Guess who laid the groundwork for the sociopathic sanctions against Venezuela?

The Struggle For Our Future

Part I—Attacking the Progressive Past

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019 occurred under different circumstances, and yet they are very similar in their results. They both put an authoritarian figure in power through democratic electoral procedures. As well, both of these figures, like so many modern reactionary leaders before them, denigrate the recent past. Why do they do so?

In the case of Donald Trump, the past he despises is the 1960s, with its progressive civil rights legislation. The laws passed at this time pushed the white supremacy model out of the public realm. Trump. in practice, has proven to be a white supremacist and an extreme nationalist. Most of his “core” voting base adheres to these ideas as well. This worldview demands that he undo— through presidential orders and future decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court—the progress toward equalitarianism and a multicultural society symbolized by the election of America’s first African-American president, Barack Obama. Trump also wants to “Make America Great Again” by acting on the basis of national power alone—thus destroying along the way any number of alliances and treaties enshrining human rights and progressive international law.

Of course, these ambitions alone are not exactly why he was elected. Trump’s racist “core” is too small to have elected him by themselves. He was elected because too many Americans did not want to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016—whom they saw as a status quo candidate—and Trump was the GOP alternative. It may well be that a good number of the electorate who voted for Trump had no idea of what sort of person they were supporting. By now they should have no doubt.

In the case of Benjamin Netanyahu, the story is an even odder one. The past that Netanyahu rejects is the one designed after World War II to criminalize behaviors such as the waging of aggressive war, genocide, and apartheid. Some of these behaviors had for centuries threatened European Jews. Netanyahu, and those who voted for him, no longer identify with the suffering of their European ancestors. Israel is now a strong, aggressive, land-hungry power much like 19th century Russia and Germany. Many Israeli Jews are also, like Donald Trump’s core supporters, ethnic racists and supremacists.

Netanyahu’s problem is that the post-World War II international laws and treaties seeking to prevent aggressive nationalism, racism, and the oppression of minorities now stand in the way of Israeli ambitions. So, oddly, the only way Israel can realize its Zionist ambitions while also being seen as a “normal” country—one that is in tune with the international community— is by changing international norms. That is, Isreal now seeks to undermine the progressive international environment that was, in good part, designed to protect the remnants of European Jews. And it would seem, many of those who voted for Netanyahu knew exactly what sort of society they were endorsing.

Trump and Netanyahu both stand against minority members of their societies, and through such postures rally a dangerous core base. They are not alone. The nations of the world are increasingly led by reactionary “thugs in suits,” many of them popularly elected. They are all Pied Pipers leading their populations backward—resurrecting the

pre-progressive “past in present tense.” Their destination is an environment that, historically, we have enough negative experience to want to avoid. Yet we follow these leaders anyway. To paraphrase Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, it is a case of “blind citizens governed by lethal idiots.”

Part II—Multiplying Casualties

Evidence of this rush to the rear can be found in a partial list of the rights being undermined and the individuals being attacked:

A. Attack on a Free Press

— The editor of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is in prison in the UK after losing his seven-year-long asylum status at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He will now have to fight extradition to the U.S. where he is wanted for posting on the web shocking evidence of shocking American barbarism in Iraq, as well as other embarrassing revelations.

Assange “has been charged for alleged conspiracy with whistleblower Chelsea Manning under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.” The indictment also “describes routine journalistic interactions with sources as evidence of conspiracy.” Thus, “the ability to use an encrypted chat messenger or try to keep a source’s identity anonymous are … portrayed as criminal in nature by the Trump Justice Department.” By the way, that same Justice Department will argue that the nature of the leaked information, revealing the brutal and sometimes criminal behavior of the U.S. military, is irrelevant to the charge against Assange and therefore is inadmissible in court.

The larger problem with this attack on Assange is that his alleged “conspiring” to publish information gathered in this fashion is something reporters and newspaper editors do all the time. It is the essence of foundational investigative journalism, and as such the case against Assange is a threat to freedom of the press.

In the meantime, the Israelis have stepped into the act by falsely asserting that Assange is a longtime “anti-Semite.”

— Chelsea Manning, Assange’s alleged co-conspirator, is also back in jail. She is being held in contempt of a grand jury subpoena seeking to force her to testify about Assange and Wikileaks.

