Blowing up stuff

On March 6, 1970, the same day that bombs went off by mistake in a Greenwich Village townhouse, leveling the entire building and killing three members of the Weather Underground – who had supposedly been acting on their own, without the approval of the organization’s national leadership – unexploded bombs were found in an alley next to the headquarters of the Detroit Police Officers’ Association and in a ladies’ room in the 13^th Precinct of the Detroit Police Department. The combination of the New York explosion and the discovery of the bombs in Detroit (which went unreported at the time in major newspapers) not only strongly suggested that the Greenwich Village bombers, far from being renegades, were in fact working in collusion with Weathermen in other cities, but also led J. Edgar Hoover to take the Weather Underground seriously as a domestic threat. (The discovery in late March of a “bomb factory” in Chicago only further emphasized the danger.) In the months that followed, the FBI hunted down leaders of the group, who went underground.

The Greenwich Village explosion was far from the beginning of the Weathermen story. On February 12, 1970, Weathermen set off pipe bombs next to police cars parked near the Berkeley, California, police department headquarters. One policeman’s arm was permanently mangled, and several other policemen suffered minor injuries. But some of the bombers were disappointed because nobody had died. On February 21, firebombs went off at several locations in New York – at the home of the judge in a then-ongoing Black Panther trial, at a police car, at two armed forces recruiting stations, and at the Low Library at Columbia University. On March 2, the group firebombed a policeman’s home in Cleveland. On March 12, three Manhattan skyscrapers were bombed, and 300 bomb threats phoned in; while there were no deaths, thousands of people were evacuated from office buildings. On June 9, eight policemen were injured in a bombing of New York City police headquarters. (One scary aspect of this crime was that the bomb had actually been planted inside the building.) And on August 24, a Weathermen-connected group of radicals in Madison, Wisconsin, destroyed the Army Mathematics Research Center in that city with a truck bomb, killing a researcher and injuring several others.

Phil Ochs, Berkeley, CAApril 1969 sheet 272 frame 11-12 — Phil Ochs

Such was the spirit of the era, at least in certain circles, that many public figures saw the Weathermen not as despicable sowers of mayhem and destroyers of innocent lives but as heroic rebels. As Arthur M. Eckstein writes in his splendid history of the group, Bad Moon Rising, folk singer Phil Ochs, whose concert at Carnegie Hall on March 27, 1970, was disrupted by a bomb threat that was possibly phoned in by the Weathermen, was tickled pink by the prospect of that storied venue being leveled by a Weather Underground bomb. “It’s be great!” he said.

J. Edgar Hoover didn’t agree. He wanted to destroy the Weathermen. More on that tomorrow.

Posted on May 10, 2017May 7, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

The murderers on West 11th Street

On March 6, 1970, bombs created by a radical terrorist group called the Weather Underground destroyed a three-story townhouse at 18 West 11^th Street in Greenwich Village. Three people (Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold) were killed, and two others (Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson) were injured. When police inspected the premises, they found enough unexploded dynamite to have destroyed every building on both sides of that rather long block. (At the time, actor Dustin Hoffman lived right next door.) The truth that eventually came to light was that the house itself – which the poet James Merrill had lived in as a child, and which had later been the home of lyricist Howard Dietz – had not been the target of the bombers, but had been their headquarters. The five people who had been killed or injured had, in fact, planned to bomb a dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. “It is likely,” writes Arthur M. Eckstein in his history of the group, Bad Moon Rising, “that dozens of people would have been killed if the plan had succeeded.”

09cityroom-weathermen2-blog480 — 18 West 11th Street, then and now

At first they called themselves Weatherman – singular, not plural. After a while they came to be known publicly as the Weathermen or the Weather Underground. The group itself had begun as a faction within the radical organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was a Leninist group, devoted to an international revolutionary struggle on behalf of the proletariat against the forces of imperialism, capitalism, and racism; many of its members had spent time in Cuba, idolized Che Guevara, met with North Vietnamese officials, and/or been influenced by Mao Zedong.

