Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, War Resister
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American Jews Redefining Judaism
Israeli war planes are bombing the northern half of the Gaza Strip, reducing everything – hospitals, mosques, schools, homes – to rubble. Those who survive the march south may be driven into the Sinai desert. More than 1 million Palestinians had lived there. They have been ordered to vacate their homes and walk south on pain of death. Food, water, electricity, and medical supplies have been cut off to these people, half of whom are children. This is being facilitated by American military, financial, diplomatic, and media support.
Guest – Rabbi Brant Rosen is the leader of the congregation Tzedek Chicago whose members are not Zionists and who oppose the historic Zionist project of dispossessing the native Palestinians forcing them out of their homeland. The attention of the world today is focused on the tiny northern half of the Gaza Strip. Tsedek Chicago’s website states that “during the course of his rabbinate, Rabbi Brant Rosen became an increasingly vocal activist for justice and human rights, particularly in Israel/Palestine. After publicly wrestling with his relationship with Israel and openly questioning his lifelong Zionism, he eventually became a prominent Jewish presence in the Palestine solidarity movement cofounding the Jewish Voice for Peace rabbinical council .“
Rabbi Brant’s writings have appeared in many journals and publications, including Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the Jewish Forward, Tikkun, and Truthout. Tikkun, magazine editor Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote that Rabbi Brant Rosen is “at once a courageous rabbi and the voice of a new generation of American Jews who are refusing to allow the right wing voice of the Jewish world to define Judaism.“
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Christian Fascism Poised To Reshape The United States
Our guest today claims that we are far down the road that leads to fascism in the United States, and he places the blame at the feet of the liberal class to halt the corporate assault on working people that has spawned an ascendant Christian fascism that is poised to seize power and radically reshape America. As he says in his article of October 8th, “the parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state.
The Liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic security and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement.”
Guest – Chris Hedges, award-winning journalist and political writer reported for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005 and served as the Times’ Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 2001 Hedges was one of the Times’ writers on an entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Prior to his work for the Times, he worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, and the Dallas Morning News. His books include Death of the Liberal Class, War on America, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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International Community Call For Cease Fire As Civilians Targeted And Generations Under Siege In Israel, Gaza
On October 7, Hamas fired 2,000 missiles from the Gaza Strip into Israel, and sent hundreds of fighters into Israel, killing hundreds of Israeli civilians. Israel retaliated with overwhelming force – bombing Gazan civilians, homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and civilian buildings. As we record this interview on October 11, Israel is reportedly planning to mount a ground offensive in Gaza with 360,000 Israeli reserve troops poised to invade.
As of today, at least 1,200 Israelis and 950 Palestinians have been killed and tens of hundreds have been wounded on both sides.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas but Israel’s actions reveal that Israel is mounting war on the Palestinian people as a whole – especially in Gaza.
Targeting civilians constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention, regardless of who commits them. And if we’re serious about stopping all war crimes, it’s crucial that we under the context. Hamas’s offensive was launched in the context of decades of the Israeli apartheid regime and settler colonialism.
Guest – Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who serves as the International Adviser for Jewish Voice for Peace, and is a member of the national board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is the 7th updated edition of “Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer,” published in 2018. Phyllis wrote a new article in The Hill titled As Israel and Gaza Erupt, The US Must Commit To Ending The Violence – All The Violence.
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Investigating The Assassination Of Palestinian American Journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh
The Zionist colonial settler state of Israel is not the moral legatee of the victims of the Holocaust much less the moral legatee of the ancient prophets of the Jewish people. Never has this been more evident than with the exposure of the Israeli army’s assassination of the beloved Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh. Assassination is a political murder.
Shireen had covered the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank for Al Jazeera for 25 years. The day she was killed she was reporting on the Israeli military invasion of Jenin, an Arab town on the West Bank occupied by the Israeli army for 55 years. She was wearing a helmet and a protective vest marked “PRESS.”
It is the practice of the Israeli army to shoot journalists and otherwise suppress the truth of their war crimes including the illegal theft of Palestinian lands. Israel’s brutal occupation has been going on since it illegally seized the West Bank as a prize of the 1967 war between Israel and three of its neighbors. Since then the Israeli military has ruled the native Arabs. Shireen is the 86th journalist to be killed while covering Israel’s illegal occupation since 1967.
