Author: The FAR Platform

It feels obvious to me that if Henry Louis Gates, Jr. had been white things would have gone differently. The assumption that underpinned Officer Jim Crowley’s actions was that Gates, a black man, was out of place both physically and attitudinally. Gates did not show the officer proper respect, and part of the respect the officer expected was rooted in racial status difference.

But racism is not the whole issue. Other critical pieces to discuss are the problems of the category of “disorderly conduct” and the behavior of the police officer in luring Gates outside so he could arrest him for this problematic criminal category. Disorderly conduct belongs to that class of “crimes” that includes “vagrancy” (having no established residence or lawful or visible means of support) and “loitering” (remaining in an area for no obvious reason). These are classified as “public order” offenses, and they carry serious penalties, including substantial fines and jail time.

Public order offenses are not really criminal acts according to the standard definition of crime. The historically-constant moral and legal definition of crime requires the material existence of acts of force or fraud that cause or threaten to cause demonstrable and significant emotional, financial, or physical harm to other persons.

It is crucial that those whose interests are being protected by real criminal categories are able to demonstrate reasonably-accepted emotional, financial, or physical harm. Being irritated or offended by a person’s behavior existential state does not rise to the level of significant harm. Behavior which a particular individual believes is harmful, but which reasonable persons do not, is also not a criminal offense. For example, it may be emotionally damaging to a particularly sensitive adult to have his trousers referred to a “high waters,” but reasonable persons would agree that the insult does not represent a significant harm to an adult’s emotional interests. Besides, the constitutionally-guaranteed right to free speech protects irritating and offensive speech.

Throughout time, for various reasons, categories of crime have appeared that do not fit the historically-constant definition. In theocracies, thought and behavior challenging the accepted character of the universe are usually defined in the criminal law thereby subjecting the offending persons to punishment. If, for example, the Church says the Earth is the center of the solar system, it transgresses the law to say that the Sun is. Compulsory heterosexuality has found its way into the criminal law, making sexual activity between persons of the same gender criminal. Consumption of various substances, such as the smoking of certain plants, has been controlled using the criminal law. Selling sexual services has also been criminalized in many societies.

Examples of criminal acts that do not fit the historically-constant definition of crime but which reflect the time-bounded norms of a particular society, norms constructed and enforced by the powerful of that particular society against those that annoy them, are practically endless. It will suffice to have the reader note that in none of the “crimes” listed in the previous paragraph can an appeal be made to reasonably-accepted emotional, financial, or physical harm to other persons, and remind the reader that, in a free society, a person is at liberty to emotionally, financially, or physically harm him or herself.

So what is the purpose of such public order crimes as disorderly conduct? This is not difficult to ascertain. The purpose of the crime of disorderly conduct is to permit the arbitrary control of undesirable persons by providing authorized agents of the state, that’s the police in modern society, with broad and almost-infinitely rationalizable categories with which to justify arbitrary arrest and detention.

Individuals charged with such crimes are subject to the will or judgment of police officers regarding behavior or existential states that do not impose harm upon the public. In public order offenses, the criminal behavior may simply be acting or existing in a manner the police or the public don’t like at the moment. The defendant’s fate in the moment is contingent solely upon the police officer’s discretion independent of harm to others.

Disorderly conduct has become a catch-all rule police use to arrests persons who refuse to respect them. Disorderly conduct thus gives the police the power to arrest anyone speaking angrily at them in public, disturbing the peace, or disrupting order in the community. Speaking in agitated tones to police officers is what it called “contempt of cop.” The proper disposition of the average citizen with respect to a police officers is to be servilely obedient or respectful, that is to assume some manner of genuflection.

However, constitutional limitation to disorderly conduct has placed a crucial condition on its administration, namely that, for the charge to be triggered, the speech or behavior must occur in a public place where it may be alleged that others may be disturbed. Standing in one’s living room and dressing down a police officer is not disorderly conduct. Contempt of cop is not yet codified into law.

