This morning I watched two documentaries about the sixties that were structured around the reminiscences of senior citizens (like me) who were radicals back then. One titled “Here Come the Videofreex” opens today at the IFC Center in NY and tells the story of the pioneering efforts of a video-making collective of the same name to record some of the most important events and personalities of the period using the Sony CV-2400 Porta Pak, the first hand-held camcorder to hit the market. The other is a Youtube video titled “Activist State” that allows veterans of the San Francisco State student strike of 1968 to reflect on the struggle and its lingering impact on student activism. It was made by Jonathan Craig, who during his junior year of college in 2008-2009 developed and produced it on behalf of the broadcast department at San Francisco State University.
Sometimes when I am watching films such as these, I have to step back and consider how far we have travelled chronologically. With the Videofreex collective getting started in 1968, the same year as the SF student strike, you are talking about a nearly half-century in the past. It would be around the same timespan as between the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the events that the Videofreex, SF State activists and my entry into the Trotskyist movement. I try to imagine what it would have been like for Lenin and his band of merry revolutionaries to have camcorders on hand in the Smolny Institute or for Farrell Dobbs to have them in Minneapolis in 1934. It makes my head spin.
Part of the pleasure of watching “Here Come the Videofreex” is seeing how much the elderly members of the collective appear to have the same counter-cultural and radical sensibility as they had in their youth. Not a repentant figure among them, least of all David Cort who was the founder of the group by virtue of being able to buy Sony equipment on the cheap after the commercial video recording company he worked for went under. Although he has put on a few pounds, he still wears his hair long.
Cort soon gathered around him a group of like-minded people with technical experience, including a woman who was being recruited by CBS executive Don West to provide an “alternative” youth oriented dimension to his network.
As might be expected, the romance between mammon and the movement came to a quick end after the network preferred to show footage they recorded of people in a procession past Fred Hampton’s coffin in 1969 rather than an interview they did with him when he was alive. That interview and ones with Abby Hoffman are priceless. Since most of “Videofreex” consists of archival footage they shot in the sixties and seventies, the film is indispensable as history as well as oral history with the principals providing voiceover looking back in retrospect.
The problem for the Videofreex was how to get an audience for their videos, especially after they bailed out on CBS. Abby Hoffman had a brainstorm to set up portable broadcasting studios in panel trucks that could be deployed around New York. Like many of his ideas, this was impractical.
The group finally found a place where they could connect with the people, even if it was on a small scale. Using money from an arts grant, they moved to Lanesville in the northern Catskills and rented a big and somewhat dilapidated house. From there, they launched a pirate TV channel where they recorded the quotidian events of the local population who welcomed the long-haired young people with open arms.
Check out “Here Come the Videofreex” if you want to understand the sixties as well as have a good time.
Like the Columbia student strike that occurred the same year, the SF strike involved some of the same issues. If Columbia was bent on colonizing Morningside park for a new gym against the wishes of Harlem, SF State administrators had dragged their feet over implementing an ethnic studies department. Perhaps because SF State had more of a proletarian orientation so to speak, there were far more non-white students in the leadership of the movement than at Columbia, where Mark Rudd and other whites played the major role. For example, a Chicano student named Roger Alvarado represented the Third World Liberation Front that provided most of the leadership of the struggle.
While I cannot gauge the exact weight of SDS in the student strike, I have always been under the impression that the faction associated with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party was an important part of the strike leadership as well. One of its members was Hari Dillon who would spend a year in prison for trumped up charges on rioting, etc. I got to know Hari well when he went to work for Tecnica in 1989 to head up our expansion into Africa. After Tecnica folded, Hari became the Executive Director of the Vanguard Foundation, a leftist philanthropy whose funds he misused in the pursuit of a fraudulent investment scheme and personal luxuries landed him in prison once again. I was touched to see the young Hari Dillon in 2:41 of Craig’s video.
As opening night of the 2016 Socially Relevant Film Festival nears, I want to share my take on three outstanding films that I was asked to judge as a member of the documentary awards jury. (An earlier review can be read here.)
The first is “Beneath the Olive Tree”, a film about the Greek Civil War focused on a group of women now in their eighties who were exiled to island prisons where they were tortured by the former cops and soldiers of the pro-Nazi regime that the revolutionary anti-fascist movement overthrew during WWII. The civil war began in 1946 after Churchill and Truman decided that the left in Greece that had lost thousands of lives in struggle were not to be trusted in the reshaping of the country as a NATO vassal. As the film states in the outset, many of the problems facing Greece today are rooted in the trauma suffered just seventy years ago.
The title of the film derives from journals that women prisoners buried near an olive tree during the time that they were imprisoned on Trikeri island. Filmmaker Stavroula Toska, whose mother was a child during this period, never understood why she never spoke about how it impacted her. It was only when she learned that her grandmother had been one of the imprisoned women that the pained silence became understandable. A key part of the drama of this wrenching documentary is how Toska’s mother managed to come to terms with the trauma and transcend it in the course of telling her daughter about her memories.
As soon as the allies decided that the popular forces stood in the way of consolidating an anti-Communist but “democratic” Europe, they imposed a regime that differed little from the one that had been overthrown. Leftists were forced to sign a statement renouncing Communism, even if they were not party members. Like the Nazis, the rightwing government favored by Churchill cast a wide net often jailing young people who had simply carried supplies to the guerrillas who were often just the sons, daughters or spouses of those fightine.
All of the women interviewed in the film demonstrate the kind of unrepentant belief in social justice that led them to support the resistance 70 years ago and today. Ironically, Alex Tsipras, who was the only party leader in Greece willing to speak about the repression, told Toskas that Syriza supports a new textbook for Greek students that would reveal the great crimes of Truman and Churchill’s Vichy style dictatorship that are barely discussed in high school. With Germany playing the role today that England played in 1946, it is open to question whether Tsipras can do anything to overturn the country’s virtual colonial status except mandate a more truthful history textbook—if that.
Towards the end of the film the women interviewed in the film tour Trikeri island and reminisce about life in a concentration camp used by a “democracy”. It evokes the tour that Armenians took in eastern Anatolia in the very fine documentary “100 Years Later” that is also being shown as part of SR 2016. Put both on your calendar for an enlightening take on how people maintain the spirit of resistance against the barbarisms of the 20th century.
