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At least that’s what the loony left would have you believe. The reality is much less sinister. Kovel’s contract at Bard ended and he was let go due to lack of funds and poor student evaluations.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
In his letter, Kovel argues that his position at Bard deteriorated as his opposition to Zionism grew and became more public. He cites his various public statements as well as the links of Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, to Israel. Botstein is musical director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and Kovel’s letter cites as problematic a visit by the orchestra to Bard’s campus in which the national anthems of the United States and Israel were played. (While Bard does have ties to Israel, it notably has ties to Palestinian higher ed that may be deeper than those of most institutions, just this week announcing a series of joint programs with Al Quds University.)
A Bard spokesman declined to comment on the situation, citing the confidentiality of personnel actions. But an evaluation of Kovel, which he released, suggests that his “long and productive career” at Bard has been problematic of late. The evaluation notes an increasing number of student complaints about Kovel’s lack of organization, which he has previously explained by saying that he likes his courses to focus on current material.
Kovel isn’t the only instructor who was fired in this round of cuts. Here is a Bard student commenting on what is happening in other departments:
I am a student at Bard College. I’m a dance major, and really, I don’t think he’s being treated any differently than MANY of the non-tenured professors at Bard right now.
The exact same weekend, the dance department let go two of its part time professors who had been working there for 20 years. That’s two professors out of a total of six in the department. And the two let go were some of the favored in the department overall. Same goes for the theater department, who let go one of their favored professors.
Now, I’m not saying that Joel Kovel’s nonrenewal has nothing to do with politics. I just think it’s important to know that many other professors with no political issues with President Botstein were fired at the same time.
In case you an unfamiliar with Kovel, he is a psychiatrist, professor of Social Studies and an author of numerous books including White Racism, A Psychohistory (1970), Red Hunting in the Promised Land (1994) and most recently, Overcoming Zionism (2007), which is published by far-left Pluto Press.
After the University of Michigan Press halted distribution of Overcoming Zionism, the standard anti-Zionist authors and organizations expressed their outrage. I blogged about the University of Michigan Press’ decision to end their partnership with Pluto Press here. Kovel and Pluto Press editor David Castle founded the Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism (CODZ) to “defend the principle of free speech on debate over Israel.” Israel is the focus of undergraduate and graduate courses, seminars by organizations on the left and right and demonstrations (pro and con) on college campuses across the United States. Organizations like CODZ do not support free speech, they want to control the debate.
Ron Radosh has an excellent post regarding Kovel. Here is a bit:
[W]hen Bard College announced that it was firing Professor Joel Kovel, his followers and supporters immediately tried to mount a campaign claiming that Kovel had been dismissed from his position because of his open and impassioned attack on Israel and his argument that Israel should be replaced by a unitary secular state made up of both former Israelis and Palestinians. Kovel himself wrote a statement about his termination in which he writes that, “If the world stands outraged at Israeli aggression in Gaza, it should also be outraged at institutions in the United States that grant Israel impunity.”
Kovel goes on to actually accuse Bard of firing him because he believes that it is the role of an educator to criticize the injustices in the world, and that Bard’s failure to not oppose Israel’s occupation and aggression makes it an accomplice in the perpetuation of Israel’s “state violence.” Since he implies that Bard defends both Zionism and Israel ( he points out that its President Leon Botstein is musical director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and that when it played at Bard the group performed both the Israeli and American national anthems) he argues that the worse Israel’s behavior, “the more strenuous must be the suppression of criticism.” His major point: Bard College “has suppressed critical engagement with Israel and Zionism, and therefore has enabled abuses such as have occurred and are occurring in Gaza.”
As for Kovel’s record at Bard, I have learned from sources that among other things, he used only his own books in the courses he taught. And as for his scholarly record, his publications include books like Red Hunting in the Promised Land:Anticommunism and the Making of America, which was published by Basic Books in 1994. I have read that book by Kovel, and on the basis of his analysis and argument, I would have hesitated in appointing anyone who wrote such drivel to teach in the humanities, when his own field is that of psychology, and who had previously been a Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College. In this volume, he uses his psychological credentials to essentially argue that those who oppose communism in the United States- the anti-Communists- were essentially mentally ill.
You can find Kovel’s statement at numerous lefty blogs including this one. The vast majority seem to agree that Bard is an outpost of the Zionist colonial project and many think it is a conservative school. This shows how far out these people are. Bard has closer relations with Palestinian institutions of higher education than most colleges in the U.S. and a conservative school would not have a position in the department of social studies, let alone a chair in the department, named after communist spy Alger Hiss.
More at Harry’s Place and Solomonia.
[Nothing radical about these California mixed nuts.]
I haven’t posted anything on radical nuts for a while. Here are a couple of items. The first concerns the animal rights extremists I posted about back in August of 2008. I read that the FBI picked up a suspect named Nathan Pope shortly after the firebombing but did not charge him for the crime.
