I just read the talk Ward Churchill gave at the University of Colorado and I could almost feel the energy. It was really good to read and really good to know that he is going to be fighting this, and the tone of it all was just right. This was the best part of the speech for me:
Author: Justin Podur
Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction.
Mechanisms of Denial
A couple of weeks ago I discussed an event I attended at ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ at the University of Toronto.
One of the speakers at that event was Ilan Pappe, who I interviewed the following day. The interview is published on ZNet. Check it out.
Mechanisms of Denial: Interviewing Ilan Pappe
http://www.zcommunications.org/mechanisms-of-denial-by-ilan-pappe
lan Pappe is a professor of History at Haifa University in Israel. He is an activist for Palestinian rights. He was in Toronto in February to give the keynote speech at ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ at the University of Toronto. He was interviewed by telephone on February 5, 2005.
Continue reading “Mechanisms of Denial: Interviewing Ilan Pappe”
Lynne Stewart files
A speech by Lynne Stewart… continuing on yesterday’s discussion.
Colombia’s movements are at it again…
In particular, the indigenous and popular congress that moved the country in October 2004 is trying to make a popular consultation against the FTA happen. It’s starting at the beginning of March 2005. You’ll be hearing more about it here…
Free Speech continues
Of course I forgot the Lynne Stewart case in my attempt to chronicle the decline of such liberal traditions as exist in the US. Here’s a piece on it by David Cole of the Nation. It’s not the most solidaristic piece, but it’s got info.
And another decent piece about the turns the Ward Churchill attacks are taking by Lyons.
I will try to get to the Chavez-Uribe meeting that happened on the 15th and some Nepal stuff tomorrow.
What to do with torturers and tortured
A bizarre story from the Los Angeles Times, David G. Savage yesterday (Feb 15). Some US pilots – presumably engaged in the high-tech mass murder of some 100,000 people in Iraq in 1991 (see Blum’s ‘Killing Hope’ for some introductory documentation) – were captured as prisoners of war.
They were awarded $1B from Iraq by a US federal judge as compensation for their treatment by Iraq. The US government is now trying to prevent that $1B from going to the pilots.
According to Savage, this action by the US government pits it “squarely against its own war heroes and the Geneva Convention”.
A bad wind is blowing
These are bad times for this whole business of free speech.
It is easily enough protected in theory. It just takes a lot of people who understand what it is and are willing to use it enough to defend it.
In practice, that is lacking. The results are bad. They are getting worse.
Let’s start with the latest.
After the CNN Blog Swarm
So, the US killed some journalists in Iraq.
There was al-Jazeera’s Tariq Ayoub. Some time after he was killed the US effectively banned al-Jazeera from Iraq. In the previous US war, al-Jazeera’s offices in Afghanistan were bombed.
There were some European journalists who were killed early in the war; Fisk and others wrote about it.
Al Franken and Liberal Limits
In keeping with the Killing Train’s tendency to stay well behind the times, I got around to reading ‘Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them’ by Al Franken, the 2004 paperback version.
It was interesting. Funny at times. He does a good job debunking the various appalling things done by the likes of Anne Coulter and Bill O’Reilly.