We could send clowns

 

August 17

 

GUEST: Barbara Larcom, human rights activist, coordinator of the Nicaraguan sister city Casa Baltimore Limay, and co-organizer of the monthly Nicaragua Webinar Series, talks about the successes of the Sandinista Revolution and why the US is still trying to crush it.

Baltimore sister city

 

The wall art to the right is a commemoration of the life of Ben Linder, US peace activist who was killed by the Contras in Nicaragua. He was shot while helping a rural community get access to electricity, and his assassins were paid for by the Pentagon. 

 

Never content with a Latin American president elected by the majority of the people, the US Empire is still trying to rid the region of the Sandinista Revolution. We still blockade its commerce with the rest of the world. We still fund violent coups to overthrow their duly elected presidents. And we still fill our ever compliant media with attacks on Nicaragua's achievements. 

 

People like Barbara Larcom are so important. They bring back what is actually happening in Nicaragua, so that we as citizens can understand our own militarism in the rest of the world. What right does the US have to boycott Nicaragua? To spend millions of dollars fomenting another armed coup? Haven't we learned our lesson yet; the Nicaraguan people don't want to be told what type of government to have.   

Ben was an entertainer too, and often gave performances for the children of his Nicaraguan town. People from the North don't have to be killers. Perhaps Ben Linder will remind us that we don't have to keep hiring killers and sending them to Central America. We could send clowns, and seek peace rather than hegemony.

How dumb does Mr. Gold think the American people are?

Mr. Gold, president of the Jewish Federation of Ulster County, thinks I am lying about Israel. But the "facts" he presents are nothing but ham-fisted distortions. How about: "Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy full rights under the law, including freedom of worship, access to healthcare, education and the courts"?

Human Rights Watch describes a very different reality in Israel and the occupied territories: "Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy."

Or how about Amnesty International? A recent 280 page report finds that: "Israel is imposing an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it exercised control over their rights, fragmenting and segregating Palestinian citizens of Israel, residents of the OPT and Palestinian refugees denied the right of return. Through massive seizures of land and property, unlawful killings, infliction of serious injuries, forcible transfers, arbitrary restrictions on freedom of movement, and denial of nationality, among other inhuman or inhumane acts, Israeli officials would be responsible for the crime against humanity of apartheid, which falls under the jurisdiction of the ICC [International Criminal Court]."

Numerous studies have shown that Palestinian residents of both Israel and the Occupied Territories face dozens of Israeli laws that discriminate against them. According to Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace laureate from South Africa: "I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government." The quote is from the Jerusalem Post - March 10, 2014.

So how dumb does Mr. Gold think the American people are? It's apartheid, and shamefully, the Jewish Federation of Ulster County is part of it. Maybe we all are. According to a statement by Jewish Voice for Peace: "Let's be very clear: the U.S. is complicit in this. We send $3.8 billion in annual military funding to the Israeli government; we shield the Israeli government from accountability at the United Nations; we object to investigations into Israel's war crimes at the International Criminal Court; and we silence BDS activists here at home who try to speak out for Palestinian rights."

Fred Nagel

A proud member of Veterans For Peace

 

August 10

 

GUEST: Norman Solomon, American journalist, media critic, activist, and executive director of the media watch group Institute for Public Accuracy, talks about his latest book: War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine.

War Made Invisible - Book Review

I also wrote a book review for War Made Invisible:

"Well researched history of our endless wars.
Why aren't more citizens horrified at America's history of wars over the last seventy years? This book explains why; the military industrial complex has gotten very good at hiding the damage and covering up the dead. Norman Solomon shows us just how it's done, and what we can do about it now."

One can't read this book without rethinking the role our country has played in the world since WW II. That's why people should read it. There is no escaping the fact that most of our wars since then have been colonial occupations, with all the racism and environmental destruction that follows. Our warlike intentions were quite evident in our invasions of Korea and Vietnam. And sense then, we have spread our military power to every nook and cranny of the globe.

Can we the people stop this momentum? For a time in the 1960s I thought that was possible. Our soldiers weren't fighting anymore. In fact, they were sometimes killing their own officers. Drafted and sent to Korea in 1968, I considered myself part of the resistance. And when the colonel of Seventh Aviation Battalion told me that if we were in Vietnam, he would pull out his pistol and shoot me, I told him, "If we were in Vietnam, you would be dead already." I think he knew I was right. The battalion hated him and was sick of the war.

So I give credit to the GIs who refused to go to Vietnam and went to jail instead. And they were only the tip of the iceberg. There is no way the US could win a war with an army that refused to fight. That's why I am a proud member of Veterans For Peace.

Have you no shame?

Law students graduating from CUNY Law School enter a hostile world. The curriculum is all about standing up for the poor and oppressed in society, using one's legal skills to speak truth to power.

But the powerful in our society have learned to use their influence and money  to make such goals difficult indeed. Our representatives in government rarely stand up for the powerless. Our media has no interest in home grown oppression. And our colleges have become dependent on the very rich to fund them. There is hardly room for idealism in the neoliberal world we have created.

