How we started ‘Radio against Apartheid’ in Philly
By Matthew Graber | Mondoweiss | December 7, 2011
In August, here on Mondoweiss, I wrote an article on the failure to recognize Palestinians in public discourse.
In order to listen to a Palestinian, one must be able to hear their voice, and to give that voice consideration and legitimation. The refusal to recognize a land known as Palestine coincides with the refusal to consider the Arab people who live there – to refuse to recognize their existence, their humanity, their mortality, and their voices.
So in September, when a friend with Prometheus Radio pitched the idea for members of Philly BDS to take to the airwaves with West Philadelphia’s community radio station WPEB 88.1, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Evan “DJ Ev Daddy” Hoffman and I, Matt Graber, have been producing a radio program called ‘Radio Against Apartheid‘ on WPEB 88.1 every Wednesday at 9 PM for the past 6 weeks. We are hoping to bring voices for justice and equality throughout the Middle East to the Philadelphia community by radio and to the world via podcast. We have both been active with the Philadelphia Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Coalition for over a year, and through this work we have been fortunate to collaborate with a tremendous group of insightful and moral individuals.
Evan was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in a family which strongly valued criticism, protest, and social justice. Even in his youth, his family has been involved in a peace group in the area called the Lehigh-Pocono Committee of Concern (LEPOCO). Evan remembers being 8 years old and marching against the first Gulf war in Washington DC with his parents and their good Palestinian friends, Lena and her daughter, Jinan. He carried all these experiences with him through college at Temple University, where he majored in dance and continued to be an independent disc jockey. Evan has always utilized the power of creative expression, choreographing dances protesting the Iraq war (as a member of Not In Our Name), DJing at peace/justice rallies at City Hall in Philly and other locations, and learning how to connect lines of expression to create a new dialogue and use his voice! Radio Against Apartheid is another project of his which seeks to incorporate the power of creative expression into political activism.
I have only been marginally employed for the past year, after leaving the University of Pennsylvania with an incomplete masters degree in Social Work. In the summer of 2010, I spent a month living in al Azzeh refugee camp in Bethlehem. There, I experienced first hand the violence of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. We didn’t have running water for 23 days. I was tear gassed in Bil’in, and harassed at a check point. I helped to rebuild a demolished home in al Walaja. Reflecting on these experiences, I realized that in the world which I want to build, political institutions must come to consider both my own well-being and livelihood along with that of the anonymous other, regardless of their geographic location, ethnicity, spoken language, gender, or any other identifier.
Radio Against Apartheid is our way of bringing progressive, alternative views of the Middle East to the West Philadelphia community. Though there were no shows about the Middle East on West Philadelphia’s WPEB 88.1 until we started our program, the issues facing Palestinians are not foreign to the local community. West Philadelphia is a community historically and currently facing gentrification at the hands of the University of Pennsylvania and patrolled by a militant Philadelphia police force. Just as Palestinian communities are being destroyed and Palestinians are being unjustly imprisoned, so too have communities of Philadelphia been decimated and destroyed by gentrification and urban renewal, and so too have homes been bombed and people been imprisoned for political reasons.
With programs such as Labor Justice Radio and On the Block, West Philadelphia’s WPEB 88.1 has already been dealing with critical issues facing the local community. Radio Against Apartheid continues this tradition. As the charter of the radio station states:
WPEB 88.1 FM is an independent, noncommercial community radio station dedicated to reflecting, representing, incorporating, empowering, and serving West Philadelphia communities by:
providing a channel for groups, issues, and music that have been overlooked, suppressed or misrepresented by other media.
promoting communication, education, and entertainment through programming that invites interaction between the station and the community.
providing training that facilitates creative expression and exploration of public issues with the goal of incorporating and empowering members of the community.
Our hope with Radio Against Apartheid is to be a venue in Philadelphia fostering critical analysis of America’s and Israel’s continuing militarism in the Middle East and North Africa by featuring and listening to those most directly affected by these policies. So we’ve featured artists such as Omar Offendum, Suheir Hammad, and Susan Abulhawa, and we’ve gotten firsthand accounts, insight, and analysis from reporters Joseph Dana and Jesse Rosenfeld.
In an interview broadcast heard by hundreds, if not thousands, over the radio and through podcast, Joseph Dana and Jesse Rosenfeld reflected on their experiences as journalists living in Ramallah. Rosenfeld has reported for Alternet, The Nation, and various other outlets, and was on board the second Freedom Flotilla. Dana has reported for The Nation on board the US Boat to Gaza, the Audacity of Hope, and he writes regularly for +972 Magazine. His views challenged the notion of Israel as a democratic state:
Last Summer, Israel, a Western-style democracy, decides to basically cancel freedom of speech over [the issue of boycott, divestment, and sanctions] by passing an anti-boycott law, in which myself, as an Israeli citizen, am unable to publicly state any support for the boycott, and I’m unable to publicly advocate for the boycott. So if I was to say on this program, ‘Palestinian unarmed resistance is the best form of resistance. I understand their desire to resist the occupation and I think the boycott move is the most effective form of unarmed resistance and therefore people should support it.’ If I say that, then I can be sued in Israel. The people that would bring a lawsuit against me, any Israeli, they don’t have to prove that I actually damaged them. They just have to prove that I intended to. And so this law is so corrosive and so toxic that it, first off, demonstrates how effective the boycott campaign is. Because governments don’t pass these types of laws unless they’re effective. And secondly, its taking off this mask of Israeli democracy that we’ve had for so long. I mean, we can talk about it in terms of the rights of non-Jews, but now its filtering even into the rights of Jews.
