Monday, September 11, 2017

Truest statement of the week

How much longer can Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Benjamin Netanyahu, AIPAC , and associated Zionist organizations cover for Rwandan President Paul Kagame? How much longer can they claim that he was Rwanda’s savior, that he stopped a genocide recalling the Holocaust, then helped Rwanda rise from the ashes?
This week another woman who dared to challenge him for the presidency says he has taken vengeance on her and her family. In 2010, Kagame imprisoned Victoire Ingabire, who is now serving the seventh of a fifteen-year prison sentence, and now he has arrested Diane Rwigara, who attempted to stand against him this year. Like Ingabire in 2010, Rwigara was told that her name could not appear on the ballot because her nomination papers were insufficient. Kagame’s election bureaucracy is a Kafkaesque maze for anyone who might pose a real threat to his reign of terror.

Rwandan police arrested Ingabire, then put her under house arrest, shortly after her return to Rwanda in January 2010. They arrested and imprisoned her shortly after Kagame claimed re-election with an implausible 93% of the vote in August that year. They arrested Rwigara shortly after Kagame claimed an even more implausible 99% on August 4th. As of September 5, there were many conflicting reports and no definitive account of the timeline of events before, during, and after the arrest. Aljazeera was reporting that Rwigara had been arrested, charged, and then returned to her home. Rwigara’s assistant said that she had taken over her Twitter feed and that Rwigara is now under house arrest, though not yet formally.

-- Ann Garrison, "Bill Clinton's favorite African Paul Kagame Wins Re-election by 99%, Arrests Opponent" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).

A note to our readers

Hey --

Close to Sunday.


What did we come up with?



Editorial: When?

The West’s counter-ISIS efforts cost Iraq and Syria dearly -

At what point does America's so-called 'social justice warriors' wake up to the reality that the Iraq War continues and that it is destroying Iraq, not saving it?

Media: Next year, better include Tori Amos

Troy L. Smith is the problem.

Yes, THE CLEVELAND.COM writer is part of the problem.

But he's also the problem itself.

Crap like composing a list of 19 people who should make the "Rock Hall Class of 2018" and having 16 be all men, 1 be a duo (Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics) and 2 be women?

In 2017, that's what he's offering?

And you wonder why things are as bad as they are?

Where's Tina Turner on his list?

Tina's not in the hall as a solo.

Despite having the biggest comeback ever.  Despite being considered the queen of rock and roll.

Tina's not on the list.

Cher didn't make his list.

Nor did Sade, Melanie Safka, Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Carly Simon, Dionne Warwick, The Shangri-Las . . .

Where's Tracy Chapman?

Her first album was released in 1988.

How does Troy Smith ignore that?

Why are we supposed to be thrilled that he included Janet Jackson and Chaka Khan?

That's two women in 19 slots.

He is the problem.

More to the point, what album came out in 1992?


Where is Tori Amos?

We're wondering that.

Happy Release Day, can't wait for you all to finally hear the whole record. Looking forward to seeing you on the road!

She released an album last Friday.

And it's been 25 years since LITTLE EARTHQUAKES was released.

That's the rule for nominating, right?

We're wondering a lot lately.

For example, Susan Sarandon's being trashed online yet again.  And Jill Stein gets trashed repeatedly.

Where's Gloria Steinem?

She's not defending these women.

Susan Sarandon supported Jill Stein for president in 2016.  That's her right.  It's Jill's right to run.

But our self-appointed feminist leader allows both women to be trashed and never calls it out.

Please note, she does call out some 2016 voters.

We sat through her nonsense recently as she attacked women who voted for Donald Trump.

These women were portrayed by her as dependent upon their husbands.

This dependency, she explained, was why they voted against their own interests.

Feminism is about choices.

We're sorry to break it to CIA Gloria, but some women were for Trump.

And not because they were shut away in the home and had to please their husbands.

What an insulting description Gloria offered.

We were aghast.

It was a demeaning and sexist portrayal of women.

