Anti-BDS Document Gets Leaked in Canada

This message was passed to the executives of the Canadian student movement Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights by Laith Marouf. It in turn has been passed onto SPHR’s affiliates, which includes the University of Waterloo based Students for Palestinian Rights, which is how it was then passed onto me (I am an active member of SFPR and one of the administrators of the group’s website).

The document details efforts going on at the moment by pro-Zionist organizations in Canada, including McGill Professor Gil Troy, to undermine the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, which was the major focus of last week and this week’s world wide Israeli Apartheid Week events. It also details the desire by the apologists of Zionism to criminalize perhaps the most potent description of the Israeli regime, the apartheid analogy. These latest moves show just how desperate the Zionist movement in Canada has become as they feel that they can no longer simply argue over the facts and must now move to criminalizing the opposition.

Most importantly the document deals with plans to undermine the BDS and Palestinian Solidarity movements by re-branding them, especially by framing them as the tools of a kind of primordial antisemitism (a common tactic of the Zionist movement, which seeks to distract serious discussion away from meaningful criticism of Israel and its policies by accusing all critics, from soft ones to hard ones, of being Naziesque antisemites) and Islamist’s, who according to the document have a “strategy to undermine the West.”

Those of us in Canada whose hearts beat for the people of Palestine must organize to defeat this latest, especially the continuing efforts to paint us as enemies of the Jewish people, or the new efforts to portray as a beachhead for radical Islamist forces. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Women’s Rights, Population and Climate Change: A Debate

Should climate activists and feminists support campaigns to slow population growth?

The Blog Climate and Capitalism recently published a debate between Betsy Hartmann and Laurie Mazur about campaigns that promote family planning and reproductive health programs as means of slowing population growth and fighting global warming.

Subsequently it also published a reply to Laurie Mazur in which editor Ian Angus argued that “The combination of population reduction and women’s rights was already like oil and water. Adding CO2 reductions to the mix only makes things worse.”

For some time now the notion that population reduction should be part of any action plan geared at staving off global ecological disaster has been popular amongst environmental activists and thinkers. This is not just the case for the eco-right, or eco-fascists, where the idea figures prominently, as it has also been taken up by many committed leftists with an ecological conscience. This has been especially so amongst though who take more of a “dark green” or tech critical perspective, such as deep ecologists and anti-civilizationists, but they are far from the only ones.

In attempt to try and foster debate I have below collected all of the posts from C&C. I also encourage readers to join the discussion over there in the Comments feature at the bottom of the original articles.

• Laurie Mazur is director of the Population Justice Project. Her book, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice and the Environmental Challenge, was published this year by Island Press.
• Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism. His book, The Global Fight for Climate Justice: Anticapitalist Responses to Global Warming and Environmental Destruction, is published in North America by Fernwood Publishing, and in Europe by Resistance Books.
• Betsy Hartmann is author of “The ‘New’ Population Control Craze: Retro, Racist, Wrong Way to Go,” is the director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College. She is the author ofReproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control(South End Press, 1995).

Israel in OECD: Israel Set to Join Club of Richest Nations

By Jonathan Cook. Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.  His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books).  His website is http://www.jkcook.net/.  This appeared on MR Zine. A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

Is Europe Planning Seal of Approval for Israeli Settlers?

An exclusive club of the world’s most developed countries is poised to admit Israel as a member even though, a confidential internal document indicates, doing so will amount to endorsing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territories.

Israel has been told that its accession to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is all but assured when the 30 member states meet in May.

But a draft OECD report concedes that Israel has breached one of the organization’s key requirements on providing accurate and transparent data on its economic activity.

The information supplied by Israel, the report notes, includes not only the economic activity of its citizens inside its recognized borders but also Jewish settlers who live in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan in violation of international law.

Israel’s accession to the OECD on such terms threatens to severely embarrass many of the organization’s member states, especially those in the European Union that are publicly committed to avoiding collusion with the occupation.

The OECD report proposes that these legal difficulties may be circumvented by asking Israel to produce new statistics within a year of its accession excluding the settler population — even though, an OECD official has admitted, Israel would have the power to veto such a demand after it becomes a member.

Israel as a Rogue State

By Praful Bidwai. A TNI Fellow and former senior editor of The Times of India, Praful is a freelance journalist and insightful columnist for several leading newspapers in South Asia writing regularly on all aspects of Indian politics, economy, society and its international relations. He is an associate editor of Security Dialogue, published by PRIO, Oslo; a member of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists against Proliferation (INESAP) and co-founder of the Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament (MIND).

From Praful Bidwai’s ZSpace Page

Israel’s practice of illegal assassinations, such as the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhough in Dubai, is in line with its ruthless policy of consolidating its occupation, expanding illegal settlements, and tightening its economic hold over Palestinians — in defiance of Security Council resolutions and global opinion.

Overwhelming evidence has now emerged that Israel’s notorious secret service Mossad assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhough of the Palestinian-Islamist group Hamas in Dubai on January 20. Closed-circuit television footage of the operation, available at www.youtube.com, leaves little room for doubt of Mossad’s involvement.

According to the London Sunday Times, the plot was approved by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, no less. Mossad is believed to have 48-50 members in assassination teams called Kidon, in addition to 100 field agents termed Katsa. The criminality of al-Mabhough’s killing stands compounded by the use of forged passports of British, Irish, French and German citizens of dual nationality living in Israel. These included one diplomatic passport.

Mossad’s cold-blooded murder of an unarmed man is patently illegal and indefensible. Israel has recklessly used such illegal means to the point of jeopardizing its intelligence-sharing and diplomatic relations with friendly countries. In the 1980s, the UK government shut down Mossad’s British operations after it forged British passports. But Mossad habitually practices such means in many countries, barring the US.

The west’s reaction to the assassination has been mild and timid, although it flagrantly breaches international law, besides elementary norms of civilized conduct. The British foreign secretary’s “outrage” was targeted more at the forgery of British passports than at al-Mabhough’s murder, surely an incomparably greater offence.

Palestinian Revolutionaries on International Women’s Day

Sukant Chandan interviews Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled and Palestinian Gaza resident and revolutionary Shireen Said for International Women’s Day 2010. Sukant Chandan is a London-based political analyst and filmmaker and runs the Sons of Malcolm blog.   He can be contacted at sukant.chandan@gmail.com

Please note that the posting of this article is not meant as an endorsement of the particular tactics employed by any of the groups discussed within it.

