Israeli Apartheid Week begins today. There will be a discussion on NYU's Tel Aviv campus tomorrow in Kimmel. See the schedule below. For more information visit www.apartheidweek.org/.
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From Johannesburg to Jerusalem: Anti-Apartheid Organizing in the US
Monday, March 2nd, 7 pm
St Mary’s Episcopal Church, 521 West 126th Street, NYC
Showing of critically acclaimed film Have You Heard from Johannesburg? Apartheid And The Club Of The West, followed by a discussion with David Wildman of the United Methodist Church and Sam Anderson, anti-apartheid activist, educator, and founding board member of The Malcom X Museum.
Event organized by the IAW New York Organizing Coalition
NYU-Tel Aviv University: A Partnership in Occupation
Tuesday, March 3rd, 8 pm
Kimmel Center, NYU (Room 802), 60 Washington Square South (between Thompson and Laguardia), NYC
Panel discussion on NYU's relationship with Tel Aviv University, featuring award-winning novelist Elias Khoury, New York University professor Andrew Ross, and Nir Harel, member of Israel's Anarchists Against The Wall.
Event organized by NYU Students for Justice in Palestine
Identification required to enter building
The Impact of Occupation: This Body Is A Prison
Wednesday, March 4th, 7:30 pm
Kimmel Center, NYU (Room 914), 60 Washington Square South (between Thompson and Laguardia), NYC
Screening of the critically acclaimed This Body Is A Prison, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Dylan Bergeson.
The film addresses the psychological impacts of growing up under occupation in different areas of the West Bank. It explores how isolation and violence existentially impact the way that children construct their sense of self. The film contains a spectrum of human experiences not commonly accessible to people in the West, as well as rare footage that takes the viewer literally inside a military invasion.
Organized by NYU Students for Justice in Palestine & the Arab Student Association at Columbia University's School of International & Public Affairs (SIPA)
Identification required to enter building
The Art of Resistance: Culture and the Boycott of Israel
Friday, March 6th, 7 pm
Judson Memorial Church, 243 Thompson St., just off of Washington Square Park, NYC
Panel discussion with best-selling author Ahdaf Soueif, founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel Omar Barghouti, and NYC poet Remi Kanazi; moderated by Brooklyn College Professor Moustafa Bayoumi.
Event organized by the IAW New York Organizing Coalition
The Israeli attack on Gaza: What is needed for a just solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict?
Saturday, March 7th, 3 pm
Judson Memorial Church Assembly Hall, 239 Thompson St. (1/2 block south of Washington Square Park), NYC
Israel’s three-week-long attack on Gaza in December and January left over 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed and thousands of Palestinians wounded. Israel’s bombardment left the infrastructure in Gaza in a shambles, with schools, hospitals, mosques destroyed, while Israel continues to blockade needed supplies of food, electricity and water.
Panelists:
Riham Barghouti, Adalah-NY, Coalition for Justice in the Middle East
Nellie Hester Bailey, Harlem Anti-War Coalition
Joel Kovel, Committee for an Open Discussion of Zionism & Author of “Overcoming Zionism”
Dorothy Zellner, Center for Constitutional Rights & “Jews Say No”
Steve Bloom, Activist Poets’ Roundtable
Moderator: Justine McCabe, Co-Chair, Green Party U.S. International Committee
Event organized by the West Side Green Party
Party Against Apartheid
Saturday, March 7th, 9 pm
Alwan for the Arts, 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor (bet. Broad & Broadway), NYC
Event organized by the IAW New York Organizing Coalition
Monday, March 2, 2009
Israeli Apartheid Week
One Reflection on Take Back NYU sit-in
As the days pass since the NYU student occupation of Kimmel, I have finally had a chance to read some of the press Take Back NYU! has received in response to our actions. While we have received an outpouring of support from across the globe, including student activists at major universities and renowned intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Take Back NYU! has also come under harsh criticism from many people who have consistently misunderstood the importance and legitimacy of the student occupation of NYU.
While much of the criticism of the student occupation has been directed at the various demands of Take Back NYU!, deeming them vague and disjointed, these critics have consistently failed to analyze the actual substance of the demands themselves. They are far from disconnected or irrelevant – each demand of the occupation stems from the same framework, one demanding accountability, transparency, and social justice for all. Not only is it a glaring oversight not to see their binding thread, but it is is crucial to recognize that all progressive social movements are inextricably linked together. As Martin Luther King made clear towards the end of his life, it was impossible to struggle within the civil rights movement without simultaneously struggling against the Vietnam war and all forms of American imperialism.
The NYU student occupiers understand that demands for disclosure of the budget are profoundly related to demands for the right of graduate students to unionize. These demands reject the notion that profit should hold primacy over individual lives and reflect a desire for democracy, transparency, and protection of human rights. The ability of the student body to hold their university accountable for their actions is only possible with disclosure of the budget. Thus, the central demand of the Take Back NYU! campaign is and always has been full disclosure. We are incapable of exerting a say in the financial decisions of the administration if we remain unaware of where the money is being spent. Knowledge of the budget is necessary for future political campaigns on campus, such as divestment from Israel. While a divestment campaign is currently building on campus, we felt that the campaign had not yet gained enough momentum to be included as one of our demands. However, our solidarity with the people of war torn Gaza and the people of Palestine as a whole remains intact, and we sought for our demands to reflect this position.
While Take Back NYU! ultimately challenged the formal means of expressing political opposition, they did not take this step from the beginning. For two years, Take Back NYU! has traveled down the traditional channels of voicing political dissent – from town hall meetings to electing a student senator on our platform – all of which consistently proved unproductive. All attempts to engage in meaningful dialogue were repeatedly ignored and never once were our grievances directly addressed. The occupation of Kimmel came as a result of two years of campaigning and two years of being pushed aside, ignored, and mocked by the NYU administration. As occupiers, Take Back NYU! attempted to push the NYU administration into a position where they could no longer run away but instead would be forced to interact with us. Unfortunately, what the occupiers did not fully understand was the degree of trickery and deceit the administration would employ to expel the students from the building. They used numerous scare tactics, from calling students’ parents threatening expulsion to turning off the power and internet connection inside the building. But worst of all was their final decision to lie and deceive the negotiators. NYU informed the occupiers they would be able to meet with the administration, and in good faith, the negotiators went into a room to begin proceedings. When they entered the room, they were denied negotiations, told they were suspended until further hearings, and could not return to the rest of the occupying students. The administration’s failure to address the students’ demands reflects the fundamental factors behind the demands themselves - the lack of democracy, transparency, and student say in how their university is run.
Most of the students engaged in this protest are on financial aid, have taken out massive loans, or work jobs to pay for their education. All of the students have acted out of sincere commitment to the values of social justice, democracy, and education. So, of all of the criticisms, what may be most disturbing is the assertion that the student protesters are privileged whiners. They have worked tirelessly to receive a quality education, one they are only seeking to improve. But a student’s economic standing is ultimately beside the point. In a democratic society, all individuals, whether or not economically privileged, have an obligation to fight for the human rights of others. Those with political, social, or economic leverage hold an ever greater responsibility to utilize their position and education as a means of helping others.
