#Jan25 Egypt - Omar Offendum, The Narcicyst, Fr…
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One year ago today. As this unfolded, we watched unfolding events live streaming on Al Jazeera English in my Sociology of War and Peace class.
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UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car (hi…
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Chancellor Katehi’s walk to her car is accompanied by absolute silence (except for a few members of the press who apparently weren’t clued in). The silence is deafening. This my, friends, is the power of nonviolence.
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Keith’s Special Comment: Why Occupy Wall Street…
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Keith Olbermann understands the historical context that repression invigorates protest. As Ivan Marovic, of the Serbian student movement Otpor said, “It is like Newton’s third law of action and reaction. When you raise the level of repression, resistance goes up as well.”
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Pick any moment in our history — our history as a country founded by and invigorated by and re-invigorated by protests — and you will find men like George Wallace and Joe McCarthy and Jim Rhodes and Richard Daley. Go back further — to men like the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company or the officials who sent the police to the Haymarket Square and the troops to the Pullman town or John Brown or George Grenville, the British politician who had a bright idea about the American colonies, an idea called the Stamp Act.
American freedom has not flourished in spite of these morons of history, it has flourished because of them — because they overreacted, because they under-thought, overreached, under-understood. We owe them our traditions of protest. We owe them our freedoms. We owe them our very independence. None of them ever understood that — around these parts anyway — suppression always creates the opposite of the effect desired.
Such a man is Michael Rubens Bloomberg, mayor of New York City and — as of today — the most valuable, the most essential, the most irreplaceable man inside the Occupy movement.
Who else but a cliché like Bloomberg could take a protest beginning to grow a little stale around the edges and vault it back in the headlines, complete with mortifying scenes of police dressed as storm troopers, carrying military weapons, using figurative bazookas to kill figurative mosquitoes?
Who else but an archetype like Bloomberg could claim a group of protesters was making too much noise in a residential area and then choose to try to disperse them by bringing out LRAD audio cannons, machines that send painful waves of sound indiscriminately over the very same residential area?
Who else but a cartoon like Bloomberg could have become rich creating a multi-billion-dollar media and news company and then authorize illegally preventing reporters from witnessing police actions he claimed were utterly legal, and then authorize the arrests of four reporters at a church?
Who else but a human platitude like Bloomberg could have just gotten back from Jerusalem — and the dedication of a ten-million-dollar medical facility for which he generously paid — and then enabled the image of policemen seizing 5,500 books from the Occupy Wall Street library, and throwing them in a Dumpster as if the cops were book burners?
Who else but a hypocrite like Bloomberg could have overridden — by a backroom deal with the New York City Council — the results of two separate referendums, limiting those in his office to just two terms as mayor, so he could serve a third term? And then had police arrest, beat up and incarcerate a member of the New York City Council?
Who else but a putz like Bloomberg could have insisted protesters were not above the rule of law and yet — when the courts ruled he could not sees the protesters’ tents and sleeping bags, nor kick them out of Zuccotti park, nor keep them from returning with their tents and sleeping bags — who else could have stalled for hours until he could find another judge to give him the ruling he insisted upon?
Who else but the epitome of tone-deafness that is Bloomberg could have better illustrated the fundamental issue of Occupy, when he puts the entire weight of the most people-driven city in the history of the Earth behind already-crushingly rich and their efforts to grab themselves still more advantages from those people and he, himself, is the 12th richest man in America?
Who else but a publicity addict like Bloomberg could have enabled the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge and yet, two months later, frozen 20 square miles of New York City in gridlock traffic over two days, so somebody could film another goddamned Batman movie on the 59th Street Bridge? Leading to the inescapable conclusion that — if you want to tie up a little traffic during a protest for equality and freedom from corporate domination on a bridge in New York City — you will be arrested. But — if you want to tie up all of the traffic during a goddamned movie shoot for the financial benefit of corporate domination — the city of New York will embrace you and give you tax breaks.
