WE WILL NOT BE SILENT created the UNARMED CIVILIAN shirt/hoody in 2011 to be worn in protest against the threat of violence that so many face from racism and militarism throughout this country and the world. 

We are heartbroken at the loss of Trayvon Martin. 

We wear UNARMED CIVILIAN in memory of all those beautiful people the world has lost. 

We embody this text to acknowledge the risk to so many others.

Wearing the UNARMED CIVILIAN hoody is our call for justice.

We encourage UNARMED CIVILIAN public actions. 

Gather in public places to call out the names of those who have lost their lives from within the U.S. and beyond.  RECLAIM JUSTICE. RECLAIM POWER. 

Going forward we commit to donate one dollar for every UNARMED CIVILIAN shirt sold to support efforts seeking justice for these crimes against all our humanity. 

Our first donation will be made to the family of Trayvon Martin to support their effort and acknowledge their great loss.

Sarah Wellington. (Photo: WeWillNotBeSilent.net)

All over New York City, Laurie Arbeiter and Sarah Wellington can be found selling the t-shirts, which helped support activist causes such as the U.S. Boat to Gaza. Since 2006, these activists have sold the original “we will not be silent” design, which was translated into six languages, connecting with over 50,000 people around the world. Moving forward, the new designs will reflect the changes in the Arab World, and the growing popular moments internal to the U.S. “We will not be silent” new designs include: “mic check,” “reclaim solidarity,” “occupy the U.S.A.,” “reclaim rights,” “reclaim the common good,” and “reclaim the future.”

Reverse of “Palestine” shirt.

“We will not be silent,” also added a new, special “Palestine” design, which includes a list of human rights on the back-side of the t-shirt, including “the right to live together,” “the right to your olive trees,” “the right to build a movement,” and “the right to thrive.”

With the holidays rapidlyapproaching, this is the official Mondoweiss plug, to consider purchasing a “begin again” or “still here” t-shirt.

http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/we-will-not-be-silent-releases-new-t-shirt-designs.html

About Allison Deger

Allison Deger is the Assitant Editor of Mondoweiss.net. Follow her on twitter at @allissoncd.

Arundhati Roy, renowned Indian writer and global justice activist. She has written many books, including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize. Her journalism and essays have been collected in books including An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire and Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Arundhati Roy’s latest book, just out, is Walking with the Comrades.

AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the renowned Indian writer, global justice activist, Arundhati Roy. She has written many books, including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize. Her journalism and essays have been collected in books including An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire and Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Arundhati Roy’s latest book, just out, is called Walking with the Comrades, a chronicle of her time in the forests of India alongside rebel guerrillas who are resisting a military campaign by the Indian government.

Last week, I sat down with Arundhati Roy when she came to New York—she had just visited Occupy Wall Street on her first day in New York—to talk about the significance of this, but also we spoke about the Arab Spring. We talk about her walk with the Maoists in India. Tomorrow, she will be speaking at Washington Square Park, part of a national day of action. First, Arundhati discusses Occupy Wall Street.

ARUNDHATI ROY: You know, what they are doing becomes so important because it is in the heart of empire, or what used to be empire, and to criticize and to protest against the model that the rest of the world is aspiring to is a very important and a very serious business. So I think that it makes me—it makes me very, very hopeful that after a long time you’re seeing some nascent political, real political anger here.

It does—I mean, it does need a lot of thinking through, but I would say that, to me, fundamentally, you know, people have to begin to formulate some kind of a vision, you know, and that vision has to be the dismantling of this particular model, in which a few people can be allowed to have an unlimited amount of wealth, of power, both political as well as corporate. You know, that has to be dismantled. And that has to be the aim of this movement. And that has to then move down into countries like mine, where people look at the U.S. as some great, aspirational model. And I can tell you that there is such a lot of beauty still in India. There’s such a lot of ferocity there that actually can provide a lot of political understanding, even to the protest on Wall Street. To me, the forests of central India and the protesters in Wall Street are connected by a big pipeline, and I am one of those people in that pipeline.

AMY GOODMAN: I asked you about the Occupy Wall Street movement. What is your assessment of President Obama?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think, you know, when—I was never one of those people who was, you know, throwing my hat in the air when he won, even though—even though the memory of, you know, old black people, you know, feeling so happy to have a black man in the White House was something you just couldn’t ignore. But to see how he has—I mean, it’s almost reprehensible. You see—what has he done? He’s expanded the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. Those drone attacks are killing people every day. You know, it’s—I don’t think he has any idea what he’s doing in that subcontinent. You know, no idea whatsoever. It is just devolving into a completely unmanageable, horrendous situation.