Leila Khaled: “Palestinian women have a fundamental role in uniting Palestinians”

The Palestinian people’s oppression continues due primarily to the financial, diplomatic, and military support that the Zionist state receives from the USA and secondly to the acquiescence of pro-Western states in the region.  After the fall of the Zionist state’s long lost brother — the Apartheid state of South Africa — the Palestinian struggle remains perhaps the leading and most potent anti-imperialist struggle in the world.  Therefore, Palestinian women are a central example of what role women can play in the struggle to free themselves, their families, their communities, and their nation from imperialism.

Leila Khaled brought the Palestinian struggle to the world’s attention by means of two dramatic plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970, in which no one but one of her own comrades was killed.  The person killed was American-Nicaraguan Patrick Arguello.  Kahled narrates her account of this hijacking in her autobiography My People Shall Live (1973) in which she writes:

Patrick Arguello, age twenty-seven, father of three children, a Nicaraguan citizen of the world, born in San Francisco, USA, was pronounced dead.  What had prompted someone half-way across the world from Palestine to undertake this dangerous mission?  Patrick was a revolutionary Communist.  His gallant action was a gesture of international solidarity.  A flame of life was extinguished; it lit the world for a moment; it blazed a trail on the road back to Palestine.  Arguello lives, so do my people, so does the revolution!

Khaled remains one of the most inspirational and influential leftist anti-imperialist women in the post-Second World War period.  Leila Khaled remains active today in the leadership of the Palestinian revolution, as she is one of the central committee members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as well as a representative of the Palestinian National Council.

Nadezhda Krupskaya, a Revolutionary Fighter, Feminist and Pioneer of Socialist Education

By Graham Milner writing for Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Krupskaya spent a good deal of her later years attempting to disseminate through the means available to her the legacy of Lenin. Thus she wrote and published her famous Reminiscences of Lenin.

Born into a family of radical Russian gentry in 1869, Nedezhda (which from Russian translates as “Hope”) Konstantinovna Krupskaya became, with her partner V.I. Lenin, a founder and central leader of the organisation of revolutionaries that led the Russian working class to power in October 1917 — the Bolshevik Party (majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party).

Following the 1917 October Revolution, Krupskaya played an important role in developing public education and cultural life in the Soviet state. A prolific writer and speaker, her collected works in the field of education alone fill a dozen large volumes. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Krupskaya was one of the first prominent communists in the Soviet Union to raise her voice against the usurpation of power by the conservative, bureaucratic forces around Joseph Stalin. Although she withdrew her support from the United Opposition to Stalin (led by Leon Trotsky, Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev) in 1926, Krupskaya never reconciled herself to the gangster regime established by the Stalinists. Soon after her death in 1939, Stalin ordered Krupskaya’s name never again to be mentioned in the public media, and indeed it rarely was until after Stalin died in 1953.

Radical beliefs

Krupskaya came early to radical beliefs. She recalled in a brief personal memoir written in later life how the experiences of her parents in resisting the autocratic regime of the tsars had brought her to an appreciation of different aspects of national and social oppression. At one time her father worked as a factory inspector, until he was sacked for giving too accurate an account of abuses by the factory management. Krupskaya recalls that she used to play with the factory workers’ children, and that they always tried hard to ambush the factory manager and hit him with snowballs.

Radical Women on the 100th International Women’s Day

One hundred years ago, at the Second International Socialist Women’s Conference, participants from 17 countries voted unanimously to create a day to honor the struggles of working-class women. International Women’s Day was born, and it’s been celebrated in countries across the globe ever since.

Women now, just as they did one hundred years ago, hold a unique economic and social position in society-oppressed in the home and super-exploited in the workplace. Women suffer more frequently from poverty; they labor long hours at home, raising the young and nursing the aged and sick; and they often also perform double-duty outside the home, working for lower wages than their male counterparts. This harsh reality makes women the best and toughest leaders of movements fighting for social and economic justice. In other words, women always have everything to gain and little to lose by organizing for a better world. As the South African song proclaims, “When yu strike a women, you strike a rock!”

rebellion by women against an unjust global economic order is very much alive. In Iran, women are revolting against a thoroughly bankrupt, oppressive regime; in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian women are organizing and international boycott of Israel;; in Italy, France and Spain, immigrant women went on strike against xenophobic racism; in Australia, feminists convened a national conference to coordinate and re-energize the abortion rights movement, in Mexico, women staunchly defend striking mine workers who fight for basic labor and human rights.

In the United States, queers and their allies are agitating for equality in all aspects of life. On university and college campuses, young women are organizing strikes and conferences in answer to the draconian cuts and tuition hikes that politicians of both parties are implementing to balance shrinking state budgets.

Mamilla Cemetery: Victim of Israeli “Tolerance”

Zionists’ Threat to Canada’s Freedom of Speech

Karin Brothers of The Canadian Charger.

The censure of Israeli Apartheid Week in Canada by Ontario MPPs, by the Liberal and Conservative national leaders and now by the Toronto School Board represent threats to freedom of speech in Canada that must galvanize Canadians into action.

The most stunning aspect of this condemnation of speech and belief is the subject: the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

The well-documented ethnic cleansing of Palestinians now occurring in Occupied Arab East Jerusalem, the ongoing attacks and genocidal siege of Gazans now in its fourth brutal year, the confiscation of West Bank Land and ongoing humiliations faced by all Palestinians are presumably acceptable; it is only the description of this treatment that is unacceptable to our various leaders.

Given the apparent outrage at this usage, many may be surprised at the documentation validating the use of the term apartheid: the quotes from Israelis who have used that word to describe their treatment of Palestinians, the quotes of South Africans who claim that the Palestinian treatment is worse than their own apartheid, and the 2009 South African legal study that confirms the validity of “apartheid” to describe Palestinian treatment under Israeli occupation.

Turning the Page on Colonial Oppression: Defenders of the Land Meets in Vancouver

Peter Kulchyski, writing for Canadian Dimension.

Early this fall, an event largely ignored by the mass media in Canada, took place in northwestern Ontario. A floatplane filled with equipment and staff from the Platinex mining company attempted to land on Big Trout Lake, known as Kitchenuhmaykoosib to the local Inninuwug. The chief and other members of the community got in their boats and played a game of “chicken” with the plane, maneuvering their boats in front of its landing trajectory to keep it from being able settle onto the lake. After making several attempts, the pilot turned around and returned south. A few months later the community heard the news that the Ontario government had bought out Platinex’s interest in the disputed territory (part of Treaty 9) and announced that the platinum mining development in the region would not proceed.

