Haroon Siddiqui’s My Name is NOT Harry

Memoir of a Toronto icon

by Eric Walberg / March 29th, 2024

Haroon Siddiqui’s 2023 memoir, My Name is Not Harry, is a dazzling journey through Indian Sufism, pre-partition Muslim-Hindu harmony, the horrors of partition, a leap across the ocean to the middle of nowhere (sorry, Brandon Manitoba), finally finding his home at the Toronto Star, from whence, back to central Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India during the tumultuous 1979+), hobnobbing with media and political stars, stopping for heart surgery, all the time building and defending his new multicultural faith, adding his own distinct, Muslim flavour to what it means to be a Canadian. A whirlwind tour of the 20th-21st centuries, as if by a latter day Muslim Christopher Columbus, one meant to try to undo the five centuries of imperialist horror that Columbus unleashed.

He relishes slaying the dragons of bigotry he encounters, starting with

*Winston Churchill, the racist. He who had labelled Indians ‘a barbarous people’, ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion’, ‘the beastliest people in the world next to Germans’. Who exacerbated the 1943 Bengal famine that had killed millions by insisting that Indian rice exports for the allied war effort not be interrupted. He who had called Gandhi ‘a naked fakir’ whom he wanted ‘bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled by an enormous elephant with a new viceroy seated on its back.’

*Even the Toronto Star‘s iconic Gordon Sinclair, who won fame in the 1930s with his dispatches form India – ‘the pagan peninsula’ with its ‘wild and woolly Hindus’, Brahmins, the supreme high hooper-doopers of this impossible land’, ‘scrawny, underfed untouchables’, impossible-looking beggars’ and ‘yowling idiots’. In tune with those times, [the Star] still going ga-ga over Sinclair well into my own time.

*On Iran, the only Muslim ‘experts’ and commentators on TV and in print were anti-revolution or anti-Khomeini, authenticating the worst of western prejudices. Anything different, such as mine, must have been a welcome novelty, brought to them by Canada’s largest newspaper.

*On 9//11, Rushdie see below.

One of those should-haves of his life as dragonslayer was at the annual press gallery dinner in Ottawa, where he hosted Solicitor General Robert Kaplan. When they were walking to dinner, Kaplan started waxing eloquently about his love for India and yoga but his dislike of Muslims! He assumed that being from India I could only be a Hindu. What a testament to power the Zionist Jewish mindset had/has over even a proud Muslim like Siddiqui. But bravo, Harry (sorry, Haroon) for owning up. That’s the great thing about him. He lives his multiculturalism, which means meeting the other on his/her grounds, looking for the middle ground, not stoking enmity.

Iranian Ayatollahs, Afghan communists

He shines on the thorniest issue, one of which confronted him soon after arriving at the Star, when he was sent off to Iran in 1979. Speaking Urdu (close to Persian) and fully versed in Sunni and Shia Islam, he was able to make sense of the chaos, making his way to Qom to visit Ayatollah Madari, Khomeini’s rival, who lived just down the maze of alleys from Khomeini, who was already commanding the revolution from his modest home there, rather than Tehran.

He was told it was impossible to meet with Madari, even for a Canadian Muslim, but when he revealed that he’d just come from Tabriz, where Madari’s People’s Republican Party followers had risen up against Khomeini, rejecting the Islamic state constitution, Madari relented. Madari wanted a secular state and ‘the sovereignty of the people’ not a person. He answered every question patiently for nearly two hours. That was his only interview in the wake of the revolt. It would be his last. He was placed under house arrest until his death six years later.

He also met with Morteza Pasandideh, 82, Khomeini’s older brother, who was quite jovial. Siddiqui admired them all for their stress-free lives, their inner peace all, living productive lives into their 80s or 90s. Qom is famous for sohan halwa (sweet sweet) made with pistachios, almonds and butter. Back in Toronto, he asked John Ralston Saul to taste and guess which enemy country it was from. Whatever it is, it could only have been made by a great civilization.

He toured the now-occupied US embassy and chatted amiably (sympathetically?) with the students about how they had pulled off the siege, overpowering the bulky Marines. They said their resolve got strengthened after seeing a large-size picture of Khomeini on a dartboard and several crude cartoons of Khomeini from American and British newspapers in the embassy. At Christmas they made cookies for their captives. An American priest who had come to perform the Christmas Mass said: We should be grateful that we are in a Muslim country and there are not drunk guards. Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor told him: There are no anti-Canadian feelings here. No one has indicated any inclination to leave Tehran. There’s no panic. When he met Taylor later, he said: Mr Taylor, you’re a great liar. Taylor: That’s what I got paid for.

After an exhausting year in Tehran, the Soviets invaded (came to the assistance of) secular revolutionary Kabul and he was ordered to get there asap. But first he flew to the Iranian border and crossed into Afghanistan to meet a local tribal chieftain, who told him, ‘We’ll kick the bastards out.’ How to get there legitimately? Pakistan? Better India, which had good relations with the communists in Moscow and Kabul, so off to New Delhi and the Afghan embassy. Indira Gandhi never condemned the Soviet invasion. (How wise in retrospect.) In Kabul he was told not to go anywhere and only communicate through an official guide. Ha, ha! He snuck out the back door of his hotel, spoke to a soldier in Urdu, said ‘Canada’ and quickly found a local driver.

He credits Canada’s reputation for peaceful relations, a well-known eye clinic in Kabul. Off to (Shia) Herat where he heard Long live Islam, Long live Iran! He bought a Russian fur cap but was told never to wear it in public or he might be shot. He left via Pushtunistan to Jalalabad, Pakistan, where he met the legendary 91-year-old frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who like the Siddiquis had protested the division of India. He was ailing but contemptuous of Soviet attempts to appease religious Afghans. Everything in Afghanistan is done in the name of religion. But this is a political religion, not the religion of Islam and Allah and Muhammad. Communism has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with the stomach. The Russians knew this and tried to convince the Afghans that they could keep their religion, but it was too little, too late. The Russians refused to try to treat their Gandhi, fearing if he died, they would be accused of killing him.

He pressed on to the Khyber Pass, the route for a stream of invaders – Cyrus, Darius, Genghis Khan, Alexander, the Mughals. Tribal chief Mohammed Gul told him: if the Iranians can knock off the Shah and the Americans, we certainly can kick out the Russians. He saw that resistance was beginning to jell within weeks of the Soviet occupation. It took a decade for the Soviets to depart, the US and allies, including Canada, taking double the time to conclude that Afghans have both the courage and patience to bleed any occupier dry.

This being the days before internet, getting copy out required ingenuity. Siddiqui would go to the airport on the days Indian Airlines came to Kabul, meet the crew and cajole/tip them into taking copy and dropping it off at the Reuters news agency in Delhi for forwarding to Toronto. He also went on the day Pakistan International Airlines came just in case. Later he was told everything came, sometimes twice. He met Brzezinski in Peshawar (!) but he wouldn’t give Siddiqui the time of day.

Following the Iraq-Iran war, he was disgusted that western media ignored the poison gas supplied to Iraq by American, German, French, Dutch, Swiss and Belgian companies. On the Iranian front line he hid from Iraqi snipers and marveled at how soldiers dying from gassing were rushed from the front to Tehran hospitals. He was appalled by Khomeini’s hitman, a sadistic prosecutor Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the hanging judge. Later in Paris, he met Bani Sadr, the first president, who had been impeached and fled the country disguised as a woman in a chador, in an Iran Air Force jet piloted by a sympathizer. He laments that US hostility prompted Khomeini to restart the nuclear program begun under the Shah, after ending it as unIslamic.

