Chris Hedges's Blog, page 400

5 Reasons Trump Won’t Fire Mueller

For those who fear that Donald Trump is about to lower the boom on special counsel Robert Mueller, take a deep breath and slowly exhale. Despite all you’ve heard from Trump himself, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and law professor Alan Dershowitz about the commander-in-chief’s unfettered authority to discharge any member of the executive branch with impunity, Mueller isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

There are at least five reasons why Mueller and his probe are safe:

1. Trump lacks unilateral authority to remove Mueller.

The Department of Justice regulations under which Mueller was appointed preclude the president from dismissing a special counsel on his own initiative.

The current regulations were adopted in 1999. They replaced the old Clinton-era “independent counsel” statute, which expired the same year.

As the present regulations clearly stipulate:

The Special Counsel may be disciplined or removed from office only by the personal action of the Attorney General. The Attorney General may remove a Special Counsel for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause, including violation of Departmental policies. The Attorney General shall inform the Special Counsel in writing of the specific reason for his or her removal.” [emphasis added].

2. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker may lack the legal authority to remove Mueller.

Although Trump can’t fire Mueller directly, he can order the attorney general to do his bidding. According to conventional wisdom, Whitaker will be only too eager to oblige. Indeed, in the view of many of the president’s foes, that’s the reason Trump elevated Whitaker to the position of acting attorney general after he forced the resignation of Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from overseeing the Mueller inquiry. With Sessions out of the way, Whitaker has replaced Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as Mueller’s boss.

Since Mueller’s appointment, Whitaker has been among the foremost critics of the special counsel’s work, often echoing Trump’s own unhinged rants. Before he became Sessions’ chief of staff, Whitaker was a right-wing blogger and a regular talking head on cable news. In that capacity, he not only argued that the attorney general could defund the Mueller probe, but also that the probe would devolve into a “witch hunt” if it crossed a “red line” into an examination of Trump’s finances.

Last week, the line was breached when former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the extent of his erstwhile client’s efforts during the 2016 election campaign to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

But Trump’s plans to deploy Whitaker to ax Mueller may be dead on arrival, because Whitaker’s appointment may be unconstitutional. To date, at least half a dozen lawsuits have been filed challenging Whitaker’s installation for running afoul of the Constitution’s appointment clause (Article II, Section 2).

The clause provides that all principal officers of the United States be appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. There is little doubt that the attorney general, as a Cabinet member answerable only to the president, is a principal officer of the government and not an ordinary employee who can be hired by the president alone.

The lawsuits against Whitaker contend that he cannot lawfully discharge the duties of the attorney general because he hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate. As matters presently stand, the suits may well succeed, at least to the degree that Whitaker might try to alter pre-existing Justice Department positions in pending litigation and investigations. Firing Mueller could well persuade the courts to quash Whitaker’s appointment.

3. Whitaker may defy expectations and refuse to fire Mueller.

Despite his past statements about the Mueller investigation, it’s not a lock that Whitaker would carry out a presidential order to fire Mueller. He may not be quite the stooge and lackey many assume him to be.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that it had reviewed “hundreds of public comments” made by Whitaker before becoming Sessions’ chief of staff. Among other discoveries, the Post found that while working as a radio and TV commentator, Whitaker sometimes took Trump to task for his “dangerous behavior,” such as failing to release his tax returns, “playing with the truth” and being “self-serving” in the way he fired former FBI Director James Comey.

Lackey or not, Whitaker thus far has taken no discernible action to rein in Mueller. Even with Whitaker looking over his shoulder, Mueller has proceeded full steam ahead in obtaining Cohen’s recent guilty plea, and he is apparently hard at work preparing new indictments against high-profile Trump loyalists Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone.

4. Mueller can contest his firing.

Even if Whitaker follows presidential orders to fire Mueller, the special counsel can contest the firing by filing a wrongful termination case in federal court.

As ethics experts Noah Bookbinder, Norm Eisen and Caroline Fredrickson wrote in a lengthy memorandum published in December 2017, Mueller and his staff likely would have standing to argue that the special counsel was sacked without good cause if his termination is politically motivated.

What’s more, if Mueller and his colleagues go to court, they would have a ready-made template to follow in the 1973 case of Nader v. Bork. In that case, Ralph Nader persuaded a federal district court judge to declare that Robert Bork’s firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” violated the terms of the Justice Department regulations under which Cox was appointed.

Although the judge declined to reinstate Cox, he did so only because Cox had declined to join the lawsuit as a party. If Mueller and his staff initiate their own proceeding, that barrier would be absent.

5. Trump is deathly afraid of impeachment

The image of Trump as a strongman who hits back twice as hard as his opponents is a mirage. Beneath his bravado lurks what many prominent mental-health professionals perceive is a brittle, insecure narcissist who lives in fear of being exposed as a weak and craven con man.

For the first two years of his presidency, Trump’s narcissism went essentially unchecked. He could fire Comey, threaten to discharge Mueller, hint at pardoning supporters and himself and lie about everything from his business dealings with Russia to his efforts to obstruct the Russia probe, and get away with it all.

No more.

If Trump fires Mueller or cripples his investigation, he will face certain impeachment in the House, which the Democrats will control come January. Despite the reservations of the party leadership, the new breed of progressive Democrats who have been elected to the House will demand no less.

“I’ve been supportive of impeachment for some time now,” Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.,  told Vice News in response to Cohen’s latest guilty plea. “I think [this] just adds to the case” against Trump.

The Democratic rank and file is also ready to roll. Midterm exit polls conducted by CNN found that a staggering 77 percent of self-identified Democrats said they support impeachment.

If the House pulls the impeachment trigger, we can expect the mother of all congressional hearings. In scope and length, the hearings could far exceed the House’s investigation of Richard Nixon, which dragged on for more than nine months.

Every act of alleged collusion, every illegal emolument, every item of tax evasion, every instance of obstruction, every material lie Trump has ever uttered about the Mueller probe will be laid bare for all the world to see.

It won’t matter that the Senate, still in Republican hands, might not convict Trump of any impeachable offenses the House refers to the upper chamber. If Mueller is fired, all that will matter is exposing the fraud of the Trump presidency—and that will prove as easy as, well, shooting fish in a barrel.

The smarter course of action for Trump is to let Mueller finish his job, and to hope that in so doing, he manages to save his own skin.

The Film the Israel Lobby Does Not Want You to See

“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, at how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with U.S. domestic Jewish groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Israel Project and StandWithUs to spy on, smear and attack critics, especially American university students who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It shows how the Israel lobby uses huge cash donations, often far above the U.S. legal limit, and flies hundreds of members of Congress to Israel for lavish and unpaid vacations at Israeli seaside resorts, bribing the American lawmakers to do Israel’s bidding, including providing military aid such as the $38 billion (over 10 years) that was approved by Congress in 2016. It uncovers Israel’s sleazy character assassination of academics, activists and journalists, its well-funded fake grassroots activism, its manipulation of press coverage, and its ham-fisted attempts to destroy marriages, personal relationships and careers. The film highlights the efforts to discredit liberal Jews and Jewish organizations as tools of radical jihadists, referring, for example, to Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” and claiming that many members of the organization are not actually Jewish. Israel recruits black South Africans into an Israeli front group called Stop Stealing My Apartheid, in a desperate effort to counter the reality of the apartheid state that Israel has constructed. The series documents Israel’s repeated and multifaceted interference in the internal affairs of the United States, including elections; efforts to discredit progressive groups such as Black Lives Matter that express sympathy for the Palestinians; and routine employment of Americans to spy on other Americans. Israel’s behavior is unethical and perhaps illegal. But don’t expect anyone in the establishment or either of the two ruling political parties to do anything about it. It is abundantly clear by the end of the series that they have been intimidated, discredited or bought off.

“Imagine if China was doing this, if Iran was doing this, if Russia was doing this?” Ali Abunimah, the author of “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, says in the film. “There would be uproar. You would have Congress going off to them. You would have hearings.”

Those of us who denounce and expose the Israeli crimes committed against Palestinians are intimately familiar with the sordid and nefarious tactics of the Israel lobby. The power of the film series is that in dealing with the reporter—a young Oxford postgraduate, James Anthony Kleinfeld, who goes by the name Tony in the film and poses as a pro-Israel student—major figures within the Israel lobby candidly explain and expose their massive covert campaign in the United States. There is no plausible deniability. And this is why Israel worked so hard to stop the film from being broadcast.