One of my favorite shows featured a conversation with Susan Abulhawa, the author of ‘Mornings in Jenin’, Karina Goulordava of the Great Book Robbery, and me. We discussed the Great Book Robbery – a project examining the systematic theft of thousands of Palestinian books during al Nakba – and the consequences of the project from the perspective of Edward Said’s Orientalism.
In a conversation filled with grim topics, Susan offered hope to the program and to our listeners:
Of course they would want to hide evidence of culture. But you can’t. Israel has succeeded to a large extent at sort of re-writing history and covering it up. But I think that the truth has a way of emerging, of finding its way to the light. And I think we’re living in a time where we’re seeing that starting to happen. This documentary, The Great Book Robbery, is one element of that. The explosion of Palestinian literature throughout the West is another manifestation of that. There are a lot of documentaries in addition to the Great Book Robbery that are emerging by very talented film-makers. And of course the growing international solidarity and the slow but sure persistent awakening of civil society across the world. This is the truth starting to come to light.
This was Susan’s second appearance on the program, after her appearance on our second show when she told the history of Palestine since 1948.
Everybody involved in the show has been gracious. Its been very humbling to connect with such amazing guests, who have been surprisingly accessible. As we just began our program, I wasn’t certain about how we could create content for the radio show. At first, we thought “Every week? That sounds like a whole lot of content to put together in a short amount of time.” But we went about e-mailing people involved in the movement for justice in Palestine, and they replied. Everybody whom we have contacted has done an amazing job of working through their extremely busy schedules to try to make time for our program.
The people with WPEB and Scribe Video, the parent organization of WPEB, have also been supportive throughout the process. After our first proposal, they were helpful in training us in the studio and then getting us on the air. With a very tight schedule of programming at WPEB, Rashaw Alston cut an hour of his programming to fit with our schedules and allow us to go on the air. And though WPEB and Scribe have received complaints, they’ve been steadfast in their support of our program. We would never have been able to do this without the support from the WPEB community.
WPEB has been running a fundraiser from the beginning of October until the end of the year in the hopes of raising $5,000. This money would go towards keeping all of our programs on the air. The media landscape in the United States is dominated by corporate media, and it is essential to maintain community and independent radio as a place for alternative viewpoints to be expressed. If you’d like to make a donation to keep all of our programming going, you can go to the Scribe website.
As exciting as the experience has been so far, what is most exciting is the potential for what the program could be. This week’s show features a new segment produced by the Palestine News Network, “News from the Occupied Territories”, which reports on this week’s arrests, home demolitions, and land seizures in the occupied West Bank. This segment is the result of a new partnership between Radio Against Apartheid and the Palestine News Network.
This effort really shows how radio can be used to bring people together. And we would love to have your comments, ideas, and contributions. As a space for people to talk about building a world based on values of justice and equality, we hope that you’ll tune in and join the conversation.
Links to our latest program, relevant news topics, and previous shows are all posted to our blog. You can also subscribe to the weekly podcast via itunes. You can reach us by e-mail at RadioAgainstApartheid@Gmail.com and on Twitter at PEB881RAA.
Disengaging from Zionism
By Kristoffer Larsson | Dissident Voice | December 7th, 2011
In 2009 the UN Human Rights Council appointed the South African Judge Richard Goldstone to head the fact-finding mission investigating possible Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Aside from being a well-respected judge, Richard Goldstone could not easily be dismissed as anti-Semitic given his Jewish origin.
Goldstone probably had no idea what awaited him. After the Mission published its findings and conclusions, the judge quickly became the victim of a vicious slander campaign. Israel’s Information Minister said that the Goldstone Report was “anti-Semitic.” Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz informed the listeners of Israel Army Radio that Goldstone was “an evil, evil man” and “an absolute traitor,” a “man who uses his language and words against the Jewish people.” Dershowitz later apologised for calling Goldstone a traitor, saying he thought the term moser (Hebrew for informer, delator) meant “monster” (as if that was any less harsh).
“I wrote to the broadcaster, retracting my word ‘traitor,’” Dershowitz told the Forward. “But if you’re asking me deep in my heart and soul do I believe that the word fairly characterizes him, in light of the way he’s used his Jewishness, both as a shield and a sword? You know, if the shoe fits.”
In the end, it all became too much for the South African judge. He’s tried to retract parts of the report he co-authored, along with publicly defending Israel against ‘the Apartheid Slander’. And if the truth be told it seems that he has never disengaged himself from Zionism. However, the damage has already been done and the greater part of the Jewish community simply has no trust in him anymore.
I came to think of Goldstone’s destiny as I was reading Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists. The book is an anthology with contributions from 25 Jewish activists living in different parts of the world who have come to see the conflict from the Palestinian point of view. For most Jews, criticising Israel comes at a price – relatives and Jewish friends regard it as treason, they are accused of being self-hating, and in some cases even of paving the way for another Holocaust. But these stories are not mainly about the price they have to pay for their activism; it’s about their personal journeys that led them from being (in many cases) completely uncritical supporters of Israel and Zionism into defenders of Palestinian rights.
The book is edited by Avigail Abarbanel, a psychotherapist residing in the United Kingdom. Born in Israel in 1964, Abarbanel grew up in an abusive family and was—just like most other Israelis—completely blind to Palestinians and their suffering. Instead, Jewish suffering was the ubiquitous issue. During her school years the fear of another Holocaust was “repeatedly raised and debated” and she “was taught that everyone in the world, including Arabs, hated us just because we were Jews.” Even though Palestinians make up a fifth of Israel’s population she never understood who they were. She recalls:
I resented the Arab countries around us and our “enemy from within”—or the “fifth column” as the Palestinian citizens of Israel were sometimes called—that I thought wanted to “throw us into the sea”. I resented the world that didn’t seem to understand us and was against us all the time, for what I thought was no reason except our Jewishness. I didn’t understand why “they” couldn’t just leave us in peace. I thought the reason for our suffering, anxiety and insecurity was out there. Together with everyone else I felt hard done by, hassled and unsafe.