Jim Crowley, the cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Gate’s front porch, states in his police report that Gates was yelling very loudly and accusing Crowley of being a racist as they stood in Gates’ kitchen. Crowley was frustrated because he knew this is not disorderly conduct. This is why Crowley wanted Gates to come outside, claiming that the “acoustics of the kitchen” made it difficult to hear Gates. This is a patently absurd claim, transparent in its intention. The officer was deceiving Gates in order to arrest him—that is, punish him for back-talking a police officer.

“I would say it is not constitutional to arrest someone in his home just for being loud and abusive to a police officer,” Boston University law professor Tracey Maclin was quoted in a LA Times story. “That’s why the cop asked him to come outside, where he could be arrested for being disorderly in public.” Crowley claimed that he arrested Gates for “his continued tumultuous behavior outside the residence, in view of the public.”

Boston defense lawyer Samuel Goldberg told the LA Times, “You might think that in the United States, you have a right to state an opinion, even an offensive opinion. But prosecutors like to say you don’t have a right to mouth off to the police.” This is, as I have described elsewhere, a thought crime. “Gates was saying, ‘You are hassling me because I’m black.’ I understand how that’s offensive to a police officer,” Goldberg said. “It’s astounding to me to call it criminal.”

What Gates was doing, even according to Crowley’s police report, was criticizing a police officer. Gates was indignant. And that is his right. Human beings have a natural right to be angry with people who displease them. Police work for the taxpayers and, moreover, free speech rights permit a citizen to criticize state employees, whether they are politicians, bureaucrats, or police officers.

Crowley did not appreciate being called a racist and or having his authority challenged. But he knew he could not arrest Gates inside the house. So he had to get Gates outside in public so he could use the presence of other citizens—the presence of other police officers would have been insufficient—to meet what Crowley perceived was the threshold for disorderly conduct.

The charge of disorderly conduct was dropped—and hardly anybody seems to want to focus on this—was because Crowley didn’t have a legitimate case. The arrest was a mistake. The cop acted stupidly. No rule of law was in force, but rather a police officer using his power to arrest somebody he didn’t like at the moment. He wanted to punish Gates, so he arrested him.

Those who love liberty cannot support the behavior of this police officer. Although police abusing their power has been all to common in the United States, most of us will agree that this behavior is out of step with the values Americans hold dear.

In Wausau, Wisconsin, the state in which I reside, the police walked onto the property of a US citizen and removed an upside-down US flag he was flying. Why? Because neighbors thought it was unpatriotic. So?

On the advice of Marinette County District Attorney Allen Brey, the police confiscated the flag on Independence Day. Vito Congin’s First Amendment rights were trampled on the very day Americans celebrate the independence that paved the way for the establishment of uniquely American liberties, which include the right to fly the US flag upside-down. 

Congin’s neighbor, Steven Klein was stunned. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ They said, ‘It is none of your business.’” Marinette County Sheriff Jim Kanikula put it this way: it’s not illegal to fly the flag upside down but people were upset and, after all, it was the Fourth of July. What the fuck?

Village President John Deschane, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam, said many people in town believe it’s disrespectful to fly the flag upside-down. “If he wants to protest, let him protest, but find a different way to do it.” Hey John, which constitutional amendment gives Deschane the right to dictate to a fellow citizen the manner in which he should protest his government?

By the way, Congine is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq in 2004. Here’s what he had to say: “It is pretty bad when I go and fight a tyrannical government somewhere else and then I come home to find it right here at my front door.“ Indeed.

Academic freedom is the lifeblood of the academy. Without the freedom to make interpretations and draw judgments about the empirical and conceptual materials in front of them, intellectuals can’t do their work. The desire to censor objectionable materials and punish the professors who present them is not the work of rational minds but of ideologues who wish to put the university in the service of state and other projects—in the case of the persecution of Bill Robinson, the project of a foreign power. We must not allow the university to become any more of a tool of the elite, foreign or domestic, any more than it is already.

