Chris Hedges's Blog, page 597

Film Academy Expels Cosby and Polanski

LOS ANGELES—The organization that bestows the Academy Awards said Thursday that it has expelled two prominent members convicted of sexual offenses, Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski, from its membership.

It’s the first major decision since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences implemented revised standards of conduct for its over 8,400 members following its expulsion of disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein in October. In Polanski’s case, the expulsion comes more than 40 years after he was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl he plied with champagne and Quaaludes during a photo shoot, and 15 years after he won a best director Oscar.

Polanski’s attorney Harland Braun said Thursday the decision “blindsided” the director, who learned of his expulsion from media reports.

Braun accused the academy of failing to follow its rules and give Polanski’s team a chance to respond to efforts to expel him. He said he and Polanski’s agent will ask for the director to be reinstated next week and they want a hearing before a new vote on his membership is taken.

The academy wrote in a statement that its board of governors met Tuesday night and voted on Polanski and Cosby’s status in accordance with the new standards. Polanski’s membership dates back to 1969, and Cosby’s to 1996.

The organization’s rules state that its board of governors is entitled to enforce its standards of conduct, and “any member of the Academy may be suspended or expelled for cause.” Suspension or expulsion requires two-thirds approval of the 55-member board.

Polanski, who won a best director Oscar for 2002’s “The Pianist,” remains a fugitive after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in 1977 and fleeing the United States the following year. Cosby was convicted last week of sexual assault in Pennsylvania, for drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia mansion 14 years ago.

A spokesman for Cosby did not return a message seeking comment Thursday.

In its statement, the film academy said its board “continues to encourage ethical standards that require members to uphold the Academy’s values of respect for human dignity.”

Adopted in December, the code of conduct stipulates that the academy is no place for “people who abuse their status, power or influence in a manner that violates standards of decency.”

The academy’s board may now suspend or expel those who violate the code of conduct or who “compromise the integrity” of the academy.

Before Weinstein, only one person is thought to have been expelled from the academy: Carmine Caridi, a character actor who had his membership revoked in 2004 for lending DVD screeners of films in contention for Oscars that ended up online.

The film academy came under intense scrutiny following Weinstein’s expulsion and the rise of the #MeToo movement for some of its active members, like Cosby, Polanski and Mel Gibson. And since then, many others have faced new allegations like Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner, John Lasseter and Paul Haggis. It even became late-night fodder for people like John Oliver.

Because its members are not made public, occasionally incorrect assumptions are made about who are part of the organization. Woody Allen, for one, is not.

Polanski has been one of the more divisive members of the organization for years. At the 2003 ceremony, Polanski’s win — his first — received a standing ovation. He was not in attendance. He’d previously been nominated for writing his adaptation of “Rosemary’s Baby,” and directing “Chinatown” and “Tess.”

Prominent actors like Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly continued to work with him, and in 2009, when Polanski was arrested in Zurich and U.S. authorities attempted to extradite him, more than 100 celebrities signed a petition for his release, including Allen, Weinstein, Martin Scorsese, Darren Aronofsky, David Lynch, Penelope Cruz and Tilda Swinton.

Natalie Portman recently told BuzzFeed that she regretted signing the petition.

“We lived in a different world, and that doesn’t excuse anything. But you can have your eyes opened and completely change the way you want to live,” Portman said. “My eyes were not open.”

The film academy has faced a number of challenges in the Time’s Up era, including the question of whether or not Casey Affleck would present the best actress Oscar this past March in accordance with tradition. Affleck, who settled a pair of civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual harassment in 2010 during the production of the mockumentary “I’m Still Here,” bowed out of the task himself early in the year. Jodie Foster and Jennifer Lawrence ended up presenting the award instead.

While this year’s Oscars ceremony and host Jimmy Kimmel did not shy away from addressing the movement, it also awarded former Lakers star Kobe Bryant, who in 2003 was accused of raping a 19-year-old hotel employee in Colorado, with an Academy Award for the animated short “Dear Basketball.” He admitted to a sexual encounter with the woman, but denied the assault allegation and criminal case was dropped after Bryant’s accuser refused to testify. She later filed a civil suit against him, which was settled out of court and included Bryant’s public apology to her, although he admitted no guilt.

Its president John Bailey also recently faced an allegation of sexual misconduct, but was cleared after a committee and an outside law firm investigated the claim and unanimously voted that no other action was required and that Bailey would remain in his position.

Wake Up and Stop the Madness of a War With Iran

The Iran nuclear deal is on the verge of sinking on May 12, when Donald Trump will decide whether or not to waive the nuclear-related sanctions, as the deal calls for. While the world is cheering the upcoming meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (including Trump’s fans calling for a Nobel Peace Prize), Trump is needlessly and recklessly driving our nation down a path toward war with Iran—and neither Congress nor the American people seem to care.