Michael Bloomberg — no such a figure, no such a living, breathing embodiment of all that is wrong and all that is stupid in the establishment in this country could be ordered up from the works of fiction, or the casting calls of that goddamned Batman movie they filmed the weekend before he ordered the raid on Occupy Wall Street.
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The raid of Occupy Wall Street in New York City early this morning came one day after officers cleared the Occupy Oakland encampment in California. Thirty-two people were arrested. Two prominent members of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s team have resigned over the past day. Hours before Monday’s raid, Oakland mayoral legal adviser Dan Siegel resigned to protest the city’s crackdown on the Occupy movement. Last night, Deputy Oakland Mayor Sharon Cornu also stepped down. We talk to Siegel later in our broadcast.
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Democracy Now! | Headlines for November 15, 2011
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Care to put that to a test, Captain Bennett?
“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence,” UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. “I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/10/MNH21LTC4D.DTL#ixzz1dRETnWix
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Dr. King, whose life was spent preaching unconditional love and nonviolent redemptive good, continues to inspire people the world over who are helping to shape his vision of an “arc of the moral universe” that is long but bends toward justice. Gandhi, King, Mandela—there are precious few whose legacies resonate with those who are risking their lives today, in a nonviolent fashion, to eliminate the evils of racism, poverty, militarism and environmental destruction. King’s tribute to global peacemakers should have reached out to them as the legitimate heirs of the King legacy, not the monied interests who helped pay for the piece of carved granite that bears his image.
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| — | Medea Benjamin, “No Way to Honor Dr. King” | MichaelMoore.com August 26th, 2011 11:06 AM |
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I heard Kathy Kelly speak a few years ago about being in Iraq as a nonviolent witness when it was invaded. She and a number of Americans who were staying with families in Baghdad went out to greet the bewildered peachfuzz Americans that poked their helmeted heads out of their tanks like little turtles, offering them water and dates. She is one of those people who is Gandhi in the world today.
Last week, newly-arrived in Athens as part of the US Boat to Gaza project, our team of activists gathered for nonviolence training. We are here to sail to Gaza, in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade, in our ship, “The Audacity of Hope.” Our team, and nine other ships’ crews from countries around the world, want Israel to end its lethal blockade of Gaza by letting our crews through to shore to meet with Gazans. The US ship will bring over 3,000 letters of support to a population suffering its fifth continuous decade of de facto occupation, now in the form of a military blockade controlling Gaza’s sea and sky, punctuated by frequent deadly military incursions, that has starved Gaza’s economy and people to the exact level of cruelty considered acceptable to the domestic population of our own United States, Israel’s staunchest ally.
The international flotilla last year was brutally attacked and the Turkish ship fired on from the air, with a cherrypicked video clip of the resulting panic presented to the world to justify nine deaths, one of a United States citizen, most of them execution-style killings. So it’s essential, albeit a bit bizarre, to plan for how we will respond to military assaults. Israeli news reports say that their naval commandos are preparing to use attack dogs and snipers to board the boats. In the past, they have used water cannons, taser guns, stink bombs, sound bombs, stun guns, tear gas, and pepper spray against flotilla passengers. I’ve tried to make a mental list of plausible responses: remove glasses, don life jacket, affix clip line which might prevent sliding off the deck, carry a half onion to offset effect of tear gas, remember to breathe.
Israel Defense Forces are reportedly training for a fierce assault intended to “secure” each boat in the flotilla, the “Freedom Flotilla 2”. As passengers specifically on the U.S. boat, we may be spared the most violent responses, although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has not ruled out such violent responses and has preemptively certified any response we may “provoke” (in sailing from international waters to a coastline that is not part of Israel) is an expression of Israel’s “right to defend themselves” (http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/hillary-clinton-gives-green-light-israeli-attack-gaza-flotilla). Israel says it is prepared for a number of scenarios, ranging “from no violence” (which it knows full well to expect) to “extreme violence” (http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=226655). We are preparing ourselves not to panic, and to practice disciplined nonviolence whatever scenario Israel decides to enact.
