Amy Goodman's Blog, page 32

By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Judy Ancel, a Kansas City, Missouri, professor, and her St Louis colleague were teaching a labour history class together this spring semester. Little did they know, video recordings of the class were making their way into the thriving sub rosa world of rightwing attack video editing, twisting their words in a way that resulted in the loss of one of the professors' jobs amid a wave of intimidation and death threats. Fortunately, reason and solid facts prevailed, and the videos ultimately were exposed for what they are: fraudulent, deceptive, sloppily edited hit pieces.

Rightwing media personality Andrew Breitbart is the forceful advocate of the slew of deceptively edited videos that target and smear progressive individuals and institutions. He promoted the videos that purported to catch employees of the community organization Acorn assisting a couple in setting up a prostitution ring. He showcased the edited video of Shirley Sherrod, an African American employee of the US department of agriculture, which completely convoluted her speech, making her appear to admit to discriminating against a white farmer. She was fired as a result of the cooked-up controversy. Similar video attacks have been waged against Planned Parenthood.

Judy Ancel has been the director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City's institute for labour studies since 1988. Using a live video link, she co-teaches a course on the history of the labour movement with Professor Don Giljum, who teaches at University of Missouri-St Louis. The course comprises seven day-long, interactive sessions throughout the semester. They are video-recorded and made available through a password-protected system to students registered in the class.

One of those students, Philip Christofanelli, copied the videos and, he admits on one of Breitbart's sites, that he did "give them out in their entirety to a number of my friends". At some point, a series of highly and very deceptively edited renditions of the classes appeared on Breitbart's website. It was then that Ancel's and Giljum's lives were disrupted, and the death threats started. A post on Breitbart's BigGovernment.com summarized the video: "The professors not only advocate the occasional need for violence and industrial sabotage, they outline specific tactics that can be used."

Ancel told me, "I was just appalled, because I knew it was me speaking, but it wasn't saying what I had said in class." She related the attack against her and Giljum to the broader attack on progressive institutions currently: "These kinds of attacks are the equivalent of electronic brownshirts. They create so much fear, and they are so directed against anything that is progressive – the right to an education, the rights of unions, the rights of working people – I see, are all part of an overall attack to silence the majority of people and create the kind of climate of fear that allows for us to move very, very sharply to the right. And it's very frightening."

Ancel's contact information was included in the attack video, as was Giljum's. She received a flurry of threatening emails. Giljum received at least two death threats over the phone. The University of Missouri conducted an investigation into the charges prompted by the videos, during which time they posted uniformed and plainclothes police in the classrooms. Giljum is an adjunct professor, with a full-time job working as the business manager for Operating Engineers Local 148, a union in St Louis. Meanwhile, the union acceded to pressure from the Missouri AFL-CIO, and asked Giljum to resign, just days before his 1 May retirement, after working there for 27 years.

Gail Hackett, provost of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, released a statement after the investigation, clearing the two professors of any wrongdoing: "It is clear that edited videos posted on the internet depict statements from the instructors in an inaccurate and distorted manner by taking their statements out of context and reordering the sequence in which those statements were actually made so as to change their meaning."

The University of Missouri-St Louis also weighed in with similar findings, and stated that Giljum was still eligible to teach there.

On 18 April, Andrew Breitbart appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, declaring, "We are going to take on education next, go after the teachers and the union organizers." It looks as if Ancel and Giljum were the first targets of that attack.

In this case, the attack failed. While Acorn was ultimately exonerated by a congressional investigation, the attack took its toll, and the organization lost its funding and collapsed. President Barack Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to Shirley Sherrod, and Vilsack begged her to return to work. Sherrod has a book coming out and a lawsuit pending against Breitbart.

Let's hope this is a sign that deception, intimidation and the influence of the rightwing echo chamber are on the decline.

Denis Moynihan contributed to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," an independent, daily global TV/radio news hour airing on more than 950 stations in the United States and around the world. She is the author of "Breaking the Sound Barrier," recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2011 Amy Goodman

Judy Ancel, a Kansas City, Missouri, professor, and her St Louis colleague were teaching a labour history class together this spring semester. Little did they know, video recordings of the class were making their way into the thriving sub rosa world of right-wing attack video editing, twisting their words in a way that resulted in the loss of one of the professors' jobs amid a wave of intimidation and death threats. Fortunately, reason and solid facts prevailed, and the videos ultimately were exposed for what they are: fraudulent, deceptive, sloppily edited hit pieces.

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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

Tony Kushner will be receiving an honorary degree from John Jay College of criminal justice in New York City. This shouldn't be big news. Kushner is a renowned playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, along with an Emmy award and two Tonys. The degree became big news when it was abruptly shelved by the City University of New York board of trustees during its 2 May meeting, after a trustee accused Kushner of being anti-Israel.

A campaign grew almost immediately, first calling on previous recipients of honorary degrees from CUNY colleges (of which John Jay College is one) to return them. Within days, what would have been a quickly forgotten bestowal of an honorary degree erupted into an international scandal. The chair of the board, Benno Schmidt, former president of Yale University, convened an emergency executive session of the board, which voted unanimously to restore the honour to Kushner.

The controversy exposed the extreme polarity that increasingly defines the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the willingness by some to suppress free speech and vigorous dialogue to further rigid, political dogma. The trustee who attacked Kushner, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, began his tirade at the original board meeting with an attack on Mary Robinson, who was formerly both the president of Ireland and the United Nations high commissioner for human rights. He then went on: "There is a lot of disingenuous and nonintellectual activity directed against the state of Israel on campuses throughout the country, the west generally, and oftentimes the United States, as well."