Critics of the NYU student occupation better pay attention fast or they will be left behind as this new wave of student activism emerges. The Take Back NYU! occupation was inspired by the countless other student uprisings across the globe, from Greece to the New School here in New York City. In the UK alone, there have been 25 similar student occupations. Just as Take Back NYU! has learned from these student bodies that we can assert our dissent through nontraditional channels, the NYU occupation will undoubtedly inspire other students to do the same. To every student around the world struggling against injustice and political and social domination by their schools, it is absolutely crucial to remember that your school belongs to nobody but you. There would be no school without its students. It is our duty to force schools to put students over profit, transparency over secrecy, and democracy over control by the elite. It is time to rise up and resist - reclaim your space, assert your voice, and let the world know that human lives must always hold primacy over economic gain. As students we must never forget that we are struggling together to fight the same powers that seek to oppress us. And most importantly, in the words of Frederick Douglass, we must remember that “power concedes nothing without a demand.”
C. Green
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
TONIGHT: PICKET IN SOLIDARITY WITH TAKE BACK NYU
The Palestinian Solidarity Coalition at NYU is co-sponsoring a picket in solidarity with the suspended students of the Kimmel sit-in. Hope you all can make it.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
7:00pm - 9:00pm
Outside of Kimmel Center
New York, NY
Come out and support the Take Back NYU! students who recently occupied Kimmel in order to force the NYU administration to meet their demands. Their efforts reflect a brave effort to pursue badly needed democratic reform at NYU. We condemn any and all efforts to retaliate against, punish, or sanction the students involved in the sit-in.
GO TO TAKEBACKNYU.COM AND SIGN THE PETITION!
Friday, February 20, 2009
Another support rally at 12 noon today
There is another support rally at Kimmel today at noon. Keep checking for updates at Take Back NYU's website.
Last night's support rally had several hundred people and a lot of energy. As NYU management continues their refusal to negotiate, we all know it is critical that support and energy is sustained. We hope whoever can get there will make it....
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Democratic Solidarity Committee Supports Take Back NYU student occupation
As student members of the anti-Israeli apartheid Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions coalition campaign that is currently forming at NYU, we fully support and are participating in the Take Back NYU occupation of the Kimmel Center.
Since its completion in 2003, this so-called “student center” has been a fitting symbol for everything that is wrong with NYU. More of a citadel and platform for administrative offices, politicians, corporate mixers, and think-tank conferences, it is the least accessible to those who deserve it most: the students and workers of NYU. We have heard over and over again the NYU motto of “A Private University in the Public Service” and President John Sexton’s routine bad-faith posturing about "free exchange of ideas" as our college ideal. However, like every facet of NYU, Kimmel is organized around the key ideological principle of those who rule campus: this is an institution in the service of official society rather than the people who work and study here.
Mirroring broader trends in New York City, the administration has attempted to create what has been called “NYU Inc.”
Corporate NYU is a place where student free speech and association are routinely combated, where tuition is rising while the quality of student life is on a steady decline, where there is no financial transparency, where meaningful scholarships are few and far between, where for staff, graduate teachers, and adjunct faculty there is a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, where the GSOC UAW local 2110 was smashed because it is the only legitimate representative of graduate teachers, where Washington Square Park is becoming the private property of NYU and long-time Village residents are evicted from their homes by one of the largest real estate owners in the city. Is this a university or a corporation?
It is no accident the NYU administration has enthusiastically supported Israeli apartheid. This is not only because NYU serves as a prominent speaking stage for Israeli politicians. It is so because John Sexton speaks of democracy and promoting the public good while vocally attacking the idea of divestment and academic boycott, most recently targeting the British University and College Union boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Sexton called it “a disavowal of the free exchange of ideas, antithetical to the values and tenets of institutions of advanced learning.” Needless to say, Palestinians under a racist system, with fewer or no political rights themselves, cannot take such “values” for granted.
The building of a study abroad program in Tel Aviv is only the most tangible example of such hypocritical commitments by the NYU administration. It is equally unsurprising that NYU is building a satellite campus in the United Arab Emirates, a dictatorship where the majority of workers have no citizenship rights at all. Perhaps John Sexton will next be lecturing the student and workers movements in the Middle East struggling against U.S.-backed dictatorships and corrupt neo-liberal elites.
Finally, we are very pleased that among the sit-in demands were those supporting NYU scholarships for Palestinians and donations to the Islamic University of Gaza, recently destroyed by the Israeli army. This is an important step in linking our struggles in the U.S., particularly among people of color and working people, with the struggles against apartheid as well as democratic struggles throughout the Middle East.
We call on people to support the Take Back NYU occupation of Kimmel and continue to support the Take Back NYU campaign, as well as the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions at NYU.
Take Back NYU!
Following the recent occupation of New School in order to oust President Bob Kerrey, the Take Back NYU! campaign has begun a sit-in at the Kimmel Center. A support rally begins at noon today. Please come out and show your support.
For more information check the New School in Exile blog and the Take Back NYU! website. The NYU Washington Square News is also carrying ongoing updates.
Sit-in demands follow:
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***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE******
NYU BUILDING TAKEOVER!!!
At approximately 10pm tonight (Feb. 18), students of Take Back NYU! took over the Kimmel Marketplace. They have blockaded the doors and declared an occupation! They presented their demands to the NYU administration. They read as follows:
DEMANDS
We, the students of NYU, declare an occupation of this space. This occupation is the culmination of a two-year campaign by the Take Back NYU! coalition, and of campaigns from years past, in whose footsteps we follow.
In order to create a more accountable, democratic and socially responsible university, we demand the following:
1. Full legal and disciplinary amnesty for all parties involved in the occupation.
2. Full compensation for all employees whose jobs were disrupted during the course of the occupation.
3. Public release of NYU's annual operating budget, including a full list of university expenditures, salaries for all employees compensated on a semester or annual basis, funds allocated for staff wages, contracts to non-university organizations for university construction and services, financial aid data for each college, and money allocated to each college, department, and administrative unit of the university. Furthermore, this should include a full disclosure of the amount and sources of the university's funding.
4. Disclosure of NYU's endowment holdings, investment strategy, projected endowment growth, and persons, corporations and firms involved in the investment of the university's endowment funds. Additionally, we demand an endowment oversight body of students, faculty and staff who exercise shareholder proxy voting power for the university's investments.
5. That the NYU Administration agrees to resume negotiations with GSOC/UAW Local 2110 – the union for NYU graduate assistants, teaching assistants, and research assistants. That NYU publically affirm its commitment to respect all its workers, including student employees, by recognizing their right to form unions and to bargain collectively. That NYU publically affirm that it will recognize workers' unions through majority card verification.