After the townhouse bombing, the Weather Underground publicly announced that the 11^th Street bombers were members of a renegade New York cell that had been engaged in a “rogue operation” that had not been approved by the Weathermen’s national leaders. The Weathermen’s national leaders further announced that, while they would continue to work toward a guerrilla revolution that would overthrow the U.S. government, they would make certain not to plant bombs that might actually harm or kill people and would instead carrying out bombings that would do damage only to property.

bill-ayers-video-still — Bill Ayers today

In the years and decades that followed, this claim – that the townhouse crew had gone rogue and that the Weathermen, as a whole, weren’t out to murder but only to commit vandalism – was faithfully repeated in the writings and public statements by members (and, later, former members) of the group, most famously Bill Ayers, who has since become famous as a friend and mentor of former President Obama. This relatively benign line was also reliably echoed in the Academy Award-nominated 2003 documentary Weather Underground and in Jeremy Varon’s 2004 book Bringing the War Home (a comparison of the Weather Underground with Germany’s Red Army Faction, which we wrote about last September). Only in recent years has this narrative been prominently challenged. As Eckstein makes clear in his book, many if not most members of the Weather Underground were, in fact, devoted to killing, and Ayers and other Weather leaders presented “a united front committed to maximum violence.” In short, the would-be bombers who worked out of that 11^th Street townhouse were not defying the Weathermen leadership; they were engaged in precisely the sort of activity that Ayers urged upon them.

More tomorrow.

Posted on May 9, 2017May 7, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Trump evil, CAIR good: the world of Bethany Allen

This week we’ve been exploring the world of Foreign Policy assistant editor Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, who appears to have begun making a successful career for herself as a slick apologist for even the most extreme aspects of Islam. She did this recently by painting Georgetown University’s Jonathan A.C. Brown, who defended sharia law’s acceptance of slavery, as a victim of Islamophobia. Christmas before last, she performed a similar service for her Muslim husband, celebrating her parents’ Thanksgiving-dinner capitulation to his religion’s strict dietary laws as a triumph over cruel anti-Islamic bigotry.

She’s still at it. On a February 9 of this year, Allen-Ebrahimian wrote an article for the Washington Post in which she worried about the prospects for Muslim life in America under Trump – who, she charged, hates Muslims, and is surrounded by people who share that hatred. She noted that after 9/11 American Muslims “didn’t know where to turn for help….They had almost no political, social or cultural capital.” They were helpless, she lamented, when “Muslims and Muslim charities were targeted in terrorism investigations.” She omitted to mention, however, that these investigations found many Muslims, including supposedly peaceful imams and activists, to have intimate links to terrorists, and discovered that many Muslim “charities” were, in fact, fronts for terrorist groups. Mosques, too.

Ghassan Elashi, a CAIR leader convicted of funneling money to Hamas

But American Muslims, she reported, are no longer powerless. “American Muslims have learned to arm themselves, not with weapons but with the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution….Muslim society in the United States has undergone a stunning transformation.” There are two Muslims in Congress, and plenty of groups such as “the Muslim Legal Fund of America, the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, the Alliance for an Indivisible America 2020, WORDE, the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding in Michigan, Ta’leef Collective in California, the Texas Muslim Women’s Foundation and many others.”

She highlighted “the nation’s premier Muslim civil rights advocacy organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),” which in recent years has “vastly expanded its footprint and now operates 30 offices nationwide.” Again, she omitted to point out that CAIR has been shown to be closely tied to Hamas; that it has given aid to, and expressed support for, terrorist atrocities; and that it is, essentially, a front for a coalition of radical Islamic groups.

