Hoewel Ian Buruma beweert dat voor hem de VS ‘a model of freedom and openness’ is stelt hij tegelijkertijd dat er in ‘Amerika’ een ‘morele hysterie’ heerst:
Wie beschuldigd wordt, terecht of onterecht, wordt meteen verguisd op de sociale media. Daar zit geen limiet op… Je wordt uitgestoten uit de maatschappij. Je wordt bijna een non-persoon.
De mening van Buruma veranderde ingrijpend nadat hij zich slachtoffer begon te voelen van de exemplarische ‘vrijheid en openheid’ die in ‘the land of the free, home of the brave’ zou bestaan. Zijn opportunistische houding verraadt hoe een ‘liberal’ in een handomdraai van opinie verandert zodra hem dit uitkomt. Bovendien ging het in de zogeheten Ghomeshi-affaire niet om de verguizing ‘op de sociale media,’ maar om een conflict met de redactie van The New York Review of Books die genoeg had van Buruma's autoritaire hoofdredacteurschap en zijn onvermogen om rekening te houden met de huidige tijdgeest. Of, zoals hij het op zijn 65ste zelf verwoordde: 'Ik ben gesneuveld in een generatieconflict, tussen de min-dertigers en de plus-veertigers.’ Buruma’s morele flexibiliteit kent geen limiet; wat hij het ene moment met grote stelligheid poneert, kan mijn oude vriend het volgende moment weer met evenveel stelligheid weerleggen. Wat dat betreft is hij een kind van zijn tijd, want het typerende van de postmoderne massamedia is dat er geen waarheid is, er bestaat alleen een virtuele werkelijkheid die elk ogenblik van gedaante kan veranderen.
Hoe ironisch kan het leven zijn. Hier is een opiniemaker aan het woord die volgens eigen zeggen ‘gesneuveld’ is ‘in een generatieconflict,’ terwijl hijzelf tot een generatie behoort die eind jaren zestig, begin jaren zeventig, de toen veel besproken ‘generatiekloof’ won, door de patriarchale regenten eruit te werken om hun plaats te kunnen innemen. De geschiedenis herhaalt zich nu. Daarnaast is het wonderlijk dat Buruma geen oog heeft voor de pré-socratische wijsheid panta rhei, alles stroomt, niets is bestendig. In plaats van zich slachtoffer te voelen van de geschiedenis, zou hij de veranderingen juist moeten toejuichen. Zijn (en mijn) tijd zit erop, en het getuigt van weinig inzicht te denken dat je over je eigen graf heen kan regeren. Dat hij dit niet beseft is een ander symptoom van de mateloosheid die mijn generatie kenmerkt. Opgegroeid en oud geworden in overvloed en vrede geloven veel van mijn tijdgenoten dat het feest nooit zal ophouden. Zij kunnen zich de vergankelijkheid van alles en iedereen niet voorstellen, en weigeren in te zien dat ook zij, na hun dood snel vergeten zullen worden, dat zij niet meer zijn geweest dan een voetnoot. Terwijl zij elkaar en zichzelf met hommages overladen, laten zij een armzalige erfenis achter, zich niet realiserend dat zijzelf de barbaren zijn geworden voor wie zij altijd zo gewaarschuwd hebben.
Op de voorpagina van The New York Times van 6 maart 2019 beschreef de columnist Nicholas Kristof de diepe crisis als volgt:
In his testimony before Congress last week, Michael Cohen in effect warned of a coup:
‘Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,’ Cohen said…
The polarization also leads Trump supporters to worry about a coup — by the ‘deep state’ against Trump — and some make glib references about resorting to violence.
‘We are in a civil war in this country,’ Joseph diGenova, a prominent conservative commentator on Fox News and other programs, told Laura Ingraham in her podcast. He added, ‘As I say to my friends, I do two things — I vote and I buy guns.’
Let’s all take a deep breath.
I think Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, has a point when he says: ‘This is a moment of great peril for our democracy.’
In deze bewoordingen beschrijft Kristof de nadagen van het Amerikaans imperialisme. Het enige dat Europese lezers kunnen hopen is dat die ‘civil war’ in de VS zo snel mogelijk uitloopt op massaal binnenlands geweld, zodat Europa niet wordt meegezogen in een Derde Wereldoorlog, waarin de VS en Europa strijden tegen Rusland en China, waardoor de mogelijkheid van een nucleair armageddon alles behalve ondenkbaar is.