I heard about the story from Sam Mckay at a Defenders of the Land gathering this fall in Vancouver. He was one of six members of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug band council jailed for trying to fight off Platinex a year and a half earlier. This provisional victory, along with a few others — charges were dropped in the fall against Grassy Narrows citizen Roberta Keesig for building an unlicensed cabin in her family’s traditional trapping territory — bolster the spirits of activists trying to turn back the tide of colonialism. Colonialism continues to ravage First Nations, Inuit, and Metis lands from real estate, logging, and hydro developments in the west coast, to the tar sands developments in Miskew Cree and Chipweyan territories, to hydro developments in Pimicikamak Inninew lands north of Lake Winnipeg, to logging in Asubpeeschoseewagong territory in Treaty 3, to “development” and government interference in Barrier Lake, to continued fishing and logging disputes involving Mi’kmaq lands and waters on the east coast.

But perhaps nothing is as inspiring as seeing and hearing people from all these communities — and more — gathered together to tell their stories and try to find ways of supporting each other.

Book Extract: Israel’s Assault on Gaza – A Case of Self-Defence?

Below is an extract from Norman Finkelstein’s new book on Israel’s 2009 assault on Gaza, ‘This Time We Went Too Far’. The book is available exclusively from OR Books at www.orbooks.com”.

From Chapter 1: Self-Defense

Question:
What do you feel is the most acceptable solution to the Palestine problem?

Mahatma Gandhi:
The abandonment wholly by the Jews of terrorism and other forms of violence. (1 June 1947)[1]

5,000 Arab and Jewish Peace Activists Rally in East Jerusalem Against Settlers

By the Communist Party of Israel. For more info on the CPI visit www.maki.org.il

Some 5,000 Arab and Jewish peace activists rallied tonight (Saturday, March 6), among them several members of Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality – Communist Party of Israel), in the Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem in order to protest against the settlement of Jews in the area and the eviction of Arab families from their homes.

The protestors gathered in a soccer field in the neighborhood and waved Israeli and Palestinian flags before marching towards the Tomb of Simon the Just.  A leading member of the Communist Party of Israel MK Dov Khenin noted that “any political agreement will require Jerusalem’s division and these settlements are aimed at preventing peace.”  Protesters carried red banners and Palestinian flags and chanted: “Stop the Destruction of Homes!”  “There Is No Sanctity in an Occupied City!”

For the past six months, a group of Israeli peace activists have demonstrated every Friday in the East Jerusalem neighborhood, protesting the takeover of Palestinian homes by settlers.

Last week, the demonstrators asked the Jerusalem police for permission to hold a large rally in the street leading to a contested house, to protest against the settlers and show solidarity with the Palestinian residents of the neighborhood.  Several Palestinian families of Sheikh Jarrah have been expelled in recent months in favor of Israeli settlers.  The evictions led to demonstrations that were put down by the police, who arrested dozens of Israeli peace activists.

Challenging Israel’s Ambassador

Ryan McGinley and Eskandar report on how students at Georgia State University in Atlanta are organizing to expose the reality of Israeli apartheid.

To view the statement against GILEE and sign the petition, visit the GSU Progressive Student Alliance Web site. First published at The Ruh of Brown Folks.

ATLANTA–The Movement to End Israeli Apartheid-Georgia (MEIA-G) kicked off the first day of Israeli Apartheid Week on March 1 by packing a lecture by Israeli ambassador Reda Mansour at Georgia State University (GSU).

Students and local activists dominated the question-and-answer session, challenging the ambassador’s whitewashed narrative of a “vibrant and diverse Israeli democracy” with critical questions about Israeli apartheid. After it had become apparent that Palestinian solidarity activists had hijacked the discussion, the ambassador was forced to end the event early.

The aim of Israeli Apartheid Week is to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign as part of a growing global BDS movement. The BDS movement seeks to isolate Israel, as South Africa was isolated during the apartheid era, until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with international law.

The UN International Civil Society Conference adopted the Palestinian call for BDS in 2005. Since then, Zionists have sought to counter the BDS movement and accusations of apartheid by pursuing “dialogue-driven” outreach that highlights the “diversity” and “liberal innovation” of Israeli society. Just as South Africa used Black members of the collaborationist Inkatha Freedom Party as foreign emissaries for the apartheid regime, Israel chose Reda Mansour–an Israeli citizen and member of Israel’s relatively privileged Druze Arab minority–to represent its interests.

Not an Analogy: Israel and the Crime of Apartheid

By Hazem Jamjoum. He is the editor of al-Majdal the English language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Originally published on The Electronic Intifada.

In recent years, increasing numbers of individuals around the world have begun adopting and developing an analysis of Israel as an apartheid regime. This can be seen in the ways that the global movement in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is taking on a pointedly anti-apartheid character, as evidenced by the growth of Israeli Apartheid Week . Further, much of the recent international diplomatic support for Israel has increasingly taken on the form of denying that racial discrimination is a root cause of the oppression of Palestinians. This has taken on new levels of absurdity in Western responses to the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in which Palestinians were identified as victims of racism (the US, Israel, Canada and Italy have already announced that they will not participate because of the potential for criticism of Israel).

Many of the writings stemming from this analysis work to detail levels of similarity and difference with apartheid South Africa, rather than looking at apartheid as a system that can be practiced by any state. To some extent, this strong emphasis on historical comparisons is understandable given that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the central campaign called for by Palestinian civil society for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and is modeled on the one that helped end South African apartheid. However, an over-emphasis on similarities and differences confines the use of the term to narrow limits. With the expanding agreement that the term “apartheid” is useful in describing the level and layout of Israel’s crimes, it is important that our understanding of the “apartheid label” be deepened, both as a means of informing activism in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, and in order to most effectively make use of comparisons with other struggles.

The Apartheid Analogy

It is perhaps understandable that some advocates of Palestinian rights look at the “apartheid label,” in its comparative sense, as a politically useful tool. The struggle of the South African people for justice and equality reached a certain sacred status in the 1980s and ’90s when the anti-apartheid struggle reached its zenith. The reverence with which activists and non-activists alike look to the righteousness of the South African struggle, and the ignominy of the colonial apartheid regime, are well placed. Black South Africans fought against both Dutch and British colonization for centuries, endured countless hardships including imprisonment and death, and were labeled terrorists as the powers of the world stood by the racist apartheid regime.