Siddiqui’s credo

I must admit, I’ve become jaded about multiculturalism. Toronto is now mostly first or second generation immigrants. Our culture feels shallow and American now. I find the turban-wearing Uber electric scooters grazing me unawares on bike paths frightening, and pointless, as they ferry onion rings to lazy people with too much money. I bemoan the lack of interest in Canadian history, our struggle to define an identity that’s not American. Most immigrants really would prefer big, rich, warm America to Canada and would have no problem if the US decided to invade. What has happened to Canadian culture?

But then I’ve become equally jaded about our heroic history. We are all immigrants, in the case of the paleface, mostly riff-raff, having decimated our poor brown natives. The post-WWII immigrants from brown countries like Siddiqui’s India/ Pakistan are mostly university-educated, the elites of their countries, so they really are a step up from my Irish-English-Swedish peasant ancestors.

But then, I find that equally disturbing. We stole the land from the real Canadians. Now we steal the intellectual wealth from poor countries. Sure we’re richer; the imperialist ‘centre’ is always richer. Our Canadianism was and is still a fraud. So, white flag, hello multiculturalism, for better or worse. But one that should give first place to our natives as the real owners, spiritually, of the land. And no more stealing, whether it be minds from ‘over there’, or land here or ‘over there’. That means Israel, our ‘best friend’, according to PM Harper in 2013 and PM Trudeau in 2015.

Siddiqui is unapologetically for mass immigration and has no time for the ecological problems that mass migration entails. He boasts having visited India 50 times in 40 years, not to mention his other peregrinations. That grates. Yes, brown/black is just as good as white, but what’s holding us together anymore? I don’t know, but I’m happy for Siddiqui, who at least has helped Canada transform from a country of bigotry and chauvinism to … a nice, tame, bland cosmopolis.

His journey through the swinging ’60s into the terrible ’20s is an upbeat panorama of not only Canada at its peak of popularity and feel-goodness, but, reading between the lines, also the decline of Canada, its loss of feel-good innocence transformation into an unapologetic toady of US empire. He took pride in being Canadian when Ambassador Taylor helped US hostages escape Tehran in 1980, when Chretien refused to go along with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it’s been downhill since then, with Harper’s disastrous commitment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan, his open Islamo- and Russophobia, his worship of Israel. While Trudeau has welcomed Syrian refugees (and now Afghans, fall out from Harper’s war), he did not fulfill his pledge to renew relations with Iran, despite the Iranian exile community’s pleas. His Russophobia is pathetic. Multiculturalism is looking mighty threadbare.

Yes, following Trudeau senior, Siddiqui’s credo is that all cultural communities have ‘the right to preserve and develop their own cultures within Canadian society’, which he notes is the ethos of India, best articulated by Indian novelist Shivaram Karanth: There’s no such thing as Indian culture. Indian culture is so varied as to be called cultures. But what has happened to India’s multiculturalism under arch-Hindu nationalist Modi?

Star Foreign Editor Jimmy Atkins (R) with Star chair John Honderich, South African President Nelson Mandela & first lady Graca Machel, Star editorial board editor Haroon Siddiqui.

Free trade, Sikhs, Laïcité

Siddiqui gets along with everyone, doesn’t drink or smoke (anymore), a model Muslim in the House of War.¹ He traces his ancestors to the first caliph Abu-bakr Siddiq, and second caliph Umar al-Khattab al-Faruq. A worthy disciple of the Prophet Muhammad, the multiculturalist par excellence.² The fearsome Bee (Star editor-in-chief Beland Honderich) famously got along with Haroon. Siddiqui started from scratch in Brandon (no halal, no yogurt in 1968), then the Star, rising quickly through the ranks to foreign correspondent, front page editor, editorial page editor, and finally columnist, all the time the only Muslim in mainstream Canadian media.

He and the Star were against Mulroney’s ‘free’ trade pact with the yankee devil, realizing it was only good for fat cats. He has acted as a public spokesman explaining the problems of all immigrants and BIPOC,³ an acronym he promotes. He highlights the racism which feeds on the changing demographics from white to nonwhite, recountiing a Tanzanian immigrant pushed onto Toronto’s subway tracks, crippling him, and the existence of a KKK chapter operating openly in Toronto.

The case of Sikhs is thorny. Sikh Canadians were mostly quietist, but when Sikh separatists were ejected from the Golden Temple by Indira Gandhi in 1984, she was assassinated, and Sikh separatists blew up an Indian Airlines plane full of Hindu Canadians in 1985. This still ranks as Canada’s worst such tragedy, but was downplayed by the Canadian government with the investigation bungled by the RCMP, as anti-Sikh/ Hindu racism grew. And it continues, the latest being a hit job on a (Sikh separatist) Canadian, openly, by India’s militant Hindu nationalist government. Multiculturalism is easily abused and hard to defend.

To their credit, the Sikhs in Canada have bounced back, entering politics (Justin Trudeau boasted more Sikhs in his cabinet than Modi), joining the RCMP, police, army, working hard, being good citizens. The bad apples didn’t spoil the whole barrel, though Sikhs have no use for India, and they really did capture the lackluster leadership convention of the NDP out of nowhere in 2017. The unlikely NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has been earnest, if not inspiring.

How does this multiculturalism pan out? Quebec separatists don’t like immigrants much, as they are not interested in living in a parochial, xenophobic province, and have enough trouble learning passable English, let alone Quebecois. They voted en masse against independence, and the pesky Muslim women want to wear hijab or worse, niqab. Vive la laïcité. Quebec has chosen to copy France’s punitive banning hijab and other restrictions. Still, English and French get along.

Tribalism, French vs English, Sikhs vs Hindus, Buddhists remains strong. That contrasts with Muslims, who quickly drop their ethnic identity for universal Islam and Canadianism (84% cite being Muslim and 81% cite being Canadian as their primary identity),⁴ as I’ve noticed at Muslim conferences, where a truly united nations reigns. That brings us to Jewish Canadians vs Muslim Canadians, the most tragic stand-off of the past century. Siddiqui doesn’t go to this forbidding territory. On the contrary, (wisely) he has spoken to Bnai Brith and Canadian Jewish Congress gatherings and kept a low profile as a Muslim Canadian. As the sole prominent Muslim journalist here, he was operating in enemy territory, as his encounter with Kaplan confirmed.

Enlightening Canadians on things Islamic

More important, he wrote engagingly about Muslims in Toronto, which hosts the largest Iranian emigre community after the US, mostly in ‘Tehronto’, a mix of pro- and anti-Khomeini, but able to live peacefully, all agreeing that the Canadian government nonrecognition of Iran and boycott is bad politics for everyone. His appreciation for this ‘great civilization’ contrasts with the negative press that Iran uniformly gets here.

Siddiqui realized quickly that Canadian media coverage and commentary ‘smelled of American propaganda’ and the US and allies were inflicting too many horrors on Muslims and Muslims lands. In 1988, the US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner killing 290, prompting Bush I to boast: I will never apologize for the US. I don’t care what the facts are. Instead, Washington awarded medals to the captain and crew of the Vincennes. Did any other mainstream journalist note this then or now? He refused to blacken Islam after 9/11. Now a columnist he wrote his third post-9/11 column ‘It’s the US foreign policy, stupid,’ causing a storm of letters to the editor, a majority ‘thank you for saying it’.

Ismailis came in 1972, expelled by Idi Amin of Uganda, joined later by Ismailis from Kenya and Tanzania. Self-reliant, educated, entrepreneurial, they inspired the Aga Khan to build a museum of Islamic culture in Toronto in 2014, the only such museum in the West. Ironically it was officially opened by arch-Islamophobe PM Harper. We celebrate today not only the harmonious meeting of green gardens and glass galleries. We rejoice above all in the special spirit which fills this place and gives it its soul. But then, to Islamophobe Harper, Ismailis are Islam-lite, not considered real Muslims by most.