In zijn boek Wall Street’s Think Tank. The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2019, formuleert de Amerikaanse auteur en historicus Laurence H. Shoup de situatie als volgt:
This book’s focus on the Council on Foreign Relations helps expose the phoniness of American ‘democracy,' a corrupt system in which the needs and avarice the capitalist class are dominant, a desire to accumulate more and more wealth in all of its forms. Behind this avarice is a passion for power over others, an unquenchable thirst for conquest, to rule over more and more human beings in order to exploit their labor power, to keep them imprisoned in an immoral slave-like division of labor, often including low wages, poor conditions, and work insecurity. This division of labor puts the capitalist at the top, making decisions about the lives of the workers, as well as plundering the surplus value/profits and, as folk wisdom puts it, ‘laughing all the way to the bank.’ This focus on the Council and its activities also provides important advance knowledge about developing trends in ruling-class thinking, intelligence that can be useful to working people as they confront the capitalists in their daily and longer-term struggles.
At the more individual level, the ‘in-and-outers’ (part of the revolving door between private institutions and the government), very often CFR members who almost always remain members while serving in government, academic life, or in te private sector business world, are a kind of double agent, serving the iterates of the capitalist class and its corporations while in ‘public service,’ then leaving, often to reap the benefits of their decision after returning to top corporate or other lucrative positions. Their membership in the Council informs al who will make decisions in conformity with the needs and interests of the capitalist class and neoliberale geopolitics.
These facts and analyses have a crucial bearing on the often mentioned, but mistaken, ‘relative autonomy of the state’ theory of state power and governmental decision making. This theory and its proponents assert that the state bureaucracy in the United States is relatively independent of a ruling capitalist class and has the autonomy to make decisions that are in the interest of the system as a whole. The advocates of this view have failed to consider that market and private trade associations are not the only important social relationships among the top capitalists and their relationships to government. The capitalist class also has the deep state — made up of the CFR and related organizations especially — to formulate and coordinate their overall strategic interests and insert the into the government. The Council and its larger network of interlocked institutions plays a central role in training and selecting the capitalist-class and professional-class leaders who occupy the highest levels of state power.
Het resultaat van dit neoliberale ‘socialisme voor de rijken' werd op 19 januari 2019 door de onafhankelijke, joods-Amerikaanse senator voor de staat Vermont, Bernie Sanders, als volgt samengevat:
Companies have announced over $1 trillion in stock buybacks last year alone. In 2017, the top 10 corporate executives saw their combined compensation skyrocket by more than 60 percent from the year before, reaching almost $1.9 billion. On average, they each received $185 million in compensation. In 2017, the top 25 Wall Street hedge fund managers made more than $15.3 billion, their highest compensation in years. Incredibly, that amount is nearly double what all 140,000 kindergarten teachers in the United States earned last year.
Yes, the economy is doing great for the top 1 percent. While the very rich get richer, real wages for average workers over the past year are up by all of 1.2 percent at around $9 a week and millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages. Today, the United States has more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s. Since the 2008 Wall Street crash, 46 percent of all new income has gone to the top 1 percent. Chief executive officer incomes have gone up 937 percent over the past 40 years and they now make 361 times more than the average worker.
The most important economic reality of our time is that, over the past four decades, there has been an enormous transfer of income and wealth from the middle class to the richest people. Since 1979, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their very share of national income decline from 58 percent to 46 percent, costing them nearly $11,000 per household.
Naast het economisch onrecht van het parasitaire neoliberalisme, is er tevens sprake van een historisch onrecht, die ten grondslag ligt aan een diepe morele crisis. Daarover schreef de joods-Amerikaanse conservatieve New York Times-columnist David Brooks op 7 maart 2019:
while there have been many types of discrimination in our history, the African-American (and the Native American) experiences are unique and different. Theirs are not immigrant experiences but involve a moral injury that simply isn’t there for other groups.
Slavery and the continuing pattern of discrimination aren’t only an attempt to steal labor; they are an attempt to cover over a person’s soul, a whole people’s soul.
That injury shows up today as geographic segregation, the gigantic wealth gap, the lack of a financial safety net, but also the lack of the psychological and moral safety net that comes when society has a history of affirming: You belong. You are us. You are equal.
