Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, November 1, 2023

Saturday, November 4, 2023, 1:00 P.M.

San Francisco Civic Center

 

Now is the time to stand with the besieged people of Palestine! Gaza is being bombed by the hour. Its people are denied food, water, and electricity by Israel. Tens of thousands more people are likely to die. We must ACT! People are in the streets every day in their local cities and towns. Now we must UNITE! Join the tens-of-thousands people, from every corner of the United States, who are converging for a truly massive National March on Washington D.C. on Saturday, November 4.

 

Today, the Israeli military deliberately bombed a hospital where thousands of people had taken refuge. The death toll is staggering, and the Biden administration has announced that it is preparing 2,000 troops to support Israel after having already deployed an aircraft carrier battle group and war planes.

 

Israel, with the full backing of the U.S. government, is carrying out an unprecedented massacre in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians are being killed with bombs, bullets and missiles paid for by U.S. tax dollars. This is the latest bloody chapter in the colonial project of Israel, founded with the objective of dispossessing Palestinians from their land.

 

Join us in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, November 4 at 1pm to demand: End the Siege of Gaza! End all U.S. aid to Israel! Free Palestine!

 

Initial co-sponsoring organizations:

 

Palestinian Youth Movement

ANSWER Coalition

American Muslim Association

The People’s Forum

National Students for Justice in Palestine

Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition

Party for Socialism and Liberation

U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)

U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR)

Maryland2Palestine

 

Endorse the march here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdIoioEdHTwb1d8Qx9ZbH2a-gsh3aDa3hWSiSMPsAR0scgIfw/viewform?pli=1

 

Buses and transportation centers are being organized in cities and towns across the country. Check back here for updated information about transportation options.

 

Please make an urgently needed donation to support solidarity work with Palestine in this pivotal moment:

https://www.answercoalition.org/donate?utm_campaign=palestine_11_4_national_demo_a&utm_medium=email&utm_source=answercoalition

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"The Rock" on top of Bernal Hill overlooking downtown San Francisco re-painted October 26, 2023, after pro-Israeli Zionist's destroyed it. 

Palestinians killed and wounded by Israel:

As of November 1, 2023, the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel is now over 8,800 in Gaza (at least 3,542 of them children—with more than 21,543 Palestinians injured and 2,000 remain buried under the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings) and more than 124 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank.

Israelis killed and abducted by Hamas: 

A total of 1,400 Israelis killed by Hamas (30 of them children) and 240 abducted on October 7, 2023.

NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA  PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!

FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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Viva Fidel!

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PLEASE SIGN AND FORWARD WIDELY!

 

To endorse the following statement as a trade unionist, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd2tpd2c62Sh5YEVDOr2vmGWTuQArt-6OPQMDwd2wUnfNi_rQ/viewform

 

To endorse as other, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdzWaP1U_KOHlH-ou1R3OD8zsuI5BWW1b9H4gtPoFK_lIQB3g/viewform

 

The list of signers will be updated periodically

Contact: info@laborforpalestine.net

Website: laborforpalestine.net

 

Stand With Palestinian Workers: 

Cease the Genocide Now—Stop Arming Israel!

Labor for Palestine

 

“We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel (October 16, 2023)

 

The undersigned U.S. workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists join labor around the world in condemning the Israeli siege on Gaza that has killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians—many of them children—and stand with Palestinians’ “right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.”

 

The latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine.

 

Israel’s crimes are only possible because of more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10+ million per day) in bipartisan US military aid that gives Israel the guns, bullets, tanks, ships, jet fighters, missiles, helicopters, white phosphorus and other weapons to kill and maim the Palestinian people. This is the same system of racist state violence that, through shared surveillance technology and police exchange programs, brutalizes BIPOC and working class people in the United States and around the world.

 

In response, we demand an immediate end to the genocide, and embrace the recent Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel:

 

1.     To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel. 

 

2.     To pass motions in their trade union to this effect. 

 

3.     To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution. 

 

4.     Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.

 

We further reaffirm the call on labor bodies to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by adopting this statement, and/or the model resolution below to divest from Israel Bonds, sever all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respect the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). 

 

Initial Signers on behalf of Labor for Palestine

(organizational affiliations listed for identification only)

Suzanne Adely, Labor for Palestine, US Palestinian Community Network, Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President, National Lawyers Guild; Monadel Herzallah, Arab American Union Members Council; Ruth Jennison, Department Rep., Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA, NEA; Co-Chair, Labor Standing Committee River Valley DSA; Delegate to Western Mass Area Labor Federation; Lara Kiswani, Executive Director, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC); Block the Boat; Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Jews for Palestinian Right of Return; Corinna Mullin, PSC-CUNY International Committee; CUNY for Palestine; Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired.)

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Join us for an exciting Cuba solidarity event coming up on Sunday, November 12th, 4 pm at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley. Liz Oliva Fernández, a Cuban journalist and filmmaker with the Belly of the Beast media organization, is coming to the Bay Area as part of a national tour. She will be showing two new short documentary films exposing what's behind Biden's Cuba policy. This is an important chance for the Bay Area community to learn about current U.S. policy and show support for Cuba. 

Cuba has been outspoken about its solidarity with Palestine/Gaza during the current crisis.

Liz Oliva Fernández

Liz Oliva Fernández is a 29-year old journalist and on-camera television presenter from Havana, Cuba.  She is the award-winning presenter of the acclaimed documentary series The War on Cuba,  produced by Belly of the Beast and executive-produced by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover.  In addition to her journalism and filmmaking, Fernández is a dedicated anti-racist and feminist activist who co-founded Chicas Poderosas Cuba (Powerful Cuban Girls), an initiative that promotes change by inspiring female leadership and gender equality in Cuban society. 

Liz writes: “As a Cuban Black woman, I feel that the reality in which I grew up and still live is reflected in the stories we have told at Belly of the Beast. We challenge clichés – positive and negative – about Cuba and its people. And we are taking on issues that have been ignored or misrepresented by major media outlets both in Cuba and outside.”

Sponsored by Bay Area Cuba Solidarity Network

Venceremos Brigade, Bay Area and 

Richmond, CA - Regla, Cuba Friendship Committee

More info: bayareacubasolidarity@gmail.com

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Jewish Doctor Speaks Out on Israel and Palestine

Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author describes his own life experience and expresses his view on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

“I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and most of my extended family were killed. I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.

“There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent—that’s what’s called the ‘Nakba’ in Arabic; the ‘disaster’ or the ‘catastrophe.’ There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.

“I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then.

“It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century. I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit!

“So, then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an ‘outdoor prison,’ which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity. You think the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.

“And ‘anybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite’ is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true.”

—Independent Catholic News, October 16, 2023

https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/48251

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TERRORISM IN THE EYES OF THE IMPERIAL BEHOLDER - a poem

 

the French word

for rabies

is

la rage -

rage or outrage

 

and 

the French have a saying -

a man who wants to get rid of his dog

accuses it of spreading rabies

 

the people of Gaza

treated as inhuman animals

worse than dogs

are charged

with terrorism

 

come to think of it

what an honor !

 

world war two's resistance

against nazi extermination

was designated

as terrorism

by the Axis allies

 

what an honor !

 

Mandela

was monitored

as a terrorist

by the CIA

 

What an honor !

 

Tortuguita

peacefully meditating

near Israeli-funded cop city

was executed

in cold blood

on suspicion

of domestic terrorism 

 

What an honor !

