Helter Swelter

by E.R. Bills / April 30th, 2024

In various and fluctuating levels of awareness, we knew this was coming.

Rivers ceased to flow. Lakes and reservoirs dropped to record-low levels or dried up altogether. Maybe not every year in every region, but pretty regularly over the last decade. Then, Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Panhandle this past February—the largest wildfire in Texas history.

In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature of the Earth through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, English steam engineer (and amateur climate scientist) Guy Callendar began gathering climate records from almost 150 weather stations around the world. From this data—and completing all the calculations by hand—he demonstrated that global temperatures had risen 0.3°C over the previous half-century (which roughly parallelled the Second Industrial Revolution and its short-term repercussions). Callendar suggested that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrial processes were responsible for planetary warming, but his ideas were dismissed because other scientists refused to accept the premise that human beings might be capable of drastically impacting the environment.

Callendar’s rudimentary estimates of climate change subsequently proved to be remarkably accurate and consistent with modern assessments. But the term “global warming” didn’t appear until a Science journal article published on August 8, 1975. Titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”, it was written by American geochemist Wallace Smith Broecker.

It sent up red flags in Big Oil boardrooms from sea to shining sea.

American corporatists pre-empted public concerns by funding studies disproving serious analysis of Global Warming and Climate Change and favoring reports that underemphasized what was a stake. But for anyone who was really paying attention, the truth was obvious.

The truth, however, was a liability.

Now, coming up on fifty years later, the truth is more accessible than ever, but no one wants to address it. And Texas is at the forefront of American heedlessness.

Just this past Earth Day, April 22, 2024, the Texas A & M Office of the Texas State Climatologist issued a report titled “Assessment of Historic and Future Trends of Extreme Weather in Texas, 1900-2036.” In 40+ pages, this report predicts that for the next twelve years, things will be hotter and dryer, and wildfires will get worse and expand eastward. Meanwhile, the seas in the Gulf of Mexico will rise and the Gulf storms will become larger and more frequent. And winter as a season, at least, will wither, shrink and occasionally disappear.

Unless—as those pesky folks who are paying attention, again, wonder—Global Warming hastens the next Ice Age. Then, the planet will enjoy winter all year long for centuries.

But who cares when profits are up!

As of August 2023, Texas was responsible for 42% of total United States crude oil production. As of October 2023, Texas was responsible for 43% of all the natural gas produced in America. Also, as of October 2023, Texas was producing 52% of the nation’s exportable natural gas liquids.

No wonder so many Texans walk around with guns.

Like William Barret Travis, Lone Star legend of old, Texans have drawn a line in the sand. But this time we’re behaving more like Charlie Manson than Travis, vowing to normalize heat death and defend a super-sized Alamo constructed from hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic that lie in the 620,000-square-mile Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch—which is, of course, an obscenely profitable derivative of fractional crude oil distillation.

So, let’s not be coy. Texas has made gazillions from trickle-down ecocide, and we have no plans to quit. Heck, you and I even enjoy front row seats. We knew this was coming.

We just didn’t want to deal with it. Hell, we still have political leaders and pundits who refuse to acknowledge what’s even happening. So, by proxy, they’re arguably straight-facedly orchestrating this hellishness—but they will never be held responsible for it. And they definitely won’t be the ones sweating or burning or dying as a result.

But why extend the Texas State Climatologist Earth Day report only through 2036?

Even Travis knows the “official” answer to that.

The year 2036 marks the 200th anniversary of Texas Independence. Unofficially, however, conditions project to get so much worse by 2050 that truncating the truth with a historical cap was probably all the powers that be could stomach.

Capitalism is a flame-thrower and, in the end, we’ll be reduced to cinder by corporate greed or frozen to death by our own mad obliviousness.

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Fort Worth native E. R. Bills is the author of Texas Obscurities: Stories of the Peculiar, Exceptional & Nefarious and Tell-Tale Texas: Investigations in Infamous History. Read other articles by E.R..

 

University Investments: Divesting from the Military-Industrial Complex

by Binoy Kampmark / April 30th, 2024

The rage and protest against Israel’s campaign in Gaza, ongoing since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, has stirred student activity across a number of US university campuses and beyond.  Echoes of the Vietnam anti-war protests are being cited.  The docile consumers of education are being prodded and found interested.  University administrators and managers are, as they always tend to, doing the bidding of their donors and funders in trying to restore order, punish the protesting students where necessary and restrict various forms of protest.  Finally, those in the classrooms have something to talk about.

