Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1154
March 29, 2018
SF Mary Lou McDonald. Pro Abortion On Demand.
Helen McClafferty dismisses Mary Lou McDonald's support for abortion.
(That's a 3 months + 1 week old baby).
How generous of her.
What Ms. McDonald deliberately fails to acknowledge is that being pro-life is not a question of religion, it's a question of human right's of the unborn child. Ms. McDonald and SF are trying to put a spin on the reasons the 8th should be repealed by making it about religion and in particular about being "Catholic".
How is she any different from those in the British government who proclaimed to the media the 'Troubles' were based on nothing more than a religious divide between Catholics and Protestants?
The 8th Amendment already protects the life of the mother when in danger during pregnancy. However, that's not good enough for Ms. McDonald. She wants abortion on demand and is willing to suspend and/or terminate any of her fellow SF party members who speak out against abortion or dare to vote their conscience.
Regardless of religious affiliation, or none at all, this issue should transcend Sinn Fein's toxic identity politics when it comes to abortion on demand.
Repeal of the 8TH should be recognized for what it is. The taking of an unborn baby's life up to 3 months old, on demand, even if the mother's life is not in any danger. That is total disregard for the child's right to life and is simply just plain murder.
The leader advocates support for the Fine Gael government's legislation that is expected to emerge if a majority votes to repeal the amendment. It is likely to legalise abortion under any circumstances in a period of up to 13 weeks.
(That's a 3 months + 1 week old baby).
Not all Sinn Féin representatives will be happy with the move but Mrs McDonald insists she has a "duty to lead on this". And despite being a practising Catholic, who has raised her three children in the Catholic faith, the Sinn Féin leader says she can reconcile her religious beliefs and her efforts to modernise Ireland's abortion laws "with great ease".
How generous of her.
What Ms. McDonald deliberately fails to acknowledge is that being pro-life is not a question of religion, it's a question of human right's of the unborn child. Ms. McDonald and SF are trying to put a spin on the reasons the 8th should be repealed by making it about religion and in particular about being "Catholic".
How is she any different from those in the British government who proclaimed to the media the 'Troubles' were based on nothing more than a religious divide between Catholics and Protestants?
The 8th Amendment already protects the life of the mother when in danger during pregnancy. However, that's not good enough for Ms. McDonald. She wants abortion on demand and is willing to suspend and/or terminate any of her fellow SF party members who speak out against abortion or dare to vote their conscience.
Regardless of religious affiliation, or none at all, this issue should transcend Sinn Fein's toxic identity politics when it comes to abortion on demand.
Repeal of the 8TH should be recognized for what it is. The taking of an unborn baby's life up to 3 months old, on demand, even if the mother's life is not in any danger. That is total disregard for the child's right to life and is simply just plain murder.
March 26, 2018
Literary War Against Unionism
We are already living in a united Ireland - its just that republicans haven’t realised it yet. In his latest Fearless Flying Column, contentious political commentator, Dr John Coulter, suggested that nationalists’ rewriting of history has unleashed a literary war on the Union.
Former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams may have been a few years out with his pontificating that there would be a united Ireland by 2016 (two years ago!) to mark the centenary of the doomed Dublin Easter Rising.
But the Sinn Fein propagandists have realised the merits of a new tactic to ‘bash the Brits’, and they have borrowed it from their forefathers’ pussy-footing with Hitler’s Nazis during the Second World War.
The IRA of the 1940s wanted to take advantage of the United Kingdom’s dilemma in trying to defeat Nazi Germany, when the UK stood alone against Hitler’s legions with France defeated and the United States not yet in the war prior to the disaster at Pearl Harbour.
The IRA operated a simple philosophy - Britain’s misfortune is Ireland’s opportunity. It was the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, who coined the maxim - tell a lie often enough, and the people will believe it!
For 30 years, the IRA’s terrorist shot and bombed the pro-Union community. After the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the republican movement embarked on a cultural war against the pro-Union community, targeting parades, bonfires and anything which represented the pro-Union identity.
Now phase three of this republican agenda is being unleashed - the literary war against the pro-Union community through the art of rewriting history with the central theme - a united Ireland is inevitable so you Unionists might as well face that reality!
In this literary war, revision of legacy issues will be foremost, especially focusing on the deaths of IRA terrorists. That revisionism tactic will be to use any legacy funding to reach a conclusion which will move from the ‘they could have been arrested’ to ‘they were summarily executed by the British state’.
This revisionism by republicans will be used to both justify IRA murders as well as condemn the killings of republicans by British security forces - and every murder committed by loyalists was assisted by acts of collusion from the British state.
While IRA atrocities, such as the La Mon massacre and the Kingsmill massacre, are currently being placated with lip-service and lame-duck condemnation, the republican concept of ‘the long war’ means republicans waiting for a number of years until many who suffered in those attacks have passed away or are too elderly to object - then we will see a propaganda campaign to justify the need by republicans to attack a collie dog dinner at La Mon and butcher 10 Protestant workers as they returned home.
Republicans will have already used this revisionist tactic to justify their atrocities during the Irish Civil War in the 1920 - especially with the centenary of that inter-republican bloodbath approaching in two years’ time.
No doubt to the fore will be the fact that more than 70 IRA members - who opposed the Treaty - were executed by the pro-Treaty Free State forces, many with trial and even some tied to a land mine which exploded. Could the revisionist bandwagon roll on so much that all IRA terrorists executed during that civil war will be given a posthumous pardon and compensation paid to their descendants, as well as gaining a formal apology from the Taoiseach of the day?
Every gain or concession gained from the British Government, either through the expected Direct Rule, a restored Stormont Executive, or evenly a politically boosted British Irish Intergovernmental Conference, particularly if Direct Rule heralds in same-sex marriage for Northern Ireland, more liberal abortion legislation, a stand-alone Irish Language Act, and tougher defamation laws - moves which will leave Northern Ireland society resembling the pluralist and secular society which has developed south of the Irish border.
Sinn Fein’s revisionist and literary war will aim to try and get the British Government to formally apologise for the deaths of IRA terrorists in shoot-outs with the security forces. The key fight in this campaign will focus on the Loughgall ambush in the late 1980s when eight IRA terrorists from the East Tyrone Brigade were wiped out by the SAS.
Under the revisionist scheme, republicans will work towards a scheme whereby the British Government issues a statement admitting that the eight IRA terrorists shot dead were murdered, formally apologises for their deaths and pays substantial compensation to the families of the eight.
Win the Loughgall case, and republicans will systemically work their way through many other incidents in which republicans died campaigning for a similar outcome. In turn, the murders of members of the security forces will be justified and the victims demonised. Civilian deaths will be explained away as collateral damage.
The ultimate long-term aim is to convince the pro-Union community that they are no longer in the UK and they might as well accept the reality that they are in a united Ireland in all but a political name.
The key flaw in republicans’ propaganda campaign is - what happens if a section of the pro-Union community post Brexit starts to push the agenda that the only way for the Republic to survive economically is to negotiate a closer Union with the UK, especially if support for the Scottish National Party continues to ebb north of the English border and the chance for a second independence referendum rapidly evaporates.
While this is the flaw in republican revisionist thinking and strategy, it also contains a major Achilles’ Heel. What happens if a small group of loyalists decide to begin a terror war - not against Catholics in Northern Ireland, but against economic and political targets in the South?
Skeptics will clearly suggest that loyalism as it currently exists does not possess the stomach for a new terror campaign. But that is to assume that such dissident loyalists will come from the existing groups, such as the UVF, UDA, Red Hand Commando and the LVF.
What Sinn Fein revisionists seem to have overlooked is that a new generation of loyalist exists for whom the Good Friday Agreement and the 1994 ceasefire by the Combined Loyalist Military Command are merely statistics in history books.
Indeed, what republicanism also seems to be forgetting the changing nature of terrorism, with the pace being set by the ‘lone wolf’ tactic adopted by Islamic radicals.
It would only take a handful of loyalist fanatics to bring Dublin to its political knees within a fortnight. The days of Ulster Third Force and Ulster Resistance prancing around the streets of Ulster are long gone. Terror groups are no longer organised in platoons, companies and battalions, like the old Carsonsite UVF.
A small cell with access to Islamic-style arsenals could create havoc in the Republic. Such an analysis should not be dismissed as Right-wing sabre-rattling.
The massive question which republicans must urgently address - could nationalism push loyalism too far with its revisionist literary war against the pro-Union community in Northern Ireland?
John Coulter is a unionist political commentator and former Blanket columnist.
John Coulter is also author of ‘An Sais Glas: (The Green Sash): The Road to National Republicanism’, which is available on Amazon Kindle.
Follow John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoul
Former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams may have been a few years out with his pontificating that there would be a united Ireland by 2016 (two years ago!) to mark the centenary of the doomed Dublin Easter Rising.
But the Sinn Fein propagandists have realised the merits of a new tactic to ‘bash the Brits’, and they have borrowed it from their forefathers’ pussy-footing with Hitler’s Nazis during the Second World War.
The IRA of the 1940s wanted to take advantage of the United Kingdom’s dilemma in trying to defeat Nazi Germany, when the UK stood alone against Hitler’s legions with France defeated and the United States not yet in the war prior to the disaster at Pearl Harbour.
The IRA operated a simple philosophy - Britain’s misfortune is Ireland’s opportunity. It was the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, who coined the maxim - tell a lie often enough, and the people will believe it!
For 30 years, the IRA’s terrorist shot and bombed the pro-Union community. After the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the republican movement embarked on a cultural war against the pro-Union community, targeting parades, bonfires and anything which represented the pro-Union identity.
Now phase three of this republican agenda is being unleashed - the literary war against the pro-Union community through the art of rewriting history with the central theme - a united Ireland is inevitable so you Unionists might as well face that reality!
In this literary war, revision of legacy issues will be foremost, especially focusing on the deaths of IRA terrorists. That revisionism tactic will be to use any legacy funding to reach a conclusion which will move from the ‘they could have been arrested’ to ‘they were summarily executed by the British state’.
This revisionism by republicans will be used to both justify IRA murders as well as condemn the killings of republicans by British security forces - and every murder committed by loyalists was assisted by acts of collusion from the British state.
While IRA atrocities, such as the La Mon massacre and the Kingsmill massacre, are currently being placated with lip-service and lame-duck condemnation, the republican concept of ‘the long war’ means republicans waiting for a number of years until many who suffered in those attacks have passed away or are too elderly to object - then we will see a propaganda campaign to justify the need by republicans to attack a collie dog dinner at La Mon and butcher 10 Protestant workers as they returned home.
Republicans will have already used this revisionist tactic to justify their atrocities during the Irish Civil War in the 1920 - especially with the centenary of that inter-republican bloodbath approaching in two years’ time.
No doubt to the fore will be the fact that more than 70 IRA members - who opposed the Treaty - were executed by the pro-Treaty Free State forces, many with trial and even some tied to a land mine which exploded. Could the revisionist bandwagon roll on so much that all IRA terrorists executed during that civil war will be given a posthumous pardon and compensation paid to their descendants, as well as gaining a formal apology from the Taoiseach of the day?
Every gain or concession gained from the British Government, either through the expected Direct Rule, a restored Stormont Executive, or evenly a politically boosted British Irish Intergovernmental Conference, particularly if Direct Rule heralds in same-sex marriage for Northern Ireland, more liberal abortion legislation, a stand-alone Irish Language Act, and tougher defamation laws - moves which will leave Northern Ireland society resembling the pluralist and secular society which has developed south of the Irish border.
Sinn Fein’s revisionist and literary war will aim to try and get the British Government to formally apologise for the deaths of IRA terrorists in shoot-outs with the security forces. The key fight in this campaign will focus on the Loughgall ambush in the late 1980s when eight IRA terrorists from the East Tyrone Brigade were wiped out by the SAS.
Under the revisionist scheme, republicans will work towards a scheme whereby the British Government issues a statement admitting that the eight IRA terrorists shot dead were murdered, formally apologises for their deaths and pays substantial compensation to the families of the eight.
Win the Loughgall case, and republicans will systemically work their way through many other incidents in which republicans died campaigning for a similar outcome. In turn, the murders of members of the security forces will be justified and the victims demonised. Civilian deaths will be explained away as collateral damage.
The ultimate long-term aim is to convince the pro-Union community that they are no longer in the UK and they might as well accept the reality that they are in a united Ireland in all but a political name.
The key flaw in republicans’ propaganda campaign is - what happens if a section of the pro-Union community post Brexit starts to push the agenda that the only way for the Republic to survive economically is to negotiate a closer Union with the UK, especially if support for the Scottish National Party continues to ebb north of the English border and the chance for a second independence referendum rapidly evaporates.
While this is the flaw in republican revisionist thinking and strategy, it also contains a major Achilles’ Heel. What happens if a small group of loyalists decide to begin a terror war - not against Catholics in Northern Ireland, but against economic and political targets in the South?
Skeptics will clearly suggest that loyalism as it currently exists does not possess the stomach for a new terror campaign. But that is to assume that such dissident loyalists will come from the existing groups, such as the UVF, UDA, Red Hand Commando and the LVF.
What Sinn Fein revisionists seem to have overlooked is that a new generation of loyalist exists for whom the Good Friday Agreement and the 1994 ceasefire by the Combined Loyalist Military Command are merely statistics in history books.
Indeed, what republicanism also seems to be forgetting the changing nature of terrorism, with the pace being set by the ‘lone wolf’ tactic adopted by Islamic radicals.
It would only take a handful of loyalist fanatics to bring Dublin to its political knees within a fortnight. The days of Ulster Third Force and Ulster Resistance prancing around the streets of Ulster are long gone. Terror groups are no longer organised in platoons, companies and battalions, like the old Carsonsite UVF.
A small cell with access to Islamic-style arsenals could create havoc in the Republic. Such an analysis should not be dismissed as Right-wing sabre-rattling.
The massive question which republicans must urgently address - could nationalism push loyalism too far with its revisionist literary war against the pro-Union community in Northern Ireland?
John Coulter is a unionist political commentator and former Blanket columnist. John Coulter is also author of ‘An Sais Glas: (The Green Sash): The Road to National Republicanism’, which is available on Amazon Kindle.
Follow John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoul
March 25, 2018
My Thoughts On Charitable Wishes For Stephen Hawking In Hell
Melissa Krawczyk writing in Atheist Republic looks at the "godnuts" who gloated that the late Stephen Hawking might be in Hell.
World-renowned physicist and atheist Stephen Hawking recently passed away. Why do some believers seem to relish the idea of his eternal torment in Hell? This is one perspective from an ex-evangelical.