Some women are conservatives.

That's reality.

They're not self-haters.

They're just conservative.

Some women also didn't want Hillary for president -- she's a corporatist War Hawk whose tawdry marriage is not anything to hold up to the rest of the world.  It's a marriage of survival, not of love. So maybe Gloria should back off from demonizing the marriages of women who voted for Trump?

We watched in disgust as we saw Gloria pimp insults and gender stereotypes and we realized this was the ego who had appointed herself a leader in the early 70s and refused to allow any other woman to lead.

She can't lead anymore.  Most women who turned out were sharing glances with us and others as Gloria came off demented.

Later, we also heard the women discussing just how bad Gloria looks today.

Since the press (which she was a part of) helped create her with the lie that she was beautiful (she was almost attractive when she was young), it's fitting that all the plastic surgery she's had to look young no longer works and her thinning hair makes her look like a witch in a children's fairy tale.

She is a horrible creature.

Where did she spend election night?

Hob-knobbing with Mad Maddie Albright.

That's not feminism.

And where was she hob-knobbing?

At a party thrown by Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein.

That's not feminism.

Taking Henry Kissinger cock into your vagina?

Not feminism either.

Lying about dating Kissinger?

Feminism isn't about empire.

"Gloria's entire life is a lie!"

Reader Keitalya e-mailed that as she noted Whitney Webb's "Lawyers And Doctors For Human Rights: New NGO Masking Old Geopolitical Goals?" (NEW MINT PRESS):

LDHR is not the first “NGO” to accuse the Syrian army and government of torture and other atrocities. But previous accusations came almost exclusively from a group called “Women Under Siege,” which relies on unverified, hearsay reports as “evidence” of atrocities allegedly carried out by the Assad regime. The collected reports are clearly biased as they, for example, report 14 cases of the Syrian Army enslaving women for sexualized violence while reporting only one such case of [. . .] (ISIS) doing the same — despite the fact that the terror group is well-known to have a policy of enslaving women for sexual purposes.
Women Under Siege is a project funded by the U.S.-based Women’s Media Center (WMC), an organization founded by former CIA asset Gloria Steinem. The parent organization of WMC is the Ms Foundation which is chiefly funded by the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, Google, and the Ford Foundation – a “philanthropy” organization that has long funded the controversial Bilderberg conferences and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). All three of these groups have been tied to regime-change efforts in Syria.

Reading the above, we shared Keitalya's outrage.  It doesn't sound like feminism at all.

And without the outrage came memories.

Meeting with Afghan female activists and writers in the 2004 and hearing all the broken promises Gloria had yet again made.

And, of course, GREENSTONE MEDIA.

In 2006, we promoted GREENSTONE MEDIA which was GREENSTONE RADIO.

The same women responsible for WMC were responsible for GREENSTONE MEDIA.

We promoted some of their three shows.

It didn't matter that we didn't agree with one show's promotion of Aaron Sorkin (and refusal to note his sexism).  We're not the voice of feminism.  We're two voices who are feminists.

We could promote shows we disagreed with.

But one show?

We couldn't promote it.

It's not just that we disagreed, it's that we're not War Hawks.

GREENSTONE RADIO did a call in show hosted by a War Hawk.  We never promoted it.  The woman wanted US forces in Sudan and in Syria.

(Yes, the war on Syria goes far back.)

It wasn't about feminism.

Nor is Women Under Siege.


Gloria's little project there was not about celebrating women.

We had to guilt and shame them in 2008 to get them to write an article about Cynthia McKinney, the only woman running for president in 2008.  (Hillary had run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, she did not get it and she didn't get to run for president.)

If so-called WOMEN'S MEDIA CENTER can't note the Green Party ticket on their own -- a ticket headed by Cynthia and her running mate Rosa Clemente -- then what are they really?

A bunch of White spoiled women whose internalized racism keeps them from noting the historic Green Party ticket -- the first ticket featuring two women of color?

