Exchange Between Bill Moyers and Abraham Foxman
Click here.
Randall Kuhn on Gaza (and San Diego and Tijuana)
Randall Kuhn teaches at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies, where I also teach. This piece appeared in the Washington Times.
Zola In Gaza
By coincidence, this morning – no it is already yesterday morning, I was talking in a class (Transitions From Communism) about Emile Zola’s famous serious of articles entitled `J’Accuse’ (I accuse). In them, the 19th Century French novelist accuses the French government of the time of falsely blaming one of its Jewish officers – Alfred Dreyfus (according to my mother and aunt a distant relative of our family) of passing military secrets to the Germans and as a result causing the dramatic French defeat by Germany in the Franco Prussian War of 1870.
No Place Like New York!
Click here.
A Song for Gaza
Jimmy Carter on Gaza
Click here.
Neo Conservatism Dies in Gaza
Good piece by Juan Cole
Where Were All The Christians? – John Kane’s Thoughts on a Denver Vigil against the Israeli Bombing of Gaza
Note: John Kane is Professor of Religious Studies at Regis University here in Denver. We’ve met and discussed the situation of Jews and Catholics in America several times. He published a progressive Catholic newsletter. I am not sure if it still exists, but the issues I read I found interesting. The vigil he describes took place on Tuesday December 30 at the State Capitol in Denver. He submitted this piece to the Denver Post. They didn’t print it. I’m glad to. My op ed, submitted to the local media, follows below. I should add a detail in the spirit of Kane’s piece. Before Christmas I was involved in an effort – before the Israeli offensive in Gaza began – to get some local ministers to speak out against the human rights tragedy unfolding in Gaza as a result of the Israeli siege and blockade. I was doing this in conjunction with the wife of a local minister who has gotten involved. But the good ministers were `too busy with Christmas’ to participate, or so they said. Then they were too busy with New Years’. Now I guess they are too busy preparing for Valentine’s Day or maybe Easter… rjp
Where were all the Christians? That was the question that pained me as I stood in vigil with several hundred persons in the cold wind on the West steps of the Capitol this Tuesday evening.
Not surprisingly, the crowd gathered there to protest Israeli bombing in Gaza was mostly Muslim — not just Palestinians and other Arabs, but also Muslims from black Africa and South Asia. They stood under a crescent new moon, as if (to my mind) Allah was blessing their cry of protest.
Going Blind In Gaza
Happy New Year
Has it really been two months? I guess it has.
The piece below was submitted to the local media here in Colorado. It was published in an edited form in the Rocky Mountain News.
Going Blind In Gaza
Some years ago, I was a part of a circle that believed, because this country’s conservative media was churning out criticisms of Stalin, such claims must be exaggerations if not outright lies. It was not possible, we reasoned, that the Soviet Union was eating its own – repressing millions, wantonly destroying the environment and trampling democracy…in the name of building socialism. But not only was it possible, it happened.
If there was some exaggeration, especially where it concerned the Soviet military threat, much of the critique of the Soviet Union was accurate. Even now there are some old ideological warriors who cannot face the obvious: the Soviet Union was a failure. I think I understand their defensiveness. People who dedicate their lives to an idea, a utopia, find it difficult to believe that the project is flawed, no less bankrupt.
Which brings me to the subject of Israel and its more ardent supporters – Jewish or not – here in the United States. They, too, live in an ideological bubble of their own making that helps them explain away the current assault on Gaza and much else that Israel has done to the Palestinians in the past decades. Naively, they’d like to believe that Israel is a wonderful place. Israel could not possibly be committing war crimes in Gaza, the argument goes. Jews, we are told, don’t commit war crimes against other people. Words like `occupation’, `ethnic cleansing’ to say nothing of `war crimes’ – grate and are considered – despite their accuracy – as `inflammatory’ as I was once told not long ago. The logic continues: the claims of Israeli military brutality, of the oppressive nature of the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – supported by every US Administration for 42 years – must be blown all out of proportion The fact that people all over the world are critical of Israel is written off as some kind of global `anti-semitism’ – which it isn’t.
