The Last of the Semites

Al-Jazeera posted this article written by Joseph Massad and then deleted it after intense pressure from prominent zionists. This is a well researched, well thought out and well written indictment of that system which has proved so damaging to the world. I think this quote explains the reason for the intense reaction.

What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the "solution" to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

Oops. We aren’t allowed to bring up inconvenient truths about Israel. Well the truth doesn’t change because it makes people mad. The zionists did cut deals with anti-semites. There. I said it and I said it because it is true. Read on.

“Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what gentile Europeans called the "Jewish Question". What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the "solution" to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would solidify through their discovery of the family of "Semitic" languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as "Semites". The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a giant one.

Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of "restoring" Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century. Less interested in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the Millenarians, these secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest Laharanne, the private secretary of Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine in order to set them up as agents of European imperialism in Asia. Their call would be espoused by many "anti-Semites", a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. Marr was careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of Christian hatred of Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line with Semitic philology and racial theories of the 19th century, that the distinction to be made between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial.

Assimilating Jews into European culture

Scientific anti-Semitism insisted that the Jews were different from Christian Europeans. Indeed that the Jews were not European at all and that their very presence in Europe is what causes anti-Semitism. The reason why Jews caused so many problems for European Christians had to do with their alleged rootlessness, that they lacked a country, and hence country-based loyalty. In the Romantic age of European nationalisms, anti-Semites argued that Jews did not fit in the new national configurations, and disrupted national and racial purity essential to most European nationalisms. This is why if the Jews remained in Europe, the anti-Semites argued, they could only cause hostility among Christian Europeans. The only solution was for the Jews to exit from Europe and have their own country. Needless to say, religious and secular Jews opposed this horrific anti-Semitic line of thinking. Orthodox and Reform Jews, Socialist and Communist Jews, cosmopolitan and Yiddishkeit cultural Jews, all agreed that this was a dangerous ideology of hostility that sought the expulsion of Jews from their European homelands.

The Jewish Haskalah, or Enlightenment, which emerged also in the 19th century, sought to assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture and have them shed their Jewish culture. It was the Haskalah that sought to break the hegemony of Orthodox Jewish rabbis on the "Ostjuden" of the East European shtetl and to shed what it perceived as a "medieval" Jewish culture in favour of the modern secular culture of European Christians. Reform Judaism, as a Christian- and Protestant-like variant of Judaism, would emerge from the bosom of the Haskalah. This assimilationist programme, however, sought to integrate Jews in European modernity, not to expel them outside Europe's geography.

When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr's anti-Semitic programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas, including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were "Semites", who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. In his foundational pamphlet Der Judenstaat, Herzl explained that it was Jews, not their Christian enemies, who "cause" anti-Semitism and that "where it does not exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations", indeed that "the unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America"; that Jews were a "nation" that should leave Europe to restore their "nationhood" in Palestine or Argentina; that Jews must emulate European Christians culturally and abandon their living languages and traditions in favour of modern European languages or a restored ancient national language. Herzl preferred that all Jews adopt German, while the East European Zionists wanted Hebrew. Zionists after Herzl even agreed and affirmed that Jews were separate racially from Aryans. As for Yiddish, the living language of most European Jews, all Zionists agreed that it should be abandoned.

The majority of Jews continued to resist Zionism and understood its precepts as those of anti-Semitism and as a continuation of the Haskalah quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular gentile culture, except that Zionism sought the latter not inside Europe but at a geographical remove following the expulsion of Jews from Europe. The Bund, or the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which was founded in Vilna in early October 1897, a few weeks after the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in late August 1897, would become Zionism's fiercest enemy. The Bund joined the existing anti-Zionist Jewish coalition of Orthodox and Reform rabbis who had combined forces a few months earlier to prevent Herzl from convening the first Zionist Congress in Munich, which forced him to move it to Basel. Jewish anti-Zionism across Europe and in the United States had the support of the majority of Jews who continued to view Zionism as an anti-Jewish movement well into the 1940s.

Anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts

Realising that its plan for the future of European Jews was in line with those of anti-Semites, Herzl strategised early on an alliance with the latter. He declared in Der Judenstaat that:

"The Governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want."

He added that "not only poor Jews" would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, "but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them". Herzl unapologetically confided in his Diaries that:

"The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies."

Thus when Herzl began to meet in 1903 with infamous anti-Semites like the Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, it was an alliance that he sought by design. That it would be the anti-Semitic Lord Balfour, who as Prime Minister of Britain in 1905 oversaw his government's Aliens Act, which prevented East European Jews fleeing Russian pogroms from entering Britain in order, as he put it, to save the country from the "undoubted evils" of "an immigration which was largely Jewish", was hardy coincidental. Balfour's infamous Declaration of 1917 to create in Palestine a "national home" for the "Jewish people", was designed, among other things, to curb Jewish support for the Russian Revolution and to stem the tide of further unwanted Jewish immigrants into Britain.

The Nazis would not be an exception in this anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts. Indeed, the Zionists would strike a deal with the Nazis very early in their history. It was in 1933 that the infamous Transfer (Ha'avara) Agreement was signed between the Zionists and the Nazi government to facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine and which broke the international Jewishboycott of Nazi Germany started by American Jews. It was in this spirit that Nazi envoys were dispatched to Palestine to report on the successes of Jewish colonisation of the country. Adolf Eichmann returned from his 1937 trip to Palestine full of fantastic stories about the achievements of the racially-separatist Ashkenazi Kibbutz, one of which he visited on Mount Carmel as a guest of the Zionists.

Despite the overwhelming opposition of most German Jews, it was the Zionist Federation of Germany that was the only Jewish group that supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, as they agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and separable races. This was not a tactical support but one based on ideological similitude. The Nazis' Final Solution initially meant the expulsion of Germany's Jews to Madagascar. It is this shared goal of expelling Jews from Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between Nazis and Zionists all along.

While the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis of Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites, the Nazi genocide not only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes.

The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.

Theodor Herzl , Diaries

After the War, the horror at the Jewish holocaust did not stop European countries from supporting the anti-Semitic programme of Zionism. On the contrary, these countries shared with the Nazis a predilection for Zionism. They only opposed Nazism's genocidal programme. European countries, along with the United States, refused to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the holocaust. In fact, these countries voted against a UN resolution introduced by the Arab states in 1947 calling on them to take in the Jewish survivors, yet these same countries would be the ones who would support the United Nations Partition Plan of November 1947 to create a Jewish State in Palestine to which these unwanted Jewish refugees could be expelled.

The pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis

The United States and European countries, including Germany, would continue the pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis. Post-War West German governments that presented themselves as opening a new page in their relationship with Jews in reality did no such thing. Since the establishment of the country after WWII, every West German government (and every German government since unification in1990) has continued the pro-Zionist Nazi policies unabated. There was never a break with Nazi pro-Zionism. The only break was with the genocidal and racial hatred of Jews that Nazism consecrated, but not with the desire to see Jews set up in a country in Asia, away from Europe. Indeed, the Germans would explain that much of the money they were sending to Israel was to help offset the costs of resettling European Jewish refugees in the country.

After World War II, a new consensus emerged in the United States and Europe that Jews had to be integrated posthumously into white Europeanness, and that the horror of the Jewish holocaust was essentially a horror at the murder of white Europeans. Since the 1960s, Hollywood films about the holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of Nazism as white Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented people not unlike contemporary European and American Christians who should and would identify with them. Presumably if the films were to depict the poor religious Jews of Eastern Europe (and most East European Jews who were killed by the Nazis were poor and many were religious), contemporary white Christians would not find commonality with them. Hence, the post-holocaust European Christian horror at the genocide of European Jews was not based on the horror of slaughtering people in the millions who were different from European Christians, but rather a horror at the murder of millions of people who were the same as European Christians. This explains why in a country like the United States, which had nothing to do with the slaughter of European Jews, there exists upwards of 40 holocaust memorials and a major museum for the murdered Jews of Europe, but not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African Americans for which the US is responsible.

Aimé Césaire understood this process very well. In his famous speech on colonialism, he affirmed that the retrospective view of European Christians about Nazism is that

it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices; and they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

That for Césaire the Nazi wars and holocaust were European colonialism turned inwards is true enough. But since the rehabilitation of Nazism's victims as white people, Europe and its American accomplice would continue their Nazi policy of visiting horrors on non-white people around the world, on Korea, on Vietnam and Indochina, on Algeria, on Indonesia, on Central and South America, on Central and Southern Africa, on Palestine, on Iran, and on Iraq and Afghanistan.

