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Peace March in Berkeley 4/2/02
An image from the march and rally Tuesday in Berkeley. 1-2000 marched down University Ave. The march was blocked at 6th and University. One person was arrested. Video follows.
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There was lots of support from the cars honking for
peace... nice atmosphere today... there was alot of support from the watching type... maybe it's just Berkely, but I think the world is starting to warm up more to the idea of peace.
Free Palestine!
We thought the goal was to show support for the Palestinian by marching as a large diverse group, and trying to bring our message to the people
in the streets. The march started out that way and got a very positive response by people passing by. It would have been far better if we had
marched back to the BART station and kept up the positive energy. In the last four blocks the mood changed and became testosterone driven.
Some young men covered their faces and others started yelling "We're going to do a direct action". We didn't know they had planned to shut
down the freeway, and apparently neither did most of the marchers. It was clear to us that a few people wanted a confrontation with the police.
Most people left, and people we talked to or overheard said things like "This isn't good", "I didn't agree to this". The "diversity" left rapidly, no
more older people, disabled people, or people with kids, and left a small group of mostly young people, and a line of nervous police. This action
was totally counterproductive. The blocked drivers were annoyed and honking in anger and not in support. There were no pedestrians to read
our signs-so much for reaching the public. The focus changed from the plight of the Palestinian people to a small group of people acting
competitively "protesty". No one was chanting and the energy fizzled. It was a missed opportunity, and a bad tactic.
We have a responsibility to each other during protests, and we counted on the organizers to show good judgment, and keep older people,
disabled, and small children safe. We feel like we were used to provide color and diversity, and give the impression that all of us supported this
direct action, when clearly few people knew about it, and few participated.
Notice the photos of the confrontation don't show the entire crowd-for good reason, it was small (less than 50) at that point. If we want to reach
people and want the movement to grow we need to choose tactics that make sense, will really help the people we claim to be peacefully supporting, not pointlessly antagonize police and the public, and be truly inclusive.
1)We did march back to the BART station. Just not immediatly.
2)I do not agree that the mood became testosterone driven. From what I saw, the confrontation with the police was spur of the moment, and from the videos I've seen, largely at fault of the police. The one person taken by the police was FEMALE.
3)People stayed because we believe in solidarity. Yes we have a responsiblity in protests. We were not going to let the police take the female demonstrator away. This is a very effective tactic to use in demonstrations and they released her.
5)It was not counter-productive at all. Passing traffic honked in support - and we had been blocking traffic the whole march so I don't se what the difference is here. Plenty of news crews came. It was getting late anyway and there wouldn't have been many more pedestrians had we turned back immediatly. I saw plently of older people, parents with thier kids, etc, throught the demo. The energy did not fizzle: we sang songs and chanted for hours! It was one of the most passionate, dedicated protestests I have seen in a while.
4)Most of us did not know where we were going period, let alone if we were going to hold an intersection.
A few thoughts regarding the Palestinian Justice march in Berkeley:
We thought the goal was to show support for the Palestinian by marching as a large diverse group, and trying to bring our message to the people
in the streets. The march started out that way and got a very positive response by people passing by. It would have been far better if we had
marched back to the BART station and kept up the positive energy. In the last four blocks the mood changed and became testosterone driven.
Some young men covered their faces and others started yelling "We're going to do a direct action". We didn't know they had planned to shut
down the freeway, and apparently neither did most of the marchers. It was clear to us that a few people wanted a confrontation with the police.
Most people left, and people we talked to or overheard said things like "This isn't good", "I didn't agree to this". The "diversity" left rapidly, no
more older people, disabled people, or people with kids, and left a small group of mostly young people, and a line of nervous police. This action
was totally counterproductive. The blocked drivers were annoyed and honking in anger and not in support. There were no pedestrians to read
our signs-so much for reaching the public. The focus changed from the plight of the Palestinian people to a small group of people acting
competitively "protesty". No one was chanting and the energy fizzled. It was a missed opportunity, and a bad tactic.
We have a responsibility to each other during protests, and we counted on the organizers to show good judgment, and keep older people,
disabled, and small children safe. We feel like we were used to provide color and diversity, and give the impression that all of us supported this
direct action, when clearly few people knew about it, and few participated.
Notice the photos of the confrontation don't show the entire crowd-for good reason, it was small (less than 50) at that point. If we want to reach
people and want the movement to grow we need to choose tactics that make sense, will really help the people we claim to be peacefully supporting, not pointlessly antagonize police and the public, and be truly inclusive.
The march was an absolute success. It was a statement against the inaction of the US government in regards to the Middle East crisis. Much of Berkeley supported the demo, as was evidenced by the continual horn toots and waves. The best comment for me came from a bus driver caught in the back-up. As he turned left to avoid the police line, he leaned out the window and shouted, 'YEAH, STICK IT TO THE MAN!' It made my night! That and the size of the diverse crowd which stayed for damn near five hours at the roadblock! When little kids playing in the street join your march and start shouting, "Free Palestine", I think you can call that a successful rally.
Free, Free, Palestine!!!
Is it time for violence against the left, to defend our God-given Constitutional rights?
Why do they dress up in masks like their arab-pig terrorist brothers, and try to kill Jews?
I think it's time for aviolent response to outdated leftist assholes from wealthy families who dress up in smelly thrift store garbage so they can try to look poor.
Who the fuck are they kidding? Themselves? Everyone knows they are nothing but spoiled littel brats from wealthy families.
faithful to his anti-American roots. "I am not going to back away from being a radical," he said. My politics are to bring the walls down [in Washington]."
