Open Source with Chris Lydon: Mustafa Barghouti -- Is there Room for Gandhi in Palestine?

Mustafa Barghouti: Is there Room for Gandhi in Palestine?
Open Source (Watson Institute for International Studies: Brown University)

Ask Palestinians why there is no Gandhi in their movement, and often the answer comes: but there are several, and Mustafa Barghouti should be recognized more widely as one of them.

A medical doctor, born in Jerusalem in 1954, trained both in the old Soviet Union and in the US, he is the advocate of a strong, non-violent push to a two-state deal with Israel. He got his break in the show biz of American opinion last Fall on the Daily Show. His B. D. S. campaign this Spring in the world press and on American campuses stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions to bring the pressure of international attention and law on the Israeli government.

Mustafa Barghouti has set his own course in the famous Barghouti family and in Palestinian politics. With Edward Said and others in 2002, Mustafa Barghouti helped found the Palestinian National Initiative. He was the Initiative’s candidate (and ran second to Mahmood Abbas) to succeed Yasir Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority in 2005. His Initiative banner waves for “a truly democratic and independent ‘third way’ for the large majority of silent and unrepresented Palestinian voters, who favour neither the autocracy and corruption of the governing Fatah party, nor the fundamentalism of Hamas.” In a long conversation at Brown’s Watson Institute yesterday, Dr. Barghouti seemed a model of the old virtues: patience, long-suffering, gentleness and a certain deep enthusiasm.

There isn’t any place in the world where apartheid is so systematic as it is today in Palestine… You are talking about a situation where we the Palestinians are prevented from using all our main roads because they are exclusive for Israelis and Israeli Army and Israeli settlers. This did not happen even during the segregation time in the [United] States. People could not use the same bus or same restaurant. But here you can’t use the same road even. I am an elected Member of Parliament. I ran for president in Palestine; I was second in the presidential race. I was born in Jerusalem. I worked as medical doctor, as a cardiologist, in a very important hospital in Jerusalem for 15 years. And since five years I am prevented, like 98 percent of the Palestinians, from entering Jerusalem. If I am caught in Jerusalem, I could be sentenced to seven years in jail.

This is unbelievable. You have a situation where a husband and a wife cannot be together. If a husband is from Jerusalem and his wife is from the West Bank, or the opposite, they cannot live together. Because if the husband or the wife comes to the West Bank they lose their ID, they lose their residency. And the wife or the husband from the other side cannot be granted citizenship in Jerusalem. We have never seen a situation where a country occupies a city like East Jerusalem and then declares the citizens of the city — who have lived there for hundreds, and some of the families for thousands of years — “temporary residents.” And if one of them goes out to study at Brown for five years for instance, they would lose their residency. This is what you see are acts of ethnic cleansing.

There isn’t a place in the world where officially the policy is, if I have a person with a heart attack and I need to get him to a hospital in Jerusalem or in Israel, I have to get a military permit from a coordinator in the military headquarters. And this can take hours or days, or it can not be granted at all. I’ve had patients die in front of my eyes because I could not get them through the checkpoints. We had 80 women who had to give birth at checkpoints, and 30 of them lost their babies. And to me, the fact that a woman cannot give birth in a dignified manner, and having to give birth in front of foreign soldiers out in the street, is equal to the utmost injustice. Tell me, where does that happen anywhere in the world? And this is happening by a country that is claiming that it is a democracy and that it is civilized. And by people that have had suffering in the past. I mean, that’s what amazes me, you know. People who understand how terrible it is to be discriminated against…

So we ask ourselves: how do we make the Israelis change their minds? How do we convince them to stop the oppressive system which is hurting our future and their future? …We have to make their system of occupation painful; and we have to make their system of occupation costly. This can be done through only two ways: either you turn to violence, which I totally disagree with, I don’t believe in and I think is counterproductive; or you turn to non-violence and mobilizing international pressures on Israel, as people did in the case of the apartheid system in South Africa. If it wasn’t for the divestment sanctions campaign in the 80s and 90s we would never have seen the apartheid system fall apart in South Africa, simply because the balance of forces between the regime and the people is so big in the interest of the regime. We have the same situation in Palestine. That’s why I speak about divestment and sanctions to encourage non-violence. This is the only way we make non-violent resistance succeed, by having an international component, especially in the United States. We are not talking about boycotting Israel, or Israeli people. We are talking about boycotting occupation and about divestment from occupation and military industry that is exploiting people, that is destroying people’s lives and that is consolidating an apartheid system. So we are calling for divestment from occupation and apartheid and injustice…

Let’s say we have a Palestinian state and an Israel state. This will make many Israelis calmer because they will not be afraid about the Jewish nature of Israel as a state, although 20 percent of its citizens are Palestinian today. Eventually there will be cooperation between the Palestinian state and the Israeli state, economically, say. I don’t see a problem with us and Israel joining the European Union together, for instance. But Israel has to answer a bigger question.

