Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
January 27, 2019
Hello All – The coup underway in Venezuela is a tragedy for both the people of Venezuela and the people of the United States. Our government, to our shame, is playing a leading role in this coup. Years of economic warfare against Venezuela have contributed to the country's economic crisis. The justified anger of the Venezuelan people against their government's failures has led to a deep polarization of the country. By threatening military intervention, however, rather than assisting with international efforts at peacefully resolving Venezuela's crisis, the Trump administration is fanning the flames of civil war.
Why is our government doing this? Since the election of President Hugo Chavez in 1988, our government has opposed what is called in Venezuela the "Bolivarian Revolution." This project, widely popular at the outset, was intended to restore national sovereignty over the country's immense (oil) wealth. The goal of the Revolution was also to spread participation in governing the country to lower-income people, until then excluded. Both of these goals were rejected by Venezuela's traditional ruling classes, however, and two decades of conflict ensued.
During much of the last 20 years, US policy has been focused on the Middle East. As a result, Latin America was ignored by the United States, enabling a "pink tide," of socialist or liberal governments that, following the inspiration of Venezuela, sought greater independence in running their affairs, while seeking a New Deal for poor or previously excluded people. This has now changed. The Trump administration has returned the foreign-policy spotlight back to what was traditionally our "backyard," Latin America. Conservative elites in Latin America are assisted, while more liberal governments are punished. And President Trump has chosen John Bolton, a notorious "hawk," as his National Security Adviser, turned over much of our country's Latin America policy to Republican Mario Rubio and his rightwing exile cronies in Florida, and selected convicted Iran-Contra conspirator Eliot Abrams to be the Under-Secretary of State to handle Venezuela.
Over the last several days the Venezuelan military has affirmed its support for the Maduro government; and unless this changes, the prognosis is for continued chaos and escalating violence. The possibility that Venezuela will descend into civil war is a tragedy; but the even greater danger is that an event in Venezuela or a decision in Washington will lead to US military intervention. This would be a disaster – for both Venezuela and the United States. Our congressman, Eliot Engel, who has an important role as chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, has tweeted in favor of regime change, but wants to draw the line on military intervention. A useful thing we can do is let him know that his constituents also oppose military intervention. Please call his office (718-796-9700) and make known your opinion on the important issue.
News Notes
In a story about the sentencing to 25 years in prison for three extremist white nationalists who plotted to blow up a Somali-American apartment complex in Kansas, Juan Cole notes that "a big problem is that television news covers a similar plot by a Muslim 357 times more than it covers plots by the Western far right wing." He asks, "How Long til Trump & GOP radical Islamophobia causes a major massacre?"
The Nation magazine's Katha Pollit was in Washington, DC last week, covering both the Women's March and the March for Life. Read her interesting essay, "A Tale of Two Marches: The streets of Washington were full of priests, pussy hats, and everything in between."
Last week the Newsletter reported on the case of US citizen Marizieh Hashemi, an anchor for Iran's PressTV who was arrested at a St. Louis airport and transferred into FBI custody, where she was held for 10 days before being released on Wednesday. Never charged with a crime, she was apparently held as a "material witness," but about what and why no one seems to know. For an update on her case go here.
Things to Do/Coming Attractions
Sunday, February 3rd – Please join us at the next monthly meeting of CFOW. We meet at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society, 12 Elm St. in Dobbs, from 7 to 9 PM. Everyone is welcome at these meetings, where we review our work of the past month and make plans for the month to come.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or climate change, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. We (usually) meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
This Newsletter
Articles linked in the CFOW newsletter are intended to illuminate some of the main action-issues about which we are concerned. Coming mostly from the "dissenting media," they provide an alternative to the perspectives of the mainstream media. In addition to the excellent Featured Essays and the set of readings and videos on Venezuela, I especially recommend the Empire Report video on "Trump's Syria Deception"' Sasha Abramsky's article on "Why Does Trump Want to Terminate Temporary Protected Status?"; Does Israel Have A Right To Exist' Is A Trick Question"; and the essay ("Our History") about Nelson Mandela's revolutionary life in South Africa.
