Justin Podur

Colombian Government’s Counteroffensive

Vicente Otero was once the elected mayor of the small Colombian town of Caldono in the department of Cauca. He was instrumental in the Nasa indigenous movement’s recent referendum against the Free Trade Agreement, in which record numbers participated and in which the FTA was unanimously rejected. He has long been an important leader in the indigenous movement for autonomy and peace. On the morning of May 19 at 6am, Colombian police and secret agents raided his house. He was not home. The only people home during the read were Otero’s 11-year old son and his mentally ill younger brother. They entered, took his literature on the FTA and his computer and planted a radio, a rocket, and a grenade. They are now claiming that he had an ‘arsenal’ in his home. The idea that Otero had an arsenal in his house is preposterous on every level. A lifelong pacifist, well-known political organizer and leader in the indigenous movement, Otero is well-versed in indigenous methods of solving problems and works intimately with the ‘guardia indigena’, the unarmed ‘indigenous guards’ who ensure security throughout the region with only the prestige symbolized in the batons they carry. Today Otero is in hiding, awaiting guarantees of his security, an apology, and the clearing of his name by those agencies who have planted false evidence in order to implicate him.

Otero would not be the first person from the indigenous communities of Northern Cauca to be framed in this way. Twenty-one others have been detained and taken off to Cali (Colombia’s second largest city), all community members from the town of Jambalo, over the past several days (12 on May 9 and 9 more on May 10). Four days later the Army’s Third Brigade announced that they had already ‘judged’ the community members for their ‘links’ to FARC.

This is an established pattern of government repression in indigenous territory. In January 2004, 8 people from Toribio – mine workers, farmers, craftspeople – were pointed out by someone wearing a ski mask and taken to Popayan (the site of Cauca’s biggest prison) by a group of heavily armed police and military personnel. They were later shown on television with weapons none of them had ever seen before. They army claimed they had captured high-level guerrilla commanders. The community knew better, but the prisoners rotted in jail with no rights to face their accusers, no rights to see the evidence against them, and no rights to a jury trial.

The pattern is escalating. DAS (Colombia’s secret police) officers announced to the press on May 19 that 200 other indigenous people from northern Cauca will be arrested this weekend (May 21-22) for ‘supposed links to FARC’. The idea that the secret police could announce an exact number – one could call it a quota – of Indians it is planning on arresting in advance of the arrest, and have the figure published in the papers, makes an utter mockery of any notion of a justice system in which evidence, charges, or law matters. The language of the article describing the announcement, published in ‘El Tiempo’ on May 19, betrays the racism: ‘Agents from DAS, the Army, and the Attorney-General’s office raided various houses in Caldono looking for Indians and war materials,’ the leading paragraph proclaimed, placing the region’s people and various inanimate objects in the same category.

Added to frame-ups by the government are death threats from paramilitaries. On May 16, Hollman Morris, a television journalist who is well-known in Colombia for his documentaries, received a bouquet of funeral flowers at his office, accompanied by a note announcing his death. Another journalist, Carlos Lozano, received the same death threat that day. Hollman Morris’s most recent work has been on – the indigenous movement in Northern Cauca, the march against the FTA, and the recent military attacks and campaigns taking place there. Prior to his stories on Cauca, Hollman did a special on the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado.

The ‘Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyer’s Collective’ is based in the department of Antioquia, the same department as the community of San Jose de Apartado. Its lawyers document and organize around human rights abuses. About a week ago the president of the collective, Soraya Gutierrez, received a dismembered doll in the mail with a death threat against her family. The lawyer’s collective has been one of the loudest voices bringing to light information about the most recent army/paramilitary massacre against San Jose de Apartado, in which 8 people were brutally murdered on February 21, bringing the total of murders against the people of Apartado to 150 over the past 8 years. Apartado’s members have decided that they want no part of the armed conflict and have a declared stance of ‘active neutrality’ in it. For that, they have been savagely attacked over years. As in Northern Cauca, the military attacks against civilians were accompanied by vicious and slanderous accusations against the very community that had suffered the massacres: President Uribe himself accused the Peace Community of collaborating with guerrillas. As in Northern Cauca, the slanders were followed up with paramilitary action against outside supporters of the community (Hollman Morris in Cauca, and Soraya Gutierrez in Antioquia).

Hollman Morris was threatened for his coverage of the quickly evolving military and political situation in Apartado and also in Northern Cauca. On April 14, 2005, Colombia’s main guerrilla group, the FARC, attacked various towns in Northern Cauca, a department in the South west of the country. The government counterattacked immediately, but the FARC were not dislodged. Militarily, the attack was a demonstration of power. The Colombian President, Alvaro Uribe Velez, had assumed power in 2002 on a platform of eradicating the guerrillas and abandoning peace dialogues or agreements. His principal military policy was called ‘Plan Patriota’, and consisted of a major military offensive in the south of the country. The offensive was barely contested by FARC, and both Uribe and the Colombian military became smug. Then FARC launched a number of spectacular attacks last month, announcing that they had not, in fact, been eliminated, and they could take, and even hold, parts of the national territory, against the Colombian army.

But parallel to the military campaigns and deeper than them is the real Colombian war: the war against the civilian population of the country, its organizations and its leaders. FARC’s offensive in Northern Cauca attacked the very heart of Colombia’s indigenous movement, where indigenous leaders have patiently and courageously built autonomous institutions for their own development and governance over decades, as well as their own mechanisms for peace, conflict resolution, and demilitarization of the zone. One of the leaders of this indigenous project is Vicente Otero. One of the principal effects of the combats in Northern Cauca has been to militarize the region and undermine the indigenous political project. Colombian analysts like Daniel Garcia-Pena, who was active in the peace process in the 1990s, argued that the FARC’s offensive was a military success but, since it showed disregard for the indigenous movement and for the civilian population, it was a political failure. Now the government, having failed in its military counterattack against FARC, is engaging in dirty political war against the country’s social movements.

