bookfan

The investigation of peace activists in Minneapolis and Chicago is part of a new push by the Department of Justice to undermine support for organizations the federal government has designated as “foreign terrorist organizations.” This strategy involves prosecuting even those American citizens who merely support the legal activities of such organizations. The targets of this strategy, naturally, are often vocal opponents of some aspect of the U.S. government’s foreign policy. This strategy got a big boost from Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project, a 2010 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled 6-3 that it was not unconstitutional to punish Americans who sought to provide training in human rights advocacy and peacemaking to the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey, a designated terrorist organization. From an analysis of the ruling: The Court ruled, by a 6-3 vote, that it does not violate the Constitution for the government to block speech and other forms of advocacy supporting a foreign organization that has been officially labeled as terrorist, even if the aim is to support such a group’s peaceful or humanitarian actions. But the Court added a significant qualifier: such activity may be banned only if it is coordinated with or controlled by the overseas terrorist group…. Speech or other forms of advocacy will escape criminal prosecution so long as it is “independent advocacy,” or constitutes “any activities not directed to, coordinated with, or controlled by foreign terrorist groups,” in language used in the Chief Justice’s opinion. Congress, in enacting various versions of the “material support’ law, has avoided imposing any restrictions on those actions, Roberts stressed. Moreover, no kind of speech activity can be punished under the law, according to the opinion, unless the speaker knows the foreign group being supported is a terrorist organization on the government’s banned list. I tend to agree with the dissent of Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor, who said that once the government is allowed to forbid support for legal activities, “there is no natural stopping place.” It is notable that the court’s majority upheld the government’s assertion that it would be illegal for Americans to hire an attorney to file a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a proscribed organization. The worst thing about this is that we have become, in a way, one of those nations in which the government bans political parties and persecutes their collaborators. Along with legitimizing torture and “disappearing” people into secret prisons, we have removed a very sad amount of the distance that used to exist between our old ideals and those of third-world dictators. The same federal government that wrote up legal justifications for torture is now complaining that peacemaking can "legitimize" acts of terrorism. The hypocrisy is monumental. And who are the latest Americans the Justice Department is going after? Read the profiles of the people targeted in the raids in Minneapolis and Chicago. They don’t sound like threats to our national security. Davis is right to raise the specter of CoIntelPro. The Justice Department has repeatedly been used to punish dissent.

...have nothing to do with what Angela Davis was talking about. Look, Kola, I made this a separate thread so it wouldn't be about you. Give it a break. I don't hate you.

The Derrick Bell Reader In other reading, I came across a reference to his essay, "The Constitutional Contradiction." Sounded interesting, so I Googled him and learned he was a real warrior in the school desegregation movement. His views -- especially his argument that whites only grant blacks rights when it doesn't threaten white privilege -- sounded like they would definitely be new intellectual territory for me, so I got the book. So far, I've just read the above-mentioned essay, which deals with the fact that the founding fathers made a deal with the devil (slavery) to get a government agreed to. This is one of several essays, apparently, in which Bell employs a signature narrative-fiction style rather than a scholarly approach. He constructs his essay as a sort of science fiction story, in which a black woman travels back in time to the Constitutional Convention to reprove the delegates -- all the while protected from the wrath of the Southerners by a shining force field. That's hokey enough that it was a distraction from the issues. Plenty more to read in this book, and I'm looking forward to it. Check it out here.

No, you're not. That's your brain playing tricks on you.

Well, this is embarassing. I should have looked a little harder, as this was a big deal in Minneapolis and Chicago, where the raids took place. According to news reports, the people targeted by the raids were peace activists and critics of American foreign policy from the Twin Cities or from Chicago's Freedom Road Socialist Organization. These were people who had traveled to Colombia and the Middle East, and the FBI was looking for evidence they had provided "material support" to FARC, a guerrilla organization in Colombia, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or Hezbollah. Those are indeed terrorist groups (and in the case of FARC, kidnappers and drug traffickers to boot), and some of these people acknowledge having talked to members of the foreign organizations. That's where this investigation gets controversial: the Department of Justice has previously prosecuted American citizens for merely talking on the phone to people connected to proscribed groups. In the Sattar/Stewart case, those kinds of charges were thrown out by the courts. My apologies to Ms. Davis for too much knee-jerk skepticism.

This was referenced in another thread, but I'm starting a separate one to talk just about this issue. A statement attributed to Angela Davis was posted on the web on Nov. 17, saying: On September 24 the FBI raided homes of 14 activists in movements in solidarity with oppressed workers and peoples of Latin America and Israel/Palestine. Read the whole thing here. As far as I can tell from scouring the Web, Davis is the only person in the world who claims to know anything about this. And she isn't sharing any details that would allow anyone to find out any more about it. I'd be very interested to learn more about this alleged incident. But did it really happen? And did that statement really come from Davis? If it did, why is she being so coy about it?

Author Juliette Akinyi Ochieng, aka blogger "Baldilocks," says her book, Tale of the Tigers, has sold 23 copies on Amazon in the 11 months since it was released (can't tell if it's been on Amazon that long). Its current sales rank is #10,139 overall and #9 in sports fiction. That appears to indicate that 99.9 percent of Amazon books have sold fewer than two dozen copies in the past year.

For a contemporary, non-fiction compendium of the horrors devised by slave owners and their overseers, read the online version of American Slavery As It Is. In 1839, the American Anti-Slavery Society published this 224-page encyclopedia of the unholy private tortures and public laws used to keep slaves in submission. The information was so brutal that the book came with this blurb: "True humanity consists not in a Squeamish Ear, but in listening to the story of human suffering and endeavoring to relieve it." The book is a Gulag Archipelago for American slavery -- information that should never be forgotten. It should be a text for Southern school children until there is no more of this kind of nostalgia for evil.