B. Attack on Free Speech

The U.S. Congress, as well as some twenty-seven state legislatures, are attacking freedom of speech by attempting to outlaw the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. House Resolution 246 and Senate Resolution 120, both of which identify criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism (which is the equivalent of mistaking apples for oranges), have now been introduced and, though patently unconstitutional because they undermine the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, may be passed into law any way. This subversive action is being carried out at the urging of American Zionists. The Zionists, in turn, are doing this to defend Israel, an apartheid state and violator of international law. So much for the devotion of legislators to the U.S. Bill of Rights in the face of strong lobbies. The Trump administration has simultaneously decided to refuse a visa for Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the BDS movement. Mr. Barghouti has been accused by Zionists such as U.S. Congressman Lee Zelden of being “filled w/ anti-Israel & anti-Semitic hatred.” As someone who is personally acquainted with Mr. Barghouti, I can testify that this is absolutely untrue. I can also attest that he, as a victim of Israeli apartheid, has no patience with racists.

It should be pointed out that the tactics used by American and Israeli Zionists not only have a corrupting effect on the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, and the Constitution itself, but also sully Jews in the aggregate and the and the Jewish religion. They do so by insisting that support for the self-aggrandizing, racist political ideology of Zionism is part of the definition of being Jewish.

C. Attack on International Law

The Trump administration has now expressed its disdain for international law by threatening the judges and investigators of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and refusing visas to those associated with the court even when they simply seek to carry out their duties at the United Nations in New York. The United Nations maintains another headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and ICC business with the UN may now take place there.

Part III—Why Recent Progress is Threatened

How is it that after making such progressive strides, we now see them threatened?

In the U.S. case, part of the answer is that, in the age of the patriarchal nation-state, progressive issues such as multicultural equalitarianism, feminism, gay rights, immigrant rights, and the like are not cultural positions easily sustained. The Civil Rights Movement was successful not just because its leaders formed a strong political coalition, but because their cause proved an important one within the Cold War struggle of the time. In turn, its success did encourage other progressive movements to push their agendas, and the resulting collective social pressure within the U.S. created a smoldering undercurrent of white ethnic resentment. That resentment has now broken out in what is known as a culture war.

This culture war has serious political consequences and reflects a polarized nation. Correspondingly, the number of moderates or centrists who are politically active has shrunk. On the conservative side, this polarization has destroyed the traditional Republican Party and replaced it with a rightwing extremist rump party led by Donald Trump. It is this essentially purged Republican Party that now leads the fight to destroy the progressive domestic achievements of the recent past.

The Democratic Party has so far remained intact. However, that does not necessarily give it political advantage. The party’s leaders have alienated large sections of their once loyal liberal supporters. They continue to direct their political messages to a centrist audience whose numbers are declining. In other words, the party is poorly led and awash in internal dissension. This is a poor position from which to defend, much less further promote, America’s progressive domestic legacy.

The one thing the United States does have going for it is a fairly large number of well-educated citizens who are aware that their country has a constitution and a bill of rights that are integral to the character of the nation. Appeals to these documents provide, at least in theory, the basis for progressive legislation and policies.

When we turn to Israel, we find little or no regard for the country’s “Basic Laws” that stand in for a constitution. Also, despite all the play given to the Holocaust, many Israelis have a real disdain for Jewish behavior relative to that event. Indeed, Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust are often a source of shame for today’s Israelis. This is because, allegedly, they did not put up a sufficient fight against their genocidal persecutors. The fact that the fate of modern European Jewry helped underwrite much of the universal human rights treaties and related international law is not something the majority of Israelis celebrate.

As suggested above, modern Israel’s response to European Jewish history was to become a warrior state. That is what it is at present, and as such it celebrates the sense of superiority that is so often harbored by warriors, and drives their ambitions of conquest and domination.

Part IV—Conclusion

It would seem that we are in a decisive struggle that will determine the shape of our future. Will it be reactionary or progressive in nature? Organized conservatism has evolved into a reactionary force throughout much of the West, and the hard-fought-for, progressive aspects of our world are in serious danger. The fate of Donald Trump, the U.S.’s ersatz Mussolini, in the 2020 election might be a pivotal moment in this struggle. In the meantime the struggle seems over in Israel—the reactionaries have won.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He has been publishing his analyses of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, international and humanitarian law and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010.

Void Vision - Sour

Minimalist synth pop - from the haunting soundtrack of 'Wild Wild Country' (Netflix):

Police are now a leading cause of death among young American men

If you’re a young man in America today – and especially a young black man – you might want to give law enforcement a wide berth. A new study found that shootings, choke holds, and other uses of force by police officers, whether warranted or not, are now the sixth-highest cause of death for males between the ages of 25 and 29.

The study, conducted by researchers at Rutgers University-Newark and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found that black men are two-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by law enforcement over their lifetime than white men, and that African-American women, American Indian/Alaska native men and women, and Latino men also face higher odds of dying at police hands.