I mean, Israel is not an island in the ocean. Israel is an island in the Middle East. What we have so far is an Israeli government that is always in conflict with others. They seek conflict, in my opinion, and they use this conflict to justify oppression of Palestinians, and to justify a lack of solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. First it was the Soviet Union: they could not make a solution because a Palestinian state would be closer to the Soviet Union, for instance – or with Egypt which was at that time closer to the Soviet Union. Then it was the problem of Egypt and Syria, and then they had peace with Egypt and ceasefire with Syria. They had a problem with Iraq. Today they speak about Iran. Tomorrow if Iran is no problem they probably will start speaking about Azerbaijan. They keep looking for an external justification for a problem that’s internal.

Many Israelis speak of this. And they ask: in a globalized world when you have economic cooperation, why does Israel want us not to be a democracy? Why did they kill twice already our best experiences developing a democratic system – once in 1976 when we had the first municipatlity elections, and they didn’t like the results. At the time there was no Hamas; at that time Israel was cooperating with Islamic parties against the secular national democratic groups like us. And they killed the results of the 2006 elections which were praised by the United States and the world community as the best democratic elections in the Middle East. You see, I see racism here. Why are Israelis entitled to democracy and Palestinians are not? The question is why are they afraid of us being a democracy? Because we will have a government that cannot be manipulated?

To Listen to the Conversation

Background for Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss' "Introduction" to Global Politics

Antonio Gramsci:

Wikipedia: Antonio Gramsci

Monica Stillo: Overview and Analysis of Some of Gramsci's Key Concepts

Wikipedia: Neo-Gramscian

Wikipedia: Cultural Hegemony

Marxist Internet Archive: Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

Informal Education: "Antonio Gramsci, Schooling and Education"

International Gramsci Society

Gustavo E. Fischman and Peter McLaren: "Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and the Gramscian and Freirean Legacies -- From Organic to Committed Intellectuals or Critical Pedagogy, Commitment, and Praxis"

Stephen Gill: "Gramsci, Modernity and Globalization"

Sofia Perrino on Antonio Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" (selections)

Frank Rosengarten: "Antonio Gramsci and C.L.R. James: Some Parallels and Similarities"

Mark Rupert: "Reading Gramsci in an Era of Globalising
Capitalism"

E. San Juan, Jr.: "Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avantgarde"

Laura E. Ruberto: "A Gramscian Podcast on Women Workers and Migration"

Adrian Budd: Gramsci's Marxism and International Relations

Robert Cox:

Robert Cox: "World Orders, Historical Change, and the Purpose of Theory in International Relations"

Robert Cox: "Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory"

Stuart Hall:

Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies: "Decoding Cultural Oppression"

Stuart Hall: "The Question of Cultural Identity"

Stuart Hall: "Cultural Identity and Diaspora"

Stuart Hall: "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"

Stuart Hall: "Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance"

Stuart Hall: Encoding, Decoding

Stuart Hall: Cultural Hallmark (Interview)

David Scott: "Stuart Hall's Ethics"

Wikipedia: Stuart Hall -- Cultural Theorist

Resistance: Peace and Conflict Studies Archive

[Organized and chaotic, designed to disrupt everyday life and a direct challenge to the powers that be]

Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq. "Tunisia, Egypt, and the Big Picture: Egypt lies on the fault lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy, and economic crises—and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure." Yes! (February 2, 2011)

Ali, Tariq and Zalmay Khalilzad. "A new beginning: As social revolutions sweep through the Arab world, how will they affect the role of the US in the region?" Al Jazeera (February 28, 2011)

"Reporting the Egyptian Revolution." Listening Post (February 13, 2011)

Ball, Julien. "A People's History of the French Revolution." We Are Many (June 2010)

Bennis, Phyllis. "As Fighting Continues in Tripoli, A Look at Role of the U.S., NATO and Oil Firms in Libya Uprising." Democracy Now (August 23, 2011)

Chomsky, Noam. “This is the Most Remarkable Regional Uprising that I Can Remember” Democracy Now (February 2, 2011)