My research consisted of clicking on the link you provided. Thanks!

Judging by the review I read, the paperback cover gives a little better hint to Sugar's occupation. From the chat: Troy: The Sugar on the cover did not match the one in the story Ron: lol. I know the feeling but as covers go, I thought this one was pretty nice Troy: Nice, but incongruent Ron: Yeah, Sugar didn't sound that attractive Thumper: Yeah, I'm going to ask her about that. Thumper: Are you serious, Sugar didn't sound attractive? Troy: I thought Sugar sounded good myself (smile) Troy: Sugar: Tall, dark Skinned, sexy, hmmm, hmm hmmmmm

Interesting (to me) facts about Dendur Temple: built by the Roman emperor Augustus but dedicated to the local Nubian gods later used later as a Coptic (Christian) church Nile fish used to swim where NY museumgoers now walk: the temple was completely submerged at times after the first Aswan dam was built given to the U.S. by the government of Egypt the Smithsonian lost out to the Met in a bid to re-construct it on the bank of the Potomac (that would have been cool!)

Christie says the action in Death on the Nile takes place on the African continent, but other than a brief visit the all-white cast makes to an Egyptian temple, there really is nothing African at all in the story. It's about Americans and Europeans shut up in boat. Place matters so little that she could have had them sail up the Hudson and stop to visit the Temple of Dendur at the Met without any meaningful difference. Except that the Temple of Dendur was still actually on the Nile when Christie wrote the story, of course.

On his website, Izrael responds to what he admits are frequent accusations that his attitude towards women is misogynistic. He links to Jamilah "Sister Toldja" Lemieux's pretty savage review of his book (quote: "THIS IS THE WORST F*CKING BOOK I HAVE EVER READ") but does not deal with the substance of it. Here are his major points, such as they are: 1. He rebuts the accusation that he is a "relentless misogynist" -- not by focusing on whether his attitudes are "misogynist", but on whether his expression of them can properly be called "relentless." He calculates that only 51 percent of his writing deals with women, which I guess proves that, at worst, he is only a misogynist when he's talking about women. 2. His defends using "bitch" 29 times in The Denzel Principle by saying that most of those uses are "context appropriate." What makes it appropriate, he explains, is that he is referring in some of those instances to two specific women -- presumably his ex-wives. 3. If you don't like it when men refer to women as bitches, that's because "you don’t hang out in bars or barbershops -- like I do." I'll tell you, this guy does not have an impressive intellect. Let me check the respect meter. [tap tap] Nope. Registering zero.

I like your videos, DT. I saw the blurb for your "Mark of the Beast" pamphlet. Let me guess: it's the SKU?

This week's winner: Kam Williams, for his curt assessment of Jimi Izrael. In his review of Izrael's book, The Denzel Principle, Kam calls Izrael "a miserable two-time loser with some serious unresolved anger issues." Apparently, a good part of Izrael's book is devoted to slagging his two ex-wives. Without a trace of irony, Izrael says both the women he chose to marry were "crazy bitches," and that, as black women, they had an "inability to make good choices." The irony just doesn't stop: Izrael's subtitle says "Black Women Can’t Find Good Black Men," and he complains about his second wife leaving him for some dreadlocked guy who "[wasn't] particularly handsome." Speaking of hair fetishists who aren't particularly handsome... Jimi Izrael more Jimi One of the topics on which you can hire Izrael to speak is "The Myth of Misogyny in Hip-Hop." If he's okay with calling women "ho's" than it's no surprise he's single again...and again.

Anybody read this one?

I'm going to put that on a T shirt. Yes, this board is pretty dead now.

That's squirrel, Chris. MISTER Squirrel.

Izrael also had the runner-up for comment of the week. After noting that Kola claims to have dated every famous person in the world--including Elmo--he said, "...w8...she didn't date Elmo? WTF?" Seriously funny.

McBragg says, "I invented the airplane." Münchhausen says, "I rode a cannonball." Kola says, "Jamal Lewis lied to me about his identity while we were dating."

Gladwell's ideas are not particularly original. Law professors have been writing revisionist takes on Atticus Finch for a while. See Steven Lubet's 1999 article, "Reconstructing Atticus Finch," and Monroe Freedman's 1992 comments in the same vein. What I liked most about Gladwell's piece is how he points out that what Lee has Finch describe as a "blind spot" afflicting the leader of the lynch mob is actually a homicidal hatred of blacks.

Both the teams that played for the Stanley Cup have mixed-race players. Dustin Byfuglien Ray Emery None of these guys got the whites-only memo, either.

I don't agree that the only way the Blackhawks' Stanley Cup win can be described is as the emergence of a totem for racists. Are the black fans in that video self-haters?

Author, professor, pundit, blogger, and NPR host Jimi Izrael called Kola Boof “the angry transxual Colonel McBragg of the Twitter game.” The man has a way with words (if not a perfect memory for the military rank of cartoon characters). Man, that takes me back to childhood! John Kass of the Chicago Tribune said years ago that Joe Harris based his Commander McBragg character in part on the Baron von Münchhausen stories. Remember how Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle, "You're no Jack Kennedy." Well, Kola, you definitely are a Münchhausen.

A great book. The celebrated writer Malcolm Gladwell has celebrated the anniversary with a piece in the New Yorker that says Atticus Finch isn't as heroic a character as people like to think: The Courthouse Ring. A lot of people are now mad at Gladwell, some because he's a Canadian-born New Yorker making pronouncements about the culture of the South in an era before he was born.