Abarbanel later left Israel for Australia, where she earned a degree in psychotherapy. As a student she was forced to scrutinise her past. This, along with reading The Iron Wall by Avi Shlaim, led her to renounce her Israeli citizenship and eventually reject Zionism altogether.
Ronit Yarosky was also unaware of who the Palestinians were. Her family left Montreal for Israel when she was 14 years old. She did her military service and was stationed in the West Bank. The Palestinian residents served as background actors – they were there, yet unimportant. West Bank cities and towns she stayed in as a soldier “were nameless to me because they were “only” Arab towns, and therefore of no significance in my life,” she remembers. Yarosky’s conversion began as she was working on her MA thesis back in Canada. It wasn’t until she read Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem that she realised that Jewish settlements were established on the ruins of Arab villages, and that her uncle was even living in a Palestinian house. When she brought this up with her mother, the latter replied: “Well, obviously.” But to Ronit the newly discovered facts was life-changing, and after she could no longer turn a blind eye to what is happening to the Palestinians.
For others like Peter Slezak, Zionism as such doesn’t appear to have been important in his childhood. As a Jew in Australia he felt as an outsider already in primary school. And with most of his relatives being Holocaust survivors, the Haggadah’s warning that “in every generation they [i.e. non-Jews] rise against us to destroy us….” can easily feel validated. Slezak, like many other Jews, used to worry that all non-Jews inevitably harbored anti-Semitic feelings, a worry that took many years to finally overcome. Instead of regarding the Holocaust as a crime against Jews and a proof of why a Jewish state is needed, he sees a universalistic message in Never again. Some Jewish friends have even cut all ties with Selzak, and he has in his own words ended up “becoming a pariah in my own community” because of his pro-Palestinian activism.
This culture of intolerance is well captured by American musician Rich Siegel when he describes himself as “a cult survivor.” There is something “very seriously wrong with Israel, and with the culture that supports it,” he writes. Siegel should know. He was an ardent Zionist as a teenager, even to the degree that he was out in the streets protesting Arafat’s appearance at the UN in 1974, this while singing along to lyrics such as “We’ll kill those Syrians.” For Siegel, the image of an innocent Israel threatened by Jew-hating Arabs first started to crack while waiting for his wife outside a train station in Rhode Island in 2004. A few activists had a book stand outside the train station and he perused Phyllis Bennis’s Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. He was left shocked after reading about Jews massacring Arabs at Deir Yassin, something he had never heard of. He kept on reading books about the conflict and came to understood what Zionism represented. Some of his friends and relatives are no longer part of his life, but he has no regrets.
I have here only presented glimpses from some of the 25 contributions, but they all deserve to be read in full. As a non-Jew it is difficult to fully relate to the ‘sacredness’ of the Jewish state. However, all people and cultures have their taboos that cannot be disrespected without running the risk of being questioned, persecuted or excommunicated. On a personal level, we all have inner demons holding us back until we have the courage to face them.
Hardly surprising, fear is a reoccurring theme in the stories. Zionism thrives on fears – fear of the Arabs who want to kill the Jews just because of who they are; fear of the non-Jewish world that doesn’t understand Jews because there’s an anti-Semite living in every Gentile. It is only by challenging and facing their fears that Jews can detach themselves from Zionism.
In the afterword Abarbanel writes that she struggled with finding a common denominator for all 25 contributors. But eventually she did find one thing they all share, which she terms “emotional resilience.” She defines it as “the ability to tolerate uncomfortable feelings without avoiding them or trying to make them go away,” and adds that it includes “the ability to tolerate the experience of being disapproved of, disliked and rejected by others, sometimes even by relatives and close friends.” In plain English: to have the courage to stand up for what you believe in no matter the cost.
This is what makes the book so inspiring. 25 stories written by people who struggle because they feel what they are not supposed to feel, because they do things they are not supposed to do. They have the emotional resilience and sense of justice that Richard Goldstone lacks.
~
Kristoffer Larsson studies Economics at a Swedish university. He holds a BA in Theology and is on the Board of Directors of Deir Yassin Remembered. He can be reached at: krislarsson@comhem.se.
Egyptians in US protest gas manufacturer
Basant Zain-eddine – Al-Masry Al-Yuom – 04/12/2011
Egyptians in the United States staged fresh protests on Friday outside the Combined Systems Inc. (CSI) firm in Pennsylvania, which is believed to be the manufacturer of the tear gas used by Egyptian security forces.
At least 43 protesters were killed in week-long clashes with security forces that erupted on 19 November near the Interior Ministry building in downtown Cairo. Eyewitnesses and medical sources reported that many protesters suffocated due to intensive use of tear gas by police.
The protesters outside CSI, who were joined by Occupy Wall Street activists, laid on the ground and played dead to denounce the export of tear gas to Egypt and other Arab states. Some of the firm’s employees tried to forcibly remove the protesters.
The demonstrators wore eye patches in solidarity with several protesters in Cairo who lost their eyes due to rubber bullets used by security forces during the encounters.
Meanwhile, a number of Washington-based Egyptians and Americans have submitted a memo to the White House in which they call for halting the export of tear gas to Arab states, as it is being used to hurt peaceful demonstrators.
Protests outside the Egyptian consulates in New York and Canada also took place in solidarity with demonstrators in Cairo.