During his long career Dellums worked hand-in-glove with Soviet front groups, proposed scrapping all U.S. "offensive weapons," used his government position to oppose every U.S. effort to block the spread of Communist rule and, in the Eighties, even turned over his congressional office to a Cuban intelligence agent organizing a network of "solidarity committees" on U.S. campuses to support Communist guerrilla movements in Central America. When a Democratic White House under Jimmy Carter attempted, in 1979, to re-institute the draft and increase America's military preparedness after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Dellums joined a "Stop the Draft" rally of Berkeley leftists, denounced American "militarism" and condemned Carter's White House as "evil."
Dellums' attitude towards America's intelligence services reflected his consistent support for America's international enemies. Just before the 1980 presidential election, with Soviet invasion forces flooding into Afghanistan, with the American embassy held hostage by the new radical Islamic regime in Iran, and with crowds chanting "Death to America" in the streets of Tehran, Dellums told the same Berkeley rally: "We should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, nail by nail, brick by brick."
Yet, despite these views, Dellums was no marginalized backbencher in the Democratic House. With the full approval of the Democratic Party leadership and its House caucus, Dellums was made a member of the Armed Services Committee on which he served throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the midst of a hot war with Central American Communists seeking to establish a Soviet military base in the Western hemisphere, Democrats made Dellums Chairman of the House Subcommittee on U.S. Military Installations worldwide, where he enjoyed top security clearance. This was done with the specific imprimatur of the Democratic chair of the Armed Services Committee, Les Aspin.
Nor was Dellums alone. He had like-minded allies in both the legislative and executive branches of the Clinton government. Most notoriously, Clinton appointed an anti-military, environmental leftist Hazel O'Leary to be Secretary of Energy, a department responsible for the nation's nuclear weapons labs. O'Leary promptly surrounded herself with other political leftists (including one self-described "Marxist-Feminist") and anti-nuclear activists, appointing them as her assistant secretaries with responsibility for the security of the nuclear labs. In one of her first acts, O'Leary declassified eleven million pages of nuclear documents, including reports on 204 U.S. nuclear tests, describing the move as an act to safeguard the environment and a protest against a "bomb-building culture."
Having made America's nuclear weapons' secrets available to the whole world including the al-Qaeda network, O'Leary then took steps to relax security precautions at the nuclear laboratories under her control. She appointed Rose Gottemoeller, a former Clinton National Security Council staffer with extreme anti-nuclear views to be her director in charge of national security issues. Gottemoeller had been previously nominated to fill the post—long vacant in the Clinton Administration—of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. The appointment was successfully blocked, however, by congressional Republicans alarmed by her radical disarmament agendas. The Clinton response to this rejection was to put her in charge of security for the nation's nuclear weapons labs.
In the 1980s, a time when the United States was fighting a fierce battle of the Cold War in Central America, Democrats also appointed George Crockett to head the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs. Crockett had strong ties directly to the Communist Party and to pro-Communist organizations. He had begun his career as a lawyer for the Communist Party in Detroit, and was so loyal to its agendas that he was the only House member to refuse to sign a resolution condemning the Soviet Union for its unprovoked shooting down of a commercial Korean airliner (KAL 007) and the only member to vote against a House resolution condemning the Soviet Union for denying medical aid to US Major Arthur Nicholson after he had been shot in East Germany and the Communists had denied him medical aid for 45 minutes while he bled to death.
Crockett's appointment came at a time when the Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua was engaged in supplying military aid to Communist guerrillas in Guatemala and El Salvador and was building a major Soviet military base on its territory. Dellums and Crockett were the most prominent and probably the most extreme supporters of the Communists in the Democratic caucus, but they had powerful allies in their efforts to protect the Sandinista regime and the Communist guerrillas from House leaders like David Bonior and Senators Patrick Leahy and Chris Dodd among others. Appointed to head the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2001, Leahy became the leader of Democrats' opposition to Bush Administration attempts to insert stronger measures into domestic anti-terrorism legislation after the September 11 attacks.
In 1991, Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley appointed Ron Dellums and five other leftwing party members to the sensitive House Intelligence Committee, with oversight over the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Two years later, Bill Clinton appointed Les Aspin, the left-wing Democrat behind Dellums' rise, to be his first Secretary of Defense. As Aspin's protégé, Dellums became the Chair of the Armed Services Committee, and thus the most important member of the House in overseeing all U.S. military defenses, controlling their purse strings, and acting as the chief House advisor on military matters to the President himself.
The vote among members of the Democratic caucus to confirm this determined enemy of American power as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee was 198-10. In other words 198 congressional Democrats including its entire leadership saw nothing wrong in placing America's defenses in the hands of one of its most implacable foes. They saw nothing problematic in Dellums' statement that as head of the Armed Services Committee he would (in the words of the Los Angeles Times) "favor a faster reduction of the armed forces and billions more for economic conversion," calling for a "tripling" of the billions that he would actively seek to be moved out of the defense sector.
The vote to confirm Dellums' new position and authority took place on January 17, 1993. Exactly one month later, on February 26, al-Qaeda terrorists bombed the World Trade Center. On his retirement four years afterwards in a ceremony in the Capitol, Dellums was presented by Bill Clinton's third secretary of Defense, William Cohen, with the highest honor for "service to his country" that the Pentagon can bestow on a civilian.
The Party of Blame America First
How could the Democratic Party have become host to—and promote—legislators whose commitment to America's security was so defective, and whose loyalties were so questionable? How could a party that led the fight against Hitler, that organized a Cold War alliance to save Europe from Stalin's aggression, that under John F. Kennedy led the greatest expansion of America's military power in peacetime, reach a point where so many of its leaders seemed to regard America itself as the world's problem, rather than "the brightest beacon"—as President Bush put it—"for freedom and opportunity in the world."
The transformation of the congressional Democrats into a party of the left can be traced to the turbulent decade of the Vietnam War and the 1972 presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern, whose campaign slogan, "America Come Home," is self-explanatory. George McGovern had been a World War II hero who completed more than thirty bomber missions. But he emerged from combat traumatized by the killing he had witnessed and transformed into a kind of premature "peacenik."