There are two chapters dealing with the ummah: Cultural Warfare on Muslims, and Harper and Muslims (In his ugliness, he was well ahead of Trump – and more effective). Some particularly painful episodes he covered:

*Harper invited (till then terrorist) Modi to Canada in 2014 when first elected, accompanying him to Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver,

*He established an office of religious freedom, which he unveiled at a Mississauga Coptic church. He announced the position of a new ambassador of religious freedom at the Ahmadiyya mosque in Vaughan, defending Christian and other minorities in Muslim nations, doing nothing for Uighurs, Rohingyas, Shia in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

I could go on – I haven’t even got to the Rushdie circus – but I urge all Muslim Canadians, no, all Canadians, to read for yourselves. Siddiqui provides an excellent survey of all the post-9/11 Islamophobic nonsense, especially in Euroland.

The West has discredited democracy by allowing anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourse to be one of our last acceptable forms of racism and bigotry. It’s in this milieu that Rushdie and the Rushdie affair have thrived. Has Rushdie been exploiting western prejudices or has the West been using him as a shield for its own prejudices? Or is this a case of mutual convenience?

Having rid ourselves of Harper, how quickly we forget the pain when it stops. As it has under Trudeau Jr. For all his silliness and US-Israel fawning, Justin Trudeau is true to his father’s legacy, and undid much of Harper’s bigotry, especially relating to Muslims.

We should be wary of letting the unrepentant Conservatives take back Parliament Hill. However, I don’t think it’s possible to relaunch the Harper take-no-hostages Crusade. 9/11 (whoever did it) is what motivated me and many more to become a Muslim, and October 7 is now rapidly expanding the Muslim ummah, especially in the West, the heart of the beast. The trouble for the Harpers is that the more Islam and Muslims are reviled, the more Muslims (re)turn to their religion. But then that’s the way of imperialism, creating its enemies, stoking them, as Israel did with Hamas, thinking they can then pick off the ‘terrorists’, ‘mow the grass’.

Siddiqui draws from his experience surviving partition in India, adhering to Shaykh Madani’s view that ‘there is too much diversity within Islam for democracy to work, that an Islamic state would inevitably be authoritarian.’ Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran are the leading examples. The best protection for peoples of faith was a democratic state that stayed neutral between faiths and advanced mutual respect.⁵

The Harpers accuse Muslims of being unwilling to integrate. Canada, Britain and the US are shining examples of the opposite.

*In the 2021 federal election 12 Muslims won seats. Two hold senior Cabinet portfolios: Omar Alghabra and Ahmed Hussen.

*In Britain, in 2019, 19 were elected. Sadiq Khan has been mayor of London since 2016.

*Humza Yousaf became first minister in Scotland in 2023, the first Muslim to lead a western nation. When Khan was sworn in as a member of the Privy Council at Bukhingham Palace in 2009, it was discovered there was no Quran in the palace, so he brought his own and left it as a present to the Queen.

*In the US 57 Muslims were elected in 2020. Keith Ellison, the first member of the House was sworn in on a copy of the Quran owned by President Jefferson, who had bought an English translation out of the ‘desire to understand Islam on its own terms.’

*Arab and Muslim entertainers, stand-up comedians, writers, actors, Little Mosque on the Prairie …

*To welcome Syrian refugees arriving in Canada, Ottawa French public schools joined to sing Talaʽ al-Badru ʽAlaynā,⁶ which went viral on YouTube.

Siddiqui’s openmindedness and lack of prejudice are his not-so-secret weapon, able to find common humanity where western propaganda serves up bile. To no small degree, thanks to Haroon and other new (brown) Canadians, Marshall McLuhan’s global village is a reality at home, the most successful heterogeneous experiment in human history.

ENDNOTES

• 1
  Dar al-harb vs Dar al-Salam, House of Peace, referring to the Muslim world.
• 2
  Quran16:13 And all the [beauty of] many hues-which He has created for you on earth: in this, behold, there is a message for people who [are willing to] take it to heart.
• 3
  Black, indigenous, people of colour.
• 4
  Half of Muslim Canadians consider their ethnic identity as very important. Statistics Canada, ‘The Canadian Census: A rich portrait of the country’s religious and ethnocultural diversity,’ 2022.
• 5
  Siddiqui, My name is not Harry: A memoir, 392.
• 6
  (طلع البدر) nasheed that the Ansar sang for the Islamic prophet Muhammad upon his arrival at Medina from the (non)battle of Tabuk.

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

How Israel Quietly Crushed Early American Jewish Dissent on Palestine

“Our Palestine Question,” an explosive new book by Geoffrey Levin, delves into American Jewish McCarthyism from the 1950s through late 1970s.

By Debbie Nathan

March 4, 2024

Source: The Intercept


At the State House, activists from the Providence community and the University gave speeches, decried Palestinian oppression, denounced Israel for its continued use of force and criticized the U.S. federal government for its financial support of the Israeli Defense Force. Media by Ashley Cai


The Israeli government covertly meddled into American Jewish politics from the 1950s to 1970s, and they did so to quash Jewish criticisms of the 1948 Nakba — the mass dispossession and expulsions of Palestinians during Israel’s founding — and Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Israeli diplomats who oversaw the furtive campaign were at one point assisted by Wolf Blitzer — today the host of CNN’s primetime show “The Situation Room.”

These are some of the findings of “Our Palestine Question,” an explosive new book by Emory University scholar Geoffrey Levin that offers historical perspective on today’s crisis in Gaza, especially as it plays out today among American Jews.

Since the murderous October 7 attacks by Hamas against Israel, and Israel’s overwhelming retaliatory attacks against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, American Jews have organized dramatic protests. They have demanded everything from a ceasefire and to an end to U.S. military funding for Israel.

This diverse group of American Jews opposed to Israeli policy, and, at times, Israel itself, is drawing on a history of activism in the U.S. that has long since faded into obscurity — and they are bringing it from history into the present day.

Many of these activists explicitly cite earlier political movements as their inspiration. One was the socialist, anti-Zionist General Jewish Labor Bund, founded over a century ago in Eastern Europe, but which had been defunct for generations. The others are a post-1980 agglomeration of U.S. groups including the now-defunct New Jewish Agenda and liberal J Street, which is still around and lobbying politicians, albeit with fewer resources than the Zionist right. These smaller groups were formed after avowed Zionists and anti-Zionists stopped talking to each other, except to scream.

What few activists remark upon, however, is a time within living memory, in the 1950s, when the biggest Jewish organization in the U.S. — the American Jewish Committee, or AJC — was publicly critiquing the Nakba and pushing Israel to afford full civil and human rights to Palestinians. Less noted and lesser known is how this remarkable status quo was erased: From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Israel orchestrated the back-channel attacks on influential individuals and groups, including the AJC, who were pushing for Palestinian rights.

“Our Palestinian Question” pries the lid from this suppressed tale.

American Jewish McCarthyism

Levin picked up the scent of this hidden history a few years ago. He was a Hebrew and Judaic Studies doctoral student then, sifting through Jewish history special collections in Manhattan as well as the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, when he dug up evidence of the sub rosa American Jewish McCarthyism. He was the first researcher to discover how the Israeli government, through its diplomats and a spy in the United States, pressured American Jewish institutions to ghost a prominent journalist, fire a brilliant researcher, and discredit an organization of Jews who were critiquing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and trying to open channels for discussion with Arabs.

Take the case of journalist William Zukerman. A respected Yiddish- and English-language writer in the 1930s and 1940s, with clips in Harpers and the New York Times, Zukerman started his own biweekly, the Jewish Newsletter, in 1948. It was highly critical of Jewish nationalism and its destructive effects in the new state of Israel and beyond.