“Beneath the Olive Tree” can be seen at Bowtie Cinema, Wednesday 3/16 6 PM. Full schedule information is here: http://www.ratedsrfilms.org/.
When I used to visit my wife up in Albany when she was a graduate student, I always had trouble wrapping my head around the architecture of downtown Albany as the bus entered the city. The soulless architecture had a certain fascist redolence that was in keeping with the cold and foreboding university architecture itself, an expression of 20th century modernism that haunted capital cities in the USA, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia alike. It was an attempt to project the strength and permanence of regimes that in two out of three cases turned out to be fairly short-lived. Our best hope is that the third will join them in the dustbin of history before too long.
The government center known as Empire State Plaza in Albany that dominates the downtown was one of the gifts that Nelson Rockefeller bestowed on the city during the time he was Governor. This “liberal” Republican decided that the city’s south side with its largely Italian population was a slum that had to be condemned and removed. Using the same dictatorial powers that Robert Moses made infamous, Rockefeller used eminent domain to condemn neighborhoods that hardly matched the descriptions the governor used.
In a series of interviews with people who lived on Albany’s south side up until their buildings began being demolished in 1965, we learn in Mary Paley’s “The Neighborhood that Disappeared” that this was a community united by food, music, religion and above all a sense of solidarity that has largely evaporated in most urban settings. As one interviewee put it, if an elder sitting on a stoop saw a kid stepping out of line, he’d report it to his or her parents. Nowadays it is a cop’s bullet that enforces discipline.
Rockefeller got the idea for the complex after Princess Beatrix visited the city. Afterwards, the governor rued that “the city did not look as I think the Princess thought it was going to”. So what was it supposed to look like? Rockefeller believed it should look more like Brasilia, another one of those cities like Ankara and Stalingrad that incorporated an esthetic that had more in common with a cinder block.
As might be expected, Albany’s mayor Erastus Corning was a Democrat who promised the residents that he would resist their urban removal and then folded like a two-dollar suitcase afterwards (besides making millions as a businessman benefiting from the project). All of the wonderful little Italian bakeries and restaurants were demolished, replaced by an underground city filled with McDonalds restaurants and the like. In a July 2, 1976 article for the NY Times, architecture critic Paul Goldberger summarized his view of the Empire State Plaza as follows:
Ultimately, of course, one realizes that the entire mall complex is not so much a vision of the future as of the past. The ideas here were dead before they left the drawing board, and every design decision, from the space allocations to the over-all concept, emerges from an outdated notion of what modern architecture, not to mention modern government, should stand for.
The mall may look like Buck Rogers, but it is important to remember that the Buck Rogers comic-book visions were all drawn decades ago. Now they have become a comfortable part of our popular past, and it is only a tragically misguided kind of thinking that could turn them into icons for the present.
Truer words were never written.
“The Neighborhood that Disappeared” can be seen at Bowtie Cinema, Friday 3/18 10PM. Full schedule information is here: http://www.ratedsrfilms.org/.
At the beginning of Davison Mudzingwa’s “Lost Tongue”, we learn that of the 60,000 languages now being spoken today, half of them will be extinct by the end of the century, something that might evoke nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders if you identify with the crypto-fascist mindset that gave birth to the Empire State Plaza
The language threatened in this documentary is N!uu, a language spoken by the Khomani-San people from the Kalahari region of South Africa, commonly known as the Bushmen. They predate all other peoples in the country with evidence of their tools being excavated from a site in KwaZulu-Natal that is 44,000 years old.
I am not exactly sure how to pronounce N!uu but the language is replete with the “clicking” sound we associate with the Zulu and Xhosa languages for which it possibly served as a base. As is the case with most indigenous peoples, the San were forcibly assimilated by the Boers and today speak Afrikaner. Except for elders like Ouma Katrina, there are few who grew up speaking San. Determined that the language continue, she set up a rudimentary school and enlisted a young San woman named Helena Steenkamp to become her apprentice. As is the case with African-Americans, the victims of white oppression ended up with the surnames of their oppressors.
As someone who has written fairly extensively about American Indian issues, the language question is very close to my heart. If genocide is defined by the UN includes the systematic destruction of a people’s culture—including its language—there is little doubt that all those who believe in human rights should identify with and support the efforts of people like Ouma Katrina and Helena Steenkamp.
Another thing worth noting is that the principals involved in making this film are black South Africans who obviously understand such a need as reflected in the statement that can be found on the film’s website:
Imagine if you could not speak your own language and all you do is speak the language of the people who once persecuted and exploited your community.
Imagine if there were only three people in the entire community or world who could speak the language and you are not one of them.
Imagine if these people were elderly, reaching the end of their lives but there is only a small window for you to reclaim your true identity and history and unlock the hidden secret clicks of your ancient language. The language of your forefathers.
Fellow human beings, this is the dire situation facing the Khomanl San – a deeply marginalized indigenous minority in South Africa who centuries have endured slavery, colonialism, land dispossession, persecution and cultural genocide. Along with this untold suffering, their ancient language — N!uu — underwent systematic attack from colonialists who forced them to speak their own language — Afrikaans.
As is so often the case today, documentary filmmakers are the conscience of a society and a true vanguard in political terms. With young Black South Africans making the effort on behalf of South Africa’s most downtrodden, there are reasons to hold out hope that a better future is possible in a country that was once a shining example of how to struggle for social justice.
“The Neighborhood that Disappeared” can be seen at Bowtie Cinema, Thursday 3/17 10PM. Full schedule information is here: http://www.ratedsrfilms.org/.
