CounterPunch

ON THE latest slimed path Julian Assange has been made to trod, a few things have presented themselves. The rusty sword of Damocles may be suspended above him (he, we are informed, has contracted Covid-19), but there are those, in the meantime, willing to defend him with decent conviction against his dispatch to the United States, where he is certain to perish.

From the side of decent conviction and steadfastness came the October 8 protests across a number of cities, attended by thousands. A human chain numbering some 7,000 persons formed around the Houses of Parliament in London demanding the release of the WikiLeaks publisher from Belmarsh Prison.

Then there was the Boadicea-like performance that his wife is becoming famous for. On the ideologically dry-cured medium of Piers Morgans Uncensored Program, a taster of that vengeance US justice is famous for could be gathered from an encounter between Stella, and the trumpeting warmonger and failed Trump advisor, John Bolton.

Bolton, it should be remembered, was the only evidence that president George W Bush, dyslexic and reformed drunk, had a mild sense of humour. Sending that man to the United Nations as US ambassador was the equivalent of appointing a randy, murderous fox to guard unsuspecting chickens. That appointment had it all: resentment, masochism and disgust for that concept known as international law.

There is much to say that former president Donald Trump, for all his insufferable foibles, insoluble perversions and naggingly vicious pettiness, never embarked on the eschatological murderous destiny that Bolton believes the US is destined for. The messianic types always find some higher meaning for death and sacrifice, as long they are not the ones doing it. The difference between the suicide bomber and the deskbound scribbler keen on killing is one of practice, not conviction. Both believe that there is a higher meaning written in blood, inscribed in the babble of post-life relevance and invisible virtue. For us humble folk, life is good enough, and should be preserved.

According to Bolton, the 175 years Assange might receive for exposing the abundant dirty laundry known as US foreign policy and imperial violence was hardly sufficient. He would, naturally, get a fair trial in the United States (never explain the ideologically self-evident), though absolute fairness was dependent on him receiving 176 years. Well, I think thats a small amount of the sentence he deserves. With such a fabulous nose for justice, Bolton shares common ground with the commissars and gauleiters.

Unsurprisingly, Stella Assange had a view markedly at odds with such an assessment. Her husband was being pursued, For receiving information from a source and publishing it, and it was in the public interest. It was US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he revealed tens of thousands of civilian deaths that had not been acknowledged before.

Morgan, an incarnation of that guttersnipe, sewerage swilling demon virtually unsurpassed in modern British media, tried to sound cerebral and moral at points. Did WikiLeaks redact the material from Chelsea Manning, one of the key sources for the disclosures? Or had WikiLeaks been drunkenly cavalier in exposing all and sundry to the world? Best ignore reading trial transcripts, Piers. Knowledge drawn upon the cobblestones of truth is bound to be rough.

To those familiar with WikiLeaks, its practices and, indeed, the trial at the Old Bailey regarding Assanges extradition, such claims could only be seen as decidedly weak. Stella explained that WikiLeaks did redact all of those documents that Manning gave to WikiLeaks, and in fact it was in cooperation with those newspapers. The trial itself made it clear that the secret spiller, as Assange has often been accused of being, was none other than the Guardian itself, whose journalists had left, with tantalising promise, the decryption key in their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assanges war on secrecy.

Stella, aflame with purpose and aware of her brief, also reminded the audience who she was talking to. Bolton, she shot with acid fury, sought to undermine the international legal system, sought to ensure that the US is not under the International Criminal Courts jurisdiction.

Then came the well fashioned grenade, pin removed. And if it was, Mr Bolton might in fact be prosecuted under the ICC [International Criminal Court]. He was one of the chief cheerleaders of the Iraq war, which Julian then exposed through these leaks, so he has a conflict of interest.

There have been other befouling episodes that can only be of concern to Assange and his family. It has now come to light that security officials, in Australias Parliament, were under significant pressure to seize books from the Assange delegation during their August visit to Canberra. A letter to Greens Senator David Shoebridge by the Department of Parliamentary Services explained that it was all linked to a protest.

The nature of the bureaucrats tone is to mock the valuable and diminish the relevant. In the considered view of the secretary of the department of parliamentary services, Rob Stefanic, I appreciate that Assanges family may not have viewed the screening procedure in a positive light, but having reviewed the processes followed by security staff, I am confident they performed their duties with respect and due diligence. Such reasoning would suffice for most police states, where bureaucrats sup at the same table with the security wonks.

The department, it transpired, had tripped up. The claim about the protest was inaccurate, as neither Assanges father, John Shipton, nor his brother, Gabriel, had attended any protests. It is apparent that there are factual inaccuracies in the letter to Senator Shoebridge and the secretary will be writing to correct the record.

The world has turned full circle. Those opening the cabinet of secrets are considered the nasty tittle-tattles, who simply revealed the fact that daddy fiddled and mummy drank. In this world, homicidally excited types like Bolton revel in expressing unsavoury views in the open; those who expose the bankruptcy of such views are to be punished. We await the next grotesquery with resigned disgust.

CounterPunch.org, October 13. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Link:
Facing the warmongers: An Assange update - newagebd.net

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced at 11am local time on Friday in Oslo, Norway.

The Peace Prize is one of six awards established by Swedish chemist (and inventor of dynamite) Alfred Nobel in 1895. The prize is considered the most expansive in its recognition, given that it awards people who have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The other five recognize contributions in literature, physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and economic sciences.

The winner is selected by the five-person Norwegian Nobel Committee, which is appointed by Norways parliament.

According to a Reuters survey, Belarusian opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, British nature broadcaster David Attenborough, the World Health Organization, environmental activist Greta Thunberg, Pope Francis, Tuvalus foreign minister Simon Kofe, and Myanmars National Unity government are among those who have been nominated by Norwegian lawmakers. The lawmakers have a track record of picking the eventual winner.

Below, a list of some of the favorites to win, based on nominations that were made public via Norwegian lawmakers, bookmakers odds, and a personal shortlist by the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was on the 2022 TIME 100 list, is the bookmakers favorite to win the peace prize. After Russian President Vladimir Putins full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Zelensky stood firm in Kyiv. He recorded a simple message, saying: We are here We are in Kyiv. We are protecting Ukraine.

Zelensky has since repeatedly spoken out against Russias actions on the global stage and urged international allies to punish the Kremlin for its aggression. He has had his share of close escapes; as the war first broke out, Russian troops were just minutes from finding him and his family. And more than seven months after the conflict broke outand after Russia annexed parts of UkraineZelensky continues to advocate for the country.

The People of Ukraine and the Kyiv Independent rank high up on the list of bookmakers odds.

Belarusian opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has been living in exile ever since running against Alexander Lukashenko in the countrys 2020 presidential election. Lukashenko claimed victory despite concerns that the election was unfair and a widespread belief that the results put Tsikhanouskaya ahead of him.

Tsikhanouskaya didnt always intend to enter politics. She was a full-time mother who had been considering restarting her career as an English teacher until May 2020 when Belarusian authorities arrested her husbandbringing his campaign to President to an end. Thats when she stepped in. Her candidacy galvanized many Belarusians and women in particular. After Lukashenko claimed victory two years ago, he ordered security forces to crack down violently on protests. Demonstrations against Lukashenkos regime have continued since and Tsikhanouskaya has continued to play a key role in challenging the President and authorities in calls for fair elections and an end to violence.

