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Announcement :: Civil & Human Rights |
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Daniel Clarks's List Of Ameica's Enemies |
Current rating: 0 |
by brian
(No verified email address) |
13 Oct 2002
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a wannerbee McCarthy has published a list of what he claims are enemies of the state. You could be next on his list |
Earlier this month, seventy American citizens declared their opposition to the U.S. war effort by signing a statement entitled, "Not In Our Name: A Statement of Conscience." The letter was a declaration to the rest of the world that our enemies still have some reliable allies here in the states. They don't come right out and call themselves "traitors," of course, but what else would you call Americans who claim that the United States is the single greatest threat to civilization? They did just that when they agreed that, "The signers of this statement call on the people of the U.S. to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world."
"We too watched with shock the horrific events of September 11, 2001," they write. Not "anger," mind you, but only "shock." They couldn't afford to be judgmental, though, while setting up a moral equivalency like this one: "We too mourned the thousands of innocent dead and shook our heads at the terrible scenes of carnage -- even as we recalled similar scenes in Baghdad, Panama City and, a generation ago, Vietnam." Get it? What the terrorists did was really no worse than what the United States does in every military campaign. Anyone who isn't an inveterate anti-American can easily see the absurdity. These people can't recall any similar scenes to September 11th -- except, maybe, from a really bad LSD trip.
The statement goes on to whine that our political leaders have "put out a simplistic script of 'good vs. evil'." All right, we know that they don't think we're good, but can't they at least meet us halfway and admit that the enemy is evil? Evidently not.
"We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name or for our welfare," they say. "We extend a hand to those around the world suffering from these policies; we will show our solidarity in word and deed."
They've probably concocted some poststructuralist formula according to which everybody suffers from U.S. policies ... especially "the children" and "working families." Most directly, though, the ones who are suffering are the Taliban and al-Qaeda. These seventy people are showing their solidarity with the enemy in word. If they live up to their pledge by showing that solidarity in deed, they could and should be prosecuted for treason.
So who are these people who are warning the world not to think that Americans are united against an immediate threat to their own nation? The English news service Guardian Unlimited, which printed the protest letter -- ironically enough, on the day that we observe in this country as Flag Day -- called them "prominent Americans." They're not prominent as Americans, though. In fact, many of them are very outspoken about their anti-Americanism.
Although the statement tags them with such benign identifiers as "historian" and "author," they would be more accurately described as a pack of America-hating ultra-leftists. Among them are admitted Communists, Jew-baiters, Earth-worshippers, criminal-lovers, abortion-pushers and racial Balkanists. A few of them appear even to be all these things at once.
Below are the names and descriptions of the seventy people who signed the statement. A few of them are recognizable as celebrities, but many, many others are respected members of academia. If you are in college, or you have a son or daughter who is, you might want to print this list, and watch to see how often these people's writings are assigned to unwitting students, who are taught to accept them as enlightened thinkers.
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Michael Albert -- The socialist economic theorist, who calls himself a "market abolitionist," is a founder of an online publication called Z Magazine. Here's a sampling, from one of his columns in that magazine, of how Mr. Albert looks at the war: "In the case of [Timothy] McVeigh, bombing Montana wouldn't benefit elites. In the case of September 11, elites think bombing diverse targets will benefit their capitalist profit-making and geopolitical interests." Oh ... so that's why we didn't bomb Montana.
Laurie Anderson -- A performance artist and NEA grant recipient. She performs benefit concerts for the pro-abortion movement with the Feminist Majority Foundation's "Rock for Choice" project. She admits she "slept through the Eighties, politically," as is evident when she blames Ronald Reagan for the spread of AIDS.
Ed Asner -- The dean of Hollywood liberalism, Asner is remembered by many for his rambling, belching, telemarketing ad for the Gore 2000 campaign, in which he groused about G.W. Bush's plans for Social Security privatization. He has been an activist on behalf of extremely guilty criminals like Mumia Abu-Jamal (more on him later) and Leonard Peltier. A vociferous critic of U.S. involvement in Central America during the Reagan administration, Asner raised funds for Communist rebels in El Salvador. More recently, he has become a vegan, and a participant in National Meat Out Day. In an interview with VegTV, he moaned, "In these trying days of the threat of meat to all of us, I think it's good to make people aware that there are alternatives, healthy alternatives, healthy for both the individual and for the land on which we grow our food. The desecration of the land that takes place by creating meat is one of the worst problems." Meat is a threat, Communism is not. Go figure.
