Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iraq Veterans, Iraq War, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Updates:
—–
Mass Demonstration Planned: March Forward
On Saturday March 20, there will be a massive National March and Rally in Washington DC organized against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, while fighting for social and economic justice at home. The demonstrations will pull together veterans, active-duty service members and those have served in the US military. Other mass rallies will be held on the same day in San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The day before on Friday March 19, there will be a day of action and outreach. Today Michael Prysner joins us to give us more information and details on this mass demonstration. Michael recently delivered a powerful speech as an IVAW member. From Michael’s speech, ” Our real enemies are not those living in a distant land whose names or policies we don’t understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it’s profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it’s profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us.”
Mike Prysner:
- I’m a co-founder of March Forward, it’s also an affiliate with the ANSWER coalition which is Act Now To Stop War End Racism. We know now that there are more people who are becoming tired of the wars and watching 500 million dollars a day squandered on these senseless wars and occupations.
- On March 20, you’re going to see thousands of people from all over the country. We’re coming off of a year of President Obama being elected. Many people thought that they were voting for an to the war, and change to the colonial policies of the US government.
- So, change comes not from an election, but through a struggle and mass movement. We need to be there on the anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq.
- Demands: US out of Iraq and Afghanistan. An immediate end to occupations. Freedom for Palestine, reparations for Haiti, money for jobs, education, housing and health care, not for war.
- WAR: This is about the United States expanding its reach economically, to seize the local economies and natural resources and the markets of these countries. These wars are for empire to expand US business interests.
- I went to Iraq in 2003 during the invasion, and then month after month I thought we were there for a very different purpose. There was a growing frustration within the military, people don’t want to go and kill and be killed. People join the military because they need access to a job, education, health care.
- It was the Iraqi children that I saw, that cried and screamed at us, I dragged from their houses during raids. It was innocent Iraqis that were shot. This is what turned me around.
- Seeing their faces, that made me realize that we were not the liberators that we thought we were going to be.
- Afghanistan: Soldiers are used as bait. They are put at an outpost and wait to get attacked. They get attacked and call in air strikes. Soldiers are put in danger, without any real expressed purpose. Now the Generals have warned us that we should be braced for hundreds of casualties every month.
- We have these 2 things, the horrible deaths and destruction and then no reason why. It’s cloaked in chauvinism and racism, and that’s the only justification.
Guest – Michael Prysner, lead coordinator of March Forward and Iraq Veterans Against the War member.
————
John Brown’s Farm Faces Possible Closure – Update
Today we look into the possible closure of the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba, New York. State lawmakers have announced that budget cuts could result in the closure of the farm where the famed abolitionist lived with his family and is now buried. There are others buried there, those that perished in Brown’s 1859 raid on a federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry. Historic sites and parks are often the first casualties of budget cuts. In one scenario, the New York legislature would have to approve a proposed transfer of 5 million dollars from the Environmental Protection Fund to shore up the budget cuts that would affect New York parks including John Brown’s farm. Meanwhile, many New York residents are pulling together to speak out and save this historic area. John Brown’s Body – song Recent News: John Brown Resolution Introduced by Senator
Louis DeCaro:
- The land was given to John Brown by Gerrit Smith who gave land grants to many including “free blacks” from New York State. The area was nicknamed Tim Buk Tu. John Brown lived up there in a rented farm, but later his son in law built the farm house that is there (1854)
- He was somewhat of a black nationalist as well as being a forerunner in the civil rights movement. He supported black self determination. Some people had said it was an underground railroad stop and it really wasn’t.
- For years, African American churches made trips to the farm, John Brown was buried there, of course after being hanged in W. Virginia in 1859. It’s a spiritual experience, you ascend this road, you get to the top, you see the farm house there. There’s a great boulder where John Brown loved to sit on this boulder and read his Bible.
- I brought Charles 37X up there as an elderly man in 1999. I’ll never forget the impact this had, the connections he made up there. It’s marginalized in American memory.
- I believe as we progress as a society that this will a place that’s more treasured.