In 1948, he entered politics as an activist in the Progressive Party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, who was running as an "anti-war" candidate for the pro-Soviet left. Wallace had once been FDR's vice-president, but in 1948 he left the Democratic Party to protest Harry Truman's "Cold War" policy of opposing Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe. Although Wallace himself was not a Communist, the Progressive Party was a creation of the American Communist Party and under its political control. The Communist Party was controlled by the Kremlin, which had instructed its American supporters to create the campaign in order to weaken America's opposition to Soviet expansion.
Like Wallace, George McGovern was not a Communist or even a radical. But like many otherwise patriotic Americans, then and since, he was seduced by the appeasement politics of the left and became permanently convinced that the United States was co-responsible with Stalin for the Cold War, because Washington had failed to understand the "root causes" of the conflict in Soviet fears of invasion. In McGovern's view the Cold War could have been averted if Truman had been more accommodating to the Soviet dictator and his designs on Eastern Europe. This anti-anti-communist naivete was a permanent aspect of McGovern's foreign policy agendas throughout his political career.
At the end of the 1960s, the radicals who had bolted the Democratic Party in 1948 to oppose the Cold War, began to return under circumstances that made the party particularly vulnerable to their agendas. In 1968, the Democrats' presidential candidate was Hubert Humphrey, a liberal but also a staunch anti-Communist who wanted to stay the course and prevent a Communist victory in Vietnam. At the Democratic convention to nominate Humphrey, the anti-war radicals staged an event that destroyed Humphrey's chances of becoming president.
The anti-Humphrey plan was the brainchild of radical leader Tom Hayden, who had met with the Vietnamese Communists in Czechoslovakia the previous year, and gone on to Hanoi to collaborate with the Communist enemy. In the late spring of 1968, Hayden proceeded to plan and then to organize a riot at the Democratic Party convention in the full glare of the assembled media. The negative fallout from the chaos in the streets of Chicago and the Democrats' heavy-handed reaction to the "anti-war" rioters effectively elected the Republican candidate Richard Nixon the following November.
After Nixon's election, "the anti-war" radicals turned their attention to the Democratic Party with the intention of seizing control of its political machinery. Humphrey's defeat fatally weakened the political power of the anti-Communist forces that had supported him. A series of internal rule changes pressed by the radicals paved the way for the ascension of the anti-Humphrey left. Their agenda was to remake the party into a leftwing organization like the Progressive Party of 1948, which would not stand in the way of Communist expansion. The party figure around whom they rallied their forces was Senator George McGovern who had been put in charge of the committee to reform the party's rules. The left's immediate agenda was to end the Democratic Party's support for the anti-Communist war.
During the Sixties, radicals were intent on making a "revolution in the streets." They were led back into electoral politics by figures like Hayden himself, and his wife-to-be Jane Fonda. Through Hayden's auspices, Fonda had traveled to Hanoi to make anti-American war propaganda for Hanoi, inciting American troops to defect and also aiding the Communists in their denials that they were torturing John McCain and other American POWs. On their return, Hayden and Fonda, gave "anti-war" lectures to the House Democratic Caucus. Although radicals like Hayden had previously condemned the Democrats and deliberately destroyed the party's presidential candidate, their energies were now directed towards infiltrating the party and shaping its agendas. This compromise of political principle was made painless by McGovern's campaign slogan—"America Come Home"—which implied that America's military power was the source of the Cold War conflict with Communism instead of its solution.
Radicals became Democratic Party regulars and—in the case of Hillary Clinton and others—eventually party leaders. Among the more famous activists elected to Congress as Democrats in this period were Ron Dellums, Bella Abzug, Elizabeth Holtzman, Richard Drinan, David Bonior, Pat Schroeder, and Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther. Hayden himself failed to win a congressional seat but became a Democratic State Assemblyman and then a Democratic State Senator in California. As noted, following the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Nixon the newly radicalized Democrats voted to cut off all economic aid to the anti-Communist governments of Cambodia and South Vietnam. (The United States had already withdrawn its armies from Indo-China after signing the truce of 1973). Both regimes fell within months of the vote leading to the mass slaughter in both countries of approximately two and half million peasants at the hands of their new Communist rulers.
McGovern's presidential campaign was an electoral disaster. The candidate carried only one state (Massachusetts) in losing the biggest electoral landslide in American history. But the internal party reforms the McGovernites were able to put in place after the election established the left as a power inside the Democratic Party. From this new-found position of strength the left was able to shape the Carter presidency (1977-1981), following Nixon's Watergate debacle. Notwithstanding that Jimmy Carter was a southerner, a Navy man, and a self-described conservative—all factors that made him electable—his foreign policy reflected the leftward tilt of the party he inherited.
Of his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, it was said "he was the closest thing to a pacifist that the U.S. has ever had as a secretary of state, with the possible exception of William Jennings Bryan." Carter himself warned of Americans' "inordinate fear of Communism" as though this and not Soviet expansion were responsible for the Cold War. At the end of Carter's term in 1980, his foreign policy performance was summed up by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in these words: "The Carter Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War."
Among these "serious upheavals" were the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan (the first crossing of an international border by the Red Army since 1945) and the Sandinista coup in Nicaragua (in which the Carter Administration stood by while a group of pro-Castro Marxists subverted a democratic revolution, joined the Soviet bloc and began arming Communist insurgencies in Guatemala and El Salvador). A third debacle was the loss of Iran to Islamic fundamentalists in a 1979 revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeni.
This event transformed Iran into the first radical Islamicist state and thus launched the forces that eventually came together in the World Trade Center attack. Because of its bias to the left, the Carter White House had bungled the defense of the existing regime, led by the dictatorial but modernizing Shah. Among the Shah's achievements that incited the hatred of the Ayatollah's rebels, was the lifting of the veil and the education of women. Despite the misogynist and reactionary agendas of the Khomeni revolution, the American left naturally cheered the seizure of power by these anti-American radicals, as a "Third World" liberation.
