UN: Israel continues demolition, seizures of Palestinian homes

Israeli forces demolish Palestinian homes in Jerusalem on 1 March 2021 

[Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency]


March 27, 2021 

Israeli occupation authorities demolished and seized 26 Palestinian-owned structures in Area C of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem between 2 and 15 March, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has reported.

As a result of these demolitions and seizures, 42 people were displaced, including 24 children, the Protection of Civilians report published by the UN OCHA disclosed.

Seventeen of the structures, and all of the displaced people, were recorded in Area C, which is under full Israeli military control.

OCHA confirmed that two buildings were demolished in Ein Shibli village, in the Nablus area, displacing 17 people on the basis of Military Order 1797, which allows for demolitions within 96 hours of the issuance of a "removal order".

The remaining displacement resulted from the demolition of four homes in Al-Tuwani and Khallet Athaba' communities in Hebron and Beit Jala in Bethlehem.

READ: Israel demolishes Bedouin village for 185th time

The livelihoods of 20 people were affected by the demolition of a vegetable stall near Qalqilya city, while 16 were affected by the demolition of two uninhabited houses and the confiscation of one metal container in Isteih in the Jericho area.

Meanwhile, Israeli settlers injured six Palestinians in the Hebron governorate and damaged Palestinian-owned property, including vehicles and trees. Four of the injured were physically assaulted in three incidents.

Two boys, aged 13 and 14, were injured in separate incidents in the H2 area of Hebron and the Bir al 'Idd area, respectively. In the latter incident, the donkey on which the boy was riding was stabbed.

According to Palestinian sources, Israeli settlers damaged at least five vehicles, a house and an agricultural structure in the villages of Jalud and Huwwara in the Nablus district, and Kafr ad-Dik and Bruqin in the Salfit district.

Israel Won Its Independence Using Nazi Weapons? Yes, That Is True.

Stalin and the Soviets supplied Israel with weapons taken from the defeated Germans after World War II.

by Peter Suciu

March 26, 2021

Here's What You Need to Remember: Today it might seem odd that the Soviet Union would supply Israel with the weapons, given the close ties the country now has to the west, but it should be remembered that the Zionists who set up with communes in Palestine prior to World War II based these on the Soviet model.

NOT TRUE THE KIBBUTIZM WERE SOCIALIST COMMUNES PREDATING STALINISM, AND BOLSHEVIK


When Israel declared its independence as a sovereign state on May 14, 1948 it faced enemies on all fronts. A day later the forces of the Arab League, which included Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan, mobilized their sizable armies and invaded their smaller neighbor thus beginning the First Arab-Israeli War.


While nearly every one of the 600,000 Israelis now in their new homeland were ready to fight, one problem was that there wasn't really a single fighting force. The new government instead called upon members of the older independence groups, notably the Haganah ("The Defense") to help fend off the invasion. Needed as much as fighters were weapons, and in a strange twist of fate mass amounts of World War II surplus firearms from Nazi Germany were thus sent to help ensure the future of a Jewish state.

Following the Second World War Germany was defeated and more importantly disarmed. Much of the material, which include vast amounts of K98 Mauser rifles, Luger and P38 pistols, MG34 machine guns and other equipment was stockpiled in formerly occupied lands, notably Czechoslovakia.

And here is where the other odd twist of fate happened, Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin provided the arms. Today it might seem odd that the Soviet Union would supply Israel with the weapons, given the close ties the country now has to the west, but it should be remembered that the Zionists who set up with communes in Palestine prior to World War II based these on the Soviet model.

THE KIBBUTIZIM WERE NOT AND ARE NOT ALL ZIONISTS. ORIGANALLY AS MANY WERE ANARCHIST AND SOCIALIST AS WERE ZIONISTS.


Moreover, the western democracies had mixed feelings about the creation of Israel and Stalin took advantage of this and hoped to spread communism into the Middle East from a new Jewish state.

While he couldn't openly provide the weapons, in 1947 Stalin allowed the Jewish agency to begin purchasing large amounts of arms and ammunition. The weapons couldn't be of Soviet design or manufacture – but there were vast amounts of those captured German weapons in the Soviet's new client state of Czechoslovakia.

The deal was handled via "Operation Balak," which involved several purchases of arms handled by Ominpol via a shadowy government holding company. The initial sale included dozens MG34 machine guns, 4,500 K98 rifles and more than 50 million rounds of ammunition – all of which was smuggled in Palestine. An advantage of using the German rifles was the fact that the 7.92x57mm ammunition was produced by Czechoslovakia after the war and thus could still be supplied.

The K98, which was one of the most widely issued bolt action rifles of the war and was carried by German conquerors across Europe, became the main battle rifle of the fledgling Jewish state. When it turned out that additional rifles were needed by Israel after Stalin's support for Israel wavered, the new nation turned to the Belgian Fabrique Nationale (FN), which continued to manufacture new K98 rifles – along with other weapons for the Israelis.