- There’s optimism but still the real possibility (of the farm to be closed)
- Write to: Assembly woman Teresa Sayward / 940 Legislative Office Bldg / Albany NY / 12248 / EMAIL: sayward@assembly.state.ny.us
- State Senator Betty Little / Room 506 / Legislative Office Bldg / Albany NY / 12247/ EMAIL: little@senate.state.ny.us
Guest – Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of History at Alliance Theological Seminary’s New York City campus, and is also the pastor of an urban church. Of course, he often dreams of being a full-time researcher and student of the life and letters of John Brown the abolitionist. His latest work is entitled, “John Brown: The Man Who Lived” (Lulu, 2009), a collection of essays prepared in honor of the sesquicentennial of the Harper’s Ferry Raid and the hanging of John Brown. Lou’s previous works on the abolitionist are “John Brown–the Cost of Freedom” (International Publishers, 2007)–which features new insights based on cutting edge research and transcriptions of twenty John Brown letters, and ‘Fire from the Midst of You’: A Religious Life of John Brown” (New York University Press, 2002). He is also a contributor to “The Afterlife of John Brown,” edited by Eldrid Herrington and Andrew Taylor (2005), and Jean Libby’s monumental “John Brown Photo Chronology” (2009).
——————————————————————————————
Civil Liberties, Habeas Corpus, Human Rights, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Updates:
—
CCR’s Second Stop and Frisk Lawsuit: Floyd, et al. v. City of New York
In the beginning of 2009, statistics show that 84 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked by the New York City Police Department were black or Hispanic. Very few stops yielded any contraband or weapons. Critics call these stops, racially oriented harrassement and despicable. Not everyone stopped by police is frisked however. About 59.4 percent of all Hispanics stopped were also frisked, 56.6 percent of blacks stopped were frisked and 46 percent of whites stopped were frisked. Whites had composed less than 16 percent of these stops in early 2009. The New York City Police Department insists the stops help fight crime. The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a class-action lawsuit against the city and the Police Department over the stops. Please visit MalcolmXGrassRootsMovement.
Plaintiff David Floyd:
- The case is surrounding stop and frisk cases, particularly in black and Latino communities.
- I’ve been stopped in community over the past couple years. I live in Parkchester in the Bronx.
- Both times, I was stopped, I was going about my daily life, I work and go to school. The second time I was stopped, was on the premises where I live. The first time I was stopped, they gave no probable cause and I asked for names and badge numbers.
- The second time they said there were a string of robberies in the neighborhood. It’s a script that we found, the police go by continually.
- It’s almost as if you’re walking down the street and somebody jumps up out of no where to rob you. They go in your pockets, they take your wallet, but in this instance, what they try to walk away with is your dignity.
- There are ways to very calmly challenge and ask questions but they don’t like that. I ask “why is it that I’m being stopped, do you have probable cause?” Part of our response as a community has to support young people, anyone and everyone who are getting stopped illegally.
- You should make sure that they know, that you know your rights. People have cameras now, we need to make sure we document this constantly. Community members become activists so that internationally, there’s a voice that comes out.
- The securities industry is benefiting from tactics being used against black people here in the United States. Tactics that are being used against Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans. The tactics that the NYPD think are successful are being exported into other cities. There is a veil of accountability with the CCRB
- Challenging state violence is the responsibility of those who go through it.
——
Sunita Patel:
- The important thing to remember is that the Constitution requires that police have a reasonable suspicion that a crime is about to be committed. In 2005, there were 4 hundred thousand stops.
- We also allege in our lawsuit that there is a failure to train and discipline police officers, that goes all the way up. It’s important that there is still this historic memory of Amu Dudiallo, Abner Louima.
- We are also seeking more accountability within the CCRB, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the body to hear civilian complaints regarding the NYPD. We think the CCRB should have it’s own prosecutorial or enforcement powers. There is a sense in the community, how can we bring change about when the system is so amomous?
- We also think there has to be a change in the way that police train rookie cops and undercover police officers that are flooding communities. Make the Road By Walking / Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
- We don’t have the breakdown of arrests racially, yet. The number of stop and frisks are on the rise and we should take a stand against it. We think we will be able to obtain information about widespread practices
Guest – Sunita Patel, Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney, Sunita is involved with racial profiling, immigrant rights and other human rights litigation.