A True Believer’s Response to the Death of Stephen Hawking
Physicist Stephen Hawking died several days ago, on March 14th, 2018. In a very short time – possibly within minutes of the news getting out – some devout believers (Christian and Muslim, etc.) took to the internet to post what seemed like gleeful warnings about his demise and damnation. One Instagram account @positiva.tea began posting images of a disfigured, zombie-like picture of Hawking in his iconic wheelchair with a video overlay of flickering flames. Aside from one other tweet from last May, the only images on the account – all 14 of them at my last count - show the same flaming video with the following caption, posted at various intervals.1
Later in the day Richard Dawkins shared the same image and tweeted:
While I think Richard made an interesting hypothesis in the latter half of the tweet, the first part stung – I used to believe this myself! It also clearly displayed his understandable anger and utter disgust.3
But I don’t think we should assume low intelligence when we see statements like this and then neglect the rather extraordinary and powerful effects of indoctrination and confirmation bias combined with the strong determination of the human mind. I was an evangelical/fundamentalist Christian, and this is exactly what I believed at one point in my life – and a variation of what I believed at others -- though I don't think I was ever so heartless as to desire it for someone.
I was never taught by my parents to be joyful about the eternal damnation of others, or to gloat about it -- or my own salvation -- but I did think this was the way it was. The threat of eternal damnation in my childhood was intended – I hope – to be a powerful motivator to become a devoted “fisher of men”4 and a missionary to the world, sharing the good news of salvation through Christ Jesus. But because I believed that atheists (read blasphemers) chose their own fate, often freely5, it was fine to use the lost and damned as an example of the dangers presented by denying God. A statement like the one made by positiva.tea – and I did hear such things -- would be met with solemn nods and thankful murmurs of therefore but by the grace of god go I, but certainly not anger, disgust or horror at the sentiment.6
Are Believers Mortally Terrified that They Might Be Wrong?
Read the latter part of Richard’s tweet again:
When you're taught from early childhood that any time you feel uncomfortable with a teaching, that those feelings are caused by the indwelling Holy Spirit warning you of the influence of Satan, then you aren't even able to evaluate whether you should be afraid. You immediately close your ears. Discomfort means you are straying into dangerous territory and you should put up barriers to exposure. I once visited a “charismatic” Pentecostal-style worship service when visiting family, and I recall the extreme discomfort I felt in the middle of a worship service full of people worshipping God in a different way than I was accustomed to. Dancing, arms raised, talking over each other, speaking in tongues. I was certain that the Devil was at work, leading those poor believers astray and tempting me to adopt practices that were displeasing to God. In reality, I simply felt out of place, but I couldn’t recognize that then. I had been warned repeatedly that I would feel discomfort when teaching strayed into dangerous or heretical territory. As a result, when I encountered an unfamiliar and different viewpoint, rather than being able to listen and evaluate, I was primed to feel uneasy, and when I noticed that I would rejoice in the fact that my personal Holy Spirit alarm system was working correctly - confirmation bias!
Once I felt that discomfort – and I felt it many times over the years - I could deploy protective measures. I could slam the walls into place and refuse to listen or be tempted by the siren song of false faith - no matter who was singing it. I believe Richard is right - there are some people who believe in God and Heaven and Hell that are afraid that their beliefs might be wrong, and express anger and disgust toward people who threaten to dismantle or poke holes in their beliefs. But I suspect that those are not often the devout faithful. I honestly think that many more people – especially “true believers” – simply never even allow themselves to listen long enough to experience fear at all. At the first hint of discomfort they stick their fingers in their ears and say “lalalalalala” and totally refuse to hear. Evangelical faith is a battlefield and there are no neutral parties. You are either with God, or against him, and if you are with him, you are a strong warrior. Fear isn’t allowed to enter.
How Do Believers Respond to Atheism?
I do think that there are definitely preachers, pastors and religious leaders in many faiths that know – often from experience -- that questioning will surely take people away. In most cases I think this leads to well-meaning attempts to keep the flock safe by warning, building up faith and teaching protection mechanisms.7 I think there is a smaller subset still that know and experience existential fear. I think they are responsible for the indoctrination of anger and hatred in their flock, in addition to the standard indoctrination of belief. They “otherize” non-believers and atheists, as well as believers from other religions that “don’t worship the same God.” They teach that the Others choose their fate – that they are wicked and hate God. And don’t people who hate God deserve to be vilified and hated themselves? It’s a logical step, even if not an explicitly stated one. That small subset that doubts, fears and hates grows when the people indoctrinated into hatred eventually begin to fear doubt as well.
Many of us from different evangelical traditions can recall memories such as this:8
When difference of belief can instead be relabeled as a tactic of your enemy in battle then righteous anger and hatred can be easily justified. When you believe that the enemy is being powered by spiritual forces behind the scenes, when you believe that they have chosen the path to destruction, then it is possible to view such people as less than human. Empathy and compassion are vanquished. There is then no allowance for redemption.
When atheists are systematically seen as agents of the devil, who have chosen their fate, then they are just pawns on the losing team, to be exploited for gains on the righteous winning side. People who believe these things may possess “low intelligence.” But sadly, any deeply devout believer is at risk and the ones who are the most intelligent can be especially skilled at using motivated reasoning to reduce cognitive dissonance.
The Results
When the people indoctrinated into hatred begin to fear, and both are combined, then we see the most truly horrific results: It becomes possible for someone to feel absolutely confident that they are displaying the love of Jesus Christ to the world by glorying in the eternal torment of an unbeliever, and being entirely satisfied that they deserve it.
What do you think of my conclusions? They are, of course, a product of my own personal experience as a devout believer combined with my more recent experience as an atheist.
References / Notes:
1 I first saw this image on the Twitter account of Michael A. Sherlock – shared from his Instagram account. He is the one who added the note in the corner that says “StephenHawking was an unrepentant and unapologetic #atheist. Be like Stephen. #BeAtheist.) I sent the image to my online research notebook for my book Losing Your Life to Save It and copied Richard Dawkins as I often do. This charming soul was not alone in tweeting about Hawking, as noted by Hemant Mehta: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2018/03/14/a-bunch-of-relig...
2 https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/973986103639322641
3 I commented on his tweet then wrote him a slightly petulant email saying, “Richard, it isn't low intelligence necessarily. You know the power of indoctrination and confirmation bias. Remember, this is EXACTLY what I believed, though I don't think I was ever so heartless as to desire it for someone.” His response – an apology and the following statement: “Let me put it this way. Childhood indoctrination must indeed be very powerful indeed if it can cause even someone as intelligent and educated as you to think the creator of the majestically expanding universe (versed as he must be in General Relativity, Quantum Gravity, Dark Matter, etc.) cares a tuppenny bit for the sins and beliefs of evolved creatures on a speck of cosmic dust in the outer reaches of one rather ordinary galaxy!” I responded with a laugh and “Either that or I have an incredible power of will and stubbornness. Probably a deadly mix of both.”
4 https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Matthew%204%3A19
5 Sometimes people’s “hearts were hardened” by God and they were used for his purpose without a choice – Pharaoh in Egypt refusing to let the Israelites go, Judas betraying Jesus, etc.
6 I attended progressively more dogmatic churches as I grew up. I began at a non-denominational church with my family in Western Pennsylvania that we attended until I was about 15-years-old. When we moved to New York I began to attend a Christian and Missionary Alliance church with my mother and aunt. That was followed by attendance at what I believe was a Baptist church in Connecticut – of my own choosing and on my own. My last regularly attended church, during my college years, was one that I now consider to be a fundamentalist Baptist church, in upstate New York. Ironically, at the point when my mind should have been most open to science and critical thinking, while I studied Materials Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, it instead became the most closed and dogmatic.
7 Or in some cases, expulsion of the offending person asking questions.
8 https://twitter.com/ElleWest25/status/973995761569599488
Follow Atheist Republic on Twitter @AtheistRepublic
World-renowned physicist and atheist Stephen Hawking recently passed away. Why do some believers seem to relish the idea of his eternal torment in Hell? This is one perspective from an ex-evangelical.
A True Believer’s Response to the Death of Stephen Hawking
Physicist Stephen Hawking died several days ago, on March 14th, 2018. In a very short time – possibly within minutes of the news getting out – some devout believers (Christian and Muslim, etc.) took to the internet to post what seemed like gleeful warnings about his demise and damnation. One Instagram account @positiva.tea began posting images of a disfigured, zombie-like picture of Hawking in his iconic wheelchair with a video overlay of flickering flames. Aside from one other tweet from last May, the only images on the account – all 14 of them at my last count - show the same flaming video with the following caption, posted at various intervals.1
Later in the day Richard Dawkins shared the same image and tweeted:
Hate at this pathological level demands explanation beyond the obvious low intelligence. I suggest that Godnuts are secretly unconfident of their beliefs & mortally terrified they might be wrong. This translates into hyper-extreme hate of anyone who credibly boosts their doubts.2
While I think Richard made an interesting hypothesis in the latter half of the tweet, the first part stung – I used to believe this myself! It also clearly displayed his understandable anger and utter disgust.3
But I don’t think we should assume low intelligence when we see statements like this and then neglect the rather extraordinary and powerful effects of indoctrination and confirmation bias combined with the strong determination of the human mind. I was an evangelical/fundamentalist Christian, and this is exactly what I believed at one point in my life – and a variation of what I believed at others -- though I don't think I was ever so heartless as to desire it for someone.
I was never taught by my parents to be joyful about the eternal damnation of others, or to gloat about it -- or my own salvation -- but I did think this was the way it was. The threat of eternal damnation in my childhood was intended – I hope – to be a powerful motivator to become a devoted “fisher of men”4 and a missionary to the world, sharing the good news of salvation through Christ Jesus. But because I believed that atheists (read blasphemers) chose their own fate, often freely5, it was fine to use the lost and damned as an example of the dangers presented by denying God. A statement like the one made by positiva.tea – and I did hear such things -- would be met with solemn nods and thankful murmurs of therefore but by the grace of god go I, but certainly not anger, disgust or horror at the sentiment.6
Are Believers Mortally Terrified that They Might Be Wrong?
Read the latter part of Richard’s tweet again:
I suggest that Godnuts are secretly unconfident of their beliefs & mortally terrified they might be wrong. This translates into hyper-extreme hate of anyone who credibly boosts their doubts.
When you're taught from early childhood that any time you feel uncomfortable with a teaching, that those feelings are caused by the indwelling Holy Spirit warning you of the influence of Satan, then you aren't even able to evaluate whether you should be afraid. You immediately close your ears. Discomfort means you are straying into dangerous territory and you should put up barriers to exposure. I once visited a “charismatic” Pentecostal-style worship service when visiting family, and I recall the extreme discomfort I felt in the middle of a worship service full of people worshipping God in a different way than I was accustomed to. Dancing, arms raised, talking over each other, speaking in tongues. I was certain that the Devil was at work, leading those poor believers astray and tempting me to adopt practices that were displeasing to God. In reality, I simply felt out of place, but I couldn’t recognize that then. I had been warned repeatedly that I would feel discomfort when teaching strayed into dangerous or heretical territory. As a result, when I encountered an unfamiliar and different viewpoint, rather than being able to listen and evaluate, I was primed to feel uneasy, and when I noticed that I would rejoice in the fact that my personal Holy Spirit alarm system was working correctly - confirmation bias!
Once I felt that discomfort – and I felt it many times over the years - I could deploy protective measures. I could slam the walls into place and refuse to listen or be tempted by the siren song of false faith - no matter who was singing it. I believe Richard is right - there are some people who believe in God and Heaven and Hell that are afraid that their beliefs might be wrong, and express anger and disgust toward people who threaten to dismantle or poke holes in their beliefs. But I suspect that those are not often the devout faithful. I honestly think that many more people – especially “true believers” – simply never even allow themselves to listen long enough to experience fear at all. At the first hint of discomfort they stick their fingers in their ears and say “lalalalalala” and totally refuse to hear. Evangelical faith is a battlefield and there are no neutral parties. You are either with God, or against him, and if you are with him, you are a strong warrior. Fear isn’t allowed to enter.
How Do Believers Respond to Atheism?
I do think that there are definitely preachers, pastors and religious leaders in many faiths that know – often from experience -- that questioning will surely take people away. In most cases I think this leads to well-meaning attempts to keep the flock safe by warning, building up faith and teaching protection mechanisms.7 I think there is a smaller subset still that know and experience existential fear. I think they are responsible for the indoctrination of anger and hatred in their flock, in addition to the standard indoctrination of belief. They “otherize” non-believers and atheists, as well as believers from other religions that “don’t worship the same God.” They teach that the Others choose their fate – that they are wicked and hate God. And don’t people who hate God deserve to be vilified and hated themselves? It’s a logical step, even if not an explicitly stated one. That small subset that doubts, fears and hates grows when the people indoctrinated into hatred eventually begin to fear doubt as well.
Many of us from different evangelical traditions can recall memories such as this:8
“In prayer sessions we prayed that people be punished or be “taken” to hell for “leading the flock of Jesus astray” if I remember correctly. The idea was that these “bad people” were corrupting innocents so we had to pray that they be punished or “struck down” by god. That counts?”
When difference of belief can instead be relabeled as a tactic of your enemy in battle then righteous anger and hatred can be easily justified. When you believe that the enemy is being powered by spiritual forces behind the scenes, when you believe that they have chosen the path to destruction, then it is possible to view such people as less than human. Empathy and compassion are vanquished. There is then no allowance for redemption.
When atheists are systematically seen as agents of the devil, who have chosen their fate, then they are just pawns on the losing team, to be exploited for gains on the righteous winning side. People who believe these things may possess “low intelligence.” But sadly, any deeply devout believer is at risk and the ones who are the most intelligent can be especially skilled at using motivated reasoning to reduce cognitive dissonance.
The Results
When the people indoctrinated into hatred begin to fear, and both are combined, then we see the most truly horrific results: It becomes possible for someone to feel absolutely confident that they are displaying the love of Jesus Christ to the world by glorying in the eternal torment of an unbeliever, and being entirely satisfied that they deserve it.
What do you think of my conclusions? They are, of course, a product of my own personal experience as a devout believer combined with my more recent experience as an atheist.
References / Notes:
1 I first saw this image on the Twitter account of Michael A. Sherlock – shared from his Instagram account. He is the one who added the note in the corner that says “StephenHawking was an unrepentant and unapologetic #atheist. Be like Stephen. #BeAtheist.) I sent the image to my online research notebook for my book Losing Your Life to Save It and copied Richard Dawkins as I often do. This charming soul was not alone in tweeting about Hawking, as noted by Hemant Mehta: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2018/03/14/a-bunch-of-relig...
2 https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/973986103639322641
3 I commented on his tweet then wrote him a slightly petulant email saying, “Richard, it isn't low intelligence necessarily. You know the power of indoctrination and confirmation bias. Remember, this is EXACTLY what I believed, though I don't think I was ever so heartless as to desire it for someone.” His response – an apology and the following statement: “Let me put it this way. Childhood indoctrination must indeed be very powerful indeed if it can cause even someone as intelligent and educated as you to think the creator of the majestically expanding universe (versed as he must be in General Relativity, Quantum Gravity, Dark Matter, etc.) cares a tuppenny bit for the sins and beliefs of evolved creatures on a speck of cosmic dust in the outer reaches of one rather ordinary galaxy!” I responded with a laugh and “Either that or I have an incredible power of will and stubbornness. Probably a deadly mix of both.”