The utopian illusion was short-lived, however. "Khomeini lost no time in installing a fundamentalist Islamic Republic, executing homosexuals and revoking, among other security laws, the statute granting women the right to divorce and restricting polygamy." American leftists and liberals had pressured Carter to abandon the Shah because of his repressive police apparatus the SAVAK. But "Khomeini's regime executed more people in its first year in power than the Shah's SAVAK had allegedly executed in the previous 25 years." The advent of the Khomeni regime was the real beginning of the current war between the West and Islamic radicals.
Clinton
On November 7, 2001—one month to the day after America began its response to the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center, the man most singularly responsible for the security failure gave a speech to college students at Georgetown that may rank as the most disgraceful utterance ever to pass the lips of a former American president. Without any acknowledgment of his own responsibilities as commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton joined America's enemies in attempting to transfer the blame for the atrocities to his country. "Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless," he explained, reflecting sentiments made familiar by American appeasers since the Wallace campaign of 1948.
Although Europeans in America were the creators of a political democracy that had declared all men equal and had separated church from state (so that it did not identify a category of people as "infidels," let alone wage wars against them), Clinton linked the terror of the Islamo-fascists to their victims by recalling a crime committed by Christian crusaders against Jews and Muslims a thousand years before. "In the first Crusade when the Christian Soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it," he said, then mentioned that the crusaders killed some Muslims as well. "I can assure you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it."
Even this version of the past neglected to mention the Muslim invasions that provoked the crusades. Did Clinton seriously intend to suggest, moreover, that the al-Qaeda fundamentalists would be outraged by the story of the martyred Jews rather than wishing the crusaders had perhaps killed 3 million instead of 300? This genocidal passion is the reality in today's Middle East. But what was the point of the Clinton story? The Crusades took place a thousand years ago. It is the Muslim world that still hasn't learned to separate the religious from the secular, and God from the state. Or to live with those who do not share their religious beliefs. It is the Muslim world that is still conducting "holy wars." What Christian church in modern America or in any modern European country has sanctioned the religious murder of "infidels"?
As though the attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the terrorist aggressors and their American victims was not obscene enough, Clinton then threw in the equally absurd but increasingly popular example of black slavery. "Here in the United States," he continued his ethnic insult, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery…" What version of American history is this but the standard ideological libel of the anti-American left?
In point of historical fact the United States was founded as a nation dedicated to ending slavery and did so at an enormous cost of half a million American lives. Some of these American lives were also sacrificed to end the Atlantic slave trade and the slave systems that persisted in Africa itself, which were conducted by Muslims and black Africans. The President's idea that Osama bin Laden and the fanatical Islamicists at war with America should care in the slightest about the plight of black slaves today—let alone more than a century ago—is itself a lunatic anti-Americanism, in view of the fact that one of bin Laden's former allies, the Muslim government of the Sudan still practices slavery against blacks, while the descendants of slaves in America have the highest standard of living and the most generous and secure civil rights of any blacks anywhere in the world today.
One point Clinton failed to make is that the current leaders of America's war against Islamic racism are two African-Americans, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. This fact is of world significance, since there is no example comparable among other states great or small of minorities entrusted with a nation's security. It would be hard to sum up in a more succinct image the historic impact America has had on the liberation of ethnic minorities, of the world's "huddled masses," of those still forgotten in the princely kingdoms of the Muslim world—its role as "a beacon of freedom and opportunity," to use the words of the Republican president who appointed them. Because of the skill with which they have managed America's war against al-Qaeda, the leadership roles of Powell and Rice have made all of our citizens the beneficiaries of America's remarkable progressive influence in world affairs. They symbolize the extent to which our ex-President – like our enemies—has turned matters upside down.
Clinton's attempt to smear his own country in order to exculpate himself from his national security failures is itself a symbol of how this nation is under threat not only from the external forces of a theocratic radicalism but from radical nihilists and self-doubters within, whose political locus is the Democratic Party and the liberal culture.
No Excuses
In August 1998, the chair of the National Commission on Terrorism, Paul Bremer, wrote in the Washington Post, "The ideology of [terrorist] groups makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures ... We cannot seek a political solution with them." He then proposed that we, "defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad….Attack the enemy. Keep up the pressure on terrorist groups. Show that we can be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush bin Laden's operations by pressure and disruption. The U.S. government further should announce a large reward for bin Laden's capture—dead or alive."
Bremer was not alone. Given these warnings, as Andrew Sullivan observes, "Whatever excuses the Clintonites can make, they cannot argue that the threat wasn't clear, that the solution wasn't proposed, that a strategy for success hadn't been outlined. Everything necessary to prevent September 11 had been proposed in private and in public, in government reports and on op-ed pages, for eight long years. The Clinton Administration simply refused to do anything serious about the threat."
On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States. Within months of taking office, he ordered a new strategy for combating terrorism that would be more than just "swatting at flies," as he described Clinton's policy. The new plan reached the President's desk on September 10, 2001. It was "too late," as columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote, "But it remains a fact that the new administration had devised in eight months a strategy that Bill Clinton had delayed for eight years."
http://www.geocities.com/yatrimblo/index.html
It details the decline of the University of California under the leadership of guilty white leftists. It also shows the crimes committed, and the violations of civil rights that the left engages in every day, which is why the university, once one of the greatest in the world, is now considered a joke.
yes, that's right, take another look at the brown banner in one of the photos above, being held aloft by several nazi leftist pigs. The swastika is right above the arab writing.
You people are fucking trash. You are sick-minded, hate-filled bigots, and your time is rapidly coming to an end.