A recent press release (February 20, 2008) from the Department of Justice reports University of California Berkeley Police officers, Joint Terrorism Task force members and F.B.I. agents arrested Pope (26), Adriana Stumpo (23), Maryam Khajavi (20) and Joseph Bundenberg (25) for “terrorizing University of California Researchers.” The report continues:
The arrests stem from a series of threatening incidents beginning in October 2007:
On Sunday, October 21, 2007 a group of approximately twenty people, including Mr. Buddenberg, Mr. Pope, and Ms. Stumpo, demonstrated outside a University of California Berkeley professor’s personal residence in El Cerrito, California. The group, some wearing bandanas to hide their faces, trespassed on his front yard, chanted slogans, and accused him of being a murderer because of his use of animals in research. The professor told police he was afraid, and felt harassed and intimidated by the extremists.
On Sunday, January 27, 2008, a group of approximately eleven individuals, including Mr. Buddenberg, Mr. Pope, Ms. Stumpo, and Ms. Khajavi, demonstrated outside the private residences of several University of California Berkeley researchers over the course of the day. At each residence, extremists dressed generally in all black clothing and wearing bandanas to hide their faces marched, chanted, and chalked defamatory comments on the public sidewalks in front of the residences. One of the researchers informed authorities he had been previously harassed and the incident had caused him to fear for his health and safety.
On February 24, 2008, five to six individuals including Mr. Pope, Ms. Stumpo, and Ms. Khajavi, attempted to forcibly enter the private home of a University of California researcher in Santa Cruz. When her husband opened the door, a struggle ensued and he was hit by an object. As the individuals fled, one yelled, “We’re gonna get you.” The professor and her husband both told the FBI they were terrified by the incident.
On July 29, 2008, a stack of flyers titled “Murderers and torturers alive & well in Santa Cruz July 2008 edition” was found at the Café Pergolesi in Santa Cruz. The fliers listed the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of several University of California researchers and stated “animal abusers everywhere beware we know where you live we know where you work we will never back down until you end your abuse.” The investigation connected Mr. Buddenberg, Mr. Pope, and Ms. Stumpo to the production and distribution of the fliers.
The flyers were distributed days before the firebombing of the homes of two researchers employed by the University of California, Santa Cruz. These attacks are still under investigation by the FBI. However, all of the individuals will be charged under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act which states:
whoever uses or causes to be used any facility of interstate commerce for the purpose of damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise, and in connection with such purpose, intentionally places a person in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury to that person or an immediate family member, or conspires or attempts to do so, by a course of conduct involving threats, acts of vandalism, property damage, criminal trespass, harassment, or intimidation, shall be imprisoned for not more than five years.
The Animal Liberation Press Office (ALPO) released this somewhat contradictory statement:
The irony is, that by targeting legal protesters, federal and state authorities are inadvertently encouraging more illegal direct action on behalf of non-human animals. One has only to look at the increased number of actions of economic sabotage, vandalism and live animal liberations over the last 2 years to realize that LEGAL activists are being increasingly driven into clandestine and anonymous actions, morally justified but illegal actions which are rarely punished.
As a supporter of direct action, the Animal Liberation Press Office is pleased at the increase in actions by the Animal Liberation Front and other clandestine groups; the increase is expected to continue as long as authorities persist with their heavy-handed abuse of legal protesters. In today’s climate, it appears that it’s less risky by far to engage in underground activities then in legal pickets.
ALPO is essentially arguing society should allow thugs to intimidate scientists or else activists will engage in more extreme behavior. Furthermore, they openly support criminality. This is what extremist activism is all about. Accept their warped vision of reality or face the destruction of your property and possibly serious injury or even the loss of your life.
Moving overseas to Greece, radical leftist terrorist wackos Sect of Revolutionaries have claimed responsibility for shooting a police station earlier this month and are turning their attention to journalists, capitalists and other “prominent Greeks.” The day after the Sect’s attack on the offices of Alter TV, Athens police “discovered a car bomb abandoned outside Citibank offices in Athens, which contained enough explosives to crumble a four-story building” (ERT News).
Athens News notes:
The group claimed it had been “unlucky” not to kill a police officer during a predawn attack two days earlier against the police station in the western Athens suburb of Korydallos, in which three assailants in hoods and helmets opened fire and threw a handgrenade that failed to explode. Nobody was injured.
“Our aim was to execute them,” the statement said of the police officers, adding: “They were lucky… We were unlucky… Next time they will not have luck on their side.”
The group also vowed to target other prominent Greeks.
“To those who are already wondering why we chose some random policemen and not a high-ranking official, a prominent journalist, a state functionary or at least a capitalist, we answer that their turn will come,” the statement said.
Police spokesman Panayiotis Stathis said on February 4 that authorities were taking the statement seriously and that the group seemed to be following the methods of the Revolutionary Struggle extremists who shot and seriously wounded a riot policeman last month.
“It seems to be genuine; it’s a group that has not appeared before but the methodology seems to be the same as that of Revolutionary Struggle,” Stathis said.
Sixteen 9mm bullet cases, believed to be from a German MP5 submachine gun, were found by police at the scene and are being tested to see if they match bullets used in known Revolutionary Struggle attacks. Police authorities are also studying closed-circuit television footage from the area.
Although the anti-authoritarian rioting sparked by 15-year-old Grigoropoulos’ death subsided before Christmas, attacks on police targets have increased.
Media reports are contradictory with some claiming this is a new group and others suggesting the Sect may be related to another organization, Revolutionary Struggle. You might remember Revolutionary Struggle from their attack on the American embassy in Athens back in 2007. Another group calling itself the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei has claimed responsibility for seventeen firebombings across Athens.