Cole, Juan. "Scenarios for Egypt’s Future: How Democratic Will it Be?" Informed Comment (February 12, 2011)

Coleman, Gabriella. "What It's Like to Participate in Anonymous' Actions." The Atlantic (December 10, 2010)

Coleman, Gabriella, Rich Fein and X. "Hacktivism’s Global Reach, From Targeting Scientology to Backing WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring." Democracy Now (August 16, 2011)

Crawshaw, Steve and John Jackson. "10 Everyday Acts of Resistance That Changed the World: Václav Havel called it 'the power of the powerless.' How regular people, from Denmark to Liberia, have stood up to power—and won." Yes! (April 1, 2011)

"Egypt Today, Tomorrow the World." CrimethInc (February 2, 2011)

Hajjar, Lisa. "Omar Suleiman, the CIA’s Man in Cairo and Egypt’s Torturer-in-Chief." Democracy Now (February 11, 2011)

Harvey, David. "Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets." Reading Marx's Capital (August 11, 2011)

"History of the Paris Commune." Marxists Internet Archive (Archive)

Lendman, Stephen. "Egyptians Again Rally for Change." MWC News (July 9, 2011)

Lynch, Marc. "Tunisia's Twitter Revolution?" On the Media (January 21, 2011)

The People Want to Bring Down the Regime [Cairo, Egypt: "This blog is a collection of comments, contributions and visual media from the Egyptian uprising. It is sent out from one of the few locations in Cairo with an internet connection. Mubarak’s regime cut the internet to the country ahead of a call for a day of rage. The consequences of this day have gone beyond any expectations. “The people want to bring down the regime” has become the most common chant on the streets.]

Power, Nina. There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored: Those condemning the events in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture The Guardian (August 8, 2011)

Prashad, Vijay. "'The Empire’s Bagman': Obama Egypt Envoy Frank Wisner Says Mubarak Should Stay." Democracy Now (February 7, 2011)

Prins, Nomi. "The Egyptian Uprising Is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism." AlterNet (February 4, 2011)

Quinn, Ben. "London riots and UK unrest: Tuesday 9 August [4th Night]." (August 9, 2011)

Stryker, Deena. "Iceland's On-going Revolution." Daily Kos (August 1, 2011)

"Tunisian Blogger Lina Ben Mhenni." On the Media (January 21, 2011)

A Tunisian Girl (Tunisian blogger, linguist and activist Lina Ben Mhenni.)

"Tunisia Revolution 2011." Global Voices (Ongoing Archive of Reports)

"Uprising in Egypt: A Two-Hour Special on the Revolt Against the U.S.-Backed Mubarak Regime." Democracy Now (February 5, 2011)

Zizek, Slavoj. "For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir SquareThere is no room for compromise. Either the entire Mubarak edifice falls, or the uprising is betrayed." Guardian (February 10, 2011)

Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers: On Deceit

Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers
The anti-war activist and MIT linguist meets the Rutgers evolutionary biologist in the Seed Salon to discuss deceit.
Seed (September 2006)

In the 1970s, a Harvard class taught by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers ignited a controversy that would escalate into the "sociobiology wars." His papers provided a Darwinian basis for understanding complex human activities and relationships. Across town at MIT, revolutionary linguist Noam Chomsky had earned a reputation as a leading opponent of the Vietnam War. Throughout those pivotal years, and in the following decades, the two explored similar ideas from different perspectives. Long aware of each other's work, they had never met until a couple of months ago, when they sat down to compare notes on some common interests: deceit and self-deception.

Noam Chomsky: One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public—and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US—roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control.

And by now these are huge industries. They not only dominate marketing of commodities, but they also control the political system. As anyone who watches a US election knows, it's marketing. It's the same techniques that are used to market toothpaste.

And, of course, there are power systems in place to facilitate this. Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is—it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.

Robert Trivers: So you're talking about self-deception in at least two contexts. One is intellectuals who, in a sense, go through a process of education which results in a self-deceived organism who is really working to serve the interests of the privileged few without necessarily being conscious of it at all.
The other thing is these massive industries of persuasion and deception, which, one can conceptualize, are also inducing a form of either ignorance or self-deception in listeners, where they come to believe that they know the truth when in fact they're just being manipulated.

To read the rest of the dialogue and access video of their discussion

HUM 221: Liberalism Reading -- What and Who is a Person?