Rewards
This week's Rewards are good ones. First up, thanks to EZ, is a 2011 clip of The Smothers Brothers that I know will bring some laughs. For more of these funny men, check out this documentary film about them. And for something completely different, I'd like to share something that I came across in reading about Marcel Carné, the French filmmaker whose "Children of Paradise" (1945) many consider the best French film ever. So here is Carné's very first film, (1929, 14 minutes) "Nogent El Dorado du dimanche," a loving portrait Nogent-sur-Marne, the Paris version of (perhaps) Coney Island, the "El Dorado" of a Parisian's day off (Sunday). Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
FEATURED ESSAYS
Black Lives Matter. Do Elections?
By Frances Fox Piven, In These Times [January 21, 2019]
---- One distinctive trait of Black Lives Matter is its ecumenical stance toward problems of internal structure, problems that often absorb and distract activists. BLM activists have constructed a loose coalition of movement groups, and they seem satisfied with that arrangement. Another is a shared skepticism of the electoral arena. Instead, the BLM movement favors disruptive collective action. Or, to put it another way, while these activists by no means reject electoral politics, they don't rely on it either. They believe in movements. … In the wake of the 2018 midterms, we all harbor the hope of a different future. Maybe the new Democratic House will be sufficiently aggressive in its investigations that it will at least paralyze the mad king and his regime, and at the same time promote the policies, or at least the political discourse, that will make left reform seem possible. That hope means we have come to the conclusion that electoral politics is important for the growth and success of social movements. This is a big change in the thinking of the broad Left. The energy of movement activists as they worked to elect left-leaning Democrats reflects not only a recognition of the dangers of the Republican Right, but also a recognition that movements benefit in important ways when a regime includes sympathetic political leaders. … In other words, electoral and movement politics are not separate and uncrossing paths. Rather, they are deeply intertwined. That hope means we have come to the conclusion that electoral politics is important for the growth and success of social movements. [Read More]
Michelle Alexander Is Right About Israel-Palestine
By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout [January 25, 2019]
---- Amid ever-worsening injustices created by the Israeli system of apartheid and Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, it is past time for this to change. I am hopeful that the firestorm sparked by Michelle Alexander's recent New York Times column, "Time to Break the Silence on Palestine," will finally generate the heat necessary to force more people and groups on the left to overcome the fundamental hypocrisy of the "progressive except Palestine" approach. I was deeply inspired by Alexander's column and her decision to speak so honestly about the difficulty of overcoming the fear of backlash over taking a public stand against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. … Alexander's words resonated with me, a Jew who uncritically supported Israel for many years until I saw the parallels between US policy in Vietnam and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. My activism and critical writings have followed a trajectory from Vietnam to South Africa to Israel to Iraq to Afghanistan and other countries where the United States continues its imperial military actions. Although many of my articles are controversial as they criticize the actions of the US government — under both Democratic and Republican regimes — I get the most pushback from my writings about Israel-Palestine. When I analyze Israel's illegal occupation and crimes against the Palestinians, I am often called a "self-hating" Jew. [Read More] Michelle Alexander's article, "Time to Break the Silence on Palestine," can be read here. Another appreciative comment, by James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute, can be read here.