The rehabilitation of European Jews after WWII was a crucial part of US Cold War propaganda. As American social scientists and ideologues developed the theory of "totalitarianism", which posited Soviet Communism and Nazism as essentially the same type of regime, European Jews, as victims of one totalitarian regime, became part of the atrocity exhibition that American and West European propaganda claimed was like the atrocities that the Soviet regime was allegedly committing in the pre- and post-War periods. That Israel would jump on the bandwagon by accusing the Soviets of anti-Semitism for their refusal to allow Soviet Jewish citizens to self-expel and leave to Israel was part of the propaganda.

Commitment to white supremacy

It was thus that the European and US commitment to white supremacy was preserved, except that it now included Jews as part of "white" people, and what came to be called "Judeo-Christian" civilisation. European and American policies after World War II, which continued to be inspired and dictated by racism against Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Arabs and Muslims, and continued to support Zionism's anti-Semitic programme of assimilating Jews into whiteness in a colonial settler state away from Europe, were a direct continuation of anti-Semitic policies prevalent before the War. It was just that much of the anti-Semitic racialist venom would now be directed at Arabs and Muslims (both, those who are immigrants and citizens in Europe and the United States and those who live in Asia and Africa) while the erstwhile anti-Semitic support for Zionism would continue unhindered.

West Germany's alliance with Zionism and Israel after WWII, of supplying Israel with huge economic aid in the 1950s and of economic and military aid since the early 1960s, including tanks, which it used to kill Palestinians and other Arabs, is a continuation of the alliance that the Nazi government concluded with the Zionists in the 1930s. In the 1960s, West Germany even provided military training to Israeli soldiers and since the 1970s has provided Israel with nuclear-ready German-made submarines with which Israel hopes to kill more Arabs and Muslims. Israel has in recent years armed the most recentGerman-supplied submarines with nuclear tipped cruise missiles, a fact that is well known to the current German government. Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Der Spiegel in 2012 that Germans should be "proud" that they have secured the existence of the state of Israel "for many years". Berlin financed one-third of the cost of the submarines, around 135 million euros ($168 million) per submarine, and has allowed Israel to defer its payment until 2015. That this makes Germany an accomplice in the dispossession of the Palestinians is of no more concern to current German governments than it was in the 1960s to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer who affirmed that "the Federal Republic has neither the right nor the responsibility to take a position on the Palestinian refugees".

This is to be added to the massive billions that Germany has paid to the Israeli government as compensation for the holocaust, as if Israel and Zionism were the victims of Nazism, when in reality it was anti-Zionist Jews who were killed by the Nazis. The current German government does not care about the fact that even those German Jews who fled the Nazis and ended up in Palestine hated Zionism and its project and were hated in turn by Zionist colonists in Palestine. As German refugees in 1930s and 1940s Palestine refused to learn Hebrew and published half a dozen German newspapers in the country, they were attacked by the Hebrew press, including by Haartez, which called for the closure of their newspapers in 1939 and again in 1941. Zionist colonists attacked a German-owned café in Tel Aviv because its Jewish owners refused to speak Hebrew, and the Tel Aviv municipality threatened in June 1944 some of its German Jewish residents for holding in their home on 21 Allenby street "parties and balls entirely in the German language, including programmes that are foreign to the spirit of our city" and that this would "not be tolerated in Tel Aviv". German Jews, or Yekkes as they were known in the Yishuv, would even organise a celebration of the Kaiser's birthday in 1941 (for these and more details about German Jewish refugees in Palestine, read Tom Segev's book The Seventh Million).

Add to that Germany's support for Israeli policies against Palestinians at the United Nations, and the picture becomes complete. Even the new holocaust memorial built in Berlin that opened in 2005 maintains Nazi racial apartheid, as this "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" is only for Jewish victims of the Nazis who must still today be set apart, as Hitler mandated, from the other millions of non-Jews who also fell victim to Nazism. That a subsidiary of the German company Degussa, which collaborated with the Nazis and which produced the Zyklon B gas that was used to kill people in the gas chambers, was contracted to build the memorial was anything but surprising, as it simply confirms that those who killed Jews in Germany in the late 1930s and in the 1940s now regret what they had done because they now understand Jews to be white Europeans who must be commemorated and who should not have been killed in the first place on account of their whiteness. The German policy of abetting the killing of Arabs by Israel, however, is hardly unrelated to this commitment to anti-Semitism, which continues through the predominant contemporary anti-Muslim German racism that targets Muslim immigrants.

Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition

The Jewish holocaust killed off the majority of Jews who fought and struggled against European anti-Semitism, including Zionism. With their death, the only remaining "Semites" who are fighting against Zionism and its anti-Semitism today are the Palestinian people. Whereas Israel insists that European Jews do not belong in Europe and must come to Palestine, the Palestinians have always insisted that the homelands of European Jews were their European countries and not Palestine, and that Zionist colonialism springs from its very anti-Semitism. Whereas Zionism insists that Jews are a race separate from European Christians, the Palestinians insist that European Jews are nothing if not European and have nothing to do with Palestine, its people, or its culture. What Israel and its American and European allies have sought to do in the last six and a half decades is to convince Palestinians that they too must become anti-Semites and believe as the Nazis, Israel, and its Western anti-Semitic allies do, that Jews are a race that is different from European races, that Palestine is their country, and that Israel speaks for all Jews. That the two largest American pro-Israel voting blocks today are Millenarian Protestants and secular imperialists continues the very same Euro-American anti-Jewish tradition that extends back to the Protestant Reformation and 19th century imperialism. But the Palestinians have remained unconvinced and steadfast in their resistance to anti-Semitism.

European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination…

Yasser Arafat, 1974 UN speech

Israel and its anti-Semitic allies affirm that Israel is "the Jewish people", that its policies are "Jewish" policies, that its achievements are "Jewish" achievements, that its crimes are "Jewish" crimes, and that therefore anyone who dares to criticise Israel is criticising Jews and must be an anti-Semite. The Palestinian people have mounted a major struggle against this anti-Semitic incitement. They continue to affirm instead that the Israeli government does not speak for all Jews, that it does not represent all Jews, and that its colonial crimes against the Palestinian people are its own crimes and not the crimes of "the Jewish people", and that therefore it must be criticised, condemned and prosecuted for its ongoing war crimes against the Palestinian people. This is not a new Palestinian position, but one that was adopted since the turn of the 20th century and continued throughout the pre-WWII Palestinian struggle against Zionism. Yasser Arafat's speech at the United Nations in 1974 stressed all these points vehemently:

Just as colonialism heedlessly used the wretched, the poor, the exploited as mere inert matter with which to build and to carry out settler colonialism, so too were destitute, oppressed European Jews employed on behalf of world imperialism and of the Zionist leadership. European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination…Zionist theology was utilised against our Palestinian people: the purpose was not only the establishment of Western-style settler colonialism but also the severing of Jews from their various homelands and subsequently their estrangement from their nations. Zionism… is united with anti-Semitism in its retrograde tenets and is, when all is said and done, another side of the same base coin. For when what is proposed is that adherents of the Jewish faith, regardless of their national residence, should neither owe allegiance to their national residence nor live on equal footing with its other, non-Jewish citizens -when that is proposed we hear anti-Semitism being proposed. When it is proposed that the only solution for the Jewish problem is that Jews must alienate themselves from communities or nations of which they have been a historical part, when it is proposed that Jews solve the Jewish problem by immigrating to and forcibly settling the land of another people - when this occurs, exactly the same position is being advocated as the one urged by anti-Semites against Jews.

Israel's claim that its critics must be anti-Semites presupposes that its critics believe its claims that it represents "the Jewish people". But it is Israel's claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all.

Today, Israel and the Western powers want to elevate anti-Semitism to an international principle around which they seek to establish full consensus. They insist that for there to be peace in the Middle East, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must become, like the West, anti-Semites by espousing Zionism and recognising Israel's anti-Semitic claims. Except for dictatorial Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority and its cronies, on this 65th anniversary of the anti-Semitic conquest of Palestine by the Zionists, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, the Palestinian people and the few surviving anti-Zionist Jews continue to refuse to heed this international call and incitement to anti-Semitism. They affirm that they are, as the last of the Semites, the heirs of the pre-WWII Jewish and Palestinian struggles against anti-Semitism and its Zionist colonial manifestation. It is their resistance that stands in the way of a complete victory for European anti-Semitism in the Middle East and the world at large.”

Joseph Massad teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians.