Take Apartheid off the Menu
By Julie Holm for MIFTAH | November 30, 2011
For as long as I can remember I have checked every grocery item I ever bought to see where it came from. If the label said “Israel” or if the first three numbers of the barcode were “729” it was almost like I had picked up something I shouldn’t have touched, and I would hurry to put it back on the shelves. Boycotting Israeli products is a given to me. If my local supermarket in Norway or Denmark did not offer alternatives to Israeli products, I would let them know that they should. And if, at Christmas for example, the oranges where not labelled with a country I would ask the store employees, and if the oranges turned out to be Israeli, I would ask them to make sure there was a visible label. People have a right to know and a right to make a choice. Not everyone, however, thinks of this every time they go to the store. It is not everyone who cares either. When confronted with my boycott habits, many people react by saying “but does it actually make a difference?” My answer is always the same: It doesn’t make a difference if only I boycott Israeli products, but if we all did, it could change at least this tiny corner of the world.
Luckily I am far from the only one who boycotts Israel. Last Saturday, November 26, activists in 10 European countries had a day of action under the banner “Take Apartheid off the Menu”. Using flash mobs, demonstrations and lobby actions the human rights campaigners, trade unionists and NGOs created 60 events throughout Europe. In events staged outside supermarkets the activists called on consumers to boycott products made in Israeli settlements, urging the supermarkets to stop carrying such products.
The Israeli products found on the shelves in European supermarkets are often produced on occupied Palestinian soil, in the Jordan Valley for example. That means that buying these products helps finance illegal Israeli settlements and facilitates the violation of Palestinian rights and international law. The agriculture industry is one of the most important sources of income for the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Israeli agricultural export companies like Mehadrin and Agrexco deprive Palestinians from access to land and water and directly profit from this theft of resources.
Since 1948 the Israeli agriculture industry has been one of the most important tools in the occupation of Palestine. It has led to the loss of land and income for many Palestinians who have been forced to live a life marked by poverty and oppression. The Jordan Valley is the most agriculturally utilized area of the West Bank. Here Israel controls 96% of the area through closed military zones where large farms are owned and controlled by Israeli settlers. Civil business as a method of occupation is a violation of the Geneva Conventions and international organisations have documented severe violations of human rights in this area.
If anyone asks why I boycott Israeli products, this is what I tell them. The fact that some people profit from oppressing others, forcing them into poverty is not something that I want to support.
The actions in Europe this Saturday show that there are tools for anyone who wants to pressure Israel into stopping the occupation of Palestine. The boycott actions are growing and more and more consumers are making a conscious choice not to buy products that support the occupation. This could force the supermarket chains and importers to take action as well. The bankruptcy of Agrexco, Israel’s leading flower exporter shows that boycotting does actually make a difference.
There is really no reason why people everywhere shouldn’t take apartheid off the menu. First of all, it is a personal, ethical choice: Who would want to support the oppression of Palestinians, deprive them of land, water and rights every time they buy an orange? Secondly, it is not a matter of accessibility. The European supermarkets are bulging with products and it is always possible to find an alternative to an Israeli product. And third: Yes, it does make a difference. It is all about the numbers. If enough people make a conscious choice not to buy Israeli products, it can be a powerful tool against illegal settlements and Israeli occupation of Palestine.
~
Julie Holm is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.
General Strike Rocks Nation: Workers Across Britain Confront Conservative Austerity Demands
By Linn Washington Jr. | This Can’t Be Happening | 12/01/2011
London — Standing on a picket line in front of her work place at a world renowned heart-lung hospital in London wasn’t Jeanette Anderson’s first choice for how to spend her day.
However, Anderson said protesting was her “only choice.”
Protesting as part of a nationwide general strike in the UK, Anderson said, was necessary to combat austerity measures from Britain’s conservative led government that now targets the pensions of public sector workers like Anderson and her picket line colleagues at the Royal Brompton Hospital in this city’s up-scale Chelsea section.
“We do not get the fat-cat pensions like the rich,” Anderson said, noting that participating in the one-day strike action wasn’t something she took lightly.
“Public sector workers are already into a two-year pay freeze and now the government plans to extend that pay freeze for another two years.”
Anderson, her Brompton Hospital picket line colleagues and an estimated two million other public sector workers staged a one-day general strike across Britain Wednesday (11/30).
Public workers prepare to march through Central London in Wednesday’s UK General Strike (photo by Linn Washington)
That strike – the largest labor action in Britain in 30 years – closed 62 percent of the public schools in England, Scotland and Wales in addition to shuttering many government offices (local and national) including courts plus disrupting government services, such as forcing the postponements of some
Three miles from Anderson’s Brompton Hospital picket line over 25,000 public workers staged a rally and march that was one of over 1,000 protest actions by workers across Britain on November 30th.
Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron mocked the effectiveness of the general strike, citing its failure to disrupt operations at the nation’s major airports.
The Cameron government brought strikebreakers for the airports from as far away as the Caribbean to off-set the strike’s impact. Further, major airlines initiated programs to reschedule flights to avoid problems from the strike, particularly anticipated delays in processing passports of arriving passengers.
Countering Cameron, Brendan Barber, head of Britain’s Trade Union Congress, termed the strike a success, saying, “There has been magnificent support” for the strike. Barber promised similar labor actions in the near future if the Cameron government continues to assault the living standards of workers.
The flash point of the strike is the British government’s demands that public sector workers make higher contributions to their pensions and work longer before retirement.
Yet, the wider context of the strike is the set of austerity measures Britain’s conservative leaders say are required to reduce massive national budget deficits.
Deficit reduction actions, many contend, are unfairly targeting the middle and lower classes by forcing them to pay for the economic woes created by the upper class that is largely escaping the slash-and-burn pain of tax increases and service cuts.