4 https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Matthew%204%3A19
5 Sometimes people’s “hearts were hardened” by God and they were used for his purpose without a choice – Pharaoh in Egypt refusing to let the Israelites go, Judas betraying Jesus, etc.
6 I attended progressively more dogmatic churches as I grew up. I began at a non-denominational church with my family in Western Pennsylvania that we attended until I was about 15-years-old. When we moved to New York I began to attend a Christian and Missionary Alliance church with my mother and aunt. That was followed by attendance at what I believe was a Baptist church in Connecticut – of my own choosing and on my own. My last regularly attended church, during my college years, was one that I now consider to be a fundamentalist Baptist church, in upstate New York. Ironically, at the point when my mind should have been most open to science and critical thinking, while I studied Materials Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, it instead became the most closed and dogmatic.
7 Or in some cases, expulsion of the offending person asking questions.
8 https://twitter.com/ElleWest25/status/973995761569599488
Follow Atheist Republic on Twitter @AtheistRepublic
March 24, 2018
The Great Conspiracy
The Uri Avnery Column looks at discrimination against some Jews in Israeli Society.
In The Autumn of 1948, after some eight months of continuous fighting, I was promoted to the lofty rank of corporal. After taking part in a crash course for squad leaders, I was allowed to choose my new soldiers – new immigrants from Poland or Morocco.
(Everybody wanted Bulgarians, but the Bulgarians were already taken. They were known to be excellent fighters, disciplined and stoical.)
I chose the Moroccans. I also got two Tunisians and five Turks, altogether 15 men. All of them had just arrived by ship and not one spoke Hebrew. So how does one explain to them that a hand grenade has a high course of flight and a sharp angle of descent?
Fortunately one of them knew some Hebrew, so he translated into French, one of the Turks understood some French, and translated into Turkish, and so we got along.
It was not easy. There were a lot of psychological problems. But I decided to adapt myself as much as possible. For example: one day we got an order to go to the sea shore and fill a truck with sand, in order to enlarge our camp with more tents.
When we arrived on the beach, none of my soldiers moved. "We have come to this country to fight, not to work!" their spokesman explained.
I was nonplussed. What to do? The course had not prepared me for such a situation. Then I had an idea. I said: "You are quite right. So please sit under that tree and enjoy the shade!"
I took a spade and started to dig. I heard them whisper. Then one of them got up and took a spade. Then another. In the end we all worked happily.
Unhappily, We were an exception. Most Ashkenazis (Jews of European descent) who had been born in the country, or immigrated years before, thought that they had done their part and suffered enough, and that now it was up to the new Oriental immigrants to do theirs. Cultural difference were huge, but nobody paid much attention to them.
Soon after that scene, we were allowed leave for a few hours in Tel Aviv. When I got on the truck, I noticed that some of my men did not get on. "Are you crazy?" I cried. "Leave in Tel Aviv is paradise!"
"Not for us," they replied. "The girls in Tel Aviv won't go out with us. They call us Morroccan-Knives." There had indeed been a few cases of hot-headed Moroccans who had felt insulted and attacked people with knives.
My attitude towards "my Moroccans” paid off. When I was severely wounded, four of them brought me out, under heavy enemy fire. They granted me 70 more years of life (so far).
A few years later, when I was already the Chief Editor of a news magazine, I published a series of investigative articles under the title "They Fuck the Blacks". It contained revelations about the discrimination against the Oriental immigrants (nicknamed "blacks", though they are brown). It aroused a storm of anger throughout the country. The very suggestion of discrimination was vehemently denied.
At the end of the 1950s, a minor incident in the Wadi Salib quarter of Haifa triggered major disturbances by Oriental Jews. All the press took the side of the police, my magazine was the only one which justified the rebels.
I Bring Up all this ancient history because it has suddenly become very topical.
A TV series by an Oriental filmmaker is whipping up a storm in Israel. It is called "Salah, This is The Land of Israel", and claims to describe the experiences of his grandparents when they arrived in Israel in the early 1950s. Salah is an Arab first name.
They wanted to settle in Jerusalem, the only place in the country whose name they knew. Instead they were taken to a remote spot in the desert, thrown from the trucks, and left there to vegetate in tents, without work except for a few days per month of "emergency work", digging holes for trees.
According to the filmmaker, David Deri, it was a gigantic "conspiracy" (his word) by the Ashkenazis to have the Oriental Jews come here, to throw them into the desert and leave them there, prey to hunger and deprivation.
Deri is not making things up. He quotes extensively from secret official protocols in which the operation was discussed at length and explained as a national necessity in order to fill the empty areas (from which the Arabs had previously been expelled).
All the facts are right. Yet the overall picture is wrong. Deri did not try to describe this chapter in history objectively. He produced a propaganda piece.
Let Me cite again my personal experiences.
I was born in Germany to wealthy parents. When the Nazis assumed power, in 1933, my father immediately decided to leave Germany and go to Palestine.
No one received us with flowers. We were left to fend for ourselves. We brought with us a large sum of money. My father was not used to the commercial customs then prevailing in the country, and we lost all our money within a year.
Both my parents, who had never done any physical work in Germany, started to work very hard, 10-12 hours a day. Seeing this, I left elementary school after 7 classes and started to work at the age of 14, as did my brother and sisters. Not one of us complained. The happenings in Germany reminded us every day what we had escaped.
The lot of new immigrants is hard, and has always been so everywhere. We were intent on building "our" country. The immigrants who came from East and West after World War II were expected to do the same.
Much later I became friendly with one of the main organizers of the "absorption" of the immigrants in he 1950s, Lova Eliav. He told me how the immigrants, Eastern and Western, were brought to the empty Lakhish region, and when they refused to get off the trucks, the driver was told to operate the mechanism and literally pour the people onto the ground. He was not ashamed of it – for him it was a part of building the country.
Lova, by the way, was one of the country's great idealists. At an advanced age he himself went into the desert, near the Egyptian border, to live with the young people for whom he built a new village far from everywhere.
Deri discovered that police spies had infiltrated "Oriental" groups. That made me laugh out loud. Because it was an open secret that for many years the secret service had spied on every move of my editorial staff, especially mine.
Deri is not troubled by the fact that during those years the Communists were treated much worse, not to mention the Arab citizens, who suffered daily oppression under "military rule".
All in all, Deri did not actually falsify or invent anything. But he takes everything out of context. It is as if somebody took a painting of Michelangelo and removed one color – say red. It's still basically the same painting, but it's not the same.
David Deri was born 43 years ago in Yeruham, one of those villages created by Lova Eliav and his colleagues in the middle of nowhere, south of Be'er Sheva.
Today, Yeruham is still one of the poorer townships. But it has advanced a lot. Politically it is, of course, solidly Likud.
Deri makes no attempt to paint a "balanced" picture. On the contrary, he quite openly tries to incite the Oriental Jews against the Ashkenazis.
I don't know his political outlook. But in today's reality, the film serves the incitement campaign of Binyamin Netanyahu against the imaginary "leftist Ashkenazi elite", which includes the media, the universities, the police and the courts (and me as well, of course).
By the way, Deri himself is the best evidence of how in two or three generations those poor Moroccans who were thrown into the desert are forming a new elite.
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
In The Autumn of 1948, after some eight months of continuous fighting, I was promoted to the lofty rank of corporal. After taking part in a crash course for squad leaders, I was allowed to choose my new soldiers – new immigrants from Poland or Morocco.
(Everybody wanted Bulgarians, but the Bulgarians were already taken. They were known to be excellent fighters, disciplined and stoical.)
I chose the Moroccans. I also got two Tunisians and five Turks, altogether 15 men. All of them had just arrived by ship and not one spoke Hebrew. So how does one explain to them that a hand grenade has a high course of flight and a sharp angle of descent?
Fortunately one of them knew some Hebrew, so he translated into French, one of the Turks understood some French, and translated into Turkish, and so we got along.
It was not easy. There were a lot of psychological problems. But I decided to adapt myself as much as possible. For example: one day we got an order to go to the sea shore and fill a truck with sand, in order to enlarge our camp with more tents.
When we arrived on the beach, none of my soldiers moved. "We have come to this country to fight, not to work!" their spokesman explained.
I was nonplussed. What to do? The course had not prepared me for such a situation. Then I had an idea. I said: "You are quite right. So please sit under that tree and enjoy the shade!"
I took a spade and started to dig. I heard them whisper. Then one of them got up and took a spade. Then another. In the end we all worked happily.
Unhappily, We were an exception. Most Ashkenazis (Jews of European descent) who had been born in the country, or immigrated years before, thought that they had done their part and suffered enough, and that now it was up to the new Oriental immigrants to do theirs. Cultural difference were huge, but nobody paid much attention to them.
Soon after that scene, we were allowed leave for a few hours in Tel Aviv. When I got on the truck, I noticed that some of my men did not get on. "Are you crazy?" I cried. "Leave in Tel Aviv is paradise!"
"Not for us," they replied. "The girls in Tel Aviv won't go out with us. They call us Morroccan-Knives." There had indeed been a few cases of hot-headed Moroccans who had felt insulted and attacked people with knives.
My attitude towards "my Moroccans” paid off. When I was severely wounded, four of them brought me out, under heavy enemy fire. They granted me 70 more years of life (so far).
A few years later, when I was already the Chief Editor of a news magazine, I published a series of investigative articles under the title "They Fuck the Blacks". It contained revelations about the discrimination against the Oriental immigrants (nicknamed "blacks", though they are brown). It aroused a storm of anger throughout the country. The very suggestion of discrimination was vehemently denied.
At the end of the 1950s, a minor incident in the Wadi Salib quarter of Haifa triggered major disturbances by Oriental Jews. All the press took the side of the police, my magazine was the only one which justified the rebels.
I Bring Up all this ancient history because it has suddenly become very topical.
A TV series by an Oriental filmmaker is whipping up a storm in Israel. It is called "Salah, This is The Land of Israel", and claims to describe the experiences of his grandparents when they arrived in Israel in the early 1950s. Salah is an Arab first name.
They wanted to settle in Jerusalem, the only place in the country whose name they knew. Instead they were taken to a remote spot in the desert, thrown from the trucks, and left there to vegetate in tents, without work except for a few days per month of "emergency work", digging holes for trees.
According to the filmmaker, David Deri, it was a gigantic "conspiracy" (his word) by the Ashkenazis to have the Oriental Jews come here, to throw them into the desert and leave them there, prey to hunger and deprivation.
Deri is not making things up. He quotes extensively from secret official protocols in which the operation was discussed at length and explained as a national necessity in order to fill the empty areas (from which the Arabs had previously been expelled).
All the facts are right. Yet the overall picture is wrong. Deri did not try to describe this chapter in history objectively. He produced a propaganda piece.
Let Me cite again my personal experiences.
I was born in Germany to wealthy parents. When the Nazis assumed power, in 1933, my father immediately decided to leave Germany and go to Palestine.
No one received us with flowers. We were left to fend for ourselves. We brought with us a large sum of money. My father was not used to the commercial customs then prevailing in the country, and we lost all our money within a year.
Both my parents, who had never done any physical work in Germany, started to work very hard, 10-12 hours a day. Seeing this, I left elementary school after 7 classes and started to work at the age of 14, as did my brother and sisters. Not one of us complained. The happenings in Germany reminded us every day what we had escaped.
The lot of new immigrants is hard, and has always been so everywhere. We were intent on building "our" country. The immigrants who came from East and West after World War II were expected to do the same.
Much later I became friendly with one of the main organizers of the "absorption" of the immigrants in he 1950s, Lova Eliav. He told me how the immigrants, Eastern and Western, were brought to the empty Lakhish region, and when they refused to get off the trucks, the driver was told to operate the mechanism and literally pour the people onto the ground. He was not ashamed of it – for him it was a part of building the country.
Lova, by the way, was one of the country's great idealists. At an advanced age he himself went into the desert, near the Egyptian border, to live with the young people for whom he built a new village far from everywhere.
Deri discovered that police spies had infiltrated "Oriental" groups. That made me laugh out loud. Because it was an open secret that for many years the secret service had spied on every move of my editorial staff, especially mine.
Deri is not troubled by the fact that during those years the Communists were treated much worse, not to mention the Arab citizens, who suffered daily oppression under "military rule".
All in all, Deri did not actually falsify or invent anything. But he takes everything out of context. It is as if somebody took a painting of Michelangelo and removed one color – say red. It's still basically the same painting, but it's not the same.
David Deri was born 43 years ago in Yeruham, one of those villages created by Lova Eliav and his colleagues in the middle of nowhere, south of Be'er Sheva.
Today, Yeruham is still one of the poorer townships. But it has advanced a lot. Politically it is, of course, solidly Likud.
Deri makes no attempt to paint a "balanced" picture. On the contrary, he quite openly tries to incite the Oriental Jews against the Ashkenazis.
I don't know his political outlook. But in today's reality, the film serves the incitement campaign of Binyamin Netanyahu against the imaginary "leftist Ashkenazi elite", which includes the media, the universities, the police and the courts (and me as well, of course).
By the way, Deri himself is the best evidence of how in two or three generations those poor Moroccans who were thrown into the desert are forming a new elite.
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
March 22, 2018
Dreadful Judiciary
Mick Hall doesn't think much of British beaks.
Sweden long ago gave up the ghost of prosecuting Julian, having withdrawn their extradition warrant officially for any alleged crimes he was accused of committing within their jurisdiction.
Unlike in the UK, where if he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge he faces arrest for breaching his former bail conditions.
Let me remind readers of why Assange is really being targeted by the US state and their British caddy. He broadcast to the world a video of US troops murdering journalists and innocent Iraqi men and wounding their children. (See below)
Without the help of Wikileaks whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, whose heroic attempt to expose her nation's wrong doing would never have seen the light of day. Hence the US government's vindictive determination to make an example of Assange in the hope this will put off any future potential whistleblowers currently working within the state apparatus.
In October 2013 Sweden advised the CPS lawyer that it was time to withdraw the European arrest warrant on the grounds of proportionality, but due to UK intransigence it was four years before this eventually occurred.
Earlier this month the English aristocrat and wife of a Tory politician, Emma Arbuthnot, the senior district judge sitting at Westminster magistrates court summed up why she was refusing to lift the arrest warrant on Assange. What she said had echoes of Denning and Widgery when as senior members of the judiciary they absolved the British government and it's military of any blame for Bloody Sunday after British soldiers shot 28 unarmed civilians in Derry during a peaceful protest march. Fourteen of them died.
Emma Arbuthnot:
What the judge says it so typical of the doublespeak and sleight of hand of the British judiciary. If extradited, Julian would not be "returned to the USA." He is not a US citizen and Wikileaks have never operated in that jurisdiction.
Sweden long ago gave up any claim on him as I pointed out above. What he rightly fears now is the British caddy in Westminster extraditing him to the USA.