6. That NYU signs a contract guaranteeing fair labor practices for all NYU employees at home and abroad. This contract will extend to subcontracted workers, including bus drivers, food service employees and anyone involved in the construction, operation and maintenance at any of NYU's non-U.S. sites.
7. The establishment of a student elected Socially Responsible Finance Committee. This Committee will have full power to vote on proxies, draft shareholder resolutions, screen all university investments, establish new programs that encourage social and environmental responsibility and override all financial decisions the committee deems socially irresponsible, including investment decisions. The committee will be composed of two subcommittees: one to assess the operating budget and one to assess the endowment holdings. Each committee will be composed of ten students democratically elected from the graduate and under-graduate student bodies. All committee decisions will be made a strict majority vote, and will be upheld by the university. All members of the Socially Responsible Finance Committee will sit on the board of trustees, and will have equal voting rights. All Socially Responsible Finance Committee and Trustee meetings shall be open to the public, and their minutes made accessible electronically through NYU's website. Elections will be held the second Tuesday of every March beginning March 10th 2009, and meetings will be held biweekly beginning the week of March 30th 2009.
8. That the first two orders of business of the Socially Responsible Finance committee will be:
a) An in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories.
b) A reassessment of the recently lifted of the ban on Coca Cola products.
9. That annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students, starting with the 2009/2010 academic year. These scholarships will include funding for books, housing, meals and travel expenses.
10. That the university donate all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.
11. Tuition stabilization for all students, beginning with the class of 2012. All students will pay their initial tuition rate throughout the course of their education at New York University. Tuition rates for each successive year will not exceed the rate of inflation, nor shall they exceed one percent. The university shall meet 100% of government-calculated student financial need.
12. That student groups have priority when reserving space in the buildings owned or leased by New York University, including, and especially, the Kimmel Center.
13. That the general public have access to Bobst Library.
Along with this, students have issued a
SOLIDARITY STATEMENT
We, the students of Take Back NYU! declare our solidarity with the student [sleepovers] in Greece,
Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as those of the University of
Rochester, the New School for Social Research, and with future
[sleepovers] to come in the name of democracy and student power. We stand
in solidarity with the University of Gaza, and with the people of
Palestine.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
NYU News: Students protest alleged NYU-Israel economic ties
From Washington Square News Online
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About 40 people congregated outside the Silver Center earlier today to advocate for Palestinian rights in Israel. The Gaza Solidarity Rally was organized by the NYU Democratic Solidarity Committee, Students Creating Radical Change and Students for Justice in Palestine.Police officers looked on while NYU students — as well as several CUNY students, Columbia students and alumni and members of the community — held signs and shouted through megaphones, begging NYU to discontinue economic support of the country the groups call “the last colonial settler regime in the world.”
Although NYU has not disclosed their budget, which includes information about the university’s investments, students said they assumed NYU has investments in Israel. “There’s a campus opening in Tel Aviv, for example,” CAS sophomore Farah Khimji said. Khimji works with Students Creating Radical Change. While the group shouted slogans like “End the occupation now!” and “Free, free Palestine!” Chris Shortsleeve, a CAS graduate student who is involved with the Democratic Solidarity Committee, told WSN, “There is a myth that Israel is the only democracy in the east, but it’s not a democracy: it’s an ethnocracy,” According to the Democratic Solidarity Committee, countries that support Israel economically should boycott Israeli goods and services to protect Palestinian rights.
Flyers Shortsleeve gave to passers-by compare the situation in Israel to South African apartheid, which collapsed 15 years ago after countries and organizations around the world boycotted South African products and business initiatives. “This [movement] is definitely about ending apartheid and standing in support of people who have been under occupation since 1948,” Clara Green, a Gallatin senior, said. Green helped organize the rally, along with Khimji. Khimji said the groups have plans to publicize the Palestinian struggle in Gaza in the future. “The rally was the first event of many to come,” she said.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Israeli elections
Jews sans frontieres has posted an excellent guide to the important elections in Israel tomorrow. There is a good chance that far right former prime minister Netanyahu will win the elections along with significant gains for fascist sympathizer Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu.
Here is an excerpt:
"Finally, Israel Beiteinu is the Russian party, whose leader is the former Kahanist Avigdor Lieberman. It held 11 seats in the last Knesset and seems to be the rising surprise of the elections, overtaking Labor as the third largest party. It pushes the Likud compromise from the direction of the populist right, using open racism as the major selling point.
The summary is this. The secular Ashkenazi founders of Zionism built a racist society based on their own political, economic and cultural domination. Since the seventies, that domination has been increasingly challenged by Jews of lower status and different backgrounds. Because racism against Palestinians is the glue that holds the nation together, all Jewish challenges to the founders' hegemony are expressed as a competition in racism. Parties step in front of the electoral mirror and ask,
mirror mirror on the wall, who's the most racist of us all.
The only restraining factor is the fear of alienating the Western alliance that support Israel. The rise of the "extreme" right (as if Labor isn't extreme) expresses a number of trends: 1) the continuing assertion of Palestinian presence in the land 2) an intensification of the internal social struggle among Jewish Israelis 3) the continuing decline of the secular Israeli block and 4) the growing confidence that Israel need not worry about negative repercussions from the U.S. and Europe.
Some say that this confidence is a misreading of the international moment. I hope so but I wouldn't be so sure."
Monday, February 9, 2009
British Student Occupations
PFUUPE Salutes UK Students
The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) salutes the solidarity actions of students from universities across England in response to Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Students from eleven universities have occupied buildings in their campuses in solidarity with Palestinian rights, including the right to education, and in outrage over Israel’s rolling massacres and wanton destruction in Gaza, including many educational institutions, in its latest war of aggression on Gaza and the year and a half of its criminal siege of Gaza that continues till today.
Students from the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS), the London School of Economics (LSE), Kings College, Oxford University, University of Warwick, University of Leeds, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Sussex, Newcastle University, University of Birmingham, and the University of Essex have all acted to pressure their respective university administrations to respond to their demands.
In part, the students’ demands have included calls for their universities to condemn the attacks on Palestinian educational institutions as well as urging official mechanisms and programs that would support the right to education for all Palestinians. In light of the atrocities committed by the Israeli army in Gaza, students have also demanded that their universities pursue practical steps towards divesting from companies and institutions implicated in Israeli occupation of Palestine and its violation of international law.
We in PFUUPE are grateful for the hard and principled work of our colleagues in the British academic community over the past years in support of the cause of justice and peace in Palestine and for Palestinian academic freedom, in particular. The University and College Union’s 2008 motion condemning the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in the perpetuation of Israel’s occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people gives an excellent example of these efforts. We acknowledge the latest forms of student activism in England and elsewhere as a welcome continuation of those efforts aimed at holding Israel accountable for its injustice and crimes.