Russell Banks -- The novelist once left college in the late Fifties, with the intention of going to Cuba to help Fidel Castro's guerillas. Fortuitously, he only made it as far as Florida. Oh, well ... it's the though that counts.
Rosalyn Baxandall -- A feminist leader who was active in the movement to legalize abortion in the state of New York in the Sixties. The founding member of New York Radical Women now chairs the "American studies" department at SUNY of Old Westbury. She is also on the advisory board of a journal called Rethinking Marxism, which is produced by the Association for Economic and Social Analysis. The AESA regularly organizes panels at the annual Socialist Scholars Conference.
Jessica Blank -- She and her husband, Erik Jensen, co-authored a play called The Exonerated, about people wrongly convicted of capital crimes. Her credibility regarding this matter is somewhat damaged by the fact that she coordinated the "National Day of Art" in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Abu-Jamal is a favorite cause of a large percentage of the people on this list, so it's important to take a minute to review his situation, and consider why so many activists who take up his cause are also agitating against the war on terrorism.
Mumia Abu-Jamal was arrested in 1981 for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Officer Faulkner had pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother, William Cook, for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. When Cook got out of the car, he struck Faulkner in the face, and Faulkner subdued him by clubbing him on the shoulder with a flashlight. This account of the event was verified by Cook himself, who later pled guilty to assaulting Faulkner. Abu-Jamal, who had been across the street in his taxi cab, came running to the scene of the disturbance, where he shot Faulkner in the back from about two feet away. Faulkner turned and shot Abu-Jamal in the chest as he fell. Abu-Jamal then stood over Faulkner and shot him multiple times, finishing with a lethal shot to the face from inches away. The wounded Abu-Jamal sat down on the curb, where he was apprehended by the police moments later, wearing an empty shoulder holster, with a gun, registered to Abu-Jamal, resting beside him, containing five spent shells. When two officers escorted Abu-Jamal to the emergency room, they, along with a hospital security guard, heard him announce, "I shot the motherf-----, and I hope the motherf----- dies."
In spite of all this, there is a large contingent of activists who insist that Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent. A popular theory is that Faulkner was shot by a mysterious Mafia hitman, and the police deliberately let the real cop-killer go free so that they could frame Abu-Jamal. They had considered him a threat, the tale goes, because he had been critical of the police when he was a part-time reporter on National Public Radio, until being fired a year before the shooting.
One can only guess how many of Mumia's supporters truly believe he's innocent, and how many instead believe he was justified in whatever he did. What's obvious, though, is that the reason they support him is that they share his leftist political beliefs. Abu-Jamal had been a Lieutenant Minister of Information for the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers. If you visit the Black Panther Party website, you'll find their demands listed in a "Ten Point Plan" that includes the following:
"We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income." ... "We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities." ... "We want decent education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society." ... "We want completely free health care..." ... "We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression. We believe that the various conflicts which exist around the world stem directly from the aggressive desire of the United States ruling circle and government to force its domination upon the oppressed people of the world." ... "We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and people's community control of modern technology."
Contrary to the protestations of Mumia supporters, it is they, and not the police and the justice system, who have been biased by his left-wing political activism, as will become undeniably clear by the end of this list.
Medea Benjamin -- The co-founder and director of Global Exchange, an organization committed to, among other things, "environmental, political, and social justice."
As if that didn't give a clear enough idea of what this group's politics are, here's the opening paragraph of a "Cuba Fact Sheet" from Global Exchange's site: "Under such leaders as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, among others, the Cuban Revolution burst onto the international scene on January 1, 1959, -- overthrowing the U.S.-supported dictator Fulgencio Batista -- with a commitment to feed, clothe, house, educate, employ and provide health care for its entire population, a formerly unrealizable dream." That dream is "formerly unrealizable," according to Benjamin's group, because Castro had brought it to pass. The "fact sheet" continues, "Through their state-supported agricultural system and ration program for basic nutrients, Cuba had become the first underdeveloped country in the world to totally wipe out hunger and malnutrition," and "Cuba had wiped out the infectious disease and epidemics that plague other developing countries." The reason it says that Cuba "had" done these things is that they contend the U.S. undid all Castro's progress, by imposing what Global Exchange erroneously calls "the blockade."
