Dissident Veteran For Peace

I first joined Veterans For Peace well over a decade ago. As I explained earlier, one of the main reasons I recently gave up on VFP was because it finally became clear that the VFP national leadership was dead set against involving the group in the kind of broad-based effort that will be required for an effective peace movement in the US. On the contrary, their misguided idea of "broad-based" is to work with Lefties of all types and virtually no one else in pursuit of a statist, Left-Liberal agenda along with all the violence inherent in that. I cannot say that the tiny VFP rank-and-file affirmatively endorses this program as much as they acquiesce in it.

Fortunately, not everyone on the Left is as short-sighted as the leaders of VFP. Last spring Yes! magazine ran an interesting article entitled "Can the Left and Right Unite to End Corporate Rule? An Interview with Ralph Nader and Daniel McCarthy". It may be too little, too late but it is a hopeful sign nevertheless. Below are a two excerpts from the interview.

Ralph Nader: Well, liberalism and conservatism, in various ways, have been hijacked by corporatism.

Liberalism in the 18th and 19th centuries was the classic philosophy aimed at restraining arbitrary government power—then often exercised by kings and emperors. Civil liberties were the foundation of freedom of speech and due process of law, which became part of our Constitution.

Fast forward, you now have corporate liberals— like the Clintons—and you have the corporatists who call themselves conservatives throughout Congress. They're all pushing corporate welfare and bailouts for banks.

What we're trying to do here is go back to fundamental principles and un-hijack conservatism and liberalism. When we do that, we see that there's a convergence of support on a lot of major issues.

McCarthy: Yeah, the two parties and the bipartisan elite have had their own kind of convergence on a strategy for dominating the country, both in government and in big business.

Americans of all ideological stripes have been feeling a great deal of alienation, resentment, and anger. But it's very difficult to talk about the actual structure of government and of the economy and to explain how it is that people have been effectively disenfranchised and manipulated. It’s much easier on both the left and the right to focus on cultural issues, where you can have scapegoats and think that those are the central issues, and to ignore these more structural problems.

I think the left's embrace of identity politics in the 1960s and '70s was disastrous for the working class. It was very bad for the labor union movement, it was very bad for any number of economic issues. Which is not to say that there wasn’t a place for the civil rights movement. Of course there was. But identity-based politics went from being a necessary thing to being something that started to preclude some of the economic and other policy efforts that needed to be undertaken.

And similarly on the right. It's not just a matter of a cynical manipulation of the public by going for hot-button issues. There really was a sense among many ordinary people in the 1960s that something had gone culturally wrong in the country. Crime rates were going up, promiscuity was going up. There were changes that people found weird or disorienting. Whether or not they were right or wrong, they were unfamiliar and new, and therefore alarming.

This set of emotional complexes was turned into the so-called culture war, to the detriment of anything that would reform our economy, our self-government, or our foreign policy. Those sort of complex issues have been thrown by the wayside in favor of identity politics.

Labels: anti-war movement, Clintons, identity, politics, Ralph Nader, United States, Veterans for Peace

The statement below is reposted from the chemtrailsplanet.net website. Although I am not familiar with the site and I don't buy the idea that contrails are actually chemtrails I am reposting the statement because it rings true to my own VFP experience, its authenticity has been confirmed by Gerry Genesio, and because I can't find it anywhere else.

While the concerns and positions reflected in the statement below differ somewhat from my own, there is actually a considerable overlap. Although I am not a statist, I am a person of the Left broadly who sees VFP's utter failure to reach out to anti-war moderates and conservatives as an indication that its leaders and members are not serious about non-violence or working to end war. They seem very serious about pursuing a broader statist, Leftist social agenda that, at best, is questionable on the merits but also sure to preserve VFP's continung marginality. It would be one thing if we had solved that whole US militarism problem but we have not.

I also echo Genesio's concerns about the lack of transparency and democracy in VFP and the recriminations awaiting anyone who runs afoul of leadership or dogma in VFP. In my experience they are well-founded.

Why I Am Withdrawing My Lifetime Membership From Veterans for Peace

By Jerry Genesio (Website)

Ever since the Peace At Home – Peace Abroad project was introduced to the VFP rank-and-file membership at the last annual convention as a fait accompli, I’ve been corresponding with members of VFP in an attempt to determine if anyone could explain why this mission-changing project was never drafted as a resolution and submitted to the entire membership for a vote. Much less important issues certainly were. To this day I have not received an explanation other than that the Board of Directors, in its infinite wisdom, deemed it to be so, and that’s just not good enough. I should add that Ken Dalton, then a member of the Board, opposed the PAH-PA concept. In response, he was called a f***ing idiot, a racist, and told he was not being a team player and had become “suspect”, and these comments came from fellow Board members, as hard as that might be to believe. In the face of such unforgiveable intolerance, Ken resigned, and I can’t say that I blame him.

For the past seven or eight months, since the 2014 convention, I’ve been paying close attention to the VFP website and the activities of VFP’s national leadership circle. I’ve complained about much that was missing from the website such as financial reports for the past couple of years, and Board minutes since October of last year. The financial reports finally materialized, and most of the missing minutes have only recently been posted, but the minutes for November and December of 2014 are still missing without explanation. Why?

I recently saw a national roster that indicated former national Board of Directors member Margaret Stevens’ military service had never been documented (a requirement for full membership) and that her dues had lapsed in June of 2014 (also a requirement for full membership), and yet she held a seat on VFP’s Board of Directors and was certainly one of the strongest advocates of the Peace At Home – Peace Abroad project. I was told only recently that Stevens’ military service has been documented, but I have no idea when that might have happened, if indeed it has. If the roster is correct, Ms. Stevens was never eligible to be nominated for a seat on the Board of Directors, nor was she eligible to be reimbursed for travel and accommodations associated with VFP conventions and Board meetings during her tenure. But I have been told her expenses were indeed covered by VFP.

Perhaps the February 2015 Board minutes weren’t posted previously because our national leaders did not wish to reveal how they addressed my concerns during that meeting. Every VFP member should read them. The discussion not only questions why the Board should feel obligated to share information with the membership, but it gave several members, especially Tarak Kauff and Michael McPhearson, an opportunity to express their opinions of me. Tarak said of me, “the guy is a racist”, and McPhearson advised the Board to “let him reveal his racism”. Simply because I dared to challenge the membership status of Margaret Stevens during her tenure as a National Board member. Such comments are ignorant at best, and because they have been published perhaps libelous as well as slanderous at worst. This is the very same syndrome that so often manifests when one criticizes Israel for any reason: dare to do so and you are anti-Semitic.

The same roster indicates Board member Michael Prysner’s dues lapsed on January 1, 2013. According to the By-laws, that means he was not a full member of VFP at least through mid-November of 2014 and therefore ineligible to serve on the Board. I for one would like to know if expenses Prysner incurred to attend VFP conventions and Board meetings were unlawfully reimbursed, while Lifetime and regular dues paying members were required to pay their own expenses. Further, I suspect that every motion he and/or Stevens’ voted on during that period arguably could be legally challenged. On February 10, 2015, well over six weeks ago, I submitted a formal request to VFP President Barry Ladendorf for an investigation into several of these allegations which I was aware of at that time, but I have not yet received a copy of any formal investigation or its conclusions. And based on an informal e-mail response I did receive, it appears that the entire matter might well be swept under the national office rug.

While some insist Peace At Home – Peace Abroad is naught but a “lens”, it has become a major national office focus without a vote of the membership. The phrase is ubiquitous within the VFP organization. It’s even prominently displayed on the banner carried by our national leaders at the recent Spring Rising in D.C. PAH-PA rose to the top of VFP’s agenda in Ferguson, MO, where VFP national leaders chose a side during the Michael Brown protests, which in and of itself was in conflict with the spirit and intent of the VFP Statement of Purpose. I was there when it was written and it was never intended to embrace domestic social justice issues. Those who would amend the statement to include domestic social justice issues should write a proposed amendment and submit it to the full membership for a vote. That’s what democratic principles require. And that is certainly what is required of every issue, resolution or amendment that is not supported by the Board.