Clayton Swisher, who directed the series, wrote in the liberal Jewish newspaper The Forward that leaders from the Israel lobby met with the state of Qatar’s registered agent and lobbyist, a former aide to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz named Nick Muzin, to “see if he could use his ties with the Qataris to stop the airing.” Qatar funds Al-Jazeera. Muzin told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “he was discussing the issue with the Qataris and didn’t think the film would broadcast in the near future.” An anonymous source told Haaretz that “the Qatari emir himself helped make the decision” to spike the film.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates severed ties with Qatar in June 2017 and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the Persian Gulf state. They accuse Doha of supporting terrorism and radical Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The four states have issued a list of demands for re-establishing ties that include Qatar’s shutting down Al-Jazeera, along with severing relations with Iran. Qatar has appealed to the United States to intercede and has, as part of this effort, reached out to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States for support. American Jewish leaders, including the former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have met with the Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and have discussed with him what they describe as the network’s “anti-Semitism.” It is widely believed the series was sacrificed by Qatar in an effort to placate the Israel lobby and get its support for an end to the sanctions, although the blockade remains in force.

The series exposes how Israeli intelligence services monitor American critics of Israel and feeds real-time information about them to American Jewish organizations.

“We are for example in the process of creating a comprehensive picture of the campuses,” Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, tells a gathering of pro-Israel activists in the film. “If you want to defeat a phenomenon you must have the upper hand in terms of information and knowledge.”

The Israeli government operates Israel Cyber Shield, a civil intelligence unit that collects and analyzes BDS activities and coordinates attacks against the BDS movement.

“We are giving them data—for example, one day Sima’s deputy is sending me a photo. Just a photo on Whatsapp,” Sagi Balasha, who was CEO of the Israeli-American Council from 2011 to 2015, says when speaking on an Israeli-American Council panel. “It’s written ‘Boycott Israel’ on the billboard.”

He shows a picture of a roadside billboard that reads: “BOYCOTT ISRAEL UNTIL PALESTINIANS HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS. StopFundingApartheid.org.”

“In a few hours our systems and analysts could find the exact organization, people, and even their names, and where they live,” says Balasha, who now works with cyber-intelligence organizations that target BDS activists. “We gave it back to the ministry, and I have no idea what they did with this. But the fact is, three days later there were no billboards.”

“We use all sorts of technology,” Jacob Baime, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, says in the film. “We use corporate-level, enterprise-grade social media intelligence software. Almost all of this happens on social media, so we have custom algorithms and formulae that acquire this stuff immediately.”

“Generally, within about 30 seconds or less of one of these things popping up on campus, whether it’s a Facebook event, whether it’s the right kind of mention on Twitter, the system picks it up,” says Baime. “It goes into a queue and alerts our researchers and they evaluate it. They tag it, and if it rises to a certain level, we issue early-warning alerts to our partners.”

Those recruited by the Israel lobby, including the undercover Al-Jazeera reporter in the documentary, are sent to training sessions such as Fuel the Truth. The film records a session in which trainees watch a video of Palestinian children as the narrator says, “Children are taught in UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] Palestinian schools to hate Jews.” The trainees are told that scenes of devastation in Gaza are, in fact, misrepresented images disseminated by critics from Syria or Iraq. They are instructed in role-playing workshops how to brand all those who criticize Israeli policies as anti-Semites, members of a hate group or self-hating Jews.

The reporter is placed in the so-called war room run by The Israel Project, known as TIP, which monitors American media for stories on Israel and the Palestinians. The goal is “neutralizing undesired narratives.”

“We develop relationships … ,” David Hazony, the managing director of The Israel Project, says about how to influence journalists. “A lot of alcohol to get them to trust us. We’re basically messaging on the following—BDS is essentially a kind of a hate group targeting Israel. They’re anti-peace. We try not to even use the terms because it builds their brand. We just refer to boycotters. The goal is to actually make things happen. And to figure out what are the means of communication to do that.”

The BDS movement, which I support, was formed in 2005. It is an attempt by Palestinian civil rights groups to build a nonviolent international movement to boycott Israel, divest from Israeli companies and eventually impose sanctions—as was done against apartheid South Africa—until basic Palestinian rights under international law are achieved. While the movement has not gained traction financially in the United States, with most colleges and universities refusing to divest, it has been very effective at illuminating the injustices committed against Palestinians by Israel and severely eroded Israel’s credibility and support in the U.S. This ongoing shift in public opinion terrifies Israel, which has poured tremendous resources into crushing the BDS movement.

“Government ministers attacked me in person,” Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement, says in the film. “One of them threatening BDS leaders with targeted civil assassination. Others threatened to revoke my permanent residency [in Israel], along other threats.”

“We suffered from intense denial-of-service attacks, hacking attacks on our website,” Barghouti says. “Israel decided to go on cyber warfare against BDS. Publicly, they said, ‘We shall spy on BDS individuals and networks, especially in the West.’ We have not heard a peep from any Western government complaining that Israel is admitting that it will spy on your citizens. Imagine Iran saying it will spy on British or American citizens. Just imagine what could happen.”

“So, like nobody really knows what we’re doing,” says Julia Reifkind, who was director of community affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “But mainly it’s been a lot of research, like monitoring BDS things and reporting it back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Like making sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need a lot of research done and stuff like that. When they talk about it in the Knesset, we’ve usually contributed to what the background information is. I’m not going to campuses. It’s more about connecting organizations and I guess campuses, providing resources and strategy if students need it.”

“I write a report and give it to my boss, who translates it,” Reifkind says. “It’s really weird. We don’t talk to them on the phone or email. There’s a special server that’s really secure that I don’t have access to because I’m an American. You have to have clearance to access the server. It’s called Cables. It’s not even the same [word translated] in Hebrew, it’s like literally ‘Cables.’ I’ve seen it. It looks really bizarre. So, I write reports that my boss translates into the cables and sends them. Then they’ll send something back. Then he’ll translate it and tell me what I need to do.”

“Is the Israeli Embassy trying to leverage faculty?” Tony, the undercover reporter, asks her.

“Yeah,” she says. “We are working with several faculty advocacy groups that kind of train faculty, and so we are helping them a little bit with funding, connections, bringing them to speak, having them to speak to diplomats and people at the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] that need this information. So, I want to be that resource to show students what we’re doing, to see what you’re doing, here’s some information if you need anything at all. We can connect you. Just kind of be that person there for you.”

Reifkind was president of the pro-Israel group at the University of California at Davis and worked closely with the Israel lobby to attempt to crush the BDS movement on campus, especially after Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) brought a divestment motion to the student senate.

“We knew they were going to win because the entire student senate was all pro-BDS,” she says. “They ran for that purpose and won for that purpose. We have been pushed out of student government for months.”

Reifkind and a few supporters went to the senate meeting where the vote was scheduled.

“We have been ignored and disrespected year after year, but we have never been silenced,” she tells the student gathering. “We are a beacon of peace and inclusion on a campus plagued by anti-Semitism.”

“The intolerance that spawned this [divestment] resolution is the same kind of intolerance that spawned anti-Semitic movements throughout history,” she shouts.

She and her handful of supporters walk out, an action they had agreed on in advance and then carefully filmed.

The passing of the BDS motion at UC Davis set the gears of the Israel lobby and the Israeli government in motion.

“That day all of us released like 50 op-eds in major news sources so that when people made a hashtag, like a whole thing trending, so when people opened their Facebooks it wouldn’t be them celebrating their victory,” Reifkind says in the film. “It would be us sharing our stories. Once it blew up, then random people like The Huffington Post contacted me and was like, “Do you have anything to say?” And I was like, ‘Conveniently, I wrote an op-ed two weeks ago just in case.’ ”

Israel and its surrogates in the United States used their considerable resources to carry out vicious and anonymous personal attacks against the campus BDS activists at UC Davis, calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas sympathizers” who support Sharia on campus. The lobby also skillfully framed the narrative in the national media, claiming falsely that the pro-Israel students were forced out of the meeting room.

“Pro-Israel students were taunted by pro-Hamas students after an anti-Israel vote passed on campus,” says an announcer on Fox News as a caption underneath video reads, “RUNNING RAMPANT: UC Davis Plagued by Anti-Semitic Feelings.” “And right after the vote passed, a student senator posted this on Facebook, ‘Hamas and Sharia law have taken over UC Davis. Brb [be right back] crying over the resilience.’ ”

Shortly after the vote, Jewish students said they found two swastikas painted on their fraternity house in Davis. The media, tipped off, was at the fraternity house almost immediately. The BDS activists were blamed for the graffiti.

The film shows a CBS 13 news clip.