On Friday March 4, 2016 massive popular demonstrations throughout the liberated areas of Syria occurred under the slogan “The revolution continues”. More than 100 protests were recorded on this day, according to various opposition figures. In the demonstrations, protesters were chanting the original songs of the revolution: “The people are one and united”, “Death rather than humiliation”, “The People want the downfall of the regime”, “The Syrian people want freedom”, “Revolution for dignity and Freedom”, etc….The spirit of the beginning of the revolution could be felt with democratic and non-sectarian slogans, and as a protester wrote on his placard: “the doors of the peaceful revolution reopen”. The Syrian revolutionary flag was seen everywhere. It is interesting to note that salafist djihadist military forces and their symbols were absent from these popular demonstrations, while Jabhat Al-Nusra soldiers organised a small demonstration against the massive popular demonstration in in the city Ma’aret al-Naaman, Idlib, and chanted slogans against democracy and secularism, and for an Islamic state. They also told the demonstrators on the squares to wear the full niqab as real men go to fight on the military front.During the past week, protests against the Assad regime were also organised in Aleppo, Damascus countryside (Daraya and Dhumeir), Da’el and the countryside of Quneytra. As a protester said in the besieged town of Daraya, “Of course we’re going to seize this opportunity (to protest) because the rest of the time there were constant barrel bombs and shelling”. In the free neighborhood of Aleppo, mass demonstration erupted the second day of the truce, chanting: “The people want the downfall of the regime”. Another protest occurred in Aleppo countryside, Al-Atareb, on February 27, demanding for opposition military factions to unite under the Free Syrian Army banner, and express their solidarity with the villages that are being bombed amid the truce, while calling on the Jabhat Al Nusra to exit their city. Civilians and activists in Al-Atareb declared during the preparation of the Friday protest their will to revive the peaceful Syrian revolution, which demanded freedom and justice and dignity according to them. Many protesters across the country express a similar will to encourage peaceful demonstrations as a way to come back to the spirit of the revolution.
Although it is tempting to compare Trump to Mussolini given the similarity of their facial mugging, shoulder-shrugging, and histrionic hand gestures—not to speak of the obscurantist and deeply reactionary ideology—I find it much more useful to see him as aspiring version of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Like Berlusconi, Trump is another master of televised demagogy. And also like Berlusconi, he exploits the backwardness of the average boob tube addict who tends to think in the sort of crude terms we associate with reality TV programs like Trump’s “The Apprentice”. Finally, despite the toxic quality of Trump’s speeches and off the cuff comments, they are about as much of a threat to bourgeois democracy as there was in Italy in the nearly ten years of Berlusconi’s misrule for the simple reason that the ruling classes of both countries would much prefer to maintain through the illusion of freedom rather than the risky use of truncheons and dictatorship.
The connection between Trump and Berlusconi has been made by others but not always with complete alacrity. For example, Robert Kuttner saw Trump as another Berlusconi but also as another Hitler in Huffington Post. He accurately notes that both Trump and Berlusconi tried to bypass traditional political parties in their bid to appeal directly to the “people” using their own considerable fortunes but sees Trump’s business about making America great again as a page torn from Mein Kampf In actuality, every president since Reagan has used this kind of demagogy in the face of a declining economic situation even though Trump tends to do it without bothering to explain how. When he says “we will take their oil” or “we will send the Mexicans back”, it is more in line with empty threats we associate with shows like “Housewives of New Jersey” rather than Heritage Foundation White Papers.
Frank Bruni of the NY Times, who used to be the paper’s restaurant critic, was best at seeing the common origins of the men on horseback as well as informing his readers about others who saw the similarity like the NY Times’s Timothy Egan and Vanity Fair’s Evgenia Peretz:
Like Trump, Berlusconi built his fortune with real estate. He then bought media outlet after media outlet, infiltrating people’s hourly lives, imprinting himself on their very consciousness. A similar impulse animates Trump, who has emblazoned his name not just on skyscrapers and casinos but on mattresses, clothes, cologne.
They’re both after omnipresence, and they both understood early on how crucial television was to that. Berlusconi took ownership of Italy’s airwaves, which he used to broadcast game shows and news programs with women in various states of undress. Trump took partial control of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, and played the lord of all capitalism on “The Apprentice.”
While this by no means exhausts the Trump-Berlusconi corpus, an article by Berlusconi’s countrymen Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Francesco Ronchi in the essential Le Monde diplomatiquehits all the high notes:
Although Berlusconi’s political fortunes now appear to be on the wane, looking back at reasons for his erstwhile success might shed light on the current fascination with Donald Trump’s US presidential bid.
They share a flaunted machismo and political incorrectness. This is part of a well-calculated electoral strategy. What Berlusconi had already understood before Trump is that saying outrageous things gets you free media coverage and forces others to engage with what you are saying. So you get to set the terms of the political debate, while shifting its center of gravity in your favor. At the same time, Berlusconi and Trump’s political incorrectness targets a specific electoral group — predominantly blue-collar white males who feel threatened by globalization, multiculturalism and women’s rights. There is an element of revanchism in their discourse, which allows them to attract conservative votes while assuming an air of radicalism.
Berlusconi’s popularity in Italy was also due to his capacity to transform class antagonisms into cultural issues, capturing large swathes of the working-class vote. The fact that he was a billionaire never seemed to distance him from ordinary people. On the contrary, it tapped into their aspirations. Even more importantly, the fact that he had brought commercial television to Italy implied an association with popular culture that set him in opposition to the country’s traditionally left-leaning cultural elites. In the same way, Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric appeals to working-class voters who resent what they perceive as the patronizing attitude of ‘liberal elites’. This suggests the old class antagonism is now translated into a new cultural division which plays out in terms of political style rather than income.
Finally, Berlusconi’s electoral success depended on his alliance with the far-right League of the North, a xenophobic party whose message pivoted almost entirely around the association between immigration and crime. The foundation of this alliance was the convergence of interests between Berlusconi’s predominantly national business empire and the economic protectionism implied in the League of the North’s anti-immigrant stance. In the US, this alliance between business interests and anti-immigration rhetoric had not been as prominent, largely because big business saw itself as wedded to globalization. Trump, on the other hand, seems to have understood that it may be in the interest of small to medium business owners to take a stand against immigration, because it ensures that a large portion of incoming labor is illegal and therefore in a weaker bargaining position. De-linking immigration from economics and re-framing it as a question of crime and security is the best way of pulling this off.
Two films that can be seen on Amazon streaming are also useful in understanding the similarities. In reviewing “Videocracy”, a documentary about Berlusconi, I referred to Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” a narrative film that many people believe helps to explain Trump’s voter base. Indeed the fellow who wrote the screenplay for “Idiocracy” tweeted that he never expected it to become a documentary, obviously referring to Trump.
I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary.