The risk of death for each group is highest between the ages of 20 and 35 and declines with age.

USA Today.

The numbers.

Odious Pompeo and his Dubious Friends

[...]

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to the bigots themselves. Brigitte Gabriel runs ACT for America, which has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “the largest grassroots anti-Muslim organization in the country.” Gabriel herself has said a practicing Muslim “cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America” and believes Arab Muslims are “a natural threat to civilized people of the world.” She has also bragged about the secretary of state being “a steadfast ally of ours since the day he was elected to Congress.” In 2016, ACT bestowed upon Pompeo its “highest honor,” the National Security Eagle Award.

Pompeo, in turn, has been keen to boost Gabriel and ACT. As researchers from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative on Islamophobia have observed, in 2016, “Pompeo sponsored the room at the U.S. Capitol for ACT’s ‘Legislative Briefing’ in conjunction with its annual national conference,” and he “spoke at these briefings in 2016, 2015 and 2013.”

Then there’s Frank Gaffney, who runs the Center for Security Policy, which the SPLC calls a hate group and a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement.” Gaffney himself has suggested that former President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim and has accused U.S. mosques and Muslim organizations of mounting a “stealth jihad” against the United States. He has also described Pompeo as “one of the most intelligent men I know in public life.”

Again, the feeling seems to be mutual. According to the Bridge researchers, Pompeo appeared on CSP’s “Secure Freedom Radio” 18 times between 2014 and 2016. He also spoke at a CSP event in 2015, alongside the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has called for the eradication of Islam and a ban on the Quran, and the far-right lawyer David Yerushalmi, who has declared that “Muslim civilization is at war with Judeo-Christian civilization” and is the driving force behind the anti-sharia movement in the United States.

Pompeo and Yerushalmi share the same conspiratorial obsession with the Muslim Brotherhood and have both promulgated the (false) claim that mainstream Muslim-American organizations are “fronts” for the Brotherhood. Pompeo even co-sponsored congressional legislation in 2014 and 2015 to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization. [Almost comically, Gaffney has also targeted Grover Norquist as an "agent of the Muslim Brotherhood" - Ed.]

As J.M. Berger, a counterterrorism analyst and author of a book on extremism, told BuzzFeed News in 2016 that the GOP’s obsession with banning the Brotherhood is really about “controlling American Muslims, not with any issue pertaining to the Muslim Brotherhood in any practical or realistic sense.”

Should we be surprised? Islamophobia was rampant in the Republican Party even before the election of Trump. Anti-Muslim bigotry, in fact, is what unites far-right parties across the West.

@TI.

Israel's New Revisionism: Erasing Proof of the Nakba

By Tony Greenstein

I was brought up as a Zionist and from an early age I learnt that, despite the wishes of the Israelis, the Arabs had insisted on leaving Palestine in order to let the Arab armies invade and drive the Jews out. In every Arab village there was a radio which conveyed orders from the Arab states to get out in order not to impede the invading Arab armies.

Looking at it today, it is a wonder how I and generations of Jews bought into these myths. They are, when seen in the cold light of day, absurd. No indigenous population voluntarily exiles itself. It makes no sense. Why would the Palestinians take orders from distant Arab rulers. But to us it made sense. After all ‘the Arabs’ were the enemy.

The history of what has happened has been told in many books and articles such as Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Problem Revisited. Over half the Palestinian refugees had already been expelled by May 15th 1948 when Israel declared its independence.

We were also told how the Zionists begged the Palestinians to stay and in particular how the Mayor of Haifa Shabtai Levy pleaded with the Palestinians to stay. Indeed Golda Meir wrote in her autobiography “My Life” that Ben-Gurion asked her to try and prevent the flight of Haifa’s Arabs.

“Ben-Gurion called me and said: ‘I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear,’ he said. And so, I went immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn’t work,”

It was also a lie. In fact on 2nd June 1948, barely a month after their expulsion, David Ben-Gurion sent a letter to Abba Khoushy, the secretary-general of the Haifa Workers’ Council, and later the city’s mayor instructing him that ‘we don’t want a return of the enemy. And all institutions should act accordingly’ After Capturing Haifa, Ben-Gurion GaveOrder to Stop Fleeing Arabs From Returning. What we weren’t told was how the Palestinians in Haifa had been shelled and mortared by the Zionist terror militias and that the main militia, the Labour Zionist Haganah had used loudspeakers to warn of a terrible massacre if any Arabs stayed. Such was the panic that many Palestinians drowned in the sea at Haifa Port when boarding the boats to take them to safety. [See Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine]

