Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The War on Civil Liberties Continues

The USA PATRIOT Act was passed on October 26, 2001, with only one U.S. Senator voting against it. The House passed the Act by a 357 to 66 margin. Most Senators and Congresspeople had not read it. Most Americans had never heard of it. Since then it has become one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in U.S. history and the centerpiece of U.S. secret investigation and prosecution of its own citizens.

Sixteen sections of the Act were scheduled to expire on December 31, 2005, including the controversial Section 215, the socalled library records provision. Other controversial sections were the socalled “sneak and peek” features of Sec. 213, which permitted the government to secretly search the homes of individuals while they were away, without prior notice and without probable cause. Only a pro forma warrant from a secret court was required. Only delayed notification of a search was necessary, sometimes months later.

Sec. 505 gave the Justice Department the authority to issue National Security Letters (like subpoenas) to obtain a wide variety of business, financial, and Internet information about individuals from businesses and other organizations, and to obtain membership lists of organizations without court supervision. The letters were accompanied by gag orders that prohibited the recipients from even mentioning them, let alone challenging them.

Sec. 216 permitted the government to obtain the subjects of private email communications and the places people visited while using the Internet, such as Google searches, again without probable cause.

All Justice Department lawyers were required to do was present a request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court (FISA), stating that the information was sought “in connection with a terrorist investigation.” Proceedings before this secret court are not adversarial. Only one side appears before the court and is represented by a lawyer—the government. In 2004 the FISA court did not deny a single government request out of 1,758 applications.

The claimed purpose of this activity was to investigate and prevent terrorism. But it soon became apparent that the government envisioned a far more expansive role for the PATRIOT Act: to prosecute ordinary crimes, under lesser evidentiary standards; to gather information about political groups; to infiltrate groups engaged in legitimate, constitutionally guaranteed protests; to intimidate individuals and groups who sought to protest at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions; to keep protesters removed from the president’s vision, behind cyclone fences; and to investigate and intimidate the organizers of many innocent activities, such as art shows, school drawings, auto shows, personal posters in homes, animal rights groups’ activities, and individuals and groups who protested the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq war.

Wasted Effort, Wasted Money

The PATRIOT Act and the climate of surveillance it spawned have led to some extraordinary and bizarre actions. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and various federal agencies, flush with funds to fight terrorism, have been throwing money at phantom targets with little or no regard for its effectiveness. Law enforcement agencies at state and local levels have only to ask for funds to initiate programs that once would have been laughed at, by merely claiming it’s about the security of Americans.

The DHS budget for fiscal year 2003 was $3.5 billion; $1.5 billion was earmarked for grants to state and local preparedness activities for equipment, training, exercises, and planning. States were required to allocate 80 percent of these funds to local gov ernments.

Dillingham, a small hamlet in Northwestern Alaska, population 2,400, recently applied for and received a Homeland Security grant for $202,000 to “defend against a terrorist attack.” The money was used to purchase and install 80 surveillance cameras, one for every 30 residents of the town. Some of the locals chuckle at such waste while others consider the cameras, which are ubiquitous, an invasion of their privacy. But the town police chief, who applied for the grant, defends their installation because terrorists, he asserts, could backdoor the U.S. by entering through an obscure, nowhere fishing village.

As it turned out the PATRIOT Act was the least of Americans’ worries about secret surveillance. Not content with the increased powers of surveillance afforded by the PATRIOT Act, it was revealed recently that as early as 2001 the president authorized the conduct of secret surveillance of U.S. citizens completely outside any law or judicial oversight whatsoever, including that of the rubber stamp FISA court. This activity is conducted under the auspices of the National Security Agency (NSA). Until recently the executive office had refused demands from Congress to provide details of these activities, claiming some sort of executive privilege. The White House has reluctantly agreed to brief members of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, but no one really expects it will be very forthcoming.

Retreating further from public disclosure, the government moved recently to reclassify thousands of CIA and other documents that previously had been declassified. An internal review concluded that the documents were improperly reclassified.

On allegations that AT&T was cooperating with the government to turn over customer records to the Justice Department, Justice Department lawyers intervened in a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, even though the government was not a party to the suit. The government claimed its intervention to have the suit dismissed—on grounds that it threatened to reveal government and military secrets—should not be construed as an admission that the allegations are true.

Then it was revealed in USA Today (May 11, 2006) that AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South had been cooperating with the federal government since shortly after 9/11 to turn over the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans suspected of nothing. The purpose of this data mining operation was not made clear, other than the usual administration protestations that it is to protect the safety of Americans by trolling massive amounts of data in search of calling patterns. What is clear, however, is that these actions constitute violations of the privacy rights of these telephone company customers and may violate federal laws.

The PATRIOT Act has been used to prosecute ordinary crimes that were not the original intent of the Act. But it also has been employed to prosecute activities which can only be described as overreaching. One example involved Sami alHussayen, an Idaho University student who was a computer technician hired as a webmaster for the Islamic Assembly of North America. AlHussayen’s duties included providing web links to speeches by leading Muslim scholars, some of which advocated violence, including suicide missions. He was charged under Section 805 of the PATRIOT Act, which makes it a crime to provide “expert advice and assistance” to a terrorist organization. Al Hussayen was acquitted of all charges by a jury, but agreed to be voluntarily deported.

Opposition to the PATRIOT Act

As the PATRIOT Act became more widely known and understood, it raised increased concerns. Various civil rights organizations and the public became involved. There were numerous legal challenges to the Act and public interest groups organized grassroots opposition to its worst features.

At the same time there was growing opposition to the general unconstitutional use of surveillance of Americans from an important segment of the legal community. On February 15, 2006, the usually staid American Bar Association issued a strongly worded statement, overwhelmingly approved by its legislative body, the House of Delegates. It calls on the president to abide by constitutional checks and balances and to end electronic surveillance within the United States that is not in compliance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Last August the presidentelect of the American Bar Association (ABA) stated that some of the federal government’s investigative powers included in the PATRIOT Act are threats to constitutional rights. He indicated that the ABA had taken four or five policy positions in opposition to actions of the Bush administration that violate due process rights.

In Congress an increasing number of re presentatives and senators expressed serious concerns about the PATRIOT Act and the uses to which it had been applied in violation of constitutional rights. A “Right to Read” bill was introduced to counter the provisions of Sec. 215. Other measures to correct specific abuses were proposed. None of them got past committee.

Since passage of the Act more than 400 local and state governments, including 8 states, passed resolutions opposing it. Some even vowed not to enforce it. California is the most recent state to enact a resolution critical of the Act, on February 16, 2006, and is the largest state to do so. Together these governments represent almost 85 million Americans, nearly 30 percent of the population.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) have sued the government for civil rights violations in a number of instances and have seen some degree of success in the courts.

Opinion polls of lawyers, police chiefs, political scientists, and constitutional scholars revealed grave concerns with the Act’s encroachment on the civil liberties of Americans. Countless other groups, organizations and individuals have taken positions opposing many of the more egregious civil rights violations contained in the Act. Public opinion polls have shown that Americans are increasingly skeptical about the Act and concerned with government spying and restrictions of civil liberties.

Four librarians from Connecticut, who were served with National Security Letter subpoenas for library records of patrons and gag orders in August 2005, finally went public when a federal judge lifted the gag order. But it was first necessary for the ACLU to file suit on their behalf.

So what has all of this opposition achieved? Unhappily, very little. In some respects matters have gotten worse. By and large, the Administration and the U.S. Congress have ignored the American people and the weight of legal and scholarly authority in opposition to continuing civil rights violations pursuant to the Act. Measures introduced in Congress to curtail some of the Act’s most invasive features have died in committee or been permanently tabled. Sixteen parts of the original Act that were scheduled to expire on December, 31, 2005, unless renewed, were renewed. One of these was Sec. 215, the socalled library records provision.

Reauthorization Bill

As Congress began to consider renewal, several bills to limit certain features of the PATRIOT Act gained the support of a bipartisan majority in the House. But these were beaten back by the Republican leadership, under intense pressure from the White House.