Ahmad Saleem (left, with lawyer), arrested last year on child-trafficking charges

But Trump, Allen-Ebrahimian freeted, may undo all of this. She quoted a speaker at CAIR’s annual banquet last December: “A nightmare that we have been fighting in this country for the past 15 years is now in the White House.” Many Americans – indeed, many people throughout the West – would say that the nightmare we have been fighting for the past 15 years is something called Islamic terrorism, which has taken thousands of lives in barbaric acts in New York, Paris, London, Madrid, San Bernardino, Orlando, Boston, Brussels, Mumbai, Bali, and numerous other places. In her Post article, and throughout all the work of hers that we’ve looked at, Allen-Ebrahimian only mentions these horrible actions in the context of complaining about reasonable actions intended to prevent more of them.

Posted on April 21, 2017April 21, 2017 by usefulstooges 4

Bethany Allen: whitewashing totalitarian religion

Yesterday we took a look at Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian’s Christman 2015 Washington Post article about how her Christian family went all halal at Thanksgiving time in order to please her grumpy Muslim husband. We were disturbed by the article but impressed by many of the reactions in the Post‘s online comments field.

To be sure, many readers congratulated Allen Ebrahimian’s family for their welcoming spirit. Others, however, were more critical. One reader was put off by Allen-Ebrahimian’s statement that American Islamophobia had made her cry: “I bet the families of the San Bernardino victims burst into tears occasionally too.” Another reader didn’t appreciate the Trump bashing: “So you and your friends have a problem with Donald Trump because he wants to put more scrutiny to identify potential terrorists. Say that to the families who lost their loved ones in San Bernardino and Paris.” Another pointed out that Allen-Ebrahimian had married into a religion that punishes apostates with death and allows men to have up to four wives. Yet another was “sick and tired of the seemingly endless procession of Islamophobia articles and editorials by the Washington Post….Muslims are safer here than probably any other place in the world.”

A couple of readers zeroed in on Allen-Ebrahimian’s husband – and his family: “What kind of a grown up is he when he doesn’t want to talk to your family because he was not served halal food[?]” Also: “I would be very interested to know the accommodations offered to you by your husband’s family.” Another reader had the same thought: “you (and your family) assimilated into his culture and started eating halal. What has he done to assimilate into yours?” Indeed, what’s missing from Allen-Ebrahimian’s essay is any sign of recognition on her part that she and her family have, unthinkingly or otherwise, accepted the idea that such accommodation should go only one way.

Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen and his wife

Another reader made essentially the same point: “When she was a child and her enlightened family took those global travels to broaden the kids’ minds, did they feel ‘isolated’ because nobody in Nairobi or Vienna served up Thanksgiving turkeys?…When she moved to China, did she expect people to Americanize their holidays for her benefit? On the contrary – by her own reckoning she did everything she could to leave Texas behind, and learn about, celebrate, and adapt to the traditions of her host country. Somehow in the United States, though, the progressive narrative deems that Americans are insensitive for celebrating their own traditions, and that people who move here voluntarily are victims when locals aren’t sufficiently speedy at rewriting traditions on their behalf.”

We might add that it’s especially unsettling to discover that Allen-Ebrahimian, raised in a free country, was drawn to a tyrannical Communist one (China) and, raised in a family that practiced a tolerant and loving version of the Christian faith, has now found herself whitewashing a totalitarian religious ideology.

Posted on April 20, 2017April 19, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Deep in the heart of Texas: Jew-hatred

An outfit called Canary Mission, a watchdog group that “anonymously monitors anti-American, anti-Israel and antisemitic activity on US college campuses,” reported recently on a particular egregious finding.

college-park-center — UTA’s College Park Center

On both Facebook and Twitter, no fewer than 24 current and former students at the University of Texas-Arlington (UTA) have posted the vilest imaginable comments about Jews. They’ve advocated anti-Semitic violence, denied the Holocaust, celebrated the Holocaust, and written things like “Stuff Jews in the oven.”