Television reporter: “Pro-Israel students said they feared recent events would lead to this.”

UC Davis male student: “This has been sort of a bad week to be Jewish on campus.”

Television reporter: “After years of heated meetings, the student body passed a resolution Thursday, urging UC Davis to end any affiliation with companies that support Israel.”

Another UC Davis male student, speaking in front of one of the swastikas: “So, this is not out of the blue. We’re pretty sure this is directly related.”

“StandWithUs helped us a little bit in terms of actual research on the speech,” Reifkind says in referring to her comments before the student senate. “They gave us some legal research type stuff. I’m always biased and want to work with AIPAC. They kind of helped, more like mold support. And David Project helped us a little bit. It was more help like gaining contacts in the media world. I guess we needed money to pay for someone to film the speech. We had a Davis Faculty for Israel group, and they were hugely helpful to us. Some of them were retired lawyers, they’d write legal documents for us. They knew the administration. They were tenured. They had pull.”

“After looking back on everything, I feel a little creepy because of what happened after the vote,” says Marcelle Obeid, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis. “People who were affiliated with the [pro-Palestinian] group were just smeared and had to deal with these very personal crises—the world calling us terrorists, the world thinking that we were this spiteful hate group. It’s pretty unequivocal how organized they were, how brutal and ruthless that narrative was, and how it affected us.”

The Electronic Intifada’s Abunimah says, “There’s an intensive effort by Israel and pro-Israel groups to get governments, universities, legislative bodies to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel and its state ideology, Zionism.”

“They have created this perverse definition of anti-Semitism where calling for everyone in Palestine and Israel to have equal rights is somehow an attack on Jews,” he says. “They’re trying to get this pushed into official definitions. This has been a key goal of the Brandeis Center so they can go after people who are advocating for equality and bring them up on charges that they’re actually anti-Semitic bigots.”

Kenneth Marcus, founding president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, confirms this stance in the film and is shown saying: “You have to show that they’re racist hate groups, that they are using intimidation to get funded, and to consistently portray them that way.”

But despite its campaign, Israel is acutely aware that it is losing the public relations war, especially among the young.

“The polling isn’t good,” David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, which combats BDS on American campuses, says in the film. “And all of you probably know that if you look at the polls, the younger you get on the demographic scales, the lower support for Israel is. … It seems to be achieving its goals. I think it threatens future American support for Israel. Younger people are leaving college less sympathetic to Israel than when they entered.”

And many of these young people are Jewish, finding their identity and meaning in values that Israel refuses to uphold.

“The work that Jewish Voice for Peace does is grounded in Jewish tradition, the most basic Jewish and human values that every single person has inherent worth and dignity and should be treated with respect,” Rabbi Joseph Berman says in the film. “We then see what’s happening to Palestinians, the occupation, the displacement, the inequality, and say we need to end these things.”

But while Israel may be losing in the court of public opinion, it tightly embraces elected officials in the United States, where legalized bribery is institutionalized.

“Does the war of ideas matter?” asks Eric Gallagher, who was a director at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did. That’s what I’m proud to have been a part of for so long. My job was basically to convince students that participating in the war of ideas on campuses is actually a distraction. You can hold up signs and have rallies on campus, but the Congress gets $3.1 billion a year for Israel. Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress. Congress is where you have leverage. So, you can’t influence the president of the United States directly, but the Congress can.”

“What the lobby is all about is to make sure that Israel gets special treatment from the United States, forever,” John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” says in the film.

Mearsheimer says, “What AIPAC does is it makes sure that money is funneled your way if you’re seen as pro-Israel, and it will go to significant lengths to make sure that you stay in office if you continue to be staunchly pro-Israel.”

“What happens is Jeff [Talpins] meets with congressmen in the backroom, tells them exactly what his goals are,” David Ochs, founder of HaLev, says of the pro-Israeli hedge fund manager Jeff Talpins and how politicians receive sums of as much as $200,000 from the Israel lobby. “And by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million. Basically, they hand an envelope with 20 credit cards and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit card for $1,000 each.’ ”

“If you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run against you,” Mearsheimer says. “And support that person very generously. The end result is you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”

“They have questionnaires,” recalls former U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from northern Virginia who was in the House from 1991 to 2015. Moran, who opposed the 2002 congressional resolution to invade Iraq, became a target for the Israel lobby, which pushed hard for the war. “Anyone running for Congress is required [by the lobby] to fill out a questionnaire. And they [AIPAC] evaluate the depth of your commitment to Israel on the basis of [those questions]. And then you have an interview with local people. If you get AIPAC support, then more often than not you’re going to win.”

“There was a conservative rabbi in my district who was assigned to me, I assume, by AIPAC,” Moran says. “He warned me that if I voiced my views about the Israeli lobby that my career would be over, and implied that it would be done through the Post. Sure enough, The Washington Post editorialized brutally. Everyone ganged up.”

There is a screen shot of a Washington Post headline: “Sorry, Mr. Moran, You’re Not Fit For Public Office.”

Character assassination is a common tactic used by the Israel lobby against its critics. Bill Mullen, a professor of American studies at Purdue University, has been a campaigner for the BDS movement for years. His wife was sent a link to a website containing a letter addressed to her.

“It was a Sunday,” he says. “I was in the kitchen. My partner was in the living room with my daughter. Came in with her laptop and said, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ This letter, reported to be by a former student, said she had been sexually harassed by me. She had found other students at Purdue who have had the same experience. And she was writing this letter to tell their story. Within a very short time, within about 48 hours, we were able to establish that these multiple sites that were attacking me had been taken out [created] almost at the same time. And that they were clearly the work of the same people. One of the accounts said, in the process of supposedly putting my hand on her, I invited her to a Palestine organizational meeting. Well, I thought, ‘You’re sort of putting your cards on the table there,’ whoever you are.”

“With the anti-Israel people, what we found has been most effective, in the last year, you do the opposition research,” says Baime, the Israel on Campus Coalition official. “Put up an anonymous website. Then put up targeted Facebook ads. Every few hours you drip out a new piece of opposition research, it’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy. They either shut down or they spend time investigating it and responding to it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. That’s incredibly effective.”

“It was really an attempt, by people who didn’t know us, ‘Maybe I can destroy this marriage at the very least,’ ” Purdue’s Mullen says. “ ‘Maybe I can cause them horrendous, personal suffering.’ The same letter purporting to me harassment, sent to my wife, used the name of our daughter. I think that was the worst moment. We thought, ‘These people will do anything. They’re capable of doing anything.’ ”

Perhaps the film’s greatest investigative coup is the unwitting disclosure by Eric Gallagher at The Israel Project that the hedge fund manager Adam Milstein is “the guy who funds” the anonymous Canary Mission website. The website provides the names, backgrounds and photos of students, professors, invited speakers and organizations that are allegedly tied to terrorism and anti-Semitism through their support for Palestinian rights.

“There’s a guy named who you might want to meet,” Gallagher says to Tony about Adam Milstein. “He’s a convicted felon. That’s a bad way to describe him. He’s a real estate mogul. When I was working with him at AIPAC, I was literally emailing back and forth with him while he was in jail. He’s loaded. He’s close to half a billion dollars.”

Milstein was convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison for three months in 2009. The Israeli-American Council, which he leads, funds numerous pro-Israel organizations: Milstein also sits on the boards of AIPAC, StandWithUs and the Israel on Campus Coalition. He is close to billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the wealthiest donor to the pro-Israel lobby and the largest donor to the Trump campaign.

The promotional video for the Canary Mission, played in the film, says: “A few years later, these individuals are applying for jobs in your companies … ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”

“It was shattering to me because I had to look for a job, I had to start my life,” Obeid from UC Davis says. “And now I had this website smearing my name before I even got a chance to make a name for myself.”

“Somebody did contact my employer and asked for me to be fired based on my pro-Palestine activism,” says Summer Award, who campaigned at the University of Tennessee for Palestinian equal rights. “They said if they continued to employ me, their values are anti-Semitic. It can be really scary at first. I was mostly harassed via Twitter. They were tweeting me every two or three days. They take screen shots, even way back to my Facebook pictures that don’t even look like me anymore. Just digging and digging through my online presence.”

Israel’s moral bankruptcy is powerfully exposed in one of the last scenes in the film. Tony joins an “astroturf” protest organized by the Hoover Institution. Those in the protest have been paid to travel on a bus to George Mason University to disrupt a conference of Students for Justice in Palestine. They are coached by Lerman Mazar, the StandWithUs director of legal affairs, in what to shout.

