SIGN Appeal: Drop Frame-up Charges vs. USW 8751 Leader Steve Kirschbaum

by solidarity on July 10, 2014

To SIGN the statement below, email endorsement to schoolbus5@teamsolidarity.org Stop Veolia/City Escalating War on USW 8751 Boston School Bus Union Drop Outrageous Union Busting Frame-up Charges filed by Boston Police Department (BPD) against Steve Kirschbaum, Chair of the Grievance Committee and a founder of the Local. On July 3, 2014, four plain clothes BPD detectives paid two visits to brother Kirschbaum’s home while he was at the Boston Teachers Union in contract negotiations with Veolia Transportation, Inc.  Lieutenant Detective Thomas Hopkins served Steve’s daughter with his Summons charging him with Assault and Battery with a dangerous Weapon, Trespass, Breaking and Entering during the Daytime to Commit a Felony, and Malicious Destruction of Property.  These false, defamatory, and outrageous charges are identified as “offenses” alleged to have occurred on June 30th at the Solidarity Day rallies and march. On June 30th Solidarity Day nearly 500 USW 8751 Boston School Bus drivers and supporters took the struggle against Veolia/City union busting to the streets surrounding the Freeport bus yard and Veolia Corporate Headquarters.  Protestors were demanding the rehiring of the 4 illegally fired leaders, a just new contract, and, joining with the community of Boston, saying “NO” to the City’s austerity cutbacks. The protest included an opening rally featuring Labor and Community supporters followed by a march to Veolia HQ for another rally.  The demonstrators then took to the streets again, concluding with an impromptu “union membership briefing” in the Freeport Driver’s Room.  The union leaders advised both company representatives and BPD that the union members were asserting their contract right to “access to the property” to conduct “union activity” (Article 15, sec 1 and 3.), namely a critical briefing on that day’s contract negotiations, as the contract expiration was just hours away.  The doors to the facility were unlocked and opened.  The union, drivers, monitors, families and supporters had access to the drivers` room facilities all day on June 30th, as is always the case.  There was no issue of “disruption of operations,” as there were no operations taking place at that time of the day.  The company’s illegal efforts to stop the meeting by calling the police proved ineffective in deterring the union.  The meeting was held in an orderly, peaceful manner, and the gathering disbursed at the conclusion without incident.  There are scores of witnesses that can confirm that the charges against Steve are absolutely false.  These false charges seek to defame Steve Kirschbaum and USW 8751’s 40 year history of dedicated unionism, social activism and solidarity with labor struggles locally, nationally and globally. These frame-up charges represent the most recent link in an unbroken chain of vile anti-union attacks against the hard working women and men of USW 8751, their fighting union, and the communities they serve.  It is part and parcel of the Veolia/City war against USW 8751 that has included the illegal firing of the four USW leaders, 18 Unfair Labor Practice charges against Veolia with the National Labor Relations Board, hundreds of individual and class action grievances, and more. At the negotiating table the company is seeking to take away 40 years of collective bargaining progress while the city’s cuts represent a most serious attack on the community’s right to safe, on time, professional yellow school bus transportation and equal, quality education generally. The Union busters will fail.  USW 8751 has a proud history of defending its members, the majority of whom come from Boston’s African American and immigrant communities; winning wages, benefits and working conditions; and ensuring union rights that are the envy of the school bus industry.  The unity and solidarity demonstrated by Solidarity Day will prove decisive in the battle to win Safety for the Students and Justice for the Drivers.  This is a struggle to defend Local 8751 and the union movement as a whole. Drop the anti-union charges against Steve Kirschbaum NOW! Rehire the fired leaders! No Concessions!  Contract Justice NOW!  Download pdf of this statement Email endorsement to schoolbus5@teamsolidarity.org

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The Return of George Orwell and Big Brother’s War

On Israel, Ukraine and Truth

by JOHN PILGER

The other night, I saw George Orwells’s 1984 performed on the London stage. Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s warning about the future was presented as a period piece: remote, unthreatening, almost reassuring. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said, “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

Acclaimed by critics, the skilful production was a measure of our cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other distractions beckoned. “What a mindfuck,” said the young woman, lighting up her phone.

As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984. “Democracy” is now a rhetorical device.  Peace is “perpetual war”. “Global” is imperial. The once hopeful concept of “reform” now means regression, even destruction. “Austerity” is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.

In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith.  “Picasso’s red period,” says an Observer headline, “and why politics don’t make good art.” Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name.

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice.  Among the insistent voices of consumer- feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital”.

At the National Theatre, a new play, Great Britain, satirises the phone hacking scandal that has seen journalists tried and convicted, including a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Described as a “farce with fangs [that] puts the whole incestuous [media] culture in the dock and subjects it to merciless ridicule”, the play’s targets are the “blessedly funny” characters in Britain’s tabloid press. That is well and good, and so familiar. What of the non-tabloid media that regards itself as reputable and credible, yet serves a parallel role as an arm of state and corporate power, as in the promotion of illegal war?