Last December 52 Senators challenged the Administration and filibustered the PATRIOT Reauthor ization bill, in an attempt to reform some of the Act’s worst features and protect the civil rights of innocent citizens. But they were unable to muster sufficient support to derail the reauthorization. Following an emergency temporary extension of the Act because a congressional stalemate could not be overcome before the congressional holiday recess in early March the Reauthorization passed by 8911 in the Senate and by 280 to 138 in the House. It was signed into law on March 9, 2006. The president issued a signing statement at the same time indicating that despite the Act being what his Administration sought, he would not comply with parts of it that require the Administration to report on uses of the Act to the Congress. In the reauthorization the main controversial provisions remain intact, including Sec. 213, Sec. 215 and Sec. 505, National Security Subpoenas. Key features are:

* A new fouryear sunset date on three provisions; Sec. 215, Sec. 206 (“John Doe” roving wiretaps, which allow for multiple phones to be tapped with no required relation to a terrorism investigation)
* The socalled Lone Wolf provision (added in 2004) that authorizes secret surveillance of nonU.S. citizens without a showing that they are acting on behalf of a foreign government
* FBI use of National Security letters, denominated National Security Subpoenas (NSS) without a warrant was expanded and made more coercive and more punitive. Any employee who discloses a records demand made by the government can be imprisoned for five years
* Customers or employees about whom sensitive personal records are demanded can never be informed they are the target of an investigation
* Recipients of NSSs may contact a lawyer and challenge the request but may not challenge the restriction on their own free speech rights for one year; the burden imposed on anyone challenging a NSS is virtually insurmountable, as one must show bad faith without being able to see the government’s records
* An attempt failed in the Senate to shorten the delayed notification of Sec. 213 Sneak and Peek searches to seven days, subject to exceptions and extensions on request; no showing of any link to terrorism whatsoever is required
* The broad definition of domestic terrorism under the original PATRIOT Act is now limited to specified federal terrorism crimes, a modest victory for opponents of the broad sweep of the Act
* Secret Service powers to limit access to “national security events,” whether or not security is needed to protect any official, are expanded; these are the socalled free speech zones and anyone using false credentials or violating a designated SS perimeter can be charged with a federal crime
* New restrictions on the sale of overthecounter cold and allergy medications, which contain a key ingredient used in the production of methamphetamines, apparently on the assumption that terrorists get high on meth before carrying out terrorist acts
* Creates several new federal offenses linked to terrorism that carry the death penalty

How to Spot a Terrorist

State and local law enforcement agencies have been eager to join in the terrorism investigation game with the availability of large amounts of federal money. Soon after 9/11, local officials in DeKalb County outside Atlanta, set up what they described as the nation’s first local department of Homeland Security. The county quickly obtained almost $12 million in federal grants to fight terrorism. A police intelligence unit was established.

Among the intelligence unit’s accomplishments was the assignment of two agents to tail the county executive, not because of any suspected terrorist activities, but to discover if the executive was being tailed by a district attorney investigator who was looking into alleged misappropriation of county funds. Subsequently, one of the unit’s plainclothes agents was assigned to photograph a group of vegan activists passing out antimeat pamphlets. Police demands for the group’s notes, which only contained the license number of an undercover police vehicle that had been tailing them, were challenged in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

In one of the more bizarre episodes in a continuing saga of paranoia and silliness, the state of Texas issued a pamphlet alleged to help the public identify potential terrorists. Some characteristics people were advised to watch for were: the purchase of baby formula or beer, the wearing of Levi jeans, carrying identifying documents such as a driver’s license and traveling in the company of women and children. This quickly narrowed the range of terrorist suspects to about 80 percent of all men in the state.

Not to be outdone, a Virginia public employee training manual used to assist public employees in identifying terrorists lists antigovernment and property rights activists as terrorists and identifies binoculars, video cameras, pads, and notebooks as typical terrorist tools. Aside from the silly examples noted above, the Act has been used to:

1. Prosecute and imprison for 2 years a love sick 20yearold who posted threatening messages on a cruise liner in hopes it would return to port and she could be reunited with her boyfriend.
2. ttempt to prosecute a Connecticut librarian for refusing to disclose the names of library patrons and what they read to the FBI and then trying to speak out publicly about the matter. (The government dropped its objection recently, for undisclosed reasons.)
3. Prosecute multiple money launderers and drug dealers who could be prosecuted under ordinary criminal statutes.
4. Charge a student at the University of Idaho under Sec. 805 for supplying web links to speeches by prominent Muslim scholars, some of which advocated violence, to his employer, the Islamic Assembly of North America. (Could national news media be prosecuted for providing links to taped statements by Osama bin Laden?)
5. Search the home of Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer, and an Islam convert, and arrest and hold him for two weeks as a material witness in the Madrid train bombings because the FBI mismatched his fingerprints with those of one of the real Madrid bombing suspects. The PATRIOT Act was misused to obtain the search warrant by claiming it was in connection with a terrorist investigation when it was for a purely criminal matter.
6. Issue more than 30,000 National Security Letters a year for the last three years.
7. Initiate data mining operations designed to profile millions of innocent persons in a national data bank containing medical, Internet use, travel patterns, video rental records etc.—just because.
8. Begin the assembly of a realtime census of every visitor to Las Vegas over a fourday period—about a million people—because of intelligence that hinted at a terrorist attack in that city on New Year’s eve. The government sought from casinos and other businesses detailed hotel guest lists, car rentals and storage unit rentals data on every airline passenger who landed in the city, and every conceivable link, by shared address, utility account, check deposits, and phone calls. When the investigation was halted because of strong protests by casino operators and hoteliers, the FBI retained all the data already collected.
9. Send FBI investigators six times to visit Sarah Bardwell, an intern at a Denver antiwar group, in an apparent attempt to intimidate her and other members of the group from attending political protests.
10. Launch a fullcourt press by the FBI in the weeks leading up to the Democratic and Republican National conventions to identify anyone with knowledge of any person or organization planning any violent or disruptive actions, by interviewing dozens of individuals in six states, including past protesters, and members of their families and friends.

The FBI reports that cases in which it acted as the lead investigator fell from 19,000 in fiscal year 2001 to 14,000 in fiscal 2005, with convictions down from about 13,500 to just over 12,000. The number of white collar crime prosecutions fell by more than 40 percent. Drug cases also declined by 40 percent. The FBI blames the decrease on terrorist investigations and convictions, which increased from 84 to 336 during the same period. Of 174 reported terrorism related convictions, the Government Accountability Office found that threefourths should not have been labeled “terrorism.” Immigration and other lowlevel violations were being counted as terrorism.

Three years ago I argued that the trappings of a U.S. police state already were taking shape, that civil liberties, once lost, are seldom voluntarily restored. At that time, only 100 local governments and one state, Hawaii, had come out in opposition to the PATRIOT Act. Since then many others have followed suit and numerous civil rights groups have led the opposition to the Act’s civil liberties threats. It will require continuing and forceful demands by citizens for our government to restore these lost liberties. The Congress and the president have yet to get the message.

Jim Cornehls is professor and director of the Law and Public Policy Graduate Certificate Program at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Reprinted from Zmagazine July 2006-under Fair Use guidelines

Top Lies About Iraq from the Bush Administration

(1) Iraq was a “grave and gathering threat”

After years of pre-invasion propaganda about the threat from Iraq as “imminent,” “immediate,” “urgent,” “serious,” “real,” and “dangerous,” the Administration fell into line with the studied message of “grave and gathering.” It was not. Crippled by 10 years of sanctions, Iraq had one of the weakest militaries and economies in the region when the U.S. attacked them. Iraq had not planned, threatened, or even been capable of any serious attack on the United States or its allies outside of its own borders. Confirmed post-invasion, this view was also supported by numerous pre-war reports by our government, our allies, and private think tanks, all ignored or down-played by the Administration and its friends in corporate media. Bush created a special propaganda team to invent justifications for invading Iraq (Office of Special Plans), but “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of invading Iraq no matter what, according to official documents of our closest ally, the British.

(2) Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” programs after the early 1990s

This lie still has legs in Fox News-land, but has suffered a serious blow with the publication of the government’s official post-invasion investigation (Kay/Duelfer report). It was also asserted to be false or highly unlikely pre-invasion by a high ranking Iraqi defector, official weapons inspectors, and (again) numerous pre-war investigations from diverse knowledgeable sources, even from the CIA. Bush continued this lie for a while after the invasion nevertheless, falsely asserting on May 29, 2003 that we had “found the weapons of mass destruction.” “Niger uranium,” “enrichment tubes,” “mobile weapons labs,” leading to “mushroom clouds over American cities”—years of lies have now been completely discredited.

Related to this, “Saddam threw out the weapons inspectors” is still bandied about despite the fact that we “withdrew” inspectors (twice) so we could bomb Iraq, even after inspectors reported that Iraq was “fundamentally disarmed.” No evidence was ever found of a continuation of the WMD programs (that we had helped Iraq build up in the 1980s) after the 1991 Gulf War and the UN-mandated disarmament program. Nevertheless, some of the weapons that had been secured by inspectors in the early 1990s, and untouched by the Iraqi government since, were left unguarded by “coalition troops” after the invasion and were then stolen by parties unknown—showing our real concern over this false pretense.