Al Nakba, the Catastrophe

“Of all the stories of the Palestinian Nakba, none surpasses this march through the hills from al-Ramla and Lydda 58 years ago this month. ‘Nobody will ever know how many children died,’ Glubb would recall in his memoir, “A Soldier With the Arabs.” The Death March, as the Palestinians call it, along with the massacre at Deir Yassin, represent two of the central traumas that form the Palestinian catastrophe. Countless thousands fled from their villages, many because of “whispering campaigns” by Israeli military intelligence agents, which, following Deir Yassin, were designed to spark Arab fears of another massacre. Tens of thousands more were driven from their homes by force.” Sandy Tolan

“American media should be ashamed. I am in my 40s, have a college degree, read the newspaper every day, and yet I have never heard about al-Nakba. Salon is to be commended for revealing the history of this atrocity. Shame on the media in this country for their pro-Israeli bias. Keeping the American people in a bubble of ignorance will cause us all to suffer.”

That is my comment to a Salon article back in 2006. I was and am embarrassed that I knew so little about the world until recently. Of course the fault is not entirely my own. Like all Americans I have been fed a steady diet of propaganda my entire life. The lies about Israeli history are among the worst.
I am ashamed that I swallowed wholesale the myth of the courageous Israelis when in fact they forcibly drove out the Palestinians and stole their country. Today is the 65th anniversary of the beginning of the Nakba. Learn about it. Remember it.

Why Jay-Z Went to Cuba

Yesterday I posted an interview with Dhoruba bin Wahad about the Assata Shakur/Jay-Z connection. While I agree there is a link, my explanation is simpler.

Obama wants to normalize relations with Cuba, but not with noble intent. He wants to do what he always does, make right wing dreams come true. Hugo Chavez is dead, the Castros are old men. What better time to resurrect the doctrine that the U.S. should control this hemisphere?

The only thing standing in his way is right won't reaction. No problem. Tell the Cubans that Shakur is the price they must pay to end sanctions. I believe that is the message that Jay-Z delivered.

Obama Uses Jay Z to Trap Assata Shakur

"Increasingly it is becoming clear that the Obama administration in preparation for its change in its Latin American policy has been using Hip-Hop millionaires as pawns to cover some of its most unsavory actions. Only a few astute old activists recognized early that Obama was using Pop-culture like Richard Nixon used Ping Pong diplomacy in opening up China to a new US diplomacy. 

The recent visit of Millionaire Rap Mogul Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé to Cuba served as a cover for unofficial back-door communications to the Cuban government conveying the Obama’s intentions to modify or lift the four decade old illegal embargo/blockade of Cuba and that the presence of former Black Panther, and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur could hinder or derail this diplomacy. Jay-Z’s delegation included a State-Department “reliable” personage who transmitted the Obama’s administration’s position.  Once the Republican/Right got wind of this overture they screamed bloody murder, but could do little about it as lifting the Cuban Blockade is now crucial to the US reasserting dominance in a post Castro-Chavez Latin America as the geo-economic center for Latin American nations. So Assata is a pawn in the chess game of US imperial diplomacy." - Dhoruba bin Wahad

When Jay-Z and Beyonce went to Cuba I groaned and rolled my eyes just because I'm truly sick of hearing about them and other celebrities. But when the FBI announced a $1 million increase in the bounty for Assata Shakur and named her as a domestic terrorist I should have smelled a rat.

"It should have been instantly revelatory why the Obama’s State Department issued a “tourist visa” to Rapper Jay-Z several weeks before the FBI announced its addition of Assata to its “Ten Most Wanted International Terrorist” list."

I should have known that something was amiss when  Jay-Z, whose politics are thoroughly reactionary, suddenly claimed an interest in Cuba.

The More Effective Evil: The Impact of Barack Obama's Presidency on the ...

Great documentary from Solomon Commissiong. Black Agenda Report well represented. Good commentary from a wide variety of voices.

Glen Ford "Hands Off Assata Shakur"

Too bad it took me a minute to figure out to to video using my phone. Glen Ford speaking at "Hands off Assata Shakur" rally today in Harlem.

Hands Off Assata Shakur

“Assata Shakur could well end up dead at Obama’s hands like Anwar al-Awlakki and his sixteen year old son. Cuba may be attacked on the pretext of capturing Shakur. No president since John F. Kennedy has attempted an actual military assault on Cuban soil. Obama is known for his ability to go where other presidents have dared not. He killed Gaddafi and overthrew the Libyan government. Why wouldn’t he try the same with Cuba?”

In this week’s issue of Black Agenda Report we provide comprehensive coverage of the Obama administration’s declaration that Assata Shakur is a domestic terrorist. Bruce Dixon, Glen Ford, Raymond Nat Turner and yours truly all comment on the latest effort to solidify America’s plunge into fascism.

Barack Obama is the master of his own shock and awe. In one fell swoop he killed off memory of the black liberation struggle, declared war on Cuba and found a way to silence thousands of critics. Lest we forget, Shakur supporters can now be charged with giving “material support to terror”, which means anything the president says it means.

Today the Black is Back Coalition hosted a rally in Harlem, Hands Off Assata Shakur. Glen Ford and I spoke. These are my comments.

“When the 1% chose this president, and they always do, they committed the perfect crime. They had a president who would do all their dirty work, presidents always do, without being subject to the scrutiny that a republican or a white democrat would face.

Only Nixon could go to China and only Obama could kill Gaddafi. Bush may have claimed the right to detain anyone he wanted for any reason he chose, but Obama claims the right to actually kill anyone he wants.

Now that he, and make no mistake, it is Obama, has labeled Assata Shakur a terrorist, he can kill her, detain her or do anything else he wants. Supporters of Assata Shakur can be charged with giving material aid to a terrorist and for any reason the government makes up.

Obama can use Assata Shakur as pretext for attacking Cuba, just as he and NATO attacked Libya and now Syria. This terror designation covers a multitude of sins, and Barack Obama is the #1 sinner.

We are told that democrats are the lesser of two evils. This expression is partly true, this system can never benefit humanity, but the question isn’t who is the lesser evil, but which side can get away with its evil doing more easily. The 1% determined, correctly, that in 2008 and again in 2012 that person was Barack Obama.

The ironically named justice department upped the ante last week when they called Shakur a terrorist. We must do the same on our end. Those of us who gather here today cannot be shy when we talk about this case or any of the other outrages being perpetrated by our government. And we can’t be shy when we talk about the president. I’m proud to be part of the Black Agenda Report team for many reasons, but today I’m most pleased to say that we had Obama’s number all along. We told you so.

Power to the people! Thank you.”

Words of the Week

“Hey, Mr. Kill List: I am not your gay brother. Take your patronizing, mawkish, Hallmark card, gasbag philosophizing -- and you know what you can do with it.”  - Arthur Silber

Just read what Arthur has to say. He is one of my favorite bloggers of all time.

I Love Lupe Fiasco

Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist, Gaza was getting bombed Obama didn’t say sh*t. That’s why I ain’t vote for him next one either. I’m part of the problem, the problem is I’m peaceful.

Until recently I knew nothing about Lupe Fiasco. I am similarly and quite happily uninformed about every other popular artist of the moment as well. I am too old and too stuck in the music of my youth to care. What’s going on? I’m the wrong one to ask.

Recently Lupe Fiasco got onto my personal radar screen because he criticized Obama for killing people. It seems like a reasonable thing to do. We are taught that killing is wrong, but somehow comfortably do moral injury to ourselves by excusing murder when it is committed by anyone who is wearing a uniform or living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Not Mr. Fiasco. Last night he was performing at an inauguration event in Washington and he sang an anti-war song. Viva Lupe! He was escorted off stage because he was booed by the crowd, or because his song was too long, or because he proclaimed he didn’t vote for Obama. Versions differ, but Fiasco is now in the Obamabot dog house.

Artists are supposed to take risks and some of those risks are political. On a day when millions will only debate who loves Obama more, it is refreshing to know that there are a few who will speak out.

I still know nothing about his music, but I love Lupe if only because he is willing to tell the truth. It is sad but true, being peaceful is seen as being a problem in this culture.

Let’s hear it for the problem children.

Justice for Shawty Lo!

Carlos Walker, aka Shawty Lo, was doomed from day one. From the moment his new reality show “All My Babies’ Mamas” was announced, it attracted a firestorm of criticism.

At this late date in history, black people still experience shame and embarrassment about the behavior of other black people. I think that the over wrought response was rather sad. I had never heard of Atlanta based rapper, and wasn’t interested in watching him or his 11 children and their mothers. I was at times amused about the online petitions and expressions of outrage. At other moments I despaired that black people spent so much time and energy debating a silly show that ought to be ignored.

What do white people think of us all when they see the Walkers of the world? They think what they thought before they saw them. The black president is called the food stamp president and lazy, so it is clear that the stature of individual black people doesn’t deter racist thinking. The sight of Shawty won’t change anyone’s opinion and racism will be alive and well regardless.