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, fearing the consequences of a broken deal, visited the White House. Macron tried to appease Trump by suggesting new agreements to the deal, something Iran’s government views as ludicrous. According to Iranian president Hassan Rouhani—who has been subjected to enormous domestic criticism for striking a deal with Washington only to see the U.S. threaten to back out so quickly: “We will not add anything to the deal or remove anything from it, even one sentence. The nuclear deal is the nuclear deal.”

Instead of appeasing Trump’s irrational stance, European leaders could have declared that they would side with Tehran by invoking a dispute resolution mechanism in the agreement, which could buy another 45 days to convince the United States to stay in the deal. They would have done better warning Trump they would invoke trade penalties if the United States tried to enforce sanctions on oil imports from Iran.

Instead, they left empty-handed and remained quiet when the U.S. president, in their presence, continued to call the agreement “insane” and “ridiculous.” At a news conference with Merkel by his side, Trump virtually threatened to bomb Iran if it tried to develop nuclear weapons.

This is something Trump’s new National Security Adviser John Bolton advocated in a 2015 New York Times opinion piece entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” where he proposed a U.S. or Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear reactors. “An attack [on Iran’s nuclear facilities] need not destroy Iran’s entire nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years,” Bolton mused, adding, “The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary.”

How would Iran respond? Iran and its allies, such as Hezbollah, could retaliate by attacking both Israeli and U.S. troops stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and on military bases throughout the Middle East. The conflicts that have consumed the Middle East for the past 16 years would get infinitely worse, and drag the United States deeper into the abyss.

This is precisely where Trump’s team seems to be headed. Newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in his first week on the job, traveled to Saudi Arabia and Israel—Iran’s greatest adversaries and opponents of the nuclear deal—calling for concerted international action against Iran.

While Saudi Arabia just bombed a Yemeni wedding as part of its relentless, three-year attacks that have been killing, maiming and starving millions of Yemenis, Pompeo ignored Yemen and instead concurred with the Saudi rulers that Iran “destabilizes this entire region.” Pompeo also failed to mention that it is the Saudi’s extremist Sunni ideology, not Iran’s Shiism, that forms the theological underpinnings of radical terrorist groups from al-Qaida to Islamic State.

In Israel, Pompeo and Benjamin Netanyahu complained that the nuclear deal does not do enough to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear-weapons capability, saying nothing about Israel’s totally illegal nuclear arsenal. Israel has been advocating for the U.S. military to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, even though Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons of its own and Iran has none. And while Israel has refused to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and would never allow inspections of its nuclear facilities, Iran has joined the treaty and has agreed to the most intrusive inspections ever devised.

Israel immediately followed Pompeo’s visit by striking an Iranian-linked target in Syria on April 30, killing 11 Iranians and ratcheting up regional tensions.

The great tragedy of the horrifying specter of another Middle East war is that it is wholly fabricated by the U.S. administration. The Iran deal is a good one (it would be amazing if Trump could negotiate as good a deal with North Korea), and Iran is fully complying with its end of the bargain. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said so in 10 consecutive reports. America’s European allies have said so. So has a recent State Department report and Trump’s own Defense Secretary James Mattis, who, by the way, told a congressional committee that keeping the nuclear agreement intact was in the U.S. national interest.

The party that has not been in compliance is actually the United States. The deal requires that the signatories allow Iran’s reintegration into the global economy. At a NATO summit last May, Trump tried to persuade European partners to stop making business deals with Iran. The Trump administration has also been blocking permits for companies to engage in commercial transactions with Iran.

Just the lack of certainty over U.S. support for the deal has already scared off potential investors. While Iran’s trade with Europe has increased slightly over the past few years, very few major deals have been signed. The one large deal by the French oil company, Total, is now under threat because of uncertainty over U.S. sanctions. There is still no major European bank willing to finance trade with Iran because of fear of possible U.S. penalties.

The Iranian currency has taken a tremendous hit in the last six months, losing a quarter of its value. The precipitous drop was attributed in large measure to Trump’s appointment of hardline anti-Iran figures Mike Pompeo and John Bolton to senior posts in his administration.

The economic crisis in Tehran has the hardliners in Trump’s cabinet smelling blood, thinking that with enough pressure on the economy, the regime itself could fall. Both John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have made no secret of their desire to see regime change in Iran. This is the ultimate goal of Trump’s war cabinet, but it doesn’t have the slightest idea of the chaos that would follow a collapse of the Iranian government.