When the VFP Statement of Purpose was created, it was considered very unique, perhaps because VFP has always been and until very recently still was very unique. There is not now nor has there ever been another military veterans’ organization exactly like it. Our focus has been unique. VFP members have been respected, if not for their opinions, for their service, and because we have limited our projects to activities and pursuits we know something about: the military and war. We are not nationally recognized as an authority on social justice issues, or the constitution, or law enforcement, or medical indications for marijuana, or criminal psychology. In other words, VFP cannot be all things to all people. If it continues trying to be, I firmly believe it will become ineffective, insubstantial and eventually irrelevant.

According to a report titled “Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the ‘War on Terror'” produced as a collaborative effort between Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has thus far been responsible for the deaths of approximately 1 million Iraqis, which is 5 percent of the total population of that country. The report also tallies hundreds of thousands of casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The total number of lives lost in these three countries is at least 1.3 million since the onset of the wars that followed the terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001.

How can the Board possibly justify removing VFP from its formerly enviable and unique position in the U.S. peace movement presuming that a paradigm shift will allow it to compete and not be lost among the other 3,513 U.S. organizations that result when you search the GuideStar non-profit directory for “social justice” organizations in the U.S.? But when you search the same directory for “true costs of war”, only seven organizations result and two of them are VFP National and VFP Chapter 132. This is where all of VFP’s members, time and resources are desperately needed, and this applies in particular to VFP’s national leadership.

I’m also concerned about the fact that VFP’s Executive Director Michael McPhearson is co-chair of the Don’t Shoot Coalition which includes the New Black Panther Party. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the New Black Panther Party “a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers”. It is also very troubling to me that while VFP Board members have been standing with those protesting the killing of African-Americans by white police officers, they have not protested or issued a statement condemning the deliberate and related murders of two police officers in New York and another in Ferguson, Missouri. Former National Board member Ken Dalton asked the Board to issue such a statement following the New York incident, but there was no response of which I am aware. On March 12, 2015, when I asked VFP President Ladendorf for a VFP response to the Ferguson incident, he told me the Board should issue a statement condemning the murder. That was more than a month ago but to the best of my knowledge, no such statement has yet been made public, nor do I expect to see one.

One of VFP’s directors, Michael Prysner, is also a leader, perhaps even the founder, of an organization called March Forward! Their web site states that they and “Veterans for Peace . . . are actively building a multinational, multigenerational group of veterans and service members who will stand up and fight back against the injustice perpetrated by the Pentagon against our sisters and brothers throughout the developing world, against working and poor people in the United States, and against those still serving in the U.S. military.” What exactly does that mean? After reading March Forward!’s 10-Point Program, also on their web site http://www.marchforward.org/10_point_program , I am certain I don’t wish to be associated with them any more than I wish to be associated with the New Black Panther Party.

Another of VFP’s national directors, Kourtney Mitchell, is on the Steering Committee of an organization called Deep Green Resistance. As I read their website http://deepgreenresistance.org/en/ it appears that they advocate attacks on the infrastructure of civilization in the interest of destroying civilization as we know it today so we can begin again. I simply cannot bring VFP’s Statement of Purpose and DGR’s philosophy together without encountering more contradictions than anyone could possibly explain.

It has been reported in the minutes of VFP Board meetings or teleconferences that the national leadership has given IVAW as much as $60,000.00 in loans over the past couple of years. And I understand these were unsecured loans, which means the funds were knowingly placed at risk. I have a problem with VFP asking for funds to support VFP’s work and projects and then loaning $60,000.00 of those funds to another organization to benefit them and their work, and accepting the possibility that those funds could be lost. The VFP National Board of Directors is responsible for safeguarding the organization’s assets and vested interests. Have our national leaders become such hypocrites that they hold everyone accountable but themselves?

I have asked why VFP has seen such instability and rapid changes at the national office over the past few years. Several Executive Directors have come and gone without explanation. I was told the reasons were “confidential”, which left me wondering how VFP can celebrate people like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, when it apparently has some dark secrets of its own. Perhaps the VFP national office, or at least the membership, could benefit from a few Wikileaks as well.

For the past few months, I have subscribed to the vfp-all Yahoo list serve and at times I really can’t quite believe what I’m reading, at least not in terms of how it relates to VFP. I’ve seen insulting, angry and intolerant exchanges. Some members claim the U.S. government is working with ISIS and the Mafia…..Really? Just exactly what kind of conspiracy theorists is VFP attracting these days…..how many…….and perhaps more importantly……WHY? There was a time when VFP attracted thinkers who considered their words carefully and never made accusations they couldn’t support with sources generally deemed reliable. They believed that “Black Lives Matter” because they believed “All Lives Matter” regardless of their color. They loved no country more than their own and wanted nothing more passionately than to correct their country’s mistakes. Unfortunately, far too many of them have already left VFP in disappointment and frustration. I did the same thing some time ago but recently returned hoping to find the wrinkles had been ironed out. Instead I find the wrinkles have become folds that are hiding new and even greater problems.

Today I watched a video of Ben Swanson’s interview of Gerry Condon concerning the Bowe Bergdahl controversy on RT-TV, which is the English language U.S. satellite of Russian Television. In it Condon was introduced as VFP’s president. He is not. Condon claimed to know why Bergdahl abandoned his post in Afghanistan. He does not. Condon claimed to know what motivated President Obama and the Pentagon to bring charges against Bergdahl. He does not. And I’m not at all sure President Obama has been involved in Bergdahl’s case in any way other than to approve the terms for securing his freedom from captivity by the Taliban.

Ben Swanson introduced Gerry Condon not only as the President of VFP, but also as a deserter from the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The VFP Statement of Purpose is clear about our military service:

“ We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace.”

But veterans who were deserters, draft dodgers, or were otherwise discharged under less than honorable conditions did not “dutifully” serve their nation in the spirit of that phrase as it was written. I make no personal judgments, but I do not believe veterans who served under less than honorable conditions should campaign or be nominated for national leadership positions in VFP, for whether right or wrong, their personal status will tarnish the organization’s credibility in the eyes of most Americans. I believe it’s also the reason why VFP’s recruiting efforts have not been very successful in attracting veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars. For good or ill, VFP derives its credibility solely from the singular claim that its members have “dutifully served our nation”. Some, perhaps even many members, will say they could not care less what most Americans think. But their attitude will paralyze the progress of VFP toward achieving its stated goals for no politician will publicly stand with us, and without politicians standing with us in agreement, we will accomplish very little in terms of policy reform.

I sincerely hope others will pick up the gauntlet where I have dropped it; continuing to ask questions and demanding answers. But I am getting on in years, my health is not what it once was, and I don’t want to spend the years I have left swimming against the tide in the company of people who are so busy fighting among themselves and casting aspersions on the organization and everyone in it that they have lost sight of the good fight altogether.

The VFP that exists today is not even close to being the VFP that was founded in 1985. I don’t really know what this VFP is, what it stands for, or what it hopes to accomplish. Radical protests appear to be its raison d’etre rather than activities like Project RENEW or the Children of War Rescue Project, which require a lot of personal sacrifice and hard work. VFP has evolved into something much different than it was when it began and I don’t wish to be a part of it any longer. Perhaps, if and when VFP should ever return to its original mission, new leaders who respect democratic principles, openness, and the rights of those who would disagree will invite those of us who have left to return, but until then I will march only with those who stand in defense of the rights of ALL others. I have been asking a lot of unsettling questions lately so I don’t doubt that some, perhaps many, will be pleased to learn of my departure. But that only serves to further define what VFP has become.