We-Are-Not-Them Exceptionalism
By Karen J. Greenberg, Tom Dispatch [January 22, 2019]
---- From north to south, east to west, children around the world are suffering, increasingly unsafe, and preyed upon in ever larger numbers. For years now, their deaths from disease, deprivation, starvation, and conflicts of every sort have been on the rise. They are increasingly fodder for weapons of war. This is the case, disturbingly, for countries in which the United States has been deeply involved in its post-9/11 global war on terror, which over the last 17 years has unsettled a significant part of the planet and badly affected children in particular. … in the long run, the United States will not remain untouched by such violence. Unfortunately, in this century American officials and policymakers have remained convinced that the only way this country can be protected against the turmoil and chaos engulfing the larger world is via a military-first foreign policy. … As the first 18 years of this century have shown, reality defies this false sense of security, which contends that it is possible to keep the problems of our world at arm's length. As the 9/11 attacks should have shown us, in a global age of communications, travel, trade, and the delivery of the weapons of war, the spawning of a homeless, stateless, angry generation is guaranteed to create unbearable future problems, even here in the United States. The only way to limit such future damage isn't the walling off of America, but some kind of compassionate attention to those young people now. [Read More]
---- From north to south, east to west, children around the world are suffering, increasingly unsafe, and preyed upon in ever larger numbers. For years now, their deaths from disease, deprivation, starvation, and conflicts of every sort have been on the rise. They are increasingly fodder for weapons of war. This is the case, disturbingly, for countries in which the United States has been deeply involved in its post-9/11 global war on terror, which over the last 17 years has unsettled a significant part of the planet and badly affected children in particular. … in the long run, the United States will not remain untouched by such violence. Unfortunately, in this century American officials and policymakers have remained convinced that the only way this country can be protected against the turmoil and chaos engulfing the larger world is via a military-first foreign policy. … As the first 18 years of this century have shown, reality defies this false sense of security, which contends that it is possible to keep the problems of our world at arm's length. As the 9/11 attacks should have shown us, in a global age of communications, travel, trade, and the delivery of the weapons of war, the spawning of a homeless, stateless, angry generation is guaranteed to create unbearable future problems, even here in the United States. The only way to limit such future damage isn't the walling off of America, but some kind of compassionate attention to those young people now. [Read More]
CRISIS IN VENEZUELA
[FB – Linked below are several articles and videos that I hope will provide an insightful and user-friendly introduction to what's going down in Venezuela, and what the Trump administration is doing in support of the coup attempt now underway. To keep up to date between now and the next newsletter, I recommend the daily news program of Democracy Now! and the programming of The Real News Network, whose Venezuela pages can be found The Real News Network. I also encourage you to follow the work of Eva Golinger, who spoke at CFOW events in 2017, and whose website Venezuelanalysis is imo a reliable source of information. For breaking news, I recommend Golinger's twitter posts.]
Venezuela at Another Crossroads
By Rebecca Hanson and Tim Gill, NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) [January 24, 2019]
---- Thousands of protestors in the streets. A self-proclaimed president. An uncertain political future. Venezuela has been here before. In 2002, dissident military officers with the support of private media, opposition politicians, and the Metropolitan Police removed Hugo Chávez from office for 48 hours while Pedro Carmona, the President of the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce, declared himself interim president. Yet, aside from the George W. Bush administration, the hemisphere roundly condemned these efforts. On January 23—on the anniversary of the overthrow of Venezuela's last dictator, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez—Juan Guaidó, like Carmona almost 17 years ago, declared the government of Nicolás Maduro illegitimate and himself as interim president. Guaidó is the current president of the National Assembly, itself a contested political institution in the country. Much has changed, though, since the days of the April 2002 coup, when, in response, the Venezuelan poor famously came "down from the barrios" to defend President Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Indeed, at that time, there was little doubt that Chávez commanded the support of the Venezuelan populace. And while the opposition thought they had outwitted their progressive president, they were forced to return Chávez to the Miraflores Palace lest the country potentially descend into civil war. Nearly two decades later, Venezuelan President Maduro faces a far different scenario. [Read More]
How the Right Is Using Venezuela to Reorder Politics
By Greg Grandin, The Nation [January 25, 2019]