sjputa — Some members of the UTA chapter of SJP

How can such extensive Jew-hatred have taken root in, of all places, a college in Arlington, Texas? Well, one clue to the answer is that most of the repulsive posts were made by members of the UTA chapters of two groups. One of them is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has been described as a “front for Hamas and the Hamas intermediary American Muslims for Palestine.” The group, which has chapters on at least 200 campuses in the U.S., is viewed as playing a leading role in the spread of anti-Semitism among American college students. As a 2014 article observed,

Instead of promoting justice, SJP and/or its members spend almost all of their energy demonizing Israel, advocating for its eventual destruction, showing an unfortunate affinity for pro-terrorist figures, bullying and intimidating pro-Israel and Jewish students with vicious and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric, and even at times engaging in physical violence. While SJP may pay lip-service to peaceful aims, their rhetoric and actions make it hard to avoid the conclusion that a culture of hatred permeates nearly everything the group does—making the college experience increasingly uncomfortable, at times even dangerous, for Jewish or pro-Israel students.

Three years ago, Northeastern University banned SJU entirely, “after years of anti-Semitic vandalism, glorification of terrorist groups, calls for the destruction of Israel, and other actions.”

The other group behind the rash of anti-Semitism at UTA: the Muslim Student Association (MSA), a front for the Muslim Brotherhood that has chapters around the world and that has not only routinely voiced a virulent anti-Semitism but has also aligned itself with Communist and other radical-left groups.

Among the UTA students named in Canary Mission’s report is Mariam Ghanem, who belongs to both the SJP and MSA and who has “compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler, and tweeted a cartoon equating Nazi soldiers and IDF officers.” Ghanem, now a senior at George Mason University, has worked as an intern at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve; her profile at the Society of Egyptian American Professionals says that she hopes to “use her education and background to give back to the global community and to improve the lives of as many people as she can.”

Also mentioned in the report was SJP member Nancy Salem, who once “retweeted a riddle asking: ‘How many Jews died in the Holocaust?’ The answer: ‘Not enough, HAHAHAHA.’” When a friend left for a visit to the Holy Land, Salem tweeted: “Have a safe trip Lulu. I love you baby girl! See you in 3 weeks! Kiss the Palestine ground for me and kill some jews! <3 #IMissYouAlready.” Then there’s Ismail Said Aboukar, who “referred to the Nazi genocide of the Jews as ‘#LiesToldInSchool’” and wrote that the “world would be sooo much better without jews man.”

Attention UTA administrators: perhaps it’s time for you to learn a lesson from Northeastern University –and, in fact, do them one better by banning both of these hate-inculcating groups?

Posted on March 20, 2017March 20, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Smearing critics: Jonathan Brown

He occupies an influential position at Georgetown University, from which – as we’ve seen this week – he defends Muslims who own slaves, champions old Muslim men who marry little girls, and spews double-talk in an effort to cover up Islam’s unequivocal view of homosexuality as a capital crime. For years he’s routinely expressed opinions that would have gotten a non-Muslim fired from almost any major university in the United States. And nobody has stood up to him.

Well, almost nobody. In fact, Robert Spencer, the author of several books about Islam, has repeatedly challenged Jonathan A.C. Brown‘s systematic lies. On January 30, Brown responded to Spencer’s critiques in a lecture at Gonzaga University, offering to debate Spencer anytime and claiming that he would “mop the floor with” Spencer. Spencer promptly accepted the offer via Twitter. Instead of trying to arrange a time and place, Brown replied with a personal insult: “my God you’re ugly.” At this writing, Brown has yet to issue a serious response to Spencer.