A few days ago, a friend sent me an email suggesting that the Palestinians were faking their sufferings in Gaza during the bombardment and that really, the situation wasn’t all that bad!
In the end, the facts are rather straight-forward and contradict the more halcyon scenarios: war crimes are being committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. Nothing can justify this offensive, not Hamas rockets nor its suicide bombers. For its part, the Bush Administration, as it has for the past eight years, is supporting Israel’s inhumane policies if not conspiring with her. Politically unable to attack Iran, as he very much wanted to, or to launch another war against Lebanon, George Bush is putting all his political marbles in the Israeli attack on Gaza. It is Bush’s last ditch effort to leave the Middle East in such a mess that not even Barak Obama with all his charisma will be able to put the region back together again.
What is to be done?
Israel’s military offensive against Gaza should end immediately. Much of the world is demanding a cease-fire, an end to the siege of Gaza and the occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza, the opening of comprehensive international negotiations based upon UN resolutions to resolve the crisis. I join them. Such a political process would do more to insure Israel’s security and future prospects than all the bombs it is dropping on Gaza, yet the thinking in this direction seems remote, both in Israel and in Washington DC
Congo Collapses…Again (1)
Washington Post piece on the Congo
A week ago, students at the University of Denver, most associated with the Korbel School of International Studies (where I teach), both grads and undergrads held a week of activities called `Congo Awareness Week’. The highlight of the week was a talk given by Guy Patrice Lumumba, son of the famous Congolese nationalist leader, first elected president of the Congo who was – with the connivance of Belgium, the United States and the United Nations – turned over to his political enemies in Katanga and then tortured and assassinated. According to Belgian journalist Colette Braeckmann (Le Dinosaur) Lumumba’s body was then dissolved in sulphuric acid so that a future grave site would not become a shrine for would be nationalists.
We’ll never know if Patrice Lumumba’s vision for the Congo and for Africa would have worked. His was `the road not taken’. But we do know that the road taken and directed by one Mobutu Seku Sesu for 35 years was one of economic collapse, olympic gold medal – level national theft (led by Mobutu himself), decades of oppression and ill conceived economic projects which in the 1990s left the Congo prostrate and open to the plague – a politically motivated plague – that would result in 6 million deaths in 10 years, the collapse of the state as a viable institution and untold suffering for the Congolese people. The United States, using Cold War logic, supported Mobutu from beginning to end and in a very real way, Mobutu’s failure is also America’s failure – perhaps its most dramatic one – in Africa. Yet throughout these recent years, even with the political chaos, the mines of the Eastern Congo and Katanga have continued to produce, the country’s wealth extracted often to the benefit of its neighbors (who are doing the extracting).
Guy Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba’s fifth child, would only be born six months after his father’s death.
We listened to Lumumba and his traveling associate, Maurice Carney, national coordinator of Friends of the Congo, tease out and explain some of the economic and political roots of the current crisis. I’ll try to follow and explain these themes and the events in the Congo in the weeks ahead.
At the University of Denver, we are trying to put together an on-going project to address the Congo humanitarian crisis and to look for political solutions that could defuse it. The initiative could not be more timely. More soon
Powerpoint Presentation on the pro-Israel Lobby
Commentary added December 28, 2018.
Note: This powerpoint was written about ten years ago, probably for a presentation that I gave at the time. That said, I agree with most of what I wrote a decade ago…
Of course this is prior to the Arab Spring and the U.S.-led and orchestrated wars to overthrow the Khadaffi government in Libya and the now failed effort to overthrow the Assad government in Syria and partition that country. Nor is there anything here about Saudi Arabia – which is a vital part of what Noam Chomsky referred to in his very valuable book “The Fateful Triangle” (consisting of the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia).