In my review of “Videocracy”, I referred to exactly the same kinds of people who would love nothing better than to compete on Trump’s “The Apprentice”:
Watching “Videocracy”, you get the impression that the whole of Italy has been sent to Mike Judge’s future world. We meet a 26-year-old machinist named Rick Canelli who is practicing karate moves on the front lawn of the house he shares with his mother. After he is finished with his work-out, he tells us that unless you appear on television in Italy, you are nothing. Or more exactly, you are condemned to do work as a machinist or whatever capitalist society has assigned you to do as a function of class origins and education. Canelli dreams of being a contestant on what appears to be the Italian version of American Idol, on one of the three private stations owned by Berlusconi. (He also controls the public stations by virtue of being prime minister. All in all, he has 90 percent of the airwaves locked up.)
Canelli says that he will be the first person on TV ever to combine martial arts moves and singing like Ricky Martin. He says that he can be the next Jean Van Damme, but with singing. After we see him auditioning, it is clear that he can sing just about as well as Van Damme. Like most people who audition for such shows (including American Idol, now in its 9th execrable season), he has no idea of how bad he is. But nevertheless they try out because the reality of being a machinist or a nurse for the rest of their lives is unbearable. It is Berlusconi’s dubious distinction to have made what appears to be all of Italy hungering for the chance to be on television in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s 1968 observation that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In Berlusconi’s Italy, that observation seems truer than ever.
While the film was a first-rate character study of Berlusconi and essential for understanding his American avatar (available on Amazon streaming), it did not begin to probe the depths of Italian society that allowed him to take power. For that, I refer you to long-time radical observers of the Italian political scene like historian Paul Ginsborg and journalist Alexander Stille who have both written biographies of Berlusconi.
In the May-June 2003 New Left Review article titled “The Patrimonial Ambitions of Silvio B”, Ginsborg explains how the sleazy politician/media mogul took advantage of the sexism that pervades Italian society:
Another strong connexion between Christian Democracy and the House of Liberties, all to the detriment of the Left, lies in the long-term patterns of gender voting. After the war the culture of the Church and that of Italian women overlapped in a very strong way. It was with some trepidation that both the French and the Italian Left had agreed to universal suffrage in the period 1945–47. Nearly sixty years later, women over the age of 55 and those who are practising Catholics still show a very marked preference for the centre-right. However, the pattern of women’s voting in the 2001 elections is not limited to this unsurprising fact. An extraordinary 44.8 per cent of housewives—in themselves a significant social category, given the low percentages of female occupation in Italy—voted not just for the centre-right but specifically for Forza Italia. Furthermore, the more television women watched, the more they showed a propensity to vote for Silvio Berlusconi. 42.3 per cent of those who watched more than three hours a day voted for Forza Italia, compared to 31.6 per cent of those who only watched between one or two hours daily. The connexions between housework and the advertising of commodities, between the consumption of goods and the formation of subjectivities, between female viewing and the packaged messages of the charismatic male political figure, are here to be found in striking form.
For his part, Stille supplies crucial information about the dirty role played by the Italian Socialist Party leader in enabling Berlusconi’s rise to power in a Nation Magazine article titled “Emperor of the Air” from November 29, 1999:
It should be mentioned that Berlusconi’s rise to power was made easier by the fecklessness of the Italian left, of which the Socialists are one of the main components.
A promising new left party called Rifondazione Comunista made the mistake of forming a coalition government with the Socialists and bourgeois parties headed by one Romano Prodi. This bourgeois politician, serving possibly as an inspiration for Barack Obama, then proceeded to use his leftist backing as a way to pass legislation that led to the deployment of Italian troops in Lebanon in 2006. The disillusionment of the left in this umpteenth attempt at a popular front led to Berlusconi’s election. Like the U.S., Italian politics appears mired in videocracy and lesser-evil Sisyphean frustrations.
As long as people like Trump and Reagan on one side and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on the other can continue to keep a befuddled and largely passive population largely under the control of a rigged electoral game, there is no reason for the ruling class to risk everything on a fascist bid even though undoubtedly there will be a need for that in the future as the economic continues its downward slide and the environmental crisis becomes more and more destructive. Who might serve as a new Hitler or Mussolini in those times is not worth considering at this point, all the more so since we have trouble enough breathing life into the mass movements that might ultimately cause the Koch brothers, Bill Gates et al to fund an American version of Golden Dawn.
Close followers of the Syrian struggle against the Baathist dictatorship have probably grown accustomed to the “false flag” arguments of its apologists who see every regime massacre as an incident staged by the CIA et al to undermine the regime with the most prominent case being the sarin gas attack on East Ghouta in August 2013.
In the latest go-round, Rick Sterling of the misnamed Syria Solidarity Coalition has written a 30 page dossier titled The Caesar Photo Fraud that Undermined Syrian Negotiations that begins by referring to past “false flag” conspiracies with this at the top of the list:
In Gulf War 1, there were reports of Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwait, leaving babies to die on the cold floor. Amnesty International incorrectly “verified” the false accusations.
As is so often the case with the Baathist amen corner, there is very little introspection. If this was such a blatant lie (and it was), why did the father of the current dynast in Damascus hook up with the USA, Saudi Arabia and other demonic powers against Iraq? Putting 7,500 troops at the disposal of the imperialist invasion force, Hafez al-Assad calculated that it might ingratiate him with the likely victors. He was correct. After standing up for the feudal lords of Kuwait, he was rewarded with renewed diplomatic relations with Britain and an easing of tensions with the USA that clearly recognized the importance of having an “anti-imperialist” government on its side as the NY Times reported on September 15, 1990:
The main purpose of Mr. Baker’s visit, American officials insisted, was symbolic. By meeting with President Assad, Mr. Baker sought to draw attention, particularly in the Arab world, to the fact that one of the most hard-line Arab nationalist regimes is joining the American-led multinational coalition against Iraq.
Syria’s participation legitimizes that coalition in Arab eyes in a way that no other country could, American officials say. The Administration has been worried from the start that President Saddam Hussein would break out of the boycott by convincing the Arab public that he is really fighting the Americans and just a few Arab ”lackeys.”
So in a war that really set the tone for the next invasion of Iraq in 2002, Bashar’s daddy was indispensable for selling the war to the Arab world, arguably with much more force than the stealing incubators bullshit. You might say that in this instance the true flag was a lot more damaging than the false flag.
