Category: Stanley Cohen

Ethnic Cleansing Begins At Home

Nazi ethnic cleansing began with a single unknown undesirable, but within a decade the 1 became the 6,000,000. To observe that number from the perspective of coincidence, it’s the number of Palestinians alive today: each a refugee still. There is no statute of limitation for war crimes. Just ask someone on the receiving end of genocide.

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Have I mentioned that the Palestinians are from Palestine? Roots matter to olive trees and to Palestinians. Water, hummus, olives. An incomparable Mediterranean coastline. Countless cities and villages cleansed of long-established inhabitants.

Viva Palestina!

The time for Israel to stop Palestinian home demolition and pacification was 68 years ago; both demolitions and executions are crimes against humanity, against an indigenous people living under occupation today or as refugees in planet-wide diaspora.

Daily life for the indigenous Semitic people of this land: constant torment by mostly non-Semitic settlers indigenous to Europe. IDF and IOF combatants may commit any crime of their choosing, without fear of consequence or inconvenience. Any day, every day, all day. Which Semites are not included in a blanket inditement: Antisemitism! Antisemitism!

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A strange celebration of Sparta and ungodly decadence: a failed experiment, a way of life that requires several billion dollar annual infusions from the United States and the Marshall Islands.

A land-based aircraft carrier with a hundred nuclear weapons, a laboratory for testing weapon systems and conducting security experiments. Well chosen people? Well…

From the layout of the house housing a 12-year-old rock-throwing terrorist. IDF soldiers show up at 2:00 A.M. No proverbial knock on the door, just break it down and rattle the sleeping. Rattle and curse the ugliest phrases a fighting man can muster. And, so a final enough solution: indefinite incarceration for the kid, a house removed by a wrecking ball or dozer, a homeless family. But it doesn’t matter: they are annoying Arabs. Ptui.

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Some sources for guidance in non-violent resistance. Think Warsaw Ghetto.

Jews Against Genocide

Jews for Justice for Palestine

Jewish Voice for Peace

Thanks for reading.

Taking BDS Viral: Stanley Cohen OpEd

Just when will an article on Palestinian human rights ever go viral? My hope is NOW.

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It is not cheap to make all the news that’s fetid to print. You have to make it palatable while erroneous. American media giants are like Wonder Bread, not remotely wonderful but they knead a profit. What else matters?

A few days ago an Op-Ed written by Stanley Cohen popped up on Al Jazeera.

Here is my reaction:

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Stanley Cohen is major league.  Whenever perplexed on the state of the State of Palestine and the refugees living there, listen to someone who has been well informed for something like a half-century.

During that time he has not wavered from representing real Palestinians. Universal human rights belong to all 7 billion individuals on this battered orb. Pleas are not just for the chosen.

Expedience is not the name of the game today, it’s a character flaw that Mr. Cohen doesn’t have, and he is not about to change. Stanley is not a political animal, and that doesn’t play well among multicrats gazing at the weather vane and thinking about trial balloons.

As hard as they have tried the powers that be have never been able to pin a single charge on Mr. Cohen, it’s not the wonders of teflon at play. Actually just simple human integrity at work: rare mettle.

The injustice system of Prison America sent him to Canaan Prison for eleven months in 2015 while they looked for some evidence they could find or that they could convincingly plant. They have never found any, but that’s the genius of the Patriot Act. Make the prison industrial complex the heartbeat of America.

Through 2015 Caged but Undaunted kept his voice alive.  A tip of the hat to Marion Heads., another Mensch out there lighting candles for every fellow traveller suffering under the drang of fascism.

It’s expedient to imprison without cause. Today it’s Orwellian patriotism, though I don’t like calling it Orwellian. The word itself peals like something out of the NewSpeak Dictionary. George Orwell saw it coming point blank.

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Source

Previous stuff on Stanley Cohen that you won’t read this on NYT or NPR. Unfortunately they follow the expedient.

#UpTheRebels

Editor note: I am humbled by my readers. That’s as it should be. However, I published my last article before it could be properly edited and several of you read the more hapless early version, and so I Speak Arabic Openly and Joyfully.

Reporting from the land of the fête and the home of the Atlanta Braves. BDS USA BDS USA!

Thanks for reading. Opposing viewpoints welcome.

Incarceration Industries and US

Prisons, Portfolios and Humans as Resources

Prisons are like factory farms: in an American mindset they are just there. Small town employment opportunities depend on their existence, it’s what holds many small communities together: the jail, the slaughterhouse, the slightly trained health services workers, the armed-services recruitment center.