So when a young CUNY graduate has the courage to give a commencement speech about the victims no one wants to hear about, all hell breaks loose. Five million Palestinians suffer under a ruthless apartheid occupation, and our country pays for the whole human rights catastrophe. But that subject is taboo, especially in the minds of all the politicians who are generously funded by the Israel Lobby. For ours is a democracy hanging by a thread. The very richest get to speak for us all. How else to explain the obscene disparity between the billionaires and everyone else?

Maybe Fatima Mohammed's commencement address to her class will be the tipping point. Perhaps the American people will finally ask the right question of the Israel Lobby: "Have you no shame?"

Fred Nagel

Our country becoming another apartheid Israel?

Anyone interested in understanding the state of Israel, doesn't have to make much of an effort. Even the New York Times is often blunt about the government sanctioned racism and ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank and Gaza. Even the propaganda spinners in the Pentagon can't use the usual catchword phrases like "protecting freedom" or "restoring democracy" to explain away Israel's brutal behavior. The Palestinians living under the boot of Israel's apartheid state have never experienced either of these fine principals.

Rather than promoting freedom or democracy, our country actively supports Israel's constant military attacks, home demolitions, detentions of minors, and destruction of infrastructure. How can a country that celebrates the inalienable  rights of its citizens, turn around and pay billions to Israel for denying basic human rights to its non Jewish population?

The website OpenSecrets.org explains part of it. Most members of Congress are feeding at the trough of the Israel Lobby, and are well paid to look the other way. They are scared too. The lobby threatens to defeat any candidate who even mentions Palestinian suffering.

Another supporter of Israel's apartheid is the right wing Evangelical Church. Christian fundamentalists believe that Jesus will appear when all Jews are returned to the Holy Land. And that fits nicely with their plans to restore the supremacy of conservative, Christian, Republican males in the United States.

A third interest group that favors Israel is made up of Jews who believe that the next Holocaust is bound to happen. In their fear, they assume that an ethnically cleansed Israel is the only safe place for them to ever live. For this sanctuary, they are willing to sacrifice the lives of five million Palestinians who are simply in the way.

To change US policy in Palestine, we have to reform Congress. It should be illegal for the Israel Lobby to spend millions bribing our representatives. At the next town meeting held by your House or Senate member, why don't you ask them how much the Israel Lobby pays them each year. Let's put an end to this interference in our elections by a foreign country.

Challenging the Christian right in the US should also be a priority. A theocracy based on Christianity would be as morally reprehensible as one based on Jewish Supremacy. We must protect the rights of all our minorities: immigrants, gays, Jews, Blacks, and Asians. To end Israeli apartheid, we must win the battle against fascism here at home. We cannot allow our country to become another apartheid Israel.

Fred Nagel

Possibilities of a new world

 

August 3

 

GUEST: Zohar Regev Chamberlain, an Israeli citizen, human rights activist, and boat leader for the Al Awda (The Return) during its attempt to break the blockade of Gaza, talks about her life devoted to Palestinian liberation.

Women who build the future

 

I got to know Zohar when she spent several months in the Mid Hudson area, talking about sailing boats to break the siege of Gaza. She has many stories to tell, both about her growing up on a kibbutz in Israel, and traveling the globe to promote Palestinian rights. 

 

Zohar's moral stances are her own. Life in a kibbutz was never focused on human rights. Whatever was shared never made it to Arab workers who traditionally did much of the agricultural work. According to an article in Haaretz:

And while we’re on the subject of comparing settlements and kibbutzim – the majority of the guests in our “hotel” were from the religious-Zionist movement. Together with the good old kibbutzniks, they constituted and continue to constitute, the spearhead of Zionist ideology. And of course they don’t lift a finger. They’re here to vacation. What are they, suckers? The maids are Arabs, the reception clerks are Arabs, the cooks are Arabs, the waiters are Arabs, the lifeguards are Arabs. The Cookilida seller is a Jewish woman. But the gardeners who keep the grass green – Arabs. Not Palestinians, heaven forbid. They are Arabs because that is their fate. To be erased citizens, devoid of political and social aspirations. Condemned to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. Here you have a brief history of Zionism: be a master, not a slave. That’s the basic principle. All the rest is inventions and excuses.

Zohar is tired of Israel's acceptance of the occupation. She is equally disgusted at how the American people have supported their relationship to the apartheid state. The US pays Israel 3.8 billion dollars a year to oppress the Palestinians, and yet few Americans even think about the fate of these five million captive people. Zohar speaks out because she thinks she has to.

 

But societies are not so accepting of truth tellers. Look at the decades long torture of imprisonment of Julian Assange. He proved that the US is indeed an empire, with scarcely any limits on the endless wars it pursues in the name of global dominance. Israel is just a piece of the grander imperialist plans, all paid for by the American public. People like Assange and Zohar show us the possibilities of a new world, and they are always in danger from the old.