No matter. The Oxygen cable network has decided not to move ahead with the show. I took a look at the website and discovered several reality shows I had never even heard of. I suspect that Shawty would have gone under the radar as well.

Shawty Lo’ and all his babies’ mamas

Until about one week ago I had never heard of Shawty Lo’. I now know he is an Atlanta based rapper born with the name Carlos Walker. News about him is difficult to avoid. 

You see, Shawty is the father of 11 children whom he produced with 10 different women. Not cool, for about 10 or 11 different reasons, but it does happen. I don’t think I was alone in being blissfully unaware of Walker’s existence, but he is now a household name because he will be the star of an upcoming reality show, All My Babies’ Mamas, which will be shown on the Oxygen network.

Black America has not been so unified in expressing disgust, outrage, hatred and anxiety in quite some time. There is an online petition demanding that Shawty, his babies, and their mamas not appear on our televisions.

It isn’t hard to understand why black people are so uncomfortable about the prospect of Shawty and his family appearing on television. What could be more stereotypical than a black man who has children with 10 different women?

Yet I have to admit feeling that some of the outrage is excessive in this age of reality television. There are reality series about redneck rocket scientists, redneck loggers, and rednecks who fish with their hands. Then we have crazed parents dressing their pre-school daughters in padded bras and wigs  in order to win beauty pageants. The entire state of Alaska is now a source of fascination with gold prospectors, state troopers, and the coast guard on the small screen. Pawn shops, storage facilities, the Amish, ghost hunters, ice road truckers, bigfoot hunters, hoarders, pregnant teens, addicts and polygamist families (not just Shorty’s) are also on the list of  reality fare.

I think the anti-Shawty brigade is really afraid that they will succumb to the inclination to rubberneck and will end up watching the rapper and his babies and their mamas. We all fume when someone else slows down to view the wreck by the side of the road, but who resists the temptation to glance at the mayhem themselves?

If Shawty makes it onto the air, most black people horrified by this news will end up watching some part of what outrages them so much. They may watch just a few minutes, or just one episode, or will watch only because a friend calls and tells them to, but Shawty will not be shunned.

Without having watched even one episode of Sister Wives I know that a mormon fundamentalist named Cody had three wives and then took a fourth wife who had been married before and already had two children. I know this just from the commercials I can’t avoid when I’m watching something else.

So I and millions of other people who are either judgmental towards or indifferent to Shawty will still know about his life. That is the real fear. There is no escape in this age of media over saturation.

The Shawty haters will still see the commercials, have friends or family who post facebook news about him or be told that there is a viral video about one or other mama or baby. Shawty will be ever present in our lives whether we want him to be or not.

If people are going to spend time and energy thinking about Shawty Lo’ it should be used to discuss how we are inundated by media and how that effects us all. Why do these corporations play such a big role in our lives and how can we avoid their ever growing influence?

Don’t fear Shawty, fear the corporation and the fact that they have put him front and center. No one else will have 11 kids with 10 different women unless they were inclined to do so in the first place. We will be no worse off if he has a television show and white people who see him as affirming their negative opinions of all black people will be racist whether Shawty is on television or not.

So bring it on Oxygen. Why should rednecks make all the reality cash? Someone with 11 kids definitely needs to make money.

Aaron Swartz Legal Defense Fund

“Economic suffering and anxiety — and anger over it and the flamboyant prosperity of the elites who caused it — is only going to worsen.  So, too, will the refusal of the Western citizenry to meekly accept their predicament. As that happens, who it is who controls the Internet and the flow of information and communications takes on greater importance.  Those who are devoted to preserving the current system of prerogatives certainly know that, and that is what explains this obsession with expanding the Surveillance State and secrecy powers, maintaining control over the dissemination of information, and harshly punishing those who threaten it.” Glenn Greenwald

Aaron Swartz is facing up to 35 years in prison and fines of up to $1 million because the Barack Obama justice department has decided to persecute him.  I deliberately did not say prosecute. Persecution is a better description of the vendetta being carried out against him.

Swartz downloaded scientific journals from the subscription service Journal Storage, Jstor, without paying for them. He didn’t distribute the articles to anyone else, and he returned the content to Jstor, which has no interest in prosecuting Swartz.

At first glance it seems illogical that the feds would go to such lengths to punish Swartz, but the quote from Glenn Greenwald explains it all. The system wants to punish, to thoroughly crush anyone who threatens their prerogatives. The Greenwald article gives examples of how governments in Egypt or the UK or the managers of the BART transit system have used technology to disrupt dissent.

There is a lot more dissent coming, with austerity measures ruining the lives of millions of people and the military powers of the west being used to kill anywhere on the planet where it is deemed convenient to do so.  That is why it is imperative that Aaron Swartz get the best legal defense possible. You can contribute to the Aaron Swartz Legal Defense Fund. It isn’t hyperbolic to say that by doing so, you will strike a blow for liberty.

Friday is Buy Nothing Day

Capitalism is in its last rotten stages. It isn't enough that we are propagandized into going broke the day after thanksgiving. Now they want us to start the race to hell on thanksgiving day itself. Enough already. Just say no. Buy nothing!

Hold His Feet to the Fire

At last, after four years, black people will now hold Obama's feet to the fire. He won, no re-election worries, we are free to make demands. Hello. Hello. Anybody out there?

Words of the Week

I don't have that much more to say about Barack Obama. I will defer to someone who was a much better writer, the late Juan Santos.

"Obama plays the role of a Black Cinderella. He does for Black folks what Cinderella does for girls. He shows that oppression and silence can be good for you – at least if you are the one the prince chooses, or if you are the one who gets to be the prince. It’s total fantasy. It’s a glass slipper that will break at the arch and be turned on us like a broken beer bottle or a jagged-edged knife; the same knife Obama has threatened to turn on the people of Iran and Pakistan." 
Juan Santos, Fourth World

Black Voters and Gay Marriage

Contrary to conventional wisdom, black people have a wide diversity of opinion on the subject of LGBT rights. We are incorrectly and unfairly labeled as being hyper homophobic despite the fact that millions of people in the black LGBT community have relatives and friends and co-workers who accept them as they are. I have written on the subject in the past on this blog and in Black Agenda Report.

Today the New York Times presented in its Op-Docs column a video from the film The Black Vote for Gay Marriage. Film maker Yoruba Richen does an excellent job of displaying the nuances and complexities of black opinions on the issue of gay marriage. It is worth a look.

While I am on the subject, I will point out yet again that the often repeated statistic that 70% of black Californians voted against gay marriage in 2008 is incorrect. Black voter approval of Proposition 8 was more like 58%, a slightly higher figure than for other groups, but nothing which indicates that we are such outliers.

Important Critique of Obama

"Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017, the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality. The tragedy is that black elites — from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members — have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House."
Fredrick Harris

Media coverage of hurricane Sandy makes it appear that nothing else is happening in the world. We are holding a national election one week from today, and there is no better time for analysis of the Obama legacy.

Fredrick Harris is the author of the The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics and a professor at Columbia University. In a New York Times op-ed, Harris explains how the Obama presidency has come at a steep price for black Americans, who have by and large decided to stand down politically in order to protect the black president. Harris explains that Obama hasn't protected them. We have given up our birth right, our legacy of challenging the system, in exchange for seeing a black first family and it has cost us dearly.

People like Fredrick Harris are very important to black people, even though they may be angered by his words. One day Obama will not be president and perhaps that will be an opportunity to speak truthfully about what him and what he has done to black America.

Black Agenda Report Celebrating at Riverside Church October 12, 2012:

On Friday evening, October 12th, Black Agenda Report held a fund raising event at the Riverside Church in New York City. We celebrated our 6th anniversary featuring a conversation with Cornel West, presented our pilot episode of Black Agenda Report television, and had a powerful group of panelists moderated by yours truly. I am very proud of not only this event but also of being part of the Black Agenda Report family.

The VP Debate: What They Didn't Talk About

I did post debate analysis on the Real News Network. I am pleased with my comments and that I stated for the record that I'm not voting for Obama.

"Well, I'd vote for—I'm still a registered Democrat, but I no longer vote for presidential—Democratic presidential candidates anymore. And if I—I live in a blue state, but if I lived in the state where I was born, Ohio, I would do the same thing. I can no longer justify going along with the empire building, the, in fact, criminality of the United States abroad, because of the smaller and smaller number of issues that do in fact matter. She asked about abortion, where there's a very clear difference. But the only differences left are in the issue of personal freedom. I call it personal liberalism on gay marriage or abortion, and I'm not going to say those issues aren't important, but I no longer feel that they are worth giving up principles on the many other issues of foreign policy, the bailing out of the banks, which has continued under Obama. So for me it does not matter any longer, and I think it's time for people on the left to stop allowing themselves to be so frightened of those few issues where there are differences that we keep supporting the same terrible policies."