Jerry Genesio

Founder & Past President

Veterans For Peace

“(I)n America, disagreement with the policies of the government is not evidence of lack of patriotism.”     U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-ME)

Labels: anti-war movement, critical thinking, politics, Veterans for Peace

Labels: anti-war movement, Obama, politics, voting

Labels: anti-war movement, history, music, resistance, United States, video, War

In the July 2009 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Senator James Abourezk writes (p. 24) about the decision of the Obama administration to drop espionage charges against AIPAC staffers Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. Abourezk says: "Strange, they [prosecutors] sent the government official, Larry Franklin, to prison for over 12 years, but didn't feel they could win the case against the two AIPAC honchos." Former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin (he worked for Neocons Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz) pled guilty in the case and was, indeed, sentenced to 12 years in prison in April, 2006. However, Franklin apparently got lost on his way. I checked the Federal Bureau of Prisons web site today and Larry Anthony Franklin is "NOT in BOP CUSTODY."

The spring 2009 edition of the War Resisters League's (WRL) WIN: Through Revolutionary Nonviolence magazine suggests that the editors are committed to losing the struggle for peace. This issue and the Winter 2009 issue have almost nothing to say about Israel's Hanukkah Massacre last winter or the ongoing US support of Israel's decades long war of attrition against the Palestinian people. So, why have they left out one of the linchpin conflicts of our lifetime? Perhaps a clue emerges in the presence of two pieces linked to the Democratic Party-front and Zionist-dominated United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ).

On page 21 of the current issue, UFPJ conditions the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan on transforming "America's failed approach" with "bold, peace solutions." UFPJ style of "peace and justice" is decidedly of the "White Man's Burden" school. They want the US to "pressure President Hamid Karzai" and to "Push for an independent international commission to investigate and press grievances" and they have plenty of other suggestions to use American power to 'improve' Afghan society for the benighted Afghans. By contrast, consider the remarks of one Marine on Vietnam:

I believe that if we had and would keep our bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people they will arrive at a solution of their own. . . . And if unfortunately their revolution must be of a violent type because the 'haves' refuse to share with the 'have nots' by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.

Source: David M. Shoup, General, USMC (ret.), Medal of Honor winner, as quoted in "Former Marine Commandant Questions Vietnam." Congressional Record. Feb. 20, 1967; 113:3976.

In the Winter issue UFPJ organizing coordinator Judith LeBlanc says: "Now the peace movement must retool ..." I agree and we can start by dumping pro-Empire, anti-democratic, Obama-supporting Zionists like LeBlanc. Don't hold your breath for that, though.

In closing, it's worth noting that the WRL can't even get the history of Afghanistan right. In a WRL statement on "Beyond Afghanistan" printed on page 3 of the current issue they claim: "The Taliban rose to power with the support of the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services, intervening against the USSR's invasion." The Taliban did not emerge as a force until 1994--more than five years after the Soviet withdrawal. The Taliban did not take power in Kabul until 1996. More importantly, the WRL statement fails to note that the Carter administration sponsored weapons transfers to Islamic militants before the Soviet invasion precisely in order to provoke an invasion.

Labels: Afghanistan, anti-war movement, crime, Israel Lobby, LeBlanc, Obama, United for Peace and Justice, United States, Zionism

Yesterday, I wrote on solidarity with Hamas and included reports from the West Bank, Cairo, London, and Vancouver. Below are a few excerpts from a report on a demonstration in Berlin on Saturday.

The demonstration was incredible. There were approximately 15 thousand people, nearly all Arab youth, broken informally and fraternally into sections that were more religious in chanting and signs or more secular-political in their chanting and signs. There were also mass sections of the demo made up exclusively of young women, whose chants tended towards the secular-political. I wandered through the crowd and witnessed the first arrest of many that happened through the march of a young man carrying a Hamas flag. Because Hamas is illegal and classified under the terrorism act, it is illegal to hold a Hamas flag in Germany. It is also (inexplicably) illegal to hold a sign or chant anything to the order of "God is God, there is only one God". The police had interpreters on hand to read Arabic signs for these messages and listen in on chants. ...

The police were a constant presence over every inch of the demo. Although the march stretched for five or six blocks, the police were visible on the sidewalk every inch of the way on both sides of the street; but their presence was most of the time ridiculous. The only time they could make arrests to charge Hamas flag carrying youth with terrorism was when someone was isolated. It was clear that they would pick out anyone who touched a Hamas flag to try to get them later when they were walking outside of a tight throng of marchers. At one such arrest when I was in the surge of the crowd that rushed forward to protest the arrest, I saw a woman who I had been walking alongside (with who looked like her elderly mother and her child in stroller), pull two oranges out of her bag and throw them over the heads of the demonstrators at the police line while shouting "Allah Akbar!" ...

In this case I was also struck by the absurdity of the "left" attitude that I noticed and that was also reported to me by the leftist Palestine solidarity activists I met that many leftists are not comfortable in marches like this one because "Allah Akbar!" is said too often and too broadly. In the context of this march, it is clear to me that "Allah Akbar" is simultaneously a religious statement and a statement of resistance. Especially given the borderline criminalized character of the Islamic faith in Germany, such religious statements take on an even greater meaning / signification of resistance against Zionism in specific and colonialism and imperialism in general. ...

It's been my observation that the left in Germany is divided on the question of Palestine, with the majority of the pro-Palestine section of that divide fairly paralyzed by apologia against accusations of anti-semitism. The result is that they are silent in practice and absent from demonstrations like today's. This is a tremendous failing. As I mentioned, the vast majority of this demo was made up of Arab youth who I found to be open to statements from the left in support of Palestine.

Labels: anti-war movement, Hamas, resistance

As the Jewish state continues to rain bombs, missiles, artillery rounds, white phosphorus, and bullets down upon the people of Gaza, Palestinians are expressing and calling for unity and that includes unity with "the Hamas government -- the only democratically elected government in the entire Arab world." And all over the world people of conscience are answering that call and expressing their solidarity with the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas.

Writing from Gaza (5 Jan 09), Safa Joudeh says:

Israel has come into our homes, is fighting us in our streets and is expressing its brutality against us in full force. ...

All Palestinian factions have united and are out facing the enemy, using all of their military capabilities that they collectively have. Although these capabilities are incomparable to the military strength exerted by Israel, yet it has made us more certain than ever that Palestinians will fight to the very end to protect their own. It has shown us that resistance, courage and love are an integral part of the Palestinian identity that will never change despite all the hardships we endure. It has given us a moral boost, which comes at a time when we need it most.

The Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the al-Quds Brigades of the Islamic Jihad movement, The Izzedin al-Qassam brigades of Hamas, the Salah al-Din Brigades of the Popular Resistance Committees, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of Fatah have all come together as one united front and at a high, almost affirmed risk of peril, are out protecting our streets and our homes, ready to die if that means preventing the death of one more helpless child. We are united and we have accepted our fate recurrently, but the people of Gaza -- almost 80 percent of them refugees -- will not be massacred and displaced yet again by people from the outside guided by tyranny and greed.

The New York Times reports (5 Jan 09) that the support extends to the West Bank, which is in the grip of the traitorous Fatah faction:

In a series of interviews, people here [in Nablus] said they were enraged by the photographs and television images of the Palestinian dead in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which they consider part of themselves.

They said that support for Hamas would grow as this conflict went on, and that they were intimidated by the Palestinian security forces of Mr. Abbas and his appointed prime minister, Salam Fayyad — forces subsidized by the United States and trained by Jordan — which have cracked down on a series of demonstrations and banned the showing of the Hamas flag. ...

On Monday afternoon, for example, a march of several hundred students from Birzeit University outside Ramallah toward the nearby Atarot checkpoint was broken up by Palestinian security forces wielding clubs. The students wanted to confront Israeli soldiers at Atarot, and the security forces wanted to prevent the confrontation.