Israeli Apartheid Week: Beirut

By Daniel Drennan. He is a professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut and founder of the artists’ collective Jamaa al-Yad.  He can be reached at <info@jamaalyad.org>

Two months ago a few students got together at the American University of Beirut and started planning a week of conferences, workshops, and actions based on the model offered by Israeli Apartheid Week which started six years ago in Toronto.  A list of speakers was drawn up, and with nothing much to offer except the basic idea itself, invitations went out.

The response was phenomenal, in terms of international faculty support and the desire for speakers to come to Beirut and engage with this issue.  As the reality of the event grew, the students had to pull together a multi-day event, organize travel and accommodations, publicize the event, and logistically plan out the week.

As unlikely a possibility as it might have seemed two months ago, IAW: Beirut is happening this week on AUB’s campus.  In collaboration with this event, some students worked with me under the aegis of the collective that received official recognition in December: Jamaa al-Yad.  We started work on a series of posters that documented the reality of apartheid Palestine, while also listing the criminal corporations that are currently profiting from occupation.  We combined the images with Lebanese proverbs to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.  We presented the project to the local daily newspaper al-Akhbar, which printed up the posters in a supplement to their Thursday, February 25 edition.  We again graciously thank the editorial staff and pressmen of al-Akhbar for their faith in this project as well as their support and supreme generosity.

The images are shown below; they can be found as downloadable PDF documents at the Jamaa al-Yad web site.

The Fourth International Becomes a Perspective

By Salvatore Cannavò. Salvatore is a member of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International and of the leadership of Sinistra Critica in Italy. In November 2009 Sinistra Critica decided to declare itself in political solidarity with the Fourth International thus bringing its political experience and forces to strengthen the FI.

To recount the 16th congress of the Fourth International, we could begin by speaking of the reconstitution of the Russian section of the International, a kind of return to the sources: the Fourth International was founded at the initiative of Leon Trotsky in 1938, in the wake of the struggle and defeat of the Left Opposition to Stalinism, destroyed in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s.

We could continue by noting the presence of many Latin American organizations, starting with Marea Socialista, which is part of Chavez’s United Socialist Party in Venezuela and proposed to strengthen political and international unity so as to respond collectively to the proposal for a Fifth International launched by the Venezuelan president. We could stress the importance of the birth of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste in France, regardless of its contradictions and its growing pains, constituting the main novelty of European politics as well as the dynamics, under other political latitudes, of the German left.

However, to reflect the success represented by the 16th World Congress of the Fourth International – which ended on February 28, 2010 at Ostend, Belgium, on the North Sea – we prefer to cite three elements:

* Firstly, participation. Delegates, observers and guests coming from a good 40 countries helped develop a debate powered by the presence of all the continents, from Australia to Canada, Argentina to Russia, China to Britain, and Congo to the United States. To succeed in bringing together in one place over five days, in completely self-financed manner and without any institutional support, so many organizations, is not an easy thing.

Will Canada Join Israel’s Next War?

By Jack Miller writing for the World Socialist Web Site.

Since taking office in 2006, Stephen Harper’s minority federal Conservative government has shifted Canada’s foreign policy sharply to the right. It has championed Canada’s role in the Afghan war and the use of “hard power” in foreign affairs and loudly proclaimed Ottawa’s allegiance to US foreign policy objectives and support for Israeli aggression in Lebanon and Gaza. Now, a junior cabinet minister has implied that the Canadian Armed Forces would fight alongside Israel in the next Middle East conflict.

On February 12, Shalom Life, the online magazine of the weekly Jewish newspaper Shalom Toronto, published an interview with Peter Kent, the minister of state for foreign affairs (Americas). “Prime Minister Harper,” Kent told Shalom Life, “has made it quite clear for some time now and has regularly stated that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.”

Whilst Harper, a proponent of Canadian participation in the illegal US-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, has lost no opportunity to voice his and his government’s support for Israel, he has not made any such remark, at least publicly.

The implication of Kent’s statement, reflecting as it does the wording of the NATO treaty, is that if Israel were to find itself at war, Canada would automatically deploy the Canadian Armed Forces to fight by Israel’s side.

Israel Is an Apartheid State and That is Why They Are Losing Legitimacy

By Judy Rebick

Judy Rebick is the CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy and maintains a blog at transformingpower.ca where this article first appeared.

Before Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) even began members of the Ontario Legislature and the Canadian Parliament are falling all over each other to denounce it. I can’t remember another time when elected legislators formally denounced a student activity like this. Perhaps during the 1950s when McCarthyism was rampant but that was before my time.

Last week the Ontario Legislature unanimously passed a resolution denouncing Israel Apartheid Week submitted by PC Peter Shure who said calling Israel an apartheid state was “close to hate speech.” While there were only 30 MPPs in the Legislature at the time, NDP MPP Cheri di Novo was one of them and spoke in favour of the resolution. This week a Conservative MP is introducing a resolution calling IAW anti-Semitic.

Before I deal with why these unprecedented attacks are taking place, I’d like to share with you a great talk I heard last night at Ryerson from Na’eem Jeena (view video below), a leading activist and academic from South Africa who works for Palestinian solidarity. He told us that South African apartheid had three pillars of apartheid and Israel shares all three.

1. Different rights for different races. In the case of Israel, it is different rights for Jews and for non-Jews. For example the law of return of 1950 says Jews can return to Israel and be given citizenship even if they have no links to the country other than mythical biblical ones; whereas Palestinians cannot return even if their parents or grandparents lived there.

2. Separation of so-called racial groups into different geographical areas. Even within the borders of Israel, 93 percent of land is reserved as a national land trust or Jewish National Fund land is for the exclusive use of Jews. The 20 percent of the population that is Palestinians living in Israel have to share access to the 7 percent of private land that is left. The Israeli Supreme Court has made a number of decisions that Palestinians cannot live on Jewish lands. There are not only residential areas that are banned to Palestinians but there are separate roads for Jews and Palestinians. That was never true in South Africa even in times of crisis. Moreover Palestinians have less access to water than Jews living nearby.