The bombing of the Islamic University, scores of public and UNRWA schools, and the headquarters of the University Teachers’ Association-Palestine in Gaza is only the latest episode in an ongoing Israeli policy of undermining and directly targeting Palestinian educational institutions. In light of this policy of the occupation, the effective solidarity of academics and students worldwide, particularly in the form of boycott, is particularly significant and highly appreciated by Palestinian academics. By their work in protest of these barbaric acts, our comrades have shown that this destruction cannot and will not occur in silence and without protest.
Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza was described by leading international jurists as constituting a war crime, even a crime against humanity. It has caused over 1300 deaths and the injury of more than 5000 Palestinians, the great majority of whom are civilians. As the dust begins to settle in Gaza, we are only now beginning to comprehend the enormity of the indiscriminate destruction caused by the Israeli attacks.
We strongly admire and support the students in the United Kingdom who are calling for boycott and divestment, urging their universities not just to protest and condemn Israel's massacre in Gaza, but also to join and intensify the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel to end its impunity and to hold it accountable for its persistent violations of international law and Palestinian rights. We agree that, without sustained, effective pressure by people of conscience the world over, Israel will continue with its gradual, rolling acts of genocide against the Palestinians.
We urge academics around the world to intensify their boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and to isolate the Israeli academy in international forums, associations of academics, and other international venues. Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the entrenched system of oppression practiced by the Israeli state, and their silence at this critical moment is only the most vociferous indicator of this complicity.
Dr. Amjad Barham
President
PFUUPE
Sunday, February 8, 2009
IJAZ Statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day
The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network has released a statement to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day in a time of deepening Israeli apartheid.
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How does the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow!...
She weeps sore into the night, and her tears are on her cheeks:
among all who loved her she has none to comfort her.
(Book of Lamentations)
Last week, after murdering 1400 people – of whom 400 were children – after bombing hospitals and mosques, schools, universities and humanitarian supplies, and tens of thousand of homes, Israel declared a cease-fire. A shameful parade of European leaders immediately went to Jerusalem to embrace the mass murderers and to pledge their support for the continuing siege of Gaza.
The primary purpose of this massacre was to break the spirit of the Palestinian people until they surrender and accept their fate as lesser human beings. As former Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon said in 2002, "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people." European leaders support this goal, as did previous U.S. administrations, as do the ruling elites of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi-Arabia, despite the fury of their peoples. We wait to see if the freshly inaugurated Obama Administration will break with sixty long years of attack on the Palestinian people armed and financed by the U.S. and Europe.
We grieve with the people of Gaza. We see the faces of the children, of the women and the men; we hear their voices. We also hear the silence of the leaders of Western countries, intermittently broken by evasive platitudes. And we are reminded of the time when the world turned a blind eye while our forebears, our families, were slaughtered.
100,000 Palestinians were made homeless in Gaza this month. Most of them became refugees in 1948 when they were expelled at gunpoint from their towns and villages. Now they are homeless again, even in their land of exile, and at risk of being driven out from Palestine altogether.
Yet on January 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the leaders of the U.S. and Europe will be joined in honoring the memory of our dead. Even as we seek to remember and to honor the immensity of that loss, we struggle to find words to convey the hypocrisy of these ceremonies, in which those who are silent today pay homage to the victims of yesterday’s silence.
The radical Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, who died while fleeing the Nazis, wrote, "not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." The Third Reich was defeated, and yet, "the enemy has not ceased to be victorious." Racism, mass murder, and genocide continue to be accepted tools of statecraft. Even our dead are not safe. They have been called up, disturbed, dredged from their mass graves and forced to testify against their fellow human beings in pain, to confess a hatred that was alien to them and to offer themselves up as justification for a new cycle of suffering in Palestine. Their ghosts have been enlisted to help displace fellow Jews from Arab homelands, and to bequeath to them that same alien hatred, conscripting those of us descending from Arab lands to become enemies of our own memory and past.
The Jewish British MP Gerald Kaufman spoke in anguish while the massacres in Gaza were taking place: "My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza." We share and echo that refusal. Let not the memory of Jews murdered by the Nazi regime serve as cover for the attempted destruction of the Palestinian people!
Although the guns are relatively silent, this genocidal assault on the Palestinian people isn’t over. The siege, the lack of food and fresh water, the disease-threatening broken sewage system, and economic collapse and humanitarian crisis persist in Gaza with the full support of the U.S., Europe and the Egyptian government. As the siege of Gaza continues, so does the slow ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the home demolitions, the building of the apartheid wall, the settlement build-up, the economic devastation of the towns and villages strangled by checkpoints, the assault on Palestinian neighborhoods in Jaffa, Akka, Lydda, the Galilee and the Negev, the mass imprisonment of Palestinians (over 11,000), and all the large and small ways by which Israel is seeking to crush the spirit and erase the presence of the Palestinian people in their homeland.
Faced with the threat of annihilation in Europe, Jews resisted. From ghettos to concentration camps and within countries under occupation, Jews led resistance to the Nazi regime. Today, from the ghetto of Gaza to the Bantustans of the West Bank and from the neighborhoods of Jaffa and Akka to cities across the globe, Palestinians resist Israel’s attempt to destroy them as a people. On January 27th, honoring the memory of our dead is for us inseparable from honoring more than sixty years of Palestinian survival and resistance. Only when the Palestinian people regain their freedom will the dead rest safely. Then we will all celebrate another victory for life.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
International Writers and Scholars Endorse Academic Boycott of Israel
We stand in support of the indigenous Palestinian people in Gaza, who are fighting for their survival against one of the most brutal uses of state power in both this century and the last.
We condemn Israel’s recent (December 2008/ January 2009) breaches of international law in the Gaza Strip, which include the bombing of densely-populated neighborhoods, illegal deployment of the chemical white phosphorous, and attacks on schools, ambulances, relief agencies, hospitals, universities, and places of worship. We condemn Israel’s restriction of access to media and aid workers.
We reject as false Israel’s characterization of its military attacks on Gaza as retaliation. Israel’s latest assault on Gaza is part of its longtime racist jurisprudence against its indigenous Palestinian population, during which the Israeli state has systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited the Palestinian people.
We reject as untrue the Israeli government’s claims that the Palestinians use civilians as human shields, and that Hamas is an irredeemable terrorist organization. Without endorsing its platforms or philosophy, we recognize Hamas as a democratically elected ruling party. We do not endorse the regime of any existing Arab state, and call for the upholding of internationally mandated human rights and democratic elections in all Arab states.
We call upon our fellow writers and academics in the United States to question discourses that justify and rationalize injustice, and to address Israeli assaults on civilians in Gaza as one of the most important moral issues of our time.
We call upon institutions of higher education in the U.S. to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, dissolve study abroad programs in Israel, and divest institutional funds from Israeli companies, using the 1980s boycott against apartheid South Africa as a model.
We call on all people of conscience to join us in boycotting Israeli products and institutions until a just, democratic state for all residents of Palestine/Israel comes into existence.
