Leave those kids alone! Thousands of schoolchildren being spied on without their knowledge
RT | November 8, 2016
At least 1,000 schools have installed software that allows teachers to monitor their students’ internet activity, but most schools have failed to inform youngsters that they are being watched.
According to a report by civil liberties watchdog Big Brother Watch, several secondary schools in England and Wales have installed the Classroom Management Software in more than 821,000 devices owned by the institutions and by pupils themselves.
The tool can allow teachers to monitor the screens on every single desktop in the classroom, as well as access the students’ internet browsing history and alert staff of “signs of extremism and radicalization.”
Campaigners were shocked to find that of the few institutions (149) able to provide Acceptable Use policies on their management of the software, over 80 percent did not give detailed information on the monitoring process.
Big Brother Watch believes although the software may have a role to play in keeping students safe, children and parents should be advised about the privacy settings of the program.
“Finding the balance between keeping pupils safe online without impinging on their right to privacy is a challenge for every school,” said the group’s chief executive Renate Samson.
“But encouraging schools to track and monitor pupils creates a worrying precedent, particularly if pupils and parents are being left in the dark.
“As technology in the classroom becomes the norm, schools must ensure they don’t become modern day panopticons, where children grow up believing their every digital move is being watched.”
It cost the taxpayer a total of £2 million (US$2.48 million) to install the controversial software. More is spent each year on maintenance and subscription fees.
‘Conspiracy Vs. Government’ Is Part of an Elite Wave of Propaganda Justifying Violent Repression
The daily Bell – October 31, 2016
The rise of paranoid politics could make America ungovernable – and the FBI is fuelling the fire … Nothing can disprove the fears of a paranoiac. Indeed, everything confirms them … It takes away politicians’ incentive to understand one another and get things done. It says that if you scream loud enough, established norms will buckle under the pressure. And while those norms might be annoying and flawed, we’ll all miss them if they go. –UK Telegraph
With US belief in “conspiracy theory” over 50 percent (see our previous article here) elites are showing increasing concern that they have lost control of their narrative.
This article again illustrates elite push back. The article explains that if people grow paranoid about government, then the “norms” of government will collapse.
Conspiracy theory is called “paranoid politics” in this article but it amounts to the same thing.
The article also has parallels to an article we analyzed recently here by Cass Sunstein. His Bloomberg editorial suggested that nothing was more important from a political standpoint than returning “civility” to Congress and politics generally.
This article runs along the same lines: Negative perceptions of the US government can make the process of “governing” dysfunctional
More:
Take the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory: the idea that the white trails left behind in the sky by aeroplanes are sinister chemicals dispersed to sterilise or control voters.
If a government declares there is “no evidence” of such chemicals, that itself must be clear evidence that there’s something “they” don’t want us to know. But if that government were to open up an investigation, that too would be incontrovertible proof: “they” must have found something.
Let’s reverse this reasoning. Apparently, one can’t question much that government does because skepticism puts government in a no-win situation.
Better to accept official pronouncements, then. The only trouble is that almost anything modern Western governments say are lies.
Governments aren’t even important these days. The world from what we can tell is run by a small banking elite that controls the awesome power of central banks and the money they print.
The trillions available to this small group has allowed it to change the nature of society around the world.
The goal is global government and every kind of violence and corruption is employed to achieve it.
Secrecy is still employed by those creating “one world.” Thus the world is bent on the task of creating global governance while never admitting it.
But in the past several decades, the Internet has credibly exposed plans for world government. As a result, people have lost faith in mainstream media, politicians and capitalism itself.
This is the reason for the rise in “conspiracy theory” and “paranoid politics.”
This is also the reason elites would like to shut down the Internet, or at least control it more thoroughly.
Part of the push for control involves making a case that the Internet needs to be better regulated and appropriately censored.
To this end, elite propaganda has been aimed at justifying various anti-‘Net actions.
One justification involves the “populism versus globalism” meme we’ve covered extensively. (Just use a search engine for the phrase and “Daily Bell.”)
Another justification – another emergent meme – is that government itself is jeopardized by pervasive distrust.
One would think the answer would be to lie less, but this is not the conclusion we’re being furnished.
Both Sunstein in his article, and now the argument in this article, show us clearly that the solution to pervasive electoral cyncism and worse is to better control one’s attitude.
In other words, paranoia and conspiratorial cynicism need to be damped for government to survive and perform its proper function.
Here:
Why, then, did a seasoned operator like Mr Comey, whose judiciousness was praised by the Clinton campaign through the summer, feel the need to divulge this half-baked and potentially insignificant development before assessing it? There is one answer: fear of the mob.
The director of the FBI – those tough guys who smash in doors and shoot people – was scared that if he didn’t talk now and the news leaked out, it would confirm every conspiracy theory going about how the agency was in the Clintons’ pocket. In other words, we’ve reached a point in the politics of the world’s most powerful democracy where the appearance of probity matters more than the reality.
This is a key point in the article. It is one that fully reveals the cognitive dissonance at the heart of this particular argument. The idea is that government is too delicate to sustain itself in the face of the “mob.” The mob must therefore be silenced or “probity will matter more than reality.”
But who is to determine what constitutes a “mob”? And who is determine that the mob’s “reality” is false?
Both the Sunstein article and now this one are erecting very specific kinds of arguments. Government, we are told, is fragile and must be protected from forces that will undermine its credibility.
But this conclusion is merely assumed. It is never proven.
This argument begins and ends with government. Yet the Internet and its recovered history shows us clearly that Western governments mostly provide concealment for the world’s real powers that prefer to operate behind the scenes.
This is the reason for so much cynicism. Many have realized that the society constructed around them is lie. They have reacted by distrusting almost anything associated with modern society.
But in these articles, we can see the forces being marshaled against this state of mind. The preferred antidote is simply to assert that people’s distrust is corrosive to government authority and democracy generally.
No logic bolsters this argument. That’s why it is an emergent elite meme.
The goal of an elite meme is to be convincing not truthful.
And if it is not convincing – and increasingly elite memes are not – then its function is, anyway, to provide a justification for what we call directed history. These are the authoritarian strategies that elites wish to inflict on the rest of us.
This latter meme is an outgrowth of “populism versus globalism.” Populists, as we’ve pointed out, are being cast as ignorant, violent and intolerant. The current meme – let’s call it “conspiracy versus government” – lumps in conspiracy with populism.
Populists, we learn, are apt to adopt an irrational distrust of government. And what is government? It must comprise all that is good and virtuous in an uncivil world.