[No links in this post. Feel free to visit The Nation's website if you are so inclined.]
I don’t read The Nation that much these days. What’s the point? The authors always provide a standard lefty perspective that is predictable to the point of boredom. But a good friend of my wife stops by on occasion to chat and she always drops off her old copies of the magazine (as well as the New Yorker, another magazine I find grating).
So, while I was in the restroom this morning, I happened upon The Nation’s Gaza extravaganza and there was plenty to get my bowels moving. First up was an editorial claiming:
Israel’s invasion of Gaza has dramatically worsened a grave humanitarian crisis and will benefit only those who always benefit from war. There is no military solution to what is fundamentally a political conflict.
My reply is, tell that to Hamas.They don’t seem to agree with you, Nation editors. Instead, the organization is ideologically dedicated to Israel’s destruction and the murder of Jews. Why do these authors feel the need to project their own politics onto Hamas? Why don’t they take the time to understand Hamas in their own words?
Next was Alexander Cockburn’s “Beat the Devil” column. Cockburn is a knee-jerk anti-Zionist and his hatred of Jews has been well documented. One sentence of his article was especially relavent:
[I]f the elites are as solidly a part of the amen chorus as they have been down the decades, once you leave the corporate and political highways and get on the side roads of the Internet, the picture is changing.
Yes, on the cesspools of the Internet like Cockburn’s Counterpunch the picture is not so much changing as it is getting more shrill regarding the so-called “Holocaust” and “genocide” in Gaza.
By the time I got to Naomi Klein’s “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction” (BDS for short) I got the picture loud and clear. Like most of the loony left, the pundits at The Nation place an extremely negative emphasis on Israel while denying the war crimes and other human rights violations of Hamas. Hamas is rarely, if ever, mentioned in any of these pieces. Instead, we have a narrative where Israel (and the United States) are to blame for all of Gaza’s ills, rather that the genocidal, totalitarian, and theocratic motivations of Israel’s enemies.
Zombietime provides a comprehensive roundup of peace anti-Jew rallies around the world:
On January 10, the war between Israel and Hamas became a global conflict. No longer confined to the Gaza Strip, the fighting spread to cities around the world: what were billed as “anti-war” demonstrations from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and beyond were in fact overtly pro-Hamas demonstrations, and on Saturday, January 10 there was a unprecedented eruption of violence and extremism in dozens of European and American cities, surpassing anything seen at anti-war rallies in recent years.
Read it all here.
[H/t to D.K. aka The Kvetcher]
The Kvetcher has been exploring some interesting and controversial territory regarding immigration. Reading his discussions with the people at the Nativist, paleocon VDARE website is like stepping into some strange yet familiar nexus where the tropes of radical left and extreme right meet.
Here is DK’s original post (Jewish Unease Towards Mass Immigration from Islamic Countries Spreads Left):
For a long-time in the mainstream Jewish community, it seemed only Stephen Steinlight was brave enough to publicly declare it wasn’t in the Jewish community’s interest to support mass immigration from Islamic countries. (In fact, Steinlight went further, questioning the wisdom of accepting mass immigration from Mexico, because he is a fearless and principled man, who treasures his country and his community more than being popular).
Well…it’s over seven years later, and finally the hawkish Left is coming round.
Marty Peretz writes on TNR,
As it happens, jihadism has less deadly manifestations than murder. As the Ku Klux Klan had less deadly manifestations than lynching. This morning I watched a frightening episode in the public life of America. It was a demonstration by, say, 200 Muslim immigrants in Fort Lauderdale against the Israeli air strikes over Gaza. Now, the first amendment protects such demos, and I would not for a moment want to curb them. But I ask each of you to pay attention to the details of what was being shouted. Especially by the young women screaming, “Jews to the ovens.” No jihad in America, huh? Do we want such immigrants in our country? Well, John, do we?
Most Jews on the social Left will continue to denounce our concerns as “fascist” and “racist” and will continue to give space-cadet reasons why we shouldn’t be concerned AT ALL about little inconveniences like terrorism, harassment, and a loss of power from say, an additional ten million religious Muslims immigrating to the U.S.
D.K. posted a follow-up titled “Jews and the Larger Mass Immigration Issues” where he notes:
I would ask the question like this: Is this a good time for mass immigration?
The answer is an unequivocal “no.” We are in a period of massive unemployment. Seeking a greater labor supply at this time is absolutely absurd, and cruel to our working-class countrymen. We already suffer from an acute and increasing labor surplus. And it is probably only going to get worse, perhaps much worse.
There are plenty of other reasons to object to mass immigration. The list is so long…but employment issues alone in today’s devolving economy suffice to warrant something approaching a moratorium on mass immigration, or at least, it presents an opportune time for reevaluation of current policies.
And that is legal immigration. That defense offered for amnesty or amnesty-like policies for illegal immigrants is a mind-blowing chutzpah. Maddeningly, there are Jews and Jewish groups who actually claim on our communal behalf that illegal immigration somehow parallels are own legal immigrant past.