The Leveson inquiry into phone hacking glimpsed this unmentionable. Tony Blair was giving evidence, complaining to His Lordship about the tabloids’ harassment of his wife, when he was interrupted by a voice from the public gallery. David Lawley-Wakelin, a film-maker, demanded Blair’s arrest and prosecution for war crimes. There was a long pause: the shock of truth. Lord Leveson leapt to his feet and ordered the truth-teller thrown out and apologised to the war criminal. Lawley-Wakelin was prosecuted; Blair went free.

Blair’s enduring accomplices are more respectable than the phone hackers. When the BBC arts presenter, Kirsty Wark, interviewed him on the tenth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, she gifted him a moment he could only dream of; she allowed him to agonise over his “difficult” decision on Iraq rather than call him to account for his epic crime. This evoked the procession of BBC journalists who in 2003 declared that Blair could feel “vindicated”, and the subsequent, “seminal” BBC series, The Blair Years, for which David Aaronovitch was chosen as the writer, presenter and interviewer. A Murdoch retainer who campaigned for military attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria, Aaronovitch fawned expertly.

Since the invasion of Iraq – the exemplar of an act of unprovoked aggression the Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson called “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” — Blair and his mouthpiece and principal accomplice, Alastair Campbell, have been afforded generous space in the Guardian to rehabilitate their reputations. Described as a Labour Party “star”, Campbell has sought the sympathy of readers for his depression and displayed his interests, though not his current assignment as advisor, with Blair, to the Egyptian military tyranny.

As Iraq is dismembered as a consequence of the Blair/Bush invasion, a Guardian headline declares: “Toppling Saddam was right, but we pulled out too soon”. This ran across a prominent article on 13 June by a former Blair functionary, John McTernan, who also served Iraq’s CIA installed dictator Iyad Allawi. In calling for a repeat invasion of a country his former master helped destroy , he made no reference to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, the flight of four million refugees and sectarian turmoil in a nation once proud of its communal tolerance.

“Blair embodies corruption and war,” wrote the radical Guardian columnist Seumas Milne in a spirited piece on 3 July. This is known in the trade as “balance”. The following day, the paper published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the bomber were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain”. This other embodiment of “corruption and war” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered people across the developing world.

In a village in Afghanistan, inhabited by the poorest of the poor, I filmed Orifa, kneeling at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed in the adjacent house. A “precision” 500-pound bomb fell directly on their small mud, stone and straw house, leaving a crater 50 feet wide. Lockheed Martin, the plane’s manufacturer’s, had pride of place in the Guardian’s advertisement.

The former US secretary of state and aspiring president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, was recently on the BBC’s Women’s Hour, the quintessence of media respectability. The presenter, Jenni Murray, presented Clinton as a beacon of female achievement. She did not remind her listeners about Clinton’s profanity that Afghanistan was invaded to “liberate” women like Orifa. She asked  Clinton nothing about her administration’s terror campaign using drones to kill women, men and children. There was no mention of Clinton’s idle threat, while campaigning to be the first female president, to “eliminate” Iran, and nothing about her support for illegal mass surveillance and the pursuit of whistle-blowers.

Murray did ask one finger-to-the-lips question. Had Clinton forgiven Monica Lewinsky for having an affair with husband? “Forgiveness is a choice,” said Clinton, “for me, it was absolutely the right choice.” This recalled the 1990s and the years consumed by the Lewinsky “scandal”. President Bill Clinton was then invading Haiti, and bombing the Balkans, Africa and Iraq. He was also destroying the lives of Iraqi children; Unicef reported the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five as a result of an embargo led by the US and Britain.

The children were media unpeople, just as Hillary Clinton’s victims in the invasions she supported and promoted – Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia — are media unpeople. Murray made no reference to them. A photograph of her and her distinguished guest, beaming, appears on the BBC website.

In politics as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. When I began a career in Britain’s Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron’s celebrated reports of the explosion of the Hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Today’s grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is insidious, contagious, effective and liberal.

In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill wrote: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required.  “It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature: its conviction that it represents a superior form of life.” He had in mind a speech by Blair in which the then prime minister promised to “reorder the world around us” according to his “moral values”.

Richard Falk, the respected authority on international law and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, once described a “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence”. It is “so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable”.

Tenure and patronage reward the guardians. On BBC Radio 4, Razia Iqbal interviewed Toni Morrison, the African-American Nobel Laureate. Morrison wondered why people were “so angry” with Barack Obama, who was “cool” and wished to build a “strong economy and health care”. Morrison was proud to have talked on the phone with her hero, who had read one of her books and invited her to his inauguration.

Neither she nor her interviewer mentioned Obama’s seven wars, including his terror campaign by drone, in which whole families, their rescuers and mourners have been murdered. What seemed to matter was that a “finely spoken” man of colour had risen to the commanding heights of power. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that the “historic mission” of the colonised was to serve as a “transmission line” to those who ruled and oppressed. In the modern era, the employment of ethnic difference in western power and propaganda systems is now seen as essential. Obama epitomises this, though the cabinet of George W. Bush – his warmongering clique – was the most multiracial in presidential history.

