Showing posts with label Martin Luther King. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King. Show all posts
Monday, March 4, 2013
"The gun is the only thing that will free us..."
"The gun is the only thing that will free us — gain us our liberation.”
So said The Black Panthers, a group who had a more consistent and passionate defense of Second Amendment gun rights than the GOP or NRA ever have:
Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”
Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us — gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.
Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.
Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.
The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.
In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.
“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.
Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.
“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.
“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.
By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.
The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.
To read the full article:
The Secret History of Guns
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608
Friday, May 6, 2011
Convicted RFK assassin says girl manipulated him
LINDA DEUTSCH
4/28/2011
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42806895/ns/us_news/
Convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot to shoot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his bullets did not kill the presidential candidate, lawyers for Sirhan said in new legal papers.
The documents filed this week in federal court detail extensive interviews with Sirhan during the past three years, some done while he was under hypnosis.
The papers point to a mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress as the controller who led Sirhan to fire a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. But the documents suggest a second person shot and killed Kennedy while using Sirhan as a diversion.
For the first time, Sirhan said under hypnosis that on a cue from the girl he went into "range mode" believing he was at a firing range and seeing circles with targets in front of his eyes.
"I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy," Sirhan was quoted as saying during interviews with Daniel Brown, a Harvard University professor and expert in trauma memory and hypnosis. He interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours with and without hypnosis, according to the legal brief.
Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, said prosecutors were unaware of the legal filing and could not comment.
The story of the girl has been a lingering theme in accounts of the events just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy was gunned down in the hotel pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.
Dan Moldea, author of the 1995 book, "The Killing Of Robert F. Kennedy," said he interviewed Sirhan then and concluded he was the lone gunman who shot Kennedy.
He acknowledged the account of Sirhan seeing circle targets was new.
"I think Sirhan's new theory about what happened is nonsense," Moldea said. "Sirhan was lying from the outset and he continues to lie, and his attorneys are enabling him to continue that lie."
Through the years, Sirhan has claimed no memory of shooting Kennedy and said in the recent interviews that his presence at the hotel was an accident, not a planned destination.
Under hypnosis, he remembered meeting the girl that night and becoming smitten with her. He said she led him to the pantry.
"I am trying to figure out how to hit on her ... That's all that I can think about," he said in one interview cited in the documents. "I was fascinated with her looks .... She never said much. It was very erotic. I was consumed by her. She was a seductress with an unspoken unavailability."
Brown was hired by Sirhan's lawyer William F. Pepper.
Pepper's associate, attorney Laurie Dusek, attended the interviews. and Brown said in the documents they both took verbatim notes because prison officials would not let them tape record nearly all the sessions.
Sirhan maintained in the hypnotic interviews that the mystery girl touched him or "pinched" him on the shoulder just before he fired then spun him around to see people coming through the pantry door.
"Then I was on the target range ... a flashback to the shooting range ... I didn't know that I had a gun," Sirhan said.
Under what Brown called the condition of hypnotic free recall, he said Sirhan remembered seeing the flash of a second gun at the time of the assassination. Without hypnosis, he said, Sirhan could not remember that shot.
Pepper, a New York lawyer with an international practice, previously tried to prove that James Earl Ray was not the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.
The lawyer said he is convinced that Sirhan was a victim of a mind control project such as those used by the CIA in the 1960s. He is seeking an evidentiary hearing to exonerate Sirhan in Kennedy's killing.
Dusek said in an interview that Sirhan was hypnotized for perhaps 30 percent of the interviews, most of which had to be done through a glass partition with Brown talking to him on a phone.
Only when Sirhan was moved from the state prison at Corcoran to his current location at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga were they allowed face-to-face visits, she said, and a few of those were recorded.
Other portions of the motion allege suppression of ballistics evidence and the autopsy report, and claim ineffective assistance of counsel. It contends previous lawyers for Sirhan accepted from the start that he was the lone shooter, settled on a defense of diminished capacity and did not seek other avenues of defense.
During the trial, Sirhan tried to confess to killing Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought," but the judge rejected the blurted statement.
A large portion of the new documents seek to prove the bullets that hit Kennedy came from a different direction than the spot where Sirhan was standing. The papers do not name any other possible shooter.
Sirhan was denied parole in March by a panel that said he had not shown sufficient remorse for the killing.
4/28/2011
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42806895/ns/us_news/
Convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot to shoot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his bullets did not kill the presidential candidate, lawyers for Sirhan said in new legal papers.
The documents filed this week in federal court detail extensive interviews with Sirhan during the past three years, some done while he was under hypnosis.
The papers point to a mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress as the controller who led Sirhan to fire a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. But the documents suggest a second person shot and killed Kennedy while using Sirhan as a diversion.
For the first time, Sirhan said under hypnosis that on a cue from the girl he went into "range mode" believing he was at a firing range and seeing circles with targets in front of his eyes.
"I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy," Sirhan was quoted as saying during interviews with Daniel Brown, a Harvard University professor and expert in trauma memory and hypnosis. He interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours with and without hypnosis, according to the legal brief.
Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, said prosecutors were unaware of the legal filing and could not comment.
The story of the girl has been a lingering theme in accounts of the events just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy was gunned down in the hotel pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.
Dan Moldea, author of the 1995 book, "The Killing Of Robert F. Kennedy," said he interviewed Sirhan then and concluded he was the lone gunman who shot Kennedy.
He acknowledged the account of Sirhan seeing circle targets was new.
"I think Sirhan's new theory about what happened is nonsense," Moldea said. "Sirhan was lying from the outset and he continues to lie, and his attorneys are enabling him to continue that lie."
Through the years, Sirhan has claimed no memory of shooting Kennedy and said in the recent interviews that his presence at the hotel was an accident, not a planned destination.
Under hypnosis, he remembered meeting the girl that night and becoming smitten with her. He said she led him to the pantry.
"I am trying to figure out how to hit on her ... That's all that I can think about," he said in one interview cited in the documents. "I was fascinated with her looks .... She never said much. It was very erotic. I was consumed by her. She was a seductress with an unspoken unavailability."
Brown was hired by Sirhan's lawyer William F. Pepper.
Pepper's associate, attorney Laurie Dusek, attended the interviews. and Brown said in the documents they both took verbatim notes because prison officials would not let them tape record nearly all the sessions.
Sirhan maintained in the hypnotic interviews that the mystery girl touched him or "pinched" him on the shoulder just before he fired then spun him around to see people coming through the pantry door.
"Then I was on the target range ... a flashback to the shooting range ... I didn't know that I had a gun," Sirhan said.
Under what Brown called the condition of hypnotic free recall, he said Sirhan remembered seeing the flash of a second gun at the time of the assassination. Without hypnosis, he said, Sirhan could not remember that shot.
Pepper, a New York lawyer with an international practice, previously tried to prove that James Earl Ray was not the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.
The lawyer said he is convinced that Sirhan was a victim of a mind control project such as those used by the CIA in the 1960s. He is seeking an evidentiary hearing to exonerate Sirhan in Kennedy's killing.
Dusek said in an interview that Sirhan was hypnotized for perhaps 30 percent of the interviews, most of which had to be done through a glass partition with Brown talking to him on a phone.
Only when Sirhan was moved from the state prison at Corcoran to his current location at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga were they allowed face-to-face visits, she said, and a few of those were recorded.
Other portions of the motion allege suppression of ballistics evidence and the autopsy report, and claim ineffective assistance of counsel. It contends previous lawyers for Sirhan accepted from the start that he was the lone shooter, settled on a defense of diminished capacity and did not seek other avenues of defense.
During the trial, Sirhan tried to confess to killing Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought," but the judge rejected the blurted statement.
A large portion of the new documents seek to prove the bullets that hit Kennedy came from a different direction than the spot where Sirhan was standing. The papers do not name any other possible shooter.
Sirhan was denied parole in March by a panel that said he had not shown sufficient remorse for the killing.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Robert Reich Blasts Right Wing Lies
Two pieces by Robert Reich help set the record straight on current economic issues.
Item One: Why was MLK in Memphis in 1968 when he was assassinated? To support public workers:
"In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they’ve earned.
But now the right is going after public employees.
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work - sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees – to call them 'faceless bureaucrats' and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets..."
The Shameful Attack on Public Employees
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/2615647030
Item Two:
"Republicans are telling Americans a Big Lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is our economic problems are due to a government that’s too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.
The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us. The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity. Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can’t borrow as before, and must save for retirement."
The Big Lie
Monday, January 3, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/2586459266
Item One: Why was MLK in Memphis in 1968 when he was assassinated? To support public workers:
"In 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they’ve earned.
But now the right is going after public employees.
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work - sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees – to call them 'faceless bureaucrats' and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets..."
The Shameful Attack on Public Employees
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/2615647030
Item Two:
"Republicans are telling Americans a Big Lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is our economic problems are due to a government that’s too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.
The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us. The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity. Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can’t borrow as before, and must save for retirement."
The Big Lie
Monday, January 3, 2011
http://robertreich.org/post/2586459266
Friday, October 29, 2010
50 years ago: Kennedy intervenes for imprisoned Martin Luther King
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/twih-o25.shtml
50 years ago: Kennedy intervenes for imprisoned Martin Luther King
25 October 2010
With days to go before his 1960 presidential contest with Vice President Richard Nixon, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy intervened to secure the release of Martin Luther King Jr. from a Georgia state prison. Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta, while Robert Kennedy personally pressured the judge in the case.
King had been arrested for participating in a Georgia sit-in. The misdemeanor charge of failing to vacate private property would not have resulted in prison, but the judge in the case seized on an earlier trumped-up charge against King—operating a motor vehicle without a proper Georgia drivers license—to order King’s jailing for four months. The civil rights leader was hustled away on October 26 in the early morning so that his attorneys could not lodge a habeas corpus plea.
Kennedy’s intervention arose from his emphasis during the campaign on what he argued was the erosion of US global prestige during the Eisenhower administration. He understood that the abuse of King by state authorities was an embarrassment to the US, which was attempting to portray itself in its Cold War duel with the Soviet Union as an unswerving advocate of democracy and freedom.
The move was not without its political risks. The Southern elite had been drifting out of the Democratic Party “New Deal coalition” for some time, and Nixon was leading in the polls in a number of Southern states. During the 1960 campaign, prominent “Dixiecrats” openly campaigned against Kennedy. Among them were Sen. Harry Byrd of West Virginia, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Gov. S. Ernest Vandiver of Georgia, who defended the prison sentence and called King a “race agitator.”
50 years ago: Kennedy intervenes for imprisoned Martin Luther King
25 October 2010
With days to go before his 1960 presidential contest with Vice President Richard Nixon, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy intervened to secure the release of Martin Luther King Jr. from a Georgia state prison. Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta, while Robert Kennedy personally pressured the judge in the case.
King had been arrested for participating in a Georgia sit-in. The misdemeanor charge of failing to vacate private property would not have resulted in prison, but the judge in the case seized on an earlier trumped-up charge against King—operating a motor vehicle without a proper Georgia drivers license—to order King’s jailing for four months. The civil rights leader was hustled away on October 26 in the early morning so that his attorneys could not lodge a habeas corpus plea.
Kennedy’s intervention arose from his emphasis during the campaign on what he argued was the erosion of US global prestige during the Eisenhower administration. He understood that the abuse of King by state authorities was an embarrassment to the US, which was attempting to portray itself in its Cold War duel with the Soviet Union as an unswerving advocate of democracy and freedom.
The move was not without its political risks. The Southern elite had been drifting out of the Democratic Party “New Deal coalition” for some time, and Nixon was leading in the polls in a number of Southern states. During the 1960 campaign, prominent “Dixiecrats” openly campaigned against Kennedy. Among them were Sen. Harry Byrd of West Virginia, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Gov. S. Ernest Vandiver of Georgia, who defended the prison sentence and called King a “race agitator.”
Monday, September 27, 2010
Ernest Withers the Informant
http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-ernest-withers-informant
Freedom Rider: Ernest Withers the Informant
Wed, 09/22/2010
BAR editor and senior Margaret Kimberley
The trusted “movement” photographer was a spy for J. Edgar Hoover. Ernest Withers apparently cashed in on his close relationship with unsuspecting Black Sixties activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Withers is dead, but not forgiven. “The revelation of Withers’ activity should be a reminder of the extent to which the state dedicated itself to destroying any organized effort at black empowerment.”
“Sadly, many of the people personally victimized by Withers are defending and rationalizing his actions.”
The long and infamous history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its attacks upon black Americans in their struggles for human and civil rights are by now well known. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover actively worked to destroy any and all black activists beginning in 1919 when he pursued the political and personal destruction of Marcus Garvey. That subversion of legal rights and the democratic process continued for decades but operated at its fullest extent in the 1950s and 1960s.
The purpose of the FBI Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO was, in Hoover‘s words, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” what Hoover called “hate groups” but which were in fact organizations fighting for full citizenship rights. The most infamous COINTELPRO action was the murder of the Black Panther Party Chicago chief Fred Hampton. An informant, William O’Neal, joined the Black Panther Party under FBI direction, served as Hampton’s bodyguard, and was then instrumental in planning his killing.
That terrible history was brought to public attention recently when Ernest C. Withers’ relationship with the FBI was revealed. Withers was a celebrated photographer whose work included coverage of the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, and the Memphis protests which brought King to the place of his assassination. According to a report in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Withers was an FBI informant who gave extensive information on King and other activists in Memphis, their movements, and their conversations. Withers reported to the FBI on the day of King’s assassination and in the days following.
Unfortunately, Withers died in 2007 without ever being confronted with the longstanding rumors of his activities. His colleagues are left to their own devices in trying to understand why he acted as he did. They are also left trying to decide how and, in some cases, whether to judge Withers for his betrayals.
“He actively sabotaged the work of others and endangered their lives, livelihoods and a movement which was bigger than any one person.”
The human response of wanting to defend someone thought to be a friend may be understandable on a personal level, but should never be acceptable politically. The charges against Withers are well documented and in all likelihood he was an informer and was paid by the FBI. This means he actively sabotaged the work of others and endangered their lives, livelihoods and a movement which was bigger than any one person, even those who may still feel a personal connection to Withers.
Whatever the justification for their activities, informants like Withers should never be forgiven and their acts should not be justified. Sadly, many of the people personally victimized by Withers are defending and rationalizing his actions. He had a large family to support, he may have been threatened, the information he gave probably did little harm, etc. Andrew Young’s comments about Withers are the worst of all. "I don't think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money on the side.''