In America now, I just feel—I just feel a bit upset every time I hear that smooth, silver-tongued, you know, kind of delivery, which actually means nothing most of the time. And so, if—I keep thinking that if George Bush had done what Obama does, everybody would be saying he’s a fascist, you know, but we really step back and make so much space for what’s going on here, that—you know, it’s an old dilemma, of course, that somebody can do by day what the other person does at night. And, you know, people are so caught up in this view that the only choice you have is between the Democrats and the Republicans or between the Congress and the BJP. Our imaginations have been locked into this kind of electoral politics, so we feel like we have to say nice things about him. But I don’t feel like saying nice things about him.

AMY GOODMAN: This book, Walking with the Comrades — talk about your experiences in India with the people you call “the comrades.” Who are they?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, they are—in this case, they are the Maoist guerrillas who are in the forests of central India, fighting against the Indian state and these huge mining corporations that are now moving in to more or less annihilate the forest, as well as the adivasi people, the tribal people. So, actually, it’s a more complicated question than you may perhaps imagine, to say who are the comrades, because I, having been there, don’t know, myself, because they do call themselves Maoists, and the—you know, the Communist Party of India, Maoist, has existed in different avatars, you know, since 1967. But in fact, 99 percent of them are actually adivasi people, tribal people. And so, to what extent the adivasis have influenced Maoist ideology and to what extent the Maoists have influenced the adivasi peoples is an important question, you know, and an unresolved one, as far as I am concerned. But—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the term “adivasi.”

ARUNDHATI ROY: Adivasi is—adivasi means the original inhabitants in India, and it means, basically, indigenous, what you would call indigenous, tribal people. And they are a huge population in India. It’s about 150 million people that belong to different tribes.

AMY GOODMAN: What would be like half the population of the United States.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yeah. And yet, they are really facing a kind of annihilation right now. The entire machinery of Indian democracy has more or less conspired to sort of silence what is actually going on. There’s very little news that comes out of the forest. And last—year before last, the Indian government actually announced a war, called Operation Green Hunt, against the Maoists, though, for the government, anybody who’s resisting the takeover of their lands by these mining corporations, whether it’s Maoists or whether it’s Gandhians or whether it’s militant, you know, independent movements, all of them are being called Maoists.

There is a whole sort of set of laws, mostly the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act or the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act, which allows them to arrest and imprison anybody, really, without a trial. And so, thousands of people are in jail, and there are 200,000 paramilitary forces moving in to these forests, heavily armed and basically pushing people out of their villages. So you have in the state of Chhattisgarh, where the—which is where I went into the forest and walked with the guerrillas, they actually also had a vigilante—a government-sponsored vigilante group of tribal people, who went in burning, raping, looting the place. And the whole idea—I mean, it’s an old idea; it’s nothing new. But they basically, more or less, forced people, something like 350,000 people, from about 600 villages to flee. And some of them were forced into roadside camps. About 50,000 people were forced into police camps on the roadside. And the others just went off the radar. Either they were hiding in the forest, some of them joined the Maoists, others fled to different states. So the idea is really to empty these forests, because in the year 2005, the Indian government signed hundreds of what we call MoUs, you know, memorandums of understanding, with various mining and infrastructure companies, and then began this war.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the great Indian writer Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and her most recent book, Walking with the Comrades. We will play more of this interview in the coming days.

Democracy Now!

November 15, 2011

Yesterday at noon, this blog’s trusty mentor, the Slovenian philosopher-scholar Slavoj Žižek, spoke at Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street protests are being held. Here is a full transcript of his speech. Update: Transcript of the Q&A portion of the talk has been posted as well.

Made some corrections, Oct 25, 6:30PM EST

— TRANSCRIPT —

They are saying we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.

We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cat reaches a precipice but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath this ground. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, “Hey, look down!”

In mid-April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dreaming. Here, we don’t need a prohibition because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless, moral protest. A decaffienated protest. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes to third world starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after marriage agencies are now outsourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, “Impossible, this means totalitarian state.” There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservatives fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostaligically remembering “What a nice time we had here.” Promise yourselves that this will not be the case. We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much.