Nearly five years ago I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s (prominente zwarte Amerikaanse journalist en auteur. svh) Atlantic article ‘The Case for Reparations,’ with mild disagreement. All sorts of practical objections leapt to mind. What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron (beroemde zwarte Amerikaanse basketbalspeler. svh)?
But I have had so many experiences over the past year — sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953 — that suggest we are at another moment of make-or-break racial reckoning.
Coates’s essay seems right now, especially this part: ‘And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely… What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.’
We’re a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation — the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices.
The need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives, in which all feel known. That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life. Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story.
Het is veelbetekenend dat deze ‘wond’ wel wordt gezien door Amerikaanse intellectuelen van naam, maar niet door drie Nederlandse ‘gojim’ columnisten als Ian Buruma, Bas Heijne en Geert Mak, die achtereenvolgens beweren dat de VS ‘a force for good’ is, een ‘in alle opzichten superieure’ cultuur, die ‘decennialang als ordebewaker en politieagent’ fungeerde, ‘om maar te zwijgen van alle hulp die het uitdeelde.’ Ondanks het feit dat ‘vandaag de dag’ die — ook door Brooks gesignaleerde — ‘wond’ zich ‘vandaag de dag manifesteert als een geografische segregatie, de gigantische kloof in rijkdom, het gebrek aan een financieel vangnet, maar ook in het ontbreken van psychologische en morele betrouwbaarheid,’ blijven de drie Hollandse opiniemakers hier in de polder doorgaan voor grote denkers. Het demonstreert de morele corruptie van niet alleen Buruma, Heijne en Mak, maar — veel gevaarlijker nog — van het gehele Nederlandse establishment, inclusief een groot deel van de academische wereld. Hoewel Ian Buruma de VS prees als ‘a model of freedom and openness’ constateert David Brooks dat ‘[w]e’re a nation coming apart at the seams,’ als gevolg van ‘the original sin that hardens the heart,’ die ‘separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices.’
De zwarte auteur James Baldwin had gelijk toen hij waarschuwde dat ‘onwetendheid, verbonden met macht, de meest wrede vijand is die gerechtigheid kan hebben.’ De vraag is dan ook gerechtvaardigd: waarom blijven de drie witte Nederlandse opiniemakers zo ‘onwetend’? Waarom menen zij dat de VS overal met massaal geweld als ‘politieagent en ordebewaker’ mag optreden, en oordelen zij dat er zelfs sprake is van een ‘in alle opzichten superieure’ cultuur, met een ‘betrekkelijk goedaardig imperialisme uit Washington,’ waarnaar later de mensheid ‘met weemoed’ zal ‘terugkijken’? Nooit dissidente Amerikaanse lectuur gelezen, nooit buiten een verpolitiekte werkelijkheid durven denken? Of is het dat zijzelf nooit in verzet zijn gekomen? In een ‘Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Davis,’ de zwarte Amerikaanse intellectueel en activiste die op dat moment gevangen zat, schreef Baldwin op 19 november 1970:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.
And so, Newsweek, civilized defender of the indefensible, attempts to drown you in a sea of crocodile tears (‘it remained to be seen what sort of personal liberation she had achieved’) and puts you on its cover, chained.
You look exceedingly alone — as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors, chained together in the name of Jesus, headed for a Christian land.
Well. Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can, here in Europe, on radio and television — in fact, have just returned from a land, Germany, which was made notorious by a silent majority not so very long ago. I was asked to speak on the case of Miss Angela Davis, and did so. Very probably an exercise in futility, but one must let no opportunity slide…
The American triumph — in which the American tragedy has always been implicit — was to make Black people despise themselves. When I was little I despised myself, I did not know any better. And this meant, albeit unconsciously, or against my will, or in great pain, that I also despised my father. And my mother. And my brothers. And my sisters. Black people were killing each other every Saturday night out on Lenox Avenue, when I was growing up; and no one explained to them, or to me, that it was intended that they should; that they were penned where they were, like animals, in order that they should consider themselves no better than animals. Everything supported this sense of reality, nothing denied it: and so one was ready, when it came time to go to work, to be treated as a slave. So one was ready, when human terrors came, to bow before a white God and beg Jesus for salvation — this same white God who was unable to raise a finger to do so little as to help you pay your rent, unable to be awakened in time to help you save your child!
There is always, of course, more to any picture than can speedily be perceived and in all of this — groaning and moaning, watching, calculating, clowning, surviving, and outwitting, some tremendous strength was nevertheless being forged, which is part of our legacy today. But that particular aspect of our journey now begins to be behind us. The secret is out: we are men!