William Blum -- The former Johnson administration State Department official resigned in 1967 due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. He identifies U.S. foreign policy, and especially the actions of the CIA, as the source of most of the world's troubles. He maintains a website entitled "The American Holocaust."
Blase Bonpane -- Director of Office of the Americas, a nonprofit organization "dedicated to furthering the cause of justice and peace in the hemisphere through broad based educational programs." The OOA has responded to the September 11th terrorist attacks by equating them with U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Grenada.
Theresa Bonpane -- Executive Director of the OOA, and wife of Blase Bonpane. See above.
Father Bob Bossie -- An anti-nuke activist and spokesman for a fringe Catholic organization called the 8th Day Center for Justice. At first glance, that organization's materials look like respectable, if gullible and simplistic, efforts to bring about world peace. You don't have to dig very deep, however, to find the anti-American subtext. Here's a sample letter that the 8th Day Center encouraged members to send to President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright after the bombing of the USS Cole:
"Please refrain from calling the attack against the USS Cole an act of terrorism. The Cole -- which was armed, on duty and merely making a brief refueling stop -- was part of a larger force being used to monitor sanctions against Iraq. This silent, deadly weapon has taken the lives of over one million Iraqis since 1990, over half of whom were children under five. Moreover, the Cole is part of an overall campaign of bombing Iraq and efforts to overthrow Iraq's government. ... Since the Cole was engaged in aggressive military activity, the attack does not constitute terrorism, even according to the State Department's definition. There is no doubt that what happened can be called a deadly attack, a suicide mission, a bomb attack. It is also an enormous tragedy for the families of the sailors who were killed. ...Calling this action 'terrorism' helps to hide the genocidal goals of the Cole itself. It also conjures up thoughts of irrational violence by dark, different and thoroughly evil people fueled by hate and religion, specifically Islam. ...Ending sanctions and refraining from inflammatory rhetoric will go a long way toward safeguarding U.S. troops and making the U.S. a respected world actor."
Leslie Cagan -- A professional organizer, she directed David Dinkins' 1989 New York mayoral campaign. She has also organized a national campaign against the Gulf War, demonstrated for nuclear disarmament, and coordinated the 1997 World Youth Festival in Cuba. Until recently, she was the director of a pro-Castro organ called the Cuban Information Project.
Henry Chalfant -- A photographer whose prize collection is a series of pictures of subway graffiti. An online review of his work boasts that he "has photographed important works by artists such as LEE, DONDI, SKEME, SEEN and BLADE, and many others."
Gosh! The BLADE? Congratulations are in order.
Bell Chevigny -- A novelist and prisoners' rights activist, who has given writing courses to inmates. She opposes capital punishment, advocates lighter sentences, if any, for drug offenders, and believes that prison terms should generally be shortened, in order to facilitate prisoners' reintroduction into society. Doing Time, a book of prison writing that Chevigny edited, was given a glowing review by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Paul Chevigny -- The husband of Bell Chevigny, he is a law professor at NYU. His writings focus chiefly on police brutality.
Noam Chomsky -- Considered an academic giant, his field is linguistics, but the self-described anarchist is better known for his supercilious rants against all things American. The MIT professor defines terrorism as a weapon used by the strong against the weak, so that he can accuse the United States of being the main culprit. By Chomsky's ... oh, let's call it "reasoning," for lack of a handier term ... when the U.S. funds and trains rebels against a Communist government, the rebels are the terrorists. When the U.S. supports a sitting government against a Communist rebellion, on the other hand, it is the government which is sponsoring terror.
In 1970, Chomsky gave a speech that was broadcast on Radio Hanoi. He told the North Vietnamese that "[Y]our cause is the cause of humanity as it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the socialist society in which free, creative men control their own destiny ... I believe that in the United States there will be some day a social revolution that will be of great significance to us and all of mankind, and if this hope is to be proven correct, it will be in large part because the people of Vietnam have shown us the way." Not only did he support Ho Chi Minh, but he also defended Pol Pot, until the scope of the Cambodian butcher's atrocities was found to be so great that even he could no longer deny them.