A key aspect of the protest centres on university divestment from US military companies linked and supplying the Israeli industrial war machine.  (The pattern is also repeating itself in other countries, including Canada and Australia.)  The response from university officialdom has been to formulate a more vigorous antisemitism policy – whatever that means – buttressed, as was the case in Columbia University, by the muscular use of police to remove protesting students for trespassing and disruption.  On April 18, in what she described as a necessary if “extraordinary step”, Columbia President Minouche Shafik summoned officers from the New York Police Department, outfitted in riot gear, to remove 108 demonstrators occupying Columbia’s South Lawn.  Charges have been issued; suspensions levelled.

Students from other institutions are also falling in, with similar results.  An encampment was made at New York University, with the now predictable police response.  At Yale, 45 protestors were arrested and charged with misdemeanour trespassing.  Much was made of the fact that tents had been set up on Beinecke Plaza.  A tent encampment was also set up at MIT’s Cambridge campus.

The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has also been pressuring university heads to put the boot in, well illustrating the fact that freedom of speech is a mighty fine thing till it aggrieves, offends and upsets various factional groups who wish to reserve it for themselves.  Paradoxically enough, one can burn the US flag one owns as a form of protest, exercise free speech rights as a Nazi, yet not occupy the president’s office of a US university if not unequivocal in condemning protest slogans that might be seen as antisemitic.  It would have been a far more honest proposition to simply make the legislators show their credentials as card carrying members of the MIC.

The focus by students on the Israeli-US military corporate nexus and its role in the destruction of Gaza has been sharp and vocal.  Given the instinctive support of the US political and military establishment for Israel, this is far from surprising. But it should not be singular or peculiar to one state’s warring machine, or one relationship.  The military-industrial complex is protean, spectacular in spread, with those in its service promiscuous to patrons.  Fidelity is subordinated to the profit motive.

The salient warning that universities were at risk of being snared by government interests and, it followed, government objectives, was well noted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his heralded 1961 farewell address, one which publicly outed the “military-industrial complex” as a sinister threat.  Just as such a complex exercised “unwarranted influence” more broadly, “the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research.  Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”  The nation’s academics risked “domination … by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money”.

This has yielded what can only be seen as a ghastly result: the military-industrial-academic complex, heavy with what has been described as “social autism” and protected by almost impenetrable walls of secrecy.

The nature of this complex stretches into the extremities of the education process, including the grooming and encouragement of Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students.  Focusing on Lockheed Martin’s recruitment process on US college campuses in his 2022 study for In These Times, Indigo Olivier found a vast, aggressive effort involving “TED-style talks, flight simulations, technology demos and on-the-spot interviews.”  Much is on offer: scholarships, well-paid internships and a generous student repayment loan program.  A dozen or so universities, at the very least, “participate in Lockheed Martin Day, part of a sweeping national effort to establish defense industry recruitment pipelines in college STEM”.

Before the Israel-Gaza War, some movements were already showing signs of alertness to the need to disentangle US learning institutions from the warring establishment they so readily fund.  Dissenters, for instance, is a national movement of student organisers focused on “reclaiming our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving services, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world.”

Such aspirations seem pollyannaish in scope and vague in operation, but they can hardly be faulted for their intent.  The Dissenters, for instance, took to the activist road, being part of a  weeklong effort in October 2021 comprising students at 16 campuses promoting three central objects: that universities divest all holdings and sever ties with “the top five US war profiteers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics”; banish the police from campuses; and remove all recruiters from all campuses.

Demanding divestment from specific industries is a task complicated by the opacity of the university sector’s funding and investment arrangements.  Money, far from talking, operates soundlessly, making its way into nominated accounts through the designated channels of research funding.

The university should, as part of its humane intellectual mission, divest from the military-industrial complex in totality.  But it will help to see the books and investment returns, the unveiling, as it were, of the endowments of some of the richest universities on the planet.  Follow the money; the picture is bound to be an ugly one.Facebook

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

Mayday Mayday Mayday

by Philip A. Faruggio / May 1st, 2024

Fifty four years ago today this writer was getting ready to hitchhike to classes at Brooklyn College. It was a sunny, blue sky, early Spring day, and the college was a few miles from our apartment building. This writer was into just two important things in May of 1970: Meeting girls (as we called them then) and preparing for our school’s first football schedule in over 15 years. Ah, to be twenty years old and looking “lean and mean” with my bellbottom jeans, longish, wavy hair, Joe-Namath green eyes, and white buck shoes. I was ready to Rock and Roll at the campus.