Last Friday, security forces broke up larger demonstrations in Hebron and Ramallah, arresting Hamas supporters, confiscating Hamas flags and ripping up placards with pro-Hamas slogans. For the first time in memory, the Palestinian police used tear gas against their own people.

The Jerusalem Post, covering the same story (5 Jan 09), reports:

The Palestinian Authority Police has proven capable of quelling violent protests and maintaining law and order in the West Bank during Israel's military offensive against Hamas in Gaza, Israeli security officials said Sunday.

"The Palestinian police have succeeded in dealing with the demonstrations in the West Bank over the last week," Judea and Samaria Police spokesman Ch.-Supt. Danny Poleg said.

The PA police, which recently received training from the Americans, had largely been able to contain violent protests in Palestinian-controlled cities, so they didn't spill over into Israeli-controlled areas, Poleg said."They are under the same high alert as we are," he said.

On the instructions of PA President Mahmoud Abbas,the Fatah-controlled security forces have banned pro-Hamas demonstrations.

Hamas supporters in the West Bank said the PA's security forces threatened to arrest them if they raised Hamas flags or chanted slogans in favor of the Islamist movement. ...

"Our security forces have instructions to use an iron fist against anyone who incites and expresses support for Hamas," the [senior PA official in Ramallah] official said.

In "The West Bank: We're all Hamas now - supporters of Fatah unite behind enemy," Ben Lynfield writes (9 Jan 09) in The Independent (UK):

Palestinian Authority security forces are keeping a tight lid on protests, preventing confrontations with Israeli troops and arresting anyone raising Hamas banners at rallies. But displays of identification with the beleaguered Gazans are everywhere. Nine-year-old green-kerchiefed girl Scouts, their foreheads marked with the word Gaza in red ink, were among those who marched through the main al-Manara square in a protest. They held up pictures of bandaged toddlers, and dozens of demonstrators chanted, "With blood and spirit, we will redeem you, O Gaza".

The Daily News of Egypt reports (29 Dec 09): "On Monday between 4,000–5,000 demonstrators carrying Hamas flags chanted 'We are all Hamas' ..." The display of a sign saying "We are Hamas" on the streets of London has set the teeth of quislings and Zionists alike to gnashing. In Vancouver, BC, a Zionist spying on anti-Israel protests "was shocked," shocked, I tell you, at what happened there. Adam Carroll of the Canada-Israel Committee says:

I've probably gone to more anti-Israel protests than most anti-Israel protesters, because I go to them for my job just to keep tabs on what's happening, ... I don't think I've ever been to one as radical and as vicious as the one I went to yesterday. There was a bile in the air that I'd never, never seen before. There's always been "Free, free Palestine" and some of the more benign chants, but "Viva, viva intifada", you know, and those sorts of armed resistance calls, no. Those are new. For me, anyway. And hearing individuals chanting "We are all Hamas" and things along those lines was a bit unsettling.

I'll bet it was unsettling, Adam, that people momentarily threw off the mental shackles to make solidarity with the popular, democratic resistance movement known as Hamas, even though it has been incessantly drilled into our heads that Hamas are "terrorists"--Koran-toting (gasp!) terrorists at that. Maybe, we'll wake up and realize the real problem is the Jewish and Christian terrorists and their enablers and they kill a lot more people.

See also:

• On Fatah's treachery, "Hamas gaining sympathy as onslaught continues" by Khalid Amayreh on the web site of The Palestinian Information Center.
• "We must adjust our distorted image of Hamas" in The Times (UK)
• "Hamas Flag Flies in Berlin"
  

Labels: anti-war movement, critical thinking, Hamas, Palestine, resistance, solidarity

From Bill Perry via VFP Discussion:

Unbelievable! Well into the 8th Day of Israeli War Crimes, and we still haven't heard a peep from Veterans For Peace Nat'l Office, in St Louis. Nothing on Page 1 of the VFP Website. Nothing on any of the many VFP LISTS. Nothing about VFP's position. NOTHING !

SILENCE IS Complicity. Veterans For "Peace" silence = complicity in Zionist War Crimes... Silence actually makes us Veterans For War.

C'mon, Y'all... STAND UP & FIGHT BACK!

Why do MY dues support Nat'l Headquarters people who can't find an hour to put together a statement CONDEMMING and OPPOSING Zionist War Criminals who seize private homes, olive & date orchards, aquifyers, and the best beachfront property, facing the setting sun, on the entire Mediterainean, while these same Zionist War Criminals enforce Collective Punishment (of 1.5 million people in Gaza, an open air prison), Ethnic Cleansing (since 1948), Walled Apartheid (separating farms and orchards from their rightful owners), illegal imprisonment (nearly 11,000 Palestinians, jailed for being Palestinians), Targeted Assassinations (with F-16's, Apache Helicopters, Predator Drones, etc., armed and paid for with MY tax dollar), and other sick & cruel Israeli State Policies. At least hail Kucinich on Collective Punishment.

WTF?
Why can't our National PAID staff find an hour to do what 99% of the VFP membership does, ALL the time? FREE VOLUNTEER WORK !

Why can't our National PAID staff find an hour to condemn 61 years of U.N. violations, by Israel?

Why can't our National PAID staff find an hour to condemn the "2 State Solution", conveniently used by Zionists to further their THEFT of private homes, olive & date orchards, aquifyers, and the best beachfront property, facing the setting sun, on the entire Mediterainean, while these same Zionist War Criminals enforce Collective Punishment (of 1.5 million people in Gaza, an open air prison), Ethnic Cleansing (since 1948), Walled Apartheid (separating farms and orchards from their rightful owners), illegal imprisonment (nearly 11,000 Palestinians, jailed for being Palestinians), Targeted Assassinations (with F-16's, Apache Helicopters, Predator Drones, etc., armed and paid for with MY tax dollar), and other sick & cruel Israeli State Policies. WHY?

Oh...My Bad... I forgot... Zionist Embeds have totally confused our "low information" VFP members by pointing to MLK & Gandhi, and by saying that the Palestinians should submit to total humiliation and degradation, and be glad that their lives and families are trashed by the Zionists, as they prevent the Gaza export taxes, medications, medical supplies, cooking oil, and food from International sources to get past the Israeli "Check Points". Then saying VFP should maintain MLK / Gandhi ideals, and DO NOTHING about Israeli bloodthirsty THEFT & MURDER.

Zionist "sanctions" kill almost as many as their American Missiles, Rockets, and Bombs kill !

Hell, IMHO, VFP Zionist embeds with tortuous legal arguments are also WAR CRIMINALS. Why are they so powerful, in VFP circles? Do we REALLY need their contributions that bad? (answer me personally-although Dave Cline put me on Chapter-Contacts, I've been removed since Dave died)

How in hell can VFP Zionist apologists say to the Palestinians: "lay down in the mud, get shit upon, get indiscriminately murdered and maimed, while you wait for another MLK and/or Gandhi to magically appear". WTF? It ain't gonna happen any time soon.

And, worse yet, Zionist Embeds have gotten this GARBAGE written into VFP Resolutions! There's NO Gandhi or MLK on the horizon. There's only more death and destruction of a defenseless people, by GREEDY people.

Zionists don't seem to care that their air strikes rival Guernica, Hiroshima, Dresden, or our generation's "Shock & Awe"

Zionists don't seem to care that they are giving credence to the SLURS contained in the "Protocals of the Learned Elders of Zion"

Hell, the Zionists, after denying the veracity of "Protocals of the Learned Elders of Zion" for the last 125 years, now seem to embrace the Urban Legend of the "Protocals of the Learned Elders of Zion"
WTF?

The Torah says "An EYE for an EYE",
NOT
"420 PAIRS of EYES, for an EYE"
WTF?