“They want us to increase our contributions into the pension pot to ten percent of our pay and then they want to cut our pensions by twenty percent. Where is the fairness in that?” asked Steve Caddick, a National Health Service worker on the picket line with NHS colleague Anderson.
The National Health Service is the government funded healthcare system in the UK that provides much of its comprehensive medical services free of charge unlike the steep fee based system in the United States.
Sam Wheeler, another Brompton Hospital NHS picketer, echoed criticism of the fundamental unfairness in the government’s initiatives.
“Our pension fund makes profits each year but the government takes those profits for other purposes, unlike private pension funds that reinvest the profits to increase the fund,” Wheeler said. “All of this is the government taking from public sector workers to pay for the deficits caused by the bankers. The government still is not putting regulations on the banks and that’s what upsets me.”
Those participating in the general strike challenge claims pushed by conservative government officials and media coverage that public sector workers enjoy plush pensions particularly when compared to private sector workers.
The average pension for a worker in the National Health Service – Britain’s largest public sector employer – is $12,500 annually in U.S. dollars… hardly sufficient for a lavish life style, especially with the costs of food, energy and seemingly everything else soaring.
According to Britain’s Trade Union Congress, a key organizer of the general strike, public sector pensions average between $7,859-to-$14,147 annually in U.S. dollars.
Many workers argue that government official’s the pitting of public sector pensions against pensions for lower-waged workers in the private sector is both deceptive effort devised to maliciously divide workers.
“Some people in the private sector do have lower pensions than those in the public sector but most forget that many of those lower paid private sector workers used to hold public sector jobs that were privatized, with pay and benefits subsequently reduced,” veteran labor activist Glenroy Watson said.
Watson said there should be “parity” between public and private sector pensions but divide-and-rule tactics are a part of “the general attack” by the conservative government to “claw back” gains that workers have achieved in the past few decades.
“The fact of the matter is that this government’s austerity program is the same program of [the late Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she stole a lot from ordinary people. Here are the same kinds of people back again taking for themselves,” Watson said.
“All the issues in conflict under Thatcher like stealing benefits from ordinary people are nothing new. Too many people refuse to analyze this properly. There is no difference between Thatcher and the current government of [David] Cameron.”
The day before the November 30th general strike, Prime Minister Cameron’s finance head, George Osborne, announced new austerity-driven fiscal measures including pay freezes for public workers and hundreds of thousands of additional job cuts in the public sector.
Osborne’s announcements did include plans for billions in infrastructure improvements to stimulate the economy, government loans for small businesses to expand, targeted programs to reduce massive youth unemployment and increases in welfare benefits.
But data from Osborne’s own independent Office of Budget Responsibility stated that his cuts directed toward reducing deficits only had a 60-percent chance of meeting the stated goal of eliminating deficits by 2015-16.
Bracketing Osborne’s announcements were reports from think-tanks painting grim pictures of a possible new recession in Britain, steep reductions living standards for the average family and the poorest 30-percent of households losing more than three times as much as the richest 30-percent of the population.
The day after the general strike news reported that researchers for the British Parliament’s House of Commons library calculated that women in the UK will bear 73-percent of changes in tax credits and caps on public sector pay pushed by Osborne compared to 27-percent impacting men.
Others outside of public sector employment also oppose the austerity initiatives, criticizing the failure of the Cameron coalition government to end accelerating income inequities and crack down on the corporate classes that created the economic collapse with manipulative enrichment-schemes.
“That notion of shared sacrifice pushed by the government is nonsense. It is predicated on the assumption that during the boom economic times everyone benefited and they did not,” activist Osagyefo Tongogara said, while leafleting near the route of the protest march through Central London.
Tongogara, who supported the general strike, said the measurements the government uses to set public pension rates were changed earlier this year to an accounting methodology that short-changes workers by undercounting the impact of inflation.
Austerity actions, Tongogara said, are increasing rates of poverty, especially among children and the elderly – an assertion backed by economists and other experts. “The rich continue to off-shore billions of pounds to avoid paying taxes. Tax evasion is illegal for working people but tax avoidance is not illegal for the rich…that is wrong,” he said.
Activist Selma James, 81, criticizes Cameron’s coalition government for failing to seriously address accelerating income inequities that aggravate existing poverty particularly impoverishment impacting children and the elderly.
“The 1% is pushing us around determining our lives, stealing our money, our resources and our possibilities,” James, the founder of London’s Crossroads Womens’ Centre, stated in an email interview.
James, the widow of the late Caribbean author/activist C.L.R. James, said actions like the general strike and the Occupy Movement are vital.
Those activities, said James, are a “strength for all to stop suffering in silence and spell out our real conditions of life and the brutality we try to defeat every hour we’re alive.”
‘It’s time to stop the bully’: Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn on Occupy Wall Street, the Israel lobby and the New York Times
By Alex Kane | Mondoweiss | November 28, 2011
When the Occupy Wall Street protests began to attract attention in the fall, everyone wanted to know where the idea to set up a permanent protest at the heart of Manhattan’s financial district came from. The answer was the mind of Kalle Lasn, the co-editor (along with Micah White) of the anti-consumerist “culture jamming” magazine Adbusters. It was Adbusters, calling for an American “Tahrir moment,” that originally put out the call to occupy Wall Street on September 17.
But not all the attention Lasn and his magazine received was positive, though. It was the New York Times coverage of Adbusters and Lasn’s role in the Occupy movement that caused him the most grief by smearing them as anti-Semitic.
“For me, the New York Times is really important right now, because it was one of the most ugly experiences of my year, where they took a couple of quick swipes at my magazine and me personally,” Lasn told Mondoweiss in a recent phone interview. “I have such huge respect for the New York Times and I subscribe to it and I’ve been reading it every morning for the last ten years of my life.”