Hanging out on the campus that day, I first heard the news of President Nixon’s latest edict of sending US soldiers into the sovereign nation of Cambodia, along with our bombers, to rout the Vietcong. Up to that point, quite candidly, I cared too little (for my own good) about the shit that was going down in Nam. Why should I? My self-centered narcissism was on cruise control with my 2-S draft deferment. As long as I stayed in school and took at least 12 credit hours a term Uncle Sam could not touch me. The way I looked at it that would be at least three more years before I might be forced into uniform. Yet, when one of my old freshman baseball team pals gave me the lowdown on this latest dose of Nixonian craziness, I took notice… finally! My friend, Larry, in addition to his addiction to the trotters (harness racing) and his girlfriend, was the first “Lefty” I had ever met at school. All of my football team compatriots were not into any sort of politics at all. Why I don’t really know, but I was just like them at this time. Larry said that this latest news was just too much to take for any sane American.

We all got the news about the many college campuses throughout the nation where there were not only demonstrations, but student strikes as well. Everything accelerated when some of our college’s more radical students were demanding that all military recruiters must get off our campus… NOW! Having experienced a few guys from my neighborhood coming home in boxes now hit home with me… finally! I joined the ranks of the protestors and got myself deep into the strike that just like that fermented.

Before you know it I was up inside the school President’s office with a group of fellow strikers. The President had left his office, as had most of the other staff , including all of our professors and instructors. I organized a group of student strikers to join me in getting the campus grounds cleaned up of all the thousands of flyers throughout. I knew the local news would be there real soon, and wanted to show the world that protestors can be diligent in keeping things copacetic. A real trip was when I got a guy I knew from Buildings and Grounds, a handball buddy, to help us with the tools we needed to make things look normal.

The strike took a more ominous tone on May 4 when those four Kent State student protestors were shot dead by National Guardsman; I was just about the same age as them. The cops were soon called in, but our student strike had already petered out. You see, it’s tough to maintain such an energy when 100% of the student population are commuters. So, the war in Vietnam had finally reached many of us students. I for one grew up that May of 1970 to become what I am today, a lifelong Anti (Phony) War Activist.

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Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the It’s the Empire… Stupid radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Philip.

 

Returning to the 11th Century

Before you leave, turn out the lights

by T.P. Wilkinson / May 1st, 2024

Technology fetishism and dogmatic irresponsibility

Without the use of digital devices, instead mainly that analog apparatus known as the pen, I have managed to retain meaningful recollections and engage in analytical reflection for the better part of sixty two years. The manner in which I have worked since the earliest moments I can remember has engendered the habit of collecting, sorting, observing and evaluating life as I lived it or perceived it by others. It was about 1976 that I was introduced to Russell Ackoff, a professor at the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania. He was introducing some basic tenets of systems theory, also outlined in his short book Redesigning the Future. My attendance was accidental since it was my high school physics teacher who took me to this meeting of a regional planning commission where Professor Ackoff had been invited to speak. He was quite droll and said several witting things. However, the most important statement he made was that the purpose of planning was not to produce a plan. Rather planning was a purpose in its own right. What he clearly meant – and that was reiterated in the book I subsequently read – was that planning was an attitude toward the future or toward life and not an industrial process for producing planning documents. The logical consequence of Ackoff’s argument was that the attitude of planning was more important than the creation of machines for churning out plans which would be obsolete before they could be implemented.

Although I only learned about the book ten years later, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at various universities and one of the early researchers in what became the field of artificial intelligence (AI), published Computer Power and Human Reason in the same year. 1976 was one year after the ignominious withdrawal of US Forces from Vietnam, ending more than 30 years of their organized terror in that part of Southeast Asia. The US war against Vietnam was the first testing ground for both systems theory and artificial intelligence. These concepts and the technology developed to apply them were dedicated to surveillance, planning, target acquisition and destruction of the so-called Vietcong infrastructure, i.e. the civilian government that operated in lieu of the criminal state established by the French and US Americans first in Hanoi and then in Saigon after the partition of the country in Geneva. The government agency primarily responsible for planning and implementing the destruction of the popular government of Vietnam was the US Central Intelligence Agency. ICEX was the first name given to what became known as the Phoenix Program. One of the CIA officers interviewed after the war called it “computerized mass murder”. He was referring to the kill lists generated by the PHIS, the Phoenix Information System by which all the data about Vietnamese citizens was collated and evaluated to guide the deployment of the various hunter-killer teams. These teams were composed of local hires, mercenaries, RVN and US military personnel like the infamous Lt. Caley, and other contractors working on behalf of the Agency. Recently there has been mild consternation because of the PHIS legacy product used by the IDF to perform the same kinds of tasks. Lavender is called an AI solution. It is just a later version of the same computer-driven murder planning machine deployed half a century ago.