Historical comparison is standard method in both social science and historiography, and comparisons may involve historical facts, documents, photographs, art, music, religious ideology, and so forth. One compares cases to theorize and test hypotheses concerning the causal forces and processes underpinning social phenomena. For example, one may compare revolutions to test the hypothesis that, for example, a weak state is the main factor in successful social revolutions. In making such comparisons it is understood that the cases are not identical, rather that they have differences and similarities.

In the Robinson case, the professor forwarded a comparisons between the Warsaw and Gaza ghettos, the experience of the victims (Jews and Palestinians), and the behavior of the oppressors (Germans and Jews). Both cases were the result of ethnonationalist projects and the similarities are too numerous to document here (view the materials for yourself and study the cases—any objective observer will find the comparison apt). To be sure, there were differences. Of course. But the differences do not eradicate the similarities.

Some members of groups who are driven from their homes and off their land into ghettos or onto reservations, denied their freedoms, daily humiliated and periodically massacred, have been known to take violent action against their oppressors. Native Americans sometimes responded to European colonists in violent ways, which the colonists used to justify colonization and genocide. Blacks sometimes violently resisted the policies of the National Party in South Africa. I could provide many other examples. Jewish resistance in Poland is an apt one. It’s a very old pattern. Anti-colonial violence is the consequence of colonialism.

Even when anti-colonial resistance in Palestine dies down (which is remarkable given the conditions Palestinians have been forced to live under for decades), Israel provokes Palestinians to violence. After Israel pulled out its colonists in 2005 (a result of Palestinians’ increasingly successful resistance tactics) and the Palestinians exercised their choice and elected Hamas, Israel blockaded Gaza. Hamas responded to this act of war with rocket and mortar attacks. Israel used these actions to justify bombing and launching several raids into Gaza killing scores of Palestinians.

Palestinians negotiated a ceasefire with Israel June 19, 2008, and rocket and mortar fire dropped to the single digits during these months. In fact, in September and October the number of rockets fired into Israel dropped to one per month. Overall, there was a 98% reduction in rocket and mortar attacks. The rockets that were fired were from groups in opposition to Hamas. Israel did not live up to its end of the bargain, which was to end the blockade of Gaza. Then Israel violated the ceasefire in November by launching a raid into Gaza killing six Palestinians. When some Gazans responded to this provocation, Israel used this action to justify the Gazan Massacre. Even after Israel violated the ceasefire, Hamas attempted to renegotiate. But it was election season in Israel, and politicians needed to look tough.

Finally, while it’s true that international law recognizes the power of countries to control their borders, it does not recognize the “right” of countries to control the borders of other countries or territories not legally under their authority. When a country controls the borders of a territory, then that country effectively occupies that territory.

Israel controls more than the borders of Gaza. As news stories out today demonstrate, Israel has decimated Gaza’s fishing industry by progressively ratcheting down Gaza’s freedom to fish its own territorial waters. Israel restricted Gaza to twenty miles, then to ten, then to three nautical miles, where it stands today. The fishing industry employed 45,000 of the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza (the majority of which are refugees). With the disappearance of the industry, one of Gaza’s few sources of protein is disappearing, and since Israel restricts food aid into Gaza, Palestinians are among the most malnourished people in the world.

Resistance to this situation is grounds for more oppression? In what moral universe are some people living?

Dagobert D. Runes writes,

Karl Marx was not only born a Jew; he came from a rabbinical family. His father Heschel Marx accepted Christianity in 1816 in order to practice law in Prussian territory. Like many converts, Marx found it necessary all his life to justify the mass conversion of his family by attacks against his blood brothers.

Runes wrote this in the forward to a A World Without Jews, a book attributed to Karl Marx, published in 1959. But Karl Marx never wrote a book called A World Without Jews. Moreover, the essays that form the chapters of this book are collected from essays published separately, and include passages that do not appear in previously published versions.