Guest – David Floyd, plaintiff in the case and Bronx resident. MalcolmXGrassRootsMovement
—
Chris Hedges – Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
We are delighted to have back with us, award winning journalist and author Chris Hedges. His new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle thoughtfully examines the erosion of American culture and levels a heavy criticism. Chris Hedges says we are living in a totalitarian society that is image based. This image is not benign, he says. It is skillfully manipulated by for-profit corporations to get us to do things not in our interest. Right now, 40 million Americans are illiterate. In this media landscape, nuanced discussions of ideas are replaced by carnival barking and interruption, meanwhile newspapers and publishing companies are in decline. Hedges has called it a slow motion coup d’etat where democracy and the Constitution are held up as ideals while the levers of power are driven by destructive forces.
Chris Hedges:
- I think the best way to see how illusionned we are as a culture is through prism of popular entertainment.
- We’re of course a completely pornified society. The largest users of porn on the internet are teenagers.
- What are the messages being pumped out whether its the WWF or porn.
- Porn isn’t the back lit shaved bodies of the playboy channel. It’s violence and not simulated violence.
- The women are popping pain pills and require surgery after sex. When you look at the stills from Abu Gharib, they could be stills from a set of a porn film, and I don’t think that is accidental.
- The narrative that we use to explain ourselves to ourselves is no longer print based.
- 42 million in the US illiterate, 50 million semi-illiterate.
- 80 percent of American households didn’t buy a book last year. The danger of that is the images we are fed are skillfully done by those with an agenda and power. It is meant to confuse a brand with knowledge and not see the underlying structures of the corporate state.
- We are a culture severing ourselves from verifiable fact and replacing it with a culture where lies become true where opinions and facts are interchangable.
- Intellectual thought by its nature is subversive, because it questions structures and assumptions.
- I think there has been tremendous cultural transformation, with the rise of the corporate state. Our form of inverted totalitarianism, which has been designed to shut out the bottom two thirds of the country.
- The jobs that we are shedding are not coming back, we are entering a form of neo-feudalism.
- A dream is something you strive towards, an illusion is something you live in.
- The system has been so ethically perverted by corporations, that we now sit by passively and allow our for-profit health care industry to legally hold sick children hostage while parents bankrupt themselves trying to save their sons or daughters.
- What kind of society I would like to see is one wresting back the government from the hands of the corporations. Once somebody is dead, they’re not worth anything in a commodity culture.
- We have to walk out of the mainstream, don’t fall for this what Ralph Nader calls the least worst.
Guest – Chris Hedges, the author of many books specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and society. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was also the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.
—————————————————————–
Civil Liberties, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Iraq War, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Updates:
—-
Simon Wiesanthal Museum of Intolerance: Mamilla Cemetery In Jerusalem
Critics continue to speak out against plans to build the new Simon Wiesanthal Museum of Tolerance near the Mamilla Cemetery. The cemetery is an 800 year old Muslim burial in the heart of Jerusalem and covers about 12 percent of the plot of the new 250 million dollar museum. Today we examine the ongoing legal fights to preserve the cemetery. Mamillacampaign.org
The museum construction has been halted several times in the last few years. Recently, the Israel’s Supreme Court ruled to go ahead with the continued construction, since there was no objection in 1960 when a parking lot was built over a small part of the cemetery. Controversy swirls around the project, the previous architect of the museum project designed an imposing futuristic mix of titanium, glass and stone. Police detain filmmakers
The initial outcry opposing the project came from the Palestinian community, Israeli archaeologists and Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Meanwhile, construction of the museum continues in portions of the area where human remains have not been found. CCR Synopsis
Dima Khalidi:
- Mamilla Cemetery is a huge piece of land located in West Jerusalem It’s an ancient cemetery dating back possibly to the 7th century. Palestinians buried their relatives there since at least 1948
- It has the ancestors of the biggest Jerusalem families including my own family.