After successfully winning its first war with its neighbors, Israel then began to develop its own arms industry, yet the K98s remained in use during the 1956 Suez Crisis, even as more modern weapons became available. Israel also maintained close ties with FN, and in 1955 it officially adopted the FN FAL and FALO rifles, while the K98 was relegated to training and seconding use until being removed from service only in the 1970s.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and website. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

This article was published last year and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

The Revolutionary Power Of Deb Haaland

Her ascent to the Department of the Interior is nothing short of transformational for Native Americans.

AS TOLD TO ROSE MINUTAGLIO

MAR 26, 2021


JIM WATSON

Crystal Echo Hawk is an enrolled member of Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma and the founder of IllumiNative, a nonprofit working to increase the visibility of—and "challenge the negative narrative about"—Native Nations. 

Below, Echo Hawk on needing to "reset the relationship" between the U.S. government and tribes—and why she believes Secretary Deb Haaland, who made history last week as the first Native woman to head the Department of the Interior, is the one to lead the charge.

My grandfather, Ernest Echohawk, was taken from his family at a very young age and put into a boarding school, where he was abused and beaten for speaking his own language. He passed away in 2005 and, at the end of his life, had so much sadness about what was stolen from him. In his final years, I watched as he tried hard to remember our language. It was clear the pain of what he had experienced never left him.

When he was alive, my grandfather served on our tribal council and dealt a lot with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was so paternalistic and, in so many ways, demeaning to our people. I can only imagine how emotional he would be if he were still alive to see the first Native American Cabinet secretary—not to mention that it is a woman.

Deb Haaland's secretary of the Interior confirmation is transformational for Native people. Finally, a leader who can help Americans understand that we are human beings—not caricatures or mascots. We aren't a peoples that don't exist anymore. We are here.

My elders who are still alive never thought this could be possible—and certainly not in their lifetimes. I just wish my grandfather was here to witness this history-making moment, too.

Echo Hawk (far right) with her daughter Wicanhpi EchoHawk (far left) and Secretary Haaland (center).
COURTESY CRYSTAL ECHO HAWK

I saw firsthand growing up how hard Native women work in the leadership roles they hold in our communities. But looking outward into society, we were always invisible. No matter what tribe we came from. Too often in this country, Native people, and especially Native women, are considered insignificant. We operate in a space in which nearly 80 percent of Americans know little to nothing about us. A significant portion of that percentage aren't even sure we even exist.

Our invisibility is our greatest threat.

When Secretary Haaland was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2018, she helped us dream. She became a voice for Native people in a country that cannot conceive Native people in a 21st century context. She spoke out on a range of issues, not just ones important to her constituents in New Mexico, but she also spoke out on key issues like the murdered and missing Indigenous women epidemic, which has been largely ignored in this country up until recently. We're talking thousands of Indigenous women and girls who have been killed or who have disappeared, with no justice in sight.

Two years later, as COVID-19 spread to the U.S., there was hardly any coverage of how the virus was impacting Native American tribes. In that moment, our invisibility became a matter of life and death. Secretary Haaland, who was a congresswoman at the time, was one of just a handful of voices advocating on a national level for the federal government to come up with a response to support Native communities.
This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

When I heard she was in contention for Secretary of Interior, I knew how profound this moment could be. The Department of Interior is the agency responsible for managing the federal government's "trust responsibility" to tribes and to Native Americans.

[Editor's note: The U.S. government has imposed itself as the "trustee" for various tribal lands. This "trust responsibility," as it's called, holds the federal government accountable for protecting "tribal and individual Indian lands, assets, resources, and treaty and similarly recognized rights," according to the Department of the Interior.]

RELATED STORY

Deb Haaland on Native American Voter Suppression

OCTOBER 2018 !!!!!!!

It is important to understand the harm that the agency has historically caused. Peel back the curtains and you'll find so much dark history, corruption, and mismanagement of resources belonging to tribes and individual Native Americans. One of Secretary Haaland's Interior predecessors gave a speech about the extermination policy of Native Americans—and that wasn't even that long ago.

To have a Native leader sitting in that role, and to have the opportunity to begin to reset the relationship between the federal government and tribes, which is one that has been characterized by genocide, violence, removal, and corruption—well, it is revolutionary.


Echo Hawk and her daughter, Wicanhpi Winyan, last year.
COURTESY CRYSTAL ECHO HAWK

IllumiNative helped host a virtual watch party on the night of the Senate vote to confirm Secretary Haaland. More than 21,000 viewers tuned it. It was beautiful, people from all over Indian country came together as the final votes trickled in. My daughter, Wicanhpi Winyan, texted me and said, "Mom, I want you to know I'm watching!" For her—someone who was relentlessly bullied in school for her looks and for having a traditional Dakota name—to see a Native woman ascend to that level of leadership was so empowering.

