated the value of exhibitions such as Violent Salt.

The show is scheduled to travel to Lake Macquarie City Art gallery in June, then Canberra Contemporary Art Space and Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery and Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in Victoria.




Linda Morris

RED JOS - ACTIVIST KICKS BACKS



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90 years old, political gay activist, hosting two web sites, one personal: http://www.red-jos.net one shared with my partner, 94-year-old Ken Lovett: http://www.josken.net and also this blog. The blog now has an alphabetical index: http://www.red-jos.net/alpha3.htm

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