But the blunt, open articulation of this secret has frightened the nation to death. I wish I could say, ‘to life,’ but that is much to demand of a disparate collection of displaced people still cowering in their wagon trains and singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ The nation, if America is a nation, it is not in the least prepared for this day. It is a day which the Americans never expected or desired to see, however piously they may declare their belief in progress and democracy. Those words, now, on American lips, have become a kind of universal obscenity: for this most unhappy people, strong believers in arithmetic, never expected to be confronted with the algebra of their history.
One way of gauging a nation's health, or of discerning what it really considers to be its interests — or to what extent it can be considered as a nation as distinguished from a coalition of special interests — is to examine those people it elects to represent or protect it. One glance at the American leaders (or figure-heads) conveys that America is on the edge of absolute chaos, and also suggests the future to which American interests, if not the bulk of the American people, appear willing to consign the Blacks. (Indeed, one look at our past conveys that.) It is clear that for the bulk of our (nominal) countrymen, we are all expendable. And Messrs. Nixon, Agnew, Mitchell, and Hoover, to say nothing, of course, of the Kings' Row basket case, the winning Ronnie Reagan, will not hesitate for an instant to carry out what they insist is the will of the people.
But what, in America, is the will of the people? And who, for the above-named, are the people? The people, whoever they may be, know as much about the forces which have placed the above-named gentlemen in power as they do about the forces responsible for the slaughter in Vietnam. The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and Blacks alike. But most white Americans do not dare admit this (though they suspect it) and this fact contains mortal danger for the Blacks and tragedy for the nation.
Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness — for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps — they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify — as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our Black church) in their sins — that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps — for that is what they are — is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than Black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove. If the American people are unable to contend with their elected leaders for the redemption of their own honor and the lives of their own children, we, the Blacks, the most rejected of the Western children, can expect very little help at their hands: which, after all, is nothing new. What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried. We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world! We know that a man is not a thing and is not to be placed at the mercy of things. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else's profit. We know that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and, finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is in him, or that has ever been.
We know that we, the Blacks, and not only we, the Blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.
The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own — which it is — and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
Therefore: peace.
BROTHER JAMES
Baldwin noemde bijna een halve eeuw geleden het verzet van de nakomelingen van zwarte slaven ‘The Beginning or the End of America.’ Of de VS zou werkelijk een democratie worden, waarin iedere burger gelijk was voor de wet, een land zonder een etterende ‘wond.’ Of de VS zou een racistische en totalitaire politiestaat blijven, die permanent in oorlog bleef met mens en natuur. In 2012, ten tijde van juist het presidentschap van de ‘eerste zwarte president,’ die zijn kiezers bedroog met de leuze ‘Change We Can Believe In,’ zag de gekleurde bevolking in de VS zich gedwongen Black Lives Matter op te richten, een beweging die de zwarte gemeenschap wil beschermen tegen het politiegeweld en straffeloos vermoorden van zwarte jongeren. Niks ‘Change,’ dezelfde repressie als altijd, 'geloven' doet men in de kerk. Het infantiel enthousiasme van de ‘liberals’ was op niets concreets gebaseerd, behalve dan op de huidskleur van Obama, die half wit, half zwart is. Maar wie sceptisch toekeek werd onmiddellijk gemarginaliseerd dan wel volkomen genegeerd. Vandaar dat geen van de propagandisten de scherpzinnige beschouwing lazen van de Amerikaanse intellectueel Shelby Steele, die, net als Obama kind van een zwarte vader en een witte moeder is. In zijn boek A Bound Man. Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, verschenen in januari 2008, tien maanden voordat Obama tot de 'eerste zwarte Amerikaanse president' werd gekozen stelde Steele in het laatste hoofdstuk, getiteld 'The Visible Man,’ de volgende vragen:
Can a black ask for power at the level of the American presidency without wearing a mask, without reassuring whites that they will be given the benefit of the doubt without lessening the anxiety inherent in being white today? Is real power possible for blacks without some negotiation with white innocence?
Steele merkte op dat:
In order to be part of history, to participate in its relentless evolution, the black American has always had to don (opzetten. svh) the mask that would enable him to join the larger white world, where, presumably, history is being made. Thus, to a degree, inauthenticity has been the price blacks have paid to join history,
waardoor
the price for acting in the interest of his own authenticity — for being mask less — was to fall outside of history.