As his secret police were raiding the houses of political activists and announcing plans to arrest hundreds more, as his army was bundling innocent civilians off to jail without charges, as journalists who covered these abuses were receiving death threats in the mail from paramilitaries, Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe Velez was angrily making a public statement denying that he has any paramilitary links. He was responding to accusations by other politicians (Horacio Serpa and Enrique Penalosa) that he is close to the paramilitaries. He told them they should produce proof if they want to make such accusations. In fact, producing such proof is no real challenge (see, for example, this interview with human rights activist Javier Giraldo from 2004: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5156). But if Uribe is arguing that public accusations ought not to be made without proof, lest they cause harm and damage to individuals and communities, he should put this principle into practice. Northern Cauca and San Jose de Apartado would be a good place to start.

Some of the leaders of Northern Cauca’s indigenous movement were on the Pacifica Radio Program Democracy Now! On May 20: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/20/1425246

Palestinians in Israel’s Prisons: Interviewing Sahar Francis

http://www.zcommunications.org/palestinians-in-israels-prisons-by-sahar-francis

Sahar Francis is a lawyer and human rights advocate in the Occupied Territories. She works with Addameer (www.addameer.org) in Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank on political prisonerâ€™s rights campaigns. In April 2005, she was part of a North American tour organized by Sumoud (http://sumoud.tao.ca) to raise issues of Palestinian prisoners internationally. I interviewed her in Toronto.

Justin Podur (JP): Can you introduce us to your organization, Addameer?

Continue reading “Palestinians in Israel’s Prisons: Interviewing Sahar Francis”

Colombian government acts quickly to stop a crime spree!

A crime epidemic has affected Colombia! But not to worry. Despite accusations that it is selective in its application of justice, Uribe’s administration and its military and paramilitary apparatus have come to the rescue.

Continue reading “Colombian government acts quickly to stop a crime spree!”

My weekend in London (Ontario)

I attended the London (Ontario) Palestine Film Festival over the weekend. There were some great films shown. I was there to visit friends and to be on a panel on media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict. The panel was shown after the film ‘Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land’ (I follow Bollywood convention and abbreviate this film to P3L). All of the films were, in my opinion, excellent. In the order that I preferred them, from excellent to superb, here are some brief descriptions.

Continue reading “My weekend in London (Ontario)”

Reporters without borders is a sham

There is something peculiar about the way colonialism works today. The most sophisticated colonial projects use the rhetoric of human rights, democracy, and even anti-racism in their favour. This has a profoundly immobilizing effect on those who are actually trying to support struggles for self-determination. All the ‘democracy promotion’ that’s been going on at the hands of the US in recent years is a case in point. A very important example is ‘Reporters Without Borders’. Take a look at Salim Lamrani’s article on that institution, and you will see what I mean. Serious anti-imperialists are going to have to do some serious thinking about how to deal with all this stuff. It is very important in demobilizing our potential constituency.

Thanks Kole for holding it down over the past few days.

Report from (just outside) the shareholder’s meeting of a Canadian war profiteer

I have had the honour of participating in a so-far small but I believe politically important campaign against Canadian war profiteering, focusing on a corporation called SNC-Lavalin. I gave a long talk to a group about the topic, with some information on the corporation and some thoughts on related issues, a few months ago. Today, the shareholder’s meeting of SNC-Lavalin in Toronto, was, in a sense, our first test.

The action started at 10am, since the meeting started an hour later. Turnout was small, and there are several reasons for this. The first and most obvious is that Canadian war profiteering, despite being a long tradition, is not well known and indeed, while most Canadians are against the war and occupation in Iraq, most Canadians also think Canada isn’t participating in the war and occupation in Iraq. So there’s the chicken-and-egg problem of needing to do actions like this to raise the issue, and that such actions will be limited in size so long as the issue is not well-known…

There are also serious organizational and resource limitations. I know personally many of the organizers of today’s event, and I can tell you that they are a bunch of fanatically devoted hard-working people who are stretched to the gills with the amount of work they are doing, with essentially no resources. Along with organization there’s also logistics – the shareholders might be able to go to the meeting during business hours. The only demonstrators who could go were folks who work in the afternoon or evening, or students, who were most of the demonstrators.

Adding to these difficulties was the appalling behaviour of the police. This is to be expected, and is taken for granted, unfortunately, but there were a few dozen people mobilized to raise issues that are of life-and-death for millions of people (and death for tens of thousands already), and the police responded with horses, paddy wagons, special surveillance equipment, and plenty of plain nastiness. They made several arrests that seemed to me to have been motivated by pure vindictiveness (and possibly training, wanting to try out violent techniques on more or less helpless people in a street setting). One of the arrests was far closer to a kidnapping, with several huge armed men nabbing a kid after the demonstration had already ended and speeding off in an unmarked vehicle. It was shameful for the macho posturing and for the political message conveyed – no the two are doubt related. The organizational and personal costs of these arrests are high, especially since those singled out for arrest were some of the most energetic and inspiring people who will now have to deal with whatever trumped-up charges the state will come up with.