- The cemetery has been constantly built on since the fifties and sixties. Our petition to several United Nation bodies is really part of a larger opposition. UN rapporteur on Freedom and Belief and the rapporteur on Ending Racial Discrimination
- We are asking that they label the Mamilla cemetery as a historic site and protect it and move this project, also find the remains that have been dug up so that the Palestinian families can re-bury them. 250 sets of bones removed, at least.
- There are four layers of burials dating back to the 11th century. 2 thousand people buried there.
- The museum’s archeologist called it an archeological crime. The mayor of Jerusalem offered a different site.
- Michael Ratner: what’s going on here is the expulsion of the memory and history of Musliims and Palestinians from Jerusalem
- Israeli Supreme Court handed down a decision in December 2009 affirming previous decision that it was legal to build this museum on top of the cemetery.
Guest – Palestinian-American lawyer Dima Khalidi. Dima is based in Chicago, she has a JD from DePaul University College of Law in Chicago and a Masters from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in International and Comparative Law with a focus on Islamic Law. She has worked with the People’s Law Office in Chicago, and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York. Prior to studying law, she spent two years working in the West Bank at Birzeit University on a project studying the role of customary/tribal law in Palestinian society. She has been working on the Mamilla cemetery case with CCR and other attorneys in recent months.
——-
The Iraq Papers: John Ehrenberg
Political science professor and author John Ehrenberg joined hosts live in the studio to talk about a book he had worked on with 4 other colleagues titled The Iraq Papers. (From the review) The book offers a compelling documentary narrative and interpretation of this momentous conflict. With keen editing and incisive commentary, the book weaves together original documents that range from presidential addresses to redacted memos, carrying us from the ideology behind the invasion to negotiations for withdrawal. These papers trace the rise of the neoconservatives and reveal the role of strategic thinking about oil supplies.
The authors also provide Congressional resolutions and speeches by President Bush, but internal security papers, Pentagon planning documents, the report of the Future of Iraq Project, and eloquent opposition statements by Senator Robert Byrd, other world governments, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the World Council of Churches.
John Ehrenberg:
- The book is a compendium of presidential speeches, position papers, news conferences.
- All the way from those who planned it beginning in the late 1990s to those who fought it in Iraq,
- This is not a neutral book, this is a reader with an attitude. It’s an anti-war reader. We try to be fair, and try to represent the many voices in the Iraq war. The lead up to the war so marked by misinformation, duplicity, lies, silence, everybody’s hands are dirty on this.
- As we debated, we really came to the one single variable that could be used to describe this war.
- with the fall of the Soviet Union is the late 80s, there arose in Washington a group of insiders who thought with considerable evidence that the world had passed from a bipolar system to a unipolar system, these groups became consolidated into groups one of which became PNAC (Project for the New American Century)
- Their view was that history had presented the US with a unique moment to cement its hegemony over the entire world. It’s really as simple and scary as that.
- Why care about it now? A lot of reasons. To what extent did unilateralism and pre-emption simply mirror the longstanding trends in American foreign policy? We split the middle and decided both were true.
- The people who signed PNAC go into the state department of the Bush Administration.
- The neo-conservatives haven’t disappeared. Every couple weeks, Dick Cheney gets on the air to attack Obama. Sara Palin.
- The architecture of the Iraq war, the reasons for it are still alive and kicking. There’s a very good piece in the NY Times that Gary Wills wrote. He says it doesn’t matter how reformist he/she is that comes into power, confronts the “deep state”
- They are deep beneath the surface and are immune to democratic power and they are not touched by elections or anything else. Coming into power (Obama) is confronted en mass by secret treaties, foreign obligations, military entanglements, hundreds of bases, hundreds of countries.
- Assuming he was honest, he would be unable to disentangle from that apparatus. I think Afghanistan is a way to protect Obama from the right on charges of abandoning Iraq. I don’t think Obama’s people are under any illusions to think that they can do what others couldn’t in recorded history.
- This is a holding operation to provide them with cover. We have a document called the Kubark, its a CIA manual (read manual) that became declassified a few years ago, that basically outlines all of the torture techniques.
- The basic orientation of the Bush foreign policy was organized around what we call pre-emption.