Romney, Like Obama, Sucks Up to Rich People

Today a video showing Mitt Romney sucking up to a rich fund raiser is the hot news story. In the video, Romney is heard telling guests at a fund raiser that Obama supporters are all dependent on the government for help and think the government should supply them with housing and health care.

Big deal. Obama tells his check bundling patrons what they want to hear. At the home of one Richard Richman (real name). He said the following about the people who put him in office.

"Now, the second reason I'm telling you this is because Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particularly derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.)"

In other words, just shut the f*ck up and let Obama do whatever he wants.

Of course Romney is making an appeal to racism, but what is so terrible about thinking that the government should help us with housing and health care. They ought to be seen as fundamental human rights, and if liberals had any sense they would attack Romney for the right reasons. They should defend the idea of government assisting people. That is what happens in the truly civilized world, a world which excludes the United States.

Liberals show their true colors. They are in fact, not so liberal any more. Like Obama and the democrats they move further and further to the right. No, not all Obama supporters depend on government. But they should defend government spending as beneficial to the entire society. It is austerity that is killing our economy. It is the dog-eat-dog individualism and racism and the harshness of our society which have destroyed public education and millions of jobs and housing and put 2 million Americans behind bars.

We need more government help, not less, and democrats should say so. Romney is a mediocre and stupid man and his flailing campaign proves it. The democrats are slicker and know how to pretend to care when they don’t.

No, Maybe These are the Words of the Week

One of my Facebook friends wrote this in response to the bizarre, over wrought reaction to Michelle Obama's convention speech.

"I think this is why I have always liked math and science more so than the arts or law or politics. I like concreteness. If you solve a mathematical equation, you are wrong and there is no getting around it. Although the more variables yo

u enter into the equation and more unknowns, the harder it becomes to come to a solid conclusion in science, it is still much better than anything left up completely to the rational of man, singularly or collectively. I listened to Michelle Obama's speech and it was the most innocuous, lazy, weak, vacuous, milquetoast speech I can think of by a grown woman who should have been speaking on issues and topics that are affecting so many daily lives here and abroad. Instead, I hear about her dating time with Barack and silly shit like that...Yet, she is getting glowing reviews for her speech on the liberal left...this would be the best example of 'Kafkaesque' that I can think of. I would think I am crazy and that the speech somehow resonated some type of depth, except all I have to do is look at all the things I post on my facebook everyday to know the shallowness in the speech, this woman, the people listening to it and cheering in the building, the viewing audience, the pundits and ultimately, this society. How can any serious political mind grounded in any type of knowledge concerning ANY of the issues we are facing listen to that speech and think it was good? The indoctrination process never stops. At least, the people commenting below the article have a semblance of understanding of what is going on."

Forrest Palmer

Words of the Week

The Democrats have zero argument. They are the party of Guantanamo now. They are the party that escalates the war in Afghanistan/Pakistan. Their jets and navies back up a murderous order in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. Their diplomats, Israeli allies and war-planners target Iran.

They coldly send murder drones and assassination squads all over the world.

Their response to the oil spill was to put BP in charge of cleanup — and to shield the oil companies and future drilling because of capitalist logic.

They have given a trillion dollar blank check to vampire banks, a debt that will bankrupt social security and tattered social nets. “Too big to fail”? While none of the people are too small to stomp.

They have escalated the heartless deportations of immigrants — in widespread communities, in factories, at the border.

The Democrats’ only hope is to point hysterically to the country’s ugliest fringe, the Tea Party, and proclaim “We are your protection against them.”

Fuck off.

Mike Ely (Nando Sims)

Desmond Tutu Shuns Tony Blair

"On what grounds do we decide that Robert Mugabe should go the International Criminal Court, Tony Blair should join the international speakers' circuit, bin Laden should be assassinated, but Iraq should be invaded, not because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, as Mr. Bush's chief supporter, Mr. Blair, confessed last week, but in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein?"  
Desmond Tutu

Tutu is definitely laying down the knowledge and making good on his Nobel peace prize winner status. Tutu recently took a very principled stand when he chose not to attend an event in South African which Tony Blair was also scheduled to attend.

There was a time when scoundrels were shunned in polite society. Ah, the good old days. Unfortunately, being a former PM of Great Britain gives one a permanent status of acceptability, even if war crimes are committed. Blair even gets to teach religion at a university. (Try not to vomit.)

Tutu has also done the world a great service by discussing one of the great unmentionables of the day. He asks why powerful white men and their allies get away with what are war crimes by any definition when only Africans are held accountable by international law.

"... in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague."

Thank you Desmond Tutu. It is too bad that now any riffraff head of state from a killer nation gets to be a peace prize  laureate. The honor used to mean something.

Nixoncare Finally Wins

"The time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high-quality health care within the reach of every American. I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it."  - Richard Nixon

The Supreme Court decision to uphold the constitutionality of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act has caused a rejoicing among liberals not seen since the 2008 presidential election. The threat of repeal of the legislation now known by friend and foe alike as Obamacare, has united democrats and republicans too. The inability of any president to successfully provide universal health care to Americans made the passage and survival of Obamacare seem like a greater victory than it actually was. Republicans are united in thwarting the initiatives of any democratic president, especially a black one whose very presence causes them to react like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

Barack Obama’s health care plan is very much like a health care plan first presented by another president in 1971. Then president Richard Nixon presented a plan that was very similar to the over hyped Obamacare. Nixon proposed forcing private insurance companies to cover everyone regardless of prior health condition, and the government subsidizing those unable to pay.

The elation created by the Obama court victory is symptomatic of many things that are very wrong in the American body politic. Once again we see proof that the democrats of the 21st century are akin to the republicans of forty years ago. There is no other way to explain their bizarre rejoicing because a bandaid has been placed over a gunshot wound.

Nixon’s proposal ultimately failed because the late senator Ted Kennedy opposed it. Kennedy was the democratic point person on health care and he saw the obvious flaws in a plan which maintained a dependence on the rule of private health insurers. He assumed that an eventual democratic presidential victory would bring true health care reform, and torpedoed the Nixon initiative which is now being celebrated by democrats as a progressive triumph.

The Obama plan does address some of the major problems inherent in the current system, such as allowing parents to continue covering young adult children and preventing pre-existing conditions from barring access to coverage. These are certainly worthy goals, but a true single payer, medicare for all plan would address those problems too, and would also address the biggest obstruction to true health care reform, the reliance on private health insurance companies to provide care for every person.

Private health insurance companies are the problem, and the Affordable Care Act presents a huge windfall for them. When Obama’s plan goes into full effect in 2014, there will still be nothing to prevent health insurance companies from manipulating the market place and giving Americans access to inferior coverage with high deductibles. Medical care bankruptcies will not disappear, and the true death panel, privately run health care, will continue with the help of government dollars. Nixon’s plan was in some ways superior to Obama’s because it called for strict federal oversight of the insurance companies. Greater regulation would have prevented what will now be an inferior and overly expensive system from dictating health care outcomes.

As Vice President Biden famously said, the Obama plan is a “big f*ing deal.” It is a tremendous political victory for Obama but once again we must ask if political victories and also victories for the people. We now have a deeply flawed health care system which is more entrenched than ever. The argument that this plan will eventually lead to a single payer system is highly problematic. Big pharma and health insurance companies were at the negotiating table every step of the way while single payer advocates were locked out.
This act solidifies their control over our lives and shows once again the degree to which corporations drive American public policy.

A victory for Obama is not necessarily a victory for the people, even if that political victory causes insanity among republicans. Scorn from Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are not necessarily justifications for rejoicing. Republicans can’t strike a blow against Obama in part because he accepted and promoted so many of their policies. From making war around the world, to bailing out the banks, to bailing out health care, Obama and the democrats act like the republicans they say are their political enemies.

We are told that Ted Kennedy must be smiling in his grave because his long held dream came true. After living to see only backward steps in the health care system he acknowledged regret at not accepting the Nixon plan The president who resigned in disgrace ended up winning in the end. Nixon may also be happy in the great beyond. It took a black man and the democratic party to give him his final political victory.

US National Day of Action-News Analysis-07-04-2012

I had to watch Iranian tv to get a good analysis of the 4th of July and what it does and doesn't mean.

Aljazeera's Inside Story - Can the ICC deliver impartial justice?