For all his anti-capitalist drivel, Chomsky shows no compunction about exploiting the terrorist attacks. He hastily slapped together a collection of seven interviews, put a picture of the World Trade Center on the cover, wittily entitled the book 9-11, and got it on the shelves before the fires at Ground Zero were even extinguished.
He exhaustively likens the U.S.A. to Nazi Germany, apparently based on some transitive property of geopolitics, which goes something like this: Nazi Germany opposed the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and the United States opposed the Soviet Union after the Second World War; therefore, the postwar United States is equal to the Third Reich. He even asserts that the postwar U.S. was bent on world domination. Funny our rebuilding the countries of our vanquished foes, then. Chomsky even imagines that the reason the U.S. invaded Grenada is that we feared the tiny nation would build a socialist Xanadu, and expose the inferiority of our capitalist republic. His bloviations have been dismantled by more responsible commentators in the mainstream of the political Left (Christopher Hitchens) and Right (David Horowitz). For that, they both deserve our thanks, but any intellectual analysis of Chomsky's stated political beliefs -- even a systematic and thorough shredding of them -- lends them a false sense of legitimacy. Suffice it to say, the man is a liar, a traitor, and an ass.
Stephanie Coontz -- A professor of "family studies" at Evergreen State College in Washington state, she is an advocate of federally subsidized child care, and mandating that employers provide paid family leave. She says that the social effect of single parenthood is "hugely exaggerated."
Kia Corthron -- A playwright and NEA grant recipient who participated in a Refuse & Resist event called "Imagine: Iraq," which consisted of eight plays by different authors, written in protest of U.S. and U.N. sanctions against that country.
Kevin Danaher -- Co-founder of Global Exchange. See: Benjamin, Medea.
Ossie Davis -- The veteran actor and director was recently flayed in a Weekly Standard article by Lee Bockhorn, for his long-running Communist sympathies. In particular, it points out an article Davis wrote in 1967 for a Communist magazine called the New World Review. The piece, entitled "A Black Man's Salute," was published as part of a collection of essays called "Symposium of the USSR: The First Fifty Years." In it, Davis wrote, "[F]ifty years ago when the good news came out of Russia that men there had decided to abandon capitalism and attempt to construct ... a system of true equality ultimately to be formulated as 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,' it was only natural that black men should associate their own hopes and their own expectations with the promise of socialism." Mind you, he was writing this fourteen years after the reign of Josef Stalin.
Mos Def -- A rapper without any major left-wing credentials to his name, he's apparently trying to build up his resume.
Carol Downer -- A director of Chico, California's euphemistically entitled Feminist Women's Health Center, she teaches women how to perform abortions on themselves during the first four weeks of pregnancy, with the aid of a speculum (a metal or plastic instrument used for dilating), a mirror and a flashlight. In her movement's hilariously opaque terminology, she refers to this procedure as "self help."
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz -- The Oklahoma socialist is the author of a book entitled "Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie," in which she examines her own youth and concludes that she finds "evidence of the lie of the American dream." America seems to be doing all right for Dunbar-Ortiz, though, as she defrauds her students by purporting to "teach" them "ethnic and women's studies" at Cal State-Hayward.
Eve Ensler -- The feminist playwright responsible for a production called The Vagina Monologues. Liberal actresses have practically trampled each other for the privilege of performing in this show, so that they can say the word "vagina" in front of hundreds of people, and then congratulate themselves on their naughtiness. Ensler runs a nonprofit organization called V-Day, which holds annual events on Valentine's Day. The V-Day site explains that, "The 'V' symbolizes many things. Victory over Violence, Valentine's Day. And of course, Vagina!" Note the enthusiasm for that last one. You could almost hear the drum roll.
Through V-Day, Ensler releases statistics that feminists have made up out of thin air, and which have been debunked for years. For example, V-Day claims that, "Every 21 hours on each college campus in the U.S. there is a rape." By the critical ciphering of columnist Glenn Sacks, this works out to 400 rapes per campus per year. It's no wonder feminists hate men, if they walk around believing insanity like that.
Leo Estrada -- An "urban planning" professor at UCLA, he is on the advisory committee of a group called the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). Just a word of advice -- anytime an alliance comes at you trying to sustain an economy, run for the hills. CAUSE was established by the Ventura County Living Wage Coalition.