---- Donald Trump has been hot for Venezuela for some time now. In the summer of 2017, Trump, citing George H.W. Bush's 1989–90 invasion of Panama as a positive precedent, repeatedly pushed his national-security staff to launch a military assault on the crisis-plagued country. Trump was serious. He wanted to know: Why couldn't the United States just invade? He brought up the idea in meeting after meeting. … Trump has a wobbly sense of history, but his instinct to see Venezuela through the prism of Panama is on the mark. Similar to Panama then, Venezuela is today a nation suffering a long, seemingly insurmountable crisis, governed by a regime challenged by a united (or united enough) opposition, which Washington can use to justify intervention and then install in power once the intervention is complete. And Trump, looking at Venezuela, is doing no more than George H.W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan before him, who both used a one-off war in the Washington's "backyard" to reorder domestic and international politics… But if the social-democratic wing of the Democratic Party wants not just to react to an existing agenda but set a new agenda, it needs to realize the extent to which foreign policy is the place where, in Gramscian terms, hegemony is established—not over other nations but within this nation; where normative ideas concerning how best to organize society get worked out; where contradictions—between ideas, interests, social groups—get reconciled. That reconciliation comes about not through a laundry list of pragmatic policies but by seizing the ideological high ground. [Read More]
And here are some useful video discussions:
The US Strategy for Regime Change in Venezuela
From the Real News Network [January 23, 2019]
---- From economic sanctions to international pressure, how has the US strategy for regime change in Venezuela worked until now? [See the Program]
Trump Sanctions Against Venezuela Have Decimated Oil Production
From The Real News Network pJanuary 18, 2019] 12 minutes
---- The Trump administration is evaluating oil sanctions on Venezuela now. The sanctions that are already in place lead to many deaths and make an economic recovery practically impossible. [See the Program]
Historian: Venezuela Is "Staging Ground" for U.S. to Reassert Control Over Latin America
From Democracy Now! [January 25, 2019]
---- While Mexico and Uruguay are calling for dialogue to address the crisis in Venezuela, much of Latin America has sided with the Trump administration by recognizing Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela's new leader. [See the Program]
Attempted Coup in Venezuela with Abby Martin, Greg Wilpert, Paul Jay
From the Real News Network [January 25, 2019] - 41 minutes [See the Program]
WAR & PEACE
Why Trump Doesn't Always Get It Wrong on the Middle East
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent [UK] [January 27, 2019]
---- Trump's sudden decision in December to pull US troops out of Syria was condemned by everybody from the most liberal Democrats to the most belligerent Republicans. They all jumped on to their moral high horses, but none proffered an alternative policy and happily pretended that the status quo was sustainable – though it is not. The US is a bit player in Syria where the Kurdish-led forces it backs have largely defeated Isis. …. Other US objectives in Syria, such as curtailing Iranian influence and weakening Bashar al-Assad, are not attainable and are simply an excuse for continuing a war of extraordinary ferocity and destructiveness. The Washington establishment, which is itself a child of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, seems quite happy to contemplate this and denounces Trump for breaking the logjam. What is needed is for the US, as it withdraws, to keep Turkey from launching an onslaught against the Syrian Kurds, and this can only be done – if it is to be done at all – by allowing the Kurds to do a deal with Damascus and for Syrian troops to return to the Syrian-Turkish border. [Read More}
The War in Yemen
From Rights Abuses to Yemen War Crimes, Saudi Can't Escape Spotlight
[January 24, 2019]
---- Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman faced scrutiny over the country's human rights record in 2018 following the murder of a prominent journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, by Saudi agents at the country's Istanbul consulate on October 2, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2019. The scrutiny shed additional light on ongoing abuses, including unlawful attacks in Yemen that may amount to war crimes by the Saudi-led coalition and escalated repression of dissidents and human rights activists at home. [Read More]
The War in Syria
(Video) Trump's Syria Deception
From The Real News Network [January 22, 2019]
---- In Part II of our series, Trump Expanding the Empire, Abby Martin addresses the surprise order from Trump that he was "ending the war" in Syria. Having drastically escalated the war in Syria and Iraq, find out what's behind the supposed troop withdrawal and the hidden facts in the policies [Read More]
Congress Is Pushing Sanctions Against Supporters of Syria's Bashar al-Assad
By Aída Chávez, The Intercept [
---- On Tuesday, the House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation to impose new sanctions on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad and its allies, and those who do business with them. The move comes a month after President Donald Trump's announcement to withdraw troops from Syria, and as some Arab governments are thawing relations with the Assad regime, which has all but secured a military victory after nearly eight years of war. The measure has been passed by the House twice in previous sessions, and a companion bill currently remains pending in the Senate. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., reintroduced the standalone version of the Syria bill, H.R. 31, which passed under fast-track procedures. On the Senate side, the bill is one provision rolled into a foreign policy-related package called the Strengthening America's Security in the Middle East Act, with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as a lead sponsor. Senate Democrats blocked the bill — designated as S.1, which symbolizes heightened importance — on the grounds that Congress should reopen the government before considering unrelated legislation. … The women's anti-war group Code Pink is one of the more prominent opponents of the bill. Before the House vote, the group urged its supporters to contact their representative to voice their concern over the bill, which they described as an attempt to reverse U.S. withdrawal from Syria through sanctions with "unrealistic conditions" that would have to be met before the penalties could be suspended. [Read More]
War with Iran?