- These guys were clear in their intention, and the astounding thing is they announced their intention years before.
- None of this should have come as a shock to people. The claim was power trumps everything.
- You can’t solve political issues militarily, and that’s what the neo-cons were convinced they could do.
Guest – John Ehrenberg, author of Servants of Wealth, The Rights Assault on Economic Justice, and recently, The Iraq Papers. He’s also professor of political science at Long Island University.
Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Gaza, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The War Before: The Story of Black Panther and Political Prisoner Safiya Bukhari – By Laura Whitehorn
We’re delighted to have political activist and former Weather Underground member Laura Whitehorn back with us to talk about her new book titled, The War Before. In the book about Laura introduces us to Safiya Bukhari, a member of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. The War Before traces Safiya’s life’s commitment of organizing around the rights of the oppressed. Through Safiya’s personal writings, we hear her unique perspective of what had happened to the Black Panther Party and her personal insights into the incarceration of outspoken radicals. Safiya, herself a longtime political prisoner and jailhouse activist, died in 2003. It was at the request of Safiya’s daughter Wonda Jones, that Laura assembled and edited the War Before.
Laura Whitehorn/Sundiata Sadiq:
- When I was first in prison there was no library. Nothing. Whoever we were as political prisoners, we would have met Safiya. When she got out of prison in 1983, she made it her business to go and fight for every political prisoner in this country, that she could get to who wanted to be part of a movement to free political prisoners.
- Safiya: The fight for the freedom of political prisoners can’t be separate from the fight against repression in general whomever that is effecting. If she were alive today, I’m sure she would have been at the rally for Fahad Hashmi and fighting for the rights of immigrant detainees.
- Safiya: Political prisoners will continue to arise if people oppose the government.
- This book began with Wonda Jones (Safiya’s daughter) Wonda in some ways has been working on this book for her entire life.
- Safiya was aware all the time that the “freedom and democracy” that this country promotes as its image only exists on the suffering of so many people. Her politics were a challenge to the government all along, her being was a challenge.
- Some of these are essays, some of these are speeches. Safiya was investigating, she was questioning, she was willing to look at herself, what each of us brings into a movement. There is a connection between her humility, her honesty and her commitment.
- Sundiata: I became close to Herman Ferguson and Safiya.
- Laura: I was in prison when Jericho was founded.
- Sundiata: I was asked to get Sofiya into the Sing Sing Prison to talk to the brothers.
- They had to remove her (Safiya) uterus because of fibroids.
- In the February issue of the Monthly Review we have an excerpt of Sofiya’s chapters. It’s about post traumatic stress symptoms in the Black Panther party. When I was putting this manuscript together and re-read it, I thought, I would like people to read this book from beginning to end.
Guest: Laura Whitehorn – revolutionary ex-political prisoner and native New Yorker Laura Whitehorn. Since the 1960s Laura was active in supporting groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Movement and was active with Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. Laura also worked to expose the FBI’s Counter Intelligence.
Guest – Sundiata Sadiq. (Walter Brooks) He is a leading member of the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition in New York City and was a close friend of Safiya Bukhari for many years. Sudiata has been politically active since the late sixties, and he was also the president of the Ossining, New York Chapter of the NAACP.
—-
Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal: Johanna Fernandez
The U.S. Supreme Court recently re-opened the possibility that Pennsylvania may execute award-winning journalist and world-renowned “Voice of the Voiceless” Mumia Abu-Jamal. The high Court referred his case back to the Third Circuit to reconsider its 2008 decision that Mumia could have a new penalty phase hearing in light of the Court’s ruling in the Ohio case of Smith v. Spisak. Spisak’s jury-imposed death sentence had been reversed when his attorneys, like Mumia’s, successfully invoked a critical 1988 Supreme Court decision in the Mills V. Maryland case. Mills rejected the idea that jurors had to be unanimous on the mitigating circumstances that existed in a case. Before Mills, juries had little or no alternative but to impose death if even one juror blocked consideration of a mitigating circumstance. The High Court’s recent decision in Mills will now make it easier to obtain death sentences in capital cases; Mumia’s attorneys will argue that his case is distinguishable from Spisak’s.