Apartheid Wall: Why the Term Apartheid Embodies Historic, Present and Future of Palestine & is a Necessary Tool for Organization and Mobilization

The largest ever measure to be undertaken by the Zionist project since the 1948 Nakba, the construction of the massive Apartheid Wall throughout Palestine is bringing about the dispossession, strangulation and expulsion of the Palestinian people into miniscule, caged-in Bantustans on a daily basis!

From Stop the Wall, a grassroots Palestinian anti-apartheid wall campaign.

What is Apartheid?

Apartheid literally means separation, but this universally accepted term, which is often times referred to as “colonialism of a special type”1 embodies within it the major components of displacement through colonization, including its changing policies and measures in which expansionism and racism subjugate and eradicate a people. Apartheid was officially made a universal term by the United Nations in the 1976 “International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid”2. Apartheid began and is rooted in the very establishment of the colonial Jewish State, both in law (de jure) and in the implementation of its goals on various levels (de facto), including mechanisms used to justify its practices to avoid its legalization. Apartheid is characterized by forcible transfer of populations, land control, labor exploitation, humiliation and murder.

Separation: An Apartheid Apparatus

Apartheid in Arabic is translated to “Racist Separation”. Racism is a basic motive for separation. Separation is a way to oppress and control an Apartheid apparatus. Apartheid was also cynically known in South Africa by the whites as a “policy of good neighborliness”3 as Africans were forced to live under oppressive policies that ensured white control over their lands and daily existence; the Wall today is under the slogan of “good fences make good neighbors”4. Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is based on Ehud Barak’s call for “Peace through Separation: we are here and they are there”5 which motivates the oppression of Palestinians wherever Jews settle and seek to control. The “separation discourse” may adopt various terms, such as current talk of “disengagement” or the Zionist racist notion of the Palestinian “demographic threat.”

The Call for Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment against Israeli Apartheid

From Stop the Wall, a grassroots Palestinian anti-apartheid wall campaign.

1. What is the Call for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions against Israeli Occupation and Apartheid?

The Call to Isolate Apartheid Israel, issued by the Palestinian grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign on the day that the International Court of Justice declared the Wall illegal, became a rallying cry for the national movement when on 9 July 2005 the Palestinian Unified Call for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions against Israel was published. So far, it has been endorsed by over 170 Palestinian parties, organizations, trade unions and movements representing the Palestinian people in the 1967 and 1948 territories and in the diaspora.

The main goals of the Call for Boycott, Divestment& Sanctions are:

• To reveal to the world the nature of Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime
• To give human rights a real value by making Israel accountable and forcing it to pay a price for its crimes
• To reveal and highlight the responsibility of the international community in supporting Israeli crimes and violations of Human Rights and International Law
• Above all, to end international support for Israeli Occupation and Apartheid, since apartheid can never survive without external Assistance

We have struggled for decades against the racism, colonization, and military occupation imposed on us by Jewish settlers via the Zionist Movement and the foundation of the state of Israel. Since then, the process of colonization, occupation, and entrenchment of the apartheid system over Palestine (and later the Golan Heights) has continued at a rapid pace towards the definitive destruction of Palestinian lives, livelihoods, lands, heritage, and future. The daily crimes of the Israeli Occupation need to be stopped, the refugees return, and justice and liberation assured in Palestine.

People throughout the world are expressing their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. The international community has expressed its views in countless UN resolutions, and the highest judicial body in the world – the International Court of Justice in The Hague – has confirmed the illegality of the Apartheid Wall, as well as the Israeli Occupation and colonial settlement policy. The ICJ has reminded all states of their “obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction.” However, Israel has refused to recognize and comply with this decision, just as it has done with all other resolutions regarding Palestinian rights. Only concrete international pressure can ensure that these decisions are implemented and that Israeli Occupation and Apartheid is finally brought to an end.

David Thorstad vs Sherry Wolf on Sexuality, Part 2

Last week, the left wing Web site MR Zine published a harshly critical review by David Thorstad of Sherry Wolf’s recent book Sexuality and Socialism. I am publishing both the review by Thorstad and Wolf’s reply here today as I think they offer a look into the different takes on sex, youth and sexual liberation within the avowedly revolutionary leftist tradition. It is interesting note though that as far as polemics go MR Zine has so far refused to publish Wolf’s response to Thorstad, and instead can be found on Socialist Worker.

More than usual I would like to note that the posting of these articles does not imply endorsement of either, and they do not reflect the views of myself or this blog. As an anthropologist and sociologist who has studied the history of sexuality as well as its presentation cross-culturally, I have views that clash, at times quite stongly, with both Wolf and Thorstad on this topic.

Youth, Sexuality and the Left by Sherry Wolf

More than 200,000 people raised their voices for LGBT equality

I DON’T usually respond to screeds, but David Thorstad’s railings about my book, Sexuality and Socialism, were posted on MRZine, which I often find a useful source for socialists and the left generally.

I won’t bother to waste time here challenging his position that the left should abandon the dynamic social movements for equal marriage and other LGBT civil rights because to him these movements are not radical enough. I’ve written widely about this elsewhere, and Thorstad needs to get past Luxemburg’s title page of Reform or Revolution to absorb that her argument is against reformism, not the fight for reforms.

David Thorstad vs Sherry Wolf on Sexuality, Part 1

Last week, the left wing Web site MR Zine published a harshly critical review by David Thorstad of Sherry Wolf’s recent book Sexuality and Socialism. I am publishing both the review by Thorstad and Wolf’s reply here today as I think they offer a look into the different takes on sex, youth and sexual liberation within the avowedly revolutionary leftist tradition. It is interesting note though that as far as polemics go MR Zine has so far refused to publish Wolf’s response to Thorstad, and instead can be found on Socialist Worker.

More than usual I would like to note that the posting of these articles does not imply endorsement of either, and they do not reflect the views of myself or this blog. As an anthropologist and sociologist who has studied the history of sexuality as well as its presentation cross-culturally, I have views that clash, sometimes quite strongly, with both Wolf and Thorstad on this topic.

A Socialist View of Sexuality and Liberation? by David Thorstad

The cover photo on Sherry Wolf’s book shows a protest rally with a woman holding a highlighted rainbow flag.  Radical gay and lesbian activists, one assumes.  Look closely, though, and you’ll see that the woman is sporting a Hillary for President button.  The contrast seems odd for a book on socialism.  But maybe not.  The idea that the Democratic Party can be pressured into doing the right thing for oppressed groups has grown stronger as the influence of the left has diminished.  This mix of radicalism and reformism pervades the book.