Mohammed Abed
Elmaz Abinader
Diana Abu-Jaber
Ali Abunimah
Opal Palmer Adisa
Deborah Al-Najjar
Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany
Amina Baraka
Amiri Baraka
George Bisharat
Sherwin Bitsui
Breyten Breytenbach
Van Brock
Hayan Charara
Alison Hedge Coke
Lara Deeb
Vicente Diaz
Marilyn Hacker
Mechthild Hart
Sam Hamill
Randa Jarrar
Fady Joudah
Mohja Kahf
Rima Najjar Kapitan
Persis Karim
J. Kehaulani Kaunanui
Haunani Kay-Trask
David Lloyd
Sunaina Maira
Nur Masalha
Khaled Mattawa
Daniel AbdalHayy Moore
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Nadine Naber
Marcy Newman
Viet Nguyen
Simon J. Ortiz
Vijay Prashad
Steven Salaita
Therese Saliba
Sarita See
Deema Shehabi
Matthew Shenoda
Naomi Shihab Nye
Magid Shihade
Vandana Shiva
Noenoe Silva
Andrea Smith
Ahdaf Soueif
Ghada Talhami
Frank X. Walker
Robert Warrior
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, May 19, 2008
Anti-apartheid Solidarity in Canada
The Canadian journal Upping the Anti has a recent and excellent essay on their blog about efforts of Zionist groups working with the state to step up attacks on anti-apartheid solidarity. In 2004 there was a major push by Concordia university working with the state and Zionist groups to end anti-apartheid solidarity on the campus. When organizers attempted to block far right politician and occasional prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking, the university administration suspended several leading organizers and banned all anti-apartheid work on campus. These are the same liberal administrators who will be telling their grand kids 30 years from now how they were always against Israeli apartheid, just like they supposedly were with South African anti-Apartheid. Yeah right.
Like with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, there is a lot of revisionist history official society does to boost up their legitimacy. They don't tell you at the official NYU "celebrations" every year presided over by Sexton that Dr. King was hysterically denounced and threatened by these liberals when he came out and denounced the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism. Today you have to laugh as they denounce Reverend Wright as a dangerous black man, and then try to turn Dr. King into a symbol in support of contemporary imperialism and white supremacy.
Anyway, this essay on more recent developments in Canadian anti-apartheid solidarity points out a few key issues that are critical for understanding what the struggle of a single campaign on a campus, community or union and the wider movement as a whole is. The Zionists and official society may have all the guns and money and coercive power of the state, which makes it difficult to organize at times (even as many make a lot of disingenuous excuses), but unfortunately for them, reality and history aren't on their side.
The solidarity movement in the U.S. is at a low point of activity at this time. By 2003-2004 things were slowing down. This was partially due to the fact that the second Intifada was devastated by Israeli state terror, but it was also largely due to the liberal political contradictions of many in the solidarity movement. As the U.S. and Israel attempted to resurrect the Oslo framework again and install the Palestinian elite in the West Bank firmly back in control with the Palestinian Authority apparatus at their disposal. Today, the same dynamics are playing out, only now is added the civil war strategy of the American and Israeli regimes, with the creation of death squad mercenary forces, first using this tactic in Iraq in 2004-2005 (learned from Central America in the 1980s and the Phoenix Program in Vietnam in the 1960s), and applied to Gaza as they carried out a coup against the elected Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority in 2007 and now being used in Lebanon as recently as this month.
In the last three years or so some of what was aimed for since 2000-2001 with the outbreak of the second Intifada and solidarity efforts has been achieved and begun to be implemented, but largely in Britain and Canada, not the U.S. The official announcement of the Campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was an important step that could not occur in 2000-2003, important years in U.S. anti-apartheid solidarity. The Zionist establishment and official society by 2003 had gotten back on their feet and organized a bit by the time the U.S. scene was fading some. They hit back in ways described in this essay, but much of the solidarity efforts were slowed down because of their own liberal political contradictions. Were the "negotiations" that the U.S. and Israel orchestrated with their Palestinian puppets legitimate or not? Was a "two-state solution" just a propaganda line or a viable reality that reflected the facts of the Israeli system? Were Zionist attempts in the U.S. to "dialogue" just a means to make relative apartheid or legitimate expressions of the political situation in Palestine-Israel? Were campus administrations and the state potential "neutral" arbitrators of this political struggle or part of the interests that support apartheid? We could go on.
What was at stake then for the Zionists, the state and university administrations was what this essay details well: the question of legitimacy. Just as U.S. imperialism must legitimize itself by saying it is all for "democracy", Israeli apartheid must attempt to maintain its "progressive" image. They benefit by the vast majority of people's lack of knowledge about the real situation and therefore they need to keep it that way. Because if most people really knew about these things they would obviously support the struggle for democracy and freedom that the U.S. and Israel must repress.
Every anti-apartheid campaign is about the struggle for legitimacy. When the British university teachers voted to boycott Israeli academics, the British and U.S. rulers, Zionist elites and university administrations went crazy with statements supporting apartheid, because they know that this is a serious blow against the legitimacy of apartheid. This is why in a campaign it is important to clearly struggle for the public space about how the situation is to be defined. It is important to make them defend apartheid and white supremacy by clearly and relentlessly showing that is what they are.
However, they must back up their always failing attempts at maintaining legitimacy with direct repression. Zionist forces working with the state and with support from the Israeli government have worked with McMaster and York Universities in Canada to expel students, ban events and tabling. In the U.S., Zionist groups and the Israeli government work closely with the FBI and local police to spy on and attack solidarity efforts and protests.
Today, anti-apartheid solidarity goes to the heart of exposing the anti-democratic and racist character of official society, because the legitimacy of the Israeli regime is tied directly to the legitimacy of their rule. It is the reason they do anything to attack free speech and association concerning solidarity work.
The efforts of Canadian anti-apartheid solidarity shows how far these efforts have come since 2000, where things are going, and what still needs to be done.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Cowards and Pigs
Friday, May 16, 2008
The Colonial Mind
Democracy Now recently had a debate between Benny Morris, Saree Makdisi and Norman Finkelstein on the 60 year mark of the Palestinian Nakba. Makdisi and Finkelstein provide standard fare. Finkelstein restates his commitment to the "two-state solution" despite all the evidence this is complete utopianism on his part, and Makdisi restates the impossibility of such a program. He could have added that the "two-state solution" is not simply contradicted by the facts of the Israeli system and its ideological committments.
The two state solution has moved from a revisionist two-stage theory of liberation adopted by the PLO in the 1970s and currently by Hamas, to a two-state theory. However, since the realities of Israeli rule exclude the possibility of any two-state solution, Fatah elites use it as a slogan to stay in the favor of the Western powers who set up the Palestinian Authority apparatus for them and recently restored them to power in the 2007 coup. But it is also a slogan of the U.S., Israeli and European governments to maintain their legitimacy to speak on the question at all. They can claim they have a program for Palestinian freedom, even though their actions say otherwise.