The first thing scores of informed VFP observers of this planets' sorry state need to do is form a new VFP LIST, and take Dr Jack Dresser's Minneapolis-Bloomington proposal, and hone it, educate our "low info" brothers and sisters in VFP, then RE-SUBMIT it, at our College Park, Maryland Convention, the summer of 2009.

If we don't add our input, and have something concrete to organize around, the current tragic massacre will occur time and again, for the NEXT 61 years. Folks seem to have forgotten that the 19 Sky Jackers, on 9/11, were pissed about Zionists killing Palestinians. The Zionists are creating MORE desperate suicidal criminals, AS I TYPE !

We Veterans should be backing a ONE STATE, DEMOCRATIC solution...

From the Jordan River, to the Mediterranean Sea, from Golan Heights to Egypt's border; from Southern Lebanon's border, to Elat...

ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE, ONE STATE, for EVERYBODY

It's the ONLY solution that will work !

Nothing is worse than our National membership being on the same page as George Bush (43 & 41), Condi Rice, NeoCons, and sick Zionists, everywhere.

In solidarity,
bill perry

FREE PALESTINE !
The ONE STATE, DEMOCRATIC solution...

From the Jordan River, to the Mediterranean Sea, from Golan Heights to Egypt's border; from Southern Lebanon's border, to Elat...

ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE, ONE STATE, for EVERYBODY

Labels: anti-war movement, Veterans for Peace, Zionism

While the US peace movement--hamstrung by Zionists and liberals and often Zionist liberals--is reduced to street theater and begging the masters for peace, thousands of Thai protesters--"anti-democratic" or not--showed us what could be done. They shut down Bangkok's international airport for a week and "forced the Prime Minister ... out of office". Of course, it will be argued and with good reason that the Thai protesters enjoyed the backing of the elites and the military. But we don't need that kind of support here. We, in the US, live in a democracy, right?

Labels: anti-war movement, politics, Thailand, United States

As long as "anti-war" mothers care more about their sons than they care about the daughters, sons, parents, and siblings whom their sons kill or help kill, the killing will continue.

As long as self-described liberals refuse to argue with "our soldiers" when they allow themselves to be the instruments of the deadly policies those same liberals claim to oppose, the killing will continue.

As long as Americans indulge themselves and their children in the beliefs that those people over there in the "horrible underbelly of the world" are different and unlike "us" and that "we" have no part in "all this hatred and all this sort of evil around the world," the killing will continue.

Labels: anti-war movement, Carlos Latuff, militarism, War

A troop is an invention of the military,
A battlefield commodity to be used and discarded
Like a spent shell casing.
A troop obeys without question,
It does not ponder the significance
Of the Nuremburg Principles.

A troop is an invention of the military.
It may be given a nerve gas "antidote"
Which will allow it to fight a while longer,
But will not keep it from dying.
It may be given experimental drugs
Without its permission.

A troop is an invention of the military.
It may be sent home in an HRP
(Human Remains Pouch),
Or wheeled away on a gurney
To fill a bed recently cleared
Of troops from the previous war.

A troop is an invention of the military.
A dead troop is a "casuality" if from the U.S.,
Or "collateral damage" if from Iraq.
It may be male or female
(the war is an equal opportunity killer).
A troop is the property of the military.

See also:

• Green Berets: Who's the Coward?
• The "Other War" in Iraq
• Really a Good Guy
• On "Victory to the Iraqi Resistance"

Labels: anti-war movement, critical thinking, United States

Below is an e-mail message from Jeri L. Reed, mother of anti-war Iraq veteran Cody Camacho. She has some insightful things to say about the anti-war movement, the upcoming presidential elections, and she supports Holy Name 6. I wrote to Jeri and she confirmed that this was her work and gave me permission to repost it. To see my earlier post on the Holy Name 6 featuring photos of the Holy Name 6 and a video click here.

I stood out on the street Monday night with about fifteen others. Two members of the Oklahoma National Guard, one a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, both about to deploy to Iraq. Another mother whose two sons have been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, one son is in the Green Zone right now. Safer? She worries that he is in the middle of Baghdad, in the middle of Iraq, surrounded by millions of Iraqis who could one day get sick and tired of the American occupation once and for all. A big supporter of IVAW who distributes their newsletter in his small Oklahoma town drove up from his farm to join us, his Marine son was killed in Iraq on September 6 last year, my birthday, he is my birthday soldier, which probably all of us have by now. We were supposed to be commemorating the death of the 4000th soldier in Iraq. But people weren't even honking any more like they used to. I'm sure a lot of people drove by thinking we were just foolish for even bothering. What’s another dead soldier in a sea of so many? What's another dead Iraqi?

We keep standing out there even though it really does not do much to end the occupations. I wouldn't know what else to do, when my son rolled across the Iraq border five years ago on March 21, 2003, it became my eternal responsibility to do something, even if it seemed hopeless, which it does. But maybe that is what a lot of people think—why bother? We are powerless to end this war, so why try? Better to just ignore it and keep our minds elsewhere. A lot of people have turned their attention to electoral politics, putting their faith into one of the dismal presidential candidates. At the same time, I have not talked to anyone who really believes that any of the candidates will actually end the war in Iraq, and of course, few people think to consider Afghanistan at all.

But some small events have given me hope, actions that have been criticized by others as rash and disruptive. Actions by young people guided by their passion and certainty that the occupation of Iraq is a crime against humanity that needs to stop immediately, by their youthful disbelief that such things could take place and no one would do anything to stop them. On Easter Sunday, six young people, members of a street theater group called Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War, entered the services at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago and staged a die-in, they spread fake blood around, right in the aisle in the middle of respectable parishioners there to quietly hear the mass, not be reminded of the atrocities happening thousands of miles away. They yelled out "Even the Pope calls for peace!" and lay down in the aisles as if dead. They vocally objected to the priest, Cardinal George, meeting with a known war criminal, George W. Bush. They were arrested, and face felony charges for their actions, bail was set at $25,000 for five of them, $35,000 for Donte Smith allegedly due to a previous arrest at the School of the Americas, they are presently all free after putting up $16,000 of borrowed money. It made me so glad; it gave me so much hope. I was so proud of them.


Because if anyone thinks, after five years of this outrage, after one horrible year of my son invading another country and helping to wreak havoc and death and destruction, after a year of him being mortared almost daily, wading through depleted uranium which is like the ticking time bomb of our lives, after two years of trying to help him deal with the after effects to no avail, which of course we are supposed to keep to ourselves so as not to disturb others and simply smile and go about our normal lives which are not normal, after filing for bankruptcy the first year and continuing to sink money I don’t have into fighting this war, we all do, those of us affected, our cards if we still have them are maxed out, we don’t pay our bills. After sharing the pain of hundreds of other families and soldiers for five years, of all of those friends whose kids did not return from Iraq or Afghanistan, of all of those members of Iraq Veterans Against the War who despite the fact that they must deal with their own deep injuries physical and mental are courageously willing to put themselves on the line, even if they are active duty, even if they are in Iraq. Saying nothing of course about the tens of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis and Afghanis or the lives they must lead in devastated nations, the fear that they live with daily, the sorrow and anguish they face daily. If anyone thinks that after all of this pain and death and disruption and destruction of our lives and the lives of all the people in Iraq and Afghanistan I care if Easter Mass at Mayor Daley’s church was disrupted by six young people with fake blood and cries for an end to this atrocity, they would be wrong. Good. I hope they do it some more. They are our hope.

I’m just saying that because I was looking for updates on the Holy Name 6, the name they have acquired, and ran across a message board, a generally anti-war message board made up of “progressive” Democrats, where opinion seems to be running against them, how dare they, on Easter Sunday yet, disrupt a church service. The innocent parishioners should have been allowed to enjoy their Easter in peace, to think of peace, perhaps to pray for it, then head to their homes for nice Easter dinners with their families. There were children present after all. They were scared.