War Against Iran Becoming Ever More Likely
By Jim Lobe and Ben Armbruster, Lobelog [January 25, 2019
---- Donald Trump's domestic troubles, combined with the current makeup of his foreign policy team, provide a confluence of circumstances, perhaps a perfect storm, to pull the United States into a war with Iran. Indeed, the walls are closing in around Trump. The president's poll numbers—once seemingly impervious to an already unprecedentedly tumultuous administration—are sinking, even among his most ardent supporters, as he increasingly boxes himself into the corner of a government shutdown for which the public says he's largely responsible. At the same time, impeachment looms on the horizon. House Democratic committee chairs are winding up for some serious investigations into a whole range of alleged misdeeds by the president and some of his Cabinet appointments, and Robert Mueller is wrapping up his investigation into Trump's highly questionable ties to Russia. In short, Trump's position has never been weaker. And despite what appears to be his personal desire to extract U.S. troops from the Middle East, as shown by his order to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and his assertion two weeks later that Iran's leaders "can do what they want" there, his deepening political problems may make war more attractive. [Read More]
War with North Korea?
Second-Round Stakes Higher for Trump and Kim
By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News [January 24, 2019]
---- President Donald Trump's announcement late last week that he will meet North Korea's Kim Jong-un next month promises a significant result whether the encounter succeeds or fails. In the intervening weeks, we have two questions to ponder. No. 1: what will this second summit accomplish? The first Trump–Kim meeting last June in Singapore was about establishing rapport and can by this measure be counted a success. Something of substance, however modest, needs to get done this time. No. 2, and just as important, will Trump's foreign policy minders undermine this encounter before it takes place? The record suggests this is a serious possibility. A month ago, Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. special forces from Syria. The howls of protest, Capitol Hill Democrats often the shrillest, have not ceased. And troops have not started to pack their duffle bags. But the Syria decision may prove a turning point, given that Trump directly confronted the policy clique — segments of the Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies, as well as members of the National Security Council —who have been sabotaging his objectives since his first day in office two years ago. [Read More]
---- President Donald Trump's announcement late last week that he will meet North Korea's Kim Jong-un next month promises a significant result whether the encounter succeeds or fails. In the intervening weeks, we have two questions to ponder. No. 1: what will this second summit accomplish? The first Trump–Kim meeting last June in Singapore was about establishing rapport and can by this measure be counted a success. Something of substance, however modest, needs to get done this time. No. 2, and just as important, will Trump's foreign policy minders undermine this encounter before it takes place? The record suggests this is a serious possibility. A month ago, Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. special forces from Syria. The howls of protest, Capitol Hill Democrats often the shrillest, have not ceased. And troops have not started to pack their duffle bags. But the Syria decision may prove a turning point, given that Trump directly confronted the policy clique — segments of the Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies, as well as members of the National Security Council —who have been sabotaging his objectives since his first day in office two years ago. [Read More]
GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHAOS
We're on Course to Miss our "Best Chance" of Stopping Runaway Climate Change by 2020
---- The world is on course to miss its "best chance" of preventing runaway climate change by ensuring global greenhouse gas emissions peak in 2020, researchers warned Tuesday. Even as Earth is buffeted by superstorms, droughts and flooding made worse by rising seas, and as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise globally, an analysis by the World Resources Institute showed that current efforts to limit temperature increases are falling well short. In 2017, experts identified six key milestones that mankind must hit by 2020 if the Paris climate goal of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) is to have a fighting chance of being met. They include radical changes to how we get our electricity, and to how goods and services are distributed worldwide. Chief among these are an immediate phasing out of fossil fuels, including a total halt to new coal power plant construction within two years, as well as an end to dirty energy subsidies. The WRI on Tuesday said that achieving the 2020 goals was Earth's "best chance" of honoring the Paris deal goals. [Read More]
Also useful/appalling on global warming/climate crisis – "Senate Energy Democrats Hire Former Industry Lobbyist to Lead Staff," by Steve Horn, The Real News Network [January 24, 2019] [Link]; and "Greenland's Melting Ice Nears a 'Tipping Point,' Scientists Say," by John Schwartz, New York Times [January 21, 2019] [Link].