Wolf writes in a readable style, and her book offers a useful overview of the American gay movement’s history of the past few decades, as well as some insights into its politics.  But despite the book’s strengths, it is riddled with errors and gives short shrift to the third element of her subtitle: theory.

Ontario MPPs Ignore International Denounciations of Israeli Apartheid

Shourideh Molavi, writing for The Bullet, the eZine of the Canadian Socialist Project.

On February 25, a group of Ontario Members of Provincial Parliament (MPP) voted unanimously on a motion to “denounce” this year’s Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). Claiming to send a message of so-called “moral suasion” to all “fair-minded Ontarians,” Peter Shurman, the MPP who tabled the motion, argued that the mere application of the phrase ‘Israeli apartheid’ is “about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested.” In what seemed a veiled threat of possible arrests in the future of those accusing Israel with the crime of apartheid, Shurman moved on to state that he was “not certain” that its use “doesn’t actually cross over that line.”

To make the case for curtailing the use of this phrase, random online blogs not associated with IAW are quoted, after which a barrage of name-calling which vilify the organizers as “propagandists” and “liars,” and label IAW as “pure garbage” and “toxic” follow. Once tabled, a range of bizarre anecdotes of relatives, neighbours and friends who support the Zionist project were presented by various NDP, Liberal and Conservative MPPs as reasons for supporting this blatant censure of freedom of expression. Other than a letter written by Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath, distancing the NDP from the motion, there was little disagreement.

The Israeli Agenda

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. Flynt Leverett directs the Iran Project at the New America Foundation, where he is also a Senior Research Fellow.  Additionally, he teaches at Pennsylvania State University’s School of International Affairs.  Hillary Mann Leverett is CEO of Strategic Energy and Global Analysis (STRATEGA), a political risk consultancy.  In September 2010, she will also take up an appointment as Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

From MR Zine.

Does Israel want another war in Lebanon and/or Gaza?  Certainly, the Israeli posture toward both Lebanon and Gaza has grown increasingly provocative.  Violations of Lebanese airspace by Israeli military aircraft are not new, but have increased dramatically in recent weeks.  For the past several weeks, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has been warning of escalating Israeli threats against Lebanon.  On a state visit to Italy, Hariri said explicitly that Israel is seeking war with “Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.” Likewise, last month, Syrian President Assad said that Israel is “pushing the region toward war.”  Israel also appears to be stepping up the pace of its military incursions in Gaza and engaging in more skirmishes with HAMAS fighters there.  Mabhouh’s assassination in Dubai indicates that Israel has not abandoned its policy of targeted killings, and is now prepared to violate longstanding agreements with European countries not to forge these countries’ passports in order to facilitate Mossad operations.

Why is Israel doing these things?  Three possible explanations suggest themselves.

First, it is possible — though, in our view, not likely — that Israel is deliberately laying the predicate for major military action against Hizballah and/or HAMAS later this year.  Israeli intelligence estimates that Hizballah has more than replenished its military stockpiles since the 2006 war, and has acquired longer-range and more capable rockets that significantly increase the damage it could do to Israel in a conflict.  In the wake of last year’s elections in Lebanon, Hizballah showed that it remains indispensable to the country’s political stability, and Hariri’s government has formally endorsed Hizballah’s weapons as an integral part of Lebanon’s national security posture.  Israel also believes that HAMAS is rebuilding its military capabilities in Gaza.  Politically, Egyptian efforts to force HAMAS to accept a blatantly pro-Fatah “unity” agreement have blown up, damaging the credibility and standing of both Egypt and Fatah in the eyes of many Arab observers.  Under these circumstances, it is not wholly implausible that the Israeli security establishment (the IDF, the intelligence services, and the Foreign Ministry) and the Netanyahu Government calculate that Israel needs to strike before the region’s two most prominent resistance groups — as well as their chief regional backers, Syria and Iran — grow even stronger.

Rachel Corrie Gets Her Day in Court

By Robert Naiman. Robert Naiman is National Coordinator of Just Foreign Policy.  Naiman also edits the daily Just Foreign Policy news summary and blogs at the Web site of Just Foreign Policy.  This article was first published in the Just Foreign Policy blog on 25 February 2010.

On March 10, in the Israeli city of Haifa, American peace activist Rachel Corrie will get her day in court.  Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, are bringing suit against the Israeli defence ministry for Rachel’s killing by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003.

Four key American and British witnesses who were present at the scene — members of the International Solidarity Movement — will be allowed into Israel to testify, despite having been barred previously by the Israeli authorities from entering the country.  This reversal by the Israeli authorities is apparently due to U.S. government pressure, theGuardian reports.  (Three cheers for any U.S. officials who contributed to this pressure.  What else could you make the Israeli government do?)

A Palestinian doctor from Gaza who treated Corrie after she was injured has not been given permission by the Israeli authorities to leave Gaza to attend.  (This would seem to be important testimony concerning the nature of Rachel’s injuries — did U.S. officials exert pressure for his appearance?)

This case isn’t just about accountability for Rachel’s death.  It’s a test case for the power of the rule of law in Israel, when the rule of law comes into conflict with the policies of military occupation.

When the rule of law in Israel comes into conflict with the policies of occupation, the rule of law often loses.  But it does not always lose, particularly when the rule of law gets a boost from vigorous protest and political agitation.  This month, Reuters reported, Israel began rerouting part of its “West Bank barrier” near the village of Bilin — the site of many Palestinian, Israeli, and international protests — in response to a petition filed in 2007 by Palestinians whose land was confiscated for the project.  This was only a partial victory, because it only affected a minority of the confiscated land.  But it shows that the rule of law in Israel is not totally impotent against the occupation, particularly when the rule of law is aided by protest and agitation.

The Second Battle of Gaza: Israel’s Undermining of International Law

By Jeff Halper. Jeff Halper is the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).  He can be reached at <jeff@icahd.org>. H/t to MR Zine for this article.

The Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population, impoverished and the victim of occupation and besiegement these past 42 years.  It was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR people, and politicians, led by (no less) a philosopher of ethics.  It is an effort coordinated as well with other governments whose political and military leaders are looking for ways to pursue “asymmetrical warfare” against peoples resisting domination and the plundering of their resources and labor without the encumbrances of human rights and current international law.  It is a campaign that is making progress and had better be taken seriously by us all.

