Progressive Calendar 07.17.14 /3
From: David Shove (shove001umn.edu)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 09:55:10 -0700 (PDT)
*PROGRESSIVE CALENDAR 07.17.14*

1. Mpls 1934 teamster strike           7.17 6:30pm
2. Labor movie -  Uprisings of 1934   7.17 7pm
3. Ignite social justice                      7.17 7pm
4. Sami Rasuli:  Update from Iraq      7.17 7pm

5. Chris Hedges -  Israel Is Captive to Its ‘Destructive Process
6. Joshua Frank - Obama, Israel and Liberal Capitulation
7. ed                 - two haikus and a song

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From:Tom Dooley

“Revolutionary Teamsters”: with author Bryan Palmer, July 17, Minneapolis,
6:30 p.m. (Central Library)
--“A Fresh Look at the Minneapolis Teamster Strikes After 80 Years”

In his new book, Revolutionary Teamsters, Canadian labor historian Bryan
Palmer tells the compelling story of how a handful of revolutionary
Trotskyists, working in the largely nonunion Minneapolis trucking sector,
led the drive in 1934 to organize the unorganized and built an industrial
union. What emerges is a compelling narrative of class struggle, a reminder
of what can be accomplished, even in the worst of circumstances, with a
principled and visionary leadership.

Palmer will speak about his book at  6:30PM, Thursday, July 17 at the
Minneapolis Central Library,300 Nicollet Ave.


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From: tom Dooley

Labor Movie Night: “Uprisings of 1934,” July 18, Minneapolis, 7 p.m. (Bell
Museum of Natural History)


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>From Tom Dooley

Author Event, “Educating for Action—Strategies to Ignite Social Justice,”
Anthony Nocella, on his co-edited new book. Thursday, July 17th, 7:00 PM.


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Sami Rasuli:  Update from Iraq

Thursday, July 17th @ 7pm @ Spirit of St Stephens, 2201 First Ave,
Minneapolis
Sami Rasuli, an Iraqi American peace activist, has returned from another
year of living in Iraq.  Come hear his first hand account of the dangers of
US intervention in Iraq and the region.
Organized by the Twin Cities Peace Campaign & the WAMM End War Committee.
Co-Sponsored by: Anti-War Committee; Minnesota Peace Action Coalition
(MnPAC); Veterans For Peace Chapter 27; Spirit of Saint Stephen’s Justice,
Education and Action Committee (JEAC). FFI: Call WAMM 612-827-5364.


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Israel Is Captive to Its ‘Destructive Process’
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/israel_is_captive_to_its_destructive_process_20140714/
Posted on Jul 14, 2014
By Chris Hedges

Raul Hilberg in his monumental work “The Destruction of the European Jews”
chronicled a process of repression that at first was “relatively mild” but
led, step by step, to the Holocaust. It started with legal discrimination
and ended with mass murder. “The destructive process was a development that
was begun with caution and ended without restraint,” Hilberg wrote.

The Palestinians over the past few decades have endured a similar
“destructive process.” They have gradually been stripped of basic civil
liberties, robbed of assets including much of their land and often their
homes, have suffered from mounting restrictions on their physical
movements, been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling
of produce, and found themselves increasingly impoverished and finally
trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West
Bank.

“The process of destruction [of the European Jews] unfolded in a definite
pattern,” Hilberg wrote. “It did not, however, proceed from a basic plan.
No bureaucrat in 1933 could have predicted what kind of measures would be
taken in 1938, nor was it possible in 1938 to foretell the configuration of
the undertaking in 1942. The destructive process was a step-by-step
operation, and the administrator could seldom see more than one step ahead.”

There will never be transports or extermination camps for the Palestinians,
but amid increasing violence against Palestinians larger and larger numbers
of them will die, in airstrikes, targeted assassinations and other armed
attacks. Hunger and misery will expand. Israeli demands for “transfer”—the
forced expulsion of Palestinians from occupied territory to neighboring
countries—will grow.