Last January, Ann Garrison (at COUNTERPUNCH) examined Gloria's remarks at the ridiculous celebrity protest in DC:

Gloria Steinem: “I’ve been thinking about the uses of a long life. And one of them is that you remember when things were worse. We remember the death of the future with Martin Luther King, with Jack Kennedy, with Bobby Kennedy, with Malcolm X. Without those deaths, for instance, Nixon would not have been elected and there would not have been many of the wars that we have had.”

Huh?  These assassinations of the 1960s brought on the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and very nearly Syria?  The ongoing 15-year Afghanistan War?

Also last January, Rebecca noted Gloria:

patrick iber ('new republic') writes about the c.i.a. and notes, good for him, gloria steinem's days working for the c.i.a. (and how proud she used to be about it).

and reading how the c.i.a. supported magazines that attacked russia, i was reminded of 'ms. magazine.'

seems like they were always 'sponsoring' some woman from the soviet union.

am i remembering wrong?

tatyana mamonova's 1980 visit and speaking gigs were sponsored by ms.

they always had time to back some 1 attacking the u.s.s.r.

maybe it's time gloria steinem explains why that was?

Gloria was CIA.  She can whine to THE NEW YORK TIMES -- as she did last year -- for them noting it, but it's where she trained and where she served.

In 1976, Nancy Borman (VILLAGE VOICE) investigated the issue and found:

In 1967 both the New York Times and the Washington Post carried interviews with Steinem in the wake of Ramparts' expose of CIA funding of the National Student Association and other organizations. Steinem was the founder and director of one of those groups, Independent Research Service, for which she had solicited and obtained CIA money to carry out covert operations at Communist youth festivals in Vienna and Helsinki in 1959 and 1952. Unlike most of the other principals in the scandal, who had repudiated their past work with the agency and turned over information to the press, Steinem defended her secret deal with the CIA, calling the undermining of the youth festivals "the CIA's finest hour."

We both know Gloria.  We used to marvel over the 'rumors' -- because that's how her guardians always presented it.

We began to notice how ineffectual she was as a leader and realized this was a historical pattern for her.  See Veronica Geng's "Requiem for the women's movement," the November 1976 cover story of  HARPER'S.  And for a take on 1972 that paints Gloria as a sell-out to women, see Germaine Greer's "McGovern, the big tease" from the October 1972 issue of HARPER'S.

At best, she's ineffectual.  At worst, she's attempting to control and circumvent feminism.

It's past Gloria's time to fade.

And she's of no value to women if all she can do is offer gender stereotypes for women she disagrees with and will not even offer a Tweet in defense of either Jill Stein or Susan Sarandon.

As with Troy L. Smith, she is the problem.

She can't defend women and she won't promote them.

She's useless.

Troy L. Smith pretends to be a music writer but he's promoting Radiohead (eligible due to a 1992 single) and ignoring Tori Amos (eligible due to a 1992 album)?

When you don't use your power and your space to make things better, you are part of the problem -- and, reality, most of the media is part of the problem.

The controversy should not be Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges.

He's recently angered a lot of people.

I was on panel with Jill Stein Medea Benjamin. Now Hedges excuses terrorists. Wouldn't do it again.

Chris Hedges is trash Chris Hedges hates anti-fa Chris Hedges lies Chris Hedges draws false equivalences Chris Hedges plagiarizes

Chris Hedges (and others) lie and slander Antifa militants. This is Why. Our preface and an article by Matt...

Counter Punch encourages the Left to unite around in rebuttal of Chris Hedges & Noam Chomsky.

Equating the long history of right-wing violence with the comparatively negligible carried out by AntiFa is absurd.

  1. What's Wrong with Chris Hedges view that ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’ - antifainternational: ara-la:...
  2. Chris Hedges is a tool. God, I cant believe the support he garners. Its what a no sense of humor can get you I guess.

He's also had some supporters.