 

in the spirit of Mandela

in the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising

in the spirit of Tortuguita

in the spirit of Attica

may the anti colonial outrage

of the People of Palestine

contaminate us all -

the only epidemic

worth dying for

 

 (c) Julia Wright. October 17 2023. All Rights Reserved To The family of Wadea Al- Fayoume.

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Ruchell Cinque Magee Joins the Ancestors 

                                                         1939-2023

There will be memorial services for Ruchell Cinque Magee

 

October 31, 2023, at 2:30 P.M.

Forest Lawn

21300 via Verde St

Covina, CA 91724

 

Ruchell Cinque Magee joined the ancestors October 17, 2023, after recently being released after 67 years of being caged!

 

Ruchell Magee was 84 years old and spent most of his life behind bars. Throughout his sixty-seven years of unjust captivity, Ruchell was one of the first and most consistent prisoners linking mass incarceration and the U.S. prison system to slavery. Ruchell Magee took the name Cinque from the enslaved African Sengbe Pieh who led an 1839 rebellion to commandeer the slave ship La Amistad, arguing that Africans have the right to resist “unlawful” slavery. Ruchell maintained that Black people in the US have the right to resist this new form of slavery which is part of the colonial control of Black people in this country:

 

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

Ruchell’s life commitment, political stance and writings point to the need for a prison abolitionist movement to seriously address the historical legacy of slavery, and slave rebellions in order to truly be in solidarity with the millions of people incarcerated in the US. 

 

May Ruchell Cinque Magee rest in power!

 

Ruchell Cinque Magee joined the ancestors last night after recently being released after 67 years of being caged!

 

Ruchell Magee was 84 years old and spent most of his life behind bars. Throughout his sixty-seven years of unjust captivity, Ruchell was one of the first and most consistent prisoners linking mass incarceration and the U.S. prison system to slavery. Ruchell Magee took the name Cinque from the enslaved African Sengbe Pieh who led an 1839 rebellion to commandeer the slave ship La Amistad, arguing that Africans have the right to resist “unlawful” slavery. Ruchell maintained that Black people in the US have the right to resist this new form of slavery which is part of the colonial control of Black people in this country:

 

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

Ruchell’s life commitment, political stance and writings point to the need for a prison abolitionist movement to seriously address the historical legacy of slavery, and slave rebellions in order to truly be in solidarity with the millions of people incarcerated in the US. 

 

May Ruchell Cinque Magee rest in power!

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The ongoing Zionist theft of Palestinian land from 1946 to now.

77 years of brutal oppression must end!

End all U.S. aid to Israel now!

For a democratic, secular Palestine!

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Leonard Peltier’s Letter Delivered to Supporters on September 12, 2023, in Front of the Whitehouse

 

Dear friends, relatives, supporters, loved ones:

 

Seventy-nine years old. Mother Earth has taken us on another journey around Grandfather Sun.  Babies have taken their first breath. People have lived, loved, and died. Seeds have been planted and sent their roots deep below red earth and their breath to the Stars and our Ancestors.

 

I am still here.

 

Time has twisted one more year out of me. A year that has been a moment.  A year that has been a lifetime. For almost five decades I’ve existed in a cage of concrete and steel.  With the “good time” calculations of the system, I’ve actually served over 60 years.

 

Year after year, I have encouraged you to live as spirit warriors. Even while in here, I can envision what is real and far beyond these walls.  I’ve seen a reawakening of an ancient Native pride that does my heart good.

 

I may leave this place in a box. That is a cold truth. But I have put my heart and soul into making our world a better place and there is a lot of work left to do – I would like to get out and do it with you.

 

I know that the spirit warriors coming up behind me have the heart and soul to fight racism and oppression, and to fight the greed that is poisoning our lands, waters, and people. 

 

We are still here.

 

Remember who you are, even if they come for your land, your water, your family. We are children of Mother Earth and we owe her and her other children our care.

 

I long to turn my face to the sky. In this cage, I am denied that simple pleasure. I am in prison, but in my mind, I remain as I was born: a free Native spirit.

 

That is what allows me to laugh, keeps me laughing. These walls cannot contain my laughter – or my hope.

 

I know there are those who stand with me, who work around the clock for my freedom. I have been blessed to have such friends.

 

We are still here and you give me hope. 

 

I hope to breathe free air before I die. Hope is a hard thing to hold, but no one is strong enough to take it from me. 

 

I love you. I hope for you. I pray for you. 

 

And prayer is more than a cry to the Creator that runs through your head.  Prayer is an action.

 

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

DOKSHA, 

LEONARD PELTIER

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman 1

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.

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Free Julian Assange

Immediate Repeated Action Needed to Free Assange

 

Please call your Congressional Representatives, the White House, and the DOJ. Calls are tallied—they do count.  We are to believe we are represented in this country.  This is a political case, so our efforts can change things politically as well.  Please take this action as often as you can:

 

Find your representatives:

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

 

Leave each of your representatives a message individually to: 

·      Drop the charges against Julian Assange

·      Speak out publicly against the indictment and

·      Sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to the DOJ to drop the charges: 

           202-224-3121—Capitol Main Switchboard 

 

Leave a message on the White House comment line to 

Demand Julian Assange be pardoned: 

             202-456-1111

             Tuesday–Thursday, 11:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M. EST

 

Call the DOJ and demand they drop the charges against Julian Assange:

             202-353-1555—DOJ Comment Line

             202-514-2000 Main Switchboard 

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!

FREE HIM NOW!

Write to Mumia at:

Smart Communications/PADOC

Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335

SCI Mahanoy

P.O. Box 33028

St. Petersburg, FL 33733

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Updates From Kevin Cooper 

March 23, 2023 

Dear Friends and Comrades, 

This is Kevin Cooper writing and sending this update to you in 'Peace & Solidarity'. First and foremost I am well and healthy, and over the ill effect(s) that I went through after that biased report from MoFo, and their pro prosecution and law enforcement experts. I am back working with my legal team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.

'We' have made great progress in refuting all that those experts from MoFo came up with by twisting the truth to fit their narrative, or omitting things, ignoring, things, and using all the other tactics that they did to reach their conclusions. Orrick has hired four(4) real experts who have no questionable backgrounds. One is a DNA attorney, like Barry Scheck of the innocence project in New York is for example. A DNA expert, a expect to refute what they say Jousha Ryen said when he was a child, and his memory. A expect on the credibility of MoFo's experts, and the attorney's at Orrick are dealing with the legal issues.

This all is taking a little longer than we first expected it to take, and that in part is because 'we' have to make sure everything is correct in what we have in our reply. We cannot put ourselves in a situation where we can be refuted... Second, some of our experts had other things planned, like court cases and such before they got the phone call from Rene, the now lead attorney of the Orrick team. With that being said, I can say that our experts, and legal team have shown, and will show to the power(s) that be that MoFo's DNA expert could not have come to the conclusion(s) that he came to, without having used 'junk science'! They, and by they I mean my entire legal team, including our experts, have done what we have done ever since Orrick took my case on in 2004, shown that all that is being said by MoFo's experts is not true, and we are once again having to show what the truth really is.

Will this work with the Governor? Who knows... 'but' we are going to try! One of our comrades, Rebecca D.   said to me, 'You and Mumia'...meaning that my case and the case of Mumia Abu Jamal are cases in which no matter what evidence comes out supporting our innocence, or prosecution misconduct, we cannot get a break. That the forces in the so called justice system won't let us go. 'Yes' she is correct about that sad to say...

