Time of commitment and joy

GUEST: Maria Luisa Rosal, field organizer for SOA Watch, and planner for the upcoming vigil on Nov 20 - 22 to close the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, talks about the disastrous results of US military training being given to Latin American army personnel.

I remember first hearing former Roman Catholic priest Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch, at the St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Staatsburg. He has a gift for educating people about the difficult subject of American militarism abroad. Most of his work has been done in Central and South America, a part of the world still suffering from US sponsored death squads and CIA funded coups against democratically elected presidents.

The subject is difficult for two reasons. We as American citizens rarely hear about what is being done to other countries in our name. Our media is closer to state sponsored propaganda than most of us realize, and since The New York Times doesn't cover imperialism in Latin America, we just don't know about it.

It is also difficult because once we learn the full extent of the suffering, we experience intense grief. Tens of thousands of women and children have been murdered by US supported dictators. Some of the worst butchery has been carried out using US supplied guns, ammunition and training. It is only after we have come to terms with this grief that we can organize to oppose US policy.

There is an exhilaration that comes from seeing that we can resist our country's racism and militarism in Latin America. Armed with a knowledge of US oppression, we can expose the long history of wars and military interventions based on US corporate profits.

November 20 - 22 is such a time of commitment and joy.

Behind Israel's war crimes

GUEST: Bassem Tamimi, internationally recognized Palestinian human rights activist from the West Bank farming village of Nabi Selah, talks about the weekly nonviolent demonstrations held in opposition to illegal Israeli settlement construction and military occupation.

I found it much harder watching  this YouTube video of this young Palestinian boy than talking to the young boy's father, Bassem.

Bassem Tamimi has a quite way about him, possibly from the beatings and torture he received in Israeli prisons for his activism. As he spoke to me, I became increasingly aware of what the Israelis will have to do to the Palestinians to permanently subjugate them or drive them away from their lands; Israel will have to massacre them. After over 65 years, the Palestinians are still resisting. Not only that, whole families like Bassem's have made keeping their lands and keeping their dignity their most important human value. 

Of course, in trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland, the Israelis have lost their religion as well as their humanity. Occupation does that to the occupying nation. In the end, the occupier must become the murderer. 

Unexpectedly, Bassem talked about the Holocaust with sadness and sensitivity. Jews have suffered greatly, and now it is his people who bear the brunt of hatred and vicious racism. Did he feel a kinship with the Jews being persecuted in Germany during the 1930s? He certainly expressed his admiration for the Jewish Israelis who stand with him against the taking of his land and the murdering of his people. 

Like most human rights activists, Bassem has come to the conclusion that it is the apartheid state of Israel that is responsible for the impending genocide of his people. And behind it all stands the empire, always ready to provide Israel with weapons, billions in aid, and protection at the UN. Yes, behind Israel's war crimes are the American people, you and me. 

At the risk of seeming ridiculous

GUEST: Cornell West speaking at Marist College plus Jewish Voice for Peace explaining the Israel/Palestine conflict. Two perspective on state supported racism. Due to a technical problem, Bassem Tamimi's interview will be played next week.

I am glad I got a chance to record and play part of Cornell West's talk. He combines an honest look at state supported racism in America, with a call to join the resistance. It spoke to me, as it did to so many others in the large audience. We become something better when we oppose racism; we act on feelings of love. 

Love has a lot to do with revolutionary change, of course. We want a better world for all its people, and when working and sacrificing for that goal, we get a shot of that nectar of the gods. Love isn't rational, at least by the measurements of philosophy or science. You can't buy it, because it is all about giving of yourself. 

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love."                                                                    -Ernesto Che Guevara              

The "privilege" of doing the right thing

GUEST: Noga Kadman, Israeli human rights researcher and author of “Erased from Space and Consciousness,” talks about how Palestinian villages were depopulated in 1948 and then erased from the memory of the Israeli people.

ALSO: Gideon Levy in Greenburgh, NY

Noga's matter of fact approach contrasted nicely with the starling material she has collected. Of course there was massive ethnic cleansing, and here are the towns and cities. Yes, it included massacres of fleeing Palestinians. It's all documented.

What about the "land without a people" Americans keep hearing about. Noga said that nobody in Israel talks about that anymore. Now the narrative is purely how necessary the ethnic cleansing was to create a Jewish theocracy. 

Is it sustainable? Noga doesn't speculate too much. She shows what the history was and presents it as a way to recover Israel's humanity. The Nakba must be admitted before any understanding between Israelis and Palestinians can ever happen. And of course, there never will be any peace for either group until the fall of Israeli apartheid. 