Now, Lasn is speaking out about the New York Times‘ refusal to print his response to two articles in the newspaper that alleged Adbusters was anti-Semitic. (Read more about the controversy here, and read this New Yorker article on the origins and future of Occupy Wall Street for more about Lasn and White.)
Mondoweiss recently caught up with Lasn for an extended interview with the sixty-nine year old activist to discuss Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, the Israel lobby and more.
Alex Kane: Tell me about yourself, I’ve read some, but details about your life and what you’re doing at Adbusters.
Kalle Lasn: Well, I don’t think my history’s all that fascinating, but I think the really fascinating thing about Adbusters magazine and what I’m doing right now is this Occupy movement that we helped to spark a couple of months ago and the possibilities for where this movement could—the possibility it could fizzle out, but it could also blossom into this powerful kind of force on the political left that could change not just the way we think about financial speculators and fat cats on Wall Street, but all kinds of arenas as well, including the political and foreign policy arenas. So, yeah, that’s sort of the big thing in my life right now, just thinking about that and trying to infuse our magazine and our website and our tactical briefings with this spirit of this youthful revolt that the Occupy movement represents.
AK: How do you see Adbusters’ role in the Occupy movement?
KL: Well you know, we were the people who were lucky enough to sort of spark the whole thing just at the right moment with some of the posters we came up with and that hashtag Occupy Wall Street [#occupywallstreet], choosing that magical date, September 17th, that seemed to absolutely be the right moment. When a movement is ripe, then all it takes is one spark, and I think that spark did happen on September the 17th, and after that of course, the movement started to have a life of its own, and all we’ve really been doing is churning out our tactical briefings and trying to, to the extent that it’s possible, to sort of have influence on a movement like this, to infuse our Adbusters’ tactical ideas into the movement and trying to keep our finger in the pie, so to speak.
AK: Obviously, Adbusters’ role in this has been distorted, which has led to the charges of anti-Semitism. I know you have the right of reply campaign going on, but what’s your general take?
KL: Let me enlarge the conversation a little bit. I think one of the interesting things about this Occupy movement is that I think it will come back, after hibernating for the winter, it will come back next spring and it will get involved in more than just economics. It will start playing around with politics and possibly launching third political parties and all kinds of political energy will come out of this movement. And one of the arenas that I think it may have some influence on is this—kind of a, what Adbusters long ago started calling the United States of Amnesia—this fact that most of the people in America actually aren’t getting the information that they need to make wise decisions about foreign policy and political matters. I think from my perspective, it seems like American political thinking is being distorted by a number of bubbles, and one of those bubbles is that AIPAC bubble, which is a very powerful, probably the most powerful lobby in America, and it has the power to intimidate politicians and get them to never say anything negative about Israel, and it’s got to the point where even the president of the United States is intimidated by this lobby and forced to do all kinds of things that he wouldn’t normally do.
I think another one of the bubbles is a media bubble, because there’s a special sensitivity to this issue, and the Holocaust, and it’s such an emotionally charged thing, and I think the media is quite often pro-Israeli in a knee-jerk way. For example, when Ehud Barak visited the United States of America last week, he went on the Charlie Rose Show, and with Fareed Zakaria, and he basically blitzed the media, and he left the impression that somehow it would be absolutely perfectly okay for us to attack Iran. Some of the other ways of looking at it—like this idea that Israel also has nukes, and that maybe a smarter strategy would be to fight for a nuclear-free Middle East rather than bomb the hell out of Iran, and some of the historical nuances about American CIA involvement back there a long time ago that started this unholy business that has been unfolding these past 30, 40, 50 years—those things were completely missing from the media. And then even newspapers like the New York Times, which is one of the great newspapers of the world, has Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner, a couple of their main people who write about the Middle East and Israeli/Palestine matters, and these two people are so obviously biased in favor of Israel, that it’s really disheartening to see the New York Times not mixing it up a little bit more and allowing more of a Palestinian perspective into what they write.
And David Brooks had a quick swipe at Adbusters, and then Joseph Berger took an even more vicious anti-Semitic swipe at Adbusters, and when we wrote them back a letter demanding a right of reply, they wouldn’t even print it, because we weren’t just talking about Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner and David Brooks, but we actually pointed out in our letter that the New York Times has got an anti-Palestinian bias to it, and they didn’t want to run that letter, I don’t know why. I hope you can phone them up and ask them. I did send an envelope to everybody at the New York Times giving them this back and forth e-mail exchange that I had fighting for my right of reply.
So there’s an AIPAC bubble, there’s a media bubble, but I think one of the even more powerful bubbles that exists in America in addition, is what I call the neocon bubble, and this is a very powerful, quite often very highly pro-Israeli bunch of intellectuals who have sort of been keeping all of us on our toes and they were instrumental in pushing a lot of policies, very heavily pro-Israeli policies, they were instrumental in pushing for the Iraq War and now they’re also instrumental in pushing for an attack on Iran. We have three big bubbles in America, and this is what we here at Adbusters have been kind of fighting against for the last 15 years.
AK: Right. It’s interesting, because what connects all those bubbles, really, is a devotion to Israel. But the article that David Brooks and Commentary criticized Adbusters for was pointing out the very simple fact that many neoconservatives are Jewish, and it’s a sensitive subject for many reasons obviously. But what are your thoughts on how all these questions relate to Jewish privilege and influence in the United States?
KL: Well, I’m not quite sure what you’re asking here, I mean, as I pointed out in my right of reply letter, David Brooks wrote an article last year where he pointed out that x percent of Pulitzer Prize winners were Jewish, and he had sort of a litany of a half-dozen percentages that all pointed out how intellectually powerful and creative the Jewish people are. And in my right of reply letter, I wanted to ask David Brooks, well, if he can quote those percentages, then why can’t Adbusters point out that a percentage of the neocons are also Jewish?
