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Saturday, June 22, 2024

Will the Revolution Be Funded?

Organizers and researchers Zac Chapman and Nairuti Shastry examine how movements can build power by working within, without, and against philanthropy.'

June 15, 2024
Source: The Forge


Image credit: Big Door Brigade



In April 2022, grassroots organization Mijente unveiled a political framework in which it advocated for a threefold strategy of working within, without, and against the state to achieve its political goals. This framing was inspired by a movement group in Chile, the Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha.

We propose a similar path: building strategic alignment across groups working within, without, and against philanthropy. We aim to share the historical and present-day value of diverse approaches to fundraising that include but are in no way limited to philanthropic investment. Moreover, we seek to show how aligning work within, without, and against philanthropy can catalyze power building on the Left.
New Gilded Age

This April marked twenty years since INCITE!’s landmark conference, “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” shifted the conversation about how the Left organizes and funds our movements. The conference and eponymous anthology published in 2007 put forth incisive critiques of how the “nonprofit industrial complex”—largely due to its pernicious relationship with philanthropy—professionalizes, derails, and cools off dissent that would otherwise go toward mass movement building.

INCITE!’s own experience was informed by a 2004 incident in which the Ford Foundation retracted a $100,000 grant after catching wind of a letter the group had written in support of Palestinian liberation. Two decades later, censorship continues, and funders remain largely silent about the escalating genocide and collective punishment wrought on the Palestinian people.

The past two decades have marked the rise of a “new gilded age” of capitalist accumulation. Foundations currently hoard upward of $1.5 trillion. Moreover, movement organizations on both the Left and Right increasingly rely on this capital to advance their work, no matter how frustrating the funding process may be. In March 2024, the New Economy Coalition (an organization with whom we both work) hosted “Will the Revolution Be Funded?,” an event marking the launch of a new Solidarity Economy Funding Library. When asked to share a word or a phrase participants might use to describe what resourcing has looked like for their communities at large, the chat flooded with hundreds of comments: keywords included “gaslighting,” “exploitative,” “scarce,” and “soul theft and spirit murder.”

Foundations gave away an estimated $105.21 billion in 2022—a 2.5 percent increase from the previous year—so why does it still feel like there is not enough?
Thrice-Stolen Wealth

As Justice Funders note in their Just Transition Investment Framework, foundations “[contribute] over 13 times [more] to extractive global stock markets” than to grants through their portfolio assets. Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to philanthropic wealth as “twice stolen,” but it could really be viewed as thrice stolen: the $1.5 trillion in current US philanthropic assets are not just (1) stolen from wage laborers and (2) warehoused outside of the realm of taxation but are also (3) actively invested every day into ensuring this same extractive cycle continues.

Where do we go from here? While INCITE!’s conference, anthology, and very phrase “nonprofit industrial complex” conjure images of burning one’s problematic nonprofit to the ground, the introduction to the book’s 2009 edition makes it clear that “the more important question [is] not whether one should ever get nonprofit status, but what is the most strategic way to use nonprofits so they support movements rather than being thought of as [the] movement.”

When we live in a world where nonprofits have largely become the movement, we need to explore better ways—beyond philanthropy—of building power.
Organizing Without

Tiny (lisa) gray-garcia is a lot of things—“that houseless momma, that houseless daughter,” “a poverty scholar…[who rocks her] jailhouse attire”—and unabashedly so. As cofounder of POOR Magazine and PeopleSkool, she is invested in work that uplifts the voices of the poor and unhoused. The Homefulness Project in East Oakland is a manifestation of that work, a co-housing project funded by what tiny calls “the bank of community reparations,” an interracial and interclass community fund.

Self-funding for unmet community and movement needs, although difficult and time-consuming, is at the heart of organizing without philanthropy. The historical record is replete with other examples of how self-funding our movements can itself serve as prefigurative power building. One of the Black Panther Party’s most profitable funding streams funding stream came from its book publications, a point that compelled researcher Andrew Fearnley to write that “the Panthers’ books were not just accounts of their activism, but examples of it.”

Another example comes from the radically simple technology of member dues, which union members have put toward worker power building for decades. Recently, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced a $40 million investment of dues toward organizing workers in the nonunion auto sector. This mark of renewed labor militancy came just weeks after UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, plans for a 2028 general strike.

Mutual aid groups like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project also organize without philanthropy: In 2013, it released a report describing how sliding-scale dues structures build “members’ investment in the work,” limit potential philanthropic co-optation, and nurture leadership. And new outfits like the Resource Organizing Project are building off of this wisdom by training cohorts of movement organizations to build out grassroots donor bases while reconstructing fundraising to be a “form of organizing, power building, and healing.”

All of this draws on the long legacy of community savings pools and other forms of solidarity funding to meet immediate needs across historically colonized and oppressed communities, precluding the need for external monetary support.

Beyond self-funding, organizing without philanthropy includes fortifying alternative financing efforts—like community lending, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), social movement investing, regulation crowdfunding, and more—so there is no longer a hyper-reliance on philanthropic capital.

The work of both PODER Emma and the Drivers Cooperative is a testament to this effort, serving as powerful prefigurations of what solidarity economies can look like if we truly leverage a plurality of non-extractive financing options. In the words of Seed Commons (a cooperatively governed network of loan funds that moves millions of dollars into worker-owned businesses each year): “Non-extraction is defined simply as the returns to the lender not ever exceeding the wealth created by the borrower.” Non-extractive financing—as opposed to traditional financing—places emphasis on the social impact and community success of the investment alongside (and, at times, over) financial return.

Alan Ramirez is a community organizer who hails from western North Carolina and works as a cooperative developer with PODER Emma. For years, PODER Emma has worked to preserve the homes and livelihoods of Asheville’s increasingly gentrifying immigrant neighborhoods—and it’s done so by relying on non-extractive lending capital for sustainable land and housing projects in the city’s Emma neighborhood. Alan’s care for workers in the South is palpable, even over Zoom. When asked, at the conclusion of our event, what they would want wealth holders (read: hoarders) to know, they looked unflinchingly into the camera and said, “We got us.”

Erik Forman is one of those people who is so gracious and humble that you wouldn’t believe that his Drivers Cooperative, a worker-owned alternative to Uber, made headlines in the New York Times. As Erik explains it, the Drivers Cooperative started in 2019 as 25 drivers in a classroom and grew to 2,500 drivers and 40,000 users by August 2021. Largely funded through non-extractive investments, a membership drive with 2,500 members, and regulation crowdfunding, the cooperative is a hallmark example of building without philanthropy.

As Alan and Erik secure resourcing outside the current paradigm of reliance on philanthropic dollars, they not only demonstrate what fundraising looks like in a post-philanthropic world but also showcase a new form of community-controlled enterprise that is not hoarding the wealth that creates philanthropic surplus in the first place.
Organizing Within

There have been some improvements in the realm of philanthropy in recent years, most notably in the rise of more movementanchored funders and radical philanthropy-serving organizations (PSOs). It’s also important to note recent strides in democratic practices such as participatory grantmaking, giving circles, and worker self-directed governance. Much of these advancements have largely been the result of the burgeoning field of funder organizing, which looks at certain groups of funders as a base that can and should be organized to support redistributive and reparative work.

But it would be a misunderstanding to view funder organizing as merely “moving the money.” “Money is a governance tool. We’re trying to figure out how to govern, and we need to build out our infrastructure,” said Michael Brennan, project coordinator of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, on a recent call. Brennan sees the notion that money is something finite “to be moved” as limiting our organizing horizons. Transactionally viewing funders as ATMs to rage against also absolves them of their wider political responsibility for shifting power.