I guess I was one of those 'testosterone driven young men with covered faces that wanted to fight with the police.' Problem is I just passed the half-century mark and have been a union worker for most of the last 30 years. I wasn't alone and you distort the reality. Truth is it would've been better if my face had been covered, since the Berkeley police decided to wash my face with pepper-spray.
My son and I joined this protest in Berkeley where we live, work and pay taxes. The 'young men with the covered faces' [and young women] are friends of mine. The crowd that stayed after the police blocked our path was diverse and committed. Just as committed as the police were in making sure that all the folks riding on the freeway weren't aware, as we would've liked them to be, that WE AREN'T UNITED WITH PRESIDENT BUSH in support of the fascist Israeli siege in Palestine.
The police chose to block the street. I think we could've responded better, more creatively. However, the police made creative decisions more difficult when they attacked, pepper-sprayed and arrested. Let's be honest and put the blame where it truly belongs; not on enthusiastic, committed defenders of the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people in the context of the fascist siege of Ramallah, etc.
The various police agencies that met us on University Av were there to prevent our ability from breaking through the silence, overcoming the fear of confronting King George and his support for this fascist Israeli terror. We simply wanted to alert the traveling Bay Area public that we support the Palestinian people, perhaps arousing additional support - and the police make this a crime - and you blame the youth.
I think you need to feel the frustration, and place the blame where it belongs; on a city administration that allows the police to suppress free speech, and on a country whose allegiance is actually pledged to Enron and the other Corporate Entites of Amerikkka, whose interests colide with the needs of working people on a global basis.
First of all, you are not the "youth". You're an outdated has-been, in a city of outdated has-beens.
Secondly, if you're so concerned about "free speech" why weren't you running your mouth when leftist scumbags stole the entire press run of the Berkeley conservative newspaper?
Why? Because you're an outdated hypocrite. You want "free speech" for people who agree with you, and no one else, just like your communist predecessors.
I hope you had fun marching in the parade with swastika banners being toted by outdated berkeley leftist stooges (see photo above).
How 'bout you just make sure my calls go thru, without any comments from your fuckin' mouth, OK beaner!?!
As to Randy being a "beaner," like anyone has to inform you of what race they are to make the protest justifiable or meaningful. We are citizens of America trying to have a free voice in our own city, and the Police took that freedom from us yesterday.
As most people pointed out most of the march wasn't going to shut down the freeway, but the bridge should've been taken. Next time, the bridge WILL be ours, and the city will know that we won't be silenced.
And next time I hope you show YOUR racist face so I can spray IT with pepper spray and push you around. Who's the racists here when they're attacking us calling us "beaners" because we're fed up with the racist propoganda of our society?
Get real. The signs are there... you can read em. I didn't edit anything... thats why they're there. We believe in FREE SPEECH. I don't believe with what some of the signs said either, but hey, thats not the point. The point is we're out there making a difference. There IS resistance, and it WILL be heard.
Some of the justifications people make to defend their rants is amazing. We're just trying to be heard.
As to the people bitching about someone stealing a few papers, you can't really believe that everyone there wanted to steal papers and harrass people? Get real. We're trying to spread the word of peace, but in a society that justifies the repression of free speech daily it is hard to be heard. But make no mistake, this is just a beginning. The rally was great, and next time it will be better.
FREE PALESTINE! SI SE PUEDE!
You're an outdated stooge. It figures the Left would support the most retrograde, hate-filled murderers, namely the arab/islamic anti-civilization bloc.
They stand against everything the left stands for: They oppress women, and force them wear black veils in 100 degree heat; they routinely stone to death homosexuals and anyone else they don't like the looks of; they murder, threaten, and imprison journalists who criticize them; they routinely murder innocent civilians.
And yet, outdated bay area leftists from wealthy families support them.
Why should that come as a surprise: They supported Mao, who killed millions of his own people; they support the psychopathic sadist slavemaster Castro, who routinely jails and tortures journalists who are critical of his despotism; they supported the Khmer Rouge before the news of their slaughters became undeniable (and Berkeley leftist SCUMBAGS did their best to deny it).
The left supports every murderous psychopathic regime on earth. What the fuck is wrong with these retrograde jackasses?
You're an outdated stooge. It figures the Left would support the most retrograde, hate-filled murderers, namely the arab/islamic anti-civilization bloc.
They stand against everything the left stands for: They oppress women, and force them wear black veils in 100 degree heat; they routinely stone to death homosexuals and anyone else they don't like the looks of; they murder, threaten, and imprison journalists who criticize them; they routinely murder innocent civilians.
And yet, outdated bay area leftists from wealthy families support them.
Why should that come as a surprise: They supported Mao, who killed millions of his own people; they support the psychopathic sadist slavemaster Castro, who routinely jails and tortures journalists who are critical of his despotism; they supported the Khmer Rouge before the news of their slaughters became undeniable (and Berkeley leftist SCUMBAGS did their best to deny it).
The left supports every murderous psychopathic regime on earth.
And now they support the palestinian, Jew-hating murderers. Now they march in the streets carrying swastikas.
You are sick.
Do you ever wonder why they they leave their own country to get an education, while Arafat is spending millions of dollars on munitions?
It's because the Palestinian authorityis a Fascist regime. It fits nearly every definition.
Smash, pointing out the Nazi symbol that JoJo found, was a really astute point. You see, Yassir Arafats Uncle was a very strong supporter of the nazi cause, as many Arab Activist are. http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/recruited.html
The big point here is you protesting Dopes are supporting Fascism while you think you're protesting against it!!!!!!!!!
You're all Idiots!
I support anyone who is against you!!!!!
The Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people are two different things. To support the Palestinian people, one need not support the PA.