Andrew Harrod, a writer for the Campus Watch website, attended the lecture with which we began this week – the one in which Brown whitewashed Islamic slavery. Or, in fact, he had tried to attend the lecture. In the article he wrote afterwards, Harrod reported that Brown had first observed him, Harrod, in the audience while preparing for the lecture with a fellow professor and “two veiled…assistants.” “Brown,” wrote Harrod, “became visibly irritated” on seeing him. Harrod had covered previous talks by Brown, and Brown has responded to Harrod’s criticism by calling his articles “stupid.” Brown slammed Harrod’s pieces and asked him if he intended to avail himself of the refreshments offered at the event. Brown’s colleague then asked Harrod to leave – a perfect illustration, argued Harrod, “of how he and his fellow Islamism apologists handle opposing views.”

One last thing about Brown. He’s married to Laila Al-Arian, a producer for Al Jazeera television and the daughter of Sami Al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida who was held in house arrest and then deported to Turkey in 2015 for aiding members of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian is definitely a figure worthy of attention by this website; but we’ll have to get around to him on another day.

Posted on March 10, 2017February 14, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Deepa Kumar’s immoral lies on women and Islam

Yesterday we met Deepa Kumar, a Rutgers professor who, four years after 9/11, two years after the massive terrorist attack on the Atocha train station in Madrid, and just months after the July 2005 bombings in London, published a long, ardent essay in Monthly Review because she was irate. Not at the terrorists, mind you, but at the people in the West who were – among other unspeakable things – drawing cartoons of Muhammed.

For academics like Kumar, pretty much everything that happens in the world is simple to understand because it all fits into a single overarching paradigm: on the one hand there are Western imperialists and oppressors, and on the other hand there are their victims. Even the most violent acts of Islamic terrorism are by definition always a response – and perhaps even a defensible one – to Western imperialism and oppression; even acts by Westerners that might seem relatively innocuous acts, such as drawing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammed, are absolutely reprehensible because what’s going on is that a member of the oppressor class is spitting on the oppressed – celebrating his own privilege and cruelly reminding the oppressed of their subservience.

In a later piece responding to critics of her first article, Kumar largely repeated her argument, but she did add something new. A few of her critics had dared to suggest that a key difference between the West and the Islamic world is that the former has undergone an Enlightenment and the latter has not. But Kumar, as it turned out, was not so hot on the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, she claimed, had “laid the basis for racism”; among its “legacies” were “slavery, colonialism, and racism.” While the premises for the English, French, and American revolutions “were no doubt progressive,” she added, the capitalist systems they ushered in were not “based on equality, justice, or liberty.” So much, then, for the Enlightenment, in the view of Deepa Kumar.

Kumar then turned to the subject of women – while, curiously enough, avoiding any explicit mention of the fact that women, in most of the Islamic world, are (at best) second-class citizens, are treated as the property of men, and can be raped, subjected to clitoridectomies, forced into marriages, and even killed with total impunity. Kumar dropped all that, then, down the memory hole. By way of demonstrating, however, that women have it bad in the West, she noted that the state legislature of South Dakota had recently banned abortion. (True – although the law, as it happens, was overturned a few months later.)

Her point: “the idea that the Enlightenment magically emancipated women in the West is nonsense.” But of course nobody says that the Enlightenment instantly freed Western women from servitude; the point is that it introduced ideas about freedom, justice, and equality that eventually, and inevitably, eventuated in women’s liberation. But Kumar had an addition claim in regard to this topic: she insisted that America’s “rulers…have never cared about the rights of women right here in the U.S.; they are not going to suddenly start caring about women’s rights elsewhere.” In other words, anyone in a position of authority in the Western world who actually professes to be disturbed by the treatment of women under Islam is just pretending. This is a standard assertion among academic leftists – because it’s pretty much the only position they can take in response to arguments that they don’t care about the brutal abuses of Islam.

Is there more? Of course there is. Tune in tomorrow.

Posted on January 31, 2017January 31, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

The Rutgers prof who declares Islam off-limits for humorists

“I’ve just about had it,” she wrote in February 2006. Across Europe and the Islamic world, Muslims were rioting, committing acts of vandalism, and murdering innocent people in supposed outrage over the publication by a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, of a set of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed.