Mumia as many know, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. A previous guest here on Law and Disorder, author/ journalist J. Patrick O’Connor who wrote The Framing of Mumia Abu Jamal, says the real shooter was Kenneth Freeman a business partner of Mumia’s brother. Freeman, was found dead in 1985, bound and cuffed in a Philadelphia parking lot.
Professor Johanna Fernandez:
- Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal emerged in the 1990s to build a profile for Mumia on college campuses among educators and students.
- We’re also making the movement mainstream in pointing out what’s wrong with the criminal justice system.
- We’re getting a hip hop show for schools for spring break (Pennsylvania colleges)
- We want to educate young people and students in a nation that incarcerates 3 million people. That’s the size of San Francisco.
- I’ve known Mumia for about five years. I have used Mumia in the classroom live through phone conference. He speaks on issues such as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Black Panther Party and the criminal justice system today. These live conferences are incredibly powerful.
- Conversations with Mumia are intense, we talk about politics, Obama. We talk a lot about what life is like on death row. His cell is the size of a small bathroom. He’s only allowed 20 books at any given time. His cell is messy because he’s a researcher, a writer.
- Mumia: food is horrendous. They’re allowed to buy food, MRE style pre-packaged dry food. The servicing of inmates in this country is a billion dollar industry.
- What’s interesting about his situation is the state has tried to strip him of his intellectual vitality. Although they have failed, he’s written six books from death row, he’s got his radio journals.
- The first thing the movement is asking people to do is to arm themselves with the facts of the case. Then you can sign a petition. There’s another petition calling for Obama to make a statement on the case.
- If you’re a student or a university professor we are asking you to help us organize a large town hall meeting, for April 3, 2010 (likely in NYC) Mumia’s case should be taken up during Black History Month by colleges all over the city.
Guest – Educators for Mumia member Johanna Fernandez. Johanna Fernandez is a native New Yorker. She received a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and a B.A. in Literature and American Civilization from Brown University.
——-
Gaza Freedom March Report Back Speeches
We hear another strong speech from Palestinian teacher and filmmaker Fida Qishta. Fida is from Rafah, Southern Gaza.
Gaza Freedom March Commitments Include:
- Palestinian Self-Determination
- Ending the Occupation
- Equal Rights for All within historic Palestine
- The full Right of Return for Palestinian refugees
From: Waging Nonviolence blog. The Egyptian government didn’t let most of the over 1,300 protesters from around the world into Gaza for the planned march, but those at Judson said that they witnessed a new stage in the emergence of a global movement, facilitated by the Internet, that may well be poised to end the international support that makes Israel’s policies possible. The lynchpin of the movement, the Cairo Declaration of the Gaza Freedom March, was drafted by would-be marchers while they waited in Egypt.
——————————————————————————————–
Censorship, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Gaza, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Updates:
——–
Gaza Freedom March Report Back Speeches
We hear strong speeches detailing the experience at the Gaza Freedom March by Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and our own co-host Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. As many listeners know, hundreds of activists with the Gaza Freedom Marchers returned from Israel, Palestine and Egypt from the largest international mobilization of people in solidarity. The Egyptian authorities refused to allow the 1,365 participants from 43 countries to enter the Gaza Strip, but later 100 people were let in to Gaza.
Michael Ratner’s Article: From Hebron to Yad Vashem: Jewish Sorrow Justifying the Sorrow of Others
Gaza Freedom March Commitments Include:
- Palestinian Self-Determination
- Ending the Occupation
- Equal Rights for All within historic Palestine
- The full Right of Return for Palestinian refugees
From: Waging Nonviolence blog. The Egyptian government didn’t let most of the over 1,300 protesters from around the world into Gaza for the planned march, but those at Judson said that they witnessed a new stage in the emergence of a global movement, facilitated by the Internet, that may well be poised to end the international support that makes Israel’s policies possible. The lynchpin of the movement, the Cairo Declaration of the Gaza Freedom March, was drafted by would-be marchers while they waited in Egypt.