Tsikhanouskaya was on the 2021 TIME100 Next list, which honors emerging leaders shaping the future, and is a favorite among bookmakers.

Russias jailed opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny has been a key figure in fighting for democratic reform. In 2011, Navalny created the Anti-Corruption Foundation to investigate high ranking Russian officials for corruption. For years, he has worked to hold Putins regimealong with its allied oligarchsaccountable.

Navalnys work has come at a high cost to his personal safety and freedom. He survived an assassination attempt in 2020, when he was poisoned by a nerve agent. Despite the danger to his life, he returned to Russia after living briefly in Germany during his recovery.

Navalny has some critics on the liberal side, too. Amnesty International stripped Navalny of his prisoner of conscience status after receiving many complaints about xenophobic comments he made that appeared to compare immigrants to cockroaches.

Navalny was recognized on the 2021 TIME100 list.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been at the forefront of responding to crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan, providing cash assistance and relief items to those in need.

The war in Ukraine has led to more than 7.2 million refugees from Ukraine across Europe since Feb. 24 and more than 6.9 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced, according to the U.N. It amounts to Europes largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. In recent years, UNHCR has also led humanitarian responses to the Syrian war and the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. The agency previously received the peace prize in 1954 and 1981.

For almost three years, the World Health Organization has been at the forefront of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In that time, it has garnered praise for providing money, vaccines, and equipment to help contain the disease around the world. The WHO-backed COVAX program, which focuses on poorer countries, has so far delivered more than 1.7 billion vaccines to 146 countries.

But the United Nations agency has also been criticized for a series of missteps. Among them: a weeks delay in declaring the outbreak in China an international emergency, contradictory statements about asymptomatic spread, and a lack of urgency in advising people to wear masks to reduce transmission in the early phases of the outbreak.

The WHO was also considered a frontrunner to win the peace prize in both 2020 and 2021.

Tuvalus foreign minister Simon Kofe has made it a key part of his mission to address the climate crisis. Rising seas are a significant threat for sinking Pacific islands like Tuvalu, which is the fourth smallest country in the world and made up of nine small islands.

Kofe delivered his COP26 speech while knee-deep in the ocean to show just how much global warming and the sea level rise was impacting the island nation. Kofe pulled out of this years U.N. Ocean Conference to protest Chinas decision to block Taiwanese delegates.

David Attenborough, 95, is most beloved for his iconic voice and award-winning nature series, including Life on Earth and The Blue Planet. His works have intimately showcased wildlife and nature for many decades. More recently, Attenborough has spoken before the U.N. and World Economic Forum to advocate for addressing the climate crisis.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunburg, TIMEs 2019 Person of the Year, has kept the pressure on global powers to do more to combat the climate crisis. Thunberg has long been vocal about a lack of action on climate change.

In 2021, she dismissed the COP26 climate summit as a failuresaying that it did not do enough to drastically cut CO2 emissions. More recently, she took aim at Swedish politicianssaying that they ignored the climate crisis ahead of Septembers national elections.

Thunberg first rose to fame in 2018 after starting a movement for students across the world to protest in favor of actions to combat the climate crisis. The 19-year-old has been considered a favorite to win the Peace Prize every year since 2019.

Indian activist Harsh Mander has long been vocal about the countrys crackdown on religious minoritieswhat he has described as a move away from its secular constitution. The Indian government charged Mander with inciting violence after he gave a speech at a peaceful anti-government protest in 2019. Today, when the Muslims of this country are being asked to prove their love and loyalty for this country, its important to note that this question is being asked by those who never participated in Indias freedom struggle and made no sacrifices, Mander had said.

Officials raided Manders home in 2021 after he went to Germany for a six-month fellowship programprompting backlash from hundreds of activists and academics.

Mander created the national initiative Karwan e Mohabbat (Caravan of Love) in 2017a collaborative movement that supports families who lost loved ones to hate violence and lynching.

Journalists Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair, co-founders of Indian fact checking website AltNews, have relentlessly been battling misinformation in India, where the Hindu nationalist BJP party has been accused of frequently stoking discrimination against Muslims. Sinha and Zubair have methodologically debunked rumors and fake news circulating on social media and called out hate speech.

Indian authorities arrested Zubair in June for a meme he tweeted four years ago. Journalists around the world condemned the arrest and argued it was retribution for his fact-checking work. It is apparent that AltNews alert vigilance was resented by those who use disinformation as a tool to polarize the society and rake nationalist sentiments, said a June 28 statement from the Editors Guild of India. The Committee to Protect Journalists also called for Zubairs releasepointing to his arrest as another low for press freedom in India, where the government has created a hostile and unsafe environment for members of the press reporting on sectarian issues.

Uyghur activist Ilham Tohti was an economist and academic at Minzu University of Chinain Beijing before China charged Tohti with promoting separatism in 2014 and sentenced him to life in prison. He frequently used his position to shed light on the Chinese governments oppresion of the Muslim Uyghur community. Human rights groups have reported that Tohti has faced torture, including the denial of food and having his feet shackled, during his imprisonment. Tohtis daughter has repeatedly expressed concern for his lifesaying she doesnt know whether he is still alive.

Earlier this year, a set of essays and articles written by Tohti before his imprisonmentWe Uyghurs Have No Saywas released. The writings expand on his work unpacking Chinas treatment of Uyghurs and how the consequences of the countrys promotion of Han ethno-nationalism.

The Myanmar National Unity Government emerged as a shadow government after the countrys military detained Aung San Suu Kyi in a coup last February. The military charged her with violating COVID-19 rules and corruption. More than 1,000 people have been killed since her arrest. Thousands more have been arrested for protesting military rule.

The Myanmar National Unity Government is made up of elected officials who oppose military rule; many remain in exile. Myanmars military has ruled with a heavy handperpetuating a genocide against Rohingya Muslims and cracking down on nationwide protests calling for democratic reform.

The director of the Peace Research Institute Oslos personal shortlist includes Tsikhanouskaya and Navalny, Mander, and Tohti but also features: the International Court of Justice; Hong Kong activists Agnes Chow and Nathan Law; and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group Center (HRDAG) and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS).

Bookmakers also list the Committee to Protect Journalists.

According to the Reuters survey, the Arctic Council, aid group CARE, Chelsea Manning, Iranian human rights activist Masih Alinejad, the International Criminal Court, NATO, and WikiLeaks are also nominees that have been revealed by Norwegian lawmakers.

This is a developing story and has been updated on Oct. 5 and Oct. 6 to include additional names.

More Must-Read Stories From TIME

Write to Sanya Mansoor at sanya.mansoor@time.com.

See original here:
Here Are the Favorites To Win the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize - TIME

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made headlines last week after agency director William J. Burns cut the ribbon on a new statue of Harriet Tubman outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The statue of Tubman (c. 1822-1913), the great abolitionist and political activist of the American Civil War, now stands next to two others: Nathan Hale, an American spy executed by the British during the Revolutionary War, and William J. Donovan, considered the founding father of the CIA.

The unveiling of the statue is the focal point of a broader CIA campaign around Tubmans legacy. A special tribute on the CIA website titled, Honoring Harriet Tubman: A Symbol of Freedom and an Intelligence Pioneer, attempts to rebrand Tubman as a 19th century version of a CIA spy. The piece is a carefully written, distorted history of Tubmans life and the historical significance of her work.

The piece couches Tubmans heroic work of rescuing slaves through the Underground Railroad in military garb, describing her as leading clandestine operations to gather vital intelligence as a spy.