So I posted some comments and questions at The Kvetcher, and, lo and behold, DK devoted a blog post to me. Here are my comments, condensed in some places and somewhat elaborated in others:
The labor economist Isaac Hourwich (Immigration and Labor, 1912) argued close to a century ago that American assumptions regarding immigration and the labor market are not correct i.e. that too many people were chasing too few jobs and this was driving wages down. The solution for critics of immigration was to limit or ban it altogether. However, rather than overcrowding the labor market and driving down wages, Hourwich contends the expansion of the economy far outpaced the pace of immigration. He supports his claims with economic data complied by the federal and various state governments.
The bottom line is immigration flows in open, free, capitalist economies respond to labor demand. As labor demand increases, immigration will increase. As labor demand decreases, immigration will decrease. Increases and decreases in labor demand result from the boom/bust cycles of the broader economy. Stated very simply:
↑Economy →↑Labor Demand →↑Immigration
Or, as as Hourwich notes:
The supply of immigrant labor is determined by free competition, like any other commodity. It may sometimes exceed the demand and at other times fall short if it; in the long run, however, supply adjusts itself to demand.
Regarding “own legal immigrant past,” the notion of “legal” and “illegal” immigrant is a fairly recent invention and our borders were much more porous in the past than they are today. It was actually much easier (politically and economically) to immigrate to the U.S. in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than the twenty-first. Travel by steamship back then was more dangerous than airplane today, but it was much less expensive.
Another critique is the language used by contemporary Nativist outfits like VDARE is almost identical to that used by Nativists in the eighteenth century, nineteenth century and twentieth century. The claims made back then were as false (Russians, Italians, Poles, etc. do not want to learn English, they are clannish and stick to their “own kind,” they do not want to assimilate, etc.) as they are today.
Given my familiarity with the radical (baroque, faux, rococco, leftover) left, I was also puzzled by one poster (”Jenny”) who claimed:
[T]here has been an alliance formed between the corporate elites and the far left.
I suspect Jenny has not been to any demonstrations over the past say, fifteen or twenty years or read much, if any, far left literature. The far left–anarchists, communists, etc.–are definitely not in alliance with corporate elites. They are against NAFTA just like the paleocons at VDARE. They even use similar (anti-capitalist) rhetoric. Extremists on the left and right both rail against what they call globalism (hard right) or globalization (hard left).
Jenny adds:
I read an article today that stated that even among Mexicans, three out of five aren’t religious any longer. There is a strong movement of radical Marxists in the pro-illegal alien community, and they are indoctrinating them. That’s the reason why there is such a huge antisemitic tendency in the illegal alien community, and no amount of ADL huckstering on their behalf is going to change that.
If you follow the link above Jenny’s arguments and the rhetoric she uses are almost identical to those used against Jews, Italians, Catholics, Russians and others who were part of “new immigration” wave in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These arguments were rehashed from the critiques made of those who arrived as part of the “old immigrantation” wave (Dutch, Germans and Irish) in the eighteenth century.
I recommended DK and Jenny (and readers, if interested) have a read of Isaac Hourwich’s “Immigration and Labor” (link below). It is eye-opening, if depressing, to see how little the arguments have changed.
The idea that immigrants of the past did not flock to communities dominated by their countrymen and countrywomen, that they did not create media in their own languages (newspapers, books, etc.), is simply not supported by the evidence. Take a look at the images of early American cities with storefront signs in Yiddish, Polish, Italian, Russian, etc. (not English) take a look at the names of the newspapers that were popular in immigrant communities, take a look at the languages they were published in.
This process of assimilation has been going on for a long, long, time. Critics of immigration said Jews would not assimilate. They said we were not interested in becoming American, we were only interested in making a “quick profit” and that increasing numbers of us were not even religious, instead informed and guided by foreign ideologies like Marxism, anarchism and communism. Sound familiar?
While not in favor of open borders, I am generally in the pro-immigration camp. I am also in favor of free trade as opposed to protectionism. Nevertheless, D.K.’s overarching concern with radicalism is something that concerns me as well. While worries of Europe turning into Eurabia are often overstated, there has been an alarming increase in political violence and anti-Semitism on the continent.
On a more subjective note, I have long felt that Jews, as the people who coined the term Diaspora and spent so much of our collective existence as outsiders in others’ lands, should be sensitive about the situation of immigrants. Remember, we were strangers in the land of Egypt (Leviticus 19:34):
The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
One last thing, I know they would probably prefer not to know, but DK’s positions are not very far from Sultan Knish’s…
More Info:
AFL-CIO page on Immigrant Workers
Center for Migration Studies NY
Change to Win Coalition on Immigrant Workers’ Rights
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
Immigration and Labor by Isaac Hourwich (1912) via Google Books.
Ernest’s Sternberg’s review of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (New York: Random House, 2008 ) in Telos (A Revivified Corpse: Left Fascism in the Twenty-First Century) is well worth reading (also check out Fred Siegel’s review in Democratiya here).
The review is a pithy summary of many of the issues that concern me today including the collusion and alliances of the extreme left and extreme right, the development of Islamist totalitarianism, and the increasing frequency of antisemitism cloaked as anti-imperialism. Observing events in his native France since the fall of the Soviet Union and especially after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Lévy asks, “what happened to the secular, liberal, left?” In answering this question, Sternberg notes two ideas at the core of Lévy’s conception of contemporary neo-progressive thought:
One is the Good (a poorly chosen word, an insult to classical thinking about the good): the idea that here and now our troubled society can be upended to create a shining new and just society. It’s the end for which it’s worth sacrificing a generation to starvation, reeducation camps, and the police state (p. 66).