Andrew Young has been the king of the cringe-worthy comment for some time now, but this remark is appalling even for him. As one of King’s closest confidantes, Young should know better than anyone the damage caused by FBI’s actions against King. They tapped his phones, recorded his conversations and encouraged him to commit suicide. Because there was no timely investigation into the King assassination, we will never know if the FBI was directly involved. The fact that Withers was located in Memphis and reported on King’s activities and movements up until the very moment of his death is in and of itself suspicious. The revelation of Withers’ activity should be a reminder of the extent to which the state dedicated itself to destroying any organized effort at black empowerment.
The muted response to the Withers revelation is sad proof of the lack of study of the movement, its fall and its aftermath. If this world-changing phenomenon were considered in the light that it ought to be, there would be unified revulsion expressed about Withers and a meaningful discussion of how the movement ended. The killing of Martin Luther King meant the effective end of one of the most successful mass movements in the history of the world. It is difficult to imagine that the information Withers provided to the FBI was not in some way connected with King’s death. For that reason alone, the outrage surrounding this revelation should have been loud and clear.
“It is difficult to imagine that the information Withers provided to the FBI was not in some way connected with King’s death.”
The Withers case should not be seen through the window of the past. It is a warning to us in the present and a reminder that the police state apparatus is ever present. Should the civil rights movement be reactivated and organizing for change become the norm once again, there will be another COINTELPRO, under a different name no doubt, but the activities will be revived and some “friends” will turn out to be wolves in sheep’s clothing.
We now have a government which gives itself the right to order the assassination of American citizens and which claims the right to order anyone arrested and incarcerated without charge or trial. Black Americans have been entrapped in dubious, false flag terror cases created out of whole cloth by the government and its informants. The past is prologue and Ernest C. Withers will not be the last person used to sabotage his own people.
An energized, well organized movement for political change is what this nation needs most. That movement should learn the history of past movements, including the errors, and the betrayals that brought so many people and organizations to premature death. Individuals brave enough to speak truth to the powerful should be able to do so without repeating past mistakes or falling prey to the snares which brought down so many in the past. Ernest Withers should be remembered as a traitor. Yes his photos are iconic but they are now tainted and cannot be rehabilitated for the sake of sentimentality. The revelations about Withers are indeed frightening and rightly cause paranoia and anger. Those feelings cannot be submerged. They should be discussed openly. If they are not, then there are more Ernest Withers’ in our future and more destroyed movements.
Commercial appeal
http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgandaReport.com.
Freedom Rider: Ernest Withers the Informant
Wed, 09/22/2010
BAR editor and senior Margaret Kimberley
The trusted “movement” photographer was a spy for J. Edgar Hoover. Ernest Withers apparently cashed in on his close relationship with unsuspecting Black Sixties activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Withers is dead, but not forgiven. “The revelation of Withers’ activity should be a reminder of the extent to which the state dedicated itself to destroying any organized effort at black empowerment.”
“Sadly, many of the people personally victimized by Withers are defending and rationalizing his actions.”
The long and infamous history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its attacks upon black Americans in their struggles for human and civil rights are by now well known. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover actively worked to destroy any and all black activists beginning in 1919 when he pursued the political and personal destruction of Marcus Garvey. That subversion of legal rights and the democratic process continued for decades but operated at its fullest extent in the 1950s and 1960s.
The purpose of the FBI Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO was, in Hoover‘s words, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” what Hoover called “hate groups” but which were in fact organizations fighting for full citizenship rights. The most infamous COINTELPRO action was the murder of the Black Panther Party Chicago chief Fred Hampton. An informant, William O’Neal, joined the Black Panther Party under FBI direction, served as Hampton’s bodyguard, and was then instrumental in planning his killing.
That terrible history was brought to public attention recently when Ernest C. Withers’ relationship with the FBI was revealed. Withers was a celebrated photographer whose work included coverage of the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, and the Memphis protests which brought King to the place of his assassination. According to a report in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Withers was an FBI informant who gave extensive information on King and other activists in Memphis, their movements, and their conversations. Withers reported to the FBI on the day of King’s assassination and in the days following.
Unfortunately, Withers died in 2007 without ever being confronted with the longstanding rumors of his activities. His colleagues are left to their own devices in trying to understand why he acted as he did. They are also left trying to decide how and, in some cases, whether to judge Withers for his betrayals.
“He actively sabotaged the work of others and endangered their lives, livelihoods and a movement which was bigger than any one person.”
The human response of wanting to defend someone thought to be a friend may be understandable on a personal level, but should never be acceptable politically. The charges against Withers are well documented and in all likelihood he was an informer and was paid by the FBI. This means he actively sabotaged the work of others and endangered their lives, livelihoods and a movement which was bigger than any one person, even those who may still feel a personal connection to Withers.
Whatever the justification for their activities, informants like Withers should never be forgiven and their acts should not be justified. Sadly, many of the people personally victimized by Withers are defending and rationalizing his actions. He had a large family to support, he may have been threatened, the information he gave probably did little harm, etc. Andrew Young’s comments about Withers are the worst of all. "I don't think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money on the side.''
Andrew Young has been the king of the cringe-worthy comment for some time now, but this remark is appalling even for him. As one of King’s closest confidantes, Young should know better than anyone the damage caused by FBI’s actions against King. They tapped his phones, recorded his conversations and encouraged him to commit suicide. Because there was no timely investigation into the King assassination, we will never know if the FBI was directly involved. The fact that Withers was located in Memphis and reported on King’s activities and movements up until the very moment of his death is in and of itself suspicious. The revelation of Withers’ activity should be a reminder of the extent to which the state dedicated itself to destroying any organized effort at black empowerment.
The muted response to the Withers revelation is sad proof of the lack of study of the movement, its fall and its aftermath. If this world-changing phenomenon were considered in the light that it ought to be, there would be unified revulsion expressed about Withers and a meaningful discussion of how the movement ended. The killing of Martin Luther King meant the effective end of one of the most successful mass movements in the history of the world. It is difficult to imagine that the information Withers provided to the FBI was not in some way connected with King’s death. For that reason alone, the outrage surrounding this revelation should have been loud and clear.
“It is difficult to imagine that the information Withers provided to the FBI was not in some way connected with King’s death.”
The Withers case should not be seen through the window of the past. It is a warning to us in the present and a reminder that the police state apparatus is ever present. Should the civil rights movement be reactivated and organizing for change become the norm once again, there will be another COINTELPRO, under a different name no doubt, but the activities will be revived and some “friends” will turn out to be wolves in sheep’s clothing.
We now have a government which gives itself the right to order the assassination of American citizens and which claims the right to order anyone arrested and incarcerated without charge or trial. Black Americans have been entrapped in dubious, false flag terror cases created out of whole cloth by the government and its informants. The past is prologue and Ernest C. Withers will not be the last person used to sabotage his own people.
An energized, well organized movement for political change is what this nation needs most. That movement should learn the history of past movements, including the errors, and the betrayals that brought so many people and organizations to premature death. Individuals brave enough to speak truth to the powerful should be able to do so without repeating past mistakes or falling prey to the snares which brought down so many in the past. Ernest Withers should be remembered as a traitor. Yes his photos are iconic but they are now tainted and cannot be rehabilitated for the sake of sentimentality. The revelations about Withers are indeed frightening and rightly cause paranoia and anger. Those feelings cannot be submerged. They should be discussed openly. If they are not, then there are more Ernest Withers’ in our future and more destroyed movements.
Commercial appeal
http://www.commercialappeal.com/withers-exposed/
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgandaReport.com.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
“This is Beyond Sports”
http://edgeofsports.com/2010-05-11-531/index.html
“This is Beyond Sports”
Chuck D on the fight in Arizona
By Dave Zirin
5-11-10
Chuck D. The Hard Rhymer. The man on the mic for the most politically explosive hip-hop group in history, Public Enemy. With albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” “Fear of a Black Planet,” and anthems like “Fight the Power” and “Bring the Noise” along with the breathtaking production of the Bomb Squad, PE created a standard of politics and art. Perhaps their most controversial track was “By the Time I Get to Arizona” (1991) about seeking revenge against Arizona political officials for refusing to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday [Lyrics include: 'Cause my money's spent on The goddamn rent/Neither party is mine not the Jackass or the elephant.] Today, in the wake of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration Senate Bill 1070, “By the Time I Get to Arizona” has been remixed and revived by DJ Spooky. Chuck D also recorded his own track several months before the bill was passed called “Tear Down That Wall.” I spoke to Chuck about the music and the nexus between immigration politics and sports.
DZ: Why did you choose to record “Tear Down this Wall?”
Chuck D: I had done "Tear Down this Wall" four or five months ago because I heard a professor who works with my wife here on the West Coast speak in a speech about the multi-billion dollar dividing wall between the U.S. and Mexico, so, therefore, I based "Tear Down that Wall" on the policy of the United States border patrol in the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. I just wanted to put a twist of irony on it saying if Ronald Reagan back in 1988 had told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall separating the world from countries of capitalism and communism, we have a billion dollar wall right here in our hemisphere that exists that needs to have a bunch of questions raised. Questions like: “What the Hell?” I wrote the song about five months ago and I did it coincidently, with all that’s brewing in the state of Arizona. Immigration laws and racial profiling is happening right here and I think the border situation, not only with the U.S. and Mexico but the U.S. and Canada, on both sides is just out of control. It's crazy.
DZ: You did "Tear Down This Wall," we have the DJ Spooky remix of "By the Time I Get to Arizona," and with your wife, Dr. Gaye Theresa Johnson, you wrote a syndicated column on SB 1070. What’s the response been to you being so out front on this issue?
Chuck D: Well the response is the usual, but I make it a habit not to look at any blogs, because I think the font of a computer gives as much credence to ignorance as it does to somebody who makes sense. So I try not to read those responses, because anybody can respond quickly. Back when people had to write letters it took an effort, especially if someone didn't have decent penmanship and handwriting. I try not to look at the responses. I try to do the right thing. I tell you this much, there is a rap contingent, a hip-hop contingent from Phoenix, who did a remake of "By the Time I Get to Arizona." I think that needs to be recognized because these are young people. The song is about eight minutes long. There's about 12 MCs on it, and they are putting it down. They are talking about how ridiculous this law is. They are speaking out against it and they are putting all the facts on the table, and they need to be acknowledged and highlighted. There is a stereotype about young people and young MCs [being apolitical]. They break it.
DZ: It’s remarkable how the original “By the Time I Get to Arizona” has been resurrected from the early 90's now that the struggle has picked up. Did you hear former NBA player Chris Webber before the Suns/Spurs game say, "Its like PE said ‘By the Time I get to Arizona.’”?
Chuck D: [laughs] My Dad told me about that, You know Chris Webber is the man. I wasn't tuned into TNT at that particular time.
DZ: He said more than that. He said, “Public Enemy said it a long time ago. ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona.’ I’m not surprised. They didn’t even want there to be a Martin Luther King Day when John McCain was in [office.]. So if you follow history you know that this is part of Arizona politics.’” So he brought it all together with Public Enemy at the center of it.
Chuck D: Unfortunately when it comes to culture, the speed of technology and news today makes things out of sight, out of mind. While these situations [the MLK fight and the immigration fights] are different, the politics of both things stay around like a stain.... Once again Arizona has put themselves into this mix. I don't know what the hell was on Gov. Jan Brewer’s mind or what contingent is behind her, but, you know, to make a decision like this and to be told to ignore the people who have been in this area on this earth the longest period of time. It just kind of resonates with me as being crazy.
DZ: Do you support an athletic or artistic boycott of Arizona until this gets settled?
Chuck D: Dave, you know I do. Artists and musicians can say we’re going to play Texas, El Paso, New Mexico, Albuquerque, and we gotta play L.A. But we’ll skip Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tucson and the like. But you know what this is really a challenge for: that’s Major League Baseball. You’ve got nearly a third of the players that are Latino. If they don’t stand up to this bill, they will actually be validating the divide amongst Latinos [between documented and undocumented immigrants]. At the same time they’ll also be lining themselves right into the stereotype of what an athlete is if they don’t speak out: a high priced slave that doesn’t say anything. And to me it’s beyond just boycotting the All-Star game. What are those Latino players on the Diamondbacks going to do? What are the players going to say who go into Arizona to play against the Diamondbacks? What are they going to say and what are they going to do? Major League Baseball has to step up. The NBA has very few players of Latino descent and [the Suns] are saying something. But Major League Baseball, if they don’t say anything, it’s crazy. The owners, the team, the league, and especially the players, whether they come from the Dominican Republic, whether they come from Venezuela, whether they come from Puerto Rico, they better step up. If they don’t step up, the music industry, at least from my area, we’re going to clown them. For us to speak out against this law, and basketball stepping up, and Major League Baseball not stepping up at all?! Come on now, give me a break. And I know a lot of the cats they live in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico or whatever, there’s like a trillion years difference between them and their high salaries and the average people living in the streets. They might build themselves a castle with a militia to protect them, but this is the time to unite yourself with the people and at least live in the legacy that [Major League Hall of Famer] Roberto Clemente set of uniting people just to protect against the nonsense that the other side can come up with. They need to know that it’s going to spread if they don’t come up and say something about it.
DZ: Any final thoughts? Perhaps about Major League Baseball pulling the All Star Game out of Phoenix?
Chuck D: At the end of the day man, sports is really not that important compared to people living their everyday lives. Say you have a Major League player, and he happens to play for another team, or he happens to play for the Diamondbacks and he gets pulled over because people think he’s an illegal immigrant. Then all of a sudden that’s when the “ish” finally hits the fan? Come on. This is beyond sports. We want athletes to speak up because they have advantages. They have everyday coverage. They’re covered by a person that has a mic and a camera in their face, and this is the time to step up. Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star game out of Arizona should be the least of it.
Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
“This is Beyond Sports”
Chuck D on the fight in Arizona
By Dave Zirin
5-11-10
Chuck D. The Hard Rhymer. The man on the mic for the most politically explosive hip-hop group in history, Public Enemy. With albums like “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” “Fear of a Black Planet,” and anthems like “Fight the Power” and “Bring the Noise” along with the breathtaking production of the Bomb Squad, PE created a standard of politics and art. Perhaps their most controversial track was “By the Time I Get to Arizona” (1991) about seeking revenge against Arizona political officials for refusing to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday [Lyrics include: 'Cause my money's spent on The goddamn rent/Neither party is mine not the Jackass or the elephant.] Today, in the wake of Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration Senate Bill 1070, “By the Time I Get to Arizona” has been remixed and revived by DJ Spooky. Chuck D also recorded his own track several months before the bill was passed called “Tear Down That Wall.” I spoke to Chuck about the music and the nexus between immigration politics and sports.
DZ: Why did you choose to record “Tear Down this Wall?”