A Twitter post by the CIA announcing the piece reads, Harriet Tubman was not only a conductor of the Underground Railroad, but also a spy for the Union.

One struggles to find the words to describe the level of absurdity surrounding the whole campaign. Commentary on the event reads like a skit showcasing the height of delusion and depravity in the ruling class.

It was awesome, CIA Museum Director Robert Byer told the Washington Post after the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Byer went on to explain to NBC News that Tubmans legacy was an example of intelligence work, going behind enemy lines, using safe houses and signals intelligence to get people to freedom.

Tubman operated with ingenuity, stealth, courage and selflessness, Byer said. These are all traits we want our officers to embody.

At first blush, the Washington Post writes, Tubman, a civil rights activist who famously and repeatedly broke the law, might seem an unlikely inspiration for todays foreign intelligence officers. But Byer said there was a lot of overlap between the ethos of the CIA and Tubmans. Who do they think they are fooling?

Tubman was part of a whole generation of anti-slavery opponents such as Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, and Wendell Phillips who represented a profoundly egalitarian and democratic tradition.

When they supported the military struggle of the Union against the Confederacy, as Tubman did, not just in words but in deeds, they were fighting on side of that democratic tradition against the monster of slavocracy. Today, by contrast, the CIA defends countless reactionary, dictatorial regimes around the world, including some, like Saudi Arabia, where slavery is still practiced.

If one were to search for the modern-day equivalent of the oppressors against whom Tubman and her contemporaries fought, the plantation masters and their slave-catchers, those who today shackle, enslave and torture others, one would need look no further than the CIA itself.

The record of CIA torture and crimes against humanity is matched in modern history only by the Nazi Gestapo and the Stalinist GPU/KBD. The agency runs a world-wide network of criminality, deceit, and violence operating through hundreds of black sites in every corner of the globe, used to carry out the interests of American imperialism with the most inhumane and depraved means.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, issued in 2014 as a heavily redacted document, cited the regular use of tactics such as waterboarding, systematic beatings, forced chaining to a wall for up to 17 days, depriving prisoners of sleep for more than a week, threatening prisoners with death, mock burials, and hitherto unknown tortures such as rectal feeding.

One shudders to imagine what would be revealed in the unredacted report.

What are the real character traits of those able to carry out such extreme violence? If one were to ask Majid Khan, Chelsea Manning, or Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri what skills their torturers possessed, what would they say?

When former CIA director Gina Haspel was watching the torture of detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was hooded and naked, at a US black site in Thailand in 2002, was she portraying the same Harriet Tubman-style selflessness that Byer hopes all their officers embody?

Of course, it is hardly necessary to argue that the guiding principles of equality and freedom that were the bedrock of Tubmans life stand as the complete antithesis to the entire basis of the CIA, which has organized the overthrow of democratically elected governments from Indonesia to Iran to Ukraine to Guatemala, Chile, and most of Latin America.

In fact, the real motivation behind the CIA campaign is quite plainly stated by the agency itself.

We need diversity in order to do our mission here, Byer said. If those slaves hadnt trusted Harriet Tubman, they wouldnt have given her information. That is, the co-opting of Harriet Tubman is a part of a broader campaign by the CIA to attract a more diverse workforce to the agency on the basis of identity politics imperialism.

This identity-based campaign initially garnered attention in 2021 with the launching of the Humans of CIA'' series. The campaign amounted to a series of videos highlighting the agencys commitment to racial and gender diversity.

The rebranding of Tubman is part-and-parcel of the same basic campaign. One of the things that this agency has in place is the idea that our workforce cannot work on worldwide missions without looking like the United States, without looking like the world, Janelle Neises, deputy director of the CIAs museum, explained in an interview.

The campaign has caused the usual backlash among the right-wing elements. Mike Pompeo, for example, tweeted in response to the unveiling of the statue, a woke military is a weak military. On the other hand, there has been no public backlash thus far from outlets claiming to be left.

Their silence is a reflection of an extreme nervousness. The seamless marriage of identity politics and US imperialism is a devastating exposure of the reactionary content of politics based on race, gender, and sexuality that almost all the so-called left organizations in the US have so ferociously promoted.

Identity politics and related ideologies such as intersectionality have become a fundamental part of the Democratic Partys efforts to divide workers and enrich a thin layer of the middle class which falsely presents itself as representative of the broad masses.

The fact that these left ideas'' are now proving an essential tool of the bourgeoisie to maintain its class domination over the working class by keeping workers divided along racial and gender lines stands to expose all those identity politicians who have made careers out of denigrating class identity, promoting the Democratic Party, and supporting so-called human rights imperialism.

Moreover, the CIA is carrying out this campaign against the backdrop of open and intense discussion within the ruling class about the possibility of nuclear war. The United States and NATO are in a reckless pursuit of global geopolitical objectives for which they are prepared to sacrifice an untold number of working class lives and livelihoods, regardless of skin color, gender or sexual identity.

However, there is immense opposition to war within the working class and especially among working class youth. The reemergence of a wave of working class struggles throughout the US and around the world is generating a powerful bulwark of working class solidarity against the divisive and toxic politics of identity.

Over the last several months, an explosive opposition of rail workers has developed against the efforts of the unions and the Biden administration to force through a sellout agreement. There are also developing strike movements among health care workers, educators, service workers and other sections of the working class.

It will only be on the basis of a unified struggle by workers in defense of their social and democratic rights that war can be stopped, and all of the institutions of class exploitation dismantled.

Join the Socialist Equality Party!

The Socialist Equality Party is organizing the working class in the fight for socialism: the reorganization of all of economic life to serve social needs, not private profit.

See the article here:
CIA co-opts Harriet Tubman to boost its efforts to recruit spies and assassins - WSWS

The Feminist Know-It-All: You know her. You cant stand her.Good thing shes not here!Instead, this column by gender and womens studies librarian Karla Strand will amplify stories of the creation, access, use and preservation of knowledge by women and girls around the world; share innovative projects and initiatives that focus on information, literacies, libraries and more; and, of course, talk about all of the books.

Each month, I provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.

The aims of these lists are threefold:

Happy autumn (in the Northern hemisphere)!

As I write this, we are observing the autumnal equinox, where the daylight hours exactly equal the nighttime hours. So in the States, we are gearing up for fall, and in the Midwest where I am, we are sucking every last drop of sunlight out of the sky before it grows darker and colder.

I normally love seasonal changes; to me, they always signal renewal and transformation, grateful goodbyes and making way for new ventures. Wherever you are, I am hopeful you have time for reflection, gratitude and planning for whatever the future holds for you.

Just be sure to make some time to read one or two of these 30 new books, or whatever goes well with your pumpkin spice latte or hot apple cider!

By Derecka Purnell (@dereckapurnell). Astra House. 320 pages. Out Oct. 4.

Somehow I missed including this one when the hardcover came out in October of 2021. But heres the paperback, with new material, just when we need it!

Written by Gabriela Ponce and translated by Sarah Booker (@sarahkbooker). Restless Books. 192 pages. Out Oct. 4.

Now available in English, this sharp and singular stream of consciousness story of one womans experiences of divorce, embodiment, love, womanhood, power and freedom. Wicked in all the best ways.

Written by Igiaba Scego (@casamacombo). Translated by John Cullen and Gregory Conti. Other Press. 544 pages. Out Oct. 4.