Perhaps a better term is “the perfect” as in “the perfect is the enemy of the good” or simply, utopianism.
The review continues:
The other is the Evil: that filth and corruption in which we are now trapped. Leading from one to the other is the “boulevard of history.” Driving us along it is that dialectical machine, that curative force, that “political medicalism” (Lévy quoting Foucault) that carries us from our miserable existence into this fabulous future, with such certainty that we need not fret about lives discarded along the way.
How far we have drifted from May ‘68, Lévy mourns. It had seemed then that the Left had shorn itself of communism, devoted itself to anti-fascism and anti-racism, and agreed to work for human rights through imperfect liberal-democratic regimes. It is this non-Marxist Left that had Lévy’s allegiance. But after the collapse of communism and all the more so after 9/11, Lévy saw the coalescence of a new ideology, a new degenerate Left. It first seemed to him pointless, just something cobbled together from defunct ideologies. But then he understood that it was a revivified Left, which was once again acceding to totalitarian temptation. The outcome is today’s neoprogressivism.
Sternberg has more substantial critiques of Lévy’s analysis. In particular, his “failure to comprehend mainstream Anglo-American conservatism.” For Lévy:
conservatism brings to mind those martinets who persecuted Dreyfus: those whose highest values were Authority, Order, Nation, State, Tradition, and Social Body (his capitalizations) as against intellectuals, freedom, democracy, parliament, and rights of man (p. 24). Unable to extricate himself from hoary Left-Right dichotomy, even as he reveals its bankruptcy, Lévy claims the parliamentarian Edmund Burke, whose sin was to be a conservative, as one of the origins of the historical path to Nazism (p. 92).
The irony is that Lévy himself has taken a Burkean turn. Lévy identifies the essence of the anti-totalitarian spirit as one that conceives of politics “as a world of indecision, indetermination, which takes into account the complexity of human affairs, the need for deliberation and compromise” (p. 70)…
American conservatives aren’t interested in Burke because he admired the French queen but because he formulated a powerful argument for incremental reform in light of society’s overwhelming complexity, an argument not so far removed from Lévy’s own…
…Most versions of American conservative thought look for inspiration and tradition not to an ancien régime, but to the American revolution, the Founding Fathers, the constitution, Lincoln’s reforms, and incremental development of America as the original liberal, anti-absolutist state.
Intellectual historian George Nash covers this in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945. Nash argues that the ideology of American conservatism is difficult to pin down. For European conservatives, things were (are?) much easier. Generally speaking, European conservatives were against radical political and social change—better known as revolution—and they supported a national church. In the United States, a country founded on revolution, such a political idea would be regarded as anti-American and the establishment of a state Church–whether Protestant or Catholic–also ran counter to American political culture.
A more serious deficiency is Lévy:
lacks an explanation for the rise of neoprogressive barbarism. Despite much intellectual name-dropping, the book is short on theory. Yet, his initial outline of totalitarian articles of faith gives a hint. The new totalitarians must envision a Good as well as an Evil, only Lévy is silent on what their Good might be.
Sternberg will discuss “Left Fascism” at the 2009 Telos Conference in NYC (Jan 17). Details below:
From the conference website:
The conference topic will be New Administration: War, Class and Critical Theory, which will consider both the new administration in Washington and political shifts abroad, viewed in light of Telos’s long-standing concern with “administered society,” expansive bureaucracies, and the role of the “new class.”
Conference Schedule
Saturday, January 17
9:00 Greetings: Mary Piccone, Introduction: Russell Berman
New Class and Capitalism:
Beyond Welfare and State and Neo-Liberalism
Chair: David Pan
9:15 Jim Kulk: “Political Divisions and the Financial Crisis”
10:00 John Milbank: “Revived Red Toryism: The New Political Paradox”
10:45 Break
11:00 Neil Turnbull: “Federal Populism and its Failure as Regionalism”
11:45 Michael Marder: “In the Name of the Law: Schmitt and the Metonymic Abuses of Legitimacy”
12:30 Lunch
Old Wars, New Wars
Chair: Tim Luke
1:30 Joseph Bendersky: “Horkheimer, ‘Militant Democracy,’ and War”
2:15 David Pan: “World Order and the Decline of U.S. Power: Soft or Hard Landing?”
3:00 Break
3:15 Adrian Pabst: “The Berlin Doctrine: Rethinking the Euro-Atlantic Community”
4:00 Ernie Sternberg: “Left Fascism”
4:45 Closing Discussion
A good friend of mine, call him Z, paid me a visit last week. I met Z in graduate school in NYC close to ten years ago and he currently resides in Athens. As the child of Greek parents, he had an option to get Greek citizenship (sort of like a right of return) and decided to do so a few years ago. I have not seen him for close to two years so we discussed a lot of things, mostly our personal lives, the standard trials and tribulations, I was also able to pick his brain about the riots in Athens.