Sterling’s goal is to debunk the notion that a former Syrian army photographer code named Caesar had 55,000 photographs documenting the torture and killing of 11,000 detainees by the Syrian security establishment when he defected to the USA two days before peace talks were to begin on January 20, 2014 and thusly undermining them. Not that photos of dead Syrians who had been tortured in prison would make much difference to a world inured to Baathist savagery.
The burden of his proof is that a HRW report in December 2015 admitted that nearly half the photos are of dead Baathist soldiers. But what does this have to do with the close study of the photos that did reveal torture? Attempting to discredit the original report conducted by the Carter Ruck Inquiry Team, Sterling claims that the accusations that these were victims of “death in detention” or “death by torture” or death in “government custody” are almost certainly false.
However, the Carter Ruck report makes no such claims. In fact, it is rather clear that only 835 corpses were examined in depth by the forensic team. And of those, just 20% showed evidence of inflicted trauma while 30% were “equivocal”. Meanwhile, another 42% showed emaciation. So basically, Sterling is knocking down a straw man. The report is very measured in its analysis and makes none of the extravagant claims that Sterling imputes to it.
Apparently, Assad’s goons had a weakness for strangling people just like mafia gangsters. The forensic team reported:
Neck images of 19% of individuals showed non-specific injuries and 16% showed evidence of ligature marks on the neck. In the opinion of the forensics team these ligature marks would be consistent with fatal or non-fatal ligature strangulation. The marks did not appear to be consistent with execution by hanging and in one case a characteristic ligature was in place.
Here are a couple of photos that the forensic team viewed as evidence of torture and starvation meted out to prisoners of the dictatorship people like Rick Sterling apologizes for:
I invite everybody reading this article to check out the Carter Rucker report for yourself and draw your own conclusions about its validity. It certainly holds up a lot better than Sterling’s amateurish conspiracy-mongering.
To give you a real insight into how Sterling tries to taint the findings, he invokes the CIA as a co-conspirator of the Carter Ruck investigation. He states that Caesar was introduced to the investigators by someone referred to as his “case officer” by David Crane, its chairman. This leads Sterling to conclude that Caesar was in the company of a CIA agent, which does not seem that far-fetched. What that has to do with a photograph of strangling marks on someone’s neck is open to question. Getting up a full head of steam, Sterling points out that Crane is a professor at Syracuse University “where the CIA actively recruits new officers despite student resistance.” Plus, everybody knows their basketball team is always up to infractions of one sort or another.
Yeah, that CIA. You can never trust anybody who has any dealings with those bastards, especially a government that participated in George W. Bush’s extraordinary rendition program that led to the kidnapping of a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar who was hauled off to Syria in 2002 where he was tortured for a year just like the men depicted in the Carter Ruck photos. Fortunately for him, pressure forced Bashar al-Assad to release the falsely accused “terrorist” who told CounterPunch readers what he had to endure:
This moment is still vivid in my mind because it was the first I was ever beaten in my life. Then he asked me to open my left hand. He hit me again. And that one missed and hit my wrist. The pain from that hit lasted approximately six months. And then he would ask me questions. And I would have to answer very quickly. And then he would repeat the beating this time anywhere on my, on my body. Sometimes he would take me to a room where I could, where I was alone, I could hear other prisoners being tortured, severely tortured. I remember that I used to hear their screams. I just couldn’t believe it, that human beings would do this to other human beings.
Now what kind of government would allow someone kidnapped by the CIA to be tortured in its prisons for a year like this to serve Bush’s “war on terror”? Surely, this too must be a “false flag” operation to discredit the only government in the Middle East supposedly committed to democracy, religious tolerance, ethnic diversity and kindness. Oh, I know. The same kind of government that would deploy 7,500 troops in partnership with Saudi Arabia and the USA against Iraq in 1990.
Finally, on the question of whether the photos were used to sabotage the peace talks alluded to earlier in this article. Sterling claimed that they were used as a trump card to bolster opposition demands that Assad resign. Once again the intransigent jihadists with backing from the USA would keep the war going. That, at least, is what Sterling would have you believe. But is there any truth to his claim that demands that “Assad must go” were strengthened by the photos, thereby torpedoing a chance for peace? That is only possible if you base your information on what you hear from RT.com or Press TV.
The NY Times reported less than a month after the photos were released:
The Syrian opposition coalition on Wednesday presented its most detailed vision yet of a political transition to end Syria’s conflict, in a 24-point plan that, strikingly, made no mention of President Bashar al-Assad or his ouster, while outlining strong requirements for human rights and justice in a future Syria.
The proposal, detailed in a document presented to the Syrian government’s delegation during peace talks here, marked a shift in tone for the opposition group, which has long insisted on Mr. Assad’s departure as the starting point for a political resolution to the conflict.
The shift was bold yet risky, coming as the opposition delegation has managed for the first time to persuade several representatives of armed rebel groups to attend the Geneva talks. It carried the risk that the fighters, whose trust the exile opposition coalition seeks to gain, would feel betrayed by the omission of a demand for Mr. Assad’s ouster.
Opposition members said they hoped the proposal would help ease the fears of Syrian fence-sitters — by signaling that Mr. Assad’s opponents want to avoid a state collapse like that in Iraq following the American-led invasion in 2003 — and warm relations with Russia, the Assad government’s strongest backer. Russia has long said it is not committed to Mr. Assad personally but rejects making his ouster a precondition for political transition.
“We would really like to open new channels with the Russians, and it is very important for us to meet with them,” said Abdulahad Astepho, a member of the opposition delegation, adding that the group hoped to meet with the Russian deputy foreign minister, Gennady Gatilov, after talks with the American undersecretary of state for political affairs, Wendy Sherman, on Friday.
Now, of course, none of this matters to the likes of Rick Sterling. He has no interest in developing an intelligent and honest portrait of Syrian realities. Like all cheap propagandists who have preceded him in a dismal five years of lying, his only interest is in covering up a torturing, murdering, thieving bunch of gangsters who make the mafia look tame by comparison.
Two films dealing with the jihadist takeover in northern Mali will be considered in this review. The first is a remarkable documentary titled “They Will Have to Kill Us First” that opens tomorrow at the Village East in New York; the other is “Timbuktu”, a narrative film that was released in May of 2014 and that can now be seen on Amazon streaming. While “Timbuktu” has garnered a 99 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it is not without its problems. I have to admit that I walked out on it 15 minutes into a press screening two years ago but decided to give it another try in order to survey such films within a broader consideration of the jihadist penetration of a country whose cultural significance is impossible to exaggerate. In both films, music and its banishment provide the narrative arc.