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Why Does Trump Want to Terminate Temporary Protected Status?
By Sasha Abramsky, The Nation [January 25, 2019]
---- Hiwaida Elarabi, a public-health worker turned restaurateur, lives in the United States under a federal initiative known as "temporary protected status," or TPS, which was created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990. She is one of nearly half a million residents—people from Sudan, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, and a handful of other countries—who arrived in the United States without documents, or who overstayed a tourist visa, at some point in the 1990s, and who were then allowed to live and work here because of catastrophically dangerous conditions in their home countries. In some instances, those conditions were linked to wars; in others, to natural disasters, economic collapse, or both. Forcing these people to return was, the State Department and Congress agreed, too dangerous. Allowing them to work in the United States was seen as both the best humanitarian response and as a way of serving America's own self-interest—drawing them out of the shadows, in which so many millions of undocumented people live, and into the taxable economy. It was a compromise similar to the one later put into effect by Barack Obama for a different group of immigrants with his executive order establishing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. [Read More]
How the Poor People's Campaign Is Building a 'New Electorate'
[FB – This is a conversation with Reverend Liz Theoharis on the campaign's broad agenda for 2019].
By Greg Kaufmann, The Nation [January 24, 2019]
---- On New Year's Eve, Reverend Drs. Liz Theoharis and William Barber II, co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, laid out the campaign's plans for 2019. The Poor People's Campaign will continue its pursuit of an audacious agenda: eradicating poverty and systemic racism; addressing ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy; and changing the narrative about poverty in this country from one that demonizes the poor to one which recognizes their strengths and vision while questioning the morality of current public policy. Now established in 40 states and the District of Columbia, the Poor People's Campaign is focused on changing electoral politics by targeting districts where poor and low-wealth people who are less likely to vote could potentially swing elections. The Nation spoke with Rev. Theoharis about this work and more broadly the campaign's approach to working with "poor people as agents of change." [Read More]
The Young Left's Anti-Capitalist Manifesto
By Clare Malone, Five-Thirty-Eight [January 22, 2019]
---- For a few years now, Democratic voters have shown they're primed for a leftward shift, and this rising group of activists and politicians wants to push them even further. At the heart of the young left's project is a discomfort with the free market capitalist system under which we live. It's a system deeply ingrained in many Americans' identities, though increasingly less so: 2016 was the first year since Gallup started tracking the question that it found Democrats had a more positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism. This new group of activists wants to capitalize on that shift. And they're doing it by tweeting incessantly and acting impertinently toward their fellow Democrats. Unlike bright young political things of years gone by, their purpose is to confound the party's leadership, not earn their praise. [Read More]
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
'Does Israel Have A Right To Exist' Is A Trick Question.
January 22, 2019]
[FB - Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights].