Bridget Brehen, director of resource mobilization for Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, recently told us that we must organize alongside the organizers and allies that have strategically deployed into philanthropy, as well as organizing funders to see themselves “as political actors with the potential to become conscious organizers.” In the same breath, she shared that the ecosystem model of transformative organizing presents unique challenges in its application to philanthropy. As Brehen put it, “Poor and working-class people are the base and primary drivers of transformation. Who is the ‘base’ we are organizing in philanthropy, given the class character is vastly different?”

Additionally, there are so many different sectors within philanthropy itself (e.g., foundations, PSOs, and donor advisors). A continuous question remains: How do we further organize the multifarious bases of philanthropy in alignment both with grassroots groups and with each other?

Writing in Dissent last year, Working Families Party organizer Nina Luo made a compelling case for bringing funders “into live campaigns where they can experience what it’s like to struggle together.” Luo calls for a militant comradeship with funders who “practice organizing skills, build deep relationships of trust, see directly how money sustains or kills work, and develop the political discipline that comes from making complex decisions with real consequences.” Such a process outlines one way in which we can organize funders into alignment with grassroots movements.

One limitation of Luo’s piece is what amounts to a dismissal of projects that go beyond seizing and wielding state power. Limiting the funding ecosystem to policy and electoral wins harms the very forms of prefigurative power building that make those wins meaningful. Building housing justice won’t just come from passing TOPA (tenant opportunity to purchase) laws and electing more members of the Squad. It’s also going to derive from resourcing the tenants’ rights groups and community land trusts that make laws like TOPA worth fighting for. It’s going to derive from resourcing communities willing to take risky direct actions that shape a narrative exposing how violent rentier capitalists truly are. And it’s going to derive from resourcing movement-anchored lawyers like those at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, who are developing new legal structures of what housing under community control can look like.

While funder organizing entails philanthropy grappling with the paradoxical role of working to provide capital to those from whom wealth has been intergenerationally stolen, it also entails opening the risky terrain of engaging with (some) funders as solidaristic political actors who can become organizers.
Organizing Against

While organizing with funders is a crucial component of leftist power building, it’s severely limited by one blatant fact: on a structural level, we’re not going to convince the owning class to work against their class interests. And yet there has been a glaring asymmetry between the number of groups organizing within philanthropy (as evidenced by the proliferation of the industry of philanthropic-serving organizations) and the number of those attempting to wield both state and people power to fight back against big philanthropy as a permissible phenomenon in the first place.

This has not always been the case. In 1915, institutional philanthropy, still in its nascent stage, was put on trial in the form of a congressional investigation. The proceedings included testimonies by people across the political spectrum speaking out against institutional philanthropy as a deeply anti-democratic phenomenon. The commission concluded that foundations “are so grave a menace [that] it would be desirable to recommend their abolition.”

Today Congress remains largely silent on philanthropy’s unchecked power. The 1969 Tax Reform Act was the last meaningful federal policy reigning in the power of foundations. Even a milquetoast piece of legislation calling for a mandatory 15-year payout of donor-advised fund assets has stalled in Congress. However, several advocates are still working toward leveraging policy-level interventions to make the landscape untenable for big philanthropy. The Institute for Policy Studies’ 2022 Gilded Giving report, for example, calls for a constellation of non-reformist reforms that would completely overhaul philanthropy as we know it.
Aligning Our Strategies

The current political moment is awash with resourcing strategies, from resurgent dues-based labor organizing, increased mutual aid activity, and funder organizing to frontline groups using financial tools to put community assets under community control. Many initiatives are already oscillating among within, without, and against strategies. It Takes Roots, for example, organizes funders to advocate for policies that curtail the power of philanthropy itself. The organization with whom we work, New Economy Coalition, is funded by institutional philanthropy, grassroots donors, and mandatory member dues.

Mijente’s threefold political framework is powerful precisely because it allows for cross-coalitional experiments in power building that wouldn’t otherwise take place. These experiments are happening at this very moment in the form of solidarity between organized labor and worker cooperatives. As Brennan reflected to us, “One of the reasons unions and cooperatives should work together is that cooperatives can help shape the ceiling of what is possible in an industry, and unions can help raise the floor toward that.”

Despite this proliferation of diverse funding strategies, there continues to be a lack of alignment. To us, after having worked in this field for nearly a decade, one thing is certain: The current economic system operates on one thousand coordinated fronts. In order to supplant it, we must work on ten thousand.

This kind of alignment necessitates going beyond reductionist arguments for moral purity (even Vladimir Lenin avidly courted wealthy donors and was an unlikely champion of professionalized paid organizers, as Chicago-based organizer and researcher Jasson Perez recently unearthed). It requires us to hold philanthropy and funders to account culturally, materially, and legislatively. It compels us to imagine and build out a rigorous federation of anti-capitalist financial tools and tactics. And it demands that we organize together to make this work, in the words of Toni Cade Bambara, irresistible.

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Zac Chapman is an organizer and researcher based in western Massachusetts. He is the Resource Mobilization Director at the New Economy Coalition, a steering committee member of Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network, and board member of LittleSis. tiktok: @applzeed

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Five Digital Strategies of Germany’s Neo-Fascists
June 7, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Image by DT Rocks, Creative Commons 4.0


Germany’s far-right extremist party – the AfD – has achieved a domineering presence on “social media” – commercial online platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc. And breaking the digital power of the AfD is an urgent task for all democrats.

Imagine Germany’s Chancellor Herr Scholz, Finance Minister Herr Lindner, and Foreign Minister Frau Baerbock answer the following question, “what can people do who are unhappy with the current government?”, with a video that shows their combined answer, “vote AfD”.

Of course, Germany’s chancellor, vice-chancellor, and foreign minister would never utter these words – as all three belong to democratic parties. Yet, this scenario of a faked online election clip – using artificial intelligence (AI) – was one of the suggestions made by AfD apparatchiks to tempt unsuspecting voters to vote for the AfD.

Worse, the AfD has already posted a total of twenty-four of such “fake clips” in what the AfD calls “a digital advent calendar” – an online platform propaganda trick in the run-up to Christmas.

The AfD’s online propaganda shows the most successful use of AI in party communications ever undertaken in Germany. In fact, Germany’s neo-fascist AfD is the “pioneer” in the use of AI for electoral purposes, for fake news, far-right propaganda and otherwise.

That the AfD’s manipulative online strategy is leading voters – and the electoral process as a whole – into a destructive and undemocratic direction that includes gaslighting and fake TikTok clips, should hardly be surprising.

Many younger AfD apparatchiks have grown up as “digital natives” – people who are born in the “Age of the Internet” and are accustomed to the Internet. These AfD flunkies prefer to focus on direct communication with the electorate.

As awareness of the success of the AfD’s online strategy started to kick in, there were plenty of media reporting on the AfD’s dominance in online political advertising. Yet, the stratospheric advantage the AfD has achieved over Germany’s democratic parties barely becomes clear through numbers and figures alone.

What complicates this is the fact that the numbers of AfD fans, supporters and online followers alone do not provide concrete information about the actual reach and impact of the AfD’s online propaganda.

On TikTok, for example, an AfD video averaged 435 viewers in 2022 and 2023. By comparison: the videos of Germany’s conservatives (the CDU) averaged at just 90 – this is the second-best result! Yet, it still is way behind the AfD reaching five times as many people.

The most successful TikTok video of the neo-fascist AfD reached a whopping 6.6 million viewers. This propaganda video was entitled “This politics is crazy”.