What was it that Deepa Kumar, an Assistant Professor of Journalism, Media Studies, and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, had just about had enough of? No, not the utterly irrational violence on the part of all those Muslims. She was, she explained, “sick and tired” of people on the left and in the U.S. antiwar movement who failed, in her view, “to defend Muslims against all the attacks they have faced both domestically and internationally.” She was incensed by what she described as “the steady rightward drift among sections of the left since 9/11 on the question of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism.” While antiwar Europeans were rallying “in solidarity with Muslims outraged over the cartoons,” she complained, their American counterparts had “done little.”

She cited some specifics. In October 2005, Sasha Abramsky, writing in The Progressive, had argued “that Al Qaeda, a ‘classically imperialist’ force, must be vanquished by the West because it hates the best points of the West, in particular ‘the pluralism, the rationalism, individual liberty, the emancipation of women, the openness and social dynamism that represent the strongest legacy of the Enlightenment.’” Kumar wasn’t buying it: “Never mind that the emancipation of women is far from a done deal, or that even small gains like universal suffrage had to be fought for by workers, women, and minorities, hardly the ‘legacy’ of Enlightenment.”

Equally appalling to her was Christopher Fons’s February 2006 article in Counterpunch, in which he dared to suggest that when Scandinavian social democracies open their borders to millions of immigrants with “backward ideas, like sexism, religious superstition, belief in inequality, etc.,” it could mean the end of equality and social democracy.

And then there was a Sydney Morning Herald piece (republished in Counterpunch in February 2005) in which Richard Neville defended the Danish cartoons and wondered aloud why the “rampaging Muslims are so angry.” After all, Christians don’t riot over cartoons mocking their religion. A very irate Kumar had an answer to that: “making fun of Islam is not the same as making fun of Christianity.” Why? Because “Islam and Christianity do not occupy an equal position in a world dominated by US imperialism.” You can’t talk about “equal-opportunity” humor, she maintained, “when you are talking about oppressed and disempowered people, who do not have equal access to the mass media.” Bottom line: “Jokes are political. The jokes of the dominant poking fun at the marginalized, unlike those of the powerless satirizing the powerful, are a way of communicating to the world, first of all to the marginalized themselves: their oppression is acceptable…even funny.”

All this may sound ridiculous in the real world, but in much of the American academy it’s sheer common sense, the product of a postmodern academic ideology which sees all interactions in human society as boiling down to the relationship between groups – power vs. powerless, oppressor vs. oppressed. In today’s world, moreover, oppression only works one way. Europeans, people of European descent, Christians, the West, Israel: no matter what the facts on the ground may be, these folks are always the oppressors, the imperialists, the powerful. People of color, Muslims, Arabs, blacks, and so on: these are always the oppressed, the victims, the powerless. Even if the President of the U.S. is black, in some sense he remains an oppressed individual, while an unemployed white coal miner in West Virginia is his oppressor. Similarly, Muslims in the Islamic world who, in reality, viciously oppress the Christians and Jews in their midst are viewed by Kumar and her ilk as being oppressed by those whom they beat, abuse, torture, and murder.

But Kumar had only just started down this road. More tomorrow.

Posted on January 30, 2017January 31, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Social justice, with guns

The last couple of days we’ve been chronicling the life of Lori Berenson, a privileged Manhattan lass who, some two decades ago, took the $50,000 her left-wing, college-professor parents had set aside for her education and used it to bankroll her involvement in the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), a mass-murdering terrorist group in Peru. After her arrest in 1996, a military tribunal found her guilty of terrorism and sentenced her to life in prison; later, granted a trial in a civil court, she insisted – as she had from the beginning – that she was not a terrorist, that she hadn’t been part of MRTA, and that, in fact, she hadn’t even know that those fierce-looking, unkempt people living in her house were MRTA terrorists.