How many political parties do you know that ran candidates for president in 2008? Why do most people only know the people and position of only two parties? Why doesn't the mainstream media pay any attention to the other political parties. Do their perspectives matter?

Baldwin/Castle (Constitution)
Barr/Root (Libertarian)
Calero/Kennedy (Socialist Workers)
Keyes/Drake (Independent)
La Riva/Puryear (Socialism and Liberation)
McCain/Palin (Republican)
McKinney/Clemente (Green)
Moore/Alexander (Socialist)
Nader/Gonzalez (Independent)
Obama/Biden (Democrat)
Weill/McEnulty (Reform)

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Before we start: I want to ask you what is the nature of democracy? Does it depend on silent consensus or passive acceptance? Does it demand that its citizens inform themselves about the issues of their world and engage in arguments about how we should live? Does a healthy democracy coincide with a societal attitude that you shouldn't debate politics? Does it depend on the active engagement/participation of its citizens?

The concept of "person" is a complex and important philosophical designation in Western society:

Wikipedia: Person

In our democracy are all persons equal? Who is considered a person? Has this changed over time?

America is undoubtably a racist society. How has this effected our considerations of the rights of people in the history of our liberal democracy and our designations of who is to be considered a person deserving of rights? Race is the classification of humans. While science has demonstrated that the concept of "race" is an illusion, it is still a very powerful illusion that shapes the way that humans act and think.

"This is our first and most fundamental question of liberalism: Who, in our constitutional scheme, is a 'person' that deserves "equal opportunity?"

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson anchored a new nation on the rock of a single, revolutionary, but to him "self-evident" truth: that all men are created equal. ... As devoted as many Americans claim to be to the Jeffersonian ideal, America has an equally deep penchant for denying what we now call "human rights." ... As a leader, Jefferson said "everyone," and yet as a slave master, he said "not everyone.

In the search for profit or political power, in the fervency of faith and fear, we have limited or ignored the legal personhood--even the elemental humanity--of a long list of people, from Native Americans, to slaves, to women, to people of a certain age, to peoples in other parts of the world, and currently anyone accused of being a terrorist.

Richard Rubenstein in The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future explains how political personhood is necessary for one to have any basic recognizable human rights in a society and how without this recognition we become vulnerable to predation, exploitation and elimination (without any recognition--because we are not recognizable "persons").

It took many generations for women to become recognized in America as full persons in the eyes of the law? It took them generations to progress from what amounted to legal chattel to full-fledged citizens.

Are you fully a "person" and offered equal opportunity if you are not allowed to "marry" in the eyes of the law?

Are corporations "persons" with legal rights? Perhaps only in America, the land that puts "personhood" at the center of the universe, would that be a question. The answer: Yes, corporations are persons in American law.

Do we really want to be "one America," as Obama put it?

What about groups for whom personhood is a settled issue, at least in terms of the law? Do we owe them for their suffering? Do we owe them preference in hiring or education?

What do we do when some persons insist on their right to separateness and develop subcultures that consider others to be "inferior?"

Is there such a status as personhood-plus in America? Keeping in mind that the U.S. Constitution has the 1787 decision that African slaves would be considered three-fifths of a person for tax and census purposes? This parsing of persons is built into our "liberal" values?

Are we really "one America"?

Think about the current "religious test" for political candidates in which they have to "prove" that they "believe" in a (Christian) God. Whatever happened to separation of church/state? Is it right that non-believers are discriminated against in this manner? What, then, does this "Christian" test for presidential candidates mean to anyone who is not a Christian. Are they less capable people... or not even worthy of consideration?

Essentially we are attempting to understand the effects of institutionalized (or how about "structured") prejudice (of all sorts) on the people/groups who are discriminated against. This is difficult because we all hold prejudices, but this does not excuse us from recognizing how they operate in our thinking and in the larger operations of our society and/or world. To help you to think about this take a listen to this philosophy podcast:

Philosophy Bites: Miranda Fricker on Epistemic Injustice (12 minutes)

Fricker states that epistemic injustice, in part, results when a person or certain groups of people, is ignored or dismissed based upon non-related perceived characteristics (a classic example would be a woman speaking up in a group of men on a political or social issue and being ignored--but this operates on so many levels... for instance an academic researcher believing they know better the conditions/needs of their subjects and ignoring their statements that contradict their research.)

