On Tuesday, May 24, 2011, the United States Department of State unilaterally imposed sanctions against Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), for its alleged relations with the government of Iran. The sanctions are a desperate and weak attempt to link Venezuela to Iran’s nuclear energy program as part of an ongoing campaign to justify further aggressive action against the South American oil producing nation.
As citizens of the United States, we unequivocally reject this latest attempt of our administration to demonize the Venezuelan government and undermine the vibrant democracy of the Venezuelan people. The Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez has already been victim of a coup d’etat in 2002, backed by Washington, which briefly ousted the President from power. Fortunately for the health of Venezuela’s democracy, the people fought back, rescued their President, and reinstated constitutional order. Then, as now, the United States stood alone in its support for hostilities against Venezuela’s democratically-elected government.
The government of Hugo Chavez has used its oil wealth to invest heavily in improving the wellbeing of its people. Currently, more than 60% of oil industry profits are directed towards social programs in Venezuela, including free healthcare, education, job training, community media, grassroots organizations and subsidized food and housing. The results are notable. Poverty in Venezuela has been reduced by over 50% during the Chavez administration, illiteracy has been eradicated and free, universal healthcare and education are available and accessible to all. These policies of social justice have extended well beyond the borders of Venezuela to the United States though programs that supply free, discounted or subsidized heating oil and fuel to low income neighborhoods, indigenous peoples’ communities and homeless shelters throughout the nation.
More than 250,000 US citizens in 25 states and the District of Columbia have benefited to date from the Venezuelan government’s subsidized heating oil program, which is run through PDVSA’s subsidiary in the United States, CITGO. No other oil company in the world – including US companies – has offered to help low income families suffering from the inflated cost of heating oil during the past six years, except for CITGO. Venezuela’s solidarity with the people of the United States has enabled thousands of families to survive through these difficult economic times.
We find it outrageous that the United States government would attempt to demonize the one company, and country, that has been there for our neighbors, putting people before profits. And we call on our representatives in Washington to suspend these sanctions against Venezuela immediately.
An analyst exposes the parasitic links between Western organizations and pro-Israeli groups with dissidents who cause interwoven upheavals in Middle Eastern countries.
‘The test of a first-rate intelligence,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, ‘is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ When it comes to what’s been dubbed the ‘Arab Spring,’ most Middle East analysts pass Fitzgerald’s test with flying colours.
Hardly anyone would dispute the claim that Haim Saban cares deeply about Israel. After all, the Egyptian-born Israeli-American media mogul has admitted to the New York Times, “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” A New Yorker profile last year elaborated:
“His greatest concern, he says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship. At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described his formula. His ‘three ways to be influential in American politics,’ he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets.”
The think tank part of Saban’s tripartite Israel-protection formula was initiated in 2002 with a pledge of nearly $13 million to the Brookings Institution to establish the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. In 2007, the Saban Center expanded operations with the launch of the Brookings Doha Center. Its Qatar-based project was inaugurated in February 2008 by the founding director of the Saban Center, Martin Indyk. A former research director at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Indyk had previously founded the AIPAC-created Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).
All three experts at the Brookings Doha Center — its director, deputy director and director of research — are fellows at the pro-Israel Saban Center, while two of the three have close ties to Washington’s “democracy promotion” establishment. The center’s deputy director, Ibrahim Sharqieh, previously managed a long term USAID development project in Yemen, as well as a U.S. State Department Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) civic education project. According to a March 12 report in the Washington Post detailing U.S. support for Arab democrats, USAID grants “proved vital to activists in a half-dozen Arab lands,” financing, for example, the training by groups such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and Freedom House of up to 80 percent of the leaders of the Egyptian uprising. MEPI, according to an April 18 Washington Post report, has funneled up to $6 million to Syrian opposition groups since 2006. As further testament to Haim Saban’s contribution to Middle East democracy, MEPI is currently headed by Tamara Wittes, formerly director of the Saban Center’s Middle East Democracy and Development (MEDD) Project.
Shadi Hamid, the Doha center’s director of research, is aptly described as an expert on democratization in the Middle East. Prior to working for the Saban Center, he was a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). CDDRL’s director, Larry Diamond, is the founding co-editor of the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy and a longtime advocate of Arab democracy. Hamid was also director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED), whose board of advisors, reading like a who’s who of the democracy promotion establishment, includes Diamond and the NDI and IRI presidents. Hamid has also served as a program specialist on public diplomacy at the U.S. State Department. James Glassman, the former Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy who brought Middle Eastern pro-democracy activists to New York for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit in 2008, viewed public diplomacy as “the direct or indirect engagement of foreign publics to support national security objectives,” while observing that “it’s a lot easier to be influential when others are making the pronouncements.”