ICC Prosecutes Only Africans

As I said in my Black Agenda Report column, the International Criminal Court is itself criminal. Palestine has "no standing" and can't get justice after Israel kills thousands of Gazan civilians. Black Libyans were targeted by lynch mobs but the ICC didn't act. The U.S. is beyond ICC justice because it refuses to sign the treaty which brought the ICC into being. Africans friendly to the U.S. and western European nations have nothing to fear when they commit crimes.

I was honored to appear on Aljazeera's Inside Story program last Sunday. Listen up. I lay down a little bit of knowledge.

Frederick Douglass and the 4th of July
"Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future."

"Fellow citizens, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation (Babylon) whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin.

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!"

To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.
My subject, then, fellow citizens, is "American Slavery." I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery -- the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate - I will not excuse." I will use the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slave-holder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some of my audience say it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother Abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more and denounce less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to like punishment.

What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments, forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then I will argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold; that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that we are engaged in all the enterprises common to other men -- digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave -- we are called upon to prove that we are men?

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to understand? How should I look today in the presence of Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What! Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No - I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be divine. Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may - I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Go search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."

Frederick Douglass - July 4, 1852

WFSB Channel 3

Why Black Boys Don't Succeed


“Do it. Go ahead. No balls. Oh you’re a tough guy. Hey boss, show me your nine."
Racist teacher talking to three year old


This daycare worker was so certain she could humiliate a child with impunity that she filmed herself doing it and shared the video with at least one other person. Whenever the issue of black success or lack thereof is raised, remember this scene.

Actually the portion of the video shown on WFSB doesn't show the worst part. See text of the confrontation here.

I Didn’t Vote Today

Today we had congressional primary elections here in New York state and I did something unheard of, for me anyway. I didn’t vote. I am one of those people who always votes in primaries and general elections, so much so that I am then victimized by annoying robocalls and election flyers in my mail box.

My congressman is Charles Rangel. He has been around a long time, more than 40 years. Rangel is one of the longest serving members of the house of representatives and he needs to go. His seniority doesn’t benefit the people of his district, and if we have anything to show for his time in office, he is keeping it a closely guarded secret.

The last straw for me with Rangel was his pathetic defense of Israel as the Gaza freedom flotilla approached that country in 2010. He actually compared it to the Cuban missile crisis. Like I said, pathetic. But for me it was liberation day. It signaled the beginning of the end between me and the democrats.

I know that you can’t raise campaign money in New York unless you bow down to Zion. I know Rangel didn’t believe one word he was saying, but I don’t care any longer. I can’t keep supporting this system which I abhor.

May Rangel live a long life. He is a charming man of the old school and came of age politically before the congressional black caucus was bought off by corporations. He fought to protect Haiti from America’s most recent intervention, and publicly took Colin Powell to task for aiding and abetting the over throw. He deserves credit for that.

But the Obama era has ended black politics and the CBC is a shell of its former self.  Harlem is being gentrified out of existence and Rangel and the rest have done nothing to stop it.

I think he will win his primary and go on to yet another term. But he will do so without my help. I am done with the democrats.

Robert Mangabeira Unger - "Beyond Obama"

"Obama must be defeated."


Unger taught Obama at Harvard. He gets to the heart of the matter at about 6 minutes 10 seconds. The most important point he makes is that a democratic loss is really no big deal any more.

The Scars of Stop and Frisk

“When you’re young and you’re black no matter how you look you fit the description.”

So says Tyquan Brehon. He is featured in the short documentary, The Scars of Stop and Frisk, in which he states that he was stopped and frisked at least 60 times in a three year period.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is presiding over the worst police state in the country. Young Mr. Brehon is one of over 600,000 people stopped and frisked by the NYPD last year.
Not only was he stopped numerous times, but he was also locked up at his local precinct when he dared ask why he was being stopped. Brehon was eventually expelled from school when in his anger he began to misbehave as a result of the abuse he surfaced. He is now back in school and hopes to be a lawyer some day. Hopefully his experience will make him a better advocate.
But as for the city policy, it is blatantly racist and is a tool to force black people out. Gentrification is apparently not happening fast enough to suit Bloomberg. More police mistreatment will make the city more attractive to the “hipsters” and Europeans intent on homogenizing New York so that only they and their friends will have a place to live.
Kudos to Brehon for speaking up and to all those who are fighting back.

Why the Democrats Lost in Wisconsin

“Political campaigns are pretty much where movements go to die, get betrayed or are stillborn … When movements become campaigns their participants lose their independence and initiative. Instead of being ready and willing to act outside the law, they become its most loyal supporters.”  Bruce Dixon

Republican governor Scott Walker survived a recall vote in Wisconsin not just because he had more money at his disposal. He won because the democrats were incompetent and because they do not want to activate their base.

Why would the democrats choose an opponent who had already lost to Walker? Why would they demobilize the thousands of people who turned out in the state capitol to fight Walker’s union busting?

In last week’s Black Agenda Report Bruce Dixon explained why politics is a sorry substitute for movement building. Michael Smith of Stop Me Before I Vote Again shows us what can happen when movement builders tell politicians what do do, as was the case in Quebec.

Democrats would rather lose than create movements which would supplant their rule. The end result is of course, defeat. We can learn the what to do from Quebec and the what not to do from Wisconsin.

Obama Weighs In On Wisconsin Recall Defeat

Obama to Wisconsin: "I didn't really give a f*ck."

Still Waiting for Our First Black President

Fredrick Harris is a professor at Columbia University who made news because he did nothing more than tell the truth about Barack Obama. In a Washington Post op-ed Harris explained what we at the Black Agenda Report have been saying for years.

Barack Obama is no friend to black people, nor is anyone else who succeeds in making it to the oval office. Indeed, a black president must by necessity become an enemy of black people. Our desire to see a black face in a high place and the racist foundations of American life are a toxic mix. True, Obama can’t advocate for black people without alienating white people, but that means we should never have wanted to see him or any other black person in the presidency in the first place.

We are left with nothing more than swooning over the sight of Obama presiding over state dinners, meeting the queen of England, or wearing his POTUS jacket onboard Air Force One. The pride in Obama’s accomplishment is akin to wanting a black actor to win an oscar or a black athlete to medal at the winter olympics.

Yet we are talking about politics, and our very survival. Black people have advanced the most when we made demands upon the political system. We are now left with nothing but defending Obama, regardless of his deliberate decisions to do nothing on our behalf.

History will show that the Obama era was among the worst in the political life of black America. In fact, we now have no political life. The combination of the effects of corporate cash on black politics and the Obama stand down have been absolutely disastrous.

I am looking forward to reading Harris’ new book, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics. Black politics has been in decline for some time and for a variety of reasons, but the Obama election was the nail in the coffin.

Killer President for a Bloodthirsty Nation

“Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret  ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.”

The American people are a blood thirsty bunch. How else can one explain the white house using the New York Times to brag about President Obama personally killing so many terror suspects.

I emphasize the word suspect. That means they haven’t been found guilty of anything. They haven’t been accused, charged, indicted, or anything else we used to do in federal court houses. Our constitutional law professor has taken it upon himself to personally decide who should get whacked.

It is appalling, and if people in this country had any morals, Obama would not be able to show his face outside of the white house without being booed. But I said it all in the first sentence, Obama and his team knew that publicizing details of how the president arrives at his hit list would raise his approval ratings.

Why do you think they went on and on ad nauseam in bragging about bin Laden’s assassination? Snarky remarks about Romney being unwilling to pull the trigger became daily campaign rhetoric. What better way to gain and keep popularity than to tell voters how the president decides who he is going to kill next.

I’m now going to be the middle aged baptist lady that I am and call him and his henchmen and women to account.

This is evil. Yes, it is unconstitutional. Yes, congress has not done its job. Yes, the federal judiciary have given up their independence. All of that is true, but is also true that we have pure evil running our government. The lowest rung of hell is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Amen.

Fascism Watch

I started using the title Fascism Watch for certain blog posts during the Bush presidency. I blamed Bush and Cheney for our loss of civil liberties and American terror around the globe. I was right about them but naïve about the system.

We are still headed towards full fledged fascism and we now have a democratic president. It will be the same no matter which party is in power. Alexander Cockburn explains it all in Counterpunch.

Black Agenda Report at UNAC Conference

The Black Agenda Report team at the UNAC conference in March. Great conference, great panel.

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of May 14, 2012

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of May 14, 2012

Black Agenda Radio has a great line up this week. Paul Street, Tony Monteiro, Doug Henwood, Chris Gauvreau of UNAC and Abayomi Azikiwe discussed the NATO protests, election boycotts, the derivatives disaster and Obama's true allegiance.