“If you do happen to speak with any reporters just stay on message,” Mazar tells her lackluster protesters. “And what is the message? SJP is a ….”

“Hate group,” the protesters answer feebly.

Labour Will Try to Topple Theresa May if Brexit Deal Is Rejected

LONDON — Britain’s opposition Labour Party ramped up the pressure on Prime Minister Theresa May Sunday, saying it will call a no-confidence vote if Parliament rejects her Brexit deal on Dec. 11.

May is battling to persuade skeptical British lawmakers to back the deal her government and the European Union reached last month. Rejecting it would leave the U.K. facing a messy, economically damaging “no-deal” Brexit on March 29.

Labour Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said it’s “inevitable” that Labour will bring a motion of no-confidence in the government if Parliament rejects the Brexit agreement.

“If she’s lost a vote of this significance after two years of negotiation, then it is right that there should be a general election,” Starmer told Sky News.

If May’s government lost a no-confidence vote, it would have two weeks to overturn the result with a new vote by lawmakers. If that failed, Britain would hold a national election.

Politicians on both sides of Britain’s EU membership debate oppose the agreement May has struck with the bloc — Brexiteers because it keeps Britain bound closely to the EU, and pro-EU politicians because it erects barriers between the U.K. and its biggest trading partner.

With opposition parties and dozens of the prime minister’s fellow Conservatives against the deal, May’s chances of winning the vote in Parliament appear slim. But Environment Secretary Michal Gove said, “I believe that we can win the argument and win the vote.”

“I know it is challenging,” he told the BBC on Sunday.

“One of the things that I hope people will have the chance to do over the next nine days is to recognize that we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good,” Gove said. “We have got to recognize that if we don’t vote for this, the alternatives are no deal or no Brexit.”

Before the Dec. 11 vote, Labour is also trying to force May to publish confidential advice from the country’s top law officer about the Brexit deal.

Under opposition pressure, the government promised last month to show Parliament the legal advice from Attorney General Geoffrey Cox “in full.” Now, however, it says only that Cox will make a statement to Parliament.

Starmer said Labour would accuse the government of being in contempt of Parliament if it does not release all of the attorney general’s input. A refusal to publish the text could trigger “a historic constitutional row that puts Parliament in direct conflict with the executive,” he said.

A key legal issue is how Britain can get out of a “backstop” provision that would keep the country in a customs union with the EU to guarantee an open border between the U.K.’s Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland.

Pro-Brexit lawmakers say the backstop could leave Britain tied to the EU indefinitely, unable to strike new trade deals around the world.

Israeli Police Call for Indicting Netanyahu on Bribery Charges

JERUSALEM — Israeli police on Sunday recommended indicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bribery charges, adding to a growing collection of legal troubles that have clouded the longtime leader’s prospects for pursuing re-election next year.

Netanyahu denied the latest allegations. But his fate now lies in the hands of his attorney general, who will decide in the coming months whether the prime minister should stand trial on a host of corruption allegations that could play a central role in next year’s election campaign.

In a scathing attack on police investigators in a speech on Sunday, Netanyahu called the investigation a “witch hunt” that was “tainted from the start.”

“Israel is a law-abiding country. And in a law-abiding country police recommendations have no legal weight,” he told his Likud party at a Hannukah candle-lighting ceremony. Most of his half-hour holiday speech went to dismissing the allegations, and the boisterous crowd of hundreds of party members rallied behind him.

Sunday’s decision followed a lengthy investigation into a case involving Netanyahu’s relationship with Shaul Elovitch, the controlling shareholder of Israel’s telecom giant Bezeq.

Police said they found sufficient evidence that confidants of Netanyahu promoted regulatory changes worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Bezeq. In exchange, they believe Netanyahu used his connections with Elovitch to receive positive press coverage on Bezeq’s popular news site Walla.

In a statement, police said the investigation concluded that Netanyahu and Elovitch engaged in a “bribe-based relationship.”

Police said they believed there was sufficient evidence to charge Netanyahu and his wife Sara with accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust. They also recommended charges be brought against Elovitch, members of his family and members of his Bezeq management team.

Police have already recommended indicting Netanyahu on corruption charges in two other cases. One involves accepting gifts from billionaire friends, and the second revolves around alleged offers of advantageous legislation for a major newspaper in return for favorable coverage.

The prime minister has denied any wrongdoing.

“The police recommendations regarding me and my wife don’t surprise anyone,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “These recommendations were decided upon and leaked even before the investigation began.”

The police recommendations do not have any immediate impact on Netanyahu. They go to his hand-picked attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, who will review the material and make the final decision on whether to press charges.

That decision will have a great impact on Netanyahu’s future. Israeli law is unclear about whether an indicted prime minister would have to step down. But at the minimum, a trial would put great pressure on Netanyahu, who has been in office for nearly a decade, to step aside.

Israel must hold its next election by November 2019. But Israeli governments rarely last their full terms.

Netanyahu last month was nearly forced to call elections after a key partner withdrew from his coalition to protest a cease-fire with the Hamas militant group in Gaza. Netanyahu now leads a coalition with a razor-thin 61 seat majority in the 120-seat parliament.

With his Likud Party firmly behind him and his remaining coalition partners remaining silent, there does not seem to be any immediate threat to the government.

Mandelblit’s office has not said when he will issue his decision. Most analysts expect him to take several months to review the material.

Reuven Hazan, a political scientist at Hebrew University, said Netanyahu will likely try to push forward elections before Mandelblit decides whether to indict. Netanyahu holds a solid lead in all opinion polls, and a victory would make it more difficult for Mandelblit to indict and potentially force out a newly re-elected leader.

“He’ll send a message to the attorney general that everyone knew about these three police reports and they still voted for him and want him in power,” Hazan said. That would force the attorney general “to seriously reconsider his decision,” he said.

The Bezeq case, known as Case 4000, is the most serious of which Netanyahu has been accused. Two of his top confidants have turned state witnesses and are believed to have provided police with incriminating evidence.

Netanyahu held the government’s communications portfolio until last year and oversaw regulation in the field. Former journalists at the Walla news site have attested to being pressured to refrain from negative reporting of Netanyahu.

Opposition lawmakers called on Netanyahu to resign.

“The prime minister has no moral mandate to keep his seat and must resign today. Israel must go to elections,” said Tamar Zandberg, head of the dovish Meretz party.

But Netanyahu’s colleagues in the ruling Likud Party lined up behind him, attacking outgoing Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh for releasing the recommendation on his last day on the job.

The appointment of Alsheikh’s potential successor is being held up after a government-appointed committee rejected his candidacy, and Netanyahu has repeatedly criticized the police as the investigations into his behavior have mounted.

Micky Zohar, a Likud lawmaker, sarcastically called the police report Alsheikh’s “parting gift” to Netanyahu.

Netanyahu and his wife have long had reputations for being overindulgent and out of touch with common Israelis.

Sara Netanyahu went on trial in October on fraud and breach of trust charges for allegedly spending roughly $100,000 of government funds on private meals at the prime minister’s official residence, even as there was a full-time chef on staff.

In 2016, a court ruled she abused an employee and awarded the man $42,000 in damages. Other former employees have accused her of mistreatment, charges the Netanyahus have vehemently denied.

EU’s Climate Target Draws Large Show of Support

KATOWICE, Poland — The Latest on the U.N. climate talks taking place in Katowice, Poland (all times local):

3:35 p.m.

At least 65,000 people marched on the European Union’s headquarters in Belgium to show support for the bloc’s proposed curbs on climate change.

Braving rain and wind, demonstrators thronged the main road in central Brussels where the EU headquarters are located. Police said the peaceful march, held as a global climate conference got underway in Poland on Sunday, was the biggest climate demonstration in Belgium’s history.

The EU has proposed cutting greenhouse gas emissions from member countries to net zero by 2050. Scientists say that target needs to be adopted worldwide to avoid catastrophic global warming.

The EU has traditionally been among the most ambitious climate advocates.

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3:10 p.m.

Greenpeace is condemning a court in Slovakia for ordering the continued detention of activists who protested a lignite mining company.

A county court in Prievidza ruled on Sunday that the 12 Greenpeace activists would have to remain in custody until they are put on trial, saying they might continue illegal activity if they are released.

The activists from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Finland and Belgium were arrested for displaying anti-coal mining banners on a mining tower in Novaky. The Slovakian court’s order came as negotiators from around the world assembled in neighboring Poland for two weeks of talks on curbing climate change.

Greenpeace says the 12 face unfounded criminal charges and could face prison terms of up to five years if they are convicted. It called their detention “unacceptable.”