It contains an excerpt from a speech by the AfD parliamentarian Martin Sichert. His far-right rhetoric is a political propaganda masterpiece. He falsely claimed that an Ukrainian refugee, driving a Mercedes-Benz S-Class, receives more state-financial support in Germany than a single mother.

This is not new. Hitler’s speeches presented an endless number of falsehoods. Yet millions believed the antisemitic nonsense of an Aryan race being threatened by a non-existing ‘worldwide conspiracy of Jews’. None of those twisted conspiracy fantasies ever occurred but millions were killed. As Madeleine Albright once said,


“it is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps

than to kill the ideas that gave them birth”.

To spread its dehumanising ideology, the AfD has become “the” champion of YouTube, TikTok, and so on. Worse, the far-right party also shows manipulative propaganda videos on its own TV channel called “AfD TV”. With this, the AfD reaches the highest number of people among all of Germany’s political parties.

The most successful YouTube videos of the AfD can reach an audience of millions. One of the AfD’s more disturbing propaganda videos, for example, is entitled “The income of politicians – simply UNFAIR!” It received 3.1 million viewers.

In it, the AfD attacks the compensation of democratically elected politicians. The AfD does not attack the rich and super-rich but politicians. Perhaps, the AfD’s goal is to eliminate such compensations so that only the rich can enter the parliament.

The next most popular AfD propaganda video is “The Weidel hammer” by – now officially labelled – “nazi-bitch” Alice Weidel. The video had 2.5 million viewers.

Apart from all this, Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) are also online platforms where the AfD has the highest number of interactions and the highest reach with its unscrupulous self-marketing postings.

Until today, the “online superpower” AfD remains the unchallenged titleholder when it comes to the Internet far outmanoeuvring all other parties. Worse, it holds this title on “all” relevant social media platforms. With its individualised contributions, the AfD is able to address an audience of millions.

From a strategic point of view, the AfD’s dominant presence on TikTok, for example, seems to be of great importance. In Germany’s 2021 election, the AfD only received 6% among first-time voters. The AfD’s overall result was: 12.6%. Since then, the AfD’s TikTok activities have significantly expanded to capture the pool of young voters.

The AfD has done this at all levels: federal, state, and local. This has contributed to better results among young voters. In the former East-Germany state of Saxony, for example, the AfD was supported by 21% of young voters – ahead of the Greens (20%) – the traditional home of Germany’s young voters.

These are some of the most outstanding successes of the AfD’s digital propaganda. Structurally, the electoral victories of Germany’s right-wing populists can largely be attributed to its popularity on social media platforms.

Yet, there is also a strong link between being relevant for online algorithms and displaying the typical characteristics of right-wing populism. This is the point where right-wing sensationalism meets the commercialism of online platforms.

Both attract each other. Right-wing populists deliver emotional, polarised, sensational and provocative contents. These are promptly rewarded by online algorithms creating – almost automatically and definitely “by default” – an extremely high visibility.

In addition to these favourable conditions, there are also several very specific reasons for the success of the AfD on online platforms. In essence, five factors can be identified:

1. Resources:

Firstly, the AfD spends an extremely high level of resources in terms of finance, personnel, and technology on its digital propaganda. The AfD was also the first political party to set up a professional studio for video production on its parliamentarian premises in Berlin.

With this, the AfD has gained a competitive advantage on old (Facebook) and new (TikTok, Telegram) platforms. It also utilises the “first mover” position to systematically communicate its far-right propaganda.

2. Propaganda instead of Information, Debate and Democratic Engagement:

Secondly, the AfD follows a strong self-understanding as a political party of PR. This understanding drives the AfD’s far-right propaganda strategy. In its digital propaganda strategy, the AfD’s plan is to substitute – ideally to eliminate or at least replace – independent journalism.

As one of the AfD’s top-Führers, Alice Weidel, once said, the goal is to make people watch “AfD –not ARD”. ARD is Germany’s most watched public TV channel. Once Germans have moved from independent TV channels to the propaganda channel of the AfD, the AfD is on a winning ticket. Goebbel-style Gleichschaltung of the media – like in Poland or Hungary – would no longer be needed.

True to its right-wing populism, on the AfD’s very own propaganda website “AfD-TV.de”, the AfD announced, Germany’s “old media and old parties distort the truth … therefore, we have launched AfD-TV.de”. In a classical Orwellian twist, the very opposite is true. The AfD has launched AfD-TV to distort the truth. Its goal is a Poland-like and Hungary-like “illiberal” state.

The propaganda strategy of AfD seeks to eliminate the division between party-PR and independent journalism. As with Goebbel’s dictatorship, both are set to become one and the same.

Contrary to the authoritarianism favoured by the AfD, the separation between party-PR and independent journalism is necessary for a democracy to work. Yet, the AfD does not want democracy to work.

3. The AfD’s Counter-Audience:

Thirdly, the strategic prioritisation in online platforms that is pushed by the AfD is supported by the guiding ideas of creating a right-wing counter-public. Inside such a counter-public, AfD politicians present themselves in terms of right-wing aesthetics, style, and appealing formats.

This PR strategy also includes the use of well-known influencers like Albanian AfD lackey Enxhi Selizacharias and supporter of the neo-fascist and deeply racist “Identitarian Movement” Roger Beckamp.

Both are known for using influencer-like propaganda. Beyond that, the AfD also relies on a huge number of young activists and media professionals from Germany’s digital-oriented far-right.

The AfD’s youth organisation is called “Young Alternative”. The JA works in close association with the even more radical “Identitarian Movement” (IM). Both outfits run their own high-reach channels using their very own influencers, i.e. manipulators.

IM and JA are also important cornerstones of the AfD’s right-wing extremist digital networks. These networks have become a kind of “right-wing influencer agencies”. These far-right online networks are able to coordinate political actions, mob violence, far-right rallies and electoral campaigns.

4. Building a new Volksgemeinschaft:

One of the more chilling examples of the success of the AfD’s online strategy was the Germanic-Austrian “Pride Month” campaign of 2023. It was set to build a right-wing extremist alternative to the progressive “Pride Parade”. The AfD’s idea was to counter, attack, and intimidate LGBTQ people. The purpose of this campaign was about building a white-power-style right-wing identity.

The AfD is constructing a far-right collective identity – a new Volksgemeinschaft – merging party ideology with its hallucination of a far-right nationalistic community. This is the AfD’s fourth success factor.

In its Facebook propaganda, for example, a well-designed chauvinistic “we” is constructed. This nationalistic “we” shapes almost 75% of recent posts. A sense of a right-wing community has been developed by the party for a socio-cultural and racial homogeneity built on history, race, and tradition.

5. The AfD as a Digital Propaganda Party:

As for the fifth propaganda strategy, negative emotions like fear, anger, indignation and resentment as well as “positive” (!) aspects like racial/white superiority are conjured up. Key to much of this is the AfD’s success in what is known as “message transfer”.

This means that the AfD’s propaganda talks inside Germany’s parliament are seamlessly being transferred to its online platforms. In other words, AfD politicians deliver pre-planned “platform-compliant” speeches in Germany’s parliament. These speeches and shouting matches are not designed for democratic engagement. They are designed for far-right propaganda.

Key parts of AfD speeches are deliberately and purposefully pre-formulated with regards to a statement’s length (60 to 90 seconds) and form (completed, short, pointed, simplifying, emotional and sensational). The format needs to be perfect for short videos to be posted on online platforms.

While Germany’s democratic parties are kept in the belief that the AfD is engaging in open debates, seeks conflict resolution, is interested in finding common ground and favours democratic commitment, the AfD has only one goal in mind: far-right propaganda.