Both populists and conspiracy theory are to be vanquished, eventually, by wise globalists who understand that the absence of government will lead to violent “anarchy.”
Would that it were true. It is not. Government is merely in this day-and-age a curtain hiding the world’s real controllers who use endless violence, monetary debasement and economic depression to get their way.
Conclusion: We are watching the emergence of a new, dangerous memes. Increasingly and forcefully, it is being argued that “government” is good and that the truths people have discovered about their lives and society are destabilizing to government, and therefore “bad.” The idea will be to use these memes to make a case for increased censorship and even, eventually, violent repression – and worse.
Facebook investigated by German prosecutors for failing to stop ‘hate speech’
RT | November 4, 2016
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and other senior executives are being investigated in Germany after a lawyer filed a complaint accusing them of allegedly allowing racist and violent posts to remain on the social networking site.
The social media giant was accused of doing little to stop racism, Holocaust denial and violent threats on the site, according to Der Spiegel.
A Bavarian lawyer initiated the case by reporting Facebook to the police, accusing the company’s management of allowing such hateful posts to stay on the site without any consequences.
Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, European policy director Richard Allan and company head in the Berlin office Maria Kirschsieper, are also under investigation.
German law requires Facebook to delete any content considered to be inciting hatred. Earlier this year, the company was also hit with a criminal complaint, but authorities said at the time they were unable to investigate because the accused, Zuckerberg, was not residing within German borders when it was brought to light.
German politicians have criticized Facebook for reportedly failing to take action against hate speech on the site.
In October, Volker Kauder, a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said Facebook and other social media giants should face penalties for not taking action against hate speech, following the rise of xenophobic comments amid the refugee crisis in Europe.
Kauder said he had “run out of patience” with how social media giants were dealing with abusive content.
Many users of Facebook, Twitter and Google said that despite pledges from the companies to remove hate speech within 24 hours from their sites, users complaints were not adequately dealt with, the Local reports.
Facebook did not comment on the investigation status but said “the allegations lack merit and there has been no violation of German law by Facebook or its employees.”
Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, Bias Reporting: The New Micro-techniques of Surveillance and Control
By Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. | Legitgov | September 12, 2016
A singular orthodoxy has infiltrated the discursive parameters of U.S. and other universities and colleges. This orthodoxy now constitutes the ethical vocabulary of academia. Adopted from feminism, anti-racism, and LGBTQ theory and practice, the language, doctrines, and mechanisms of this orthodoxy now dominate academia’s policies, procedures and handbooks. The terminology has become the vernacular among the swelling ranks of administrators, especially the relatively new cohort of chief diversity officers, directors of diversity, associate provosts of diversity, assistant provosts of diversity, diversity consultants, and so on and so on. I refer not merely to the orthodoxy of “diversity,” but in particular to “diversity” initiatives as they are currently administered, using a particular set of policies, procedures, and mechanisms: trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias reporting, and the like.
While ridiculed by media outlets, and, at least where trigger warnings are concerned, disavowed by the American Association of University Professors, nevertheless, American colleges and universities are dominated by this ethos and its collective techne. At the University of Chicago for example, the Dean of Students, John (Jay) Ellison, Ph.D., announced (to the great chagrin of some faculty and many students):
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own…
Yet, the same university has also assembled and maintains a “Bias Response Team,” and “urges anyone who has experienced or witnessed a Bias Incident to report it to the Bias Response Team.”
As it usually happens, any perspective that deviates from this “academic” orthodoxy – or any opposition expressed by faculty members in reasoned commentary or debate about the premises of the creed and/or its techniques – is virtually proscribed in advance. Whether or not they happen to be progressives, left communists, or radicals of another stripe, potential critics rightly fear being figured as right-wing reactionaries opposed to diversity and the confrontation of oppression. Any complaints or criticisms, they fear, would be peremptorily dismissed, and likely circulated among other faculty members within their own universities or in academia at large as gossip, subjecting the critic to ridicule and disrepute.
Indeed, despite the fact that a new form of policing has been surreptitiously introduced into academia at large, one would be hard-pressed to find a single article, essay, or book that subjects the entire administratively controlled apparatuses of “diversity” to any kind of real scrutiny. While innumerable articles have appeared on one or another of these topics (mostly on trigger warnings and safe spaces), no one has explained the structural provenance nor analysed the probable effects of these developments as a whole. Nor has anyone provided a theoretical or historical framework with which to understand them.
Ironically, perhaps, the most clearly appropriate critical theoretic for grasping the structural origins, as well as the social and political implications of this new largely “academic”1 development, can be found within the ambit of postmodern theory itself. The new mechanisms adopted and adapted by academic administrations clearly and incredibly mirror those described in a text widely read within humanities and social science studies courses throughout American universities and beyond. Indeed, it is a wonder that no one has, until now, applied this critique to the mechanisms of this academic creed. Faculty members, graduate students, and even many undergraduates, who have had even the slightest brush with trends in the humanities and social sciences, will know to what I refer here: Michel Foucault’s brilliant 1975 book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Particularly uncanny is the resemblance of the academic mechanisms in question to the “micro-physics of power” described in the third chapter, “Panopticism.”
In this riveting essay, Foucault effectually describes the transmutation of power from the pre-modern to the modern period. Adducing Jeremy Bentham’s architectural model of the “Panopticon,” Foucault proffers what at the time was an utterly novel understanding of modern “discipline” and control. The new disciplinary mechanisms that Foucault discusses replace the earlier corporeal forms of punishment, such as quartering people in public, or branding them with the crimes they supposedly committed, and so forth. While the Panopticon was first introduced by Bentham as a model of prison, asylum, and school reform, the forms of surveillance and discipline to some extent prefigured by the Panopticon and in some sense preceding it, for Foucault had already metastasized beyond the prison system, becoming the general means of discipline and control in so-called “democratic” societies.
The Panopticon itself is a circular building, in which its subjects – inmates, patients, students, etc. – are arrayed in cells surrounding a central tower. The subjects can be seen at any time by a guard, who may (or may not) occupy the central tower. The captive subjects cannot see into the tower, nor can they see each other. Likewise, they are never certain whether or not they are being observed:
Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap (Foucault 200).
Although the captive individual can never verify with certainty that she is being observed, the very possibility of being observed at any time produces the intended effects of hyper-vigilance and self-circumspection on the part of the subject. As such, the subjects themselves internalize the observer, and effectively monitor and police themselves. As Foucault brilliantly describes the effects of this technological innovation:
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles [that of observer and observed]; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (203, emphasis added).