As the Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the jihadists of ISIS, Obama said, “The American people made huge investments and sacrifices in order to give Iraqis the opportunity to chart a better destiny.” How “cool” is that lie? How “finely spoken” was Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on 28 May. Delivering his “state of the world” address at the graduation ceremony of those who “will take American leadership” across the world, Obama said, “The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it. International opinion matters, but America will never ask permission …”

In repudiating international law and the rights of independent nations, the American president claims a divinity based on the might of his “indispensable nation”. It is a familiar message of imperial impunity, though always bracing to hear. Evoking the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being.”  Historian Norman Pollack wrote: “For goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

In February, the US mounted one of its “colour” coups against the elected government in Ukraine, exploiting genuine protests against corruption in Kiev. Obama’s national security adviser Victoria Nuland personally selected the leader of an “interim government”. She nicknamed him “Yats”. Vice President Joe Biden came to Kiev, as did CIA Director John Brennan. The shock troops of their putsch were Ukrainian fascists.

For the first time since 1945, a neo-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital.  No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism in the borderland through which Hitler’s invading Nazis took millions of Russian lives. They were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for the massacre of Jews and Russians they called “vermin”. The UPA is the historical inspiration of the present-day Svoboda Party and its fellow-travelling Right Sector. Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its Nato Enlargement Project. Reneging on a promise made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the east”, Nato has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, Nato’s expansion is the biggest military build-up since the Second World War.

A Nato Membership Action Plan is Washington’s gift to the coup-regime in Kiev. In August, “Operation Rapid Trident” will put American and British troops on Ukraine’s Russian border and “Sea Breeze” will send US warships within sight of Russian ports. Imagine the response if these acts of provocation, or intimidation, were carried out on America’s borders.

In reclaiming Crimea — which Nikita Kruschev illegally detached from Russia in 1954 – the Russians defended themselves as they have done for almost a century. More than 90 per cent of the population of Crimea voted to return the territory to Russia. Crimea is the home of the Black Sea Fleet and its loss would mean life or death for the Russian Navy and a prize for Nato. Confounding the war parties in Washington and Kiev, Vladimir Putin withdrew troops from the Ukrainian border and urged ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon separatism.

In Orwellian fashion, this has been inverted in the west to the “Russian threat”. Hillary Clinton likened Putin to Hitler. Without irony, right-wing German commentators said as much. In the media, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are sanitised as “nationalists” or “ultra nationalists”. What they fear is that Putin is skilfully seeking a diplomatic solution, and may succeed. On 27 June, responding to Putin’s latest accommodation – his request to the Russian Parliament to rescind legislation that gave him the power to intervene on behalf of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians – Secretary of State John Kerry issued another of his ultimatums. Russia must “act within the next few hours, literally” to end the revolt in eastern Ukraine. Notwithstanding that Kerry is widely recognised as a buffoon, the serious purpose of these “warnings” is to confer pariah status on Russia and suppress news of the Kiev regime’s war on its own people.

A third of the population of Ukraine are Russian-speaking and bilingual. They have long sought a democratic federation that reflects Ukraine’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland. Separatism is a reaction to the Kiev junta’s attacks on them, causing as many as 110,000 (UN estimate) to flee across the border into Russia. Typically, they are traumatised women and children.

Like Iraq’s embargoed infants, and Afghanistan’s “liberated” women and girls, terrorised by the CIA’s warlords, these ethnic people of Ukraine are media unpeople in the west, their suffering and the atrocities committed against them minimised, or suppressed. No sense of the scale of the regime’s assault is reported in the mainstream western media. This is not unprecedented. Reading again Phillip Knightley’s masterly The First Casualty: the war correspondent as hero, propagandist and mythmaker, I renewed my admiration for the Manchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price, the only western reporter to remain in Russia during the 1917 revolution and report the truth of a disastrous invasion by the western allies. Fair-minded and courageous, Philips Price alone disturbed what Knightley calls an anti-Russian “dark silence” in the west.

On 2 May, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. There is horrifying video evidence.  The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). The New York Times buried it, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint”.

On 28 June, the Guardian devoted most of a page to declarations by the Kiev regime’s “president”, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko.  Again, Orwell’s rule of inversion applied. There was no putsch; no war against Ukraine’s minority; the Russians were to blame for everything. “We want to modernise my country,” said Poroshenko. “We want to introduce freedom, democracy and European values. Somebody doesn’t like that. Somebody doesn’t like us for that.”

According to his report, the Guardian’s reporter, Luke Harding, did not challenge these assertions, or mention the Odessa atrocity, the regime’s air and artillery attacks on residential areas, the killing and kidnapping of journalists, the firebombing of an opposition newspaper and his threat to “free Ukraine from dirt and parasites”. The enemy are “rebels”, “militants”, “insurgents”, “terrorists” and stooges of the Kremlin. Summon from history the ghosts of Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, southern Africa, Iraq; note the same tags. Palestine is the lodestone of this unchanging deceit. On 11 July, following the latest Israeli, American equipped slaughter in Gaza – 80 people including six children in one family — an Israeli general writes in the Guardian under the headline, “A necessary show of force”.

In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.”

