amateur ramblings

In a conversation on the law student mailing list, one student, understandably upset about the loss of a favorite mug, shared a warning with others about thefts in the library. To the dismay of other students, however, the cautionary message also expressed frustration to the effect of “I hope to accomplish two things with this email: first, to express how ghetto it is that someone would steal property out of another student’s carrel….”

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As the House of Representatives passed its delusional resolution condemning the Goldstone Report last week, Congressman Kucinich forcefully objected: “Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist. Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking….“

Today marks the one year anniversary of November 13 2008. On this evening one year ago, a group of three Palestinian students holding flags in silent protest were violently confronted by a group of three concert organizers for the right-wing anti-Arab organization, Tikvah Students for Israel. Unsurprisingly, the assailants quickly tried to discredit their victims by reporting the story backwards, claiming they were the victims. Conflicting narratives do not a dispute of fact make, however, and while many were inclined to put faith in one group or another, it takes nothing less than a deliberate suspension of reason to refuse to acknowledge the bruises that appeared the next morning. (more…)

For the most part, public and explicit expressions of extreme hate or animosity towards racialized groups of people are pretty easy to identify as wrong. Despite this, in certain spaces, the infamous ‘harmless racist joke’ persists because, as the defender says, it is not to be taken as a serious communication of ill-will.

Examples of these jokes can sound something like this (and I apologize for repeating them):

• “How was the Grand Canyon formed? A Jew dropped a penny down a manhole!”
• “How do you blind an Asian woman? Put a windshield in front of her!”
• “What’s the difference between a pizza and a Mexican? A pizza can feed four!”

Of course, the person delivering this joke loves to glamorize him/herself as a bold hero who is not afraid of “being offensive” and won’t let something silly like “political correctness” get in the way of his/her free speech. In this First Amendment martyr’s world, not only should it simply be legal to tell the racist joke, but it’s also a moral duty to do so. It’s only humor, after all. (more…)

UC Berkeley student group Tikvah’s “Israeli Peace and Diversity Week” makes two claims about Israel that are simply not borne out by history. The first is that there is such a thing as Israeli peace, even in the wake of the recent Israeli massacres that killed over 1,300 people in Gaza and prompted Amnesty International to call for an arms embargo against Israel. The second is that the ethnocratic state of Israel embraces diversity. Neither could be further from the truth.

Israel is not a country of peace. It was founded after terrorist militias called the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah gerrymandered a Jewish majority state by forcibly expelling non-Jews from the land that became Israel in 1948. It later instated two racist laws that forbade those refugees from returning. The laws of absentee property appropriated all property belonging to refugees as state land and made its sale to non-Jews illegal. The Law of Return allowed any person of Jewish background around the world to immediately receive citizenship and move to Israel, even if they had no roots in the land. At the same time, Palestinians who were actually born there but forced to leave were not allowed to return because they might shift the demographics of the new state. Since then, there has been virtually no time at which Israel was not at war protecting the Jewish-supremacist institutions of the state. Both laws are still in effect. (more…)

Note: I wrote this when I was in Syria last summer. I’ve decided to publish it in the hopes of starting a discussion on the nature of the freedoms we tend to discuss in political activism in different parts of the world. At the very heart of it, the question is, what kind of freedom do states produce? The guiding logic is that the biggest threat to the state is a desire for freedom from the state.

In Syria, a number of sites like Facebook are blocked. The official reason has been security. The common response has been, “citizens’ rights are being violated.” Granted, it is easy enough to agree with the latter perspective: it is certainly more troublesome than it ought to be to access these sites, but more than a few of the Internet cafes I’ve come across in Damascus have found a way to get around the block. What I am interested in exploring, though, is the degree to which we can say that it is not actually a contradiction to believe in both the reason for the block, as well as the opposition to it. In other words, are state security and the liberal rights which justify the opposition to the block incompatible with one another, or do they in fact complement one another? It might appear here that I am trying to reconcile the two perspectives in order to find some imagined ‘happy balance’: in fact, I am only trying to show that they were never even separate in the first place to require reconciliation. Further, when I say that the first point should be “believed,” I am in fact not endorsing it, but only trying to make the point that there might be a connection between the “freedoms” we think we have in some places, and the extensiveness of “security” apparatuses in those places. (more…)

The ASUC is the elected student government at UC Berkeley. Composed of five executives and twenty senators, its most important task is to distribute money to student organizations. Many people believe that the ASUC can, in some sense, be an activist tool for “change.” Unfortunately, I don’t think this is true, despite having believed it to be the case earlier. I will argue that fixation on the ASUC is actually harmful to progressive activists and causes in the long-term. Further, I will argue that in the long-term, the legitimacy bestowed upon the ASUC actually disempowers students in their relationship with the University administration and as far as ownership over campus spaces is concerned.

First, a few myths about the ASUC.

Myth: The ASUC is the student voice.