You probably know these riots started after the police killed a Greek teen. College students and other youth took to the streets and started breaking windows and clashing with the police. V has a soft spot for anarchism and libertarian socialism but he has little time for anarcho-vandals. Rather than seeing the riots as a replay of Paris 68, he saw it as an outburst or tantrum. This was an expression of political impotency rather than political strength and solidarity. He explained the riots provide a steam valve of sorts in a society that rarely charges the police officers involved in acts of brutality (and has never sent a single officer to jail) or the rioters who throw bricks and molotav cocktails. It is all business as usual over there. Almost like a game.
Another point Z made was that Greece has seen a influx of immigrants or “guest workers” from Eastern Europe and Africa. He doubted the populace would have been in such an uproar had the person killed been African. He said “no one would have cared.” So much for international proletarian solidarity.
The same week V was in town, I read about a police shooting in my former home, Oakland, California. Early New Year’s morning, an officer of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police shot Oscar Grant while he was being detained. The shooting was recorded by at least one cellphone and was subsequently uploaded to Youtube (I am not providing links to any of the videos).
BART police stopped the twenty-two year old Grant early New Year’s morning in response to a group of African-American males fighting on the train station platform. While the precise details of the incident are still emerging, videos show Grant detained by two officers when a third officer shot and killed him. Grant does not appear to be a threat to the officers or the public when he was killed. However, in contrast to those who call this a “police lynching”, judging by the look of shock on the officers faces, it seems more like a tragic accident than an execution.
The slow response and lack of action by the BART police led to frustration and in some cases anger. A demonstration was called for January 8 that ended in what is being described as a riot by the international press.
From what I’ve read and heard from family and friends a very small area was impacted. A few storefronts of small businesses were broken, a public teacher’s car was trashed, and a few Oakland PD cars were damaged (even though the OPD was not involved in the incident). The teacher noted a protester telling her, “fuck your car.”
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
The roving mob expressed fury at police and frustration over society’s racial injustice. Yet the demonstrators were often indiscriminate, frequently targeting the businesses and prized possessions of people of color.
They smashed a hair salon, a pharmacy and several restaurants. Police in riot gear tried to control the crowd, but some people retreated along 14th Street and bashed cars along the way.
The mob smashed the windows at Creative African Braids on 14th Street, and a woman walked out of the shop holding a baby in her arms.
“This is our business,” shouted Leemu Topka, the black owner of the salon she started four years ago. “This is our shop. This is what you call a protest?”
…
“I feel like the night is going great,” said Nia Sykes, 24, of San Francisco, one of the demonstrators. “I feel like Oakland should make some noise. This is how we need to fight back. It’s for the murder of a black male.”
Sykes, who is black, had little sympathy for the owner of Creative African Braids.
“She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life,” Sykes said. She added that she did have one worry for the night: “I just hope nobody gets shot or killed.”
[Added: Ms. Sykes claims she was misquoted "grossly out of context".]
Videos online (Youtube and elsewhere) show African-American teens and white anarchists in their 20s participating in vandalism. Anarchists also claimed responsibility for vandalizing the North Berkeley BART station the day after the demonstration claiming, ” From the East Bay to Greece – WE ARE EVERYWHERE!” Other protesters made a shameless connection between Oakland and Gaza.
As of this post, three miscreants have been arrested and formally charged:
A 28-year-old Oakland man was charged with misdemeanor possession of a concealed weapon and possession of a loaded firearm. He was arrested on the 2000 block of Broadway at about 11 p.m. and blurted out when arrested “I’ve got guns in both my pockets”, police said. Police found two semi-automatic pistols, one in each pocket.
A 20-year-old Oakland man charged with felony possession of cocaine and misdemeanor vandalism. He was one of those arrested for breaking windows McDonalds on 14th and Jackson streets.
The third person charged was a 30-year-old San Francisco man, who was arrested when officers saw him setting fire to a garbage can at 14th and Clay streets at about 10 p.m. He was charged with felony arson.
What is illustrative to me is how the story is framed. For example, I was listening to a public radio broadcast where the host referred to the “obvious instance of police brutality” in this case and a Canadian morning show that made mention of looting. Bear in mind there has been no investigation, let alone a trial, there was no looting, but the mainstream media was ready, willing and able to expect the worst.
More:
CNN: Riots erupt in Oakland after slain father laid to rest
Oakland Tribune: Not quite a riot, but terrifying
Stanley Crouch: A rage in Oakland
Ta-Nehesi Coates: Oscar Grant
[H/t Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)]
I received this email and thought you might be interested:
We, the undersigned university faculty members from around the world call upon the members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) to oppose any resolution to ban Israeli academics from teaching in Ontario or anywhere else. The current resolution invokes, as justification for the proposed ban, bombing that damaged the Islamic University in Gaza on December 29. Sid Ryan of CUPE’s Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee says: “Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general.” No other country’s academics have been the targets of such union action before, whether or not their country was at war. Israel is engaged in a war to defend its people against an enemy that has been firing missiles at Israeli civilians for years. The enemy, Hamas, had been using the Islamic University as a training camp, launching pad, and weapons depot. Other universities in Gaza were not Hamas facilities and were therefore not bombed.
The proposed ban clearly represents ethnic discrimination, and the proposed ideological litmus test is a violation of free speech. The members of the University and College Union in England recently rejected a similar proposal because of its discriminatory nature, and we urge the Ontario CUPE members to reject the proposal now before them.
