Progressive Calendar 07.12.12 /2
From: David Shove (shove001umn.edu)
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 12:52:37 -0700 (PDT)
*P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R   07.12.12*

1. Syria in crisis        7.12 7pm
2. AWC newbies       7.12 7pm
3. Midstream reading 7.12 7:30pm

4.  Rich Broderick - Unhappy Anniversary: In which a young journalist
learns the truth about free speech and a free press

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From: WAMM
Syria in crisis 7.12 7pm

Discussion: “Syria in Crisis” Thursday, July 12, 7:00 p.m. First Unitarian
Society, 900 Mount Curve Avenue, Minneapolis.

The situation in Syria has progressively escalated in the last year. A
peaceful popular uprising has become a violent conflict. U.N. monitors and
journalists have had limited access inside Syria. This is a complex
situation where more information is needed than is presented in the
mainstream media.

Presenters include: Dr. William Beeman, professor and chair of the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota; Dr. Wael Khouli,
Syrian American, physician and human rights activist; Mazen Halabi, Syrian
American and community activist; Coleen Rowley, WAMM board member and Time
Magazine “Whistleblower of the Year.”

Sponsored by: Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP), Social
Justice Committee of First Unitarian Society, Veterans for Peace (VFP) and
the Minnesota Peace Project. FFI: Call 612-377-6608.


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>From AWC
AWC newbies 7.12 7pm

New Members Meeting:  Check out the Anti-War Committee!
Thursday, July 12 @ 7pm @ AWC office in the UTEC Bldg, 1313 5th St SE Rm
112C, Mpls
Spend your summer vacation opposing war! Help us build a movement to stop
US wars from Afghanistan to where ever is next. Get involved! Meet new
people.  Organized by the Anti-War Committee.
https://www.facebook.com/events/497739233576187/


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From: ed
Midstream reading 7.12 7:30pm

Midstream Reading Series
When: Thursday July 12, 7:30–8:30pm.

Where: Blue Moon building,  corner of 39th and (3820) East Lake.  Upstairs.
 Entrance just west of the Blue Moon coffee house; up the stairs and to the
left. Air-conditioned. Not wheel-chair accessible. Plentiful street
parking.
  Best to arrive 10-20 minutes early to get coffee and food/dessert from
the Blue Moon, and to be seated by 7:30 so we can begin on time. And, the
venue will easily hold about 30; after that, standing or floor-sitting room
only. The early bird gets the seat.

Original poems and stories read/performed by their creators:
Richard Broderick
Marie Sheppard Williams
Thomas R Smith
Sue Crouse

Richard Broderick
The author of three books of fiction and poetry, Richard Broderick has
received numerous awards for his writing, including a Minnesota State Arts
Board Fellowship and a Minnesota Book Award. At the moment, he is spending
the summer loafing and inviting his soul.

Marie Sheppard Williams
Marie Sheppard Williams has lived and worked in Minnesota all her life.
 Currently she cohabits with a very large orange cat named Albert Einstein,
and is at work on a new book.  She has won many awards for her writing,
including two Pushcart Prizes and a Bush Artist Fellowship.  Among her
publications are The Worldwide Church of the Handicapped, The Weekend Girl,
The Soap Game, Stories from the Child, Us, and The Best Cat, a book of
poems by Sheppard Williams with illustrations by her daughter, Megan
Williams; and her most recent collection, The Magic Stories.  She and her
work are featured in the latest online and print versions of Grey Sparrow
Magazine

Thomas R Smith
Thomas R. Smith is the author of several books of poems, most recently The
Foot of the Rainbow (Red Dragonfly Press).  He is editing Airmail:  The
Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer for April, 2013 release by
Graywolf Press.  He teaches at the Loft Literary Center, where he is a
poetry advisor in the Foreword program.  He lives in western Wisconsin.

Sue Reed Crouse
Sue Reed Crouse began writing poetry in earnest after the 2008 death of her
20 year old daughter, Laura. Sue has taken several poetry classes at the
Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. In 2011, she was invited to
participate in the LMT/Foreword program where she is assembling a
manuscript under the guidance of poet Thomas R. Smith. She is represented
in the 2012 collection, Gatherings: A Foreword Poetry Anthology. Her work
appears in The Aurorean, where she was featured as the Showcase Poet,
Talking Stick, where she won an Honorable Mention and Verse Wisconsin.