Make no mistake, Foucault describes and mobilizes the architectural model of the Panopticon in order to introduce his central argument – in modernity, entire societies are inscribed with, underwritten by, and even predicated upon a generalizable and generalized method of surveillance and control – panopticism. Even the once structure-bound, institution-specific disciplinary techniques as represented so well by the Panopticon have metastasized and traveled well beyond their former institutional borders. They now permeate the entire social body. In fact, in an important section, Foucault discusses “the swarming of the disciplinary mechanisms” of panopticism. The phrasing will invoke for contemporary readers the sentinels in “The Matrix,” the legion of squid-like robots that seek out, locate, and swarm about the escapees from the matrix in sweltering masses.
For our purposes, perhaps the most salient aspect of panopticism is the way that it makes all of its subjects into potential sentinels of surveillance: “We have seen that anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of surveillance” (207). That is, anyone and everyone can be interpellated as a functionary of panopticism. “If you see something, say something” is the mantra that effectively encapsulates this logic. Universities and colleges employ the micro-techniques of power precisely in the fashion described by Foucault.
At this point, I should make clear a parallel between the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century model that Foucault treats, and the contemporary devices employed in academia and beyond. A point that is often lost on many readers of Foucault’s “Panopticism,” especially those unfamiliar with nineteenth-century British cultural history, is that Jeremy Bentham was not some reactionary, right-wing or even conservative thinker attempting to impose a nefarious, draconian form of discipline and punishment upon the population. In fact, during his time, Bentham was regarded as a radical, what today we would call a “progressive.” Bentham was known as the principle member of an early nineteenth-century group of reformers known as “the philosophical radicals.” As noted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he advocated numerous liberal reforms, including “annual elections; equal electoral districts; a wide suffrage, including woman suffrage; and the secret ballot. He supported in principle the participation of women in government and argued for the reform of marriage law to allow greater freedom to divorce.”
My point here is that regardless of the political provenance or original intention of the repertoire of diversity mechanisms, as Foucault makes clear, such methods and techniques, whether introduced initially by reformers for progressive ends or not, can and have often been co-opted by administers of power and wielded to oppressive ends. Likewise, the origin of the new academic instruments or “micro-physics of power” in feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ discourse and practice in no way exempts them from being employed as mechanisms of surveillance and control.
Academia has co-opted and now brandishes identity-politics and its techniques of micro-power – including trigger warnings, safe spaces, and bias reporting – as means of the disciplining of the subject. Bias reporting lines are examples of the ways colleges and universities are able to enlist everyone within their ambit as sentinels of surveillance, discipline, and punishment. Bias reporting lines and reporting systems encourage everyone to act as an instrument of panopticism, an instrument of self- and other-policing.
In terms of the academy, however, the use of such mechanisms does not represent a perversion of intent. They are coercive as such, by definition. They are part of a growing panoply of micro-techniques of power representing the appropriation and defusing of politics, rather than opposition to the systems of oppression that such politics intend to represent.
These techniques of surveillance and control recall such organizations of the nineteenth century as The Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1802. The only real difference involves what now count as punishable offenses. In the early to mid-nineteenth century in Britain, offenses included the production, distribution and consumption of pornography, as well as expressions of blasphemy, and the like. Today, “vices” and “blasphemies” include real or imagined “micro-aggressions,” or any conceivable displays of “bias,” however absurdly construed. Both regimes, however, are equally religious in character, involving as they do moralistic, individualized, and personalized policing. While both are insidious, only contemporary academic panopticism, operating under the guise of protecting and encouraging “diversity,” is anathema to academic freedom and inquiry, while simultaneously underming any potential for collective agency, or solidarity, among its subjects. Above all, panopticism individualizes.
Meanwhile, and probably most importantly, none of this policing and self-policing will do anything to challenge or overturn systemic oppression in the least. In fact, while serving the ideological function of obscuring the underlying structural inequities, oppression and exploitation of capitalism, they also constitute their own form of oppression.
[1] As Lori R. Price has pointed out, these same mechanisms have metastasized and infiltrated such social media platforms as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.com.
Michael Rectenwald is a professor in Global Liberal Studies at New York University. He is the author of Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), primary editor of Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age (De Gruyter, 2015), and primary author of Academic Writing, Real World Topics (Broadview Press, 2015). His essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including the British Journal for the History of Science, Endevour, and George Eliot in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
NYPD to Innocent Business Owners: Give Up Your Rights or Get Shut Down
Institute For Justice | October 12, 2016
When undercover NYPD officers offered to sell stolen electronics to customers at Sung Cho’s laundromat, near the northern tip of Manhattan, Sung never imagined the sting operation could be used as a pretext to shut down his business. But that’s exactly what happened. Attorneys for the city threatened Sung with eviction merely because a “stolen property” offense had happened at his business.
The city presented Sung with a choice: See his business shut down or sign an agreement giving up constitutional rights—including his Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches of his business. Faced with the imminent closure of his laundromat, Sung had no real choice but to sign.
In New York City today, this experience is all too common. Under New York City’s so-called nuisance eviction ordinance—more appropriately termed a “no-fault” eviction ordinance—residents and business owners can be evicted simply because their home or business was the site of a criminal offense. Under the ordinance, the identity of the criminal offender is irrelevant. You can be evicted because a total stranger (or a friend or family member) decided your home or business was a good place to commit a crime.
City attorneys churn out no-fault eviction filings by the hundreds, relying on form templates and little more than NYPD officers’ say-so that the targeted home or business was the site of a crime. In many cases, the “proof” of the alleged criminal offense is an affidavit from an NYPD officer relaying vague allegations from unnamed confidential informants.
Moreover, under the ordinance, occupants of the home or business can be evicted without any notice. After being summarily evicted, occupants have just days to put together a case to persuade a judge to undo the eviction order.
City attorneys routinely offer to drop these no-fault eviction proceedings if occupants agree to waive their constitutional rights. Some, like Sung, are forced to sign agreements waiving their Fourth Amendment rights. Others are forced to sign agreements barring family members from the home—including family members who have not been accused of any crime.
Now, Sung is joining with other victims of the city’s conduct to bring a federal class action lawsuit challenging the city’s no-fault eviction ordinance. If the lawsuit is successful, past waivers of constitutional rights will be declared unenforceable and, going forward, this practice will be put to an end once and for all.