Zodra de zwarten voor hun eigen ‘authenticiteit’ kiezen worden zij ogenblikkelijk voor de blanke 'orde' gezichtsloos. Dan zijn zij 'loud, colorful, and completely self-invented out of the historical chaos of black life.' Zij zijn dan 'existential cowboys wearing no mask for the white world, and yet, for all their self-satisfaction, they were completely outside of history.' Shelby Steele zette uiteen dat:
Barack Obama entered history by wearing the bargainers mask. He was born to a fate that literally schooled him in bargaining. It was not a hard-earned and carefully evolved individuality that won him entrée into the national imagination...
His supporters do not look to him to DO something; they look to him primarily to BE something, to REPRESENT something. He is a bound man because he cannot be two opposing worldviews at the same time — he cannot grant whites their racial innocence and simultaneously withhold it from them.
Barack Obama emerged into a political culture that needed him more as an icon than as a man. He has gone 'far because the need is great. But this easy appeal has also been his downfall. It is a seduction away from character and conviction. In the Brotherhood, Tod Clifton (Afro-Amerikaanse hoofdrolspeler in de roman 'De Onzichtbare Man,' even onzichtbaar als Obama. svh) thought he never had to discover what he truly believed. He never considered his true self to be relevant. When he finally lurches away from this falseness, there is no self to guide him toward a meaningful life. Probably the greatest debilitation in black American life is that our history of masking — once so necessary to our survival — has caused us to overvalue the manipulation of white people and to undervalue the evolution of our individual selves.
The challenge for Barack Obama is the same as it is for all free people: to achieve visibility as an individual, to in fact become an individual rather than a racial cipher. Today, he is in the same peril of falling 'out of history' as the fictional Tod Clifton was sixty years ago. Unless we get to know who he is — what beliefs he would risk his life for — he could become a cautionary tale in his own right, an iconic figure who neglected to become himself!
Waar het hier om draait is datgene wat Baldwin noemt: ‘to achieve visibility as an individual’ in een al eeuwenlang racistische klassenmaatschappij beheerst door een schatrijke ‘white Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ elite, na de Tweede Wereldoorlog aangevuld met nieuwe rijken uit kringen van joodse-Amerikanen. Aangezien ‘power corrupts,’ corrumpeerden al snel ook de laatst genoemde groep, met als gevolg dat de joods-Amerikaanse Amy Goodman -- samen met mede-oprichter van Democracy Now! Denis Moynihan -- op 21 februari 2019 de joodse Pro-Israel Lobby als volgt bekritiseerde:
‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter From Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963. King was arrested there for his role in organizing nonviolent protests against segregation, which were being led by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. ‘Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States,’ King also wrote in that famous letter. Civil-rights campaigners were so frequently targeted with bombs by the Ku Klux Klan that the city was often called ‘Bombingham.’ Five months after King’s letter, one of those bombs went off at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four little girls. Today, across the street from that church sits the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), which for more than a quarter century has educated and inspired millions of visitors.
Last October, the BCRI announced it would bestow its 2018 Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award on Angela Y. Davis, the legendary civil-rights activist, prison abolition advocate and scholar. Angela Davis is a Birmingham native, and grew up amidst segregation. Her neighborhood suffered so many Klan bombings that it was nicknamed ‘Dynamite Hill.' The daughter of civil-rights activists, she went on to become a prominent member of the Communist Party USA and a leader in the Black Panther Party. As a result, like so many activists in that era (MLK included), she was targeted by the FBI. She was charged as a conspirator in the shooting death of a judge. She faced three death sentences in a trial that became an international cause célèbre. She was ultimately acquitted of all the charges.
The BCRI’s decision to honor Angela Davis made perfect sense. She has gained renown for her tireless work on behalf of prisoners and to abolish the U.S. prison-industrial complex. Integral to her life’s work, she has long expressed unflinching support for the rights of Palestinian people. In a recently published collection of essays and speeches titled ‘Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement,’ she writes, reflecting on the life of Nelson Mandela and the successful campaign to eliminate South African apartheid, ‘We are now confronted with the task of assisting our sisters and brothers in Palestine as they battle against Israeli apartheid.’