Directed by Joanna Schwartz, “They Will Have to Kill Us First”, is a profile of a group of musicians who were forced to leave the northern towns of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal after Ansar Dine (Arabic for defenders of the faith), a group aligned with al-Qaeda, took over. Now they are living in Bamako, the capital of Mali, or in other countries bordering Mali such as Burkina Faso. Drawn to Mali originally to cover the annual Festival in the Desert concert, Schwartz was introduced to Khaira Arby, the “nightingale of the north” who had sought refuge in Bamako. She was the person whose words about being denied the right to sing in her hometown Timbuktu serve as the film’s title.
She also profiles another female star exiled from the north known as Disco to her fans. Her real name is Fadimata Walet Oumar, the wife of a man identified only as “Jimmy” who was a top military leader of the Tuareg insurrection that was in a united front with Ansar Dine at one point. In the tangled political history of Mali, it is necessary to acknowledge that simple divisions between “good” and “evil” were not possible. The central government in Bamako had oppressed the Tuaregs for generations just as Bashar al-Assad had oppressed the Sunni majority. When the Tuareg resistance emerged as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), it found itself tactically aligned with the jihadists of Ansar Dine, a group that was made up of members of the Ifora tribe of Tuaregs and their allies from Algeria and Nigeria. The MNLA was dedicated to carving out a territory much as the Kurds are attempting in Syria and Iraq while Ansar Dine’s goal was to create an Islamic State based on Sharia law in all of Mali. Considering the possibility that the MNLA fueled the flames that led to his wife’s exile, Jimmy struggles between his ideals and the harsh reality they collided with.
Disco’s neighbor in Timbuktu was the guitarist Moussa Sidi who is now living in exile in Burkina Faso eking out a living playing in tiny clubs and at weddings. His wife stayed behind in Gao where she worked as an MNLA activist. Jailed for her beliefs, she remained unrepentant. Unlike her, Sidi was far more interested in music and good times than politics even though as a Tuareg he opposed the oppression his people suffered and remained true to his Muslim beliefs.
Finally, there are the members of Songhoy Blues, a group with no particular connection to the Tuareg struggle who fled to Bamako to escape the violence and tyrannical social norms of the north. They exemplify the Malian esthetic with their blend of American rock, Arabic harmony and Sub-Saharan rhythms. After they came to the attention of Brian Eno, the band toured England to great acclaim.
The film mixes interviews with the various musicians and their performances. It also includes a soundtrack from other Malian musicians including Ali Farka Touré, a superstar guitarist from the north who died in 2006 long before the troubles might have driven him into exile as well.
The climax of the film consists of the musicians on a return to Timbuktu to perform before adoring fans, only made possible by the military defeat of Ansar Dine by the Malian military and French intervention on its behalf. The Tuareg question still remains unresolved.
In the press notes for “They Will Have to Kill Us First”, Schwartz provides an answer to the question “What did the extremist groups do?”:
Extremists imposing Islamic law in Mali’s north were abusing human rights, particularly those of women, and paying families for children to become rebel fighters.
They imposed an extremist version of sharia law: music, football, alcohol and cigarettes were banned. There were cases of summary execution of captured soldiers, instances of lootings, rapes, stonings, beheadings and amputations. Women were forced to be covered and their ability to work was restricted. Men were forced to wear short trousers. Forced marriages happened – with a wife costing less than $1,000. Children were enlisted to fight and their families were paid about $600 or less.
The extremists destroyed ancient shrines, manuscripts from Timbuktu, and Sufi mosques. Radio stations, mobile phone towers and satellites were also destroyed.
This is essentially the conditions described in “Timbuktu” that begins with a scene depicting machine gun fire shattering African statues.
From that point on, the film pits longtime Timbuktu residents trying in their own passive resistance way to live as they have for millennia. They are observant Muslims but resistant to the Wahhabi straightjacket that Ansar Dine is trying to impose on them. We see its chieftan wrangling with a local imam who abjures them from oppressing the people with their harsh rule. When the Salafist states that they are obeying jihad, the imam replies that he too is for jihad but only within in his own heart as he struggles to avoid evil.
In a most telling scene, Ansar Dine morality police are sent out on a mission to find out the source of music that has been banned, just like soccer and long pants for men. When they track down the culprits, they are not sure what to do since the words of the singers accompanying a jaunty tune has to do with glorifying Allah rather than chasing after the opposite sex. It doesn’t matter. They are arrested and whipped.
The main character in the film is Kidane, a Tuareg herdsman who has stayed behind with his wife and daughter in the desert not far from Timbuktu determined to survive under jihadi rule even as all of his neighbors have fled. To show that he symbolizes Tuareg traditional values, he plays the guitar in his tent to provide the kind of entertainment his people have enjoyed from time immemorial.
Eventually a quarrel with a local fisherman escalates into a violent confrontation that leaves the fisherman dead and Kidane being arrested. His trial by a Sharia court is fairly consistent with the actual practice and arguably a lot less irrational than the other rules imposed on townspeople, including one that forces women to wear gloves at all times even if they are handling fish in the marketplace.
What the film lacks, and to an extent this is true of the documentary as well, is any kind of background on what caused Ansar Dine to be spawned and its ambivalent relationship to the long suffering Tuareg people. By characterizing Ansar militants as a kind of horror movie deus ex machina, and by failing to put its invasion into any kind of context, the film suffers from a certain amount of dramatic flattening. It would have made for a more interesting film if the leader of the jihadists had a back story that explained why he became such a fanatic. Since director Abderrahmane Sissako represented him as an Arab who did not even speak the local language, he remained rather opaque.
That being said, the film is definitely worth watching especially if you are trying to get a handle on the local manifestation of a global problem that some regard as the greatest threat to Western civilization since the days of the Ottoman Empire at its height. Perhaps the one-sided portrayal of the jihadists explains the 99 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. With Arab terrorists and fanatics replacing the Communists and Nazis as evil incarnate, films such as “Timbuktu” satisfy a certain self-righteousness in the intelligentsia. It would have been a far more interesting film if it accurately reflected the true leader of Ansar Dine, who in fact was not an Arab but a Tuareg named Iyad Ag Ghaly who was a native son of northern Mali.