We were also told how the Zionists begged the Palestinians to stay and in particular how the Mayor of Haifa Shabtai Levy pleaded with the Palestinians to stay. But as Michael Bar-Zohar, the biographer of Ben Gurion, noted appeals to“the Arabs to stay” were political gestures for external audiences whereas “[i]n internal discussions”, Ben-Gurion communicated that “it was better that the smallest possible number of Arabs remain within the area of the state.”[Michael Bar-Zohar (1977): Ben-Gurion: A Political Biography. Hebrew, Tel Aviv, vol. 2, pp. 702–3]

It would have been impossible to form a majority Jewish state if the Arabs had stayed. In 1961 two researchers, quite independently of each other, Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers, conducted research which involved transcribing the CIA and BBC reports and tapes of the Arab radio stations of the period. [See Erskine Childers, The Other Exodus, The Spectator, 12.5.61.]

What Khalidi and Childers found was that these radio stations instructed the Arabs of Palestine to stay and indeed threatened them with dire consequences if they left. There was no evidence of any instruction to leave, contrary to the Zionist mythology and yet a whole lie has been built on this myth, which was constructed in order that Israel could avoid implementing UN Resolution 194. [see The Palestinian Exodus in 1948, Institute for Palestine Studies].

In Israel the official lie, that the Arabs left of their own accord, persists. In 2011 the Knesset passed the Naqba Law which authorised the Finance Minister to reduce state funding or support for an institution if it holds an activity that rejects the existence of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” or commemorates “Israel’s Independence Day or the day on which the state was established as a day of mourning.”

The Palestinians still left in Israel are supposed to rejoice on the day that their relatives were expelled or massacred. The State instructs them to commemorate and celebrate a lie on pain of suffering the consequences.

Interestingly by August last year the Finance Ministry had rejected all 98 appeals, 17 of which had been submitted by Israel’s fascist culture Minister Miri Regev, to reduce funding to institutions which had nonetheless held events commemorating Naqba day. In practice it was difficult to implement a law designed to change history to fit in with national myths.

However a Committee set up as a result of Regev’s whining decided to fine the Jaffa theatre a few thousand shekels for holding two events, one of which featured the poetry of Dareen Tatour, an Israeli Palestinian poet gaoled for her poetry by Israel.

It is clear that the Israeli state is intent on preserving the myth of its creation, that the Arabs ran away. It seeks to do this both by the use of legislation fining any institution, including schools, which provide another version of history and through closing their archives, even when they have previously been open to historians and researchers. The truth is a malleable instrument of power.

However the genie is out of the bottle. Once a document has been revealed and read no amount of retrospective censorship can put the genie back into the bottle. The mere fact that Israel is trying, by the crudest censorship, to put a stop to these embarrassing revelations about its history, by resealing the archives, is proof that Israel has a great deal to hide, not least the circumstances of its own creation.

History is being rewritten by Israel’s security services with the sole purpose of distorting the past in order to shape the future.

Today the same dilemma faces Israel as it did in 1948. The majority of those now living within Greater Israel are Palestinian Arabs. The Jewish State can only remain Jewish by depriving the majority of Palestinians under their control of any civil or political rights. In other words Israel has chosen a combination of apartheid (previously dressed up as the 2 State Solution) and bantustanisation. The question is whether and when it resorts to its final solution, transfer or ethnic cleansing. As Jonathan Ofir writes in the article below:

‘Everything is being buried, by an arm of the Israeli government. If someone were doing this to Holocaust documents, there would be a cry to the heavens. … The Jewish State is actively trying to erase the Nakba and any critical discussion of it. Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany – but Nakba denial is not illegal in Israel, and it is thriving.

Reading through the following articles and in particular the interview with Yehiel Horev, Director Malmab, the Head of the Defence Ministry Department charged with restricting access to already open archives is chilling. He makes no secret of his belief that historical documents are a plaything of a government intent on rewriting history. Horev explained that:

the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem. In Horev’s view, an allegation made by a researcher that’s backed up by an original document is not the same as an allegation that cannot be proved or refuted.

Horev elaborated, quite shamelessly, that

When the state imposes confidentiality, the published work is weakened, because he doesn’t have the document

There are those who still profess that Israel is just another liberal western democracy. This deception lies at the heart of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance misdefinition of democracy. What is happening with Israeli archives dealing with the origins of the State demonstrates that Israel’s democracy is just a facade, a sugar coating that covers a military state. What other democracy would allows its intelligence services to roam the country intimidating academic archivists into permiting the censorship of embarrassing documents?

Tony Greenstein

Possibly THE funniest Jimmy Dore: Neera Tanden!