Technically, it is not up to Trump to end the deal, as it is a political agreement between Iran and six world powers: Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States. Iran could certainly remain in the deal without the United States. But if it gets no economic benefit, the hardliners in Iran will get the upper hand, pushing Iran to end the intrusive inspections and accelerate its nuclear program. That will provide justification for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, to press for a direct military attack or support for an Israeli attack on Iran.

As long-time Iran analyst Trita Parsi has noted, Iran has boxed itself into a corner by negotiating a deal before obtaining nuclear weapons, and then by complying, while North Korea will likely be rewarded for its aggressive actions. “North Korea tested bombs and ballistic missiles capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. Iran, on the other hand, went to the negotiating table after only having enriched uranium at 20 percent. It had no nuclear weapons nor missiles capable of carrying them. Now, North Korea appears set on a path toward striking a deal with Trump and getting the recognition it has long sought. Iran, on the other hand, is about to see its nuclear deal collapse because the U.S. has been led to believe that Iran has run out of options.”

The New York Times has called out the administration’s reckless and hypocritical stance toward Iran. “It’s curious,” notes its April 30 editorial, “that while the United States is now preparing to extend an olive branch to the North Koreans, it has placed itself on a collision course with Tehran.” Before the Trump administration takes a wrecking ball to the best global foreign policy achievement in the last decade, the American people—and the Congress that is supposed to represent their interests—better wake up and stop it.

Twitter Advises Users to Change Their Passwords

SAN FRANCISCO—Twitter is advising all users to change their passwords.

The company said Thursday that it recently discovered a bug that stored passwords in an internal log in an unprotected form.

Twitter says there’s no indication that there was a breach or that any of the passwords were misused. But as a precaution, Twitter recommends users consider changing the passwords they use to log onto Twitter. They should also change that password if they used it for any other services.

The San Francisco company says it masks, or encrypts, passwords by replacing them with a random set of numbers and letters. But the bug caused passwords to be written to an internal log before that masking occurred. The company says it discovered the bug on its own and has fixed it.

House Chaplain Wins His Job Back

WASHINGTON—The embattled chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives has won his job back just hours after sending a scalding letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan that accused a top Ryan staff aide of telling him “something like ‘maybe it’s time that we had a Chaplain that wasn’t a Catholic.'”

Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, forced Reverend Pat Conroy to tender his resignation last month, sparking a firestorm. Ryan has said he was dissatisfied with Conroy’s pastoral care to lawmakers.

But in a statement Thursday, Ryan — himself a Catholic — reversed course.

“It is my job as speaker to do what is best for this body, and I know that this body is not well served by a protracted fight over such an important position,” Ryan said.

Ryan’s statement came soon after Conroy delivered a two-page letter that said he has never “heard a complaint about my ministry” as House chaplain. Instead, Conroy says top Ryan aide Jonathan Burks told him the speaker wanted his resignation, and cited a prayer last year that was potentially critical of the GOP tax bill.

“I inquired as to whether or not it was ‘for cause,’ and Mr. Burks mentioned something dismissively like ‘maybe it’s time that we had a Chaplain that wasn’t a Catholic,'” Conroy wrote to Ryan in a letter that was also sent to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Ryan did not directly address Conroy’s explosive charge, saying, “To be clear, that decision was based on my duty to ensure that the House has the kind of pastoral services that it deserves.”

Burks, in a statement released by Ryan’s office, said “I strongly disagree with Father Conroy’s recollection of our conversation.”

Conroy also wrote that Burks mentioned a November prayer regarding the GOP tax bill that upset many Republicans.

Then, Conroy prayed for lawmakers to make sure that “there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”

Conroy told The New York Times last week that shortly afterward Ryan warned Conroy to “stay out of politics.” Conroy also invited a Muslim cleric last year to give the opening prayer, a move that Democrats say may have upset GOP conservatives.

Conroy’s resignation sparked an uproar last week when it became known that he was asked to quit. Catholic lawmakers such as Reps. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., and Peter King, R-N.Y., were particularly upset, especially after a Republican lawmaker, Mark Walker, R-N.C., was quoted in The Hill as saying Conroy’s replacement should have a family — which would rule out Catholic priests — to better serve the needs of lawmakers.

Ryan’s retreat came quickly. Congress is on vacation this week but Ryan said he would meet with Conroy early next week “so that we can move forward for the good of the whole House.”

The chaplain is elected by the full House and Democrats said Ryan does not have the power to fire him.

In an appearance in Milwaukee last week, Ryan said: “This was not about politics or prayers, it was about pastoral services. And a number of our members felt like the pastoral services were not being adequately served, or offered.”

But Conroy fired back, saying, “this is not the reason that Mr. Burks gave when asking for my ‘resignation.'”

Conroy’s resignation letter said he was offering to step down at Ryan’s request, calling his seven years of House service “one of the great privileges of my life.”