John Pilger is the author of Freedom Next Time. All his documentary films can be viewed free on his websitehttp://www.johnpilger.com/

 

 

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The largest Union in Britain, UNITE, endorsed a call to Boycott, Divest and Enact Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, because of its treatment and occupation of Palestine.

UK's Largest Union Backs Boycott of Israel

Jerry Lewis, July 6, 2014
LONDON - UNITE, Britain's largest Trades Union - which last week confirmed it will be financially backing Labor Party leader Ed Miliband's [PHOTO at right] bid for the premiership next May - has defied his recent call to not support the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment campaign against Israel.

At their annual conference held in the south coast resort of Brighton last week, they voted to support two hostile- to-Israel resolutions, including one that actively supports the BDS policy promoted by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The union, which claims a membership of around 1.3 million, overwhelmingly carried two pro-Palestinian resolutions, while clearly rejecting a pro-Israeli motion. The third motion, from the Bank of England branch, proposed greater co-operation between UNITE and the Histradut by way of constructive dialogue and support for the Israeli union movement.

The main pro-Palestinian resolution calls for raising awareness, building support, campaigning, and lobbying for "a free and independent Palestine" by highlighting the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and 'Israel' itself.

A key section of the resolution instructs the union to work with others to develop campaigning and a "leverage strategy" around the BDS movement, including tackling "complicit companies" involved in the "occupation," the "apartheid wall," and "illegal settlements" "through workforce pressure, contracts, and pension funds," while encouraging members to call on supermarkets and retailers "to stop using companies that export goods from illegal settlements."

The union is also urged to raise the issue and table motions "in support of BDS" in other trades union forums around the world.

However, this flies in the face of Miliband who, after his pre Passover visit to Israel, told Labor Friends of Israel's annual lunch not three weeks ago that, as far as he is concerned, nothing but nothing should get in the way of peace.  [LOL; typo? piece of Palestine?]

And it was in that context that he added, "We are clear that the threat of boycotts of Israel is the wrong response.

We do and we will resolutely oppose the isolation of Israel. And my party does so."

While it was not the first time he indicated his view, he had not said so as explicitly as on this occasion.

However, complicating the issue was the decision announced at the beginning of last week that UNITE was to give the opposition Labor Party a further #12 million of much needed funding in preparation for the May 2015 general election.

The ruling Conservative Party leadership rubbed their hands with glee as they pointed to the prospect of the left-leaning union's boss Len McClusky having more influence over Labor Party policy because of the sponsorship. This is something that Miliband has been trying to deny and break away from since he won the election to become party leader in September 2010.

A senior Labor Party source told The Jerusalem Post Saturday night that Miliband is the party leader and what he says is party policy and nothing that UNITE discusses at its party conference will change that simple fact.

A Labor Party representative added: "Ed Miliband made both his and the Labor Party's position on this clear at a recent Labor Friends of Israel event.

That was his firm position then, and remains his firm position now."

Introducing the BDS Movement

The global movement for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights was initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005, and is coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), established in 2007. BDS is a strategy that allows people of conscience to play an effective role in the Palestinian struggle for justice.

For decades, Israel has denied Palestinians their fundamental rights of freedom, equality, and self-determination through ethnic cleansing, colonization, racial discrimination, and military occupation. Despite abundant condemnation of Israeli policies by the UN, other international bodies, and preeminent human rights organisations, the world community has failed to hold Israel accountable and enforce compliance with basic principles of law. Israel’s crimes have continued with impunity.

In view of this continued failure, Palestinian civil society called for a global citizens’ response. On July 9 2005, a year after the International Court of Justice’s historic advisory opinion on the illegality of Israel’s Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), a clear majority of Palestinian civil society called upon their counterparts and people of conscience all over the world to launch broad boycotts, implement divestment initiatives, and to demand sanctions against Israel, until Palestinian rights are recognised in full compliance with international law.

The campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) is shaped by a rights-based approach and highlights the three broad sections of the Palestinian people: the refugees, those under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Palestinians in Israel. The call urges various forms of boycott against Israel until it meets its obligations under international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

The BDS call was endorsed by over 170 Palestinian political parties, organizations, trade unions and movements. The signatories represent the refugees, Palestinians in the OPT, and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Boycotts target products and companies (Israeli and international) that profit from the violation of Palestinian rights, as well as Israeli sporting, cultural and academic institutions. Anyone can boycott Israeli goods, simply by making sure that they don’t buy produce made in Israel or by Israeli companies. Campaigners and groups call on consumers not to buy Israeli goods and on businesses not to buy or sell them.

Israeli cultural and academic institutions directly contribute to maintaining, defending or whitewashing the oppression of Palestinians, as Israel deliberately tries to boost its image internationally through academic and cultural collaborations. As part of the boycott, academics, artists and consumers are campaigning against such collaboration and ‘rebranding’. A growing number of artists have refused to exhibit or play in Israel.

Divestment means targeting corporations complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights and ensuring that the likes of university investment portfolios and pension funds are not used to finance such companies. These efforts raise awareness about the reality of Israel’s policies and encourage companies to use their economic influence to pressure Israel to end its systematic denial of Palestinian rights.