—-
Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace
In the wake of Gaza Siege earlier this year, many groups such as Code Pink have brought delegations of people to Israel to visit and bring support to Palestinian refugees and families. Today we talk with Joel Bitar, he’s a student who traveled to Israel with the group Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. The group is an international network of academics and students supporting a complete end to the illegal Israeli occupation of lands seized in 1967. Last summer, Joel was among many who visited Israeli universities, the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and stayed with Palestinian families. These delegations call on the international academic community to take a stand in supporting the end to occupation in Gaza and the West Bank.
Joel Bitar:
- Most of my life I tried to hide my Palestinian identity and this trip was all about confronting and realizing who I am. For so long, especially after 9/11 it wasn’t respectable to be an Arab in America.
- I was kind of ashamed of my Dad’s history and culture for a long time. This trip was about inner healing and understanding where I came from.
- I went to the West Bank for a month and a half.
- It’s all about fitting in and surviving, being a confrontational force in a culture is something I didn’t have the courage to do unfortunately. My family has been apolitical. Doing activism around this (Gaza) has been unifying for my family.
- It’s enabled us to confront all the awful aspects of American culture and society.
- What happened in Gaza, shook me, woke me up. I’ve been doing a lot of investigating about the conflict, it seemed so mystical and mysterious. I read a couple books, it’s really not that complicated, it’s very simple. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid – Jimmy Carter / The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
- I learned about Norman Finkelstein and conflict between him and Alan Dershwitz.
- Simple in terms of the law. The law is very clear. You can’t acquire territory by force. Something you learn when you’re growing up, don’t bully people, don’t take their stuff.
- We visited numerous hot spots of the occupation, we went to Hebron, which is under vicious occupation by Israeli soldiers.
- 8 Meter high concrete slabs in many places. 85 percent of the wall runs on Palestinian land.
- Duel road systems and duel license plates.
- My Palestinian family pay taxes but don’t get the benefits of the taxes, they’re living in an imposed ghetto.
- They don’t have access to water 24/7 like every other Jew in the settlement. There’s garbage everywhere.
- We’ve been doing a lot of work with the Gaza Freedom March, with the anti-war movement at Hunter.
- A lot of the Jews who do an iota of research at Hunter know that what Israel did was awful. Breaking The Silence Report
Guest: Joel Bitar, a Hunter College student who traveled to Israel with the group Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. The group is an international network of academics and students supporting a complete end to the illegal Israeli occupation of lands seized in 1967. Joel is active with the Hunter College Campus Anti-War Network.
———————————————————————
Afghanistan War, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Death Penalty, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Prison Industry, Supreme Court, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Updates:
—
The Death Penalty Loses Support of The American Law Institute
In late 2009, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual structure for the current capital justice system for nearly 50 years, essentially announced that its project has failed. The American Law Institute or A.L.I. is made up of around 4 thousand judges, lawyers and law professors, streamlines law and model codes to provide coherence in a federal legal system that is usually taking a varied approach. In a 1962 Model Code, the best legal minds of the institute framed a way for the death penalty to be carried out fairly, it then was re-instated in 1976. Now, the same people disavow the structure saying there is no fair system of capital punishment. The New York Times, in one article wrote (quote) the institute’s move represents a tectonic shift in legal theory. The article also points out that capital punishment was plagued by problems including racial disparities.
David Seth Michaels:
- American Law Institute, the intellectual group that tries to cobble together federal law in the United States including capital punishment. The capital punishment rules that they invented fifty years ago, have been the groundwork on which everything has happened since.
- So, it comes as a bit of a shock that fifty years later, they say “oh, oh.” It doesn’t work. It won’t work, we can’t make it work, so we’re going to fold up our tents. We won’t have anything else to do with it.
- Unworkable elements in the system: They’re troubled by the racial disparity on who gets executed, there’s tremendous disparity that is regional across the U.S. The prospect of capital punishment is ridiculously expensive. There’s risk of executing innocent people and politics of appointed judges who wantonly convict.
- It’s one of these circumstances that it is irreparably falling apart, broken. Everywhere you turn you find horrendous errors, egregious discrimination.
- The murder rate is higher in places where they have the death penalty than places where they don’t have the death penalty. Public support for the death penalty has been slowly and gradually decreasing.
