Black Agenda Radio – 7.04.16

This is Black Agenda Radio, the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. Your hosts are Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey, here they are with a weekly hour of African American political thought and action.

– In two three weeks, Philadelphia will host the Democratic National Convention and thousands of protesters who would like to shut the whole thing down. We spoke with Erica Mimes, of the Philly Coalition for REAL Justice, part of the People of Color DNC Resistance Against Police Terrorism and State Repression. They’ve teamed up with “Shut Down DNC” for a march at the height of the convention, on Tuesday, July 26th. But Philadelphia officials have not yet granted them a parade permit. Mimes doesn’t expect fairness of the city.

– MONEY makes the world of the Democrats and the Republicans go round, according to Dr. Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, at Boston. Dr. Ferguson is author of the book, “The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money Driven Politics.” He says says this election season has been quite unusual, on both sides of the two-party system. Bernie Sanders mounted a challenge to the Democratic establishment with mostly small campaign contributions, and Donald Trump used his personal fortune to raise issues that Republicans hardly ever talk about. Does that mean Donald Trump marches to a different drummer?

– Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, is among the speakers who will address a mass meeting on “The Politics of Incarceration in Palestine and the United States,” on July 15th, at the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Educational Center, in New York City. Nyle Forte, a young minister and Phad candidate from Newark, New Jersey, is also a speaker, along with others who recently traveled to Palestine. We asked Nyle Forte what Israeli treatment of Palestinians has to do with mass Black incarceration in the United States.

– On the 4th of July in the year 1852, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.” We spoke with Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist, and asked her if Frederick Douglass’s assessment sounds familiar, in the present day.

– Holidays like the 4th of July don’t mean much to the 2.2 million people locked up in this country’s prisons. Political prison Yan Lahman has for months been denied direct communication with the outside world. His commentary, for Prison Radio, is titled “Prisoners’ Voices Blocked and Censorship of U.S. Prisons.” It’s read by Lynn Stewar, the people’s lawyer who has also been a political prisoner, herself.

How Zionism Corrupts Judaism By Daniel C. Maguire

Like the Palestinian people, Judaism is also suffering from siege and occupation. Zionism, a Nineteenth Century hallucinatory piece of fictive theology and a vicious ideology, has gotten a demonic grip on much of modern Jewish consciousness and has taken possession of U.S. policies in the Middle East. Zionism is not Judaism; Judaism is 3,000 years old. Zionism is a heretical …

The Western Left and Its Sterile ‘Field of Ideas’ by RAMZY BAROUD

Over the year, I realized that the term ‘left’ is not exclusive to a political ideology, but a mode of thinking championed mostly by self-tailored ‘leftist’ western intellectuals. I grew to dislike it with intensity. But that has not always been the case. My father was a communist, or so he called himself. He read the translated work of great …

Global Research News Hour – Palestine Solidarity: Freedom Flotilla III and Empowering Gaza with Solar Power – 06.22.15

As Freedom Flotilla III is departing from an undisclosed location in the Mediterranean Sea to Gaza, this week’s Global Research News Hour focuses on activists abroad coming to the assistance of that region’s destitute population.

We’ll speak to Richard Day, a Queen’s University Professor and colleague of one of the Freedom Flotilla participants about the parallels between the plight of Palestinians in Israeli occupied territories and the plight of Indigenous peoples in Colonized Canada. We’ll hear a pre-recorded commentary from Professor Lovelace. We’ll hear from activist and Canadian Boat to Gaza Steering Committee member David Heap about the Flotilla itself, and we’ll hear from Dr. Benjamin Thomson, a physician who has worked in Gaza and is behind an exciting initiative to power Gaza hospitals with Solar panels.

Ben Gurion’s 1948 Letter: The Ethnic Cleansing Policy and Palestinians “Right of Return” By Jonathan Cook

Over many decades, Israel’s self-serving deceptions about the Nakba in 1948 have been exposed for the lies Palestinians already knew them to be. It was long accepted in the west that, as Israel claimed, Palestinians left their homes because they had been ordered to do so by neighbouring Arab leaders. The lie usefully distracted diplomats and scholars from the much more pertinent question of why Israel had refused to allow 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return to …

The “Zionisation of America” – Anthony Bellchambers

A total of $56.73 million has been paid over the last three decades, to ensure that the U.S. Congress is populated only by those who accept the agenda of the American Zionist Council. This, according to the official record, was the amount paid by the American Zionist Council from 1978-2014 to ensure the selection of its approved congressional candidates in …

Israel’s “Every Day Terrorism”, Crimes against Palestinian Children. For Hamza: Arms Sanctions Against Israel

This is for the child that is searching for an answer, I wish I could take your tears and replace them with laughter, Long live Palestine, Long live Gaza! Lowkey Meet little Hamza Mus’ab Almadani of Khan Younis, Gaza. Look carefully, look tenderly, don’t turn away. Please don’t turn away as all the nations of the world have, for decades, …

The Arab intellectual is resting, not dead

Whenever a new poem by Mahmoud Darwish was published in al-Quds newspaper, I rushed over to Abu Aymen’s newsstand that was located in the refugee camp’s main square. It was a crowded and dusty place where grimy taxis waited for passengers, surrounded by fish and vegetable venders. Darwish’s poetry was too cryptic for us teenagers at a refugee camp in Gaza …