For something to set against all these costs, I believe the demonstration was a political victory. Indeed, the costs might have ‘overshadowed’ the victory for us, but according to the Canadian Press article about the meeting, SNC’s first-quarter profit was ‘overshadowed’ by our protest.

The CEO of SNC-Lavalin, Jacques Lamarre, also provided (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps perfectly wittingly) proof, as if it was necessary, that Canada’s participation in the Iraq occupation should not be considered to be merely a matter of corporate participation, but was in fact official government policy. “As long as the Canadian government tells us you can sell to the U.S. government, we will do it,” he was quoted on the newswires saying. “We never make any sale . . . which is not 100 per cent approved and reviewed by the Canadian government.”

Tells something about the relationship between a corporation like SNC and the state, if the violently disproportionate behaviour of the police was insufficient to do so.

(On a more personal note, I had an odd verbal exchange with a police officer who I at first thought was merely trying to run me over with his bicycle, but turned out had come over to call me an ‘anti-semite’ for mentioning Israel/Palestine during my brief turn at the megaphone. You see, from what we’re able to tell, SNC-Lavalin is involved in building highways and settler-only roads in Israel and the occupied territories, and is thus helping apartheid and occupation there as well. I mentioned this role, and mentioned as well the well-documented and widespread use of torture by Israel against the Palestinians, showing how occupation and torture go together in Israel/Palestine as in Iraq. The officer said something like: ‘You know, I am just here to do a job, I didn’t have any problem with you people, but then you bring this anti-Jewish stuff into it. You’re a bunch of anti-semites’. I replied that it wasn’t about Jews. He said, approximately, that I didn’t know anything about it, because I hadn’t been there. I said I probably knew more than he thought, and that I’d been to Jenin. He said he’d been to Israel and that they were fighting a war there (suggesting, perhaps, that he was a volunteer in the Israeli army?) I knew nothing about. (He was quite wrong. I’ve seen his war. ) This went on for a while – I suppose I am sensitive to being called a racist, even when the person making the accusation is a violent racist himself. My friends thought I was putting myself in unnecessary danger talking to him. I suppose the image that came to my mind when he was talking to me wasn’t so much the wreckage that he and the people he identifies so strongly with have wrought on the people he has such contempt for that he can’t even acknowledge they exist – see Junaid Alam’s article, linked just above, for an interesting discussion of this – but Neta Golan, at the Qalandiya checkpoint, trying to reason with a similar fellow saying and doing similar things. That was a long time ago now, and I’m not Neta. But enough about that all.)

Threats from the smugglers and the drug people

Lots on Northern Cauca coming – Uribe’s made his political countermove, trying to undermine the indigenous organization. I’ll get some stuff on ACIN’s response soon.

Meantime though, let me report on a rather bizarre experience I had on the weekend. I attended the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Canada (CAIR-Can) fundraiser on Saturday evening. CAIR-Can is an advocacy organization. It does media relations work, tries to educate Canadian society about Islam and Muslim-Canadians, and raises some civil liberties as well. That was my interest, and the interest of the group I was with that attended. In particular, we went to hear Maher Arar speak. Maher Arar, you’ll recall, is the Syrian-Canadian who had the misfortune of traveling through the United States, which was enough to get him shipped off to Syria for 10 months of torture. He gave a speech critical of the federal government’s bill C-36, Canada’s own ‘anti-terrorism’, anti-civil-liberties law. The head of CAIR-Can gave Maher Arar an award. He made a nice little speech at that point about the difference between ‘advocacy’ and ‘activism’. Maher Arar had said he wanted to be called an ‘advocate’ not an ‘activist’, because Arar considers himself unworthy of the title ‘activist’. So the head of CAIR-Can said he was obliged to call Arar an ‘activist’ because to him, an ‘activist’ was someone who suffers personally and makes sacrifices for the cause, while an ‘advocate’ is more detached. That makes Arar an activist (and I suppose it makes me an advocate!)

None of that was the bizarre part. The bizarre part was who else was speaking. Among the attendees was Lloyd Axworthy, former Canadian Foreign Minister. Some people I talked to thought Axworthy’s speech was completely incoherent. I disagreed. I think Axworthy’s speech was a coherent intellectual formulation of Canadian imperialism. In order to create such a formulation, Axworthy had to engage in some serious myth-making. But that was no problem for the established politician.

Axworthy began by telling a story of how he was in Egypt the week before. Egypt’s (I’ll just insert a little reminder that Egypt is a client state of the US with little pretense of any democracy whose President ‘wins’ elections by margins of 99%) Foreign Minister talked about the ‘flowering of democracy in the Middle East’ (that would be one of the myths) and asked ‘where is Canada’?

Lloyd challenged the audience with that question. He suggested Canada had been too isolationist since the trauma of 9/11 (that would strike me as another myth – for one, Canada wasn’t struck by 9/11, and I don’t think there was much national trauma there, and for another, that ‘national trauma’ didn’t stop Canada from occupying Haiti – but we’ll get back to Haiti in a second). He then discussed how Ethiopia and Eritrea are having a border conflict that is devastating, and how Canadians got obsessed with their border too.

Then the – ahem – BS started to flow fast and furious. He described what he called the ‘turmoils’ in Iraq, ‘the Middle East’ (don’t say ‘Israel’, Lloyd, much less ‘Palestine’), Sudan, Congo, Uganda. He described a world where ‘threats’ like a disease nobody knew could reach Toronto. He described the framework he built as foreign minister, one of ‘human security’, because individuals face threats. These threats?