In one story, Zukerman reported about a Holocaust survivor who had recently resettled in Israel, in the former home of an Arab family. The survivor became “openly obsessed” about her morality, Zukerman wrote, after her children found some of the evicted family’s possessions. “The mother was suddenly struck by the thought that her children were playing with the toys of Arab children who were now exiled and homeless,” Zukerman continued. “Is she not doing to the Arabs what the Nazis did to her and her family?”

By the early 1950s, the Jewish Newsletter had a few thousand subscribers, and its work was republished in many other outlets, Jewish and non-Jewish, with much larger circulations — Time magazine, for instance. Not all of Zukerman’s readers, however, opposed Zionism. Each of the hundreds of chapters of the Jewish student organization Hillel had a subscription to the Jewish Newsletter.

According to declassified Israeli Foreign Ministry files found by Levin, the Israeli government was alarmed by Zukerman’s influence on American Jews. It started a campaign to keep him from “confusing” Zionists about Israel and Palestinian rights. Israel aimed a letter-writing campaign at the New York Herald Post to discourage the paper from running more of Zukerman’s work, and hatched a scheme to distribute boilerplate text for Zionists to mail to other editors, asking them not to publish Zukerman anymore. The head of Israel’s Office of Information in New York worked to have the prestigious London-based Jewish Chronicle get rid of Zukerman’s column, and he lost the position. By 1953, his work no longer appeared in the Jewish press.

And there was Don Peretz, an American Jew with generationslong ancestral roots in the Middle East and Palestine. As a young man in the early 1950s, he’d written the first doctoral dissertation about the post-Nakba Palestinian refugee crisis. The study was considered so authoritative that it was published as a book that, for years, was used as a college text. Peretz’s work earned him attention from the AJC. Founded at the turn of the 20th century, the organization had spent decades advocating first for civil and human rights for American Jews and, later, for oppressed groups worldwide. Concerned about the plight of Palestinians and worried that their mistreatment by Israel would increase American antisemitism, the AJC in 1956 hired Peretz as a researcher.

Don Peretz, second from left, in Palestine in February 1949 with fellow volunteers for the Quaker group the American Friends Service Committee. The group was distributing aid to those displaced during the Nakba, the forced expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians during Israel’s founding. Photo: Courtesy of Deb Peretz

Peretz had extensive, friendly contacts with Palestinians. He began writing informational pamphlets and reports. In one, which an AJC leader personally gave to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Peretz suggested that Israel might repatriate Palestinians expelled during the Nakba. After Israeli officials read the pamphlet, they asked a worker at AJC to send them on-the-sly intelligence about the author, with the aim of getting him fired. Then Israel asked the AJC to submit all Peretz’s Middle East-related work to the Israeli Embassy in Washington or the Consul General in New York, for pre-publication review. The AJC complied. When Peretz wrote a new book about Israel and Palestine, the Israelis strongly disapproved of it, communicating their displeasure to the AJC. The group demoted Peretz to half-time work. He quit.

It’s probably no coincidence that Peretz’s departure occurred in 1958, the year the novel “Exodus” debuted. It quickly became a blockbuster and, later, a movie starring blonde, blue-eyed Paul Newman as a steely, pre-independence Israeli paramilitary warrior. It seemed by then that Americans, Jewish or not, were loving Israeli Zionism more and caring about Palestinians less.

Meanwhile, diaspora Jews were triumphantly assimilating into mainstream America. Their acceptance came with problems. With weakening ties to traditional religious practice, increasing intermarriage, and mass suburbanization, they grappled with an identity crisis and sought new touchstones. One was communal enactment of Holocaust remembrance. Another was the celebration of Israel — no matter what.

It was a cultural coup for pro-Israel advocates — American Jews were coming around en masse — informed by societal changes in the diaspora, but also with organized elements, much of it orchestrated by Israel, that catalyzed and enforced the shifts. Over the next decade, the trend would only increase, as Israel’s unlikely victory against its Arab neighbors in the 1967 Arab Israeli war reinforced themes of both admirable, scrappy Israel, and a nation badly in need of support from fellow Jews across the world. In the U.S., American Jews increasingly answered the call.

Against Two States

Even as the ubiquity of American Jewish support for Israel grew, Israel and its advocates began to push back not just on anti-Zionism, but even what would become widely known in the U.S. as liberal Zionism. It was in this capacity that Blitzer, the CNN host, became involved in the sorts of efforts Levin covers in “Our Palestine Question.”

Levin discusses an incident from late 1976 where Blitzer, still a young reporter, and Israeli government sources worked together to kneecap an American Jewish peace group called Breira: A Project of Concern in Diaspora-Israel Relations. Breira means “alternative” in Hebrew. The group had first organized in 1973 to protest the hard-line Jewish organizational positions that emerged after the recent 1973 Arab–Israeli War.

Pro-Israel advocates in the U.S. were taking on more right-wing visions of Zionism and reacted to the war by embracing the ideas that Zionist settlements in the occupied territories and ostracization of the Palestine Liberation Organization were essential to Israel’s survival. Instead, Breira wanted to provide the “alternative” and called for Israel to recognize Palestinians’ desire for nationhood; it was the first American Jewish group to advocate for a two-state solution. The New York Times editorialized in early 1976 that Breira was overcoming “the misapprehension of many Jewish Americans that criticism of Israeli policies would be seen as a rejection of Israel.”

Then Israel pushed back.

In November 1976, a handful of people who worked at several American Jewish organizations met secretly and as private individuals with moderate representatives of the PLO. Attendees were affiliated with the American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith, the National Council of Jewish Women, and Breira. They would later insist that they had no wish to engage in diplomacy with the PLO, only informal dialogue to discuss peacemaking. One meeting took place in New York City; the other was in Washington. Afterward, some attendees wrote reports and sent copies for informational purposes to Israeli diplomats they knew personally. They trusted that the diplomats would not publicize the meetings.

At the time when the meetings occurred, Blitzer worked as Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. His beat was reporting on how Middle East affairs played out in America, especially regarding Israel. The Jerusalem Post, however, was not his only employer. Blitzer also worked for two publications that, in effect, were the house organs of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Days after the Washington meeting, Blitzer wrote a hit job about the Washington meeting for the Jerusalem Post and named the American Jewish attendees. Based on details in his coverage and press that followed, attendees said it was clear that Blitzer had received a confidential report leaked by Israel. His piece quoted unnamed “Israeli officials” and an unnamed diplomat expressing “concern” about the meeting as part of novel “PLO propaganda tactics” with the aim of “the destruction of Israel.”

A firestorm ensued among American Jewish groups. All the organizations whose members had attended as individuals denounced the meetings — all, that is, except for Breira. Its continued defense of the gatherings prompted AIPAC to excoriate the group as “anti-Israel,” “pro-PLO,” and “self-hating Jews.” Virtually no influential Jewish organizations publicly countered these denouncements. Breira’s national convention in 1977 was disrupted and vandalized by intruders who left leaflets supporting the vigilante far-right Jewish Defense League. The group lost membership, and internal conflict led its major donor to withdraw funding. By 1978, Breira had sputtered out. Thanks to an AIPAC-linked journalist and Israeli officials, another vein of American Jewish dissent about Israeli policies had been stripped.

Though Levin’s book was already in press months before the October 7 attacks, the mothballed history it airs has become since especially apt. If the Jewish community decades ago had known about Israel’s meddling, “you could have had a broader conversation,” he speculates, “which maybe would have led to less discomfort discussing difficult issues now.”

Levin added that “a lot of really bright people were pushed out of the mainstream American Jewish establishment” for discussing issues that have today been furiously rekindled. Would Jewish America’s Palestine question have stronger answers now if not for Israel’s underhanded attempts, years ago, to silence its U.S. diaspora critics? “You have to wonder,” Levin said, “what the American Jewish community would have looked like if it had welcomed some of these voices.”