Our reply will be out hopefully in the not too distant future, and that's because the people in Sacramento have been put on notice that it is coming, and why. Every one of you will receive our draft copy of the reply according to Rene because he wants feedback on it. Carole and others will send it out once they receive it. 'We' were on the verge of getting me out, and those people knew it, so they sabotaged what the Governor ordered them to do, look at all the evidence as well as the DNA evidence. They did not do that, they made this a DNA case, by doing what they did, and twisted the facts on the other issues that they dealt with.   'more later'...

In Struggle & Solidarity,

An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:

Mr. Kevin Cooper

C-65304. 4-EB-82

San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin, CA 94974

 

 

Call California Governor Newsom:

1-(916) 445-2841

Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish, 

press 6 to speak with a representative and

wait for someone to answer 

(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)

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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system. 

See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings

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Sign the petition:

https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/

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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale

 

I’m pleased to announce that last week our client, Daniel Hale, was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. The “Corner-Brightener Candlestick” was presented to Daniel’s friend Noor Mir. You can watch the online ceremony here. As it happens, this week is also the 20th anniversary of the first drone assassination in Yemen. From the beginning, the drone assassination program has been deeply shrouded in secrecy, allowing U.S. officials to hide significant violations of international law, and the American Constitution. In addition to the lives directly impacted by these strikes, the program has significantly eroded respect for international law and thereby puts civilians around the world in danger. Daniel Hale’s revelations threw a beam of light into a very dark corner, allowing journalists to definitively show that the government's official narrative was a lie. It is thanks to the great personal sacrifice of drone whistleblowers like Hale that public understanding has finally begun to catch up to reality. As the Sam Adams Associates note:  “Mr. Hale was well aware of the cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment to which other courageous officials have been subjected — and that he would likely suffer the same. And yet — in the manner of his famous ancestor Nathan Hale — he put his country first, knowing what awaited him at the hands of those who serve what has become a repressive Perpetual War State wreaking havoc upon much of the world.” We hope you’ll join the growing call to pardon or commute Hale’s sentence. U.S. citizens can contact your representatives here.

Happy new year, and thank you for your support! Jesselyn Radack Director Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) ExposeFacts Twitter: @JesselynRadack

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Laws are created to be followed

by the poor.

Laws are made by the rich

to bring some order to exploitation.

The poor are the only law abiders in history.

When the poor make laws

the rich will be no more.

 

—Roque Dalton Presente!

(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]

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[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.

Poems: 

http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/

About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton

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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Self Portrait by Leonard Peltier

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be

Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603

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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/

 

Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

 

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

 

Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312

San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org

Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

 

National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811

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1) Newsom still convinced of Death Row prisoner Kevin Cooper’s guilt following report alleging bias, racism

Photo of Bob Egelko

Bob Egelko, Oct. 25, 2023, Updated: Oct. 27, 2023

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/kevin-cooper-gavin-newsom-18193725.php

An investigation ordered by Gov. Gavin Newsom into the hotly contested death sentence of Kevin Cooper concluded in January that Cooper was clearly guilty of the 1983 murders of a married couple and two children in San Bernardino County. Now Cooper’s lawyers, in their own report to Newsom, say the investigation was a one-sided effort that ignored evidence of innocence and racism.

 

The study Newsom commissioned, labeled as a report from an independent counsel, was “riddled with confirmation bias and a steadfast commitment to ‘stick to the script’ the prosecution has been peddling for the last 40 years,” attorney Norman Hile and his colleagues said in a 77-page rebuttal they have sent to the governor.

 

The defense lawyers said prosecutors at Cooper’s trial in 1985 failed to disclose bloody coveralls that could have incriminated another man, clothing a sheriff’s deputy threw into a dumpster without testing it. They said the report to Newsom had distorted and largely ignored evidence that the 8-year-old boy who survived the attacks identified the assailants as white men. Cooper is Black.

 

And Cooper’s current attorneys said the supposedly independent expert witnesses whose conclusions were cited in the January report to Newsom included a former San Francisco police crime laboratory investigator who resigned in 1999, after a judge questioned his work, and two former Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators.

 

The lawyers cited a 2015 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an affiliate of the Organization of American States, that concluded the government “violated Mr. Cooper’s right to due process and to a fair trial.” The commission said courts that had upheld his conviction and death sentence had failed to adequately review the competence of his court-appointed trial attorneys or evidence of racism in his prosecution and trial.

 

But Danella Debel, a spokesperson for Newsom, said the governor has reviewed the defense lawyers’ conclusions and remains convinced that Cooper is guilty.

 

Cooper, now 65, was convicted and sentenced to death for the fatal stabbings of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica Ryen, and 11-year-old house guest Christopher Hughes at the Ryens’ home in Chino Hills. Two days before the killings, Cooper had escaped from a nearby state prison, where he was serving a sentence for burglary.

 

State and federal courts have rejected his appeals, and he was within hours of execution in 2004 when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay. The 9th Circuit rejected a later appeal from Cooper in 2009, but five judges led by William Fletcher issued a 101-page dissent, saying they had reason to believe officers had “manipulated and planted evidence” against Cooper. 

 

Vice President Kamala Harris, when she was a U.S. senator from California, urged Newsom, then the governor-elect in 2018, to order new DNA testing on evidence in the case. Newsom issued that order in February 2019, declared a moratorium on all executions in the state a month later, and in May 2021 ordered what he described as an independent investigation into Cooper’s case.

 

The 104-page report issued in January by the San Francisco law firm Morrison Foerster to the state Board of Parole Hearings said there was “conclusive” evidence of Cooper’s guilt. A spokesperson for the board told the Chronicle shortly afterward that the report had been “independent and unbiased” and that no further review was needed.

 

A central dispute between the two reports was Cooper’s claim that the actual killer was Lee Furrow, a paroled murderer who had also been in the area. Furrow’s former girlfriend told a state investigator that soon after the killings she saw him wearing a pair of bloodstained coveralls. Six months later, a sheriff’s deputy questioned Furrow, then took the coveralls and discarded them without any testing.

 

Two men who had worked with Furrow on construction projects told a California investigator that they had heard Furrow say in 2018 that “me and my boys, we butchered a whole family.” But in the January report, the law firm said the workers had recently seen a television program that described Furrow as a possible suspect.

 

The firm also said the killer’s clothing would have been covered with blood, and not the scattered bloodstains described by Furrow’s former girlfriend, and that Cooper’s DNA — but not Furrow’s — were found at the murder site. Cooper’s lawyers said they had evidence that his DNA had been planted.

 

The rebuttal was issued by lawyers from the firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, who did not represent Cooper at his trial but agreed to take up his case at their own cost in 2003. Their report contended the evidence about Furrow, discovered after the trial, not only called Cooper’s guilt into question but also showed that prosecutors had violated their constitutional obligation to notify the defense of any information they could have used in his case.

 

In addition to the bloody coveralls, they said, prosecutors failed to disclose that another shirt with blood on it was found near the crime scene and was not tested; that witnesses had told officers that three white people with blood on their clothes were seen in a nearby bar the night of the murders; and that another witness described seeing three men, one with blond hair, in the Ryens’ car that day.