But getting to the point about why this debate is interesting: it is the perfect articulation of Left Zionist white nationalism by Benny Morris. Benny Morris is well-known as the pioneering "revisionist" historian, the first Jew who documented with Israeli government papers that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 was a purposeful plan and that hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were bulldozed. This undercut the main government propaganda that it was all just the fog of war.
But Morris is no repentant progressive in the normal sense. In an interview a few years ago he said that it was a shame the Zionist militias didn't finish the job. Now there's this big problem: the Jewish-only state governs 5 million Palestinians in historic Palestine and they've put this man in a moral quandry. They've made him feel bad about having to contemplate finishing the genocide. And it's so sad for Left Zionists like Morris because Palestinians by having any resistance to Israeli apartheid only bring state and fascist violence on themselves.
What's striking is the extent to which he states so clearly in this debate arguments that resonate with contemporary white racialism. He implies that the problems of the Jewish-only state arise because THEY--the Palestinians--are there in Palestine-Israel. The problem isn't him and Zionism. He (theoretically) has no problem with THEM being somewhere else, but not living next to him. Finally, in the end Morris says that white Jews could never live with Palestinians because they are different cultural species. Most white racialism today, even fascism, is not through race as a biological category, but a cultural one. Morris explains this as succinctly as possible. David Duke learned that sometime ago and the British National Party has been winning a lot of seats in state power learning this as well. They are simply for white rights and the protection of "their" culture.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Egyptian Intifada
Hosni gets a face lift
The Mubarak regime has been facing a rising strike movement in recent years. Similar developments have been happening in Iran. However, in Egypt, middle class grievances have been merging with the growing workers movement and combining with the protests against the regime in its alliance with US imperialism. Currently, the growing frustration with inflation, such as the rising cost of bread, as a result of world-wide rise in commodity prices, the mass arrest of hundreds of Muslim Brothers candidates and other opposition parties leading up to the recent elections, the deepening of neoliberal restructuring of the economy, the deepening of privatization of industries, casualization with the growth in temporary labor contracts, massive corruption and the strengthening of Israeli apartheid and the continuing occupation of Iraq is taking on the character of a wide-ranging political movement to bring down the Mubarak dictatorship. However, state terror has been effective before in preventing such democratic movements from cohering and Egyptian activists are routinely arrested and tortured.
And this is exactly what has been happening. Much of the leadership of the strike, along with a leader of Kefaya, and several well-known bloggers have been arrested and many of them have been tortured. The regime's attempt to occupy the factories and smash the student solidarity demonstrations in Cairo led to tens of thousands fighting back in the streets these last few days. Knowing that elections are a sham, and paralleling a call by the Muslim Brothers for a voter boycott, turnout for the most recent local elections has been estimated at 3%. While the U.S. and British rulers prop-up the dictatorship with billions of dollars in what they say is their fight for democracy, its legitimacy is near zero with its foundations being pulled at brick by brick with the hands of the working and middle classes alike.
To read the NYTimes or Washington Post you would think only when Egyptian bloggers "insult Islam" are they jailed by the regime.
Since the early 1990s, the Egyptian government has embarked on a process of neoliberal restructuring involving the selling off of state-owned industries, the introduction of temporary labor contracts or casualization, reduction of subsidies for staples, and cut back on social services. It is a process familiar to the U.S. and around the world that has defined the political climate and social policy for the last 30 years. While street protest against the government, centered around student activity, has been developing since 2002 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, the center of strike activity began in the textile industry in earnest in 2006 and spread quickly from there.
During the 1919 revolution in Egypt the liberal elite Wafd Party rode the rebellion of working people to power, negotiating a deal with British colonial occupation and smashing the early democratic organizations of the workers that were decisive in winning the qualified independence of 1923. The anti-democratic Wafd was politically dependent on British imperialism, the importation of British capital, and the British-installed monarchist stooge. The situation is no different from the liberal elites promoted by today's "progressive" imperialists. Textiles have been a major industry in Egypt going back to the 1930s and 1940s and it was textile workers who played a major role in finally running the Wafd elites out of power.
The rise to power of the radical nationalist Nasser saw the break with British and American imperialism. Nasser and his Revolutionary Command Council, or Free Officers, consolidated their power not by smashing the Egyptian working classes' organizations, but by incorporating them into intense state-capitalist development and support from Soviet capital. Like the New Deal in the U.S. or the British Labor Party in Britain, this resulted in the creation of new "progressive" labor law, subsidies and other benifits and compensation. These state-capitalist concessions were made possible through the destruction of any independent political power of Egyptian workers and the incorporation of a union bureaucracy that would help guarantee labor quiet. Once again, working people found a new regime of exploitation.
By the late 1970s the Nasserist state was seeing the first signs of being dismantled. By the 1990s neoliberal political and economic policies had taken fully hold in Egypt, a world-wide phenomenon. The union bureaucracies of the old Nasserist state have helped this neoliberal bonanza for the rich by ensuring that the roots of the Mubarak regime continue to wrap around and strangle any independent democratic movement in Egyptian industry. Egypt is just one more example of how the only relation in today's ruling class ideology to "democracy" (pimped in the NYtimes and flying on the wings of imperialism and "economic reforms") is making sure it doesn't exist.
The strikes of the last two years have been the center of gravity of the movement that has spread out across other industries, including the growing privatized industries, combining with the student movement, and embracing the middle class professional associations, with college professors and doctors going out on strike, and much of the civil service, whose salaries are not keeping up with inflation.
For more check out this interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy and this interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy and Rabab el-Mahdi.
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Sunday, April 6, 2008
Liberalism and the New White Man's Burden
Rudyard Kipling Returns
Paul Berman has become better known in recent years for writing a number of books since 9-11, reconstructing the ideological defense of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and support for Israeli apartheid. He is a favorite intellectual of the liberal elites in his attempts to give imperialism "democratic" justifications.
For his efforts, they have rewarded him well, reserving spots in the NYTimes and a chance to cash in with a post at NYU. However, Berman first proved his bona fides in writing the usual "leftist"-turned-sober story in his 1990s A Tale of Two Utopias. Like his fellow sadists Todd Gitlin and Christopher Hitchens, he dons the mantle of authenticity by impersonating a former New Leftist himself, and making his "critique" more marketable. In distinguishing between the legacy of "bad" New Leftist, say the old anti-imperialist militant--perhaps a Black Panther still scaring the kids--and the "good" New Leftist, like someone who went on to sober up and realize that providing charity to the poor and the oppressed is more respectable, the dollars start rolling in.
Today he's manning up as editor of the progressive imperialist journal Dissent, founded by Irving Howe, a cousin of what came to be known as neoconservatism, and playing ideological general in search of an army of young idealist imperial social workers. Writing in the New York Times this past week, he's laid out some of his ideas about the need for solidarity with Arab and Muslim "liberals". So for those who are not familiar, what does he have to say and why is it important?