Students’ voices are the students’ voices. While students may come to a consensus on some issues, they cannot on all issues. Furthermore, a unanimous voice on anything of substance is almost unimaginable. When the ASUC proclaims itself to be the student voice, it actually attempts to monopolize legitimate expression in the student body. That may not be the intention, but it is the effect. To defend the ASUC by claiming that any voice may join the ASUC given enough votes only re-affirms the point that a voice must be present in the ASUC to be legitimate, when that is not the case. (more…)

Background: On Nov 13, 2008, three members of the Zionist Freedom Alliance, including current ASUC Senator John Moghtader, stormed up several flights of stairs in Eshleman Hall to confront three Palestinian students who silently held Palestinian flags on a balcony  above a ZFA event to protest the group’s anti-Palestinian message. An altercation ensued in which the Palestinian students claim they were attacked by the ZFA members, and the ZFA members claim the opposite. UCPD recommended charges be filed against the ZFA members, but the DA did not press charges. Now the Zionist Organization of America intervenes, likely at the request of members of the  ZFA or Tikvah.

A few days ago, Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) issued a press release urging UC Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau to address “Campus Anti-Semitism and Israel-Bashing.” The phone contact was in the 212 area code, nowhere close to Berkeley. Remember that, because it tells us much of what we need to know to see how flawed the ZOA’s press release and letter to Birgeneau (which reads like the pre-cursor to a lawsuit) are.

There are many contentious and mostly false claims made in the ZOA’s press release, but I will focus primarily on the sections related to the Nov 13 attack on Palestinian students as well as the ensuing recall election of John Moghtader, the Senator who was kicked out of the SQUELCH party, president of Tikvah, and sponsor of the ASUC bill funding the Zionist Freedom Alliance (ZFA) concert.

I will disclose, if it is not obvious already, that I believe in the victims’ narrative of what happened, that after they silently hung a Palestinian flag in protest on a balcony above a concert for the ZFA–an organization which openly advocates the “elimination” of Palestinians–three ZFA organizers, including Moghtader, ran up several flights of stairs to confront the Palestinian students on the balcony. I will concede, however, that besides people close to either “side” of this encounter, who tend to believe their friends, no third party in Berkeley has really bothered or felt confident enough to take a stand either way. That includes the Daily Californian, the Berkeley Daily Planet, Jewish News Weekly SF, the Dean of Students, Chancellor Birgeneau, and the District Attorney, all of whom agree on only one thing: that they can’t decide who to believe because the evidence consists of diametrically opposed stories coming from the attackers and the victims. Someone is lying, but nobody can decide who. (more…)

Recent weeks have seen the appearance of a group called the Zionist Freedom Alliance at UC Berkeley. It is not clear at this point what the group’s affiliation is with Tikvah, however all the major members of Tikvah work with the Alliance, which sponsored Israeli Liberation Week.

The Zionist Freedom Alliance reflects the desperate and doomed status of right-wing Zionism in the United States. In tactics, it adopts thuggery, aggression, and violence in the style of Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the terrorist organization the Jewish Defense League (which Tikvah links to on its Facebook group). It also romanticizes the Irgun, a Zionist militia group which carried out dozens of attacks on civilians in the 1930s and 40s. In rhetoric, it pretends social justice, national liberation, and anti-imperialism. Overall, it symbolizes a failing attempt to maintain victim status for the State of Israel, which possesses the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East as well as the world’s 5th most powerful military. (more…)

As soon as Obama finished giving his acceptance speech, crowds of students began to gather in the streets of Berkeley. By the time I melded myself into the march somewhere on Durant Avenue, hundreds of students had already amassed. We ran down Durant feeling that a huge weight was off our shoulders, that there were only better days ahead. As we rejoiced, preparing to say goodbye forever to those familiar faces of the Bush regime, it dawned on me that we had no idea where we were going. Where was this march headed? (more…)

I put this graph together to get a visual representation of how much an individual person’s vote is worth when translated into an electoral college vote. I did this by dividing the number of electoral votes per state, by the population of each state. According to these numbers, each citizen of Wyoming has four times as much of an electoral vote as a citizen of Texas. The graph is scaled up by 1,000,000 so that it can be indexed by whole numbers. Population statistics are taken from here.

Of course, this representation is not accurate except in a world where everybody votes regardless of their age. In reality, the actual vote you cast will not be worth what the table used to make the graph claims.

First, you run the risk of your vote having no impact whatsoever on the electoral college if you vote for a losing candidate in your state. That means that you and your neighbors have to fight amongst each other over who will even get to have a vote in the electoral college. If your candidate wins in your state, you’re probably taking away your neighbor’s vote.

Second, the numbers are based on population, not on actual voter turnout per state. The lower voter turnout is in your state, the more your individual vote is worth if your candidate has won. Since a large percentage of the population in many states is not qualified to vote, either due to age or other reasons, the numbers could change dramatically, though I have no idea whether it would much affect the relationship between states. The turnout thing is a real zinger: if turnout in some states is significantly lower than turnout in other states, the votes in the first state are worth more than votes in the second state.

What this graph really says is, “if everybody who lived in every state could vote, this is how much each vote would be worth.” But of course, not everybody who lives in every state can vote, nor will everybody who can vote, actually vote: so this is only a theoretical example, though it illustrates how undemocratic the voting system is under perfect conditions.

I plan to create a follow-up graph after the election based on actual voter turnout to see who actually chose the President. That one will be more interesting.