Show a Film, End Up on a Watch List
By Ted Steinberg | CounterPunch | October 31, 2016
In a speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee earlier this year, Hillary Clinton, who vehemently opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement warned against anyone who tries to “to shut down debate, especially in places of learning like colleges and universities.” Her concern, of course, was with reassuring pro-Israel students that she stood behind them as they battled efforts to criticize Israel from the left.
It is certainly sportsman-like of Clinton to be open to debate, but the reality is that the free exchange of ideas on campus is currently under assault, not from the left but from the right. Consider the following incident from here in Ohio.
On September 21, the Case Western Reserve University Radical Student Union showed a documentary titled “The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States,” which is available to all members of the university community through the Kanopy streaming service. Today, the RSU stands accused by the AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit pro-Israel group, of engaging in an “antisemitic expression” that “condoned terrorism,” simply for showing the film in public. One radical student critical of Israel’s policies likened the climate of fear on the CWRU campus with respect to this issue as akin to being “stalked.”
The RSU decided to host the film to raise awareness and in the words of its president, Gabriel Murcia, to give “voice to people who don’t have a voice.” Although some 100 people attended the screening, the RSU decided at the last minute not to have a formal discussion after the film when an email raising the specter of antisemitism emerged from the president of a pro-Israel student group.
I have watched this film at least four times now. There is absolutely not one shred of evidence of antisemitism in it if by that word we mean hatred or discrimination against the Jewish people. The film does, however, take Israel to task for engaging in a dishonest campaign of public diplomacy. These efforts have tended to cast the problem in Israel/Palestine in terms of terror instead of territory, and have made it seem as if Palestinians are on the whole just prone to violence instead of people with legitimate grievances about displacement and dispossession of land.
After the movie, a student fellow of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a group formed after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, noted that though “every student on this campus is entitled to express their opinion” the film was biased and “unacceptable to be presented by a student organization at our university.” The student then expressed her opposition to the BDS movement and argued that the president of CWRU had made opposition to academic boycotts the institution’s official stance.
The student’s reference is to a 2013 statement in which the president and provost, like many university administrations across the country, communicated their personal opposition to the academic boycott of Israel following the American Studies Association’s endorsement of it. They argued that the boycott compromised academic freedom. Never mind that the academic boycott was set up to help Palestinian scholars achieve academic freedom while under the Israeli occupation. The AMCHA Initiative liked their statement so much that it still links to it on its website. The statement was not, however, the official position of CWRU, simply the personal opinions of its two highest administrators.
The statement by the CWRU administration and the letter from the CAMERA fellow recall, as I pointed out in a letter to the student paper, Edward Said’s comment, nearly 40 years ago, that politically speaking, the Palestinian in the United States “does not exist.”
I thought the matter was at an end, but to my surprise the Cleveland Jewish News ran a story about the movie screening. A university administrator who directs a continuing education center dedicated to “the heritage of Jewish learning” condemned the film and the RSU, as if a radical Jewish tradition did not exist. He also implied that faculty drove the group’s agenda, implying that the students were not bright enough to think for themselves. The chairman of the board of trustees of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, Gary Gross, meanwhile, called the film a bunch of “lies and distortions” without providing any evidence in support of the assertion. In fact, the film is about a policy of using lies and distortions to advance the interests of a foreign government. Gross added that he supports free speech, but then ominously intoned, “We will follow what’s happening on [the CWRU] campus through our partner agency, Cleveland Hillel.”
The reference to Hillel was not an idle one. Cleveland Hillel just partnered with CWRU on the creation of the new Albert & Norma Geller Hillel Student Center which includes within it classrooms available for undergraduate courses. Some students on the left are dismayed that they are forced to take classes in a building run by a group that offers “Israel advocacy training.”
This incident is part of nationwide trend. Universities all over the country are under surveillance, most famously at the University of California, Berkeley, where a student-led course titled Palestine: A Settler-Colonial Analysis was canceled after AMCHA coordinated with other groups, including CAMERA, to pressure administrators. The course was later reinstated, but the intimidation continues online. An anonymous website called the Canary Mission, established in 2015, targets those on campus critical of the Israeli occupation. The site’s main goal is to harass student activists and attempt to block their admission into graduate school.
If Hillary Clinton really does care about academic freedom, she should step up and publicly condemn the blacklisting of students and faculty concerned about Palestinian human rights. And so should the university presidents who invoked academic freedom as the rationale for their opposition to the ASA’s endorsement of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. These leaders should also learn something from the experience on the Berkeley campus and stop caving in to people who have trouble tolerating a perspective that challenges them to think.
When I informed Mr. Murcia about his group’s inclusion on the AMCHA website he was saddened. As he put it, “All we did was show a movie.”
Ted Steinberg teaches history and law at Case Western Reserve University. He is the faculty advisor to the Radical Student Union and the author, most recently, of Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York.
The U.S. National Bird Is Now a Drone
By David Swanson | Let’s Try Democracy | October 27, 2016
Officially, of course, the national bird of the United States is that half-a-peace-sign that Philadelphia sports fans like to hold up at opposing teams. But unofficially, the film National Bird has it right: the national bird is a killer drone.
Finally, finally, finally, somebody allowed me to see this movie. And finally somebody made this movie. There have been several drone movies worth seeing, most of them fictional drama, and one very much worth avoiding (Eye in the Sky ). But National Bird is raw truth, not entirely unlike what you might fantasize media news reports would be in a magical world in which media outlets gave a damn about human life.
The first half of National Bird is the stories of three participants in the U.S. military’s drone murder program, as told by them. And then, just as you’re starting to think you’ll have to write that old familiar review that praises how well the stories of the victims among the aggressors were told but asks in exasperation whether any of the victims of the actual missiles have any stories, National Bird expands to include just what is so often missing, and even to combine the two narratives in a powerful way.
Heather Linebaugh wanted to protect people, benefit the world, travel, see the world, and use super cool technology. Apparently our society did not explain to her in time what it means to join the military. Now she suffers guilt, anxiety, moral injury, PTSD, sleep disorder, despair, and a sense of responsibility to speak out on behalf of friends, other veterans, who have killed themselves or become too alcoholic to speak for themselves. Linebaugh helped murder people with missiles from drones, and watched them die, and identified body parts or watched loved ones gather up body parts.
Even while still in the Air Force, Linebaugh was on a suicide watch list and had a psychologist recommend moving her to a different sort of job, but the Air Force refused. She has episodes. She sees things. She hears things. But she’s forbidden to discuss her work with friends or even with a therapist who doesn’t have the proper “security clearance.”