 

The lawyers said they contacted some of the former jurors and described the evidence they had not seen at the trial. “Had I known at the time of the deliberations the information recently provided to me … or had there been just one more piece of evidence of Mr. Cooper’s innocence during the trial,” one unidentified juror was quoted as saying, “I would have recognized that there was reasonable doubt about Mr. Cooper’s guilt, and I would have voted ‘not guilty.’ ”

 

Another dispute involved the only survivor of the attack, 8-year-old Josh Ryen, whose parents and sister were killed. Josh, whose throat was slashed, was questioned in the hospital by a social worker when he was unable to speak, but he signaled, by touching letters and numbers on a page, that the attackers had been three white men. Furrow is white.

 

The boy later told a sheriff’s deputy that three Mexican men had been at the house that night. And after seeing a televised photo of Cooper, Josh said, according to a law enforcement officer, “That wasn’t the guy that did it.”

 

Josh Ryen did not testify at Cooper’s trial, and he said recently he is now convinced of Cooper’s guilt. The January report said the boy’s responses in the hospital did not support Cooper’s case because Josh “never stated that he saw or got a good look” at the killer or killers.

 

That conclusion, Cooper’s lawyers said, ignores not only the evidence of what Josh Ryen said at the time of the crime but also the fact that he changed his account after being questioned by prosecution investigators.

 

“The analytical gymnastics (by the law firm) to reach the conclusion that Josh Ryen’s statement that Cooper ‘wasn’t the guy’ actually meant that Cooper was the guy is confirmation bias in its highest, and most blatant, form,” defense lawyers said.  

 

Their report was submitted to the Board of Parole Hearings, whose members were appointed by Newsom and his predecessors. The ultimate decision for Newsom is whether to grant clemency to Cooper and either vacate his conviction or commute his sentence — an action he has not taken for any of the 654 prisoners under death sentences in California, despite Newsom’s condemnation of capital punishment as unjust and racist.

 

Newsom has not indicated he is considering clemency for any condemned prisoners or responded to the Chronicle’s inquiries on the issue. Without clemency, his successor as governor could lift Newsom’s moratorium and return the prisoners to Death Row.

 

Cooper could also file a legal challenge under the Racial Justice Act, a state law signed by Newsom in 2020 and broadened last year. It allows prisoners under death sentences to seek to overturn their sentences and convictions based on racial bias at their trial, such as the unjustified dismissal of Black jurors or racist conduct by prosecutors. It will be expanded in 2026 to apply to all past felony convictions. 

 

Cooper’s lawyers contend his prosecutors removed Black jurors without justification, and that county prosecutors ignored evidence of white killers and pressured Josh Ryen to change his description of the attackers’ race. But Rene Kathawala, one of Cooper’s lawyers, said they would need access to records that prosecutors would almost certainly refuse to disclose, leading to lengthy legal battles.

 

“It could take years to get decided,” Kathawala said, and at Cooper’s age, “there’s no guarantee that he’ll ever see the results.”

 

Reach Bob Egelko: begelko@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @BobEgelko

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2) G.M. Said to Reach Tentative Deal With U.A.W.

General Motors became the last of the three large U.S. automakers to reach a tentative agreement on a new contract with the United Automobile Workers union.

By Neal E. Boudette, Oct. 30, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/business/economy/gm-uaw-contract-deal.html

The United Automobile Workers union escalated its strike against General Motors as recently as Saturday. Earlier it struck the company’s largest plant, in Arlington, Texas. Credit...Reuters

General Motors and the United Automobile Workers union reached a tentative agreement on a new labor contract on Monday, according to two people familiar with the matter, setting the stage for an end to the union’s six-week wave of strikes against the three large U.S. automakers.

 

The agreement comes days after the union announced tentative agreements with Ford Motor and Stellantis on new contracts. The three deals contain many of the same or similar terms, including a 25 percent general wage increase for U.A.W. members as well as the possibility for cost-of-living wage adjustments if inflation flares.

 

The tentative agreement with G.M., the largest U.S. car company by sales, requires approval by a union council that oversees negotiations with the company, and then ratification by a majority of its 46,000 U.A.W. workers.

 

The union’s contracts with the three automakers expired on Sept. 15. Since then, the union has called on more than 14,000 G.M. workers to walk off the job at factories in Missouri, Michigan, Tennessee and Texas, and at 18 spare-parts warehouses across the country. The most recent escalation of the strike came on Saturday, shortly after the union reached a deal with Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram. On that day, the U.A.W. told workers to go on strike at G.M.’s plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., that makes several sport utility vehicle models.

 

The strike has halted the production of some of G.M.’s most profitable vehicles, including the Cadillac Escalade S.U.V., the Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck and the Chevrolet Traverse S.U.V.

 

G.M. said last week that the strike had lowered its earnings by about $800 million, before interest and taxes, with part of the impact coming in the third quarter and most in the fourth quarter.

 

For decades, the union has negotiated similar contracts with all three automakers, a method known as pattern bargaining. Like the contract it hammered out with Ford and Stellantis, the tentative G.M. deal would lift the top U.A.W. wage from $32 an hour to more than $40 over four and a half years. That would allow employees working 40 hours a week to earn about $84,000 a year.

 

G.M., Ford and Stellantis began negotiating with the U.A.W. in July. The companies have sought to limit increases in labor costs because they already have higher labor costs than automakers like Tesla, Toyota and Honda that operate nonunion plants in the United States.

 

The three large U.S. automakers are also trying to control costs while investing tens of billions of dollars to develop new electric vehicles, build battery plants and retool factories.

 

“We need to make sure we have a contract that is going to allow us to compete and win in what is a challenging market for E.V.s,” G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, said on an earnings call.

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3) How Posters of Kidnapped Israelis Ignited a Firestorm on American Sidewalks

In the weeks since Hamas attacked Israel, fliers depicting the hostages have become ubiquitous. But in cities and on college campuses across the globe, anti-Israel protesters have removed them.

By Katherine Rosman, Oct. 31, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/nyregion/israel-gaza-kidnapped-poster-fight.html

Posters showing some of the people kidnapped by Hamas in Israel are displayed on a pole near New York University. Some have been torn down. Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

“KIDNAPPED,” the posters say, in big block letters above pictures of people taken hostage by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel, urgent reminders of the men, women and children still being held hostage in Gaza.

 

But on college campuses and in cities around the world in recent weeks, people have been caught tearing them down.

 

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” a man says in a video posted on social media as he watches two young people at the University of Southern California shove wadded-up posters into the trash.

 

“They’re making the conflict worse,” one of the young people replies, adding, “I’m not a fan of Hamas.”

 

In the weeks since the war in the Middle East started, the “kidnapped” posters, created by Israeli street artists, have grown ubiquitous, papering public spaces across the United States, Western Europe and beyond. Available to anyone with an internet connection, they can be printed out and pasted onto lampposts, boarded-up storefronts and subway entrances.

 

Displaying the posters has become a form of activism, keeping the more than 200 hostages seized by Hamas in full view of the public.

 

But removing the posters has quickly emerged as its own form of protest — a release valve and also a provocation by those anguished by the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in the years before Oct. 7 and since the bombing of Gaza began.

 

Some of those caught destroying the posters have been condemned on social media. A dentist in Boston and a person in South Florida, among others, have lost their jobs.

 

The battle has inflamed already tense emotions. And it captures one of the most fervently debated questions of the war: Whose suffering should command public attention and sympathy?

 

Those who object to the posters have derided them as wartime propaganda. Critics of those tearing them down have characterized the act as antisemitic and lacking basic humanity. Increasingly, the disputes seem to teeter on the brink of violence, a proxy battle for the life-or-death war in the Middle East.