Chuck D: I had done "Tear Down this Wall" four or five months ago because I heard a professor who works with my wife here on the West Coast speak in a speech about the multi-billion dollar dividing wall between the U.S. and Mexico, so, therefore, I based "Tear Down that Wall" on the policy of the United States border patrol in the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. I just wanted to put a twist of irony on it saying if Ronald Reagan back in 1988 had told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall separating the world from countries of capitalism and communism, we have a billion dollar wall right here in our hemisphere that exists that needs to have a bunch of questions raised. Questions like: “What the Hell?” I wrote the song about five months ago and I did it coincidently, with all that’s brewing in the state of Arizona. Immigration laws and racial profiling is happening right here and I think the border situation, not only with the U.S. and Mexico but the U.S. and Canada, on both sides is just out of control. It's crazy.
DZ: You did "Tear Down This Wall," we have the DJ Spooky remix of "By the Time I Get to Arizona," and with your wife, Dr. Gaye Theresa Johnson, you wrote a syndicated column on SB 1070. What’s the response been to you being so out front on this issue?
Chuck D: Well the response is the usual, but I make it a habit not to look at any blogs, because I think the font of a computer gives as much credence to ignorance as it does to somebody who makes sense. So I try not to read those responses, because anybody can respond quickly. Back when people had to write letters it took an effort, especially if someone didn't have decent penmanship and handwriting. I try not to look at the responses. I try to do the right thing. I tell you this much, there is a rap contingent, a hip-hop contingent from Phoenix, who did a remake of "By the Time I Get to Arizona." I think that needs to be recognized because these are young people. The song is about eight minutes long. There's about 12 MCs on it, and they are putting it down. They are talking about how ridiculous this law is. They are speaking out against it and they are putting all the facts on the table, and they need to be acknowledged and highlighted. There is a stereotype about young people and young MCs [being apolitical]. They break it.
DZ: It’s remarkable how the original “By the Time I Get to Arizona” has been resurrected from the early 90's now that the struggle has picked up. Did you hear former NBA player Chris Webber before the Suns/Spurs game say, "Its like PE said ‘By the Time I get to Arizona.’”?
Chuck D: [laughs] My Dad told me about that, You know Chris Webber is the man. I wasn't tuned into TNT at that particular time.
DZ: He said more than that. He said, “Public Enemy said it a long time ago. ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona.’ I’m not surprised. They didn’t even want there to be a Martin Luther King Day when John McCain was in [office.]. So if you follow history you know that this is part of Arizona politics.’” So he brought it all together with Public Enemy at the center of it.
Chuck D: Unfortunately when it comes to culture, the speed of technology and news today makes things out of sight, out of mind. While these situations [the MLK fight and the immigration fights] are different, the politics of both things stay around like a stain.... Once again Arizona has put themselves into this mix. I don't know what the hell was on Gov. Jan Brewer’s mind or what contingent is behind her, but, you know, to make a decision like this and to be told to ignore the people who have been in this area on this earth the longest period of time. It just kind of resonates with me as being crazy.
DZ: Do you support an athletic or artistic boycott of Arizona until this gets settled?
Chuck D: Dave, you know I do. Artists and musicians can say we’re going to play Texas, El Paso, New Mexico, Albuquerque, and we gotta play L.A. But we’ll skip Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tucson and the like. But you know what this is really a challenge for: that’s Major League Baseball. You’ve got nearly a third of the players that are Latino. If they don’t stand up to this bill, they will actually be validating the divide amongst Latinos [between documented and undocumented immigrants]. At the same time they’ll also be lining themselves right into the stereotype of what an athlete is if they don’t speak out: a high priced slave that doesn’t say anything. And to me it’s beyond just boycotting the All-Star game. What are those Latino players on the Diamondbacks going to do? What are the players going to say who go into Arizona to play against the Diamondbacks? What are they going to say and what are they going to do? Major League Baseball has to step up. The NBA has very few players of Latino descent and [the Suns] are saying something. But Major League Baseball, if they don’t say anything, it’s crazy. The owners, the team, the league, and especially the players, whether they come from the Dominican Republic, whether they come from Venezuela, whether they come from Puerto Rico, they better step up. If they don’t step up, the music industry, at least from my area, we’re going to clown them. For us to speak out against this law, and basketball stepping up, and Major League Baseball not stepping up at all?! Come on now, give me a break. And I know a lot of the cats they live in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico or whatever, there’s like a trillion years difference between them and their high salaries and the average people living in the streets. They might build themselves a castle with a militia to protect them, but this is the time to unite yourself with the people and at least live in the legacy that [Major League Hall of Famer] Roberto Clemente set of uniting people just to protect against the nonsense that the other side can come up with. They need to know that it’s going to spread if they don’t come up and say something about it.
DZ: Any final thoughts? Perhaps about Major League Baseball pulling the All Star Game out of Phoenix?
Chuck D: At the end of the day man, sports is really not that important compared to people living their everyday lives. Say you have a Major League player, and he happens to play for another team, or he happens to play for the Diamondbacks and he gets pulled over because people think he’s an illegal immigrant. Then all of a sudden that’s when the “ish” finally hits the fan? Come on. This is beyond sports. We want athletes to speak up because they have advantages. They have everyday coverage. They’re covered by a person that has a mic and a camera in their face, and this is the time to step up. Major League Baseball pulling the All-Star game out of Arizona should be the least of it.
Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
“My Hell in an Israeli Jail"
http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/%E2%80%9Cmy-hell-israeli-jail%E2%80%9D-israel-prison-population-90-percent-black-africans
“My Hell in an Israeli Jail”: Israel Prison Population 90 Percent Black Africans
It should come as no surprise that a settler state based on the rule of one ethnic group would be steeped in racist public policies. But the sheer scope of Israel's institutional oppression of Africans shocked human rights activists imprisoned for attempting to deliver humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. “The first day I was there, I witnessed 500 Africans scooped from the streets of Tel Aviv thrown into prison,” said a Black British activist. “The prison population continues to grow daily with Africans falling victim to the Israeli judiciary system.”
07/21/2009
by Voice Online, UK
“Africans, like Palestinians, are being persecuted by the Israeli government.”
Black British filmmaker Ishmahil Blagrove has launched an outspoken attack against the “racist” Israeli government after being abducted from the high seas and imprisoned for seven days.
Jamaica-born Blagrove, who lives in West London, was one of six British nationals taking part in a mercy mission to Gaza who were seized from the vessel Spirit of Humanity on June 30 by Israeli military forces.
The ship, which Blagrove says was illegally boarded in international waters, was bringing a cargo of medicines, children’s toys and reconstruction materials to the devastated people of Gaza.
“I’m not concerned with the time that I spent in jail because I am now free, however, there are still thousands of people being persecuted as we speak,” said Blagrove.
“I went on the voyage to deliver medical aid, toys and film a documentary about Palestinians living in Gaza post the 22-day bombing last year however, I was unable to fulfill my mission and have now returned with a bigger story to tell. Africans, like Palestinians, are being persecuted by the Israeli governmentand the world needs to know.”
Sailing from Larnaca, Cyprus, with a crew of 21 human rights activists, humanitarian workers and journalists from 11 different countries, those on board included Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
“We were surrounded by four Zodiac Special Forces, which are Israeli gunships.”
Blagrove told how Israeli warships surrounded their vessel threatening to open fire if they did not turn back.
“We were 18 miles of the coast of Gaza and 23 miles outside the international water boundaries. The Israelis made contact with us via radio at approximately 1.30 am. Our ship had been given security clearance by the port authorities in Cyprus so we posed no threat, yet the Israeli government insisted that we aborted our journey.
“When we refused to be intimidated, they jammed our instrumentation and blocked our GPS, radar, and navigation systems, putting our lives at risk.
“Before we knew it we were surrounded by four Zodiac Special Forces, which are Israeli gunships and helicopters were also flying over our heads. They stormed our ship and took us against our will to Ashdod Port in Israel.
“They confiscated and destroyed all our equipment including all our medical aid and toys and eventually we were all taken to Ramla High Security Prison where we were imprisoned.”
“Most astonishingly the prison was full of black Africans.”
Describing his experience inside Ramla, Blagrove said: “Without insulting the memory of those that have survived the Nazi concentration camps, the prison we were kept in can only be described in that manor. But most astonishingly the prison was full of black Africans. I was absolutely dumbfounded!
“Israel operates under a right-wing racist government that discriminates anyone that is non-Jewish.
“The first day I was there, I witnessed 500 Africans scooped from the streets of Tel Aviv thrown into prison. The next day 300 more Africans were taken in and the prison population continues to grow daily with Africans falling victim to the Israeli judiciary system.
“There were Africans from the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Ethiopia and so on. The prison population in Israel is 90 percent black, which is why I was so welcomed by fellow inmates. There are thousands upon thousands of Africans inside the Israeli prisons.
“I was told atrocious stories. Real harrowing tales and countless inmates that have been transferred from one prison to the other informed me and that every prison is the same and the government is refusing to send them back to their own country.”
“I witnessed 500 Africans scooped from the streets of Tel Aviv thrown into prison.”
Haunted by the conditions of the prison, he said: “I shared a seven foot by seven foot cell with 14 others. We were constantly being barked at and threatened with physical abuse. If you disobey, prisoners are stripped naked and put inside a hole with no lights or heating. We were seen as sub-human.
“In the corner of the room there was a white plastic bag full of single slices of bread, which was our breakfast, lunch and dinner. If we were lucky they occasional gave us a cup of yoghurt to share.
“The toilets are two tubes and to pass your waste you have to aim and squat. The smell was indescribable because it was a mixture of sweat, urine and feces.”
Explaining that the government officials tried to force him to sign documents in Hebrew, which is illegal as all prisoners must be able to understand what they are consenting too, Blagrove said: “My fellow passengers and I were only kept for seven days because they knew the world was watching.”
“I shared a seven foot by seven foot cell with 14 others.”
Quoting Martin Luther King, Blagrove stated: “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I want people to realize that social injustice is an international struggle and one man’s suffering in any region around the world cannot be ignored by others.
The filmmaker, who is currently make a documentary about African roots in Cuba, added: “The Israeli government has been very clever in stopping the truth being told about their regime because whenever anybody speaks out they are instantly labeled anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish.
“I challenge anybody to go and investigate the crimes against humanity inside Israeli prisons and the people of Gaza.”
“I am disturbed that the mainstream British media, and in particular the BBC, has chosen to ignore what is taking place in Israel.
“If we had been kidnapped by Iranians it would have been front page on every newspaper and David Milliband would have made a public statement including Gordon Brown and Barack Obama.
“There is a conspiracy of silence to protect Israel from the crimes it commits. The biggest lie ever told is that Israel is defending themselves from Palestinians who are trying to kill them. Until people broaden their minds and really unearth the truth this problem will not go away.”
“My Hell in an Israeli Jail”: Israel Prison Population 90 Percent Black Africans
It should come as no surprise that a settler state based on the rule of one ethnic group would be steeped in racist public policies. But the sheer scope of Israel's institutional oppression of Africans shocked human rights activists imprisoned for attempting to deliver humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. “The first day I was there, I witnessed 500 Africans scooped from the streets of Tel Aviv thrown into prison,” said a Black British activist. “The prison population continues to grow daily with Africans falling victim to the Israeli judiciary system.”
07/21/2009
by Voice Online, UK
“Africans, like Palestinians, are being persecuted by the Israeli government.”
Black British filmmaker Ishmahil Blagrove has launched an outspoken attack against the “racist” Israeli government after being abducted from the high seas and imprisoned for seven days.
Jamaica-born Blagrove, who lives in West London, was one of six British nationals taking part in a mercy mission to Gaza who were seized from the vessel Spirit of Humanity on June 30 by Israeli military forces.
The ship, which Blagrove says was illegally boarded in international waters, was bringing a cargo of medicines, children’s toys and reconstruction materials to the devastated people of Gaza.
“I’m not concerned with the time that I spent in jail because I am now free, however, there are still thousands of people being persecuted as we speak,” said Blagrove.
“I went on the voyage to deliver medical aid, toys and film a documentary about Palestinians living in Gaza post the 22-day bombing last year however, I was unable to fulfill my mission and have now returned with a bigger story to tell. Africans, like Palestinians, are being persecuted by the Israeli governmentand the world needs to know.”
Sailing from Larnaca, Cyprus, with a crew of 21 human rights activists, humanitarian workers and journalists from 11 different countries, those on board included Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
“We were surrounded by four Zodiac Special Forces, which are Israeli gunships.”
Blagrove told how Israeli warships surrounded their vessel threatening to open fire if they did not turn back.
“We were 18 miles of the coast of Gaza and 23 miles outside the international water boundaries. The Israelis made contact with us via radio at approximately 1.30 am. Our ship had been given security clearance by the port authorities in Cyprus so we posed no threat, yet the Israeli government insisted that we aborted our journey.
“When we refused to be intimidated, they jammed our instrumentation and blocked our GPS, radar, and navigation systems, putting our lives at risk.
“Before we knew it we were surrounded by four Zodiac Special Forces, which are Israeli gunships and helicopters were also flying over our heads. They stormed our ship and took us against our will to Ashdod Port in Israel.
“They confiscated and destroyed all our equipment including all our medical aid and toys and eventually we were all taken to Ramla High Security Prison where we were imprisoned.”
“Most astonishingly the prison was full of black Africans.”
Describing his experience inside Ramla, Blagrove said: “Without insulting the memory of those that have survived the Nazi concentration camps, the prison we were kept in can only be described in that manor. But most astonishingly the prison was full of black Africans. I was absolutely dumbfounded!
“Israel operates under a right-wing racist government that discriminates anyone that is non-Jewish.
“The first day I was there, I witnessed 500 Africans scooped from the streets of Tel Aviv thrown into prison. The next day 300 more Africans were taken in and the prison population continues to grow daily with Africans falling victim to the Israeli judiciary system.
“There were Africans from the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Ethiopia and so on. The prison population in Israel is 90 percent black, which is why I was so welcomed by fellow inmates. There are thousands upon thousands of Africans inside the Israeli prisons.
“I was told atrocious stories. Real harrowing tales and countless inmates that have been transferred from one prison to the other informed me and that every prison is the same and the government is refusing to send them back to their own country.”
“I witnessed 500 Africans scooped from the streets of Tel Aviv thrown into prison.”
Haunted by the conditions of the prison, he said: “I shared a seven foot by seven foot cell with 14 others. We were constantly being barked at and threatened with physical abuse. If you disobey, prisoners are stripped naked and put inside a hole with no lights or heating. We were seen as sub-human.
“In the corner of the room there was a white plastic bag full of single slices of bread, which was our breakfast, lunch and dinner. If we were lucky they occasional gave us a cup of yoghurt to share.
“The toilets are two tubes and to pass your waste you have to aim and squat. The smell was indescribable because it was a mixture of sweat, urine and feces.”
Explaining that the government officials tried to force him to sign documents in Hebrew, which is illegal as all prisoners must be able to understand what they are consenting too, Blagrove said: “My fellow passengers and I were only kept for seven days because they knew the world was watching.”