The implications of this moment are beyond what we can even imagine, especially for future generations, and especially for Native women.

Will Secretary Haaland solve every problem overnight? No, because it's so much bigger than that. But this is an important start.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

ROSE MINUTAGLIO

STAFF WRITERRose is a Staff Writer at ELLE.com covering culture, news, and women's issues.

#STOPWOLFHUNTING

The Bizarre Story of the Montana Governor Shooting a Wolf From Yellowstone

BY MOLLY OLMSTEAD

MARCH 28, 2021

Not the wolf the governor killed. Julian Stratenschulte/Getty Images


On Tuesday, Nate Hegyi, a reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau, reported that Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte had trapped and killed a radio-collared wolf from Yellowstone National Park. Because the wolf had wandered out of the park, Gianforte was legally allowed to kill it, but the governor was cited for violating state hunting regulations for failing to take a required wolf-trapping education course. The story raised questions about Gianforte’s honesty and about whether the governor violated more serious hunting regulations.

Slate spoke to Hegyi, who lives in Missoula, on Friday to see how the story had gone down in his state. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: How did this story come about?

Nate Hegyi: I have to protect a source, so I’m going to be vague. I received a tip that the governor had trapped and killed a Yellowstone wolf. And I was like, What? That’s crazy.

The person who tipped me off gave me some pretty critical information that I needed to start my reporting into it. I started asking questions with Montana’s top wildlife agency, and they confirmed that the governor had trapped and killed a wolf near the park, and that he was given a written warning. We decided to do it as a written story first, instead of an audio story. Then it kind of blew up.

How would you say your typical Montanan feels about these Yellowstone wolves?

A typical Montanan, their political views are all across the board. We have these college towns, Bozeman and Missoula, where you’ve got a lot of pretty liberal environmentalists. I’m sure they would be super angry that he killed a wolf so close to the park, and that it was radio-collared. You have animal rights activists. You’ve got people who will spend an entire summer driving around following the wolf packs. And then you have the hunting folks here in the state—who may not be bothered about the wolf trapping itself, because that’s perfectly legal in the state of Montana, but would be bothered by the fact that the governor didn’t take the trapping course, because it’s like taking driver’s ed before you go driving.

And then you have the super conservative contingent in Montana, including a lot of people who have moved here in recent years from places like California or Texas. They’re coming with a much more Trumpian conservatism that we haven’t really seen much in the state prior to, even, the pandemic. A lot of those new folks are not going to care whatsoever that the governor did this. In fact, they might like the governor more because he did this.

And then you have among a lot of other Montanans a general dislike of wolves. Because they do kill sheep and livestock. They are kind of considered a boogeyman out here in the West. And so the idea of killing a wolf, trapping education or not, doesn’t really bother them, because they see them more as a pest or nuisance.

What has been the wider reaction to your story?

If you look at it nationally, there’s definitely an expected rage. That didn’t surprise me. But within Montana, it’s more just like, there are more questions. How did he expect to check his traps every day while also serving as governor? You have to check [traps] at least every 48 hours. But ethically, you should be checking it every day. And those traps were set two and a half or three hours south of the Capitol. It’s a very time-intensive thing to do, to trap. Was that the best use of the governor’s time?

Do you know how long those traps were out?

The governor told a local reporter that they’ve been out since January, which would be at least two weeks prior to trapping that wolf. This is where it gets a little wonky. Gianforte was setting traps on a private ranch owned by a big conservative media mogul. And that guy’s ranch manager (who’s also the vice president of the Montana Trappers Association)—his name was also on these traps. And so there’s a good chance that the ranch manager was actually checking the traps for Gianforte. And maybe Gianforte was lucky enough that he was just down there on a federal holiday, and there was the wolf, after two or more weeks of waiting for the animal to get trapped. Was it just serendipitous? Or was the wolf trapped, and the ranch manager found it and called Gianforte? I don’t want to say either way, but that’s my biggest question. If the ranch manager called Gianforte, and Gianforte drove or flew over to kill it, that would have broken the state hunting regulations. You’re supposed to kill it or release it immediately upon seeing it. It’s the more humane thing to do.

Can you tell me about the debates happening with the wolf management policy?

The state legislature is Republican controlled, and for the first time in a couple of decades, we have a Republican governor. And one of their top priorities is pushing through a slate of bills that would make it a lot easier to hunt and trap more wolves, with the goal of reducing the population of wolves in the state. And there’s talk of reimbursing people for the cost to hunt a wolf, which critics call a bounty.

What else do people from outside the state need to know to understand this story?

Wolves are super controversial. In the West, they do kill livestock. Some people rely on cows and sheep to make a living. On the other hand, Montana relies on a lot of tourism. Maybe you went to Yellowstone National Park to see those wolves. The wolves are a big boon for our tourism industry. And so it’s just kind of a very classic push-and-pull between those two camps. Americans had pretty much eradicated the wolf from the West up until 1995, when they were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park. And so it’s still very fresh. They’re like a symbol for the kind of culture wars that happen out West.