In a subsequent step, these propaganda clips are distributed on its platforms with very eye-catching, pointed, and sensationalised headings. The primary target audience of such AfD speeches is not to be found in Germany’s parliament. Such speeches are designed to generate rage, fear, and resentment. They are made for the party’s “digital rage chambers”.

Fake news, false information, disinformation, images of imagined enemies and the strategy that one’s own party propaganda should replace independent journalism defines AfD’s manipulative hype.

While other political parties are democratic parties, the AfD is a “digital propaganda party”. One set of political parties works in the framework of democracy. The neo-fascist parties work in the framework of far-right propaganda.


ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers. DONATE

Related PostsThe Online Successes of Germany’s Neo-Fascism
Thomas Klikauer -- January 25, 2024
Mass Protests Against the Far Right AfD in Germany
Thomas Klikauer -- February 02, 2024
Union Strategies Against Germany’s Far-Right
Thomas Klikauer -- June 01, 2024
German Capitalism & German Neo-Nazis
Thomas Klikauer -- April 11, 2024
The Illegality of Germany’s Neo-Fascist Party
Thomas Klikauer -- February 14, 2024
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Born on the foothills of Castle Frankenstein
Thomas Klikauer (PhD) is the author of  a book on “The AfD”.

Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).

Friday, May 31, 2024

DEMOCRACY NOW!

“I Was Shocked”: Meet the State Dept. Official Who Quit After Report Denies Israel Blocking Gaza Aid


STORYMAY 31, 2024


GUESTS
Stacy Gilbert
former State Department official who resigned in protest over the Biden administration’s Gaza policies.

After working at the U.S. State Department for over 20 years, Stacy Gilbert quit the Biden administration this week after a report she contributed to concluded Israel was not obstructing humanitarian assistance to Gaza. Gilbert served as a senior civil military adviser in the State Department’s chief humanitarian office, which features heavily in internal policy discussions over Gaza. Despite “abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” the report concluded the opposite and was used by the Biden administration to justify continuing to send billions of dollars of weapons to Israel. Gilbert says she was “shocked” to find that the report concluded Israel was not not blocking humanitarian assistance: “That is not the view of subject matter experts at the State Department, at USAID, nor among the humanitarian community. And that was known. That was absolutely known to the administration for a very long time.” Gilbert says there is a clear pattern by Israel “of arbitrarily limiting, restricting or just outright blocking assistance going in that has caused the very grave situation in Gaza

 


Exclusive: USAID Contractor Resigns After Presentation on Maternal & Child Mortality in Gaza Canceled

STORY  MAY 31, 2024

GUESTS
Alex Smith former contractor for USAID who was forced to resign over the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza.

In a broadcast exclusive, Democracy Now! speaks with Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development who resigned in protest over the Biden’s administration’s support for the war on Gaza. Smith worked as a senior adviser on gender, maternal health, child health and nutrition at USAID until last week, when he was set to deliver a presentation on maternal and child mortality among Palestinians. One day before he was scheduled to present, the USAID leadership canceled his presentation. Smith says he was then given a choice between resignation and dismissal. “I would like them to stop gaslighting and speak truthfully about what is happening,” says Smith, who says USAID must do more than acknowledge famine is happening in Gaza. “We need to take the next step of saying it is illegal and who is doing the starvation intentionally.” Smith condemns the Biden administration for silencing U.S. experts while supporting Israel, which claims there is no famine in Gaza. “It’s shameful that that misinformation can go around the world to millions, while we at USAID can’t even whisper about it in a conference on gender and human rights and health outcomes.”


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Monday, May 27, 2024

 

Critics of Campus Protests are Weaponizing 


Anti-Semitism to Undermine Student 


Resistance


 
MAY 27, 2024
Facebook

Image by Hany Osman.

College campuses and universities across the country have organized some of the largest peace activities and anti-war protests since 1969. As the social movement points in specific directions in calling for Palestinian liberation, over 100 schools scattered across the United States from American to Yale University have participated and issued their own sets of “Five Demands.”

College students especially are utilizing and expanding their educational experiences and cutting their activist teeth on campus in the form of teach-ins, demonstrations, lectures, speeches, and creative art, largely on their own but also with facilitation and professors in solidarity. Further, it’s not lost on young people elsewhere, as news of the movement reached the Gazan children along with families expressing their gratitude.

A common reaction to the widespread nature and success stories on the part of the student activists has been for naysayers to label and paint the demonstrators and demonstrations as antisemites engaging in antisemitic activity. Perhaps a tool and offshoot from the modern hasbara playbook. Its purpose is to draw suspicion over a real and authentic concern of historical and current antisemitism.

There are several ways critics and campus protest skeptics have constructed their own reality to undermine student resistance. The methods include counter-protesting, the calling of police, message distortion, flimsy polling data, and the utilization of the mainstream press.

From the look of the counter-protesting, the goals look fairly obvious. First, counter-protesting presupposes that the Mideast world was a tidy and peaceful place on October 6th and that Iranian and Lebanese proxies simply created a need for power and dominance to defend “good states” (US, Israel, Saudi Arabia) from “bad states” (Yemen, Iran, Syria) on October 7th.  As reported by journalist Joshua Frank, one Columbia professor’s motivation to counter-protest wasn’t based on any intellectual argument at all but rather significant familial ties to arms manufacturing.

Secondly, counter-protesting invites people to think that Israeli force and Palestinian resistance present a “both sides” argument (bad) and this ranges to counter-protesting that characterizes Netanyahu policy as self-defense (worse). Another motivation of counter-protesting is to draw ire and/or elicit a slip up in words or actions from budding activists in a further effort to categorize them as antisemitic. Hecklers of the encampments have tried to test random students with gotcha questions regarding geography (re: from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea), to sending in staged distractions to enhance the possibility of media spectacle. These techniques haven’t amounted to much but the proposition alone that they are feasible is enough to warrant a concern regarding perhaps the ultimate goal of counter-protesting – to necessitate a presence for law enforcement.

The idea and symbolic presence of law enforcement in the face of the encampment promotes the idea that the cops are there to catch bad people and to ensure that good kids can safely get to class (they always could) when in fact the role of the police hasn’t changed since the days of ancient societies. That is, the main roles of the police are to protect private property and concentrations of wealth and power from well-organized outside forces of resistance. Often, it is the police force’s duty to make sure that mass movements and mobilization techniques are struck down while maintaining a highly stratified society based on law and order. Universities are complicit businesses that must carry on undisturbed just as free enterprise must remain steady.

It does not help the students either that almost all of New York City’s political class, as an example, is tied to the established order and Biden’s bipartisan consensus when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although they differ from Republicans, Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul are poised to undermine the student’s resistance just as they are to cut public resources whenever their respective donor classes apply economic or political pressure. When a mayor or governor cannot deviate very far from the established order, the police become willing combatants against the students and professors. The misinformation on the part of the police was best illustrated when the NYPD Commissioner held up a copy of Oxford’s Very Short Introduction Series (Terrorism) believing it was a student’s “how to” book. It served as a microcosm for how the entirety of the encampments have been misunderstood by people with authority.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the politics of encampment are how the detractors purposefully change the meaning of protest rhetoric as a scare tactic. In response, it reached a level of such carelessness that a Peace Action Group in New York went out of its way to prohibit signs, slogans, and chants at one of their pro-Palestine rallies. They feared that saying such words as “decolonize,” “intifada,” and “revolution,” (even when Jewish activists wanted to use these words) all constituted terms beyond their control. This form of liberal respectability unfortunately played into the hands of the forces attempting to “other” the campus protests. This wasn’t liberal rationality to eliminate infantile leftism as a knee jerk reaction, but servility to power and privilege to protect their organization.