Focusing on the above quoted passage, there are two problems with it. The first is the wrong of classic psychological ad hominem. To suppose Marx was psychologically motivated to criticize Judaism and the role of Jews in European society, whatever the reason, is a fallacious argument form. Marx’s argument in the essay is well constructed and, assuming someone with the same intellect, a criticism a man or woman of any ethnic background could make.

The second problem is this phrase “blood brothers,” as in Jews are blood brothers and therefore a Jew who criticizes Judaism is a race traitor. Runes is here embracing the racialization of Jews, an imposition upon Jews by non-Jewish Europeans who sought to make them something other than Europeans. This is the wellspring of anti-Semitism. Jews are Jews by blood. Jewish blood must be something different than non-Jewish blood. This means that creating a Jewish state in Palestine is the creation of a racial state.

The bulk of the argument Marx is making is found in the 1844 essay “On The Jewish Question” in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. It which was a response to Bruno Bauer’s 1943 book Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question). Bauer’s book is complex, and I may return to a discussion of it on a later date, but the substance of Marx’s argument written in the context of his critique of Bauer is that liberation from religion would mean liberation from Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc. Marx was an atheist who advocated overthrowing the world order—capitalism—that underpinned modern religious ritual. A world without religion and capitalism would be a world without Jews because Judaism is a religion. The same would be true for Christians and Muslims. And so on. In other words, the argument is not anti-Semitic but rather anti-capitalist and irreligious. Indeed, Marx argued on behalf of Jewish liberation in Germany.

US Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor on Friday resigned her membership in an all-women organization, hoping to head off criticism that she belonged to a discriminatory organization before her confirmation hearings begin next month.

The group, the Belizean Grove, calls itself “a constellation of influential women” formed in response to the all-male Bohemian Club, whose annual revels at its expansive Northern California estate are attended by powerful and influential men.

The Belizean Grove apparently doesn’t own its own property, but schedules periodic events in the US, Belize, and other locations in Central America, according to its Web site.

“I believe the Belizean Grove does not practice invidious discrimination and my membership did not violate the Judicial Code of Ethics, but I do not want questions about this to distract anyone from my qualifications and record,” Judge Sotomayor wrote in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and ranking Republican, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

“The Belizean Grove is proud and privileged to have had Sonia Sotomayor as a member,” Susan S. Stautberg, the group’s founder, said in a statement. “We’re all sorry that she is not able to continue.”

A Senate Republican aide said Republicans didn’t plan to object to Judge Sotomayor s membership in the group, but did hope to contrast their position with Democrats, who in past years have criticized Republican judicial nominees for membership in all-male clubs.

It doesn’t matter how many abortions Tiller performed or at what point during the pregnancy he performed them or whether the fetus had birth defects or how much money he made performing abortions or whether the fetus is a person or the motives behind the desire to seek an abortion. All this is beside the point. An abortion is a private matter between the doctor and the patient. In a free society, women decide whether to have children. Not the state. Not the father. Not the church. Nobody else and no other entity can make that decision for women while at the same time maintaining the personal sovereignty of women. Tiller helped tens of thousand of women realize their personal liberty by empowering them to determine for themselves if and when they should use their sovereign bodies to multiply the numbers of persons on earth. The state didn’t decide for them. They state forced them neither to have a baby nor to have an abortion. That is how it should be in a free society. What matters in this case is that a terrorist from a so-called movement calling itself “pro-life,” but which is in fact a extremist countermovement aiming to deny women sovereignty over their bodies, assassinated a doctor in the foyer of his church.

