Uri Avnery, Israel’s visionary of peace

by Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace bloc

Gush Shalom grieves and mourns the passing of its founder, Uri Avnery. Until the last moment he continued on the way he had traveled all his life. On Saturday, two weeks ago, he collapsed in his home when he was about to leave for the Rabin Square and attend a demonstration against the “Nation State Law,” a few hours after he wrote a sharp article against that law.

Avnery devoted himself entirely to the struggle to achieve peace between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people in their independent state, as well as between Israel and the Arab and Muslim World. He did not get to the end of the road, did not live to see peace come about. We — the members of Gush Shalom as well as very many other people who were directly and indirectly influenced by him — will continue his mission and honor his memory.

On the day of the passing of Uri Avnery, the most right wing government in the history of Israel is engaged in negotiations with Hamas. Ironically, the same kind of demagogic accusations which were hurled at Uri Avnery throughout his life are now made against Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

In the history of the State of Israel, Uri Avnery will be inscribed as a far-seeing visionary who pointed to a way which others failed to see. It is the fate and future of the State of Israel to reach peace with its neighbors and to integrate into the geographical and political region in which it is located. Avnery’s greatest opponents will ultimately have to follow in his footsteps — because the State of Israel has no other real choice.

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Who’s the enemy? Whose enemy?

by Eric Jackson

Politicians who incessantly lie dislike those who contradict them about factual matters. That’s the gist of Donald Trump’s complaint.

That the man has a following is largely a product of people using certain media — this medium, that medium, the other medium but certainly not any conspiratorial singular “media,” something that rightfully does not exist in the English language — to spread disinformation.

Not “misinformation,” which is unintended error. Nor even a slant, which is the choice, interpretation and ordering of facts to make a point, fair or unfair as it may be, generally a point consistent with a particular world view. From championing the “Birther” fraud to the screeds of all those Russian bots and troll, Trump rode into office on a wave of lies.

From a Gringo perspective, do we want to get into worship of the purportedly holy framers of the US Constitution, and in our “originalism” pontificate on what they meant about the press? The folks who do this are generally fools.

First of all, there were no reporters at the Constitutional Convention, although one of the great founding figures of American journalism, Benjamin Franklin, was there as one of the main protagonists. It was held behind closed doors, with delegates bound by an oath of secrecy about the proceedings.

Second, there was no such thing as a media corporation at that time. There wasn’t even the business corporation as we would know it. Corporations were rare, limited purpose, state-chartered entities in an economy of sole proprietorships and business partnerships.

Third, the original document didn’t even mention freedom of speech, the press, or peaceful assembly. But the American people of that time would not stand for such an omission. Thus the first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, had to be passed to get the Constitution ratified. The First Amendment freedom of the press was by popular demand, not the design of the Constitution’s framers. And that popular demand? It was rooted in what had become a custom in the American colonies well before they separated from England. Publish the truth and it could not be libel, the Americans said, contrary to what was the law back in the British Isles at the time.

So a republic was born, with this class of sole proprietors of varying ethics publishing little pamphlets, broadsheets and posters on their rudimentary little presses. The American press of the late 18th and early 19th century was on the whole highly partisan. Federalist rags ran scurrilous — and TRUE — tales about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. Democrat rags compared John Adams to the by then quite mad King George III. Founding generations of American sickies read both sides and giggled. The republic survived.

A slick move by one of the men who convinced America to ratify the Constitution — Alexander Hamilton — gave rise to the business corporation as we know it. The Industrial Revolution — large and rapid printing presses, railroads and telegraphs — created the basis for large media corporations of national scope, and the technological changes kept coming.

There were unscrupulous people, and those who thought of themselves and their actions in the holiest of terms, who used their freedom of the press to incite wars, genocide or rebellion. As the First Amendment applied only to the federal government (“Congress shall make no law…”) many states in the run-up to the Civil War did make laws against the press, in particular slave states prohibiting abolitionist literature. Those exercising freedom of the press increasingly advocated war, genocide and rebellion, and some 600,000 people were killed in a conflict that among other things, gave rise to the 14th Amendment’s protection of fundamental freedoms from the states’ actions.

After that war industrial combines arose, and among the “robber barons” were the captains of the news industry of that time. Their business rested on advertising and among the techniques that the American ad agencies pioneered was The Big Lie — the lie so endlessly repeated that people ended up believing that it was true. It was a great way to sell cigarettes, or guns, or as German activists of the 20s and 30s discovered, racist politics.

After the war and crimes incited by THAT, one of Germany’s media barons, Der Sturmer publisher Julius Streicher, was tried at Nuremberg and hanged as an enemy of all humanity.

Streicher well deserved it. But an activist from the American Indian Movement whom I met at a gathering of people seeking amnesty for political prisoners in the USA told me that Americans were worse: “The Nazis tried to hide what they were doing. The Americans massacred our people and they put it on movie and television screens to entertain kids.”

The Cold War came and went, and in the course of it so many of the Nuremberg Principles became dead letters. But in the aftermath of massacres in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, it was decided that the ban on incitement of genocide is still good law, as infrequently as it gets enforced.

The media corporations went through so many of the changes of industrial and technological progress, giving its main proprietors greater powers to judiciously use of arrogantly abuse, giving rise to new codes of ethics, giving voices to new forces good and evil. One of the things that happened along the way was a conflation of “the press” with “media corporations,” as in the First Amendment was no longer considered an individual right, a guarantee that every individual could gather and publish information and opinions, but as an exclusive property of the large media corporations. So that the hippie selling the underground newspaper on the street could be hassled or arrested. So that the muckraker operating on a shoestring could be excluded as a “real journalist” and prosecuted as a spy. So that the reporter not embedded among soldiers or police could be treated as an enemy of the state. So that for a price, pompous criminal lawyers could prosecute journalists on behalf of pompous fraud artists whom the journalists exposed, and the corporate mainstream media would remain silent because those being prosecuted, not being employed by some oligarch’s medium, could by definition not be “real journalists.”

