Angela and Ilhan: birds of a feather

Angela Davis in her youth

In June 2016, as we reported here at the time, Angela Davis was celebrated by a feminist art center at the Brooklyn Museum for being “first in her field.” What field would that be? Diehard Communism? As a young woman she joined the American Communist Party and studied at Humboldt University in what was then the Soviet puppet state of East Germany, and has remained a devotee of Marx and Engels ever since. Or is her field domestic terrorism? In the incident that made her famous, she bought a bunch of guns that were used several days later by some pals of hers who invaded a courtroom, took the judge, prosecutor, and three jurors hostage, and ended up in a shootout with cops in which the judge was killed, the prosecutor paralyzed for life, and one of the jurors injured – the perpetrators’ goal having been to compel the release of Angela’s then husband, a Black Panther, Communist, and armed robber named George Jackson, from Soledad State Prison.

Arrested for her role in this atrocity, Davis, despite massive evidence against her, was acquitted by a jury that was plainly swayed by dishonest propaganda that painted her as a victim of racial prejudice.

Angela and Fidel

Thus began her career as a public figure – specifically, as a full-time critic of democratic capitalism, booster of Communism, and outspoken anti-Semite. She palled around with Fidel Castro in Cuba and accepted the Lenin Peace Prize in Moscow. She publicly supported the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Twice in the 1980s, she ran for Vice President of the United States on the Communist Party line. Meanwhile she pursued an academic career, and the American university having undergone a political sea change in the 1960s and 70s, her hard-line Communist credentials only helped her advance: from San Francisco State, where she taught Ethnic Studies, she proceeded to UC Santa Cruz, where she taught in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies departments and was appointed to the UC Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies. The website of Santa Cruz, where is now listed as a “Distinguished Professor Emerita,” provides a sugarcoated version of her criminal past and calls her “a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era.” Nor has her fanatical Communism kept her from being a darling of the American left, which has promoted her tirelessly as a heroine of rights for women and black people.

She stood with Fidel. She stood with Brezhnev. Now she stands with Ilhan.

Which brings us to her latest activities. On April 30, Davis joined “scores of other black women” at a Capitol Hill rally in support of Ilhan Omar, the hijab-wearing, Somali-born freshman Congresswoman from Minnesota. As the website of the left-wing TV/radio program Democracy Now put it, Omar had “been at the center of numerous right-wing attacks since taking office.” Translation: since her election in November, Omar had made a series of chillingly anti-Semitic comments, and a great many decent-minded people had had the audacity to take offense. There had been an effort to pass a resolution condemning her, but members of her own party had circled the wagons and rewritten the resolution so that it made no explicit mention of Omar and was at least as much a statement about “Islamophobia” as about anti-Semitism. Speaking to Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, Davis maintained that Omar had been “targeted because she is an immigrant, because she is Muslim, because she is a courageous, bold black woman who speaks out in defense of Palestinians.” She added: “I am extremely proud that finally we’ve elected someone to Congress who speaks out in such a powerful way on behalf of black women, on behalf of Palestinians, on behalf of all people who are oppressed.” Birds of a feather flock together.

Angela (gray hair) seated behind Ilhan at the big rally

Davis’s support for Omar made headlines. The Huffington Post, describing Davis as a “civil rights icon,” whitewashed the comments that had gotten Omar in trouble and took Omar’s word for it that she had received a mountain of death threats. At The Nation, one Rebecca Pierce celebrated Davis and her confreres for creating “a force field of support” around Omar “in the face of Islamophobic incitement from the Trump White House.” UPI bought the death-threats claim too, running a piece under the headline “Activists rally in support of Rep. Ilhan Omar after death threats.”

As for the rally itself…well, stay tuned. We’ll get to that on Thursday.

Rasmea Odeh, terrorist and feminist

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Linda Sansour

Recently we looked at Linda Sarsour, one of the organizers of the January 21 Women’s March. Less than two months later, on March 8, another mass women’s event was held: the so-called Day Without a Woman, which, according to its official website, sought to recognize “the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system – while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity.”

Why another large-scale action so soon after the first? Well, they were meant to be two very different kinds of actions – the first, a march; the second, a sort of “general strike,” an “international day of struggle.” The website for A Day Without A Woman called on women to “take the day off, from paid and unpaid labor,” to “[a]void shopping for one day (with exceptions for small, women- and minority-owned businesses),” and to “[w]ear RED in solidarity with A Day Without A Woman.” The organizers also declared their solidarity with “the ‘Bodega strike’ lead [sic] by Yemeni immigrant store owners in New York City and the Day Without Immigrants across the U.S.”