The US and British government's had hoped the Swedish government would do the dirty deed but they eventually refused the poison chalice. Once in US custody he would be lost within the Supermax prison system.
If anyone seriously doubts the British government's intention they need to question why they continue to spend millions of pounds to get their hands on Julian. Now the Swedes have withdrawn their extradition request, the most Assange could be charged with in the UK is the comparatively minor crime of not answering his bail. At most the forfeit of his bail money would be the normal procedure when there are no outstanding charges due. That the British government has not gone down this road makes his legal team believe there is far more to his case than the British government is telling.
After Arbuthnot passed her verdict, Gareth Peirce, one of Mr Assange's legal team said: “The history of the case from start to finish is extraordinary. Each aspect of it becomes puzzling and troubling as it is scrutinised.”
The mainstream media glitterati
And what of glitterati of the mainstream media who were happy to use the info Wikileaks provided about US forces killing innocent civilians in Iraq and rightly so, but when it came to supporting Julian Assange after he had little choice but to find sanctuary in the Ecuador embassy, they turned their backs and reported the fake news manufactured about him in Langley.
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.
Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
Sweden long ago gave up the ghost of prosecuting Julian, having withdrawn their extradition warrant officially for any alleged crimes he was accused of committing within their jurisdiction.
Unlike in the UK, where if he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge he faces arrest for breaching his former bail conditions.
Let me remind readers of why Assange is really being targeted by the US state and their British caddy. He broadcast to the world a video of US troops murdering journalists and innocent Iraqi men and wounding their children. (See below)
Without the help of Wikileaks whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, whose heroic attempt to expose her nation's wrong doing would never have seen the light of day. Hence the US government's vindictive determination to make an example of Assange in the hope this will put off any future potential whistleblowers currently working within the state apparatus.
In October 2013 Sweden advised the CPS lawyer that it was time to withdraw the European arrest warrant on the grounds of proportionality, but due to UK intransigence it was four years before this eventually occurred.
Earlier this month the English aristocrat and wife of a Tory politician, Emma Arbuthnot, the senior district judge sitting at Westminster magistrates court summed up why she was refusing to lift the arrest warrant on Assange. What she said had echoes of Denning and Widgery when as senior members of the judiciary they absolved the British government and it's military of any blame for Bloody Sunday after British soldiers shot 28 unarmed civilians in Derry during a peaceful protest march. Fourteen of them died.
Emma Arbuthnot:
I accept that Mr Assange had expressed fears of being returned to the United States from a very early stage in the Swedish extradition proceedings but, absent any evidence from Mr Assange on oath, I do not find that Mr Assange’s fears were reasonable. I do not accept that Sweden would have rendered Mr Assange to the US.Legal language is precise even in a flawed legal system like the UK's so why would Arbuthnot use a word like returned?
What the judge says it so typical of the doublespeak and sleight of hand of the British judiciary. If extradited, Julian would not be "returned to the USA." He is not a US citizen and Wikileaks have never operated in that jurisdiction.
Sweden long ago gave up any claim on him as I pointed out above. What he rightly fears now is the British caddy in Westminster extraditing him to the USA.
The US and British government's had hoped the Swedish government would do the dirty deed but they eventually refused the poison chalice. Once in US custody he would be lost within the Supermax prison system.
If anyone seriously doubts the British government's intention they need to question why they continue to spend millions of pounds to get their hands on Julian. Now the Swedes have withdrawn their extradition request, the most Assange could be charged with in the UK is the comparatively minor crime of not answering his bail. At most the forfeit of his bail money would be the normal procedure when there are no outstanding charges due. That the British government has not gone down this road makes his legal team believe there is far more to his case than the British government is telling.
After Arbuthnot passed her verdict, Gareth Peirce, one of Mr Assange's legal team said: “The history of the case from start to finish is extraordinary. Each aspect of it becomes puzzling and troubling as it is scrutinised.”
The mainstream media glitterati
And what of glitterati of the mainstream media who were happy to use the info Wikileaks provided about US forces killing innocent civilians in Iraq and rightly so, but when it came to supporting Julian Assange after he had little choice but to find sanctuary in the Ecuador embassy, they turned their backs and reported the fake news manufactured about him in Langley.
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
March 21, 2018
The Marketplace Of Ideas: Assaulting The First Amendment
Stanley Cohen vigorously champions free speech.
Photo by Paul Keller | CC BY 2.0A decade before he was to become President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson (the principal author of the Declaration of Independence) then serving as Minister to France, penned these words for the ages. It was the eve of the French Revolution and the world was ablaze with revolutionary ideas and potent words:
Poetry of freedom, this verse has safeguarded the chase of truth in ways that no military might can provide or preserve be it in the United States or elsewhere.
Almost 250 years later, we are, again, witness to an evident onslaught upon the core of our collective freedom … the marketplace of ideas.
The Attack on Al Jazeera
Recently, in a brazen effort to forestall, if not censor, the release of a news report depicting the insidious impact of AIPAC upon core democratic institutions of the United States, a number of congressmen demanded that Al Jazeera be designated a “foreign agent” involved in the release of “deceptive propaganda.”
Citing nothing more than so-called favorable coverage of various movements including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah the legislators went on to declare Al Jazeera as a less than impartial news source airing “radical anti-American, anti-Semitic [and] anti-Israel broadcasts.”
The attack on the independence of Al Jazeera comes soon after the successful political drive to compel RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents of Russia lest they be compelled to undergo intrusive, and possibly criminal, investigations of their networks.
The demand that Al Jazeera be forced to register under FARA as a foreign agent is little more than political pretext designed to control the narrative and limit the debate over some of the most compelling issues of our time. It is nothing short of an unconstitutional effort to control the free exchange of ideas and the marketplace within which they are debated.
Implicit in the First Amendment is a fundamental belief that the governed are far more capable than the government of distinguishing truth from falsehood and that the government’s role is not to regulate the content of the marketplace but to ensure it remains open to all ideas; those true and not… radical or conventional.
That these legislators, their constituents or lobbyists are offended by the content of various stories, opinion pieces or documentaries published or aired by Al Jazeera is of no constitutional moment. To the contrary, information deemed by some to be offensive propaganda is to others relevant and probative of issues to be contested and resolved in an open and free society.
To be sure, it is the friction between conflicting narratives and opinion that furthers the reach of freedom not dampens it. It is the conflict between voices that not only empowers those who partake in the debate or listen to it but ultimately strengthens society as a whole.
Under the First Amendment, people may elect to embrace or promote “radical” anti-American, anti-Israeli or even anti-Semitic commentary or opinion; it is a choice left to them and them alone. Neither the government nor any of its minions have the constitutional authority to limit access to information not in itself otherwise prohibited by law.
The marketplace must be open to all ideas – even false ideas. In an open marketplace ideas must “clash” and “grapple;” they must stand up to assault and prove their worthiness. Truth cannot be pampered, too delicate to be examined – truth must be tested, forged in the furnace of doubt and questioning.
And, where, as here, government seeks to reprimand Al Jazeera for ensuring our collective right to the widest diversity of information and opinion it is a punishment that penalizes all.
The History of Government Repression
Efforts to intimidate journalists or sculpt the popular political narrative of the day are not at all new in the United States. We are a country with a long and sordid history in which the government, or various groups within it, have endeavored to control what we hear and from whom.
Whether by legislative censorship, intimidation, arrest, or outright violence, those pundits who have strayed from trendy political consensus have often paid a dear price for their voice. Nowhere has that been more prominent or painful than within communities of color or among dissidents… sentinels that have dared to challenge the silence that is necessarily companion to safe-guarding the status quo.
Long before the revolution that gave birth to the First Amendment, newspapers played an essential role in the lifeblood of their communities… particularly in such major port cities as New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and Boston.
What began in earnest as largely a platform to share news about local commerce or amusing gossip soon swelled to become the bullhorn of challenge to British rule as editors realized criticism of the local governor attracted increasingly larger audiences. Not ones to sit in silence as subjects deigned to challenge Royal rule, governors began to shutter local newspapers… often leading to explosive street-side or courtroom battles.
In 1734, in what was to herald the first dramatic speech-based confrontation over the right of the press to criticize, indeed, mock the political rule of the time, the governor of New York ordered the arrest of John Peter Zenger after his paper published some satirical attacks.
When a grand jury refused to indict Zenger, the governor ordered the Attorney General to charge him with criminal libel. At trial, Zenger’s lawyers argued, with success, that truth was a defense against libel. The jury found him not guilty. That verdict was to set the stage for a generation of increasingly acerbic attacks upon the monarchy as colonial newspapers played a key role in fomenting the revolution.
Thus, beginning with the attack on the Stamp Act of 1765, newspapers and street corner pamphleteers, alike, provided essential news of what was happening throughout the colonies as they published rebel grievances such as “No taxation without representation!” To be sure, Tom Paine’s explosive pamphlet, Common Sense (1776) is credited with not just ravaging the king’s prominence but galvanizing revolutionary fervor overnight in favor of independence.
Given the pivotal role that a free press and speech played in the revolution, the founding fathers showed no hesitation, whatsoever, in engrafting each within the First Amendment to the fledgling Constitution. While there is little record of any debate among the framers over just what limits, if any, rubbed up against a free press, James Madison, the principal drafter of the Bill of Rights, opined:
For more than two centuries, in the United States, this expression, nay, this wisdom, has pitted those without power, but with striking voice, against those grown rigid and comfortable with the strength and arrogance that comes with position, elected or otherwise. It is a tension born of the drive to control not just the narrative but, ultimately, the body politic in ways that exalt the vision of the few at the expense of the many.
At times, it has been a battle born of legislative fiat while, at others, a desperate explosive rage that mistakes the messenger for the message and sees silence, even that obtained through deadly violence, as success. Ultimately, power sees no limits to its reach: self-preservation its sole aim.
In 1798, President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Although a broadside against immigrants and foreign nationals, its primary thrust was to outlaw any “conspiracy” against the government… largely by silencing people from speaking in a “false, scandalous and malicious” manner against it. Adams’ prime targets were newspaper, pamphlet and broadside publishers who printed articles disparaging of his administration.
Between 1798 and 1801, twenty-six dissidents of the day, many of whom were editors of “opposition” newspapers and all opposed to the administration, were prosecuted under the Sedition Act. Some were imprisoned for “false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the said President of the United States.” Following furious debate over the meaning of a free press and opposition speech, by 1802, all of the Acts related to this expression were repealed or expired.
In 1823, Utah passed a criminal libel and slander law allowing journalists to be prosecuted under the same sorts of charges used against Zenger a century earlier. In relevant part, the statute made it a crime to “…intentionally and with a malicious intent to injure publish libelous statements.”
Not declared unconstitutional until some 130 years later, today, Utah still maintains, but does not enforce, a closely worded criminal defamation statute. Roughly a dozen other states still maintain criminal libel laws (Six years ago, Colorado repealed theirs which made it a felony carrying up to 18 months in prison and a fine up to $100,000 for the first offense).
As World War I raged abroad, the Government unleashed an unprecedented domestic campaign against those it considered disloyal to the effort. Though federal agents, local police, and volunteer vigilantes initially targeted left-wing and trade union activists for surveillance and harassment, the government’s attention soon evolved into an all-out effort to silence “subversive” publications. It was to continue on even after the end of the war.
With the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917, the Postmaster General ordered that mail be monitored to ensure that newspapers, books and magazines “… calculated … to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny… or otherwise embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war” were denied the use of the postal service. This was to end the circulation of Appeal to Reason, a magazine, with a circulation of more than a half a million, affiliated with the Socialist Party. Before the war was over, seventy-five different publications would be either censored or completely banned.
The following year, the Department of Justice prosecuted The Masses, a literary journal that published a veritable who’s who of the day’s socialist politics, for an issue that was identified as “treasonable material.” Charged with conspiracy to obstruct conscription, contributors including Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed, Josephine Bell and Merrill Rogers faced twenty years of imprisonment on the basis of speech and speech alone.
Tried twice, with neither jury able to reach a unanimous verdict, the legal instructions of legendary jurist Learned Hand reaffirmed already accepted constitutional protections regarding free speech and press:
The evolution of that message continued on, in 1931, in Near v. Minnesota, where the U.S. Supreme Court held that a prior restraint on newspaper publications is, in nearly all instances, a violation of the First Amendment’s press freedom clause.
In sum, the court held it impermissible for the government to bring a publisher before a judge to seek suppression of a periodical on the grounds that its publication would release “scandalous and defamatory” materials… in particular, as against public officers.
Finding it to be the “essence of censorship”, the court upheld the freedom of the marketplace of ideas to access almost all information as its participants pursued the search for truth unfettered by government control or manipulation.
Although some of these struggles produced fierce, at times, violent repression of press and speech, ultimately, most played out in aged courthouses remarkable as much for their fine wood benches and high backed leather seats as the solemnity of the moment.
While these diverse controversies went on to become the keystone of today’s First Amendment freedoms, at the time the most explosive sense of the moment was little more than sharp-tongued banter cast amidst a carnival like atmosphere.
Nowhere was that more entertaining than in the backdrop of The Masses trials where a band played patriotic songs in support of a campaign to sell Liberty Bonds outside the courthouse while, inside, one of the accused jumped to attention to salute the flag whenever he heard the “Star Spangled Banner.”
However, for black women and men of this First Amendment journey, free speech proved to be anything but an entertaining montage as “badges and incidents of slavery” often reared its hideous head in the ash-heap of fire-bombed newspapers and segregated cemeteries.
Beginning before World War I, the Bureau of Investigations initiated a country-wide surveillance of most black newspapers under the guise of the threat of communism.
Later to be renamed the FBI it targeted, in particular, the Chicago Defender (Defender), a wildly popular newspaper within African American communities especially in the North. Unleashing an all-out attack on institutional racism and discrimination, the paper also played an active role in union organizing… in particular, among the Pullman who distributed copies of it as their trains traveled throughout the South.
The government attack on the Defender involved more than surveillance. In 1919, the FBI burglarized its offices… stealing its subscriber and distributor lists. Decades later, the government threatened to indict the Defender and other African American newspapers for sedition as a result of their protest against the treatment of African American servicemen fighting in World War II and their demand that the armed forces be integrated.
It has been reported that, in 1943, army bases were confiscating black newspapers deemed “prejudicial to military discipline.” Although suppression and threats to prosecute proved relatively short lived, historically other black speakers, publishers, journalists and their allies have not been so fortunate.
In 1837, a pro-slavery mob killed abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy originally of the St. Louis Observer, where his press was destroyed three times, and then of the Alton, Illinois, Observer.
Aaron Bradley, a black Georgia lawyer and politician in the 1860s and 70s, was arrested, time and time again, for use of such “insurrectionary language” as asking for reparations and telling former slaves to stay on the land and claim it for themselves under color of law. In 1865, he was sentenced for his speeches, by federal reconstruction authorities, to a year of hard labor.