Washington’s Iran policy has zigzagged all over the place, but as is well known, is currently misguided, reactionary and self defeating.
For all that, even though it is a sketch, it is pretty accurate especially where it concerns the make up and activities of the “Pro-Israel” lobby in Washington DC. and so…I’ll republish it for your reading pleasure.
Congo-Kinshasa: What the World Owes DRC
Kambale Musavuli
Following the ‘Break the Silence’ Congo Week at the end of October, Kambale Musavuli discusses the importance of raising awareness around the crisis in the DR Congo. As a Congolese granted asylum in the USA in 1998, Musavuli urges the global community, and African-Americans in particular, to revitalise international attention on the Congo as a means of shedding light on the ongoing conflict and harnessing the potential for strong advocacy relationships.
Last summer, the national news media announced the deaths of four gorillas killed in a national park in eastern Congo. A United Nations delegation was quickly dispatched to investigate.
As a Congolese living in the United States and hungry for news back home, I was thankful for the coverage. But since my grandparents still live in east Congo, I would have also liked to have heard about some other recent breaking news items: women being raped, children being enslaved, men being killed, and many more horrors. I would like to hear about the nearly six million lives lost, half of them children under age five, that every month, 45,000 people continue to die in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and that the scale of devastation seen in Darfur happens in the Congo every five and a half months.
I was granted asylum in 1998. Every day since then, I have appreciated the privilege of living in a peaceful community and pursuing a college degree at North Carolina A&T State University. But I will never forget that my people are not free, or the responsibility that comes with the privilege of living in the most powerful country in the world.
19-25 October was ‘Break the Silence’ Congo Week, a global initiative led by students to raise awareness and provide support to the people of Congo. There were participants in more than 30 countries and on 125 college campuses, including key student leaders at North Carolina A&T, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Greensboro, the University of Maryland, Howard University, Bowie State University, Bryn Mawr College and Cornell University. Students showed films, held teach-ins, hosted fundraisers, organised forums, participated in a cell phone boycott on the Wednesday and undertook many more activities to raise awareness about the dire situation in Congo. Communities also organised interfaith prayer vigils to ask for peace in the DRC.
Part of the challenge is educating people about the history of Congo, which has struggled to overcome its Belgian colonial past, and the present scramble for its rich natural resources by multinational corporations.
Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novel, Heart of Darkness, covered the period in the country’s history when King Leopold II owned Congo as his own private property. The widespread misreading of Conrad’s novel cemented an incomplete picture of the continent as a dark, uncivilised place. In reality, the source of the conflict in Congo for most of its history has been the scramble for its enormous wealth, not the internecine, ethnic bloodletting more commonly blamed. In the late 1990s, Congo was invaded twice by Rwanda and Uganda with the backing and support of the United States, as documented in the 2001 congressional hearings held by Representatives Cynthia McKinney and Tom Tancredo. It was these invasions that unleashed the tremendous suffering that exists in Congo today.
But it is not just history that needs to be re-examined. From copper, tin and cobalt to coltan (a mineral found in cell phones, video games and other gadgets we have come to rely on), American corporations stand to make millions at the expense of the people of Congo. Dan Rather’s recent report on Phoenix-based FreePort McMoRan’s odious contract in acquiring what many say is the world’s richest copper deposit is but a window into the systemic exploitation of Congo’s wealth.
There are strong advocacy relationships that can be built on. Even before 1974, when Congo (then known as Zaire) gained international attention hosting the Rumble in the Jungle, the historic boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, African-Americans in particular have a long history of championing the country’s cause. In 1909, William H. Sheppard, the first African-American to serve as a Presbyterian missionary to Congo, gave a frank account of atrocities he witnessed during King Leopold’s barbaric reign. During the same period, the African-American historian George Washington Williams did the same.