(3) Iraq had “ties to Al Qaeda” and 9/11

Once believed by a majority of Americans—due to years propaganda, general ignorance, and nationalist war hysteria—this absurdity ignored Bin Laden’s stated disdain (“apostate,” “infidel”) for Saddam Hussein and the secular Iraqi government and the complete lack of verifiable evidence for any connection. Most associated with Cheney (“over-whelming evidence there was a connection”), this lie was also put in play by Bush, Powell, and others, usually by strong but non-definitive terms for the “sinister nexus,” like “harboring,” “dealing with,” and “aids and protects.” In fact, the “terrorist training camps” referred to pre-invasion by Bush and Powell were in U.S.-protected Kurdish areas of northern Iraq where “Saddam” was forbidden to intervene, were led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi who had fought on the U.S. side in the 1980s against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and were allowed to operate without U.S. harassment for years (the Bush White House even vetoing three different Pentagon plans to take them out) until well past the initial stage of the 2003 U.S. invasion.

(4) Our invasion of Iraq was to support “Security Council resolutions”

Bush claimed that he was invading Iraq to enforce UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and that the UN’s reluctance to endorse his invasion risked making the institution “irrelevant.” Besides the contrary logic of “do what we want or you’re irrelevant,” the charge that Iraq was then violating resolutions on WMD was dubious, if not completely false. Likewise, the charge that resolutions were violated by Iraq’s firing on U.S.-British planes over the “no-fly zones” (aircraft that regularly killed civilians throughout the previous decade) was also false and was rebuffed by the UN’s secretary-general and members of the Security Council.

Powell’s and Bush’s presentations of detailed lies to the UN failed to convince the UNSC that invading Iraq was justified (despite U.S. bribes, arm twisting, and spying on delegations to the UNSC), a lack of approval which made our subsequent invasion explicitly illegal under the UN Charter, under international law as agreed to by the U.S. through treaty (and hence also illegal under U.S. law), and under war crimes conventions that describe such aggressive war as the “supreme crime.” Finally, dozens of UNSC resolutions have been and continue to be violated, many by U.S. allies such as Israel and Turkey, but the lawful decision of enforcing them with military attack is not left to individual states, but the UNSC.

(5) Our invasion of Iraq was to “promote democracy”

The “supporting democracy” argument achieved primacy after the WMD and Al Qaeda-link lies were exposed, but are belied by post-invasion history. It took blackmail to force us into even planning elections in a somewhat timely manner. Occupation “administrator” Bremer had initially promised only U.S.-appointed councils, and then elections in some indefinite form two-to-five years or so down the road. However, during massive Shiite uprisings and pro-democracy demonstrations in late 2003 and early 2004, Iraq’s Ayatollah Ali Sistani insisted on holding elections sooner. Facing full-scale rebellion, Bremer reluctantly agreed. Nevertheless, the U.S. “authority” imposed long-reaching undemocratic edicts allowing foreign ownership over Iraq’s assets.

Also ignored, elections held after an illegal invasion under occupation by a hostile foreign military are generally not considered legitimate under international law and convention, and were of questionable value in Iraq due to violence, intimidation, and unrepresented groups of voters in several provinces. Finally, though most Iraqis—even the newly elected Green Zone government—and a majority of Americans want the U.S. to leave, the Administration has so far refused.

(6) It is better to “fight them there” than on our streets

This is perhaps the most common lie today—that somehow the Iraq invasion and occupation (even if illegal and based on lies) is making the U.S. population at home “safer.” Bush and friends have repeatedly made this claim, even asking the enemy to “bring it on” over there.

First, there are the assumptions “them” and “there.” The 9/11-perpetrating Al Qaeda organization (“them”) was not in Iraq when the U.S. invaded (except in small numbers at the aforementioned Bush-protected camps). The few thousand or so Al Qaeda trained operatives who were thought to have remained active members were scattered around the world, but were based in Afghanistan. The U.S.’s response “there” deployed limited numbers of troops in favor of a massive and “long planned” (O’Neill, Clarke, Woodward, etc.) invasion of Iraq, which has now become the new “there.”

Second, how well are we now fighting “them” in this new “there?” According to such terrorist sympathizers as the U.S. Army War College, the Iraq invasion was an “unnecessary” “distraction” from the “war on terror.” It is worse than that, however. Our internationally condemned Iraq invasion has increased the number of independent groups emulating Al Qaeda and even taking their name, such as Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has gained skills and become ideologically wedded to the idea of fighting the United States in a war without borders or rules. Some of “them” are now no longer even “there.” According to a UN report in March “senior fighters have left Iraq to gather existing supporters and these fresh recruits into new cells” around the world.

Third, is fighting “them there” really making the U.S. safer at home? Terrorist attacks against Western targets have risen dramatically every year since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Attacks specifically linked to the invasion are also occurring with greater frequency outside of Iraq, as seen in major attacks in Jordan, Spain, and Great Britain, among other countries. Though the U.S. has yet to suffer another 9/11-type event, one would have to be willfully blind not to see the confluence of troubles described above—coupled with continued incompetence, corruption, and overreaching against domestic “peace activists” at home by “Homeland Security” amid rising budgetary deficits—as making us “safer” in the long term. Taking a discretionary fight to their streets, without “just cause,” is an obvious prelude to at least some of them bringing it back to ours.

(7) If the lies were true, then we would have been justified in invading Iraq

This is the premise underlying all discussions in the U.S. about Iraq. However, the only “legal war” between nation-states is one of self-defense against an actual invasion or attack (or, in some cases, a narrowly defined “imminent” attack). The use of ongoing military force (beyond immediate defensive purposes) in order to be lawful needs to be approved by the United Nations Security Council. This system is not arbitrary or whimsical. It is based on the unprecedented horrors of all-out warfare in the 20th century, and was devised as the best possible plan to try to prevent large scale wars from breaking out in the future. It was promoted by the U.S. government and incorporated into U.S. law through treaty after WWII.

WMD, a “gathering” threat, dictatorship—none of this would make an attack by one country on another legal or moral (see also “just war” theory), and such precepts if universally adopted would result in world conflagration. Even if Iraq had ties to the 9/11 attacks (which they did not), the only lawful use of force by the U.S. in response would have been defensive, to prevent another imminent attack. The legal recourse for the previous attack would have been through the World Court, which could have referred the matter to the UN Security Council for lawful military action. Without such a system, for example, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, and scores of other countries could be justified in attacking the U.S. in the future in retribution for U.S. attacks on them in the past.

That such an institution of legal structures designed to prevent world war (even though biased towards dominant powers like the U.S.) is the source of widespread scorn in the U..S, especially among its elite opinion-makers and power-holders, is an astounding admission and frightening to the rest of the world, where opinion polls now show the U.S. (with “pre-emptive war” as official policy) is viewed as the greatest threat to peace on the planet.

List by Andy Dunn, compiled from sources at http://www.bushlies.net, http://www.whodies.com, and http://www.tvnewslies.org.

Also, see:
http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2673

Reprinted from Zmagazine July 2006-under Fair Use guidelines

Hip Hop’s Betrayal of Black Women

Kevin Powell in Notes of a HipHop Head writes, “Indeed, like rock and roll, hip-hop sometimes makes you think we men don’t like women much at all, except to objectify them as trophy pieces or, as contemporary vernacular mandates, as baby mommas, chickenheads, or bitches.

“But just as it was unfair to demonize men of color in the 1960s solely as wild-eyed radicals when what they wanted, amidst their fury, was a little freedom and a little power, today it is wrong to categorically dismiss hip-hop without taking into serious consideration the socioeconomic conditions (and the many record labels that eagerly exploit and benefit from the ignorance of many of these young artists) that have led to the current state of affairs. Or, to paraphrase the late Tupac Shakur, we were given this world, we did not make it.”

Powell’s “socio-economic” explanation for the sexism in hip-hop is a way to silence feminist critiques of the culture. It is to make an understanding of the misogynistic objectification of black women in hip-hop so elusive that we can’t grasp it long enough to wring the neck of its power over us. His argument completely ignores the fact that women, too, are raised in this environment of poverty and violence, but have yet to produce the same negative and hateful representation of black men that male rappers are capable of making against women.

Powell’s understanding also lends itself to elitist assumption that somehow poverty breeds sexism, or at least should excuse it. Yet we all know that wealthy white boys can create the same hateful and violent music as poor black boys. As long as the boys can agree that their common enemy is female and that their power resides in their penis, women must not hesitate to name the war they have declared on us.

Hip-hop owes its success to the ideology of woman-hating. It creates, perpetuates, and reaps the rewards of objectification. Sexism and homophobia saturate hip-hop culture and any deviation from these forms of bigotry is made marginal to its most dominant and lucrative expressions. Few artists dare to embody equality and respect between the sexes through their music. Those who do have to fight to be heard above the dominant chorus of misogyny.