- In the early 70s I became concerned about conditions in the prisons and mental hospitals in Tennesee and Mississippi. This is after the restoration of the death penalty in 1976.
- I can’t wait for the day that capital punishment is abolished. This system can’t die soon enough. You got nobody supporting the death penalty on an intellectual basis.
- National Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
Guest – Attorney David Seth Michaels. David has represented clients for 30 years, clients such as prison inmates in Mississippi and Tennessee. He’s worked with Brooklyn Legal Services B and with the Federal Defenders Service Appeals. He is also a novelist, has his own practice in New York.
—————————-
Lawyers You’ll Like: Jim Lafferty Part II
We’re delighted to have back with us attorney Jim Lafferty for the second half of our Lawyers You’ll Like series. He is the Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles and host of The Lawyers Guild Show, a weekly public affairs program on Pacifica radio sister station KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
He has served as a chief officer of, and spokesperson for, various national anti-war coalitions, including the National Peace Action Coalition, the anti-Vietnam War coalition that organized the largest protests during that war; the National Coalition for Peace in the Middle East; and, the National Campaign to End U.S. Intervention in the Philippines. In the 60s and 70s, his law firm, Lafferty, Reosti, Jabara, Papakian & Smith, represented virtually all of the left political movements in and around Detroit, Michigan, during which time he became one of this nation’s leading experts on Selective Service law and military law.
In the early 80’s, Mr. Lafferty founded and chaired the largest A.C.L.U. Chapter in the State of Michigan. In New York City, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, he traveled the world organizing on behalf of the labor rights of merchant seafarers. During this time he also taught a course at the New School for Social Research, entitled, Vietnam: The War at Home and Abroad. More recently, Jim Lafferty was the Coordinator of the L.A. Coalition to Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as a member of the national steering committee of the Campaign to Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Jim Lafferty:
- The man who was presented to me as my uncle, when I was sixteen he died, my mother acknowledged that he was my father. A friend of mine, she was a white nurse and she was married to a white school teacher and had a 3 year old daughter.
- She divorced that man and married a black surgeon. Her mother and former husband wanted custody feeling it was inappropriate for child to be raised in biracial home. George Crockett was one of the lawyers in the National Lawyers Guild in Michigan, took the case only if I clerked and read every opinion on domestic relations given down by the Michigan Supreme Court.
- We lost that case, and I continued working with that firm. They made a movie about that called “One Potato, Two Potato”
- The firm had been lawyers for UAW. I had gone down South to work with the lawyers guild in 1963, I was taking depositions for the Freedom Democratic Party. That’s where I met Mary Robinson.
- Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy / Bill Kunstler’s book (1966) Deep In My Heart
- Michael Smith: Jeff Haas says Fred Hampton had Bill’s book, Deep In My Heart on his bed.
- When you finally take a stand, even though it leads to your incarceration and apparent lack of freedom, you’re finally free. Anti-war movements: Some friends of mine ran as peace candidates just to bring up the question of the war. We ran the entire campaign for 3300.00. Including 10 small billboards. Later we put together the Detroit Coalition to End the War in Vietnam Now.
- I wasn’t representing people anymore, but as the head of this coalition, you were doing public speaking, and getting an appreciation for what the power of people could do. To the credit of those lawyers who were winning those victories, even then they were saying to younger lawyers like me, but the real important thing is what goes on in the streets.
- Los Angeles Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, – Labor Movement is vital. The anti-war movement is vibrant. You can’t blame the young activists for not knowing history, because nobody’s bothered to teach them. I’d like to see the movement coalesce around a meaningful left socialist third party.
- On the issue of the war, we’re worse off than we were with Bush.
- Healthcare plan: boondoggle for insurance companies, if you insure people who haven’t been insured, the profits of insurance companies aren’t gonna go down, you and I will pay more. Whereas the government should be paying more. NY Times article: putting aside the public option, you get past it by not dealing with it.
Guest – Attorney Jim Lafferty, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles and host of The Lawyers Guild Show, a weekly public affairs program on Pacifica radio sister station KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
————————————————————–