There are children in Iraq. They are scared. They are wounded. They die. They have needed us to end this occupation for five years. They needed us to stop the invasion before it began. We failed. None of us are innocent. If our young people are willing to take risks to try to shock some compassion and concern into the American public who would rather look the other way and spend their time on football scores rather than thinking about the number of dead Americans and Iraqis and Afghanis, we need to support them. This is our hope, sedate crowds of marching old people have failed, devoted prayers of peace have failed, polite conversations with spineless and lying politicians have failed.

The action at Holy Name last Sunday is not the only sign of hope. Earlier this month at the University of Alabama, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Students for a Democratic Society were arrested for staging a mock incident between soldiers and Iraqis in one of the university’s buildings. Recreating the day-to-day behavior of soldiers in Iraq towards Iraqi citizens was simply too alarming for those nearby, or in the words of the dean of students, it was disruptive and wrong because it was “mimicking a true emergency.” This IS a true emergency.

Students at the University of Iowa recently made Karl Rove very unwelcome after he was paid $40, 000 to speak there. Not only did a couple hundred students disrupt the speaking event, they surrounded the restaurant where Rove ate dinner later, calling for him to “come out with his hands up” over a bullhorn, attempting to make a citizens' arrest of this notorious war criminal, causing him to delay his exit for quite a while.

At a “teach in” near the University of North Texas a few weeks ago, I listened to students talk about ideas for actions, much of it taken from the pages of history. Members of a new SDS chapter like those springing up on campuses around the country were present. I found myself wanting to interrupt; some of the ideas sounded too much like the ideas of 20-year-old college students for me, because they were. I stopped myself from criticizing. It is all right for us to share wisdom. It is not all right to stifle our young people in this hopeless situation. We cannot tell them what to do. We have no grounds. We have failed.

Two weeks ago, Tina Richards spent the evening waiting at the juvenile facility in Washington DC for the release of her fourteen year old daughter who had been arrested blocking a street while chanting "Arrest Bush, not kids!" as part of the Stop-Loss Congress actions, along with many young people who descended on our nation’s capitol for what they called Our Spring Break. This was Chrissy’s second arrest. With two other young women, she was held for hours in a cell smeared with human feces and male bodily fluids, while the arresting officer kept trying to intimidate them, trying to scare them. They sang instead, they emerged with shining eyes and smiling faces, these three girls. They were proud of themselves and they should have been. And Chrissy was ready to do it again. This is personal to Chrissy, along with her mother she has had to deal with the problems of her brother Cloy, a former Marine, now disabled with PTSD. She has had to stand by her mother as Cloy collapsed further and further after returning from Iraq, to the point where he called Tina and told her he was holding a gun to his mouth. Chrissy’s life is permanently disrupted; I don’t think she cares whether the rest of the country feels her pain.

I can remember how I felt when I was young, just realizing how the world really worked, I remember my shock and disbelief, my anger and my passion, and my belief that I could help change things. I think of things that I did that I would not do now, things that seem rash and dangerous. It is easy to look at the alleged excesses of the 60s and 70s with a critical eye, looking at the actions of so many young people then, the actions of ourselves. Some of them were misguided; some of them just did not work out the way they were planned. These were not things done by people who worried about their personal safety or the long-term repercussions of their actions. But then again, the Vietnam War ended and people of color in this country got more rights. None of this happened because people quietly prayed it away or went to the polls and elected the “right” people. Nothing has ever really changed in this country because people followed the rules and did the right thing and did not disturb others.

We live in the most powerful nation in the world with the biggest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, run by people who are murderers and torturers and thieves. Most of us acknowledge that we are ruled by murderers and torturers and thieves, mainly because they don’t even bother to keep it from us. You could not bring enough buttons reading “Arrest Bush and Cheney” or the ever popular t-shirt “Arrest Cheney First” into the state of Oklahoma to satisfy demand. Yet no one seems willing to do anything about it. They don’t want to disrupt their lives. When the bombs started dropping on Baghdad on March 19, 2003, then my son drove into Iraq two days later, I knew we had failed. We had not been willing to disrupt our lives to stop this; I had not been willing to disrupt my own life enough even to prevent my own son from participating in these atrocities. I have always thought, what we should have done was shut down the whole country to stop it, no matter what.

None of the actions listed involved any kind of violence; they merely caused a lot of disruption and inconvenience for surrounding people, watch the video if you want to see what the Holy Name 6 actually did. None of these small incidents by themselves did much to end the war. But one can only hope that they are sparks. One can only hope. And if our young people decide that they simply do not want a future like this, that they do not want to give their silent assent to war crimes and war criminals as most of the country is doing, if they decide to disrupt the whole country to end this, to do what we have not been willing to do, we don’t need to criticize them, we need to support them. Or join them.

Labels: anti-war movement, Holy Name 6, Iraq, nonviolence, politics, resistance, War

Below is an excerpt from the first online page of "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness" by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian in The Nation. The article is the result of the authors' interviews with "fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians." Now, you'd think that Iraqi civilians could actually better testify to "the effects ... on average Iraqi civilians" but, this being America and all, we have to privilege the voices of the perps and their in-theater enablers just as we do in the larger 'peace' movement.

Yes, I know I'm a veteran for peace but I object to the 'patriotic correctness' that drives so much of the pandering to US military veterans and I think that any time a veteran speaks at an anti-war event s/he ought to acknowledge the fact that s/he is a former killer, former would-be killer, or former enabler of killers. The US military is not a social welfare organization, it is an imperial killing machine and "the troops" keep the killing going and, if nothing else, anti-war veterans have a duty to be honest to themselves and others about this reality. My experience is that lots of anti-war vets and others are in denial about this basic fact.

Don't get me wrong I think veterans deserve all the help they need, even the vets who don't have the integrity, knowledge, or moral courage to turn against the machine--they are victims but our suffering can never equated to or elevated above that of the victims of US aggression killed, maimed, or dispossessed in their own homelands. I also think there is a place for vets in the peace movement, perhaps even a prominent one, but that ought to be conditioned on honesty and candor about the US military. End lecture, here's the excerpt:

Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.

Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished.

...

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise. ... Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

"I'll tell you the point where I really turned," said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. "I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg.... An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn't crying, wasn't anything, it just looked at me like--I know she couldn't speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?... I was just like, This is--this is it. This is ridiculous."

Much of the resentment toward Iraqis described to The Nation by veterans was confirmed in a report released May 4 by the Pentagon. According to the survey, conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army Medical Command, just 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines agreed that civilians should be treated with dignity and respect. Only 55 percent of soldiers and 40 percent of marines said they would report a unit member who had killed or injured "an innocent noncombatant."

These attitudes reflect the limited contact occupation troops said they had with Iraqis. They rarely saw their enemy. They lived bottled up in heavily fortified compounds that often came under mortar attack. They only ventured outside their compounds ready for combat. The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effect of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis.

Veterans described reckless firing once they left their compounds. Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses.

See also:

• On "Victory to the Iraqi Resistance"
• Imperialist Peaceniks

Labels: anti-war movement, Iraq, War

Here is a July 4th essay by James Petras:

“You cannot win the peace unless you know the enemy at home and abroad”
US Marine Colonel from Tennessee.

Everywhere I visit from Copenhagen to Istanbul, Patagonia to Mexico City, journalists and academics, trade unionists and businesspeople, as well as ordinary citizens, inevitably ask me why the US public tolerates the killing of over a million Iraqis over the last two decades, and thousands of Afghans since 2001? Why, they ask, is a public, which opinion polls reveal as over sixty percent in favor of withdrawing US troops from Iraq, so politically impotent? A journalist from a leading business journal in India asked me what is preventing the US government from ending its aggression against Iran, if almost all of the world’s major oil companies, including US multinationals are eager to strike oil deals with Teheran? Anti-war advocates in Europe, Asia and Latin America ask me at large public forums what has happened to the US peace movement in the face of the consensus between the Republican White House and the Democratic Party-dominated Congress to continue funding the slaughter of Iraqis, supporting Israeli starvation, killing and occupation of Palestine and destruction of Lebanon?