On its international advisory council, the Brookings Doha Center boasts such luminaries of democracy promotion as Madeleine Albright. The former U.S. Secretary of State currently chairs the NDI, the Democratic affiliate of the quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy (NED). As Kenneth Timmerman candidly admitted in 2009, “The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.” During the protests in Egypt, Albright was interviewed by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, one of the corporate sponsors of Movements.org, the AYM’s online hub which supports the activities of pro-democracy digital activists. Considering her lack of scruples about the sanctions-induced deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, Albright’s condemnation of the Mubarak regime’s brutality has to be taken with a grain of salt. More importantly, however, the NDI chair acknowledged that her democracy-promoting organization had been “working within Egypt for a long time.”
From the beginning of the Arab uprisings, the Brookings Doha Center has been churning out commentaries with titles like “Saleh Falls,” “In Syria, Assad Must Exit the Stage” and “If United States Doesn’t Make Qaddafi Go, Who Will?” which leave little doubt about their stance. In a recent Washington Post report, which reads more like an editorial in support of the Arab Spring, the center’s director, Salman Shaikh, warns, “If these Arab revolutions do become a footnote, and if people do become frustrated and see no light at the end of the tunnel, I don’t know where it could lead in terms of people thinking of al-Qaeda.”
Yet few Middle East observers seem to be asking: If the Arab Spring is backed so unreservedly by Haim Saban’s think tank, which was created to protect Israel, then how could it possibly threaten Israeli interests?
RAMALLAH — A political adviser to the late president Yasser Arafat issued a statement Tuesday, alleging that US Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell resigned because of the “extreme bias” of his deputy Dennis Ross.
Bassam Abu Shareef said Ross obstructed all US initiatives aiming to achieve progress in the peace process, and blamed the deputy’s bias for Mitchell’s resignation Saturday.
Abu Shareef said senior American officials informed him that Mitchell viewed the appointment of Ross a step to obstruct the peace process. He added that Mitchell believed Ross was working against US interests.
The official paraphrased comments he said were made by Mitchell during a meeting, where he asked: “How can Dennis Ross assist in the peace process when he refuses to meet with the Palestinians, when he despises their leadership and hates their president?”
Abu Shareef also said Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “rejects peace,” and would have no part of a Palestinian state with Hamas in its leadership.
“This means they are opening war on Palestinians and their nation,” he added.
On Wednesday, Reps. Steve Israel (D – NY) and Tom Cole (R – OK) led a bipartisan letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan urging the Prime Minister to stop another flotilla from departing Turkey for the Gaza Strip.
Thirty-six Members of Congress signed the bipartisan letter including:
In honor of the sixty-third anniversary of Israel’s independence from the proprietors of the land on which it was established, the Israeli embassy in Panama is issuing a four-part magazine series entitled “Israel: 63 years of constant progress”. The first 30-page installment arrived last week with the morning La Prensa and dealt with typical cultural themes such as hummus, shawarma, and the coexistence in the Israeli democratic “oasis” of various ethnicities enjoying equal rights. Cultural trivia items included that “Israelis drink 3.5 cups of coffee per day”, “A cup of coffee costs 4 dollars on average”, and “Because they are adventurous, Israelis love extreme sports”.
Higher-caliber trivia—such as the success of an Israeli invention for an electric hair removal device, which according to Israel’s Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs “makes women happy all over the world” and should thus be used in order to counter “barbs of criticism” levied against Jewish state on account of its barbarous policies—was not on this occasion made available to Panamanians. Nor was it explained whether the multi-ethnic democracy’s Afghan Jewish inhabitants, represented by a photograph of women in blue burqas, had access to alternate ensembles for use during skydiving and other extreme activities, or how vast portions of the Israeli population living below the poverty line can spend 14 dollars a day on coffee.
The theme of the second supplement in the anniversary series, which arrived yesterday, is Israeli-Panamanian relations. The magazine cover features a handshake, with one hand patterned after the Israeli flag and the other after the Panamanian one. Lest there remain any doubt as to economic motives for political obsequiousness to Israel, this installment—like the first—is transparently interspersed with full-page advertisements from Panamanian banks and related institutions congratulating Israel on 63 years of independence. Also interspersed, however, is the detail that the “land of Israel” was in 1947 “also known as Palestine”.