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Rasmea Yousef Odeh

Now, about those organizers. As we’ve discussed on this site, one of the four top names behind the Women’s March on January 21, Linda Sarsour, is a fierce supporter of sharia law. As it happens, one of the organizers of A Day Without A Woman is Rasmea Yousef Odeh, who does Sarsour one better: not only is she a sharia enthusiast – she’s a convicted terrorist.

Here’s the story. Back in 1969, Odeh, then a university student, was involved in the bombing of a crowded Jerusalem supermarket. Two students from Hebrew University, Leon Kanner (21) and Eddie Joffe (22), were killed; nine others were wounded. A second bomb at the same site was defused. Four days later, a bomb went off at the British Consulate. Odeh was involved in that bombing, too.

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The Jerusalem supermarket after the bombing, 1969

Odeh’s guilt was beyond doubt. She was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which the U.S. State Department considers a terrorist organization and which took “credit” for both bombings. Explosives and bomb-making materials were found in her home. Odeh was sentenced to life in 1970 but after ten years in prison was released, along with several dozen other terrorists, in an exchange for an IDF soldier held captive by the PFLP.

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The graves of Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner

In the mid 1990s, she moved to the U.S., where she eventually became a citizen. She was involved in activism on behalf of Palestinian women in Israeli jails and became associate director of the Chicago-based Arab American Action Network. Four years ago, it was discovered that she had failed to reveal her criminal background when submitting her immigration application. She was convicted of immigration fraud in November 2014, stripped of her U.S. citizenship, and spent a year and a half in prison. In February 2016, however, an appeals court vacated her conviction; last December, she was granted a new trial, which began in January.

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Angela Davis and friend

“All right,” you may say, “Odeh may be a terrorist. But that doesn’t mean the event was illegitimate. After all, she’s not the only organizer.” Alas, one of the other organizers was Angela Davis, the longtime Communist and Black Panther who was once on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. (We wrote about her last year, here and here.) Another was Tithi Bhattacharya, who, as Kyle Smith noted in the New York Post, “praised Maoism in an essay for the International Socialist Review.” These are the people who are presenting themselves as the voices of ordinary American women.

“The embodiment of all we hold dear”

davislifeYesterday we met Angela Davis, who in August 1970 supplied guns for a courtroom raid and hostage-taking incident in Marin County, California, that was intended to free her boyfriend, a felon then confined at Soledad State Prison. The incident ended in several deaths, and when the authorities became aware of Davis’s role, she was charged with murder, conspiracy, and kidnapping. Instead of surrendering to the police, Davis – who at the time was an active member of both the Communist Party and Black Panthers – became a fugitive from justice.

During her months underground, the FBI put her on its Ten Most Wanted List. She became a household name. Some American Communist leaders wanted to expel her from the Party and brand her a terrorist; but they lost out to other Party honchos, who decided to give Davis the Party’s full support and publicly identify her as a noble crusader against – and tragic victim of – racist, sexist, and capitalist oppression. 

American activist Angela Davis, shortly after she was fired from her post as philosophy professor at UCLA due to her membership of the Communist Party of America, 27th November 1969. (Photo by Lucas Mendes/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Davis in 1969

Davis was finally tracked down and arrested at a New York motel in October 1970. When she went on trial in February 1972, she was represented by the American Communist Party’s general counsel. At the same time, the Party, in league with its sister parties in the West and under the direction of the Kremlin, spearheaded a high-profile worldwide movement promoting sympathy for her “cause” and calling for her release.

This movement won the support of a number of useful celebrity idiots. The Rolling Stones dedicated a song, “Sweet Black Angel,” to Davis; John Lennon and Yoko Ono also recorded a song about her, “Angela.” (It began: “Angela / They put you in prison / Angela / They shot down your man / Angela / You’re one of the billion political prisoners in the world.”)

Among Davis’s fervent supporters were Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. In the USSR, thousands of people signed petitions demanding her freedom; Soviet children mailed postcards to President Nixon pleading with him to let her go.

In the end, Davis was acquitted, despite mountains of incriminating evidence. Ron Radosh later compared the verdict to that in the O.J. Simpson murder trial; so did Roger Kimball, writing: “How did she get off? In part, for the same reason that O.J. Simpson got off: celebrity, edged with racial grievance mongering.” What’s more, the jury was heavily compromised: one of its members was Mary Timothy, an activist who would later become romantically involved with Communist Party official Bettina Aptheker, a friend of Davis’s and founder of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.