An ode to Black migrants artistry, ambition and experiences as the other, The Color Line examines the unbreakable bond between two women living over a century apart.

By Emerald Garner with Etan Thomas and Monet Durham. Haymarket Books. 180 pages. Out Oct. 4.

This is the searing memoir of Emerald Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who was brutally murdered by police in 2014.

By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (@leahlashmiwrites). Arsenal Pulp Press. 272 pages. Out Oct. 4.

As only they can, Piepzna-Samarasinha has written a thoughtful volume of songs, letters, messages and stories for and about the life-sustaining work of disabled people during COVID (and always).

Edited by Joe Vallese (@joevallese). The Feminist Press at CUNY. 400 pages. Out Oct. 4.

Your nonfiction Halloween read is this fantastic anthology of writing about horror, all from deliciously queer perspectives. It includes contributions from Carmen Maria Machado, Prince Shakur, Tosha R. Taylor, Sarah Fonseca, and more, writing their takes on your favorite spooky flicks.

Edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly (@blackleftaf) and Jodi Dean (@jodi7768). Verso. 336 pages. Out Oct. 4.

In this groundbreaking collection, Burden-Stelly and Dean have compiled a treasure trove of historical, political and seminal writings about Communism from Black womens perspectives. Includes pieces by Claudia Jones, Charlotta Bass, Alice Childress, Dorothy Burnham and so many more.

By Jennifer Givhan (@GivhanJenn). Blackstone Publishing. 330 pages. Out Oct. 4.

Full of magick and mystery, Givhans latest explores tradition, power, creativity and connection in her signature lush, sensual prose.

By Ann Dvila Cardinal (@anndcardinal). Sourcebooks Landmark. 336 pages. Out Oct. 4.

If its mystical, masterful storytelling you crave this month, youll want to pick up award-winning writer Cardinals latest, which explores themes of loss, blessings, ancestry and mystery.

By Stephen Shames (@stephenshames)and Ericka Huggins. Acc Art Books. 192 pages. Out Oct. 10.

This stunning volume is an ode to the imperative, yet often unappreciated, roles of women of the Black Panther Party. Complementing Ericka Huggins superlative text are candid photos by Stephen Shames, many of which have never been published before.

By Marcie R. Rendon (White Earth Nation) (@MarcieRendon). Soho Crime. 240 pages. Out Oct. 11.

Thank goodness, Cash Blackbear is back! If you like a good mystery, this will be right up your alley.

By Vanessa A. Bee (@Vanessa_ABee). Astra House. 256 pages. Out Oct. 11.

This candid and compelling debut memoir examines identity, migration, status, tradition and family ties in intimate and evocative detail.

Written by Djaili Amadou Amal. Translated by Emma Ramadan (@EmKateRam). HarperVia. 176 pages. Out Oct. 11.

This powerful debut explores what happens when three Cameroonian women dare to challenge tradition, deconstruct taboos and fight for security and freedom.

By Charlayne Hunter-Gault (@charlaynehg). Harper. 368 pages. Out Oct. 11.

Pathblazing journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault has gifted us this collection of some of her most essential pieces, illustrating the beauty, variety and nuance of the Black experience over five decades.

By Tricia Hersey (@TheNapMinistry). Little, Brown Spark. 224 pages. Out Oct. 11.

If you dont follow The Nap Ministry, what are you even doing? Get on that, get the book and then read, nap, rest, relax and repeat. Its for the resistance, after all.

By Ruha Benjamin (@ruha9). Princeton University Press. 392 pages. Out Oct. 11.

Have the last few years been a veritable dumpster fire of crises in health and humanity? Yes! And theres no one better to light the way out and guide us in building a just future than Ruha Benjamin.

By April Ryan (@AprilDRyan). Amistad. 208 pages. Out Oct. 18.

As long-time White House correspondent, April Ryan, reflects on 2020, she reminds us of the Black women who have (always) led the way on paths to justice, well-being and truth.

Written by Kaoru Takamura, translated by Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida. Soho Crime. 600 pages. Out Oct. 18.

Are as excited for Lady Joker 2 as I am? Well, okay, probably not. But if you havent given this brilliantly dark and mysterious crime saga a read yet, theres no time like the present!

Grand Central Publishing. 256 pages. Out Oct. 18.

This groundbreaking volume is the first collection of Afghan womens short fiction. The stories are reflective, surprising and candid, as the authors grapple with gender, tradition, relationships, violence, work and more.

By Luke Dani Blue (@LukeDaniBlue). Amethyst Editions. 256 pages. Out Oct. 18.

In their first collection of stories, Luke Dani Blue explores queerness, identity and meaning-making in new, intense and remarkable ways.

By Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea). Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 272 pages. Out Oct. 18.

Its here! Its here! Those of you who read this column know how long Ive been awaiting Chelsea Mannings memoir. I havent gotten my hands on it yet, but Ive waited this long, so I can wait a little longer

By Chant Reid. Sarabande Books. 96 pages. Out Oct. 18.

Reids incisive debut is not for the faint of heart. Dont let the small size fool you, its full of experimental prose, poetics, photos, thoughts, secrets, depth and breadth. Stick with it and witness the brilliant vulnerability that it gently holds.

By Fatimah Asghar (@asgharthegrouch). One World. 352 pages. Out Oct. 18.

Longlisted for the National Book Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, this debut is not to be missed. Its an achingly lovely story of sisterhood, loss, violence and redemption.

By Nadia Shammas (@nadiashammas) and Marie Enger (@so_engery). Tor Nightfire. 128 pages. Out Oct. 18.

Heres your graphic novel for Halloween! Shammas and Enger have created a singularly compassionate and gorgeous look at mental health, horror and humanity.

By Lizzie Borden (@LizzieBordenLA). Seven Stories Press. 432 pages. Out Oct. 18.

In this candid and kaleidoscopic anthology, filmmaker Lizzie Borden presents a glorious, shocking and illuminating collection of autobiographical stories and interviews by and about strippers.

By Nghi Vo (@nghivowriting). Tordotcom. 112 pages. Out Oct. 25.

Nghi Vos last installment of the Singing Hills series continues the magical, mythical and memorable adventures of Chih, the wandering cleric. If you are late to the series, dont worry, they can be read in any orderand you dont want to miss them!

By Wanda A. Hendricks. University of Illinois Press. 344 pages. Out Oct. 25.

This is the long-overdue biography of Madie Hall Xuma, who took her social justice work in the Jim Crow U.S. South to South Africa during the height of apartheid.

Edited by Shane Burley (@shane_burley1). AK Press. 564 pages. Out Oct. 25.

With contributions by Margaret Killjoy, Mirna Wabi-Sabi, Shane Burley, Emily Gorcenski and many more, this remarkable collection focuses on anti-fascism and the fight against white supremacy and far-right hate.

By Shira Hassan. Haymarket Books. 408 pages. Out Oct. 25.

For decades, Shira Hassan has led the labor for liberatory harm reduction. Now she has compiled this groundbreaking anthology to share stories, successes and lessons.

By Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk). Duke University Press. 224 pages. Out Oct. 31.

In their latest, Sami Schalk explores the histories and essential lessons of Black disabled labor, politics and movements. This is a long-overdue and essential volume.

U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection pointfrom the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms. has been forging feminist journalismreporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all thats at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms. today with a donationany amount that is meaningful to you. For as little as $5 each month, youll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms. Studios events and podcasts. We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity.