On page 15 of the magazine it is announced that “Panama played an important role in the processes that led to the creation of the state of Israel”, thanks especially to a certain Eduardo Morgan Alvarez who “understood the injustices that the Jews had suffered” and who was appointed by Panamanian President Enrique A. Jimenez to represent the country before the U.N. Palestine Commission. According to the magazine, Morgan’s most important achievement “was to persuade smaller countries, primarily in Latin America, to support the U.N. [partition] resolution”.
Regarding Israeli acquisition of an air force, meanwhile, consider the following paragraph:
“The first planes arrived to [Israel] by way of clandestine operations, due to the arms embargo by the West. One such operation involved transferring 13 planes from the U.S. to Panama, registering them under the name of Líneas Aéreas de Panama, LAPSA, a company that was created precisely for this purpose. The first plane arrived to Israel on June 21, 1948.”
Other bright spots in the history of Israeli-Panamanian relations appear on page 17, where we learn that current Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli’s March 2010 visit to Israel and signing of five accords prompted the Israelis to “issue a page of postage stamps in his honor”.
As for the report that bilateral trade between Israel and Panama increased 35 percent last year and that “Panama is one of Israel’s best trading partners in Latin America”, the sanctity of the arrangement is not without constraints—something confirmed by recently WikiLeaked cables indicating that Martinelli bowed to U.S. embassy pressure to cease providing contracts to the Israeli security firm Global CST. Run by former Head of the Operations Directorate of the IDF Israel Ziv, the firm’s regional accomplishments include employing an Argentine-born Israeli interpreter who endeavored to sell classified Colombian military documents to the FARC.
Of course, such trivia is irrelevant to Israel’s sixty-third anniversary of promoting conflict at home and abroad. Far more important is the recognition that “Israelis understand and appreciate good coffee, and they drink it the same way the Europeans do”, and that “Israel has the most divers per capita in the world, who enjoy world-renowned diving spots”.
With Barada TV, the anti-Assad satellite channel referred to by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, all roads lead to Israel.
According to an April 18 Washington Post report, the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) has funneled up to $6 million to Syrian opposition groups such as Barada TV since 2006. MEPI is supervised by Tamara Wittes, a longtime pro-Israel advocate of democratic reform in the Middle East and author of Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy. The Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), where she coordinates democracy and human rights policy for the NEA Bureau, is a former director of the Saban Center’s Middle East Democracy and Development (MEDD) Project. As to the nature of MEDD’s concern for the Middle East, a New Yorker profile of Haim Saban is revealing:
His greatest concern, [Saban] says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship. At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described his formula. His ‘three ways to be influential in American politics,’ he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets.”
Asked to comment on the Post’s allegations, Wittes responded:
“There are a lot of organizations in Syria and other countries that are seeking changes from their government. That’s an agenda that we believe in and we’re going to support.”
According to the Post, the money was funneled through an LA-based non-profit, the Democracy Council. Jim Prince, the founder and president of the Democracy Council, is also an advisor to CyberDissidents.org, which was launched in 2008 by the Jerusalem-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies “to research and focus attention on the online activities of democracy advocates and dissidents in the Middle East, in the hope of empowering them at home and raising awareness of their plight abroad.”
Dissidents who put their faith in such improbable champions of their freedom would do well to remember the words of Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino mogul whose $4.5 million grant set up the institute in 2007. Referring to a conversation he had with Iranian dissident Amir Abbas Fakhravar at a neoconservative 2007 Prague conference on “Democracy and Security,” the Likudnik casino magnate reportedly said, “I like Fakhravar because he says that, if we attack, the Iranian people will be ecstatic.” But when another Iranian pro-democracy activist disputed that assumption, Adelson candidly responded:
“I really don’t care what happens to Iran. I am for Israel.”
Egyptian authorities have reportedly blocked access to the Sinai Peninsula to prevent activists from reaching the Gazan town of Rafah.
Pro-Palestinian activists plan to march to the Gaza Strip on Sunday, to mark the 63rd anniversary of the day of Nakba, or catastrophe, which marks the day when Israel occupied Palestinian lands.
The Egyptian army has warned against rallies at the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip.
However, a convoy left Cairo’s Liberation square on Saturday to head to Sinai.
Organizers say their march is to show that the Palestinian issue concerns all Arabs and supporting it remains a concern for Egyptians. The activists are calling for Palestinian statehood, an end to the Israeli occupation, as well as the release of all Palestinian prisoners.