Sanctions are an essential part of demonstrating disapproval for a country’s actions. Israel’s membership of various diplomatic and economic forums provides both an unmerited veneer of respectability and material support for its crimes. By calling for sanctions against Israel, campaigners educate society about violations of international law and seek to end the complicity of other nations in these violations.

The BDS National Committee

The efforts to coordinate the BDS campaign, that began to grow rapidly as soon as/once the 2005 Call was made public, culminated in the first Palestinian BDS Conference held in Ramallah in November 2007. Out of this conference emerged the BDS National Committee (BNC) as the Palestinian coordinating body for the BDS campaign worldwide. See the BNC page for more details.

Israel's real purpose in Gaza operation? To kill Arabs

Since the first Lebanon war over 30 years ago, Israel's main strategy has been killing Arabs. The current atrocious war in Gaza is no different.

By Gideon Levy | 02:42 13.07.14 |  6

The goal of Operation Protective Edge is to restore the calm; the means: killing civilians. The slogan of the Mafia has become official Israeli policy. Israel sincerely believes that if it kills hundreds of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, quiet will reign. It is pointless to destroy the weapons stores of Hamas, which has already proved capable of rearmament. Bringing down the Hamas government is an unrealistic (and illegitimate) goal, one that Israel does not want: It is aware that the alternative could be much worse. That leaves only one possible purpose for the military operation: death to Arabs, accompanied by the cheering of the masses.

The Israel Defense Forces already has a “map of pain,” a diabolical invention that has replaced the no less diabolical “bank of targets,” and that map is spreading at a sickening pace. Watch Al Jazeera English, a balanced and professional television channel (unlike its Arabic sister station), and see the extent of its success. You won’t see it in Israel’s “open” broadcast studios, which as usual are only open to the Israeli victim, but on Al Jazeera you will see the whole truth, and perhaps you will even be shocked.

The bodies in Gaza are piling up, the desperate, constantly updated tabulation of mass killing that Israel boasts of, which already numbers dozens of civilians, including 24 children as of noon on Saturday; hundreds of people injured, in addition to horror and destruction. One school and one hospital have already been bombed. The aim is to strike homes, and no amount of justification can help: It’s a war crime, even if the IDF calls them “command-and-control centers” or “conference rooms.” Granted, there are strikes that are much more brutal than Israel’s, but in this war, which is nothing other than mutual attacks on civilians — the elephant against the fly — there aren’t even any refugees. In contrast to Syria and Iraq, in the Gaza Strip the inhabitants do not have the luxury of fleeing for their lives. In a cage, there’s nowhere to run.

Since the first Lebanon war, more than 30 years ago, the killing of Arabs has become Israel’s primary strategic instrument. The IDF doesn’t wage war against armies, and its main target is civilian populations. Arabs are born only to kill and to be killed, as everyone knows. They have no other goal in life, and Israel kills them.

One must, of course, be outraged by the modus operandi of Hamas: Not only does it aim its rockets at civilian population centers in Israel, not only does it position itself within population centers — it may not have an alternative, given the crowded conditions in the Strip — but it also leaves the Gazan civilian population vulnerable to Israel’s brutal attacks, without seeing to a single siren, shelter or protected space. That is criminal. But the barrages of the Israel Air Force are no less criminal, on account of both the result and the intent: There isn’t a single residential building in the Gaza Strip that is not home to dozens of women and children; the IDF cannot, therefore, claim that it does not mean to hurt innocent civilians. If the recent demolition of the home of a terrorist in the West Bank still stirred a weak protest, now dozens of homes are being destroyed, together with their occupants.

Retired generals and commentators on active duty compete to make the most monstrous proposal: “If we kill their families, that will frighten them,” explained Maj.Gen. (res.) Oren Shachor, without batting an eyelid. “We must create a situation such that when they come out of their burrows, they won’t recognize Gaza,” others said. Shamelessly, without question — until the next Goldstone investigation.

A war with no goal is among the most despicable of wars; the deliberate targeting of civilians is among the most atrocious of means. Terror now reigns in Israel as well, but it’s unlikely there is a single Israeli who can imagine what it’s like for Gaza’s 1.8 million inhabitants, whose already miserable lives are now totally horrific. The Gaza Strip is not a “hornet’s nest,” it is a province of human desperation. Hamas is not an army, far from it, despite all the fear tactics: If it really did build such a sophisticated network of tunnels there, as is claimed, then why doesn’t it build Tel Aviv’s light rail network, already?

The 1,000-sortie and 1,000 tons of explosives marks have almost been reached, and Israel is waiting for the “victory picture” that has already been achieved: Death to Arabs.

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Veterans For Peace-Cambridge  

Midnight Voices

(the young dead soldiers do not speak, they have a silence that speaks for them at night when the clock counts)

Calling all poets, slammers, word smiths, lyricists, rappers, misfits, musicians and anyone who has the gift of gab! We are hosting Midnight Voices, a monthly collaborative coffeehouse, spoken word, and open mic series 3^rd Thursdays at Cambridge Friends Meeting at 7pm. This third Thursday 17 July,  we are featuring David Rothauser, he will be bringing an excerpt from his most recent play. Open mic performances will follow.
      