Since Ariel Sharon was indicted by a Belgian court in 2001 over his involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres and Israel faced accusations of war crimes in the wake of its 2002 invasion of the cities of the West Bank, with its high toll in civilian casualties (some 500 people killed, 1,500 wounded, more than 4,000 arrested), hundreds of homes demolished and the urban infrastructure utterly destroyed, Israel has adopted a bold and aggressive strategy: alter international law so that non-state actors caught in a conflict with states and deemed by the states as “non-legitimate actors” (“terrorists,” “insurgents” and “non-state actors,” as well as the civilian population that supports them) can no longer claim protection from invading armies.  The urgency of this campaign has been underscored by a series of notable setbacks Israel subsequently incurred at the hands of the UN.  In 2004, at the request of the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Israel’s construction of wall inside Palestinian territory is “contrary to international law” and must be dismantled — a ruling adopted almost unanimously by the General Assembly, with only Israel, the US, Australia, and a few Pacific atolls dissenting.  In 2006 the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that “asignificant pattern of excessive, indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by the IDF against Lebanese civilians and civilian objects, failing to distinguish civilians from combatants and civilian objects from military targets.”  The harsh criticism of the UN’s Goldstone report on Gaza accusing the Israeli government and military again of targeting Palestinian civilians and causing disproportionate destruction has made this campaign even more urgent.

Fortunately, it is an uphill battle.  The thrust of just war theory, from which international humanitarian law (IHL) draws,

Aristocrats at the Tea Party

Nicole Colson reveals the insiders, lobbyists and corporate interests that well entrenched in a movement that claims to be grassroots and populist. From Socialist Worker.

RIGHT-WING lunacy seemed to burst out all over in February, with the Tea Party movement conference held in Nashville earlier in the month, followed last week by the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

According to a poll by CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation, some 11 percent of Americans say they’ve engaged in “active support” for the Tea Party movement–a vaguely defined label applied to anti-tax, anti-”Big Government,” pro-”patriotic” agitation. Only 5 percent of people claim to have “attended a rally or meeting held by any organization associated with the Tea Party movement”–a relatively small number, especially considering that polls tracking “activism” have a record of inflating such numbers.

But you’d never know that from the media. To hear them tell it, America is being swallowed under by a right-wing tidal wave.

Since the Tea Party “movement” broke onto the scene last year–inspired by the supposedly spontaneous rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade against Barack Obama’s modest “mortgage relief plan”–the mainstream media in general, and right-wing Fox News in particular, have lavished attention on the Tea Partiers.

Apartheid in East Jerusalem

Daphna Thier describes a brewing struggle to defend Palestinian residents in a neighborhood of the city where she grew up. From Socialist Worker.

Protesters stand in the back yard of a house now occupied by Israeli settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhoodProtesters stand in the back yard of a house now occupied by Israeli settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood

OVER WINTER break, I traveled home for two weeks. My friends had been sending me updates of their activities in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, the city I grew up in. Many had been beaten and arrested at protests there, part of a solidarity movement to stop evictions of Palestinians from their homes.

In August 2009, a court order was issued to evict two Palestinian families from their homes. Since then, a total of five families living in 28 houses have been evicted. In the wake of the evictions, Israeli settlers moved in and are now constructing a new settlement right in the heart of this Palestinian neighborhood–”legally” no less.

Maged Hanun, aged 51, tells me he was born in the house he and his family were evicted from–the home that belonged to them for the past 60 years. “So how can they just take me out of my home?” he asks me.

Prior to 1948, these families owned homes in the western parts of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and other parts of what is now northern Israel. Now, their homes are in Sheikh Jarrah. All of these families are of modest means, and their options are limited. In other words, this is not a fight about ideology or religion. It is a fight that these families are compelled to wage as a matter of survival. It is a fight out of necessity.

Land Disputes Continue Despite Olympics: Okanagan Indigenous Community Blocks Access to Logging Company

By Andrew Crosby writing for the Vancouver Media Co-Op

Land disputes between indigenous communities, resource-based companies, and the Canadian state are numerous and on-going. There is no Olympic time-out in this historical struggle.

On Saturday, February 20, the Okanagan Indian Band held an emergency meeting and passed a motion to establish checkpoints throughout the community as a reaction to the Tolko Industries logging company’s plans to cut trees in the Browns Creek Watershed, near Vernon.

While a B.C. court ruled that Tolko could begin logging in the area, the Band insists that the company lacks jurisdiction to harvest trees where land claims remain unresolved.

The court ruling was contingent on an archaeological consultation, one that Grand Chief Stewart Phillip and Chief Fabian Alexis contend was less than genuine and ultimately flawed.

Okanagan Band Launches Road Block to Protect Their Water Supply

Originally from Intercontinental Cry

The Okanagan Indian Band (OIB) launched a “protective blockade” this morning, February 23, at the Okanagan campsite near Bouleau Lake in southern British Colombia.

A member of the greater Okanagan Nation, the OIB say they have been left with no choice but to stop the logging company Tolko Industries from endangering their water supply.

“This is not an action we took lightly, nor is it one we commenced without exhausting all of our legal options,” states OIB Chief Fabian Alexis, in a recent press statement. “However given the active collusion between the Ministry of Forests and Tolko and the continued indifference of the federal government, we had no choice but to act…”

Since at least 2003, the OIB has been seeking the legal protection of their water, which is provided by the Browns Creek watershed. The region has been extensively logged for more than forty years; and now, the Okanagan People fear that any further logging will threaten their health and safety.

Mexico’s Forgotten Black History

By Giselda. The originally appeared on the Solidarity webzine. Solidarity is a democratic, revolutionary socialist, feminist, anti-racist organization in the United States.

For decades, he revolted against the Spanish crown. He lead an autonomous community of hundreds whose existence panicked the ruling classes from Mexico City to Veracruz. In 1609, his band survived a devastating incursion from the Spaniards, paving the way to an eventual negotiation – one that would make his community one of the first semi-autonomous communities recognized in the colonized Americas. Had an indigenous chief, rebellious priest or mixed peasant accomplished such a historical feat, it would not be hard to imagine their name still proudly spoken or recognized among Mexicans and Chican@s on both sides of the border. Gaspar Yanga, however, was brought to Mexico in chains. His original homeland is said to be what is now the African nation of Gabon. Aside from a lonely statue and yearly festival in what is now the town of Yanga, Veracruz, his legacy remains largely unknown.