John Gillis -- A history professor at Rutgers, and author of A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values. He argues that the nuclear family and its rituals (like celebrating holidays together) are only a trend that lasted from the oppressive Victorian Era to the equally oppressive 1950's. Besides, the vision we have of today of families during that time is highly idealized, so there's really nothing to fear from the recent trend toward what we mistakenly view as non-traditional family structures.
Jeremy Matthew Glick -- Not to be confused with his namesake, the Jeremy Glick who was one of the heroes from United Flight 93, this Jeremy Glick's father was killed at the World Trade Center. Glick blames President Bush for what happened, and wishes others to do the same. To that end, he co-edited Another World Is Possible, a collection of interviews with people who were directly affected by the terrorist attacks, and hold less than patriotic views about it.
In his introduction, he writes, "My dad first pulled my coats to Marxism, the Black Panthers (the first books I stole from my folk's [sic] awesome basement library), Richard Wright, and detective fiction. I was often mad or disappointed in what I perceived as a mellowing out (or selling out) of my dad's once more radically pronounced views. It took listening to his eulogies to really get some clarity on how much my dad's sacrifices enabled my own radical activism. The endless drudge of going to work, to provide, and enable my actions was my father's sacrifice. A sacrifice that this system never acknowledged or paid him what he's worth, and ultimately, thanked him for by violently ripping him from his family."
His prejudice couldn't be any more obvious. He must blame this (capitalist) system for his father's death, or else his father's sacrifice, which is what allows him to be a radical Marxist, would have been for nothing. To arrive at the desired conclusion requires some creative reconstruction of the facts, but he's up to the task. "The Bush family enabled financially and militarily the regime and actors that killed my father. ... American imperialism has received a boost on 9/11 rationalizing the most flagrant acts of racist violence and geopolitical thuggery as patriotic piety and self-preservation. To see the folks responsible for your father's death get further enfranchised and pimp your family's trauma for their own oil greed is appalling. I'm happy to be able to contribute to a project that patiently begs a rethinking of U.S. foreign policy and legacies of domestic terror." The "regime" that killed his father? His father was killed by al-Qaeda, which is defended militarily by the Taliban, which was not ruling Afghanistan in the Eighties, when the Reagan-Bush administration helped the Muhjadeen drive out the Soviet invaders. And how might the Bushes have militarily enabled the attacks anyway, by training hijackers to fly airplanes into buildings? What the terrorists did that day was not, strictly speaking, a military attack.
Many people have clumsily referred to what happened on September 11th as a "tragedy." That wasn't a tragedy, it was a vicious and unprovoked attack. What's a tragedy is that one of its victims would refuse to see the truth about it, other than through the funhouse mirror of his own warped ideology.
Suheir Hammad -- The Palestinian-born poet and pro-Mumia activist is a citizen of New York, but it seems as if she still gets her news from P.A.-approved sources. In her poem First Writing Since, she repeated a false rumor that the news footage of Palestinians celebrating the attacks was actually filmed during the Gulf War, and deceptively presented by the networks as if it were just happening. Elsewhere in this same poem, she exhibits an incredibly selective memory. "we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma." (The lack of capitalization appears in the original -- indicating the influence of e.e. cummings ... or Ziggy.) Has she never heard the phrases "angry white male" and "white male paranoia" that were ubiquitously yammered about after the bombing? "and when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we never mention the kkk?" Ah, yes. One day, Americans must break their conspiracy of silence, and dare to start discussing the Klan. She might as well complain that people didn't talk enough about the Olympic figure skating controversy.
David Harvey -- An anthropology professor at CUNY who has spoken at the Socialist Scholars Conference in 1997 and 2002, he's a regular contributor to a journal called The Socialist Register.
Rakaa Irscience -- A rapper whose underground group, Dilated Peoples, has sometimes been criticized for seeking mainstream approval within the music industry. Maybe he figured signing this statement would do the trick.
etc
http://shinbone.home.att.net/enelist.htm |
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Damn Right!!! |
by Just Another Joe,
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Oct 2002
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Damn right! put an American Flag on your gas-gussleing S.U.V., and salute the Brave (draft-dodging) administration who is united to start a war to steal Iraq's oil, kill untold thousands, led by a beetle-brow President, who wasn't even elected. Yep, proud to start World War III! |
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