Were there any major hurdles you encountered when reporting this story?

I was frustrated with the governor’s office for not answering the questions I posed to them and for not making the governor available for an interview. I think that that’s something we’ve noticed since the Trump era.

Gianforte is famously antagonistic towards reporters.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s just a bummer. Because there has been a culture in the past of openness among both Republicans and Democrats. And it’s been frustrating to watch that culture of openness change. It doesn’t feel very Montanan.

 The perils of wandering wolves: M2001, a lone male from Banff, shot dead by Montana hunter

The Way We Think About “Mass Shootings” Ignores Many Black Victims

High-casualty shootings didn’t disappear during the pandemic — they nearly doubled.

BY CHAMPE BARTON

MARCH 25, 2021

Police tape is seen near the scene of a shooting on June 22, 2020 in Charlotte, North Carolina, that resulted in two deaths and several more people wounded or injured. Sarah Blake Morgan/AP

This story was reported by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.

In the days following the mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, media organizations, politicians, and online commentators bemoaned the reappearance of mass violence in America. “Gun Carnage Returns,” read the headline of an editorial from Newsday. “Is this what a return to normal looks like?” asked an article published by NBC News. Even former President Barack Obama, in a statement released on Twitter, referred to the moment as a recurrence of a phenomenon the pandemic had stalled: “A once-in-a-century pandemic cannot be the only thing that slows mass shootings in this country.”

But mass shootings only slowed under a commonly used but restrictive definition that leaves out most mass-casualty incidents. When defined as incidents in which four or more people were shot in a public or private space, there were more mass shootings in 2020 than in any of the previous years for which data is kept, according to Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence in America. Last year saw more than 600 mass shootings, almost double the average of the previous five years. The trend has continued into 2021, with more than 100 such shootings before the end of March.

There was the shooting in Charlotte, North Carolina, in June of last year, where gunmen fired more than 200 rounds into a crowded block party, killing four and injuring five others. Two months later in Washington, D.C., multiple shooters fired into another neighborhood block party, killing one and injuring 21. In January of this year, gunfire erupted during a basketball game at a public park in Miami, injuring eight. None of these shootings prompted multi-day news cycles or condolences from former presidents. But they were just as devastating to local communities as the shootings in Boulder or Atlanta, doing the same kind of damage to residents’ sense of safety in public spaces. As Reverend Keith Butler, the father of one of the Miami shooting victims, told a local reporter, “My son now doesn’t even feel safe at a public park.”

As The Trace has reported, many victims and community activists believe the dearth of coverage of particular shootings owes, at least partially, to the race of the victims. In 2020, mass shootings disproportionately occurred in majority-Black neighborhoods. But even the highest-casualty incidents received limited national media attention.

“The fear that a lot of Americans are struggling with and facing right now is the fear that people in our neighborhoods have been living with and navigating for decades,” said Greg Jackson, the director of the Community Justice Action Fund, a national nonprofit dedicated to advancing community-focused policy solutions to address violence. “And I think the media has written off our communities. Through their consistent criminalization and dehumanization of the people we’ve lost, they have become part of the problem.”

According to a recent study published in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity about shooting victims in Chicago, this pattern held for local news outlets. It found that Black people killed in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city in 2016 received roughly half as much news coverage as white people killed in majority white neighborhoods, and were less likely to be discussed as “multifaceted, complex people.”

“The most newsworthy shootings seem to break an assumption that a particular place is safe,” said Shannon Morrissey, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, who co-authored the study. “Our research suggests that in Chicago, shootings in majority-Black neighborhoods are not breaking those assumptions, at least for the people living outside of them.”

Varying definitions of what constitutes a “mass shooting” also seem to have influenced coverage choices. The Violence Project, whose data has been cited by several news organizations in the wake of the Atlanta and Boulder shootings, uses a definition devised by the Congressional Research Service, which counts only incidents where four or more people were killed in a public place with no connection to any underlying criminal activity or commonplace circumstance. The Gun Violence Archive uses a much broader definition, which The Trace follows, counting every incident where four or more people were injured or killed by gunfire in a single location. Unlike most definitions, the Gun Violence Archive does not require that a shooting happened in a public place to be counted as a mass shooting. As a result, many of the incidents in its data refer to shootings that took place in homes and backyards.

The differences reflect the distinct types of shootings each group intends to study or track. The Violence Project’s definition, for example, allows the organization to gather data about a specific and poorly-researched phenomenon in America, said its co-founder, Jillian Peterson: “public shootings with lots of fatalities where there’s no relationship between the shooter and the victims.” Few shootings fit this bill. Because Peterson and her colleagues maintain so precise a focus, their data excludes many high-casualty shootings, including those stemming from domestic violence or community conflicts. The latter accounts for a majority of high-casualty shootings in predominantly Black neighborhoods across the country.