Maybe the only the way to change Israel's oppression of the Palestinians is to convince enough American people to take a stand against war crimes and murder being done in their name. Congress is flush with Zionist money. There has to be some other way to make them pay a price for selling out to the Israeli lobby. Eventually, it has to become an issue when they run for office. "Paid for by the Zionists" must become a label that begins to hurt them in their campaigns. 

Hey, "The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice." MLK was part of that arc, and we all get our chance to struggle for justice. We all are given that momentous gift, the "privilege" of doing the right thing.

Free ourselves of their imposed reality

GUEST: Charles Eisenstein, teacher, speaker, and author of "Sacred Economics" talks about money, cultural evolution and the illegitimacy of debt.

Reading Charles Eisenstein can make you uncomfortable. All the things you thought you knew about economics turn out to be not only negotiable but also dependent on community consensus. As he says, the zeros in some bank account somewhere don't have to mean very much.

And since so much of our governmental system is like that, there is room to challenge how everything is supposed to work. Maybe student debt should be bought up by the government and either forgiven or stripped of interest obligations. Maybe countries whose military dictatorships took on huge debts, shouldn't have to pay those "odious" debts back. 

Maybe to save our planet, we will have to stop monetizing every exchange of services and reverse the growth of material consumption. We don't need iPhones and Facebook to have supportive relationships. In fact, technology is often an obstacle to genuine human interaction. We pay dearly to isolate ourselves from what we so desperately need.

The dominance of the ruling class seems immutable, until we begin to free ourselves of their imposed reality. Thank you, Charles Eisenstein, for helping us look for new solutions.

The real terrorists are the mega-corporations

GUEST: Kathy Stevens, founder and president of the Catskill Animal Sanctuary, talks about the 110-acre haven for horses and farmed animals rescued from cruelty and neglect.

Kathy came to our studio for the interview. She is passionate about what she does, answering the phone at any time of day or night and saving animals from abuse by their owners.

We discussed the links between respecting animal and human life. Maybe one needs a level of empathy to see oneself in another living being. Is that the same type of awareness that enables one to treat different races and ethnic groups with respect, and love.

Animal based agriculture, according to Kathy, is an important component of climate change. But the giant farming and chemical industries want to obscure the fact that eating less meat would greatly reduce greenhouse gasses.

What we were able to agree on is that demonstrators who do civil disobedience against huge factory farms are not "terrorists," as they have been accused of being. The the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is an unconstitutional attack on free speech, pushed through Congress by multimillion dollar corporate lobbyists.

Of course, the real terrorists are the mega-corporations that are ruining the planet and endangering all life on earth. Keep up the good work, Kathy. You have given us a lot to think about. 

It is a state secret

GUEST: David Vine, assistant professor of anthropology at American University and author of the newly published "Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World" talks about his research into the over 800 military bases beyond our nation's shores.

We had such an interesting discussion with David Vine. The facts about the empire have been there since our victory in World War II. It is just that nobody important besides President Eisenhower ever referred to it.

I never got around to asking David about the difference between the British Empire and the American one. The British people were proud of their military occupations and bragged about bringing civilization to a backward Third World. Of course, Americans talk about bringing democracy to all the countries the US has attacked and devastated, so maybe that is the equivalent.

Gandhi famously responded to a question about Western civilization by stating that "it would be a very good idea." The British occupation of India had led to at least four major famines that killed millions. Perhaps the same answer can be give to a query about American democracy. In "spreading democracy" around the world, our country has killed millions of people with high tech weaponry. Moreover, the US has a long track record of overthrowing democratically elected leaders and setting up pro-American dictators. Our CIA then trains and furnishes lists to state run death squads that, in turn, murder tens of thousands more. Hundreds of thousands in Guatemala and Indonesia.

Want to learn about this? Read what the major US media is saying about Honduras. Then read alternative media from the rest of the world to familiarize yourself with the daily killings of journalists and labor leaders. Far from nurturing democracy in the Third World, out country spreads terror, led by our own secretive Storm Troopers, the CIA.

It is a system based on corporate greed, and an amoral use of whatever killing machines are most effective. US supported death squads or little silver drones, it doesn't matter. Ours is an empire based on exploitation and death.

No political leader wants to talk about this. Not even Bernie Sanders, the "socialist" running for president. Our newspaper of record has a long history of applauding every American invasion and overthrow planned in the Pentagon. It's no wonder that Americans have never considered their empire. It is a state secret.