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October 2022 Reads for the Rest of Us - Ms. Magazine

Pvt. Chelsea Manning is getting out of prison on Wednesday, and because her court-martial conviction is still under appeal, she'll be staying in the Army for the forseeable future.

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison back in 2013, but an order by former President Obama in January commuted her sentence to seven years from her initial arrest, which adds up to May 17, 2017.

She won't draw a paycheck once she's out, but she will be eligible for some benefits, according to an Army spokesman.

"Pvt. Manning is statutorily entitled to medical care while on excess leave in an active duty status, pending final appellate review," said Dave Foster. "In an active duty status, although in an unpaid status, Manning is eligible for direct care at medical treatment facilities, commissary privileges, Morale Welfare and Recreation privileges, and Exchange privileges."

The former intelligence analyst, who was court-martialed as Pfc. Bradley Manning, was convicted of leaking thousands of documents to Wikileaks in 2010. News of her return to active duty was first reported by USA Today.

Soon after being incarcerated at U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Leavenworth, Kansas, Manning came out as transgender and began taking hormones and living as a woman in prison.

Manning's fragile mental state, including a suicide attempt and subsequent stay in solitary confinement, informed Obama's decision to order her early release. It was a decision that was met with fierce opposition from lawmakers and service members alike.

Shortly after his decision was announced, Obama told reporters he granted clemency to Manning because she had gone to trial, taken responsibility for her crime and received a sentence that was harsher than other leakers have received. He added that he did not grant Manning a pardon, which would have symbolically forgiven her for the crime.

"I feel very comfortable that justice has been served," Obama said at the time.

The Army declined to provide details about where Manning will be stationed, citing privacy and security concerns.

Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.

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Chelsea Manning to return to active duty after prison release - Army Times

Depending on how generous you are with the definition of memoir, this might be Shatners ninth autobiographical outing. At 91, the Star Trek actor is still hungry for more adventures, more outlets to express himselfand more work. (He hosts a History show, recently dropped another spoken-word album, and is writing lyrics for his next.) Shatner delivers on his subtitle, offering musings about nature (and his deep regret at having hunted for sport), the beauty of life, and the erotic energy of toasted rye bread. The man is nothing if not in touch with his emotions. He recalls how last year he rode Jeff Bezos Blue Origin to the edge of space; the sight of the vast, cold expanse filled him with unexpected dread and moved him to tears. Another recollection delivers on the titles unintentional promise of going, boldly: Midway through the premiere of his one-man show in 2012, he shat(nered?) his pants. Quickly announcing a technical difficulty, he ran offstage, changed, then stepped back into the spotlight to finish his show, a testament to his work ethic. Not all the material here is fresh, but much of it is fun.

An aside for fans of celeb memoirs: This month has a pre-holiday bumper crop. Besides Shatner and Wu, there are titles from Jemele Hill, Tom Felton, Ralph Macchio, Geena Davis, Sam Heughan, and Chelsea Manning, as well as posthumous fare from Paul Newman and Alan Rickman.

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10 books you should read in October, including David Bowie's Moonage Daydream and William Shatner's Boldly Go - The A.V. Club

Whatever your feelings about former President Trump, there are reasons to be skeptical when government officials say it was necessary to raid his Florida home to recover classified documents that threatened national security.

Like the former president, I was once accused by the government of mishandling classified information connected to my representation of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. There was nothing in my clients file that posed any danger to national security. My client was an innocent shopkeeper who was sold to the Americans back in 2003 when the U.S. was paying bounties to corrupt Afghan warlords to turn in Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters, and then shipping those men 8,000 miles to our newly built prison camp in Cuba. The government decided to classify every document in the detainee files as secret, not to protect national security, but so it could lie with impunity and tell the American people that the prisoners at Gitmo were the worst of the worst, and terrorists captured on the battlefield.

I never revealed any classified information. I got into trouble after writing an article criticizing the governments practice of classifying certain evidence above the security clearance level of the detainees lawyer, making it impossible to challenge. Following a hearing at the Department of Justice, I was allowed to keep my security clearance long enough to see my client released back to his home and his family after 12 years of unjust imprisonment.

I was never in serious legal jeopardy. But the experience opened my eyes to the ways that our government abuses its power to classify information as secret to protect its own officials from embarrassment or criminal exposure. Since 9/11, the people most aggressively pursued for mishandling classified materials are whistleblowers, not traitors.

Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange revealed official crimes such as the murder of unarmed Iraqi civilians and journalists. Daniel Hale revealed that our drone assassination program regularly slaughters innocent civilians, contrary to public statements about surgical strikes. John Kiriakou revealed inconvenient facts about our torture program. Edward Snowden revealed an illegal mass surveillance program. All these truth-tellers were aggressively pursued under the Espionage Act. Assange may die in prison for telling the truth about the crimes of our leaders.

While Trump may not fit the mold of a selfless whistleblower, there is still cause for concern. First, the official justifications for the raid on Mar-a-Lago are highly suspect. Initially we were told that Trump possessed classified documents relating to nuclear weapons that he might sell to a foreign government like Saudi Arabia. This shocking accusation has been quietly dropped. Now we are told that the government has grave concern that Trump might blow the cover on clandestine human sources described in the mainstream media as the lifeblood of our intelligence community. Disclosure could jeopardize the life of the human source, a former legal adviser to the National Security Council told the New York Times.

This second justificationto protect sourcesis also dubious. The DOJ has been in negotiation with Trumps lawyers since he left the oval office with his boxes of documents. If the government was just concerned about protecting its informants, a deal could have easily been struck wherein government lawyers would go to Mar-a-Lago and redact the lines in the documents that identify informants without the need for a full-blown raid.

The sudden concern in the mainstream media about protecting informants in order to take down Trump is short-sighted. The U.S. has a long and sordid history of using corrupt, lying informants to launch disastrous policies like the Iraq War. In 2002-03, we were told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell that the government had solid intelligence that the Iraqi regime possessed mobile production facilities for biological and chemical weapons. Had ordinary Americans then had access to the intelligence reportsleaked years later, after the disastrous war was in full flightwe would have learned that the solid intelligence about mobile weapons labs came from a single informant named Curveball, who had been described by his handlers as crazy and probably a fabricator and his intelligence as highly suspect. Had some brave patriot leaked these reports in real time, millions more Americans would have taken to the streets in 2002 to stop the planned invasion of Iraq.

The media should be demanding more information from our government, especially about its use of informants, and not more secrecy. It is a basic rule of journalism that governments lie, and they often bribe (and sometimes torture) informants to support those lies.

Many innocent men, including my client, were sent to Guantanamo Bay on the word of informants who were bribed with large cash rewards. If these informants are the lifeblood of our intelligence service, then that service should be defunded.

A more plausible explanation for the Mar-a-Lago raid was provided by two high-level U.S. intelligence officials who told Newsweeks William M. Arkin that the true target of the raid was a personal stash of hidden documents that Justice Department officials feared Donald Trump might weaponize. This stash reportedly included material that Trump thought would exonerate him of any claims of Russian collusion in 2016 or any other election-related charges. Trump was particularly interested in matters related to the Russia hoax and the wrong-doings of the deep state, one former Trump official told Newsweek.

This explanation is corroborated by former senior director for counterterrorism Kash Patel, who prepared a key House report that revealed significant intelligence tradecraft failings in connection with the Intelligence Communitys Assessment on Russian interference. But the CIA has blocked the release of Patels report by classifying it as secret.