But for me, I think the really big point is, that article we wrote—that was written seven years ago. It was a half-page article in a copy of Adbusters seven years ago, and it has caused us a lot of grief—grief because we were attacked for being anti-Semitic, because if you start defending yourself against anti-Semitism, I found, then it’s a losing proposition. It’s like defending yourself against rabies; it’s like defending yourself against smallpox. The more you defend yourself, the more excited you get about defending yourself against it, the more people think, well this is suspicious, maybe the guy does have rabies, maybe the guy does have smallpox, maybe he is anti-Semitic.
So defending yourself against anti-Semitism is really a game, and I played that game for the first few months, and years after that article came out, I always lost. So I’ve decided I’m not going to play that game anymore. I would like to now go on the offensive, and I would like to talk about AIPAC, and I’d like to talk about the New York Times and Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner and David Brooks, and I’d like to, above all, start popping these three bubbles. The people who feel that American foreign policy has been distorted by the neocons, by the media and by AIPAC, it’s time for us to stop arguing about it and start going on the offensive. Stop defending yourself and go on the offensive right now and start popping those three bubbles. And I’m hoping that a lot of people of like mind from this Occupy movement will move into this area, and we will be as aggressive as AIPAC, as aggressive as some of these neocons have been, and fighting back against them. What I’m saying is, we need a hashtag, #occupytheneocons, we need a hashtag, #occupyAIPAC.
AK: You said the charges of anti-Semitism caused you at Adbusters a lot of grief. Was this personal grief, was this professional grief? Obviously, the charge of anti-Semitism can be a powerful one, and it can be career wrecking for some people.
KL: Oh yeah, it has ruined a lot of careers. And it’s damaged many of them. I really sympathize with people like Norman Finkelstein and even President Carter, who dare to use words like apartheid, or who dare to speak back against these neocons, and suddenly found themselves vilified, they found themselves pilloried in the media, and so it is a very, very dangerous thing to stand up and speak the way that Adbusters and many other people have done, because it can be career destroying, for a politician it could mean you’re not going to get elected next time around, and it’s for a lot of people, it’s just like a lose-lose proposition. It takes a lot of courage, and I hope that from now on the political left will have more of that courage, because why we’ve been losing these political battles for so long, and why American foreign policy has been so distorted by the dual-loyalties of many neocons. It’s because we’re always on the defensive, we’re scared to go on the offensive and we’re scared to actually expose one by one these neocons and actually point out where their loyalties lie and so on. And we’re scared to really rabidly go after AIPAC because it’s such a huge, big opponent that can do us in. So yes, I think we need more courage on the political left.
AK: You live in Canada, correct?
KL: Yes.
AK: And you know, Palestine, when it comes up in the Occupy movement, in New York at least, there’s been some controversy about it—kind of the old dividing line in left and anti-war movements. Where you live—I know Canada has become extremely right-wing in its support for Israel—but is the discourse the same where you live, or is it different?
KL: I think it’s very similar. Especially right now, we have a prime minister who is very right-wing and the discourse is very, very similar, I think it’s kind of a North American discourse, and I don’t think there’s a huge different between the Canadian discourse and the U.S. discourse. It’s just very, very similar, and the situation here is the same. Like for example, when we published an article that Canadian Jewish groups here found disturbing or offensive, then they were instrumental in convincing the biggest magazine distributor in Canada to pull 3,000 issues of Adbusters and not to allow Adbusters to distribute our magazine in their hundreds of stores around Canada. So this is the sort of power they have and this is the grief that they can cause for people. Quite apart from some people getting offended and canceling their subscription, which is just par for the course when you run a magazine, but the Jewish lobby, the pro-Israeli lobby in Canada and the U.S., has this power to really make magazines like us pay a price for speaking back.
AK: What do you make of the fact that there has been controversy, at least some and obviously Palestine doesn’t play a big part in the Occupy movement, but the fact that there has been at least some online controversy about Palestine in the Occupy movement. What does that say to you?
KL: Oh, I haven’t thought too much about that, I don’t really think about stuff like that. I mean, for me, it’s a more simple kind of situation, I don’t really bother with smaller skirmishes. I mean, for me, it’s about Israel behaving badly, and it’s about the Palestinian freedom fight, which I really believe in. I believe that the Palestinian freedom fight is one of the great freedom fights of our time, and I want to support it in any way that I can.
AK: And you were saying before, as the Occupy movement expands, you want and you think and you’re interested in seeing whether the Occupy movements take on U.S. foreign policy. Can you talk more about that?
KL: You know, well, I think that the political left has been whining and complaining and being kind of useless, in the sense that the Berlin Wall fell back in 1989, and we basically have been very ineffectual. And here at Adbusters we have been saying for a long, long time that we have to jump over the dead body of the old left, and we’ve been trying to do that but now with this Occupy movement I think it is finally possible to jump over the dead body of the old left, and for some of these Young Turks who are coming out of the Occupy movement, for us to start having our own powerful, kind of a, intellectual group of people that can stand up to the neocons, and can infuse the American media with different perspectives than what we’re getting right now and we can sort of engage with AIPAC in a way where they don’t always win. So I think that many of the occupiers will not agree with me that the Palestinian freedom fight is one of the great freedom fights of all time and they should be supported, I mean they will have their own perspective, but I think, and do feel, that now that it’s kind of “cool” to be left again, there will be some powerful lefty political discourse starting to come out of this movement. And I think it has the power to start popping some of these bubbles that I’ve been talking about and giving the people of America more information to make wise decisions about whether we should support an attack on Iran, or whether we should cut off the money supply to the Palestinians, or whether we should allow Netanyahu to build more settlements, and stuff like that.