Today there is a new imperative for the global community, and African-Americans in particular, to bring light to the story of Congo. ‘Break the Silence’ week is an apt place to start. In 1961, Congo’s first freely elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, said: ‘We are not alone. Africa, Asia, and free and liberated people from every corner of the world will always be found at the side of the Congolese.’
We must not be left to stand alone now.
Kambale Musavuli is a Congolese activist and member of Friends of the Congo. He is pursuing a civil engineering degree at North Carolina A&T State University.
A Month Later… The Campaign
With McCain and Palin plunging in the polls which now give Obama-Biden a 6-7 point edge, Sarah Palin has taken the even lower road of her traditionally gutter politics, resorting to red-baiting – the kind of guilt-by-association smears which have long been a part of the American political tradition, especially since the McCarthyite period of the 1950s (although it began much earlier). Both in California and here in Colorado yesterday, Palin began a campaign to associate Obama with Bill Ayres, a former SDS Weatherman from Chicago who, with Bernadine Dorn, remains active in radical fringe politics in Chicago.
It turns out that Ayres and Obama served on some community boards together and on occasion found themselves on the same panels. Hardly the stuff to make such noise about but as the purpose of guilt by association charges is to cast credibility shadows over candidates Palin has decided to get as much mileage out of this as possible. She’s building on the fact that in his memoirs, Ayres makes not much of his distant association with Obama.
Ayres’ politics have moderated considerably over forty years. He’s written a few book on public education and has remained active – if somewhat obsolete – in Chicago politics. Dorn, who does not seem to have learned much from her 60s-70s political experiences, now a professor, has been able to maintain a bit of a media presence for no good reason I can tell. She often appears with a number of other washed out, burnt out left overs of the sixties and seventies – Kathleen Cleaver, Ward Churchill and Company, and others all of whom didn’t organize very much in their day but knew how to play the media well enough. They still do.
Gutter Politics Again
I would be surprised if the Obama-Ayres connection gets much traction and will sway voters much.
It is a terribly warn out tactic. Ayres wasn’t particularly important or influential in his Weatherman days and thus, to make a case of the connection requires exaggerating his role in the movement at that time (and that of the Weathermen). He’s gone on to do some interesting local organizing in Chicago and his writings on the challenges of teaching in the Chicago public school system are worth reading. Anyhow that isn’t the point. The point is to link Obama in whatever way possible with Osama Bin Laden and terrorism. The attempts have been ludicrous – the attacks on his former minister, the fact that his middle name is `Hussein’, his tangential relationship in Hawaii with an organizer from the Communist Party USA, and now making noise about Ayres.
Just the crudest form of gutter politics now based upon the latest style of American racism: anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racism, which permeates the national political scene. Of course it’s quite a stretch to connect Ayres to Osama Bin Laden. But, based upon the logic that all terrorist roads lead to the Saudi construction multi-millionaire, Republican strategists are confident that simply the accusation of such links will take away votes from Obama in swing states. They are banking on historical precedent, with a deep faith in the political stupidity of the American people to believe anything they hear. And even if the American people don’t believe every lie Palin tells, it will have an impact, due to some confusion among voters who are simply not sure how to separate fact from fiction. That is the main goal. It is not necessary to prove the point, merely to create enough doubt so as to influence voting patterns. ie…Obama might not be a Moslem because his middle name is Hasan..but then again, why would he have such a middle name? (A common middle name in Africa).
Palin’s role since her coming out party at the Republican Party Convention has been two fold – first to take the attention off of McCain’s sagging image and to create the impression that Obama is running against Palin and not McCain. This approach worked for a while but appears to be losing traction. Secondly it was to launch the kind of racist personalized attack against Obama that McCain would like to do himself but has been advised not to. So Palin becomes, as it has been described, `McCain’s pitbull.’ She gives the impression to every rightwing Christian fundamentalist bigot in America that they too have a chance to reach high office in America at a time when the `Blacks’ are taking over. The message, even before Palin opens her mouth (for the campaign’s sake she’s better off not doing that) is: “look what we’re losing – people like me – white working class Christians – and look what we’re gaining `a black whose middle name is Hussein and who pals around with bomb-throughing radicals. ” In other words, in that great Republican tradition, her candidacy plays primarily – no uniquely – on fear.