Kash Patel, who is a current board member of Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), began his career in government under President Obama as a national security prosecutor and later held several positions in the Trump administration. In April 2017, he was picked to lead a team of investigators for the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Republican Devin Nunes (now CEO of TMTG), and tasked with evaluating the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian interference. Although the media touted the ICA as the consensus view of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, it was in fact a rushed job completed in the final days of the Obama administration by a small group of CIA analysts led by then-CIA Director John Brennan.

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Patels team obtained and reviewed the key documents underlying the ICAs conclusions, and interviewed around 70 witnesses under oath. His demands that intelligence agencies produce relevant documents caused a stir among deep state officials unaccustomed to being called to account for their actions. As the Washington Post reported, Democrats criticized the unusual direct requests to the agencies by Patels team of investigators. Patel, a former public defender, apparently believed that even the intelligence community should be subject to the rule of law.

In March 2018, Patels team produced a report that found serious flaws in the CIAs Russia investigation and called into question the intelligence communitys key claims that Russia ordered a cyber-hacking and interference campaign to help Trump. The CIAs response to Patels report was to classify it as secret and block its release.

During the next three years, Patel and others, including then-President Trump and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, pushed for declassification of Patels report on the ICA. But the heads of the intelligence agencies continued to obstruct, claiming that releasing the report would compromise intelligence sources and methods and cause harm to national security, including specific harm to the military. Trump eventually backed down.

Then in December 2020, according to the Post, Trump tried to fire Gina Haspel as CIA director for resisting efforts by Trump and Patel to declassify Patels report. But once again, Trump backed down and the document still remains under lock and key. Not surprisingly, in its article about Patels battle with the intelligence community, the Washington Post sides with the CIA, describing CIA Director Haspel and her colleagues, who demanded that Patels report criticizing their work be kept secret, as courageous officials who sought to protect the government.

Patel has publicly voiced his frustration with the CIA for blocking release of his report on the ICA. I think there were people within the IC [Intelligence Community], at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesnt look good on the agency itself, Patel said in an interview. Patel also said he has been threatened with criminal prosecution just for talking to the media about his classified report. The power of government officials to say, we have classified your report and if you even talk about it to the media we might put you in jail, is the power of a despot.

In an interview with the Grayzones Aaron Mat, Patel disputed the claim that releasing his report harms national security, noting that his committee released similar reports of its other investigations and we didnt lose a single source, we didnt lose a single relationship, and no one died by the public disclosures we made, because we did it in a systematic and professional fashion.

For example, in January 2018, Patel authored a report that showed serious abuses by the FBI in the Carter Page investigation, which caused a former FBI lawyer to plead guilty to falsifying information that was used to apply for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This report criticizing the FBI was released to the public, suggesting that it is still permissible to criticize the FBI, but not the CIA.

Patels public statements suggest his agreement with Newsweeks report that the true motivation for the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was seizing documents relating to the Russia investigation that Trump took with him when he left the White House. In a recent interview with Real Clear Politics, Patel noted that the same corrupt FBI government gangsters, the same agents that were involved in Russiagate, the same counterintelligence agents that were involved in making the bad false call on Hunter Bidens laptop, are also involved in the raid on President Trumps home, with the intent to make sure the American public never gets the full story on Russiagate.

The saga of the Mar-a-Lago raid sheds some light on the important question of who really controls what we are permitted to see about the inner workings of our own government. While the sitting president may in theory have unilateral authority to declassify and release information to the American people, the deep state bureaucracy still holds the power to obstruct the president. As one former bureaucrat told CNN, the process for declassification must include signoff from the agency that classified the information in the first place in order to protect the intelligence-gathering process, its sources and methods.

Whatever one thinks of Trump, is it really in the public interest to have a deep state controlling what information gets out to the public? In 1953, the CIA directed a military coup that overthrew democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, and in 1973, the CIA helped overthrow democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende. These leaders were targeted not because they were unfriendly to the American people but because they were unfriendly to international oil and copper interests that wanted to exploit those countries resources. And while the people of Iran and Chile knew in real time who was responsible, the American people were kept in the dark for decades until key historical documents were finally declassified.

Many scholars believe the CIA was complicit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Yet 60 years later, thousands of key documents remain redacted or under seal. President Trump came to office promising to release those records, as required by the JFK Records Act. But deep state bureaucrats opposed the release, claiming it would cause potentially irreversible harm to our Nations security. Trump backed down, quite possibly recalling the fate of the last president to go to war with the CIA.

Its not necessary to side with Trump to oppose excessive secrecy. Its our government. We have a right to see whatever secrets Trump had hidden in his basement. And if government bureaucrats are truly concerned that one of their informants might be outed, they can redact those few lines from the reports. But show us the rest.

Independent Media Institute

This article originally appeared on ScheerPost and is distributed in partnership with Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Excessive Secrecy and the Deep State: Is there Cause for Concern? - LA Progressive

The brutal attack on novelist Salman Rushdie at a public lecture in Chautauqua, New York, last month has prompted a flood of revealing responses from liberals in the West. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik decried the enduring terrorist threat to liberal civilization in rhetoric that might well have been issued by the administration of George W. Bush. (Even law enforcement has declined to link the assault to terrorism.) Meanwhile, Graeme Wood, writing in the Atlantic, likens criticism of texts to complicity in assassination, while Bernard-Henri Lvys predictable diatribe against fanaticism calls for a campaign to ensure that Rushdie wins this years Nobel Prize in Literaturea cause New Yorker editor David Remnick has now joined, too. If it shocks us that the novelist was attacked after so long, it should also shock us that this commentary looks much the same as it did when his life was first threatened more than thirty years ago.

The defining feature of liberal exasperation over free speech is a dogmatic repudiation of history.

The defining feature of this genre of liberal exasperation is a dogmatic repudiation of history. In place of careful analysis of particular (and therefore changing) circumstances, it relies on stereotype and anecdote to depict a metaphysical conflict between religious fanaticism and liberal toleranceone that is always and everywhere the same.

The erasure of context is striking. You will search these pieces in vain for any distinction between the original protests following the September 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses and Ayatollah Khomeinis call for Rushdies death months later, in February 1989. The effect is to obscure perhaps the central historical question: how, exactly, the publication of Rushdies novel became a global geopolitical phenomenon that resulted in the threat to his life.

You will also search in vain for even the most basic awareness of Muslim legal history and culture, passing familiarity with which cant help but revise ones understanding of the Rushdie affair. It is no surprise that these commentators persist in using the wrong terminology by calling Khomeinis pronouncement a fatwa; as the Washington Post explained two and a half decades ago, it was in fact a hukm. (A fatwa is issued by a religious authority in response to a hypothetical question and possesses no legal force, while a hukm, or decree by the head of state, represents the intervention of a government.) It was the Western press, not Iran, that insisted on calling the declaration of fatwaa tellingly ignorant but typical conflation of politics and religion (and exactly what liberals accuse Muslim fanatics of doing).

Nor does the liberal conceit of an unchanging battle between fanaticism and tolerance illuminate the specific Muslim arguments against Rushdie, which were more about secular hurt than sin. Rushdies American attacker, born in California and living in New Jersey, undoubtedly believed he was defending Islam, but his motivations share a great deal with his countrys more familiar culture of violence. By all accounts he was fixated by a marginal cause, one that has been of no interest to recent Sunni militancy and is not a live issue in Shia Iran, either. Apart from some official glee in Tehran and some scattered support on social media, the attack was more or less ignored by Muslims globally. In short, Rushdie was correct in thinking there was no longer a systematic threat against him.