If they overcome our boat swiftly, they will presumably handcuff us and possibly hood us, before commandeering our ship toward an Israeli port, removing us from the ship, jailing us and (judging from their past actions) deporting us. I don’t know what country I would be deported to, but I would eventually return to the U.S. and to my home city of Chicago, and to a safety I cannot share with the desperate people of Gaza, or friends from throughout this region so troubled by war, much of it instigated by my own country.
The slogan of our flotilla is “Stay Human.” It’s advice that exposure to violence, real or imagined, always tempts us to forget. Young friends I have met in Afghanistan, faced with pervasive everyday precarity I cannot easily imagine, have expressed this idea in a YouTube video which utterly takes my breath away: They ask Gazan youth to hold on to hope and to the capacity for childlike joy: “To friends in Gaza: don’t stay angry for too long, Stay together, and love from us in Afghanistan!”
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Bin Laden always insisted that only through subscribing to his apocalyptic reactionary ideology and genocidal methods could Muslim peoples overthrow oppressive and corrupt U.S.-backed Arab dictatorships. Indeed, his first attack against U.S. interests was a residential compound of U.S. soldiers training the repressive Saudi internal security forces back in 1995. However, bin Laden and his followers never came close to overthrowing any Arab regime. Most Arabs found his methods not only morally reprehensible, but recognized how he gave dictatorial governments an excuse to crack down even harder against all dissent. Instead, millions of Middle Easterners are recognizing — as did Filipinos, Poles, Chileans, Serbs and others before them — that strategic nonviolent action is far more powerful and effective. The masses calling for freedom, liberty, and social justice directly counter bin Laden’s medieval visions of a theocratic dictatorship to which very few Muslims aspire.
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Stephen Zunes: “The Killing of Bin Laden and the Threat of Al Qaeda” HuffPost 5/5/11 In the words of many young people I know, when they have just done or said something amazing, jovially taunt “What now?” |
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cross-posted at icancstructures:
I recall reading an article about Abdul Ghaffar “Badsha” Khan, “the Moslem Gandhi” in an joint publication of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and its international parent organization (IFOR). On Wednesday, I was just telling students in the Sociology of War and Peace about him. Little did I know he brought Gandhi to Abbottabad, too.
By Amitabh Pal, May 5, 2011The very place connected with Osama bin Laden’s death offers us an alternative to his violent, nihilistic version of Islam.
Abbottabad, the quiet, picturesque hill town where bin Laden was found and killed, held another resident back in 1939. He was a person with a different worldview, a person whose global name recognition rivals that of Al Qaeda’s founder, a person by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi was there as a guest of the great Pashtun pacifist Abdul Ghaffar Khan, whose interpretation of Islam starkly contrasts with that of bin Laden.
“There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pashtun like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence,” Khan said. “It is not a new creed. It was followed fourteen hundred years ago by the prophet all the time when he was in Mecca.”
I love Amit Pal’s conclusion to the piece most of all.
In another incredible coincidence, bin Laden’s Abbottabad hosts were from the same district (Charsadda) as Ghaffar Khan. Due to a remarkable process of socialization into nonviolence (the details are in my new book “ ‘Islam’ Means Peace”), Khan became the polar opposite of these enablers of a psychopathic mass murderer. <
Fortunately, nonviolent disobedience in the Muslim world did not end with Khan’s death in January 1988. Instead, it persevered down the years. And 2011 has been the most remarkable ever, with peaceful agitation resonating throughout the Middle East, in countries ranging from Tunisia and Egypt, where mass protests have overthrown tyrants, to Syria and Yemen, where demonstrators have mostly adhered to the peaceful path even in the face of massive repression.
Between Ghaffar Khan’s and bin Laden’s competing visions, it is the peaceful one that is emerging triumphant. [emphasis added]
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by Margaret Benefiel, guest contributor
Children watch fish in the reflection of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi at a park in Thrissur, India on International Non-Violence Day. (photo: Ragesh Vasudevan/Flickr)In the midst of the American discussions of violence and civility in…
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