The murder of Shireen was not adequately exposed by the U.S. press. The United States supports Israel politically, ideologically, economically, and morally. The U.S. gives the state of Israel more than $3.8 billion a year in weapons. Shireen was killed by a high-velocity armor-piercing 5.56 mm bullet fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semi automatic rifle – a weapon made in the U.S.
Israel has refused to conduct an investigation of Shireen’s assassination, because it “would provoke opposition and controversy within the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] and in Israeli society in general,” according to the Israeli government. Although complaints have been filed in the International Criminal Court against Israel, the court does not appear to have the political will to thoroughly investigate those charges.
There is an apocryphal story of three rabbis dispatched from a Zionist congress in Vienna many years ago to report back on the situation in Palestine. They reported back that the bride is beautiful but she’s married to another man.
The claim of the Zionist is that Israel was built on a land without a people for a people without a land. This is Israeli propaganda. This propaganda is less and less swallowed by the new generations in the United States and Europe as they witness Israel taking over more and more of historic Palestine and attempting to prevent the truth of what they are doing from coming out.
Guest – Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi is a Palestinian American historian of the Middle East, the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and Director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. He was educated at Yale and Oxford universities and is the author of many books on the Middle East. He is also the author of Under Siege: PLO Decision Making During the 1982 War, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East and recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017.
Hosted by attorneys Heidi Boghosian, Michael Smith and Marjorie Cohn
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crony Capitalism, Human Rights
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Homelessness, Free Speech Cases Before U.S. Supreme Court
Today we look at two issues coming before the Supreme Court in its just opened 2023-24 term. First, we’ll discuss two cases whose outcome will determine the future of free speech online, when it considers the constitutionality of laws passed in Texas and Florida that, if allowed to stand, will severely restrict social media companies from removing certain political posts or social media accounts.
We then take up the matter of whether or not the Court agrees to hear a case where California’s Governor Newson, and officials from other states, ask the Supreme Court to overrule Martin-v-Boise, a Federal Appeals Court case protecting the rights of the unhoused to sleep outside on public property if there are no adequate alternatives available.
Guest – Stephen Rohde, a noted constitutional scholar and activist. He is the past chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California; the founder and current chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace; the author of American Words of Freedom and the book, Freedom of Assembly. Steve Rohde is also a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, TruthDig, and a leader in the national campaign to free imprisoned investigative journalist, Julian Assange.
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Right Wing Billionaires Want New US Constitution
Our current Constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787. It could be replaced by something draconian. We are in eminent danger of the curtailment of the federal government’s ability to protect the environment, consumers and civil rights. This includes barring Congress from delegating rule making to federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and placing caps on federal spending that would trigger massive cuts.
Now right wing billionaires such as Charles Koch, a fossil fuel industry giant, and right wing foundations, think tanks, and organizations have been steadily organizing at the state legislative level to call a new Constitutional convention and replace what we’re living under now with something very bad.
If this happens, such a convention would allow an unelected, unaccountable delegates free reign, to rewrite our Constitution – imposing an extreme right wing agenda on the entire nation, with no recourse or oversight
This could all happen by 2025. All it takes is 2/3 of the states to declare they want a new Constitutional convention. The right wingers are only six states shy at this point.
Guest – David Armiak is research director with the Center for Media and Democracy. David joined CMD in 2015 and has conducted extensive investigations on dark money, corporate corruption, and right-wing networks. He is responsible for filing and analyzing hundreds of public records requests every year.
Hosted by attorneys Michael Smith and Jim Lafferty
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, genocide, Human Rights
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Tens of Thousands Of Armenians Forced To Flee Their Homes
Two weeks ago, the small mountainous Republic of Artsakh was vanquished by Azeri military forces. It happened with such haste that thousands of its predominantly ethnic Armenian population had just minutes to abandon their homes.. This followed on the heels of an Azerbaijani blockade that left Armenians without food, fuel, and medicine. Artsakh has been the site of a decades-long protracted battle between Muslim and Turkish Azerbaijanis and Christian Armenians. The conflict began when Armenia and Azerbaijan were under Soviet rule. After both nations gained independence, the conflict escalated into full scale war. That war ended in 1994, with an independent Artsakh, the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh, and Armenia in control of a wide swath of Azerbaijan.