The fanatics, the warlords, the drug people, the smugglers. An underworld of power. Information technology can bring them into your living room, to rip society, overwhelm security, and destroy the young.

(The whole rant was worthy of Tom Ridge when he used to declare those orange alerts, really).

So to deal with these ‘threats’, Lloyd formulated ‘human security’ and ‘the Responsibility to Protect’. The test case for this was Kosovo, where they took responsibility and protected the people (by bombing). An interesting test case, that, and one I won’t go into here (there’s an archive at ZNet if you’re looking for some)

‘Responsibility to protect’, Lloyd said, would protect small states from big ones (like it protected Iraq from the US? Or Haiti from Canada/France/US? Or the Congo from Rwanda? Or…) The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ was the antidote to those who wanted to divide the world into ‘civilizations’ (I guess Lloyd was talking about Huntington), divide the world into those ‘inside’ and ‘outside the law’ (I guess he was talking about the US with their concept of ‘enemy combatants’, but he certainly didn’t say so). We shouldn’t let 9/11 force us to draw inward, he said (strange way of being drawn inward, ousting governments and occupying countries), but we should open the door to the future.

Really, ‘Responsibility to Protect’ is just another term for ‘White Man’s Burden’.

By now you’re probably wondering why I called this coherent. There’s a reason. Now I just read Walden Bello’s ‘Dilemmas of Domination’ and its effect was the opposite of the one the author intended. He was arguing that the empire is weak: it made me think that the empire is stronger than he thinks. I don’t think the collapse is going to happen any time soon, and I think when it comes it could very well take all of us with it. But I suspect that well before that happens, there will be some testing of strategic alternatives. The Bush people are a particularly nasty kind of imperialism – they offer nothing to their subjects, very little even rhetorically. Lloyd sketches out a kinder, gentler seeming way. The same dirty deeds can get done, but without the clumsy (or is it just brazen?) contempt for the pretense of legitimacy exhibited by the Bush people. Canada’s historic role in imperialism, exemplified in the Vietnam war, has always been like this. Canada’s the good cop – a better analogy would be the doctor who shows up to help keep the torture victim alive so the torture can proceed for longer.

A testament to Lloyd’s incoherence, as opposed to his being understood for what he was really saying: he got a standing ovation.

Cauca Update

There is a great deal going on in Colombia even beyond Cauca. I am a bit backlogged in terms of article writing, but an article updating and explaining the situation throughout Colombia is definitely on the agenda. Meanwhile, some more information on the military and political situation in Northern Cauca.

I forgot to link here to the article I did a few days ago. on the topic. There is also an op-ed by Daniel Garcia-Pena Jaramillo, a very good analyst with long experience with the FARC and the government from when he was peace commissioner during the negotiations in the 1990s. His piece is on the political failure of the FARC. His last line expresses a disbelief that is widely felt.

Even worse than not speaking though, is not listening. I don’t understand a guerrilla organization that is indifferent to what the people say can aspire to be the army of the people.

Since he wrote his piece and I wrote mine the military confrontation continues. On April 28 the Colombian daily El Tiempo reported new combats in the towns of Jambalo and Tacueyo, which neighbours Toribio (I visited Jambalo briefly last year during my trip to Cauca and have several photos of Tacueyo in the photo essay on the movement). In Tacueyo three minors were injured by a pipe bomb.

These attacks have taken place since members of the community have begun to return. On April 25 El Tiempo reported that 5000 people who had left Toribio were returning. Mayor Arquimedes Vitonas expressed worries that “now will come the selective assassinations.” On April 26, the indigenous council of Jambalo reported that ‘in a gesture of nonviolent resistance the community of Jambalo has decided to remain in Permanent Assembly so long as the conditions under which they can return to their homes are absent.” (They assembled in the centre of town and camped there overnight – defying the armed actors who told them to leave.)

I believe the most important single piece of news in the area is the statement made by the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN), whose communique of two days ago demanded that the military organizations ‘silence the guns so words can be heard’. They call for 1) a ceasefire, 2) demilitarization of the region, and 3) commencement of negotiations toward a political solution to the conflict. A translation (I can’t take credit for it) of this communique is below.

URGENT COMMUNIQUÉ: “SILENCE THE GUNS SO WORDS CAN BE HEARD”

In face of the escalation of the war in our territory, and taking into account the difficult situation in which we are living, we the Nasa Paez communities reiterate before national an international opinion – as has already been expressed in the official communiqués of the ACIN beginning on April 15, 2005 (see www.nasaacin.net) – our call to a:

CEASE FIRE, COMPLETE DEMILITARIZATION OF THE AREA, AND THE BEGINNING OF CONVERSATIONS TO SEARCH FOR A NEGOTIATED SOLUTION TO THE ARMED CONFLICT IN COLOMBIA.

We say this taking into account our deep rejection of:

The declarations of Mr. President of the Republic Álvaro Uribe Vélez concerning his firm decision to “eradicate the guerrillas from Cauca” and no dialogue with terrorist groups until they put an end to their military actions (in the same way that has been done with the self-defense groups).

The continued presence and political pressure from the members of the FARC on the dwellers of a wide area of Northern Cauca and their expressed position of strengthening their military control in that territory.

Faced with these radical positions of the actors at war, we the indigenous peoples of the Northern zone of the department reiterate OUR DECLARATION OF A STATE OF HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCY until there exist true guarantees for human rights, international humanitarian law and, above all, for the community process of the indigenous communities.

We openly manifest that we the indigenous population, as a whole and as each individual person, are in imminent danger of being subjected to processes of legal prosecution or execution, currently or afterwards, by any one of the actors involved in the conflict.