An American historian’s reflections on self-immolation as an act of protest


With so many other methods of dissent available, what is it that provokes individuals like Aaron Bushnell to resort to such a painful way of protesting? An expert weighs in.

RALPH YOUNG

People place flowers at a vigil for US Airman Aaron Bushnell at the US Army Recruiting Office in Times Square on February 27, 2024 in New York City. Bushnell died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on Sunday.

 (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images).

Dissent is central to American history. Indeed, the United States itself is a product of dissent. Colonists protesting against Parliament’s taxation policies in the 18th century moved from petitions to boycotts to demonstrations to property destruction to outright rebellion against the Crown.

After independence was won, the right to dissent was considered so important that the framers of the Constitution inscribed it into the First Amendment.

Throughout the subsequent history of the nation, Americans have protested for every cause imaginable - the abolition of slavery, workers’ rights to organise, women’s suffrage, civil rights for Black Americans, and equal rights for Latinos, Native Americans and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Every war in American history has had its protesters, from the Revolution to the Vietnam War, from the Civil War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.


Demonstrators protest inside the Rockefeller Center asking for a ceasefire in Gaza as US President Biden attends an interview in midtown Manhattan in New York, U.S. February 26, 2024 (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz).


Throughout all these movements, dissenters have employed a wide variety of means to protest for their cause. Writing letters to the press, signing petitions to lawmakers, giving speeches, organising teach-ins, participating in demonstrations, designing posters, staging political dramas in theatres and on the streets, and singing songs of protest.

If their voices are not heard, protesters engage in acts of civil disobedience or defiantly break laws they consider unjust or they might go further and engage in property destruction, riots, looting, flagrant acts of violence, and in some cases taking up arms.

From the Boston Tea Party to the Earth Liberation Front’s destruction of a ski lodge, from Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

From Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 to the torching of a police station in Minneapolis in 2020 during the George Floyd protests.


Demonstrators march through lower Manhattan during a rally to remember the murder of George Floyd on Tuesday, May 25, 2021, in New York (AP/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez).


Many activists have exposed themselves to bodily harm during protests or political action campaigns. One thinks of civil rights volunteers on the Freedom Rides in 1961 or those risking their lives in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964.

There have been times when dissenters around the world have put their lives on the line by engaging in hunger strikes—Alice Paul in 1917, Mahatma Gandhi repeatedly from the 1920s-40s, Cesar Chavez in 1968, Holger Meins in 1974, Bobby Sands in 1981.


Seldom, however, have dissenters expressed their outrage against injustice by deliberately committing suicide, especially through such unbearably painful means as Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation on February 25, protesting Israel’s war against Hamas, which he perceived as a war on Gaza.

Self-immolation is perhaps the most attention-grabbing protest a dissenter can perform, and it has a rich history.


A memorial to commemorate the monk Thic Quang Duc, who publicly set himself on fire in protest against the US-American backed South Vietnamese government on 11 June 1963, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 15 February 2015. The burning, which incited unrest that later led to the fall of the regime, took place publicly on the corner of Nguyen Dinh Chein and Cach Mang Tang Streets. Today there is a memorial and a sign commemorating the monk (Christiane Oelrich/picture alliance via Getty Images).

One of the most indelible images of modern protest was the self-immolation of Mahayana Buddhist monk Thích Quang Dúc on June 11, 1963. Thích Quang Dúc, and a procession of fellow monks, marched down a busy street in Saigon. Thích Quang Dúc sat down in the lotus position and began meditating. Monks chanted Buddhist chants while one of them poured gasoline over him and lit a match.

Thích Quang Dúc was instantly transformed into a pillar of fire, but he did not move or react to the flames until his body toppled over. Photographs and newsreel footage of the event shocked people around the world, especially Americans, many of whom were not even aware of what was happening in Vietnam.

During that summer, another five monks followed his example to protest against -South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem’s persecution of Buddhists. The impact of these protests helped bring about the coup that deposed Diem and eventually led to further US involvement and escalation of the disastrous war in Vietnam.

A group of US Armed Forces veterans burned their uniforms in a show of solidarity with the late airman Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in protest over Israel’s war on Gaza — and Washington’s complicity — on February 25 pic.twitter.com/1VJOTkb2F1— TRT World (@trtworld) February 29, 2024

This has inspired others to use self-immolation as a compelling weapon for protest. In November 1965, anti-war protester Norman Morrison, a Quaker, committed self-immolation at a demonstration at the Pentagon outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office window.

Antiwar protests in the United States intensified dramatically for the rest of the decade. In Prague, after the Russians militarily crushed the democratising "Prague Spring" movement in Czechoslovakia, 20-year-old Charles University student Jan Palach committed self-immolation in January 1969.

His act reverberated over the next 20 years, as anti-Soviet resistance in Czechoslovakia increased and eventually led to the 1989 Velvet Revolution precipitating the end of the Cold War.

Remember Mohamed Bouazizi? He was the Tunisian man who self-immolated to protest against his government in 2010. He wasn't labeled mentally ill. Obama compared him to Rosa Parks and the founding fathers. Although he shouldn't have connected her to them. But that's another story. pic.twitter.com/fGQvyFoCJ1— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) February 28, 2024

More recently, in December 2010, a young street vendor in Tunisia named Mohammad Bouazizi committed self-immolation as an act of defiance and despair against the harassment and humiliation he suffered at the hands of the autocratic regime.

This was the spark that set off the so-called "Arab Spring," as citizens of other Arab countries took to the streets protesting for freedom from despotic rule.

Climate activists who despaired that politicians would never heed their demands to enact laws to mitigate the devastating effects of climate change also grabbed attention for their cause through the means of self-immolation.

David Buckel set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in 2018 and Wynn Alan Bruce did so in front of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC in 2022.


A vigil is held in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, April 29, 2022, to honor Wynn Alan Bruce, 50, of Boulder, Colorado. Bruce self-immolated in front of the court building on Earth Day, April 22, 2022, and died from his injuries the following day. Bruce was a devout Buddhist, climate activist and photojournalist 

(Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post via Getty Images).


With so many other methods of protest available, what is it that provokes individuals like Aaron Bushnell to resort to such a painful way of protesting? Clearly, it is a last resort. All other means of convincing people, whether the public at large or those at the top of the power structure, have been exhausted without effect.


Self-immolation will surely garner attention. But it is more than that. The individual feels a sense of personal responsibility so deeply that he can no longer tolerate being a part of a society that refuses accountability and refuses to find a solution.
,,


Is anyone listening to Bushnell's plea?


Aaron Bushnell served in the US Air Force as an active-duty airman and I imagine that he was quite aware of the consequences of military activity.

Perhaps this heightened his sense of personal responsibility. The despair that Bushnell must have felt at the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza was so overwhelming that he decided he could no longer live in a world that tolerated such atrocities.


Is anyone listening to Bushnell's plea?

SOURCE: TRT WORLD

Ralph Young
Ralph Young is a history professor at Temple University where he teaches courses on Dissenters and Protest Movements in the United States. He also leads weekly teach-ins on the historical context of contemporary controversial issues. His most recent book is American Patriots: A Short History of Dissent. He is also the author of Dissent in America: Voices That Shaped a Nation, Dissent: The History of an America Idea, and Make Art Not War: Political Protest Posters from the Twentieth Century.


DC vigil remembers Aaron Bushnell after his pro-Gaza self-immolation

Protesters gather outside Israeli embassy in Washington DC to honour life and mourn death of 25-year-old US Airman, who set himself ablaze in front of the embassy to protest Israel's "genocide" in besieged Gaza.

SADIQ BHAT


A mourner places incense at a memorial during a vigil for US Airman Aaron Bushnell, who died after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. 