Absence of a Peace Movement?

Just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 over one million US citizens demonstrated against the war. Since then there have been few and smaller protests even as the slaughter of Iraqis escalates, US casualties mount and a new war with Iran looms on the horizon. The demise of the peace movement is largely the result of the major peace organizations’ decision to shift from independent social mobilizations to electoral politics, namely channeling activists into working for the election of Democratic candidates – most of whom have supported the war. The rationale offered by these 'peace leaders' was that once elected the Democrats would respond to the anti-war voters who put them in office. Of course practical experience and history should have taught the peace movement otherwise: The Democrats in Congress voted every military budget since the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. The total capitulation of the newly elected Democratic majority has had a major demoralizing effect on the disoriented peace activists and has discredited many of its leaders.

Absence of a National Movement

As David Brooks (La Jornada July 2, 2007) correctly reported at the US Social forum there is no coherent national social movement in the US. Instead we have a collection of fragmented ‘identity groups’ each embedded in narrow sets of (identity) interests, and totally incapable of building a national movement against the war. The proliferation of these sectarian ‘non-governmental’ ‘identity’ ‘groups’ is based on their structure, financing and leadership. Many depend on private foundations and public agencies for their financing, which precludes them from taking political positions. At best they operate as ‘lobbies’ simply pressuring the elite politicians of both parties. Their leaders depend on maintaining a separate existence in order to justify their salaries and secure future advances in government agencies.

The US trade unions are virtually non-existent in more than half of the United States: They represent less than 9% of the private sector and 12% of the total labor force. Most national, regional and city-wide trade union officials receive salaries comparable to senior business executives: between $300,000 to $500,000 dollars a year. Almost 90% of the top trade union bureaucrats finance and support pro-war Democrats and have supported Bush and the Congressional war budgets, bought Israel Bonds ($25 billion dollars) and the slaughter of Palestinians and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon.

The Unopposed War Lobby

The US is the only country in the world where the peace movement is unwilling to recognize, publically condemn or oppose the major influential political and social institutions consistently supporting and promoting the US wars in the Middle East. The political power of the pro-Israel power configuration, led by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), supported within the government by highly placed pro-Israel Congressional leaders and White House and Pentagon officials has been well documented in books and articles by leading journalists, scholars and former President Jimmy Carter. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has over two thousand full-time functionaries, more than 250,000 activists, over a thousand billionaire and multi-millionaire political donors who contribute funds both political parties. The ZPC secures 20% of the US foreign military aid budget for Israel, over 95% congressional support for Israel’s boycott and armed incursions in Gaza, invasion of Lebanon and preemptive military option against Iran.

The US invasion and occupation policy in Iraq, including the fabricated evidence justifying the invasion, was deeply influenced by top officials with long-standing loyalties and ties to Israel. Wolfowitz and Feith, numbers 2 and 3 in the Pentagon, are life-long Zionists, who lost security clearance early in their careers for handing over documents to Israel. Vice President Cheney’s chief foreign policy adviser in the planning of the Iraq invasion is Irving Lewis Liebowitz (‘Scooter Libby’). He is a protégé and long-time collaborator of Wolfowitz and a convicted felon.

Libby-Liebowitz committed perjury, defending the White House’s complicity in punishing officials critical of its Iraq war propaganda. Libby-Liebowitz received powerful political and financial support from the pro-Israel lobby during his trial. No sooner did he lose his appeal on his conviction on five counts of perjury, obstructing justice and lying, than the ZPC convinced President Bush to ‘commute’ his prison sentence, in effect freeing him from a 30 month prison sentence before he had served a day. While Democratic politicians and some peace leaders criticized President Bush, none dared hold responsible the pro-Israel lobby which pressured the White House.

The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO) – numbering 52 – and their regional and local affiliates are the leading force transmitting Israel’s war agenda against Iran. The PMAJO, working closely with US-Israeli Congressman Rahm Emmanuel and leading Zionist Senators Charles Schumer and Joseph Lieberman, succeeded in eliminating a clause in the budget appropriation setting a date for the withdrawal for US troops from Iraq.

In contrast to the successful vast propaganda, congressional and media campaigns, organized and funded by the pro-Israel lobbies for the war policies, there is no public record of the big oil companies supporting the Iraq war, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon or the military threats of preemptive attacks on Iran. Interviews with investment bankers, oil company executives and a thorough review of the major Petroleum Institute publications over the past seven years provide conclusive evidence that ‘Big Oil’ was deeply interested in negotiating oil agreements with Saddam Hussein and the Iranian Islamic government. ‘Big Oil’ perceives US Middle East wars as a threat to their long-standing profitable relations with all the conservative Arab oil states in the Gulf. Despite the strategic position in the US economy and their great wealth '‘Big Oil' was totally incapable of countering their political power and organized influence of the pro-Israel lobby. In fact Big Oil was totally marginalized by the White House National Security Advisor for the Middle East, Elliot Abrams, a fanatical Zionist and militarist.

Despite the massive and sustained pro-war activity of the leading Zionist organizations inside and outside of the government and despite the absence of any overt or covert pro-war campaign by ‘Big Oil’, the leaders of the US peace movement have refused to attack the pro-Israel war lobby and continue to mouth unfounded clichés about the role of ‘Big Oil’ in the Middle East conflicts.

The apparently ‘radical’ slogans against the oil industry by some leading intellectual critics of the war has served as a ‘cover’ to avoid the much more challenging task of taking on the powerful, Zionist lobby. There are several reasons for the failure of the leaders of the peace movement to confront the militant Zionist lobby. One is fear of the powerful propaganda and smear campaign which the pro-Israel lobby is expert at mounting, with its aggressive accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ and its capacity to blacklist critics, leading to job loss, career destruction, public abuse and death threats.

The second reason that peace leaders fail to criticize the leading pro-war lobby is because of the influence of pro-Israel ‘progressives’ in the movement. These progressives condition their support of ‘peace in Iraq’ only if the movement does not criticize the pro-war Israel lobby in and outside the US government, the role of Israel as a belligerent partner to the US in Lebanon, Palestine and Kurdish Northern Iraq. A movement claiming to be in favor of peace, which refuses to attack the main proponents of war, is pursuing irrelevance: it deflects attention from the pro-Israel high officials in the government and the lobbyists in Congress who back the war and set the White House’s Middle East agenda. By focusing attention exclusively on President Bush, the peace leaders failed to confront the majority pro-Israel Democratic congress people who fund Bush’s war, back his escalation of troops and give unconditional support to Israel’s military option for Iran.

The collapse of the US peace movement, the lack of credibility of most of its leaders and the demoralization of many activists can be traced to strategic political failures: the unwillingness to identify and confront the real pro-war movements and the inability to create a political alternative to the bellicose Democratic Party. The political failure of the leaders of the peace movement is all the more dramatic in the face of the large majority of passive Americans who oppose the war, most of whom did not display their flags this Fourth of July and are not led in tow by either the pro-Israel lobby or their intellectual apologists within progressive circles.

The word to anti-war critics of the world is that over sixty percent of the US public opposes the war but our streets are empty because our peace movement leaders are spineless and politically impotent.

See also:

• UFPJ's LeBlanc Waffles on Iraq Withdrawal
• Iraq War Will Worsen
• On the Iraqi Resistance--Take II
• Zionists Out of the Peace Movement

Labels: anti-war movement, Cagan, Democrats, Iraq, James Petras, LeBlanc, Lerner, Ruth Messinger, United for Peace and Justice, Zionism

A week ago, activists apparently calling themselves Bakers without Borders put a cream pie in Medea Benjamin's face at the US Social Forum. There are some discussions going at the links listed below. Some of the comments are interesting, some enlightening, and some just plain depressing.

