amateur ramblings

Six months ago, I wrote an article for The Electronic Intifada raising questions about Palestine Note’s funding and editorial style. Of its two founding funders, Hani Masri donated money to notoriously anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab Congressman Anthony Weiner, and Abul Huda Farouki contracted with the US military to provide material support for the occupation of Iraq. To make matters more problematic, its editorial style privileged the voices of Israeli Jews over those of Palestinians, creating an image of symmetry or balance where in reality a huge power imbalance exists.

Today, Palestine Note’s determination to violate Palestinian civil society’s call for solidarity persists undeterred. It has come to my attention that the website knowingly and prominently displays a social networking bar at the bottom of its site that is produced by an Israeli company called Wibiya. (more…)

“The U.S. has not made any declaration regarding the State of Israel and, therefore, we will not bring a recommendation before the Board to divest from companies doing business with the State of Israel.”

– UC President Mark Yudof, UC Regents Chairman Russell Gould, and UC Regents Vice Chair Sherry Lansing

UC President Mark Yudof — who the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has called “an unabashed Israel supporter” and who has previously compared the UC to a cemetery — has weighed in against UC Berkeley’s divestment initiative, laying out a bizarre formula for UC investments that sets the bar so low it would have prevented UC divestment from South Africa during the apartheid era.

Under the Yudof doctrine, the UC Regents would only divest from a foreign country if the United States government had decided that the country had engaged in acts of genocide. Apparently that is the only standard under which Israel can continue to escape scrutiny by the UC Regents. But the policy has implications beyond the Israeli occupation of Palestine, for under this rule the UC Regents would not be able to modify its investment policy in order to alleviate a host of other social harms, such as the occupation of Tibet, slave labor, human trafficking, any government practices that are racist, sexist, homophobic and otherwise dehumanizing. It clearly leaves much to be desired in the human rights arena.

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Perhaps the most important success of the divestment movement at Berkeley has been overlooked. Yes, it is true that a super majority of the student senate supported divestment from Israeli war crimes and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. It is true that the vote was reversed only after pro-Israel mobilization kicked in to remind people where the interests of power reside. It is true that it was thus clear to all, including the flip-flopping senators, what the “right” thing to do was. It was also clear that the right thing to do, would not be the easy thing to do.

Yet the greater success lies elsewhere. While many have hailed the diversity of the bill’s proponents, few have pointed out that these coalitions were built in spite of extensive and expensive campaigns by pro-Israel propagandists to conjure an image of Israel as the natural cause for people of color, queer communities, and other progressive-minded activists working on environmental issues. In and of itself this is a huge victory for Palestinians and their supporters, and a huge defeat for the Israeli propaganda machine.

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Following the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning political speech restrictions on corporations and unions, a chorus of voices from the Democratic Party has attacked the decision. Notably, President Obama claimed in his State of the Union address that the ruling “will open the floodgates for special interests… to spend without limit in our elections.”

I think we are missing the point. The fact is that corporate, special, and powerful interests already have effective control of our political system. As Jon Stewart’s coverage of the State of the Union effectively shows, our public discourse is already in the shits. Fox offered only vapid criticisms, saying the President was not acting “presidential” — whatever the hell that means. MSNBC the most desperate praises; and CNN the most useless collection of raw data from Twitter. This is the discourse we desperately need to save, say the Democrats?

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What the CIA looks like to the rest of the world.

There is no doubt that the families of CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan have personal tragedies to attend to. However, is it a public tragedy? For it is no less the case that those hundreds and thousands of civilians–indeed even combatants–killed by Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and now all over the world, also have families who mourn and continue to mourn for them. (more…)

One need not agree with whatever happened at the Chancellor’s mansion to resist the administration’s attempt to co-opt independent student forces by soliciting their blanket condemnation of the incident.

Governor Schwarzenegger finally took notice of public education after the incident, calling individuals who were allegedly involved “terrorists.” Earlier today the Chancellor and his PR spokesperson Dan Mogulof echoed a similar approach, calling them “extremists.” Of course, we have no idea what actually happened yet, or if police provocateurs played any role, but it is clear that with this incident the administration and police hope to obtain a pretext to further suppress student organizing efforts. Students should not give it to them — even if they disagree with what their peers are accused of doing. (more…)

UC Berkeley administrators are still dodging responsibility for police brutality on Berkeley’s campus during the occupation of Wheeler Hall on November 20. Measures that have been announced are meant to distract the campus community from the crucial fact that the problem is not necessarily with policing policy, but rather with policing as a policy. (more…)

Artificial rivalries between offensively similar elite centers of privilege are noxious enough in their own right, but when they foster elitism and prejudice, they become dangerous.

In last Friday’s edition of YDN, Bijan Aboutorabi argues that, in withdrawing a t-shirt design calling the rival-but-mirror-image team “sissies,” a university committee tasked with facilitating this crass competition produced solid evidence of “the kind of conversations the doctrine of political correctness has left us.” Aboutorabi mistakenly applies a free speech analysis to evaluate the decision, claiming that “with the words ‘I am offended!,’ any member of a community [can] decide what is or is not acceptable to say,” and that such a condition is “inimical to our ideals of free expression.” Aboutorabi is wrong on all counts. (more…)

Following the occupation of Wheeler Hall on Friday November 20, former Student Action Senator Tara Raffi penned a regrettable op-ed decrying the protest and its participants. I know Raffi, who has always been kind and respectful towards me, but her demeanor cannot save her claims from criticism or scrutiny.

Unfortunately Raffi’s column appears to misapprehend crucial facts both about the strikes and the situation facing the university. For one, Raffi draws an offensive and elitist image of the protesters. Second, she imputes onto the strikers a simplicity and ignorance that is simply dishonest given all that has been discussed at campus teach-in’s and in various fora that allow for more elaboration than a protest placard or chant. Third, she takes for granted that University administrators are acting in students’ interests (as if students cannot decide for themselves their own interests) and lets them off the hook when they should actually be spending every conscious moment lobbying on behalf of students. (more…)

Please forward to UC faculty, grad students, and friends

Dear UC Faculty and Friends,

There are few words that can describe the horror of police violence against students on UC Berkeley’s campus Friday November 20. Chancellor Birgeneau’s dispatches to the campus community, most recently those today pre-empting a critical outrage to what transpired, are disgraceful and must be met with a forceful response by UC faculty and students. What started as aggressive and unjustified provocation by UCPD was soon supplemented by the vicious behavior of officers from Berkeley Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriff. As students peaceably assembled in support of those occupying Wheeler Hall, Chancellor Birgeneau ordered or approved the deployment of hundreds of police brandishing their batons to beat the spirit of ownership out of them.

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