“TO CONTINUE WITH ROOTS IN THE LAND”

ASSOCIATION OF INDIGENOUS TOWNSHIPS OF NORTHERN CAUCA (ACIN)
CAHB WALA KIWE

Buy any good languages lately?

Lots to report. New combats in Jambalo; the people of the communities have started returning to their homes; Nicaragua is exploding in protest; the Mexican electoral scandal in which the current President Fox was trying to prevent the leftist favourite for the 2006 election, Lopez Obrador, from being allowed to run, by the most outrageous convoluted procedure, seems to have ended with a total victory for Lopez Obrador (Mexico’s attorney general resigned); but I don’t have time tonight to explain any of it in detail. There will be more stuff on Cauca tomorrow, but if you need stuff on Mexico or Nicaragua you’ll probably have to ask for it in the comments section.

To tide you over for tonight I will pass you this note that I got that part of me simply can’t believe. It’s searingly written, and I haven’t seen anything about it elsewhere. See what you think.

Kahnawake Band Council Sells Mohawk Language to Microsoft

MNN. April 20, 2005. The Canadian government Department of Indian Affairs band council in Kahnawake is launching a “language” auction. They’re selling the Mohawk language to the highest bidder. They’re signing an agreement with multi-national corporation, Microsoft, to “co-develop an innovative Kanienkehaka language project”!

Section 4- Ownership of Work By Microsoft; License To Microsoft Materials states as follows: “The Mohawks” agree to dissolve all rights that we may have to any and all copyrights in the work and assigns all rights, title and interests over to Microsoft including but not limited to . the right to sue for infringements which may occur before the date of this Agreement, and to collect and retain damages from any such infringements..”

A Maori student visiting from New Zealand warned, “Language is a sacred thing not to be appropriated by Microsoft. This is how they co-opt our culture. Microsoft will make a lot of money on this. Now you have no river, no land, you don’t even have your own language. Your language is your essence of being and they are stealing it”. She said that the song of one of their people has been copyrighted by a football team down there. Now they can’t write about it unless they pay money to the football team.

Disgusting giveaway. The band council of Kahnawake is giving away the rights to the Mohawk language which our ancestors have been developing since Sky Woman fell to earth. This is an unprecedented insult. The band council cannot sign away our rights on behalf of us or the generations yet unborn. We will be opening ourselves up to policing and lawsuits by this mega corp which will become the ultimate authority on the use of our language.

No consultation. If Microsoft sincerely wishes to contribute its expertise to the Kanienkehaka people so that it can benefit from the wisdom collected and preserved in our language, it needs to come and meet with us, the People. Microsoft must present its project to a proper traditional consultation process. This agreement was made in secret. It is not legal because there was no valid consultation with the People.

The Kanienkehaka language belongs to the Kanienkehaka people. It has been passed down from one generation to the next since time immemorial – long before Europeans came here to colonize us. The language contains the collective knowledge and wisdom of all of our ancestors. It is our duty to learn it, preserve it and pass it on to the generations to come. It establishes our tie to our land where our ancestors have lived for thousands of years.

Tongue-tied! Most members of the current band council have neglected their duty to learn the language. They do not own it and yet they are selling it. The band council is always signing agreements that continuously put our nation, our people, our lands, and now even our language at risk.

Microsoft represents the conglomerate that massacred our ancestors, put us in concentration camps on our homeland, forced laws and ways meant to eliminate us. Now we are being forced to ask for their permission to speak and use our language!

The Kanienkehaka Onkwawen:na Raotitiohkwa Cultural Center in Kahnawake refused to support the agreement. They accused the band council of “knowingly and unilaterally agree[ing] to sell our intellectual property rights . to a foreign corporate entity that seek sto gain full ownership, monopoly and control of our language”. The band council rejects our traditional governments. They are creatures of the Canadian government created under their illegal Indian Act. The councilors commit themselves to defend and uphold the laws of Canada. This is proof that they have discarded their responsibility to their people.

Residential schools. From the time the Europeans arrived, our people have been subjected to colonization. Our children were forced into residential schools and denied the right to speak our language! In some schools almost 100% of the children died. Overall, around 50% did not come out of these institutions alive. Those who did lost their languages. In Kahnawake there were nuns and priests who had the same job, to force the Indian out of us. Kanienkeha is who we are. It is our identity. It defines our ties to the land and to each other. No one has ANY right to sell us! We the Kanienkehaka of Kahnawake must stand up now and defend ourselves

Tongue tax. As the agreement states, “In the event that taxes are required to be withheld on payment made under this Agreement by ANY government authority, Microsoft may deduct such taxes from the amount owed the Mohawks and pay them to the appropriate taxing authority”. In other words, Microssoft has agreed to be an instrument of colonization parasiting on our heritage. They want to cook our tongues for breakfast. The band council has agreed to chop off bits of our flesh to give to whatever bandit demands a slice of the action. And people called us “cannibals”! We Kanienkehaka will now be forced to pay taxes on the unique way we flip our tongues. Nothing is more quintessential to Kanienkehaka identity than the Kanienkeha language. The colonizers stole our land and now they are trying to steal our language. They will be selling our language to other people. It’s a product to them. They will have a market for it in Germany and elsewhere.

How do we stop this? This is one of the richest corporations in the world. They have all the lawyers they want at their beck and call. We can’t afford any. But we have tongues to speak for ourselves. Everyone should email Microsoft to complain. Otkon! Microsoft! Go ahead and sue me. You might get some more choice Mohawk words from me.