For further information:
David Shove shove001 [at] umn.edu     651-636-5672
Unhappy Anniversary: In which a young journalist learns the truth about
free speech and a free press
By Rich Broderick, Ground Zero


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Unhappy Anniversary: In which a young journalist learns the truth about
free speech and a free press
Rich Broderick
June 28, 2012

Thirty years ago this in June, Israel invaded Lebanon, ostensibly to
destroy PLO military units hunkered down along the border of the two
countries.

Although independent observers had verified the PLO’s faithful adherence to
a 1981 ceasefire, Israel claimed that Palestinian forces under Yassir
Arafat’s command had mounted cross-border raids and fired missiles into the
Galilee giving Israel no choice but to retaliate.

Just prior to the invasion, meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador to England,
Shlomo Argov, was the target of an attempted assassination by the Abu Nidal
terrorist organization, a sworn enemy of the PLO.

In the wake of the botched assasination, the PLO not only publicly
condemned the shooting but also condemned to death, in absentia, Abu Nidal,
who was known to be the mastermind behind similar attempts against the
lives of PLO leaders. Israel went ahead anyway and cited the murder attempt
as yet another casus belli. Though the announced limit of the Israeli
assault was the banks of the Litani River about a third of the way to
Beirut, Israeli forces did not halt there but pressed on to Beirut.

At the time this sequence of events was unfolding, I was a staff reporter
with the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader. About a year earlier I had created
what I believe was the first newspaper venue for media criticism here in
town, a weekly column I called “Mediawatch.”

Until the time of Israel’s invasion I, like most Americans, was for good
reason naive about the realities of power politics in the Middle East and
about the peculiar nature, as some have called it, of the U.S.-Israeli
relationship.

That began to change when I learned from the Palestinian-American husband
of a member of a writer’s group I had helped form that his two sisters,
both studying at the American University of Beirut, were trapped in the
western part of that city, terrified for their lives by Israeli’s
unrelenting air, ground, and sea attack on the undefended capital. A little
investigation led me to discover that, among other things, such an attack
on an undefended “open” city was, and still is, a prima facie war crime. In
this case, the flagrant violation of international law was funded in large
part by American tax money.

I began a systematic analyzis of U.S. press coverage of the invasion,
comparing it in those pre-Al Jazeera days to coverage in such radical
overseas venues as the BBC, CBC and LeMonde.

Paul Findley was a former Republican Representative from Illinois. Like a
few other politicians, including fellow Republicans Pete McCloskey and
Chuck Percy, and Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney, Findley had lost his
office when tons of out-of-district cash poured into the coffers of his
opponent following Findley’s criticism of the American government’s blind
support of Israel. In 1985, Findley published a carefully researched,
best-selling book with the unfortunate title of They Dare Speak Out. It
detailed his experience and those of others, including journalists, who’d
suffered a similar fate. Herewith, I will allow Rep. Findley to take up my
tale.

"Mediawatch" Blinks Out

During the summer of 1982, Minneapolis columnist Richard Broderick devoted
several installments of his "Mediawatch" column—a weekly feature on media
coverage—to exposing inequities in American media coverage of the Israeli
invasion. Among his findings: "Tapes, purportedly of [Yasser] Arafat's
'bunker' and 'PLO military headquarters' being bombed, aired over and over
again, while tape of civilian casualties wound up on the edit room floor.
... As Israeli ground forces swept through southern Lebanon, the American
press continued to employ the euphemism 'incursion' to describe what was
clearly an invasion."

In local newspaper coverage, Broderick found: "While Palestinian and
Lebanese civilians were being killed by the thousands, the Minneapolis Star
and Tribune ran a front-page photo of an Israeli mother mourning her dead
son. Later that same day, another photo showed a group of men bound and
squatting in a barbed-wire enclosure guarded by Israeli soldiers. The
caption described the scene as a group of 'suspected  Palestinians'
captured by Israeli forces. Simply being Palestinian, the caption implied,
was sufficient cause to be rounded up."

Broderick also used his column to relate scenes of horror that were
witnessed by the Reverend Don Wagner, who had been in Beirut inspecting
Palestinian refugee camps when the Israeli bombing began. Wagner saw a wing
of Gaza Hospital knocked down by the bombing, and he was in Akka Hospital
while hundreds of civilian casualties were brought in. Wagner described his
experiences to the Beirut network bureaus for NBC, ABC, and CBS, but their
reports, which were beamed back to the United States, were never aired.