“I shared a seven foot by seven foot cell with 14 others.”
Quoting Martin Luther King, Blagrove stated: “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I want people to realize that social injustice is an international struggle and one man’s suffering in any region around the world cannot be ignored by others.
The filmmaker, who is currently make a documentary about African roots in Cuba, added: “The Israeli government has been very clever in stopping the truth being told about their regime because whenever anybody speaks out they are instantly labeled anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish.
“I challenge anybody to go and investigate the crimes against humanity inside Israeli prisons and the people of Gaza.”
“I am disturbed that the mainstream British media, and in particular the BBC, has chosen to ignore what is taking place in Israel.
“If we had been kidnapped by Iranians it would have been front page on every newspaper and David Milliband would have made a public statement including Gordon Brown and Barack Obama.
“There is a conspiracy of silence to protect Israel from the crimes it commits. The biggest lie ever told is that Israel is defending themselves from Palestinians who are trying to kill them. Until people broaden their minds and really unearth the truth this problem will not go away.”
Sunday, March 1, 2009
The Day the Music Died
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1037&Itemid=1
The Day the Music Died: Malcolm X's Assassination
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
by Roland Sheppard
"When I looked up, I saw Malcolm X standing up and glaring down at one of his assassins. At that point, from the corner of my eye, nearby to my left, I saw a flash from a gun as I watched Malcolm X fall down and back about ten feet."
An earlier edited version of this article appeared in the San Francisco BayView National Black Newspaper.
"It was the saddest day of my life."
In the afternoon, on January 21, 1965, I went to the Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm X speak. I also went to sell the newspaper, The Militant, a radical newspaper, which at that time, printed the truth about Malcolm X, his speeches, and publicly defended him.
When I got to the Ballroom, things were radically different -- there were no cops. (Normally Malcolm's meetings in Harlem were crawling with cops.) As I was selling papers, Malcolm X approached the Audubon Ballroom, I offered to sell him the latest issue, but he told me, "not today Roland, I am alone and in a hurry."
A while later, as I entered the meeting room I again did not see any cops. I went in to sit down, where I normally sat along with the rest of the press in the front and the left side of the room. On the way to my seat, Gene Roberts, who later surfaced as a police agent member of the Black Panther Party, told me that I could not sit at my regular place, but on that day I had to sit in the front row on the right side of the hall, facing the stage.
As I sat down, I glanced over, to where I normally sat, and saw a large Black man, with a Navy Blue-gray trench coat. When the meeting started all was quiet, as the crowd listened to Benjamin X introducing Malcolm X.
When Malcolm approached the podium, he gave the normal Muslim greeting for peace, at that point a disturbance occurred in the room. Two men were standing about halfway back in the room and to the right of the Malcolm on stage. One was shouting "Get your hand out of my pocket." Malcolm was trying to calm things down, when the men, one later identified as Talmadge Hayer, started running down the aisle shouting and firing a pistol at Malcolm and ran out the exit doors by the stage, to the right of Malcolm X.
"I saw a flash from a gun as I watched Malcolm X fall down and back about ten feet."
Suddenly I heard gunshots fired from all over the place, and I instinctively hit the floor. When I looked up, I saw Malcolm X standing up and glaring down at one of his assassins. At that point, from the corner of my eye, nearby to my left, I saw a flash from a gun as I watched Malcolm X fall down and back about ten feet. In that instant, when Malcolm died before my eyes, I suddenly realized how big he was and I realized that he was a giant in stature, in the world. This vision of Malcolm X, being assassinated, has haunted me till this day. (The fatal blast, which I later found out to be from a shotgun, came from the area where I had seen the large Black man, with a Navy Blue-gray trench coat!)
When I left the hall, Malcolm's bodyguards told me that they had caught two of the assassins, one who was shot (Talmadge Hayer) and one whom the police took away.
A few weeks later, when I was questioned in the Harlem Police station, I was shown a series of photos of people whom I recognized as members of the Nation of Islam or Malcolm's organization. I also saw a picture of the large Black man, with a Navy Blue-gray trench coat, that I had seen at the Audubon Ballroom. I was thinking of how to respond to the cops and how to say that I did not recognize the photos of Malcolm's friends and supporters and the members of the Nation of Islam.
I then told the cops that I had to go to the rest room. When I got to the men's room door, I saw the same large Black man, coming out of the men's room, that I had seen in the Audubon Ballroom and in the photos that were just shown to me. Then he walked by me, he walked past the desks of the secretary pool, and went to his office inside the police station! At that point I knew that he and the government either killed Malcolm X or were part of the assassination plot. I became very nervous thinking about what I was going to say to the cops when I got back and how I was going to get out of the station alive. I then came up with, "I can not recognize anyone, for all Black people look the same." The cops nodded in agreement and I was then allowed to leave the police station.
"At that point I knew that he and the government either killed Malcolm X or were part of the assassination plot."
Malcolm X was my one of my heroes. He was the most honest mass leader that I have ever known or seen. He was a great orator and his speeches seemed like a conversation between himself and the audience. His speeches were like music to my ear and have inspired me for the rest of my life in the fight for social justice.
He was so human in his orations, I still remember him when made the Harlem 'Hate Gang' Scare speech at The Militant Labor Forum, on May 29, 1964 and other speeches when he chuckled a 'heh heh' when he was about to make a special comment. At that Forum he said: "It's impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg... The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. It is impossible for it , as it now stands, to produce freedom right now for the Black man in this country - it is impossible. And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, (heh heh) I'm certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken. (heh heh)"
Both he and Martin Luther King had come to similar positions about capitalism and the Vietnam War at the time of their death. That is why this government assassinated them. No one has followed in their footsteps. From the point of view of this government, the world leader in political assassinations, the two assassinations worked. For to this day, no mass leader has had the courage to pick up where they left off. They were able to silence the art, science, and truth, of these two great orators. To me, February 21st is "The day the Music Died." It was the saddest day of my life.
Roland Sheppard is a writer and activist and former BA of the Painters Union in San Francisco. Email him at rolandsheppard@gmail.com and visit his website, http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret.
The Day the Music Died: Malcolm X's Assassination
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
by Roland Sheppard
"When I looked up, I saw Malcolm X standing up and glaring down at one of his assassins. At that point, from the corner of my eye, nearby to my left, I saw a flash from a gun as I watched Malcolm X fall down and back about ten feet."
An earlier edited version of this article appeared in the San Francisco BayView National Black Newspaper.
"It was the saddest day of my life."
In the afternoon, on January 21, 1965, I went to the Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm X speak. I also went to sell the newspaper, The Militant, a radical newspaper, which at that time, printed the truth about Malcolm X, his speeches, and publicly defended him.
When I got to the Ballroom, things were radically different -- there were no cops. (Normally Malcolm's meetings in Harlem were crawling with cops.) As I was selling papers, Malcolm X approached the Audubon Ballroom, I offered to sell him the latest issue, but he told me, "not today Roland, I am alone and in a hurry."
A while later, as I entered the meeting room I again did not see any cops. I went in to sit down, where I normally sat along with the rest of the press in the front and the left side of the room. On the way to my seat, Gene Roberts, who later surfaced as a police agent member of the Black Panther Party, told me that I could not sit at my regular place, but on that day I had to sit in the front row on the right side of the hall, facing the stage.
As I sat down, I glanced over, to where I normally sat, and saw a large Black man, with a Navy Blue-gray trench coat. When the meeting started all was quiet, as the crowd listened to Benjamin X introducing Malcolm X.
When Malcolm approached the podium, he gave the normal Muslim greeting for peace, at that point a disturbance occurred in the room. Two men were standing about halfway back in the room and to the right of the Malcolm on stage. One was shouting "Get your hand out of my pocket." Malcolm was trying to calm things down, when the men, one later identified as Talmadge Hayer, started running down the aisle shouting and firing a pistol at Malcolm and ran out the exit doors by the stage, to the right of Malcolm X.
"I saw a flash from a gun as I watched Malcolm X fall down and back about ten feet."
Suddenly I heard gunshots fired from all over the place, and I instinctively hit the floor. When I looked up, I saw Malcolm X standing up and glaring down at one of his assassins. At that point, from the corner of my eye, nearby to my left, I saw a flash from a gun as I watched Malcolm X fall down and back about ten feet. In that instant, when Malcolm died before my eyes, I suddenly realized how big he was and I realized that he was a giant in stature, in the world. This vision of Malcolm X, being assassinated, has haunted me till this day. (The fatal blast, which I later found out to be from a shotgun, came from the area where I had seen the large Black man, with a Navy Blue-gray trench coat!)
When I left the hall, Malcolm's bodyguards told me that they had caught two of the assassins, one who was shot (Talmadge Hayer) and one whom the police took away.
A few weeks later, when I was questioned in the Harlem Police station, I was shown a series of photos of people whom I recognized as members of the Nation of Islam or Malcolm's organization. I also saw a picture of the large Black man, with a Navy Blue-gray trench coat, that I had seen at the Audubon Ballroom. I was thinking of how to respond to the cops and how to say that I did not recognize the photos of Malcolm's friends and supporters and the members of the Nation of Islam.
I then told the cops that I had to go to the rest room. When I got to the men's room door, I saw the same large Black man, coming out of the men's room, that I had seen in the Audubon Ballroom and in the photos that were just shown to me. Then he walked by me, he walked past the desks of the secretary pool, and went to his office inside the police station! At that point I knew that he and the government either killed Malcolm X or were part of the assassination plot. I became very nervous thinking about what I was going to say to the cops when I got back and how I was going to get out of the station alive. I then came up with, "I can not recognize anyone, for all Black people look the same." The cops nodded in agreement and I was then allowed to leave the police station.
"At that point I knew that he and the government either killed Malcolm X or were part of the assassination plot."
Malcolm X was my one of my heroes. He was the most honest mass leader that I have ever known or seen. He was a great orator and his speeches seemed like a conversation between himself and the audience. His speeches were like music to my ear and have inspired me for the rest of my life in the fight for social justice.
He was so human in his orations, I still remember him when made the Harlem 'Hate Gang' Scare speech at The Militant Labor Forum, on May 29, 1964 and other speeches when he chuckled a 'heh heh' when he was about to make a special comment. At that Forum he said: "It's impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg... The system of this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. It is impossible for it , as it now stands, to produce freedom right now for the Black man in this country - it is impossible. And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, (heh heh) I'm certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken. (heh heh)"
Both he and Martin Luther King had come to similar positions about capitalism and the Vietnam War at the time of their death. That is why this government assassinated them. No one has followed in their footsteps. From the point of view of this government, the world leader in political assassinations, the two assassinations worked. For to this day, no mass leader has had the courage to pick up where they left off. They were able to silence the art, science, and truth, of these two great orators. To me, February 21st is "The day the Music Died." It was the saddest day of my life.
Roland Sheppard is a writer and activist and former BA of the Painters Union in San Francisco. Email him at rolandsheppard@gmail.com and visit his website, http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Celebrities Compare Obama To Biblical Figures
http://www.prisonplanet.com/celebrities-onlookers-compare-obama-to-biblical-figures.html
Celebrities, Onlookers Compare Obama To Biblical Figures
Messianic symbolism pushed by corporate media
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, Jan 21st, 2009
In a frightening confirmation of the new president’s dangerously inflated “messianic” status, inaugural attendees yesterday described Obama as having changed their lives, comparing him to Biblical apostles.
Celebrities, including Jay-Z, Smokey Robinson, Don King, Denzel Washington, and Oprah Winfrey, spoke in the hours before the inauguration just a few feet from the rostrum where Obama was sworn-in as the nation’s 44th president, CNS News reports.
They spoke about how Obama had changed their lives and which Biblical character they think he most resembles, the report states.
“I would say that he would be Joshua going across to the Promised Land,” Boxing promoter Don King said. “Martin Luther King Jr. went to the mountaintop like Moses, and he said, ‘I might not get there with you, but I can see the Promised Land.’ But we gonna’ get to the Promised Land. So Joshua carried them across. Martin Luther King, Jr. was prevented from going into the Promised Land.”
R&B singer Smokey Robinson described Obama as a “world leader” and said that “There are so many Biblical figures who had the same task,” as the new president.
“If you are an American citizen, he has changed all of our lives.” the songwriter added, comments that were echoed by hip hopper Jay Z who said “Obama changed my life in the same way he has changed your life,”.
Lennis Washington, the mother of actor Denzel Washington described Obama as being like any of the biblical leaders. “The apostle Paul, Moses, John the Baptist – any one of them. Seriously, he is like one of those apostles for our day. He came to lead us to the original design of what we are supposed to do on this earth.” she said.
The actor himself, to his credit, refused to compare the new president to a religious icon.
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who has previously described Obama as having “evolved to a higher plane”, admitted Obama had changed her life and commented “He makes me want to be a better human being.”
Yesterday we reported on how flocks of celebrities are encouraging Americans to “pledge service” to Obama, a disturbing notion given the fact that Obama has promised to found a “national civilian security force” and institute forms of compulsory community service for all Americans.
The fervor with which Obama is being received by portions of the American public is reaching a frightening level. It has come to the point where the new president is literally being painted as the anointed savior of humanity.
The symbolism evident during yesterday’s Inauguration was entirely overwhelming, the desperate throngs of people, the tears, people reaching out and looking to the heavens with unremitting expressions of relief and joy.
The image of Obama as Messiah is being pushed evermore by the corporate media. The London Telegraph reports that a vast amount of pictures taken over the past few days and weeks have shown the new president and his wife with a light source behind him so that light is thrown around his head like a halo. “Obviously this plays well for the image of Obama the messiah and it can result in some stunning pictures.” the newspaper comments.
Meanwhile, headlines around the world declare “America has its messiah“, “Obama offers hope to an ailing world“, “The savior America needs?” etc etc.
Of course, the most dangerous aspect to all this is that if you treat a man like a God, he will soon come to think of himself as one.
Celebrities, Onlookers Compare Obama To Biblical Figures
Messianic symbolism pushed by corporate media
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, Jan 21st, 2009
In a frightening confirmation of the new president’s dangerously inflated “messianic” status, inaugural attendees yesterday described Obama as having changed their lives, comparing him to Biblical apostles.
Celebrities, including Jay-Z, Smokey Robinson, Don King, Denzel Washington, and Oprah Winfrey, spoke in the hours before the inauguration just a few feet from the rostrum where Obama was sworn-in as the nation’s 44th president, CNS News reports.
They spoke about how Obama had changed their lives and which Biblical character they think he most resembles, the report states.
“I would say that he would be Joshua going across to the Promised Land,” Boxing promoter Don King said. “Martin Luther King Jr. went to the mountaintop like Moses, and he said, ‘I might not get there with you, but I can see the Promised Land.’ But we gonna’ get to the Promised Land. So Joshua carried them across. Martin Luther King, Jr. was prevented from going into the Promised Land.”