Professor Johnny Williams of Trinity College was also a guest. I was not familiar with him, but he spoke powerfully on the concept of a maximum wage and how everyone in our country would be better off if the rich took less from us than they do now. His final words were very powerful, they win my award for words of the week. His interview begins about 39 minutes into the program.

I wish that more black folk would join the [occupy]movement and stop coddling up to Obama and thinking that just because Obama is running into extreme right wing, white racists in the congress and so forth that somehow that’s why he can’t get things done.


Obama can’t get things done because he’s not trying to get things done for poor people and  for black people in the country. Once we have that in our heads we realize the people who we have been waiting for are us. We’ve got to do it, we can’t wait for him to do it.


As I have said many times, no one who is really interested in changing our system will ever become president. Black people in particular must act in opposition to presidents, even democrats and even black ones. Williams  and the rest of this week's guests make it clear why that is the case.

Why I won't be voting for Obama, or any other democratic party presidential candidate.

John Pilger Lays on the Knowledge

"In the week Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he  ordered bombing attacks on Yemen, killing a reported 63 people, 28 of them children. When Obama recently announced he supported same-sex marriage, American planes had not long blown 14 Afghan civilians to bits. In both cases, the mass murder was barely news. What mattered were the cynical vacuities of a political celebrity, the product of a zeitgeist driven by the forces of consumerism and the media with the aim of diverting the struggle for social and economic justice.

The award of the Nobel Prize to the first black president because he "offered hope" was both absurd and an authentic expression of the lifestyle liberalism that controls much of political debate in the west. Same-sex marriage is one such distraction."

Pilger is one of my favorite writers. Read here to see why. I love his term "lifestyle liberalism." It explains so much of what I hate about the gay marriage and war on women debates. Obama wouldn't be president unless he promised to continue the multiple front wars on human rights around the world. He won't stop mass incarceration, or drone strikes, or bailouts to wall street. So no, it doesn't matter that he is black. He does what presidents do, and that is bad news for the entire world.

Barack Obama, Black People and Gay Rights

Yesterday Barack Obama made big news by actually saying very little. The brouhaha of the last 24 hours is a result of his dim bulb Vice President, Joseph Biden, doing something that every mid-level manager knows not to do.

Biden got ahead of his boss, or as Obama said, “a little bit over his skis.” On Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press Biden announced to the world and to his unsuspecting boss, that he was comfortable with gay marriage. Whoopsy Daisy.

Biden’s blurting forced the president to say the same thing. Yesterday he announced that he too was personally in favor of gay marriage. Liberals predictably fell into a state of collective idol worship, despite the fact that Obama didn’t say anything more enlightened than Dick Cheney said in 2009.

Obama said that while he favored gay marriage, he favored leaving decisions up to individual states. Big deal. That is already the case.

It is all enough to make an anti-Obamaite crazy. Liberals still don’t care that their beloved president asserts a right to jail them without charge or assassinate them if he decides their terrorists. So what. They have an opportunity to look down their noses at yahoos and think themselves superior as their idol drops drones on little children in Afghanistan.

We have also been subjected to endless bloviation about how much more homophobic black people are as compared to whites. Not true. I wrote this column back in 2008 after the passage of Proposition 8 in California, and the unfair smear that black voters alone were responsible for the passage of this ban on gay marriage.

Take a look. I don’t think the issues have changed very much.

Obama and Gay Marriage


Barack Obama has now expressed his support of gay marriage. It isn't surprising. Liberals will love the decision, mostly out of true conviction, but the problem is they don't have much conviction about any issues outside of the social realm.

Obama has eviscerated civil liberties, has given himself the right to jail or even assassinate citizens without charge, and keeps killing people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Somalia and Fillintheblankistan.

I am in favor of marriage equality, but it bothers me that outside of most issues regarding personal choice, the "social issues", liberals don't care what Obama or any other democrat does while in office. Drone strikes, dead babies, bank bailouts, and good old fashioned imperialism, don't rate on the liberal scale of concerns. If Obama gives the green light for Israel to attack Iran, these same people singing his praises won't bat an eye.

No, gay is not the new black and I said as much last year when the New York state legislature made gay marriage legal. This is the Black Agenda Report column I wrote at the time.

Gay Is Not the New Black


On June 24, the New York state legislature passed a groundbreaking bill that legalized gay marriage, making New York one of only six states in the country which permit same sex couples to marry. 

Marriage equality legislation was introduced on a yearly basis and was defeated with regularity, albeit by small margins. This year the Democratic-controlled New York Assembly supported the legislation as it had in the past. It is the Republican-controlled Senate whose support was new and significant.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg were both staunch supporters of the bill. More importantly, so were the wealthy Wall Street donors who run New York politics and decide who will and won’t serve in office and under what conditions.

According to the New York Times, history was made because these financial heavy-hitters donors made it so. They worked hand-in-hand with Cuomo to assure the Republicans willing to change their votes that they would be protected from opposition and not pay a political price for their actions. Marriage equality now exists in New York because enough rich people wanted it. 

These same donors made certain that the state’s millionaire’s tax also made history – by disappearing. The same Democratic governor who forced wage and pension concessions from public employee unions was adamant that rich people would not pay their fair share in a time of growing budget deficits. 

He refused to even consider raising the income threshold and allowing the tax to exist in some form. The result is that wealthy New Yorkers now pay less in taxes than working people do.

The marriage equality outcome is right both morally and politically, but it is not the only item on the progressive agenda that New York legislators need to address. 

New York City continues its draconian practice of rounding up Blacks and Latinos through marijuana arrests. State legislative action that would make this misdemeanor a violation – and therefore not subject to arrests – languishes. Rent regulations which allow apartments to be lost to so-called "vacancy decontrol" have not been addressed, pushing more working people out of New York City because they cannot find affordable housing.

Black and Latino legislators came up empty-handed in this session, having nothing to give their constituents that improves their lives or brings them any measure of justice. Gay rights have now usurped the progressive agenda to such an extent that the inaction on rent protections and police state malfeasance will be seen as irrelevant.

Too many progressives shy away from the harder work of fighting the good fight against tough opponents like the hedge fund chieftains who demand that laws work for them and against working people. This is the most troubling aspect of this vote. Its success depended entirely on the largesse of people who have no interest in promoting legal and economic justice. They profit by undermining democracy and making their needs paramount and the needs of most citizens inconsequential.

Gov. Cuomo spent his first legislative session acting like a Democrat in name only. Money-driven politics presents clear disincentives to him or to any other governor who wants to represent the needs of most citizens. A candidate for governor in New York is not considered viable unless he or she raises a minimum of $25 million. Like the presidency, the office is for sale, and the winner is automatically beholden to the people who put him there.

Knicks Win, Sarkozy Loses

I hated that little bastard, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and I’m glad he’s gone. He never hid his obsequious love for the United States nor his willingness to play the role of puppet. He brought hell to Libya and even showed up in person to oversee the imperial destruction of that nation. The loss couldn’t have happened to a more deserving little douchebag. Je suis heureuse! (I’m happy!)

As for the New York Knicks, I assumed they would be swept by the Miami Heat. They hadn’t won a playoff game in 11 years and I didn’t think today would be any different. I’m glad the fat lady didn’t sing quite yet. They had fallen pretty far over the years, with bad management and awful ownership. It was hard to root for the home team, but I would never become a fan of any other NBA team either. As for winning a title, it has been almost 40 years. Maybe I’ll live to see it.

Tom Brokaw on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

"I think George Clooney is a great guy. I'd like to meet Charlize Theron. But I don't think a big press event in Washington should be that kind of a glittering event where the whole talk is about Cristal champagne, taking over the Italian embassy, who had the best party, who got to meet the most people." – Tom Brokaw

It looks like Brokaw is reading my work. I wrote about the dangers of the media being in bed with the president in my Black Agenda Report column. I know his politics aren’t mine, but thanks anyway Tom. You are on the right track.

Note the photos in the Huffington Post story. Claire Danes and Bob Schieffer, George Clooney and Chris Wallace, seriously? There is a lot wrong with these pictures.

Another FBI Created Plot

Once again, an FBI informant has created a crime. It seems that is all the FBI does these days, create phony terror plots to keep us all afraid and keep us from questioning the endless war on terror.

Now we are told that anarchists wanted to bomb a bridge in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The informant has been quickly identified as Shaquille Azir, who like other informants is a common criminal who implicates others in crimes he creates in order to keep himself out of jail.

We can expect more of this government sponsored criminality to continue.