Peterson says The Violence Project’s definition should be used carefully. “It’s important to be very clear about what definition you are using and why,” she said, adding that her group’s data only reflects a narrow subset of shootings, and is not representative of gun violence in America as a whole.

Over the past week, though, many news organizations have presented a limited picture of last year’s historic rise in high-casualty violence using this definition. According to The New York Times, before the shooting in Atlanta on March 16, “it had been a year since there had been a large-scale shooting in a public place.” Another story, from People Magazine, claimed that “after a year without mass shootings in American public spaces, there have been two in six days.” Both of these statements may be technically true, but neither outlet explained The Violence Project’s highly specific, multi-part definition of “mass shooting.”

As a result, both stories missed dozens of high-casualty shootings that occurred in majority-Black neighborhoods over the past year. Jackson said that using such a narrow definition of “mass shooting” enforces a harmful hierarchy of gun violence that winds up ranking shootings with Black victims as least newsworthy. By overlooking violence that happened in majority-Black communities over the past year, he said, news organizations send an implicit signal about which forms of violence legislators and the broader public should mobilize to stop. “The most dangerous part about this is that news coverage has the unique ability to prioritize policy and action.”

FACT CHECK: Antifa was not created by former President Barack Obama and George Soros

Chelsey Cox
USA TODAY
3/27/2021

The claim: Obama and George Soros created antifa

Does anti-fascist movement antifa have ties to the federal government? A Facebook post referencing an alleged Justice Department investigation makes this claim.

The Feb. 4 post is a screenshot of an apparent article or blog entry titled "ANTIFA Leads Directly To Barack Obama."

Former Attorney General William Barr launched an investigation into antifa at the request of former President Donald Trump, according to the claim. Antifa – short for "anti-fascist" – is a political protest group without central leadership. Its members engage in counter-demonstrations at far-right wing events and protests, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

"ANTIFA is the creation of Barack Obama and George Soros," the claim states. "And it is even partially funded with taxpayer money, something that will be coming to a swift end."

USA TODAY reached out to the poster for comment.

Related fact checks:
False claim of facial recognition of antifa members during U.S. Capitol riot
What's true about the Capitol riot, from antifa to BLM to Chuck Norris
Allegations that PepsiCo donated to antifa are false

Barr started an anti-government extremist task force

The Task Force on Violent Anti-Government Extremists was created to investigate perpetrators of violent acts amid peaceful protests in the wake of George Floyd's death, USA TODAY reported in June.

A memo about the task force released June 26 named the far-right wing "boogaloo" movement and antifa. At the time, members of antifa were not identified among the suspects, USA TODAY reported. The task force was referenced in a Sept. 4 press release about the arrest of two "Boogaloo Bois" for attempting to provide support to a foreign terrorist organization.

USA TODAY reached out to the Justice Department for an update on the task force.

Despite Barr's initiative, there is no evidence suggesting the Justice Department discovered an illicit connection between former President Barack Obama and philanthropist George Soros.
Claim has origins in satire

The screenshot in the Facebook post is of the headline and first paragraph of an article from Obamawatcher.com. The blog is a parody site that hosts satirical content, according to an "About us" page.

Obamawatcher's "Kraven Moorehead" wrote that Barr's lead investigator, Joseph Barron, found Soros recruited Obama to help create antifa in exchange for funding the former president's senatorial and presidential campaigns. Soros, a Hungarian businessman and investor, is a prolific donor to the Democratic Party, according to the BBC.

The writer admitted the story was a satirical fabrication at the end of the article.

"Billions of dollars were flowing into the coffers of ANTIFA, the 'grassroots' movement of liberals and leftists. The completely made-up scenario from the president and his supporters was finally coming together," he wrote. "While Trump hid out in the bunker, Barron concluded that the entire thing was much ado about nothing. It was just… Obama’s fault. That’s what he would tell him."

The Facebook claim's satirical origins were not noted on the screenshot or in the post caption.
Our rating: False

We rate this claim FALSE, based on our research. A Facebook post suggesting anti-fascist group antifa was created by former President Barack Obama and Democratic donor George Soros is derived from a work of satire. The article referenced in the claim is clearly labeled satire on its website of origin, but not in the Facebook post.