 

To Nitzan Mintz, one of the artists behind the fliers, watching them go viral in the first place was a shock. Seeing people rip down the posters has revealed what she said was clear antisemitism. “By accident this campaign did more than bring an awareness of the kidnapped people,” she said. “It brought awareness of how hated we are as a community.”

 

The skirmishes over the posters are both old-fashioned — conducted with paper and tape and bare hands — and very modern. Social media has the power to elevate street-corner disputes into international incidents, and images of people tearing down the signs have clogged the internet in recent days.

 

In one video taken in Queens and posted on social media, a group of men who say they are not Jewish confront a man who is tearing down posters. “I’m dying to put you in the hospital,” one of them says, adding an expletive.

 

At Boston University, a young woman caught removing signs appears both determined to defend herself and uneasy about being documented. “Why are you filming?” she asks the man behind the camera. “To show where the hate is coming from on this campus,” he replies.

 

In yet another video, a man identified by The New York Post as a Broadway producer is seen using scissors to remove a poster from a utility box on West 62nd Street in Manhattan and tossing it into the trash.

 

Regulations surrounding where fliers are allowed to be posted tend to be made by local governments, and college campuses usually have their own rules, said Tim Zick, a professor of law at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Va.

 

The salient issue, he said, is one of free expression. “As a matter of free speech, people who oppose the ‘kidnapped’ posters could erect posters of their own, expressing their views,” Professor Zick said.

 

The video of the Broadway producer was made public on the Instagram account associated with I Love the Upper West Side, a community news site in New York owned and operated by Mike Mishkin.

 

Mr. Mishkin said he had been “flooded” with videos and photographs showing people tearing down posters. He has included about a half dozen on his two local news websites. “I’ve gotten more than I could possibly share,” he said.

 

While Mr. Mishkin, who is Jewish, has not published the names of people included in these images, he knows that other news media outlets and digital platforms will sleuth them out and make them public. He does not feel badly about it. “If they don’t want to be caught doing it, they should have thought of that first,” he said.

 

He dismisses the excuses that have been shared online — that people are taking the posters down because they’re illegally posted on public property or because people want to clean up their neighborhood.

 

“I don’t think they’re ripping down posters of ‘Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar,’” he said.

 

In fact, the motivations of those removing signs take a variety of forms. And as unnerving as the removal of the posters has been for some Jews and supporters of Israel, at least some of the people tearing them down are Jewish themselves.

 

Miles Grant, 24, takes down posters in New York “occasionally,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s the lack of context that gets me,” said Mr. Grant, who said he is Jewish and a self-described “pro-Palestinian who is not a Zionist.”

 

“It’s so obvious that they don’t care about people’s lives,” he said of those putting up the “kidnapped” posters.

 

If they did, he said, the posters would include details explaining the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. “Why did this happen and what are the events that led to this happening? That is what’s missing, and I think it’s intentional.”

 

He said he had felt concerned at times that he would end up in a viral video, but he has not let that deter him. “I think they’re putting them up to bait people to take them down” he said. “I think it’s disgusting how they’re trying to destroy people’s lives.”

 

A woman in Brooklyn, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said her family would be upset by the publicity, said she had torn down “kidnapped” posters after a friend in a group chat for activists encouraged her. The posters, she said the friend told her, amounted to anti-Islamic war propaganda.

 

“So I said, ‘Cool beans, let’s take them down.’”

 

Ms. Mintz, one of the artists behind the posters, described her campaign as a way for Jews to deal with their own fear in a dark time. “The way we can express our worry over the kidnapped is to put up the poster, so that we don’t punch a wall or commit suicide,” she said.

 

She and her partner, Dede Bandaid, work with teams of volunteers who roam New York putting up the posters. “People do it because they are very stressed and very worried and very scared,” she said.

 

She said that they had permission from the relatives of the hostages featured on their posters, and that family members had often contacted them to request that they make a poster to include their kidnapped loved ones.

 

Criticism of the posters is creating dissension within the progressive Jewish community. Last week, Rafael Shimunov, a Jewish peace activist affiliated with a street art group called Art V War, posted a lengthy video on Instagram in which he considers the reasons some people put up the posters, including “public mourning,” and others take them down.

 

He did not endorse the removal of the posters, but said that the people putting them up should also create posters of Palestinians who are missing. The posters “don’t include Palestinians, so are they concerned about missing people?” he asked.

 

In the video, as he walks around the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn talking to the camera, he says that the area has few posters up, except for in front of a Palestinian restaurant.

 

“These posters are being used to target Palestinians in our community,” he says, concluding: “When you’re reflexively attacking the people taking them down, maybe try to understand why they’re taking them down.”

 

And, he says, some people putting the posters up may have benign motives, too — while for others, “the plan is to foment war.”

 

On a Jewish social justice listserv, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, an Israeli-born New Yorker, called Mr. Shimunov’s video “an abomination.” “We can do better than tearing down our family’s pleas for redemption, while at the same time fighting to prevent Palestinian bloodshed and horror,” he wrote.

 

In the past week, adaptations of the signs have emerged — some subverting the original intent of the posters and some supporting them.

 

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Councilwoman Julie Menin spotted a poster that looked like the originals — but instead of the word “Kidnapped,” it said “Occupier,” bearing an image of a young girl with the caption: “Ella Elyakim, 8 year old Israeli.” “This is unacceptable,” Ms. Menin commented on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

 

At the corner of Broadway and 96th Street last weekend, half-ripped posters were covered with small fliers that said: “Why are the posters of kidnapped Israelis being ripped down? Because they don’t want you to know the truth.”

 

And on Wednesday in New York, a group of 238 Holocaust survivors plan to gather and pose for a portrait organized by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. Each survivor will hold a “Kidnapped” poster, drawing a sharp connection between the horrors of World War II and the current conflict.

 

On Long Island, Guy Tsadik has found a way to ensure that the posters stay up. With friends and relatives, he has gone door-to-door through the towns of Cedarhurst, Hewlett, Inwood, Lawrence and Woodmere and asked store and restaurant owners to display the “kidnapped” posters inside windows that face the street. He has friends doing the same in New Jersey and Florida.

 

“This way it is not possible to deface or remove them,” Mr. Tsadik said.

 

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

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4) Past Lies About War in the Middle East are Getting in the Way of the Truth Today

By Zeynep Tufekci, Oct. 31, 2023

Opinion Columnist 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/opinion/columnists/israel-gaza-hamas-misinformation.html

Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Moshe Lavi, whose relatives have been taken hostage by Hamas, recently talked to a group of New York Times journalists about his family’s agony.

 

His pained voice turned to anger when he recounted encountering disbelief that Hamas committed terrible atrocities when it attacked Israel. Lavi seemed especially bewildered by people “arguing over the semantics” of whether people were beheaded or their heads fell off, or even whether there were hostages in Gaza.

 

In one particularly gruesome twist, there’s been an uproar over whether Hamas had beheaded babies — an unverified claim that President Biden repeated before the White House walked it back, and has been subject to much discussion since.

 

Indeed, since Hamas did murder children and take others as hostages, should it get credit if it didn’t also behead them? It’s an appalling thought.

 

Some of this skepticism is surely the result of antisemitism. But that’s not all that’s going on.

 

One key reason for some of the incidents of doubt is the suspicion that horrendous but false or exaggerated claims are being used as a rationale for war — and there are many such historical examples, most notably the Iraq war.