Ghaly was a leader of the Tuareg rebellion in the 1990s that foreshadowed the 2012 events depicted in the film. Indeed, his evolution into a hardcore Salafist could have provided a most interesting back story that would have enriched the film, as indicated by a fascinating article that appeared in the March 30 2012 Time Magazine (http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2110673,00.html):
The vitriolic falling out between ag Ghali and the MNLA goes some way to illustrating the complicated tapestry of interests and tensions within the Tuareg rebellion, a topic that swam into focus first after weaponry from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s looted arsenals flooded into the Sahara last year. With thousands of expatriate Tuaregs who worked for Gaddafi’s military forced to flee Libya amid the revolutionary chaos, much of the hardware is thought to have made its way to northern Mali. Desolate and unpoliceable, this swathe of desert and rocky scrub is also home to the regional terror franchise, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. That combination set alarm bells ringing. What, exactly, was the relationship between Tuareg fighters, with access to large quantities of heavy weaponry, and AQIM?
The truth, of course, is complicated. With an eye to U.S. military assistance, economic aid, international sympathy, the Malian government has much to gain by tarring the MNLA with the al-Qaeda brush — but the links are tenuous. True, over the years al-Qaeda emirs “are said to have worked to create some local relationships, both through marriage and transactions with some segments of local Tuareg and Arab communities,” explains Andrew Lebovich, an analyst with the Navanti Group who focuses on Sahelian issues. But “AQIM itself has yet to claim a role in the [Tuareg rebellion], and no overt evidence has been produced to show an AQIM role in the fighting in the north.”
Nor is Tuareg society the best fodder for Islamic fundamentalists. “Tuaregs prefer to worry about enjoying this life rather than… ensuring the perfect afterlife,” a U.S. diplomat wrote in 2009. Tuareg women go unveiled; the menfolk cover their faces but drink and dance. In fact, it is the government in Bamako — rather than the veiled warriors of the north — that may have abetted the terrorists. In 2010, an Algerian diplomat told his US counterpart that someone in the Malian establishment had tipped off AQIM operatives ahead of a combined Algerian-Malian mission against the organization, enabling the terrorists to slip the net. “It looks worse than weakness on the part of the Malians,” the Algerian diplomat growled. “It looks like willful complicity.”
Yet none of this helps explain ag Ghali and his defenders of the faith. “Iyad is a special case,” says Andy Morgan, author of a forthcoming book on the Tuareg and a former band manager of Tuareg rockers Tinariwen. “He has undoubted strengths as a political and military leader, with a perhaps a greater grasp of political tactics and subterfuge than any other Tuareg. [And] he was as much of a hedonist as many of the other [Tuareg] living in Algeria and Libya… apparently, a great fan of cigarettes, booze and partying.” Later, the story goes, ag Ghali underwent a religious re-birth, growing a voluminous beard and getting kicked out of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, during a diplomatic posting, for consorting with jihadists.
I had never come across the name Tulsi Gabbard until October 30, 2015 when Mike Whitney, the go-to guy for Baathist talking points, advised CounterPunch readers that “Everything You Needed to Know About Syria in 8 Minutes” could be found in a video interview with the House member from Hawaii for which he furnished a transcript, bless his crooked heart.
It originated in a CNN interview with her conducted by the atrocious Wolf Blitzer of CNN. This exchange is obviously what got our boy’s juices flowing:
Blitzer: So what you are saying is that the Russian military involvement in the air and on the ground Iranian involvement in Syria right now, the Hezbollah involvement, they are actually doing the US a favor?
Gabbard: They are working towards defeating our common enemy. When you look at the groups that are on the ground there, the most effective fighting groups who are fighting to overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar Assad, they are predominantly ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and these other Islamist extremist groups. They make up the vast majority of these so-called “Syrian rebels.” They are the most effective force, who has gained the most territory. So the people they (Russia and their allies) are attacking, and the Russians are dropping bombs on are these al Qaeda people who are our enemies who attacked us on 9-11.
Interesting to see a leftist like Whitney getting so enthusiastic over a politician whose rhetoric barely differs from Blitzer’s, a warhawk who cheered on George W. Bush’s war in Iraq as a necessary step to protect us from another 911 attack. This is also the mindset incorporated in Barack Obama’s far-flung drone war on wedding parties and the like—a necessary preemptive strike to make sure the bad guys don’t attack the Homeland.
The big news this week, of course, is that Gabbard has resigned from the DNC and joined the Bernie Sanders campaign as Ben Norton reported for Salon.com, a reliable source of Baathist propaganda:
Gabbard, who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, has condemned U.S. policy in Syria. In late 2015, she introduced a bipartisan bill that called for “an immediate end to the illegal, counter-productive war to overthrow” Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“The war to overthrow Assad is illegal because Congress never authorized it,” she said, calling the U.S. policy of arming and training rebels “counter-productive because it actually helps ISIS and other Islamic extremists achieve their goal of overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad and taking control of all of Syria — which will simply increase human suffering in the region, exacerbate the refugee crisis, and pose a greater threat to the world.”
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has continuously called for a more aggressive U.S. policy in Syria. She pushed for the Obama administration to bomb Syria in 2013, and has persistently called for a no-fly zone, which critics warn could lead to a new international war.
Before Norton got on the Salon payroll, he probably would have been a bit more critical of Gabbard’s spiel, especially in light of a blog article he wrote on December 10, 2014 that called attention to how “The ‘Anti-Imperialist’ Nations of Iran, Syria, and Libya Participated in the CIA Torture Program”. Referring to a map that depicted countries that tortured on behalf of the CIA, Norton commented:
Take a look at the map of the nations involved and you’ll see that, in spite of the insistence of the fervent authoritarian, RT- and Press TV-watching pseudo-“leftist” (or, in actual leftist parlance, “tankie”) to the contrary, the supposedly “anti-imperialist” nations of Iran, Syria, and Libya indeed participated in the CIA torture program.
He is singing a different tune now, sounding much more like the execrable Patrick L. Smith at Salon who is about as bad as Mike Whitney. When I see such a transformation, I am glad that I was a programmer rather than a professional left journalist who must be mindful of his publisher’s agenda or else be out of a job.