The Functional Idiot Syndrome
And for a while it looked like the strategy just might stick. After all, look at the warm welcome that the country and the media gave early on to Palin’s nomination, energizing the Republican religious conservative base. As for `historical precedent’ – the pace setters in this respect include Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, and of course our current disaster, George Bush. If people with such low intellectual thresholds could reach the highest two offices of the United States, why not Palin, who rivals Quayle in coming as close to a functional idiot as any figure in modern American political history?
As she tries to connect with America’s working people in order to peel off some of those `Reagan Democrats’ for McCain, what I find most striking about Palin is her great sense of pride and confidence in her own ignorance. In her recent debate with Joe Biden she basically showed, once again, that given the opportunity to give `a heavily rehearsed performance’, she has what it takes to throw out one-liner, excelling at reading other people’s scripts. As the Financial Times aptly put it “With more `darn it’ and `say it ain’t so, Joe’ quips in 90 minutes than has been heard during the entire campaign, the Alaska governor’s folksy showing put an end to the the media’s `Palin death watch’.
McCain’s `Palin Horse Stumbles’
Perhaps she got a little bump, but all the same, Palin’s star is falling and fast and her popularity appears to have been short-lived. As that happens, McCain’s chances of riding the Palin horse to victory evaporate before our very eyes and will continue to do so as John McCain has proven himself to be little more than Palin without boobs – a shallow, right wing politican, a militarist of the first order without much knowledge of foreign policy (like Bush), a man with an explosive temper who really doesn’t have very many ideas of his own and has proven something of an embarrassment whenever he’s been carted out to defend himself. In short – a lightweight who will, like Bush be something of a front man for policy makers behind the scenes, the Cheneys of the future.
A number of factors come into play – among them the weakened position of the Christian fundamentalist right whom she represents combined with the bigger issues – the unknown dimension of the ever-deepening financial crisis (despite the bailout) and although McCain and the Republicans would like to argue otherwise – what continues to be a failed policy in Iraq, the virtual collapse of the US backed government in Afghanistan, the burgeoning crisis in Pakistan and the inability of the Bush Administration to make any progress whatsoever on resolving the Israeli Palestinian crisis.
Will Americans Vote Against Their Class Interests Again?
One of the great successes of the Republicans since Ronald Reagan has been to get the American people to vote against their own class interests. My speculation is this results from the fact that the united States, is/was the most powerful economy in the world where, even the situation of the working class and poor has often been much better than that of people in other countries. It is not that the economy did not count, it simply did not count for as much and people could be peeled off to vent their anger on this or that exotic issues (gun control, abortion, Israel, charter schools). Of course some of that continues, but as the economic crisis deepens it appears that more and more it will take center stage in the minds of people.
The fact of the matter is the McCain-Palin campaign is going poorly on every count. Short of funds McCain had to pull campaign resources out of Michigan. Worse states that looked `in the bag’ – Florida and Indiana – are no longer in that category. Likewise in North Carolina, Virginia and here in Colorado McCain’s support appears to be slipping. The rise in unemployment with 159,000 Americans losing jobs last month didn’t help him either. But nothing hurt him more than his completely inept handling of the financial crisis. The realities of American life are wiping the smirks off of McCain and Palin’s faces and the fears that many had of a McCain-Palin Administration no longer seem so dire.
Let the McCain-Palin crumbling begin…if only so we can concentrate on how little an Obama-Biden Administration will be able to accomplish (but with a little more elbow room for us to maneuvre in)
A Month Later…
The blog has been down for nearly a month, the result of computer woes which it appears are partly solved (new machine). But as computers mimic life in that going from one machine to another is simply like going from one set of problems to another, there is a whole other set of issues that has arisen with the new machine. Boring, I know.