Kahentinetha Horn
MNN Mohawk Nation News
Kahntineta@hotmail.com

Noam Chomsky, Jeff Blankfort, and me

Over a year ago Steve Shalom and I interviewed Noam Chomsky about Israel/Palestine. I was hoping to get him to clarify a few things. I felt that I disagreed with him on the Palestinian right of return and on the so-called ‘one-state solution’ to the conflict. His arguments against both these things were unique and unlike any I’d heard before, and given how much I’ve learned from him over the years, I figured (as no doubt many do) that if we disagreed, it must be because I misunderstood something. But no, after the interview more than ever, I realized that I understood what he was saying just fine, and really did genuinely disagree.

In fact, the idea to interview Noam about this stuff came out of some reading I’d done while thinking about writing a strategy piece disagreeing with Noam on these issues and also disagreeing with some other folks who I thought go too far in the other direction, or not too far (since I don’t think that’s possible in some directions), but off in the wrong direction. I was reading someone named Jeff Blankfort, for example, who I didn’t know. A book called ‘Fallen Pillars’, and another by someone in a group called the ‘Council for the National Interest’. These pieces and books had some very compelling arguments, but also missed some important things. I was hoping that by evaluating all of these writers together I could provide something useful for activists. But somehow I couldn’t quite pull it off, and ended up shelving it, and then settling for an interview with Noam.

Recently Jeff Blankfort wrote a long article with lots of quotes from Noam’s work as an extended critique of Noam’s analysis on Israel/Palestine. Like Blankfort’s other work, I thought it made good points. I also thought it was very unfair to Noam, very personal and vituperative, and undermined its own argument and principles in important ways with the audience it is intended to sway. Since his article ends with a call for open and civil debate all with a view to making the Palestine struggle more effective, I wrote him. Two email exchanges ensued, and we agreed that they would be useful for folks to read. I am including them below. His words will be bolded.

Exchange 1

Hi Jeff.

Justin, from ZNet, here. You might have seen the interview Steve Shalom and I did with Noam some time ago. I was, in that interview, trying to change his mind about some of the things you mention in your piece. Do you know Finkelstein? I also tried taking some of these things up with him, with no luck (I wrote about that encounter in my blog). I’ve interviewed Ilan Pappe on some of these things too.

Yes, I did see that interview while preparing my article. No, I don’t know Finkelstein although I have a great respect for him. It is not surprising that he declined since he feels very close to Chomsky who has come to his defense as he has to others who have been under attack. I have interview Pappe twice and he seems to be in general agreement with my position on the lobby as is Tanya Reinhart who I also have interviewed twice and who is also close to Chomsky who mentored her in her early academic years.

I wanted to say that I like your piece, ‘Damage Control’, and, indeed, agreed with a lot of it. About a year and a half ago I was thinking of trying to write a piece that critiqued both you and Noam, but things got ahead of me and I couldn’t figure out a way to do it properly.

I have two criticisms of your piece, however, that I believe undermine your stated intention of helping the Palestine solidarity movement.

1) The tone. You obviously think Noam has done a tremendous amount of damage to the cause. But you are snarky about it, even though you criticize Noam for being ‘smug’, etc. Calling Barsamian his ‘devoted Boswell’ is one example. But more important than that is when you quote right wing critics of Noam saying he only looks at evidence that suits him, acts more like an attorney than a historian, and is only appreciated for the sheer volume of what he’s done. On the first point, how are any of us, including you and certainly Sharp, any different? When you go into the details of how counterevidence is ignored in his work, you give people a basis to evaluate your arguments. When you say that Noam only looks at evidence that favours his conclusions, you’re smearing Noam in a way that does no service to any movement. When you say he’s mostly appreciated for the volume of work, you’re certainly not speaking to all the people who have learned a great deal from him – people you dismiss as his ‘followers’ and imply – as you accuse him of doing – of being stupid, etc. I’m not going to go through and list the reasons Noam is so much appreciated. I disagree with him most strongly on the points you bring up in your work, and on various other points. But you aren’t going to make headway with your (important) case by sounding mean-spirited.

I makes no bones about it. I do believe Noam has done a tremendous amount of damage to the Palestinian cause (and in a private letter he wrote before I began my article, he said the same of me). It is for this reason that I finally decided to write it and as I read more and more of his prolific output I realized that I had made the right decision. The irony, of course, is that at the same time that he has turned more people on to left politics and to the injustices heaped on the Palestinians than any one else, he has misled with what I believe is spurious information to the point that whatever efforts they have undertaken to now have been ineffectual. I have been active on this issue since spending four months in Lebanon and Jordan in 1970 and so I have had an ample opportunity to see how this has played out.

I know David and he does good radio but his failure to ask Chomsky the tough questions makes him appear some times like a lap dog. As far as the right wing critics, and I saw nothing that Sharp wrote that made me identify him as that, what was important to me was that he was saying exactly what my conclusions had been for some time. For that matter, I would recommend reading Pat Buchanan, a person I detest on many other issues, about US involvement in Iraq and our relations in Israel, before Chomsky because what Buchanan has to say, whatever his motives is what I see as the truth. And Chomsky does ignore or dismiss counter evidence. His failure, in my mind, to include the historic battles between Gerry Ford and Bush Senior in his many books, interviews and speeches is really unconscionable, and if I had additional space I would have criticized his description of Carter’s relations with Israel. To my mind, this is intellectually dishonest.