Aristotle referred to those in "democratic" Athens, that were considered to be noncitizens, as being idiotes, from which we get the current term "idiot". As our reading reminds us (22), in "democratic" Athens, this designation would apply to "women, slaves, children and resident aliens." Is this kind of derogatory or dismissive thinking present in our current "democratic" society? Our country was founded on the understanding that full-citizens were those that owned "property." What does this tell us about the founding ideas of our "democratic" society? Is liberalism's main priority the protection of property?

Direct example of institutionalized epistemic injustice:

On July 23, 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who is African American, was arrested on the front porch of his home in Cambridge Massachusetts, on charges of disorderly conduct. The professor had yelled at the white police officer who was responding to a neighbor’s call about a suspicious looking man (Gates himself) trying to break into Gates’ home. The charges were soon dropped. Several days later, when asked about the arrest, President Barack Obama suggested that the Cambridge Police Department had acted “stupidly,” setting off a storm of media criticism. Regretting his words, President Obama invited Gates and the arresting officer to join him for a beer and a private conversation about the incident. The President and his aides described the event as a “teachable moment” about race, without specifying exactly who was teaching whom or what might actually be learned.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a 59 yr old African-American Harvard professor and a prominent American scholar, was arrested in his home because a neighbor reported seeing two black men forcing their way through the front door. He became indignant when the police arrived and questioned--rather than check his identity, easily verified, they handcuffed him and took him away. Would this have happened if he was a prominent caucasian?

Furthermore, President Obama criticized the officers mishandling of this incident and stated they had acted "stupidly." He quickly backtracked under a media storm (pundits) of criticism ... did this prove to us that even an "African-American" president can't criticize the police?



In a liberal society are women deserving of control over their own bodies?

1973 Roe vs Wade Case (made abortion legal)

"For women to enjoy their full rights as human beings, they necessarily were entitled to full control over their person, to put it literally." What do you think of this statement?

Wikipedia has an entry that attempts to outline the many issues and opinions circulating around the Abortion Debate. Remember, as always, Wikipedia can be a starting place, but when formulating your own opinions (and definitely your papers) you must conduct further research into the subject (question in the Socratic Method). Pay close attention to the arguments that are appended to wikipedia posts--these are just as important as the posts (in that we can map out the various positions that circulate around a concept/history/belief). Wikipedia is not recognized as an academic source in your papers, instead it is be used as a rough map that can get you started on more in-depth research which you will use as sources (give you some early indication of where the already-ongoing argument has gone and where you should look for more academically-legitimated sources that will be used to support your positions-perspectives). We should definitely talk more about how/why Wikipedia is useful and problematic.

Another term that might be useful in thinking about our study of ideologies is the recognition and/or claim that America is divided by a Culture War

What about the issues of "right to die" claims? In our society it is illegal for us to attempt suicide (or aid in a suicide attempt) no matter the suffering of the person. What do you think about this law?

A recent bitter and controversial legal struggle was centered around Terry Schiavo who was diagnosed as being in a "persistent vegetative state."

Are prisoners of war deserving of treatment as individuals with rights? Traditionally the Geneva Conventions have been the international standard for the just treatment of enemy combatants captured during a war.

What are the implications of our country's sanctioning of torture as a legitimate measure in the interrogation of unlawful enemy combatants? What about extraordinary rendition by the USA of persons deemed to be under suspicion of doing something wrong?

In our reading on liberalism, most of the political philosophers discussed, from Aristotle to America's founding fathers, have a deep distrust (fear) of poor people. Why do you think that is?

Have you ever heard of the Poor People's Campaign? Martin Luther King, Jr. in launching his last campaign before his assassination stated that our liberal society has a moral imperative to address poverty first and foremost: "We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty." What do you think about this statement and why is it rarely cited in our "liberal" media?

Is class an issue in the USA? The world? Is it as easily recognized as some of the other issues? Why or Why Not? Recently there was a Poor People's March during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN. Did you hear anything about the march? What do you think of the protest for the rights of poor people? Are the poor deserving of the same rights as other people? Is it an individual problem or a larger social issue?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed, in his last speech as president, before he died, the need for a Second Bill of Rights because the U.S. Constitution failed to guarantee basic political rights:

2nd Bill of Rights

Have you read Ralph Ellison's classic novel Invisible Man? If so, what did you think about the protagonists struggle against a society that treats him as if he didn't matter ("socially invisible")? Refer back to "epistemic injustice" above to help you think about this struggle and process.

Last Thought/Question:

Should this just be viewed as a case of the struggle of individuals to achieve recognition in society (individual's actions are the issue and it is not a social issue), or, should we pay attention to social structures/institutions that reproduce and mask the delegitimation of the rights of certain peoples?