Smash, pointing out the Nazi symbol that JoJo found, was a really astute point. You see, Yassir Arafats Uncle was a very strong supporter of the nazi cause, as many Arab Activist are. http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/recruited.html The big point here is you protesting Dopes are supporting Fascism while you think you're protesting against it!!!!!!!!! You're all Idiots! I support anyone who is against you!!!!!
ya know, you really should tell the whole story instead of just one side. Now I don't know about Arafat's support of the nazi's but, it is however a WELL KNOWN FACT that George Dubya Bush's family fortune, in part, played a role in supporting the Nazis. Please read the following websites and please, do try to learn something before posting:
The Draheim Report
Bush Family Values
oh, and because you seem to be one of dubya's best friends, here's a little more info on him personally: Who is George W. Bush?
The truth WILL set you free ;)
I have posted an article about the swastika-carrying leftist marchers in Berkeley on my web site:
http://www.geocities.com/yatrimblo/index.html
Now we know that you are Jew-hating garbage, just like the murderers of innocent women and children that you always support.
GO TO HELL WEALTHY BERKELEY LEFTISTS WHO MARCH BEHIND THE SWASTIKA. YOU ARE TRULY FUCKING SICK.
Your pitiful accusations of racism and such prove your cause is absolutely desperate to keep us silent by any means, or to twist our words and intentions.
If you want to know what I think about things, just ask. I'll tell you. We can disagree without you calling me names for my political stance.
I agree that there is a certain ammount of hypocracy in some of what people say, but in our movement, what you find is that we are free thinkers. We do not all conform to groupthink and believe that every one in a group thinks the same thing. So if someone says something you don't agree with, don't repeat it. It's a simple concept, its called thinking for yourself. You're free to object with how people say what they feel, but don't expect everyone to worry about what you think of them. Not only don't we care what you think about us... but we don't care. We're saying what we have to say, and you can either listen or not. Its easy. I wonder why you're beating the drum over this so much. Nervous?
Your pitiful accusations of racism and such prove your cause is absolutely desperate to keep us silent by any means, or to twist our words and intentions.
I support the Palestinians unconditionally. This does not mean I agree with everything they do, nor anything their government does. Their struggle against occupation is just, and dire. Freedom by any means neccessary.
Free Palestine!
I'm not interested in having our artwork used for hateful purposes. Truely YOU are the disgrace.
Free Palestine!
Bay Area blood libel.
Bay Area blood libel.
Not much has changed in 60 years, witness the 40+dead over the last week in suicide attacks, which you defenders of Palestine fail to mention when talking about the siegoe of Ramallah.
Fascist is as fascist does, and pictures are worth a thousand words.
That really helps your cause a lot.
What a fucking dingbat.
Never claimed so.
"Apparently he’s gotten past the fact that symbol represents all that is dark and deadly about the human mind."
Nope, actually that was the point of using it in the sign. When your morrally bankrupt IDF shoot into the houses without warning, killing anyone inside that is not justice for your people. When your troops break water pipes, and destroy all the cars in the town, that is not justice for your people. When medical personel are prevented from helping dying civilians, shot at, detained and stripped, you try to justify it with your moral lectures about the oppression of the jews. When your troops shoot at anything that moves, that is NOT JUSTICE FOR ISRAEL, THAT IS GENOCIDE. If that doesn't explain why those people used that symbol in their sign, then I'll just stop responding.
"Perhaps he’s so "enlightened" that he’s able to laugh heartily at lampshades made from human skin. Just the mention of Bergen Belsen gives him fits of giggles. Jews in ovens makes him hungry."
Who the fuck are you to know so much about me? You don't know me, yet you claim to know so much about me. Who the hell do you think you're fooling here? Seriously? I have had jewish friends through my entire life, and I have jews that are married into my family. They are very dear to me, and it would be pure idiocy to suggest that I am racist against jews. I am in complete solidarity with those jews that are under a siege of terror today too. The ones that do not support Zionism that is. Those who condone the actions of their government I have no sympathy for because they are so entrenched in their own self pity they don't realize that for every Israeli killed, there are 10 Palestinian graves. Before you judge me you should get to know me. I am unique after all, I don't believe everything I read. I don't conform to groupthink, and in fact, I refuse to accept a title that you would like to give me based on my political views. I am a human being, and I have opinions that are just as worthy as those of anyone else. I have my own personal experiences that have given me the ability to think as a human, and make my own choices about what to do and say. More rants from the peanut gallery?
"For a Leftist pig it’s only something for Protestors of the Week to use like any other tired cliché."
Personally, I wouldn't carry that sign because it does not convey MY message. That is probably because I didn't make it. Yet I can respect it for what it is: an expression of someone or multiple someones' views to the frightened public in our area. Any more assumptions you want to make about me that I can only TRY to constrew as questions about my point of view?
"We already know what the real news is. JESSE is the real racist, by virtue of his alignment."
Ah yes, there is that groupthink again. I'm sure glad you don't succumb to these things.
"Nothing wrong with that in itself, mind you. We all choose sides. But he’s elected to protest in favor of the Palestinian Feces, who like Hitler would love nothing more than genocide for Jews."
Yes yes, and I'm the racist, hate-filled man right? Do you really think I hate jews and that I am a nazi? Really? That is really amusing. Most of my friends would laugh if they were to read that.
" You’re just another goose stepping Nazi, Jesse. See you in Hell. "
And THAT is the punchline!!!!! It was nice talking to you too. It really has been an enlightening experience.
Pa-leeeeeease.
questions will be painful for people who want to hold on to outdated "isms" and to their perceived roles as leaders ... - albeit leaders of total outdated irrelevance. And, on top of this, the writer has a tone of arrogance and uses sexist language. Oh well, change takes time and the "left" of the Bay Area is stuck in the mud for sure.
As for the hate-mongering, assholes who are writing about some vast left-wing conspiracy, they are so out of touch with reality, they don't really merit any response or dialogue at all. They are either cops, trying to distract and divide indymedia readers with unfounded hate speach or they are just idiots. Either way, why respond to their drivel? Don't write back to hate mongers - it only encourages them ...