Two months after the BCRI board members announced that she had been granted the Shuttlesworth award, they received a letter from the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center asking them to reconsider the award in part because of Davis’ ‘outspoken support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.’ The BCRI board, in a 9-2 vote, rescinded the award. It canceled the award gala that had been scheduled for Feb. 16.
Ook in Nederland wordt getracht critici van het Joodse regime in Israel monddood te maken, zoals blijkt uit opmerkingen van bijvoorbeeld Hanna Luden, de Israëlisch/Nederlandse directeur van het ‘pro-zionistische lobbygroep’ het CIDI, en NRC-columnist Ian Buruma, om slechts twee propagandisten te noemen. Het geval Buruma is daarom zo interessant omdat hij als hoogleraar ‘Democracy, Human Rights & Journalism’ kritiek op de grootschalige zionistische schendingen van de mensenrechten als volgt demoniseerde:
Links antisemitisme stoelt meestal op fanatieke bezwaren tegen de Israëlische behandeling van de Palestijnen. Als critici van Israël het hebben over ‘de zionisten’ in plaats van de Israeli’s, weet je bijna zeker dat het om fanatici gaat.
Deze criminalisering toont ook nog zijn onwetendheid aan. Het betreft hier namelijk wel degelijk ‘zionistische’ terreurdaden tegen de Palestijnse burgerbevolking — inclusief vrouwen en kinderen en ongewapende mannen — aangezien ruim 20 procent van ‘de Israeli’s’ bestaat uit Palestijnen die vanzelfsprekend geen ‘zionisten’zijn. Zij zijn de nazaten van de oorspronkelijke bewoners die terugvochten, waardoor hun woongebied in ’47/’48 niet door de zionisten etnisch kon worden gezuiverd. Juist degenen die verzwijgen dat eenvijfde van de Israelische bevolking Palestijns is, kunnen met recht ‘fanatici’ worden genoemd, niet de critici van de Israelische terreur. Opmerkelijk is dat mijn oude vriend zich niet alleen als een ‘fanaticus’ gedraagt, maar ook als een antisemiet, aangezien hij de Palestijnse bevolking, eveneens semieten, domweg onzichtbaar probeert te maken. Buruma’s houding is des te verwerpelijker aangezien het huidige zionisme de vernietiging van het judaïsmebetekent. Wanneer hij om wat voor onduidelijke reden ook de terreur van de zelfbenoemde ‘Joodse staat’ wil verzwijgen, dan dient hij als opiniemaker van de mainstream-pers allereerst goed geïnformeerd te zijn, en daarna moeten beseffen welke schade hij toebrengt aan ondermeer onschuldige Palestijnse kinderen. En mocht hij die als ‘collateral damage’ beschouwen, dan is voor hem misschien wel een legitieme reden om zijn hetze tegen critici te stoppen het feit dat het zionisme het judaïsme tracht te vernietigen. Bovendien wijst de joods-Amerikaanse hoogleraar Politieke Wetenschappen aan de prestigieuze Johns Hopkins University, Benjamin Ginsberg in zijn boek The Fatal Embrace. The Politics of Anti-Semites in the United States (1998) op een ander punt:
Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade’s corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2% of the nation’s population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studio’s are Jews, as are the owners of the nation’s largest newspaper chain and most influential single newspaper, the New York Times. In the late 1960s, Jews already constituted 20% of the faculty of elite universities and 40% of the professors of elite law schools; today, these percentages doubtless are higher.
The role and influence of Jews in American politics is equally marked. Jews are elected to public office in disproportionate numbers. In 1993, ten members of the United States Senate and thirty-two members of the House of Representatives were Jewish, three to four times their percentage of the general population. Jews are even more prominent in political organizations and in finance. One recent study found that that in twenty-seven of thirty-six campaigns for the United States Senate, one or both candidates relied upon a Jewish campaign chairman or finance director. In the realm of lobbying and litigation, Jews organized what was for many years oe of Washington’s most successful political action committees, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and they play leadership roles in the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign. After the Democrats’ victory, President Clinton appointed a number of Jews to prominent positions in his administration.
Was dit geschreven door een niet-jood, dan hadden Ian Buruma en de joodse pro-Israel lobby geklaagd dat deze informatie ‘rabiaat antisemitisch’ was. Maar wat een jood in dit soort gevallen wel mag, mag een ‘goj’ niet, namelijk de werkelijkheid beschrijven. In verband met de lengte stop ik. Volgende keer meer over ondermeer Benjamin Ginsberg's boek.
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