He presented several quotes that he attributed to Kushner to make his case, ending with, "I don't want to bore you all with the details."

Tony Kushner told me: "[W]hat he's doing is sparing them not boring details, but the full extent of the things that I've said about the state of Israel that would in fact make it clear to the board that I am in no way an enemy of the state of Israel, that I am, in fact, a vocal and ardent supporter of the state of Israel, but I don't believe that criticism of state policy means that one seeks the destruction of a state. I've been very critical of the policies of my own government."

First, a little history on Kushner's work. He won the Pulitzer for his play "Angels in America". The play is subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes", and addresses the HIV/Aids epidemic and the struggle that many gay and lesbian people endure in the United States. A key character in the play is a fictionalized version of Roy Cohn, a prominent attorney who, early in his career, was a key adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn helped McCarthy with his fanatical pursuit of suspected communists in the US government and beyond. He was considered a lifelong closeted gay man, despite the fact that he helped target people for political persecution for being gay. Cohn died in 1986 of complications due to Aids, although he publicly described his illness as liver cancer. Thus, in a dramatic, real-life turn of events, Kushner, who has written extensively on the witchhunts of the McCarthy era, has now become the object of such a witch hunt himself.

The CUNY Board of Trustees' version of Roy Cohn here is Wiesenfeld, appointed by a former Republican governor of New York, George Pataki.

I interviewed Tony Kushner soon after he got word that his honorary degree had been restored. He said US policy toward the Middle East "based on rightwing fantasies and theocratic fantasies and scripture-based fantasies of what history and on-the-ground reality is telling us, is catastrophic and is going to lead to the destruction of the state of Israel". He went on: "These people are not defending it. They're not supporting it. They're, in fact, causing a distortion of US policy regarding Israel and a distortion of the internal politics of Israel itself, because they exert a tremendous influence in Israel and support rightwing politicians who, I think, have led the country into a very dark and dangerous place."

During the McCarthy era, the US was a dark and dangerous place as well. Now, amid the uprisings in the Arab and Muslim world, the recent rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas, and the likely recognition of Palestinian statehood by the United Nations general assembly, there is no more urgent time for vigorous and informed debate.

The future of peace in the Middle East depends on dissent. Those, like Tony Kushner, with the courage to speak out are the true angels in America.

Denis Moynihan contributed to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," an independent, daily global TV/radio news hour airing on more than 950 stations in the United States and around the world. She is the author of "Breaking the Sound Barrier," recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2011 Amy Goodman

Tony Kushner will be receiving an honorary degree from John Jay College of criminal justice in New York City. This shouldn't be big news. Kushner is a renowned playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, along with an Emmy award and two Tonys. The degree became big news when it was abruptly shelved by the City University of New York board of trustees during its 2 May meeting, after a trustee accused Kushner of being anti-Israel.

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Eight years to the day after then-President George W. Bush strode onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln under a banner announcing "Mission Accomplished," President Barack Obama, without flight suit or swagger, made the surprise announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a U.S. military operation (in a wealthy suburb of Pakistan, notably, not Afghanistan).

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has become the longest war in U.S. history. News outlets now summarily report that "The Taliban have begun their annual spring offensive," as if it were the release of a spring line of clothes. The fact is, this season has all the markings of the most violent of the war, or as the brave reporter Anand Gopal told me Tuesday from Kabul: "Every year has been more violent than the year before that, so it's just continuing that trend. And I suspect the same to be said for the summer. It will likely be the most violent summer since 2001."

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As the New Democratic Party surges in Canada's election, we revisit Amy Goodman's 2009 column on the late Tommy Douglas, the NDP's first leader and the pioneering politician credited with creating the modern Canadian health care system.

Imagine the scene. America 2009. Eighteen thousand people have died in one year, an average of almost 50 a day. Who's taking them out? What's killing them?

To investigate, President Barack Obama might be tempted to call on Jack Bauer, the fictional rogue intelligence agent from the hit TV series "24," who invariably employs torture and a host of other illegal tactics to help the president fight terrorism. But terrorism is not the culprit here: It's lack of adequate health care.

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The death penalty case of Mumia Abu-Jamal took a surprising turn this week, as a federal appeals court declared, for the second time, that Abu-Jamal's death sentence was unconstitutional. The third US circuit court of appeals, in Philadelphia, found that the sentencing instructions the jury received, and the verdict form they had to use in the sentencing, were unclear. While the disputes surrounding Abu-Jamal's guilt or innocence were not addressed, the case highlights inherent problems with the death penalty and the criminal justice system, especially the role played by race.

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More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, DC, this past week to discuss, organize, mobilize and protest around the issue of climate change. While tax day Tea Party gatherings of a few hundred scattered around the country made the news, this massive gathering, Power Shift 2011, was largely ignored by the media.

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One month into the pro-democracy uprising in the small Gulf state of Bahrain — where the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet is based, tasked with protecting "U.S. interests" — Bahrainis are suffering the same violent repression as Libyans. So why does Obama have nothing to say?

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On the same day President Barack Obama formally launched his re-election campaign, his attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks would be tried not in federal court, but through controversial military commissions at Guantanamo. Holder blamed members of Congress, who he said "have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any Guantanamo detainees to trial in the United States." Nevertheless, one Guantanamo case will be tried in New York. No, not the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any of his alleged co-conspirators. This week, the New York State Supreme Court will hear the case against Dr. John Leso, a psychologist who is accused of participating in torture at the Gitmo prison camp that Obama pledged, and failed, to close.

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