Unverified reports of mass killings and rape roused fears of a repeat of the 1915 Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire. The first genocide of the 20th century, it was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity during World War I. The genocide ended more than 2,000 years of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia. Along with the mass murder of Assyrian/Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of the Republic of Turkey. While the Turkish government denies the slaughter of Armenians was genocide, as of 2023, 34 countries have recognized the events as such.
Guest – Alex Galitsky is the Programs Director at the Armenian National Committee of America. Alex’s opinions and analysis have been published in major media outlets, including Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, and The Hill. He has worked at the local, state, and federal levels to advance policy and legislation to protect the rights of the Armenian people nationally and internationally. ANCA Action Center
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National Museum of the American Latino Controversy
In 2020, Congress appropriated funding to create a National Museum of the American Latino. Last year, the Smithsonian Institution opened a temporary preview exhibition inside the National Museum of American History. The show was slated to be the largest federally funded Smithsonian exhibit on Latino civil rights history. The nation’s top Latino historians and veterans of the movement gave input. It was to feature student walkouts, school integration initiatives, and environmental and immigration activism.
Instead, it has become the focus of controversy within the Latino community over how Latinos in the United States should be portrayed. The Smithsonian has nixed the show; in its place will be an exhibit on salsa and Latin music.
That’s because Republican lawmakers and others challenge what one conservative writer described last year in The Hill as an “unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history.” Right-wing Latino political activists and Cuban-American politicians like Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart voted to defund the museum.
The controversy comes as the Smithsonian is trying to raise funds to build the museum at estimated $800 million. Of this, $58 million has been raised to date.
Two historians were hired to develop the exhibit on the Latino civil rights movement of the 1960s for the museum. Felipe Hinojosa a history professor at Baylor University in Texas and Johanna Fernández, the associate professor of history at the City University of New York’s Baruch College.
Guest – Professor Felipe Hinojosa is the author of Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio. His research areas include Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, American Religion, Race and Ethnicity, and Social Movements. Prof. Hinojosa serves on the Advisory Board for the interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, and online moderated forum Latinx Talk.
Hosted by attorney Heidi Boghosian
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Human Rights, Torture, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister, Whistleblowers, worker's rights
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Assange: Journalism Is Not A Crime
Julian Assange is the greatest journalist of our time. By publishing the truth about secret government surveillance of American citizens and American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places the American government and the CIA have plotted to kidnap and kill him.
They initially smeared his name falsely, accusing him of being a rapist, forced him to get political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where they videotaped conversations with his lawyers and stole the contents of their phones and computers. At his extradition hearing in London, where the British government did the bidding of the US, they kept him incommunicado in a glass box and the judge made her decisions before she heard the evidence.
They have had him imprisoned in torturous solitary in the notorious Belmarsh prison in London for four years. He could be extradited to the United States any minute from now to stand trial on the false accusation of espionage to which he answers “journalism is not a crime.“ He will certainly be convicted and entombed in what amounts to a death sentence.
The rule of law is crashing in our country. What is being done to Julian Assange is being done in the name of the law.
Guest – Craig Murray has written the most penetrating and eloquent accounts of Julian Assange’s predicament. Murray was the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was fired for blowing the whistle on his country’s practice of torture. He himself has recently served four months of solitary confinement in prison, where he was put, he believes, to prevent him from testifying at the trial of David Morales – whose company contracted with the CIA to spy on Julian and his attorneys. This alone should’ve caused the case against Julian to be dismissed.
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UAW Organized Labor Strike 2023
It’s no secret that the size and strength of the union movement is not, today, what it has been in the past. Where once more than 30% of the U.S. private workforce was unionized, today it’s only about 5 or 6 percent, with another 33% of workers in unionized government jobs. Harsh, pro-employer labor laws are a big reason for the decline in unionized jobs, as is the change in the percentage of manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
But in the last few years, despite the harsh laws governing union organizing, we’ve witnessed a surge in militant and successful strikes by workers. Nurses, schoolteachers, more recently the UPS workers, and now the strike by the United Auto Workers. Today we examine the UAW strike, the new way it is being conducted, and to learn what it can tell us about this increased union militancy, why it’s happening now, and what it portends for the future.
And our guest for this topic could not be a better person to help us understand the UAW strike, and the increased militancy of workers and union actions across the United States, in general.