But on Thursday, Conroy said, ‘I wish to serve the remainder of my term as House Chaplain, unless terminated ‘for cause.’ Please be guided accordingly.”

Conroy copied New Jersey attorney Daniel Marchese on the letter. Marchese declined to comment other than to say Conroy is seeking to get his job back.

The chaplain is responsible for opening the House each day with a prayer and offering counseling to lawmakers and aides on the House side of the Capitol. Conroy is a Roman Catholic priest from the Jesuit order.

Palestinian Poet Convicted of Incitement

An Israeli court has convicted poet Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, of incitement and supporting a terrorist organization. The conviction is based on posts by Tatour on social media nearly three years ago, including a video of her reading one of her poems, “Resist, My People, Resist Them,” recited over footage of protesters.

PEN International, a writers association, condemned the verdict.

“Dareen Tatour has been convicted for doing what writers do every day—we use our words to peacefully challenge injustice,” said Jennifer Clement, president of PEN International. “PEN will continue to call for justice in this case.”

Israeli prosecutors say that Tatour’s reading of the poem was a call to violence, but she claims this is a misunderstanding of her work, which includes the lines, “Resist, my people, resist them. / Resist the settler’s robbery / And follow the caravan of martyrs.”

The indictment said the poem’s “content, its exposure and the circumstances of its publication created a real possibility that acts of violence or terrorism will be committed.”

+972 Magazine reports:

Gaby Lasky, Tatour’s lawyer, argued that prosecutors had relied on a police officer’s misleading and inaccurate translation of the Arabic poem.

Literary expert Prof. Nissim Calderon testified on Tatour’s behalf that poets should have a special privilege to speak freely, even when advocating violence, and argued that canonical Israeli Hebrew poets had written much worse verse.

The defense also argued that Israeli [p]olice statistics show that Jewish Israelis who post explicit calls for violence against Arabs and Palestinians on social media—including the phrase “death to Arabs”—are not similarly arrested and tried.

“There is serious discrimination here,” Tatour’s lawyer said. “If she was Jewish, there would be no case. … This decision establishes a clear precedent that criminalizes poetry.”

In 2016, more than 150 writers signed a letter of solidarity on behalf of Tatour, calling her imprisonment “part of a larger pattern of Israeli repression against all Palestinians.” More than 1,000 Israelis signed a petition in 2017 calling for her release.

BBC provides background on Tatour’s case:

Tatour, 36, was arrested in October 2015 and spent several months in prison before being placed under house arrest in January 2016.

She was initially confined to a flat in the city of Tel Aviv and her movements restricted because Israeli authorities deemed her a “threat to public safety”.

She was later permitted to return to her family home in Reineh near Nazareth, but the house arrest continued in various forms until the end of her trial and she was not allowed to use mobile phones or access the internet.

Tatour was charged in connection with three posts that appeared at the start of a wave of deadly stabbing, shooting and car-ramming attacks on Israelis by Palestinians or Israeli Arabs.

The first was a video featuring her reciting a poem and footage appearing to show Palestinian protesters throwing stones at Israeli security forces.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted Tatour as saying, “My trial ripped off the masks. The whole world will hear my story. The whole world will hear what Israel’s democracy is. A democracy for Jews only. Only Arabs go to jail. … The court said I am convicted of terrorism. If that’s my terrorism, I give the world a terrorism of love.”

Black Lives Don’t Matter in Israel

Getting caught with marijuana by authorities in country where it is illegal is never a pleasant experience. Even if members of your family back home are able to pull strings and secure your early release, it’s no fun to be behind bars for any length of time, to lose your freedom even temporarily.

But at least one Israeli citizen caught with weed in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula knows well how easy he got off. Though he was released from jail after just a few days and allowed to return home, his seriously injured cellmate, also from Tel Aviv, was left to languish for a lot longer.

The reason for the disparity in their treatment: Elyasaf is a Jew and a citizen of Israel, who had a stamp in his passport attesting to the fact that he had entered Egypt legally. Ablel, on the other hand, is an Eritrean refugee, who was forced from Israel into Egypt against his will and then tortured by human traffickers.

“Now, you hear this story, and you don’t believe it,” Elyasaf said. “It sounds unbelievable. And really, if I wasn’t there, if I didn’t meet the young man and hear it from him myself, with him there in the Egyptian jail, lying next to me, and I see that it’s true, I wouldn’t believe that something like this is possible. What kind of country do we live in? A man is kidnapped in the middle of the day from downtown Tel Aviv!”

Egyptian border guards caught Elyasaf, a 30-year-old graphic designer, with weed as he was heading home after a few days of vacation at a Red Sea resort. When they locked him up in a Taba prison, he was shocked to learn that a fellow Tel Avivan who spoke perfect Hebrew was stuck in the cell with him.