Perhaps the most glaring context omitted from these accounts, given their banal propagandizing on behalf of free speech, are the threats to free expression with which this anti-Islamic rhetoric is linkedfrom the radical diminution of the civil liberties of all Americans (to say nothing of the human rights of non-Americans) in the Wests post9/11 security states, carried out in the name of the War on Terror, to the U.S. governments hunting down of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning. These responses to the challenge of global Islam, inaugurated by the Rushdie affair at the end of the Cold War, represent threats to freedom wider and more profound than the easy contrast between fanaticism and tolerance can explain.

The first thing to note about the Rushdie affair is that it had little to do with theology. While Islamic tradition does proscribe abusing sacred figures, its terms and debates have rarely featured in the controversy or since. Occurring initially among Muslims of South Asian descent in Britain, and then moving back to India and Pakistan, the first protests against The Satanic Verses deployed a nineteenth-century colonial vocabulary that had been enshrined in the Indian Penal Code of 1860. Itself a secular document meant to allow the British to govern a religiously diverse society, the code disavowed blasphemy and penalized hurting religious sentiments instead. It was this specifically South Asian terminology about the hurt sentiments of believers in all religions, not the true faith of one, that was globalized in the Rushdie affair.

Muslim protests and violence over insults to Muhammad first emerged in colonial India during the middle of the nineteenth century. They had to do with the creation of a market in publishing through mass circulation by way of the printing press. Rather than any traditional dispute between theologians, in other words, press stories about Muhammad not only lacked theological import but were addressed to an anonymous public. They were justified on the grounds of free speech, itself modeled on free trade in proposing the market as a site at which true value, whether economic or religious, emerged through the impersonal operation of an invisible handthat is, through the marketplace of ideas. Given the unavailability of political freedoms in colonial societies, Muslim protesters took the market as their arena of operations. Accepting its non-religious character, they invoked a protectionist argument, asking for their hurt sentiments to be recognized in the same way as libel and defamation laws did for other kinds of offensive speech under British law.

The first thing to note about the Rushdie affair is that it had little to do with theology.

The only theological category in these debates was the idea of an invisible hand. The title of Rushdies novel refers to a contested incident from the life of Muhammad, when he briefly agreed to compromise with his polytheist rivals by agreeing to accept their goddesses as intercessors with God. Soon, however, he declared the verses recognizing them in the Quran as a satanic interpolation. Whether Satan could interrupt God is a real theological question, and Rushdie made brilliant use of this anecdote to reflect upon the meaning of literary creation and authorship. Tellingly, however, complaints against Rushdie never focused on this theological reference. His Muslim critics were only interested in a dream sequence where the women in a house of prostitution were given the names of the Prophets wives.

Why did theological debate suddenly give way in the nineteenth century to a focus on Muhammad as amenable to insult and offense?

Islams modernization in colonial times meant its rationalization, which involved stripping the Prophet of many superhuman traits to make him a perfect, though fully mortal, figure. Muhammad came to be seen as a model father, husband, and statesman, allowing his followers to identify with him. While God, who retained his transcendence, could neither be identified with nor insulted, the all-too human prophet had become vulnerable to any perceived abuse. Correspondingly, Muslims could take offense. This was an issue in which theology could only play an indirect role, chiefly by way of Christianity in using the term blasphemy. We should recall that one of the demands of British Muslim protesters in 1988 was that their sanctities be included in the UKs since rescinded blasphemy laws that had hitherto protected only the Church of England.

The Muslim protesters, then and now, offer no alternatives to liberalism but ask only for what they see as inclusion into it. Such demands take the form of protectionist measures in the marketplace of ideas modeled on libel and defamation law or invoking Christian notions of blasphemy. It is liberalisms hypocrisy and betrayal at failing to accommodate them, not liberalism as such, that fuels their rage which in addition is meant to exemplify the violent consequences of an unregulated market. The loss of self-control that that is said to define Muslim rage, in other words, mirrors the lack of control in the marketplace of ideas. This is hardly the great metaphysical battle between fanaticism and tolerance that commentators have conjured since 1989, and it must be understood as a conflict within liberalism itself. In the absence of a theological register, the violence of Muhammads defenders might even be described as a failure of language itself. Only very recently in Pakistan has this liberal vocabulary been supplemented by Islamic theological categories like apostasy and martyrdom to justify violence against those allegedly insulting Muhammada result of competition between rival Muslim groups to take control of the market in which the Prophet has become a commodity.

Rushdie and his novel became incidental to Muslim debate after Khomeini stepped into the controversy and made it a geopolitical issue in February 1989. The year is significant. The Rushdie affair emerged at the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the grand narrative of bipolar conflict. Issues of culture and identity came to the fore in new forms of nationalism and religion and in renewed political and cultural contests around race, gender, and sexuality. The globalization of protests about Muhammad, in other words, unfolded against the backdrop of Americas emerging culture wars in the late 1980s as well as the return of the antagonisms so clearly articulated in Samuel Huntingtons influential 1993 essay, The Clash of Civilizations, which later became a best-selling book.

Leaving behind the state-centered parties and ideologies of the Cold War for a politics in and of the social, the culture wars became premised upon the neoliberal erasure of any distinction between state and society. Submitting both domains to the logic of the market had the effect of dispersing conflict among individuals and groups. In one case, an impossible theology gave rise to violence, and in another an impossible politics produced new forms of social discipline outside the state. The cult of offense that writers like Wood rail against is not a symptom of any particular political orientation, left or right. It is the product of neoliberalism.

The Rushdie affair thus signaled the coming together of a post-colonial narrative with a neoliberal one, both dominated by the focus on marketized social relations and hurt sentiments. In a bitter irony, Rushdies attempt to give voice to immigrant lives and experience in The Satanic Verses was fulfilled by protests against it in Britain that for the first time gave Muslims a public platform. It marked a shift from race and nationality to religion as defining immigrant identity.

Khomeini dispensed with these culture wars and made the Rushdie affair into a political issue for the first time. He seems to have been aiming to consolidate his authority among Sunni Muslims in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war by defending the Prophet, who for the Shia plays the secondary role of announcing the Imam Ali. The Ayatollah had earlier dismissed Muslim complaints against Rushdie as a distraction, only to change his mind once a number of those protesting the novel were killed by police firing in Pakistan. Far more numerous than the unfortunate translators and publishers of The Satanic Verses killed or attacked by Rushdies enemies, these men are rarely mentioned and never mourned in Western commentary. Presumed to be fanatics, their deaths, for which nobody is held culpable, are collateral damage in the fight for free expression. In issuing his sentence against Rushdie, Khomeini not only took these deaths seriously but threatened for the first time to reciprocate the impunity of Western countries in killing or tolerating the deaths of civilians elsewhere.

The cult of offense is not a symptom of any particular political orientation, left or right. It is the product of neoliberalism.

Rushdie himself seemed to have changed places with his own characters. Like the figures in his novel who are changed into animals as a result of racist perceptions, he became a demon in the eyes of many Muslims. Conversely, Rushdie was made into an example of tolerance and even Western civilization by his liberal defendersa symbolic role in a metaphysical battle that has likely endangered him further. Like Mahound in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie also sought a compromise with his enemies by briefly recanting his book and claiming to have become a good Muslim. As with the novels prophet, this has not shaken the faith of his admirers. In such ways Rushdie has been forced to live the life of a figure he is accused of insulting.