I would not use the term “stupid” for those who rely on him for information and whose eyes glaze over when you speak of him critically, but I certainly don’t have a great deal of respect for the political opinions of folks I know, mainly Marxists, in fact, who cite him verbatim (without attribution) when it comes to both the lobby and Israel’s alleged position as a US client state. If I had had the space I would have quoted from web sites in the UK and the US that do just that When I have tried to line up debates on these issues there are always excuses not to. Chomsky himself when approached in 1991 to debate me at the Socialist Scholars Conference after we had had an exchange in the old National Guardian, refused, saying “it wouldn’t be useful” (to whom, I wonder). When approached by the same person last year he again refused and didn’t recall the 1991 request. The same has been true with Joel Beinin and Phyllis Bennis, for the same reason “it wouldn’t be useful”) and Zunes, after agreeing to debate, kept putting it off with one excuse after another. He is now being asked by KPFA in Berkeley to do it. I won’t hold my breath, I don’t know about being “mean-spirited.” I am angry and I am not at all ashamed to admit it. What has been happening to the Palestinians is not a US directed exercise; the occupation is not something the US has supported for its own interests, but something it has opposed since Nixon, for geopolitical reasons, not for any benefit for the Palestinians and when Chomsky twists the truth about it, and people mimic that nonsense because of his ubiquitous presence, I am certainly justified and I want others to be angry to.

2) The quoting, with approval, of folks like Sharp, or folks from the Council on the National Interest. The fact that there is a group of imperialists who don’t like Israel doesn’t have very much to do with justice for Palestine. I found a part of Findley’s book where he discusses an arms deal with Saudi Arabia that was blocked by Israel. When Noam compares Israel to a powerless client state whose economy is controlled by the US, you can rightly and sarcastically say ‘poor Israel’. But when I read Findley’s line about the arms dealers, I thought: ‘oh, poor arms dealers.’ If, as you argue, Noam’s work has made it hard for some activists to come to grips with Israel’s real relationship to the US, how much worse have been unholy alliances with a variety of right-wing forces? This can be trumped up, to be sure, and inevitably is, with all the charges of antisemitism and so on. But we have to discern very clearly who our real friends and allies are and who our real enemies are. I don’t see CNI as being allies.

You pick out a line in Findley’s book whereas I can pullout whole chapters in Chomsky’s. Who is telling the truth about the lobby? Findley or Chomsky? That’s what’s important, not whether Findley qualifies in your book as an “imperialist,” a definition I don’t happen to agree with, although some of the folks in CNI well may be. What is important to me is that they are telling the truth regarding US support for Israel and the voices of the left are not. And frankly, one of the reasons the left is not is that as an American Indian leader told me back in 1988, “they’re are too many liberal Zionists.” When I sued the ADL for spying back in 1992, my lawyer was former congressman Pete McCloskey, a Republican and classmate at Yale with Bush Senior. He opposed the Vietnam War, defended Geronimo Pratt and has more integrity than any registered Democrat I have ever known with the exception of Cynthia McKinney. This weekend I will be on a program with Paul Findley, Azmi Bishara and Diana Buttu among others, speaking about Palestinian rights and the lobby and I have no problem with that.

One reason Chomsky has been so effective is that his ‘followers’ can instantly know something about each other’s overall moral perspective and world view. Not everything, but something – and that’s more than you can say about most writers. Reading your stuff over a couple of years, I still don’t have a sense of where you’re coming from. That’s largely because of the things I mentioned above. When you said that Bush Sr.’s overall record adds up to being a war criminal, I thought – okay, this guy and I might be on the same page politically. Same with when you said there’s no limit to how much dirty work the US is ready to do for itself, these days, etc. But you are, in some sense, trying to convince Chomsky’s ‘followers’ that being really consistent with Chomsky’s positions on human rights, imperialism, etc., means breaking with Chomsky on the issue of Israel/Palestine. That’s how I think of it. You aren’t going to do that by smearing Noam or quoting right-wingers.

I agree that Chomsky has been effective, but at doing what? Certainly not building a movement which is something only those with rose colored glasses can see in this country. And yes, Chomskyites are like a cult. Some do good work. Some don’t. But when it comes to taking constructive action and building the kind of movement that these days require it just isn’t there. As Israel Shahak noted in his letter to me, Chomsky appeals to those who are looking for easy answers. Where am I coming from? Progressive and radical political activity going back to 1944 when I was ten and my father ran the congressional campaign of the first person to be elected to Congress as a write-in, and the SOB promptly sold out as did every other Demo I worked for until I understood how the system worked. I protested the Korean War, was doing civil rights work in LA before there was movement of that name, was active against the Vietnam war, worked with and for a time was the “official” photographer for the Black Panthers, and of course, my work around Palestine.. I, like my friend, Amira Hass, am pessimistic about the future and when she told me before the second intifada that the only things that kept her going as “anger,” what keeps me going is my sense of outrage..

I am guessing you are going to keep this up, and I think you should. But your work isn’t going to lead to the kind of critical thinking and rethinking this movement needs unless it’s cleaned up a bit, is my feeling.

From the responses I have received thus far, including some from friends of Chomsky, I would disagree. And the response, in general, have been overwhelmingly positive and the article is on a number of web sites including Deir Yassin Remembered of which I am a board member.

Exchange 2:

Thanks for the reply. I do understand you a bit better now, but you seem quite unmoved by what I have had to say, and I am unmoved by your answers It seems to me there wouldn’t be much profit in going back and forth endlessly over email. Though I do think that your article has had an impact, has perhaps opened the discussion, and I believe in your stated aims (of making the Palestine movement more effective), even though I think your work doesn’t fulfill those aims as much as it should, and easily could have.