On September 28, 1868, at least 200 African Americans and 20 whites were killed during the Opelousas massacre, in Louisiana, following a series of editorials in a local Republican newspaper urging African Americans to vote against Democrats who were then oppressing them. Emerson Bentley, a white editor for The Landry Progress, a local newspaper which promoted the education of black children, was beaten and seriously injured… and his paper destroyed.
In 1892, a black journalist, Ida B. Wells, who wrote about a lynch mob, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases” was forced to flee Memphis, Tenn, and her newspaper, The Free Speech, was burned to the ground.
In 1898, a mob of some 2000 white men toppled the city government in Wilmington, NC, destroying the only African American newspaper in North Carolina, the Wilmington Daily Record. Troops sent to quell rioting ended up joining the rioters shooting unarmed African Americans as they did. The riot was “triggered” by a series of unpopular editorials by the paper’s editor, Alex Manly.
In 1903, Narciso Gonzales became the first known Hispanic American journalist killed because of his work. On his way home from his job at The State, a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina Gonzalez was shot by then Lt. Gov. James Tillman. Gonzales had written an article critical of Tillman when he ran for governor calling him a “debaucher… blackguard and a proved liar.” Tillman was tried for the murder and acquitted… although he was carrying two loaded weapons while Gonzales had none.
The murder of Gonzalez was just one of many in which journalists of color or muckrakers have been targeted for the content of their investigative voice ranging from their work around political corruption to organized crime to their own personal beliefs.
Over the past 150 years, a steady succession of those who view their life’s work as essential to ensuring an informed community with knowledge about persons, places and events, no matter how controversial the story line or its messenger, have lost their lives to assassins bullets in a quest to silence their voices.
Writers, editors, photo journalists, radio hosts and political activists have been murdered, by white supremacists, anti-communists, Deputy Sheriffs, politicians and gangsters, alike, at their papers, in their homes, on assignment or walking to their cars.
The list, which includes a Pulitzer Prize winner and the named plaintiff in Near v. Minnesota, says as much about the tenor of the times as it does the risk attendant to being a recorder or commentator of a given age.
In 1877, J. Clarke Swayze of the Topeka Daily Blade was shot dead by the subject of a critical article he had penned.
In 1881, A.B. Thornton of the Boonsville News in Missouri was murdered by a local town marshal because of criticism from his newspaper. The marshal was acquitted at trial on the basis of a defense that the criticism was “too intense.”
In 1891, Ignacio Martínez, the publisher of El Mundo was murdered because of critical articles he wrote about the president of Mexico. His murderers fled and were never brought to justice.
In 1927, Donald Ring Mellett, of the Canton Daily News in Ohio, was shot dead for his crusading against mobsters infiltrating government. Later that year his paper won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
In 1934, Howard Guilford, the editor of the Saturday Press in Minneapolis, was killed after an expose on corruption and organized crime. He had been the plaintiff in the ground breaking Supreme Court case of Near v. Minnesota.
In 1949, W.H. Bill Mason, the crusading host of a popular radio show at KBKI in Alice, Tx, was shot dead by a local sheriff in the midst of a political scandal he was airing regarding a US Senate race.
In 1962, Paul Guihard, a French-British journalist for Agence France-Press, was murdered while covering James Meredith’s attempts to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi. His murder was never solved.
In 1970, Rubén Salazar, of the Los Angeles Times, was killed by deputies while covering a Chicano protest in East Los Angeles.
In 1981, Duong Trong Lam, of Cai Dinh Lang (the Village Temple) was assassinated in San Francisco by a member of an anti-communist group.
In 1984, Alan Berg, the progressive host of Denver based radio station, KOA, was murdered by a white nationalist group.
In 1989, Nhan Trong Do, a layout designer with Van Nghe Tien Phong, a Vietnamese language magazine in Fairfax Virginia, was assassinated. His murder remains unsolved.
In 1991, Jean-Claude Olivier a controversial Haitian radio show host on station WLQY-AM in Little Haiti, Miami, Florida was assassinated while walking to his car.
In 2001, less than a month after 9-11, Robert Stevens, a photo journalist for the Sun, in Boca Raton, Florida, was murdered when he opened an envelope filled with anthrax.
In 2007, Chauncey Bailey, the editor of The Oakland Post, a large circulation California based African American newspaper, was executed on his way to work by the target of his investigative reporting.
The Powers of the State Oft Repeat
In early 1971, as he ruminated about how to somehow still win in Vietnam, Richard Nixon exclaimed,
“Kill the reporters”
Not long thereafter, he preached to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff …
“The press is your enemy.”
Decades later that same refrain has found great comfort, in the Oval Office, with a steady drum beat of tweets from Donald Trump that echoes:
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!“
There is nothing new in this exhortation from a president who has threatened to cancel the broadcast licenses of media companies that offer negative coverage of him.
Indeed, well before his election, Trump made his distaste for press freedom very clear as he blacklisted reporters and entire news outlets from campaign events and told supporters he would “open up our libel laws” to sue journalists. “We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before,” said Trump, obviously oblivious to the, now, almost three hundred year old failed attempt by the British crown to do the same to John Peter Zenger.
Often referring to journalists as “scum” and “slime”, Trump noted, after remarking how Vladamir Putin has murdered journalists, :
“… But I do hate them. I hate some of these people, but I’ll be honest, I would never kill them.”
And, a few hours later, following his threat against broadcast licenses, he commented to reporters:
“It is frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write, and people should look into it.”
Trumps ignorant unconstitutional attack upon a free and robust press has inspired legislative efforts across the United States to try to silence the political speech rights of millions of supporters of the international BDS Movement. Currently, there are two dozen states that have passed some form of anti-BDS legislation and another 12 that have pending legislation.
However, to date, only in Kansas has the effort to silence BDS activity worked its way to court, not for want of legislative activity, but because no other claims have proven as yet ripe.
Under US federal law, the ripeness doctrine generally requires injury in fact before a constitutional challenge can be raised against a state legislative action no matter how silly or repugnant it may appear on its face.
In point of fact, but for Kansas, anti-BDS legislation has proven itself to be little more than loud public relations without any practical impact upon those who have organized or participated in boycotts against Israel as a core component of their First Amendment rights.
In Kansas, Ester Koontz, a Mennonite school teacher and BDS advocate, challenged a state requirement that contractors must certify they do not participate in any boycott of Israel to be eligible for various statewide programs.
Unable, in good conscience, to sign the certification, Koontz (who develops her school’s math curriculum and trains teachers on how to implement it) was denied an opportunity to participate in a statewide training program after she refused to sign away her First Amendment rights.
In quick order, the federal court blocked enforcement of the Kansas anti-BDS statute finding it impermissibly chilled Ms. Koontz’s speech rights by forcing her to choose between obtaining a state contract and her support of the boycott of Israel.
The court’s interim decision is entirely consistent with the landmark case of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Claiborne Hardware C. which was decided almost forty years ago.
In a unanimous decision that explored the tension between First Amendment rights of speech and association and potential monetary losses that might arise from economic boycotts directed largely at white owned businesses, the Supreme Court ruled that, to the extent a boycott is non- violent, it was protected by First Amendment guarantees of free speech, assembly, and freedom of political association.
As noted by Justice John Paul Stevens, the boycott ‘‘… sought to vindicate rights of equality and freedom that lie at the heart…” of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. ”One of the foundations of our society is the right of individuals to combine with other persons in pursuit of a common goal by lawful means.”
Applying this well settled constitutional doctrine to other pending, or future, legislative misadventures, there is little doubt that efforts at anti-BDS legislation will suffer the same fate as those legislative prohibitions that were struck down when applied to civil rights activists in Mississippi in 1982… and ever since.
In the United States, the march from 1734 to 2018 has been a long, difficult and, at times, painful stretch for those who have dared to challenge institutional power or social tyranny be it through our press, our voice or our feet.
Along the way, women and men of principle, conscience, and courage have long sacrificed much to ensure that their voices be heard and that the pathway to ours is both wide and secure. Some have lost their liberty… others their lives. None, however, have surrendered their courage or determination to the political expedience of the moment.
At the forefront of this historic journey has been faith that, ultimately, truth can only rise in the marketplace of unrestrained ideas, diversity in thought and action is the only path to meaningful freedom, and government has no lawful place in dictating what it is we can say… or when, where, or with whom we might share that message.
A government that is empowered to insist today that an historical event happened in a particular way can insist tomorrow that it happened differently or did not happen at all. Governments lie. Governments get it wrong. Only a robust clash of ideas in an open debate has any hope of exposing Government lies and missteps.
To turn a familiar phrase around; the cure for government lies is not more government; the cure is open, robust debate.
Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rights activist who has done extensive work in the Middle East and Africa.
Photo by Paul Keller | CC BY 2.0A decade before he was to become President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson (the principal author of the Declaration of Independence) then serving as Minister to France, penned these words for the ages. It was the eve of the French Revolution and the world was ablaze with revolutionary ideas and potent words:The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution… Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
Poetry of freedom, this verse has safeguarded the chase of truth in ways that no military might can provide or preserve be it in the United States or elsewhere.
Almost 250 years later, we are, again, witness to an evident onslaught upon the core of our collective freedom … the marketplace of ideas.
The Attack on Al Jazeera
Recently, in a brazen effort to forestall, if not censor, the release of a news report depicting the insidious impact of AIPAC upon core democratic institutions of the United States, a number of congressmen demanded that Al Jazeera be designated a “foreign agent” involved in the release of “deceptive propaganda.”
Citing nothing more than so-called favorable coverage of various movements including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah the legislators went on to declare Al Jazeera as a less than impartial news source airing “radical anti-American, anti-Semitic [and] anti-Israel broadcasts.”
The attack on the independence of Al Jazeera comes soon after the successful political drive to compel RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents of Russia lest they be compelled to undergo intrusive, and possibly criminal, investigations of their networks.
The demand that Al Jazeera be forced to register under FARA as a foreign agent is little more than political pretext designed to control the narrative and limit the debate over some of the most compelling issues of our time. It is nothing short of an unconstitutional effort to control the free exchange of ideas and the marketplace within which they are debated.
Implicit in the First Amendment is a fundamental belief that the governed are far more capable than the government of distinguishing truth from falsehood and that the government’s role is not to regulate the content of the marketplace but to ensure it remains open to all ideas; those true and not… radical or conventional.
That these legislators, their constituents or lobbyists are offended by the content of various stories, opinion pieces or documentaries published or aired by Al Jazeera is of no constitutional moment. To the contrary, information deemed by some to be offensive propaganda is to others relevant and probative of issues to be contested and resolved in an open and free society.
To be sure, it is the friction between conflicting narratives and opinion that furthers the reach of freedom not dampens it. It is the conflict between voices that not only empowers those who partake in the debate or listen to it but ultimately strengthens society as a whole.
Under the First Amendment, people may elect to embrace or promote “radical” anti-American, anti-Israeli or even anti-Semitic commentary or opinion; it is a choice left to them and them alone. Neither the government nor any of its minions have the constitutional authority to limit access to information not in itself otherwise prohibited by law.
The marketplace must be open to all ideas – even false ideas. In an open marketplace ideas must “clash” and “grapple;” they must stand up to assault and prove their worthiness. Truth cannot be pampered, too delicate to be examined – truth must be tested, forged in the furnace of doubt and questioning.
And, where, as here, government seeks to reprimand Al Jazeera for ensuring our collective right to the widest diversity of information and opinion it is a punishment that penalizes all.
The History of Government Repression
Efforts to intimidate journalists or sculpt the popular political narrative of the day are not at all new in the United States. We are a country with a long and sordid history in which the government, or various groups within it, have endeavored to control what we hear and from whom.
Whether by legislative censorship, intimidation, arrest, or outright violence, those pundits who have strayed from trendy political consensus have often paid a dear price for their voice. Nowhere has that been more prominent or painful than within communities of color or among dissidents… sentinels that have dared to challenge the silence that is necessarily companion to safe-guarding the status quo.
Long before the revolution that gave birth to the First Amendment, newspapers played an essential role in the lifeblood of their communities… particularly in such major port cities as New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and Boston.
What began in earnest as largely a platform to share news about local commerce or amusing gossip soon swelled to become the bullhorn of challenge to British rule as editors realized criticism of the local governor attracted increasingly larger audiences. Not ones to sit in silence as subjects deigned to challenge Royal rule, governors began to shutter local newspapers… often leading to explosive street-side or courtroom battles.
In 1734, in what was to herald the first dramatic speech-based confrontation over the right of the press to criticize, indeed, mock the political rule of the time, the governor of New York ordered the arrest of John Peter Zenger after his paper published some satirical attacks.
When a grand jury refused to indict Zenger, the governor ordered the Attorney General to charge him with criminal libel. At trial, Zenger’s lawyers argued, with success, that truth was a defense against libel. The jury found him not guilty. That verdict was to set the stage for a generation of increasingly acerbic attacks upon the monarchy as colonial newspapers played a key role in fomenting the revolution.
Thus, beginning with the attack on the Stamp Act of 1765, newspapers and street corner pamphleteers, alike, provided essential news of what was happening throughout the colonies as they published rebel grievances such as “No taxation without representation!” To be sure, Tom Paine’s explosive pamphlet, Common Sense (1776) is credited with not just ravaging the king’s prominence but galvanizing revolutionary fervor overnight in favor of independence.
Given the pivotal role that a free press and speech played in the revolution, the founding fathers showed no hesitation, whatsoever, in engrafting each within the First Amendment to the fledgling Constitution. While there is little record of any debate among the framers over just what limits, if any, rubbed up against a free press, James Madison, the principal drafter of the Bill of Rights, opined:
… [that] even speech that ‘creates a contempt, a disrepute, or hatred [of the government] among the people’ should be tolerated because the only way of determining whether such contempt is justified is by a free examination [of the government’s actions], and a free communication among the people thereon.
For more than two centuries, in the United States, this expression, nay, this wisdom, has pitted those without power, but with striking voice, against those grown rigid and comfortable with the strength and arrogance that comes with position, elected or otherwise. It is a tension born of the drive to control not just the narrative but, ultimately, the body politic in ways that exalt the vision of the few at the expense of the many.
At times, it has been a battle born of legislative fiat while, at others, a desperate explosive rage that mistakes the messenger for the message and sees silence, even that obtained through deadly violence, as success. Ultimately, power sees no limits to its reach: self-preservation its sole aim.
In 1798, President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Although a broadside against immigrants and foreign nationals, its primary thrust was to outlaw any “conspiracy” against the government… largely by silencing people from speaking in a “false, scandalous and malicious” manner against it. Adams’ prime targets were newspaper, pamphlet and broadside publishers who printed articles disparaging of his administration.
Between 1798 and 1801, twenty-six dissidents of the day, many of whom were editors of “opposition” newspapers and all opposed to the administration, were prosecuted under the Sedition Act. Some were imprisoned for “false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the said President of the United States.” Following furious debate over the meaning of a free press and opposition speech, by 1802, all of the Acts related to this expression were repealed or expired.