The Palestinians in Gaza live in conditions that now replicate those first
imposed on Jews by the Nazis in the ghettos set up throughout Eastern
Europe. Palestinians cannot enter or leave Gaza. They are chronically short
of food—the World Health Organization estimates that more than 50 percent
of children in Gaza and the West Bank under 2 years old have iron
deficiency anemia and reports that malnutrition and stunting in children
under 5 are “not improving” and could actually be worsening. Palestinians
often lack clean water. They are crammed into unsanitary hovels. They do
not have access to basic medical care. They are stateless and lack
passports or travel documents. They live with massive unemployment. They
are daily dehumanized in racist diatribes by their occupiers as criminals,
terrorists and mortal enemies of the Jewish people.

“A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies,” Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said recently of the Palestinians. “They
sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we
sanctify compassion.”

Ayelet Shaked, a member of the right-wing Jewish Home Party, on her
Facebook page June 30 posted an article written 12 years ago by the late
Uri Elitzur, a leader in the settler movement and a onetime adviser to
Netanyahu, saying the essay is as “relevant today as it was then.” The
article said in part: “They [the Palestinians] are all enemy combatants,
and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the
mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They
should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as
should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more
little snakes will be raised there.”

The belief that a race or class is contaminated is used by ruling elites to
justify quarantining the people of that group. But quarantine is only the
first step. The despised group can never be redeemed or cured—Hannah Arendt
noted that all racists see such contamination as something that can never
be eradicated. The fear of the other is stoked by racist leaders such as
Netanyahu to create a permanent instability. This instability is exploited
by a corrupt power elite that is also seeking the destruction of democratic
civil society for all citizens—the goal of the Israeli government (as well
as the goal of a U.S. government intent on stripping its own citizens of
rights). Max Blumenthal in his book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater
Israel” does a masterful job of capturing and dissecting this frightening
devolution within Israel.

The last time Israel mounted a Gaza military assault as severe as the
current series of attacks was in 2008, with Operation Cast Lead, which
lasted from Dec. 27 of that year to Jan. 18, 2009. That attack saw 1,455
Palestinians killed, including 333 children. Roughly 5,000 more
Palestinians were injured. A new major ground incursion, which would be
designed to punish the Palestinians with even greater ferocity, would cause
a far bigger death toll than Operation Cast Lead did. The cycle of
escalating violence, this “destructive process,” as the history of the
conflict has illustrated, would continue at an accelerating rate.

The late Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of Israel’s most brilliant scholars,
warned that, followed to its logical conclusion, the occupation of the
Palestinians would mean “concentration camps would be erected by the
Israeli rulers” and “Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be
worthwhile to preserve it.” He feared the ascendancy of right-wing,
religious Jewish nationalists and warned that “religious nationalism is to
religion what National Socialism was to socialism.” Leibowitz laid out what
occupation would finally bring for Israel:

    The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators,
inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a
hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become
a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free
speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every
colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The
administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire
Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the
Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a
result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its
commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their
colleagues in other nations.

Israel is currently attacking a population of 1.8 million that has no army,
no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control
and no heavy artillery. Israel pretends that this indiscriminate slaughter
is a war. But only the most self-deluded supporter of Israel is fooled. The
rockets fired at Israel by Hamas—which is committing a war crime by
launching those missiles against the Israeli population—are not remotely
comparable to the 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs that have been
dropped in large numbers on crowded Palestinian neighborhoods; the forced
removal of some 300,000 Palestinians from their homes; the more than 160
reported dead—the U.N. estimates that 77 percent of those killed in Gaza
have been civilians; the destruction of the basic infrastructure; the
growing food and water shortages; and the massing of military forces for a
possible major ground assault.

When all this does not work, when it becomes clear that the Palestinians
once again have not become dormant and passive, Israel will take another
step, more radical than the last. The “process of destruction” will be
stopped only from outside Israel. Israel, captive to the process, is
incapable of imposing self-restraint.

A mass movement demanding boycotts, divestment and sanctions is the only
hope now for the Palestinian people. Such a movement must work for
imposition of an arms embargo on Israel; this is especially important for
Americans because weapons systems and attack aircraft provided by the U.S.
are being used to carry out the assault. It must press within the United
States for a cutoff of the $3.1 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives
to Israel each year. It must organize to demand suspension of all free
trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these
props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be
forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to halt its
“destructive process.” As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are
doomed. If we fail to act we are complicit in the slaughter.