Our fact-check sources:

Anti-Defamation League, accessed March 23: "Who are Antifa?"
USA TODAY, June 26, 2020: "Attorney General Barr creates task force to investigate anti-government extremists"
Kerri Kupec June 26, 2020, tweet
BBC News, May 31, 2018: "Profile: Billionaire philanthropist George Soros"
Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Minnesota, Sept. 4, 2020: "Two Self-Described 'Boogaloo Bois' Charged With Attempting To Provide Material Support To Hamas"
Obamawatcher, accessed March 22: "Barr’s Investigation Of ANTIFA Leads Directly To Barack Obama"
Obamawatcher, accessed March 22: "About us"

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Amy Coney Barrett’s Originalism as a Denial of the Moral Bond That Connects Us

By  Peter Gabel 

| October 19, 2020

Credit: Anthony Garand on Unsplash

Amy Coney Barrett will not openly base her decisions on the Affordable Care Act, or Roe v. Wade, or the right to gay marriage on whether she herself agrees with the policies behind these cases. Instead, she will purport to base her decisions on her “originalism,” the view that the actual words of Constitution must be interpreted according to the original intent of the so-called Founding Fathers in 1789.

Why? Because according to her and her mentor Antonin Scalia, the only proper democratic interpretation of that document requires “finding the intent” of those who agreed upon it when it was signed (or when the Amendments to it were signed into law). Every broadening of the document beyond this narrow construal of the written words themselves is characterized, according to Scalia and affirmed by Barrett, as undemocratic judicial activism imposed on the document by unelected judges.

I myself heard Scalia say in a videotaped speech to the Federalist Society that there is no way we can know what each other thinks and agrees to besides attributing an objective meaning to words that people state when they write them down: he believed there was no binding moral claim that we have upon each other that can shape constitutional interpretation beyond the special words written mainly in the 18th century.

This worldview means that we human beings today must determine our relations with each other according to what a group of mainly 20 and 30 year-old white men, mostly wealthy slaveholders, thought were good and acceptable social relations about 250 years ago. The worldview has both a psychoanalytic meaning, and a day-to-day bureaucratic meaning within legal reasoning.

The psychoanalytic meaning is that the worldview reflects a fetish for our “Founding Fathers,” whose thoughts had a mystical value and prescience that we lesser beings must follow today.

The bureaucratic meaning reflected in the work of Barrett and others is that the judge must engage in the quite prosaic task of discerning the so-called “objective public meaning” of a group of words penned in and around 1789 and applying that ancient meaning to interpreting the validity of laws and statutes today, as well as to the text of the Constitution itself.

This latter bureaucratic aspect is what will enable Judge Barrett both to strike down progressive legislation like the Affordable Care Act, and refuse to extend constitutional protection to rights and activities not explicitly named in the original document or its amendments (such as the right to abortion and gay marriage). As a kind of legal philologist who simply interprets words from long ago according to their original public meaning, Barrett can say, “this activity is not liberal or conservative and does not reflect my opinions about these matters—it is rather just a matter of interpreting a text the only way it can be interpreted in accordance with democracy.”

Note that there is an irony about this justification of originalism in terms of democracy: Barrett is willingly participating in the grabbing of a Supreme Court seat while a democratic election is actually taking place, in part to determine who has the right to select a Justice for that very seat. If the true meaning of democracy were really of primary concern to her, she would refuse to accept this seat under these anti-democratic circumstances and instead insist upon waiting for the democratic election result.

But in any case, why should we care AT ALL about what a group of mainly 20 and 30-year old white male property-owning, in some cases slaveholders would think—as if we could know that—about what we are doing in the present-day world? Huge upheavals in society and consciousness have occurred in the last 250 years, with magnificent social movements rising up to advance the political and moral understanding of man-and-womankind. The idea that we should discard the wisdom that we have gained across all of that historical time when we today determine the meaning of the Constitution and the validity of democratically-passed legislation is just absurd on its face…or ought to be. Why then does “originalism” seem to have staying power as if it were a “legitimate position” to be solemnly agreed with or disagreed with?

The answer to that question has to do with the psychoanalytic meaning of originalism, the attachment that we are trained to feel toward the Founding Fathers and their Original Intent. I wrote a longer piece about this subject when the Original Intent theory was first being strongly advocated in the early years of the Reagan Revolution. In my article in the Buffalo Law Review called “Founding Father Knows Best,” I showed the relationship between fetishism of the Founding Fathers Original Intent and the growing authoritarianism that began in the early 1980s and is still with us in newer forms today (https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/buffalolawreview/vol36/iss2/4/).

Please here read a briefer statement of the ideas in that article published in the Tikkun magazine piece I wrote under the same title on the selection of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 (https://www.tikkun.org/the-trouble-with-brett-kavanaugh-founding-father-knows-best). The same points I made there apply, of course, to Amy Coney Barrett’s judicial philosophy, an ideology of unconscious deference to Authority that seeks to impose that deference on the whole of American society. It is that philosophy and its socio-psychological underpinnings that must be engaged with and firmly rejected by progressives trying to build a new and socially just world that thoroughly transcends the moral limitations of the 18th century.

While the 18th century world view reflected in the “original public meaning” of the Constitution did help to advance human consciousness by putting forward a vision of human community that affirmed and protected the liberty of the individual from overt group coercion through government action (with the horrific exception of slavery itself), that world view utterly lacked a commitment to fostering a world based upon empathy and compassion, based upon our deep connection and care for one another and for the Earth as well.