Egyptians have frequently demanded that their military rulers abandon Israel and lift the blockade on the besieged Gaza Strip.
Egypt’s political parties say the Gaza blockade serves the interests of Israel and the US and threatens regional stability and independence.
Under the US-backed Mubarak regime, Egypt consistently served Tel Aviv’s interests in the region by helping to impose a crippling blockade on the impoverished Strip after the democratically-elected Hamas government took control of the territory in 2007.
Regarding Philip Weiss’s recent post “Lobbying for Syrian dictatorship, Israel leaves no doubt about its support for counterrevolution in Arab world,” I believe there’s far stronger evidence, contrary to the assertions of Ben Wedeman and Ted Koppel, that Israel is actually supportive of revolution throughout the Arab world.
The clearest example of Israeli support for pro-democracy Arab dissidents is an organization called CyberDissidents.org. It was launched in 2008 by the Adelson Institute, then chaired by Natan Sharansky. The Adelson Institute was located at the Netanyahu-linked Shalem Center, financed by Ronald Lauder and on whose board Bill Kristol sits. Directed by Sharansky protégé, David Keyes, CyberDissidents.org was created “to research and focus attention on the online activities of democracy advocates and dissidents in the Middle East, in the hope of empowering them at home and raising awareness of their plight abroad.” Advising Keyes was neocon guru Bernard Lewis, who would have been very much at home at the 2007 Prague conference organized by Sharansky on “Democracy & Security” (whose participants reminded one Middle East analyst of Murder, Inc!). Also in attendance were some of the neocons’ favourite Arab dissidents. All of this is covered in more detail in my article “Arab Dissidents’ Strange Bedfellows.”
Moreover, CyberDissidents.org is only the tip of the iceberg. Check out, for example, the Saban Center’s Project on Middle East Democracy and Development (MEDD), WINEP’s Project Fikra, and the CFR’s Middle East Program to see how keenly pro-Israelis have for some time been promoting “democratic change” throughout the Middle East. Then there’s the prominence of pro-Israelis at “democracy promotion” near-governmental organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, as well as “NGOs” like the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (a subject which Jeff Blankfort and I recently discussed on his radio programme). There’s also Joshua Muravchik’s 2009 book, The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East. In fact, the list of pro-Israelis who have enthusiastically backed what Shimon Peres approvingly refers to as the Arab “awakening” goes on and on…
Two years ago at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington, DC., Joshua Muravchic spoke about his book, “The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East.” In “The Next Founders,” he profiles seven people from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Kuwait, and Syria. It’s especially noteworthy that the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) advisor was not promoting democratic voices only in regimes that would be considered unfriendly to Israel.
There to discuss Muravchik’s book was Tamara Wittes, another longtime pro-Israel advocate of democratic reform in the Middle East and author of Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy. The then director of the Saban Center’s Middle East Democracy and Development (MEDD) Project is currently Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), where she coordinates democracy and human rights policy for the NEA Bureau and supervises the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). According to an April 18 Washington Post report, MEPI has funneled up to $6 million to Syrian opposition groups since 2006. Wittes commented:
“There are a lot of organizations in Syria and other countries that are seeking changes from their government. That’s an agenda that we believe in and we’re going to support.”
Presumably, those “other countries” included Egypt. After all, as far back as 2005, while she was still working for Haim Saban’s Israel-protecting think tank, Wittes had written a critical piece on Hosni Mubarak entitled “Elections or no, he’s still Pharaoh,” in which she predicted that Egyptians would soon “start thinking, along with other Arabs, about hitting the streets.”
The US government has frozen the bank accounts belonging to Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian community organizer and director of a social service organization serving the Arab community in Chicago, and his wife, Naima.
Meanwhile, several members of Congress have written to the Obama administration to express their concerns about violations in civil liberties as a result of earlier government actions toward Abudayyeh and other activists.
The freezing of the Abudayyeh family’s bank accounts on Friday, 6 May is the latest development in a secret grand jury investigation that has been launched by US District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s office in Chicago. The freezing of the accounts has raised concerns that criminal indictments in the case may be imminent.
“I was downtown [in Chicago] on Friday, I had parked my car in a garage and when I tried to use my debit card to get out, it was declined,” Hatem Abudayyeh, director of the Arab American Action Network, told The Electronic Intifada. “I talked to Naima right away and she said she had no access with her card either, so I had to call a friend in the [Chicago] Loop to borrow money to get my car out of the garage.”
The next day the couple went to their bank branch, where the manager said that he had no information but that their accounts were frozen as a result of a government order.