The most well known artists who represent an underground and conscious force in hip-hop—like Common, The Roots, Talib Kweli, and others—remain inconsistent, apologetic, and even eager to join the mainstream player’s club. Even though fans like me support them because of their moments of decency toward women, they often want to remain on the fence by either playing down their consciousness or by offering props to misogynistic rappers. Most so-called conscious artists appear to care more about their own acceptance by mainstream artists than wanting to make positive changes in the culture.

The Roots, for example, have backed Jay-Z on both his Unplugged release and Fade to Black tours. They’ve publicly declared their admiration for him and have signed on to his new “indie” hip-hop imprint Def Jam Left to produce their next album. Yet Jay-Z is one of the most notoriously sexist and materialistic rappers of his generation.

Hip-hop artists like Talib Kweli and Common market themselves as conscious alternatives, yet they remain passive in the face of unrelenting woman-hating bravado from mainstream artists. They are willing to lament in abstract terms the state of hip-hop, but refuse to name names—unless it’s to reassure their mainstream brethren that they have nothing but love for their music.

Talib Kweli has been praised for his song “Black Girl Pain,” but clearly he’s clueless to how painful it is for a black girl to hear his boy Jay-Z rap, “I pimp hard on a trick, look Fuck if your leg broke bitch, hop up on your good foot.”

The misogyny in hip-hop is also given a pass because some of its participants are women. But female hip-hop artists remain marginalized within the industry and culture—except when they are trotted out to defend hip-hop against feminist criticism. But the truth is, all kinds of patriarchal institutions, organizations, and movements have women in their ranks in search of power and meaning. The token presence of individual women changes nothing if women as a group are still scapegoated and degraded.

Unlike men, women in hip-hop don’t speak in a collective voice in defense of themselves. The pressure on women to be hyper-feminine and hyper-sexual for the pleasure of men, and the constant threat of being called a bitch, a ho—or worse, a dyke—as a result of being strong, honest, and self-possessed, are real within hip-hop culture and the black community at large. Unless women agree to compromise their truth, self-respect, and unity with other women and instead play dutiful daughter to the phallus that represents hip-hop culture, they will be either targeted, slandered, or ignored altogether. As a result, female rappers are often just as male-identified, violent, materialistic, and ignorant as their male peers.

Hip-hop artist Eve, who describes herself as “a pit bull in a skirt,” makes an appearance in the Sporty Thieves video for “Pigeons,” one of the most hateful misogynistic anthems in hip-hop. Her appearance displays her unity not with the women branded “pigeons,” but with the men who label them. This is a heartbreaking example of how hip-hop encourages men to act collectively in the interest of male privilege while dividing women into opposing camps of good and bad or worthy and unworthy of respect.

Lip-service protest against sexism in hip-hop culture is a sly form of public relations to ensure that nobody’s money, power, or respect is ever really threatened. Real respect and equality might interfere with hip-hop’s commercial appeal. We are asked to dialogue about and ultimately celebrate our “progress”—always predicated on a few rappers and moguls getting rich. Angry young black women are expected to be satisfied with a mere mention that some hip-hop music is sexist and that this sexism of a few rappers is actually, as Powell calls it, “the ghetto blues, urban folk art, a cry out for help.” My questions then are: “Whose blues? Whose art? Why won’t anybody help the women who are raped in endless rotation by the gaze of the hip-hop camera?”

They expect us to deal with hip-hop’s pervasive woman-hating simply by alluding to it, essentially excusing and even celebrating its misogyny, its arrogance, its ignorance. What this angry black woman wants to hear from the apologists is that black women are black people too. That any attack on the women in our community is an attack on us all and that we will no longer be duped by genocidal tendencies in black-face. I want to hear these apologists declare that any black man who makes music perpetuating the hatred of women will be named, shunned, and destroyed, financially and socially, like the traitor of our community he is. That until hip-hop does right by black women, everything hip-hop ever does will fail.

If we accept Powell’s explanation for why hip-hop is the way it is—which amounts to an argument for why we should continue to consume and celebrate it—then ultimately we are accepting ourselves as victims who know only how to imitate our victimization while absolving the handful of black folk who benefit from its tragic results. I choose to challenge hip-hop by refusing to reward its commercial aspirations with my money and my attention.

I’m tired of the ridiculous excuses and justifications for the unjustifiable pillaring of black women and girls in hip-hop. Are black women the guilty parties behind black men’s experience of racism and poverty? Are black women acceptable scapegoats when black men suffer oppression? If black women experience double the oppression as both blacks and women in a racist, patriarchal culture, it is our anger at men and white folks that needs to be heard.

The black men who make excuses for the ideology of womanhating in hip-hop remind me of those who, a generation ago, supported the attacks on black female writers who went public about the reality of patriarchy in our community. The fact that these black female writers did not create incest, domestic violence, rape, and other patriarchal conditions in the black community did not shield them from being skewered by black men who had their feelings hurt by the exposure of their male privilege and domination of black women. Black women’s literature and activism that challenges sexism is often attacked by black men (and many male-identified women) who abhor domination when they are on the losing end, but want to protect it when they think it offers them a good deal.

Black women writers and activists were called traitors for refusing to be silent about the misogynistic order of things and yet women-hating rappers are made heroes by the so-called masses. To be sure, hip-hop is not about keeping it real. Hip-hop lies about the ugly reality that black women were condemned for revealing. Hip-hop is a manipulative narrative that sells because it gets men hard. It is a narrative in which, as a Wu Tang Clan video shows, black women are presented as dancing cave “chicks” in bikinis who get clubbed over the head; or where gang rapes are put to a phat beat; or where working class black women are compared to shit-eating birds.

As a black woman who views sexism as just as much the enemy of my people as racism, I can’t buy the apologies and excuses for hip-hop. I will not accept the notion that my sisters deserve to be degraded and humiliated because of the frustrations of black men—all while we suppress our own frustrations, angers, and fears in an effort to be sexy and accommodating. Although Kevin Powell blames the negatives in hip-hop on everything but hip-hop culture itself, he ultimately concludes, “What hip-hop has spawned is a way of winning on our own terms, of us making something out of nothing.”

If the terms for winning are the objectification of black women and girls, I wonder if any females were at the table when the deal went down. Did we agree to be dehumanized, vilified, made invisible? Rather than pretending to explain away the sexism of hip-hop culture, why doesn’t Powell just come clean—in the end it doesn’t matter how women are treated. Sexism is the winning ticket to mainstream acceptability and Powell, like Russell Simmons and others, knows this. It’s obvious that if these are the winning terms for our creativity, black women are ultimately the losers. And that’s exactly how these self-proclaimed players, thugs, and hip-hop intellectuals want us—on our backs and pledging allegiance to the hip-hop nation.

If we were to condemn womanhating as an enemy of our community, hip-hop would be forced to look at itself and change radically and consistently. Then it would no longer be marketable in the way that these hip-hop intellectuals celebrate. As things stand, it’s all about the Benjamins on every level of the culture and black women are being thugged and rubbed all the way to the bank.

Jennifer McLune is a librarian, activist, and writer living in Washington, DC. 

Reprinted from Zmagazine July 2006-under Fair Use guidelines

Legitimizing Palestinian Bantustans

The Occupation has a “new” scheme to ensure Palestinian rights continue to be negated and violated: the “Convergence Plan.” Offering the media as much excitement as the “Disengagement Plan,” it aims to legitimize the annexation of all territories and resources west of the apartheid wall, including Jerusalem. Palestinians are to be left under siege in Bantustans, sealed in from the east and dissected by settler highways. Meanwhile, the refugees are supposed to vanish from political discourse.

The propaganda is hinged on two key themes: the relocation of 68 to 74 settlements and the convergence of Israeli forces and settlers to some 10 percent of the West Bank. The reality, however, shows that the plan will lead to a 20 percent increase of settlement capacity and the systematic imprisonment of Palestinians on their own land. “New” plans for Jerusalem are based on the ethnic cleansing of the city, isolating even more Palestinians from their capital, institutions, and historical and religious centers by building the apartheid wall around them.

Under the plan, the Bantustans will allow more Palestinian administrative responsibility over the Jordan Valley. At the same time it ensures that Palestinians will have no access to the River Jordan, borders, and water and agricultural resources along the river.

In the western West Bank, the wall is integral to the plan. Plans to move the wall to ghettoize a dozen more Palestinian West Bank villages in the Bantustans are under way. So are discussions over the annexation of Na’ale and Nili settlements to grab additional Palestinian land and further dissect the West Bank. These adjustments ensure the wall’s path is more effective in grabbing as much land with as few Palestinians as possible. The international community dwells on these “modifications” of the wall’s path, instead of denouncing the fact that Zionism encloses an entire people behind cement blocks and razor wire.