As I have said on numerous occasions, support for Assad from people like Gabbard and Whitney is fueled by the same kind of “al-Qaeda is gonna get your mama” hysteria that was pervasive during the war on Iraq, particularly from Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and Michael Ignatieff except in this instance it is the Kremlin rather than the White House that symbolizes Enlightenment values, diversity, tolerance and decency. Did the massive casualties in Iraq ever cause Christopher Hitchens a sleepless night? No more so, one would assume, than barrel bombing and sarin gas discomfit the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Whitney.
Alternet’s Zaid Jilani summed up her worldview succinctly: “To Gabbard, the fact that Syria and Iraq have been through years of brutal civil war, wrecked economies and massive displacement is irrelevant; the only reason they have an extremism problem is because of Islamic theology.”
And here is Gabbard having a grand old time with arch-Islamophobe Bill Maher. Just go to 5:00 and hear her nodding her head in agreement with Maher about Islam being the problem:
To show that she is open to engagement with people clearly not in line with the Sanders campaign, here she is hobnobbing with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto, where she lashes out at the White House for even talking to American Muslims.
Bill Maher hates religion, but he really hates Islam. On Friday evening’s “Real Time,” the host spoke to Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii about their shared quest against Muslims.
Gabbard told Maher she believes it is “crazy” that Secretary of State John Kerry says that extremism comes from poverty — and that President Obama won’t say “Islamic extremism” instead using the words “violent extremism.” She thinks it’s important to “identify our enemy so that we can defeat them.” Secretary Kerry’s comments are particularly absurd to her because she thinks that giving someone a house to live in and a skateboard isn’t going to solve the problems of violence abroad.
I don’t know about houses and skateboards but you can bet your ass that not using drones on wedding parties would help. Speaking of drones, Gabbard supports them. This is something that deeply troubled the Maui Time, a newspaper that regarded her statement okaying their use overseas as reflecting her solidly “pro-military” views. You can bet that Gabbard’s support for drone warfare did not disqualify her in Bernie Sander’s eyes since he too believes they are necessary to protect the Homeland.
In doing some searches for “Gabbard” on CounterPunch, where I suspected there would be other effusive takes on her “antiwar” stance, I found that David Lindorff was cheered over her enlistment in the Sanders campaign since “She had the courage to introduce a bill in a Congress filled with war-besotted ‘chicken-hawks’ to require the US to end its illegal intervention aimed at ‘regime change’ in Syria.”. For his part, Binoy Kampmark was delighted that she introduced legislation that would terminate an “illegal war” to overthrow the Assad regime. As I continued my search, I found an article by Stephen Zunes, a name I usually don’t associate with the Baathist left. The name “Gabbard” came up in the article, however, in a rather different context. Zunes reported:
On July 29, the U.S. House of Representatives, with more than 100 co-sponsors from both parties, passed a resolution by unanimous consent insisting that the Israeli attacks were exclusively “focused on terrorist targets” and that Israel “goes to extraordinary lengths to target only terrorist actors.” Co-sponsors included such prominent Democrats as Alan Grayson (FL), Jared Polis (CO), Eric Swalwell (CA), Richard Neal (MA), Joseph Kennedy (MA), Tulsi Gabbard (HI), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Brad Sherman (CA), Elliot Engel (NY), and Debbie Wasserman-Schulz (FL).
Now that’s some cast of characters Gabbard is lining up with: Alan Grayson, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Elliot Engel—three of the more hard-core Israel lobby old reliables you can find in what Alexander Cockburn once called Washington Babylon. Were Whitney, Lindorff or Kampark aware of this? Probably not. When you are in the cherry-picking business, things tend to slip past you.
And to show you how steeped in Likudnik filth Gabbard is, just go to the Christians United for Israel website linked in this picture and take a look at the featured speakers. Guess what. Gabbard is one of them.
Let me conclude with a passage from Ziad Jilani’s Alternet article on Gabbard, which is the best I have seen. In addition to nailing her Islamophobic beliefs, he investigates her ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, an outfit that is widely regarded—accurately—as fascist. While of American Samoan descent, Gabbard is a convert to Hinduism and likely has absorbed its fundamentalist wing’s hatred of Muslims.
Laments about Congress’ polarization are common, and it’s rare that large numbers of Republicans and Democrats can agree, especially on progressive legislation. But in November 2013, a group of 26 House Democrats and 25 House Republicans introduced HR 417, which called on India to improve the human rights situation of its religious minorities, especially citing the case of Gujarat.
The text of the bill is fairly unoffensive; it does not single out Hindus as perpetrators of religious violence, but rather calls for all groups in India to be treated fairly and given full human rights. However, Gabbard made it her personal mission to crusade against the bill.
The following December, Congressmember Tom Lantos’ Human Rights Commission held a hearing on religious freedom in India. Rather than review the litany of abuses that have occurred in the country, Gabbard mused she did “not believe that the timing of this hearing is a coincidence….I am concerned that the goal of this hearing is to influence the outcome of India’s national elections.” She went on to state that even holding a hearing on the issue was “an attempt to foment fear and loathing purely for political purposes.”
In other words, her concern was that Modi’s electoral chances would be hurt by an honest look at religious persecution in India.
HR 417 was never voted on, and Modi won his election.
Why did Gabbard work so hard to shield BJP abuses from congressional review? The answer lies in her base of supporters. The BJP draws on support from the large Indian expatriate community through an organization called the Overseas Friends of BJP. In August of last year, the group convened a large number of Indian American BJP supporters in Atlanta as part of an eight-city tour designed to prepare for Modi’s first visit to the United States the following month.
Gabbard attended the meeting, posing with a sash adorned with the BJP’s party logo. Here she is with BJP activist Vijay Jolly:
Ironically, she spent much of her Atlanta speech condemning religious persecution—of Hindus and Iraqi Christians, not Muslims in India.
“There was a resolution supported by a few congressmen, it was basically anti-Modi, as well as anti-India resolution. And at that time, the congresswoman got up and said, ‘That, no this is wrong. We are interfering in the internal affairs of India. And that’s why this resolution should not be passed.’ So you can see that’s what she’s been doing for us,” said one BJP speaker introducing Gabbard at the event. “It is necessary that we support [a] person like Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Whatever the donations you make, it is not enough, because she needs to win this 2014 election, that’s important for us.”
That’s Tulsi Gabbard for you, a real piece of work.
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