I have documented proof that the CIA doesn't want you to see, that the experiments at Roswell played a key role in the 9-11 attacks, man.
But the cops and the system are keeping me down, man. They don't want you to see the evidence that Stephen King, Newsweek, and the Santa Cruz City Council are really responsible for the upcoming murder of Yoko Ono, and that her artwork as a member of the Fluxus group was really a subterfuge under which the blueprints for the 9-11 attacks and the phony "war on terrorism" are just the man's way of obscuring the truth.
The berkeley police are part and parcel of the 9-11 attacks. They are oppressing people of color by riding their bikes into people's vans and confiscating the real evidence that the CIA dosen't want you to see.
Viva Che!
Women's bodies produce testosterone too. It's the aggression hormone. So, I fail to see the obvious sexism. But I was near the front and the person with the black mask pounding on a sidewalk phone box was male; the person yelling "Let's do a direct action" was male; the person carrying a black flag was male; etc. The direct action crew was a gang of UCB students, mostly male with a couple of deferential females who were following their lead. My partner and I left in disgust knowing that the CHP would never let a protest group on an overpass because somebody might throw a bottle at the cars or do something else stupid. So they'd shut down the freeway, the backup could easily extend to SF. All those people trying to get home to pick up their kids, or to their second jobs, or to night school would have been a captive audience and would totally like listen to your message! Alright dude!!!
The trapped drivers on University were pissed and didn't know what was going on. The businesses were shut down on the street. Yeah dude!!! Smash the state (especially when CopWatch is filming for your protection).
I know that MECA and A Jewish Voice for Peace are committed to peace, and respect the community, so we did expect a peaceful march with intelligent tactics. If people don't think peaceful marches are the best way, they should organize their own marches.
Celia
I agree.
However, about the march itself, the situation is this: Palestine needs attention. We need to do anything and everything to bring any and all attention to the war crimes being committed in Palestine. We may disagree about how to say that, but please understand that you don't have to be involved in any actions you don't want to be.
Also, every person's actions at an event does not represent everyone in that group. If you don't agree with how the event is going, change it or leave. But please don't patronize us about how your way is the right way. We all have our ways and we need to stick together. WE NEED TO BE HEARD!
I'm not suggesting shutting down the freeway is the best way. But taking the bridge and showing resistance would've been nice. Anyway, I'll shut up, but please don't turn this into a split fight about "oh you do it your way and I'll do it mine." We NEED to get attention about Palestine, and it needs to be loud... and it needs to happen fast. If you didn't notice, the actions taken did get alot of attention. This is because things didn't go as planned. People are upset, shit is flying, people are dying, war crimes are being committed. People are angry, and rightly so. If you dont agree with what is going on, leave. Its easy, but if the group agrees to do it one way, and you disagree, its really easy to just pack up and not participate.
I don't want to start any fights or arguments but I think we owe it to Palestine to stand united on this and seriously draw attention to our cause. You don't have to agree with how the word gets out, but it has to be known that there is resistance to what is going on. Personally I'm involved because I won't allow history to say I did nothing while war crimes were being committed with my tax dollars.
Free Palestine! Solidarity! Peace Love and Resistance! All that jazz! :)
Thats why all those Skin heads and KKK clan members tend to be conservative Republicans... and if you didn't know they tend to consider themselves more right...ohhh yeah by the Way, the Fascists consider them selves right to...its the FASCIST RIGHT
But I guess your fucked up political ideological line is a little wacked..... kinda like you
The general impression given in the media is that Palestinians have lived in the Holy Land for hundreds, if not thousands of years. No wonder, then, that a recent poll of French citizens shows that the majority believe (falsely) that prior to the establishment of the State of Israel an independent Arab Palestinian state existed in its place. Yet curiously, when it comes to giving the history of this “ancient” people most news outlets find it harder to go back more than the early nineteen hundreds. CNN, an agency which has devoted countless hours of airtime to the “plight” of the Palestinians, has a website which features a special section on the Middle East conflict called “Struggle For Peace”. It includes a promising sounding section entitled “Lands Through The Ages” which assures us it will detail the history of the region using maps. Strangely, it turns out, the maps displayed start no earlier than the ancient date of 1917. The CBS News website has a background section called “A Struggle For Middle East Peace.’’ Its history timeline starts no earlier than 1897. The NBC News background section called ‘’Searching for Peace’’ has a timeline which starts in 1916. BBC’s timeline starts in 1948.
Yet, the clincher must certainly be the Palestinian National Authority’s own website. While it is top heavy on such phrases as “Israeli occupation” and “Israeli human rights violations” the site offers practically nothing on the history of the so-called Palestinian people. The only article on the site with any historical content is called “Palestinian History - 20th Century Milestones” which seems only to confirm that prior to 1900 there was no such concept as the Palestinian People.
While the modern media maybe short on information about the history of the “Palestinian people” the historical record is not. Books, such as Battleground by Samuel Katz and From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters long ago detailed the history of the region. Far from being settled by Palestinians for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the Land of Israel, according to dozens of visitors to the land, was, until the beginning of the last century, practically empty. Alphonse de Lamartine visited the land in 1835. In his book, Recollections of the East, he writes "Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw no living object, heard no living sound…." None other than the famous American author Mark Twain, who visited the Land of Israel in 1867, confirms this. In his book Innocents Abroad he writes, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely…. We never saw a human being on the whole journey.” Even the British Consul in Palestine reported, in 1857, “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population…”
In fact, according to official Ottoman Turk census figures of 1882, in the entire Land of Israel, there were only 141,000 Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab. This number was to skyrocket to 650,000 Arabs by 1922, a 450% increase in only 40 years. By 1938 that number would become over 1 million or an 800% increase in only 56 years. Population growth was especially high in areas where Jews lived. Where did all these Arabs come from? According to the Arabs the huge increase in their numbers was due to natural childbirth. In 1944, for example, they alleged that the natural increase (births minus deaths) of Arabs in the Land of Israel was the astounding figure of 334 per 1000. That would make it roughly three times the corresponding rate for the same year of Lebanon and Syria and almost four times that of Egypt, considered amongst the highest in the world. Unlikely, to say the least. If the massive increase was not due to natural births, then were did all these Arabs come from?