We let Daniel down even more than Heather. He says he actually opposed militarism but was homeless and desperate, so he joined the military. We could have given him a house for much less than we paid him to help murder people at Fort Meade.
Lisa Ling worked on a database filled by drone surveillance that compiled information on 121,000 “targets” in two years. Multiply that by a dozen years. With 90% of victims not among the targets, add up how many people would die in the targeting of the whole list. That’d be over 7 million. But it’s not numbers that have poisoned the souls of these three veterans; it’s children and mothers and brothers and uncles lying in pieces on the ground.
Ling travels to Afghanistan to see the place at ground level and to meet with drone victims. She meets a little boy who lost his leg and his 4-year-old brother and his sister and his father. On February 2, 2010, drone “pilots” at Creech Air Base murdered 23 innocent members of one family.
The filmmakers have voices read the written transcript of what the drone operators said to each other before, during, and after sending in the missiles that did the damage. This is worse than Collateral Murder. The people whose job it is to identify children and others who should not be murdered have identified children among the group of people being targeted. The “pilots” at Creech are eager to reject this information and to get on to killing as many people as they can. Their lust for blood drives the decision process. Only after they’ve killed 23 people do they recognize children among the survivors, and the lack of guns.
We see the bodies brought home to bury. Those injured describe their suffering, physical as well as mental. We see people being fitted with artificial legs. We hear Afghans describe their perception of drones. They imagine, just as many Americans may imagine, and just as viewers of Eye in the Sky would imagine, that drone operators have a clear, high resolution view of everything. In fact, they have a view of fuzzy little blobs on a computer screen that looks like it was created in the 1980s.
Linebaugh says there is no way to distinguish the little “civilian” blobs from little “militant” blobs. When Daniel hears President Obama claim that there is always near certainty that no civilians will be killed, Daniel explains that such knowledge is simply not possible. Linebaugh says she was often on the side of the conversation telling the “pilots” at Creech not to murder innocents, but that they always pushed for permission to kill.
Jesselyn Radack, attorney for whistleblowers, says in the film that the FBI told two whistleblowers that a terrorist group had put them on a kill list. She said that the FBI has also contacted Linebaugh’s family and warned her that “terrorists” have been searching for her name online, suggesting that she fix this problem by shutting up. (She had written an op-ed in the Guardian).
The FBI also raids Daniel’s house, arriving with 30 to 50 agents, badges, guns, cameras, and search warrants. They take away his papers, electronics, and phone. They tell him he is under investigation for a possible indictment under the Espionage Act. This is the World War I-era law for targeting foreign enemies that President Obama has made a routine of using to target domestic whistleblowers. While Obama has prosecuted more people under this law than did all previous presidents combined, we probably have no way of knowing how many people have been explicitly threatened with the possibility.
While we should be apologizing to, comforting, and aiding these young people rather than denying them the right to speak to anybody and threatening them with decades in prison, Lisa Ling did manage to find some kindness. Victims of drone strikes in Afghanistan told her that they forgave her. As the film ends, she’s planning another trip to Afghanistan.
Israel: 1984 Everlasting
By Stanley L. Cohen | CounterPunch | October 28, 2016
Empty Declarations of Democracy… Vacant Boasts of humanity
For decades, Israel has held itself out as being the lone “democracy” in the Middle East; a state where the rights of individuals could not and would not be held hostage to the autocratic whims of royalty, but rather a full partner to a free and robust electoral process that guarantees not just meaningful input from the governed but the ability to challenge state policies as the winds of change blow from “the river to the sea.”
Once again, recent events have proven this to be just so much a perverse myth… empty rhetoric… second only to the brazen unfounded Israeli boast of having the “most humane army in the world,” even as the body count of Palestinian children grows in cemeteries and prisons that have become very much its own unique brand of 21st century youth hostel.
Recently, Hagai El-Ad, an Israeli and Jew, who serves as executive director of B’Tselem (The Israel Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), spoke before the UN Security Council urging it to take immediate action against Israel’s illegal settlements.
Demagoguery and Inhumanity Exposed
Not quite 1400 words in its entirety, one paragraph in particular of El-Ad’s testimony sums up life for millions of those captured by a democracy that sees day as night… pain as pleasure. Crushing, despite its brevity, the power and pain of these words could easily be part of an opening statement by a war crimes prosecutor at a tribunal called to hold Israel accountable for crimes unseen since the Nuremburg tribunals some 70 years ago.
“What does it mean, in practical terms, to spend 49 years, a lifetime, under military rule? When violence breaks out, or when particular incidents attract global attention, you get a glimpse into certain aspects of life under occupation. But what about the rest of the time? What about the many “ordinary” days of a 17,898-day-long occupation, which is still going strong? Living under military rule mostly means invisible, bureaucratic, daily, violence. It means living under an endless permit regime, which controls Palestinian life from cradle to grave: Israel controls the population registry; Israel controls work permits; Israel controls who can travel abroad – and who cannot; Israel controls who can visit from abroad – and who cannot; in some villages, Israel maintains lists of who can visit the village, or who is allowed to farm which fields. Permits can sometimes be denied; permits must always be renewed. Thus with every breath they take, Palestinians breathe in occupation. Make a wrong move, and you can lose your freedom of movement, your livelihood, or even the opportunity to marry and build a family with your beloved.”
In a free democratic society these comments, while perhaps controversial, would certainly not constitute sedition. In an open, healthy State these words would surely give reason to pause and reflect… but never serve as a rational trip-wire to strip their speaker of his birthright as an unbound citizen empowered to support his government for policies he finds just but condemn it for those that bear the star of tyranny. It is a distinction that Israel has failed to adopt or learn over the course of its 50 year subjugation of millions whose only crime is to be born Palestinian in occupied land with sign-posts everywhere that simply say “ Jews only.”
Beating of Chests
Not long after El-Ad’s powerful speech before a world body entrusted with securing fundamental rights and liberty for all of its citizenry, the hue and cry could be heard among Israeli political elite to silence such subversive talk. Thus, Coalition Chairman MK David Bitan of the Likud Party undertook the first steps of reprisal by announcing he was considering submitting a bill to the Knesset that could remove the citizenship of Israelis who act against their country in international organizations. According to Bitan, “El-Ad’s actions at the Security Council are a blatant violation of the trust citizens must have for their country, so he should go find another country where he could be a citizen.”
Alarming, one might ask; no, not at all… merely another in an endless daily stream of steps by a government second to none when it comes to autocratic, indeed dictatorial, control of every fiber of its citizen’s freedoms, particularly their ability to access and exchange information without fear of retribution.