Anybody who says that the state must force women to have babies – and this includes everybody who believes abortion should be restricted by local, state, or federal government – either does not love personal liberty or does not understand what personal liberty means and why it is imperative to preserve it if we are as a people to be free. At its core, the anti-choice countermovement is the authoritarian desire to place the womb under state control, to control women by controlling their reproductive capacity. It is, whether conscious of itself or not, a desire to enforce by law the essence of patriarchal domination. Tiller, and all those other doctors assassinated by anti-choice extremists, are the victims of terrorism. These terrorists, these religious zealots who desire theocracy, hate our freedoms. They hate our way of life.

Abortion is not an issue where reasonable people can agree to disagree. Either we defend the right of women to control their own bodies or we cave to tyranny. Control over one’s body is a fundamental human right. There is no compromise.

Right wing Knesset members, led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his ultranationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu, have proposed a bill to outlaw commemorations of the al-Nakba, the catastrophe that befell hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who were expelled from their homes by Jews in the 1948 wave of ethnic cleansing, a key moment in the construction of a Jewish Zionist state. Israel’s Arab citizens, along with Palestinians in the diaspora, recognize al-Nakba on May 15, the day following the end of the British mandate over Palestine in 1948. Arabs commemorate that day by parading through villages destroyed by Jewish colonizers. The bill, if made law, would ban these commemorative practices with a prison term of up to three years for anyone participating in them.

Bill Robinson, professor of sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, recently pointed out about this law “criminalizing acts of memory, of collective identity, of cultural and political expression.” “Imagine criminalizing black commemoration of slavery, or Indian commemoration of genocide in the Americas?” He said. “Or Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust?” Indeed. Can you imagine that? Yet those who commemorate the Holocaust are proposing to forbid Arabs from commemorating al-Nakba.

This isn’t the only fascistic measure. As reported in Haaretz, the Knesset plenum has given its initial approval to a bill that would make it a crime to publicly deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This “crime” would be punishable by a prison sentence of up to a year. This means that an Arab Muslim, in an alleged democratic society, could not voice the opinion that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state. This is analogous to a law that makes punishable any public denial of the right of the German state to exist as a white non-Jewish racial state. Can you imagine a Jewish citizen of Germany being forced to keep quiet his protest of the exclusive ethnic character of his state?

Moreover, a third bill, proposed by David Rotem of the Yisrael Beiteinu, would require any persons seeking Israeli citizenship to swear an oath of loyalty to Israel. This bill reads: “those seeking citizenship will be required to declare commitment to be loyal to the state of Israel as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state, to its symbols and its values and to serve the state as required in military service or an alternative service.” Imagine an Arab Muslim, in order to be a citizen in an alleged democratic country, swearing his allegiance to a Jewish Zionist ideal, its flag and others symbols, its values, which include its religious and ethnic character, and to serve in a compulsory fashion that state even when its policies are detrimental to Arab Muslims.

Similar bills propose amendments to the laws that governs the oath taken by Knesset members and members that includes identical language. Thus an Arab Muslim elected to the Knesset would be requires to swear his allegiance to a Jewish Zionist state. Here’s the Haaretz piece: Israeli Arab committee slams ‘racist, fascist’ bills.

Counterpunch published a story today, “Bush, God, Iraq and Gog,” by Yale professor Clive Hamilton, about George W. Bush, lobbying leaders to put together the “Coalition of the Willing” in 2003, telling French president Jacques Chirac that Yahweh’s will was at work in the world, and that mythical apocalyptic creatures of the ancient Hebrews, Gog and Magog, were rising to threaten Israel. Bush was on a mission from God to vanquish them. “This confrontation is willed by God,” Bush told Chirac. God, Bush said, “wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.” Bush told Chirac that “the biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.”

Gog and Magog are mentioned in both Genesis and Ezekiel of the Old Testament, and famously in Revelations 20:7-8: “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together for battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.” (By the way, George H. W. Bush’s nickname in the Skull and Bones at Yale was “Magog.”)