The three judges, however, didn’t buy her story. They concluded – correctly – that Berenson had rented the house to provide a base for her terrorist comrades, had purchased “various computer and communications gear” that they needed for their terrorist activities, and had “used press credentials as a cover to scrutinize the halls of Congress and facilitate an eventual attack” on that building. It was all true. But after having her life sentence reduced to twenty years in prison, Berenson condemned the verdict as “unjust” and once again asserted her total innocence.

Berenson professed that she had been drawn to Peru out of love for the Peruvian people. But the Peruvian people themselves despised her. By an overwhelming margin, they were happy about the verdict. They did not appreciate the efforts of la gringa terrorista to wreak havoc in their country. However much she tried to paint herself as a noble freedom fighter on their behalf, they saw her as nothing more than a fanatical foreigner out to cause mayhem. One local journalist who covered her civilian trial said, “I think she was an idealist, but when you start messing around with violent groups, you play with fire. As intelligent as she is, it’s impossible to feel sympathy.”

We would modestly submit that, judging by all the available evidence, “intelligent” may not be the mot juste to describe Berenson. In any event, her already unconvincing efforts to distance herself from MRTA were rendered even more unconvincing by her 2003 jailhouse marriage to a fellow MRTA member, by whom she had a son in 2008. When she wasn’t enjoying conjugal visits, Berenson wrote political diatribes that her supporters posted online. Typical of these commentaries was a 2006 statement in which she asserted that “the so-called American way of life is…wrong” and that “[g]reed and individualism are not only negative character traits of some individuals, they are now the motor of our [American] society. The flourishing of the so-called free market is more important than the well-being of the people.”

After her release on parole in 2010, Berenson acknowledged that she’d known all along that her housemates were MRTA terrorists. She also admitted to collaborating with them, but maintained that she had “never participated in acts of violence nor of bloodshed.” True, but only because she’d been taken into custody before she’d had a chance to participate in her comrades’ plan to storm the Congress.

Berenson was finally allowed to leave Peru for good in 2015. Peru, wrote one reporter, “has rid itself of a figure who was reviled to the end.” When she arrived at the Lima airport for her flight to New York, a “ruckus” erupted. “Get out of here, terrorist!” someone yelled.

berensondemocnow — Appearing on “Democracy Now!” after her release

Berenson – accompanied by her son, who’d been born behind bars and was now six years old – told journalists that “she would live with her parents until she had established herself.” Her plan, she said, was “to continue to work in social justice issues.” Pause for a moment over those words. Continue to work in social justice issues? During her years in the hoosegow, she’d often maintained that she’d matured, that she despised terrorism, and that she deeply regretted her youthful folly. But her reference to “continu[ing] to work in social justice issues” suggested that all that, too, had been a lie – that, in short, she’d never really learned a thing, and that she still viewed her involvement with a murderous terrorist group as “social justice” work.

Is this conclusion unfair? Consider what she told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! after her return to the U.S. Asked by Goodman what the MRTA was, she described it as “an organization that basically followed the example of the guerrilla movements of the 1960s…the national liberation struggles” and that “forms [sic] out of different leftist organizations that actually were participating in the efforts to return to democracy.” When Goodman noted that MRTA “was deemed a terrorist organization in Peru,” Berenson replied: “Well, everything was called terrorism in Peru.” Deep-sixing the MRTA plot to take Congressmen hostage, Berenson actually repeated the tattered old lie that she’d entered the Peruvian Congress building “as a journalist.” And, on Democracy Now!, she got away with it.

She’d had twenty years in the slammer to engage in serious reflection on her actions, her values, and her falsehoods. But Lori Berenson came out spouting the same fatuous ideology and the same hogwash that she’d served up at the time of her arrest.