Marissa Alexander is Going to Prison

Marissa Alexander shot at her abusive husband in the state of Florida. The same Florida which initially allowed George Zimmerman to go free without charge after killing Trayvon Martin.

Alexander will now be going to jail for a minimum term of 20 years. Florida’s stand your ground law didn’t help her. Of course it didn’t. It was written to help white people only.

Besides, there is a war on black women and children in this country. They are being jailed and harshly punished, even if they and their children are victims of crimes.

The right to self defense does not exist for black people. It is too bad that Ms. Alexander and her lawyer were unaware of this fact. She might have pleaded guilty despite her innocence and gone to jail for a much shorter period of time.

All of which brings to mind another question. How many innocent people plead guilty because they fear, quite rightly, that the system will not give them justice? We have no way of knowing the number, but it must be thousands of people who languish in jails and prisons in this country, which of course has more people behind bars than any other on the planet.

"Barack Obama is the More Effective Evil"

It is tough following Glen Ford, but I managed to at the Left Forum conference in New York City on March 17th. I want to thank James Stone of People of Color Organized in providing this audio recording of our remarks.

Democrats are all the more effective evil, and it is time for progressives to dump them like the bad habit they have have become. Glen breaks it down as only he can. I think I did ok, but it will take a while to get up to Glen Ford speed as a speaker.

UNAC workshop 25 Mar 12

Black Agenda Report Team at UNAC Conference


I haven't posted in a few weeks because I have been quite busy. Among other things, I was a panelist at the recent United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) conference on March 24th and March 25th. The entire Black Agenda Report team was on hand with me, Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, and Nellie Bailey. Check out the video of one of our panels.

UNAC is the real, anti-war deal. It is one of the few truly anti-war groups, opposing U.S. interventions even if committed by a democrat, and first black president is in office. There were about 500 people in attendance in Stamford, Connecticut, all of them committed to a left agenda of peace abroad and justice at home.

It was great to be with old friends and new, like minded people who do not cringe in decrying NATO and G8, and who aren't afraid to use words like imperialism or condemn the impending attack on Iran. I met people I have long admired like Vijay Prashad and felt galvanized to keep writing and speaking out.\

Enjoy!

پرزیدنت اوباما در نوروز با ایرانیان صحبت کرد‬

Murdering Pompous Ass Hypocritical New Year Greeting


Every year Iranians, Kurds, Afghans, Iraqis and others celebrate the first day of spring as the new year. Unfortunately for all of those people, since 2009 the Nowruz celebration is marked by a phony greeting from president Obama. He will start killing Iranians as soon as he finds it convenient, but part of his scam is to look like the nice guy.

I do wish we had a dumb president who was easily dismissed. Mr. Blood Thirsty, smarty pants, nobel peace prize winner really gets on my nerves.

I send a happy new year greeting, but I'm not going to kill anybody.

Happy 1391

Today is the beginning of the Persian new year. Nowruz begins on the first day of spring. Kiss an Iranian today!

Slaves, Obey Your Masters

Slaves, obey your masters. So says the bible. The Pennsylvania Association of Nonbelievers quite rightly wanted to point out that the bible supports many things that no civilized person approves of any more. They installed this billboard in Harrisburg to prove a point to the state legislature, which declared “the year of the bible",” exhorting citizens to “study and apply the teachings of the holy scriptures.” Does the legislature want to bring back slavery? One would hope not, but the blanket approval of scripture would mean supporting slavery, the stoning of adulterers, and casting lepers out into the street.

Let’s just say that reaction to the billboard was swift, and not in a good way. The bill board was vandalized and groups such as the NAACP demanded an apology. The atheist group removed the vandalized board and apologized.

It isn’t clear to me what the fuss is about. The billboard shows a man shackled as many enslaved people were in horrific contraptions which kept them running away. I don’t think most people have this picture in their minds when they think of slavery, but they ought to. The billboard doesn’t support slavery, it merely points out that the bible says it was acceptable.

Christians always talk about discerning the scriptures, which ought to mean reading them critically. I guess if  the same message comes from atheists it can suddenly be ignored.

I think the brouhaha emerged because black people don’t know how to think about slavery. It is a subject which is just too painful for us to comprehend. We don’t see images of slavery like this, and we don’t want to either.

Attacking the bible is no small thing either. No one wants to hear that the book they are told is inerrant also supported the same thing that brings them so much pain.

As they say in church, this was a teachable moment. I hope someone was doing their homework.

No, I Don’t Like Obama Either

“I would have so liked to see an obvious madman at the helm of the national pirate ship, instead of a high-functioning sociopath who appears, superficially, to be a human being, and lends the whole mad and evil project a certain factitious gloss of reasonableness.” – Michael Smith

Ignore Rush Limbaugh

The 1% are laughing themselves silly. While they continue to steal the rest of us blind, and destroy the planet, democrats are having pissing matches with the likes of Rush Limbaugh because he called a college student a slut. The people and corporations at the top could give a rats butt about abortion or birth control because the two major parties do their bidding, even as they fight over social issues.

As I pointed out in my weekly Black Agenda Report column, republicans are taking extreme positions on abortion and birth control because Obama has stolen their thunder. As Ben Stein said, he is the perfect republican candidate. He has agreed to republican austerity measures, destroyed Libya, killed American citizens at will, and plans more war for Iran and or Syria. Instead of protesting these outrages, liberals get the pants in a twist over Rush Limbaugh. The divide and conquer strategy which keeps the status quo, very much status quo, is alive and well.

No, I wouldn't want Rush Limbaugh to call me a slut or a prostitute, but seriously people, the bail outs continue, unemployment numbers have improved only because millions are no longer counted in the numbers, and we spend time thinking about Limbaugh?

If he didn't exist, we would have to invent him. I have joked that Obama pays Limbaugh, Palin and company to make racist or sexist or stupid remarks, because everyone stops questioning him in order to defend him from the barbarians.

Here is the real question which should be on everyone's mind. Will Obama attack Iran before or after election day? Ponder that and ignore Rush Limbaugh.

Obama's phone call to the parents of the aggrieved young woman is all the proof one needs. The 1% get theirs, and we get political theater because the economic elite are in cahoots with both parties and the corporate media never point this out.

Words of the Week

"When Obama was elected many people were very happy because he was a black man; they thought he would be different. To me, he is neither black nor white, he is a capitalist; skin colour has nothing to do with who you are in Cuba ... I'm not disappointed in Obama because I never had any great expectations. The Cuban people now realise Obama is no different to all the others." – Victor Dreke, Cuban internationalist

I guess Obama is “post-racial” after all.

Cuba: An African Odyssey

“We always said, ‘All we’ll bring out of Angola is our comrades’ remains. We won’t take any oil, diamonds or anything. Only the remains of our dead comrades.’ ”  Jorge Risquet

Last night I saw a wonderful documentary, Cuba: An African Odyssey. It told the story of Cuba’s decades long support for liberation movements in Africa. The story spans some thirty years, from the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba to the end of South African apartheid.

After watching the film, I had feelings of anger and embarrassment. I always feel this way when I realize the enormity of the lies and propaganda I have been fed my entire life.

Our government and the wealthy and powerful work hand in hand with the corporate media to keep us uninformed.  The specter of white supremacy is also a factor in the misleading of people in the telling of history. I was raised to read the paper and/or watch the news every day, but despite all my years of reading newspapers, I did not know that the Cubans were instrumental in freeing Nelson Mandela from imprisonment.

The Cubans agreed to leave Angola if the South Africans agreed to leave Namibia. The Cubans also demanded that Mandela be released. That important fact of history was left out of news reports of the day.

In other words, the New York Times and Washington Post and CBS and CNN lied to the world. Omissions are lies just as much as misstatements of fact are also lies. I was never told that Cubans attempted to continue Lumumba’s revolution in the Congo, or that Che Guevara led a command there, or that the Soviets attempted to dissuade the Cubans from their African involvements.

I suppose it isn’t my fault, but as a writer and a leftist who claims to have knowledge others do not, I still get very angry about the propaganda bombardment I and millions of others have been subjected to.

A luta continua.

Why Obama is Dangerous

The title of this video is a bit misleading. What Pilger really explains is what makes the Obama ascendancy such an act of evil genius. His rise to the presidency and his ability to maintain such strong support despite his actions, is a thing of marketing beauty.

Is America a Police State?

Is America a police state?

"You know you live in a police state when wardens force pregnant women prisoners to deliver their babies while in chains. (Not exactly “the new birth of freedom” of which Abraham Lincoln spoke.)

You know you live in a police state when the president orders the assassination (i.e., murder) of American citizens without bothering to arrest them and bring them to trial."

Answer, hell yes! Read the sad litany of proof here.