In 1823, Utah passed a criminal libel and slander law allowing journalists to be prosecuted under the same sorts of charges used against Zenger a century earlier. In relevant part, the statute made it a crime to “…intentionally and with a malicious intent to injure publish libelous statements.”
Not declared unconstitutional until some 130 years later, today, Utah still maintains, but does not enforce, a closely worded criminal defamation statute. Roughly a dozen other states still maintain criminal libel laws (Six years ago, Colorado repealed theirs which made it a felony carrying up to 18 months in prison and a fine up to $100,000 for the first offense).
As World War I raged abroad, the Government unleashed an unprecedented domestic campaign against those it considered disloyal to the effort. Though federal agents, local police, and volunteer vigilantes initially targeted left-wing and trade union activists for surveillance and harassment, the government’s attention soon evolved into an all-out effort to silence “subversive” publications. It was to continue on even after the end of the war.
With the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917, the Postmaster General ordered that mail be monitored to ensure that newspapers, books and magazines “… calculated … to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny… or otherwise embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war” were denied the use of the postal service. This was to end the circulation of Appeal to Reason, a magazine, with a circulation of more than a half a million, affiliated with the Socialist Party. Before the war was over, seventy-five different publications would be either censored or completely banned.
The following year, the Department of Justice prosecuted The Masses, a literary journal that published a veritable who’s who of the day’s socialist politics, for an issue that was identified as “treasonable material.” Charged with conspiracy to obstruct conscription, contributors including Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed, Josephine Bell and Merrill Rogers faced twenty years of imprisonment on the basis of speech and speech alone.
Tried twice, with neither jury able to reach a unanimous verdict, the legal instructions of legendary jurist Learned Hand reaffirmed already accepted constitutional protections regarding free speech and press:
I do not have to remind you that every man has the right to have such economic, philosophic or religious opinions as seem to him best, whether they be socialist, anarchistic or atheistic.
The evolution of that message continued on, in 1931, in Near v. Minnesota, where the U.S. Supreme Court held that a prior restraint on newspaper publications is, in nearly all instances, a violation of the First Amendment’s press freedom clause.
In sum, the court held it impermissible for the government to bring a publisher before a judge to seek suppression of a periodical on the grounds that its publication would release “scandalous and defamatory” materials… in particular, as against public officers.
Finding it to be the “essence of censorship”, the court upheld the freedom of the marketplace of ideas to access almost all information as its participants pursued the search for truth unfettered by government control or manipulation.
Although some of these struggles produced fierce, at times, violent repression of press and speech, ultimately, most played out in aged courthouses remarkable as much for their fine wood benches and high backed leather seats as the solemnity of the moment.
While these diverse controversies went on to become the keystone of today’s First Amendment freedoms, at the time the most explosive sense of the moment was little more than sharp-tongued banter cast amidst a carnival like atmosphere.
Nowhere was that more entertaining than in the backdrop of The Masses trials where a band played patriotic songs in support of a campaign to sell Liberty Bonds outside the courthouse while, inside, one of the accused jumped to attention to salute the flag whenever he heard the “Star Spangled Banner.”
However, for black women and men of this First Amendment journey, free speech proved to be anything but an entertaining montage as “badges and incidents of slavery” often reared its hideous head in the ash-heap of fire-bombed newspapers and segregated cemeteries.
Beginning before World War I, the Bureau of Investigations initiated a country-wide surveillance of most black newspapers under the guise of the threat of communism.
Later to be renamed the FBI it targeted, in particular, the Chicago Defender (Defender), a wildly popular newspaper within African American communities especially in the North. Unleashing an all-out attack on institutional racism and discrimination, the paper also played an active role in union organizing… in particular, among the Pullman who distributed copies of it as their trains traveled throughout the South.
The government attack on the Defender involved more than surveillance. In 1919, the FBI burglarized its offices… stealing its subscriber and distributor lists. Decades later, the government threatened to indict the Defender and other African American newspapers for sedition as a result of their protest against the treatment of African American servicemen fighting in World War II and their demand that the armed forces be integrated.
It has been reported that, in 1943, army bases were confiscating black newspapers deemed “prejudicial to military discipline.” Although suppression and threats to prosecute proved relatively short lived, historically other black speakers, publishers, journalists and their allies have not been so fortunate.
In 1837, a pro-slavery mob killed abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy originally of the St. Louis Observer, where his press was destroyed three times, and then of the Alton, Illinois, Observer.
Aaron Bradley, a black Georgia lawyer and politician in the 1860s and 70s, was arrested, time and time again, for use of such “insurrectionary language” as asking for reparations and telling former slaves to stay on the land and claim it for themselves under color of law. In 1865, he was sentenced for his speeches, by federal reconstruction authorities, to a year of hard labor.
On September 28, 1868, at least 200 African Americans and 20 whites were killed during the Opelousas massacre, in Louisiana, following a series of editorials in a local Republican newspaper urging African Americans to vote against Democrats who were then oppressing them. Emerson Bentley, a white editor for The Landry Progress, a local newspaper which promoted the education of black children, was beaten and seriously injured… and his paper destroyed.
In 1892, a black journalist, Ida B. Wells, who wrote about a lynch mob, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases” was forced to flee Memphis, Tenn, and her newspaper, The Free Speech, was burned to the ground.
In 1898, a mob of some 2000 white men toppled the city government in Wilmington, NC, destroying the only African American newspaper in North Carolina, the Wilmington Daily Record. Troops sent to quell rioting ended up joining the rioters shooting unarmed African Americans as they did. The riot was “triggered” by a series of unpopular editorials by the paper’s editor, Alex Manly.
In 1903, Narciso Gonzales became the first known Hispanic American journalist killed because of his work. On his way home from his job at The State, a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina Gonzalez was shot by then Lt. Gov. James Tillman. Gonzales had written an article critical of Tillman when he ran for governor calling him a “debaucher… blackguard and a proved liar.” Tillman was tried for the murder and acquitted… although he was carrying two loaded weapons while Gonzales had none.
The murder of Gonzalez was just one of many in which journalists of color or muckrakers have been targeted for the content of their investigative voice ranging from their work around political corruption to organized crime to their own personal beliefs.
Over the past 150 years, a steady succession of those who view their life’s work as essential to ensuring an informed community with knowledge about persons, places and events, no matter how controversial the story line or its messenger, have lost their lives to assassins bullets in a quest to silence their voices.
Writers, editors, photo journalists, radio hosts and political activists have been murdered, by white supremacists, anti-communists, Deputy Sheriffs, politicians and gangsters, alike, at their papers, in their homes, on assignment or walking to their cars.
The list, which includes a Pulitzer Prize winner and the named plaintiff in Near v. Minnesota, says as much about the tenor of the times as it does the risk attendant to being a recorder or commentator of a given age.
In 1877, J. Clarke Swayze of the Topeka Daily Blade was shot dead by the subject of a critical article he had penned.
In 1881, A.B. Thornton of the Boonsville News in Missouri was murdered by a local town marshal because of criticism from his newspaper. The marshal was acquitted at trial on the basis of a defense that the criticism was “too intense.”
In 1891, Ignacio Martínez, the publisher of El Mundo was murdered because of critical articles he wrote about the president of Mexico. His murderers fled and were never brought to justice.
In 1927, Donald Ring Mellett, of the Canton Daily News in Ohio, was shot dead for his crusading against mobsters infiltrating government. Later that year his paper won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
In 1934, Howard Guilford, the editor of the Saturday Press in Minneapolis, was killed after an expose on corruption and organized crime. He had been the plaintiff in the ground breaking Supreme Court case of Near v. Minnesota.
In 1949, W.H. Bill Mason, the crusading host of a popular radio show at KBKI in Alice, Tx, was shot dead by a local sheriff in the midst of a political scandal he was airing regarding a US Senate race.
In 1962, Paul Guihard, a French-British journalist for Agence France-Press, was murdered while covering James Meredith’s attempts to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi. His murder was never solved.
In 1970, Rubén Salazar, of the Los Angeles Times, was killed by deputies while covering a Chicano protest in East Los Angeles.
In 1981, Duong Trong Lam, of Cai Dinh Lang (the Village Temple) was assassinated in San Francisco by a member of an anti-communist group.
In 1984, Alan Berg, the progressive host of Denver based radio station, KOA, was murdered by a white nationalist group.
In 1989, Nhan Trong Do, a layout designer with Van Nghe Tien Phong, a Vietnamese language magazine in Fairfax Virginia, was assassinated. His murder remains unsolved.
In 1991, Jean-Claude Olivier a controversial Haitian radio show host on station WLQY-AM in Little Haiti, Miami, Florida was assassinated while walking to his car.
In 2001, less than a month after 9-11, Robert Stevens, a photo journalist for the Sun, in Boca Raton, Florida, was murdered when he opened an envelope filled with anthrax.
In 2007, Chauncey Bailey, the editor of The Oakland Post, a large circulation California based African American newspaper, was executed on his way to work by the target of his investigative reporting.
The Powers of the State Oft Repeat
In early 1971, as he ruminated about how to somehow still win in Vietnam, Richard Nixon exclaimed,
“Kill the reporters”
Not long thereafter, he preached to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff …
“The press is your enemy.”
Decades later that same refrain has found great comfort, in the Oval Office, with a steady drum beat of tweets from Donald Trump that echoes:
“The FAKE NEWS media (failing New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!“
There is nothing new in this exhortation from a president who has threatened to cancel the broadcast licenses of media companies that offer negative coverage of him.
Indeed, well before his election, Trump made his distaste for press freedom very clear as he blacklisted reporters and entire news outlets from campaign events and told supporters he would “open up our libel laws” to sue journalists. “We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before,” said Trump, obviously oblivious to the, now, almost three hundred year old failed attempt by the British crown to do the same to John Peter Zenger.
Often referring to journalists as “scum” and “slime”, Trump noted, after remarking how Vladamir Putin has murdered journalists, :
“… But I do hate them. I hate some of these people, but I’ll be honest, I would never kill them.”
And, a few hours later, following his threat against broadcast licenses, he commented to reporters:
“It is frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write, and people should look into it.”
Trumps ignorant unconstitutional attack upon a free and robust press has inspired legislative efforts across the United States to try to silence the political speech rights of millions of supporters of the international BDS Movement. Currently, there are two dozen states that have passed some form of anti-BDS legislation and another 12 that have pending legislation.
However, to date, only in Kansas has the effort to silence BDS activity worked its way to court, not for want of legislative activity, but because no other claims have proven as yet ripe.
Under US federal law, the ripeness doctrine generally requires injury in fact before a constitutional challenge can be raised against a state legislative action no matter how silly or repugnant it may appear on its face.
In point of fact, but for Kansas, anti-BDS legislation has proven itself to be little more than loud public relations without any practical impact upon those who have organized or participated in boycotts against Israel as a core component of their First Amendment rights.
In Kansas, Ester Koontz, a Mennonite school teacher and BDS advocate, challenged a state requirement that contractors must certify they do not participate in any boycott of Israel to be eligible for various statewide programs.
Unable, in good conscience, to sign the certification, Koontz (who develops her school’s math curriculum and trains teachers on how to implement it) was denied an opportunity to participate in a statewide training program after she refused to sign away her First Amendment rights.
In quick order, the federal court blocked enforcement of the Kansas anti-BDS statute finding it impermissibly chilled Ms. Koontz’s speech rights by forcing her to choose between obtaining a state contract and her support of the boycott of Israel.
The court’s interim decision is entirely consistent with the landmark case of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Claiborne Hardware C. which was decided almost forty years ago.
In a unanimous decision that explored the tension between First Amendment rights of speech and association and potential monetary losses that might arise from economic boycotts directed largely at white owned businesses, the Supreme Court ruled that, to the extent a boycott is non- violent, it was protected by First Amendment guarantees of free speech, assembly, and freedom of political association.
As noted by Justice John Paul Stevens, the boycott ‘‘… sought to vindicate rights of equality and freedom that lie at the heart…” of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. ”One of the foundations of our society is the right of individuals to combine with other persons in pursuit of a common goal by lawful means.”
Applying this well settled constitutional doctrine to other pending, or future, legislative misadventures, there is little doubt that efforts at anti-BDS legislation will suffer the same fate as those legislative prohibitions that were struck down when applied to civil rights activists in Mississippi in 1982… and ever since.
In the United States, the march from 1734 to 2018 has been a long, difficult and, at times, painful stretch for those who have dared to challenge institutional power or social tyranny be it through our press, our voice or our feet.
Along the way, women and men of principle, conscience, and courage have long sacrificed much to ensure that their voices be heard and that the pathway to ours is both wide and secure. Some have lost their liberty… others their lives. None, however, have surrendered their courage or determination to the political expedience of the moment.
At the forefront of this historic journey has been faith that, ultimately, truth can only rise in the marketplace of unrestrained ideas, diversity in thought and action is the only path to meaningful freedom, and government has no lawful place in dictating what it is we can say… or when, where, or with whom we might share that message.
A government that is empowered to insist today that an historical event happened in a particular way can insist tomorrow that it happened differently or did not happen at all. Governments lie. Governments get it wrong. Only a robust clash of ideas in an open debate has any hope of exposing Government lies and missteps.
To turn a familiar phrase around; the cure for government lies is not more government; the cure is open, robust debate.
Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rights activist who has done extensive work in the Middle East and Africa.
March 20, 2018
'Famine' Lie
Chris Fogarty on the 'Famine' lie.
The competition between the truth of 1845-1851 Ireland and the “famine” lie might be ended. If the arbiters are the Irish Times and its publication (16/3/2018) of Dr. Fernihough’s interactive map based upon the 1841 and 1851 censuses of Census Commissioner William Wilde, the “famine” lie has won.
The competition started on or about 3 Nov 1845 when a group of twenty-two Irishmen urgently visited British Lord Heytesbury in his Vice-Regal Lodge, Phoenix Park, Dublin. They begged him to cease the food removal; that people were starving to death; and to halt all distilling and brewing to leave more grain available for human nourishment. The Lord ignored their pleas and, before showing them the door, he read to them from a paper about potatoes and blight.
Thus, each November 3rd there are world-wide commemorations of Ireland’s Holocaust (An t-Ár Mór) and of Heytesbury’s lie of potato famine/Gorta Mor/Great Hunger.
The Irish did not go down easily. The at-gunpoint removal from Ireland’s producers of their abundant meats, livestock, grains, oatmeal, flour, dairy and poultry products, etc., required more military (in addition to landlords’ militias and carbine-toting constabulary) than had conquered the Indian Subcontinent. It took more than half (sixty-seven of Britain’s 130-regiment army) to perpetrate that Holocaust. Approaching “mission accomplished” in 1849 Queen Victoria awarded an Order of the Bath to the perpetrating regiments’ Commander-In-Chief, General Sir Edward Blakeney.