Élysée Palace turned to a theologian at the University of Lausanne, Thomas Romer, and find out what Bush was talking about. It’s Romer who provides the first account of this revealing movement, published in an article by Jocelyn Rochat, “George W. Bush et le Code Ezéchiel,” in Allez Savoir! (No. 39, September 2007). Since the account was written in the French language, it long escaped scrutiny by US observers (much like Zbigniew Brzezinski admission in Le Nouvel Observateur, Jan 15, 1998, that the Carter administration played the key role in turning Afghanistan into a cesspool to destabilize the Soviet Union and that he had no regrets about being responsible for the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist networks operating today). Chirac has corroborated Romer’s account in a book by Jean Claude Maurice, Si vous le répétez, je démentirai, published in March of this year.

In his article, Anderson writes, “There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfillment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.” Indeed. It was a crusade in Bush’s mind. But we didn’t need to wait for this new piece of evidence to know this. Readers familiar with my work will recall that I exposed Bush’s motives to an international audience in my article “Faith Matters: George Bush and Providence,” published in The Public Eye on March 18, 2003, two days before the Iraq invasion.

(This article landed me a interview with public radio and the first invitation to speak at the United Nations University in Amman Jordan. There was a funny moment in the discussion period following my 2006 presentation in Amman, Jordan, at the United Nations University. I shared the stage with, among others, Shlomo Avineri. For those of you who are not familiar with Avineri, he is the famous Israeli political scientist noted for landmark works on Theodor Herzl, Moses Hess, and Zionism, and the political and social thought of Hegel and Marx. He also did considerable political work in negotiations in the Middle East countries on questions of science. It the work on Marx that first introduced me to Avineri. When I finished discussing the role of Christian Zionists in the Middle East, Avineri quipped, “This is help we don’t need.”)

I am happy to see Professor Hajjar defend Robinson’s academic freedom (and thus hers) even though she would not herself have made the comparison. She provides a model for all to follow. If we prize an open democratic society, we should all defend academic freedom, as well as the freedom of speech we all enjoy, even for relevant speech with which we disagree.

However, I don’t agree with her statement, “You don’t evoke Nazis unless you’re talking about Nazis.” That’s a poorly formed thought. The email evokes the Nazis for the purpose of comparing oppressive state tactics carried out against marginalized peoples. This is a legitimate exercise.

What are the reasons for not evoking Nazis unless you are talking about the Nazis? Because it is mistaken? Should we then stifle a social scientist who compares Iran to Nazi Germany even though such a comparison is rather obviously erroneous?

It is quite obvious that we can’t debate whether the comparison is erroneous if we are not allowed to evoke it. This is the purpose of the classroom (and other academic fora). Should the comparison be disallowed because the Jewish holocaust is a sacred case? Are we going to make a list of sacred cases disallowed in historical comparison? Who will make this list—this “Index of Prohibited Historical Comparisons”?

Doesn’t making exceptions run contrary to the goal of objectivity in science? The Catholic Church allowed Galileo to discuss many of the things he was discovering about our solar system. But when it came to the question of geocentrism, which the Catholic Church felt delegitimated its dogma, the Church drew the line. We all recognize now that was inappropriate. We should all understand the motive of the Church. We cannot similarly make an exception for arguments comparing the tactics of the Israeli regime against the Palestinians to the German Nazi tactics against the Jews.

The dangers of artificially constraining comparisons should be obvious. The Nazis were not the only regime in history to have perpetrated genocide. The Jews were not the only victims of genocide. Yes, the Nazi case is unique. But all genocides are unique cases taken in terms of their own particulars. Taking cases in themselves doesn’t help us fully explain them and, crucially, prevent them from happening again. Many observers, including many of Jews, have suggested something like the Jewish holocaust could happen again.

The point of comparison is to identify similarities and dissimilarities and generalize patterns to theorize common causes and dynamics. There can be no science without comparison, and science is inappropriately limited when certain cases are for non-scientific purposes excluded from analysis. Here’s the article to which I commented: Panel Defends Robinson.