To show our solidarity with our Israeli academics in this matter, we, the undersigned, hereby declare ourselves to be Israeli academics for purposes of any academic boycott. We will regard ourselves as Israeli academics and decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics are excluded.
• Visit Scholars For Peace in the Middle East website
• To Sign this petition click here.
• To see current signatures click here.
• Please consider making a donation to SPME
[H/t Labourstart]
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
The Canadian Union of Public Employees [CUPE--e.d.] in Ontario, the largest labor union representing staff members at the province’s universities, plans to introduce a resolution at its conference next month to ban Israeli academics from teaching, speaking, or doing research at Ontario universities if they do not first condemn Israeli actions in Gaza.
Ben Cohen (Z Word) rightly describes this as a “disloyalty oath.”
The push for an academic boycott is ostensibly in response to the bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza. However, CUPE-Ontario has a history of anti-Israel activities. In 2006 the union supported a boycott of goods made in Israel and CUPE president Sid Ryan let it slip that, “It’s a logical next step, building on policy adopted by our provincial convention in 2006.”
What Ryan and CUPE-Ontario do not mention is the Islamic University of Gaza is controlled by Hamas. The university is used to develop and store weapons, a sanctuary for wanted terrorists and a jail for enemies of the organization. In February of 2007, Israel Insider reported, “kidnapped soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit spent most of his time in captivity imprisoned on the campus of the Islamic University in Gaza,” according to “senior Palestinian sources.”
B’nai B’rith Canada released a statement calling for the national union to distance itself from the noxious resolution supported by CUPE-Ontario:
CUPE-Ontario has betrayed a pattern of agitating against Israel that must be addressed at the national level by its parent body. We urge CUPE-National to take steps to immediately distance itself from this biased and discriminatory resolution and to undertake a wider review of CUPE-Ontario’s operational practices that have systematically tried to delegitimize the Jewish State and its right to self-defence.
[Taj Palace Hotel, Mumbai]
Mumbai, India has been hit by another terrorist attack. Details remain sketchy but a group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen has claimed responsibility. It appears the terrorists approached the city via boat, whether hijacked or an accomplice vessel, and switched to smaller dinghies to come ashore. After landing, they attacked multiple targets throughout Mumbai.
Unlike previous attacks, the terrorists used small arms and grenades rather than high explosive devices. Early reports focused on the explicit targeting of foreigners at the Oberoi Trident and Taj hotels. However, busy locations frequented by Indians, such as the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station and the Nariman House residential and business complex were also attacked. Nariman House is the location of Chabad Lubavich’s Mumbai center.
Indian authorities report the terrorists appeared highly trained and knowledgeable of the layout of the hotels and other targets. According to the BBC, an unidentified Indian commando stated, “Not everybody can fire the AK series of weapons, not everybody can throw grenades like that,” he said. “By using such weapons and explosives, it is obvious that they would have been trained somewhere.” 140 people are reported dead and I expect this number to rise over the days as buildings are secured and cleared of terrorists.
Here are reports and commentary from around the web:
Excellent coverage may be found at the website for The Hindu and India Express newspapers and Desi Pundit blog.
The Hindu: Terrorists Used Hijacked Vessel
Even as special forces continued to battle the terrorists, investigators have been working to piece together the sequence of events that led up to the massacre that started on Wednesday night.
Based on the continuing interrogation of arrested Lashkar terrorist Ajmal Amir Kamal, investigators believe the 12 terrorists who left Karachi on a merchant ship hijacked a fishing boat to facilitate their final assault on Mumbai.
According to Kamal, the group hijacked the Porbandar-registered Kuber to avoid detection by Indian Navy and Coast Guard patrols, which had a considerable presence in off Mumbai.
While one group of terrorists used the hijacked boat to land at Sassoon Docks on the eastern coast of Mumbai, a second group used a fibreglass lifeboat to row west to the Cuffe Parade fisherman’s colony.
Before leaving the fishing boat, the terrorists beheaded its captain, who Gujarat authorities have identified as Balwant Tandel, from Una village in the Union Territory of Diu. There is no word on the fate of the remaining crew of five.
The Hindu: Premature Action, Israeli Experts
Israeli security experts have said that the Indian security forces were premature in storming the besieged Nariman House.
“Indians should have sanitised the area and first collected intelligence about the terrorists before launching flushing out operations,” a media report here said, quoting the experts.
“In hostage situations, the first thing the forces are supposed to do is assemble at the scene and begin collecting intelligence,” a former official in Israel’s famed anti-terror agency Shin Bet told The Jerusalem Post.
“In this case, it appears that the forces showed up at the scene and immediately began exchanging fire with the terrorists instead of first taking control of the area,” he said.
Foreign Policy: Who are the Deccan Mujahideen?
One must always be suspicious when a “new” terrorist organization crops up. Today’s horrific attacks in Mumbai were claimed by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen. But one India journalist claims the pattern of the attacks suggests that Lashkar-e-Taiba, a nasty Islamist organization based in Lahore, Pakistan, and with a significant presence in Kashmir and links to al Qaeda, may be to blame.