R&B singer Smokey Robinson described Obama as a “world leader” and said that “There are so many Biblical figures who had the same task,” as the new president.
“If you are an American citizen, he has changed all of our lives.” the songwriter added, comments that were echoed by hip hopper Jay Z who said “Obama changed my life in the same way he has changed your life,”.
Lennis Washington, the mother of actor Denzel Washington described Obama as being like any of the biblical leaders. “The apostle Paul, Moses, John the Baptist – any one of them. Seriously, he is like one of those apostles for our day. He came to lead us to the original design of what we are supposed to do on this earth.” she said.
The actor himself, to his credit, refused to compare the new president to a religious icon.
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who has previously described Obama as having “evolved to a higher plane”, admitted Obama had changed her life and commented “He makes me want to be a better human being.”
Yesterday we reported on how flocks of celebrities are encouraging Americans to “pledge service” to Obama, a disturbing notion given the fact that Obama has promised to found a “national civilian security force” and institute forms of compulsory community service for all Americans.
The fervor with which Obama is being received by portions of the American public is reaching a frightening level. It has come to the point where the new president is literally being painted as the anointed savior of humanity.
The symbolism evident during yesterday’s Inauguration was entirely overwhelming, the desperate throngs of people, the tears, people reaching out and looking to the heavens with unremitting expressions of relief and joy.
The image of Obama as Messiah is being pushed evermore by the corporate media. The London Telegraph reports that a vast amount of pictures taken over the past few days and weeks have shown the new president and his wife with a light source behind him so that light is thrown around his head like a halo. “Obviously this plays well for the image of Obama the messiah and it can result in some stunning pictures.” the newspaper comments.
Meanwhile, headlines around the world declare “America has its messiah“, “Obama offers hope to an ailing world“, “The savior America needs?” etc etc.
Of course, the most dangerous aspect to all this is that if you treat a man like a God, he will soon come to think of himself as one.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Beware of the Obama hype
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=511
Beware of the Obama hype. What 'change' in America really means
12 Nov 2008
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger writes that the lauding of Barack Obama has a history and that 'historical moments' ought to be less about their symbolism and accompanying histrionics than what they really mean. The question is: what is Obama's true relation to unchanging American myths about the imposition of its notorious power?
My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of president John F Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south, following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the Midlothian Mirror. Except for his drawl and fine boots, everything about Penn was the antithesis of the Texas stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official version of Kennedy’s murder.
This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented, before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose “professionalism” and “objectivity” carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth. Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic. Read American Dreams: Lost and Found by the masterly Studs Terkel, who died the other day, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute enlightened views to a majority who believe that “government should care for those who cannot care for themselves” and are prepared to pay higher taxes for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their troops out of other people’s countries.
Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the history of the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.
That is the subtext of Barack Obama’s “oratory”. He says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama’s election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting from America since 4 November (e.g. "liberal Americans smiled and the world smiled with them") but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the “bailout” of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.
Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush to continue his blood fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama never said the illegal invasion of Iraq was wrong, merely that it was a “mistake”. Thereafter, he voted in to give Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama’s election is historic, a symbol of great change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a liberal Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to “investigate” and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush’s secretary of state, Powell was often described as a “liberal” and was considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice.
Obama’s first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an “Israel-first” Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians – an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people’s loathing of the United States and the spawning of jihadism.
No serious scrutiny of this is permitted within the histrionics of Obamamania, just as no serious scrutiny of the betrayal of the majority of black South Africans was permitted within the “Mandela moment”. This is especially marked in Britain, where America’s divine right to “lead” is important to elite British interests. The once respected Observer newspaper, which supported Bush’s war in Iraq, echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that “America has restored the world’s faith in its ideals”. These “ideals”, which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children.
None of this was uttered during the election campaign. Had it been allowed, there might even have been recognition that liberalism as a narrow, supremely arrogant, war-making ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Prior to Blair’s criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and his media mystics. “Blair can be a beacon to the world,” declared the Guardian in 1997. “[He is] turning leadership into an art form.”
Today, merely insert “Obama”. As for historic moments, there is another that has gone unreported but is well under way – liberal democracy’s shift towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity, with the media as its clichéd façade. “True democracy,” wrote Penn Jones Jr, the Texas truth-teller, “is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you’re meant to think and keeping your eyes wide open at all times.”
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Making Sense of the 60s
Making Sense of the 60s
October 3-5, 2008
Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is hosting a three-day conference on the assassinations of the sixties, dealing largely with the latest evidence regarding the conspiracies in these cases, which have had lasting effects on our politics for the last nearly half a century.
I know most of you live far from this venue, but if you can come, this should be an event well worth the time and expense.
Here’s the info on the conference, for any with an interest in attending:
http://www.duq.edu/makingsense/
This is the list of people I’m sharing the stage with. I’m really thrilled and honored to be a part of this crowd. I’m also one of only two women speaking on this subject, something I hope changes in the years to come.
Gary L. Aguilar, M.D.
Head, Division of Ophthalmology, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco
Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco
Assistant Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, Stanford University Medical Center
The Honorable Joe Brown
Host, Judge Joe Brown
Former State Criminal Court Judge, Shelby County, TN (presided over James Earl Ray appeals)
Ted Charach
Writer/Director, The Second Gun
Roger Bruce Feinman, J.D.
Independent JFK Assassination Researcher
Former Attorney and CBS News Production Assistant
Isaac Farris, Jr.
CEO, The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Nephew, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Robert J. Groden
Author, High Treason and The Killing of the President
Former Staff Photographic Consultant, U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations
Godfrey Isaac, Esq.
Former Counsel to Sirhan Sirhan
The Honorable Robert J. Joling, J.D.
Fellow and Past President, American Academy of Forensic Sciences
Founder and Former Chair, Forensic Science Foundation
Co-author, An Open & Shut Case
Robert Blair Kaiser
Author, R.F.K. Must Die! Chasing the Mystery of the Robert Kennedy Assassination
William Matson Law
Co-producer, RFK
Henry C. Lee, Ph.D.
Chief Emeritus, Connecticut Department of Public Safety, Division of Scientific Services
James H. Lesar, Esq.
Freedom of Information Act Attorney, Washington, D.C.
President, Assassination Archives and Research Center
Former Counsel to James Earl Ray
Joan Mellen, Ph.D.
Author, Jim Garrison: His Life and Times, The Early Years and A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case that Should Have Changed History
Professor of English, Temple University
Shane O’Sullivan
Author, Who Killed Bobby?
Writer, Director and Producer, RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy
Lisa Pease
Chief Archivist, Real History Archives
Co-author/co-editor, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X
William F. Pepper, Esq.
Counsel to Sirhan Sirhan
Former Counsel to James Earl Ray
Author, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King and Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King
Erik Randich, Ph.D.
President, Forensic Materials International
Paul Schrade
Former RFK Campaign Aide (wounded during RFK assassination)
Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
Author, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (2003), The Road to 9/11 (2007) and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (2008)
David Talbot
Author, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
Founder and Former Editor in Chief, salon.com
Philip Van Praag
Co-author, An Open & Shut Case
Electrical engineer and author, Evolution of the Audio Recorder
Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.
Forensic Pathology Consultant, Author and Lecturer, Cyril H. Wecht & Pathology Associates
Former Coroner, Allegheny County
Member, Forensic Pathology Panel, U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations
Consultant, JFK
David R. Wrone, Ph.D.
Author, The Zapruder Film
Former Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point
I hope you are well, and would love to hear from you, especially those of you whom I haven’t talked to in a very long time!
Lisa Pease
lpease@gte.net
Blog: http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/
Site: http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/
Book: The Assassinations
***
http://www.duq.edu/makingsense/
Forty years after the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, and 45 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, questions still abound about both the circumstances and impact of their murders.
Following up on its historic 2003 conference on the JFK assassination, The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law this fall is convening many of the top experts on the JFK, RFK and MLK cases for three days of presentations and panel discussions.
About the Symposium
Forty years after the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, and 45 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, questions still abound about both the circumstances and impact of their murders.
Were these shootings really just the acts of lone gunmen, as the history books have so long advocated? Or are there clues in these crimes that might yet prove what so many seem to believe -- that James Earl Ray, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone?
On the cusp of another historic presidential election, voters and historians alike ponder why these men died, what they might have become, and what their political legacies are today.
Following up on its historic 2003 conference on the JFK assassination, The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law this fall is convening many of the top experts on the JFK, RFK and MLK cases for three days of presentations and panel discussions.
From matters of ballistics and trajectories to questions of conspiracy and cover-up, these three cases present fascinating and important topics for students of all ages and disciplines.
The Wecht Institute
It is the mission of The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law to create and support multidisciplinary courses of degree and non-degree study designed to educate students about the vast applications and reach of the forensic sciences in today’s society.
The Wecht Institute seeks to inform the local and national communities about the revolutionary impact of the forensic sciences through scholarship, conferences, seminars, workshops and publications. It also seeks to engender in all of its participants a multidisciplinary approach to applying science to the law in our collective search for the truth.
Pittsburgh 250
Pittsburgh 250 is much more than a birthday party. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to encourage people inside and outside our region to imagine a bright future here. We are celebrating an important milestone in American history – the 1758 Forbes Campaign that led to the naming of Pittsburgh, and the founding of Bedford, Ligonier and other communities west of Carlisle – and the 250 years of innovation and accomplishment that have followed.
October 3-5, 2008
Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is hosting a three-day conference on the assassinations of the sixties, dealing largely with the latest evidence regarding the conspiracies in these cases, which have had lasting effects on our politics for the last nearly half a century.
I know most of you live far from this venue, but if you can come, this should be an event well worth the time and expense.
Here’s the info on the conference, for any with an interest in attending:
http://www.duq.edu/makingsense/
This is the list of people I’m sharing the stage with. I’m really thrilled and honored to be a part of this crowd. I’m also one of only two women speaking on this subject, something I hope changes in the years to come.
Gary L. Aguilar, M.D.
Head, Division of Ophthalmology, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco
Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco
Assistant Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, Stanford University Medical Center
The Honorable Joe Brown
Host, Judge Joe Brown
Former State Criminal Court Judge, Shelby County, TN (presided over James Earl Ray appeals)
Ted Charach
Writer/Director, The Second Gun
Roger Bruce Feinman, J.D.
Independent JFK Assassination Researcher
Former Attorney and CBS News Production Assistant
Isaac Farris, Jr.
CEO, The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Nephew, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Robert J. Groden
Author, High Treason and The Killing of the President
Former Staff Photographic Consultant, U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations
Godfrey Isaac, Esq.
Former Counsel to Sirhan Sirhan
The Honorable Robert J. Joling, J.D.
Fellow and Past President, American Academy of Forensic Sciences
Founder and Former Chair, Forensic Science Foundation
Co-author, An Open & Shut Case
Robert Blair Kaiser
Author, R.F.K. Must Die! Chasing the Mystery of the Robert Kennedy Assassination
William Matson Law
Co-producer, RFK
Henry C. Lee, Ph.D.
Chief Emeritus, Connecticut Department of Public Safety, Division of Scientific Services
James H. Lesar, Esq.
Freedom of Information Act Attorney, Washington, D.C.
President, Assassination Archives and Research Center
Former Counsel to James Earl Ray
Joan Mellen, Ph.D.
Author, Jim Garrison: His Life and Times, The Early Years and A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case that Should Have Changed History
Professor of English, Temple University
Shane O’Sullivan
Author, Who Killed Bobby?
Writer, Director and Producer, RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy
Lisa Pease
Chief Archivist, Real History Archives
Co-author/co-editor, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X
William F. Pepper, Esq.
Counsel to Sirhan Sirhan
Former Counsel to James Earl Ray
Author, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King and Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King
Erik Randich, Ph.D.
President, Forensic Materials International
Paul Schrade
Former RFK Campaign Aide (wounded during RFK assassination)
Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
Author, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (2003), The Road to 9/11 (2007) and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (2008)
David Talbot
Author, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years
Founder and Former Editor in Chief, salon.com
Philip Van Praag
Co-author, An Open & Shut Case
Electrical engineer and author, Evolution of the Audio Recorder
Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D.
Forensic Pathology Consultant, Author and Lecturer, Cyril H. Wecht & Pathology Associates
Former Coroner, Allegheny County
Member, Forensic Pathology Panel, U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations
Consultant, JFK
David R. Wrone, Ph.D.
Author, The Zapruder Film
Former Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point
I hope you are well, and would love to hear from you, especially those of you whom I haven’t talked to in a very long time!
Lisa Pease
lpease@gte.net
Blog: http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/
Site: http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/
Book: The Assassinations
***
http://www.duq.edu/makingsense/
Forty years after the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, and 45 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, questions still abound about both the circumstances and impact of their murders.
Following up on its historic 2003 conference on the JFK assassination, The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law this fall is convening many of the top experts on the JFK, RFK and MLK cases for three days of presentations and panel discussions.
About the Symposium
Forty years after the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, and 45 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, questions still abound about both the circumstances and impact of their murders.
Were these shootings really just the acts of lone gunmen, as the history books have so long advocated? Or are there clues in these crimes that might yet prove what so many seem to believe -- that James Earl Ray, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone?
On the cusp of another historic presidential election, voters and historians alike ponder why these men died, what they might have become, and what their political legacies are today.
Following up on its historic 2003 conference on the JFK assassination, The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law this fall is convening many of the top experts on the JFK, RFK and MLK cases for three days of presentations and panel discussions.
From matters of ballistics and trajectories to questions of conspiracy and cover-up, these three cases present fascinating and important topics for students of all ages and disciplines.
The Wecht Institute
It is the mission of The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law to create and support multidisciplinary courses of degree and non-degree study designed to educate students about the vast applications and reach of the forensic sciences in today’s society.
The Wecht Institute seeks to inform the local and national communities about the revolutionary impact of the forensic sciences through scholarship, conferences, seminars, workshops and publications. It also seeks to engender in all of its participants a multidisciplinary approach to applying science to the law in our collective search for the truth.
Pittsburgh 250
Pittsburgh 250 is much more than a birthday party. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to encourage people inside and outside our region to imagine a bright future here. We are celebrating an important milestone in American history – the 1758 Forbes Campaign that led to the naming of Pittsburgh, and the founding of Bedford, Ligonier and other communities west of Carlisle – and the 250 years of innovation and accomplishment that have followed.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Is Obama the End of Black Politics? Lord, No
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=738&Itemid=1
Is Obama the End of Black Politics? Lord, No
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
by Mel Reeves
The New York Times magazine predicts that Black politics will fade into "mainstream" American politics as happened with the Italians and Irish, conveniently forgetting that "the Irish and Italian machines were white!" Moreover, the article seems to maintain that "electoral politics is the primary form of black political struggle" when "the most significant black struggle has occurred in the streets." Black electoral politicians aren't rated too highly in the ‘hood. "If asked to name black heroes off the top of their heads, most blacks would instantly nominate Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X - neither of whom held elective office."