 We are actively seeking co-sponsors and talent to be featured readers in upcoming months. If you have any ideas about this or want any other information please contact Eric Wasileski Ericwasileski@gmail.com

Warrior Writers Boston and the Smedley Butler Brigade, Veteran-Friends in conjunction with the FMC Peace and Social Concerns committee are hosting. These events are open to everyone; next month on August 21 @7pm we will be having Caleb Nelson as the featured reader. 

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 reopened what many people in America had long assumed was a settled ethical question: Is torture ever morally permissible? Within days, some began to suggest that, in these new circumstances, the new answer was "yes." Rebecca Gordon argues that September 11 did not, as some have said, "change everything," and that institutionalized state torture remains as wrong today as it was on the day before those terrible attacks. Furthermore, U.S. practices during the "war on terror" are rooted in a history that began long before September 11, a history that includes both support for torture regimes abroad and the use of torture in American jails and prisons. Rebecca Gordon received her B.A. from Reed College and her M.Div. and Ph.D. in Ethics and Social Theory from Graduate Theological Union. She teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco and for the university’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good. Previous publications include Letters From Nicaragua  and Cruel and Usual: How Welfare "Reform" Punishes Poor People.  She is a member of the War Times organizing committee. Talks by Rebecca Gordon on Mainstreaming Torture: Tuesday, 7/29 7:00 pm: Porter Square Books, Porter Square Shopping Center, Cambridge, MA Thursday, 7/31 7:00pm: UU Church, 669 Union Street, Manchester, NH  Friday, 8/1 2:00pm: Framingham Library, 49 Lexington St, Framingham, MA Sunday, 8/3 7:00pm: Walpole United Church, 30 Common St, Walpole, MA Wednesday, 8/20 5:00pm: Chilmark Public Library, 522 South Rd, Chilmark, MA Thursday 8/28 7:00pm: Rogers Free Library, 525 Hope St (rte 114), Bristol, RI Contact Mass. Peace Action to arrange a presentation in your town. Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (Hardcover) By Rebecca Gordon $29.95 ISBN-13: 9780199336432 Availability: Available to Order Published: Oxford University Press (UK), 5/2014

Join Massachusetts Peace Action - or renew your membership today!   Dues are $40/year for an individual, $65 for a family, or $10 for student/unemployed/low income.  Members vote for leadership and endorsements, receive newsletters and discounts on event admissions.  Donate now and you will be a member in good standing through December 2014! Your financial support makes this work possible! Massachusetts Peace Action, 11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138 617-354-2169  • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter Click here to unsubscribe

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel! 

United for Justice with Peace, in consultation with Jewish Voice for Peace and the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights and others, is calling for an emergency organizing meeting of a broad spectrum of peace, social justice, and Palestine solidarity groups to plan large/united protest actions in Boston in solidarity with the Palestinian people as long as the current brutal onslaught against the Palestinians in Gaza continues.

 

Please send representatives from your group to this action planning meeting – to build a united series of actions, starting with a large mobilization at Park St.  Please let others know.

 

TUESDAY,  JULY 15, 7:00 pm, American Friends Service Committee, 2161 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.

 

Marilyn Levin

781-316-2018

On behalf of UJP and the

Palestine Task Force

 

 

 

***Philip Marlowe-RIP-Raymond Chandler And Robert Parker’s Poodle Spring

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Poodle Springs, Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, Putnam, New York, 1989

No question when it comes to private eyes, dicks, gumshoes, peepers, shamuses or whatever you call guys (gals too these days) who take on people’s miseries for a few bucks and expenses and try to solve something that is bothering them then the classic windmill-chaser with his own rough-hewn code of honor, code of facing the world, Raymond Chandler’s seven-crime novel series star, Philip Marlowe, comes readily to mind. Then out of the blue (well maybe not out of the blue) some thirty years later we got an eighth crime novel starring the well-travelled literary and cinematic private detective.

What gives? Well, what gives was that the late well-regarded crime novel writer in his own right with the Spenser series, Robert Parker, decided to finish the incomplete novel, Poodle Spring, Chandler left behind when he died in 1959. And with some updated language, some new looks at Chandler’s slumming streets of Los Angeles (Poodle Spring is just a resting place for the rich characters who people the novel the real action is in the city of angels) and the same old vices, lusts, and virtues of the southern California sun does a creditable job.      

Here is a little twist though. Our boy Marlowe when he goes chasing windmills this time has a wife, a rich wife who slows him down, or tries to which is dangling in the background. See rich or poor Marlowe is who he is, has his code, is his own man. So the bridle of marriage is worn thinly, and eventually not at all. Yeah, a guy can’t chase windmills, save damsels in distress, and every other thing a private eye is expected to do for a hundred a day and lunch with all that baggage as tempting as it is. That little twist only slows the action a little though as Marlowe finds himself up to his neck in murder, duplicity, and greed.