Richard Eskow: Today's Visionary, Not Yesterday's Celebrity -- Martin Luther King, Jr's Words with Contemporary Images

Today's Visionary, Not Yesterday's Celebrity: Martin Luther King, Jr's Words with Contemporary Images
By Richard Eskow
Campaign for America's Future

A lot of people in the media are so afraid of offending anyone with controversial truths that they can't even tell the truth about the man whose holiday we're celebrating this weekend. Their coverage could give you the impression that the purpose of Martin Luther King, Jr's life was simply to make everybody in this country feel good about themselves - so good, in fact, that we deserve a day off just for having the wisdom to be born American.

You might be forgiven for thinking that everybody liked and admired Dr. King while he was alive - except maybe for a few angry old white people down South, who later realized the errors of their ways and were very sorry. The media have been so reluctant to convey Dr. King's true message that Glenn Beck can claim to have inherited his mantle and millions of people believe him. They're so afraid of telling his truth that a Pentagon official can claim that the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the spiritual heir to Gandhi's mantle of nonviolence, would have supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this fame-addicted age, this activist and challenger of comfortable ideals has been presented as just another celebrity. And these days "celebrity" is another word for "commodity." Dr. King: Didn't they use his picture for one of those Apple ads? Or was it Nike? Didn't he have his picture taken with movie stars and singers? Future generations may come to believe he was famous just for being famous - you know, like Heidi Montag.

This weekend Dr. King's name will be spoken by politicians and business leaders who would probably despise what he would have had to say about 21st Century America. They'll try to appropriate his name and memory to ensure their own well-being. They hope to domesticate his moral challenge in order to protect their own ambition.

Fortunately, Martin Luther King left his words behind. In his honor, here are ten quotes from Dr. King, illustrated with images from today's events to show their continued meaning. If they don't manage to comfort the afflicted on this national holiday - and at least unsettle the comfortable - they're followed by a slide show with even more quotes.

To Read the Ten Quotes with the Images and the Meanings

Tunisia -- Fears of Insecurity Overshadow the Joys of Freedom

(This report of Tunisian responses to the ongoing revolution is a lot more optimistic than the title makes it appear)

Tunisia: Fears of Insecurity Overshadow the Joys of Freedom
by Hisham
Global Voices

On January 14, 2011, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali abruptly fled the country he ruthlessly ruled for more than two decades. The people of Tunisia took to the streets to celebrate the dawn of a new independence. The euphoria rapidly gave way to fear about the security situation. News spread about vandals rampaging across major cities, looting shops and homes and setting fire to properties and buildings. The sound of gun bursts echoed in the deserted streets of the capital city, while the Army deployed its troops around key areas in the capital, Tunis. The mood among citizens remained joyful. They formed vigilante groups to defend their families and properties. Some of those have been sharing their thoughts on their blogs.

To Read the Report and Collection of Tunisian Responses

Paul Connor: The Activist's Dilemma

The Activist's Dilemma: It’s time to start matching our sentiments to our actions.
by Paul Connor
Adbusters

It’s late, maybe 2, or 3 a.m. I’m scanning my email inbox for anything important I might have missed. I notice a message that lists the names of two famous activists – Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein – in its subject header. It’s a call to action, soliciting support for Tim DeChristopher, a climate change activist who faces ten years in jail after disrupting an auction of oil and gas leases in Utah. DeChristopher prevented the Bush administration from selling off 14 parcels of land for fossil fuel extraction by placing fake bids on them, and he is being prosecuted for this crime, despite the new US administration ruling that the land had been inappropriate for sale.

I’m interested in getting involved, because of the kind of activism practiced and the punishment of jail time, but also because I now want to know more about Tim DeChristopher.

On his website (bidder70.org) there is a video of DeChristopher speaking at a climate rally in Salt Lake City last October. An athletic-looking 26-year-old with a shaved head and intense eyes, he speaks loudly and succinctly, like a charismatic churchman in full swing. At times he even breaks into gospel song. And there is more than a hint of spirituality in his speech, too. He tells the small crowd of his own personal awakening – how every day since his action, despite knowing he may soon be behind bars, he has walked a little taller and felt a little freer. He also offers them a kind of salvation, declaring that it will be social struggle and activism that will make us the truly noble beings we were meant to be.