All the evidence points to the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. In 1922 the British Governor of the Sinai noted that “illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria.” In 1930, the British Mandate -sponsored Hope-Simpson Report noted that “unemployment lists are being swollen by immigrants from Trans-Jordania” and “illicit immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of Palestine is material.” The Arabs themselves bare witness to this trend. For example, the governor of the Syrian district of Hauran, Tewfik Bey el Hurani, admitted in 1934 that in a single period of only a few months over 30,000 Syrians from Hauran had moved to the Land of Israel. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted the Arab influx. Churchill, a veteran of the early years of the British mandate in the Land of Israel, noted in 1939 that “far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied.”
Far from displacing the Arabs, as they claimed, the Jews were the very reason the Arabs chose to settle in the Land of Israel. Jobs provided by newly established Zionist industry and agriculture lured them there, just as Israeli construction and industry provides most Arabs in the Land of Israel with their main source of income today. Malcolm MacDonald, one of the principal authors of the British White Paper of 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, admitted (conservatively) that were it not for a Jewish presence the Arab population would have been little more than half of what it actually was. Today, when due to the latest “intifada” Arabs from the territories under 35 are no longer allowed into pre-1967 Israel to work, unemployment has skyrocketed to over 40% and most rely on European aid packages to survive.
Not only pre-state Arabs lied about being indigenous. Even today, many prominent so-called Palestinians, it turns out, are foreign born. Edward Said, an Ivy League Professor of Literature and a major Palestinian propagandist, long claimed to have been raised in Jerusalem. However, in an article in the September 1999 issue of Commentary Magazine Justus Reid Weiner revealed that Said actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt, a fact which Said himself was later forced to admit. But why bother with Said? PLO chief Yasir Arafat himself, self declared “leader of the Palestinian people”, has always claimed to have been born and raised in “Palestine”. In fact, according to his official biographer Richard Hart, as well as the BBC, Arafat was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929 and that’s where he grew up.
To maintain the charade of being an indigenous population, Arab propagandists have had to do more than a little rewriting of history. A major part of this rewriting involves the renaming of geography. For two thousand years the central mountainous region of Israel was known as Judea and Samaria, as any medieval map of the area testifies. However, the state of Jordan occupied the area in 1948 and renamed it the West Bank. This is a funny name for a region that actually lies in the eastern portion of the land and can only be called “West” in reference to Jordan. This does not seem to bother the majority of news outlets covering the region, which universally refer to the region by its recent Jordanian name.
The term “Palestinian" is itself a masterful twisting of history. To portray themselves as indigenous, Arab settlers adopted the name of an ancient Canaanite tribe, the Phillistines, that died out almost 3000 years ago. The connection between this tribe and modern day Arabs is nil. Who is to know the difference? Given the absence of any historical record, one can understand why Yasser Arafat claims that Jesus Christ, a Jewish carpenter from the Galilee, was a Palestinian. Every year, at Christmas time, Arafat goes to Bethlehem and tells worshippers that Jesus was in fact “the first Palestinian”.
If the Palestinians are indeed a myth, then the real question becomes “Why?” Why invent a fictitious people? The answer is that the myth of the Palestinian People serves as the justification for Arab occupation of the Land of Israel. While the Arabs already possess 21 sovereign countries of their own (more than any other single people on earth) and control a land mass 800 times the size of the Land of Israel, this is apparently not enough for them. They therefore feel the need to rob the Jews of their one and only country, one of the smallest on the planet. Unfortunately, many people ignorant of the history of the region, including much of the world media, are only too willing to help.
It is interesting to note that the Bible makes reference to a fictitious nation confronting Israel. “They have provoked me to jealously by worshipping a non-god, angered me with their vanities. I will provoke them with a non-nation; anger them with a foolish nation (Deuteronomy 32:21).”
On second thought, it may be unfair to compare Palestine to Disneyland. After all, Disneyland really exists.
I always wondered where they came from. I know that they distort school books with regard to history and teach their children that Israel does not even exist. It's high time we dealt with the issues instead of the fantasies of the Middle East.
I hope you don't mind if I keep a copy of your comments for future reference.
By extension, you could also say that the history of white settlers in America does not go back very far and they have no inherent claim to the land, so it should all be turned back over to Native American kingdoms and confederacies. You could also say that Native Americans would be justified in any use of force to promote this, if you agree with what you are saying about Palestine. So, if principles are universal and not based on race, according to you it's OK if Mohawk Warriors roll tanks into northern New York State towns, firing machineguns, bulldozing houses, destroying police hq, preventing movement and communication, declaring curfew and blocking journalists and Red Cross entry. All under the legal auspices of the Iroquoian Confederacy which has formal religious and political claim to the land extending back millenia.
In a sense native americans can still claim to be opressed. therefore they have a right to kill white people and some native american too (accidentaly).
does that make sense?
the moral issue of native americans being the jews in israel doesnt occur as they do not have power. If they got power the circumstances on which the moral problem is baised would already have shifted.
An interesting question is if you are a jew who came to israel after 1967 are you still a "fair target" to be killed or even to pay reparations to the palistinians?
what about if you are a palistinian (taht means an arab muslim) who came to Israel after 1967? should you pay reparations to the origional palistinians together with the jews and be "a fair target for retaliation"?