Much is known and largely ignored about the thousands of Palestinian civilians that have been targeted and slaughtered by the Israeli military machine in occupied Palestine, whether in Gaza or the West Bank. Indeed, the killing fields of Gaza or execution alleys of back street Jerusalem no longer acquire more than a passing fancy or footnote in the evening news spread across a world now busy with outrages of more recent vintage. After 70 years of slaughter, it’s just so much business as usual.
So, too, we have seemingly become numbed to the reality that thousands of Palestinian political prisoners languish in isolation, many sitting year after year, some for decades, in administrative detention cells of political prisons… uncharged, undefended and untried, tortured in ways that leave the spirits of those still roaming the now empty cellblocks of South Africa’s notorious Robben Island relieved their misery was ended quickly through state sanctioned executions by “suicide.”
The Mighty Censor’s Sword
Closures of Palestinian news rooms and television stations are commonplace… yet no more remarkable than assaults by Israel upon Palestinian journalists that long ago moved into triple digits and show no sign of abating. The Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) has documented a pattern of such attacks by Israel running, for some time now, at almost 400 per year. Although the exact number of Palestinian journalists killed or injured by Israel over just the last decade may never be known, it has been documented that seventeen lost their lives in Gaza, alone, during the months of bombings which it endured in 2014.
Dozens of Palestinian journalists and private bloggers have been arrested by Israel and held for violating vague administrative codes that typically come down to the application of entirely undefined prohibitions such as “incitement.” Dareen Tatour, a 35-year-old poet and Arab-Palestinian citizen of Israel, was arrested and placed under administrative detention on charges of inciting violence via her poetry which she posted on Facebook and which merely praises those who fight against Israeli domination. Also arrested and charged with criminal incitement was 19-year-old Anas Khateeb, on the basis of her Facebook posts which included such alarming statements as “Jerusalem is Arab,” and “Long live the Intifada.”
Recently, Palestinian journalist, Samah Dweik, was released from prison having served almost six months for an alleged incitement charge which resulted from comments about the occupation she posted on her private Facebook account. For most of her sentence, her family was banned from visiting or having any contact with her. She was but one of over 20 Palestinian journalists recently imprisoned by Israel for allegations of incitement, along with hundreds of other Palestinian activists or bloggers who have been targeted for arrest and prosecution for nothing more than postings of political opinions about the Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance on social media. Dweik’s release came not long after Israel and Facebook entered into an agreement to “work together” to monitor Palestinian posts.
The Sword Cuts Deeper
Increasingly, Palestinians are not the sole victims of an Israeli policy to silence “dissent” or to dramatically curb the nature and extent of information made available to its citizens… Jews and Arabs alike. For example, not long ago, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman confronted the military station director after Army Radio broadcast a documentary on the life of the leading Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, saying that material like Darwish’s shouldn’t darken Israeli airwaves.
In what can only be described as a systematic effort to control both journalists and citizens in their ability to read and write, to access and exchange information, and to reach informed opinions essential to a public and democratic dialogue about current and future Israeli policies, its machinery of censorship has become the linchpin of the State’s view of what is appropriate knowledge and speech and what is not.
Thus, of late, Israel has begun to demand of social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter that they have input, if not control, over what posts ultimately find their way into the stream of ideas and debate within the Israeli public at large. According to Quds Press, Facebook and Twitter recently deleted thousands of posts, pages and accounts as a result of demands made by the Israeli Ministry of Justice based upon little more than amorphous claims that the information posed a threat to the safety of Israel.
On an even more ominous note, the Knesset has begun to formulate legislation that would require foreign entities to actively monitor social media sites for information deemed to be offensive to Israel. Under the legislation, content based liability could be found for material published by foreign nationals, addressed to foreign nationals and posted on foreign websites thereby reducing the concept of free speech in Israel to one that is cast by the prevailing political winds of the day and little else.
Recently the chief Israeli censor notified dozens of Israeli bloggers and social media activists that any material they might wish to publish in their personal blogs or social media accounts, when dealing with a wide range of what was described as “security” related subject matters, must be vetted. Although provided a generic and ambiguous catalog of those areas to be submitted for clearance, the targets, themselves, were not permitted to disclose the makeup of the list under penalty of law. If history can be counted upon to be the guidepost of what subject matters must be prescreened before publication, in the past the list has included such security “sensitive” subject matters as:
+ Cooperation agreements with foreign militaries;
+ Letters to the editor on military or security matters;
+ Contacts with foreign countries;
+ Anything connected to the nuclear industry;
+ Information about official delegations abroad;
+ Any material which constitutes a “danger” to people’s lives;
+ Immigration policies from “endangered” nations;
+ Use of foreign sources or material that touch upon any of these areas;
+ Detention of those suspected of security offenses;
+ Any information about military industries;
+ Appointments, resignations, firings, rumors about IDF activities or commanders
Finally, in a readily transparent effort to maintain a democratic illusion of a free and uncensored flow of information in the market place of ideas, pursuant to the censorship regulations there are complete prohibitions against leaving any blank spaces or other potential indicators in one’s writing or posts that might suggest or lead one to conclude that material has been deleted.
For those disturbed over this censorship procedure, it must be remembered that we are, after all, talking about a state that recently placed 101st out of 179 countries in the press Freedom index worldwide. Indeed, this appalling placement for the Middle East’s sole democracy is significantly better than Israel has scored in the Freedom index for quite a number of years.
For those wondering just how widespread, indeed systemic, Israel’s censorship procedures are, it is a country with a military censor procedure that has banned, outright, publication of, soon to be, some 2,000 articles and redacted various information from 15,000 others in recent history. That is thousands of articles professional journalists and editors decided were of public interest but which never saw the light of day. Imagine how many more events of public interest went uninvestigated, or articles which were not written, issues debated, or challenges brought to bear for the Israeli body politic to consider because of self-censorship by journalists or editors too tired or principled to seek pre–approval of their body of work by government censors. Stories simply swallowed up and disappeared by an industry of censorship.
Human Rights… Israel Wrongs
Although not yet law, in what can only be described as an all-out onslaught against core democratic rights and values, over the last several days consideration of a bill has begun in the Knesset that would empower the Defense Minister to detain a citizen without trial; to deny one the right to pursue or obtain employment in a field of interest; to limit access to various public places; and “to impose any other order or restriction necessitated by considerations of national security or public safety”.