The Abudayyehs’ accounts were frozen just two days before Mother’s Day is observed in the United States. “We were planning on having lunch with my mom and her family, and I couldn’t buy flowers or anything like that,” Hatem Abudayyeh said.
Last September, federal agents raided and searched the Abudayyehs’ home and confiscated the family’s belongings, including financial records and, as Hatem Abudayyeh told The Electronic Intifada last November, “everything that said ‘Palestine’ on it.” Federal agents also confiscated home videos that Naima Abudayyeh, a Palestinian immigrant, had recorded during a family visit to Palestine last summer.
The Abudayyehs’ five-year-old daughter was present during the raid and the family was mainly confined to their small living room during the hours-long search through their home.
That same day, federal agents raided several other homes and offices across the Midwest, serving subpoenas to 14 anti-war and international solidarity activists to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago. After those activists refused to testify to a grand jury, saying that they were being unfairly targeted because of their work organizing in opposition to US foreign policy in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Colombia, nine additional activists were served subpoenas around the month of December.
The nine additional activists served subpoenas are all residents of Chicago and all are Palestinians or those who have organized in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The Electronic Intifada’s managing editor, Maureen Clare Murphy, was served a subpoena on 21 December. The subpoena issued to Murphy is not connected to her work with The Electronic Intifada, but likely targets her because of her Palestine solidarity activism.
All 23 activists who have received subpoenas since September have refused to testify, despite risking being jailed for doing so.
A grand jury, no longer in use anywhere outside the US, is an investigative tool that allows the government to compel citizens to testify even if they are not suspected of any crime. Activists targeted by these subpoenas, their lawyers, and their supporters, believe the government is using the grand jury as a form of political inquisition and intelligence gathering, targeting groups and individuals working for a more peaceful US foreign policy.
Attack on the US Palestinian community
According to a statement made by the Committee to Stop FBI Repression and the Coalition to Protect People’s Rights and also distributed by the US Palestinian Community Network, “Not only does the government’s action [to freeze the bank accounts] seriously disrupt the lives of the Abudayyehs and their five-year-old daughter, but it represents an attack on Chicago’s Arab community and activist community and the fundamental rights of Americans to freedom of speech” ( “Demand US Attorney Fitzgerald unfreeze the bank accounts of the Abudayyeh family,” 8 May 2011).
Of the total of 23 activists who have been subpoenaed, seven are Palestinians from Chicago — home to one of the largest Palestinian communities outside of the Middle East. Scores of Arab community and Palestine solidarity organizations, as well as anti-war groups, civil liberties organizations and faith groups, have issued statements condemning the investigation and attempts to criminalize the Palestine solidarity movement in the US.
The investigation for which the 23 activists have been targeted takes places in the context of widespread surveillance and repression of the Muslim and Arab communities in the US.
And as The Electronic Intifada reported in November of last year, the investigation targeting the subpoenaed activists is just the latest chapter in a long history of US government attempts to criminalize Palestine community organizing and support work in the country.
In December 2001, the US government shut down the largest Muslim charity in the US, the Holy Land Foundation, which sent direct humanitarian aid to Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, amongst other places. Five defendants prosecuted in relation to the case are serving out lengthy prison sentences of 15 to 65 years (for more information, see the Holy Land Foundation case website).
Other prominent Palestinian community organizers in the US who have been put on trial in recent years because of their work educating Americans about the impact of US military aid to Israel and raising funds for humanitarian assistance for Palestinians living under occupation are Dr. Sami al-Arian, Muhammad Salah and Dr. Abdelhaleem Ashqar.
All three were acquitted by juries of US citizens of all terrorism and racketeering-related charges but have been charged with or convicted of obstruction of justice or contempt of court for refusing to name the names of other Palestinian activists in the US and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Investigation into material support law violations
While the US government does not comment on grand jury investigations or even confirm that they are underway, search warrants used to raid activists’ homes last September indicate that the home invasions and subpoenas are part of an investigation into violations of the law banning material support for foreign terrorist organizations.
The material support legislation was enacted under the Clinton administration, expanded with the PATRIOT act under Bush and expanded even further last summer after the Supreme Court ruled in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project that political speech can be considered material support for foreign terrorist organizations if done in a “coordinated way.”
The broad scope of the material support laws — especially after last summer’s Supreme Court decision — has provoked sharp criticism from civil liberties groups. Humanitarian agencies have also protested the breadth of the laws, saying it impacts their ability to carry out their work.