 / Photo: Reuters

A solemn vigil, suffused with a sense of mourning and reflection, has unfolded outside the Israeli embassy in the heart of US capital, Washington DC. The occasion: to honour the life and mourn the death of Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US Airman, who immolated himself on Sunday in front of the embassy to protest Israel's "genocide" in Gaza.

Bushnell's fiery protest, seen as a harrowing act of defiance against the relentless atrocities inflicted upon besieged population of Gaza, has struck a deep chord with many across the US and around the globe.

The hashtag #AaronBushnell remained the most popular trend on X, formerly Twitter, with an astounding one million posts by Monday.

On Sunday afternoon, Bushnell began a Twitch livestream and walked toward the Israeli embassy with an insulated water bottle full of flammable fluid.

"I will no longer be complicit in genocide," he said in the video. "I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal."

As news of his death from severe burning reverberated far and wide, impassioned discussions were ignited about the moral complexities of Israel's ongoing war in Gaza, the US role in arming Tel Aviv, and an individual's capacity to confront injustice, even at great personal cost.

Against the backdrop of the Israeli embassy's stern architecture, Monday's vigil took shape with a gathering of diverse voices united by a shared sense of grief and solidarity.

Veterans stood shoulder to shoulder with students, activists with ordinary citizens, all drawn together by a common belief in the righteousness of Bushnell's cause.

Candles flickered in the gathering dusk, casting long shadows across the faces of those assembled, as they held aloft placards emblazoned with Bushnell's final plea: "Free Palestine."



As the vigil continued, subdued voices began to rise, sharing heartfelt reflections and emotions stirred by Aaron Bushnell's action.

'My heart breaks for Aaron'

Yet, amidst the solemnity, there was also a palpable undercurrent of defiance — a refusal to be silenced in the face of injustice.

Sarah, a college student who had come to pay her respects and gave her first name only, spoke of the profound impact Bushnell's death had on her own sense of purpose.

"His bravery has shaken me to the core," she told TRT World, her voice trembling with emotion. "It makes me question what I'm doing to make a difference in the world."

As the evening wore on, voices rose softly amidst the flickering candlelight, sharing stories and memories of a young man whose extreme act against the war on besieged Palestinians has touched the lives of so many.

On social media, tributes poured in from every corner of the globe, with ordinary people hailing Bushnell as a "hero" and a "martyr" for peace.

"My heart breaks for Aaron and his family. No one should ever feel so desperate that they resort to such drastic measures. It's a tragedy, a wake-up call for us all to do better, to be bette," Olivia Thompson, a retired teacher, told TRT World at the vigil site.

Yet, even as accolades were heaped upon his memory, questions lingered about what Bushnell's legacy would be in the turbulent days ahead.

For some, his sacrifice served as a stark reminder of the urgent need for change — a call to action that could not be ignored.



At the vigil ordinary people from all walks of life hailed Bushnell as a hero and a martyr for peace.

'Working towards peace in Gaza'

"He [Bushnell] is a martyr just like the rest of the Palestinians, Omar, a Palestinian American protester said. "Your sacrifices will not be forgotten. Your bravery will not be forgotten. The people of Palestine thank you."

David, an orthodox Jewish protestor, told TRT World that he came from a family that had been through the Holocaust.

"I understand this firsthand, and I can understand the despair that Aaron must have felt. Self-immolation... it's a desperate act, one born out of anguish. We owe it to him to honour his memory by working towards peace in Gaza, by fighting for a Middle East where everyone lives in dignity and respect."

As the vigil drew to a close and the last embers of the candles faded into the cold February evening, one thing remained abundantly clear: Bushnell's death, called a "tragic event" by Pentagon on Monday, will likely add more pressure on the Biden administration to rein in its ally Israel and force a binding truce in Gaza.

An active-duty member of the US Air Force set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, US, in protest of Tel Aviv’s war on Palestinians in Gaza.

The man reportedly declared he would not be complicit in genocide and repeatedly shouted “Free Palestine” after… pic.twitter.com/EawTbyCEr4— TRT World (@trtworld) February 26, 2024

SOURCE: TRT WORLD

Sadiq S Bhat is a Senior Editor at TRT World.
@sadiquiz

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for AARON BUSHNELL 

Can a socialist ex-marine fill Joe Manchin’s seat in West Virginia?

Chris Stein in Oak Hill, West Virginia
Sun, November 19, 2023

To launch his campaign for US Senate, Zach Shrewsbury chose the site of one of America’s most famous hangings.

Charles Town, West Virginia, was where state authorities executed the abolitionist John Brown after he led an attack on a federal armory a few miles down the road in Harpers Ferry, a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the civil war. One hundred and sixty four years later, Shrewsbury – who decided against attempting to get a permit for the event at the site of the insurrection, which is now a national park – stood on the courthouse grounds where Brown’s hanging took place to announce that he would be the only “real Democrat” running to represent West Virginia in the Senate next year.

“We need leaders that are cut from the working-class cloth. We need representation that will go toe to toe with corporate parasites and their bought politicians. We need a leader who will not waver in the face of these powers that keep the boot on our neck,” Shrewsbury said to applause from the small group of supporters gathered behind him.

“So, as John Brown said, ‘These men are all talk. What we need is action.’ I’m taking action right now to stand up to these bought bureaucrats.”

Related: Joe Manchin warns second Trump term will ‘destroy democracy in America’

The remarks were a swipe at Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator who for the past 13 years had managed to represent what has become one of the most Republican states in the nation. In recent years he has used his power as a swing vote in Congress to stop several of Joe Biden’s legislative priorities – attracting the ire of progressives and prompting Shrewsbury to mount a primary challenge.

A few weeks after Shrewsbury began campaigning, he was showing a friend around an abandoned mining town when his phone rang with news: Manchin had decided not to seek re-election, leaving Shrewsbury as the only Democrat in the race.

By all indications, Shrewsbury, a 32-year-old Marine Corps veteran and community organizer, faces a difficult, if not impossible, road to victory. West Virginia gave Donald Trump his second-biggest margin of support of any state in the nation three years ago, and Manchin is the last Democrat holding a statewide office. Political analysts do not expect voters to elect the Democratic candidate – whoever that turns out to be – and predict Manchin will be replaced by either Governor Jim Justice or Congressman Alex Mooney, the two leading Republicans in the Senate race.

Shrewsbury’s message to them is: not so fast.

“People were really sold on the fact that Joe Manchin could be the only Democrat that could win in West Virginia, and I very much disagree,” Shrewsbury told the Guardian a week after the senator made his announcement.

Also a former governor, Manchin is considered the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, and when the party took the majority by a single vote in the chamber in 2021, Manchin stopped the Biden administration from passing policies that would have made permanent a program to reduce child poverty, and more forcefully fight climate change.

Sitting in a conference room at the Fayette county Democratic party’s headquarters in Oak Hill, where visitors pass a lobby displaying an American flag, a pride flag, and a stack of Narcan, the opioid-overdose reversal medication, Shrewsbury outlined his plans to run a campaign distinctly to the left of Manchin’s policies – and one he believes can win.

“People want someone who’s genuine. They don’t want a politician. They want someone who actually looks like them. I mean, hell, you can’t get much more West Virginia than this,” said Shrewsbury, fond of wearing flannel shirts and hunting caps.

Among his priorities are creating universal healthcare and childcare programs, and reducing the role of incarceration in fighting the opioid epidemic ravaging West Virginia.

“Everyone here just is thankful for the scraps or crumbs that we get from whoever we elect. And that’s who we keep electing – whoever can keep the little crumbs coming along. I’m trying to say there is a better way,” Shrewsbury said.

He also doesn’t shy away from identifying as a socialist, arguing the term may be less politically damaging than it appears – West Virginia Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary, and the independent senator, he argues, is popular even with the state’s Republicans.