Condemned either as liberal prophet or religious demon, Rushdie has become a larger-than-life figure known more for his ordeal than for his literary career. His ordeal has also pushed Rushdie to adopt some unfortunate views, including supporting the disastrous War on Terror. But then, like Muhammad, Rushdie is only human.

He has since returned to an earlier version of himself and speaks out against the persecution of minorities, including the Muslims of his native India who had been the first to ban his book. This generosity of spirit can only be admired, and we must hope Rushdie makes a quick recoverynot least so that he continues to stand as a global representative for the freedom of conscience and expression. Making him the victim of a metaphysical battle between tolerance and fanaticism can only inhibit his work on this front, however, because it entails a false reading both of the Rushdie affair as well as the modern history of threats to speech which need to be thought about more expansively and in connected ways.

In the end, there are really two debates here: one about geopolitics and the behavior of liberal states, and one about social identity and the fight for cultural respect. We would do well to resist the neoliberal pressure to conflate them, as Khomeini did in his own way. While both seem intractable, each is arguably capable of resolution if dealt with separately. The political debate should be engaged not by invocations of Western values and civilization, which have long been seen as hypocritical in the world beyond, but through tough diplomacy about the real issues involved. Such engagement requires careful attention to the circumstances of history, rather than their ideological erasure. As for the social debate about offenses against religious, racial, sexual, and other identities, we must reject the neoliberal cultural warsin which Islam is the chief among several offended as well as offending groupsfor a vision of the social that rises above the marketized competition of hurt sentiments.

As we know all too well from contemporary America, social relations in the liberal West need to be rebuilt. But doing so requires understanding the controversies that derange them in more complex terms than those supplied by the banal and historically inaccurate opposition between fanaticism and tolerance.

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Salman Rushdie and the Neoliberal Culture Wars - Boston Review

As a card-carrying WLW member and pop culture fanatic, I loveeee to keep up with the messy love drama within our community. It's a great reminder that, straight, queer, or anything in-between, we all have to go through the ups and downs with this wild phenomenon call "love." So, in honor of absolute love of this topic, let's take a look at the queer couples we still get to stan and those we lost along the way: 1. Still together: Kal Penn and his fianc, Josh. 2. Broken up: Grimes and Chelsea Manning. 3. Still together: Cynthia Nixon and Christine Marinoni. 4. Broken up: Braunwyn Windham-Burke and Victoria Brito. 5. Still together: Andrew Rannells and Tuc Watkins. 6. Broken up: Josh Flagg and Bobby Boyd. 7. Still together: Madison Bailey and Mariah Linney. 8. Broken up: Tommy Dorfman and Peter Zurkuhlen. 9. Still together: Samira Wiley and Lauren Morelli. 10. Broken up: Elliot Page and Emma Portner. 11. Still together: Alexandra Hedison and Jodie Foster. 12. Broken up: Luke Evans and Rafael Olarra. 13. Still together: Noah Galvin and Ben Platt. 14. Broken up: Brad Walsh and Christian Siriano. 15. Still together: Alex and Wanda Sykes. 16. Broken up: Sara Gilbert and Linda Perry. 17. Still together: Beanie Feldstein and Bonnie Chance Roberts. 18. Broken up: Lena Waithe and Alana Mayo. 19. Still together: Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Justin Mikita. 20. Broken up: Troye Sivan and Jacob Bixenman. 21. Still together: Robin Roberts and Amber Laign. 22. Broken up: Taryn Manning and Anne Cline. 23. Still together: Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor. 24. Broken up: JoJo Siwa and Kylie Prew. 25. And finally, still together: Kristen Stewart and Dylan Meyer. BuzzFeed Daily

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Come With Me As We Reflect On The Queer Celebrity Couples Who Are Still In Love And Ones Who Called It Quits - BuzzFeed

People in this country desperately need to flip the script on faux-patriotic militarism, ratcheted up all the more following the horrible 9/11 crimes committed 21 years ago. We must promote peace and diplomacy while protecting truth-tellers like Julian Assange, deemed as enemies by the U.S. empire and its war profiteers if we wish for democracy, and perhaps, humanity itself, to survive.

The U.S. was understandably traumatized in the September 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The contemptible crimes gave us a brief glimpse and opportunity to empathize with the suffering experienced by millions victimized by wars elsewhere.

The administration proceeded to provide yet more mega-reasons for anger abroad. The U.S. launched horrific wars of choice upon Afghanistan and Iraq, killing or injuring perhaps a million people, with millions more made refugees due to ensuing regional instability and the expansion of terrorist groups, which continues to this day.

Officials, including current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, seem to be banking on the public already forgetting about those recent U.S. interventions. In trying to justify why taxpayers would be providing yet another $2 billion more in military aid to Ukraine, Austin said of his meeting with other Western allies, Were here because we refuse to live in a world where big powers trample borders by force. Unless apparently, that power happens to be the United States.

Our group condemns, without qualification, Russias invasion of Ukraine. The same with all U.S. interventions and those by other nations. We must cease the waging of all war, the killing of people from any country. Russian soldiers, most of them conscripted, are as much a part of our human family, as are all Ukrainians or Iraqis.

Congress has already approved more than $53 billion in aid to Ukraine since Russias Feb. 24 invasion, reports Chris Hedges. Pitifully, there were no Democrats in Congress, and just a few Libertarian-leaning Republicans, who voted against the $40 billion plus on authorization in May.

The U.S. spends more on our military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

War-waging seems to be the go-to foreign policy action for our nation. Consider this: the U.S. has about 750 military bases in at least 80 countries, according to the Quincy Institute. Thats three times the number of overseas bases held by all other militaries combined, the Institute states.

U.S. military bases outnumber, nearly by threefold, our nations embassies, consulates and missions worldwide, which are theoretically at least, sites for diplomacy and respectful international relations. Its perhaps not surprising that U.K. and U.S. governments played decisive roles in torpedoing Ukrainian and Russian peace talks, brokered by Turkey a few weeks after the invasion, according to an article last week in the Scheerpost.

Austin and other U.S. officials have refrained in the past few months from speaking about peace negotiations and instead advocated for supporting the Ukrainian war as a means to weaken Russia. While no justification, there are reasons why Russia invaded, including the expansion of NATO possibly extending to Ukraine, as award-winning British journalist John Pilger noted in a recent talk.

The war against Russia, with the U.S. continuing to amp up military support, is creating a dangerous potential confrontation between the two nations possessing 95% of worlds nuclear weapons.

For democracy to survive, we must have accurate information, especially about war, which can be embarrassing to the government. Russia, the U.S. and other nations strive to keep such matters secret. Thats why WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, currently being held in Great Britain, is facing up to 175 years in prison.

Perhaps the best known of WikiLeaks public releases, provided by Chelsea Manning, then an army soldier, was the Collateral Murder video, documenting the U.S. killing of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. To learn more, including details on how to contact the White House, the Justice Department and/or your congresspeople urging the U.S. government to drop charges and end efforts to extradite, please check out https://assangedefense.org/.

Please advocate for peace. All are also welcome to attend a candlelight vigil of remembrance for peace at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 11 in Peace Park on the north side of the MU campus.

Jeff Stack is coordinator of the Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation and can be reached at 573-449-4585.

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21 years after 9/11 attacks, it's time to 'flip the script' on militarism in America - Columbia Missourian