This February, while reading articles on African-American history for Black History Month, I found myself contemplating my own history, and the part of Mexican history that was all but erased following the call of Vicente Guerrero (another Mexican of African descent) to abolish slavery during his short time as Mexico’s president. Even though there were periods in which the African diaspora in Mexico greatly outnumbered Spanish colonialists, the modern narrative of Mexico is of a people and history shaped by the blending of two cultures – one European and one indigenous. Any mention of Mexico’s “third root” is usually confined to a few scholars or various darker skinned communities in Mexico where African diaspora (many times alongside indigenous communities) were able to hold on to traditions and community.

The Sixth Annual Israeli Apartheid Week 2010

Toronto's IAW Poster

Israeli Apartheid Week is upon us again already! Events are happening in a number of cities across Canada and Québec in March (March 1st-7th in some places, like Waterloo and Mar 8th-14th in others). While the first IAWs took place in Canada back in 2005, it is now spread not just within Canada, but now also within the United States, Europe, South Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, making it now a firmly worldwide event. The global focus this year will be the BDS or Boycott – Divestment – Sanction campaign.

Last year in Canada there were a number of issues around Zionists and Zionist-sympathisers attempting to censor or interfere in some way in the events held across the country. All of this was made worse by the fact that the Israelis and Zionists were attempting damage control after their most recent romp through Gaza which left over a 1000 people dead, mostly civilians, and the infrastructure of Gaza destroyed. Here in Waterloo, Ontario IAW is organized jointly by Students for Palestinian Rights (of which I am a member) at the University of Waterloo and Laurier 4 Palestine at Wilfred Laurier University and we both ran into a lot of interference being thrown at us from groups like Israel on Campus and sympathising members of the staff and faculty. Here at UW they attempted to ban our posters for the event and were actually successful at doing it at WLU. In both cases they argued against the supposed “graphic violence” and “offensiveness” of the image. A second major issue thrown at us literally came the day before the events started. Israel on Campus had called up the head of the Federation of Students Club Operations and requested a joint meeting between Students for Palestinian Rights, Israel on Campus and himself. So we went, on February 28th, the day before we were supposed to start, and we got completely side-swiped by Feds and IOC. IOC essentially demanded that we pull our posters, censor  our other materials and wanted to review the speeches that three of us (including myself) were going to be delivering the next afternoon at the opening march and rally. Luckily, that night as we were in the Student Life Centre getting our placards and speeches finished up, I ran into a friend of mine, a queer activist and no friend of Zionism, who happened to also be that year’s Feds Vice-President Internal, which made him the Club Director’s boss, and as he was outraged by not having been included on any of the decisions and over-ruled him in an email right then and there. Our speeches were still reviewed the next morning, but without Israel on Campus present, only make sure we were swearing too much.

In the end though last years events here went off extremely well, and I hope we can replicate that success again this year.

Coast Salish Blockade Bridge Where Ancestors Were Desecrated

From Censored News

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As part of the Anti-Olympics Convergence in Vancouver B.C., members of Coast Salish Katzie First Nation and supporters blocked the Golden Ears Bridge.

The Bridge spans the Frazer River between Pitt Meadows and Langley, and is adjacent to Katzie 1 and Katzie 2 Reserves. It is about a half hour drive outside of Vancouver.

The bridge opened on June 16, 2009. It is owned by Translink, who say, “It will have major long-term impacts on the region, improving travel times and promoting economic activity.” It is clearly disregarding the negative impacts on Indigenous people.

Construction of the bridge desecrated a 3,000 year old burial ground. Its massive pilings in the river disrupt currents, and the ability of local Katzie fishers to fish. Situated at the mouth of the Frazer River, the bridge effects already threatened habitat for Salmon and Indigenous fishing communities all up the Fraser River.

The Courage of the Present

An article by the French radical philosopher Alain Badiou. Originally published in Le Monde, 13 February 2010. Translated by Alberto Toscano. Reproduced here from Infinite Thought.

I reproduce here this recent essay by the French radical philosopher Alain Badiou because of its thoughts about the times in which we’re living and about the “communist hypothesis,” which are not just relevant to people in France, but to the all of the people in the world. As always, articles not by myself on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of myself. In particular, I do not share in Badiou’s defence of the U.S.S.R. under Stalin as socialist, nor am as positive in my assessment of Mao’s China. My own views on the U.S.S.R. and China can be read on this blog’s page Who Am I? under the sections titled My Thought and What Do I Think of Past Socialist Revolutions?

Alain Badiou

For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.

Rethinking CrimethInc.

The CrimethInc. Logo

CrimethInc begins with the brand name, and ends with the relentless merchandizing of “radical” products on their website. In between there is…an individualist, selfish, and inchoate rebel ideology that eschews work, political organizing, and class struggle. In a world at war and facing terminal crisis, CrimethInc’s transcendental philosophy and ahistorical lightness is a form of intellectual masturbation. Like rootless ex-pats unconnected to the daily life around them, CrimethInc’s lifestylism is a form of self-imposed exile within their own society.

—Ryan, Ramor, “Days of Crime, Nights of Horror”, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (2004)

CrimethInc., also known as CWC, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective or CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Ex-Collective is a supposed decentralized anarchist collective of autonomous cells, with the stated focus/goal of “the pursuit of a freer and more joyous world.” Sounds good, but I must ask a serious question, and that is what the hell does that actually mean to a serious activist like myself or others fighting for a better world? In short, in the context of CrimethInc., it would seem to mean little to nothing of any real value. CrimethInc. is the “intellectual” child of the worst aspects of the Hippy movement of the 1960s and 70s, with a lot of anarchist and situationist phraseology thrown into help with their radical street cred.

CrimethInc. is an umbrella “organization” (they would probably prefer a term like anti-, non- or unorganization) containing various schools of thought, ranging from post-leftism to a kind of pseudo-situationism to anarcho-primitivism, but all united by an adherence to a drop-out culture and the belief that one can contribute to the brining down of the capitalist state by simply refusing to go to work or get one’s food from a grocery store (legally that is). It is perhaps this aspect of CrimethInc. that annoys me the most as it is indicative of a white, middle class, lifestylist approach to “radicalism.” Like the Hippies that proceeded them, CrimethInc. is made up of mostly middle class white kids who think that they can rebel against authority and the “system” by playing at being poor and unemployed. However, it is the very fact that CrimethIncers tend to come from privileged strata in modern capitalist society that allows them to participate in this sort of lifestyle.