No one should wonder about this since the Israel Defense Force and the other government agencies in occupied Palestine were actively informed and involved in every stage of these system developments. The systems-driven assassination program was a major component of the US counter-insurgency operations throughout Latin America. Death squads and data processing are natural partners going back to IBM’s computer support to the NSDAP. Artificial intelligence is fundamentally an intelligence operation and part of the systems theory of mechanized murder. It has no other serious application.

Permit me to return to Joseph Weizenbaum. In 1976, many AI fetishists will argue, the technology was simply not very sophisticated. ELIZA and other experimental platforms were primitive and lacked the support of today’s super-computers. I met Weizenbaum shortly before he died. He had returned to Berlin, the city of his birth from which his family had emigrated in the 1930s. He had been invited to talk at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Having read the book in the 1980s I was anxious to meet the man who had so politely trashed the AI project. He was introduced by an obnoxious and obsequious American whose other qualities or qualifications left no impression on me. The young man tried to impress the audience by telling us that Joseph Weizenbaum was working at Case Western University when the university decided they needed a computer– and Weizenbaum built it. Normally such calculated flattery would be met with a demurred nod of appreciation. Professor Weizenbaum retorted that Case Western did not need a computer. Moreover no one needed one! That was the last we heard of the young man from Einstein Forum.

Nearly 30 years after his book was published Weizenbaum was just as adamant. Not the Internet (which most people clearly forget is an adjunct to the US atomic warfare system) or the so-called super-computers, whether in the US or China, have altered the premises upon which his argument is based. As recently as today I read some conversation strings about AI in which one author argues:

The result of having this ability is not to contest who is right or wrong, but to learn to be right most of the time so that the AI can successfully maintain a peaceful, harmonious human society. At the end of the day, humans are seriously flawed and cannot be trusted to run this society. Therefore, human management will be phased out.

The author and those who follow his reasoning clearly believe that the strip mining of the Congo and other parts of the world to obtain the rare (and toxic) minerals essential for super-computing capacity along with the impoverishment of all other components of human culture in favour of electrical engineering and computer sciences is the price to be borne by humanity so that computation can fully displace human judgement (and humanity itself). The naive yet thin veneer of modernism and claims to sophistication in the interest of peace and harmony are deeply anti-human, not only in their objectives but at every link in the chain these AI proponents would forge from cradle to grave.

Weizenbaum’s argument was not based on the state of the art in 1976. In fact he was quite clear that faster processors and larger memory storage would no doubt expand the computational capacity of the emerging technology. Instead Weizenbaum insisted that judgement was not computation. In Berlin he reiterated data is not information. Computation is nothing more than the arrangement of data according to rules defining the circulation of electrical power through increasingly complex circuits. Judgement is the result of human activity not electrical circuits. Data is the numerically codification of signals from whatever source. Information is the product of assessing data and responding to it– i.e. giving it meaning. Computers ought not to give meaning– control human responses to the world. Humans ought to control their own responses, even if they use tools like computers to generate and store data for evaluation.

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Those who, like the author cited above, imagine that machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence are, to put it mildly, confused about what intelligence is. Claiming– either naively or cynically– that machine intelligence is at least potentially far more suited for regulating human society than humans themselves, these technology fetishists betray their primitive superstitions. Artificial intelligence, which until now has never advanced beyond its intention as a weapon for mass murder and surveillance, is simply the electronic manifestation of the omnipotent deity whose every will must be fulfilled. The desire to see human management rendered obsolete or impossible is the same denial that humans have any personality beyond that defined by the absolute deity of the kind we have known from the 11th century. The dream of the AI cultist is the same dream of the absolutist papacy and the regime that survives in the modern business corporation from which this nightmare arises.

Weizenbaum did not address the whole production chain in which AI needs to be seen. His humanist position stands on its own, especially when the lines are drawn between humanism and its antitheses transhumanism and anti-humanism. Much is made of the enormous progress– far beyond what the carcinogenic West has accomplished– in Chinese AI. Suffice it here to enumerate some of the absurd claims that dominate in the media and among the cult’s prosyletizers.