 

Recently, a former permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations told Britain’s Sky News that he was “very puzzled by the constant concern which the world,” he said, “is showing for the Palestinian people.” He cited U.S. actions after Sept. 11 as a model for what Israel should do in response to Hamas’s shocking massacre of civilians on Oct. 7, which many have called Israel’s Sept. 11.

 

But if the U.S. response after Sept. 11 is a model, it is as a model of what not to do.

 

After the attacks, the United States received deep global sympathy. Many Muslims around the world were furious about this blemish upon Islam, even if they opposed U.S. policies: Citizens held vigils, politicians condemned the attacks and clerics repudiated them in mosque sermons. (The idea that Muslims widely celebrated the attacks has been repeatedly shown to be false or traces back to a few instances of dubious clarity.)

 

But, instead of mobilizing that widespread global sympathy to try to isolate the extremists, the United States chose to wage a reckless and destructive war in Iraq, driven by an impulsive desire for vengeance and justified by falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction.

 

The Bush administration’s lies in the lead-up to the war, the fiasco of its occupation, and the chaos, violence and death that the invasion set off have deeply and indelibly damaged the standing and credibility of the United States and its allies.

 

People in the region were seared by images of Iraqi institutions — hospitals, ministries, museums — being looted while the U.S. military did little, of families shot as they returned home from a hospital or at checkpoints as they missed a hand signal or instructions shouted in English, of the torture and sadism at Abu Ghraib.

 

People also saw how occupation policies, like the quick and thoughtless disbanding of the Iraqi Army, contributed to the creation of ISIS a decade later.

 

In the Middle East, the devastating aftermath of that war — justified by false claims — has never ended.

 

To make matters worse, the Israel government has a long history of making false claims and denying responsibility for atrocities that later proved to be its doing.

 

In one example of many, in 2014, four boys younger than 13 were killed by Israeli airstrikes while playing by themselves at a beach — three of them hit by a second blast while desperately fleeing the initial blast.

 

There was first a concerted effort among some pro-Israel social media activists to claim the explosions were due to a Hamas rocket misfiring. The Israeli military initially claimed that “the target of this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives.” However, the beach was near a hotel housing journalists for Western outlets, including at least one from The New York Times, who witnessed the killings. The Guardian reported that journalists who visited the area in the aftermath saw no weapons or equipment and that kids regularly played there.

 

Israel then investigated and exonerated itself. Peter Lerner, then a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, said that it had targeted a “compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilized exclusively by militants.”

 

But The Telegraph, whose correspondent also witnessed the incident, reported that some of the journalists who had seen the bombing said there had been “no attempt to interview them.”

 

One can see how this history plays out in the global upheaval over the Hamas claim two weeks ago that an Israeli missile struck a hospital courtyard in Gaza. Israeli and American officials denied this, and asserted that the missile came from within Gaza. There were also initial claims that 500 people were killed in the hospital blast, leading to headlines and global condemnations. Then the number was challenged, leading to another round of uproar and back-and-forth.

 

It is certainly possible that the hospital may have been accidentally hit by a missile fired in Gaza — such misfires have happened. But Israel bombardment has also caused large civilian casualties. The evidence isn’t conclusive either way, and the truth remains unknown.

 

Yet to a family that lost members in the hospital blast — which U.S. officials estimate killed hundreds — that squabble over exact numbers might seem as cruel as the skepticism about the atrocities committed by Hamas do to an Israeli family that suffered during the Oct. 7 attack.

 

But there’s still the fact that fabricating or exaggerating atrocities is done to influence the calculus of what the public will accept — including what costs are justified to impose on civilians.

 

In 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, there was widespread resistance in the United States to the idea of a new war — the country had not shaken “Vietnam syndrome,” that it was best for the United States to avoid large foreign military entanglements, both for practical and moral reasons.

 

It was in this context that a teenager testified before Congress in 1990 that she had seen Iraqi soldiers take premature babies out of incubators and left them to die on the cold floor, a shocking assertion repeated by many high-level officials. The claim was widely repeated by officials and the media, and even by Amnesty International.

 

Kept secret was the fact that the witness was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and her false testimony had likely been organized by a public relations firm working for the Kuwaiti government.

 

The shocking fabrication played a key role in the effort to sell the war to the reluctant American public. Needing to make sure oil fields stayed in the hands of the rulers of a tiny country created by colonial powers in the early 20th century went only so far. Opposing an army so savage that it commits the most unthinkable crimes is a more convincing appeal for war.

 

The terrible outcome of all this history is widespread distrust and dehumanization, as ordinary people’s loss and pain are viewed suspiciously as a potential cudgel that will cause further loss and pain for others.

 

Even people who I know have no sympathies toward Hamas or any kind of terrorism roll their eyes at some of the recent accounts of atrocities. “We always hear of something terrible when they want to go to war — how convenient,” one acquaintance told me recently.

 

There are plenty of echoes of this on social media. “Hamas beheaded babies, Saddam had WMD and I’m the last unicorn,” one person posted on X. Another one said, “The ‘40 babies beheaded by Hamas’ lie is equivalent to the WMD’s lie.”

 

Such sentiments are widespread.

 

All this highlights the importance of voices capable of retaining trust and consistent concern for all victims.

 

I was heartened to see that Human Rights Watch independently verified some of the videos of the horror on Oct. 7, and called the attacks deliberate killings. Similarly, Amnesty International’s independent investigation led the group to condemn the attacks as “cruel and brutal crimes including mass summary killings, hostage-taking.” Both organizations have called for the attacks to be investigated as war crimes.

 

Both organizations also have a history of documenting Israeli wrongdoings, including its treatment of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, and both organizations have been vilified for doing so, especially by the government of Israel and some NGOs and lawmakers.

 

Yet these are the kind of independent voices that need to be heard. In a context where many in the region and world already see the United States as reflexively supporting Israel, no matter its conduct, President Biden might consider elevating such independent human rights voices rather than embracing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

As Amnesty International states, kidnapping civilians is a war crime and the hostages should be released, unharmed. And their families shouldn’t have to endure this suspicion on top of their pain.

 

But to credibly demand that war crimes be stopped and lives respected requires equal concern extended to all victims, including the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

 

The victims are real — all of them — and that’s where all efforts to rebuild credibility or to seek a solution must begin.

 

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest” and a New York Times Opinion columnist. @zeynep • Facebook

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5) American Muslims Are in a Painful, Familiar Place

By Rozina Ali, Oct. 31, 2023

Ms. Ali is a journalist who covers war, Islamophobia and the Middle East. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/opinion/american-muslims-islamaphobia-war.html

Chantal Jahchan

When President Biden landed in Tel Aviv days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of more than 1,400 people, he told an audience of Israelis that this was not just Israel’s Sept. 11, that “it was like 15 9/11s.”

 

The comparison, which emerged widely and immediately, seemed apt on the surface: a brutal attack that shocked a nation and changed the course of its history. Indeed, it’s been dizzying to witness the speed at which the same patterns we saw after Sept. 11, 2001, are playing out. The mourning of a terrorist attack has been interrupted by the swift bombardment of civilian neighborhoods. American officials, pundits and companies have quickly rallied around Israel in its war on Gaza, which has rapidly intensified by the day. In the first week of the war, Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza than the United States did on Afghanistan in a year. Civilian casualties in Gaza have climbed exponentially. And in the West Bank, recent images of Palestinians being tied, blindfolded, stripped and allegedly subjected to attempted sexual assault by Israeli soldiers and settlers recall Abu Ghraib.