— END OF TRANSCRIPT —

Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.

We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.

We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at “reality” television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful—as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates—while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation—the core of social networking sites such as Facebook—and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.

To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous—look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.

In this state of cultural illusion any description of actual reality, because it does not consist of the happy talk that pollutes the airwaves from National Public Radio to Oprah, is dismissed as “negative” or “pessimistic.” The beleaguered Jeremiahs who momentarily stumble into our consciousness and in a desperate frenzy seek to warn us of our impending self-destruction are derided because they do not lay out easy formulas that permit us to drift back into fantasy. We tell ourselves they are overreacting. If reality is a bummer, and if there are no easy solutions, we don’t want to hear about it. The facts of economic and environmental collapse, now incontrovertible, cannot be discussed unless they are turned into joking banter or come accompanied with a neat, pleasing solution, the kind we are fed at the conclusion of the movies, electronic games, talk shows and sitcoms, the kind that dulls our minds into passive and empty receptacles. We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.

We confuse this happy talk with hope. But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power. The great moral voices, George Orwell and Albert Camus being perhaps two of the finest examples, describe in moving detail the human suffering we ignore or excuse. They understand that the greatest instrument for moral good is the imagination. The ability to perceive the pain and suffering of another, to feel, as King Lear says, what wretches feel, is a more powerful social corrective than the shelves of turgid religious and philosophical treatises on human will. Those who change the world for the better, who offer us hope, have the capacity to make us step outside of ourselves and feel empathy.

A print-based culture, as writer Neil Postman pointed out, demands rationality. The sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” But our brave new world of images dispenses with these attributes because the images do not require them to be understood. Communication in the image-based culture is not about knowledge. It is about the corporate manipulation of emotions, something logic, order, nuance and context protect us against. Thinking, in short, is forbidden. Entertainment and spectacle have become the aim of all human endeavors, including politics, which is how Stephen Colbert, playing his television character, can be permitted to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Campaigns are built around the manufactured personal narratives of candidates, who function as political celebrities, rather than policies or ideas. News reports have become soap operas and mini-dramas revolving around the latest celebrity scandal.

Colleges and universities, which view students as customers and suck obscene tuition payments and loans out of them with the tantalizing promise of high-paying corporate jobs, have transformed themselves into resorts and theme parks. In this new system of education almost no one fails. Students become “brothers” or “sisters” in the atavistic, tribal embrace of eating clubs, fraternities or sororities. School spirit and school branding is paramount. Campus security keeps these isolated enclaves of privilege secure. And 90,000-seat football stadiums, along with their millionaire coaches, dominate the campus. It is moral leprosy.

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis. Mass entertainment plays to the basest and crudest instincts of the crowd. It conditions us to have the same aspirations and desires. It forces us to speak in the same dead clichés and slogans. It homogenizes human experience. It wallows in a cloying nostalgia and sentimentalism that foster historical amnesia. It turns the Other into a cartoon or a stereotype. It prohibits empathy because it prohibits understanding. It denies human singularity and uniqueness. It assures us that we all have within us the ability, talent or luck to become famous and rich. It forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods.

In the wake of the deadly Israeli raid on an international flotilla carrying over 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid and hundreds of civilian passengers, during which nine activists were murdered (if not outright executed) by Israeli commandos in international waters, the global call to end the US-backed Israeli siege has grown even more forceful.

Later this year, boats from Europe, Canada, South Africa, India, and the Middle East are expected to set sail for Gaza once again. US To Gaza, which states on its website that “America pays for the blockade with our tax dollars; Americans must join together to end this collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians,” aims to add a vital American element to this new Freedom Flotilla.

The U.S. boat, which will be named The Audacity of Hope (irony intended), is expected to carry an American peace delegation of forty to sixty passengers and will join its international flotilla partners en route. But purchasing a suitable ship, securing a sailing crew, obtaining the needed licenses and registration, gathering tons of humanitarian aid, and sailing for Gaza is a costly endeavor. It is estimated that at least $370,000 needs to be raised from private donors in the next month for the U.S. ship to become, not merely hopeful audacity, but a necessary reality.

All in all, $370,000 isn’t that much money. For instance, South Carolina Republican Congressman Joe Wilson raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from individual donors giving less than $200 just because he called Barack Obama a liar. If a jackass like Wilson can raise that kind of money for shouting a disingenuous falsehood, raising funds for a just cause like breaking the illegal Gaza blockade shouldn’t be that hard.