---- The truth is that no state has a "right to exist" — not Israel, not Palestine, not the United States. Neither do Zimbabwe, Chile, North Korea, Saudi Arabia or Luxembourg have a "right to exist." States do exist; there are about 200 in our world today, even though there are thousands of ethno-religious or ethno-linguistic groups. And these states don't exist because they have a "right" to. They exist because certain groups of people amassed enough political and material power to make territorial claims and establish governments, sometimes with the consent of those already living there and, oftentimes, at their expense. … It is humans, not states, that have a right to exist. This includes all people: those who identify as Israelis and Palestinians alike, along with seven billion others. People also have a whole set of other rights — human rights, which states cannot deny. These include the right to free movement, the right to consent to being governed, the right to enter and exit their country, the right not to be tortured or collectively punished, and so on. It is by guaranteeing these rights and only by guaranteeing them that states derive their moral legitimacy; it is not from some mythical "right to exist" or even the historical need of their people, but rather from the extent to which their policies respect the rights of people. The question should not be "Does Israel have a right to exist" but rather, "Is the way in which Israel exists right?" [Read More]
(Video) "Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel"
An interview with author Ben White, Real News Network [January 14, 2019] [10 minutes]
---- Rather than tackling the century long story of Zionist and Israeli colonization of Palestine apartheid and military occupation. The book focuses on the events of the last couple of years. Now, if we see how Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is greeted by right-wing world leaders who look at the policies of U.S. President Donald Trump, who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem; if we look at the Israeli military using live sniper fire to kill unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, things look very grim for the Palestinian cause. Nevertheless, this is a very optimistic book. It really is about the cracks in the wall, signs that decades of struggle are starting to make a dent in the Israeli repression machine. [See the Program]
For more on Israel/Palestine – "Ireland Bans Israeli Settler goods from Occupied Palestinian West Bank," b[Link]; and "Israeli security forces killed 290 Palestinians in 2018; most were victims of a reckless open-fire policy," from B'tsalem [Israel] [January 17, 2019] [Link].
OUR HISTORY
Notes from Underground: Nelson Mandela
By Howard W. French, New York Review of Books [February 7, 2019 issue]
[FB – This is a review of The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela, edited by Sahm Venter, with a foreword by Zamaswazi Dlamini-Mandela.]
---- The cursory familiarity that many people today have with Mandela's story of moral courage and triumph has produced a near-universal secular beatification. Mandela enjoys an image akin to that of Martin Luther King Jr. The late South African has, in other words, become an easy-to-claim hero. And in keeping with the often invoked King quote about the arc of the moral universe being long but bent inescapably toward justice—a particular favorite of Barack Obama—from the perspective of the present, Mandela's ultimate triumph can feel deceptively predestined. Mandela's political journey, like that of his country, was far more complex. The black South Africa of the early 1960s did not yet have an obvious leader: it lacked not just a stirringly popular figure, but someone who possessed the tactical acumen and tenacity that would be needed to withstand the assaults of a ruthless racial tyranny, while channeling his society's energies—and those of the world—in the direction of peaceful liberation. Mandela's given name was Rolihlahla, which is commonly translated as "troublemaker," and some of the people closest to him worried that this was a bit too fitting. Mandela could sometimes seem both vain and impetuous, excessively given to dramatic gestures that placed him center stage. These were traits for which he would harshly judge himself in succeeding decades, as in a 1970 letter to his wife, Winnie: "I must be frank & tell you that when I look back at some of my early writings & speeches I am appalled by their pedantry, artificiality and lack of originality. The urge to impress & advertise is clearly noticeable." [Read More]
Breaking the Left's Gay Taboo
[FB – This is a review of a new book by Allen Young, Left, Gay and Green: a Writer's Life,]
---- As implied by the title, Allen deals with three phases of his life. The left refers to his emergence as a key journalist of the left through the auspices of Liberation News Service, a radical version of Associated Press that fed articles to leftist newspapers around the country informing them about pending actions and providing analysis about the antiwar movement, campus rebellions, and the Black struggle. As for the gay phase, Allen found the Stonewall rebellion as liberating as many gays and lesbians did. It inspired him to come out of the closet without worrying about what either his peers or parents thought… The final phase of Allen's long journey was colored green. In the early 70s, he and a group of gay men on the left decided to build an environmentally sustainable commune in the backwoods of Western Massachusetts that reminds me of Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond. [Read More]