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2:35 p.m.

The governor of Germany’s most populous state says it’s premature to set a firm date for phasing out the use of coal-fired power plants, as environmental campaigners are demanding.

North Rhine-Westphalia state governor Armin Laschet told Germany’s Funke media group that such a move shouldn’t be tied to the global climate conference starting in Katowice, Poland, on Sunday.

German officials had hoped to present a blueprint for the country’s exit from coal at the Dec. 2-14 meeting, but an expert committee postponed issuing its recommendations until next year.

Laschet says Germany’s decision to stop mining and burning lignite coal “must be considered seriously and decided with broad consensus.”

Laschet, whose state has large lignite mines, warned that even if a date for exiting coal is set, it should be reviewed in the 2030s to avoid jeopardizing electricity supplies.

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10 a.m.

Negotiators from around the world began two weeks of talks on curbing climate change Sunday, three years after sealing a landmark deal in Paris that set a goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Envoys from almost 200 nations gathered in Poland’s southern city of Katowice, a day earlier than originally planned, for the U.N. meeting that’s scheduled to run until Dec. 14.

Ministers and some heads of government are joining in Monday, when host Poland will push for a joint declaration to ensure a “just transition” for fossil fuel industries like coal producers who are facing closures as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The meeting received a boost over the weekend, after 19 major economies at the G-20 summit affirmed their commitment to the 2015 Paris climate accord. The only holdout was the United States, which announced under President Donald Trump that it is withdrawing from the climate pact.

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Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://www.apnews.com/Climate

Leftist Leader Takes Reins in Mexico, Vowing to Help the Poor

MEXICO CITY — Leftist politician Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador assumed Mexico’s presidency with a promise — to profoundly transform Latin America’s second-biggest economy and to lead a government free of corruption.

Seemingly tireless at age 65, Lopez Obrador breezed through a day of public appearances Saturday that included taking the oath of office and speaking to Congress and attending an inaugural celebration at Mexico City’s vast main square.

He received a spiritual cleansing by indigenous leaders as part of the festivities, then closed out the gathering with a folksy 90-minute speech to the thousands of jubilant fans jamming the Zocalo vowing to help the poor in a nation where almost half the population lives in poverty.

“We are going to govern for everyone, but we are going to give preference to the most impoverished and vulnerable,” Lopez Obrador said. “For the good of all, the poor come first.”

Speaking in a personal style he honed over decades of small-town rallies, he told the crowd: “Be patient and have confidence in me.”

Hopes for change are running high among the more than 30 million Mexicans who voted for Lopez Obrador in a sweeping July 1 election victory that also gave his party a majority in Congress. At the same time, worries are mounting among critics who see an expanding authoritarian streak.

“The country is completely divided,” said Valeria Moy, director of the Mexico, Como Vamos? think tank.

Moy said she had expected a more conciliatory tone from the president, who instead Saturday blamed many of Mexico’s ills on decades of neoliberal policies that opened the country to greater trade and foreign investment.

While many are jubilant that Mexico has its first leftist president in decades, Moy noted that others are concerned about the economic decisions that Lopez Obrador will make, and of his use of referendums to validate his proposals.

Already, Lopez Obrador has halted construction of a new $13 billion airport for Mexico City after having that move backed in an unofficial referendum that saw just over 1 percent of voters participate. The peso and Mexican stocks plunged in response.

After decades with a closed, state-dominated economy, Mexico’s governments since 1986 had signed more free trade agreements than almost any other nation and privatized every corner of the economy except oil and electricity. But Lopez Obrador has brought back a more insular tone not heard much since the 1960s, saying he wants to build more state-owned oil refineries and encouraging Mexicans to buy Mexican.

One of the most pressing issues he faces at the start of his presidency is the caravan of thousands of Central American migrants camped out at the U.S. border, hoping to obtain asylum in the U.S.

In his first official act in office, he signed an agreement Saturday with counterparts in three Central American countries to create a development plan for the region. The plan would include a fund to generate jobs as a way to lessen the poverty that drives people to leave El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Most on the minds for many in Mexico, though, is the rising tide of violence.

“I don’t expect him to change everything in two months, or even in six years, but if the violence comes down then good things will happen,” said Amira Rozenbaum, who is optimistic for change.

The president pledged Saturday to personally oversee daily 6 a.m. security briefings and to work 16-hour days to confront the brutal violence in Mexico.

He also promised to restore the energy sector to prominence and bring up Mexico’s oil production from its current 25-year lows. Lopez Obrador began his political career leading demonstrations against oil pollution in his native state of Tabasco, and he is the country’s first president since the Mexican Revolution to rise to prominence as a protest leader.

Combined with a deep sense of nationalism and his own place in history, he envisions his administration creating a historic “fourth transformation” of Mexico, following independence from Spain, the liberal reforms that broke the church’s dominance in the 1850s and the 1910-1917 revolution.

Lopez Obrador’s many devotees express an unflinching faith in him. They call themselves “AMLOvers” and break into chants of: “It’s an honor to be with Lopez Obrador.”

Maria Antonia Flores was one of those on Zocalo to celebrate and said she had supported Lopez Obrador for more than 20 years. All around her, party loyalists donned burgundy vests and hats stamped with the logo of his Morena party.

“We love him because he’s honest. He’s hard-working. He has never let us down,” she said. “He’s not corruptible.”

Lopez Obrador has pledged to end centuries of poverty and marginalization for Mexico’s more than 70 indigenous communities, and he became the first president to take part in a ceremonial inauguration by indigenous groups.

Traditional healers brushed him with bunches of herbs and blew incense smoke over him to purify him, and they invoked the spirits of their ancestors and the land to liberate him from any bad influences.

“What we want, what we desire is to purify public life in Mexico,” Lopez Obrador said during the ceremony. “I repeat my commitment: I will not lie, I will not steal or betray the people of Mexico.”

His vow to root out government graft resonate with many, including some who have disagreements with him on other matters.

Mexico’s richest man, telecom magnate Carlos Slim, whose companies were major investors in the canceled airport project, said there is common ground with Lopez Obrador’s promises to rein in wasteful spending and corruption.

“Everybody wants spending to be efficiently managed,” Slim said.

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Associated Press writers Christopher Sherman and Maria Verza contributed to this report.

The DNA Industry’s Role in the Erosion of Native Rights

Amid the barrage of racist, anti-immigrant, and other attacks launched by President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty. Such attacks have focused on tribal sovereignty, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and the voting rights of Native Americans, and they have come from Washington, the courts, and a state legislature. What they share is a single conceptual framework: the idea that the long history that has shaped U.S.-Native American relations has no relevance to today’s realities.

Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated event, Senator Elizabeth Warren, egged on by Donald Trump’s “Pocahontas” taunts and his mocking of her claims to native ancestry, triumphantly touted her DNA results to “prove” her Native American heritage. In turning to the burgeoning, for-profit DNA industry, however, she implicitly lent her progressive weight to claims about race and identity that go hand in hand with moves to undermine Native sovereignty.

The DNA industry has, in fact, found a way to profit from reviving and modernizing antiquated ideas about the biological origins of race and repackaging them in a cheerful, Disneyfied wrapping. While it’s true that the it’s-a-small-world-after-all multiculturalism of the new racial science rejects nineteenth-century scientific racism and Social Darwinism, it is offering a twenty-first-century version of pseudoscience that once again reduces race to a matter of genetics and origins. In the process, the corporate-promoted ancestry fad conveniently manages to erase the histories of conquest, colonization, and exploitation that created not just racial inequality but race itself as a crucial category in the modern world.

Today’s policy attacks on Native rights reproduce the same misunderstandings of race that the DNA industry is now so assiduously promoting. If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty. Nor must any thought be given to how to compensate for past harms, not to speak of the present ones that still structure their realities. A genetic understanding of race distorts such policies into unfair “privileges” offered to a racially defined group and so “discrimination” against non-Natives. This is precisely the logic behind recent rulings that have denied Mashpee tribal land rights in Massachusetts, dismantled the Indian Child Welfare Act (a law aimed at preventing the removal of Native American children from their families or communities), and attempted to suppress Native voting rights in North Dakota.

Profiting by Recreating Race

Let’s start by looking at how the ancestry industry contributes to, and profits from, a twenty-first-century reformulation of race. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe lure customers into donating their DNA and a hefty sum of money in exchange for detailed reports claiming to reveal the exact geographical origins of their ancestors going back multiple generations. “Who do you think you are?” asks Ancestry.com, typically enough. The answer, the company promises, lies in your genes.