AK: I know you said your personal background wasn’t pertinent, but I was reading that you were born in Estonia. Is that correct?
KL: That’s correct. If you’re looking for some sort of, bit of a hint from my history for where I’m coming from, is that, yeah, I was born in Estonia and when the Russians came in my family caught the last [way] out and spent the next five years in various displaced persons’ camps in Europe and Germany, and I remember the first few years of my life were full of emotional, political discourse. I went to sleep every night listening to the adults argue about the Nazis and the Russians and so I’m a highly politicized human being right from the start. And I’ve always believed in, I’ve always taken the side of, I hate bullies. I hate bullies and I love freedom fights.
AK: How has that experience shaped your politics on Israel/Palestine?
KL: Yeah. When I see Israel acting so arrogant and so tough—here’s one of the most powerful military forces in the world, they have nukes—and when I see them cordoning off Gaza the way they do and when they attack Gaza the way they did, it just fills me with rage because this is a powerful bully that is basically turning Gaza into kind of a turkey shoot. I really see it in this kind of very visceral way, like how could they possibly get away with doing this? For me, it’s almost a very black and white battle where, let’s stop arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong, let’s just take sides and start fighting for the human rights and the other rights that the Palestinians should have, and let’s not allow the bully to always win. I mean, it’s time to stop the bully.
UK anti-war campaigns to join labor unions in strike
Press TV – November 27, 2011
British anti-war campaigns have thrown their weight behind the nationwide strike against the government’s cuts in pensions and welfare services, urging the government to cut warfare not welfare.
Stop the War Coalition (SWC) and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament announced that they would participate in the November 30 strike action organized by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) to call on the government to cut war and Trident spending not pensions.
The campaigns stressed that the government’s spending cuts have only been applied on jobs and public services, while spending on war is mounting without interruption.
Britain spent at least £1.5 billion on the Libya war, and spends about £5 billion per year on the Afghanistan war, SWC revealed. The campaign also said that the overall costs of the war on terror to the US are $3 trillion.
It is estimated that over three million public sector workers will participate in the pension strike across Britain, to defend their pensions against the government’s austerity measures.
The anti-war campaigns proclaimed they would support the strike action of 28 unions, believing the Tory-led government’s wrong policies would boost poverty and misery for the poor people.
“The budget deficits in the US and Britain have been caused in part by the rising cost of wars. Governments have borrowed money to pay for war. They are now asking people to accept cuts and austerity to pay for them,” SWC convener Lindsey German said.
Suggesting an alternative to the cut plans, German said the government could “cut spending on war and the Trident nuclear submarine system and use the money to fund welfare.”
Mark Serwotka, general secretary of Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), also condemned the government’s war policies. “The war in Afghanistan and the war in Libya are wrong. They are misjudged; they are not about what people claim they are about. And we should actually find a way out of those pretty quickly, not make the situation in those countries worse as well as at the same time take valuable resources that could go into schools and hospitals,” he said.
Jordanians, Egyptians rally in support of Jerusalem
Palestine Information Center – 26/11/2011
AMMAN — Tens of thousands of Jordanian citizens rallied on Friday in Suweima village in the Jordanian Valley, only 25 kilometers away from occupied Jerusalem, in support of the holy city.
Ibrahim Al-Keylani, delivering the Friday sermon at the village, said that the Jordanians were displaying solidarity with their Palestinian brothers.
He championed resistance as the only hope for the liberation of the holy Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem, warning that the holy city was the target of a systematic Judaization campaign at the hands of the Israeli occupiers.
Participants torched Israeli flags and replicas of the alleged Jewish temple, which the Jews were seeking to build in place of the Aqsa mosque.
In Cairo, around 5000 Egyptians held a similar rally at the Azhar mosque to declare solidarity with Jerusalem and the Aqsa mosque on the international day for solidarity with occupied Jerusalem.
A statement delivered on behalf of the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Dr. Ahmed Al-Tayyeb, said that Jerusalem was a red line and that Muslims would never allow anyone to harm it.
Tayyeb asked Muslims worldwide to mobilize efforts and to confront the Israeli Judaization of Jerusalem.
Khalil Al-Hayya, a political bureau member of Hamas, told the rally that Arabs and Muslims should stand united to liberate Jerusalem, adding that the Israelis were planning to destroy the Aqsa mosque.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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- Minab children massacre not ‘unfortunate situation’ but ‘heinous war crime’: Tehran
- OPCW Forced To Pay Damages To Whistleblower Who Found Evidence Of False Flag In Syria
- Iran can thrive under blockade, the US and its allies cannot
- Iran slams US leadership, debunking fabrications, false war costs
- Here’s why Iran is sovereign and Germany is not
- Israel pours $730m into global propaganda machine as reputation collapses
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli Strikes Kill at Least 32 Across S Lebanon, Including Children – Amid “Ceasefire”
- Israel to pour $730m into propaganda arm amid reputational crisis
- Real Cost of Iran War Likely Double the $25 Billion Figure the Pentagon Gave to Congress
- Israel conducts farthest-ever strike in long history of attacks on Gaza humanitarian aid flotillas
- In Gaza, Israel commits 10+ ceasefire violations a day – Daily Update
- US ships 6,500 tons of munitions, equipment to Israel in 24 hours
- A New Library in Gaza Rises From the Ashes of Destruction
- Israel’s top Jewish religious body ‘refuses to condemn’ smashing of Jesus statue
- Nun assaulted in Jerusalem amid ‘pattern’ of anti-Christian attacks by Israelis
- Former Tik Tok official describes massive pressure from Israel lobby
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
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