 

In the United States, it’s as if the country has turned back the clock two decades, but not in the way that Mr. Biden suggests. For those who experienced waves of harassment and government surveillance in the years after Sept. 11, the president’s pledge of “unwavering” support for Israel set off alarm bells. I’ve been speaking with lawyers, community groups and advocacy organizations that worked closely with Muslims after September 2001 about what they’re seeing. Not since that time — not even after the election of Donald Trump, who signed an executive order banning visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries within days of taking office — have I heard so many Muslim and Arab community members say they feel isolated. After living through and reckoning with the devastating aftermath of the war on terrorism, it seems the lessons of Sept. 11 have been forgotten.

 

There seems to be a sense of both resignation — we’ve been here before — and shock — but we’ve been here before.

 

In the wake of Sept. 11, the U.S. government activated the full force of the national security and law enforcement apparatus to prevent another terrorist attack on American soil. And it bore down on one particular group: Muslims in America. Mass arrests and a national registry of immigrant Muslims led to the deportation of thousands. F.B.I. and police informants, sent to monitor mosques and Muslim neighborhoods, were later found to have been overzealous and accused of entrapping people who committed no violent crimes. The government’s focus on potentially dangerous Muslims spread to American media and society. According to F.B.I. data, hate crimes against Muslims spiked in 2001. Though that pattern slowed in later years — assaults skyrocketed again in 2015 and 2016 — rates have never dipped back to their pre-2001 numbers.

 

Today, many Muslims in the United States fear a new outbreak of violence. Days after the attacks in Israel, the Biden administration announced that local and federal law enforcement officers across the United States are “closely monitoring” for connected threats. Within a week of Oct. 7, scattered reports were made to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of F.B.I. visits to mosques, and women in hijabs were reportedly being assaulted in several cities.

 

Though communities were braced for what was to come, no one could have predicted that the first hate crime would be the killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian Muslim boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume, whose mother was rushed to the hospital after also being repeatedly stabbed. Joseph Czuba, their landlord, was charged in the killing. (He has pleaded not guilty.) According to the boy’s mother, Mr. Czuba had become violent after the news of Oct. 7 and yelled, “You Muslims must die,” before stabbing Wadea 26 times. While speaking at Wadea’s funeral, one religious leader, Imam Omar Suleiman, wondered in his remarks: “Have we not learned anything from 9/11? Do we really want to live those dark years again?”

 

Perhaps because those “dark years” were not so long ago, attacks like the one on Wadea feel as though they are opening a barely closed wound. One Illinois resident told me that community members are now planning patrols for their children, not dissimilar to those started by some mosques after Mr. Trump was elected. “This is exactly what we were afraid of,” Abed Ayoub, the director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told me recently.

 

What happened to the Muslim community in the United States after Sept. 11 — the surveillance, the targeting, the fear — was intimately tied to many Americans’ belief in the righteousness of what our government was doing abroad. As the United States invaded first Afghanistan and then Iraq, both wars that wrought devastating civilian casualties and paved the way for political chaos, the public perception of Muslims in America plummeted to new lows. Within a year of the Iraq invasion, a Pew poll found that a larger number of Americans believed Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence. By 2014, Muslims ranked lowest in another Pew poll of how the American public views different religious groups.

 

That unfounded perception has remained in the years since. The sudden arrival of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria only deepened the suspicion of Muslims in America as an ever-present threat. Once again, Islam appeared in close connection to terrorism in the American imagination as images of masked figures carrying out gruesome executions reinforced twisted stereotypes of Muslims. The ISIS phenomenon of the Western recruit meant that any wayward Muslim teenager could be a threat and that even the most assimilated people had the potential to become terrorists.

 

Since the Israel-Hamas war started, these long-held suspicions now appear to be seeping into the public debate again over showing support for Palestinians in Gaza, more than 8,000 of whom have been killed since the bombardment began, according to the Gazan health ministry. The false connection between supporting civilians in Gaza and the terrorist activities of Hamas is manifesting across our country’s public institutions. From college campuses to places of work, people are facing retribution for expressing support for Palestinians that is being misconstrued as anti-Israel or pro-Hamas. Companies have rescinded job offers, journalists have been fired for sharing posts, and students whose organizations have signed statements have been smeared publicly. The scale of suppression of speech by social media platforms, such as the shadow banning of Gaza-related posts and the blocking of accounts on Instagram, has been alarming enough that Human Rights Watch has started to document it.

 

Perhaps the Sept. 11 comparison and the good-guy/bad-guy binary can be evoked successfully because there has been almost no accountability for the failures of the war on terrorism. The oversimplification is made worse by Mr. Biden, who, in the same visit to Tel Aviv during which he cautioned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to avoid the “mistakes” America made after Sept. 11, he also referred to Palestinians as “the other team.” There is no call from Israel to win the “hearts and minds” of Palestinians, as George W. Bush claimed to do with Iraqis; there is no call to bring freedom to Gaza, as the United States said it wanted to do in Afghanistan. Instead, Mr. Biden has not publicly admonished the Israeli defense minister for saying that his country was fighting “human animals.” And at home, he and other leaders have offered little to assuage the growing fears in the Arab and Muslim community: Last week he had a private meeting with Muslim leaders that the administration never publicly announced. Though the White House released a statement the day after Wadea Al-Fayoume’s killing, the president didn’t call the boy’s family until five days later.

 

The Oct. 7 attacks didn’t happen on American soil, but this is an intimate war for many Americans. Some families wait desperately for scraps of news of their loved ones taken hostage by Hamas. Others search for some sign of their loved ones in Gaza, waiting for the blue checks to show that their WhatsApp messages have been read by family members who are trying to stay alive amid near-constant bombing and a lack of food and water.

 

The first Friday after Oct. 7, the first holy day for Muslims and Jews since the attacks, New York City and the rest of the country seemed to be on high alert, bracing itself because a former Hamas leader in Qatar had called for protests across Arab nations in support of the Palestinians, a call which was mislabeled as a day of jihad. I decided to visit the Islamic Center at N.Y.U., expecting a tense and nervous congregation. Instead, an imam finished his speech, and the women around me lined up to pray. As we knelt together, all I could hear was sobs.

 

We’ve been here before, but we don’t have to be here again.

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6) U.A.W. Strike Gains Could Reverberate Far Beyond Autos

Experts said the union’s new contracts could set precedents that give labor advantages when bargaining contracts and organizing workers.

By Noam Scheiber, Oct. 31, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/business/economy/uaw-labor.html

The United Automobile Workers union’s approach to securing big gains in contracts with the three large U.S. automakers could have ramifications for other workers and unions. Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times

Laying out a tentative contract agreement to end a six-week wave of walkouts at Ford Motor, the United Automobile Workers president made an unusual pitch to other labor unions.

 

“We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own,” the U.A.W. leader, Shawn Fain, said Sunday night.

 

“If we’re going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few,” Mr. Fain added, “then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.”

 

While it remains to be seen whether other unions follow the U.A.W.’s lead, Mr. Fain’s invitation highlights the sweeping ambition of the union’s strategy during the recent strike, the first to target all three Detroit automakers simultaneously.

 

Beyond seeking the largest wage and benefit increases in decades — and a reversal of the concessions the union made during the companies’ downturn, such as lower wage tiers for newer workers — Mr. Fain repeatedly spoke of fighting for “the entire working class.”