While such examples of bias are disturbing, still more so are the
consequences suffered by the journalist who publicizes them. Soon after the
"Mediawatch" columns on Israel ran in the Twin Cities Reader, movie
distributors of Minneapolis—who collectively represent the largest single
source of advertising for the paper—began telephoning editor Deb Hopp with
threats of permanently removing their advertising as a result of the
Broderick column. Hopp mollified them by agreeing to print, unedited, their
1,000-word reply to the offending column. Contrary to usual policy,
Broderick was not allowed to respond to this rebuttal.

Scattering the Seeds of Catastrophe

Later in the summer, Broderick reported an attempt, as he saw it, by
Minnesota Senator Rudy Boschwitz to manipulate public opinion through the
local media. Boschwitz coordinated and appeared in a press conference with
members of the American Lebanese League (ALL), an organization that
endorsed the Israeli invasion. Boschwitz cited the testimony of league
members in arguing that the people of Lebanon welcomed the Israelis.
Broderick quoted in his column a report by the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee that described the league as "the
unregistered foreign agent of the Phalange Party and the Lebanese Front.
They work in close consultation with AIPAC, which creates political
openings for them. " Senator Boschwitz, upset at seeing this information
made public, castigated Hopp and Broderick in a lengthy telephone call.
Three weeks later, Broderick was informed that his services would no longer
be needed at the Twin Cities Reader.

Still later that summer, militia belonging to the Phalange Party, a
Maronite Christian movement that frankly modeled itself after European
fascist parties (Phalange is a variation on Falange, the name adopted by
fascists who backed Franco during the Spanish Civil War) perpetrated the
massacre of as many as 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the
Sabra and Shatila  refugee camps of West Beirut. The militia were granted
entry to the camps by Gen. Ariel Sharon, commander of the Israeli invasion
forces. Israeli troops went on to block the exits to the camps for almost
three days while the Lebanese fascists carried out their murderous rampage.

By that point, I was no longer in a position to comment on news coverage of
this horrorific crime, at least in the pages of “Mediawatch.” The column
was subsequently taken over by new hires and turned into a compendium of
factoids about such topics as, say, who just got hired and/or fired as news
director at KMSP-TV or what creative director left Campbell-Mithun last
Monday to take a job at an ad firm in Chicago.

I have to admit, however, that I never did feel any anger toward Deb Hopp
or her late-husband Mark, the couple who owned the Reader. In fact, only a
few years later, I wrote sympathetically of their efforts to retain control
of the company they'd founded when the venture/vulture capitalists they'd
turned to for help when they were expanding their enterprise decided the
ROI wasn’t high enough and Mark had to go.  Even as long ago as 1982, I
understood that the loss of movie advertising would have proven fatal to
the Reader. I understood that to continue to speak out would mean my
dismissal. The choice was mine alone.

I am now bringing up what might seem like ancient history for two reasons.
First, I like marking anniversaries – it’s a way of reminding ourselves of
what really happened and that may be happening even now. In the case of the
American press and government kowtowing to Israel and its own unregistered
foreign agents, like AIPAC, things have only gotten worse.

The other reason is by way of trying to explain something to my liberal
friends. Many of them are today urging me once again to shut up, but this
time about the crimes, malfeasance, incompetence and sheer vacuity of the
Obama Administration, citing the Chicken Little argument that a Romney
victory this November will cause the sky to fall upon us. Citing the
equally specious argument that non-events like Obama’s empty announcement
that he is in favor of gay marriage (a support that, I am willing to bet,
will bear no fruit should be re-elected) are proof that he’s all that
stands between us and…well, and…. Yikes, is that a chunk of the heavens
beginning to collapse or a bit of thunder?

In the first place, I try to point out to them the sky has, in a sense,
already fallen upon us. We are, no matter who is (s)elected President this
year, in the  terminal stages of American empire and quite possibly
capitalism's hegemony (or so we can only hope, on both scores).

In the second place, I must respectfully decline, on principle, to refrain
from expressing what appears to me to be the truth, no matter how – what’s
the operative modifier here? – ah, yes, No matter how “inconvenient” that
truth might be.

In short, telling me to shut up didn’t work in 1982. It isn’t likely to
work today, either.

*Photo showing a small detail of the aftermath of the massacre in Sabra and
Shatila, September 16-18, 1982


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