Sure, the fund-raising goal can be hit with 3,700 people each pledging $100 or a mere 370 donations of $1,000 each. But why is the bar for funding justice and fighting illegal collective punishment so low? Where are the big donors who could single-handedly buy a boat and subsidize the entire delegation? Why does it seem like such a stretch for American supporters of human rights and international law to send an armada of siege-breaking ships to Gaza?

Perhaps, in order to open borders and ship a little bit of hope to suffering Palestinians in the Middle East, US to Gaza organizers should be looking for a lot of financial support from open wallets on the West Coast.

Hollywood has no shortage of outspoken Zionists, ethnic cleansing enthusiasts, and racist, right-wing nutjobs. There are those who condemn the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement and promote Israeli hasbara like Jerry Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen, Minnie Driver, and Natalie Portman (who was also a proud research assistant of Alan Dershowitz and is thanked in his appalling book The Case for Israel); there are those who oppose resistance to Israeli aggression and expansion and laud Israeli assaults that take the lives of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians like actors Michael Douglas, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Danny De Vito, Don Johnson, James Woods, Kelly Preston, Patricia Heaton, Doug Liman, Gary Sinise, Kristen Chenowith, Michael Chiklis, Vivica A. Fox, Nicole Kidman, Pat Sajak, Bernie Mac and William Hurt, along with filmmakers like Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, William Friedkin, Richard Donner and Sam Raimi; there are Zionist zealots like John Malkovich and Richard Dreyfuss; there’s also Jon Voigt.

There are celebrities like Jason Alexander, who, despite his work with the two-state promoting OneVoice/Imagine Peace project, was an honored guest at last year’s Friends of the IDF Fundraising Gala and shill for Jewish television programming that endorses violent, fanatical Zionist settler ideologies. There are fashion designers like Elie Tahari, who donated a whopping $100,000 at this year’s IDF love-fest in March.

With friends like these, it’s no wonder that the IDF, a foreign military that oppresses and occupies an indigenous population, raised over $20 million in one night at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. But American donors don’t only fund the Occupation, they also fund illegal Jewish settlements – to the tune of tax-free hundreds of millions over the past decade – that have now aggressively stolen and colonized over 42% of the West Bank.

So where are their anti-occupation, pro-international law counterparts, especially the ones with equally deep pockets? The truth is they’re everywhere.

From Alice Walker to Vanessa Redgrave, Harry Belafonte to Viggo Mortensen, Julie Christie, Wallace Shawn, Alan Rickman, Jonathan Demme, Stephen King, Ralph Fiennes, Bill Irwin, Tilda Swinton, Wim Wenders, Uma Thurman, Debra Winger, Tony Kushner, Roger Ebert, Richard Gere, John Cusack, Sally Kirkland, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, Danny Glover, Oliver Stone, Ed Asner, Sophie Fiennes, Casey Kasem, and Jeremy Pikser, celebrity support for Palestinian freedom and an end to the Israeli occupation and blockade is widespread in Tinseltown.

Actresses Salma Hayek, Halle Berry, Drew Barrymore, Brooke Shields, Andie MacDowell, Lucy Liu, Whitney Houston and Sharon Stone all had their pictures removed from the website of blood diamond dealer Lev Leviev after being alerted to Leviev’s criminal funding of illegal West Bank settlements.

Musicians like Mos Def, Laurie Anderson, Boots Riley, Steve Earle, David Byrne, Neil Young, Santana, and Roger Waters all publicly oppose Israel’s systematic oppression and land theft and Annie Lennox protested against the 2008-9 Israel slaughter of over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza.

Megastars Dustin Hoffman and Meg Ryan canceled their attendance at this year’s annual Jerusalem Film Festival the day after Israel’s bloody raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and recent performances by The Pixies, Elvis Costello, Gorillaz, Devendra Banhart, and Snoop Dogg were also canceled for similar – if not identical – reasons.

All of these well-heeled celebrities should take their courageous boycott of Israeli apartheid and aggression even further by funding more humanitarian aid ships. With their help, supplementing the support of small donors, the illegal blockade can indeed be broken.