A fundamental ramification of this plan is the Judaization of Jerusalem and the loss of Palestinian metropolitan areas which produce 90 percent of national GDP and are the pillars on which to build a modern national economy. However, Palestinians will be shut out from Jerusalem, which currently generates 40 percent of all Palestinian economic activity and hosts the most important and ancient Palestinian institutions. The Occupation plans to use the apartheid wall to isolate even more of the 230,000 Palestinians living in Jerusalem from their capital. The few Palestinians within the center of the city will be cut off from the remnants of their shops, factories, clients, and markets. The tourism industry, constituting a large part of the area’s economic activity, is to be taken over by new settler constructions and industries in the new settlement bloc.

Some 15,000 Palestinian homes have been declared illegal and threatened with demolition under the Occupation’s racist permit system. Those still resisting within the city face ongoing and systematic revocations of “residency rights.” Since 1967, over 60,000 Palestinians have been expelled from their capital.

In addition to the destruction of the capital, the districts of Salfit and Qalqiliya will be completely dissected by walls and settlements, with urban areas unable to sustain significant economic activity. Remaining Palestinian cities in the north and south of the West Bank will be barred from expanding in the metropolitan core of the West Bank.

Meanwhile, water resources and farming lands that provide livelihoods to 17 percent of the population, and are central to food sovereignty, will be stolen from the Jenin district all the way to the south of Hebron. The apartheid wall will directly affect almost 200 villages, which will lose access to part or all of their lands. In the northwestern route, 50 wells have been isolated or destroyed, while 162 wells along the River Jordan remain unusable.

This is the price Palestinians pay for the Occupation to “reshape” its crimes. Behind the “relocation” of settlers from evacuated settlements to others that are expanding, a net growth of settlement capacity parallels the settler boom during the Oslo years. Only 8.6 percent (36,322 settlers) of the total settler population in the West Bank will be relocated while the Occupation plans to build new industrial zones and housing units for at least 79,646 settlers in the colonies upon which it will “converge.” The strategy secures an initial net increase of over 20 percent in settlement capacity.

There is little new in the colonial aspirations of the plan. In 1969 Yigal Allon proposed a scheme to ensure the “borders” of the Occupation would reach Jordan while Palestinian residential areas would be cut out of the calculations of Zionist demography. The plan was never implemented, but was further developed by the Occupation in the “negotiations” at Camp David and Taba in 2000. The Palestinian people and the Arab World have already rejected these plans, as they are incompatible with Palestinian rights and international legitimacy.

The revival of Allon’s vision is grounded in the racist paradigm of a Jewish state in Palestine. Jewish colonizers are to replace the indigenous Palestinian population, or at least outnumber them by large majorities, in order to dominate them. The plan goes hand-in-hand with the decade-old vision of a new Middle East that prioritizes economic over military domination. A Bantu-state will be in the vice of new economic and financial mechanisms of control applied by the Occupation and backed by the international community. Further conquest of Palestine will be dressed up as a “solution,” furthering the path of normalization with the Occupation. Agreement to the Bantu-state by Arab and Muslim countries could thus secure for the Israeli economy new markets and fresh investments.

The international community, for its part, looks at ever-bleaker economic scenarios of ghettoized Palestinian life. Even if Israeli and international measures to starve the Palestinian population were suspended, the poverty rate in the West Bank and Gaza would reach 51 percent in 3 years. If the current situation persists, poverty will hit 74 percent. While these prospects are disastrous for Palestinians, for the world the non-sustainability of the Bantustans are measured by other criteria.

How much money are we forced to pay to support the Occupation? When will people realize that Palestinians are not facing a humanitarian crisis, but a political attack on their lives? How can we continue to shun our responsibilities to uphold Palestinian rights and international law?

Prime Mininster Olmert’s plan allows all actors to gain a facade of economic “viability” amid Israeli “concessions.” Brushing aside the ICJ decision on the illegality of the wall, international law, and dozens of UN resolutions, the Convergence Plan represents yet another wave of colonization to be resisted.

The Occupation might want to “converge” or to “disengage,” but it is doing so in pursuance of racist and colonial interests to ensure all that remains for Palestinians are enclaves without sovereignty. “Disengagement” from Gaza resulted in social and economic suffocation, continuous shelling and killings of “liberated” people within their prison walls. It shows that redeployment of settlers cannot be equated with liberation and justice. Border crossings with Egypt are not under Palestinian control while the population has become an easier target for military attacks and policies of starvation. Finally, 80 percent of Gaza’s population are still left struggling for the return to their homes destroyed in 1948. These plans not only target Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza, they target the Palestinians in the Diaspora. The establishment of a Palestinian Bantu-state is to ensure that a liberation movement is turned into a dispute over borders. 

It is important for people across the world to understand that we have struggled for generations to live in freedom, dignity, and selfdetermination, to see our refugees return and our homeland free from colonialism, oppression, and exploitation. Olmert’s plans may be hailed as an “historic” offer in some quarters, but for Palestinians and their supporters they signal the need for sustained resistance to Israeli apartheid and occupation.

Jamal Juma works with the Palestinian grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (http://www.stopthewall.org).

Reprinted from Zmagazine July 2006-under Fair Use guidelines

Has the Gay Rights Movement Hit a Brick Wall?

The gay rights movement has hit a brick wall. Yes, we have same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. Yes, the Supreme Court overturned state anti-sodomy laws. Yes, gay characters are all over mainstream TV. Still, after 35 years of slow, incremental progress, we are at a decisive crossroads. Simply put: to bring about social change—dependent on truly transforming hearts and minds—we need to reassess what kind of a movement we want it to be. Will it be a movement that continues arguing, with diminishing success, for the rights of its own people—and even at that, only for those who want to formalize a relationship? Or will we argue for a broader vision of justice and fairness that includes all Americans? If the movement does not choose the latter course, we risk becoming not just irrelevant, but a political stumbling block to progressive social change in general.

The right template for the future can be found in the gay rights movement’s own history, in the insights of gay liberation—the radical, grassroots politics that emerged in the June 1969 Stonewall Riots when queers fought in the streets of Greenwich Village for three days to protest police harassment. 

A week after those street riots came to an end the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed. While its original membership included drag queens, ragtag queer youth, and old-time reformist gay activists, it was spearheaded by men and women seasoned in progressive, coalition-based politics with ties to labor groups, women’s liberation, peace groups, economic justice organizations, and black and latino liberation groups. In addition, almost everyone was engaged in some aspect of the national movement to stop the war in Vietnam. And—no surprise—all of these people were influenced by the late-1960s culture of anti-authoritarianism, sexual freedom, and personal liberation that was sweeping the country. While I was not at the Stonewall Riots, I did join GLF shortly after it formed. I was a 20- year-old lower middle-class college student active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and anti-war protests. The idea of a politics that acknowledged, indeed was predicated on, my sexual desires was initially mind-boggling. This became the cornerstone that made my other political work make sense.

Gay liberationists have learned a lot over the past 35 years as we’ve watched post-colonial liberation struggles give rise to Islamic fundamentalism; watched a deeply reactionary fundamentalist Christian constituency take center stage in U.S. politics, endured the ravages of AIDS, and, yes, enjoyed some of the piecemeal gains made by the fight for gay rights. But it’s time to incorporate those lessons into the foundation we laid long ago, which provides a much sounder basis for the future than anything based on the limited notion equal rights for gays can offer. 

GLF wasn’t fueled just by sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was part of a worldwide political movement committed to social justice both nationally and internationally. Its name—Gay Liberation Front— came from the newly formed Woman’s Liberation Front, which in turn was taken from the North Vietnamese’s National Liberation Front and various calls for black liberation that had spun off from the civil rights movement. These queer activists pursued coalitions with a wide range of progressive political groups, including the Black Panthers, National Organization for Women, anti-Vietnam war groups, and labor unions.

Not all of these coalitions were successful—although Huey Newton, the Black Panthers leader, supported gay liberation—but they marked the beginning of a coalition-based movement for gay rights that could have become larger and stronger.

By early 1970 more moderate, strategically limited gay organizations formed. These groups— Gay Activists Alliance and National Gay Task Force were the largest—focused on the far more narrowly defined concept of “gay rights.” They argued that freedom for gay men and lesbians would be best achieved not by addressing anti-gay discrimination as part of a larger pattern of discrimination in the U.S., but by focusing on specific legal inequalities that only affected homosexuals. This strategy resulted in a mindset of strict legalism that hindered the gay move- ment’s growth and effectiveness.