Computer power rests ultimately upon the power to extract highly toxic minerals from the Earth, until now based on quasi-slave labor in Congo, i.e. central Africa. For the past half-century computer power has cost more than six million lives and the independent development of a country whose territory is roughly the size of the European Union. To this must be added the wars and other violent and corrupt interventions to obtain these resources elsewhere on the planet. Then of course we have the highly dubious benefit of employment redundancies as so-called AI systems replace human labor in the industries and service sectors previously maintained by homo sapiens. Marxists praise AI contributions to the end of alienated labor. However the implementation of AI not only aims to kill people for the IDF or other counter-insurgency agencies but to kill the conditions for economic activity for huge numbers of people at all levels of educational and occupational qualification. The subsequent radical concentration of wealth will hardly be an inducement to enhance living conditions– which after all cannot be rationally calculated except as cost minimizing. (We need not ignore the eugenicism underlying the AI cult too.)

As to the claims that these machines will be infinitely more rational and therefore better managers of human society than humans themselves, the obscenity should be obvious. Any management of humans by agents other than humans can only be accomplished by subjugation of humanity to machines. This is the dream of those whose puerile malice leads them to identify peace with the absence of other people and order with absence of responsibility for their own actions. The nightmare of AI is the dream of what was once called the Dark Ages. Don’t forget, before you leave, to turn out the lights.Facebook

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Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..

 When Safety is a Fiction: Passing the UK’s Rwanda Bill

by Binoy Kampmark / May 1st, 2024

What a stinking story of inhumanity.  A country intent on sending asylum seekers to one whose residents have actually applied for asylum and sanctuary in other states.  But the UK-Rwanda deal, having stalled and stuttered before various courts and found wanting for reasons of human rights, has become law with the passage of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.

The story of this deal has been a long one.  On April 14, 2022, the government of Boris Johnson announced the Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda, which was intended “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership”. Rwanda, for a princely sum, would receive those whose asylum claims would be otherwise processed in the UK through the “Rwanda domestic asylum system” and have the responsibility for settling and protecting applicants.

This cynical effort of deferring human rights obligations and not guarding asylum seekers and refugees from harm has been made all the more hideous by Kigali’s less than savoury reputation in the field.  Refugees have been shot for protesting over reduced food rations (twelve from the Democratic Republic of Congo died in February 2018).  Refugees have also been arrested for allegedly spreading misinformation about Rwanda’s less than spotless human rights record.  And that’s just a smidgen of a significantly blotted copybook.

Notwithstanding this, UK home secretaries have gushed over Kigali’s seemingly falsified credentials.  Suella Braverman, who formerly occupied the post, was jaw dropping in her claim that “Rwanda has a track record of successfully resettling and integrating people who are refugees or asylum seekers”.  This is markedly ironic given that the Rwandan government has been accused of creating its own complement of refugees running into the tens of thousands.

The UK government has a patchy legal record in trying to defend the legitimacy of the exchange with Rwanda.  The Court of Appeal in June 2023 reversed a lower court decision on the grounds that those asylum seekers sent to Rwanda faced real risks of mistreatment prohibited by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  Rwanda, it was noted, was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”

The government also failed to convince the UK Supreme Court, which similarly found in November 2023 that people removed to Rwanda faced a real risk of being returned to their countries of origin in violation of the principle of non-refoulement.  That principle, by which persons are not to be sent to their countries of origin or third countries if they would be placed at risk of harm, is a cardinal rule in several instruments of international law and enshrined in British law.

In what can only be regarded as a legal absurdity, the Safety of Rwanda bill essentially directs the home secretary, immigration officials, courts and tribunals to deem Rwanda a safe country in accordance with UK law and UK obligations to protect asylum seekers.  It also bars decision makers from considering the risk of refugees being sent by Rwanda to other countries and disallows UK courts from drawing upon interpretations of international law, including the European Convention of Human Rights.  Effectively, a sizeable portion of the UK’s own Human Rights Act 1998 has been rendered inconsequential in these determinations.

A final, nasty feature of the legislation is the grant of power to a Minister of the Crown to decide whether to abide by interim measures made by the European Court of Human Rights regarding any removal to Rwanda.  This is astonishing on several levels, not least because it repudiates the binding nature of such interim measures.

Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, could barely believe the passage of such an obnoxious bit of legislation.  Not only did it fly in the face of obligations to protect refugees, it constituted a direct interference in the judicial process. “The United Kingdom government should refrain from removing people under the Rwanda policy and reverse the Bill’s effective infringement of judicial independence.”

Shadowing these proceedings is an unmistakable, ghoulish legacy of Australian origin.  The former Home Secretary Priti Patel openly acknowledged that elements of the “Australian model” of processing asylum claims in third countries were appealing and something to emulate.  The particularly attractive element of the plan was the refusal by Canberra to ever permit those found to be refugees to ever settle on Australian soil.  Other countries, including such European states as Denmark, have also chosen Rwanda as an appropriate destination for unwanted asylum seekers.