 

Labor experts said the proposals that union negotiators agreed to with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the parent of Jeep, Ram and Chrysler, had produced gains that could in fact reverberate well beyond the workers that the union represented.

 

“It is a historic and transformative victory by the U.A.W.,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

Dr. Lichtenstein said that winning substantial gains through a strike in a critical industry demonstrated the benefits of work stoppages after decades in which workers had been taught to regard strikes warily.

 

“Fain says: ‘Hey, strikes work, solidarity works; we’re more unified now than before the strike,’” he added. “I think that’s a powerful argument unions can take elsewhere.”

 

Even before the strike ended, unions at other companies appeared to be doing just that.

 

In an interview in late September, David Pryzbylski, a lawyer who represents employers, said union officials in two separate contract negotiations had invoked the U.A.W. when discussing the possibility of a strike. “Outside the U.A.W., it’s putting wind in their sails,” Mr. Pryzbylski said. “They may be blustering, but I am seeing it already trickle down.”

 

A recent report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raised concerns that an emboldened labor movement was increasing strike activity and “causing collateral damage to a host of local businesses and communities” by harming the economic ecosystem that depended on automakers and other employers.

 

The element of strategy that the U.A.W. brought to its strike may also prove instructive to other workers and unions. Rather than ask all employees to strike at once, the union started small, with one key plant at each of the Big Three, then ramped up as it sought to bring additional pressure. The U.A.W. refrained from expanding the strike when it felt a company was bargaining productively, and it expanded to a highly valuable plant when it felt a company was dragging its feet — in both cases, to create an incentive for the companies to engage with the union.

 

The approach may not translate perfectly to other industries, such as retail and hospitality, that are harder to disrupt with the loss of a small number of locations. But Peter Olney, a former organizing director with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, said the strategy was more widely applicable than it might appear at first glance.

 

He cited the possibility of organizing and striking at coffee bean roasting plants and distribution centers for a company like Starbucks, where workers at hundreds of retail stores in the United States have organized over the past few years. “They have 9,000 locations, there’s a lot of redundancy and replication,” Mr. Olney said, referring to company-owned stores in the United States. “But there are some choke points in that system, too.”

 

And it is difficult for service-sector industries to send operations offshore in response to labor unrest, because proximity to customers is critical. By contrast, the U.A.W. may have to contend with the risk that companies shift production to Mexico as labor costs increase.

 

“That’s where the international solidarity aspect of it comes in — the need to build up a cross-border network with Mexico,” Mr. Olney said. Last year, workers at a large G.M. plant in the country voted out a union accused of colluding with management in favor of an independent union.

 

In some ways, the recent U.A.W. effort builds on the gains made by unions involved in other high-profile standoffs. To resolve a nearly five-month strike with Hollywood writers in September, major studios agreed to a set of restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence. The agreement was a break with employers’ typical insistence that management should have control over technology and investment decisions.

 

The tentative U.A.W. contracts award the union more influence over such decision-making as well — for example, by allowing workers to strike against the entire company over the threat of a plant shutdown before their contract has expired. The union also successfully pressed Stellantis to reopen an Illinois plant that the company had closed.

 

Mr. Pryzbylski, the management-side lawyer, said that while such strike provisions and plant reopenings are not unheard of, they are uncommon.

 

Dr. Lichtenstein said securing these gains in such a high-profile context could prompt employees at other companies to demand a say in decisions that their employers had typically characterized as management prerogatives. “It restores a kind of social and political character to investment decisions,” he said. “It’s something the left has wanted for over a century.”

 

In other cases, the U.A.W. managed to extract concessions at plants where it doesn’t yet represent workers — another unusual win that could be mimicked by fellow unions. Ford agreed that U.A.W. members would be allowed to transfer into battery and electric vehicles plants under construction in Michigan and Tennessee, and that these plants would fall under the union’s national contract if the workers unionized there. According to the U.A.W., that would happen without the need to hold a union election at either site.

 

Madeline Janis, co-executive director of Jobs to Move America, a group that seeks to create good jobs in clean technology industries, called these arrangements a “huge historic, unprecedented deal” for helping to ensure that the E.V. transition benefited workers.

 

U.A.W. officials say that adding new members is critical to the union’s survival, and that the Big Three contracts will provide a major boost to these efforts because organizers can point to large concrete benefits of unionizing.

 

“We’re not going to win a contract victory this big in the future if we’re not able to start organizing, especially in the E.V. sector,” said Mike Miller, a U.A.W. regional director in the Western United States. “It has to involve Tesla, Volkswagen and Hyundai.”

 

But some experts said the momentum of the recent contracts could help organizing campaigns that were even further afield. “It’s not just personal vehicle manufacturing — it’s the fleets of delivery vans, big electric buses and trains,” said Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice, which helps workers seeking to unionize and bargain collectively.

 

Ms. Smiley noted that many of these companies, just like electric vehicle manufacturers, had received public subsidies, creating an opportunity for organizers to appeal to politicians for help raising pay and improving benefits so that they more closely resembled what the U.A.W. just won.

 

“The administration is investing in these industries,” she added. “The question is how to use this to raise the floor.”

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7) Videos show a densely populated area of Gaza decimated by Israel’s airstrike.

Haley Willis, Christoph Koettl and Bora Erden, Oct. 31, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10/31/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Palestinians searching for casualties after an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday in Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Credit...Reuters

A Times analysis of satellite imagery and social media videos shows that an airstrike Israel said targeted a senior leader of Hamas on Tuesday had destroyed a densely populated area in the Jabaliya neighborhood, which is home to the largest refugee camp in Gaza.

 

The medical director of a nearby hospital reported hundreds of injured people and dozens killed. The scale of the destruction raises questions about whether the civilian toll is proportionate with the Israeli military’s stated military objectives.

 

Videos and images verified by The Times of the strike’s aftermath show civilians, including children, being pulled from the rubble and carried away. Some appear lifeless. “Dead bodies are everywhere,” said Mahmoud Abusalama, a local photographer at the scene who was posting to his Instagram channel. “Everyone is looking for their family.”

 

A Facebook livestream showed victims from the attack being treated at a nearby hospital. “We have to choose who we treat because we cannot treat everyone,” a doctor says.

 

The Israeli military said that the strike had killed “a large number of terrorists,” including a senior Hamas commander it identified as Ibrahim Biari, saying that he had helped plan the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. A Hamas spokesman denied that a commander had been in the targeted area.

 

The Times’s assessment of the damage shows multiple large buildings flattened. As of 2023, there were more than 116,000 people registered at the refugee camp, which covers an area of only 1.4 square kilometers.

 

The Jabaliya camp is in northern Gaza, an area for which the Israeli military has issued evacuation orders. “Giving warning does not absolve parties from the requirement to protect civilians,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch. “Civilians who do not evacuate” he added, must still be protected.

 

Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for PAX Protection of Civilians, a Dutch program affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands, told The Times that the craters at the scene were consistent with the damage caused by Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs,  used by the Israeli military. These munition kits turn unguided bombs into precision, GPS-guided weapons.

 

Experts say that Israel’s bombardment of densely populated areas raises concerns under international humanitarian law. “International law prohibits attacks in which the expected harm to civilians and civilian properties is disproportionate to the anticipated military gain,” Mr. Shakir said.

 

Ainara Tiefenthäler contributed video editing. Abeer Pamuk contributed translation.

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