“If caring about working-class people, caring about people having bodily autonomy, water rights, workers’ rights, makes you a socialist, then call me whatever you want. Doesn’t bother me,” Shrewsbury said.

Raised on a farm by a Republican family in rural Monroe county, Shrewsbury dropped out of college after a semester and joined the marines. In the years that followed, he guarded the perimeter at the US base in Guantánamo Bay, and was deployed to Japan, Malaysia and South Korea before eventually moving to Seattle and then returning to West Virginia, where he realized how bereft his home state was of the prosperity he saw elsewhere in the country and overseas.

“Why can’t my home be as economically profitable as the rest?” Shrewsbury recalls thinking. “It woke me up in the Marine Corps a little bit, and once I got back home, I really just kind of put the nail in the coffin there for what I was gonna be for work. I want to help people.”

He turned to community organizing, seeing it as a way to help a state with the fourth-highest poverty rate in the nation, which is struggling to transition from the declining coal and logging industries that have historically undergirded its economy.

Joe Manchin, who is stepping down at the next election. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

“I know Zach’s a long shot. It’s like David against three Goliaths,” said Pam Garrison, a fellow community organizer. “Zach is able to be hardline when he needs to be. I’ve seen him being forceful and steadfast in his principles and what things are. And then I’ve seen the compassionate and empathy side of Zack too, And that’s what makes a good politician.”

Since 2020, Shrewsbury has helped towns dig out from flooding, door-knocked in the narrow Appalachian valleys – known as hollers – to find out what residents were looking for from the state legislature, and talked to mayors and city councils about the opportunities presented by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes consumer usage of renewable energy, including home solar panels.

Though Manchin played a key role in authoring the IRA, he also nixed the expanded child tax credit, which has been credited with cutting the child poverty rate by half in 2021, the sole year it was in effect. Shrewsbury was outraged by reports that later emerged of the senator privately expressing worries that people would use the program’s money to buy drugs, and jumped into the race.

Despite the state’s conservative leanings, Sam Workman, the director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University, believed Manchin may have had a path to victory had he decided to run. But he said the same cannot be said for Shrewsbury or any other Democrat.

“It’s kind of a fall-on-your-sword moment,” Workman said. “Politics is like sports: you should never say never, but I do not see the Democrats winning the Senate seat, no matter who runs.”

Shrewsbury may be alone in the Democratic primary at the moment, but he expects other candidates to enter. Since launching his campaign, he has not heard from the state Democratic party, nor the national party’s senate campaign arm.

“I’m not exactly what the party wants, because I speak my mind. You know, I’m not going to toe the party line,” he said. “I wish the party would get back in more touch with the workers. But like I said, I have the message that many people aren’t saying.”

Should There be a Supreme Court? 

Its Role Has Always Been Anti-Democratic

BY MICHAEL HUDSON

COUNTERPUNCH
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“Brown, J., an’ Harlan, J., is discussin’ th’ condition in th’ Roman Impire befure th’ fire …” Political cartoon by Frederick Opper, 1890. Library of Congress.

Vested interests create “checks and balances” primarily to make political systems non-responsive to demands for social reform. Historically, therefore, the checks are politically unbalanced in practice. Instead of producing a happy medium, their effect often has been to check the power of the people to assert their interests at the expense of the more powerful. Real reform requires a revolution – often repeated attempts. The Roman Republic suffered five centuries of fighting to redistribute land and cancel debts, all of which failed as the oligarchy’s “checks” imposed deepening economic dependency and imbalance.

The Supreme Court is America’s most distinctive check. Its deepening bias since its takeover by “conservatives” claiming to be “originalist” interpreters of the constitution, has led to the most widespread protests since Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the court in the 1930s by expanding its membership to create a more democratic majority. Although appointed by presidents and consented to by Congress, the judges’ lifetime tenure imposes the ideology of past elections on the present.

So why are they needed at all? Why not permit Congress to make laws that reflect the needs of the time? The Court’s judges themselves have pointed out that if Congress doesn’t like their rulings, it should pass its own laws, or even a constitutional amendment, to provide a new point of reference.

That is not a practical solution in today’s world. The most obvious reason is that Congress is locked in a stalemate, unable to take a firm progressive step because of how far the U.S. political as well as judicial system has long been dominated by corporate and financial interests. wielding enormous sums of money to corrupt the election process since the Citizens United ruling in 2010 even at the nomination stage to determine the candidates. The Federalist Society has embarked on a five-decade lobbying effort to groom and promote judges to serve the vested interests.[1] When today’s Supreme Court act as mediums to ask what the original drafters of the Constitution wanted or meant, they simply are using these ghostly spirits as proxies for today’s ruling elites.

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court’s “originalist” seances rejecting as unconstitutional laws that most Americans want – on the excuse that they are not what the wealthy New England merchants and southern slave-owners who drafted the Constitution would have intended – classical Greek and Roman oligarchies created their own judicial checks against the prospect of Sparta’s kings, Athenian popular assemblies and Roman consuls enacting laws at the expense of the vested interests.

Sparta had two kings instead of just one, requiring their joint agreement on any new rules. And just in case they might join together to limit the wealth of the oligarchs, they were made subject to a council of ephors to “advise” them. A kindred Roman spirit called for two consuls to head the Senate. To ward against their joining to cancel debts or redistribute land – the constant demand of Romans throughout the Republic’s five centuries, 509-27 BC – the Senate’s meetings could be suspended if religious authorities found omens from the flight of birds or other airy phenomena. These always seemed to occur when a challenge to the oligarchy seemed likely to pass.

The historian Theodor Mommsen called this tactic “political astrology.” The most blatant attempt occurred in 59 BC when Julius Caesar was elected consul and proposed an agrarian law to settle some of Pompey’s veterans as well as urban plebs on public land in Italy. Additional land was to be bought from private owners, using funds from Pompey’s campaign in Asia Minor.

 Cato the Younger led the Roman Senate’s Optimates who feared Caesar’s (or anyone’s) popularity. Opposing any change in the status quo, he started one of his famous all-day speeches. Caesar ordered him led away, but many senators followed Cato out, preventing a vote from being taken. Caesar then simply bypassed the Senate to put the measure before the Centuriate Assembly, composed largely of army veterans. That was a tactic that the reformer Tiberius Gracchus had perfected after 133 to promote his own land redistribution (for which he was assassinated, the oligarchy’s traditional fallback defense in all epochs).[2]

When Caesar’s opponents threatened violence to block the popular vote, Pompey threatened to use his own force. And when the time came for the Senate to ratify the law, Caesar and Pompey filled the Forum with their soldiers, and a large crowd gathered. Cato’s son-in-law, M. Calpurnius Bibulus was Caesar’s annoying co-consul, and tried to suspend the voting by claiming to see bad omens, making public business illegal.

Caesar overruled Bibulus, based on his own higher authority as pontifex maximus, leading Bibulus to declare the rest of the year a sacred period in which no assemblies could be held or votes taken. But the crowd drove him away and broke his insignia of consulship, the ceremonial fasces carried by his lictors, and beat the tribunes allied with him. Cato likewise was pushed away when he tried to force his way to the platform to block the vote. He and Bibulus fled, and Caesar’s bill was passed, including a clause requiring all senators to take an oath to adhere to it. Bibulus went home and sulked, insisting that the entire year’s laws be nullified because they were passed under threat of violence. It was the oligarchy, however, that settled matters by assassinating Caesar and other advocates of land and debt reform.