The singular theme of the more limited rights-based movement was that “gay people were just like everyone else,” by which it meant heterosexuals. This was a wrong move, predicated on the ridiculous notion that heterosexuals were all alike, with no differences—class, racial, ethnic, sexual—among them. The gay rights movement not only ignored the myriad differences within each group, they ignored the shared similarities—and potential points of connection—that existed between the groups.

As a result, the gay rights movement became culturally and politically isolated, as liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s gave way to identity politics. By focusing only on legal inequalities—albeit, an important aspect of seeking basic civil rights—the movement never argued, as the African American civil rights movement did, for a comprehensive vision of social justice.

A clear example of this tunnel vision lies in the movement’s long- time insistence on fighting for the right to sexual and personal privacy. While the aim of the fight for privacy was to keep the government out of people’s bedrooms (a good thing), it also perpetuated the idiotic and incorrect idea that homosexuality was a completely separate aspect of a person’s identity. The “privacy” argument was attractive to mainstream culture because it kept gay people invisible. But the downside was that it also continued the social isolation of gay people, removing them from the public sphere. A right to privacy is no help to the openly queer high- school student who is forbidden by school administrators from forming a gay-straight alliance or wearing a gay T-shirt in the hallways. The right to privacy is of no use to the gay man who is visibly living with HIV/AIDS or to the lesbian couple with kids facing discrimination in school or housing.

Perhaps the best and most recent example of the fallout from this single-issue mindset can be seen in the fight for same-sex marriage. True, the marriage equality movement scored a big win in Massachusetts. But this single win generated an enormous national backlash resulting in 17 states passing constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage. In eight of those states the amendment language also prohibits civil unions and, in some cases, other legal protections, such as private-sector domestic-partnership programs. The Massachusetts win also piqued substantial interest in a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage on the federal level.

This didn’t have to happen. For instance, queer activists and academics Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim (she is chair of American Studies at New York University where he is a graduate student) suggest in a July 18, 2005 Nation article “Beyond Gay Marriage” that, “in order to counter conservative Republican strategy...gay activists and progressives will have to come together to reframe the marriage debate” by building coalitions with labor activists and economic justice advocates to promote marriage as one of many ways individuals and households might access badly needed benefits. Duggan and Kim argue that the gay rights movement might have been far more successful by working in coalition with other groups and arguing for a comprehensive system of social and economic protections for all families and household groupings.

This is political organizing 101—find people with shared interests and bring them together to enact social change. But, in many ways, the gay rights movement never passed “political organizing 101” so this would be a total revamping and revisioning of how “gay politics” have traditionally been done. Indeed, it strikes at the heart of what has been wrong with the gay rights movement for three decades —its myopic view of what “justice” might mean. The gay rights platform—“equal rights for gay people”—has never seriously grappled with the hard fact that many gay people had rights based on wealth, race, gender, class status that other gay people didn’t have. But worse than that, it has refused to embrace a grander vision—a moral vision— of how the world might be better for everyone. 

The gay rights movement has learned a great deal from the civil rights movement’s anti-discrimination legal models to fight the overwhelming discrimination lesbians and gay men face in jobs and housing. Yet, national gay rights groups never thought of forming political or strategic alliances with the civil rights groups that pioneered this type of legislation. When fighting for the rights of gay men and lesbians to adopt and parent children, the gay rights movement never took a broader stand on children’s rights and health. While it is true that the movement often sought endorsements from groups such as the National Association of Social Workers, claiming that gay people could be fine parents, they never worked closely with these groups on larger issues relating to families and children. When fighting for the right of gay people to be in the military, they rarely grappled with the basic economic and class biases of how the military is constituted, not to mention the role of militarism in U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps the most shocking example of this refusal to entertain and enact a larger political and moral vision is that, after hundreds of thousands of gay deaths from AIDS, not one national gay rights or AIDS group broached the issue of universal health care or some other modification in the broken U.S. heath-care system.

Will a return to the political and moral vision of gay liberation be the best way to enact such changes? Well, yes and no. The vision of the Gay Liberation Movement to radically reorder the entire world on the principles of justice, fairness, and individual and collective freedom could not work in 1970 and will not work now. In the best tradition of utopianism, gay liberation was maddeningly ambiguous, incredibly naïve, and wildly impractical. It refused to take seriously the impact and importance of religion in people’s lives. It also turned a blind eye to deeply entrenched gender traditions and was woefully ignorant about money and the workings of capitalism, relying instead on romanticized notions of pre-industrial economics.

The movement was also naïve in its view of human nature, feeling that people—and groups—would simply do the right thing because it was the right thing. So while they understood the concept of coalition politics, often they didn’t understand how to make those arguments convincingly and portrayed an almost comic insensitivity to the cultural and political differences among organizations. For instance, taking its cues from second wave feminism, GLF was adamantly against “macho” as a style of masculinity and celebrated a playful, gender-challenging male affect. But it had no ability to understand how black men—long subjugated as “boys” by white culture—would want to lionize their new found, aggressively masculine political personae. (Similarly, black leaders such as Eldridge Clever would attack openly gay black men such as James Baldwin as “faggots” and betrayers of black pride.) Very problematically, men in GLF would promote a newly-found sexual freedom, disregarding the fact that the experience of many feminists was that sex was a male weapon and “sexual liberation” was yet another patriarchal straight male ploy to further exploit them.

But despite these problems, the early Gay Liberation Front never believed in strict identity politics or a zero-sum approach to politics. Rather than seeing human and civil rights as identity specific they understood that if everyone worked together, there would be no losers. It also believed that truly productive political work could only occur when the full needs of all people—economic, health, safety, housing, spiritual, and sexual—were addressed and met.

Luckily, there are signs that changes are under way. When lesbian commentator Jasmin Cannick argued on her website (jasmyne cannick.typepad.com) that the rights of native-born gay men and lesbians were more important than those of illegal immigrants, she was criticized by other gay activists. Over the past year, lesbian activist and civil rights lawyer Chai Feldbaum has argued, persuasively, that rather than hiding behind the slogan “gay people are just like everyone else,” facing sexual differences is important and that the best argument for same-sex marriage is that “gay sex is good.” Even Matt Foreman, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, spoke in the human rights idiom of gay liberation when he told Bay Windows in January, “There is still a question of our fundamental humanity and equality. Either we’re fully equal and fully human or we are not. There is no other way to frame it.”

Foreman’s radical recasting of gay politics, coming from a national gay rights spokesperson, is welcome even if it is more than three decades late. But if gay politics is going to survive and prosper, as it faces increasingly intense pressure over the next few years, it will have to continue committing itself to just such a new vision of openness, self-respect, and fairness—for all. 

Michael Bronski teaches Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. His last book is Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

Reprinted from Zmagazine July 2006-under Fair Use guidelines

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

TOKYOPROGRESSIVE 7-17-06

WAR & PEACE AND THE POLICE STATE IN OUR MIDST

The War on Civil Liberties Continues
How to Spot a Terrorist: State and local law enforcement agencies have been eager to join in the terrorism investigation game with the availability of large amounts of federal money. Soon after 9/11, local officials in DeKalb County outside Atlanta, set up what they described as the nation’s first local department of Homeland Security. The county quickly obtained almost $12 million in federal grants to fight terrorism. A police intelligence unit was established......In one of the more bizarre episodes in a continuing saga of paranoia and silliness, the state of Texas issued a pamphlet alleged to help the public identify potential terrorists. Some characteristics people were advised to watch for were: the purchase of baby formula or beer, the wearing of Levi jeans, carrying identifying documents such as a driver’s license and traveling in the company of women and children. This quickly narrowed the range of terrorist suspects to about 80 percent of all men in the state.

Read more:
The War on Civil Liberties Continues

URGENT PETITION/これ以上の殺戮をどうかやめてください」署名サイト

イラクの状況を変えるためにー皆様へお願い: Please join the Iraq Hope Network in signing a petition calling for an immediate end to the suffering of people in Iraq that is resulting from the violent and illegal tactics presently being employed by the U.S. military. The petition will be delivered to President George W. Bush, with a copy to the U.S. Embassies in Tokyo and Baghdad.