The entire affair is a stunning example of political entropy, a howl from an administration marching before the firing squad.  With each failure, the Tories have tried to claw back respectability in the hope of appearing muscular in the face of irregular migration.  They have accordingly cooked up a scheme that is not merely cruel, but one of staggering cost (each asylum seeker of the current cohort promises to cost the British taxpayer £1.8 million) and ineffectualness.  Sunak, a laughably weak and unpopular prime minister, is, politically speaking, at death’s door.  Despite getting the legislation through, legal struggles from potential deportees are bound to tear into the arrangements. What Britain’s judges do will prove a true test of character.FacebookTwitter

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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Attacked in St. Louis

by Don Fitz / May 2nd, 2024

Green Party member Jill Stein center.

After attacking Dr. Jill Stein, St. Louis police charged her with assaulting them. Stein is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Green Party. On April 27 she spoke at a program of the Green Party of St. Louis and then went to support student protesters at Washington University. There, she was arrested along with Green Party campaign managers Jason Call and Kelly Merrill with about 100 others.

As students peacefully gathered in tents and on the lawn, they were soon confronted by police from four departments: University City, Richmond Heights, St. Louis City and St. Louis County. When Stein arrived at the campus, students asked her to help defuse an already tense situation.

She identified herself to onlooking university administrators as a Green Party Presidential candidate. Stein, along with St. Louis Aldermanic President Megan Green and Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, attempted to persuade university administrators to let students stay. Police moved to block the conversation. A reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who attempted a discussion with university vice-chancellor Julie Hail Flory was ordered to leave the campus.

Merrill and Stein looked for a restroom and found all doors locked, but a student was able to unlock one door. Hearing yelling that the police were about to attack, they quickly went outside. They walked into the space between students and police, pleading for calm. But the police stormed in.

Merrill reported that “This was the first time I understood why so many police are on bicycles. They picked them up and used them as weapons to push people down.” When police began assailing protesters, they targeted Stein first and did not bother the two Democratic Party officials. They threw Stein on her head, threw Merrill to the ground, jumped on Call, and dozens became their victims.

Students were charged with trespassing and disruptive behavior. Those who were arrested have been prohibited from re-entering campus even if they will miss final examinations and not graduate. The administration-police reaction followed a pattern at universities across the US as if it had been scripted in Joe Biden’s office.

Being assaulted, arrested and jailed was only the beginning of Stein’s ordeal. Not being told what would happen to her, Stein sat alone in a cell for hours before being released. Exhausted, she did not make it to our house to sleep until 3:00 in the morning.

On Monday morning, April 29 Stein took a break from her mid-states tour to get checked out at University Hospital in Columbia MO. They found that, though very bruised, her rib was not broken; and she continued to Kansas City.

Bob Suberi is a Jewish member of the St. Louis Green Party who has made several solidarity visits to the West Bank. He brings back stories of the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberately provoking Palestinians in order to have an excuse for over-reacting, sometimes with a massive raid. Similarly, Washington University students committed the trivial infraction of occupying space regularly used for events such as carnivals and this became the excuse for a police invasion.

The similarities between practices in Palestine and on US campuses is unmistakable. This is true not only for intolerance of dissent and brutality. It is also the case with the way Israelis destroy sanitary facilities in Gaza, leaving people with nowhere to relieve themselves except on sidewalks. This serves both to humiliate Palestinians and create a health crisis.

The mounting opposition to Israel’s war is reflected by the wide variety of speakers at the St. Louis Green Party event: Andrew de las Alas (Asians Demanding Justice), Saish Satyal (College Democrats), Lila Steinbach (Jewish Students for Palestine), Bahar Bastani MD (Dar al-Zahra Mosque and Education Center), Shahab Mushtaq (Green Party of St. Louis), Bob Suberi (Veterans For Peace), Chibu Asonye (Green Party of Illinois), Zaki Baruti (Universal African Peoples Organization) and Omali Yeshitela (African People’s Socialist Party).

Jewish herself, Stein insists that “The students are not the villains in this struggle against Israeli violence. They are in fact the heroes, defending the right of free speech and to peacefully protest. Many already see the villains being the Washington University administration, those who conspired with them to destroy free speech, and the Biden gang whose fingerprints are all over efforts to shut down peace initiatives. Out of one side of his mouth Biden claims he is working to end the killing and maiming of Palestinians. From the other side of his mouth comes the push for billions of war dollars that are causing the genocide.”