Such businesses eschew the actual term “race” in their literature. They claim instead that DNA reveals “ancestry composition” and “ethnicity.” In the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic markers. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the “ethnicities” they identify bear an eerie resemblance to the “races” identified by European scientific racist thinking a century ago. They then produce scientific-looking “reports” that contain purportedly exact percentages linking consumers to places as specific as “Sardinia” or as broad as “East Asia.”

At their most benign, these reports have become the equivalent of a contemporary parlor game, especially for white Americans who make up the vast majority of the participants. But there is a sinister undertone to it all, reviving as it does a long-discredited pseudoscientific basis for racism: the notion that race, ethnicity, and ancestry are revealed in the genes and the blood, and passed down inexorably, even if invisibly, from generation to generation. Behind this lies the assumption that those genes (or variations) originate within clearly defined national or geographic borders and that they reveal something meaningful about who we are — something otherwise invisible. In this way, race and ethnicity are separated from and elevated above experience, culture, and history.

Is There Any Science Behind It?

Although all humans share 99.9% of our DNA, there are some markers that exhibit variations. It’s these markers that the testers study, relying on the fact that certain variations are more (or less) common in different geographical areas. As law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts puts it, “No sooner had the Human Genome Project determined that human beings are 99.9% alike than many scientists shifted their focus from human genetic commonality to the 0.1% of human genetic difference. This difference is increasingly seen as encompassing race.”

Ancestry tests rely on a fundamental — and racialized — misunderstanding of how ancestry works. The popular assumption is that each of us contains discrete and measurable percentages of the “blood” and DNA of our two biological parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on, and that this ancestral line can be traced back hundreds of years in a meaningful way. It can’t. As science journalist Carl Zimmer explains, “DNA is not a liquid that can be broken down into microscopic drops… We inherit about a quarter of our DNA from each grandparent — but only on average… If you pick one of your ancestors from 10 generations back, the odds are around 50% that you carry any DNA from him or her. The odds get even worse beyond that.”

In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That’s partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today’s world — and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them.

So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it’s that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can’t be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today’s Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry’s claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.

While whites of European ancestry seem enthralled with the implications of this new racial science, few Native Americans have chosen to donate to such databases. Centuries of abuse at the hands of colonial researchers who made their careers on Native ancestral remains, cultural artifacts, and languages have generated a widespread skepticism toward the notion of offering genetic material for the good of “science.” In fact, when it comes to one DNA testing outfit, 23andMe, all of the countries included in its lists of the geographical origins of those who have contributed to its “Native American” database are in Latin America and the Caribbean. “In North America,” the company blandly explains, “Native American ancestry tends to be five or more generations back, so that little DNA evidence of this heritage remains.” In other words, 23andMe claims DNA as conclusive proof of Native American identity, then uses it to write Native North Americans off the map altogether.

The Ancestry Industry and the Disappearing Indian

The ancestry industry, even while celebrating diverse origins and multiculturalism, has revived long-held ideas about purity and authenticity. For much of U.S. history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans would “vanish,” at least in part through biological dilution. New England’s native peoples were, for instance, systematically denied land rights and tribal status in the nineteenth century on the grounds that they were too racially mixed to be “authentic” Indians.

As historian Jean O’Brien has explained, “Insistence on ‘blood purity’ as a central criterion of ‘authentic’ Indianness reflected the scientific racism that prevailed in the nineteenth century. New England Indians had intermarried, including with African Americans, for many decades, and their failure to comply with non-Indian ideas about Indian phenotype strained the credence for their Indianness in New England minds.” The supposed “disappearance” of such Indians then justified the elimination of any rights that they might have had to land or sovereignty, the elimination of which, in a form of circular reasoning, only confirmed their nonexistence as a people.

However, it was never phenotype or distant ancestry but, as O’Brien points out, “complex regional kinship networks that remained at the core of Indian identity in New England, despite the nearly complete Indian dispossession that English colonists accomplished… Even as Indians continued to reckon membership in their communities through the time-honored system of kinship, New Englanders invoked the myth of blood purity as identity in denying Indian persistence.”

Such antiquated understandings of race as a biological or scientific category allowed whites to deny Indian existence — and now allow them to make biological claims about “Indian” identity. Until recently, such claims, as in Senator Warren’s case, rested on the murkiness of family tales. Today, the supposed ability of DNA companies to find genetic “proof” of such a background reinforces the idea that Indian identity is something measurable in the blood and sidesteps the historical basis for the legal recognition or protection of Indian rights.

The ancestry industry assumes that there is something meaningful about the supposed racial identity of one of hundreds or even thousands of an individual’s ancestors. It’s an idea that plays directly into the hands of right-wingers who are intent on attacking what they call “identity politics” — and the notion that “minorities” are becoming unduly privileged.

Indeed, white resentment flared at the suggestion that Senator Warren might have received some professional benefit from her claim to Native status. Despite an exhaustive investigation by the Boston Globe showing conclusively that she did not, the myth persists and has become an implicit part of Donald Trump’s mockery of her. In fact, any quick scan of statistics will confirm the ludicrousness of such a position. It should be obvious that being Native American (or Black, or Latino) in the United States confers far more risks than benefits. Native Americans suffer from higher rates of poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, and low birth weight, as well as lower educational levels and shorter life spans than do whites. These statistics are the result of hundreds of years of genocide, exclusion, and discrimination — not the presence or absence of specific genetic variations.

Reviving Race to Undermine Native Rights

Native rights, from sovereignty to acknowledgment of the conditions created by 500 years of colonial misrule, rest on an acceptance that race and identity are, in fact, the products of history. “Native Americans” came into being not through genes but through the historical processes of conquest and colonial rule, along with grudging and fragile acknowledgement of Native sovereignty. Native American nations are political and cultural entities, the products of history, not genes, and white people’s assertions about Native American ancestry and the DNA industry’s claim to be able to reveal such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.

Let’s look at three developments that have, over the past year, undermined the rights of Native Americans: the reversal of reservation status for Mashpee tribal lands in Massachusetts, the striking down of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and Republican attempts to suppress Native American votes in North Dakota. Each of these acts came from a different part of the government: the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, the courts, and North Dakota’s Republican-dominated state legislature. But all three rely on notions of identity that place race firmly in our genes rather than in our history. In the process, they deny the histories that turned the sovereign and autonomous peoples of North America before European colonists arrived in “the New World” into “Native Americans,” and imply that Native American historical rights are meaningless.

The Mashpee of Massachusetts finally achieved federal recognition and a grant of reservation land only in 2007, based on the fact that they “had existed as a distinct community since the 1620s.” In other words, federal recognition was based on a historical, not a racialized, understanding of ethnicity and identity. However, the tribe’s drive to build a casino on its newly acquired reservation in Taunton, Massachusetts, would promptly be challenged by local property-owners. Their lawsuit relied on a technicality: that, as they argued in court, reservation land could only be granted to tribes that had been federally recognized as of 1934. In fact, the Mashpee struggle for recognition had been repeatedly stymied by long-held notions that the Indians of Massachusetts were not “real” or “authentic” because of centuries of racial mixing. There was nothing new in this. The state’s nineteenth-century legislature prefigured just such a twenty-first-century backlash against recognition when it boasted that real Indians no longer existed in Massachusetts and that the state was poised to wipe out all such “distinctions of race and caste.”

In September 2018, the Department of the Interior (to which the court assigned the ultimate decision) ruled against the Mashpees. Recently appointed Assistant Director of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney, the first Native American to hold that position, “paved the way for a reservation to be taken out of trust for the first time since the termination era,” a 20-year period from the 1940s to the 1960s when the federal government attempted to “terminate” Native sovereignty entirely by dismantling reservations and removing Indians to urban areas to “assimilate” them. The new ruling could affect far more than the Mashpees. Some fear that, in the Trump years, the decision portends “a new termination era,” or even a possible “extermination era,” for the country’s Native Americans.

Meanwhile, on October 4th, a U.S. District Court struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. This is a potentially devastating development as Congress passed that Act in 1978 to end the then-still-common practice of breaking up Native families by removing Indian children for adoption into white families. Such acts of removal date back to the earliest days of white settlement and over the centuries included various kinds of servitude and the founding of residential boarding schools for Indian children that were aimed at eliminating Native languages, cultures, and identities, while promoting “assimilation.” Indian child removal continued into the late twentieth century through a federally sponsored “Indian Adoption Project,” as well as the sending of a remarkable number of such children into the foster care system.