In an interview with Democracy Now, DeChristopher quotes the late US environmentalist Edward Abbey, who said that “sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” For much of his time as an activist on climate change, he explains, he felt a nagging disconnect between the scale of the issue and his response to it. But when he began to bid at the auction and risk imprisonment, he became profoundly calm.

I understand this. As a climate activist I have felt this disconnect … and also the feeling that comes from taking a stand. As I signed on to a never-ending parade of online petitions, wrote letters to politicians and chose ‘eco-friendly’ options at the local supermarket, I felt that such token actions betrayed my true feelings about the importance of the issue. But there have also been times when my actions honestly represented my convictions.

Last September I was arrested for trespassing during a mass civil disobedience action against one of the world’s dirtiest coal power stations. On another occasion I fasted on water and salt outside Australia’s Parliament House from early November till mid-December, calling for action on climate change with Climate Justice Fast! – an international hunger strike I cofounded. On those occasions I experienced the feeling DeChristopher describes. Riding in the back of a police car after my arrest, I felt a warm contentment, and strangely enough, an enormous sense of freedom. Weak and hungry from my fast, I often puzzled the journalists who asked how I felt: I told them I felt very good indeed.

What I found, and what I believe Tim DeChristopher and Edward Abbey found, was that we cannot be at peace if our actions do not reflect what we truly believe. But when they do, our spirits soar. Then we’re alive and free.

This is no groundbreaking revelation. Mahatma Gandhi expressed the same feeling when he said that “happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.” Yet while it is nothing new, there may be few ideas more urgently needed in our time.

In his 2008 book, The Freedom Paradox, Clive Hamilton argues that within free-market capitalism, corporate interests actively discourage us from acting in accord with the values, preferences and desires we would endorse after careful consideration. Very few of us, he writes, would, upon deep reflection, say that it is our innermost desire in life to work incredibly hard at a job we dislike in order to possess the latest consumer products. Yet this is precisely the life our society encourages. From early childhood onward, advertisers expertly instill within us a set of values, preferences and desires that are not our own, but those that corporations wish us to have. As a result, our true ideals become increasingly neglected and stigmatized. This denial of our moral selves, Hamilton believes, can largely explain the discontent increasingly prevalent in affluent societies.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Judge John Roll Dead, Rep. Gabby Giffords Shot in the Head In Tuscon Shooting; Sarah Palin's PAC Puts Gun Sights On Democrats She's Targeting In 2010

(Update at 4:36 PM: Talking Points Memo: Gifford Is Alive and Doctors Optimistic)

"Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win."
--Sarah Palin defending her violent metaphors used to, in her words, "target" Democrats who supported the Healthcare reform bill

Rep. Gabby Giffords and Six Others Have Died In Tuscon Shooting

Related stories:

Sarah Palin's PAC Puts Gun Sights On Democrats She's Targeting In 2010 (Gabrielle Gifford was one of the 20 democrats they placed on a map with a gun target)

"Sarah Palin Sticks to Her Guns, and Gun Imagery, in Message to Supporters"

Giffords Opponent, Jesse Kelly, Held June Event to “Shoot a Fully Automatic M16″ to “Get on Target” and “Remove Gabrielle Giffords”

Chief Judge John Roll Dead in AZ Shooting, Received Death Threats Over 2009 Immigration Case

"2nd Suspect Sought in Arizona Shooting."

A Cautionary Tale

Adi Kuntsman: Online Memories, Digital Conflicts and the Cybertouch of War

Online Memories, Digital Conflicts and the Cybertouch of War
by Adi Kuntsman
Digital Icons

Wars, conflicts and commemoration occupy the minds of today’s users of new media across the globe; and those in Russia, Eurasia and Central Europe are no exception. Digital reporting of military actions and virtual museums of past wars and genocides; hacker attacks against websites and databases and computer war games; online antiwar organising and digital performances of postwar trauma; flashmobs of political protest or racist incitement and digitalised personal memories and family histories – these are only some of the examples of the ways in which war, conflict and commemoration are narrated, experienced and performed in contemporary digital media. Thus, the aim of the special issue entitled ’War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction’ is to explore these and other phenomena, by looking at various forms and segments of digital media: Internet sites, blogs and forums, online news and discussions, social networks, commemoration sites and virtual museums, digital games, video performance and computer crimes.

The issue brings together ten authors, working in a variety of formats – articles, essays, reports, ethnographic film and digital performance – and reflecting on the following questions:

What is the role of new media in understanding, representing, negotiating and remembering (or forgetting) war and genocide?