Guest – Dianne Feeley, a 60’s radical who started off working with the Catholic Worker movement in New York City. Ms. Feeley is, herself, a retired auto worker, and former member of the UAW Local 22 in Detroit, Michigan. She is currently a leader in the socialist, feminist organization Solidarity, and writes regularly for both the Jacobin Magazine and the magazine, Against the Current.
Hosted by attorney Jim Lafferty
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Human Rights
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Can President Donald Trump Be President Again?
Last year the U.S. Supreme Court became the most conservative it has been in 90 years, with conservative justices controlling decisions with a comfortable 6-3 majority. We can no longer take any Constitutional “rights” or “liberties” we thought we had for granted. Prior Supreme Court rulings that aimed at ensuring fairness, equal opportunity, reproductive freedom, and a participatory government—including for those who were not born into the favored, elite classes—are now at great risk.
Today, with the help of Stephen Rohde, our favorite constitutional scholar as our guest, we examine two very important constitutional issues: first, the question of: “How safe is freedom of the press in our country today?” We do this by looking at the new challenges being leveled at the landmark 1964 case, New York Times v. Sullivan, a case granting protection to a newspaper when it prints a libelous story about a public official or public figure but does so without actual malice. Is that press protection about to disappear? Then, we change gears a bit and ask our guest about the currently much-discussed question flowing from the fact that former President Donald Trump, now faces criminal charges for seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The question stemming from this is: “Does Sec. Three of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution stating that any American official who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution is disqualified from holding any future office if they, and I quote, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or provided “aid and comfort to our enemies” mean that Trump is now disqualified from becoming president again? The Constitution does not spell out how to enforce this ban, It was applied twice in the late 1800’s, when it was used against former members of the Confederacy. Today, a number of State Attorneys Generals, and others, are contemplating this question and, in a few cases, preparing to take the matter to court, given their belief that Trump should now, because of his actions on and around the January 6th insurrection, be disqualified from holding any future federal office.
Guest – Stephen Rohde recently published a fabulous review of a new book by Samantha Barbas, titled Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York v. Sullivan. Steve Rohde is a writer, lecturer, and political activist who practiced civil rights, civil liberties, and intellectual property law for almost 50 years. He is past Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and a co-founder and current chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, while also playing a leadership role in many other organizations. He writes book reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, and Truthdig.org. And his articles appear regularly in many online publications.
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A Sleeping Giant In American Politics
We are in the midst of a labor upsurge. One with the promise of delivering not only better wages, and working conditions, but the prospects of wider positive social change. There is a new fighting spirit in the land, expressed by this rise in labor militancy.
We can look back five years ago to the beginning of the upsurge in teacher militancy in red states such as West Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming, and Arizona, where teachers struck, often illegally, to better not only their situation, but that of the communities they lived in. This upsurge has continued.
Recently, we have seen the great success of the Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, coming together to form a union and Starbucks workers across the country have also unionized. Meanwhile, the writers and actors in the Hollywood movie and television industry have been on strike for several months. The Democratic party, which get a lot of money from the entertainment industry, has not lifted a finger to help them.
The unemployment rates for actors is 90% and only 2% of them can make a living out of acting.“Euphoria“ star Sydney Sweeney said “They no longer pay actors what they used to and with streamers you no longer get substantial residuals.” Eighty percent of the union makes less than $26,000 a year, not enough to qualify for union health insurance.
The captains of finance and industry run and control the Democratic Party. They made sure that Bernie Sanders did not get the nomination in 2016 and 2020. The leadership of the labor movement most often supports the Democratic party, explaining that they are the lesser of two evils. The late great journalist, Glen Ford called the Democratic Party, “the more effective of two evils“. He would have cited as proof of this the Biden administration’s recent intervention which prevented the powerful railroad workers union from going on strike this summer.
Guest – Al Bradbury is the editor of Labor Notes and an advocate and practitioner of labor militancy. Labor Notes is a media and organizational project since 1978 that has been the voice of union activists who want to put the movement back into the labor movement. Editor, Al Bradbury join the staff of Labor Notes in 2012 after working with hospital workers as a researcher and organizer for the Service Employees local 49 in Oregon.
Hosted by Attorneys Michael Smith, Jim Lafferty and Maria Hall
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