In the past month the news has been dominated by the financial crisis and the dulling of Sarah Palin’s star…(and with it Obama’s bounce in the polls). Just a few thoughts on both. I’ll try to explore both later in some depth.
Concerning the financial crisis..
As it broke, one of my friends, Jamie Roth, a retired prof from Regis College, suggested in an email that the whole thing was contrived, that the timing was suspicious, that the crisis was not so serious as it seemed. The logic here – others have argued along similar lines – is that the Bush Administration provoked the crisis so as to be able, in the waning days of power, to shape the financial direction of the country in the more and more likely case that Obama wins. A new Democratic administration would essentially have to accept the deal crafted – with some difficulty it is true – between the Bush Administration and Congress, rammed through with bi-partisan support.
The tempting hook of this logic is that it nicely reflects Naomi Klein’s thesis put forth in the `Shock Doctrine’ – her best selling book. According to Klein’s hypothesis – taken seriously enough by Stiglitz that he gave the book a generally positive review – we have been living in a epoch where the `forces of evil’ have developed a strategic approach to crises, be they man made (wars, collapses of nations) or natural (hurricanes, tsunamis, the like). A pattern emerges that one can see already from the September 1973 Chilean coup (actually it started before in Indonesia in the late 1960s) to 9-11 to the S. Asian tsunami. Some kind of event takes place which traumatizes a country or region. While the population remains in shock, unable to adequately respond to events, plans, which have been rotting in some neo-con’s drawer to radically restructure society both politically and economically quickly emerge, putting in place what amounts to neo-liberal policies (free markets usually free of state intervention or with a modest amount). Thus it was that conservative University of Chicago type economists, trying to tip toe around (and later justify) all the blood running in the streets, hit the ground running in Indonesia and Chile, the public education system of New Orleans was privatized and entire fishing communities on the east coast of India were replaced a chain of multi-national owned and built hotels.
The argument in the case of the financial crisis goes more or less along the same lines…By not buying out Lehman Brothers – that financial institution that saw its birth hoarding slave-produced cotton before the Civil War – and letting it go under an unnecessary panic was created. As the crisis deepened it permitted the Bush Administration to put forth its own kind of financial bail out – one that put very few conditions on the financial sector and gave Paulson extraodinary powers to determine how $700 billion in taxpayers money would be spent. As many have noted, the Administration let home owners facing mortgage foreclosurers hang by their tootsies but came in decisively to bail out the banks and financial institutions that had crafted most of the bad loans in that sector. The key point here is that the Bush Administration understood that some kind of government bail out was necessary but hoped to accomplish it with as little state control of the private sector as possible. They understood that sooner or later a bailout was likely (because the depth of this financial crisic continues to reveal itself every week). Realistic enough to understand that things could not go on like this indefinitely, the Bush Administration engineered what might be called a `pre-emptive financial strike’ on the American people (and the world).
It seems to have worked quite well (from their perspective). Yes, in the end, because of the first rejection of the plan by the House of Representative (in response to a national protest in which calls to congressmen were coming in at a rate of 200 to 1 against the proposal), a few crumbs wer thrown to the masses that the Democrats are trying to give the impression are quite significant. They are not. But the precedent has been set: the government has given $700 billion to the market with very few strings. Thus the state will intervene in the markets but very politely and with few strings attached. With mild interest, John Maynard Keynes will turn over a few times in his grave. eorge Bush, Henry Paulson and Bank of America will be content. Of course the financial crisis will also deepen as so little of the fundamentals – a financial sector still out of control – have been addressed.
So…was it planned? Or did `things’ just unfold this way?
I don’t know that we’ll ever know, but then, does it really matter?
View from the Left Bank: Rob Prince's Blog 