There, Elyasaf became the first person to hear Ablel’s scandalous story.

After Benjamin Netanyahu’s government built a high-tech fence on the Egyptian border in 2013, the influx of African refugees to Israel ended abruptly. So criminal gangs that had made millions in the preceding years from trafficking and torturing for ransom those refugees now needed an alternate source of income. Bedouin brigands figured that refugees who had managed to make it into Israel could be brazenly kidnapped off the streets of Tel Aviv—and then smuggled back into Egypt.

In the summer of 2013, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that hundreds of Eritreans had gone missing in Israel and that the Netanyahu government couldn’t account for them. Now, however, we can account for at least one: 23-year-old Ablel Tsegay, an enterprising Eritrean refugee who ran a successful restaurant in the Neve Shaanan neighborhood.

On the Jewish fast day of Tisha B’Av in July 2013, Ablel was kidnapped in broad daylight in downtown Tel Aviv, whisked to the border with Egypt and transferred to other captors, who shackled him and other refugees, including children, in a metal shipping container. After months of torture, Ablel managed to escape and reach the Egyptian authorities.

In south Tel Aviv, Eritrean-Swedish journalist Meron Estefanos reveals a man’s scars from torture, the fate of many Eritrean refugees in recent years. (Meron Estefanos)

But because he had no passport or paperwork that proved he had been living in Israel, the Egyptians accused him of entering the country illegally and locked him up in jail. Ablel may have rotted away in that cell indefinitely had it not been for his chance meeting with Elyasaf.

In a matter of days after his arrest in Egypt, Elyasaf’s family quietly secured his release. On returning to Israel, he informed Ablel’s sister in Petach Tikvah of the fate that had befallen her brother. Ablel’s family and friends, who had feared that he had been murdered, were happy to hear he was still alive. But Ablel was not allowed to re-enter Israel. Instead, Egypt deported him back to Eritrea and the cruel dictatorship he had orginally fled.

In a three-part series for the Canadian news site Cannabis Culture, I chronicled Elyasaf’s misadventures and the scandal that he inadvertently revealed: that in Israel, in the time of Netanyahu’s war on African refugees, black lives matter very, very little—much less than most of us ever imagined.

Since Ablel was forced out of the country, 20,000 of his fellow refugees have been forced by the Israel government to return to Africa, back to statelessness and suffering. And now Netanyahu is trying to force the final 40,000 asylum-seekers out of the country as well.

In recent months, Israelis from all walks of life—doctors and artists, professors and pilots, students and survivors of the Nazi Holocaust—have expressed opposition to the deportation plan. Up until now, however, no group of Israeli pot smokers has spoken out in solidarity with the refugees.

Admittedly, to take such a step would entail a political cost. In the neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv and the greater Gush Dan area, where most of the refugees live, the vast majority of residents oppose Netanyahu’s expulsion plan. But in the rest of the country—where average Israelis have few opportunities to get to know the refugees—the numbers are reversed.

Stressful as it was, Elyasaf says he doesn’t regret going through his ordeal, because it meant that he could play a small but significant role in Ablel’s eventual liberation. “He really gave me a lot of strength. I owe this man so much,” Elyasaf told me soon after his return to Israel. “If I was able to relay a message from this man, then it will have been worth everything.”

Elyasaf helped his fellow Tel Avivan, a refugee from a totalitarian regime and a torture survivor, to escape indefinite detention and ultimately—after a long, tumultuous journey—to reach safe harbor in Switzerland. The testimony I collected from Elyasaf, embedded below, helped convince the government in Bern to grant Ablel full residency rights there, and today he has a new lease on life.

Meanwhile, however, many of his fellow African refugees—those already forced out of Israel and those targeted for deportation—are not nearly as lucky.

Below is an interview with Ablel Tsegay, translated from Tigrinya by Hilina Hailu.

Kanye West Needs to Visit the Alabama Slavery Memorial

Kanye West, the legendary rap artist, provoked controversy this week when he said in an interview with the celebrity news website TMZ: “When you hear about slavery for 400 years. … That sounds like a choice.” West was immediately challenged by a TMZ producer, Van Lathan, who said: “While you are making music and being an artist … the rest of us in society have to deal with these threats to our lives. We have to deal with the marginalization that has come from the 400 years of slavery that you said, for our people, was a choice.” Another rebuttal followed later on TMZ, from prominent Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, who advised West, “You need some time to reflect and learn more before you start making public statements.”