According to the ICWA, “An alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by nontribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions.” States, it added, “have often failed to recognize the essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social standards prevailing in Indian communities and families.” The Act gave tribes primary jurisdiction over all child custody issues including foster placements and the termination of parental rights, requiring for the first time that priority be placed on keeping Native children with their parents, kin, or at least within the tribe.

The ICWA said nothing about race or ancestry. Instead, it recognized “Indian” as a political status, while acknowledging semi-sovereign collective rights. It was based on the Constitution’s implicit acknowledgement of Indian sovereignty and land rights and the assignment to the Federal government of relations with Indian tribes. The District Court’s ICWA decision trampled on the collective political rights of Indian tribes by maintaining that the act discriminated against non-Native families in limiting their right to foster or adopt Native children. That rationale, like the rationale behindthe Mashpee decision, directly attacks the cultural and historical acknowledgement of Native sovereignty.

Superficially, the assault on Native voting rights may appear conceptually unrelated to the Mashpee and ICWA decisions. North Dakota is one of many primarily Republican-controlled states to take advantage of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling eliminating key protections of the Voting Rights Act to make registration and voting more difficult, especially for likely Democratic voters including the poor and people of color. After numerous challenges, a North Dakota law requiring prospective voters to provide a street address was finally upheld by a Supreme Court ruling in October 2018. The problem is this: thousands of rural Native Americans, on or off that state’s reservations, lack street addresses because their streets have no names, their homes no numbers. Native Americans are also disproportionately homeless.

In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of American citizens — the right to vote — whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases involve fights to defend Native sovereignty. The new voting law invoked equality and individual rights, even as it actually focused on restricting the rights of Native Americans. Underpinning such restrictions was a convenient denial by those Republicans that the country’s history had, in fact, created conditions that were decidedly unequal. (Thanks to a massive and expensive local effort to defend their right to vote, however, North Dakota’s Native Americans showed up in record numbers in the 2018 midterm election.)

These three political developments downplay Native American identity, sovereignty, and rights, while denying, implicitly or explicitly, that history created today’s realities of racial inequality. The use of DNA tests to claim “Native American” genes or blood trivializes this same history.

The recognition of tribal sovereignty at least acknowledges that the existence of the United States is predicated on its imposition of an unwanted, foreign political entity on Native lands. The concept of tribal sovereignty has given Native Americans a legal and collective basis for fighting for a different way of thinking about history, rights, and nationhood. Attempts to reduce Native American identity to a race that can be identified by a gene (or a genetic variation) do violence to our history and justify ongoing violations of Native rights.

Senator Elizabeth Warren had every right to set the record straight regarding false accusations about her employment history. She should, however, rethink the implications of letting either Donald Trump or the ancestry industry define what it means to be Native American.

How George H.W. Bush Got Us Stuck in the Mideast

On the occasion of the death of George H.W. Bush, I’d like to reflect on the meaning of his presidency for American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Bush was the last representative of the old Republican Party of wealthy Northeast businessmen and Midwestern farmers and small town dwellers, before the religious right took over the party. That the Southern Baptists and other evangelicals did not form part of his base allowed Bush to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more dispassionately than have any of his successors.

Bush admitted that he struggled with having a political vision. In 1989, the first year of his presidency, he experienced the windfall of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He called for a new world order, but it was unclear what the content of that order would be except the dominance of capital and national interest. He appeared to hope (unrealistically) that the charity sector (“a thousand points of light”) could make up for the steep decline in government-provided services impelled by the Reagan tax cuts. Workers and the poor were not his priority.

Bush was a pragmatist, and was happy to negotiate with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev over several key issues. He once pulled Gorbachev aside and explained to him that he was surrounded by “intellectual thugs” and that he might have to say harsh things about the Soviet Union publicly but that Gorbachev shouldn’t pay attention to it.

A particularly important negotiation was over the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The last Soviet tanks went over Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan in February of 1989. But Gorbachev and the Soviet officer corps left behind the dictator Najeeb Ullah, who was attempting to form a national front between the Afghan Communists (mainly Persian-speaking Tajiks) and the rebel groups (many of them Pushtun). The rebel mujahideen had been backed by the CIA with $5 billion a year in the late 1980s, which was matched by Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaida had grown up in Aghanistan as an Arab volunteer adjunct to the mujahideen, which initially received Saudi popular contributions raised by socialite Osama bin Laden from mosque congregations in the kingdom, an activity blessed by the Reagan administration.

In return for the Soviets completely withdrawing from Afghan affairs, Bush pledged to stop supplying the mujahideen, or fundamentalist holy warriors. The last shipment of weaponry went to them in late 1991. When Bill Clinton came in, in 1992, the United States was completely out of Afghanistan, as the mujahideen nevertheless swept into Kabul and established a fundamentalist government.

It may have been the right thing for Bush to do, to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan by withdrawing the U.S. from it as well. But, given that Ronald Reagan had nurtured the religious funadamentalist forces, they become increasingly important. The subsequent power vacuum produced a series of fundamentalist governments. The mujahideen, flush with U.S. and Saudi money, became dominant for a while. But after Bush cut them off, Pakistan began funding a faction of them that became the Taliban. In turn, the Taliban offered refuge to bin Laden and al-Qaida.

On Aug. 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded the small oil kingdom of Kuwait and announced its incorporation into Iraq as the “19th province.” Bush’s realist circles, including his secretary of state, James Baker, were initially unsure they should do anything about this act of naked aggression. Realist principles in political science warn against liberal humanitarianism in foreign policy and ask if national interest is affected and whether a peer power can take advantage. The Kuwait crisis did not have a direct impact on the U.S., since Saddam intended to pump Kuwaiti oil just as the Kuwaitis had. The episode did not involve the Soviet Union, then, in any case, on its last legs.

It is said that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher convinced Bush that something must be done. Thatcher believed that great powers rule by cowing lesser ones, and that if Saddam were not put down, then a whole range of third-world challengers would dare emerge to take on the industrialized democracies. Ironically, the insouciant realist Bush had his greatest success in organizing a liberal internationalist response to Saddam’s aggression.

Bush, having decided to go to war, got the right to base troops in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province from King Fahd. He worked the phones and got British, French and other buy-in. Even the Arab League joined him. He put together the biggest international military coalition since WWII, and expelled Iraq from little Kuwait with some of the biggest tank battles since WWII (along with intensive aerial bombardment). Egypt was allowed to enter Kuwait City first so as to give the impression that Arabs were taking care of their own affairs.

In order to put together his coalition, Bush had to promise the British, the French and others, that he would stop with the expulsion of the Iraqis from Kuwait and would not go on to do regime change in Baghdad. He did, however, embargo weapons sales to Iraq in the 1990s, a move emulated by the Clinton administration. The embargo on chlorine (which can be used to make chemical weapons) stopped Iraqi water purification efforts (to which it is essential) and led to the deaths of many children from dirty water. The death toll was horrible, but was exaggerated by critics to 500,000, which later studies have found too high. This statistic was quoted by bin Laden as partial justification for his 9/11 attacks.

Bush had called on the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam. The Kurds did, in the north, but then Saddam survived and they feared he would come for them with poison gas. They fled to higher ground, where they eventually would run out of food. Bush established a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan to prevent Saddam’s armored corps from coming up and massacring them. The Shiites also rose up but were put down, leading to volatile sectarian relations and, after 2003, massive reprisal killings that destabilized Iraq.

Bush used the respect and fear in which he was held in the region after the Gulf War. He pushed for peace in Israel-Palestine. He declined to underwrite Israeli squatter settlements in the West Bank with loan guarantees. He positioned the U.S. for backing the later Oslo Accords, which the Israeli center and left embraced but which the Likud Party that came to be dominated by Binyamin Netanyahu completely rejected.

Bush or his successors leased Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia for the over-lights of the no-fly zone, which allowed bin Laden to claim that the U.S. was militarily occupying the Muslim holy land, one of his stated reasons for the later Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The U.S. became the Great Power in the Gulf, finally supplanting the British, but unable again to extricate itself from Gulf affairs. It was stuck.

Bush showed pragmatism and leadership, and did not overplay his hand with the declining Soviet Union. Bush made the U.S. the security guarantor for the Gulf, a role it still maintains. The Reagan policies of backing Afghan fundamentalists and backing Saddam’s Arab nationalist Baath Party against Iran had set in play forces that Bush could not contain, and which went on, after his presidency, to have a crucial impact on the United States.