"The author is clearly out of touch with US history and the history of US race relations."
Through its Sunday magazine, the New York Times asks, "Is Obama the end of black politics?" The most obvious problem with the question is that it assumes that electoral politics is the primary form of black political struggle. Some clarification is in order.
Most of the struggle for black politics or a black piece of the pie has taken place outside of electoral politics. Rather, the most significant black struggle has occurred in the streets. The long list of black heroes in the quest for justice and equality in the US - the real black politics - includes very few politicians. In fact, if asked to name black heroes off the top of their heads, most blacks would instantly nominate Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X - neither of whom held elective office. If you asked most blacks to name the top ten African Americans of all time, maybe, just maybe, a baby boomer or two would suggest former Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell.
However the author, Matt Bai, limited his version of politics to the electoral kind. With one exception, he ignored everyone on the progressive side of the black spectrum. Clearly, his list of promising black leaders are all elected, relatively conservative Democrats - black politicos such as Newark mayor Cory Booker, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter and Alabama Congressman Artur Davis. Mr. Bai seems to hope that the ascendance of the Booker-Nutter-Davis crowd will put an end to black "whining" - and thus, black politics.
Therefore the very question seeks to put black folks in a box that we should be very careful to avoid. Electoral politics - often a game of placing black faces in previously white places - has at best yielded mixed results in our community. To be fair, black elected officials have a tough job, but they have seldom succeeded in substantially bettering the conditions of poor black folks without the corresponding protests of people in the street. A simple observation of where blacks are located along the misery index will serve to make the point.
"Mr. Bai seems to hope that the ascendance of the Booker-Nutter-Davis crowd will put an end to black ‘whining' - and thus, black politics."
There really is no such thing as a basic conflict between the "civil rights" generation versus the younger (or "Hip Hop") generation in our community. Both generations are confronted with racism. There are, no doubt, generational competitions between those in the electoral milieu who are jockeying for HNIC spots. However, the author is clearly out of touch with US history and the history of US race relations when he suggests that, "the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama's candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle - to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines joined the political mainstream"
The Times writer could at least have waited for the black historical actors to die off before he started revising African American history. First of all: the Irish and Italian machines were white! Mr. Cai is comparing apples and oranges. He is trying to wish into existence an historical transition that has not yet occurred for black people - and my never occur. Yes, there are more opportunities for blacks in America, but the hurdles of race remain extraordinarily high. Just look at the foolishness Barack Obama encounters on an almost daily basis. No matter how much he panders to the fears of whites, a significant percentage are not quite comfortable with the "colored boy." Either the author is an ostrich and has been living with his head in the ground, or a 21st century Rip Van Winkle and has been sleeping through this government's refusal to rectify or even sincerely address the damage done to black citizens by institutional racism. More importantly, the misinformed writer fails to comprehend the importance of the oil of racism to the capitalist machinery.
The most foolish statement of the article came from the mouth Cornell Belcher, an Obama campaigner who declared, with astonishing conceit, "I'm the new black politics. The people I work with are the new black politics. We don't carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but that's just the way it is."
In essence, what the not-so-young brother said, is that he is blind and ahistorical, yet nevertheless he and others like him are going to lead black folks into the new millennium.
An incredibly shallow person, Belcher puts Obama at the center of the African American universe. "Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He's the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that."
No, not-so-young man, the struggle has always been for the full social, economic and political equality of black America as a whole, not for just a few individual and token achievements.
"An incredibly shallow person, Belcher puts Obama at the center of the African American universe."
Ben Jealous, the new elected president of the NAACP, was the only person who made any sense in this very deceptive article when he said, "It's still a human rights struggle. This isn't a struggle that began in the 1930's or 1960's. It's a struggle that began in 1620."
Judging from what we have seen and heard, even if there is a president Obama in the White House in 2009 the struggle will continue. Unless Obama breaks with the political-economic-social system we know as capitalism and attempts to break the bonds of income disparity by redistributing the wealth and providing real equal opportunity and equal access to quality public education, universal health care, full employment, affordable housing, an end to military adventurism, and a fair shake from our justice department, then we will have to keep our marching boots at the ready.
Mel Reeves is an activist living in Miami. He can be contacted at mellaneous19@yahoo.com
Is Obama the End of Black Politics? Lord, No
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
by Mel Reeves
The New York Times magazine predicts that Black politics will fade into "mainstream" American politics as happened with the Italians and Irish, conveniently forgetting that "the Irish and Italian machines were white!" Moreover, the article seems to maintain that "electoral politics is the primary form of black political struggle" when "the most significant black struggle has occurred in the streets." Black electoral politicians aren't rated too highly in the ‘hood. "If asked to name black heroes off the top of their heads, most blacks would instantly nominate Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X - neither of whom held elective office."
"The author is clearly out of touch with US history and the history of US race relations."
Through its Sunday magazine, the New York Times asks, "Is Obama the end of black politics?" The most obvious problem with the question is that it assumes that electoral politics is the primary form of black political struggle. Some clarification is in order.
Most of the struggle for black politics or a black piece of the pie has taken place outside of electoral politics. Rather, the most significant black struggle has occurred in the streets. The long list of black heroes in the quest for justice and equality in the US - the real black politics - includes very few politicians. In fact, if asked to name black heroes off the top of their heads, most blacks would instantly nominate Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X - neither of whom held elective office. If you asked most blacks to name the top ten African Americans of all time, maybe, just maybe, a baby boomer or two would suggest former Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell.
However the author, Matt Bai, limited his version of politics to the electoral kind. With one exception, he ignored everyone on the progressive side of the black spectrum. Clearly, his list of promising black leaders are all elected, relatively conservative Democrats - black politicos such as Newark mayor Cory Booker, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter and Alabama Congressman Artur Davis. Mr. Bai seems to hope that the ascendance of the Booker-Nutter-Davis crowd will put an end to black "whining" - and thus, black politics.
Therefore the very question seeks to put black folks in a box that we should be very careful to avoid. Electoral politics - often a game of placing black faces in previously white places - has at best yielded mixed results in our community. To be fair, black elected officials have a tough job, but they have seldom succeeded in substantially bettering the conditions of poor black folks without the corresponding protests of people in the street. A simple observation of where blacks are located along the misery index will serve to make the point.
"Mr. Bai seems to hope that the ascendance of the Booker-Nutter-Davis crowd will put an end to black ‘whining' - and thus, black politics."
There really is no such thing as a basic conflict between the "civil rights" generation versus the younger (or "Hip Hop") generation in our community. Both generations are confronted with racism. There are, no doubt, generational competitions between those in the electoral milieu who are jockeying for HNIC spots. However, the author is clearly out of touch with US history and the history of US race relations when he suggests that, "the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama's candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle - to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines joined the political mainstream"
The Times writer could at least have waited for the black historical actors to die off before he started revising African American history. First of all: the Irish and Italian machines were white! Mr. Cai is comparing apples and oranges. He is trying to wish into existence an historical transition that has not yet occurred for black people - and my never occur. Yes, there are more opportunities for blacks in America, but the hurdles of race remain extraordinarily high. Just look at the foolishness Barack Obama encounters on an almost daily basis. No matter how much he panders to the fears of whites, a significant percentage are not quite comfortable with the "colored boy." Either the author is an ostrich and has been living with his head in the ground, or a 21st century Rip Van Winkle and has been sleeping through this government's refusal to rectify or even sincerely address the damage done to black citizens by institutional racism. More importantly, the misinformed writer fails to comprehend the importance of the oil of racism to the capitalist machinery.
The most foolish statement of the article came from the mouth Cornell Belcher, an Obama campaigner who declared, with astonishing conceit, "I'm the new black politics. The people I work with are the new black politics. We don't carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but that's just the way it is."
In essence, what the not-so-young brother said, is that he is blind and ahistorical, yet nevertheless he and others like him are going to lead black folks into the new millennium.
An incredibly shallow person, Belcher puts Obama at the center of the African American universe. "Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He's the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that."
No, not-so-young man, the struggle has always been for the full social, economic and political equality of black America as a whole, not for just a few individual and token achievements.
"An incredibly shallow person, Belcher puts Obama at the center of the African American universe."
Ben Jealous, the new elected president of the NAACP, was the only person who made any sense in this very deceptive article when he said, "It's still a human rights struggle. This isn't a struggle that began in the 1930's or 1960's. It's a struggle that began in 1620."
Judging from what we have seen and heard, even if there is a president Obama in the White House in 2009 the struggle will continue. Unless Obama breaks with the political-economic-social system we know as capitalism and attempts to break the bonds of income disparity by redistributing the wealth and providing real equal opportunity and equal access to quality public education, universal health care, full employment, affordable housing, an end to military adventurism, and a fair shake from our justice department, then we will have to keep our marching boots at the ready.
Mel Reeves is an activist living in Miami. He can be contacted at mellaneous19@yahoo.com
Saturday, May 10, 2008
"Why America May Go to Hell"
"Why America May Go to Hell"
The title of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final, undelivered sermon the Sunday after he was assassinated.
The title of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final, undelivered sermon the Sunday after he was assassinated.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/movies/06heston.html
April 6, 2008
Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84
By ROBERT BERKVIST
Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who did not specify a cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had received a diagnosis of neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”
“I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said.
Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.
When the film was released, in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.
Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s Moses.
The same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off screen, for the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as the government’s attempt to infringe on a constitutional guarantee — the right to bear arms.
In Mr. Heston, the N.R.A. found its embodiment of pioneer values — pride, independence and valor. In a speech at the N.R.A.’s annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an N.R.A. bumper sticker (“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands”), he waved a replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, “From my cold, dead hands!”
Mr. Heston’s screen presence was so commanding that he was never dominated by mammoth sets, spectacular effects or throngs of spear-waving extras. In his films, whether playing Buffalo Bill, an airline pilot, a naval captain or the commander of a spaceship, he essentially projected the same image — muscular, steely-eyed, courageous. If critics used terms like “marble-monumental” or “granitic” to describe his acting style, they just as often praised his forthright, no-nonsense characterizations.
After his success in “The Ten Commandments,” Mr. Heston tried a change of pace. Working for another legendary Hollywood director, Orson Welles, he played a Mexican narcotics investigator in the thriller “Touch of Evil,” in which Welles himself played a murderous sheriff in a border town. Also starring Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, the film, a modest success when it opened in 1958, came to be accepted as a noir classic.
A Biblical Specialty
But the following year Mr. Heston stepped back into the world of the biblical epic, this time for the director William Wyler. The movie was “Ben-Hur.” Cast as a prince in ancient Judea who rebels against the rule of Rome, Mr. Heston again dominated the screen. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, he and his co-star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a thrilling duel with whips as their horse-drawn chariots career wheel-to-wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.
“Ben-Hur” won 11 Academy Awards — a record at the time — including those for best picture, best director and, for Mr. Heston, best actor.
He went on to star opposite Sophia Loren in the 1961 film “El Cid,” battling the Moors in medieval Spain. As a Marine officer at the Forbidden City in 1900, he helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in Nicholas Ray’s 1963 epic “55 Days at Peking.” In “Khartoum” (1966), he played Gen. Charles (Chinese) Gordon, who was killed in a desert uprising, led in the film by Laurence Olivier’s Mahdi. When George Stevens produced and directed “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1965, there was Mr. Heston, back in ancient Judea, playing John the Baptist to Max von Sydow’s Jesus.
He portrayed Andrew Jackson twice, in “The President’s Lady” (1953) and “The Buccaneer” (1958). There were westerns (“Major Dundee,” “Will Penny,” “The Mountain Men”), costume dramas (“The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers,” with Mr. Heston as the crafty Cardinal Richelieu in both) and action films aplenty. Whether playing a hard-bitten landowner in an adaptation of James Michener’s novel “The Hawaiians” (1970), or a daring pilot in “Airport 1975,” he could be relied on to give moviegoers their money’s worth.
In 1965 he was cast as Michelangelo in the film version of Irving Stone’s novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Directed by Carol Reed, the film pitted Mr. Heston’s temperamental artist against Rex Harrison’s testy Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to create frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Mr. Heston’s performance took a critical drubbing, but to audiences, the larger-than-life role seemed to be another perfect fit. Mr. Heston once joked: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”
Foray Into the Future
Mr. Heston was catapulted into the distant future in the 1968 science-fiction film “Planet of the Apes,” in which he played an astronaut marooned on a desolate planet and then enslaved by its rulers, a race of anthropomorphic apes. The film was a hit. He reprised the role two years later in the sequel, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”
It was all a long way from Evanston, Ill., where Charlton Carter was born on Oct. 4, 1923, and from the small town of St. Helen, Mich., where his family moved when he was a small boy and where his father ran a lumber mill. He attended a one-room school and learned to fish and hunt and to savor the feeling of being self-reliant in the wild, where his shyness was no handicap.
When his parents divorced in the 1930s and his mother remarried — his stepfather’s surname was Heston — the family moved back to the Chicago suburbs, this time Winnetka. He joined the theater program at his new high school and went on to enroll at Northwestern University on a scholarship. By that time, he was convinced he had found his life’s work.
Mr. Heston also found a fellow drama student, Lydia Clarke, whom he married in 1944, just before he enlisted in the Army Air Forces. He became a radio-gunner and spent three years stationed in the Aleutian Islands. After his discharge, the Hestons moved to New York, failed to find work in the theater and, somewhat disenchanted but still determined, moved to North Carolina, where they spent several seasons working at the Thomas Wolfe memorial theater in Asheville.
When they returned to New York in 1947, Mr. Heston got his first big break, landing the role of Caesar’s lieutenant in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” staged by Guthrie McClintick and starring Katharine Cornell. The production ran for seven months and proved to be the high point of Mr. Heston’s New York stage career. He appeared in a handful of other plays, most of them dismal failures.
If Broadway had little to offer him, television was another matter. He made frequent appearances in dramatic series like “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “Philco Playhouse.” The door to Hollywood opened when the film producer Hal B. Wallis saw Mr. Heston’s performance as Rochester in a “Studio One” production of “Jane Eyre.” Wallis offered him a contract.
Mr. Heston made his film debut in 1950 in Wallis’s “Dark City,” a low-grade thriller in which he played a small-time gambler. Two years later, he did his first work for DeMille as a hard-driving circus boss in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
Throughout his career he studied long and hard for his roles. He prepared for the part of Moses by memorizing passages from the Old Testament. When filming began on the sun-baked slopes of Mount Sinai, he suggested to DeMille that he play the role barefoot — a decision that he felt lent an edge of truth to his performance.