There is a space in the heart of Alabama that might be just the place for Kanye West to reflect on slavery: the newly opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. The six-acre site is a sweeping, solemn commemoration of the horrors of slavery and lynching in America. A large, covered, open-walled pavilion at the center of the memorial has hundreds of steel monoliths suspended from the ceiling, each one marking a county where one or more lynchings happened, with the names of those lynched.

The memorial is the work of Bryan Stevenson and his Montgomery-based nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative. He is an attorney who has represented death row prisoners in the Deep South for decades. In 2015, EJI published a comprehensive report on the history of lynching in the United States, documenting over 4,400 victims between 1877 and 1950.

Stevenson hopes the memorial, along with EJI’s new museum in downtown Montgomery, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, will challenge what he calls the “narrative of racial difference that we have in America, this history of racial inequality that has made us tolerant of bigotry and discrimination.”

“About 10 years ago, we began working on a project to change the narrative. We started doing this research on slavery, on lynching, on segregation. We put out these reports. We started putting up public markers, because … the landscape is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy,” Stevenson said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. “For me … talking about our history of racial inequality is critical to creating a consciousness that will allow us to move forward toward justice and equality. I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of that in our country.”

The memorial and the museum have already sparked serious reflection at Alabama’s capital city newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, founded in 1829. A deeply reported section of the paper, “Legacy of lynchings: America’s shameful history of racial terror,” includes articles detailing the paper’s own failings in its reporting on lynchings. Any stories, reporter Brian Lyman wrote, “were undercut by the Advertiser’s unfailing assumption that lynching victims were guilty of a crime, whatever the facts may have been. Those assumptions were often grounded in racist views of African-Americans.”

The paper’s editorial board opened its piece with the sentence, “We were wrong,” and continued, “We went along with the 19th- and early 20th-century lies that African-Americans were inferior. We propagated a world view rooted in racism and the sickening myth of racial superiority.”

While the memorial and museum focus on the past, on 400 years of racism against Africans and African-Americans, Stevenson is focused on the present as well: “We have a schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline. We have jails and prisons that are filled with folks who are not a threat to public safety. We have black and brown people being menaced and targeted by the police. We have a network of political discussions that always exclude people of color. And until we confront those spaces and challenge those places, we’re not going to be able to achieve the kind of justice that most of us seek. That’s my challenge. That’s my heart.”

On an interior wall at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a pledge is etched:

“For the hanged and beaten,

For the shot, drowned and burned,

For the tortured, tormented, and terrorized

For those abandoned by the rule of law,

We will remember”

In 2005, Kanye West rocked the country and the White House with seven simple words uttered on a major global telecast to raise money for victims of Hurricane Katrina: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Recently, Kanye West shocked many by professing admiration for President Donald Trump and now saying slavery was “a choice.” Kanye should pay a visit to the memorial in Montgomery, and take the president with him.

Starbucks Ditches Anti-Defamation League in Anti-Racism Training

After a video of the arrest of two African-American men sitting in Starbucks without buying anything went viral, Starbucks scheduled anti-racism training. But their inclusion of the Anti-Defamation League in the training provoked another outcry and Starbucks capitulated.

On April 12, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson were arrested for trespassing at a Philadelphia Starbucks. A manager called the police because the men, who had been in the coffee shop for just a few minutes, hadn’t bought anything.

Melissa DePino, a Starbucks customer who recorded the video of the arrest that went viral on social media, said, “These guys never raised their voices. They never did anything remotely aggressive. … I was sitting close to where they were. Very close. They were not doing anything. They weren’t.”

In an attempt to avert a public relations disaster after the racist incident became public, Starbucks announced it would close most of its 8,000 locations on May 29 for racial bias training.

But, adding insult to injury, Starbucks included the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), with its notorious history of racism, as a primary participant in the anti-racism training.

Community outrage at ADL’s central role in the training was swift and strong. Starbucks demoted ADL to a consulting role, and named representatives of three prominent African-American-led civil rights organizations to lead the training.

ADL: ‘Anti-Muslim, Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Black and Anti-Activist’

After Starbucks had initially announced the composition of its anti-racism trainers, there was a powerful backlash in the civil rights community against ADL’s leadership role.

Tamika Mallory, co-chair of the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter, called for a boycott of Starbucks. Mallory, a nationally prominent organizer for gun control and women’s rights, and against police violence, is the 2018 recipient of the Coretta Scott King Legacy Award.

Mallory tweeted that Starbucks “is NOT serious about doing right by BLACK people!” because of the prominent role it gave ADL, which “is CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people.”

Cat Brooks, co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, said she agrees with Mallory. “You can’t be a piece of an anti-bias training when you openly support a racist, oppressive and brutal colonization of Palestine.”