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The First Amendment Is Meaningless if Wall Street Destroys the Press

Texas populist Jim Hightower’s columns have been distributed by Creators Syndicate for a decade—but the agency said they had to take a pass on this one. “The big, hedge-fund owned newspaper chains that Hightower calls out in his column are big customers of theirs, and as such, they don’t want to risk offending them,” says Hightower assistant Melody Byrd (Corporate Crime Reporter, 11/29/18). “While Creators’ reluctance to anger these powerful interests is somewhat understandable, the implications are frightening. It’s one more example of this dangerous time for America’s decreasingly free press that, ironically, Jim lays out in this very column.”

–FAIR

A two-panel cartoon I recently saw showed a character with a sign saying: “First they came for the reporters.” In the next panel, his sign says: “We don’t know what happened after that.”

It was, of course, a retort to Donald Trump’s ignorant campaign to demonize the news media as “the enemy of the people.” But when it comes to America’s once-proud newspapers, their worst enemy is not Trump—nor is it the rising cost of newsprint or the “free” digital news on websites. Rather, the demise of the real news reporting by our city and regional papers is a product of their profiteering owners. Not the families and companies that built and nurtured true journalism, but the new breed of fast-buck hucksters who’ve scooped up hundreds of America’s newspapers from the bargain bins of media sell-offs.

American Prospect (12/27/17)

The buyers are hedge-fund scavengers with names like Digital First and GateHouse. They know nothing about journalism and care less, for they’re ruthless Wall Street profiteers out to grab big bucks fast by slashing the journalistic and production staffs of each paper, voiding all employee benefits (from pensions to free coffee in the breakroom), shriveling the paper’s size and news content, selling the presses and other assets, tripling the price of their inferior product—then declaring bankruptcy, shutting down the paper, and auctioning off the bones before moving on to plunder another town’s paper.

By 2014, America’s two largest media chains were not venerable publishers who believe that a newspaper’s mission includes a commitment to truth and a civic responsibility, but GateHouse and Digital First, whose managers believe that good journalism is measured by the personal profit they can squeeze from it. As revealed last year in an American Prospect article, GateHouse executives had demanded that its papers cut $27 million from their operating expenses. Thousands of newspaper employees suffered that $27 million cut in large part because one employee—the hedge fund’s CEO—had extracted $54 million in personal pay from the conglomerate, including an $11 million bonus.To these absentee owners and operators, our newspapers are just mines, entitling them to extract enormous financial wealth and social well-being from our communities.

The core idea of the “civic commons” is that we are a self-governing people, capable of creating and sustaining a society based on common good.

A noble aspiration!

But achieving it requires a basic level of community-wide communication—a reliable resource that digs out and shares truths so people know enough about what’s going on to be self-governing. This is the role Americans have long expected their local and regional newspapers to play—papers that are not merely in our communities, but of, by and for them.

Of course, being profit-seeking entities, that are usually enmeshed in the local moneyed establishment, papers have commonly (and often infamously) fallen far short of their noble democratic purpose. Overall, though, a town’s daily (or, better yet, two or more dailies) makes for a more robust civic life by devoting journalistic resources to truth-telling.

But local ownership matters, as some 1,500 of our towns have learned after Wall Street’s corporate demigods of greed have swept in without warning to seize their paper, gut its journalistic mission, and devour its assets. For example, Digital Media, a huge private-equity profiteer, snatched the St. Paul Pioneer Press and, demanding a ridiculous 25 percent profit margin from its purchase, stripped the newsroom staff from a high of 225 journalists to 25!

As Robert Kuttner reported, these tyrannical private equity firms are paper constructs that produce nothing but profits for faraway speculators. He notes that the blandly-named entities only exist “thanks to three loopholes in the law”—the first lets them operate in the dark, the second provides an unlimited tax deduction for the massive amounts of money they borrow to buy up newspapers, and the third allows them to profit by intentionally bankrupting the paper they take over.

Our right to a free press is meaningless if Wall Street thieves destroy our communities’ presses. The good news is that many enterprising people are devising ways to rescue their newspapers. For more information, go to DFMworkers.org.

U.S., China Call 90-Day Cease-Fire in Their Trade War

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — The United States and China reached a 90-day cease-fire in a trade dispute that has rattled financial markets and threatened world economic growth. The breakthrough came after a dinner meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader at the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires.

Trump agreed to hold off on plans to raise tariffs Jan. 1 on $200 billion in Chinese goods. The Chinese agreed to buy a “not yet agreed upon, but very substantial amount of agricultural, energy, industrial” and other products from the United States to reduce America’s huge trade deficit with China, the White House said.

The truce, reached after a dinner of more than two hours Saturday, buys time for the two countries to work out their differences in a dispute over Beijing’s aggressive drive to supplant U.S. technological dominance.

“It’s an incredible deal,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “What I’ll be doing is holding back on tariffs. China will be opening up, China will be getting rid of tariffs. China will be buying massive amounts of products from us.”

In a long-sought concession to the U.S., China agreed to label fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid responsible for tens of thousands of American drug deaths annually, as a controlled substance. And Beijing agreed to reconsider a takeover by U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm that it had previously blocked.

The White House announcement framed a victory for Trump and his unflinching negotiating tactics, securing a commitment from China to engage in talks on key U.S. economic priorities, with little obvious concession by the U.S. Notably, however, the White House appears to be reversing course on its previous threats to tie trade discussions to security concerns, like China’s attempted territorial expansion in the South China Sea.

“It’s great the two sides took advantage of this opportunity to call a truce,” said Andy Rothman, investment strategist at Matthews Asia. “The two sides appear to have had a major change of heart to move away from confrontation toward engagement. This changes the tone and direction of the bilateral conversation.”

The Trump-Xi meeting was the marquee event of Trump’s whirlwind two-day trip to Argentina for the G-20 summit after the president canceled a sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin over mounting tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Trump also canceled a Saturday news conference, citing respect for the Bush family following the death of former President George H.W. Bush.

Trump said Bush’s death put a “damper” on what he described as a “very important meeting” with Xi.

The United States and China are locked in a dispute over their trade imbalance and Beijing’s tech policies. Washington accuses China of deploying predatory tactics in its tech drive, including stealing trade secrets and forcing American firms to hand over technology in exchange for access to the Chinese market.

Trump has imposed import taxes on $250 billion in Chinese products — 25 percent on $50 billion worth and 10 percent on the other $200 billion. Trump had planned to raise the tariffs on the $200 billion to 25 percent if he couldn’t get a deal with Xi.

China has already slapped tariffs on $110 billion in U.S. goods.

Under the agreement reached in Buenos Aires, the two countries have 90 days to resolve their differences over Beijing’s tech policies. If they can’t, the higher U.S. tariffs will go into effect on the $200 billion in Chinese imports.

U.S. officials insist that the American economy is more resilient to the tumult than China’s, but they remain anxious of the economic effects of a prolonged showdown — as Trump has made economic growth the benchmark by which he wants his administration judged.

A full-blown resolution was not expected to be reached in Buenos Aires; the issues that divide them are just too difficult.

Growing concerns that the trade war will increasingly hurt corporate earnings and the U.S. economy are a key reason why U.S. stock prices have been sinking this fall.

Joining other forecasters, economists at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development last week downgraded their outlook for global economic growth next year to 3.5 percent from a previous 3.7 percent. In doing so, they cited the trade conflict as well as political uncertainty.

The U.S. and China also made progress on the regulation of fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin. U.S. officials for years have been pressing the Chinese government to take a tougher stance against fentanyl, and most U.S. supply of the drug is manufactured in China.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says China’s decision to label the drug as a controlled substance means that “people selling Fentanyl to the United States will be subject to China’s maximum penalty under the law.”

The White House also said that China’s government is “open to approving” the purchase of Dutch semiconductor manufacturer NXP by American chipmaker Qualcomm.

China nixed the proposed takeover earlier this year, citing antitrust concerns, after U.S. and European regulators approved the deal.

China’s decision earlier this year came amid a period of heightening tensions between the U.S. and China over trade and intellectual property issues.

Qualcomm announced it was dropping plans to proceed with the deal after it failed to receive Chinese government approval. It is unclear whether the transaction could be revived even with China’s acquiescence.

In other developments, Trump announced aboard Air Force One on his return to Washington from Buenos Aires that his next meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un would likely happen in January or February. He said there were three sites under consideration, but he declined to name them.

Trump also said he would shortly be providing formal notice to Congress that he will terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement, giving lawmakers six months to approve the replacement he signed Friday. He said lawmakers can choose between the replacement, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or nothing.

___

Wiseman reported from Washington.