The occasional cow (one of a billion) breaks out and wanders onto the local highway. It makes the local news, the cow gets its fifteen minutes and an unlikely pardon. Prisoners are like cows, a link in the foodchain.

Let’s get in contact with a money manager and ask about prospects for spare dollars. Begin with questions:

How can I get in one of the fastest growing sectors of the American economy? Do I have to sell my soul to make the biggest bucks? Should my portfolio include prisons? Are there any risks to me personally? What are the long term prospects? Could growth slow down?

But not everyone is butt-ignorant. There are people who speak honestly of “business ethics” as two words that should go together well. They deserve your ear.

Read what Berna writes.

from Berna’s Vibe: THREE STRIKES LAW

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From Leo Tolstoy: I sit on a man’s back. Yes, we’re still riding that guy with every assurance that “getting with the program” is a good idea and  in full keeping with the best system ever created by man or beast.

Taking a look now at our record since bellying up against the Soviet republics and their union. Who is number one? Who is standing atop a heap of bison skulls?

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PrisonPolicy.org has well presented, well researched information.

Around 1963 I sat in the doctor’s office waiting room. I picked up Esquire and read an aritcle by Gore Vidal on the consequences of stringent controls on certain prescription drugs. He warned of its potential societal harm. It was an introduction to critical thinking.

Welcome to Jail, Inc. from The Guardian

Unless our course is changed, the prison-industrial-complex conjoined with its mighty twin the military-industrial is the future of America. Conceived and directed by our jailer mentality.

Repeat these three words three times: We’re Number 1

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Repeat these three letters three times: USA

Post late-stage capitalism has its growth industries. Last month gentle souls seeking gain gathered in Texas.

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American Jail dot Org has a bright red banner stating “I need to be a part of this.” Dystopias need allegiances, selling out is an American tradition and the fourth of July is just behind the corner.

The human body consumes its own molecules when it starves. Its decline is marked by accelerating and seemingly sudden changes (like hitting the pavement after jumping off the top floor), such as viewing the explicable in the rear-view.

We’re not in Kansas anymore, nor is Kansas. Noth the Kansas I knew in 1970 at Kansas State.

Let’s take a drive through Syria from the perspective of the journalist behind the wheel: Mad Max Redux in progress.

Reality shows morph into reality, and back again. The morphed becomes a morpher.

Is anyone watching this? Stanley Cohen is one of the one in a million. He was quite literally in Canaan (a prison complex in northeast PA). It isn’t the Promised Land. Your best source for accurate detailed information about Mr. Cohen is Caged but Undaunted. Soon to leave New York for the Middle East.

Bertolt Brecht posed a question for the audience in Der gute Mensch von Sezuan. (The Good Person of Szechwan) The question his play seeks to answer:

Is it possible to simultaneously exist in this world, yet remain a good person?

The jury is out, perhaps for the count.

Kalief Browder Learned How to Commit Suicide on Rikers

Jennifer Gonnerman is the journalist I credit with introducing me to a young man trapped as thoroughly as the protagonist Kafka introduced in his uncompleted novel Der Prozess (The Trial), a recognition of injustices that compel gentle souls to scream at the every day horror of the everyday.

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One year ago billziegler1947 became a vehicle for transporting readers via metaphor: the ancient and modern Greek for “transport.”

The transport stops here, I turn the wheel over to Ms. Gonnerman:

Before Browder ever attempted to take his own life, he saw another inmate in the jail try to end his.

Source: Kalief Browder Learned How to Commit Suicide on Rikers – The New Yorker

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African Voices: a Tribute to Kalief Browder by Jennifer Gonnerman

excerpt from her New Yorker article published at 10:45 this morning.

On June 6, 2015, Kalief Browder took his own life at his home, in the Bronx. He was twenty-two years old. He had been released from Rikers Island two years earlier, ending an ordeal that had begun on a spring night in 2010, when he had been arrested for robbery, at sixteen. He spent the next three years in jail trying to prove his innocence, and, for about two of those years, he was held in solitary confinement, where he attempted suicide several times. The charges against him were eventually dropped. I met him after his release and wrote a story about him in the fall of 2014.

Please remember Mr. Browder each Memorial Day, acknowledging the fallen and the falling: the failure of a society.

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African Voices: a Tribute to Kalief Browder by Jennifer Gonnerman

Thanks for reading.