What is the status of testimony, evidence and reportage in the age of digital reproduction?

What practices of memory do new information and communication technologies entail?

What structures of feeling operate in online reports and debates around military operations and human suffering?

How can digital mediations of conflict bring people and communities together, while tearing others apart?

And lastly, how can the embodied, physical violence intensify in digital interactions, and how can it be diffused, resisted and remembered?

This special issue was born out of a sense of political and intellectual necessity, posed by recent developments in digital media and its use. Digital media is fundamentally changing the terrain of politics, due to its reach and speed, and its function in the lives of civilian populations and states alike. For example, together with ‘citizen journalism’, enabled by blogs, the Internet has given a platform to political extremism, racism and neo-Nazism. (While Web 2.0 technologies allow non-hierarchical participation,
they also, at times, turn the Internet into a digital war zone (Karatzogianni 2006, 2009).

In today’s ‘global matrix of war’ (Kaplan 2009), digital technologies are used by both state and non-state actors, often blurring the line between military and entertainment and between control and resistance. Attacks on the ground and in the air now go hand in hand with information warfare, propaganda and racist attacks in blogs and YouTube vlogs; conflicts between states or stateless groups reverberate in cyberattacks by hackers from each side; and testimonies of atrocities are captured on mobile phones and circulated on Facebook, irrevocably changing our modes of witnessing, feeling and remembering violent and traumatic events (Ibrahim 2009; Kaplan 2009; Reading 2009).

Politically, then, the topic of war and conflict and of their relations with digital media is clearly an urgent one. In that respect, Central and Eastern Europe is not unique. The region, however, has its own, very particular, record of past wars and conflicts that scar social and mnemonic fabrics of today’s life: World War II, German occupation and the Holocaust, decades under communism, twenty years of post-communist transformation, and waves of conflicts and bloodshed they brought.

More recently, the region has witnessed a rise in the right wing nationalism and extremist racism, struggles for sovereignty and independence, ‘wars on terror’ and localised armed conflicts. Addressing all these together, through the lens of shared political conditions, while remaining attentive to each country’s unique culture and
circumstances, is what encouraged me to assemble this collection.

The special issue is also motivated by an intellectual need to shed light on the role of digital media in these processes across the region. With the growing integration of digital media into most aspects of our lives, we witness an explosion of scholarly interest in the subject, cutting across many disciplines. Similarly, the topic of war, conflict and memory is widely explored. The two, however, only recently began to intersect, for example in the special issue of Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (2006), ‘War Coverage in Cyberspace’ (2006) or in edited collections such as Digital War Reporting (Matheson and Stuart 2009) or Save As… Digital Memories (Garde-Hansen et.al. 2009).1 But even when the two fields are explored in conjunction, they mostly concentrate on one narrow aspect – such as war coverage and reportage, or memories – rather than a complex examination of how digital media and computer technologies affect the warfare itself, its social perception and the ways of remembrance and commemoration. Such complex approach is precisely what unites the papers in this special issue, when they examine how war and conflicts of past and present are negotiated, performed and remembered on the Internet and in other digital media tools.

To Read the Rest of the Introduction to the Special Issue and to Access the Issue's Essays

Natalie Merchant: Which Side Are You On

Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How it Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict

Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How it Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Panel discussion with Moustafa Bayoumi, Max Blumenthal, Rashid Khalidi, Alia Malek, Arun Gupta, Phil Weiss and Adam Horowitz
We Are Many



To Listen to the Podcast

Mark Potok: Hatewatch’s 4th Annual Smackdown Awards

The Last Word: Hatewatch’s 4th Annual Smackdown Awards
by Mark Potok
Southern Poverty Law Center

A skirt-chasing neo-Nazi huffs about the sexual mores of “the Jews.” An infamous Fox News personality predicts that one quarter of Americans will be starving come New Year’s Day. A Southern heritage group initiates a festive commemoration of the war that left more Americans dead than any other. A woman who took a walking tour of Auschwitz six decades after the Nazis ran it describes it as a luxurious and friendly work camp. All ’round, it’s been quite a year on the domestic radical right, and our intrepid staffers have had quite a time keeping up with it all. But as we do every year, we’ve hiked up our pants, put on our wading boots, and plunged into the sewers in an effort to bring you a hair-raising assortment of the very worst of the radical right in 2010. Here, with apologies to Keith Olbermann, is a countdown of the list dredged up by Hatewatch’s 4th Annual Smackdown Awards Committee:

To Read the List