Please read/sign!!!
You can find the petition here
署名サイト（日本語解説）

Top Lies About Iraq from the Bush Administration

(1) Iraq was a “grave and gathering threat”
(2) Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” programs after the early 1990sv
(3) Iraq had “ties to Al Qaeda” and 9/11
(4) Our invasion of Iraq was to support “Security Council resolutions”
(5) Our invasion of Iraq was to “promote democracy”
(6) It is better to “fight them there” than on our streets
(7) If the lies were true, then we would have been justified in invading Iraq

Read more:
Top Lies About Iraq from the Bush Administration

PALESTINE/ISRAEL

Legitimizing Palestinian Bantustans
How much money are we forced to pay to support the Occupation? When will people realize that Palestinians are not facing a humanitarian crisis, but a political attack on their lives? How can we continue to shun our responsibilities to uphold Palestinian rights and international law?
...The Occupation might want to “converge” or to “disengage,” but it is doing so in pursuance of racist and colonial interests to ensure all that remains for Palestinians are enclaves without sovereignty. “Disengagement” from Gaza resulted in social and economic suffocation, continuous shelling and killings of “liberated” people within their prison walls. It shows that redeployment of settlers cannot be equated with liberation and justice.

Read more:
Legitimizing Palestinian Bantustans

More on Palestine Israel
As Brian Dominick,editor of THE NEW STANDARD, notes:  “The quality of journalism on this story has declined rapidly, as the initial acknowledgement of asymmetry and the preponderance (near exclusivity) of civilian suffering in Lebanon has given way to the need for apparent “balance” (parity). The latest ridiculousness is dutiful identification of who supplies Hezbollah’s missiles without ever noting who supplies Israel’s missiles. I can’t really recommend any of the links I’m finding (except IPS) at this point; if you see good coverage (not commentary), please bring it to my attention. “ Meanwhile, here are a few stories:

Israel Violates Law on U.S. Weapons in Mideast

And commentaries/analyses:

Omiting Palestinian deaths
On June 28, CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer turned to CBS reporter Bob Simon for analysis of the current Israel-Palestine crisis. What Simon offered, however, was a familiar scenario that puts the blame squarely on the Palestinian side....From the start of the Intifada in September 2000 through March 17, 2002, the three major networks’ nightly news shows used some variation of the word “retaliation” ("retaliated," “will retaliate,” etc.) 150 times to describe attacks in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. About 79 percent of those references were to Israeli “retaliation” against Palestinians. Only 9 percent referred to Palestinian “retaliation” against Israelis.

Read more/take action:
CBS’s Mideast ‘Cycle of Violence’-Analysis omits Palestinian deaths
From FAIR (US)

Also:
In U.S. Media, Palestinians Attack, Israel Retaliates

MEDIA ALERT: BLAMING THE VICTIM IN GAZA
From MEDIA LENS (UK):  “In the last six months, approximately 80 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza due to Israel artillery firing… There have been exactly eight Israelis killed in the last five years from the Kassam missiles. Again, we have a huge disproportion, a huge discrepancy.” (’AIPAC v. Norman Finkelstein: A Debate on Israel’s Assault on Gaza,’ June 29, 2006).....The extent of media bias is exemplified by the New York Times which reported July 3: “for all the pyrotechnics, the [Israeli] operation has been relatively restrained”. (Ian Fisher and Steven Erlanger, ‘Israel steps up Gaza raids in bid to free soldier,’ New York Times, July 3, 2006).  This represents the view of Western journalists numbed to the suffering the West and its allies consistently heap on impoverished Third World people. To merely inflict intense suffering on hundreds of thousands of people, rather than to kill them, is “relatively restrained” for elite media executives...On the BBC’s July 3 Newsnight programme, anchor Jeremy Paxman reported breaking news that a Palestinian had been killed and two wounded in an Israeli airstrike in Northern Gaza. Paxman then went on to interview an Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev. Regev said: “Our preference, our chosen policy preference, is that he [Shalit] is released and this can end peacefully.” Paxman said not a word in response about the death he had just reported, about the five other deaths, or about people dying because of the attack on the power station.

And:

The Real Aim
Uri Avnery: THE REAL aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government. That was the aim of Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It failed. But Sharon and his pupils in the military and political leadership have never really given up on it. As in 1982, the present operation, too, was planned and is being carried out in full coordination with the US. As then, there is no doubt that it is coordinated with a part of the Lebanese elite. That’s the main thing. Everything else is noise and propaganda.

See also Uri Avnery: “Stop That Shit”
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1153268185

Israeli Left

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en
Avnery’s organization

http://www.mideastweb.org/

http://www.alternativenews.org/
Joint Palestinian-Israeli organization

http://otherisrael.home.igc.org/contents.html

http://www.btselem.org/English/index.asp

http://www.oznik.com/
Israeli resistance organization

http://electronicintifada.net/new.shtml

US Jewish Left
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/

Other
http://www.muscanet.com/~ampal/
American and Palestinian

http://www.jfjfp.org/
Jews for Justice (UK)

http://electronicintifada.net
“The Electronic Intifada (EI) publishes news, commentary, analysis, and reference materials about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian perspective. EI is the leading Palestinian portal for information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its depiction in the media.”

See also:
What are they fighting for?
Tanya Reinhart, The Electronic Intifada, 14 July 2006
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4995.shtml

http://www.middleeast.org/mereport/index.cgi
Middle East Report

The American Left and the Middle East: The Case of the Nation Magazine, II.
Perhaps you have not heard the news because the western news has not been reporting it. Perhaps you have seen the pictures because the western news is not printing the pictures (the media has access to the pictures, but is choosing not to print them).... People have protested in Australia and in Germany. Protest in the United States, as well! Protest in solidarity with the Lebanese people—who are standing united in the face of this aggression. The division is from the politicians, but not from the people. Protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people—who have been standing strong for decades in the face of Israeli aggression. We Americans, you Americans, have a particular responsibility: these weapons that are being used to massacre and destroy are paid for by US taxpayer dollars, and supported by George Bush and an acquiscent Congress.
Also see
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10589

Fleeing Lebanese Speak of Indiscriminate Bombing

What Does Israel Want?
Alternative routes for the conflict are not even raised in Israel, not even by the Zionist left. No one mentions commonsensical ideas such as an exchange of prisoners or a commencement of a dialogue with the Hamas and other Palestinian groups at least over a long ceasefire to prepare the ground for more meaningful political negotiations in the future. This alternative way forward is already backed by all the Arab countries, but alas only by them. In Washington, Donald Ramsfeld may have lost some of his deputies in the Defense Department, but he is still the Secretary. For him, the total destruction of the Hamas and Hizballah – whatever the price and if it is without loss of American life – will ‘vindicate’ the raison d’être for the Third World Theory he propagated early on in 2001. The current crisis for him is a righteous battle against a small axis of evil – away from the quagmire of Iraq and a precursor for the so far unattained goals in the ‘war against terror’ – Syria and Iran. If indeed to a certain extent the Empire was serving the proxy in Iraq, the full fledged support President Bush gave to the recent Israeli aggression in Gaza and Lebanon, shows that may be pay off time has come: now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire.

JAPAN AND ASIA

U.S. “Double-Dealing Diplomacy, North Korea and Japan/北朝鮮ミサイル危機と日本

Read more:
(1) ここです。

(2) この記事は「続・北朝鮮ミサイル危機で見えたもの」の続きです。

Japan at a constitutional and political crossroads
“Since its founding in 1955, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has repeatedly called for revision of the constitution. Over the decades, attempts to carry out this policy faltered, primarily because the pacifist and democratic clauses of the constitution enjoyed broad support among the Japanese people. Unable to mobilize the two-thirds vote of both houses of the Diet required for revising the constitution, LDP efforts never went beyond the discussion stage..... In the late 1990s, the prospects for revision began to shift. The centrist Democratic Party of Japan, which is not averse to revision, replaced the strongly anti-revision Social Democratic Party as the main opposition party, while continuing tensions with North Korea began to erode public support for pacifism. Sensing that its moment had arrived, the LDP set up research commissions on the constitution in both houses of the Diet in January 2000 to begin the lengthy process of building a consensus in favor of revision.” A number of issues are tackled here in this roundtable discussion between John Junkerman, Gavan McCormack, and David McNeil. One can well ask, in light of what they write, whether the North Korean missiles aren’t being manipulated (by Japan) to revive militarism and (by the U.S.) to insure subserviance to the U.S. agenda of world domination. What will the possible revision of the peace constitution mean?  Is the Emperor system being revived?  Why does the media go out of its way NOT to cover the growing threat to Japanese democracy such as the increasingly repressive tactics of the Japanese police toward peace aqnd social activists.

Read more:
The Politics of Constitutional Revision

SINGAPORE: Crackdown Underway on Satirical Blogging
One could be fined for breaking the laws against chewing gum, fined against littering the streets, fined for not flushing the toilet and fined for indulging in unnatural sex. What next?

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Satirising government, a new offence?.

The United States and the Japanese Mengele: Payoffs and Amnesty for Unit 731 Scientists
Everyone has heard of Auschwitz, but what about Pingfan? This Japanese germ warfare headquarters and laboratory in Manchuria, northern China, did not hold as many victims, but atrocities committed there were physically worse than in the Nazi concentration camp, and lasted much longer.....