Critics of the legislation have pointed out that had these laws been in place during the South Africa anti-apartheid movement, it would have criminalized the entire movement in the US. At the peak of the movement, the Reagan administration’s State Department placed Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC), on the designated foreign terrorist organization list. The South Africa solidarity movement in the US took direction from the ANC.
Undercover agent at center of case
The basis of the investigation for which Abudayyeh and the 22 other activists have been targeted appears to be the word of an undercover law enforcement agent who infiltrated anti-war groups in Minneapolis.
The agent, who went by the name of Karen Sullivan, became involved in the anti-war movement in Minneapolis around the time of the 2008 Republican National Convention — one of the largest anti-war protests in the US in years (“Who was Karen Sullivan?” City Pages, 20 January 2011). The 14 activists subpoenaed in September were all involved in organizing permitted marches to protest the convention.
In addition to apparently surveilling activists, the undercover agent also disrupted their work. “Sullivan” elected to join an educational trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank in the summer of 2009. When she and the two women from Minneapolis with whom she was traveling arrived at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, they were detained and ultimately deported. The two women with whom the agent was traveling have since been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.
The identity of the undercover agent has been confirmed in discussions between the activists’ legal team and the US attorneys. However, the undercover agent’s identity was not disclosed during the discovery process of the lawsuit filed by Mick Kelly — one of those raided in September — after Kelly was shot at close range and injured by a high-velocity marking device during one of the Republican National Convention marches.
Attorneys representing Kelly, one of the organizers of the march, filed a motion in March of this year to reopen the lawsuit discovery process and subpoena “Sullivan” as she was present when he was shot (“Lawsuit against police violence at Republican National Convention to go forward,” Fight Back! News, 4 March 2011).
Call to action
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression and the Coalition to Protect People’s Rights are calling on supporters to call US District Attorney Fitzgerald’s office today to protest the ongoing investigation and the freezing of the Abudayyeh family’s bank accounts (“May 9: Demand US Attorney Fitzgerald unfreeze the bank accounts …”).
Meanwhile, hundreds of concerned citizens have signed a pledge issued by the Committee to Stop FBI Repression to take action in the event of activists being jailed for refusing to testify to a grand jury or being indicted (Pledge to resist FBI, grand jury repression).
Activists across the country have built a broad support movement that has seen trade union resolutions in support of the targeted activists from locals representing more than 600,000 workers in the US. They have also lobbied to elected representatives and several members of Congress have written letters to the Obama administration raising concern of the investigation’s violations of civil liberties (see “Statements from legislators about the case,” Committee to Stop FBI Repression).
How many pro-Israelis have to support the Arab uprisings before people begin to suspect that Israel might be partial to a little “democratic change” in the region?
The latest pro-Israel advocate of democracy promotion in the Middle East to come to my attention is Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) senior fellow Steven A. Cook. Writing on his CFR blog on May 3 about the unrest in Syria, the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies urged President Obama to publicly back the opposition, increase sanctions, and call for President Assad’s departure. Despite the risk of “generalized instability” that would likely ensue from Assad’s fall, Cook opined that the “potential for isolating Iran … is worth the risk.”
Like many a policy “expert” willing to take risks with American interests, Cook has quite an impressive pro-Israel pedigree. In the late 1990s, he was a Soref Research Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the AIPAC-created think tank. In 2004, he authored “The Unspoken Power: Civil-Military Relations and the Prospects for Reform” for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy — named after Haim Saban, the Egyptian-born Israeli-American media mogul who admitted to the New York Times that Israel was the only issue that concerned him. In that paper, Cook advocated political liberalization and economic reform in the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, a theme which he pursued as director of the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. policy toward reform in the Arab world, and in his 2007 book, “Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey.” But when he isn’t busy promoting democratic reform in Israel’s neighbourhood, he reportedly “works overtime” to make sure the U.S. shares Israeli policy objectives.
And like the National Endowment for Democracy’s program officer for Middle East and North Africa, Amira Maaty, and former State Department official and CFR adjunct fellow Jared Cohen, (who “has written about how technology can empower citizens in repressive regimes”), Cook just happened to arrive in Cairo in time to witness the protests that could herald the reform he has long sought.
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
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On Tuesday, May 24, 2011, the United States Department of State unilaterally imposed sanctions against Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), for its alleged relations with the government of Iran. The sanctions are a desperate and weak attempt to link Venezuela to Iran’s nuclear energy program as part of an ongoing campaign to justify further aggressive action against the South American oil producing nation.
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