The great social movements of the last 250 years beginning with abolitionism and continuing through the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBTQ movement, and the environmental movements have all carried within them an elevation of collective consciousness calling upon one another to truly see one another and fundamentally embrace each other’s common humanity as well as the sacredness of the natural world.

Contrary to the original meaning of the Constitution, these movements have not been fundamentally about extending individual liberty in an individualistic, monadic world, but rather about recognizing, affirming, and embracing each other’s humanity and our interrelatedness as social beings. It is the deeper social and spiritual awareness illuminated by these social movements that have elevated our collective moral consciousness since the Constitution was written, and it is this very elevated awareness that has been at the heart of the transformation of judicial interpretation of the Constitution, with judges responding to the demands of rising social justice movements to extend the meaning of existing Constitutional provisions like the First and Fourteenth Amendments far beyond long-surpassed original and outdated meanings. 

The constitutional validity of the pro-labor legislation of the New Deal, the legislation inspired by the demands for human equality emerging from the civil rights, women’s movements and LGBTQ movements, and the validity of social welfare legislation like Social Security, Medicare, and now the Affordable Care Act have all been manifestations of our sharing a greater collective wisdom about the moral bonds that unite us as social beings that were not in our collective awareness yet in 1789 and that has decisively influenced our subsequent interpretation of our culture’s foundational legal document.

In truth, this moral development of our collective consciousness is leading us toward the point where we must write a new Constitution or fundamentally transform the current one to place at its center not mere individual liberty in a world of the separated, but rather a new synthesis of individual liberty with caring for each other as moral partners in a sacred and socially-connected world.

The new emphasis on integrating spirituality, law, and social justice appearing in emerging new legal paradigms like Restorative Justice across the legal profession is a harbinger of this future rewriting of our Constitution, an expression of the growing awareness progressively dawning within us that “we the people” are “constituted” not as a mere collection of isolated individuals, but as a moral community founded upon love and mutual recognition and concern.

Until that future time comes when we can reconceive the Constitution altogether, we must embrace the liberal reinterpretations of the Constitution that judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, influenced by the transcendental aspect of the movements that have transformed the essence of our national community, have articulated in expanding the meaning of the existing Bill of Rights and the Civil War amendments among other legal doctrines. And we must decisively reject an “originalism” that denies the leaps forward in our common moral awareness that the great social movements of the last 250 years have bequeathed to us, movements of and within our common humanity that have been pointing us toward the Beloved Community that “we the people” must eventually become.


ABOUT PETER GABEL

Peter Gabel is editor-at-large of Tikkun. His most recent book, The Desire for Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self (Routledge Press, 2018), was nominated for the Kirkus Prize as Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

AOC and Elizabeth Warren skillfully tear Amazon apart for its terrible tweets

Maybe it's time for Amazon to log off of Twitter.
IMAGE: SEAN GALLUP / GETTY IMAGES

BY RACHEL KRAUS

1 DAY AGO

Amazon's public relations Twitter account messed with the wrong lawmakers.

The account, @amazonnews, appears to be trying out a new PR strategy. Over the past few days, it has issued tweets denying labor abuses and (legal) tax dodging, in a tone that can only be described as.... sassy?

RE the whole pee bottle thing, Amazon got ratioed real hard by people tweeting responses with images, documents, and news reports of — what else — pee bottles. Some Amazon factory workers and delivery drivers say they have to resort to peeing in bottles because Amazon's productivity requirements don't give them enough time to go to the bathroom.

One of the people tweeting at Amazon was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She quote-tweeted Amazon's blithe denial with a letter from an Amazon Logistics employee documenting the phenomenon.

Still apparently Mad and Online, the next day, Amazon actively riled another labor rights advocate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren tweeted about her plans to close tax loopholes that allow companies like Amazon to pay lower taxes. Amazon's Twitter account decided to go with a "we're just following the rules" defense.

Warren, of course, was not having it. She responded that Amazon pays buckets of money in lobbying fees to make sure the tax code is favorable to the company. A new report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, says Amazon spends more on lobbying than any corporation in the U.S. besides Facebook (excluding trade groups and "consolidated corporate spenders" like Blue Cross Blue Shield).

The exchange is just another reminder to never pick a fight with Liz.

Maybe it's time to log off, Amazon?

WATCH: The rise of Big Tech monopolies from Microsoft to Google

U.S. police and media humanize mass shooter who killed 8 people
Maitreya Bhakal
CGTN
Opinion 18:00, 27-Mar-2021


A woman holding an anti-hate sign takes part in a candlelight vigil in standing up against Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate and violence at Almansor Park in Alhambra, California, the United States, March 20, 2021. /CFP

Editor's note: Maitreya Bhakal is an Indian commentator who writes about China, India, the U.S. and global issues. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

On March 22, 2021, 10 people died in a mass shooting in Boulder, a U.S. city once voted as the happiest in the country. Six days earlier, a white evangelical Christian shooter had killed 8 people in a terror attack in Atlanta, another U.S. city.