Dr. Ishii Shiro...was the chief of Japan’s well financed, scientifically coordinated and government approved biological warfare program from 1932-45....and supervised deliberate infection of thousands of captives with deadly diseases. He also conducted grotesque surgeries, but the unique medical specialty of Ishii and his surgical team were dissections, without anesthetic, on an estimated 3,000 live, conscious humans......In exchange for cooperation from the Japanese side, the horrific war crimes of Unit 731 were suppressed by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted by Reuters on April 19, 2006, as saying: “The government is not in possession of materials that tell us about the activities of this unit. If we do find some materials, we would accept it as a solemn fact of history.” The Japanese government, then, does not currently view Dr. Ishii Shiro’s atrocious programs as historical truth....Critics accuse the Chinese government of manipulating historical issues to foster nationalism and bolster the regime’s domestic legitimacy, while scoring easy points against Japan in the global arena of public opinion. But it was Japan, not China, which carried out the biological terror of Unit 731 and continues to evade accountability for it today—with more than a little help from its American ally.

Read more:
The United States and the Japanese Mengele: Payoffs and Amnesty for Unit 731 Scientists

Race and Gender

Hip Hop’s Betrayal of Black Women
Unlike men, women in hip-hop don’t speak in a collective voice in defense of themselves. The pressure on women to be hyper-feminine and hyper-sexual for the pleasure of men, and the constant threat of being called a bitch, a ho—or worse, a dyke—as a result of being strong, honest, and self-possessed, are real within hip-hop culture and the black community at large. Unless women agree to compromise their truth, self-respect, and unity with other women and instead play dutiful daughter to the phallus that represents hip-hop culture, they will be either targeted, slandered, or ignored altogether. As a result, female rappers are often just as male-identified, violent, materialistic, and ignorant as their male peers.

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Hip Hop’s Betrayal of Black Women

The Gay Rights Movement Has Hit a Brick Wall
The gay rights movement has hit a brick wall. Yes, we have same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. Yes, the Supreme Court overturned state anti-sodomy laws. Yes, gay characters are all over mainstream TV. Still, after 35 years of slow, incremental progress, we are at a decisive crossroads. Simply put: to bring about social change—dependent on truly transforming hearts and minds—we need to reassess what kind of a movement we want it to be....While the aim of the fight for privacy was to keep the government out of people’s bedrooms (a good thing), it also perpetuated the idiotic and incorrect idea that homosexuality was a completely separate aspect of a person’s identity. The “privacy” argument was attractive to mainstream culture because it kept gay people invisible. But the downside was that it also continued the social isolation of gay people, removing them from the public sphere. A right to privacy is no help to the openly queer high- school student who is forbidden by school administrators from forming a gay-straight alliance or wearing a gay T-shirt in the hallways. The right to privacy is of no use to the gay man who is visibly living with HIV/AIDS or to the lesbian couple with kids facing discrimination in school or housing.

Read more:
The Gay Rights Movement Has Hit a Brick Wall

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

TOKYOPROGRESSIVE 7-5-06

UPDATED JULY 23

Japan and Asia

North Korea
The Washington Post reported today that North Korea’s missile testing prompted “a hastily called session of the UN Security Council after the Stalinist state unnerved the region.”

The Associated Press reported on June 14: “The Air Force successfully tested an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile early Wednesday, officials said. The missile traveled 4,800 miles in about 30 minutes before its three warheads struck targets at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the western chain of the Marshall Islands [in the Pacific]...”
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/14816002.htm

ALICE SLATER, , http://gracelinks.org/nuke
President of the GRACE Policy Institute, which works on issues of nuclear power and the environment, Slater said today: “We are reaping the whirlwind when the North Korean government launches this shocking series of missile firings. The U.S. has been hurling missiles over the Pacific, most recently in June, after the Korean threat was reported as a ‘provocation’ to U.S. interests. Russia is getting into the act, too, having launched a ballistic missile on June 29, from a submarine in the Barents Sea, at a target nearly 4,000 miles away in the Pacific. It is folly to think we can tell North Korea what to do, when we are unwilling to restrain our own missile testing.

“We ought to be negotiating a treaty to ban all missiles. Instead, the Bush administration has pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement we had with Russia not to provoke a missile arms race, brazenly asserting our U.S. right to ‘dominate and control the military use of space,’ proclaimed in the mission statement of the U.S. Space Command.”

IAN WILLIAMS, , http://www.ianwilliams.info
Author of the book “The U.N. For Beginners,” Williams said today: “The manner in which the Security Council is dealing with Israel and North Korea is quite an interesting exercise in hypocrisy.”

“Israel has just announced it’s moving into civilian areas [in Gaza], and was already in egregious violation of international law and a multitude of UN Security Council resolutions. It has ripped up the ‘Road Map’ and, despite occasional hot air from ambassadors, the U.S. government has made sure nothing is done about it.

“Meanwhile, whatever you may think of the provocative...actions of the North Korean government, it is not violating any international statute—there is no treaty governing missile launches—but there is a rush to put the issue on the Council agenda.”

An old article on North Korea and U.S. policy that is still helpful. Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists saya that now there is more of a need than ever for diplomacy rather than Bush-style antagonisms.  Both Bush and fellow war-hawks Abe and Koizumi want to convince people that a strong military is needed, but many say the U.S. military presence in Japan actually INCREASES the danger.  Plus, the Missile Defense System that Japan and the U.S. are persuing is just false security used to justify big military expenditures.

And who says the U.S. is dedicated to peaceful coexistence?  Certainly not the Pentagon, which exaggerates the theat to the U.S. to jsutify its own belligerency.  And all along the U.S. media reports what the Pentagon says as fact, but ignoring the equally disturbing fact that the U.S. has for decades threatened North Korea with nucelar destruction.

See also the excellent ‘The North Korean Problem,’ Japan and the US: The Politics of Hypocrisy

Koizumi’s Kingdom of Illusion
What has this man and his band of neo-liberal LDP “assasins” given Japan?  The loss of jobs,"reduction of salaries, increases in social security payments and reductions in benefits...over one million households subsist[ing] on welfare....the suicide rate [leaping] from around 22,000 per year to over 30,000, subordination to the US [despite a nationalist pose]” and estrangement from the rest of Asia but, in the words of the late Masaharu Gotoda, Japan will have to lapse into “hell,” before the eyes of the people are opened.

Palestine/Israel
BNN SATIRE: Poll: 68% of American Christians would refuse to live in same building as an American Jew
From the BNN Department of Change One or Two Words in an Israeli Media Article and See How it Flies Then: Sixty-eight percent of Americans would refuse to live in the same apartment building as an American Jew, according to the results of an annual poll released Wednesday by the Center for the Struggle Against Racism. The “Index of Racism Towards American Jews,” conducted by Geocartographia, revealed only 26 percent of Americans would agree to live with Jewish neighbors in the same building…

Israel’s Aggression
The daily horrors emerging from Iraq have caused a majority of people in the United States to oppose Bush’s war there. Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis Israel has created in the occupied territories hovers below the radar for most Americans....

When will Israel learn?
The message is that Palestinians should not resist - they should just wait for the Israelis in their homes, schoolyards and on the streets, ready to die. Palestinians should not defend themselves or defend their children; they simply need to wait to be killed without resistance because any resistance, even if it comes from a victim, is an act of terror…

Stop illegal collective punishment
Israel continues to carry out fly-bys with resulting super-sonic booms over the Gaza Strip. These actions lead to psychological torture which causes damage in children whose lives have turned into a continual nightmare....In the Gaza Strip there is an intermittent food shortage which is used to exert forbidden pressure on the Palestinian civilian population [in violation of] the Geneva Conventions [which say that] “in no event shall actions...be taken which may be expected to leave the civilian population with such inadequate food or water as to cause its starvation or force its movement.” Additionally, the power stations in Gaza were harmed by Israeli attacks resulting in an acute shortage in electricity. One of the consequences of this action is that the water pumps, which use electricity, are only partially operational, creating a shortage of drinkable water…

“Israel Advocacy” in North America and how it hijacks the notion of anti-Semitism
The creation of CJPAC is part and parcel of the dramatic restructuring which the Canadian Jewish establishment has undergone in recent years… For decades, elements of corporate Canada represented by a fundraising federation structure closely tied with the United States and Israel have been increasing their control over mainstream Canadian Jewish organization…

Happy Birthday?

4th of July: Put Away the Flags (Howard Zinn)
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed… and.....Patriotism & The Fourth of July　(Howard Zinn)　
Mark Twain, having been called a “traitor” for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called “monarchical patriotism.” He said: “The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: ‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had—the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”