In his 2004 book, Terror and Liberalism, Berman essentially argues for a new Popular Front. This term refers to the policy of the Soviet Union in the 1930s calling on the Communist Parties to subordinate themselves to liberal leadership in the name of defeating fascism. Today, Berman has been one of the more visible elite intellectuals attempting to develop the ideological basis for such a policy for today's Western Left. Only this time the Berman is not alone, of course. In the U.S. and Europe such arguments have been piled up through a proliferation of books and journals big enough to fill a garbage dump off the New Jersey Turnpike.
Here are a few paragraphs from Berman:
Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.
But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.
Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.
A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.
"Dismaying" and "surprising": words that are the consequence of shibboleths playing like thought.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Kanan Makiya, Irshad Manji, Fouad Ajami, among others: these types that Berman speaks for here have solidarity enough. The government, university and corporate cash lining the pockets of these people is proof enough of that. Berman tells us that these people represent "human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society" and shouldn't the Left support them? But Berman shouldn't worry too much. The deafening silence of the liberal left on the sheer scale of mass imperial terror being carried out on Iraq, Palestinians, Lebanon, with its civil war strategies and revving up the death squads, should comfort him.
And that's the problem with Berman's bad faith posturing. The real Arab and Muslim liberals are locked up in Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and Gulf State jails. They are under attack, some being purged, from American and European universities. Berman himself wrote a long essay in The New Republic against a major Muslim liberal in Europe, Tariq Ramadan. He has expanded it into a book that is coming out shortly. And he hasn't been working alone. The U.S. government denied Ramadan a visa to enter the country as a visiting professor at Notre Dame.
This is either incomprehension or propaganda. Which ever it is, it's rooted deeply in the history of colonialism and white supremacy--the stink of bad faith is all over Berman's arguments-- and an ideological crisis of the American and European middle classes.
This movement of intellectuals has a long history in the U.S. and a somewhat more recent legacy in Europe, such as the so-called "New Philosophers" in France. In the 1990s, these establishment intellectuals began to argue for a "humanitarian imperialism". During the Cold War, these things were justified by referring to the "threat" of Communism in all things. All political movements that jeopardized the interests of the dictatorships and the ruling elites supported by these "democrats" could be smashed by U.S. imperialism through either indirect support or direct military intervention. This policy was important to shore up the political and economic order at home. Dictatorships and ruling oligarchs may depend on U.S. imperialism because they have no social support, but U.S. rulers depend on them to ensure cheap consumer goods by keeping any democratic movements disabled and therefore keeping cheap super-exploited labor available. Further, the raising of "national security", the slogan of the imperial presidency, ensures that domestic racist forces can be mobilized around an "external enemy." It used to be "Communism". Today its "terrorism".
"Humanitarian imperialism" had tried to provide a new set of explanations for the persistence of U.S. imperialism after the Soviet Union collapsed. Since the occupation of Iraq, progressive racists have attempted to graft the Humanitarian program of the 1990s onto the full neo-conservative program of "pre-emptive war". These two strains are functionally indistinguishable from each other and it is one of the reasons a Paul Berman type is usually thrown in with the neo-conservatives. However, there are important differences to consider.
We have to briefly take a step back in time to uncover the deeper intellectual roots of the relationship and differences of this ideology in American history. In the late 1940s, as the Second World War ended, the Trotskyist parties who were the most coherent forces on the anti-Stalinist left at the time, debated the nature of the Soviet Union. There were three positions. One said that the ruling class of the Soviet Union must be overthrown, but it is worth critically defending against Western imperialism because it is more progressive. Another said that both the Soviet Union and the Western states represented together two forms of state-capitalism and the path forward was not to allign with either, but support the democratic movements in all these countries that are both struggling against this new stage of capitalism. A third position was that there was no possibility of these movements against state-capitalism, but it was more possible in the West than in the Soviet bloc countries. Therefore, it was important to critically support Western imperialism abroad and subordinate to the "progressive" sections of the ruling classes and official society.
In the 1960s, this third position split into a left-wing and right-wing social democratic position in relation to the rebirth of the black movement, rank-and-file workers movements and the occupation of Vietnam. Later, with the growth of the PLO and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the politics of Israeli apartheid would enter into this dynamic. The left-wing social democrats, around Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, and the right-wing social democrats around Max Shachtman, had different ideas about how they would essentially extend the New Deal and create a more benevolent U.S. imperialism. While the right-wing social democrats cozied up around the AFL-CIO labor bosses and fully supported the continued attack on Vietnam, the left-wing social democrats came to believe that the Vietnam occupation was doing more harm than good in protecting anti-Communist forces that were also opposed to the dictatorship in South Vietnam supported by the U.S. Further, these left-wing social democrats tended to be more critical of the big labor bosses, like Meaney and Kirkland, and supported more forcefully the Civil Rights leadership in its attempt to extend the New Deal to African-Americans. Both wings were for a Popular Front-type politics in which working peoples' organizations subordinated themselves to the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party elites.
However, both strains were deeply hostile to Black Power, the rank-and-file workplace movements, and full opposition to U.S. imperialism. The rejection of white liberal patronage and the critique of their racism, in their attempt to justify the failures of the Civil Rights movement to end white supremacy, drove them crazy. Right-wing social democrats tended to view the inability of the Cold War liberal coalitions of Civil Rights, Labor Bureaucracy, and Keynesian Capitalists as unable to control the growing black movement, rank-and-file movement, the campus situation, and the economic crisis emerging in the later 1960s. This is the origins then of neo-conservativism, and neo-liberal thought more generally. It emerged as a call for the reestablishment of the racial and class order. It was perfectly attuned to the middle and ruling classes that needed to feel good again about saying they were going to be in charge, that became a signature of the rise of the New Right.
It is for this reason that the right-wing social democrats would go on to become the neo-conservatives and the heirs of the left-wing social democrats would increasingly grow quiet or even critically supportive of the Reagan Revolution as the 1980s progressed. The left-wing social democrats never programmatically broke with their belief in this old elite coalition to keep people in their place. By the 1990s, they could not muster any independent or coherent opposition to the dominance of the new neo-liberal social and economic policies, the dismantling of the New Deal, critical support for the reconstructed triumph of U.S. imperialism after its defeat in Vietnam, and dabbling in the new orientalist racialist quackery.