Posted on November 4, 2016November 3, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

“La gringa terrorista”

TOMA DE LA EMBAJADA DE JAPON — MRTA guerrillas in the Japanese embassy in Lima

Yesterday we covered the early years of Lori Berenson, who dropped out of MIT to become a terrorist in Peru (after brief stints as a budding revolutionary in Nicaragua and El Salvador). In December 1996, after she and other members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) were arrested, tried, convicted, and locked away, several of their MRTA confederates occupied the residence of the Japanese ambassador to Peru, took hostages, and demanded that Berenson and the other MRTA prisoners be released in exchange for them; instead of negotiation, however, the Peruvian government sent in special forces, who succeeded in killing all the hostage-takers.

berensonfolks — Rhoda and Mark Berenson campaigning for Lori’s release

Meanwhile Berenson’s parents were trying other approaches to springing her from the Peruvian cárcel. In fact, they quit their jobs to devote their lives full-time to this effort. They hired a filmmaker to produce a documentary about Lori. Rhoda Berenson, Lori’s mother, wrote a book entitled Lori: My Daughter, Wrongfully Imprisoned in Peru. (Noam Chomsky wrote the foreword, Ramsey Clark the afterword.) In 2000, the New York Observer profiled Rhoda, describing her as having been “a real New York classic: a physics teacher who took dance lessons at Martha Graham, who had a subscription to the Joyce Theater, who cooked, graded papers and danced under the stars at Lincoln Center with her husband, Mark, a retired statistician who taught at Baruch College.” Now, however, her life was totally different: she and her husband were taking turns flying to Peru every other week to visit Lori and discuss their expensive legal efforts to free her.

Also in 2000, both parents went on Oprah, where, as Rod Dreher wrote in the New York Post, they “made an impassioned case for America’s support for their daughter.” Their case, alas, was based entirely on lies. When Oprah asked why Lori had been in Peru in the first place, Rhoda Berenson said, “She was there to help the poor.” The little detail of her involvement in the plotting of large-scale terrorist acts was neatly dropped down the memory hole. As Dreher noted, the two major Peruvian terrorist groups, MRTA and Shining Path, had between them “killed an estimated 35,000 Peruvians – many of them dirt-poor peasants and native people” in the previous twenty years. While admitting that Peru under Fujimori was “no model of human rights,” Dreher pointed out that secret courts of the kind that had tried Berenson had become necessary “after left-wing terrorists began assassinating judges who imprisoned their comrades.”

LORI BERENSON, SE DEFENDIO ANTE LA SALA PENAL NACIONAL TRAS EL PEDIDO DE LA PROCURADURIA PARA QUE REGRESE AL PENAL SANTA MONICA POR NOHABER CUMPLIDO CON EL TERCIO DE SU CONDENA DE 20 AÑOS, EXPRESO LA EMERRETISTA — Lori Berenson in court

For her part, Lori made the following assertions in a 1998 statement to international human-rights organizations: “I have never been a member of the MRTA; I have never participated in the planning of a violent act, neither with the MRTA nor anybody else; neither have I ever promoted violence, and, what is more, I do not believe in violence and it would not be possible for me to participate in violence….. I am completely innocent of the horrendous charges made against me.”

All these claims would later prove to be lies. But they worked. International complaints about Berenson’s secret trial led Peruvian authorities to order a new trial by a civilian court. That event has been described as “the Peruvian equivalent of the O.J. Simpson trial, broadcast on television every day from the end of March to June this year. For Peruvian justice, it was a giant step forward: an open terrorism trial with cross-examination of witnesses.” In her closing statement to the court, Berenson said: “I am innocent of all charges against me….I have been called a terrorist, a term that has been used and abused in Peruvian society for far too many years, mostly because of the psychological impact of a concept that brings to mind indiscriminate violence designed to terrorize; irrational destructive violence; deadly, senseless terror. I am not a terrorist, and as I stated in this courtroom before, I condemn terrorism, I always have.”

We’ll finish up Lori’s story tomorrow.

Posted on November 3, 2016November 3, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Useful Stooges