This is an important and beautiful essay. Thank you and Please read, ponder RT and take action in your community

How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’ Very wise article by Chris Hedges. Please read, take off your mask

Online, he's had supporters and he's had opposers and the opposing has outnumbered the support.

We were largely staying out of the whole thing (Ann weighed in last month) until we saw Cindy Sheehan had linked to "Chris Hedges Is A Public Menace."  This surprised us.

Maybe it shouldn't have?

First off, Chris Hedges is not a god.

He can be criticized positively and negatively.

Can and should be.

This community, in 2008, operated on a back off Chris.


Chris was lying and has never gotten honest about one thing.

C.I. was calling him out at THE COMMON ILLS for this.

Chris -- not Judith Miller --  wrote the first NEW YORK TIMES report falsely linking Iraq to the attacks of 9/11, click here for that front page story from November 8, 2001.

Not only did it falsely link, it did so via anonymice:


One was exposed publicly by MOTHER JONES.  Jack Fairweather exposed Abu Zainab posing as Jamal al-Ghurairy.

Chris was not pressed to expose that 'defector.'

Or the other one.  And was the other one the source Jack Fairweather reported on who had spoken to Lowell Bergman of 60 MINUTES (Sabah Khodada) and, if so, why was Hedges self-presenting that he had spoken to two defectors when he had only spoken to one (who was an imposter)?

C.I. was publicly making the point that the two sources lied and they'd lost their right to be anonymous.  They'd lie to start a war and they needed to be exposed.

Why did we back off Chris?

It was 2008.  It was an election year.  Tom Hayden called C.I. and explained Chris was endorsing Ralph Nader.  Tom was a love slave to Barack Obama.  He wanted to use this issue -- the front page NYT story from 2001 -- to discredit Chris Hedges.

For that reason, we all backed off.

It was brave of Chris to step out of the duopoly and we weren't going to be a part of an effort to trash him for that.

After the election, when needed, C.I. has brought up (at THE COMMON ILLS) the issue as coverage of Iraq (the focus at THE COMMON ILLS) has required.

As the Iraq War has continued, under Barack Obama and now Donald Trump, initial lies used to sell it have become far less important than the new lies used to keep it going.

We have praised Chris when we felt he deserved it, we have called him out when we felt he deserved it.

We not only praised his book DEATH OF THE LIBERAL CLASS, we included it on our list of the ten most important books of the last ten years in 2011.

We think that's part of the process of active thinking.

We encourage those bothered by his recent column to criticize and explore.

We also discourage blind worship and fan boi hero worship.

This is a crossroad for the movement -- or what passes for one.

Some will oppose Chris' argument and think of other ways.  Some will agree with the argument Chris makes.  Some will embrace violence.

And let's not kid because that's what the issue is.

The resorting to violence is what happens when a group of people feel left out of the process.

Chris is arguing that is understandable for some who feel powerless to be left out of the process and he thinks they can still be reached.

Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong.

This road was hit by the SDS decades ago.

It led to the rise of the Weather Underground.

Some feel their actions helped end the war on Vietnam, some feel their actions harmed the left.

From a poli sci perspective, we have never condemned the Weather Underground and don't intend to.

(We have slammed would-be glamour girl Bill Ayers.  The spouse of Bernardine frequently attempts to present himself as the James Dean of the Weather Underground when, in fact, he was the Natalie Wood.)

Violence is not a path we're going to take.

You're grown ups, you need to choose your own path.

But grasp that the issue does come down to violence.

You can call it self-defense, if you like.

But it is not a new path or something that has just popped up recently.

You'd do well to educate yourself on the history of movements because you're going to have to defend yourself with words to a number of people.

Not us.

We're not your enemy.

But there are a number of people who will slam you and if this is your path and you want more on it, you need to be strong advocates for yourselves and your actions.

And as you figure out your path, grasp that the real issue isn't Chris Hedges, the real issue will be your own actions.  You will be attacked (verbally) and making it about Chris is not going to be a solid defense.

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