This is why Berman's "progressive" support for comprador Muslim and Arab intellectuals can only find him (and them) in the camp of rising white populism, fascism, apartheid and imperialism. Since Berman cannot develop his ideas in relation to any real movement of Arabs and Muslims, whether in the Middle East, Europe or the U.S., he can only justify those things he is supposedly against as the lesser of evils. His hilarious and grossly misinformed attack (or smart propaganda) on the Muslim liberal Tarik Ramadan shows the pattern. Berman is developing the racialist discourses of pathology and social deviancy that is at the center of the White Man's Burden and has been applied by "liberal-minded" whites to all democratic people of color movements and aspirations to negate white supremacy. Berman cannot abide letting people of color liberals into official institutions until they swear allegiance to the status quo. This same exact thing happened during the 1960s with Civil Rights and Black Power in the U.S. When Martin Luther King denounced the Vietnam War, called for a poor people's movement in the U.S., and called for recognition of black culture as foundational to America, he was hysterically denounced by the liberal establishment. A figure like Ramadan does no different today, yet Berman, and his friends like Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, stand with the rising tide of white populism and fascism in Europe against the democratic movement of people of color in Europe.
Berman isn't alone. There is an intellectual industry out there, with journals such as openDemocracy, Democratiya and Engage, based in the university and corporate money reconstructing an ideology of progressive imperialism and racism. Unfortunately, democratic forces from below are deeply unprepared for such an assault and the result is a profound passivity among the Left in regards to what could possibly be a new stage of U.S. imperialism. U.S. elites work undisturbed at home in literally destroying whole nations in the Middle East and shoring up their allied dictatorships. Such work to create a progressive imperialism may reflect an ideological crisis of the Western middle classes, but without counter-work that exposes these forces and engages with the real democratic tradition at home, it isn't necessary that they will fail at their task.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Free Political Prisoner Sami Al-Arian
There is a new documentary out on the arrest and show trial of Palestinian professor Sami Al-Arian that you can watch online. He was arrested in 2003 after being the subject of a sustained attack by Israeli propagandists and agents, the Federal government and Fox News. He spent most of his two years in prison in solitary confinement and was acquited of almost all charges thrown at him by the Feds. They accused him of being an organizer for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and planning terrorist attacks in the U.S. At one point, the Federal prosecutors took the jury on a field trip to watch a car bomb.
In turns out that the Feds had nothing accept his speeches, phone calls, writings, conferences and rallies he attended, and what books he owned. Many prosecution witnesses came from Israel to testify about Palestinian terrorism. Al-Arian's defense attorneys were prevented by the racist judge from mentioning the history of Israeli apartheid at all.
The jury, recognizing the government was putting him on trial for free speech and association, acquitted him in 2005, after the Feds spent tens of millions of tax dollars putting on a show trial.
Such show trials have been part of the government's propaganda efforts to expand secret police powers since 9-11. Most of these have been entrapment cases in which Federal informants have schemed-up crimes to dupe less than capable people into terrorism charges as in cases in Chicago, Albany, Miami, Detroit, and New York City. Other attempts have been to go after Islamic centers and charities. The most famous case was the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which featured central testimony from Israeli agents, that collapsed in a mistrial.
These cases are meant to normalize political repression, either in the form of creating a specter of "al Qaeda" where none exists, and attack solidarity efforts with Middle East struggles, in particular Palestinian and Lebanese movements. And to think of all the tax dollars spent on supporting Israeli apartheid, all those private funds raised, think tanks created, all those Zionist fascists sitting in city councils and state legislatures.
Since the Feds had lost, they had Al-Arian sentenced to another year in prison for 1 count of conspiracy. Breaking the plea agreement, in which it was stated he would not have to testify in any other cases, he was then forced to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a fishing expedition against Islamic charities, which he has refused to do. He was then held in contempt of court. He is currently on hunger strike.
The documentary is on the road currently. Check the free Al-Arian website for more details.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Apartheid in Hebron
An in-depth report on the advance of the segregation policies of the Israeli state in Hebron was compiled by B'Tselem last year. There is a summary essay of its findings in Counterpunch by Stephen Lendman. As the map above graphically illustrates, this report tells us a lot about what the term "Peace Process" means.
The essay is important because it provides a window into the microcosm of how the entrenchment of Israeli segregation works. By focusing on one particular Palestinian city, the report is able to explain the general features of Israeli apartheid through their specific application in the details of the social fabric of Palestinian life.
Nearly 40 years ago, a small group of fascists set up in a hotel in Hebron and would not leave. After the Israeli army armed them and the government supplied them with subsidies, the privilege of their white skin, and 40 years later, the center of the city of Hebron is cleansed of its inhabitants and several hundred white supremacists, along with the Israeli army, control the whole city of 150,000 Palestianians. Zionist fascist gangs periodically go on progroms to kick out more Palestinians from their homes while the IDF guards the whole enterprise.
Several features of the Israeli policy of separation and displacement stand out in Hebron and are typical of how this system is entrenched:
-the explicit or tacit support of armed gangs to create the outposts of Jewish-only neighborhoods which, once established, must be protected for "security reasons"
-the establishment of a legal regime that rezones urban space and geographical areas to create the pretext for the creation of Palestinian-only ghettos
-the confiscation and/or destruction of Palestinian homes
-the disruption Palestinian economic life by restricting movement through checkpoints, the implementation of pass laws, and the establishment of curfews
-the denial of building permits to Palestinians; and the expansion of building permits for Jews
After almost 30 years of this strategy, Israeli apartheid was to be famously given formal legal recognition during the "Peace Process" of the 1990s, and specifically the Hebron Agreement in 1994. Hebron was meant to be a test case for this, to see if the newly Israeli and American created Palestinian Authority, stuffed with Palestinian elites who benefited from the Oslo years, would go along with this "legal" solution to the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, just as it has reached its normative status of Palestinians living inside the Green Line as Israeli "citizens". Every time you read "Peace Process" in the papers or hear it on the news, this is what they are talking about.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Wake Up!
Last year was tough, but lots of courageous things happening in Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, France, England and right here in NYC, so it's time to get some perspective and stay uplifted thanks to Outlandish:
let's not cry tonight, I promise you one day it's through
my brothers, my sisters,
shine a light for every soul that ain't with us no more
my brothers, my sisters
As the great African liberation leader Amilcar Cabral, murdered by colonialism, said, "tell no lies; claim no easy victories". God bless all the freedom strugglers in the Middle East, Europe, America, Canada, and beyond, surviving and fighting white supremacy worldwide inshallah.
Speaking of super group Arab Summit: here's Part 1 and Part 2 of a recent interview with Davey D talking about their album, Fear of an Arab Planet. Claiming a lineage with Public Enemy, and through that the history of Black Power, should tell us a lot about where the struggle should be going. Here's another interview over at Electronic Intifada.
One more hip hop note. Long time coming documentary, Slingshot Hip Hop, on Palestinian originators DAM, Arapeyat and others, directed by NYU's own Jackie Reem Salloum, is finally coming out. Although parts of it were presented at the Other Israel film festival this last Fall, it will hit theaters after its run at Sundance last week.
There's a release party on February 8th for Slingshot Hip Hop at the Knitting Factory with DJ Kayper, GC and The Soul Mafia, and Erika Rose as part of Israeli Apartheid Week here in NYC. Check it out. Read More