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One Failure After Another
Obama, Israel and Liberal Capitulation
by JOSHUA FRANK
July 14
CounterPunch

We’ve been waiting now for nearly seven years to uncover that progressive
streak hidden deep in the heart of President Barack Obama. But one drone
strike after another, one dead child piled upon another and any glimmer of
hope that Obama would put the breaks on US extremism has finally come to an
end.

Not only has Obama refused to alter the bloody foreign policy of his
predecessors, he has vowed to continue its most extreme elements. In no
other instance has this been more true than with the case of Israel and
Palestine.

This reality has likely come as a surprise to many who placed their
aspirations in our first black president, a man who at one point early in
his career believed Palestinians had a right to not only exist, but to
reside in their own country. Yet, time and again President Obama has put
his foot down when the global community was ready to honor a Palestinian
state, as he did at the UN Security Council in 2011 and again when the US
vetoed a UN resolution that would have condemned Israel’s illegal
settlement building. Now, as bombs fall on innocent Palestinians, Obama
reasserts the US role in defending Israel.

Last week in an op-ed for Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, Obama wrote
that while “restraint” was needed on both sides, the US would continue to
provide assistance to Israeli defense, unconditionally. Just as Obama’s
piece appeared, the US and Israel were working hard behind the scenes to
prevent the UN Security Council from condemning Israel’s air-strikes.

“As I’ve said time and again, neither I nor the United States will ever
waver in our commitment to the security of Israel and the Israeli people,
and our support for peace will always remain a bedrock foundation of that
commitment,” wrote Obama in Haaretz. “Budgets in Washington are tight, but
our commitment to Israel’s security remains ironclad. The United States is
committed to providing more than $3 billion each year to help finance
Israel’s security through 2018.”

Not one dollar for Detroit, but billions for Israel. And what about
Palestine’s right to security and peace, which is certainly in far more
peril than Israel’s? One need not be an expert on the Middle East to
understand Palestinians live in a land prison, surrounded and occupied by
Israel. Electricity, water and healthcare essentials are controlled by
their oppressor. Indeed, Palestinians are a people without a country,
simply fighting to survive.

Living under brutal occupation, decade after decade, has produced elements
of extremism, as was the case of the kidnapped and murdered Israeli teens.
But what of Israel, a so-called beacon of democracy (even as Israel kills
and forces Palestinians off their ancestral homeland), where a Palestinian
boy was burned alive in spiteful revenge? Such acts only empower and serve
as recruitment tools for Hamas.

The same can be said for the indiscriminate missiles Israel launches into
Gaza: the bombing of a Mosque, countless homes destroyed, hundreds injured,
nearly two hundred more killed – many of whom have been children. And what
for? How many deaths will it take for Israel to stop its bombardment? How
many lost lives before Obama tells Israel to stop its assault? Perhaps more
importantly, when will the American people say ‘enough is enough’? Sure,
Obama has offered up the United States to broker a cease-fire, but how can
a true cease-fire be brokered when the mediator supports the military of
one side over the civilians of another?

It’s all a farce of course. Obama doesn’t really care to see the violence
end – if he did he would pay more than lip-service to Palestinian statehood
and support the matter when it counts – on the global stage in front of the
UN.

We live in a sad and desperate time in the United States, yet fair-minded
folks, many who oppose Israeli and US aggression, refuse to break from the
strangle of the Democratic Party because Republicans are more blatant in
their repulsiveness. It is this cowardly embrace that lets Democrats off
the hook (next up Hillary Clinton) and allows Israel to operate and murder
with impunity.

JOSHUA FRANK is managing editor of CounterPunch. He is author of Left Out!
How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005),
and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of
Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland and Hopeless: Barack Obama and the
Politics of Illusion, both published by AK Press. He can be reached at
brickburner [at] gmail.com.



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two haikus and a song


 Killer action game
 sweeps Middle East! Oy Vey, You're
 Dead! Get yours today!

 Holocaust. If it's
 been done to you, why not do
 it to another?


 Zionist/Netanyahu nationalist anthem

 My land is my land
 Your land is my land
 From the east where I say
 To the west where I say

 All land is my land
 My land is all land
 This land was made for me and me


-ed


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