Earlier in January 2011, the Knesset endorsed a right-wing proposal to investigate some of Israel’s best-known human rights organizations for “delegitimizing” its military. Among others was B’Tselem. The proposed investigations would entail inquiries into the funding of several human rights groups that have a history of criticizing Israeli policies. At the time, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel described the proposal as a “severe blow” to Israeli democracy and critics labeled the policy as “McCarthyist“.
Recently a variation on that bill became law in Israel compelling non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive more than half of their funding from foreign state entities to declare so publicly. Ultimately, the legislative criteria were tailored specifically to silence criticism of government policies by some 27 NGO’s… 25 of which, including B’Tselem, are considered to be left-wing… while the other two are non-affiliated. As intended, the bill will have absolutely no impact upon right-wing and pro-settlement NGOs which are funded almost entirely by private donations from powerful Zionists and Zionist entities from outside of Israel.
One can only imagine that upon returning home to the firestorm awaiting him, following his speech before the UN, Hagai El-Ad surely felt what it must have been like to be an activist leftist Jew in the United States during the dark days of McCarthy.
On the other hand, perhaps El-Ad should consider himself very fortunate indeed. On his twitter account, Arab-Palestinian MK Ahmad Tibi mocked MK David Bitan’s call for El-Ad’s de-citizenship saying: “Why stop at removing citizenship? Why not destroy the home of the B’Tselem director-general? Why not bar his entire family from entering the country, remove his land, submit them to administrative detention, and put checkpoints and closures in his neighborhood?”
UN Expert to Investigate Israel’s War on Human Rights Defenders
teleSUR | October 29, 2016
A United Nations expert said on Friday that Israel is attacking human rights organizations and trying to delegitimize their work and that he will launch an investigation into the problem.
Michael Lynk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, presented his first report to the UN General Assembly calling Israel to end the nearly 50 years of occupation, which he said “is entrenched, is dripping in human rights violations.”
“The fact that the Israeli government threatened to revoke the citizenship of the executive director of B’Tselem is a particularly worrying path for Israel to wind up taking,” Lynk said, referring to the rights groups’ appearance before the Security Council earlier this month.
He praised the recent intervention at the Security Council by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which urged the UN to end the Israeli occupation in Israel and said he was especially troubled by the Israeli government’s reaction.
In a statement, Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon called Lynk’s comments offensive and said it “shows the immense damage done by Israeli organizations that defame us in front of the international community.”
Most of the international community has labeled the Israeli occupation as illegal because the territories in which half a million Israelis live in over 230 settlements, were captured by Israel in a war in 1967 and are hence subject to the Geneva Conventions, which forbid construction on occupied lands.
The Pathologization of Dissent
Photo by Jamelle Bouie | CC BY 2.0
By CJ Hopkins | CounterPunch | October 27, 2016
According to the mainstream media, in a recent speech in West Palm Beach, Donald Trump finally completely lost it. Sawing the air with his tiny hands in a unmistakeably Hitlerian manner, he spat out a series of undeniably hateful anti-Semitic code words … like “political establishment,” “global elites” and, yes, “international banks.” He even went so far as to claim that “corporations” and their (ahem) “lobbyists” have millions of dollars at stake in this election, and are trying to pass the TTP, not to benefit the American people, but simply to enrich themselves. He then went on to accuse the media of collaborating with “the Clinton machine,” presumably to benefit these “global elites” and “international banks” and “lobbyists.”
Now, a lot of folks didn’t immediately recognize the secret meanings of these fascistic code words, and so mistakenly assumed that “global elites” referred to the transnational capitalist ruling classes, and that “lobbyists” referred to actual lobbyists, and that “banks” meant … well … you know, banks. As it turned out, this was completely wrong. None of these words actually meant what they meant, not in anti-Semitic CodeSpeak. So the mainstream media translated for us. “Political establishment” meant “the Jews.” “Global elites” also meant “the Jews.” “Banks” meant “Jews.” “Lobbyists” meant “Jews.” Even “corporate media,” meant “Jews.” Apparently, Trump’s entire speech was a series of secret dog-whistle signals to his legions of neo-Nazi goons, who, immediately following Clinton’s victory, are going to storm out of their hidey holes, frontally attack the US military, overthrow the US government, and, yes, you guessed it … “kill the Jews.”
OK, maybe I’m exaggerating the mainstream media’s reaction just a little bit. Or maybe Trump’s speech really was that fascistic. Judge for yourself. Read the transcript. (NPR offers a complete version of it here.) Then compare the reactions of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, The Inquirer, The Guardian, and other leading broadsheets, and magazines and blogs like Mother Jones, Forward, Slate, Salon, Vox, Alternet, and a host of others, most of which rely on Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League and former Special Assistant to the President, as their authoritative source on Trumpian cryptology. (Mr. Greenblatt, incidentally, should know better, given the treatment he has received from hard-line Zionist publications for refusing to demonize Black Lives Matter, and for “taking sides against” the State of Israel.)
Look, I’m not defending Donald Trump, who I consider a self-aggrandizing idiot and a soulless huckster of the lowest order, and whose supporters include a lot of real anti-Semites, and racists, and misogynists, and other such creeps. I’m simply trying to point out how the corporate media have, for months, been playing the same hysterical tune like an enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument, and how millions of Americans are singing along (as they were before the invasion of Iraq, which posed no threat to the USA , but which according to the media had WMDs), and how terribly fucking disturbing that is. In case you didn’t instantly recognize it, the name of the tune is “This guy is Hitler!” and it isn’t the short vulgarian fingers of Donald Trump that are tickling the ivories. And no, it isn’t “the Jews” either. It’s the corporate media, and the corporations that own them, and the rest of the global capitalist ruling classes … in other words, those “global elites.”
The thing I find particularly disturbing is how these rather mundane observations — i.e., (a) that a global ruling class exists, (b) that it’s primarily corporate in character, (c) that this class is pursuing its interests and not the interests of sovereign states — how such observations are being stigmatized as the ravings of unhinged anti-Semites. This stigmatization is not limited to Trumpists. Anyone to the left of Clinton is now, apparently, an anti-Semite. For example, Roger Cohen, in The New York Times, riding the tsunami of condemnation of the insidious verbiage of Trump’s West Palm speech, executed an extended smear-job on Jeremy Corbyn and his “Corbynistas” (they’re fond of coining these epithets, the media), denouncing their virulent “anti-Americanism,” “anti-Capitalism,” “anti-globalism,” and “anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.”
Which, let me hasten to add, and stress, and underscore, and repeatedly emphasize, is not to imply that the Labour Party, or the British Left, or the American Left, or any other Left, is anti-Semitism-free. Of course not. There are anti-Semites everywhere. That isn’t the point. Or it isn’t my point.