Preparing for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” he read hundreds of Michelangelo’s letters and practiced how to sculpt and paint convincingly. When filming “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” (1959), in which he played the pilot of a salvage boat, he learned deep-water diving. And he mostly rejected stunt doubles. In “Ben-Hur,” he said, he drove his own chariot for “about 80 percent of the race.”
“I worked six weeks learning how to manage the four white horses,” he said. “Nearly pulled my arms right out of their sockets.”
As the years wore on, the leading roles began to go to younger men, and by the 1980s, Mr. Heston’s appearances on screen were less frequent. He turned to stage work again, not on Broadway but in Los Angeles, at the Ahmanson Theater, where he played roles ranging from Macbeth to James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He also returned to television, appearing in 1983 as a paternalistic banker in the mini-series “Chiefs” and as an oil baron in the series “The Colbys.”
Mr. Heston was always able to channel some energies into the public arena. He was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him “a 20th-century Moses for his people,” and participated in the historic march on Washington in 1963.
Inspired by Reagan
He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971, following in the footsteps of his friend and role model Ronald Reagan. A registered Democrat for many years, he was nevertheless selective in the candidates he chose to support and often campaigned for conservatives.
In 1981, President Reagan appointed him co-chairman of the President’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, a group formed to devise ways to obtain financing for arts organizations. Although he had reservations about some projects supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Heston wound up defending the agency against charges of elitism.
Again and again, he proved himself a cogent and effective speaker, but he rejected suggestions that he run for office. “I’d rather play a senator than be one,” he said.
He became a Republican after Democrats in the Senate blocked the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative, to the Supreme Court in 1987. Mr. Heston had supported the nomination and was critical of the Reagan White House for misreading the depth of the liberal opposition.
Mr. Heston frequently spoke out against what he saw as evidence of the decline and debasement of American culture. In 1992, appalled by the lyrics on “Cop Killer,” a recording by the rap artist Ice T, he blasted the album at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and was a force in having it withdrawn from the marketplace.
In the 1996 elections, he campaigned on behalf of some 50 Republican candidates and began to speak out against gun control. In 1997, he was elected vice president of the N.R.A.
In December of that year, as the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary gala of the Free Congress Foundation, Mr. Heston described “a cultural war” raging across America, “storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.”
A Relentless Drive
The next year, in his 70’s, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In his speech at the association’s convention before his election, he trained his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton: “Mr. Clinton, sir, America didn’t trust you with our health care system. America didn’t trust you with gays in the military. America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”
He was in the news again after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999, when he said that the N.R.A.’s annual membership meeting, scheduled to be held the following week in Denver, would be scaled back in light of the killings but not canceled.
In a memorable scene from “Bowling for Columbine,” a 2002 documentary about violence in America, the director, Michael Moore, visited Mr. Heston at his home and asked him how he could defend his pro-gun stance. Mr. Heston ended the interview without comment.
In May 2001, he was unanimously re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term by the association’s board of directors. The association had amended its bylaws in 2000 to allow Mr. Heston to serve a third one-year term as president. Two months after his celebrated speech at the 2000 convention, it was disclosed that he had checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program.
Mr. Heston was proud of his collection of some 30 guns at his longtime home in the Coldwater Canyon area of Los Angeles, where he and his wife raised their son, Fraser, and daughter, Holly Ann. They all survive him, along with three grandchildren.
Never much for socializing , he spent his days either working, exercising, reading (he was fond of biographies) or sketching. An active diarist, he published several accounts of his career, including “The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976.”
In 2003, Mr. Heston was among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Bush. In 1997, he was also a recipient of the annual Kennedy Center honors.
Mr. Heston continued working through the 1990s, acting more frequently on television but also in occasional films. His most recent film appearance found him playing a cameo role, in simian makeup, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.”
He announced in 1999 that he was receiving radiation treatments for prostate cancer, but said he would continue his film work and go on making appearances on behalf of Republicans running for office.
He had always hated the thought of retirement and once explained his relentless drive as an actor. “You never get it right,” he said in a 1986 interview. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning thinking about it the next day.” His goal remained, he said, “to get it right one time.”
April 6, 2008
Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84
By ROBERT BERKVIST
Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who did not specify a cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had received a diagnosis of neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”
“I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said.
Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.
When the film was released, in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.
Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s Moses.
The same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off screen, for the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as the government’s attempt to infringe on a constitutional guarantee — the right to bear arms.
In Mr. Heston, the N.R.A. found its embodiment of pioneer values — pride, independence and valor. In a speech at the N.R.A.’s annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an N.R.A. bumper sticker (“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands”), he waved a replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, “From my cold, dead hands!”
Mr. Heston’s screen presence was so commanding that he was never dominated by mammoth sets, spectacular effects or throngs of spear-waving extras. In his films, whether playing Buffalo Bill, an airline pilot, a naval captain or the commander of a spaceship, he essentially projected the same image — muscular, steely-eyed, courageous. If critics used terms like “marble-monumental” or “granitic” to describe his acting style, they just as often praised his forthright, no-nonsense characterizations.
After his success in “The Ten Commandments,” Mr. Heston tried a change of pace. Working for another legendary Hollywood director, Orson Welles, he played a Mexican narcotics investigator in the thriller “Touch of Evil,” in which Welles himself played a murderous sheriff in a border town. Also starring Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, the film, a modest success when it opened in 1958, came to be accepted as a noir classic.
A Biblical Specialty
But the following year Mr. Heston stepped back into the world of the biblical epic, this time for the director William Wyler. The movie was “Ben-Hur.” Cast as a prince in ancient Judea who rebels against the rule of Rome, Mr. Heston again dominated the screen. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, he and his co-star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a thrilling duel with whips as their horse-drawn chariots career wheel-to-wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.
“Ben-Hur” won 11 Academy Awards — a record at the time — including those for best picture, best director and, for Mr. Heston, best actor.
He went on to star opposite Sophia Loren in the 1961 film “El Cid,” battling the Moors in medieval Spain. As a Marine officer at the Forbidden City in 1900, he helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in Nicholas Ray’s 1963 epic “55 Days at Peking.” In “Khartoum” (1966), he played Gen. Charles (Chinese) Gordon, who was killed in a desert uprising, led in the film by Laurence Olivier’s Mahdi. When George Stevens produced and directed “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1965, there was Mr. Heston, back in ancient Judea, playing John the Baptist to Max von Sydow’s Jesus.
He portrayed Andrew Jackson twice, in “The President’s Lady” (1953) and “The Buccaneer” (1958). There were westerns (“Major Dundee,” “Will Penny,” “The Mountain Men”), costume dramas (“The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers,” with Mr. Heston as the crafty Cardinal Richelieu in both) and action films aplenty. Whether playing a hard-bitten landowner in an adaptation of James Michener’s novel “The Hawaiians” (1970), or a daring pilot in “Airport 1975,” he could be relied on to give moviegoers their money’s worth.
In 1965 he was cast as Michelangelo in the film version of Irving Stone’s novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Directed by Carol Reed, the film pitted Mr. Heston’s temperamental artist against Rex Harrison’s testy Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to create frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Mr. Heston’s performance took a critical drubbing, but to audiences, the larger-than-life role seemed to be another perfect fit. Mr. Heston once joked: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”
Foray Into the Future
Mr. Heston was catapulted into the distant future in the 1968 science-fiction film “Planet of the Apes,” in which he played an astronaut marooned on a desolate planet and then enslaved by its rulers, a race of anthropomorphic apes. The film was a hit. He reprised the role two years later in the sequel, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”
It was all a long way from Evanston, Ill., where Charlton Carter was born on Oct. 4, 1923, and from the small town of St. Helen, Mich., where his family moved when he was a small boy and where his father ran a lumber mill. He attended a one-room school and learned to fish and hunt and to savor the feeling of being self-reliant in the wild, where his shyness was no handicap.
When his parents divorced in the 1930s and his mother remarried — his stepfather’s surname was Heston — the family moved back to the Chicago suburbs, this time Winnetka. He joined the theater program at his new high school and went on to enroll at Northwestern University on a scholarship. By that time, he was convinced he had found his life’s work.
Mr. Heston also found a fellow drama student, Lydia Clarke, whom he married in 1944, just before he enlisted in the Army Air Forces. He became a radio-gunner and spent three years stationed in the Aleutian Islands. After his discharge, the Hestons moved to New York, failed to find work in the theater and, somewhat disenchanted but still determined, moved to North Carolina, where they spent several seasons working at the Thomas Wolfe memorial theater in Asheville.
When they returned to New York in 1947, Mr. Heston got his first big break, landing the role of Caesar’s lieutenant in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” staged by Guthrie McClintick and starring Katharine Cornell. The production ran for seven months and proved to be the high point of Mr. Heston’s New York stage career. He appeared in a handful of other plays, most of them dismal failures.
If Broadway had little to offer him, television was another matter. He made frequent appearances in dramatic series like “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “Philco Playhouse.” The door to Hollywood opened when the film producer Hal B. Wallis saw Mr. Heston’s performance as Rochester in a “Studio One” production of “Jane Eyre.” Wallis offered him a contract.
Mr. Heston made his film debut in 1950 in Wallis’s “Dark City,” a low-grade thriller in which he played a small-time gambler. Two years later, he did his first work for DeMille as a hard-driving circus boss in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
Throughout his career he studied long and hard for his roles. He prepared for the part of Moses by memorizing passages from the Old Testament. When filming began on the sun-baked slopes of Mount Sinai, he suggested to DeMille that he play the role barefoot — a decision that he felt lent an edge of truth to his performance.
Preparing for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” he read hundreds of Michelangelo’s letters and practiced how to sculpt and paint convincingly. When filming “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” (1959), in which he played the pilot of a salvage boat, he learned deep-water diving. And he mostly rejected stunt doubles. In “Ben-Hur,” he said, he drove his own chariot for “about 80 percent of the race.”
“I worked six weeks learning how to manage the four white horses,” he said. “Nearly pulled my arms right out of their sockets.”
As the years wore on, the leading roles began to go to younger men, and by the 1980s, Mr. Heston’s appearances on screen were less frequent. He turned to stage work again, not on Broadway but in Los Angeles, at the Ahmanson Theater, where he played roles ranging from Macbeth to James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He also returned to television, appearing in 1983 as a paternalistic banker in the mini-series “Chiefs” and as an oil baron in the series “The Colbys.”
Mr. Heston was always able to channel some energies into the public arena. He was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him “a 20th-century Moses for his people,” and participated in the historic march on Washington in 1963.
Inspired by Reagan
He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971, following in the footsteps of his friend and role model Ronald Reagan. A registered Democrat for many years, he was nevertheless selective in the candidates he chose to support and often campaigned for conservatives.
In 1981, President Reagan appointed him co-chairman of the President’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, a group formed to devise ways to obtain financing for arts organizations. Although he had reservations about some projects supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Heston wound up defending the agency against charges of elitism.
Again and again, he proved himself a cogent and effective speaker, but he rejected suggestions that he run for office. “I’d rather play a senator than be one,” he said.
He became a Republican after Democrats in the Senate blocked the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative, to the Supreme Court in 1987. Mr. Heston had supported the nomination and was critical of the Reagan White House for misreading the depth of the liberal opposition.
Mr. Heston frequently spoke out against what he saw as evidence of the decline and debasement of American culture. In 1992, appalled by the lyrics on “Cop Killer,” a recording by the rap artist Ice T, he blasted the album at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and was a force in having it withdrawn from the marketplace.
In the 1996 elections, he campaigned on behalf of some 50 Republican candidates and began to speak out against gun control. In 1997, he was elected vice president of the N.R.A.
In December of that year, as the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary gala of the Free Congress Foundation, Mr. Heston described “a cultural war” raging across America, “storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.”
A Relentless Drive
The next year, in his 70’s, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In his speech at the association’s convention before his election, he trained his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton: “Mr. Clinton, sir, America didn’t trust you with our health care system. America didn’t trust you with gays in the military. America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”
He was in the news again after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999, when he said that the N.R.A.’s annual membership meeting, scheduled to be held the following week in Denver, would be scaled back in light of the killings but not canceled.
In a memorable scene from “Bowling for Columbine,” a 2002 documentary about violence in America, the director, Michael Moore, visited Mr. Heston at his home and asked him how he could defend his pro-gun stance. Mr. Heston ended the interview without comment.
In May 2001, he was unanimously re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term by the association’s board of directors. The association had amended its bylaws in 2000 to allow Mr. Heston to serve a third one-year term as president. Two months after his celebrated speech at the 2000 convention, it was disclosed that he had checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program.
Mr. Heston was proud of his collection of some 30 guns at his longtime home in the Coldwater Canyon area of Los Angeles, where he and his wife raised their son, Fraser, and daughter, Holly Ann. They all survive him, along with three grandchildren.
Never much for socializing , he spent his days either working, exercising, reading (he was fond of biographies) or sketching. An active diarist, he published several accounts of his career, including “The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976.”
In 2003, Mr. Heston was among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Bush. In 1997, he was also a recipient of the annual Kennedy Center honors.
Mr. Heston continued working through the 1990s, acting more frequently on television but also in occasional films. His most recent film appearance found him playing a cameo role, in simian makeup, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.”
He announced in 1999 that he was receiving radiation treatments for prostate cancer, but said he would continue his film work and go on making appearances on behalf of Republicans running for office.
He had always hated the thought of retirement and once explained his relentless drive as an actor. “You never get it right,” he said in a 1986 interview. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning thinking about it the next day.” His goal remained, he said, “to get it right one time.”
Friday, March 28, 2008
That Anti-American Reverend Wright
"God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war.... And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place."
Okay, clearly here with this quote, Reverend Wright has established that he hates America and everything it stands for.
Umm... Except that wasn't said by Reverend Wright. That was Martin Luther King...
Okay, clearly here with this quote, Reverend Wright has established that he hates America and everything it stands for.
Umm... Except that wasn't said by Reverend Wright. That was Martin Luther King...
Friday, March 21, 2008
Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr
http://911blogger.com/node/14438
World Video Premiere: The Truth about the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Submitted by Reprehensor on Wed, 03/19/2008
Jack Terrell Loyd Jowers Martin Luther King Jr. Memphis Phillip Melanson William F. Pepper William Schaap
"Truth crushed to earth will rise again." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
(The Radio premiere of this material will be broadcast on Pacifica affiliates over the coming days and weeks that broadcast Maria Gilardin's "TUC Radio" program. You can D/L the audio here. You can purchase a CD of the program there as well.)
"Governmental agencies caused Martin Luther King to be assassinated... They caused this whole thing to happen. And they then proceeded with the powerful means at their disposal to cover this case up. This is a conspiracy... and that's a nasty word. People insult people in this country who use the word "conspiracy." Nowhere else in the world, as Bill Schaap told you, is it viewed that way. In Italy and France conspiracy is taken for granted because they have lived with it so much longer...