Nearly a decade later Victoria also knighted William Wilde for his 1841 and 1851 census work. Wilde, husband of “Speranza” and father of Oscar, officially “established” the starvation death toll to be 21,770. To “explicate” the actual mass death, Wilde’s 1852 census cited celestial eclipses of a millennium earlier and unheard-of, imaginatively-named “pandemics.”
Victoria thus knighted Wilde for concealing what she had awarded Blakeney for perpetrating.
Dr. Fernihough might have innocently used Wilde’s ludicrous fabrications and minimizations, but Irish Times editors owe their readers an apology for publishing them. Concealing this genocide invites more of them. Why do it?
Chris Fogarty is the author of Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect."
The competition between the truth of 1845-1851 Ireland and the “famine” lie might be ended. If the arbiters are the Irish Times and its publication (16/3/2018) of Dr. Fernihough’s interactive map based upon the 1841 and 1851 censuses of Census Commissioner William Wilde, the “famine” lie has won.
The competition started on or about 3 Nov 1845 when a group of twenty-two Irishmen urgently visited British Lord Heytesbury in his Vice-Regal Lodge, Phoenix Park, Dublin. They begged him to cease the food removal; that people were starving to death; and to halt all distilling and brewing to leave more grain available for human nourishment. The Lord ignored their pleas and, before showing them the door, he read to them from a paper about potatoes and blight.
Thus, each November 3rd there are world-wide commemorations of Ireland’s Holocaust (An t-Ár Mór) and of Heytesbury’s lie of potato famine/Gorta Mor/Great Hunger.
The Irish did not go down easily. The at-gunpoint removal from Ireland’s producers of their abundant meats, livestock, grains, oatmeal, flour, dairy and poultry products, etc., required more military (in addition to landlords’ militias and carbine-toting constabulary) than had conquered the Indian Subcontinent. It took more than half (sixty-seven of Britain’s 130-regiment army) to perpetrate that Holocaust. Approaching “mission accomplished” in 1849 Queen Victoria awarded an Order of the Bath to the perpetrating regiments’ Commander-In-Chief, General Sir Edward Blakeney.
Nearly a decade later Victoria also knighted William Wilde for his 1841 and 1851 census work. Wilde, husband of “Speranza” and father of Oscar, officially “established” the starvation death toll to be 21,770. To “explicate” the actual mass death, Wilde’s 1852 census cited celestial eclipses of a millennium earlier and unheard-of, imaginatively-named “pandemics.”
Victoria thus knighted Wilde for concealing what she had awarded Blakeney for perpetrating.
Dr. Fernihough might have innocently used Wilde’s ludicrous fabrications and minimizations, but Irish Times editors owe their readers an apology for publishing them. Concealing this genocide invites more of them. Why do it?
Chris Fogarty is the author of Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect."
Far From The Madding Crowd
When ‘highly unlikely’ leads to ‘overwhelming’
Twenty four years ago, little did a Boris while slumbering on a plane parked on a Shannon runway, no doubt intoxicated on Russian Vodka, dream that his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, would be the mark for the ire of another Boris, Boris Johnson, UK Foreign Secretary.
Besides time and the sharing of a similar appellation, a correlation that is ended by nationality, language and Johnson's privately paid for public schooling which is seldom mirrored by his words and actions.
Johnson in responding to a nerve gas attack on once double-agent and ex-Soviet spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury on the 04th March described the evidence as ‘overwhelming’ that Russia was responsible because only Russia had access to the poison and also a motive for the attack.
There is something in the kind of smug, sarcastic response that we're heard from the Russians that to me betokens their fundamental guilt ... They want to simultaneously deny it and yet at the same time to glory in it.
Johnson and May in ‘highly likely’ determining that the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok (newcomer) was used in the attack have ascribed its responsibility to be ‘highly likely’ Russia.
In the Commons and while reporting to the House on this despicable violation of Britain's sovereignty, from May's lackey's, both Tory and Labour, howls of traitor directed at the leader of the opposition, Corbyn, rang around the Commons, when he had the gall to call for more concrete evidence to be produced and advised a more cautious approach to laying the blame at the door of the Kremlin without such evidence.
A call for caution based on the bloody consequences of that infamous Commons deceit by another British prime minister and in reference to those illusive Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Delivering her ultimatum to Moscow, requiring them to explain the attack, which is something that she nor her intelligence agencies were capable off, or she would conclude it as an “unlawful use of force” by Russia against the UK and withdraw the Royals from attending the World Cup in the summer.
Russia's response was as to be expected: Moscow's envoy to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya - Russia does not “speak the language of ultimatums” and will not “be spoken to in that language either”
May responded in her statement to Parliament that:
Their response demonstrated complete disdain for the gravity of these events. They have treated the use of a military-grade nerve agent in Europe with sarcasm, contempt and defiance.
Odd, that she should extend the attack to incorporate a group of countries that she and her Brexit cronies currently treat with disdain.
Backed by her Secretary of Defence Gavin Williamson on threats by Russia to reciprocate the expulsion gesture: “Russia should go away, it should shut up”.....which kind of undermines May's call for an explanation!
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has hit back at Theresa May and Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson over the allegations saying the Kremlin has "stopped paying attention".
Mays decision to expel Russian diplomats from the UK, described by Russia's ambassador to the UK, Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko, as "absolutely unacceptable" and "a provocation" and urged her to "follow international law" angered Moscow to the point where Lavrov told reporters Moscow intended to dismiss British diplomats in retaliation and said that he considered the UK's response a violation of international agreements.
Unlike Boris Johnson's pedigree education, Gavin Williamson's was called in to question when his demand that Russia shut up was responded too by Lavrov with a "Maybe he lacks education."
America, never one to concern itself with evidence Trumped in, both feet first, and threw its mighty weight unambiguously behind May. Followed closely by the newly re-instated German Chancellor Merkel and her Germany.
France, remembering their racist treatment by the British after they refused to support the British in their deceitful claims of WMD, initially described May's accusations as ‘Fantasy Politics’ and had asked for discourse with the Russians and not punitive measures. But after a phone call from the British, this stance decisively changed and they fully threw their support to the British side.
The Irish, now in a position of importance on the world political stage due to Brexit have yet to make their mind up but their media outlets have tended to dismiss the British claims as what the French called ‘Fantasy Politics’.
But let us pause and reflect on the events so far.
Sergie Skripal, 66, ex-Soviet spy and double agent and his daughter Yulia, 33, were found unconscious on 4 March in the centre of Salisbury and remain critically ill in hospital.
⧪ Theresa May claims tests showed a Soviet-era nerve agent known as Novichok (newcomer) was used in the attack, and that Russia was therefore "highly likely" to be responsible.
⧪ Corbyn voices concerns over lack of evidence and British governments approach to the Russians.
⧪ Novichock was apparently developed in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. After Uzbekistan became independent from the Soviet Union, the USA helped it to destroy stockpiles.
⧪·Between 1999[23] and 2002 the United States Department of Defence dismantled the major research and testing site for Novichok at the Chemical Research Institute in Nukus, under a $6 million Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
But ...
There are even many doubts about the existence of the nerve agent, Novichok itself:
· https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/03/the-novichok-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam/
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/25/world/us-and-uzbeks-agree-on-chemical-arms-plant-cleanup.html?referer=
⧪ Russia then alone is not the only country to have this nerve agent
⧪ Sergei Skripal was part of a legitimate ' Spy-Swop ' and the Russians normally honour this sort of arrangement.
⧪ Comparisons with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium in London in 2006, took place under very different circumstances. Litvinenko was not in Britain as part any officially sanctioned spy-swop deal between London and Moscow. Plus he was involved in activities that were strongly disapproved of by Russia whereas Skripal wasn’t.
⧪ City of choice - Séamus Martin is a former Irish Times Moscow correspondent:
London has become the city of choice for those who have made vast fortunes following the fall of the Soviet Union and not all of them have been squeaky-clean model citizens. Boris Berezovsky, for example, who employed Litvinenko, had been a prime suspect in organising the murder of American journalist Paul Klebnikov. Forbes Magazine, Klebnikov’s employer, continues on its website to point the finger in Berezovsky’s direction. A former British diplomat has told me in private that giving Berezovsky asylum was considered a major mistake in UK diplomatic circles.
The anti-Putin Berezovsky died in mysterious circumstances not long after he had lost a court case against pro-Putin oligarch Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea FC. British police ruled that his death was suicide but there are those in Britain who believe, or want to believe, he was murdered.
The oligarchs have been welcomed in London financial circles because of the amount of their money. They have been welcomed too by May’s Conservative party, which, according to recent reports in the London Times and Daily Telegraph, has received donations of £820,000 from Russian sources. Chancellor Philip Hammond has refused to return the money because he did not want to tar the oligarchs “with Putin’s brush”.
Perhaps it is time to realise that if your country becomes a haven for dodgy people like Berezovsky then dodgy things are likely to happen.
Another as yet unqualified report:
A chemical weapons factory in Eastern Ghouta in Syria was captured intact by advancing Assad forces. All equipment in it was of western origin and from captured documentation supplied by Saudi Arabia. At the UN and under the guise of a ceasefire, America announced unilateral air strikes on realising that the factory had been captured but were thwarted after Russia warned that they would retaliate by destroy the striking projectiles and their launchers!
The story has yet to break in to the mainstream media but it does raise the question of just who is using chemical weapons and where? Could Sergie Skripal's attack be related? And could this explain France's change of heart from ‘Fantasy Politics’ to full support? Perhaps the paper trail leads further West rather than South to Saudi Arabia!
But I leave you with these thoughts.
‘Circling Over Shannon’ – A descriptive expression bequeathed to Ireland by Boris Yeltsin (the original Boris) for a visit he never made and an accompaniment to a list of other well-known Irish expressions such as stocious, langered, plastered and rat-arsed.
Ant and Dec Saturday Night take Away– It would seem that we are never far from the madding crowd of the Brexiteers and the DUP, whose reach can even be extended to influence the above TV show.
When Saturday Night Take Away launched their UK Battle of Great Britain they were at pains to emphasise that it was Great Britain and Northern Ireland – a reference that could lead to a fall in their TV ratings in Ireland, but ‘highly unlikely’.
Oh, and one final thought, what ever happened to NAMA?
Alternative refrains[edit]
The oldest versions of The Elfin Knight (circa 1650) contain the refrain "my plaid away, my plaid away, the wind shall not blow my plaid away". Slightly more recent versions often contain one of a group of related refrains:
⧪ Sober and grave grows merry in time
⧪ Every rose grows merry with time
⧪ There's never a rose grows fairer with time
⧪ Yesterday holds memories in time
Sean Mallory is a Tyrone republican and TPQ columnist
March 19, 2018
The Stansted 15: Heroes For Our Time
Gabriel Levy on the opening day of the trial of The Stansted 15.
On 28 March last year, the 15, wearing hi-viz jackets, locked themselves to a Titan Airway Boeing 767-300 aircraft at Stansted airport. It had been chartered by the Home Office’s National Removals Command unit to return deportees to Nigeria and Ghana.
The flight was cancelled and the demonstrators – from End Deportations, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, and Plane Stupid – were arrested.
The action at Stansted last year. Photo by Stop Charter Flights
Initially the Stansted 15 were charged with “aggravated trespass”, the usual charge used against protesters who disrupt air traffic. But last summer the Crown Prosecution Service applied to the Attorney General to introduce a new charge – “endangering an airport”, under section 1 of the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990.
Although this Act does not specifically mention “terrorism”, it was explicitly devised as a response to an act of terrorism (the Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am flight in 1988) rather than to deal with peaceful political protest. The charge carries a potential sentence of life imprisonment.
The use of this charge is a threat to civil liberties, and to all those who want to use democratic processes to express their point of view. It is part of the criminalisation of dissent. As Graeme Hayes, Steven Cammiss and Brian Doherty argue in their excellent article on the legal background:
This is a political prosecution, with political consequences for us all.
The Stansted 15’s well-thought-out action successfully stopped the charter flight that they set out to stop. It challenged a deportations strategy designed to appease the sickest, most racist elements in the British political spectrum – and showed it could be pushed back by active resistance.
Last year’s protest. Photo by Stop Charter Flights
The 15’s supporters point out that the action blocked 34 of the 57 planned deportations, as it gave many of those on board time to pursue legal avenues against the Home Office’s vindictive target-driven tactics. A replacement flight 48 hours later had only 23 people on board.
The action drew attention to the Home Office’s inhuman “Deport First, Appeal Later” policy, which was introduced by Theresa May (as Home Secretary) in 2014 for foreigners convicted of criminal offences, but later extended to all categories of deportees, including e.g. failed asylum seekers and visa overstayers.
The policy remains in force, despite the UK Supreme Court last year unanimously finding it to be an unlawful breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. Deportees are often arrested in the UK and taken to immigration removal centres, where it is difficult or impossible to get legal representation, and then rushed aboard the charter flights.
The Stansted 15’s action was not just politically necessary; it was also morally exemplary. No I am not getting pompous. I am just saying that they have shown one way to live in a rich country that is turning itself into a fortress, to try to seal itself off from the consequences of decades of its, and others’, political and economic imperialism.
What other response to the Home Office’s murderously violent migration policies makes any moral sense? Chaining yourself to one of those infernal deportation airplanes is an answer commensurate with the Home Office’s criminal inhumanity.
That’s why the Stansted 15 are truly heroes for our time. Support them however you can. GL, 19 March 2018.
More information
The End Deportations web site
“Deportation and direct action in Britain: the ‘terrorist trial’ of the Stansted 15, on Open Democracy. This is the clearest explanation of the legal background I have seen.
A letter to the Guardian demanding the charges are dropped, by the former chief inspector of prisons and many others
A press release issued on the day of the Stansted protest
Statements by some of the deportees who were on the airplane:
“Both of my parents are here. I’ve been living in the UK for eight, nine years and I don’t have anybody back home.”
“I have been in this country for almost 18 years. The Home Office don’t follow the laws of the country. We all follow the law, but they don’t.”
“I am a lesbian which is not OK in Nigeria. My ex-husband is planning to kill me.”
This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2018 at 6:42 am and is filed under Social and labour movements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
➽ Gabriel Levy blogs @ People And Nature
On 28 March last year, the 15, wearing hi-viz jackets, locked themselves to a Titan Airway Boeing 767-300 aircraft at Stansted airport. It had been chartered by the Home Office’s National Removals Command unit to return deportees to Nigeria and Ghana.
The flight was cancelled and the demonstrators – from End Deportations, Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, and Plane Stupid – were arrested.
The action at Stansted last year. Photo by Stop Charter Flights Initially the Stansted 15 were charged with “aggravated trespass”, the usual charge used against protesters who disrupt air traffic. But last summer the Crown Prosecution Service applied to the Attorney General to introduce a new charge – “endangering an airport”, under section 1 of the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990.
Although this Act does not specifically mention “terrorism”, it was explicitly devised as a response to an act of terrorism (the Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am flight in 1988) rather than to deal with peaceful political protest. The charge carries a potential sentence of life imprisonment.