It gets worse. In a recent Hillel Poll, it found that 61% of college students surveyed cited antisemitism on campus in the wave of protests and encampments. If that wasn’t bad enough, they also concluded that intimidation and assault were increasing because of the protests, while disrupting the ability to attend class (as if student engagement is not a part of higher educations’ purpose). Sociologist Eman Abdelhadi has documented the dialogue and mutual respect found in the encampments that counters Hillel’s forms of cooked data that frames hand selected polls to intentionally distort specific points of view.

Although Hillel’s polling might be more of a political reaction to the reality that many campus demonstrators are in fact Jewish, and not antisemites, it nonetheless sounds convincing, especially when you do not wish to deny a student’s experience or feelings on the matter.

International relations scholar Richard Falk indicated to me that Hillel polls are suspect for a variety of reasons. First, the polls serve as ways to discourage activism that a strong majority of Hillel students may have previously opposed on its merits. Second, facts get in the way of the polls. 15 of 17 ICJ judges (of the two dissenters, one was the ad hoc Israel judge, the other a juridically deviant Ugandan judge with poor prior reputation) have views aligned with the student protests, and not the government. And on an urgent issue of genocide, they support the right of protest. Falk posited further, “Would we accept a comparable argument that anti-Nazi protests in the late 1930s should be suspended because they made German students uncomfortable? Would anyone dare make such an argument?” “Deconstructing the polls is an important issue,” Falk asserted, “given their manipulative role in the present context as justification for encroaching upon the core role of academic freedom in a democratic society.” Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson stated that historically, white students said similar things when schools attempted integration.

Professor and author Stephen Zunes explained to me that Hillel potentially reaches out to students that reinforce their organizational mission. Since Hillel has moved to the right over the last ten years or so, “[they are] essentially saying non-Zionist Jewish students are unwelcomed.” He continued by stating, “even if they did reach out to a more representative sampling, non-Zionist Jewish students might not want to respond if they knew it was from Hillel.” Zunes also pointed out to me: “If [students] are being told repeatedly that ‘River to the Sea’ is not a call for a democratic secular state but the killing/expelling of Israeli Jews and that ‘globalize the intifada’ is not a call for civil resistance but for terrorism against Jews, it would not be surprising that they would say they encountered language that was ‘antisemitic, threatening or derogatory toward Jewish people.’”

Collectively it seems, the goals of the counter-protestors, police, politicians, polls, and corporate media, are to conflate student support for Palestine with the center-right Hamas (who won with less than 50% of the vote in 2006) while categorizing them as a single entity without social, political, economic, or military wings. Perhaps no journalist is more skillful in this enterprise as New York Times reporter Bret Stephens. In his recent “What a ‘Free Palestine’ Actually Means,” he points out that “Israeli settlers have run riot against their Palestinian neighbors,” but cynically asserts it’s all for naught since “under Hamas” there will simply be no democracy for LGBTQ+ people, thanks to college students. He also oversimplifies and cites corrupt Arab leadership to lessen the burden on Western human rights abuses, as his underlying goal in the piece is to delegitimize any view outside of the political center. Stephens further presumes that the student protestors’ only choices are reactionary forms of ethnic nationalism on either side but to avoid the side they don’t know, Palestine. It reads as an unfortunate concoction of patronizing, gaslighting, and victim blaming.

In this writing, I looked at the ways in which campus protest skeptics have developed methods to disparage the encampments. To label them, detractors have crafted an alternate reality or, “big lie” to make the students look hateful, unorganized, unknowing, and disruptive, when they have in fact been the exact opposite. On all counts, the students have been effective in carrying out one of the prime educative examples found in many school mission statements – making extensions beyond the classroom – a feature that institutions advertise, but fear happening because it involves young people questioning the legitimacy of authority and the abuses of power.

Daniel Falcone is a teacher, journalist, and PhD student in the World History program at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He resides in New York City.

US: Why Protesting Genocide is Dubbed as ‘Anti-Semitism’


Prabhat Patnaik 




Weaponising 'anti-semitism' is another face of new McCarthyism linked to the rise of the Right and ascendancy of neo-fascism in the capitalist world.


(Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The current protests in US university campuses demanding “divestment” from firms linked to Israel’s military machine, are reminiscent of the protests that had swept these campuses in the late sixties and early seventies demanding an end to the Vietnam war. There is, however, a major difference: the US had then been directly involved in the war, while today it is not. This had meant a draft then in the US while today there is none, which makes the current student protests completely free of even a shadow of self-interest.

By the same token, direct US involvement in that war and hence the daily loss of lives of US personnel had invested the calls within the US establishment for ending the Vietnam war with a seriousness that is sorely missing in all such calls today. The fact of the US not being a direct combatant, therefore, makes the protests of the students much more principled and serious, while it makes the pronouncements on peace of the establishment much less principled and serious.

The students, in short, are moved by a pure sense of humanity. Their protests are motivated by an abhorrence for genocide, for settler colonialism, and for imperialist complicity in an apartheid Zionist regime; they are an expression of humanity’s quest for peace and fraternity.

The US establishment, on the other hand, indulges in double talk: while paying lip service to peace it does everything to prolong the conflict, and while professing opposition to the inflicting of cruelty on innocent civilians, continues supplying arms for inflicting such cruelty.

The humanity on one side, the side of the students, is in stark contrast to the chicanery on the other side. If the first is the harbinger of hope for the future, the second represents the frantic dishonesty of a tottering imperialism.

This dishonesty is manifest at every level. For years now, the metropolitan countries have been committed to a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian issue, that is, to having a Palestinian State alongside the State of Israel. The point is not whether a “one-State” solution, that is a single State with its central executive elected through universal adult franchise, and within whose boundaries the Palestinians and the Israelis live together, is better than a two-State one; the point is that a two-State solution has been accepted for long by international opinion and also by the imperialist countries.

A corollary of the two-State solution is that a Palestinian State should come into being immediately and be recognised as a full-fledged member of the United Nations. And yet whenever the issue of admitting Palestine as a full member of the UN has come up, the United States, despite being apparently committed to the idea, has exercised its veto at the Security Council which has the final authority in the matter.

This is what happened on April 19. The Zionist State of Israel does not want an independent Palestinian State for that would put an end to its settler colonial project; and the United States, despite its public posturing, goes along with this Zionist project whenever matters come to a head.

On May 10 again the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly (with 143 in favour, nine against and 25 abstentions) for full membership of Palestine, and requested the Security Council to reconsider the matter. While the US, along with some of the arch right-wing regimes of the world like Argentina and Hungary voted against, other metropolitan countries (with the exception of France alone which voted in favour) abstained. The US, when the matter comes again before the Security Council, will no doubt exercise its veto once more to thwart not only any prospect of peace, but also the will of the overwhelming mass of the people of the world to resolve the problem.

The same dishonesty is visible in the manner in which the US establishment treats the student movement. Police have been sent to several campuses to break up the encampments set up by the students and hundreds of student protesters have been arrested, despite the fact that the protests have been peaceful.

The use of strong-arm methods to deal with peaceful protests constitutes an assault on the freedom of expression; but it has been justified by the entire American establishment, from Donald Trump to Joe Biden to Hilary Clinton. Donald Trump has talked of “Radical mobs taking over our college campuses” and accused Biden of being complicit with such “mobs”.

Biden in turn who has openly supported police action against students, as at Columbia University, in conformity with “liberal” opinion in general, has charged protesting students with “anti-semitism”, a bizarre charge given the fact that student protesters have included a large number of Jewish students!