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Davis in Cuba with Fidel Castro

Following her acquittal, Davis flew to Cuba, a country that she hailed as a model of socialism and racial harmony. In 1975, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn criticized her for having refused to speak up for prisoners in Communist countries. In 1977, she expressed enthusiasm for Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple cult in Guyana, over 900 of whose members, in one of the signal events of that decade, would die in a 1979 mass murder-suicide. Also in 1979, Davis went to Moscow to accept the Lenin Peace Prize. Russian writer Vitaly Korotich, who met her there, later said that she was “a useful tool for the Brezhnev government, used to bolster Communist ideals and speak out against the West during the Cold War.”

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Davis in Moscow, 1972

During those years, the media followed Davis everywhere she went and covered her public activities and statements extensively. An opponent of all American military ventures, Davis gave a thumbs-up to the Soviet invasions of both Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain, she received honorary doctorates from two institutions in Warsaw Pact countries, Lenin University and the University of Leipzig.

davis3In 1980 and 1984, she was the Communist Party’s candidate for Vice President. In the 1980s she taught Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University; she was later hired by the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was a member of both the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies departments. The current profile of Davis on the website of UC Santa Cruz includes the following sentence: “Professor Davis’s long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment.” An interesting way of referring to the fact that Davis supplied Jonathan Jackson with those guns. 

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Davis speaking at the Brooklyn Museum

Today, she is hailed as a hero of feminism, of black civil rights, and of social-justice causes generally. In 2012, Ron Radosh noted that the Superior Court building in Washington, D.C., was hosting “a photo exhibit celebrating renowned black women” – and that one of those honored was none other than Angela Davis. Then, in early June of this year, came the news that Davis had won the Sackler Center award, presented to women at the top of their fields. At the ceremony, Elizabeth Sackler, chairwoman of the Brooklyn Museum, said that Davis was “the embodiment of all we hold dear” and that her very name was “synonymous with truth.” In fact, the award was only one more deplorable example of the contemporary elevation to heroic status of enemies of freedom and champions of totalitarianism.

Joe Stiglitz, Soros “point man”

Yesterday we started looking at Joseph Stiglitz, the massively influential Columbia University economist who derides “American-style capitalism” while preaching government intervention as the key to prosperity. We ended up by stating that while Stiglitz has been called a liberal, it really makes more sense to call him a socialist. Why?

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The Socialist International Commission on Global Financial Issues. Stiglitz can be seen along the right side of the table, leaning forward, between the windows

Well, to begin with, quite simply, he’s a card-carrying member of the Socialist International. In 2008, he chaired a Socialist International commission charged with “tackling the global financial crisis.” The commission’s other members included not just socialists but out-and-out Communists from around the world.

UNStiglitz is also a fervent enthusiast for the UN, a supporter for a dramatic increase in its power, and an advocate for the view that the U.S. and other sovereign states should be subordinated to that power. He’s one of those people who believe, perversely, that when you scrape together the (at best) dicey representatives of a hundred or so corrupt, poor, unfree, incompetently managed nations and pack them into a building on First Avenue in Manhattan, they magically turn into a body of wise, noble, upright sages who are equipt to restructure the world order – and reorder the world economy. Among the UN officials with whom Stiglitz has closely collaborated is Miguel D’Escoto, a hard-line Marxist who was foreign minister for the Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, who won the USSR’s Lenin Peace Prize, who’s an outspoken enemy of both the U.S. and Israel, who has publicly hugged Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and who, a few years back, appointed Stiglitz “to chair a high-level U.N. task force to review the global financial system.”

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Miguel D’Escoto

As great as Stiglitz’s enthusiasm for the UN is his contempt for the International Monetary Fund. In his 2002 book Globalization and Its Discontents, according to Irwin M. Stelzer, Stiglitz “almost equates the consequences of policy failures by the International Monetary Fund with the consequences of Nazi Germany’s final solution.” What, in Stiglitz’s view, needs to be done to fix the IMF? Easy: give more power to the African countries that are the chief beneficiaries of its largesse. As Stelzer put it, “in a perfect world it would be sensible to confer more power on the recipients of IMF assistance so that the funds might be deployed more effectively. But we don’t live in that world. Ours is one in which kleptocratic African regimes impoverish their nations with a combination of misrule, military adventures, and policies that discourage inward investment.”

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George Soros

Then there’s Stiglitz’s connection to George Soros, the far-left multibillionaire who is actively seeking to use his wealth to transform the world – and, not least, as we’ve seen in previous posts on this site, diminish American power and American freedom. Soros, as Cliff Kincaid has observed, “wants to phase out the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency and bring the U.S. into a system of international socialism, with new and more powerful global agencies deciding our economic and financial fate.” And who is Soros’s “point man” on this alarming project? None other than Joe Stiglitz – who, as head of a Soros-funded NGO called the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, is fighting for the institution of “a new international currency” and of an international taxation system.

Yes, you read that right: an international taxation system.

More tomorrow.