Dr. Stein joined tens of thousands of students in campuses across the US who are demanding university divestment from Boeing and other companies that manufacture weapons used by Israel. Students presented Washington University with five demands:

Cut ties with Boeing.

Boycott Israeli educational institutions.

Drop charges and suspensions against protesters and defund university police.

Stop buying land in surrounding communities and make payments in lieu of taxes to University City and St. Louis.

Release a statement condemning Palestinian genocide and calling for an immediate ceasefire.

University officials told the press that they felt that they had to take action because the demonstrators “had the potential to get out of control and become dangerous.” Apparently skilled at ignoring the obvious, these officials have never noticed that the corporate behavior of their partner, Boeing, has vastly exceeded the “potential” to become dangerous.

One of the great ironies of the episode is that above the April 28 Post-Dispatch story which described events at Washington University was another front page story reporting that Boeing was abandoning efforts to outsource much of its work. It approvingly announced that this would save 550 St. Louis jobs.

Of course, the Post-Dispatch has not published stories regarding the creation of peace-related jobs for Boeing employees if the war-manufacturer were to be downsized. Also worthy of note is the fact that no Boeing executive or government official working with them has been arrested for crimes against humanity, complicity with genocide or any other charge. Maybe they would have to peacefully sit in a tent on the Washington University campus to get busted.Facebook

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Don Fitz (fitzdon@aol.com) writes for and is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought where this article first appeared. He has been the St. Louis Green Party candidate for County Assessor and candidate of the Missouri Green Party for State Auditor and Governor. He is author of Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution (2020). Read other articles by Don.

 

Has Zionism Caused the Destruction of the Jews?

by Dan Lieberman / May 2nd, 2024

The proven danger of two million Gazans, blasted from their homes and struggling to find survival, is being overshadowed by unproven “safety concerns” for a relatively few Jewish college students who argue they are harmed by careless words and show no physical injuries. News reports reveal malicious intent and media complicity — divert the protests against genocide to a non-existent anti-Semitism and impede the effectiveness of the campus demonstrations by citing “safety concerns.” Generate hate of the campus demonstrators and disguise the malice by falsely accusing them of hate, the Zionist Modus operandi from its inception — hide the truth and answer critics by labeling them anti-Semites.

NBC News

A growing number of leaders and organizations have called on Columbia University and its president to protect students amid reports of antisemitic and offensive statements and actions on and near its campus, which has been the site this week of a pro-Palestinian encampment and protest.

CBS NEWS

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A Jewish Yale University student said she was assaulted during pro-Palestinian protests on campus and now the university is investigating. Sahar Tartak, editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press, said she was assaulted Saturday night while covering demonstrations on the campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Tartak believes she was targeted for wearing Jewish attire. “I wear a Star of David necklace,” she said. “One of them taunted me by waving a Palestinian flag in my face and jabbed me with it in the eye.”

New York Post

A Jewish Yale University student journalist reporting on an anti-Israeli protest at the Ivy League school Saturday night was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, while her assailant has gone unpunished.

Breaking Points

Krystal and Saagar discuss the ‘stabbed in the eye’ girl being debunked by the video of the incident. “This is all complete B.S.”

Examine the press reports

The campus demonstrations are protests against U.S. policy of assisting Israel in its genocide of the Palestinian people, and the press cites them as either “pro-Palestinian” or “anti-Israel.” These opposing descriptions give an impression that the protests have a bias, do not affect the American people, and mainly concern those who favor the Palestinians and those who are repulsed by actions taken against Israel. A few words, constantly repeated, affect the mindset of the American people and distract them from understanding their government’s disgraceful policies.

The NBC report is not news; it is an advertisement for organizations that have an agenda and manufacture rumors to satisfy the agenda, not different from an exterminator falsely telling Columbia University authorities to protect students amid reports of rodents infesting the campus. Note also the mental link to “a pro-Palestinian encampment and protest.”

The New York Post, an infamous rag sheet, turns an unverified statement by an Israeli supporter into her being “stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, while her assailant has gone unpunished.” The victim, Sahar Tartak, came to the demonstration with a video camera, wearing a Star of David necklace, and accompanied by another person described as having the appearance of an Orthodox Jew, an indication of purposeful intent to broadcast that she and the other person are Jewish students. Neither Sahar Tartak’s video camera nor any video camera recorded an attack upon her persona. There is no hospital report to show she was injured and her appearance immediately after the incident does not indicate harm to an eye.

Did Ms. Tartak come to the demonstration as a provocateur attempting to initiate verbal or physical attacks on her or the other Jewish student? When she did not succeed, did she fabricate an incident?