Hilary Clinton has accused the students of being ignorant of the history of the middle east, as if awareness of such history could condone the perpetration of a genocide!

The anti-Vietnam war movement had at some point acquired the support of important American public figures like Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, but that again was because of America’s direct involvement in the war. In the present case the entire phalanx of establishment politicians has lined up in favour of the war and against the students.

Similar student protests have broken out elsewhere in the metropolitan world and similar strong-arm tactics have been used in many campuses. But there have also been instances of opposition to strong-arm methods. In Britain, for instance, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s advice to vice chancellors of universities that have seen such protests, to use the State machinery to break them up has not gone down well with all vice-chancellors; some have even refused to attend a meeting called by him. But in America there has been no such opposition; university heads who have sought to assert their own judgement on how to deal with the protests, have been forced to resign.

It is this suppression of thought on campuses that has brought the charge of a new McCarthyism being unleashed in the US. Then, as now, it is a group of Right-wing lawmakers that are in the forefront of the attempt to suppress independent thinking on campuses. But the question arises: in the 1950s the context for McCarthyism was provided by the Cold War and the fear of communism; what is it in the present context that is driving this new McCarthyism?

There can be little doubt that the new McCarthyism is linked to the rise of the Right and to the ascendancy of neo-fascism in the capitalist world in the context of the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism. What the rise of neo-fascism has done is not just to thrust fascist elements that had hitherto occupied the political fringe to the centre-stage, but also to let such elements hegemonise the so-called “liberal” political forces, to create a more or less unified Right-wing consensus that beats down all efforts at a revival of the Left.

It is noteworthy that when Jeremy Corbyn had been elected the leader of the Labour Party in Britain and had mounted a challenge against the establishment that had threatened to “get out of hand”, a conspiracy had been mounted against him by dubbing him “anti-semitic” (because of his sympathy for the Palestinian cause) and even removing him from the Labour Party itself.

Students and teachers in universities still constitute in the metropolis an independent source of thought, and hence a moral force that poses a threat to this Right-wing consolidation. Control over universities, therefore, becomes an important item on the agenda of this Right-wing consolidation. Independence of thought must be destroyed, every trace of humanity must be destroyed, if this Right-wing consolidation is to have its way. What we are seeing in the United States today is this brazen 


Unity Through Resistance: 3,000 Pro-Palestine Activists Reach Detroit


Peoples Dispatch 



Hundreds of Palestine solidarity organizations are gathered in the People’s Conference for Palestine held in Detroit, MI.


Yara Shoufani delivers keynote speech at first day of People's Conference for Palestine (Photo: Zoe Alexandra)

With 3,000 people and hundreds of pro-Palestine organizations converging in a metropolitan area with the largest concentration of Arab Americans, amidst the largest movement for Palestine in US history, the People’s Conference for Palestine feels nothing short of historic.

“Eternal glory to our martyrs, speedy recovery to our wounded, and freedom for our steadfast prisoners,” Mohammed Nabulsi, leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement in Houston, Texas, opened the conference with these explicitly revolutionary invocations on the first day on Friday, May 24. “In the last eight months, we, the Palestinian people, have demonstrated to the entire world, that the only way we can author our own history, and transform our present reality, is the path of unity through resistance.”

Nabulsi, in his capacity as an organizer, is invoking the global nature of the Palestine solidarity movement, which extends far beyond the Arab diaspora of the world and has in fact touched the hearts and minds of every person who stands against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

The Palestinian Youth Movement has been at the forefront of the Palestine solidarity struggle across North America, alongside key conveners of the conference, which include National Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition, Healthcare Workers for Palestine, among others. This is a movement that has ignited the consciousness of millions across the continent, moving hundreds of thousands to cast protest votes against an incumbent president who they voted into office, moving students to set up Gaza Solidarity Encampments that bring them in direct confrontation with police and violent Zionists, and moving all major cities across North America in mass mobilization after mass mobilization.

“Gaza has ushered us into a new era: an era where Palestine has become unavoidable,” said Yara Shoufani, a leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement in Toronto, Canada, said during the opening keynote of the conference. “Gaza stands at the center of the world: waging a heroic battle not only against the Zionist enemy and its backers, but in service of world revolution.”

On the first day, conference attendees heard from key figures of the global Palestinian movement, including British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who worked as a doctor at the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza in the early weeks of the genocide. He provided a first-hand account of the horrors of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people, as well as dispatches he had received from medical workers on the ground in Rafah, where Israel is waging a brutal offensive. 

“The wounded are so malnourished when they are wounded, that their wounds cannot heal,” Abu-Sittah described. “As a killing machine, malnutrition and the manufactured famine is not just taking the lives of children, but also taking the lives of the wounded, whose bodies are no longer able to heal from their wounds and from the surgeries,” Abu-Sittah described.

Mustafa Barghouti, physician, secretary general and co-founder of the Palestinian National Initiative, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), and president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, also spoke at the opening of the conference, at the plenary entitled, “The War on Palestine”.

“And during the last seven, eight months, Israel committed terrible crimes. Up to now, we’ve lost 45,000 Palestinians, if we count the 10,000 people under the rubble,” Barghouti outlined. “If this had happened in the United States of America, you would be talking about 18 million people killed or injured in less than eight months. And these are not just numbers. Each one of the 125,000 Palestinians killed and injured, each one is a person, a family, a history, a dream.”

But Barghouti also reflected a level of revolutionary optimism that is present in the global movement for Palestine. “Today, the roads are open for reunifying all the efforts of all Palestinian people, whether they live in 1948 areas, whether they live in the occupied territories in West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem, or whether they live like you do in the diaspora,” he said. “Our future is one and our struggle is one, and we have to all be unified.”

The conference continues until the final day on Sunday, May 26. On the second day, May 25, the conference will open with a plenary on “Palestinian resistance and the path to liberation,” and will also feature plenaries on “The movement for Palestine in North America” and “Zionism and US imperialism” later on in the day. The day will end with a cultural performance by Palestinian vocalist Sanaa Moussa.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch


Our Gaza Encampments May Fall, But They’ve Already Radicalized a Generation


Many of the Gaza solidarity encampments have now been destroyed by police. How do we make sense of their legacy?
May 26, 2024
Source: TruthOut




Part of the Series: Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

At 4:45 am on May 8, the University of Chicago Police Department arrived at the UChicago Popular University of Gaza, a Gaza solidarity encampment organized by a coalition of student organizations called UChicago United for Palestine, and destroyed it.

Within 15 minutes, the most beautiful, abundant, diverse iteration of university life many of us had ever experienced was gone. All the participants in the encampment — including me, an assistant professor — were left to wonder, did we win?

By now, many of the almost 200 encampments that sprung up across the country have been raided and destroyed by police. How do we make sense of the legacy of the encampments? This question is fundamentally about how we process the rise and fall of revolutionary moments within reactionary times.

First, we must celebrate the triumph of revolutionary thinking and practice — even when its material manifestations are brief. The encampments already won something simply by existing.

Liberal and centrist forces within U.S. politics are always working to co-opt and defang social movements in the United States by pushing them into silos of reformist single-issue campaigns. Too much of the energy of the movement for gay liberation got poured into the campaign for gay marriage for this reason. And too much of the energy associated with the movement for women’s liberation got poured into distilled milquetoast logics of white, middle-class feminism. Everywhere, movements of power and liberation have too often fizzled into bids for representation in compromised institutions or within more narrow spaces, and little more.