The use of this charge is a threat to civil liberties, and to all those who want to use democratic processes to express their point of view. It is part of the criminalisation of dissent. As Graeme Hayes, Steven Cammiss and Brian Doherty argue in their excellent article on the legal background:
[T]he bringing of this charge is an explicit attempt to silence not just collective challenge to deportation policies, but non-violent direct action in Britain as a whole. [It] is part of a wider trend of democratic enclosure, central to the imposition of neo-liberal politics, and to the stigmatising and exclusionary dynamics of austerity.
This is a political prosecution, with political consequences for us all.
The Stansted 15’s well-thought-out action successfully stopped the charter flight that they set out to stop. It challenged a deportations strategy designed to appease the sickest, most racist elements in the British political spectrum – and showed it could be pushed back by active resistance.
Last year’s protest. Photo by Stop Charter Flights The 15’s supporters point out that the action blocked 34 of the 57 planned deportations, as it gave many of those on board time to pursue legal avenues against the Home Office’s vindictive target-driven tactics. A replacement flight 48 hours later had only 23 people on board.
The action drew attention to the Home Office’s inhuman “Deport First, Appeal Later” policy, which was introduced by Theresa May (as Home Secretary) in 2014 for foreigners convicted of criminal offences, but later extended to all categories of deportees, including e.g. failed asylum seekers and visa overstayers.
The policy remains in force, despite the UK Supreme Court last year unanimously finding it to be an unlawful breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. Deportees are often arrested in the UK and taken to immigration removal centres, where it is difficult or impossible to get legal representation, and then rushed aboard the charter flights.
The Stansted 15’s action was not just politically necessary; it was also morally exemplary. No I am not getting pompous. I am just saying that they have shown one way to live in a rich country that is turning itself into a fortress, to try to seal itself off from the consequences of decades of its, and others’, political and economic imperialism.
What other response to the Home Office’s murderously violent migration policies makes any moral sense? Chaining yourself to one of those infernal deportation airplanes is an answer commensurate with the Home Office’s criminal inhumanity.
That’s why the Stansted 15 are truly heroes for our time. Support them however you can. GL, 19 March 2018.
More information
The End Deportations web site
“Deportation and direct action in Britain: the ‘terrorist trial’ of the Stansted 15, on Open Democracy. This is the clearest explanation of the legal background I have seen.
A letter to the Guardian demanding the charges are dropped, by the former chief inspector of prisons and many others
A press release issued on the day of the Stansted protest
Statements by some of the deportees who were on the airplane:
“Both of my parents are here. I’ve been living in the UK for eight, nine years and I don’t have anybody back home.”
“I have been in this country for almost 18 years. The Home Office don’t follow the laws of the country. We all follow the law, but they don’t.”
“I am a lesbian which is not OK in Nigeria. My ex-husband is planning to kill me.”
This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2018 at 6:42 am and is filed under Social and labour movements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
➽ Gabriel Levy blogs @ People And Nature
The Russians Are Coming
The Russians are coming! At the risk of being deported to Moscow, controversial commentator Dr John Coulter uses his Fearless Flying Column today to suggest a helpful way of defusing the Cold War Mark Two between the United Kingdom and the former Soviet Empire.
As relations between ‘Muscles’ May and the ‘Beast from the East’ Putin rapidly descend to political sub-zero conditions, I’d like to emphasise that old maxim – “I told you so, if only you’d listened to me four years ago, this might not have happened!”
In 2014, usually reliable sources told me that Anglo-Russian relations were in danger of taking a serious downturn. It was then I floated the financial solution of a Celtic-Russian Alliance (CRA).
It was not meant to be sabre-rattling about an invasion, or the beginning of World War Three, merely a recognition that a Celtic-Russian Alliance would be a sound economic base for the Emerald Isle and could be used to defuse any future tensions between the two nuclear states of the UK and Russia.
Given that Russia has now threatened retaliation after Mrs May unveiled that around two dozen suspected spies at the Russians’ London embassy were to be booted out of the UK following the nerve agent attack on ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in England, the CRA could have been a forum for debate, compromise, cooling-off or concessions to prevent the current crisis from escalating.
But then I’m reminded of another past British Prime Minister – Chamberlain – who signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler and proclaimed ‘peace in our time’. That appeasement didn’t work, so is my idea of a CRA to defuse tensions merely a Munich Agreement Mark Two?
Russian boss Vladimir Putin may be ex-KGB, but when it comes to leading his nation, he’s the type of ‘no punches pulled’ president which the UK and Ireland can only dream about.
In the bad old days of the Cold War, the Hard Right in Britain used to scream their pants off about Ireland becoming Europe's Cuba.
Groups like the Tory Monday Club always warned the old commie Soviet Union could overrun the UK through the neutral Irish Republic.
Ironically, this ‘Red Under The Bed’ type scare was the same tactic Winston Churchill ranted on about when Ireland was neutral during World War Two.
Then there was much talk the IRA had teamed up with Hitler’s Nazis to use the South as an invasion launch pad into the UK.
With the UK voting in 2017 to leave the cash-strapped European Union, Ireland will have no other choice but to follow ‘The Auld Enemy’ out of the EU after Brexit in March 2019.
Sounds like bitter medicine for the South to swallow. But there is an even bigger nightmare for the Republic. If Scotland ever opts for independence next month, the ruling Scottish National Party has vowed to keep the new nation in the EU.
This could leave the South and the Scots as a lonely backwater region on the backside of Europe. Not a pretty sight!
There’s no doubt that Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire. The West and the Americans might be mouthing off about Putin’s tactics in Crimea and the Ukraine, but the Russian boss has proven he doesn’t really care what the Allies think or do! So the UK decides not to have either Royal Family or British Ministerial representation at this summer’s football World Cup in Russia – do we really think Putin will lose sleep over this?
In the meantime, what would be so wrong economically about the Irish climbing into bed with Putin and forming the Celtic Russian Alliance? Southern Ireland may be furiously searching for solutions to solve both the Brexit and Stormont crisis, but think of the political kudos it could gain if it managed to ease global tensions between Russia and the UK using the CRA?
Then again, the CRA could be dismissed as mere ‘pie in the sky’ politics as we could be forgiven that the West – and especially the UK – is now spoiling for a fight with Putin.
Irish republicans like to boast about the Irish American links. But with the US facing its own political turmoil under President Trump, the American cash cow – like the EU cash cow – has been milked dry. The EU simply doesn’t have the euros for another Irish bailout.
When the British eventually quit the EU, they will need more political clout than some of the former African colonies to make the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association a viable economic alternative to the EU.
If the UK could team up with Stalin’s Russia to conquer Hitler’s Nazis, the UK could also allow Putin’s Russia to become a CPA member. Now that would be a peace deal worth working for – or have relations deteriorated so much an agreement involving the CPA or my CRA is a non-starter?
And given the British military record in Iraq and Afghanistan, the English need not pontificate about Putin’s ‘kick ass’ policy in Ukraine, or any other of the former Soviet bloc republics.
If the Dáil and a reformed Stormont Executive, along with the Kremlin, were to do a formal deal, it could pave the way for Putin joining the CPA, but it would need maybe my Celtic-Russian Alliance to kick-start the process.
In spite of Putin’s KGB background, the Christian Church is flourishing in Russia, and there’s even talk of a return of the Tsarist Russian royal family. Putin has the dosh to bring Ireland firmly out of potential economic recession, especially with the uncertainties of Brexit looming large.
Think of the financial benefits for the Emerald Isle if Putin persuaded Russian tourists to visit Ireland, and students to continue their education at Irish colleges and universities?
Travel most anywhere in the globe and you'll find an Irish community. Rather than head for a jobless future in the US or Australia, why can’t our young people travel to Moscow and other Russian cities to broaden their horizons?
If Leo Varadkar really wants to remain as Taoiseach, and Arlene Foster wants to be First Minister again, they should be on the phone to Putin and make my Celtic-Russian Alliance a money-spinning reality.
Former British Prime Minister Chamberlain went down in history as a pussy-footing appeaser to Hitler. Okay, brand me ‘Chamberlain Coulter’ for talking about a Celtic-Russian Alliance in the midst of an ever-growing diplomatic crisis, but the CRA could be one appeasement which could cool the heads of potential warmongers on both sides.
Was it not Chamberlain’s successor, Churchill, who coined the phrase that it is better to jaw-jaw than war-war? Even if I end up on a plane on a one-way ticket to Moscow because of my CRA solution, hopefully someone else will have the common sense to pursue the idea.
Then again, in terms of Biblical prophecy, is the cranking up of international tensions another sign of ‘the end times’ leading to the Battle of Armageddon? One interpretation of the New Testament Book of Revelation is that the nations of Gog and Magog are together hostile nations which play a major role in the ending of the world.
In the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, Gog and Magog are mentioned as sworn enemies of Israel. Maybe Biblical prophecy is about to become a political reality.
John Coulter is a unionist political commentator and former Blanket columnist.
John Coulter is also author of ‘An Sais Glas: (The Green Sash): The Road to National Republicanism’, which is available on Amazon Kindle.
Follow John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoul
As relations between ‘Muscles’ May and the ‘Beast from the East’ Putin rapidly descend to political sub-zero conditions, I’d like to emphasise that old maxim – “I told you so, if only you’d listened to me four years ago, this might not have happened!”
In 2014, usually reliable sources told me that Anglo-Russian relations were in danger of taking a serious downturn. It was then I floated the financial solution of a Celtic-Russian Alliance (CRA).
It was not meant to be sabre-rattling about an invasion, or the beginning of World War Three, merely a recognition that a Celtic-Russian Alliance would be a sound economic base for the Emerald Isle and could be used to defuse any future tensions between the two nuclear states of the UK and Russia.
Given that Russia has now threatened retaliation after Mrs May unveiled that around two dozen suspected spies at the Russians’ London embassy were to be booted out of the UK following the nerve agent attack on ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in England, the CRA could have been a forum for debate, compromise, cooling-off or concessions to prevent the current crisis from escalating.
But then I’m reminded of another past British Prime Minister – Chamberlain – who signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler and proclaimed ‘peace in our time’. That appeasement didn’t work, so is my idea of a CRA to defuse tensions merely a Munich Agreement Mark Two?
Russian boss Vladimir Putin may be ex-KGB, but when it comes to leading his nation, he’s the type of ‘no punches pulled’ president which the UK and Ireland can only dream about.
In the bad old days of the Cold War, the Hard Right in Britain used to scream their pants off about Ireland becoming Europe's Cuba.
Groups like the Tory Monday Club always warned the old commie Soviet Union could overrun the UK through the neutral Irish Republic.
Ironically, this ‘Red Under The Bed’ type scare was the same tactic Winston Churchill ranted on about when Ireland was neutral during World War Two.
Then there was much talk the IRA had teamed up with Hitler’s Nazis to use the South as an invasion launch pad into the UK.
With the UK voting in 2017 to leave the cash-strapped European Union, Ireland will have no other choice but to follow ‘The Auld Enemy’ out of the EU after Brexit in March 2019.
Sounds like bitter medicine for the South to swallow. But there is an even bigger nightmare for the Republic. If Scotland ever opts for independence next month, the ruling Scottish National Party has vowed to keep the new nation in the EU.
This could leave the South and the Scots as a lonely backwater region on the backside of Europe. Not a pretty sight!
There’s no doubt that Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire. The West and the Americans might be mouthing off about Putin’s tactics in Crimea and the Ukraine, but the Russian boss has proven he doesn’t really care what the Allies think or do! So the UK decides not to have either Royal Family or British Ministerial representation at this summer’s football World Cup in Russia – do we really think Putin will lose sleep over this?
In the meantime, what would be so wrong economically about the Irish climbing into bed with Putin and forming the Celtic Russian Alliance? Southern Ireland may be furiously searching for solutions to solve both the Brexit and Stormont crisis, but think of the political kudos it could gain if it managed to ease global tensions between Russia and the UK using the CRA?
Then again, the CRA could be dismissed as mere ‘pie in the sky’ politics as we could be forgiven that the West – and especially the UK – is now spoiling for a fight with Putin.
Irish republicans like to boast about the Irish American links. But with the US facing its own political turmoil under President Trump, the American cash cow – like the EU cash cow – has been milked dry. The EU simply doesn’t have the euros for another Irish bailout.
When the British eventually quit the EU, they will need more political clout than some of the former African colonies to make the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association a viable economic alternative to the EU.
If the UK could team up with Stalin’s Russia to conquer Hitler’s Nazis, the UK could also allow Putin’s Russia to become a CPA member. Now that would be a peace deal worth working for – or have relations deteriorated so much an agreement involving the CPA or my CRA is a non-starter?
And given the British military record in Iraq and Afghanistan, the English need not pontificate about Putin’s ‘kick ass’ policy in Ukraine, or any other of the former Soviet bloc republics.
If the Dáil and a reformed Stormont Executive, along with the Kremlin, were to do a formal deal, it could pave the way for Putin joining the CPA, but it would need maybe my Celtic-Russian Alliance to kick-start the process.
In spite of Putin’s KGB background, the Christian Church is flourishing in Russia, and there’s even talk of a return of the Tsarist Russian royal family. Putin has the dosh to bring Ireland firmly out of potential economic recession, especially with the uncertainties of Brexit looming large.
Think of the financial benefits for the Emerald Isle if Putin persuaded Russian tourists to visit Ireland, and students to continue their education at Irish colleges and universities?
Travel most anywhere in the globe and you'll find an Irish community. Rather than head for a jobless future in the US or Australia, why can’t our young people travel to Moscow and other Russian cities to broaden their horizons?
If Leo Varadkar really wants to remain as Taoiseach, and Arlene Foster wants to be First Minister again, they should be on the phone to Putin and make my Celtic-Russian Alliance a money-spinning reality.
Former British Prime Minister Chamberlain went down in history as a pussy-footing appeaser to Hitler. Okay, brand me ‘Chamberlain Coulter’ for talking about a Celtic-Russian Alliance in the midst of an ever-growing diplomatic crisis, but the CRA could be one appeasement which could cool the heads of potential warmongers on both sides.
Was it not Chamberlain’s successor, Churchill, who coined the phrase that it is better to jaw-jaw than war-war? Even if I end up on a plane on a one-way ticket to Moscow because of my CRA solution, hopefully someone else will have the common sense to pursue the idea.
Then again, in terms of Biblical prophecy, is the cranking up of international tensions another sign of ‘the end times’ leading to the Battle of Armageddon? One interpretation of the New Testament Book of Revelation is that the nations of Gog and Magog are together hostile nations which play a major role in the ending of the world.
In the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, Gog and Magog are mentioned as sworn enemies of Israel. Maybe Biblical prophecy is about to become a political reality.
John Coulter is a unionist political commentator and former Blanket columnist. John Coulter is also author of ‘An Sais Glas: (The Green Sash): The Road to National Republicanism’, which is available on Amazon Kindle.
Follow John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoul
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