The Israeli policy of brutal blockade is clear. In 2006, after Palestinians democratically elected Hamas to the shock and chagrin of both Israel and the US (who had insisted on the elections in the first place), an economic and commercial siege was put into place by Israel as a punishment for Palestinian self-determination. As Dov Weisglass, adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, jokingly declared, “It’s like an appointment with a dietitian. The Palestinians in Gaza will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.”

Collective punishment, via forced deprivation and near-starvation, is unequivocally illegal. International law is quite clear in this regard. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which has governed Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 (and has been repeatedly affirmed by both the UN Security Council and General Assembly), states plainly:

“No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

Furthermore, though the Israeli intention may not have been to kill Palestinians in Gaza via food and medicine shortages, they have more than made up for it with their subsequent use of bombs, missiles, tank shells, bullets, depleted uranium, flechettes, white phosphorous, and DIME weaponry.

Still, Israeli officials such as former-Prime Minster, now Defense Minister, Ehud Barak and Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, Yossi Gal, continue to claim that “there is no shortage in humanitarian aid to Gaza, as food, fuel and supplies are regularly transferred into Gaza by international organizations.”

No mention is made of the fact that all building material, such as cement, plaster and dry wall, is banned from entering Gaza, in addition to the absurd prohibition of so-called “dual use” medicines, rope, wood, razors, light bulbs, textiles and fabrics, sewing and hypodermic needles, sewing machines, candles, matches, mattresses, bedsheets, pillowcases, blankets, cutlery, books, newspapers, coffee, tea, cigarettes, clothing, shoes, pencils and paper, fresh meat, seeds, nuts, cilantro, sage, cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, cumin, vinegar, biscuits, candy, potato chips, jam, chocolate, french fries, canned or dried fruit, notebooks, empty flowerpots, fishing rods or line, livestock, musical instruments, and children’s toys.

Obviously, Israeli officials take no note of the findings of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN which has reported that 61% of Gazans are “food insecure,” of which “65% are children under 18 years;” the level of anemia in infants is as high as 65.5%, about 70% of Gazans live on less than $1 a day, 75% rely on food aid, and 60% have no daily access to water.

As Rebecca Sargent of the Peace and Collaborative Development Network notes, “Much of the population remains unemployed and thus have no money to buy supplies for themselves. The UN resolution 1860 calls for the unfettered access of aid and commercial goods to Gaza, although it would appear this call has been mostly ignored by the Israeli government’s blockade.”

Also, as of the end of 2009, a U.N. report found that “insufficient food and medicine is reaching Gazans, producing a further deterioration of the mental and physical health of the entire civilian population since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the territory,” and also “blamed the blockade for continued breakdowns of the electricity and sanitation systems due to the Israeli refusal to let spare parts needed for repair get through the crossings.” Since June 2007, “the number of Palestine refugees unable to access food and lacking the means to purchase even the most basic items, such as soap, school stationery and safe drinking water, has tripled” and over 80 UN and aid agencies agree that “the formal economy in Gaza has collapsed.”

On May 31, the six-ship Gaza Freedom Flotilla was lethally attacked in international waters (the ships had no intention of sailing through Israeli territory) about 80 miles (130 kilometers) off the Gaza coast in an early morning raid by elite Israeli commandos. The attack was conducted after Israel cut off all communications from the ships and surrounded the flotilla with over 20 naval vessels and warships, along with multiple helicopters. In addition to the 45 highly-trained and heavily-armed commandos who rappelled onto the largest ship, the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, murdering at least 9 civilians and wounding about 60 more, about 650 other Israeli troops, including surveillance and support troops alongside those who actually boarded the ships, took part in the illegal assault on the flotilla.

The Mavi Marmara carried 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid on board including 6,000 tons of cement, more than 2,000 tons of iron, 100 prefabricated houses, 500 wheelchairs, crutches, medical equipment, wood and glass for building, electric generators, water purifiers, a mobile dental care facility, and food and had even been confirmed not to be transporting any weaponry by authorities before its departure.

Another aid ship, the MV Rachel Corrie, carrying 550 tons of cement, 20 tons of paper for printing school books, 25 tons of school supplies, 12 tons of sports equipment and 150 tons of medical supplies, was also illegally seized by the Israeli Navy a few days later.

On June 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced an “easing” of the four-year-long Gaza siege, declaring, “Today, after we lifted the civilian blockade of Gaza there is no reason or justification for further flotillas.”

Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz reports that “The highlight of the new policy is to be the creation and distribution of a detailed ‘black list’ of goods that will not be permitted into the Gaza Strip,” continuing that, now, “Only weapons or ‘dual-use’ materials that could be used to manufacture weapons will be on the list. Any item not on the list will be permitted into Gaza.”

As a result of this new policy, items such as car parts, agricultural and fishing tools, cosmetics, perfumes, soda, juice, jam, spices, shaving cream, potato chips, cookies and candy are now being imported into Gaza.

Nevertheless, the siege has not ended. Even though coriander, chocolate, and Coca-Cola are now allowed through Israel’s military checkpoints, goods such as cement, steel, iron, fertilizers, gas tanks, drilling equipment and water disinfectant are still prohibited. In fact, The Los Angeles Times reveals that “the new list of banned and restricted items, which fills several hundred pages, still includes goods and supplies vital to Gaza’s economic recovery.”

Consequently, Karin Laub of Associated Press reports that “because Israel will continue to ban most travel and exports and restrict the import of desperately needed construction materials, the new rules are unlikely to restore the territory’s devastated economy or allow rebuilding of all that was destroyed in last year’s war [sic].”

In short, Israel’s ongoing crime against humanity in Gaza continues. As long as Israel maintains its military control of Gaza’s economy, land and sea borders, airspace, restricts (or outright denies) the freedom of movement of its 1.5 million imprisoned inhabitants, and continues murdering Palestinians with Apache helicopters, F-15 and F-16 bombers, unmanned drones and remote-controlled machine guns, Gaza will not be free.

If the negative international attention Israel received after the Mavi Marmara massacre led to the so-called “easing” of the Gaza siege, there’s no telling what a constant barrage of boats might do. Therefore, until this collective punishment of innocent civilians ceases completely and Israel is held accountable for its crimes, more boats must continue to sail to Gaza. Among those boats should be a massive American contingent, funded by bold and steadfast believers in self-determination, human rights, and international law. We have paid for the Israeli oppression of Palestine for so long with our tax dollars, it’s now time to fight for Palestinian freedom with our tax-exempt donations.

And so, to all you stars of summer blockbusters and sold-out stadiums, start giving generously so that a fleet of blockade-busting boats can start their engines.

*****

To DONATE to US to Gaza, CLICK HERE.

*****

Nima Shirazi is a writer and musician from New York City. He is a contributing columnist for Foreign Policy Journal and Palestine Think Tank. His analysis of United States policy and Middle East issues, particularly with reference to current events in Palestine and Iran, can be found in numerous other online and print publications, such as Palestine Chronicle, Monthly Review, ColdType, Atlantic Free Press, Information Clearing House, OpEdNews, Countercurrents, The Rag Blog, Fluxed Up World, VoltaireNet, The People’s Voice, Axis of Logic, Salem News, Middle East Online, World Can’t Wait, CASMII, Ramallah Online, Kenya Imagine, InfoWars, and Woodstock International.

He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife and books.

Visit his website at: www.wideasleepinamerica.com.

Contact him at wideasleepinamerica@gmail.com.

“We are ruled not by two parties but one party,” Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. “It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded.”

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash.

“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left,” McKinney told me. “The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens Uniteddid not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”

We are bound to a party that has betrayed every principle we claim to espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war economy, to a demand for quality and affordable public education, to a concern for the jobs of the working class. And the hatred expressed within right-wing movements for the college-educated elite, who created or at least did nothing to halt the financial debacle, is not misplaced. Our educated elite, wallowing in self-righteousness, wasted its time in the boutique activism of political correctness as tens of millions of workers lost their jobs. The shouting of racist and bigoted words at black and gay members of Congress, the spitting on a black member of the House, the tossing of bricks through the windows of legislators’ offices, are part of the language of rebellion. It is as much a revolt against the educated elite as it is against the government. The blame lies with us. We created the monster.

When someone like Palin posts a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats, when she says “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!” there are desperate people cleaning their weapons who listen. When Christian fascists stand in the pulpits of megachurches and denounce Barack Obama as the Antichrist, there are messianic believers who listen. When a Republican lawmaker shouts “baby killer” at Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, there are violent extremists who see the mission of saving the unborn as a sacred duty. They have little left to lose. We made sure of that. And the violence they inflict is an expression of the violence they endure.

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.

I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going tobe Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He isObama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.