Athens, which turned oligarchic in the 4^th century BC after losing the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, used a tactic closer to today’s Supreme Court by trying to subject laws to conformity with an alleged “ancestral constitution” that presumably should never be changed – at least in a way that would favor democracy. Claiming to restore the supposed constitution of Solon, the Thirty Tyrants installed by Sparta’s oligarchy in 404 BC downgraded the Athenian boule’s governing five hundred citizens into a merely “advisory” group whose views had no official weight.[3]

The great watershed in Athenian history had been Solon’s seisachtheia – literally “shedding of [debt] burdens” in 594 BC, cancelling personal debts that bound debtors in near bondage. New demands for debt cancellation and land redistribution remained the primary democratic demands for the next four centuries. Androtion (ca. 344 BC), a follower of the oligarchic Isocrates, sought to claim the authority of Solon while denying that he had actually cancelled debts, claiming that he merely revalued the coinage, weights and measures to make debts more easily payable.[4] But there was no coinage in Solon’s time, so this attempt to rewrite history was anachronistic. That often happens when mediums claim to channel the spirit of the dead who cannot speak.

In a similar tradition, the authors of America’s constitution created the Supreme Court to provide a check on the danger that political evolution might lead Congress to pass laws threatening oligarchic rule. There no longer is a pontifex to block democratic lawmaking by claiming to read auspices in the flight of birds or other airy phenomena. Instead, there is a more secular subordination of new laws to the principle that they must not be changed from what was intended by the authors of the Constitution – as interpreted by their counterpart elites in today’s world. This approach fails to take into account how the world is evolving and how the legal system needs to be modernized to cope with such change.

I have found it to be an axiom of the history of legal philosophy that if the popular political spirit is for democratic reform – especially supporting taxes and other laws to prevent the polarization of wealth between the vested interests and the economy at large – the line of resistance to such progress is to insist on blocking any change from “original” constitutional principles that supported the power of vested interests in the first place.

The U.S. political system has become distorted by the power given to the Supreme Court enabling it to block reforms that the majority of Americans are reported to support. The problem is not only the Supreme Court, to be sure. Most voters oppose wars, support public healthcare for all and higher taxes on the wealthy. But Congress, itself captured by the oligarch donor class, routinely raises military spending, privatizes healthcare in the hands of predatory monopolies and cuts taxes for the financial rent-seeking class while pretending that spending money on government social programs would force taxes to rise for wage-earners.

The effect of the corporate capture of Congress as well as the Supreme Court as the ultimate oligarchic backstop is to block Congressional politics as a vehicle to update laws, taxes and public regulation in keeping with what voters recognize to be modern needs. The Supreme Court imposes the straitjacket of what America’s 18^th-century slaveowners and other property owners are supposed to have wanted at the time they wrote the Constitution.

James Madison and his fellow Federalists were explicit about their aim. They wanted to block what they feared was the threat of democracy by populists, abolitionists and other reformers threatening to check their property “rights” as if these were natural and inherent. The subsequent 19^th century’s flowering of classical political economists explaining the logic for checking rentier oligarchies was far beyond what they wanted. Yet today’s Supreme Court’s point of reference is still, “What would the authors of the U.S. Constitution, slaveowners fearful of democracy, have intended?” That logic is applied anachronistically to limit every democratic modernization from the right of unionized labor to go on strike, to abortion rights for women, cancellation of student debt and the right of government to tax wealth.

Even if Congress were not too divided and stalemated to write laws reflecting what most voters want, the Supreme Court would reject them, just as it sought for many decades to declare a national income tax unconstitutional under the theory of “takings.” The Supreme Court can be expected to block any law threatening the victory of the Thatcherite and Reaganomics doctrine of privatization, “small” government unable to challenge the power of wealth (but big enough to crush any attempts by labor, women or minorities to promote their own interests), a state of affairs that is an anomaly for a nation claiming to be a democracy.

A nation’s constitution should have the flexibility to modernize laws, taxes and government regulatory power to remove barriers to broadly-based progress, living standards and productivity. But these barriers have been supported by oligarchies through the ages. That was why the Supreme Court was created in the first place. The aim was to leave the economy in the control of property holders and the wealthiest families. That anachronistic judicial philosophy is helping turn the United States into a failed state by empowering a wealthy minority to reduce the rest of the population to economic dependency.

We are repeating the economic polarization of ancient Greece and Rome that I have described in my recent book The Collapse of Antiquity. The 7^th– and 6^th-century BC crisis of personal debt and land concentration led to social revolution by reformers (“tyrants,” not originally a term of invective) in Corinth, Sparta and other Greek-speaking city-states and Aegean islands. Solon was appointed archon to resolve the crisis in Athens. Unlike reformers in other Greek cities, he did not redistribute the land, but he did cancel the debts and removed the land’s crop-payment stones. The ensuing 6^th century saw Solon’s successors lay the groundwork for Athenian democracy.

But the next three centuries saw the rise of creditor oligarchies throughout Greece and Italy, using debt as a lever to monopolize land and reduce citizens to bondage. These increasingly aggressive oligarchies fought, with more and more overt violence, against new reformers seeking to cancel debts and redistribute the land to prevent the economy falling into austerity, clientage and reliance on the dole. Their oligarchic ideology was much like that of today’s right-wing Supreme Court in its approach to constitutional law. The common denominator is an age-old drive to prevent democratic change, above all by using wealth as a means of controlling the political process. That is the philosophy outlined in the Powell Memo, and in the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling permitting the political campaign system to be financialized and, in effect, privatized in the hands of the Donor Class.

As in classical antiquity, the exponential rise in debt has polarized wealth ownership. Personal debt bondage no longer exists, but most home buyers and wage earners are obliged to take on a working-lifetime debt burden to obtain a home of their own, an education to get a job to qualify for mortgage loans to buy their home, and credit-card debt simply to make ends meet. The result is debt deflation as labor is obliged to spend an increasing proportion of its income on debt service instead of goods and services. That slows the economy, while creditors use their rising accumulation of wealth to finance the inflation of housing prices, along with stock and bond prices – with yet more debt financing.

The conflict between creditors and debtors is a red thread running throughout American history, from the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s to the monetary deflation of the 1880s as “hard money” creditor interests rolled back prices and incomes to be paid in gold, increasing the control of bondholders over labor. Today, U.S. debt and tax policy is passing out of the Congress to the Supreme Court, whose members are groomed and vetted to make sure that they will favor financial and other rentier wealth by leading the Court to impose the founders’ pre-democratic philosophy of constitutional law despite the past few centuries of political reforms that, at least nominally, have endorsed democracy over oligarchy.

The victory of rentier wealth has led to the deindustrialization of America and the resulting predatory diplomacy as its economy seeks to extract from foreign countries the products that it no longer is producing at home. This is why foreign countries are moving to pursue a philosophy rejecting debt deflation, privatization and the shift of economic planning from elected governments to financial centers from Wall Street to the City of London, the Paris Bourse and Japan.

Any resilient society’s constitution should be responsive to the evolution of economic, technological, environmental and geopolitical dynamics. U.S. legal philosophy reflects mainstream economics in trying to lock in a set of principles written by creditors and other rentiers fearful of making the financial system, tax system and distribution of wealth more conducive to prosperity than to austerity and economic polarization. While there no longer is an attempt to roll back the clock to impose the outright slavery that most framers of the Constitution endorsed, the spread of debt deflation and debt dependency has become a form of economic bondage that is the modern “conservative” counterpart to the racial slavery of old. It is what the “original” power elite are thought to have wanted if we choose to go back in a time machine and ask them, instead of looking toward a less oligarchic future.

Notes.

[1] The Lewis Powell memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on August 23, 1971 laid out this plan. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/. For a review of how this almost conspiratorial propaganda and censorship attack was financed see Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history,” Harpers, September, 2004. Available at: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm.

[2] See Cassius Dio, Roman History 38.2.2. I discuss this affair in The Collapse of Antiquity, chapter 18.

[3] Athēnaion Politeia 35.2 and Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3.2 and 11.

[4] Plutarch, Solon 15.2.

Michael Hudson’s new book, The Destiny of Civilization, will be published by CounterPunch Books next month.