Here’s where it gets interesting — and I stress here that I am just speculating. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s main goal is to expel India from Kashmir. In the past, some have accused elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence services of having ties to the group. Pakistan’s government has always hotly denied such accusations.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has in recent weeks moved closer to the United States, made some significant gestures toward India, and moved to shut down the political wing of the ISI, Pakisan’s powerful intelligence service (that’s the unit that tries to steal elections). How likely is it that some angry “rogue elements” of the ISI, aligned with Kashmiri jihadists and a team of Indian domestic extremists, sought to head off these moves? I have no idea, but it’s definitely a theory worth exploring.
There’s another more straighforward explanation for today’s attacks — revenge. A group calling itself the “Indian Mujahideen” has claimed responsibility for attacks in a number of different cities over the past several months. The Indian Mujahideen sent a warning in September expressing anger over recent raids by the city’s antiterrorism squad (ATS). Today’s message from the Deccan Mujahideen appears to be identical…
Abe Greenwald (Contentions): Return of the Root Cause
The Chief Minister of Mumbai, Vilasrao Deshmukh claims that “British citizens of Pakistani origin” were among the armed terrorists who took over various sites in the city. If true, this puts a new twist on Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement that “external forces” were responsible for the attack. Time and Newsweek can publish all the articles they want about a “mounting sense of persecution” among Muslims in India, but if Indian businessmen (and foreign tourists) are being slaughtered by loyal subjects of the Crown, I’d say the media’s emphasis is a little off-base.
Islamic terrorists don’t need a regional excuse; Western journalists do. Nothing demonstrates this better than the shell game playing out in India this Thanksgiving weekend. One of the terrorists who seized the Oberoi Trident hotel told an Indian news station by phone, “We love this as our country but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?” and then his colleagues went and set off bombs to kill all the neglectful Indian lawmakers in . . . a Jewish outreach center.
Martin in the Margins: Mumbai and the Theology of Death
At lunchtime today, I listened to an insensitive, boneheaded Radio 4 presenter asking the Indian ambassador whether, given that the Mumbai attackers were probably Islamists, his government should now start attending seriously to the grievances of its Muslim population, as Britain had to do after 7/7. It’s enough to make you weep. In something he wrote after 9/11, but which I can’t find right now, Christopher Hitchens recalled asking some Chilean exile friends whether they were tempted to launch a similar attack on America, after the CIA-backed overthrow of Allende. They were horrified at the thought. Genuine radicals, those whose radicalism arises from a love of humanity and rage at inequality and injustice, don’t tend to see the mass murder of innocent people as a legitimate tactic. The murderers of Mumbai, like the Baader-Meinhof killers that I wrote about the other day, were not reacting to ‘grievances’, unless they were grievances imagined in their twisted theology of victimhood, but acting out the logical dictates of a nihilistic and death-loving ideology.
ZWord: The Mumbai Terrorist Attack
We’re continually being told that a solution to the Palestinian question will bind up the wounds inflicted on the pride of certain sections of Muslim opinion by the existence of a state for Jews. It’s never been a very convincing view and every attack like this makes it less so. A solution to the Palestinian question must be found for the sake of the Palestinians themselves and not because it would cool the ardor of radical Muslim opinion in India, Pakistan, Indonesia or anywhere else. To put it another way, does anyone really believe that the coming into existence of a Palestinian state would have convinced the Mumbai terrorists not to attack the Jewish centre?
UPDATE:
Indian troops have stormed the Chabad house. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, were among the murdered. JTA notes:
Conflicting reports following the takeover of Mumbai’s Chabad-Lubavitch house in the terrorist attacks in India, which left more than 140 dead, prompted confusion and anxiety surrounding the fate of the house’s occupants, including the Holtzbergs.
Four Israelis were among those freed from the Trident-Oberoi luxury hotel along with other hostages late Friday morning, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry…
On Thursday afternoon, Indian commandos surrounded the Nariman House, where Chabad is located, with plans to storm in and release the hostages. There reportedly were four terrorists holed up inside with six hostages. Indian special forces reportedly killed one terrorist in the building.
Earlier Thursday, the hostage takers released the Holtzberg’s 2-year-old son and the building’s cook, who said that the couple was alive but unconscious…
The Chabad house is located at 5 Hormusji Street in Mumbai. India is a popular destination for young Israeli backpackers, who often make the trip after their army service. The Holtzbergs moved to Mumbai from Brooklyn, New York in 2003 to do Jewish outreach work in India.
Concern about the fate of the Chabad rabbi and his wife mounted throughout the day, with the Brooklyn-based organization issuing calls for prayer to Jews the world over. The National Council of Young Israel also sent out an alert asking Jews to pray for the rabbi and his wife.
“One friend of Gavriel Holtzberg reported receiving an e-mail from the Mumbai rabbi at 11:30 p.m. local time,” Chabad.org reported. “The Israeli Consulate was in touch with Holtzberg, but the line was cut in middle of the conversation. No further contact has since been established.”
On Thursday morning, according to the Jerusalem Post, the Chabad rabbi’s toddler son was rushed from the house in the arms of one of the Jewish center’s employees, Sandra Samuel.
“I took the child, I just grabbed the baby and ran out,” said Samuel, 44, who was identified as a cook.
Analysis from Bill Roggio (Long War Journal)
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