Here is the skinny. A grifter porno photography trying to set himself on easy street marries into wealth (and hence easy street Palm, oops, Poodle Springs). Except there are two problems. First he is already married and secondly the rich gal he married is kinky, kinky but with a very rich shady past father who has a habit of fixing things for her. Of course every grifter has a trail behind him. Our boy Les/Larry (depending on which wife you ask) is being hounded by a former client who has some goods to sell (kinky photos of poor little rich wife). Not only that our boy is in hock to a gambler for a big IOU. Not good, not good at all when the blackmailer and gambler wind up very dead and Philip Marlowe has to figure out who killed them, or else. The “or else” being the very big and deadly reach of the rich girl’s father. Sound like a Chandler plot-line? Maybe not up to the Big Sleep but close, if our boy could just keep away from that rich wife’s bed for a while.       

A Walk Down “Dream Street”- For the “girl on the rocks” …… because we used to share some dreams

When we were students with a lifetime in front of us (hell, with living forever in front of us) we all had a fistful of dreams, some outrageously impossible, others just made up of handfuls of cloud dust. I was thinking recently that my old running mate Bill Badger, the great runner from our class, and I used to sit on the front steps at North Adamsville High a lot, mainly in summer, and go back and forth about our respective dreams for the future. I am interested in what happened to fellow classmates and their pursuit of their youthful dreams. Did things work out? I hope so. Tell us your stories. Mine is below  - A Walk Down “Dream Street.”:

A few years ago after having gone through a series of events the details of which need not detain us right now I was driven back to memories, hard, hard-bitten, hard-aching, hard-longing, mist of time, dream memories, of North Adamsville schoolboy days and thoughts of my old high school friend and running mate, Bill Badger, whom I spent many a night on the front steps at North Adamsville High with talking about our dreams.

Mostly, we spoke of dreams of the future: small, soft, fluttery, airless, flightless, high school kid-sized, working class-sized, North Adamsville-sized, non-world–beater-sized, no weight dreams really. No, that’s not right, they were weighty enough but only until 18 years old, or maybe 21, weighty. A future driven though, and driven hard, by the need to get out from under, to get away from, to put many miles between us and some crazy family life (the details of which need not detain us here either, as I now know, and I have some stories to prove it, that family condition was epidemic in the old town then, and probably still is).

We also spoke of getting out of one-horse, teen life-stealing, soul-cramping, dream-stealing, small or large dream take your pick, even breathe-stealing, North Adamsville. Of getting out into the far reaches, as far as desire and dough would carry, of the great wild, wanderlust, cosmic, American day and night road -hitch-hike if you have too, shoe leather-beating walking if you must but get out. Christ, even to Revere in a crunch, but mainly putting some miles between us and the old town.

Some of what Bill and I talked about as well at the time since we were your average teenage boys with teenage “that minute” dreams too was how we were going to do in the upcoming cross country and track seasons, girls, the desperate need to get away from the family trap, girls, no money in pockets for girls, cars, no money for cars, girls. Of course we dreamed of being world-class runners, as every runner does. Bill went on to have an outstanding high school career. I, on the other hand, was, giving myself much the best of it, a below average runner. So much for some dreams.

We occasionally spoke, as well, of other dreams then. I do not remember a lot of the content of Bill's, mainly learning a trade, maybe owning his own small business, something to put a little money in his pockets. The dreams of a lot of the have-nots in the world. Mine probably ran a parallel course. But along with those practical dreams I would drive him crazy with the dreams I had of social justice, of making this wicked old world just a little more peaceful and easy to live in. For working people, my people, his people, and probably yours too, to get a fair shake in the here and now. Those dreams, my friends, have, sad to say, not turned out as expected back then when it looked like we were riding on an upward curve of history. But enough from me. I want to hear about you. I will finish this sketch with a line from a Bob Dylan lyric. "I'll let you be in my dream, if I can be in your dream." Fair enough?