The liberal forces that seek to co-opt radical grassroots energy into the logic of single-issue campaigns usually try to persuade us that fundamentally the world is moving in the right direction. They argue that the institutions that rule our world — the government, the university, the market etc. — are replete with justice at their core and only need small tweaks to reach their equitable potential. They try to persuade us that to win those changes, we need to work only within our identity groups and stay within the system. Eventually, those who embrace this strategy may eke out some limited progress, usually in the form of increased representation. And this is held up as a promise that all will be well because the people in power will look like us, and the wealthy and privileged of our group will have all the benefits to which the wealthy and privileged are generally entitled.

The recent wave of student-led Palestine solidarity encampments at universities across the U.S. rejected these liberal logics. Students, faculty and organizers recognized the devastation of Gaza as a direct result of the capitalist world order under which we all live, a world order whose core logic is profit over people, that protects us so long as we are profitable and discards us when we are not.

Many encampments paired demands for divestment from Israeli apartheid with demands for repair of their university’s harms to local communities. For example, the UChicago United for Palestine coalition demanded reparations for members of the South Side community and a halt to the ravenous expansionism to which the university has long subjected the neighborhood. Demanding these reparations acknowledges the simple fact that the same logic that displaces Palestinians also works to displace the University of Chicago’s Black neighbors.

The encampment was not only a triumph of revolutionary thinking, it was also a triumph of revolutionary practice. In a reactionary present whose days are clearly numbered, each encampment was a practice run for a revolutionary future. Every time we seize a space in this world and decide to run it for ourselves, decide to feed ourselves, to shelter ourselves, to keep each other safe — we beckon to a revolutionary horizon. We open a window and look out onto a liberated future. We practice the hope that fuels our movements, wave after wave.

The encampments have been revolutionary, but they have not been the revolution itself. At the UChicago Popular University for Gaza, campers had to face the difficult work of debate and consensus building over strategy and tactics. Some questioned whether students should negotiate with the administration at all, while others debated what material gains would feel acceptable. After long discussions with the camp, students negotiated with the administration. These negotiations would come to naught when the administration suspended them on Sunday. In the processes of decision-making, many were eager to live out the abolitionist ideal for which the Popular University stood — an ideal where every voice in the camp had equal weight. But of course, we were not in the revolution. We were still on the campus of the University of Chicago, a private institution with a large and violent police force. We could act horizontally within the camp, but different people had different stakes in the outcomes of the encampment. Some could lose hundreds of thousands in tuition dollars or their livelihoods, others could walk away unscathed.

We must not mistake revolutionary moments for the revolution. If we do, then defeats — an unmet demand or a dispersed encampment — begin to feel like the end of the road. We have to treat every revolutionary moment as that — a moment. Moments are, by definition, ephemeral. It is in their nature to pass. But they matter because they leave us transformed in their wake. They give us a taste of freedom. Once we taste freedom, we hunger for it for the rest of our lives.

I learned civil rights activist and revolutionary Assata Shakur’s chant at a police abolitionist encampment in New York a decade ago named Liberation Square. I recited it again with my students at the UChicago Popular University for Gaza, then again with students at the University of Arizona’s Gaza solidarity encampment while in Tucson on a visit.


It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Liberation Square in New York did not win its direct aims, nor did many of the encampments demanding dignity for Black lives that proliferated across the country. Along the way to liberation, we always suffer many defeats. For my generation, some defeats have included watching the Arab Spring turn into a winter, or watching the fall of Occupy Wall Street or watching the police continue to kill Black people despite the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. But this generation of uprisings has the imprints of everything we learned during these earlier waves of movement, just as our uprisings had lessons from our elders imprinted within them. We never lose in struggle. Every action we take toward liberation plants a seed, but sometimes harvests take a long time.

Irish poet Seamus Heaney said:


History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

We must practice hope until hope and history rhyme. As we move through seasons of struggle, we practice hope by creating revolutionary space, by continuing to sample freedom and continuing to feed our hunger for it. In doing so, we beckon to our liberated future, the future we deserve. We have a world to win, and truly, we have nothing to lose but our chains.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.

'Stop It. Stop It Now, Joe.’

Even though fascist Donald Trump is still worse, just look at the latest polls in the swing states and recognize where we are heading. A true leader doesn't zig and zag when innocent people are being killed.


By Ralph Nader
May 26, 2024
Source: Common Dreams


U.S. President Joe Biden onstage during the 2024 140th Morehouse College Commencement Ceremony at Morehouse College on May 19, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. 

(Photo by Paras Griffin/WireImage)TwitterRedditEmail


As the keynote speaker at Morehouse College in Atlanta last week, Joe Biden listened to the class Valedictorian’s call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The President nodded and applauded with others in the assembly. In contrast, he had just approved another billion dollars in killer weapons for the genocidal Netanyahu regime to blow up what’s left of the Death Camps in Gaza. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” declared his wife, Dr. Jill Biden months ago.


Countless times Joe Biden has publicly urged Netanyahu to allow the waiting trucks carrying – food, water, and medicine – blocked at the Egyptian and Israeli borders to deliver this humanitarian aid. But Biden declined to demand sanctions and an end to the Israeli military blocking hundreds of trucks, paid for by the U.S., into Gaza to help the dying population. He could have draped American flags over these trucks and dared the Israeli state terrorists to stop them. Biden showed lethal weakness from an unused position of great presidential power. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” implored his wife Dr. Jill Biden as thousands of children are being killed who could have been saved.


When Biden took his oath of office, he swore to uphold the laws of the land. That oath requires action.

Biden asked early on that Netanyahu comply with international law. His government commits daily overt numerous war crimes targeting civilians, homes, schools, markets, hospitals and health clinics, ambulances, fleeing refugees, and even Mosques and Churches. The Israeli regime also violates the international law that requires the conquerors to protect the civilian population. Biden, Blinken and Austin have refused to condemn such “crimes against humanity,” halt arms shipments and thereby obey five federal laws prohibiting the U.S. from sending weapons to countries that are violating human rights or being used for offensive purposes.

When Biden took his oath of office, he swore to uphold the laws of the land. That oath requires action. His State Department, in a required compliance report this month to Congress, disgracefully punted. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” beseeched Dr. Jill Biden.

From the beginning, Biden has backed a two-state solution publicly and in private conversations with Netanyahu. These words support a peaceful settlement. Yet whether under Obama as vice president for eight years or since 2021, as president, Biden has not connected to any action advancing the two-state proposal. Worse, he has never called out Netanyahu, with consequences, for bragging year after year to his Likud Party that he has been supporting the Hamas regime and helping to fund it because Hamas, like Netanyahu, opposes a two-state solution.

Biden is still rejecting the recognition of a Palestinian state by 143 of the 193 member states of the United Nations. This week Spain, Norway and Ireland said they would recognize a Palestinian state. Biden bizarrely insists statehood be negotiated with Israel. He knows, of course, how many Israeli colonies (so-called settlements) exist in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel rejects outright any such Free Palestine. Weak Joe Biden is okay with that brutal occupation. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” says Dr. Jill Biden.

Joe Biden is always condemning anti-semitism against Jews, while he spends billions of dollars weaponizing Netanyahu’s violent anti-semitism against Arab semites in Palestine. This “other” anti-semitism has been violently inflicted, with very racist epithets, on defenseless, subjugated Palestinian families for over fifty-five years. The violence includes U.S. fighter planes bombing, ground troops smashing homes, and refugee camps, blowing up homes, imprisoning and torturing thousands of men, women and children, without charges, and hundreds of dictates, checkpoints, and other maddening harassments. (See the New York Times Magazine Sunday, May 19, 2024 piece “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel”). Biden and Netanyahu are arm-in-arm anti-semites against Arabs. (See the “Anti-Semitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org).