Linda Sarsour, also co-chair of the Women’s March, wrote on Facebook that ADL is “an anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian organization that peddles Islamophobia and attacks America’s prominent Muslim orgs and activists and supports/sponsors US law enforcement agents to travel and get trained by Israeli military.”

Palestinian-American comedian, activist and professor Amer Zahr grew up in Philadelphia. Zahr told this reporter that ADL and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) “were the architects of the anti-Arab and anti-Islamic industry in America for the last 50 to 60 years.”

Zahr said that “welcoming groups like ADL into the family of civil rights organizations … is a real slap in the face to Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims who have been the victims of ADL rhetoric for decades.”

Asked to respond to Starbucks’ decision, a spokesman for the ADL who was contacted refused to comment.

Spied on Leftists

ADL was established in 1913 “to defend Jews, and later other minority groups from discrimination,” Robert I. Friedman wrote in 1993. It led the struggle against the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, and supported the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. But in the late 1940s, “ADL spied on leftists and Communists, and shared investigative files with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the FBI. The ADL swung sharply to the right during the Reagan administration, becoming a bastion of neoconservatism.”

In 1993, the San Francisco District Attorney released 700 pages of documents that implicated ADL in an extensive spying operation against U.S. citizens who opposed Israel’s policies in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, and apartheid in South Africa. ADL then passed the information to Israel’s Mossad and South African intelligence.

The documents revealed that ADL provided information to South African intelligence shortly before Chris Hani was assassinated. Hani was a leader of the African National Congress, which led the struggle against apartheid, and was considered the successor to Nelson Mandela. Hani was killed soon after returning from a speaking tour in California, where he had been spied on by ADL.

Fifteen civil rights groups and seven individuals filed a federal lawsuit against ADL in 1993 for violation of their civil and privacy rights by spying on them. Six years later, federal Judge Richard Paez issued an injunction permanently enjoining ADL from illegally spying on Arab-American and other civil rights organizations.

But ADL’s hateful activities continue. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson said in an interview with Consortium News that ADL, which “calls itself a civil rights organization, is in truth playing a really damaging role in a number of communities.” She noted that ADL is “promoting and complicit in anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, anti-Black and anti-activist campaigns.”

Vilkomerson criticized ADL for honoring the St. Louis Police Department one year after their officers killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American man in Ferguson.

Arielle Klagsbrun of the St. Louis JVP explained, “The ADL’s side is the side of police. As someone whose family members are Holocaust survivors, the lessons I learned from the Holocaust for today are that black lives matter and that we must stand against systemic racism.”

Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of Alliance of Families for Justice, said in an interview that if one were crafting a training program against anti-Semitism, you “wouldn’t go to the NAACP for sensitivity training,” adding, “as a Black person, I found [the inclusion of ADL] further insulting.”

Vilkomerson called ADL “one of the biggest purveyors” of exchanges between Israeli and U.S. law enforcement, where American police go to Israel to learn “counter-terrorism” measures to be applied here. That encompasses “racial profiling, spying, mass surveillance and collective punishment.”

But “U.S. police don’t really need a lesson in racism,” Vilkomerson added.

Starbucks Backs Down After Anti-ADL Backlash

JVP circulated a petition against inclusion of ADL, which garnered 11,000 signatures in 72 hours. According to Vilkomerson, the “enormous outpouring” on Twitter of opposition to ADL’s initial central role in the training and the “week-long pushback,” including JVP’s petition, led Starbucks to back down.

Starbucks issued a statement identifying the leaders of the training as: Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of Equal Justice Initiative; Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Heather McGhee, president of Demos, a civil rights organization.

The three leaders “will provide advice, counsel, connections to other experts, and recommendations to Starbucks for the May 29 training, which will launch the multiphase effort for the company.”

Starbucks said it “will also consult with a diverse array of organizations and civil rights experts—including The Anti-Defamation League, The Leadership on Civil and Human Rights, UnidosUS, Muslim Advocates, and representatives of LGBTQ groups, religious groups, people with disabilities, and others.”

JVP’s deputy director Ari Wohlfeiler stated in a press release:

Starbucks will never say it publicly, but because of the huge public outcry about the ADL’s unyielding pro-Israel position, their refusal to condemn police violence, their incessant Islamophobia, and the convergence of all those retrograde positions in their active facilitation of U.S./Israeli police exchange programs, Starbucks had no choice but to demote them.

It was an “excellent outcome,” Vilkomerson said.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. The second, updated edition of her book, “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues,” was recently published.

California Faces Potential for Extreme Weather

Life is about to become uncomfortable for 40 million people in turbulent California. The  citizens of the golden state face a future of extremes, according to new research.  The number and severity of floods will grow. But so will the number of extended and severe droughts.

The backcloth to California’s climate – the overall annual precipitation – may not change greatly as the world, and the US with it, warms as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion on a global scale.

