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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 100 stations across the United States and podcasting on the web. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder October 28, 2024
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Special Report: Global Threats To Freedom Of Expression Arising From Gaza Conflict
On top of the devastating humanitarian crisis and the issues of genocide and violations of human rights in Gaza and the West Bank, there has been an unprecedented attack on freedom of the press and freedom of expression globally prompted by that war.
In August, Irene Khan the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression issued an alarming report examining the impact of the conflict in Gaza on freedom of expression throughout the world. The report highlighted “attacks on journalists and media restrictions, endangering access to information about the conflict globally; suppression of protests and dissent and undermining of academic and artistic freedoms in polarized political environment; and restrictions on legitimate political expression in the name of fighting terrorism and antisemitism.”
The Special Rapporteur assessed the compliance of States, social media companies and other private actors with international human rights standards, online and offline, and she found “an extensive pattern of unlawful, discriminatory and disproportionate restrictions on advocacy for the rights of Palestinian people.”
The report emphasized “the importance of freedom of opinion and expression – enjoyed on an equal basis by all sides – as an invaluable tool for fighting hate and encouraging mutual respect and dialogue.” Based on her detailed findings, the Special Rapporteur called on States, social media companies and other private actors to reject double standards on human rights and made concrete recommendations for them to uphold the right to freedom of opinion and expression equally for all.
Guest – Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Appointed on August 1, 2020, Ms Khan is the first woman to hold this position since the establishment of the mandate in 1993. UN Special Rapporteurs are independent human rights experts with a mandate to report and advise on human rights from a thematic perspective. As part of her role, Ms Khan conducts country visits, acts on individual cases and sends official communications to governments, and presents thematic reports to the UN General Assembly.
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A History Of Anti-Black Racism
National chauvinism and racism are essential features of fascism. The practice of white racism in the United States during the Jim Crow era was something that Hitler’s party in Germany studied and emulated. This kind of anti-black racism went on in the United States from shortly after the Civil War up until the 1960s. It has never really gone away as the mass mobilizations of the Black Lives Matter movement has recently demonstrated. This Black resistance, this fight back, will be a central aspect of anti-fascist activity in the future.
Guest – Bill Mullen is professor emeritus of American studies at Purdue University and the co-founder of The Campus Anti-fascist Network. He’s also co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition and his new book published last month We Charge Genocide: American Ashes and the Rule of Law.
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Law and Disorder October 21, 2024
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Journalists Under Fire In Israel-Gaza Conflict
Today we turn to the status of press freedom in Israel. Since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and during the ensuing war in Gaza ever since, which is now moving into the West Bank, the pressure on journalists who are trying to cover what’s been happening there is increasing… and more dangerous.
According to the New York-based Committee To Protect Journalists, the Israel-Gaza war has claimed the lives of more journalists over the course of a year than in any other conflict the organization has documented. They estimate 128 journalists killed and 69 imprisoned.
The foreign and Israeli journalists who are bold enough to enter Gaza to report on what’s happening can only do so if they are accompanied by Israeli forces… and under strict surveillance. And the Israeli military has no qualms about shutting down news outlets like Al Jazeera – even its bureau in Ramallah, in the West Bank, which is an area supposedly under Palestinian control.
And just last week, Israeli Occupational Forces arrested a US citizen, journalist Jeremy Loffredo, charging him with endangering national security for his reporting on Iranian strikes. Reporters Without Borders condemns what it calls Israel’s climate of intimidation, and has called on the Israeli authorities to stop obstructing the work of journalists covering the war.
Guest – Kevin Gosztola is a journalist and editor of The Dissenter Newsletter, which regularly covers whistleblowing, press freedom, and government secrecy. He is the author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange and known for his work reporting on the extradition proceedings against Assange and the court-martial against Chelsea Manning. Both were prosecuted and convicted under the Espionage Act.
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One issue from the Cold War topic stills looms large today: the growing threat of nuclear war. While many hoped the end of the Cold War would signal a retreat from the nuclear arms race, recent developments suggest otherwise. Tensions between amid U.S., Russia, and China have escalated, and key nuclear arms control treaties, such as the INF Treaty have eroded, with the future of the New START agreement uncertain.
The war in Ukraine, punctuated by Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling, has revived fears of potential nuclear escalation. At the same time, huge sums are being funneled into expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenals. In several decades, it is estimated that the total cost of modernizing and maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal amounts to approximately $1.7 trillion. Emerging technologies, like hypersonic missiles and Artificial Intelligence in military decision-making, further complicate the stability of nuclear deterrence, raising new questions about global security.
Guest – Dr. Ira Helfand is a member of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, which was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. Helfand is also the immediate past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, or IPPNW, a founding partner of ICAN and itself the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He co-founded and served as past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, the US affiliate of IPPNW. Dr. Helfand is also co-founder of the Back from the Brink campaign, the key vehicle for people in the U.S. who want to get involved in this issue.
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Law and Disorder October 14, 2024
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Fascism on Trial: Education, and the Possibility of Democracy
Fascist Germany’s industrial murder of Jews in Europe 80 years ago has been seared into the consciousness of humankind. Today its a great irony of history that the Israeli government, which claims to be the moral legatee of the holocaust, is carrying out a genocide against millions of Palestinians in Gaza.
This is being done with the full support of the American government which supplies political, diplomatic, and propaganda cover for what Israel is doing. It supplies the bombs, planes, artillery shells, tanks and bulldozers to physically destroy the buildings and infrastructure of the Gaza strip. The people who live there have been systematically starved, as the Nazis starved the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto.
The response of American students and college campuses across the country was magnificent. Tent encampments sprung up in several hundred places. They became the focal point for a full-throated discussion of the realities in Gaza and American complicity in the ongoing genocide. Demands for cease-fire were raised. Demands that the universities divest themselves of investments in Israel and American arms manufactures were put forward.
Sadly, this manifestation of critical thinking came to a crashing end. The wealthy and their servants in Congress, and in the mass media, accused the students of being antisemitic and of supporting terrorism. Congressional hearings were held. University presidents were fired. Professors lost their jobs. Students were expelled from schools. The great campus uprising was closed down. And new and much more restrictive rules for protest have been imposed in campuses all across the United States.
Guest – Professor Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies department and is the Pablo Frère, Distinguished Scholar in Creative Pedagogy. Henry Giroux has authored many books, most recently with Anthony DiMaggio, titled, Fascism on Trial: Education, and the Possibility of Democracy.
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War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine
The United States is engaged in constant, if often invisible, wars. Or, if not invisible, at least not accurately and fully reported on in the corporate media. Thereby leaving the people of the United States far from fully informed as to what and where U.S. military troops are stationed or engaged in military action. For example, while there has been a great deal of media coverage of the U.S. supported Israeli war in Palestine, one would have needed to pay extra close attention to that coverage to know that the U.S., even before that war began, had 40,000 U.S. troops stationed in the area. Or that the Biden Administration has just recently sent at least 1,500 more to join them. And how many of us know that late last year retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick, said that, and I quote: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. Everyone understands that we (Israel) can’t fight this war without the United States.
So last year, Norman Solomon, our guest today, wrote a much noted and much-admired book titled, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. And that book has just been reissued with an up-dated afterword about the Gaza War, by the author. Naomi Klein, best-selling author of The Shock Doctrine, says the book is “A Staggeringly Important Intervention”. Noam Chomsky, says Solomon’s book is a “gripping and painful study of the mechanisms behind our invisible, but perpetual, national state of war.”
Guest – Norman Solomon is the co-founder of RootsAction.org and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and is, in fact, the author or co-author, of 12 books, most touching on today’s topic in either close or tangential ways. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
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