Striding as obvious Jewish students, Ms. Tartak and her friend walked untouched through the angry crowd. Her behavior initiated no attacks and showed that if there are attacks on Jewish students, they must be rare. Will Columbia University investigate her actions, which appear belligerent, untruthful, and purposely agitating? Isn’t it twisted to repress those who struggle to prevent genocide and follow the dictates of those who approve genocide?

Don’t Columbia and other universities know about the genocide and the terrible consequences inflicted on the Palestinians? Is their negligence due to American media — print, online, television, and radio — treating Israel as a friendly neighbor and a victim of terrorism, and approaching the two million Palestinians as collateral damage to Israel’s overpowering a few thousand Hamas militants who have no anti-tank weapons to halt tanks, no guided missiles to cause critical damage, and no handheld missile systems to destroy drones and aircraft? Nobody equipped Hamas with an adequate defense or for an effective offense. Militants crossed the border, walked a few miles, committed random havoc, and, after being alerted, Israeli forces wiped them out.

October 7, 2023, taught the Israeli military it had no problem in containing powerless Hamas; as soon as the militants met a prepared Israeli military they were quickly defeated. Israel had a temporary border problem of relaxation and apathy, which allowed the Hamas militants to enter. Stationing troops at the border and assuring they are alert rectified the situation. There was no need to send a massive number of soldiers into Gaza, have a number of them killed, slaughter the Gazans, and ensure none of the captives survived. Why did Israel pursue the more punishing path?

(1)    The Israeli government did not want to engage in talks with Hamas, which would elevate Hamas’ importance and put Israel on the defensive.

(2)    Israel has pursued one path — steal the Palestinian land and patrimony and contrive a means to cleanse the Palestinians from the area. Hamas’ resistance is a continuous block to the pursuit and a change in tactics was ordered.

(3)    The Hamas attack presented an opportunity to change the tactics from a slow ethnic cleansing to a more rapid genocide — fool the world into believing the demolishing of the Gazans is retribution and not genocide. With the obedient Western media occupied with reports from Gaza, less attention will be given to the violent ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

Attempts to subdue campus demonstrations that protest the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people reveal the obvious — since day one of their appearance, spurious anti-Semitism has been a constant weapon of Zionists to disguise the truth, foment hatred of their opponents, and advance their agenda. Their deceptive tactics have enraged segments of U.S. and European societies and directly led to animosity and attacks against Jews. Describing their state as a “Jewish state,” and having a majority of Jews throughout the world support the state and its genocidal actions is causing a backlash to the Jews. The only salvation for the Jewish community is separation from Zionism, its oppressive state, and its suicidal inclinations and halt the continuation of relying on the media to confuse the populace into favoring, protecting, and urging governments to rescue the Jewish community.

PBS’ News Hour, supposedly a more respected element of the U.S. media, on April 26, featured Israelis mark Passover amid conflict, loss and trauma. Description of the program: “This week, Jews around the world are observing Passover, the festival of liberation that marks the historic exodus from ancient Egypt.”

“The historic exodus from Egypt?” Is there any history that tells us of this mythical exodus? Are news broadcasts a compilation of facts or fiction?

But, this year, joy is tempered with loss and trauma. More than 160,000 Israelis will mark the holiday while displaced from their homes, as the war with Hamas continues. Still others have empty chairs at the dinner table, their loved ones still held captive by Hamas.

Upon orders from their command, and not due to excessive danger, a small percentage of Israelis are taking a respite from their daily lives and still established homes and eating matzah in temporary hotel quarters. Almost all Palestinians have been forced out of destroyed homes, where relatives still lie under the rubble, and they search to find a tent or place to house their permanently displaced families and obtain some bread, leavened or non-leavened, to eat. They don’t have empty chairs at dinner tables; they have no chairs and dinner tables and suffer the loss of the tens of thousands of loved ones and captives held by Israel.

The biblical “Exodus” story did not free the Jews. Just the opposite, it has been used to keep Jews in perpetual bondage to a spurious history and to promote an attitude of constant victimhood, while distracting them from realizing the role they play in the injustices done to others. Hopefully, Jews who absorb verified history will awaken other Jews to the destructive impulses generated from Israel, which prevents them from recognizing the roots and appeal of modern Judaism and instead induces them to adopt atavistic and reactionary attitudes from ancient Hebrew stories and its fictitious world — recreating the Passover plagues that now kill Palestinian livestock and crops and sent lice, flies, frogs, wild animals, locusts, hail, boils, and extended darkness throughout Gaza, and death to the firstborn child in every Palestinian household.Facebook

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Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.