What instead will happen is that droughts will last longer, and when the rain arrives it will fall much more heavily.

“These are actually huge changes occurring: they are just on opposite ends of the spectrum,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If you only look for shifts in average precipitation, you’re missing all of the important changes in the character of precipitation.”

More probable

Dr Swain and colleagues report in the journal Nature Climate Change that they made mathematical simulations of the future pattern of the state’s climate as ever greater ratios of carbon dioxide drive global warming and potentially catastrophic climate change.

Even with small changes in overall precipitation, the probability of what they call “whiplash events” – shifts from extreme drought to devastating flood – grows measurably.

The state experienced a four-year drought between 2012 and 2016, and then what they call “an extraordinarily high number of atmospheric river storms” in the winter of 2016-2017. Roads and bridges were washed away by floods and mudslides, and after a dam failed almost 250,000 people were evacuated from their homes. And, the researchers promise, the pattern will continue into the future.

Once again, such studies deliver cumulative confidence: in the last few years scientists have repeatedly, and using separate approaches, confirmed the dangers of climate extremes in California.

They have linked devastating drought to human-induced climate change; they have warned that such droughts could be “the new normal” for citizens; and that when the rains fall, they will bring ever more flooding.

The double impact of warming atmosphere and warming oceans means that more water will be deposited when the rains do arrive. And, say the researchers, the chance of a catastrophic flood to match the 1862 calamity that destroyed one-third of the state’s taxable land will grow three or fourfold.

If it happened again – after 150 years of population growth – it could be a trillion dollar disaster, and millions would have to abandon their homes.

“We may be going from a situation where an event as big as 1862 was unlikely to occur by the end of the century to a situation where it may happen more than once,” said Dr Swain.

“People tend not to die in droughts in places with a developed economy. People do still die in floods. It happened this year and last year in California. During an event of a magnitude similar to the 1862 flood, a lot of lives would be at risk.”

Hawaii Poised to Ban Sale of Sunscreens That Damage Coral

HONOLULU—Many sunscreen makers could soon be forced to change their formulas or be banned from selling the lotions in Hawaii.

State lawmakers passed a measure this week that would ban the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate by 2021 in an effort to protect coral reefs. Scientists have found the two substances can be toxic to coral, which are a vital part of the ocean ecosystem and a popular draw for tourists.

Consumers would only be allowed to buy sunscreen with the chemicals if prescribed by a health care provider, though the measure itself doesn’t ban online purchases or tourists from bringing their own to Hawaii.

It would become the first state to enact a ban on the chemicals if Democratic Gov. David Ige signs the bill; he has not indicated whether he will.

Similar legislation failed last year, after it pitted environmental scientists against businesses and trade groups that benefit from the $2 billion market for sun care products in the U.S.

This is “a first step to help our reef and protect it from deterioration,” said Hawaii state senator Donna Mercado Kim, a fellow Democrat who introduced the measure. Although other factors contribute to reef degradation, “hopefully, other jurisdictions will look at this legislation and follow suit.”

“This is the first real chance that local reefs have to recover,” said Craig Downs, a scientist whose 2015 peer-reviewed study found oxybenzone was a threat to coral reefs. “Lots of things kill coral reefs, but we know oxybenzone prevents them from coming back.” It also affects sea urchins and kills algae, a source of food for sea turtles, he said.

He found as much as 14,000 tons of sunscreen lotion ends up in coral reefs annually.

Opponents are skeptical of the science.

“What we’re really concerned with is that there aren’t very many independent studies out there that have gone for peer review,” said Tina Yamaki, president of the Retail Merchants of Hawaii. She said the ban might discourage people from buying sunscreen products from local brick-and-mortar stores. The American Chemistry Council also opposed the bill, citing concerns over the dangers of sun exposure.

“It’s a feel good measure,” said Democrat Sharon Har, one of four lawmakers who voted against the bill. “Yes, we must protect the environment — it is our number one resource — but at the end of the day, studies have pointed to global warming, human contact, coastal development” as other significant threats to coral.

Many manufacturers already sell “reef-friendly” sunscreens, and companies can deplete current inventory ahead of the ban in 2021, Downs said.

Edgewell Personal Care, which makes Banana Boat and Hawaiian Tropic sunscreen lotions, said it makes products free of the two chemicals. The company “will continue to ensure we comply with all relevant regulations concerning oxybenzone and octinoxate.”

“We have so many problems with coral bleaching, and there is already so much contamination,” said Dr. Yuanan Lu, a professor and director of the environmental health laboratory at the University of Hawaii, who applauded the passage. “We have so many people who come to Hawaii, and some of the sunscreen ingredients can be toxic, harmful to marine systems.”