Some of these are realities I have lived, both in the United States and in Panama.

Meanwhile, the forces of technology and economics have devastated the once masters of the press. The advertising supported model of the news business has largely collapsed. The ownership of the large media has by and large passed into the hands of tycoons from other industries, many of whom know and care little about the ethics or history but very much wish to suppress any unflattering coverage of their businesses or those companies’ partners.

From the ragtag individuals who owned crude printing presses in the early days of the USA, we are back to the ragtag individuals who own computers and cameras and publish online today. Yeah, Jeff Bezos and Carlos Slim will make the distinctions about who is the “real press,” but online nazis, many of them Russian impostors, beat them and the American people with online Big Lie campaigns in 2016. And now Donald Trump would move in for the kill.

There are political adversaries who legitimately use mass communication media to further their causes. Then there are the often pseudonymous purveyors of disinformation, defamation and violent hatreds that can’t be supported by any truthful argument. These are the enemies of the people and by and large they are in Donald Trump’s camp. How did Spain’s center-right “newspaper of record,” El Pais, just put it about one of Trump’s friends, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones? “Ultraderecha paranoica” — paranoiac ultra-rightist, and by the way “incendiary” and “offensive.”

But “for balance” and business interests will establishment elites now come after me?

So yes, I condemn what Trump is doing and saying against the press, but I do not worship at the media barons’ altar. I just use my freedom of the press.

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The Martinelli scandal explodes: What Now?

Attorney General Kenia Porcell, whose performance in office is not above criticism but who ought to be believed in this instance, said in an an August 13 address to the nation that Hernán De León, presiding magistrate of the Supreme Court, had come to her office two weeks earlier and told her that the Martinelli case now in trial before the high court would be dropped. The magistrate, she said, told her that Ricardo Martinelli’s spy operation had recording of more than 5,000 people, with multiple copies of the archive stashed in the United States and other countries. One of these, she said he said, was embarrassing to the magistrate and he was being blackmailed about it. Hence the intention to drop the case.

First, this is an allegation of a prisoner threatening a judge. Not just any prisoner, not just any judge. The worldwide usual is that for this sort of infraction the inmate gets “thrown in the hole,” that is, put into isolation under harsh conditions. Martinelli, however, has a cell full of amenities that no other prisoner gets. So en route to the hole there should be a special cell extraction to which he should be a witness. In addition to guards or police to take him away to a new place of confinement — a punishment cell in La Joyita or another mainline prison — there should be others armed with hammers to destroy all of his luxuries in his presence. Prisoners threatening judges is something that Panama should never abide. The essence of sensible prison discipline is to allow inmates some small privileges which might be taken away for bad behavior. So be it. Martinelli’s phalanxes of lawyers and their endless motions should not be allowed into the prison discipline process.

Second, there needs to be full disclosure of all known facts and a full investigation into the violations of the rights of an entire nation as well as thousands of individuals. Porcell has resisted such transparency, perhaps out of concern about the lawsuits and criminal charges that people not notably members of any elites — like the editor of The Panama News – might bring. We already know of 150 people whose communications were monitored, so we already know that anyone who had electronic communications with any of these people was also monitored.

Third, there are already known accomplices in the overall surveillance scheme. The ex-president’s brother-in-law, for part of the time acting in conjunction with Cable & Wireless (which had the national surveillance camera contract) and said relative and a company of his reportedly acquiring the equipment, programs and technical assistance to set up the spy operation from Israeli and Italian firms. All individuals and companies involved or possibly involved in the Martinelli spy operation ought to be called in for questioning and certain presumptions should be made about those who do not cooperate.

Fourth, De León should resign from the Supreme Court forthwith. Wimps should not be allowed in such high places.

Finally, there should be a blue-ribbon investigating panel of qualified and impartial people, advised by an international team of experts, to both get to the bottom of the whole surveillance scandal and report to the Panamanian people and the proper institutions. They should also get into the court cases, the truncated investigations and the historical contexts of this entire matter. Let the chips fall where they may.
 

The Manafort case goes to the jury

Trump and his loyal following keep saying that there is nothing to the bevy of scandals related to the president’s and his entourage’s Russian business and political ties, let alone any collusion with Russians during the last presidential campaign.

“Collusion,” of course, is a concept not known as a specific crime in the US Code. Conspiracy to violate election laws against foreign participation in these American affairs is, however, a different story. The special prosecutor is approaching a case of just that against Donald Trump, but it may yet turn out that the president is clueless and knew nothing about what was happening in his own campaign. But the lies told along the way, the unregistered foreign agencies and covert financial dealings have already been the stuff of several guilty pleas. A case of obstruction of justice has been made in full public view by Donald Trump himself.

But now that both prosecution and defense have rested, we are about to see what a jury thinks about the Russian and Ukrainian dealings of Trump’s campaign manager, and the various financial transactions swirling around those and around the man.

A conviction may or may not turn Manafort into a cooperating witness against Trump. An acquittal on all counts would be a blow to the special prosecutor’s investigation and would probably embolden Trump to move to shut it down. But there have been too many things documented, and too many convictions already secured, for Trump’s political fortunes to survive such a blunder. Sure, he could hold out against any Democratic impeachment move, but appearances alone would send the Republicans wandering in the political wilderness for years to come.

So the end of August approaches with the federal trial of Paul Manafort coming to its resolution. Just in time for the fall, and the New York fraud trial of the Trump family and businesses and their alleged abuses of tax breaks for charities.

Lots of entertainment, but the matter is going to be decided at the polls. If you are a US citizen, register and vote.
 

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