What we're asking you to do at this point in time is send a message. We're asking you to send a message, not just right a wrong. That's important, that you right a wrong and that you allow justice to prevail once and for all. Let it prevail. Let justice and truth prevail, else the heavens fall. No matter what, let it prevail. Let it come forward. We're asking you to let that happen. But in addition to that, we're asking you to send a message, send a message to all of those in power, all of those who manipulate justice in this country that you cannot get away with this. Or if you can get away with it, you can only get away with it for so long."
- Dr. William F. Pepper, closing argument, King Family v. Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Co-conspirators, December 8, 1999.
For the first time since 1999, Americans and people around the world get to see what happened at the end of a trial that spanned three weeks, and produced many witnesses, some of which had never even been interviewed before. This 10-part series consists of the closing argument presented to the Jury, and summarizes the case against the true murderers of Dr. King.
Transcript: http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/trial.html#Transcript
There are many similarities between 4/4 (King was assassinated on April 4, 1968) and 9/11...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 9/11, luggage is "discovered" which contains evidence used to quickly build a case against Atta & Co.
On 4/4, a bundle is dropped in front of an amusement shop in Memphis which contains evidence used to quickly build a case against James Earl Ray. A slight continuity error here, the bundle (including the rifle alleged to kill Dr. King) is placed before the shooting.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 9/11, the crime scenes were not cordoned off and forensically examined, with tons of steel sold off for scrap, the crime scene was tampered with.
On 4/4, a sniper drops Dr. King, and brush that obscured the actual location of Dr. King's killer is removed the next day, reinforcing the idea that Ray shot King from a different location. The crime scene was tampered with.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 9/11 the NRO, which draws its personnel from the CIA and the military, was "running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building." The exercise was cancelled.
According to testimony by covert asset Jack Terrell, a covert team with personnel from the Army's 20th Special Forces Group, which had been training with Thirty-Ought-Six rifles, was en route to Memphis at the time of King's assassination. The operation was cancelled before the team, or "group", could take their positions. Special Forces have been known to conduct covert operations at the behest of the CIA.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since 9/11, the corporate media has parroted one and only one theory, that Arabs did 9/11, even when alleged hijacker Adnan Bukhari turned up alive on 9/12, no problem, the media just took him off the list. The original story is perpetuated.
Since 4/4, the corporate media has parroted one and only one theory, that James Earl Ray shot King and confessed to the murder of King. Ray NEVER "confessed" to the murder of King, he plead guilty, but it was an Alford plea. "North Carolina v. Alford... was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed on a 5-3 vote that there are no constitutional barriers in place to prevent a judge from accepting a guilty plea from a defendant who wants to plead guilty while still protesting his innocence. This type of plea has become known as an Alford plea, differing slightly from the nolo contendere plea in which the defendant agrees to being sentenced for the crime, but does not admit guilt.... courts must accept whatever plea a defendant chooses to enter, as long as the defendant is competently represented by counsel; the plea is intelligently chosen; and "the record before the judge contains strong evidence of actual guilt". Faced with "grim alternatives", the defendant's best choice of action may be to plead guilty to the crime, White wrote, and the courts must accept the defendant's choice made in his own interests." The media perpetuates the story to the present day.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 9/11, America's security system "failed" miserably. This has led to the speculation that this was a failure by design, including the possibility of a "stand down" order.
On 4/4, the police security normally in place for Dr. King was definitely ordered to "stand down" according to testimony by Phillip Melanson.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
9/11 was not an isolated incident. We can learn from preceding events. Arguably, all of the major assassinations in the United States during the 1960s were covert operations. (Peter Dale Scott has noted many similarities between JFK and 9/11.) Arguably, the 1993 WTC bombing, the OKC bombing, and 9/11 can be proposed as covert operations, and in this case, there is one CIA/FBI asset linking these three events, Ali Mohammed.
In 1999, Dr. William F. Pepper brought forth much truth about the assassination of MLK in a trial that would have been on the lips and in the eyes and ears of most Americans, and many people across the world, if the US media worked like it was envisioned by the founders of the United States of America. But now, the same companies that make the bombs make the news, and they protect their interests. "The spice must flow."
William Pepper will be part of a new independent investigation of 9/11, should the NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative succeed.* In my opinion, Pepper's experience will guide the direction of the Commission in such a manner that they will be able to bring some truth to the American people, and indeed the world, about what happened on 9/11. The Commission will have subpoena power, and they will use it. Then it will be up to us to make sure that the Truth is on the lips and in the eyes and ears of all who can still reason, even after being bombarded with lies, deceptions and half-truths for years.
It is the repetition of the disinformation that is the most damaging, as William Schaap revealed in his testimony. Pepper asked him, "Why is [disinformation] so effective over time?"
"...this is an area where I had to consult with other experts because it turns out really to be a neurological function.
And that was first explained to me by a professor at Harvard Medical School. And it has to do with the way the human brain remembers things, the way we learn things, the way we create patterns and associations and reinforce -- well... sort of like channels in the brain when certain things trigger certain collateral thoughts.
And when you associate one thing with another over time, just the mention of the one brings the association of the other.
What this will sometimes mean is that even when something is later exposed as a lie, if it was accepted as a truth for a long time, the exposure of it as a lie is not believed.
It's in one ear and out the other."
I'm not a member of the Commission, and I can't offer true insight about how it is operating in this early stage. However, after studying Pepper's method in the MLK case, I can't think of a legal professional more qualified to start stripping away the layers of lies and obfuscation that surround 9/11.
I'm not saying that this Commission will uncover every scrap of Truth about 9/11, but I believe it will proceed forthrightly, and maybe there will need to be more independent Commissions in the future, perhaps an International Commission to distribute a more impartial justice.
Given the chance, however, I think Pepper will apply his skills as best he can, and this will mean trouble for anyone with secrets to hide about 9/11.
Will he and the Commission make mistakes? Undoubtedly, but compared to the block of Swiss Cheese that the original 9/11 Commission left us, it would have to fail in a most spectacular manner to be a worse product.
Please pass these links around, let's try and make this April 4th, the last April 4th that Americans blame a patsy named James Earl Ray for the murder of Dr. King.
Dr. William F. Pepper's closing argument to the Jury, December 8, 1999.
Part 1:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3-mlYaWOu4E
Part 2:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=N9WYWvgo5t0
Part 3:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xWJtKKOUBAE
Part 4:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jsk1P2WJCH0
Part 5:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=T6GfQwde27g
Part 6:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xqcf2hq24fg
Part 7:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ_d3OKVZCw
Part 8:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CtQgyfPNO5g
Part 9:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_sbc0_ZNdcM
Part 10:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3iBQN9tciNM
Previously:
William Schaap's testimony on US government Disinformation
http://911blogger.com/node/14275
William Pepper's opening statement to the Jury
http://911blogger.com/node/14256
* It has been suggested that the New York City Council will not approve the Commission. According to the Ballot Initiative website, an additional 15,000 signatures will override the Council's rejection, if required.
World Video Premiere: The Truth about the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Submitted by Reprehensor on Wed, 03/19/2008
Jack Terrell Loyd Jowers Martin Luther King Jr. Memphis Phillip Melanson William F. Pepper William Schaap
"Truth crushed to earth will rise again." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
(The Radio premiere of this material will be broadcast on Pacifica affiliates over the coming days and weeks that broadcast Maria Gilardin's "TUC Radio" program. You can D/L the audio here. You can purchase a CD of the program there as well.)
"Governmental agencies caused Martin Luther King to be assassinated... They caused this whole thing to happen. And they then proceeded with the powerful means at their disposal to cover this case up. This is a conspiracy... and that's a nasty word. People insult people in this country who use the word "conspiracy." Nowhere else in the world, as Bill Schaap told you, is it viewed that way. In Italy and France conspiracy is taken for granted because they have lived with it so much longer...
What we're asking you to do at this point in time is send a message. We're asking you to send a message, not just right a wrong. That's important, that you right a wrong and that you allow justice to prevail once and for all. Let it prevail. Let justice and truth prevail, else the heavens fall. No matter what, let it prevail. Let it come forward. We're asking you to let that happen. But in addition to that, we're asking you to send a message, send a message to all of those in power, all of those who manipulate justice in this country that you cannot get away with this. Or if you can get away with it, you can only get away with it for so long."
- Dr. William F. Pepper, closing argument, King Family v. Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Co-conspirators, December 8, 1999.
For the first time since 1999, Americans and people around the world get to see what happened at the end of a trial that spanned three weeks, and produced many witnesses, some of which had never even been interviewed before. This 10-part series consists of the closing argument presented to the Jury, and summarizes the case against the true murderers of Dr. King.
Transcript: http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/trial.html#Transcript
There are many similarities between 4/4 (King was assassinated on April 4, 1968) and 9/11...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 9/11, luggage is "discovered" which contains evidence used to quickly build a case against Atta & Co.
On 4/4, a bundle is dropped in front of an amusement shop in Memphis which contains evidence used to quickly build a case against James Earl Ray. A slight continuity error here, the bundle (including the rifle alleged to kill Dr. King) is placed before the shooting.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 9/11, the crime scenes were not cordoned off and forensically examined, with tons of steel sold off for scrap, the crime scene was tampered with.
On 4/4, a sniper drops Dr. King, and brush that obscured the actual location of Dr. King's killer is removed the next day, reinforcing the idea that Ray shot King from a different location. The crime scene was tampered with.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 9/11 the NRO, which draws its personnel from the CIA and the military, was "running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building." The exercise was cancelled.
According to testimony by covert asset Jack Terrell, a covert team with personnel from the Army's 20th Special Forces Group, which had been training with Thirty-Ought-Six rifles, was en route to Memphis at the time of King's assassination. The operation was cancelled before the team, or "group", could take their positions. Special Forces have been known to conduct covert operations at the behest of the CIA.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since 9/11, the corporate media has parroted one and only one theory, that Arabs did 9/11, even when alleged hijacker Adnan Bukhari turned up alive on 9/12, no problem, the media just took him off the list. The original story is perpetuated.
Since 4/4, the corporate media has parroted one and only one theory, that James Earl Ray shot King and confessed to the murder of King. Ray NEVER "confessed" to the murder of King, he plead guilty, but it was an Alford plea. "North Carolina v. Alford... was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed on a 5-3 vote that there are no constitutional barriers in place to prevent a judge from accepting a guilty plea from a defendant who wants to plead guilty while still protesting his innocence. This type of plea has become known as an Alford plea, differing slightly from the nolo contendere plea in which the defendant agrees to being sentenced for the crime, but does not admit guilt.... courts must accept whatever plea a defendant chooses to enter, as long as the defendant is competently represented by counsel; the plea is intelligently chosen; and "the record before the judge contains strong evidence of actual guilt". Faced with "grim alternatives", the defendant's best choice of action may be to plead guilty to the crime, White wrote, and the courts must accept the defendant's choice made in his own interests." The media perpetuates the story to the present day.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 9/11, America's security system "failed" miserably. This has led to the speculation that this was a failure by design, including the possibility of a "stand down" order.
On 4/4, the police security normally in place for Dr. King was definitely ordered to "stand down" according to testimony by Phillip Melanson.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
9/11 was not an isolated incident. We can learn from preceding events. Arguably, all of the major assassinations in the United States during the 1960s were covert operations. (Peter Dale Scott has noted many similarities between JFK and 9/11.) Arguably, the 1993 WTC bombing, the OKC bombing, and 9/11 can be proposed as covert operations, and in this case, there is one CIA/FBI asset linking these three events, Ali Mohammed.
In 1999, Dr. William F. Pepper brought forth much truth about the assassination of MLK in a trial that would have been on the lips and in the eyes and ears of most Americans, and many people across the world, if the US media worked like it was envisioned by the founders of the United States of America. But now, the same companies that make the bombs make the news, and they protect their interests. "The spice must flow."
William Pepper will be part of a new independent investigation of 9/11, should the NYC 9/11 Ballot Initiative succeed.* In my opinion, Pepper's experience will guide the direction of the Commission in such a manner that they will be able to bring some truth to the American people, and indeed the world, about what happened on 9/11. The Commission will have subpoena power, and they will use it. Then it will be up to us to make sure that the Truth is on the lips and in the eyes and ears of all who can still reason, even after being bombarded with lies, deceptions and half-truths for years.
It is the repetition of the disinformation that is the most damaging, as William Schaap revealed in his testimony. Pepper asked him, "Why is [disinformation] so effective over time?"
"...this is an area where I had to consult with other experts because it turns out really to be a neurological function.
And that was first explained to me by a professor at Harvard Medical School. And it has to do with the way the human brain remembers things, the way we learn things, the way we create patterns and associations and reinforce -- well... sort of like channels in the brain when certain things trigger certain collateral thoughts.
And when you associate one thing with another over time, just the mention of the one brings the association of the other.
What this will sometimes mean is that even when something is later exposed as a lie, if it was accepted as a truth for a long time, the exposure of it as a lie is not believed.
It's in one ear and out the other."
I'm not a member of the Commission, and I can't offer true insight about how it is operating in this early stage. However, after studying Pepper's method in the MLK case, I can't think of a legal professional more qualified to start stripping away the layers of lies and obfuscation that surround 9/11.
I'm not saying that this Commission will uncover every scrap of Truth about 9/11, but I believe it will proceed forthrightly, and maybe there will need to be more independent Commissions in the future, perhaps an International Commission to distribute a more impartial justice.
Given the chance, however, I think Pepper will apply his skills as best he can, and this will mean trouble for anyone with secrets to hide about 9/11.
Will he and the Commission make mistakes? Undoubtedly, but compared to the block of Swiss Cheese that the original 9/11 Commission left us, it would have to fail in a most spectacular manner to be a worse product.
Please pass these links around, let's try and make this April 4th, the last April 4th that Americans blame a patsy named James Earl Ray for the murder of Dr. King.
Dr. William F. Pepper's closing argument to the Jury, December 8, 1999.
Part 1:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3-mlYaWOu4E
Part 2:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=N9WYWvgo5t0
Part 3:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xWJtKKOUBAE
Part 4:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jsk1P2WJCH0
Part 5:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=T6GfQwde27g
Part 6:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xqcf2hq24fg
Part 7:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kJ_d3OKVZCw
Part 8:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CtQgyfPNO5g
Part 9:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_sbc0_ZNdcM
Part 10:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3iBQN9tciNM
Previously:
William Schaap's testimony on US government Disinformation
http://911blogger.com/node/14275
William Pepper's opening statement to the Jury
http://911blogger.com/node/14256
* It has been suggested that the New York City Council will not approve the Commission. According to the Ballot Initiative website, an additional 15,000 signatures will override the Council's rejection, if required.
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