The news came as a shock to many but a surprise to exactly no one. The U.S. is a heavily crime-infested and drug-ridden nation, and gun violence is common. People frequently get killed on American streets – by gunmen both with and without a police badge. After a brief pause due to COVID-19 lockdowns (reluctantly enforced and barely followed), many were dreading the usual street violence and mass shootings that would signal the return of normalcy to America.

An epidemic of racism

What made the Atlanta attack unique was that six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent. It came when Asian Americans are being targeted across the nation in a soft riot catalyzed by U.S. propaganda – which falsely accuses China for the pandemic and thus for destroying Americans' lives. The U.S. blames China to divert attention from its own homicidal COVID-19 response. The New York Times called China the "incubator" of disease.

It worked. This gave birth to a new wave of anti-Asian violence, complementing America's existing history of Sinophobic racism. Barely a day goes by without at least one Asian American being assaulted.

The Atlanta gunman reportedly shouted "I want to kill all Asians" while committing the massacre. Seventy-three percent of U.S. respondents in a recent Pew Research survey had negative views of China, the highest in 15 years. In 16 of America's largest cities, overall hate crimes decreased by seven percent, but hate crimes targeting Asians increased by 150 percent.

One of us

U.S. policemen murder about 1,000 civilians a year – many of them from minority groups. Thus, they saw themselves in the Atlanta killer. He had more in common with the police than the victims.

People take part in a protest against Asian hate in New York, U.S., March 21, 2021. /Xinhua

Attempts to humanize the shooter and rationalize the shooting began almost immediately. The authorities' Pavlovian response was to try to grant the killer some moral character and legitimacy. The spokesperson for the local Sheriff's office acted as a spokesperson for the murderer too. The killer, he said, trying to explain his motives, "was pretty much fed up and, kind of, at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did."

Apparently, the killer wanted to "eliminate the temptation" of sex addiction by targeting spas and massage parlors. He denied racism as a motive, and the police took the killer for his word.

Many across the globe found a crime being chalked up to the criminal having "bad day" to be beneath contempt, even for America. The subsequent revelation that the spokesperson was a Sinophobe himself came as no surprise. He was after all a veteran, having spent 28 years in service (he has since been removed as a spokesperson on the case).

Killer propaganda

The U.S. media wasn't far behind. The New York Times, a newspaper that recently profiled a Nazi sympathizer in a way that many found a little too sympathetic, invited its readers on a tour of his Life and Times – something that they would probably never have done had the terrorist been Muslim or Black.

Readers were told the tale of the killer's childhood and how he was raised in Christian evangelical culture and how he suffered from sex addiction, which conflicted with his evangelical beliefs. It also told how many evangelicals "heard echoes of their own" in the terrorist's "struggle with sexual purity" and how he repeatedly sought treatment and was consumed with guilt and shame.

Others had their own agenda. Many outlets acknowledged the inter-sectional nature of the massacre, but only partially. They focused on racism and misogyny – while ignoring U.S. anti-Asian imperialism and their own Sinophobic COVID-19 coverage.

The murderer became a looking glass: everyone saw in him what they wanted to see. Some saw a misogynist. Some saw a white-supremacist and a racist. Some saw an evangelical sex addict.

And some just saw someone who was simply having a bad day.

The new normal – same as the old normal

America's recent surge of anti-Asian racism is unlikely to disappear soon. It will dovetail with the country's normal rampage of gun violence and mass murder. That same week witnessed seven mass shootings in seven days. Pandemic or no pandemic, it seems America is back to normal.

Suez Canal: Hilarious Memes Coming Out Of World Trade Concern

The maritime traffic jam at the Suez Canal is costing world trade a loss of Rs 2900 crore per hour.

Outlook Web Bureau 27 March 2021



A giant container ship remains stuck sideways in Egypt's Suez Canal, one of the world's busiest trade routes. The authorities are trying hard to free the ship and reopen traffic in the crucial waterway for global shipping.

The Ever Given, owned by Japanese firm Shoei Kisen KK, got wedged Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the canal, about 6 kilometers north of the southern entrance, near the city of Suez. While the jam is costing world trade a loss of Rs 2900 crore per hour, the internet is in laughing tears over the incident and having its own meme fest.

The authorities said that tugboats and workers were deployed to dredge the banks and seafloor near the vessel's bow to try to get it afloat again. The maritime traffic jam outside the canal grew to 280 vessels on Saturday.

Hilarious memes using #SuezCanal are flooding social media sites. Here are some of our favourites from Twitter. Have a look (laugh):