JB: From what I have seen already, it has begun to stir a debate and further questions about the issues I raised. True, a few who appreciated the article suggested that it might have been organized differently, and even in a less personal manner, but it would have been less honest on my part since, at least from my evaluation, Chomsky’s role in organizing around the I-P issue has been critical and it overall, whatever his motives, it has been instrumental in keeping it ineffective. In real terms, this means not challenging either locally or nationally, liberal Democratic politicians who may be PC on every other issue but back Israel to the bloody hilt, literally, when called upon to do so. In San Francisco, we have Nancy Pelosi, the House whip who has been given a pass by all but a few of the marginalized left who know where the organizing begins, and Tom Lantos, who gets labor support because he is strong on their issues, and again, like Pelosi, is ignored by both ANSWER and UFPJ. Chomsky’s relegation of Congress to the sidelines when it comes to Israel has produced similar responses to culpable Democrats across the country.

1) You have great respect for Finkelstein, Hass, Reinhart, Pappe – but not Noam? You are happy to say all of them support your position, presumably because you think they are (justly) respected, but you don’t think the same of Noam, who you suggest is only respected because of sheer volume of writing? You really don’t think conceding that Noam has more going for him than output and friendships would strengthen what you are saying at all?

JB: I have great respect for them because of the content of their writings as well as their personal courage. While such judgements, of course, are purely personal, I don’t think Noam measures up to any of that group in either category. What he has done, and for which credit is due, is support and assist numerous scholars here and in Israel but this while meritorious, does not account for the deficiencies that I have found in his writings. That is not to say we are on totally different pages, far from it. On most issues, we are in total agreement, but on the critical ones on this critical issue, we are poles apart. And since, in a manner inconsistent with any definition of “intellectual” he not only is unwilling to debate me, he says openly that he won’t even read what I’ve written.

2) It’s not one line out of Findley’s book I have a problem with, it’s the whole concept of ‘the National Interest’ as conceived by the figures who make up the CNI. Theirs is not a left critique. I believe that there is room for a left critique of Noam on Palestine issues, and you make some of the strongest points for that critique. But you also muddy the waters by throwing in these arguments about national interest, Pat Buchanan, and so on. What’s at stake is the kind of political alliance or coalition that could force change in the US-Israel relationship. Here’s where you and I probably have an analytical disagreement. I don’t think the US would abandon Israel unless the political culture in the US changed massively in favor of oppressed constituencies, anti-racist consciousness, more democratic media. I think you think that more conventional political pressure on politicians could make a bigger difference than I do. If you are right, then we can work with CNI or Pat Buchanan on an issue-by-issue basis. If I’m right, then by letting them in the boat we’re throwing others out – and I don’t mean liberal zionists but oppressed constituencies who are unimpressed by the politics of CNI on other issues.

JB: I understand and share your feelings concerning the term, “national interest.” but is that necessarily reactionary? Does it not depend on how that interest is perceived? I recently interviewed Prof. Andrew Bacevich who has written an important book, “The New American Militarism,” from what would be, I would guess, the CNI point of view, that the US military should exist to defend the country from attack from the outside and not as a global police force for US capital. He was coming to that point as a 23 year vet, West Point graduate, etc. While, no doubt, we have differing opinions on other issues, I think his book is more useful in convincing those not on the left of the unjustness of US policy and the present war in Iraq. How many progressives will buy and use the book? Not many, I would guess. In the case of Buchanan, it’s the same. If he is making the right arguments, ones that on the left you are only likely to find with Cockburn here, not to use them to stick one’s head in the sand. Back to the CNI, I am not aware that it takes positions on other issues than US support for Israel. If the left or progressive groups would adopt their position on this issue I would applause, but they don’t and I’m not holding my breath until they do.

3) On where you’re coming from: thanks for that. You didn’t have to say so much, but I do appreciate it. I’m much younger, though I think as outraged. And I don’t like the tendency our activists have of looking for ‘easy answers’ any more than you or Israel Shahak. But talk about easy answers, Jeff. As important as intra-left critique is for moving forward, and as important as I believe this particular critique is, you have to understand that there is a certain lack of proportion here? Surely Noam is not to blame for the situation in Palestine? And indeed, that even the movement has serious problems that go well beyond consequences of the bias towards Israel that Noam admitted he had in 1970?

JB: Of course, Noam is not to blame for the situation in Palestine. But I do know that the refusal over the years to place the Palestinian struggle for justice near the top of the movement’s international agenda has allowed it to develop to the point it has, and this has had to do with Chomsky’s point of view on the issues of Congress and the lobby and their connection to the aid issue and how it has been eagerly been taken up by those who are looking for the easy answers, “blame it all on US imperialism,” and, are either protective of Israel at some deeper level, like Chomsky, or afraid of provoking that bogeyman, “anti-semitism.”

The last comment in your email below suggests you are satisfied with the responses you’ve gotten and satisfied with your piece. If that’s the case I guess there’s not much point going too much further, especially in private email. On the other hand, if you’d like, I could post this all in my blog, along with your reply to this note (you should have the last word), and of course a link to your original leftcurve piece, in the interest of keeping the debate you opened going. I really do wish I found your piece as satisfying, but I don’t, for the reasons I’ve outlined. Still, there are important points there that activists should read.

JB: While I am pleased by the response that I have received so far, from sources that I respect, if I had more time and space, I might have organized the article differently. It’s essence, however, would be the same. As to putting this correspondence on your blog, that would be fine with me.