My point is that this stigmatization campaign is part of a much larger ideological project, one that has little to do with Trump, or Jeremy Corbyn, or their respective parties. Smearing one’s political opponents is nothing new, of course, it’s as old as the hills. But what we’re witnessing is more than smears. As I proposed in these pages back in July, political dissent is being gradually pathologized (i.e., stigmatized as aberrant or “abnormal” behavior, as opposed to a position meriting discussion). Consider the abnormalization of Sanders, back when he was talking about “banks,” “global elites,” and other things that matter, or the media’s portrayal of British voters as racists in the wake of the Brexit referendum. And, yes, the charges being leveled against Trump, much as we might despise the man. Anti-Semitism, inciting violence, paranoid conspiracy theorizing, insurrection, treason, et cetera — these are not legitimate arguments one needs to counter with superior arguments; they are symptoms of deviations from a norm, signs of criminality or pathology, which is increasingly how the corporate ruling classes are dismissing anyone who attempts to challenge them.
A line is being drawn in the ideological sand. On one side of it are the decent people, the normal people, in their business wear, with their university degrees, and prescriptions, and debts. On the other side are … well, the deplorables, the ignorant, racist, anti-Semitic, neo-nationalist, populist extremists. This line cuts through both the Left and the Right … supersedes both Left and Right, making bedfellows of supposed adversaries like Obama, Clinton, Kagan, Wolfowitz, Scowcroft, and their ilk on the Normal team, and a motley crew of Trumpists, Putinists, European populists, Corbynistas, Sandernistas, socialists, anarchists, Wikileakers, anti-Zionists, anti-capitalists, neo-Nazis, Black Lives Matterers, angry Greek pensioners, environmental activists, religious zealots, the Klu Klux Klan, David Graeber, most of the contributors to CounterPunch, and various other “extremist” types, many of whom detest each other, in the Deplorables’ current starting line-up.
The corporate media is sending a message … a message aimed at a much broader audience than undecided American voters (assuming such creatures really exist). The message is, “get with the fucking program, or get stigmatized as an anti-Semite, or a racist, or a Russian spy, or whatever.” The message is, “drop the populist rhetoric, shut the hell up about the Wall Street banks, and the corporations, and the ‘one percent,’ and … actually … forget about politics completely, except for identity politics, of course. Go ahead and knock yourself out with that.” The message is, “you’re either with us or against us … and it doesn’t matter why you’re against us, or what it is you think you’re for. Right, Left … who gives a shit? It’s one big Basket of Deplorables to us.”
This message, of course, displays many of the hallmarks of the classic authoritarian mentality, the need for nearly total conformity, mindless allegiance to one’s so-called superiors, delegitimization of all opposing viewpoints, and the infantile type of hero-worship figures like Obama and Clinton inspire … not the old-fashioned authoritarianism that would-be despots like Trump represent, but, rather, a more attractive version, a hopey, changey, lovey version, where there are no frightening Hitlerian leaders barking out anti-Semitic code words, and no one is exterminating thousands of people in faraway countries they want to destabilize in order to entirely dominate the region. No, this is the version where Obama sells the TPP on the Jimmy Fallon show, and wars of aggression are not wars of aggression, but “humanitarian interventions.” It’s also the version where universal healthcare is, regrettably, “unrealistic,” but $38 billion for the State of Israel so it can operate its Apartheid State, and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, so they can bomb the shit out of farmers in Yemen, and cut off people’s heads for blasphemy, is somehow in “America’s vital interests.”
But what do I know? I’m just a satirist. I should probably leave all this complex stuff, like what is and isn’t in my interest, and what words really mean and all that, to the experts in the mainstream media. Since they did so well decoding Trump’s speech, maybe they could translate some of these other code words I’ve been having trouble with, like the ones I put in scare quotes above, or other such code words, like “enemy combatant,” “free trade agreement,” “security barrier,” “indefinite detention,” “targeted killing,” or “troubled asset relief program.”
I could go on, but I probably shouldn’t. Odds are, I’m already on the list of Putin-worshiping, anti-Semitic, racist, misogynist, neo-nationalist, non-standing up for the National Anthem, conspiracy theorizing America-haters. The last thing I need to do at this point is start jabbering about how the United States is an authoritarian corporatist dystopia ruled by a global capitalist elite that couldn’t give less of a shit about Americans (or any other actual people living in any other actual countries), where the corporate media can whip up mass fanatical support for wars of aggression, or corporate puppets, by pointing their fingers at yet another bogeyman and shouting “Hitler” at the top of their lungs. Next thing you know I’d be writing about “banks,” and “global corporations,” and “national sovereignty,” and we all know what that’s about, don’t we?
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (US). He can reached at his website, cjhopkins.com, or at consentfactory.org.
It’s Time for Answers on Yahoo’s Email Scanning
By Kate Tummarello | EFF |October 25, 2016
You should know if the government thinks it can deputize your email provider to scan through your messages.
Like most people, we were shocked at reports earlier this month that Yahoo scanned its hundreds of millions of users’ emails looking for a digital signature on behalf of the government. We join millions of Yahoo users in wanting to know how this happened.
Together with a host of other civil liberties groups – including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the ACLU, and the Sunlight Foundation – we sent a letter today asking Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to release information about the scanning, how the U.S. government justified such a privacy-invasive search, and whether the government has conducted similar searches.
The letter warns that Yahoo’s “massive scan of the emails of millions of people, particularly if it involves the scanning of email content, could violate the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], the Fourth Amendment, and international human rights law, and has grave implications for privacy.”
Although the letter calls on the government to release additional details about the Yahoo scanning order, a recent law passed by Congress requires its declassification and release, or, alternatively, that the government produce a declassified summary.
It’s crucial that Clapper follow through on his pledge for transparency and release information about how the U.S. government justified the email scanning under FISA, as has been reported. We need to know whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has interpreted FISA – which authorizes targeted surveillance of certain foreigners’ (such as spies or terrorists) communications – to mean that the government can conscript Yahoo into mass surveillance of all of its users’ emails.
The letter also calls on Clapper to acknowledge whether the scan also involved scanning the content of the emails, disclose the kinds of search terms used in this surveillance, and to identify when this kind of surveillance first started and the total numbers of times an order like this has been used.
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Israel’s recurring use of terror on civilians
By Bob Finch | January 26, 2009
Insanely disproportionate use of violence against unarmed civilians… continue
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