(please forward widely) ISRAEL:  STOP THE KILLING OF PALESTINIANS UNITED STATES:  END ALL AID TO ISRAEL   FREEDOM AND JUSTICE FOR PALESTINE   Israel, fully backed by the United States, has engaged in collective punishment of the Palestinian people since 1948 through forced evacuation, war, occupation, apartheid practices, expanding settlements, mass incarceration, and outright terrorism.  From its inception, the Zionist objective has been ethnic cleansing and land appropriation.   The Israeli propaganda machine always has a pretext, based on charges of anti-Semitism and “existential” threat, to justify its murderous actions against the indigenous Palestinian population.  Today, they blame Hamas for the kidnapping and killing of three teenagers.  This comes in the context of the Israeli government’s anger at the recent reconciliation agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.    In “retaliation” for the slain Israeli youth, reminiscent of the Southern lynchings in the U.S., a racist gang of thugs kidnapped a Palestinian 16-year old, Mohammad Aba Khudair, and brutally beat and tortured him and finally, burned him alive.  Days later, his American 15-year old cousin, Tarek Abu Khdeir, was savagely beaten by masked police and others, and then arrested and held while medical treatment was withheld.   In recent weeks, the State of Israel has carried out thousands of military raids of Palestinian homes, arrested hundreds, encouraged mob violence against Palestinians and their civic institutions, killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians, including many children, and intensified air attacks.   The people of Gaza, living in the world’s largest penal colony, who have never recovered from Israel’s last major assault of 2008-2009 and the ongoing siege, are once again the targets of a reign of terror from a major military power.  On July 8, Israel launched a new military offensive called “Operation Protective Edge” with a barrage of intensifying missile attacks on Gaza, activating reservists, and massing thousands of infantry and assault units at the Gaza border, threatening a full-scale ground and air invasion.   There is no justification for the latest escalation of massive military and civilian violence and racist hatred directed at the besieged Palestinians.  Without U.S. financial (over $3 billion dollars annually) and political backing and military weapons, Israel could not carry out its campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing.    When U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki justified the support for the Israeli slaughter in Gaza by claiming that Israel has a right to defend itself, the question was asked whether the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves.  Despite considerable pressure, Ms. Psaki did not honor the question with a response.   In spite of the hugely disproportionate might of the forces arrayed against them, the Palestinians heroically continue to resist.  The U.S. antiwar movement must show our solidarity with them and build protests everywhere.   At the UNAC founding conference in 2010, for the first time, a large representative gathering of antiwar and social justice activists took a strong stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.  We demanded the U.S. end all aid to Israel - military, economic, and diplomatic - and took a stand in support of the Palestinian Right of Return and the international campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.  This stance was a turning point for the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. and should be embraced by all who stand for justice.   We demand:   ·         Stop Israeli bombing and killing ·         End all U.S. aid to Israel ·         Support the Palestinian call for BDS   7/10/14     click here to donate to UNAC Click here for the Facebook UNAC group. To add yourself to the UNAC listserv, please send an email to: UNAC-subscribe@lists.riseup.net

 

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The Molecular Process of the French Revolution-Robert Darnton's View -In Honor Of The 225th Anniversary Of The French Revolution

BOOK REVIEW

This year marks the commemoration of the 225th Anniversary of the great French Revolution. Democrats, socialists, communists and others rightly celebrate that event as a milestone in humankind’s history. Whether there are still lessons to be learned from the experience is an open question that political activists can fight over. None, however, can deny its grandeur. Well, except those closet and not so closet royalists and their epigones who screech in horror and grasp for their necks every time the 14th of July comes around. They have closed the door of history behind them. Won’t they be surprised then the next time there is a surge of progressive human activity?

The Great Cat Massacre- And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Robert Darnton, Vintage Press, New York, 1985

Leon Trotsky in his classic three-volume History of the Russian Revolution spent some time describing the small unresolved contradictions of everyday life that had accrued in pre-1917 Russia and that formed the underlying premises for that huge social explosion. Trotsky, using classic Marxist terminology, called that process the molecular process of the unfolding revolution. By that he meant that for long periods the unanswered grievances at the base of society (in that case, like in the French, an overwhelmingly peasant-based society in the process of facing some major changes pointing toward an industrial society) not only go unresolved but unnoticed to the naked eye. However, in retrospect it became easy to see that certain changes almost dictated that a social explosion was in the making. Robert Darnton in the present book makes that same kind of retrospective analysis of some unnoticed points on the pre- French revolutionary cultural map that led up to 1789.

That said, it is rather ironic that Darnton himself is unaware of what he has uncovered. In his introduction and throughout his painstakingly documented work Darnton downgrades the effect that the material he has presented had on that later event. Intellectually, we can argue that point all day- the extent that the cultural superstructure of the old society when under attack can bring forth organizations, cultural phenomena, etc. that form the basis for a, many times, unconscious ‘oppositional’ cultural structure that can form the basis of a new social outlook. But, we are still nevertheless looking at that old friend, the molecular process.

Darnton has presented six different episode of cultural expression beginning in the early 18th century but most of the episodes coalesce around mid-century. In the course of this exploration he investigates the transformations of ‘fairy tales’- from the age-old oral tradition of the peasantry- to see what changes are wrought there over time and location. A key episode is the essay from which the book takes its title on the artisan response to changes in the structure of work as the, let's call it, pre-pre industrial age begins to take hold in France. In short, the class struggle at the base that will reach its height in the emergence of the sans culottes in the 1790’s. Thereafter Darnton investigates an old regime bourgeois's attempt to make sense out of a world (based on observations from his city of Montpellier) that is starting ever so slightly to crumble and that can only be called a masterwork of organization and sociological insight for the period.

The last three episodes detail the emergence of the modern intelligentsia that has since played a key role in many revolutions (and counter-revolutions, as well). Darnton, as is necessity when discussing the creation of a self-conscious intelligentsia, tips his hat to Diderot and Rousseau as representative of the two emerging poles of intellectual discourse. In probably his most insightful essay Darnton describes the new reading habits of the provincial bourgeois- the very type whose break from the old regime is decisive in the early stages of the revolution. One, hopefully, can see by this summary what I mean when I state that Darnton does not fully appreciates the tremendous work that he has uncovered in search of the molecular process of revolution. Nevertheless, kudos, Professor.