Israel is the second catastrophe of the Holocaust

September 21

 

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, previous faculty member at Duke and Yale Universities, now teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities. He is the founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and Institute for Biodiversity Research in occupied Palestine. [This interview lasts the whole hour.]

Amid Environmental Destruction, Qumsiyeh Sees Hope

I was very happy to have Mazin as a guest. He did a Zoom program for our local Mideast Crisis group, and spoke for an hour to about 50 people. We couldn't get our "Share Desktop" to work, so he couldn't use his Powerpoint program with the audience. But the result was an intimate and fascinating discussion of Israel's future and his part in it. 

According to Mazin, the Holy Land has been invaded by many groups over the last several thousand years. Each group has tried to remake society in its own way, only to eventually fail and intermingle with the local population. And he predicts this will happen to Israelis and Palestinians as well.

The two other scenarios he discusses are overcoming the invaders (like in Vietnam and Algeria), or actual genocide (like in the New World). But he has hopes that perpetual resistance will eventually end the apartheid Jewish state, and restore human rights.

It is the long view for sure. At times I think that Israel will in fact exterminate its 5 million Palestinians, and take all the land in the name of its violent theocracy. For Joel Kovel, the founder of Mideast Crisis and author of Overcoming Zionism the state of Israel is the second catastrophe of the Holocaust: the destruction of two thousand years of Jewish identity. 

When we finally come out of the fascist Trump era

September 14

 

GUEST: Sarahana Shrestha, climate organizer, DSA candidate, and now member of the NY State Assembly as well as the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Legislative Caucus, talks about public utilities and why they should be owned by the people.

Rep. Shrestha to hold town hall sessions

Rep. Shrestha makes me wonder what our democracy would be like if we had politicians who put public service ahead of their private interests. Rep. Shrestha wants affordable energy that doesn't destroy our environment, and she is willing to go into county legislatures and explain how it is done. Privatizing our electrical system obviously hasn't worked. Central Hudson was sold to some huge conglomerate in Canada, and has been caught sending out inflated bills for the last several years.  

Now I get letters every day for the last two weeks, giving me credit for my over-payments. Each credit letter has a different amount, sometimes only off by less then a dollar. Why do I get an avalanche of letters signifying nothing? Because my service provider, Central Hudson, was sold to an investment firm that cares so very little about the individuals being provided electricity. Profit is the only goal when public utilities are sold off by county legislators. 

So Rep. Shrestha has made me rethink our system of government. Could we ever get enough people like her to be in Congress? Could they take over the bloated and corporatized Democratic Party? I know its not likely, but it's something. Maybe when we finally come out of the fascist Trump era, we will be looking for new people. People like Sarahana Shrestha.

 

Junkies of the military industrial complex

September 7

 

GUEST: Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Senior Lecturer at Columbia University, and member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, talks about the overarching need to resist the new Cold War.

Dismantle the nuclear doomsday machine

Perhaps global warming and the threat of nuclear war provoke the same feeling in many people. Maybe it is like dying; you know its going to happen, but let's not think about that now. it is a wondrous response, allowing one to live despite knowing that everything will collapse one day, and you will be gone.

"And to live now as we think beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."  -Howard Zinn

But that same victory should not be used to accept global warming or nuclear war. For those things can be changed. And if we care at all about generations that come after us, we should be working night and day to turn our fossil fuel saturated and nuclear radiated planet around. 

For there are villains here. Billionaires are making a killing pumping oil. They are gorging on nuclear profits. They exist at the very heart of our political system, like some giant tapeworms, swimming through the body politic. They don't care if the planet dies. They are junkies of the military industrial complex, always spinning the wheel for one more gamble. 

They are psychopaths who will end all life on our planet. That is if we let them destroy what is beautiful and wonderful about the world around us.
 

Travesties of justice

August 31

 

GUEST: Jesse Nevel, National Chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, and supporter of the African People's Solidarity Committee, talks about building white support for black power and the US government's accusation that he is a Russian agent.

Black Agenda Report

Jesse reminds us that Black people in the US do not need a Russian agent to tell them that they are being oppressed. But these are the charges that the FBI is making against the Uhuru Solidarity Movement. Offices of Uhuru have been broken into, with files and computers loaded up and taken away by the "Bureau." Now, three members of the group have been charged, one Black activist and two whites.

They face a 24 page indictment that charges them of being part of a seven year international scheme, all "orchestrated" by the Russian government. The Uhuru has already been sanctioned financially, a federal move that endangers their radio station.

Knowing the history of the FBI in suppressing leftist groups in the US, one can't be too surprised. The problem is that most Americans don't know the sordid history of the Bureau. Or how the FBI mixed racism, and paranoia in the 1961s to make the lives of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X difficult and precarious. The FBI is simply America's thought police.

And this assault on freedom of expression is just another reminder of the travesties that the Bureau is capable of. Read about the Holy Land Five and their campaign for justice.

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.