It’s the ongoing massacre of these little innocents—in their mother’s or father’s arms or in crumbling hospitals that led Dr. Jill Biden to admonish: “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”

Throughout his fifty-year political career, Biden has never said that “Palestinians have a right to defend themselves.” Only the overwhelmingly more powerful, occupying Israelis have this right, as he has repeated hundreds of times. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe,” advises Dr. Jill Biden.

Biden has expressed doubt about the Hamas Health Ministry’s fatality count in Gaza – itself a huge undercount. (See my column March 5, 2024 column: Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza). His actions enabling the Israeli annihilations (“over the top” he once blurted) are moving the real fatality toll, especially with the Rafah invasion and starvation, to the fastest rate ever recorded in 21st century conflicts, according to experts. This includes the bloody, accelerating deaths of babies and children.

It’s the ongoing massacre of these little innocents—in their mother’s or father’s arms or in crumbling hospitals that led Dr. Jill Biden to admonish: “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”

Still, Joe Biden conveys weakness to Netanyahu, to Netanyahu’s Congress and its omnipresent “Israel-can-do-no-wrong” lobby. Being weak on such a high visibility and protested genocide in Gaza is bad for your re-election, Joe. Even though Der Führer Donald is worse. Look at the latest polls in the swing states! A true leader doesn’t zig and zag when innocent people are being killed. “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”


Calls for Divestment From Apartheid South
Africa Gave Today’s pro-Palestinian Student
Activists a Blueprint to Follow



BY AMANDA JOYCE HALL
MAY 27, 2024

Photograph Source: Alisdare Hickson – CC BY-SA 2.0
In recent weeks, college campuses across the U.S. have been roiled by pro-Palestinian protests, with the police called in to arrest demonstrators and students threatened with expulsion.

But there’s nothing unusual about the protesters’ tactics of taking over university buildings and erecting tent encampments on college lawns and quads.

These students, whose actions build on years of organizing spearheaded by the Students for Justice in Palestine, are part of a long history of radical student organizing.

There are echoes of both the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s and, more recently, of South African apartheid in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, U.S. student activists worked to make higher education “South Africa Free.” They urged institutions of higher learning to commit to divest all assets held in endowments that were tied to doing business in or with South Africa.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve researched and written about these Black-led anti-apartheid movements, with a particular focus on student campaigns.

By calling out complicity on the part of colleges, corporations and the government in South Africa’s system of apartheid, student activists were able to show that demands for divestment could be a concrete and effective form of protest.

A movement decades in the making

Apartheid was a racist and exploitative project that white South African officials had developed over decades.

Segregationist laws and land seizure policies created a captive, impoverished Black population, whose exploitation and disenfranchisement supported the economic prosperity of the governing white minority.

Originally, the idea to push for the sale of assets tied to corporations doing business in South Africa stemmed from the directives of the South African liberation movements, which called for a total economic, cultural and diplomatic boycott of the country’s white minority government.

The foremost South African liberation movements were the African National Congress, formed in 1912, and the Pan Africanist Congress, established in 1959. The South African government banned both organizations in 1960, forcing organizers to build their movements in exile.

In response, anti-apartheid organizers around the world developed creative ways to heed the call.

In the late 1960s, for example, U.S. students targeted U.S. banks that lent to the South African government, calling them “partner[s] in apartheid.”

And the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee coordinated a sit-in at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City in 1965.

Following the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which South African police massacred at least 150 children, some U.S. workers began to demand that their pension funds be “South Africa Free,” and students at U.S. colleges and universities organized some of the first protests calling for the divestment of their schools’ endowments.

The 1977 formation of the Committee to Oppose Bank Loans to South Africa made economic withdrawal a centerpiece of the U.S. anti-apartheid movement, one that grew stronger both on and off campus in the decade that followed.

Calls for divestment grow

At its climax in 1985 and 1986, protests for total economic isolation of South Africa surfaced at more than 200 colleges and universities across the U.S.

Whether they were enrolled at historically Black colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges, Ivy League schools or public universities, students coordinated a national divestment movement, pushing the issue of U.S. investment in South Africa to the center of American intellectual and civic life.

Student organizing formed the militant grassroots basis for the U.S. anti-apartheid movement and contributed to the economic, political and cultural isolation of South Africa’s violent and repressive white minority regime.

Students assembled blockades, organized “sit-outs,” occupied buildings and built “shantytowns” – made to resemble the makeshift dwellings in which many Black South Africans lived under apartheid – at more than 100 universities.

These shantytown protests marked the culmination of nearly a decade of campus anti-apartheid organizing. Thousands of students at hundreds of campuses erected encampments to try to “stop business as usual,” as student groups put it.

Persistence pays off

At schools across the country, university administrators ordered police to dismantle the shantytowns.

University backlash ended up only amplifying support for the movement as media flocked to the shantytowns, while faculty, parents and alumni rallied around the students.

Students, in turn, rebuilt their encampments. Joining them were supporters from beyond the university: musicians, politicians, and New Left and Black Power activists. The presence of feminist political activist Angela Davis, counterculture activist Mario Savio, poet June Jordan, writer Amiri Baraka and Pan-Africanism organizer Kwame Ture helped draw further national attention to student demands.

The highly publicized determination of the students helped turn the tide of public opinion. Founded by Black organizers Randall Robinson, Mary Frances Berry, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Walter Fauntroy, the Free South Africa Movement – working closely with the foreign policy advocacy organization TransAfrica – led hundreds of students and everyday people in a picket outside the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Many of the activists and student protesters were arrested. But by calling out specific corporations doing business in South Africa and popularizing corporate ties to anti-Black violence, oppression and massacres in a foreign country, students succeeded in making investments in those stocks riskier and unattractive.

After two years of sustained militant organizing and demonstrations, the student anti-apartheid movement claimed to have gotten colleges and universities to divest about US$3.6 billion – or $10.3 billion in today’s dollars – from their endowments.

Revisionist history

In 1990, after 27 years of imprisonment, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

By then, South Africa’s system of apartheid was crumbling. The reinstatement of the liberation movements in 1990, the repeal of segregationist laws in 1991 and the first democratic election of 1994 signaled the official end of apartheid, though discrimination and inequality persist in South Africa to this day.

In the collective memory of the U.S., anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid movements are generally seen as righteous struggles that U.S. institutions couldn’t help but get behind.

Perhaps that’s why, after the death of Mandela in 2013, the University of California, Berkeley, administration claimed to be at the forefront of student divestment protests for South Africa.

This was revisionist history.

In fact,
at Berkeley and across many campuses, administrators called the police on protesters, threatened to revoke their scholarships, took others to court and ordered custodial staff to demolish the shanties.

Past as present

Activists,
scholars and even former U.S. President Jimmy Carter have drawn comparisons between South African apartheid and Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Many Palestinians refer to the 440-mile (708 km) separation barrier that Israel erected along the Gaza Strip as the “Wall of Apartheid.”

Still, there are some notable differences between the two movements.

Divestment is trickier today because financial instruments are more complex than they were in the 1980s, in part due to the
outsourcing of their management to investment firms and hedge funds. The size of many university endowments have also grown exponentially since then.

Nonetheless, I believe divestment from companies doing business with Israel is still possible – and can be an effective demand.
Several college administrations have agreed to consider divestment, including Brown University, Northwestern University, Evergreen State College and the University of Minnesota.

The U.S. anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s
helped topple South Africa’s apartheid government. Back then, campus anti-apartheid occupations placed students at the forefront of changing the national consensus on U.S. complicity with injustice in South Africa.

Time will tell whether today’s students can do the same with regards to
Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinian people. 

This article is republished from
The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article

Amanda Joyce Hall is Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.