Links:

• Medea Benjamin Gets Pied At US Social Forum (SF Bay Area IMC)
• Communique on USSF Pieing by Agents aNGie O'tool and Cherry Karim (SF Bay Area IMC)
• To Those Who Threw a Pie in My Face, Let’s Swap Recipes (CommonDreams.org)
• Medea Benjamin Pied At US Social Forum! (NYC IMC)
  

Labels: anti-war movement, Medea Benjamin, resistance

In April, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee announced the winners of its first annual War Tax Resistance Video Contest. I liked the third-place winner best. It's called We Are Everywhere and its by Megan Ramsey. You can watch it below, just be sure to click on the play button. To see the other winners, go to http://www.nwtrcc.org/videofinalists.html Speaking of anti-war videos, if you haven't already seen it, then have a look at Not Your Soldier. It doesn't exactly epitomize principled nonviolence but it's worth checking out anyway.

Labels: anti-war movement, Iraq, video, war tax resistance

Below is an excerpt from "Becoming Imperialist" by KEVIN PARSNEAU, ARJUN CHOWDHURY and MARK HOFFMAN in CounterPunch, May 24, 2007.

Consider these familiar assertions:

1. If Donald Rumsfeld had listened to the generals and invaded with more troops, Iraq would be stable today.
2. If the U.S. had provided security and basic services after the initial invasion, Iraqis would have embraced America's presence and agenda by now.
3. If Paul Bremer had neither de-Ba'athified nor disbanded the Iraqi army after the invasion, the insurgency would have been manageable or non-existent.

If you agree with any of these claims, you are an unwitting participant in American Imperialism. You criticize the "handling of the war" but you display faith in the capacity of the US to remake the world in its image through military force and administration. Such faith reinforces the logic of imperialist misadventures like Iraq, and paves the way for future ones.

Later, Michigan's own Carl Levin is exposed in all his sickening glory:

Senator Carl Levin (D--Michigan) expressed the "opposition's" view instructively: "America has given the Iraqi people the opportunity to build a new nation at the cost of nearly 3,000 American lives and over twenty thousand wounded. But the American people do not want our valiant troops to get caught in a crossfire between Iraqis if they insist on squandering that opportunity through civil war and sectarian strife"

Labels: anti-war movement, Empire, Iraq

A dear Iraqi friend sent me the link to a powerful and moving video of "Je m'appelle Bagdad" (My name is Baghdad) by Tina Arena. Arena is an Australian singer of Italian origin singing in French about Iraq. Eaters of "freedom fries" and "freedom toast" will probably want to (but shouldn't) skip this one.

Labels: anti-war movement, Iraq, Tina Arena, video

How in the world is Congress supporting the troops by continuing to send them to kill and die in an illegal, immoral, unwinnable quagmire?

--Nancy Lessin, co-founder of Military Families Speak Out. Quoted in "Frustration Marks Another War Anniversary" by Haider Rizvi. Inter Press Service News Agency. March 19, 2007.

Labels: anti-war movement, Iraq, quotations, War

I've gotten several reports from convention attendees now. As if to mock the convention theme of "Sow Justice--Reap Peace," the "Resolution on Justice and Peace in Palestine" was soundly defeated at the Veterans for Peace convention in Seattle on Saturday. The Board of Directors rejected the resolution on Wednesday or Thursday (although I was not informed of this until Friday night) necessitating a two-thirds vote of support at the convention business meeting in order for the resolution to pass.

Resolutions Committee Chair Lincoln Grahlfs presented the resolution at the business meeting. According to two eyewitness reports he was openly hostile to the resolution and repeatedly made negative comments during his reading of it. Then, an abbreviated debate on the resolution was permitted where one speaker spoke in favor of the resolution but was not permitted to finish his remarks. A member of my own VFP chapter used his time to smear me personally and was cut off by the VFP president Dave Cline after he started attacking the other VFP co-sponsors of the resolution. Apparently, I was identified as a "troublemaker." He's right about that--I'm trouble for peacethugs, liars, and racists no matter where I find them but especially when I find them posing as peace advocates.

Reportedly, one of the main objections was that the resolution reversed VFP's previous support for a "two-state solution" to the conflict. Thoughtful readers will recall that a "two-state solution" is what the United States killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people to preserve. Rather than let Vietnam be united under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh the Americans blocked elections and propped up a brutal puppet regime in South Vietnam--58,000 Americans died in that fiasco. The U.S. also supported the racist leaders of apartheid South Africa when they set about creating a White supremacist state and several smaller Black colonies better known as bantustans. Fortunately, people of good conscience around the world worked against apartheid and today South Africa is one country with equal rights for all of its citizens.

But racists within the ranks of the peace movement don't support that for Arabs; they support Jewish ethno-religious supremacy in the 78% of Palestine violently seized in 1948--the same year Whites imposed apartheid in South Africa. Well, millions of Palestinian refugees--most of whom live in Palestine or surrounding countries--aren't going away. Only justice will bring peace to the region and in the meantime the conflict will continue to destabilize the entire planet.

Another related complaint was that the resolution was "too controversial" because it committed VFP to supporting a one-state solution and to--God forbid--actually making anti-Zionist peace activities, such as boycotts and divestment from Israel, a real part of VFP's work. VFP leaders have done nothing to implement the boycott and divestment resolution adopted last year and that's, apparently, the way they intend to keep it. Presumably, the cowards who shun this "controversy" don't have the backbone to stand up against the false charges of 'anti-Semitism' that would have come their way if they'd had the temerity to express a "strong preference for the peaceful creation of one democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with equality for all of its citizens" as the resolution called for.

Another specious complaint was that VFP did not have sufficient means to adopt the resolution because it would have directed the Board of Directors "to allocate adequate financial and staff resources to ensure meaningful implementation of this resolution." As far as I know, no one ever explored how much that would cost but financial geniuses on the Board of Directors fortuitously knew that any cost would be too much.

Some VFP leaders, apparently, abused their positions in order to help defeat the resolution. The resolution was submitted to the Resolutions Committee Chair Lincoln Grahlfs four weeks in advance of the VFP convention but Grahlfs never even acknowledged receiving it, although VFP Executive Director Michael T. McPhearson eventually did.

The VFP "Resolutions Notice" says:

V. Resolutions received by the committee at least three weeks before
the convention will be either

1. Accepted as written and promptly acknowledged.
   
2. returned to sender with suggestions for rewriting.
   
3. returned to sender with an explanation of why they are inappropriate.

Yet, there wasn't any communication whatsoever from the Grahlfs or anyone else on the Committee. This deprived the ten VFP members supporting the resolution of time and information to address concerns, come up with alternative language, and to strategize on how to build support for the resolution. Despite repeated inquiries this lapse has never been explained. So much for maintaining "an organization that is both democratic and open" (VFP Bylaws Art. II).

In closing, here are a couple of quotes from one of the convention attendees:

...To me this is a no-brainer. ... I never have had that much to do with VFP. Now, I won't ever have anything to do with them again. Like many peace and justice organizations in this country, they are basically useless.

...

I guess we should not be surprised that Congress votes overwhelmingly for resolutions totally biased towards Israel when the so-called progressive group, VFP, basically votes the same way.

I'm going to stay in VFP and fight for justice and peace and I hope others who were discouraged by the vote on the resolution will stay and fight along with me. The Zionists, peacethugs, and the cowards in the movement want us to give up in frustration--let's not give them what they want.

See also: VFP Palestine Resolution Defeated--Take 2

Last revised: 11/28/2006

Labels: anti-war movement, apartheid, fraud, Veterans for Peace